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  13  <h1>
  14      <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/">Petter Reinholdtsen</a>
  15
  16  </h1>
  17
  18 </div>
  19
  20
  21     <h3>Entries tagged "debian".</h3>
  22
  23     <div class="entry">
  24       <div class="title">
  25         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/OpenSnitch_in_Debian_ready_for_prime_time.html">OpenSnitch in Debian ready for prime time</a>
  26       </div>
  27       <div class="date">
  28         13th May 2023
  29       </div>
  30       <div class="body">
  31         <p>A bit delayed,
  32 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/opensnitch">the interactive
  33 application firewall OpenSnitch</a> package in Debian now got the
  34 latest fixes ready for Debian Bookworm.  Because it depend on a
  35 package missing on some architectures, the autopkgtest check of the
  36 testing migration script did not understand that the tests were
  37 actually working, so the migration was delayed.  A bug in the package
  38 dependencies is also fixed, so those installing the firewall package
  39 (opensnitch) now also get the GUI admin tool (python3-opensnitch-ui)
  40 installed by default.  I am very grateful to Gustavo Iñiguez Goya for
  41 his work on getting the package ready for Debian Bookworm.</p>
  42
  43 <p>Armed with this package I have discovered some surprising
  44 connections from programs I believed were able to work completly
  45 offline, and it has already proven its worth, at least to me.  If you
  46 too want to get more familiar with the kind of programs using
  47 Internett connections on your machine, I recommend testing <tt>apt
  48 install opensnitch</tt> in Bookworm and see what you think.</p>
  49
  50 <p>The package is still not able to build its eBPF module within
  51 Debian.  Not sure how much work it would be to get it working, but
  52 suspect some kernel related packages need to be extended with more
  53 header files to get it working.</p>
  54
  55 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
  56 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
  57 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
  58
  59       </div>
  60       <div class="tags">
  61
  62
  63         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opensnitch">opensnitch</a>.
  64
  65
  66       </div>
  67     </div>
  68     <div class="padding"></div>
  69
  70     <div class="entry">
  71       <div class="title">
  72         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Speech_to_text__she_APTly_whispered__how_hard_can_it_be_.html">Speech to text, she APTly whispered, how hard can it be?</a>
  73       </div>
  74       <div class="date">
  75         23rd April 2023
  76       </div>
  77       <div class="body">
  78         <p>While visiting a convention during Easter, it occurred to me that
  79 it would be great if I could have a digital Dictaphone with
  80 transcribing capabilities, providing me with texts to cut-n-paste into
  81 stuff I need to write.  The background is that long drives often bring
  82 up the urge to write on texts I am working on, which of course is out
  83 of the question while driving.  With the release of
  84 <a href="https://github.com/openai/whisper/">OpenAI Whisper</a>, this
  85 seem to be within reach with Free Software, so I decided to give it a
  86 go.  OpenAI Whisper is a Linux based neural network system to read in
  87 audio files and provide text representation of the speech in that
  88 audio recording.  It handle multiple languages and according to its
  89 creators even can translate into a different language than the spoken
  90 one.  I have not tested the latter feature.  It can either use the CPU
  91 or a GPU with CUDA support.  As far as I can tell, CUDA in practice
  92 limit that feature to NVidia graphics cards.  I have few of those, as
  93 they do not work great with free software drivers, and have not tested
  94 the GPU option.  While looking into the matter, I did discover some
  95 work to provide CUDA support on non-NVidia GPUs, and some work with
  96 the library used by Whisper to port it to other GPUs, but have not
  97 spent much time looking into GPU support yet.  I've so far used an old
  98 X220 laptop as my test machine, and only transcribed using its
  99 CPU.</p>
 100
 101 <p>As it from a privacy standpoint is unthinkable to use computers
 102 under control of someone else (aka a "cloud" service) to transcribe
 103 ones thoughts and personal notes, I want to run the transcribing
 104 system locally on my own computers.  The only sensible approach to me
 105 is to make the effort I put into this available for any Linux user and
 106 to upload the needed packages into Debian.  Looking at Debian Bookworm, I
 107 discovered that only three packages were missing,
 108 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/1034307">tiktoken</a>,
 109 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/1034144">triton</a>, and
 110 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/1034091">openai-whisper</a>.  For a while
 111 I also believed
 112 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/1034286">ffmpeg-python</a> was
 113 needed, but as its
 114 <a href="https://github.com/kkroening/ffmpeg-python/issues/760">upstream
 115 seem to have vanished</a> I found it safer
 116 <a href="https://github.com/openai/whisper/pull/1242">to rewrite
 117 whisper</a> to stop depending on in than to introduce ffmpeg-python
 118 into Debian.  I decided to place these packages under the umbrella of
 119 <a href="https://salsa.debian.org/deeplearning-team">the Debian Deep
 120 Learning Team</a>, which seem like the best team to look after such
 121 packages.  Discussing the topic within the group also made me aware
 122 that the triton package was already a future dependency of newer
 123 versions of the torch package being planned, and would be needed after
 124 Bookworm is released.</p>
 125
 126 <p>All required code packages have been now waiting in
 127 <a href="https://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html">the Debian NEW
 128 queue</a> since Wednesday, heading for Debian Experimental until
 129 Bookworm is released.  An unsolved issue is how to handle the neural
 130 network models used by Whisper.  The default behaviour of Whisper is
 131 to require Internet connectivity and download the model requested to
 132 <tt>~/.cache/whisper/</tt> on first invocation.  This obviously would
 133 fail <a href="https://people.debian.org/~bap/dfsg-faq.html">the
 134 deserted island test of free software</a> as the Debian packages would
 135 be unusable for someone stranded with only the Debian archive and solar
 136 powered computer on a deserted island.</p>
 137
 138 <p>Because of this, I would love to include the models in the Debian
 139 mirror system.  This is problematic, as the models are very large
 140 files, which would put a heavy strain on the Debian mirror
 141 infrastructure around the globe.  The strain would be even higher if
 142 the models change often, which luckily as far as I can tell they do
 143 not.  The small model, which according to its creator is most useful
 144 for English and in my experience is not doing a great job there
 145 either, is 462 MiB (deb is 414 MiB).  The medium model, which to me
 146 seem to handle English speech fairly well is 1.5 GiB (deb is 1.3 GiB)
 147 and the large model is 2.9 GiB (deb is 2.6 GiB).  I would assume
 148 everyone with enough resources would prefer to use the large model for
 149 highest quality.  I believe the models themselves would have to go
 150 into the non-free part of the Debian archive, as they are not really
 151 including any useful source code for updating the models.  The
 152 "source", aka the model training set, according to the creators
 153 consist of "680,000 hours of multilingual and multitask supervised
 154 data collected from the web", which to me reads material with both
 155 unknown copyright terms, unavailable to the general public.  In other
 156 words, the source is not available according to the Debian Free
 157 Software Guidelines and the model should be considered non-free.</p>
 158
 159 <p>I asked the Debian FTP masters for advice regarding uploading a
 160 model package on their IRC channel, and based on the feedback there it
 161 is still unclear to me if such package would be accepted into the
 162 archive.  In any case I wrote build rules for a
 163 <a href="https://salsa.debian.org/deeplearning-team/openai-whisper-model">OpenAI
 164 Whisper model package</a> and
 165 <a href="https://github.com/openai/whisper/pull/1257">modified the
 166 Whisper code base</a> to prefer shared files under <tt>/usr/</tt> and
 167 <tt>/var/</tt> over user specific files in <tt>~/.cache/whisper/</tt>
 168 to be able to use these model packages, to prepare for such
 169 possibility.  One solution might be to include only one of the models
 170 (small or medium, I guess) in the Debian archive, and ask people to
 171 download the others from the Internet.  Not quite sure what to do
 172 here, and advice is most welcome (use the debian-ai mailing list).</p>
 173
 174 <p>To make it easier to test the new packages while I wait for them to
 175 clear the NEW queue, I created an APT source targeting bookworm.  I
 176 selected Bookworm instead of Bullseye, even though I know the latter
 177 would reach more users, is that some of the required dependencies are
 178 missing from Bullseye and I during this phase of testing did not want
 179 to backport a lot of packages just to get up and running.</p>
 180
 181 <p>Here is a recipe to run as user root if you want to test OpenAI
 182 Whisper using Debian packages on your Debian Bookworm installation,
 183 first adding the APT repository GPG key to the list of trusted keys,
 184 then setting up the APT repository and finally installing the packages
 185 and one of the models:</p>
 186
 187 <p><pre>
 188 curl https://geekbay.nuug.no/~pere/openai-whisper/D78F5C4796F353D211B119E28200D9B589641240.asc \
 189   -o /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/pere-whisper.asc
 190 mkdir -p /etc/apt/sources.list.d
 191 cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pere-whisper.list &lt;&lt;EOF
 192 deb https://geekbay.nuug.no/~pere/openai-whisper/ bookworm main
 193 deb-src https://geekbay.nuug.no/~pere/openai-whisper/ bookworm main
 194 EOF
 195 apt update
 196 apt install openai-whisper
 197 </pre></p>
 198
 199 <p>The package work for me, but have not yet been tested on any other
 200 computer than my own.  With it, I have been able to (badly) transcribe
 201 a 2 minute 40 second Norwegian audio clip to test using the small
 202 model.  This took 11 minutes and around 2.2 GiB of RAM.  Transcribing
 203 the same file with the medium model gave a accurate text in 77 minutes
 204 using around 5.2 GiB of RAM.  My test machine had too little memory to
 205 test the large model, which I believe require 11 GiB of RAM.  In
 206 short, this now work for me using Debian packages, and I hope it will
 207 for you and everyone else once the packages enter Debian.</p>
 208
 209 <p>Now I can start on the audio recording part of this project.</p>
 210
 211 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 212 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 213 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 214
 215       </div>
 216       <div class="tags">
 217
 218
 219         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
 220
 221
 222       </div>
 223     </div>
 224     <div class="padding"></div>
 225
 226     <div class="entry">
 227       <div class="title">
 228         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/rtlsdr_scanner__software_defined_radio_frequency_scanner_for_Linux____nice_free_software.html">rtlsdr-scanner, software defined radio frequency scanner for Linux  - nice free software</a>
 229       </div>
 230       <div class="date">
 231          7th April 2023
 232       </div>
 233       <div class="body">
 234         <p>Today I finally found time to track down a useful radio frequency
 235 scanner for my software defined radio.  Just for fun I tried to locate
 236 the radios used in the areas, and a good start would be to scan all
 237 the frequencies to see what is in use.  I've tried to find a useful
 238 program earlier, but ran out of time before I managed to find a useful
 239 tool.  This time I was more successful, and after a few false leads I
 240 found a description of
 241 <a href="https://www.kali.org/tools/rtlsdr-scanner/">rtlsdr-scanner
 242 over at the Kali site</a>, and was able to track down
 243 <a href="https://gitlab.com/kalilinux/packages/rtlsdr-scanner.git">the
 244 Kali package git repository</a> to build a deb package for the
 245 scanner.  Sadly the package is missing from the Debian project itself,
 246 at least in Debian Bullseye.  Two runtime dependencies,
 247 <a href="https://gitlab.com/kalilinux/packages/python-visvis.git">python-visvis</a>
 248 and
 249 <a href="https://gitlab.com/kalilinux/packages/python-rtlsdr.git">python-rtlsdr</a>
 250 had to be built and installed separately.  Luckily '<tt>gbp
 251 buildpackage</tt>' handled them just fine and no further packages had
 252 to be manually built.  The end result worked out of the box after
 253 installation.</p>
 254
 255 <p>My initial scans for FM channels worked just fine, so I knew the
 256 scanner was functioning.  But when I tried to scan every frequency
 257 from 100 to 1000 MHz, the program stopped unexpectedly near the
 258 completion.  After some debugging I discovered USB software radio I
 259 used rejected frequencies above 948 MHz, triggering a unreported
 260 exception breaking the scan.  Changing the scan to end at 957 worked
 261 better.  I similarly found the lower limit to be around 15, and ended
 262 up with the following full scan:</p>
 263
 264 <p><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2023-04-07-radio-freq-scanning.png"><img src="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2023-04-07-radio-freq-scanning.png" width="100%"></a></p>
 265
 266 <p>Saving the scan did not work, but exporting it as a CSV file worked
 267 just fine.  I ended up with around 477k CVS lines with dB level for
 268 the given frequency.</p>
 269
 270 <p>The save failure seem to be a missing UTF-8 encoding issue in the
 271 python code.  Will see if I can find time to send a patch
 272 <a href="https://github.com/CdeMills/RTLSDR-Scanner/">upstream</a>
 273 later to fix this exception:</p>
 274
 275 <pre>
 276 Traceback (most recent call last):
 277   File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/rtlsdr_scanner/main_window.py", line 485, in __on_save
 278     save_plot(fullName, self.scanInfo, self.spectrum, self.locations)
 279   File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/rtlsdr_scanner/file.py", line 408, in save_plot
 280     handle.write(json.dumps(data, indent=4))
 281 TypeError: a bytes-like object is required, not 'str'
 282 Traceback (most recent call last):
 283   File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/rtlsdr_scanner/main_window.py", line 485, in __on_save
 284     save_plot(fullName, self.scanInfo, self.spectrum, self.locations)
 285   File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/rtlsdr_scanner/file.py", line 408, in save_plot
 286     handle.write(json.dumps(data, indent=4))
 287 TypeError: a bytes-like object is required, not 'str'
 288 </pre>
 289
 290 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 291 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 292 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 293
 294       </div>
 295       <div class="tags">
 296
 297
 298         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
 299
 300
 301       </div>
 302     </div>
 303     <div class="padding"></div>
 304
 305     <div class="entry">
 306       <div class="title">
 307         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/OpenSnitch_available_in_Debian_Sid_and_Bookworm.html">OpenSnitch available in Debian Sid and Bookworm</a>
 308       </div>
 309       <div class="date">
 310         25th February 2023
 311       </div>
 312       <div class="body">
 313         <p>Thanks to the efforts of the OpenSnitch lead developer Gustavo
 314 Iñiguez Goya allowing me to sponsor the upload,
 315 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/opensnitch">the interactive
 316 application firewall OpenSnitch</a> is now available in Debian
 317 Testing, soon to become the next stable release of Debian.</p>
 318
 319 <p>This is a package which set up a network firewall on one or more
 320 machines, which is controlled by a graphical user interface that will
 321 ask the user if a program should be allowed to connect to the local
 322 network or the Internet.  If some background daemon is trying to dial
 323 home, it can be blocked from doing so with a simple mouse click, or by
 324 default simply by not doing anything when the GUI question dialog pop
 325 up.  A list of all programs discovered using the network is provided
 326 in the GUI, giving the user an overview of how the machine(s) programs
 327 use the network.</p>
 328
 329 <p>OpenSnitch was uploaded for NEW processing about a month ago, and I
 330 had little hope of it getting accepted and shaping up in time for the
 331 package freeze, but the Debian ftpmasters proved to be amazingly quick
 332 at checking out the package and it was accepted into the archive about
 333 week after the first upload.  It is now team maintained under the Go
 334 language team umbrella.  A few fixes to the default setup is only in
 335 Sid, and should migrate to Testing/Bookworm in a week.</p>
 336
 337 <p>During testing I ran into an
 338 <a href="https://github.com/evilsocket/opensnitch/issues/813">issue
 339 with Minecraft server broadcasts disappearing</a>, which was quickly
 340 resolved by the developer with a patch and a proposed configuration
 341 change.  I've been told this was caused by the Debian packages default
 342 use if /proc/ information to track down kernel status, instead of the
 343 newer eBPF module that can be used.  The reason is simply that
 344 upstream and I have failed to find a way to build the eBPF modules for
 345 OpenSnitch without a complete configured Linux kernel source tree,
 346 which as far as we can tell is unavailable as a build dependency in
 347 Debian.  We tried unsuccessfully so far to use the kernel-headers
 348 package.  It would be great if someone could provide some clues how to
 349 build eBPF modules on build daemons in Debian, possibly without the full
 350 kernel source.</p>
 351
 352 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 353 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 354 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 355
 356       </div>
 357       <div class="tags">
 358
 359
 360         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opensnitch">opensnitch</a>.
 361
 362
 363       </div>
 364     </div>
 365     <div class="padding"></div>
 366
 367     <div class="entry">
 368       <div class="title">
 369         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_the_desktop_recommending_your_program_for_opening_its_files_.html">Is the desktop recommending your program for opening its files?</a>
 370       </div>
 371       <div class="date">
 372         29th January 2023
 373       </div>
 374       <div class="body">
 375         <p>Linux desktop systems
 376 <a href="https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html">have
 377 standardized</a> how programs present themselves to the desktop
 378 system.  If a package include a .desktop file in
 379 /usr/share/applications/, Gnome, KDE, LXDE, Xfce and the other desktop
 380 environments will pick up the file and use its content to generate the
 381 menu of available programs in the system.  A lesser known fact is that
 382 a package can also explain to the desktop system how to recognize the
 383 files created by the program in question, and use it to open these
 384 files on request, for example via a GUI file browser.</p>
 385
 386 <p>A while back I ran into a package that did not tell the desktop
 387 system how to recognize its files and was not used to open its files
 388 in the file browser and fixed it.  In the process I wrote a simple
 389 debian/tests/ script to ensure the setup keep working.  It might be
 390 useful for other packages too, to ensure any future version of the
 391 package keep handling its own files.</p>
 392
 393 <p>For this to work the file format need a useful MIME type that can
 394 be used to identify the format.  If the file format do not yet have a
 395 MIME type, it should define one and preferably also
 396 <a href="https://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/media-types.xhtml">register
 397 it with IANA</a> to ensure the MIME type string is reserved.</p>
 398
 399 <p>The script uses the <tt>xdg-mime</tt> program from xdg-utils to
 400 query the database of standardized package information and ensure it
 401 return sensible values.  It also need the location of an example file
 402 for xdg-mime to guess the format of.</p>
 403
 404 <pre>
 405 #!/bin/sh
 406 #
 407 # Author: Petter Reinholdtsen
 408 # License: GPL v2 or later at your choice.
 409 #
 410 # Validate the MIME setup, making sure motor types have
 411 # application/vnd.openmotor+yaml associated with them and is connected
 412 # to the openmotor desktop file.
 413
 414 retval=0
 415
 416 mimetype="application/vnd.openmotor+yaml"
 417 testfile="test/data/real/o3100/motor.ric"
 418 mydesktopfile="openmotor.desktop"
 419
 420 filemime="$(xdg-mime query filetype "$testfile")"
 421
 422 if [ "$mimetype" != "$filemime" ] ; then
 423     retval=1
 424     echo "error: xdg-mime claim motor file MIME type is $filemine, not $mimetype"
 425 else
 426     echo "success: xdg-mime report correct mime type $mimetype for motor file"
 427 fi
 428
 429 desktop=$(xdg-mime query default "$mimetype")
 430
 431 if [ "$mydesktopfile" != "$desktop" ]; then
 432     retval=1
 433     echo "error: xdg-mime claim motor file should be handled by $desktop, not $mydesktopfile"
 434 else
 435     echo "success: xdg-mime agree motor file should be handled by $mydesktopfile"
 436 fi
 437
 438 exit $retval
 439 </pre>
 440
 441 <p>It is a simple way to ensure your users are not very surprised when
 442 they try to open one of your file formats in their file browser.</p>
 443
 444 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 445 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 446 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 447
 448       </div>
 449       <div class="tags">
 450
 451
 452         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 453
 454
 455       </div>
 456     </div>
 457     <div class="padding"></div>
 458
 459     <div class="entry">
 460       <div class="title">
 461         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Opensnitch__the_application_level_interactive_firewall__heading_into_the_Debian_archive.html">Opensnitch, the application level interactive firewall, heading into the Debian archive</a>
 462       </div>
 463       <div class="date">
 464         22nd January 2023
 465       </div>
 466       <div class="body">
 467         <p>While reading a
 468 <a href="https://sneak.berlin/20230115/macos-scans-your-local-files-now/">blog
 469 post claiming MacOS X recently started scanning local files and
 470 reporting information about them to Apple</a>, even on a machine where
 471 all such callback features had been disabled, I came across a
 472 description of the Little Snitch application for MacOS X.  It seemed
 473 like a very nice tool to have in the tool box, and I decided to see if
 474 something similar was available for Linux.</p>
 475
 476 <p>It did not take long to find
 477 <a href="https://github.com/evilsocket/opensnitch">the OpenSnitch
 478 package</a>, which has been in development since 2017, and now is in
 479 version 1.5.0.  It has had a
 480 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/909567">request for Debian
 481 packaging</a> since 2018, but no-one completed the job so far.  Just
 482 for fun, I decided to see if I could help, and I was very happy to
 483 discover that
 484 <a href="https://github.com/evilsocket/opensnitch/issues/304">upstream
 485 want a Debian package too</a>.</p>
 486
 487 <p>After struggling a bit with getting the program to run, figuring
 488 out building Go programs (and a little failed detour to look at eBPF
 489 builds too - help needed), I am very happy to report that I am
 490 sponsoring upstream to maintain the package in Debian, and it has
 491 since this morning been waiting in NEW for the ftpmasters to have a
 492 look.  Perhaps it can get into the archive in time for the Bookworm
 493 release?</p>
 494
 495 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 496 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 497 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 498
 499       </div>
 500       <div class="tags">
 501
 502
 503         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opensnitch">opensnitch</a>.
 504
 505
 506       </div>
 507     </div>
 508     <div class="padding"></div>
 509
 510     <div class="entry">
 511       <div class="title">
 512         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LinuxCNC_MQTT_publisher_component.html">LinuxCNC MQTT publisher component</a>
 513       </div>
 514       <div class="date">
 515          8th January 2023
 516       </div>
 517       <div class="body">
 518         <p>I watched <a href="https://yewtu.be/watch?v=jmKUV3aNLjk">a 2015
 519 video from Andreas Schiffler</a> the other day, where he set up
 520 <a href="https://linuxcnc.org/">LinuxCNC</a> to send status
 521 information to the MQTT broker IBM Bluemix.  As I also use MQTT for
 522 graphing, it occured to me that a generic MQTT LinuxCNC component
 523 would be useful and I set out to implement it.  Today I got the first
 524 draft limping along and submitted as
 525 <a href="https://github.com/LinuxCNC/linuxcnc/pull/2253">a patch to the
 526 LinuxCNC project</a>.</p>
 527
 528 <p>The simple part was setting up the MQTT publishing code in Python.
 529 I already have set up other parts submitting data to my Mosquito MQTT
 530 broker, so I could reuse that code.  Writing a LinuxCNC component in
 531 Python as new to me, but using existing examples in the code
 532 repository and the extensive documentation, this was fairly straight
 533 forward.  The hardest part was creating a automated test for the
 534 component to ensure it was working.  Testing it in a simulated
 535 LinuxCNC machine proved very useful, as I discovered features I needed
 536 that I had not thought of yet, and adjusted the code quite a bit to
 537 make it easier to test without a operational MQTT broker
 538 available.</p>
 539
 540 <p>The draft is ready and working, but I am unsure which LinuxCNC HAL
 541 pins I should collect and publish by default (in other words, the
 542 default set of information pieces published), and how to get the
 543 machine name from the LinuxCNC INI file.  The latter is a minor
 544 detail, but I expect it would be useful in a setup with several
 545 machines available.  I am hoping for feedback from the experienced
 546 LinuxCNC developers and users, to make the component even better
 547 before it can go into the mainland LinuxCNC code base.</p>
 548
 549 <p>Since I started on the MQTT component, I came across
 550 <a href="https://yewtu.be/watch?v=Bqa2grG0XtA">another video from Kent
 551 VanderVelden</a> where he combine LinuxCNC with a set of screen glasses
 552 controlled by a Raspberry Pi, and it occured to me that it would
 553 be useful for such use cases if LinuxCNC also provided a REST API for
 554 querying its status.  I hope to start on such component once the MQTT
 555 component is working well.</p>
 556
 557 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 558 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 559 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 560
 561       </div>
 562       <div class="tags">
 563
 564
 565         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/linuxcnc">linuxcnc</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
 566
 567
 568       </div>
 569     </div>
 570     <div class="padding"></div>
 571
 572     <div class="entry">
 573       <div class="title">
 574         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ONVIF_IP_camera_management_tool_finally_in_Debian.html">ONVIF IP camera management tool finally in Debian</a>
 575       </div>
 576       <div class="date">
 577         24th December 2022
 578       </div>
 579       <div class="body">
 580         <p>Merry Christmas to you all.  Here is a small gift to all those with
 581 IP cameras following the <a href="https://www.onvif.org/">ONVIF
 582 specification</a>.  There is finally a nice command line and GUI tool
 583 in Debian to manage ONVIF IP cameras.  After working with upstream for
 584 a few months and sponsoring the upload, I am very happy to report that
 585 the <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/libonvif">libonvif package</a>
 586 entered Debian Sid last night.</p>
 587
 588 <p>The package provide a C library to communicate with such cameras, a
 589 command line tool to locate and update settings of (like password) the
 590 cameras and a GUI tool to configure and control the units as well as
 591 preview the video from the camera.  Libonvif is available on Both
 592 Linux and Windows and the GUI tool uses the Qt library.  The main
 593 competitors are non-free software, while libonvif is GNU GPL licensed.
 594 I am very glad Debian users in the future can control their cameras
 595 using a free software system provided by Debian.  But the ONVIF world
 596 is full of slightly broken firmware, where the cameras pretend to
 597 follow the ONVIF specification but fail to set some configuration
 598 values or refuse to provide video to more than one recipient at the
 599 time, and the onvif project is quite young and might take a while
 600 before it completely work with your camera.  Upstream seem eager to
 601 improve the library, so handling any broken camera might be just <a
 602 href="https://github.com/sr99622/libonvif/">a bug report away</a>.</p>
 603
 604 <p>The package just cleared NEW, and need a new source only upload
 605 before it can enter testing.  This will happen in the next few
 606 days.</p>
 607
 608 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 609 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 610 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 611
 612       </div>
 613       <div class="tags">
 614
 615
 616         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
 617
 618
 619       </div>
 620     </div>
 621     <div class="padding"></div>
 622
 623     <div class="entry">
 624       <div class="title">
 625         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Managing_and_using_ONVIF_IP_cameras_with_Linux.html">Managing and using ONVIF IP cameras with Linux</a>
 626       </div>
 627       <div class="date">
 628         19th October 2022
 629       </div>
 630       <div class="body">
 631         <p>Recently I have been looking at how to control and collect data
 632 from a handful IP cameras using Linux.  I both wanted to change their
 633 settings and to make their imagery available via a free software
 634 service under my control.  Here is a summary of the tools I found.</p>
 635
 636 <p>First I had to identify the cameras and their protocols.  As far as
 637 I could tell, they were using some SOAP looking protocol and their
 638 internal web server seem to only work with Microsoft Internet Explorer
 639 with some proprietary binary plugin, which in these days of course is
 640 a security disaster and also made it impossible for me to use the
 641 camera web interface.  Luckily I discovered that the SOAP looking
 642 protocol is actually following <a href="https://www.onvif.org/">the
 643 ONVIF specification</a>, which seem to be supported by a lot of IP
 644 cameras these days.</p>
 645
 646 <p>Once the protocol was identified, I was able to find what appear to
 647 be the most popular way to configure ONVIF cameras, the free software
 648 Windows tool named
 649 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/projects/onvifdm/">ONVIF Device
 650 Manager</a>.  Lacking any other options at the time, I tried
 651 unsuccessfully to get it running using Wine, but was missing a dotnet
 652 40 library and I found no way around it to run it on Linux.</p>
 653
 654 <p>The next tool I found to configure the cameras were a non-free Linux Qt
 655 client <a href="https://www.lingodigit.com/onvif_nvcdemo.html">ONVIF
 656 Device Tool</a>.  I did not like its terms of use, so did not spend
 657 much time on it.</p>
 658
 659 <p>To collect the video and make it available in a web interface, I
 660 found the Zoneminder tool in Debian.  A recent version was able to
 661 automatically detect and configure ONVIF devices, so I could use it to
 662 set up motion detection in and collection of the camera output.  I had
 663 initial problems getting the ONVIF autodetection to work, as both
 664 Firefox and Chromium <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/1001188">refused
 665 the inter-tab communication</a> being used by the Zoneminder web
 666 pages, but managed to get konqueror to work.  Apparently the "Enhanced
 667 Tracking Protection" in Firefox cause the problem.  I ended up
 668 upgrading to the Bookworm edition of Zoneminder in the process to try
 669 to fix the issue, and believe the problem might be solved now.</p>
 670
 671 <p>In the process I came across the nice Linux GUI tool
 672 <a href="https://gitlab.com/caspermeijn/onvifviewer/">ONVIF Viewer</a>
 673 allowing me to preview the camera output and validate the login
 674 passwords required.  Sadly its author has grown tired of maintaining
 675 the software, so it might not see any future updates.  Which is sad,
 676 as the viewer is sightly unstable and the picture tend to lock up.
 677 Note, this lockup might be due to limitations in the cameras and not
 678 the viewer implementation.  I suspect the camera is only able to
 679 provide pictures to one client at the time, and the Zoneminder feed
 680 might interfere with the GUI viewer.  I have
 681 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/1000820">asked for the tool to be
 682 included in Debian</a>.</p>
 683
 684 <p>Finally, I found what appear to be very nice Linux free software
 685 replacement for the Windows tool, named
 686 <a href="https://github.com/sr99622/libonvif/">libonvif</a>.  It
 687 provide a C library to talk to ONVIF devices as well as a command line
 688 and GUI tool using the library.  Using the GUI tool I was able to change
 689 the admin passwords and update other settings of the cameras.  I have
 690 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/1021980">asked for the package to be
 691 included in Debian</a>.</p>
 692
 693 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 694 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 695 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 696
 697 <p><strong>Update 2022-10-20</strong>: Since my initial publication of
 698 this text, I got several suggestions for more free software Linux
 699 tools.  There is <a href="https://github.com/quatanium/python-onvif">a
 700 ONVIF python library</a> (already
 701 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/824240">requested into Debian</a>) and
 702 <a href="https://github.com/FalkTannhaeuser/python-onvif-zeep">a python 3
 703 fork</a> using a different SOAP dependency.  There is also
 704 <a href="https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/onvif/">support for
 705 ONVIF in Home Assistant</a>, and there is an alternative to Zoneminder
 706 called <a href="https://www.shinobi.video/">Shinobi</a>.  The latter
 707 two are not included in Debian either.  I have not tested any of these
 708 so far.</p>
 709
 710       </div>
 711       <div class="tags">
 712
 713
 714         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
 715
 716
 717       </div>
 718     </div>
 719     <div class="padding"></div>
 720
 721     <div class="entry">
 722       <div class="title">
 723         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_to_translate_the_Bullseye_edition_of_the_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook.html">Time to translate the Bullseye edition of the Debian Administrator's Handbook</a>
 724       </div>
 725       <div class="date">
 726         12th September 2022
 727       </div>
 728       <div class="body">
 729         <p align="center"><img align="center" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2020-10-20-debian-handbook-nb-testprint.jpeg" width="60%"/></p>
 730
 731 <p>(The picture is of the previous edition.)</p>
 732
 733 <p>Almost two years after the previous Norwegian Bokmål translation of
 734 the "<a href="https://debian-handbook.info/">The Debian Administrator's
 735 Handbook</a>" was published, a new edition is finally being prepared.  The
 736 english text is updated, and it is time to start working on the
 737 translations.  Around 37 percent of the strings have been updated, one
 738 way or another, and the translations starting from a complete Debian Buster
 739 edition now need to bring their translation up from 63% to 100%.  The
 740 complete book is licensed using a Creative Commons license, and has
 741 been published in several languages over the years.  The translations
 742 are done by volunteers to bring Linux in their native tongue.  The
 743 last time I checked, it complete text was available in English,
 744 Norwegian Bokmål, German, Indonesian, Brazil Portuguese and Spanish.
 745 In addition, work has been started for Arabic (Morocco), Catalan,
 746 Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish,
 747 Dutch, French, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Polish,
 748 Romanian, Russian, Swedish, Turkish and Vietnamese.</p>
 749
 750 <p>The translation is conducted on
 751 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-handbook/">the
 752 hosted weblate project page</a>.  Prospective translators are
 753 recommeded to subscribe to
 754 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/debian-handbook-translators">the
 755 translators mailing list</a> and should also check out
 756 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/contribute/">the instructions for
 757 contributors</a>.</p>
 758
 759 <p>I am one of the Norwegian Bokmål translators of this book, and we
 760 have just started.  Your contribution is most welcome.</p>
 761
 762 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 763 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 764 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 765
 766       </div>
 767       <div class="tags">
 768
 769
 770         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 771
 772
 773       </div>
 774     </div>
 775     <div class="padding"></div>
 776
 777     <div class="entry">
 778       <div class="title">
 779         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_LinuxCNC_servo_PID_tuning_.html">Automatic LinuxCNC servo PID tuning?</a>
 780       </div>
 781       <div class="date">
 782         16th July 2022
 783       </div>
 784       <div class="body">
 785         <p>While working on a CNC with servo motors controlled by the
 786 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LinuxCNC">LinuxCNC</a>
 787 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PID_controller">PID
 788 controller</a>, I recently had to learn how to tune the collection of values
 789 that control such mathematical machinery that a PID controller is.  It
 790 proved to be a lot harder than I hoped, and I still have not succeeded
 791 in getting the Z PID controller to successfully defy gravity, nor X
 792 and Y to move accurately and reliably.  But while climbing up this
 793 rather steep learning curve, I discovered that some motor control
 794 systems are able to tune their PID controllers.  I got the impression
 795 from the documentation that LinuxCNC were not.  This proved to be not
 796 true.</p>
 797
 798 <p>The LinuxCNC
 799 <a href="http://linuxcnc.org/docs/html/man/man9/pid.9.html">pid
 800 component</a> is the recommended PID controller to use.  It uses eight
 801 constants <tt>Pgain</tt>, <tt>Igain</tt>, <tt>Dgain</tt>,
 802 <tt>bias</tt>, <tt>FF0</tt>, <tt>FF1</tt>, <tt>FF2</tt> and
 803 <tt>FF3</tt> to calculate the output value based on current and wanted
 804 state, and all of these need to have a sensible value for the
 805 controller to behave properly.  Note, there are even more values
 806 involved, theser are just the most important ones.  In my case I need
 807 the X, Y and Z axes to follow the requested path with little error.
 808 This has proved quite a challenge for someone who have never tuned a
 809 PID controller before, but there is at least some help to be found.
 810
 811 <p>I discovered that included in LinuxCNC was this old PID component
 812 at_pid claiming to have auto tuning capabilities.  Sadly it had been
 813 neglected since 2011, and could not be used as a plug in replacement
 814 for the default pid component.  One would have to rewriting the
 815 LinuxCNC HAL setup to test at_pid.  This was rather sad, when I wanted
 816 to quickly test auto tuning to see if it did a better job than me at
 817 figuring out good P, I and D values to use.</p>
 818
 819 <p>I decided to have a look if the situation could be improved.  This
 820 involved trying to understand the code and history of the pid and
 821 at_pid components.  Apparently they had a common ancestor, as code
 822 structure, comments and variable names were quite close to each other.
 823 Sadly this was not reflected in the git history, making it hard to
 824 figure out what really happened.  My guess is that the author of
 825 <a href="https://github.com/LinuxCNC/linuxcnc/blob/master/src/hal/components/at_pid.c">at_pid.c</a>
 826 took a version of
 827 <a href="https://github.com/LinuxCNC/linuxcnc/blob/master/src/hal/components/pid.c">pid.c</a>,
 828 rewrote it to follow the structure he wished pid.c to have, then added
 829 support for auto tuning and finally got it included into the LinuxCNC
 830 repository.  The restructuring and lack of early history made it
 831 harder to figure out which part of the code were relevant to the auto
 832 tuning, and which part of the code needed to be updated to work the
 833 same way as the current pid.c implementation.  I started by trying to
 834 isolate relevant changes in pid.c, and applying them to at_pid.c.  My
 835 aim was to make sure the at_pid component could replace the pid
 836 component with a simple change in the HAL setup loadrt line, without
 837 having to "rewire" the rest of the HAL configuration.  After a few
 838 hours following this approach, I had learned quite a lot about the
 839 code structure of both components, while concluding I was heading down
 840 the wrong rabbit hole, and should get back to the surface and find a
 841 different path.</p>
 842
 843 <p>For the second attempt, I decided to throw away all the PID control
 844 related part of the original at_pid.c, and instead isolate and lift
 845 the auto tuning part of the code and inject it into a copy of pid.c.
 846 This ensured compatibility with the current pid component, while
 847 adding auto tuning as a run time option.  To make it easier to identify
 848 the relevant parts in the future, I wrapped all the auto tuning code
 849 with '#ifdef AUTO_TUNER'.  The end result behave just like the current
 850 pid component by default, as that part of the code is identical.  The
 851 <a href="https://github.com/LinuxCNC/linuxcnc/pull/1820">end result
 852 entered the LinuxCNC master branch</a> a few days ago.</p>
 853
 854 <p>To enable auto tuning, one need to set a few HAL pins in the PID
 855 component.  The most important ones are <tt>tune-effort</tt>,
 856 <tt>tune-mode</tt> and <tt>tune-start</tt>.  But lets take a step
 857 back, and see what the auto tuning code will do.  I do not know the
 858 mathematical foundation of the at_pid algorithm, but from observation
 859 I can tell that the algorithm will, when enabled, produce a square
 860 wave pattern centered around the <tt>bias</tt> value on the output pin
 861 of the PID controller.  This can be seen using the HAL Scope provided
 862 by LinuxCNC.  In my case, this is translated into voltage (+-10V) sent
 863 to the motor controller, which in turn is translated into motor speed.
 864 So at_pid will ask the motor to move the axis back and forth.  The
 865 number of cycles in the pattern is controlled by the
 866 <tt>tune-cycles</tt> pin, and the extremes of the wave pattern is
 867 controlled by the <tt>tune-effort</tt> pin.  Of course, trying to
 868 change the direction of a physical object instantly (as in going
 869 directly from a positive voltage to the equivalent negative voltage)
 870 do not change velocity instantly, and it take some time for the object
 871 to slow down and move in the opposite direction.  This result in a
 872 more smooth movement wave form, as the axis in question were vibrating
 873 back and forth.  When the axis reached the target speed in the
 874 opposing direction, the auto tuner change direction again.  After
 875 several of these changes, the average time delay between the 'peaks'
 876 and 'valleys' of this movement graph is then used to calculate
 877 proposed values for Pgain, Igain and Dgain, and insert them into the
 878 HAL model to use by the pid controller.  The auto tuned settings are
 879 not great, but htye work a lot better than the values I had been able
 880 to cook up on my own, at least for the horizontal X and Y axis.  But I
 881 had to use very small <tt>tune-effort<tt> values, as my motor
 882 controllers error out if the voltage change too quickly.  I've been
 883 less lucky with the Z axis, which is moving a heavy object up and
 884 down, and seem to confuse the algorithm.  The Z axis movement became a
 885 lot better when I introduced a <tt>bias</tt> value to counter the
 886 gravitational drag, but I will have to work a lot more on the Z axis
 887 PID values.</p>
 888
 889 <p>Armed with this knowledge, it is time to look at how to do the
 890 tuning.  Lets say the HAL configuration in question load the PID
 891 component for X, Y and Z like this:</p>
 892
 893 <blockquote><pre>
 894 loadrt pid names=pid.x,pid.y,pid.z
 895 </pre></blockquote>
 896
 897 <p>Armed with the new and improved at_pid component, the new line will
 898 look like this:</p>
 899
 900 <blockquote><pre>
 901 loadrt at_pid names=pid.x,pid.y,pid.z
 902 </pre></blockquote>
 903
 904 <p>The rest of the HAL setup can stay the same.  This work because the
 905 components are referenced by name.  If the component had used count=3
 906 instead, all use of pid.# had to be changed to at_pid.#.</p>
 907
 908 <p>To start tuning the X axis, move the axis to the middle of its
 909 range, to make sure it do not hit anything when it start moving back
 910 and forth.  Next, set the <tt>tune-effort</tt> to a low number in the
 911 output range.  I used 0.1 as my initial value.  Next, assign 1 to the
 912 <tt>tune-mode</tt> value. Note, this will disable the pid controlling
 913 part and feed 0 to the output pin, which in my case initially caused a
 914 lot of drift.  In my case it proved to be a good idea with X and Y to
 915 tune the motor driver to make sure 0 voltage stopped the motor
 916 rotation.  On the other hand, for the Z axis this proved to be a bad
 917 idea, so it will depend on your setup.  It might help to set the
 918 <tt>bias</tt> value to a output value that reduce or eliminate the
 919 axis drift.  Finally, after setting <tt>tune-mode</tt>, set
 920 <tt>tune-start</tt> to 1 to activate the auto tuning.  If all go well,
 921 your axis will vibrate for a few seconds and when it is done, new
 922 values for Pgain, Igain and Dgain will be active.  To test them,
 923 change <tt>tune-mode</tt> back to 0.  Note that this might cause the
 924 machine to suddenly jerk as it bring the axis back to its commanded
 925 position, which it might have drifted away from during tuning.  To
 926 summarize with some halcmd lines:</p>
 927
 928 <blockquote><pre>
 929 setp pid.x.tune-effort 0.1
 930 setp pid.x.tune-mode 1
 931 setp pid.x.tune-start 1
 932 # wait for the tuning to complete
 933 setp pid.x.tune-mode 0
 934 </pre></blockquote>
 935
 936 <p>After doing this task quite a few times while trying to figure out
 937 how to properly tune the PID controllers on the machine in, I decided
 938 to figure out if this process could be automated, and wrote a script
 939 to do the entire tuning process from power on.  The end result will
 940 ensure the machine is powered on and ready to run, home all axis if it
 941 is not already done, check that the extra tuning pins are available,
 942 move the axis to its mid point, run the auto tuning and re-enable the
 943 pid controller when it is done.  It can be run several times.  Check
 944 out the
 945 <a href="https://github.com/SebKuzminsky/MazakVQC1540/blob/bon-dev/scripts/run-auto-pid-tuner">run-auto-pid-tuner</a>
 946 script on github if you want to learn how it is done.</p>
 947
 948 <p>My hope is that this little adventure can inspire someone who know
 949 more about motor PID controller tuning can implement even better
 950 algorithms for automatic PID tuning in LinuxCNC, making life easier
 951 for both me and all the others that want to use LinuxCNC but lack the
 952 in depth knowledge needed to tune PID controllers well.</p>
 953
 954 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 955 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 956 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 957
 958       </div>
 959       <div class="tags">
 960
 961
 962         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/linuxcnc">linuxcnc</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
 963
 964
 965       </div>
 966     </div>
 967     <div class="padding"></div>
 968
 969     <div class="entry">
 970       <div class="title">
 971         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LinuxCNC_translators_life_just_got_a_bit_easier.html">LinuxCNC translators life just got a bit easier</a>
 972       </div>
 973       <div class="date">
 974          3rd June 2022
 975       </div>
 976       <div class="body">
 977         <p>Back in oktober last year, when I started looking at the
 978 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LinuxCNC">LinuxCNC</a> system, I
 979 proposed to change the documentation build system make life easier for
 980 translators.  The original system consisted of independently written
 981 documentation files for each language, with no automated way to track
 982 changes done in other translations and no help for the translators to
 983 know how much was left to translated.  By using
 984 <a href="https://po4a.org/">the po4a system</a> to generate POT and PO
 985 files from the English documentation, this can be improved.  A small
 986 team of LinuxCNC contributors got together and today our labour
 987 finally payed off.  Since a few hours ago, it is now possible to
 988 translate <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/linuxcnc/">the
 989 LinuxCNC documentation on Weblate</a>, alongside the program itself.</p>
 990
 991 <p>The effort to migrate the documentation to use po4a has been both
 992 slow and frustrating.  I am very happy we finally made it.</p>
 993
 994 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 995 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 996 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 997
 998       </div>
 999       <div class="tags">
1000
1001
1002         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/linuxcnc">linuxcnc</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
1003
1004
1005       </div>
1006     </div>
1007     <div class="padding"></div>
1008
1009     <div class="entry">
1010       <div class="title">
1011         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/geteltorito_make_CD_firmware_upgrades_a_breeze.html">geteltorito make CD firmware upgrades a breeze</a>
1012       </div>
1013       <div class="date">
1014         20th April 2022
1015       </div>
1016       <div class="body">
1017         <p>Recently I wanted to upgrade the firmware of my thinkpad, and
1018 located the firmware download page from Lenovo (which annoyingly do
1019 not allow access via Tor, forcing me to hand them more personal
1020 information that I would like).  The
1021 <a href="https://support.lenovo.com/no/en/search?query=thinkpad firmware bios upgrade iso&SearchType=Customer search&searchLocation=Masthead">download
1022 from Lenovo</a> is a bootable ISO image, which is a bit of a problem
1023 when all I got available is a USB memory stick.  I tried booting the
1024 ISO as a USB stick, but this did not work.  But genisoimage came to
1025 the rescue.</p>
1026
1027 <P>The geteltorito program in
1028 <a href="http://tracker.debian.org/cdrkit">the genisoimage binary
1029 package</a> is able to convert the bootable ISO image to a bootable
1030 USB stick using a simple command line recipe, which I then can write
1031 to the most recently inserted USB stick:</p>
1032
1033 <blockquote><pre>
1034 geteltorito -o usbstick.img lenovo-firmware.iso
1035 sudo dd bs=10M if=usbstick.img of=$(ls -tr /dev/sd?|tail -1)
1036 </pre></blockquote>
1037
1038 <p>This USB stick booted the firmware upgrader just fine, and in a few
1039 minutes my machine had the latest and greatest BIOS firmware in place.</p>
1040
1041       </div>
1042       <div class="tags">
1043
1044
1045         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1046
1047
1048       </div>
1049     </div>
1050     <div class="padding"></div>
1051
1052     <div class="entry">
1053       <div class="title">
1054         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Run_your_industrial_metal_working_machine_using_Debian_.html">Run your industrial metal working machine using Debian?</a>
1055       </div>
1056       <div class="date">
1057          2nd March 2022
1058       </div>
1059       <div class="body">
1060         <p>After many months of hard work by the good people involved in
1061 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LinuxCNC">LinuxCNC</a>, the
1062 system was accepted Sunday
1063 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/linuxcnc">into Debian</a>.
1064 Once it was available from Debian, I was surprised to discover from
1065 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=linuxcnc">its
1066 popularity-contest numbers</a> that people have been reporting its use
1067 since 2012.  <a href="http://linuxcnc.org/">Its project site</a> might
1068 be a good place to check out, but sadly is not working when visiting
1069 via Tor.</p>
1070
1071 <p>But what is LinuxCNC, you are probably wondering?  Perhaps a
1072 Wikipedia quote is in place?</p>
1073
1074 <blockquote>
1075 "LinuxCNC is a software system for numerical control of
1076 machines such as milling machines, lathes, plasma cutters, routers,
1077 cutting machines, robots and hexapods. It can control up to 9 axes or
1078 joints of a CNC machine using G-code (RS-274NGC) as input. It has
1079 several GUIs suited to specific kinds of usage (touch screen,
1080 interactive development)."
1081 </blockquote>
1082
1083 <p>It can even control 3D printers.  And even though the Wikipedia
1084 page indicate that it can only work with hard real time kernel
1085 features, it can also work with the user space soft real time features
1086 provided by the Debian kernel.
1087 <a href="https://github.com/linuxcnc/linuxcnc">The source code</a> is
1088 available from Github.  The last few months I've been involved in the
1089 translation setup for the program and documentation.  Translators are
1090 most welcome to
1091 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/engage/linuxcnc/">join the
1092 effort</a> using Weblate.</p>
1093
1094 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1095 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1096 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1097
1098       </div>
1099       <div class="tags">
1100
1101
1102         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/linuxcnc">linuxcnc</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
1103
1104
1105       </div>
1106     </div>
1107     <div class="padding"></div>
1108
1109     <div class="entry">
1110       <div class="title">
1111         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_still_an_excellent_choice_for_Lego_builders.html">Debian still an excellent choice for Lego builders</a>
1112       </div>
1113       <div class="date">
1114         24th October 2021
1115       </div>
1116       <div class="body">
1117         <p>The Debian Lego team saw a lot of activity the last few weeks.  All
1118 the packages under the team umbrella has been updated to fix
1119 packaging, lintian issues and BTS reports.  In addition, a new and
1120 inspiring team member appeared on both the
1121 <a href="https://alioth-lists.debian.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/debian-lego-team">debian-lego-team
1122 Team mailing list</a> and
1123 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">IRC channel
1124 #debian-lego</a>.  If you are interested in Lego CAD design and LEGO
1125 Mindstorms programming, check out the
1126 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">team wiki page</a> to
1127 see what Debian can offer the Lego enthusiast.</p>
1128
1129 <p>Patches has been sent upstream, causing new upstream releases, one
1130 even the first one in more than ten years, and old upstreams was
1131 released with new ones.  There are still a lot of work left, and the
1132 team welcome more members to help us make sure Debian is the Linux
1133 distribution of choice for Lego builders.  If you want to contribute,
1134 join us in the IRC channel and become part of
1135 <a href="https://salsa.debian.org/debian-lego-team/">the team on
1136 Salsa</a>.</p>
1137
1138 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1139 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1140 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1141
1142       </div>
1143       <div class="tags">
1144
1145
1146         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lego">lego</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
1147
1148
1149       </div>
1150     </div>
1151     <div class="padding"></div>
1152
1153     <div class="entry">
1154       <div class="title">
1155         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Six_complete_translations_of_The_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook_for_Buster.html">Six complete translations of The Debian Administrator's Handbook for Buster</a>
1156       </div>
1157       <div class="date">
1158          5th July 2021
1159       </div>
1160       <div class="body">
1161         <p>I am happy observe that the <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/">The
1162 Debian Administrator's Handbook</a> is available in six languages now.
1163 I am not sure which one of these are completely proof read, but the
1164 complete book is available in these languages:
1165
1166 <ul>
1167
1168 <li>English</li>
1169 <li>Norwegian Bokmål</li>
1170 <li>German</li>
1171 <li>Indonesian</li>
1172 <li>Brazil Portuguese</li>
1173 <li>Spanish</li>
1174
1175 </ul>
1176
1177 <p>This is the list of languages more than 70% complete, in other
1178 words with not too much left to do:</p>
1179
1180 <ul>
1181
1182 <li>Chinese (Simplified) - 90%</li>
1183 <li>French - 79%</li>
1184 <li>Italian - 79%</li>
1185 <li>Japanese - 77%</li>
1186 <li>Arabic (Morocco) - 75%</li>
1187 <li>Persian - 71%</li>
1188
1189 </ul>
1190
1191 <p>I wonder how long it will take to bring these to 100%.</p>
1192
1193 <p>Then there is the list of languages about halfway done:</p>
1194
1195 <ul>
1196
1197 <li>Russian - 63%</li>
1198 <li>Swedish - 53%</li>
1199 <li>Chinese (Traditional) - 46%</li>
1200 <li>Catalan - 45%</li>
1201
1202 </ul>
1203
1204 <p>Several are on to a good start:</p>
1205
1206 <ul>
1207
1208 <li>Dutch - 26%</li>
1209 <li>Vietnamese - 25%</li>
1210 <li>Polish - 23%</li>
1211 <li>Czech - 22%</li>
1212 <li>Turkish - 18%</li>
1213
1214 </ul>
1215
1216 <p>Finally, there are the ones just getting started:</p>
1217
1218 <ul>
1219
1220 <li>Korean - 4%</li>
1221 <li>Croatian - 2%</li>
1222 <li>Greek - 2%</li>
1223 <li>Danish - 1%</li>
1224 <li>Romanian - 1%</li>
1225
1226 </ul>
1227
1228 <p>If you want to help provide a Debian instruction book in your own
1229 language, visit
1230 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-handbook/#languages">Weblate</a>
1231 to contribute to the translations.</p>
1232
1233 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1234 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1235 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1236
1237       </div>
1238       <div class="tags">
1239
1240
1241         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1242
1243
1244       </div>
1245     </div>
1246     <div class="padding"></div>
1247
1248     <div class="entry">
1249       <div class="title">
1250         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Latest_Jami_back_in_Debian_Testing__and_scriptable_using_dbus.html">Latest Jami back in Debian Testing, and scriptable using dbus</a>
1251       </div>
1252       <div class="date">
1253         12th January 2021
1254       </div>
1255       <div class="body">
1256         <p>After a lot of hard work by its maintainer Alexandre Viau and
1257 others, the decentralized communication platform
1258 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jami_(software)">Jami</a>
1259 (earlier known as Ring), managed to get
1260 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/ring">its latest version</a>
1261 into Debian Testing.  Several of its dependencies has caused build and
1262 propagation problems, which all seem to be solved now.</p>
1263
1264 <p>In addition to the fact that Jami is decentralized, similar to how
1265 bittorrent is decentralized, I first of all like how it is not
1266 connected to external IDs like phone numbers.  This allow me to set up
1267 computers to send me notifications using Jami without having to find
1268 get a phone number for each computer.  Automatic notification via Jami
1269 is also made trivial thanks to the provided client side API (as a DBus
1270 service).  Here is my bourne shell script demonstrating how to let any
1271 system send a message to any Jami address.  It will create a new
1272 identity before sending the message, if no Jami identity exist
1273 already:</p>
1274
1275 <p><pre>
1276 #!/bin/sh
1277 #
1278 # Usage: $0 <jami-address> <message>
1279 #
1280 # Send <message> to <jami-address>, create local jami account if
1281 # missing.
1282 #
1283 # License: GPL v2 or later at your choice
1284 # Author: Petter Reinholdtsen
1285
1286
1287 if [ -z "$HOME" ] ; then
1288     echo "error: missing \$HOME, required for dbus to work"
1289     exit 1
1290 fi
1291
1292 # First, get dbus running if not already running
1293 DBUSLAUNCH=/usr/bin/dbus-launch
1294 PIDFILE=/run/asterisk/dbus-session.pid
1295 if [ -e $PIDFILE ] ; then
1296     . $PIDFILE
1297     if ! kill -0 $DBUS_SESSION_BUS_PID 2>/dev/null ; then
1298         unset DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS
1299     fi
1300 fi
1301 if [ -z "$DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS" ] && [ -x "$DBUSLAUNCH" ]; then
1302     DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS="unix:path=$HOME/.dbus"
1303     dbus-daemon --session --address="$DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS" --nofork --nopidfile --syslog-only < /dev/null > /dev/null 2>&1 3>&1 &
1304     DBUS_SESSION_BUS_PID=$!
1305     (
1306         echo DBUS_SESSION_BUS_PID=$DBUS_SESSION_BUS_PID
1307         echo DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=\""$DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS"\"
1308         echo export DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS
1309     ) > $PIDFILE
1310     . $PIDFILE
1311 fi &
1312
1313 dringop() {
1314     part="$1"; shift
1315     op="$1"; shift
1316     dbus-send --session \
1317         --dest="cx.ring.Ring" /cx/ring/Ring/$part cx.ring.Ring.$part.$op $*
1318 }
1319
1320 dringopreply() {
1321     part="$1"; shift
1322     op="$1"; shift
1323     dbus-send --session --print-reply \
1324         --dest="cx.ring.Ring" /cx/ring/Ring/$part cx.ring.Ring.$part.$op $*
1325 }
1326
1327 firstaccount() {
1328     dringopreply ConfigurationManager getAccountList | \
1329       grep string | awk -F'"' '{print $2}' | head -n 1
1330 }
1331
1332 account=$(firstaccount)
1333
1334 if [ -z "$account" ] ; then
1335     echo "Missing local account, trying to create it"
1336     dringop ConfigurationManager addAccount \
1337       dict:string:string:"Account.type","RING","Account.videoEnabled","false"
1338     account=$(firstaccount)
1339     if [ -z "$account" ] ; then
1340         echo "unable to create local account"
1341         exit 1
1342     fi
1343 fi
1344
1345 # Not using dringopreply to ensure $2 can contain spaces
1346 dbus-send --print-reply --session \
1347   --dest=cx.ring.Ring \
1348   /cx/ring/Ring/ConfigurationManager \
1349   cx.ring.Ring.ConfigurationManager.sendTextMessage \
1350   string:"$account" string:"$1" \
1351   dict:string:string:"text/plain","$2"
1352 </pre></p>
1353
1354 <p>If you want to check it out yourself, visit the
1355 <a href="https://jami.net/">the Jami system project page</a> to learn
1356 more, and install the latest Jami client from Debian Unstable or
1357 Testing.</p>
1358
1359 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1360 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1361 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1362
1363       </div>
1364       <div class="tags">
1365
1366
1367         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
1368
1369
1370       </div>
1371     </div>
1372     <div class="padding"></div>
1373
1374     <div class="entry">
1375       <div class="title">
1376         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Buster_based_Bokm_l_edition_of_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook.html">Buster based Bokmål edition of Debian Administrator's Handbook</a>
1377       </div>
1378       <div class="date">
1379         20th October 2020
1380       </div>
1381       <div class="body">
1382         <p align="center"><img align="center" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2020-10-20-debian-handbook-nb-testprint.jpeg" width="60%"/></p>
1383
1384 <p>I am happy to report that we finally made it!  Norwegian Bokmål
1385 became the first translation published on paper of the new Buster
1386 based edition of "<a href="https://debian-handbook.info/">The Debian
1387 Administrator's Handbook</a>".  The print proof reading copy arrived
1388 some days ago, and it looked good, so now the book is approved for
1389 general distribution.  This updated paperback edition <a
1390 href="https://debian-handbook.info/get/#norwegian">is available from
1391 lulu.com</a>.  The book is also available for download in electronic
1392 form as PDF, EPUB and Mobipocket, and can also be
1393 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/browse/nb-NO/stable/">read online</a>.</p>
1394
1395 <p>I am very happy to wrap up this Creative Common licensed project,
1396 which concludes several months of work by several volunteers. The
1397 number of Linux related books published in Norwegian are few, and I
1398 really hope this one will gain many readers, as it is packed with deep
1399 knowledge on Linux and the Debian ecosystem.  The book will be
1400 available for various Internet book stores like Amazon and Barnes &
1401 Noble soon, but I recommend buying
1402 "<a href="https://www.lulu.com/en/us/shop/roland-mas-and-rapha%C3%ABl-hertzog/h%C3%A5ndbok-for-debian-administratoren/paperback/product-9j7qwq.html">Håndbok
1403 for Debian-administratoren</a>" directly from the source at Lulu.
1404
1405 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1406 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1407 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1408
1409       </div>
1410       <div class="tags">
1411
1412
1413         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1414
1415
1416       </div>
1417     </div>
1418     <div class="padding"></div>
1419
1420     <div class="entry">
1421       <div class="title">
1422         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Buster_update_of_Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook_almost_done.html">Buster update of Norwegian Bokmål edition of Debian Administrator's Handbook almost done</a>
1423       </div>
1424       <div class="date">
1425         11th September 2020
1426       </div>
1427       <div class="body">
1428         <p>Thanks to the good work of several volunteers, the updated edition
1429 of the Norwegian translation for
1430 "<a href="https://debian-handbook.info/">The Debian Administrator's
1431 Handbook</a>" is now almost completed.  After many months of proof
1432 reading, I consider the proof reading complete enough for us to move
1433 to the next step, and have asked for the print version to be prepared
1434 and sent of to the print on demand service lulu.com.  While it is
1435 still not to late if you find any incorrect translations on
1436 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/languages/nb_NO/debian-handbook/">the
1437 hosted Weblate service</a>, but it will be soon. :) You can check out
1438 <a href=" https://debian-handbook.info/browse/nb-NO/stable/">the Buster
1439 edition on the web</a> until the print edition is ready.</p>
1440
1441 <p>The book will be for sale on lulu.com and various web book stores,
1442 with links available from the web site for the book linked to above.
1443 I hope a lot of readers find it useful.</p>
1444
1445 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1446 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1447 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1448
1449       </div>
1450       <div class="tags">
1451
1452
1453         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1454
1455
1456       </div>
1457     </div>
1458     <div class="padding"></div>
1459
1460     <div class="entry">
1461       <div class="title">
1462         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Working_on_updated_Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook.html">Working on updated Norwegian Bokmål edition of Debian Administrator's Handbook</a>
1463       </div>
1464       <div class="date">
1465          4th July 2020
1466       </div>
1467       <div class="body">
1468         <p>Three years ago, the first Norwegian Bokmål edition of
1469 "<a href="https://debian-handbook.info/">The Debian Administrator's
1470 Handbook</a>" was published.  This was based on Debian Jessie.  Now a
1471 new and updated version based on Buster is getting ready.  Work on the
1472 updated Norwegian Bokmål edition has been going on for a few months
1473 now, and yesterday, we reached the first mile stone, with 100% of the
1474 texts being translated.  A lot of proof reading remains, of course,
1475 but a major step towards a new edition has been taken.</p>
1476
1477 <p>The book is translated by volunteers, and we would love to get some
1478 help with the proof reading.  The translation uses
1479 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/languages/nb_NO/debian-handbook/">the
1480 hosted Weblate service</a>, and we welcome everyone to have a look and
1481 submit improvements and suggestions.  There is also a proof readers
1482 PDF available on request, get in touch if you want to help out that
1483 way.</p>
1484
1485 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1486 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1487 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1488
1489       </div>
1490       <div class="tags">
1491
1492
1493         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1494
1495
1496       </div>
1497     </div>
1498     <div class="padding"></div>
1499
1500     <div class="entry">
1501       <div class="title">
1502         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Secure_Socket_API___a_simple_and_powerful_approach_for_TLS_support_in_software.html">Secure Socket API - a simple and powerful approach for TLS support in software</a>
1503       </div>
1504       <div class="date">
1505          6th June 2020
1506       </div>
1507       <div class="body">
1508         <p>As a member of the <a href="https://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix
1509 User Group</a>, I have the pleasure of receiving the
1510 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/">USENIX</a> magazine
1511 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/">;login:</a>
1512 several times a year.  I rarely have time to read all the articles,
1513 but try to at least skim through them all as there is a lot of nice
1514 knowledge passed on there.  I even carry the latest issue with me most
1515 of the time to try to get through all the articles when I have a few
1516 spare minutes.</p>
1517
1518 <p>The other day I came across a nice article titled
1519 "<a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/winter2018/oneill">The
1520 Secure Socket API: TLS as an Operating System Service</a>" with a
1521 marvellous idea I hope can make it all the way into the POSIX standard.
1522 The idea is as simple as it is powerful.  By introducing a new
1523 socket() option IPPROTO_TLS to use TLS, and a system wide service to
1524 handle setting up TLS connections, one both make it trivial to add TLS
1525 support to any program currently using the POSIX socket API, and gain
1526 system wide control over certificates, TLS versions and encryption
1527 systems used.  Instead of doing this:</p>
1528
1529 <p><blockquote><pre>
1530 int socket = socket(PF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, IPPROTO_TCP);
1531 </pre></blockquote></p>
1532
1533 <p>the program code would be doing this:<p>
1534
1535 <p><blockquote><pre>
1536 int socket = socket(PF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, IPPROTO_TLS);
1537 </pre></blockquote></p>
1538
1539 <p>According to the ;login: article, converting a C program to use TLS
1540 would normally modify only 5-10 lines in the code, which is amazing
1541 when compared to using for example the OpenSSL API.</p>
1542
1543 <p>The project has set up the
1544 <a href="https://securesocketapi.org/">https://securesocketapi.org/</a>
1545 web site to spread the idea, and the code for a kernel module and the
1546 associated system daemon is available from two github repositories:
1547 <a href="https://github.com/markoneill/ssa">ssa</a> and
1548 <a href="https://github.com/markoneill/ssa-daemon">ssa-daemon</a>.
1549 Unfortunately there is no explicit license information with the code,
1550 so its copyright status is unclear.  A
1551 <a href="https://github.com/markoneill/ssa/issues/2">request to solve
1552 this</a> about it has been unsolved since 2018-08-17.</p>
1553
1554 <p>I love the idea of extending socket() to gain TLS support, and
1555 understand why it is an advantage to implement this as a kernel module
1556 and system wide service daemon, but can not help to think that it
1557 would be a lot easier to get projects to move to this way of setting
1558 up TLS if it was done with a user space approach where programs
1559 wanting to use this API approach could just link with a wrapper
1560 library.</p>
1561
1562 <p>I recommend you check out this simple and powerful approach to more
1563 secure network connections. :)</p>
1564
1565 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1566 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1567 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1568
1569       </div>
1570       <div class="tags">
1571
1572
1573         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sysadmin">sysadmin</a>.
1574
1575
1576       </div>
1577     </div>
1578     <div class="padding"></div>
1579
1580     <div class="entry">
1581       <div class="title">
1582         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Jami_as_a_Zoom_client__a_trick_for_password_protected_rooms___.html">Jami as a Zoom client, a trick for password protected rooms...</a>
1583       </div>
1584       <div class="date">
1585          8th May 2020
1586       </div>
1587       <div class="body">
1588         <p>Half a year ago,
1589 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Jami_Ring__finally_functioning_peer_to_peer_communication_client.html">I
1590 wrote</a> about <a href="https://jami.net/">the Jami communication
1591 client</a>, capable of peer-to-peer encrypted communication.  It
1592 handle both messages, audio and video.  It uses distributed hash
1593 tables instead of central infrastructure to connect its users to each
1594 other, which in my book is a plus.  I mentioned briefly that it could
1595 also work as a SIP client, which came in handy when the higher
1596 educational sector in Norway started to promote Zoom as its video
1597 conferencing solution.  I am reluctant to use the official Zoom client
1598 software, due to their <a href="https://zoom.us/terms">copyright
1599 license clauses</a> prohibiting users to reverse engineer (for example
1600 to check the security) and benchmark it, and thus prefer to connect to
1601 Zoom meetings with free software clients.</p>
1602
1603 <p>Jami worked OK as a SIP client to Zoom as long as there was no
1604 password set on the room.  The Jami daemon leak memory like crazy
1605 (approximately 1 GiB a minute) when I am connected to the video
1606 conference, so I had to restart the client every 7-10 minutes, which
1607 is not great.  I tried to get other SIP Linux clients to work
1608 without success, so I decided I would have to live with this wart
1609 until someone managed to fix the leak in the dring code base.  But
1610 another problem showed up once the rooms were password protected.  I
1611 could not get my dial tone signaling through from Jami to Zoom, and
1612 dial tone signaling is used to enter the password when connecting to
1613 Zoom.  I tried a lot of different permutations with my Jami and
1614 Asterisk setup to try to figure out why the signaling did not get
1615 through, only to finally discover that the fundamental problem seem to
1616 be that Zoom is simply not able to receive dial tone signaling when
1617 connecting via SIP.  There seem to be nothing wrong with the Jami and
1618 Asterisk end, it is simply broken in the Zoom end.  I got help from a
1619 very skilled VoIP engineer figuring out this last part.  And being a
1620 very skilled engineer, he was also able to locate a solution for me.
1621 Or to be exact, a workaround that solve my initial problem of
1622 connecting to password protected Zoom rooms using Jami.</p>
1623
1624 <p>So, how do you do this, I am sure you are wondering by now.  The
1625 trick is already
1626 <a href="https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/202405539-H-323-SIP-Room-Connector-Dial-Strings#sip">documented
1627 from Zoom</a>, and it is to modify the SIP address to include the room
1628 password.  What is most surprising about this is that the
1629 automatically generated email from Zoom with instructions on how to
1630 connect via SIP do not mention this.  The SIP address to use normally
1631 consist of the room ID (a number), an @ character and the IP address
1632 of the Zoom SIP gateway.  But Zoom understand a lot more than just the
1633 room ID in front of the at sign.  The format is "<tt>[Meeting
1634 ID].[Password].[Layout].[Host Key]</tt>", and you can here see how you
1635 can both enter password, control the layout (full screen, active
1636 presence and gallery) and specify the host key to start the meeting.
1637 The full SIP address entered into Jami to provide the password will
1638 then look like this (all using made up numbers):</p>
1639
1640 <p><blockquote>
1641 <tt>sip:657837644.522827@192.168.169.170</tt>
1642 </blockquote></p>
1643
1644 <p>Now if only jami would reduce its memory usage, I could even
1645 recommend this setup to others. :)</p>
1646
1647 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1648 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1649 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1650
1651       </div>
1652       <div class="tags">
1653
1654
1655         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
1656
1657
1658       </div>
1659     </div>
1660     <div class="padding"></div>
1661
1662     <div class="entry">
1663       <div class="title">
1664         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/GnuCOBOL__a_free_platform_to_learn_and_use_COBOL___nice_free_software.html">GnuCOBOL, a free platform to learn and use COBOL - nice free software</a>
1665       </div>
1666       <div class="date">
1667         29th April 2020
1668       </div>
1669       <div class="body">
1670         <p>The curiosity got the better of me when
1671 <a href="https://developers.slashdot.org/story/20/04/06/1424246/new-jersey-desperately-needs-cobol-programmers">Slashdot
1672 reported</a> that New Jersey was desperately looking for
1673 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL">COBOL</a> programmers,
1674 and a few days later it was reported that
1675 <a href="https://onezero.medium.com/ibm-rallies-cobol-engineers-to-save-overloaded-unemployment-systems-eeadf13eddce">IBM
1676 tried to locate COBOL programmers</a>.</p>
1677
1678 <p>I thus decided to have a look at free software alternatives to
1679 learn COBOL, and had the pleasure to find
1680 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/projects/open-cobol/">GnuCOBOL</a> was
1681 already <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/gnucobol">in
1682 Debian</a>.  It used to be called Open Cobol, and is a "compiler"
1683 transforming COBOL code to C or C++ before giving it to GCC or Visual
1684 Studio to build binaries.</p>
1685
1686 <p>I managed to get in touch with upstream, and was impressed with the
1687 quick response, and also was happy to see a new Debian maintainer
1688 taking over when the original one recently asked to be replaced.  A
1689 new Debian upload was done as recently as yesterday.</p>
1690
1691 <p>Using the Debian package, I was able to follow a simple COBOL
1692 introduction and make and run simple COBOL programs.  It was fun to
1693 learn a new programming language.  If you want to test for yourself,
1694 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GnuCOBOL">the GnuCOBOL Wikipedia
1695 page</a> have a few simple examples to get you startet.</p>
1696
1697 <p>As I do not have much experience with COBOL, I do not know how
1698 standard compliant it is, but it claim to pass most tests from COBOL
1699 test suite, which sound good to me.  It is nice to know it is possible
1700 to learn COBOL using software without any usage restrictions, and I am
1701 very happy such nice free software project as this is available.  If
1702 you as me is curious about COBOL, check it out.</p>
1703
1704 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1705 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1706 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1707
1708       </div>
1709       <div class="tags">
1710
1711
1712         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
1713
1714
1715       </div>
1716     </div>
1717     <div class="padding"></div>
1718
1719     <div class="entry">
1720       <div class="title">
1721         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Jami_Ring__finally_functioning_peer_to_peer_communication_client.html">Jami/Ring, finally functioning peer to peer communication client</a>
1722       </div>
1723       <div class="date">
1724         19th June 2019
1725       </div>
1726       <div class="body">
1727         <p>Some years ago, in 2016, I
1728 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Experience_and_updated_recipe_for_using_the_Signal_app_without_a_mobile_phone.html">wrote
1729 for the first time about</a> the Ring peer to peer messaging system.
1730 It would provide messaging without any central server coordinating the
1731 system and without requiring all users to register a phone number or
1732 own a mobile phone.  Back then, I could not get it to work, and put it
1733 aside until it had seen more development.  A few days ago I decided to
1734 give it another try, and am happy to report that this time I am able
1735 to not only send and receive messages, but also place audio and video
1736 calls.  But only if UDP is not blocked into your network.</p>
1737
1738 <p>The Ring system changed name earlier this year to
1739 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jami_(software)">Jami</a>.  I
1740 tried doing web search for 'ring' when I discovered it for the first
1741 time, and can only applaud this change as it is impossible to find
1742 something called Ring among the noise of other uses of that word.  Now
1743 you can search for 'jami' and this client and
1744 <a href="https://jami.net/">the Jami system</a> is the first hit at
1745 least on duckduckgo.</p>
1746
1747 <p>Jami will by default encrypt messages as well as audio and video
1748 calls, and try to send them directly between the communicating parties
1749 if possible.  If this proves impossible (for example if both ends are
1750 behind NAT), it will use a central SIP TURN server maintained by the
1751 Jami project.  Jami can also be a normal SIP client.  If the SIP
1752 server is unencrypted, the audio and video calls will also be
1753 unencrypted.  This is as far as I know the only case where Jami will
1754 do anything without encryption.</p>
1755
1756 <p>Jami is available for several platforms: Linux, Windows, MacOSX,
1757 Android, iOS, and Android TV.  It is included in Debian already.  Jami
1758 also work for those using F-Droid without any Google connections,
1759 while Signal do not.
1760 <a href="https://git.jami.net/savoirfairelinux/ring-project/wikis/technical/Protocol">The
1761 protocol</a> is described in the Ring project wiki.  The system uses a
1762 distributed hash table (DHT) system (similar to BitTorrent) running
1763 over UDP.  On one of the networks I use, I discovered Jami failed to
1764 work.  I tracked this down to the fact that incoming UDP packages
1765 going to ports 1-49999 were blocked, and the DHT would pick a random
1766 port and end up in the low range most of the time.  After talking to
1767 the developers, I solved this by enabling the dhtproxy in the
1768 settings, thus using TCP to talk to a central DHT proxy instead of
1769
1770 peering directly with others.  I've been told the developers are
1771 working on allowing DHT to use TCP to avoid this problem.  I also ran
1772 into a problem when trying to talk to the version of Ring included in
1773 Debian Stable (Stretch).  Apparently the protocol changed between
1774 beta2 and the current version, making these clients incompatible.
1775 Hopefully the protocol will not be made incompatible in the
1776 future.</p>
1777
1778 <p>It is worth noting that while looking at Jami and its features, I
1779 came across another communication platform I have not tested yet.  The
1780 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tox_(protocol)">Tox protocol</a>
1781 and <a href="https://tox.chat/">family of Tox clients</a>.  It might
1782 become the topic of a future blog post.</p>
1783
1784 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1785 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1786 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1787
1788       </div>
1789       <div class="tags">
1790
1791
1792         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
1793
1794
1795       </div>
1796     </div>
1797     <div class="padding"></div>
1798
1799     <div class="entry">
1800       <div class="title">
1801         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Strategispillet_Unknown_Horizons_n__tilgjengelig_p__bokm_l.html">Strategispillet Unknown Horizons nå tilgjengelig på bokmål</a>
1802       </div>
1803       <div class="date">
1804         23rd January 2019
1805       </div>
1806       <div class="body">
1807         <p>I høst ble jeg inspirert til å bidra til oversettelsen av
1808 <a href="http://unknown-horizons.org/">strategispillet Unknown
1809 Horizons</a>, og oversatte de nesten 200 strengene i prosjektet til
1810 bokmål.  Deretter har jeg gått å ventet på at det kom en ny utgave som
1811 inneholdt disse oversettelsene.  Nå er endelig ventetiden over.  Den
1812 nye versjonen kom på nyåret, og ble
1813 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/unknown-horizons">lastet opp i
1814 Debian</a> for noen få dager siden.  I går kveld fikk jeg testet det ut, og
1815 må innrømme at oversettelsene fungerer fint.  Fant noen få tekster som
1816 måtte justeres, men ikke noe alvorlig.  Har oppdatert
1817 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/uh/">oversettelsen på
1818 Weblate</a>, slik at neste utgave vil være enda bedre. :)</p>
1819
1820 <p>Spillet er et ressursstyringsspill ala Civilization, og er morsomt
1821 å spille for oss som liker slikt. :)</p>
1822
1823 <p>Som vanlig, hvis du bruker Bitcoin og ønsker å vise din støtte til
1824 det jeg driver med, setter jeg pris på om du sender Bitcoin-donasjoner
1825 til min adresse
1826 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.
1827 Merk, betaling med bitcoin er ikke anonymt. :)</p>
1828
1829       </div>
1830       <div class="tags">
1831
1832
1833         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>.
1834
1835
1836       </div>
1837     </div>
1838     <div class="padding"></div>
1839
1840     <div class="entry">
1841       <div class="title">
1842         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_now_got_everything_you_need_to_program_Micro_bit.html">Debian now got everything you need to program Micro:bit</a>
1843       </div>
1844       <div class="date">
1845         22nd January 2019
1846       </div>
1847       <div class="body">
1848         <p>I am amazed and very pleased to discover that since a few days ago,
1849 everything you need to program the <a href="https://microbit.org/">BBC
1850 micro:bit</a> is available from the Debian archive.  All this is
1851 thanks to the hard work of Nick Morrott and the Debian python
1852 packaging team.  The micro:bit project recommend the mu-editor to
1853 program the microcomputer, as this editor will take care of all the
1854 machinery required to injekt/flash micropython alongside the program
1855 into the micro:bit, as long as the pieces are available.</p>
1856
1857 <p>There are three main pieces involved.  The first to enter Debian
1858 was
1859 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/python-uflash">python-uflash</a>,
1860 which was accepted into the archive 2019-01-12.  The next one was
1861 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/mu-editor">mu-editor</a>, which
1862 showed up 2019-01-13.  The final and hardest part to to into the
1863 archive was
1864 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/firmware-microbit-micropython">firmware-microbit-micropython</a>,
1865 which needed to get its build system and dependencies into Debian
1866 before it was accepted 2019-01-20.  The last one is already in Debian
1867 Unstable and should enter Debian Testing / Buster in three days.  This
1868 all allow any user of the micro:bit to get going by simply running
1869 'apt install mu-editor' when using Testing or Unstable, and once
1870 Buster is released as stable, all the users of Debian stable will be
1871 catered for.</p>
1872
1873 <p>As a minor final touch, I added rules to
1874 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/isenkram">the isenkram
1875 package</a> for recognizing micro:bit and recommend the mu-editor
1876 package.  This make sure any user of the isenkram desktop daemon will
1877 get a popup suggesting to install mu-editor then the USB cable from
1878 the micro:bit is inserted for the first time.</p>
1879
1880 <p>This should make it easier to have fun.</p>
1881
1882 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1883 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1884 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1885
1886       </div>
1887       <div class="tags">
1888
1889
1890         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
1891
1892
1893       </div>
1894     </div>
1895     <div class="padding"></div>
1896
1897     <div class="entry">
1898       <div class="title">
1899         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Learn_to_program_with_Minetest_on_Debian.html">Learn to program with Minetest on Debian</a>
1900       </div>
1901       <div class="date">
1902         15th December 2018
1903       </div>
1904       <div class="body">
1905         <p>A fun way to learn how to program
1906 <a href="https://www.python.org/">Python</a> is to follow the
1907 instructions in the book
1908 "<a href="https://nostarch.com/programwithminecraft">Learn to program
1909 with Minecraft</a>", which introduces programming in Python to people
1910 who like to play with Minecraft.  The book uses a Python library to
1911 talk to a TCP/IP socket with an API accepting build instructions and
1912 providing information about the current players in a Minecraft world.
1913 The TCP/IP API was first created for the Minecraft implementation for
1914 Raspberry Pi, and has since been ported to some server versions of
1915 Minecraft.  The book contain recipes for those using Windows, MacOSX
1916 and Raspian.  But a little known fact is that you can follow the same
1917 recipes using the free software construction game
1918 <a href="https://minetest.net/">Minetest</a>.</p>
1919
1920 <p>There is <a href="https://github.com/sprintingkiwi/pycraft_mod">a
1921 Minetest module implementing the same API</a>, making it possible to
1922 use the Python programs coded to talk to Minecraft with Minetest too.
1923 I
1924 <a href="https://ftp-master.debian.org/new/minetest-mod-pycraft_0.20%2Bgit20180331.0376a0a%2Bdfsg-1.html">uploaded
1925 this module</a> to Debian two weeks ago, and as soon as it clears the
1926 FTP masters NEW queue, learning to program Python with Minetest on
1927 Debian will be a simple 'apt install' away.  The Debian package is
1928 maintained as part of the Debian Games team, and
1929 <a href="https://salsa.debian.org/games-team/unfinished/minetest-mod-pycraft">the
1930 packaging rules</a> are currently located under 'unfinished' on
1931 Salsa.</p>
1932
1933 <p>You will most likely need to install several of the Minetest
1934 modules in Debian for the examples included with the library to work
1935 well, as there are several blocks used by the example scripts that are
1936 provided via modules in Minetest.  Without the required blocks, a
1937 simple stone block is used instead.  My initial testing with a analog
1938 clock did not get gold arms as instructed in the python library, but
1939 instead used stone arms.</p>
1940
1941 <p>I tried to find a way to add the API to the desktop version of
1942 Minecraft, but were unable to find any working recipes.  The
1943 <a href="https://www.epiphanydigest.com/tag/minecraft-python-api/">recipes</a>
1944 I <a href="https://github.com/kbsriram/mcpiapi">found</a> are only
1945 working with a standalone Minecraft server setup.  Are there any
1946 options to use with the normal desktop version?</p>
1947
1948 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1949 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1950 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1951
1952       </div>
1953       <div class="tags">
1954
1955
1956         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1957
1958
1959       </div>
1960     </div>
1961     <div class="padding"></div>
1962
1963     <div class="entry">
1964       <div class="title">
1965         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_an_official_MIME_type_for_patches_.html">Time for an official MIME type for patches?</a>
1966       </div>
1967       <div class="date">
1968          1st November 2018
1969       </div>
1970       <div class="body">
1971         <p>As part of my involvement in
1972 <a href="https://gitlab.com/OsloMet-ABI/nikita-noark5-core">the Nikita
1973 archive API project</a>, I've been importing a fairly large lump of
1974 emails into a test instance of the archive to see how well this would
1975 go.  I picked a subset of <a href="https://notmuchmail.org/">my
1976 notmuch email database</a>, all public emails sent to me via
1977 @lists.debian.org, giving me a set of around 216 000 emails to import.
1978 In the process, I had a look at the various attachments included in
1979 these emails, to figure out what to do with attachments, and noticed
1980 that one of the most common attachment formats do not have
1981 <a href="https://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/media-types.xhtml">an
1982 official MIME type</a> registered with IANA/IETF.  The output from
1983 diff, ie the input for patch, is on the top 10 list of formats
1984 included in these emails.  At the moment people seem to use either
1985 text/x-patch or text/x-diff, but neither is officially registered.  It
1986 would be better if one official MIME type were registered and used
1987 everywhere.</p>
1988
1989 <p>To try to get one official MIME type for these files, I've brought
1990 up the topic on
1991 <a href="https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/media-types">the
1992 media-types mailing list</a>.  If you are interested in discussion
1993 which MIME type to use as the official for patch files, or involved in
1994 making software using a MIME type for patches, perhaps you would like
1995 to join the discussion?</p>
1996
1997 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1998 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1999 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2000
2001       </div>
2002       <div class="tags">
2003
2004
2005         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/noark5">noark5</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
2006
2007
2008       </div>
2009     </div>
2010     <div class="padding"></div>
2011
2012     <div class="entry">
2013       <div class="title">
2014         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_Google_Drive_sync_using_grive_in_Debian.html">Automatic Google Drive sync using grive in Debian</a>
2015       </div>
2016       <div class="date">
2017          4th October 2018
2018       </div>
2019       <div class="body">
2020         <p>A few days, I rescued a Windows victim over to Debian.  To try to
2021 rescue the remains, I helped set up automatic sync with Google Drive.
2022 I did not find any sensible Debian package handling this
2023 automatically, so I rebuild the grive2 source from
2024 <a href="http://www.webupd8.org/">the Ubuntu UPD8 PPA</a> to do the
2025 task and added a autostart desktop entry and a small shell script to
2026 run in the background while the user is logged in to do the sync.
2027 Here is a sketch of the setup for future reference.</p>
2028
2029 <p>I first created <tt>~/googledrive</tt>, entered the directory and
2030 ran '<tt>grive -a</tt>' to authenticate the machine/user.  Next, I
2031 created a autostart hook in <tt>~/.config/autostart/grive.desktop</tt>
2032 to start the sync when the user log in:</p>
2033
2034 <p><blockquote><pre>
2035 [Desktop Entry]
2036 Name=Google drive autosync
2037 Type=Application
2038 Exec=/home/user/bin/grive-sync
2039 </pre></blockquote></p>
2040
2041 <p>Finally, I wrote the <tt>~/bin/grive-sync</tt> script to sync
2042 ~/googledrive/ with the files in Google Drive.</p>
2043
2044 <p><blockquote><pre>
2045 #!/bin/sh
2046 set -e
2047 cd ~/
2048 cleanup() {
2049     if [ "$syncpid" ] ; then
2050         kill $syncpid
2051     fi
2052 }
2053 trap cleanup EXIT INT QUIT
2054 /usr/lib/grive/grive-sync.sh listen googledrive 2>&1 | sed "s%^%$0:%" &
2055 syncpdi=$!
2056 while true; do
2057     if ! xhost >/dev/null 2>&1 ; then
2058         echo "no DISPLAY, exiting as the user probably logged out"
2059         exit 1
2060     fi
2061     if [ ! -e /run/user/1000/grive-sync.sh_googledrive ] ; then
2062         /usr/lib/grive/grive-sync.sh sync googledrive
2063     fi
2064     sleep 300
2065 done 2>&1 | sed "s%^%$0:%"
2066 </pre></blockquote></p>
2067
2068 <p>Feel free to use the setup if you want.  It can be assumed to be
2069 GNU GPL v2 licensed (or any later version, at your leisure), but I
2070 doubt this code is possible to claim copyright on.</p>
2071
2072 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2073 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2074 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2075
2076       </div>
2077       <div class="tags">
2078
2079
2080         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2081
2082
2083       </div>
2084     </div>
2085     <div class="padding"></div>
2086
2087     <div class="entry">
2088       <div class="title">
2089         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_the_Kodi_API_to_play_Youtube_videos.html">Using the Kodi API to play Youtube videos</a>
2090       </div>
2091       <div class="date">
2092          2nd September 2018
2093       </div>
2094       <div class="body">
2095         <p>I continue to explore my Kodi installation, and today I wanted to
2096 tell it to play a youtube URL I received in a chat, without having to
2097 insert search terms using the on-screen keyboard.  After searching the
2098 web for API access to the Youtube plugin and testing a bit, I managed
2099 to find a recipe that worked.  If you got a kodi instance with its API
2100 available from http://kodihost/jsonrpc, you can try the following to
2101 have check out a nice cover band.</p>
2102
2103 <p><blockquote><pre>curl --silent --header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
2104   --data-binary '{ "id": 1, "jsonrpc": "2.0", "method": "Player.Open",
2105   "params": {"item": { "file":
2106   "plugin://plugin.video.youtube/play/?video_id=LuRGVM9O0qg" } } }' \
2107   http://projector.local/jsonrpc</pre></blockquote></p>
2108
2109 <p>I've extended kodi-stream program to take a video source as its
2110 first argument.  It can now handle direct video links, youtube links
2111 and 'desktop' to stream my desktop to Kodi.  It is almost like a
2112 Chromecast. :)</p>
2113
2114 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2115 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2116 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2117
2118       </div>
2119       <div class="tags">
2120
2121
2122         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kodi">kodi</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
2123
2124
2125       </div>
2126     </div>
2127     <div class="padding"></div>
2128
2129     <div class="entry">
2130       <div class="title">
2131         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sharing_images_with_friends_and_family_using_RSS_and_EXIF_XMP_metadata.html">Sharing images with friends and family using RSS and EXIF/XMP metadata</a>
2132       </div>
2133       <div class="date">
2134         31st July 2018
2135       </div>
2136       <div class="body">
2137         <p>For a while now, I have looked for a sensible way to share images
2138 with my family using a self hosted solution, as it is unacceptable to
2139 place images from my personal life under the control of strangers
2140 working for data hoarders like Google or Dropbox.  The last few days I
2141 have drafted an approach that might work out, and I would like to
2142 share it with you.  I would like to publish images on a server under
2143 my control, and point some Internet connected display units using some
2144 free and open standard to the images I published.  As my primary
2145 language is not limited to ASCII, I need to store metadata using
2146 UTF-8.  Many years ago, I hoped to find a digital photo frame capable
2147 of reading a RSS feed with image references (aka using the
2148 &lt;enclosure&gt; RSS tag), but was unable to find a current supplier
2149 of such frames.  In the end I gave up that approach.</p>
2150
2151 <p>Some months ago, I discovered that
2152 <a href="https://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/">XScreensaver</a> is able to
2153 read images from a RSS feed, and used it to set up a screen saver on
2154 my home info screen, showing images from the Daily images feed from
2155 NASA.  This proved to work well.  More recently I discovered that
2156 <a href="https://kodi.tv">Kodi</a> (both using
2157 <a href="https://www.openelec.tv/">OpenELEC</a> and
2158 <a href="https://libreelec.tv">LibreELEC</a>) provide the
2159 <a href="https://github.com/grinsted/script.screensaver.feedreader">Feedreader</a>
2160 screen saver capable of reading a RSS feed with images and news.  For
2161 fun, I used it this summer to test Kodi on my parents TV by hooking up
2162 a Raspberry PI unit with LibreELEC, and wanted to provide them with a
2163 screen saver showing selected pictures from my selection.</p>
2164
2165 <p>Armed with motivation and a test photo frame, I set out to generate
2166 a RSS feed for the Kodi instance.  I adjusted my <a
2167 href="https://freedombox.org/">Freedombox</a> instance, created
2168 /var/www/html/privatepictures/, wrote a small Perl script to extract
2169 title and description metadata from the photo files and generate the
2170 RSS file.  I ended up using Perl instead of python, as the
2171 libimage-exiftool-perl Debian package seemed to handle the EXIF/XMP
2172 tags I ended up using, while python3-exif did not.  The relevant EXIF
2173 tags only support ASCII, so I had to find better alternatives.  XMP
2174 seem to have the support I need.</p>
2175
2176 <p>I am a bit unsure which EXIF/XMP tags to use, as I would like to
2177 use tags that can be easily added/updated using normal free software
2178 photo managing software.  I ended up using the tags set using this
2179 exiftool command, as these tags can also be set using digiKam:</p>
2180
2181 <blockquote><pre>
2182 exiftool -headline='The RSS image title' \
2183   -description='The RSS image description.' \
2184   -subject+=for-family photo.jpeg
2185 </pre></blockquote>
2186
2187 <p>I initially tried the "-title" and "keyword" tags, but they were
2188 invisible in digiKam, so I changed to "-headline" and "-subject".  I
2189 use the keyword/subject 'for-family' to flag that the photo should be
2190 shared with my family.  Images with this keyword set are located and
2191 copied into my Freedombox for the RSS generating script to find.</p>
2192
2193 <p>Are there better ways to do this?  Get in touch if you have better
2194 suggestions.</p>
2195
2196 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2197 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2198 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2199
2200       </div>
2201       <div class="tags">
2202
2203
2204         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2205
2206
2207       </div>
2208     </div>
2209     <div class="padding"></div>
2210
2211     <div class="entry">
2212       <div class="title">
2213         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Simple_streaming_the_Linux_desktop_to_Kodi_using_GStreamer_and_RTP.html">Simple streaming the Linux desktop to Kodi using GStreamer and RTP</a>
2214       </div>
2215       <div class="date">
2216         12th July 2018
2217       </div>
2218       <div class="body">
2219         <p>Last night, I wrote
2220 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Streaming_the_Linux_desktop_to_Kodi_using_VLC_and_RTSP.html">a
2221 recipe to stream a Linux desktop using VLC to a instance of Kodi</a>.
2222 During the day I received valuable feedback, and thanks to the
2223 suggestions I have been able to rewrite the recipe into a much simpler
2224 approach requiring no setup at all.  It is a single script that take
2225 care of it all.</p>
2226
2227 <p>This new script uses GStreamer instead of VLC to capture the
2228 desktop and stream it to Kodi.  This fixed the video quality issue I
2229 saw initially.  It further removes the need to add a m3u file on the
2230 Kodi machine, as it instead connects to
2231 <a href="https://kodi.wiki/view/JSON-RPC_API/v8">the JSON-RPC API in
2232 Kodi</a> and simply ask Kodi to play from the stream created using
2233 GStreamer.  Streaming the desktop to Kodi now become trivial.  Copy
2234 the script below, run it with the DNS name or IP address of the kodi
2235 server to stream to as the only argument, and watch your screen show
2236 up on the Kodi screen.  Note, it depend on multicast on the local
2237 network, so if you need to stream outside the local network, the
2238 script must be modified.  Also note, I have no idea if audio work, as
2239 I only care about the picture part.</p>
2240
2241 <blockquote><pre>
2242 #!/bin/sh
2243 #
2244 # Stream the Linux desktop view to Kodi.  See
2245 # http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Streaming_the_Linux_desktop_to_Kodi_using_VLC_and_RTSP.html
2246 # for backgorund information.
2247
2248 # Make sure the stream is stopped in Kodi and the gstreamer process is
2249 # killed if something go wrong (for example if curl is unable to find the
2250 # kodi server).  Do the same when interrupting this script.
2251 kodicmd() {
2252     host="$1"
2253     cmd="$2"
2254     params="$3"
2255     curl --silent --header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
2256          --data-binary "{ \"id\": 1, \"jsonrpc\": \"2.0\", \"method\": \"$cmd\", \"params\": $params }" \
2257          "http://$host/jsonrpc"
2258 }
2259 cleanup() {
2260     if [ -n "$kodihost" ] ; then
2261         # Stop the playing when we end
2262         playerid=$(kodicmd "$kodihost" Player.GetActivePlayers "{}" |
2263                             jq .result[].playerid)
2264         kodicmd "$kodihost" Player.Stop "{ \"playerid\" : $playerid }" > /dev/null
2265     fi
2266     if [ "$gstpid" ] && kill -0 "$gstpid" >/dev/null 2>&1; then
2267         kill "$gstpid"
2268     fi
2269 }
2270 trap cleanup EXIT INT
2271
2272 if [ -n "$1" ]; then
2273     kodihost=$1
2274     shift
2275 else
2276     kodihost=kodi.local
2277 fi
2278
2279 mcast=239.255.0.1
2280 mcastport=1234
2281 mcastttl=1
2282
2283 pasrc=$(pactl list | grep -A2 'Source #' | grep 'Name: .*\.monitor$' | \
2284   cut -d" " -f2|head -1)
2285 gst-launch-1.0 ximagesrc use-damage=0 ! video/x-raw,framerate=30/1 ! \
2286   videoconvert ! queue2 ! \
2287   x264enc bitrate=8000 speed-preset=superfast tune=zerolatency qp-min=30 \
2288   key-int-max=15 bframes=2 ! video/x-h264,profile=high ! queue2 ! \
2289   mpegtsmux alignment=7 name=mux ! rndbuffersize max=1316 min=1316 ! \
2290   udpsink host=$mcast port=$mcastport ttl-mc=$mcastttl auto-multicast=1 sync=0 \
2291   pulsesrc device=$pasrc ! audioconvert ! queue2 ! avenc_aac ! queue2 ! mux. \
2292   > /dev/null 2>&1 &
2293 gstpid=$!
2294
2295 # Give stream a second to get going
2296 sleep 1
2297
2298 # Ask kodi to start streaming using its JSON-RPC API
2299 kodicmd "$kodihost" Player.Open \
2300         "{\"item\": { \"file\": \"udp://@$mcast:$mcastport\" } }" > /dev/null
2301
2302 # wait for gst to end
2303 wait "$gstpid"
2304 </pre></blockquote>
2305
2306 <p>I hope you find the approach useful.  I know I do.</p>
2307
2308 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2309 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2310 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2311
2312       </div>
2313       <div class="tags">
2314
2315
2316         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kodi">kodi</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
2317
2318
2319       </div>
2320     </div>
2321     <div class="padding"></div>
2322
2323     <div class="entry">
2324       <div class="title">
2325         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Streaming_the_Linux_desktop_to_Kodi_using_VLC_and_RTSP.html">Streaming the Linux desktop to Kodi using VLC and RTSP</a>
2326       </div>
2327       <div class="date">
2328         12th July 2018
2329       </div>
2330       <div class="body">
2331         <p>PS: See
2332 <ahref="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Simple_streaming_the_Linux_desktop_to_Kodi_using_GStreamer_and_RTP.html">the
2333 followup post</a> for a even better approach.</p>
2334
2335 <p>A while back, I was asked by a friend how to stream the desktop to
2336 my projector connected to Kodi.  I sadly had to admit that I had no
2337 idea, as it was a task I never had tried.  Since then, I have been
2338 looking for a way to do so, preferable without much extra software to
2339 install on either side.  Today I found a way that seem to kind of
2340 work.  Not great, but it is a start.</p>
2341
2342 <p>I had a look at several approaches, for example
2343 <a href="https://github.com/mfoetsch/dlna_live_streaming">using uPnP
2344 DLNA as described in 2011</a>, but it required a uPnP server, fuse and
2345 local storage enough to store the stream locally.  This is not going
2346 to work well for me, lacking enough free space, and it would
2347 impossible for my friend to get working.</p>
2348
2349 <p>Next, it occurred to me that perhaps I could use VLC to create a
2350 video stream that Kodi could play.  Preferably using
2351 broadcast/multicast, to avoid having to change any setup on the Kodi
2352 side when starting such stream.  Unfortunately, the only recipe I
2353 could find using multicast used the rtp protocol, and this protocol
2354 seem to not be supported by Kodi.</p>
2355
2356 <p>On the other hand, the rtsp protocol is working!  Unfortunately I
2357 have to specify the IP address of the streaming machine in both the
2358 sending command and the file on the Kodi server.  But it is showing my
2359 desktop, and thus allow us to have a shared look on the big screen at
2360 the programs I work on.</p>
2361
2362 <p>I did not spend much time investigating codeces.  I combined the
2363 rtp and rtsp recipes from
2364 <a href="https://wiki.videolan.org/Documentation:Streaming_HowTo/Command_Line_Examples/">the
2365 VLC Streaming HowTo/Command Line Examples</a>, and was able to get
2366 this working on the desktop/streaming end.</p>
2367
2368 <blockquote><pre>
2369 vlc screen:// --sout \
2370   '#transcode{vcodec=mp4v,acodec=mpga,vb=800,ab=128}:rtp{dst=projector.local,port=1234,sdp=rtsp://192.168.11.4:8080/test.sdp}'
2371 </pre></blockquote>
2372
2373 <p>I ssh-ed into my Kodi box and created a file like this with the
2374 same IP address:</p>
2375
2376 <blockquote><pre>
2377 echo rtsp://192.168.11.4:8080/test.sdp \
2378   > /storage/videos/screenstream.m3u
2379 </pre></blockquote>
2380
2381 <p>Note the 192.168.11.4 IP address is my desktops IP address.  As far
2382 as I can tell the IP must be hardcoded for this to work.  In other
2383 words, if someone elses machine is going to do the steaming, you have
2384 to update screenstream.m3u on the Kodi machine and adjust the vlc
2385 recipe.  To get started, locate the file in Kodi and select the m3u
2386 file while the VLC stream is running.  The desktop then show up in my
2387 big screen. :)</p>
2388
2389 <p>When using the same technique to stream a video file with audio,
2390 the audio quality is really bad.  No idea if the problem is package
2391 loss or bad parameters for the transcode.  I do not know VLC nor Kodi
2392 enough to tell.</p>
2393
2394 <p><strong>Update 2018-07-12</strong>: Johannes Schauer send me a few
2395 succestions and reminded me about an important step.  The "screen:"
2396 input source is only available once the vlc-plugin-access-extra
2397 package is installed on Debian.  Without it, you will see this error
2398 message: "VLC is unable to open the MRL 'screen://'.  Check the log
2399 for details."  He further found that it is possible to drop some parts
2400 of the VLC command line to reduce the amount of hardcoded information.
2401 It is also useful to consider using cvlc to avoid having the VLC
2402 window in the desktop view.  In sum, this give us this command line on
2403 the source end
2404
2405 <blockquote><pre>
2406 cvlc screen:// --sout \
2407   '#transcode{vcodec=mp4v,acodec=mpga,vb=800,ab=128}:rtp{sdp=rtsp://:8080/}'
2408 </pre></blockquote>
2409
2410 <p>and this on the Kodi end<p>
2411
2412 <blockquote><pre>
2413 echo rtsp://192.168.11.4:8080/ \
2414   > /storage/videos/screenstream.m3u
2415 </pre></blockquote>
2416
2417 <p>Still bad image quality, though.  But I did discover that streaming
2418 a DVD using dvdsimple:///dev/dvd as the source had excellent video and
2419 audio quality, so I guess the issue is in the input or transcoding
2420 parts, not the rtsp part.  I've tried to change the vb and ab
2421 parameters to use more bandwidth, but it did not make a
2422 difference.</p>
2423
2424 <p>I further received a suggestion from Einar Haraldseid to try using
2425 gstreamer instead of VLC, and this proved to work great!  He also
2426 provided me with the trick to get Kodi to use a multicast stream as
2427 its source.  By using this monstrous oneliner, I can stream my desktop
2428 with good video quality in reasonable framerate to the 239.255.0.1
2429 multicast address on port 1234:
2430
2431 <blockquote><pre>
2432 gst-launch-1.0 ximagesrc use-damage=0 ! video/x-raw,framerate=30/1 ! \
2433   videoconvert ! queue2 ! \
2434   x264enc bitrate=8000 speed-preset=superfast tune=zerolatency qp-min=30 \
2435   key-int-max=15 bframes=2 ! video/x-h264,profile=high ! queue2 ! \
2436   mpegtsmux alignment=7 name=mux ! rndbuffersize max=1316 min=1316 ! \
2437   udpsink host=239.255.0.1 port=1234 ttl-mc=1 auto-multicast=1 sync=0 \
2438   pulsesrc device=$(pactl list | grep -A2 'Source #' | \
2439     grep 'Name: .*\.monitor$' |  cut -d" " -f2|head -1) ! \
2440   audioconvert ! queue2 ! avenc_aac ! queue2 ! mux.
2441 </pre></blockquote>
2442
2443 <p>and this on the Kodi end<p>
2444
2445 <blockquote><pre>
2446 echo udp://@239.255.0.1:1234 \
2447   > /storage/videos/screenstream.m3u
2448 </pre></blockquote>
2449
2450 <p>Note the trick to pick a valid pulseaudio source.  It might not
2451 pick the one you need.  This approach will of course lead to trouble
2452 if more than one source uses the same multicast port and address.
2453 Note the ttl-mc=1 setting, which limit the multicast packages to the
2454 local network.  If the value is increased, your screen will be
2455 broadcasted further, one network "hop" for each increase (read up on
2456 multicast to learn more. :)!</p>
2457
2458 <p>Having cracked how to get Kodi to receive multicast streams, I
2459 could use this VLC command to stream to the same multicast address.
2460 The image quality is way better than the rtsp approach, but gstreamer
2461 seem to be doing a better job.</p>
2462
2463 <blockquote><pre>
2464 cvlc screen:// --sout '#transcode{vcodec=mp4v,acodec=mpga,vb=800,ab=128}:rtp{mux=ts,dst=239.255.0.1,port=1234,sdp=sap}'
2465 </pre></blockquote>
2466
2467 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2468 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2469 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2470
2471       </div>
2472       <div class="tags">
2473
2474
2475         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kodi">kodi</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
2476
2477
2478       </div>
2479     </div>
2480     <div class="padding"></div>
2481
2482     <div class="entry">
2483       <div class="title">
2484         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_most_supported_MIME_type_in_Debian_in_2018_.html">What is the most supported MIME type in Debian in 2018?</a>
2485       </div>
2486       <div class="date">
2487          9th July 2018
2488       </div>
2489       <div class="body">
2490         <p>Five years ago,
2491 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_most_supported_MIME_type_in_Debian_.html">I
2492 measured what the most supported MIME type in Debian was</a>, by
2493 analysing the desktop files in all packages in the archive.  Since
2494 then, the DEP-11 AppStream system has been put into production, making
2495 the task a lot easier.  This made me want to repeat the measurement,
2496 to see how much things changed.  Here are the new numbers, for
2497 unstable only this time:
2498
2499 <p><strong>Debian Unstable:</strong></p>
2500
2501 <pre>
2502   count MIME type
2503   ----- -----------------------
2504      56 image/jpeg
2505      55 image/png
2506      49 image/tiff
2507      48 image/gif
2508      39 image/bmp
2509      38 text/plain
2510      37 audio/mpeg
2511      34 application/ogg
2512      33 audio/x-flac
2513      32 audio/x-mp3
2514      30 audio/x-wav
2515      30 audio/x-vorbis+ogg
2516      29 image/x-portable-pixmap
2517      27 inode/directory
2518      27 image/x-portable-bitmap
2519      27 audio/x-mpeg
2520      26 application/x-ogg
2521      25 audio/x-mpegurl
2522      25 audio/ogg
2523      24 text/html
2524 </pre>
2525
2526 <p>The list was created like this using a sid chroot: "cat
2527 /var/lib/apt/lists/*sid*_dep11_Components-amd64.yml.gz| zcat | awk '/^
2528 - \S+\/\S+$/ {print $2 }' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -20"</p>
2529
2530 <p>It is interesting to see how image formats have passed text/plain
2531 as the most announced supported MIME type.  These days, thanks to the
2532 AppStream system, if you run into a file format you do not know, and
2533 want to figure out which packages support the format, you can find the
2534 MIME type of the file using "file --mime &lt;filename&gt;", and then
2535 look up all packages announcing support for this format in their
2536 AppStream metadata (XML or .desktop file) using "appstreamcli
2537 what-provides mimetype &lt;mime-type&gt;.  For example if you, like
2538 me, want to know which packages support inode/directory, you can get a
2539 list like this:</p>
2540
2541 <p><blockquote><pre>
2542 % appstreamcli what-provides mimetype inode/directory | grep Package: | sort
2543 Package: anjuta
2544 Package: audacious
2545 Package: baobab
2546 Package: cervisia
2547 Package: chirp
2548 Package: dolphin
2549 Package: doublecmd-common
2550 Package: easytag
2551 Package: enlightenment
2552 Package: ephoto
2553 Package: filelight
2554 Package: gwenview
2555 Package: k4dirstat
2556 Package: kaffeine
2557 Package: kdesvn
2558 Package: kid3
2559 Package: kid3-qt
2560 Package: nautilus
2561 Package: nemo
2562 Package: pcmanfm
2563 Package: pcmanfm-qt
2564 Package: qweborf
2565 Package: ranger
2566 Package: sirikali
2567 Package: spacefm
2568 Package: spacefm
2569 Package: vifm
2570 %
2571 </pre></blockquote></p>
2572
2573 <p>Using the same method, I can quickly discover that the Sketchup file
2574 format is not yet supported by any package in Debian:</p>
2575
2576 <p><blockquote><pre>
2577 % appstreamcli what-provides mimetype  application/vnd.sketchup.skp
2578 Could not find component providing 'mimetype::application/vnd.sketchup.skp'.
2579 %
2580 </pre></blockquote></p>
2581
2582 <p>Yesterday I used it to figure out which packages support the STL 3D
2583 format:</p>
2584
2585 <p><blockquote><pre>
2586 % appstreamcli what-provides mimetype  application/sla|grep Package
2587 Package: cura
2588 Package: meshlab
2589 Package: printrun
2590 %
2591 </pre></blockquote></p>
2592
2593 <p>PS: A new version of Cura was uploaded to Debian yesterday.</p>
2594
2595 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2596 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2597 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2598
2599       </div>
2600       <div class="tags">
2601
2602
2603         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
2604
2605
2606       </div>
2607     </div>
2608     <div class="padding"></div>
2609
2610     <div class="entry">
2611       <div class="title">
2612         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_APT_upgrade_without_enough_free_space_on_the_disk___.html">Debian APT upgrade without enough free space on the disk...</a>
2613       </div>
2614       <div class="date">
2615          8th July 2018
2616       </div>
2617       <div class="body">
2618         <p>Quite regularly, I let my Debian Sid/Unstable chroot stay untouch
2619 for a while, and when I need to update it there is not enough free
2620 space on the disk for apt to do a normal 'apt upgrade'.  I normally
2621 would resolve the issue by doing 'apt install &lt;somepackages&gt;' to
2622 upgrade only some of the packages in one batch, until the amount of
2623 packages to download fall below the amount of free space available.
2624 Today, I had about 500 packages to upgrade, and after a while I got
2625 tired of trying to install chunks of packages manually.  I concluded
2626 that I did not have the spare hours required to complete the task, and
2627 decided to see if I could automate it.  I came up with this small
2628 script which I call 'apt-in-chunks':</p>
2629
2630 <p><blockquote><pre>
2631 #!/bin/sh
2632 #
2633 # Upgrade packages when the disk is too full to upgrade every
2634 # upgradable package in one lump.  Fetching packages to upgrade using
2635 # apt, and then installing using dpkg, to avoid changing the package
2636 # flag for manual/automatic.
2637
2638 set -e
2639
2640 ignore() {
2641     if [ "$1" ]; then
2642         grep -v "$1"
2643     else
2644         cat
2645     fi
2646 }
2647
2648 for p in $(apt list --upgradable | ignore "$@" |cut -d/ -f1 | grep -v '^Listing...'); do
2649     echo "Upgrading $p"
2650     apt clean
2651     apt install --download-only -y $p
2652     for f in /var/cache/apt/archives/*.deb; do
2653         if [ -e "$f" ]; then
2654             dpkg -i /var/cache/apt/archives/*.deb
2655             break
2656         fi
2657     done
2658 done
2659 </pre></blockquote></p>
2660
2661 <p>The script will extract the list of packages to upgrade, try to
2662 download the packages needed to upgrade one package, install the
2663 downloaded packages using dpkg.  The idea is to upgrade packages
2664 without changing the APT mark for the package (ie the one recording of
2665 the package was manually requested or pulled in as a dependency).  To
2666 use it, simply run it as root from the command line.  If it fail, try
2667 'apt install -f' to clean up the mess and run the script again.  This
2668 might happen if the new packages conflict with one of the old
2669 packages.  dpkg is unable to remove, while apt can do this.</p>
2670
2671 <p>It take one option, a package to ignore in the list of packages to
2672 upgrade.  The option to ignore a package is there to be able to skip
2673 the packages that are simply too large to unpack.  Today this was
2674 'ghc', but I have run into other large packages causing similar
2675 problems earlier (like TeX).</p>
2676
2677 <p>Update 2018-07-08: Thanks to Paul Wise, I am aware of two
2678 alternative ways to handle this.  The "unattended-upgrades
2679 --minimal-upgrade-steps" option will try to calculate upgrade sets for
2680 each package to upgrade, and then upgrade them in order, smallest set
2681 first.  It might be a better option than my above mentioned script.
2682 Also, "aptutude upgrade" can upgrade single packages, thus avoiding
2683 the need for using "dpkg -i" in the script above.</p>
2684
2685 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2686 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2687 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2688
2689       </div>
2690       <div class="tags">
2691
2692
2693         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2694
2695
2696       </div>
2697     </div>
2698     <div class="padding"></div>
2699
2700     <div class="entry">
2701       <div class="title">
2702         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Version_3_1_of_Cura__the_3D_print_slicer__is_now_in_Debian.html">Version 3.1 of Cura, the 3D print slicer, is now in Debian</a>
2703       </div>
2704       <div class="date">
2705         13th February 2018
2706       </div>
2707       <div class="body">
2708         <p>A new version of the
2709 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cura">3D printer slicer
2710 software Cura</a>, version 3.1.0, is now available in Debian Testing
2711 (aka Buster) and Debian Unstable (aka Sid).  I hope you find it
2712 useful.  It was uploaded the last few days, and the last update will
2713 enter testing tomorrow.  See the
2714 <a href="https://ultimaker.com/en/products/cura-software/release-notes">release
2715 notes</a> for the list of bug fixes and new features.  Version 3.2
2716 was announced 6 days ago.  We will try to get it into Debian as
2717 well.</p>
2718
2719 <p>More information related to 3D printing is available on the
2720 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/3DPrinting">3D printing</a> and
2721 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/3D-printer">3D printer</a> wiki pages
2722 in Debian.</p>
2723
2724 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2725 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2726 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2727
2728       </div>
2729       <div class="tags">
2730
2731
2732         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2733
2734
2735       </div>
2736     </div>
2737     <div class="padding"></div>
2738
2739     <div class="entry">
2740       <div class="title">
2741         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Cura__the_nice_3D_print_slicer__is_now_in_Debian_Unstable.html">Cura, the nice 3D print slicer, is now in Debian Unstable</a>
2742       </div>
2743       <div class="date">
2744         17th December 2017
2745       </div>
2746       <div class="body">
2747         <p>After several months of working and waiting, I am happy to report
2748 that the nice and user friendly 3D printer slicer software Cura just
2749 entered Debian Unstable.  It consist of five packages,
2750 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cura">cura</a>,
2751 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cura-engine">cura-engine</a>,
2752 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/libarcus">libarcus</a>,
2753 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/fdm-materials">fdm-materials</a>,
2754 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/libsavitar">libsavitar</a> and
2755 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/uranium">uranium</a>.  The last
2756 two, uranium and cura, entered Unstable yesterday.  This should make
2757 it easier for Debian users to print on at least the Ultimaker class of
2758 3D printers.  My nearest 3D printer is an Ultimaker 2+, so it will
2759 make life easier for at least me. :)</p>
2760
2761 <p>The work to make this happen was done by Gregor Riepl, and I was
2762 happy to assist him in sponsoring the packages.  With the introduction
2763 of Cura, Debian is up to three 3D printer slicers at your service,
2764 Cura, Slic3r and Slic3r Prusa.  If you own or have access to a 3D
2765 printer, give it a go. :)</p>
2766
2767 <p>The 3D printer software is maintained by the 3D printer Debian
2768 team, flocking together on the
2769 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/3dprinter-general">3dprinter-general</a>
2770 mailing list and the
2771 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/#debian-3dprinting">#debian-3dprinting</a>
2772 IRC channel.</p>
2773
2774 <p>The next step for Cura in Debian is to update the cura package to
2775 version 3.0.3 and then update the entire set of packages to version
2776 3.1.0 which showed up the last few days.</p>
2777
2778       </div>
2779       <div class="tags">
2780
2781
2782         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2783
2784
2785       </div>
2786     </div>
2787     <div class="padding"></div>
2788
2789     <div class="entry">
2790       <div class="title">
2791         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Generating_3D_prints_in_Debian_using_Cura_and_Slic3r__prusa_.html">Generating 3D prints in Debian using Cura and Slic3r(-prusa)</a>
2792       </div>
2793       <div class="date">
2794          9th October 2017
2795       </div>
2796       <div class="body">
2797         <p>At my nearby maker space,
2798 <a href="http://sonen.ifi.uio.no/">Sonen</a>, I heard the story that it
2799 was easier to generate gcode files for theyr 3D printers (Ultimake 2+)
2800 on Windows and MacOS X than Linux, because the software involved had
2801 to be manually compiled and set up on Linux while premade packages
2802 worked out of the box on Windows and MacOS X.  I found this annoying,
2803 as the software involved,
2804 <a href="https://github.com/Ultimaker/Cura">Cura</a>, is free software
2805 and should be trivial to get up and running on Linux if someone took
2806 the time to package it for the relevant distributions.  I even found
2807 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/706656">a request for adding into
2808 Debian</a> from 2013, which had seem some activity over the years but
2809 never resulted in the software showing up in Debian.  So a few days
2810 ago I offered my help to try to improve the situation.</p>
2811
2812 <p>Now I am very happy to see that all the packages required by a
2813 working Cura in Debian are uploaded into Debian and waiting in the NEW
2814 queue for the ftpmasters to have a look.  You can track the progress
2815 on
2816 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?email=3dprinter-general%40lists.alioth.debian.org">the
2817 status page for the 3D printer team</a>.</p>
2818
2819 <p>The uploaded packages are a bit behind upstream, and was uploaded
2820 now to get slots in <a href="https://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html">the NEW
2821 queue</a> while we work up updating the packages to the latest
2822 upstream version.</p>
2823
2824 <p>On a related note, two competitors for Cura, which I found harder
2825 to use and was unable to configure correctly for Ultimaker 2+ in the
2826 short time I spent on it, are already in Debian.  If you are looking
2827 for 3D printer "slicers" and want something already available in
2828 Debian, check out
2829 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/slic3r">slic3r</a> and
2830 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/slic3r-prusa">slic3r-prusa</a>.
2831 The latter is a fork of the former.</p>
2832
2833 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2834 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2835 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2836
2837       </div>
2838       <div class="tags">
2839
2840
2841         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2842
2843
2844       </div>
2845     </div>
2846     <div class="padding"></div>
2847
2848     <div class="entry">
2849       <div class="title">
2850         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Visualizing_GSM_radio_chatter_using_gr_gsm_and_Hopglass.html">Visualizing GSM radio chatter using gr-gsm and Hopglass</a>
2851       </div>
2852       <div class="date">
2853         29th September 2017
2854       </div>
2855       <div class="body">
2856         <p>Every mobile phone announce its existence over radio to the nearby
2857 mobile cell towers.  And this radio chatter is available for anyone
2858 with a radio receiver capable of receiving them.  Details about the
2859 mobile phones with very good accuracy is of course collected by the
2860 phone companies, but this is not the topic of this blog post.  The
2861 mobile phone radio chatter make it possible to figure out when a cell
2862 phone is nearby, as it include the SIM card ID (IMSI).  By paying
2863 attention over time, one can see when a phone arrive and when it leave
2864 an area.  I believe it would be nice to make this information more
2865 available to the general public, to make more people aware of how
2866 their phones are announcing their whereabouts to anyone that care to
2867 listen.</p>
2868
2869 <p>I am very happy to report that we managed to get something
2870 visualizing this information up and running for
2871 <a href="http://norwaymakers.org/osf17">Oslo Skaperfestival 2017</a>
2872 (Oslo Makers Festival) taking place today and tomorrow at Deichmanske
2873 library.  The solution is based on the
2874 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Easier_recipe_to_observe_the_cell_phones_around_you.html">simple
2875 recipe for listening to GSM chatter</a> I posted a few days ago, and
2876 will show up at the stand of <a href="http://sonen.ifi.uio.no/">Åpen
2877 Sone from the Computer Science department of the University of
2878 Oslo</a>.  The presentation will show the nearby mobile phones (aka
2879 IMSIs) as dots in a web browser graph, with lines to the dot
2880 representing mobile base station it is talking to. It was working in
2881 the lab yesterday, and was moved into place this morning.</p>
2882
2883 <p>We set up a fairly powerful desktop machine using Debian
2884 Buster/Testing with several (five, I believe) RTL2838 DVB-T receivers
2885 connected and visualize the visible cell phone towers using an
2886 <a href="https://github.com/marlow925/hopglass">English version of
2887 Hopglass</a>.  A fairly powerfull machine is needed as the
2888 grgsm_livemon_headless processes from
2889 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/gr-gsm">gr-gsm</a> converting
2890 the radio signal to data packages is quite CPU intensive.</p>
2891
2892 <p>The frequencies to listen to, are identified using a slightly
2893 patched scan-and-livemon (to set the --args values for each receiver),
2894 and the Hopglass data is generated using the
2895 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/IMSI-catcher/tree/meshviewer-output">patches
2896 in my meshviewer-output branch</a>.  For some reason we could not get
2897 more than four SDRs working.  There is also a geographical map trying
2898 to show the location of the base stations, but I believe their
2899 coordinates are hardcoded to some random location in Germany, I
2900 believe.  The code should be replaced with code to look up location in
2901 a text file, a sqlite database or one of the online databases
2902 mentioned in
2903 <a href="https://github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher/issues/14">the github
2904 issue for the topic</a>.
2905
2906 <p>If this sound interesting, visit the stand at the festival!</p>
2907
2908       </div>
2909       <div class="tags">
2910
2911
2912         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
2913
2914
2915       </div>
2916     </div>
2917     <div class="padding"></div>
2918
2919     <div class="entry">
2920       <div class="title">
2921         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Easier_recipe_to_observe_the_cell_phones_around_you.html">Easier recipe to observe the cell phones around you</a>
2922       </div>
2923       <div class="date">
2924         24th September 2017
2925       </div>
2926       <div class="body">
2927         <p>A little more than a month ago I wrote
2928 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Simpler_recipe_on_how_to_make_a_simple__7_IMSI_Catcher_using_Debian.html">how
2929 to observe the SIM card ID (aka IMSI number) of mobile phones talking
2930 to nearby mobile phone base stations using Debian GNU/Linux and a
2931 cheap USB software defined radio</a>, and thus being able to pinpoint
2932 the location of people and equipment (like cars and trains) with an
2933 accuracy of a few kilometer.  Since then we have worked to make the
2934 procedure even simpler, and it is now possible to do this without any
2935 manual frequency tuning and without building your own packages.</p>
2936
2937 <p>The <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/gr-gsm">gr-gsm</a>
2938 package is now included in Debian testing and unstable, and the
2939 IMSI-catcher code no longer require root access to fetch and decode
2940 the GSM data collected using gr-gsm.</p>
2941
2942 <p>Here is an updated recipe, using packages built by Debian and a git
2943 clone of two python scripts:</p>
2944
2945 <ol>
2946
2947 <li>Start with a Debian machine running the Buster version (aka
2948   testing).</li>
2949
2950 <li>Run '<tt>apt install gr-gsm python-numpy python-scipy
2951   python-scapy</tt>' as root to install required packages.</li>
2952
2953 <li>Fetch the code decoding GSM packages using '<tt>git clone
2954   github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher.git</tt>'.</li>
2955
2956 <li>Insert USB software defined radio supported by GNU Radio.</li>
2957
2958 <li>Enter the IMSI-catcher directory and run '<tt>python
2959   scan-and-livemon</tt>' to locate the frequency of nearby base
2960   stations and start listening for GSM packages on one of them.</li>
2961
2962 <li>Enter the IMSI-catcher directory and run '<tt>python
2963   simple_IMSI-catcher.py</tt>' to display the collected information.</li>
2964
2965 </ol>
2966
2967 <p>Note, due to a bug somewhere the scan-and-livemon program (actually
2968 <a href="https://github.com/ptrkrysik/gr-gsm/issues/336">its underlying
2969 program grgsm_scanner</a>) do not work with the HackRF radio.  It does
2970 work with RTL 8232 and other similar USB radio receivers you can get
2971 very cheaply
2972 (<a href="https://www.ebay.com/sch/items/?_nkw=rtl+2832">for example
2973 from ebay</a>), so for now the solution is to scan using the RTL radio
2974 and only use HackRF for fetching GSM data.</p>
2975
2976 <p>As far as I can tell, a cell phone only show up on one of the
2977 frequencies at the time, so if you are going to track and count every
2978 cell phone around you, you need to listen to all the frequencies used.
2979 To listen to several frequencies, use the --numrecv argument to
2980 scan-and-livemon to use several receivers.  Further, I am not sure if
2981 phones using 3G or 4G will show as talking GSM to base stations, so
2982 this approach might not see all phones around you.  I typically see
2983 0-400 IMSI numbers an hour when looking around where I live.</p>
2984
2985 <p>I've tried to run the scanner on a
2986 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi">Raspberry Pi 2 and 3
2987 running Debian Buster</a>, but the grgsm_livemon_headless process seem
2988 to be too CPU intensive to keep up.  When GNU Radio print 'O' to
2989 stdout, I am told there it is caused by a buffer overflow between the
2990 radio and GNU Radio, caused by the program being unable to read the
2991 GSM data fast enough.  If you see a stream of 'O's from the terminal
2992 where you started scan-and-livemon, you need a give the process more
2993 CPU power.  Perhaps someone are able to optimize the code to a point
2994 where it become possible to set up RPi3 based GSM sniffers?  I tried
2995 using Raspbian instead of Debian, but there seem to be something wrong
2996 with GNU Radio on raspbian, causing glibc to abort().</p>
2997
2998       </div>
2999       <div class="tags">
3000
3001
3002         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
3003
3004
3005       </div>
3006     </div>
3007     <div class="padding"></div>
3008
3009     <div class="entry">
3010       <div class="title">
3011         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Simpler_recipe_on_how_to_make_a_simple__7_IMSI_Catcher_using_Debian.html">Simpler recipe on how to make a simple $7 IMSI Catcher using Debian</a>
3012       </div>
3013       <div class="date">
3014          9th August 2017
3015       </div>
3016       <div class="body">
3017         <p>On friday, I came across an interesting article in the Norwegian
3018 web based ICT news magazine digi.no on
3019 <a href="https://www.digi.no/artikler/sikkerhetsforsker-lagde-enkel-imsi-catcher-for-60-kroner-na-kan-mobiler-kartlegges-av-alle/398588">how
3020 to collect the IMSI numbers of nearby cell phones</a> using the cheap
3021 DVB-T software defined radios.  The article refered to instructions
3022 and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjwgNd_as30">a recipe by
3023 Keld Norman on Youtube on how to make a simple $7 IMSI Catcher</a>, and I decided to test them out.</p>
3024
3025 <p>The instructions said to use Ubuntu, install pip using apt (to
3026 bypass apt), use pip to install pybombs (to bypass both apt and pip),
3027 and the ask pybombs to fetch and build everything you need from
3028 scratch.  I wanted to see if I could do the same on the most recent
3029 Debian packages, but this did not work because pybombs tried to build
3030 stuff that no longer build with the most recent openssl library or
3031 some other version skew problem.  While trying to get this recipe
3032 working, I learned that the apt->pip->pybombs route was a long detour,
3033 and the only piece of software dependency missing in Debian was the
3034 gr-gsm package.  I also found out that the lead upstream developer of
3035 gr-gsm (the name stand for GNU Radio GSM) project already had a set of
3036 Debian packages provided in an Ubuntu PPA repository.  All I needed to
3037 do was to dget the Debian source package and built it.</p>
3038
3039 <p>The IMSI collector is a python script listening for packages on the
3040 loopback network device and printing to the terminal some specific GSM
3041 packages with IMSI numbers in them.  The code is fairly short and easy
3042 to understand.  The reason this work is because gr-gsm include a tool
3043 to read GSM data from a software defined radio like a DVB-T USB stick
3044 and other software defined radios, decode them and inject them into a
3045 network device on your Linux machine (using the loopback device by
3046 default).  This proved to work just fine, and I've been testing the
3047 collector for a few days now.</p>
3048
3049 <p>The updated and simpler recipe is thus to</p>
3050
3051 <ol>
3052
3053 <li>start with a Debian machine running Stretch or newer,</li>
3054
3055 <li>build and install the gr-gsm package available from
3056 <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>
3057
3058 <li>clone the git repostory from <a href="https://github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher">https://github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher</a>,</li>
3059
3060 <li>run grgsm_livemon and adjust the frequency until the terminal
3061 where it was started is filled with a stream of text (meaning you
3062 found a GSM station).</li>
3063
3064 <li>go into the IMSI-catcher directory and run 'sudo python simple_IMSI-catcher.py' to extract the IMSI numbers.</li>
3065
3066 </ol>
3067
3068 <p>To make it even easier in the future to get this sniffer up and
3069 running, I decided to package
3070 <a href="https://github.com/ptrkrysik/gr-gsm/">the gr-gsm project</a>
3071 for Debian (<a href="https://bugs.debian.org/871055">WNPP
3072 #871055</a>), and the package was uploaded into the NEW queue today.
3073 Luckily the gnuradio maintainer has promised to help me, as I do not
3074 know much about gnuradio stuff yet.</p>
3075
3076 <p>I doubt this "IMSI cacher" is anywhere near as powerfull as
3077 commercial tools like
3078 <a href="https://www.thespyphone.com/portable-imsi-imei-catcher/">The
3079 Spy Phone Portable IMSI / IMEI Catcher</a> or the
3080 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingray_phone_tracker">Harris
3081 Stingray</a>, but I hope the existance of cheap alternatives can make
3082 more people realise how their whereabouts when carrying a cell phone
3083 is easily tracked.  Seeing the data flow on the screen, realizing that
3084 I live close to a police station and knowing that the police is also
3085 wearing cell phones, I wonder how hard it would be for criminals to
3086 track the position of the police officers to discover when there are
3087 police near by, or for foreign military forces to track the location
3088 of the Norwegian military forces, or for anyone to track the location
3089 of government officials...</p>
3090
3091 <p>It is worth noting that the data reported by the IMSI-catcher
3092 script mentioned above is only a fraction of the data broadcasted on
3093 the GSM network.  It will only collect one frequency at the time,
3094 while a typical phone will be using several frequencies, and not all
3095 phones will be using the frequencies tracked by the grgsm_livemod
3096 program.  Also, there is a lot of radio chatter being ignored by the
3097 simple_IMSI-catcher script, which would be collected by extending the
3098 parser code.  I wonder if gr-gsm can be set up to listen to more than
3099 one frequency?</p>
3100
3101       </div>
3102       <div class="tags">
3103
3104
3105         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
3106
3107
3108       </div>
3109     </div>
3110     <div class="padding"></div>
3111
3112     <div class="entry">
3113       <div class="title">
3114         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook_is_now_available.html">Norwegian Bokmål edition of Debian Administrator's Handbook is now available</a>
3115       </div>
3116       <div class="date">
3117         25th July 2017
3118       </div>
3119       <div class="body">
3120         <p align="center"><img align="center" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-07-25-debian-handbook-nb-testprint.png"/></p>
3121
3122 <p>I finally received a copy of the Norwegian Bokmål edition of
3123 "<a href="https://debian-handbook.info/">The Debian Administrator's
3124 Handbook</a>".  This test copy arrived in the mail a few days ago, and
3125 I am very happy to hold the result in my hand.   We spent around one and a half year translating it. This paperbook edition
3126 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/get/#norwegian">is available
3127 from lulu.com</a>.  If you buy it quickly, you save 25% on the list
3128 price.  The book is also available for download in electronic form as
3129 PDF, EPUB and Mobipocket, as can be
3130 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/browse/nb-NO/stable/">read online
3131 as a web page</a>.</p>
3132
3133 <p>This is the second book I publish (the first was the book
3134 "<a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a>" by Lawrence Lessig
3135 in
3136 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22440520.html">English</a>,
3137 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/culture-libre/paperback/product-22645082.html">French</a>
3138 and
3139 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/fri-kultur/paperback/product-22441576.html">Norwegian
3140 Bokmål</a>), and I am very excited to finally wrap up this
3141 project.  I hope
3142 "<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
3143 for Debian-administratoren</a>" will be well received.</p>
3144
3145       </div>
3146       <div class="tags">
3147
3148
3149         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3150
3151
3152       </div>
3153     </div>
3154     <div class="padding"></div>
3155
3156     <div class="entry">
3157       <div class="title">
3158         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/N_r_nynorskoversettelsen_svikter_til_eksamen___.html">Når nynorskoversettelsen svikter til eksamen...</a>
3159       </div>
3160       <div class="date">
3161          3rd June 2017
3162       </div>
3163       <div class="body">
3164         <p><a href="http://www.aftenposten.no/norge/Krever-at-elever-ma-fa-annullert-eksamen-etter-rot-med-oppgavetekster-622459b.html">Aftenposten
3165 melder i dag</a> om feil i eksamensoppgavene for eksamen i politikk og
3166 menneskerettigheter, der teksten i bokmåls og nynorskutgaven ikke var
3167 like.  Oppgaveteksten er gjengitt i artikkelen, og jeg ble nysgjerring
3168 på om den fri oversetterløsningen
3169 <a href="https://www.apertium.org/">Apertium</a> ville gjort en bedre
3170 jobb enn Utdanningsdirektoratet.  Det kan se slik ut.</p>
3171
3172 <p>Her er bokmålsoppgaven fra eksamenen:</p>
3173
3174 <blockquote>
3175 <p>Drøft utfordringene knyttet til nasjonalstatenes og andre aktørers
3176 rolle og muligheter til å håndtere internasjonale utfordringer, som
3177 for eksempel flykningekrisen.</p>
3178
3179 <p>Vedlegge er eksempler på tekster som kan gi relevante perspektiver
3180 på temaet:</p>
3181 <ol>
3182 <li>Flykningeregnskapet 2016, UNHCR og IDMC
3183 <li>«Grenseløst Europa for fall» A-Magasinet, 26. november 2015
3184 </ol>
3185
3186 </blockquote>
3187
3188 <p>Dette oversetter Apertium slik:</p>
3189
3190 <blockquote>
3191 <p>Drøft utfordringane knytte til nasjonalstatane sine og rolla til
3192 andre aktørar og høve til å handtera internasjonale utfordringar, som
3193 til dømes *flykningekrisen.</p>
3194
3195 <p>Vedleggja er døme på tekster som kan gje relevante perspektiv på
3196 temaet:</p>
3197
3198 <ol>
3199 <li>*Flykningeregnskapet 2016, *UNHCR og *IDMC</li>
3200 <li>«*Grenseløst Europa for fall» A-Magasinet, 26. november 2015</li>
3201 </ol>
3202
3203 </blockquote>
3204
3205 <p>Ord som ikke ble forstått er markert med stjerne (*), og trenger
3206 ekstra språksjekk.  Men ingen ord er forsvunnet, slik det var i
3207 oppgaven elevene fikk presentert på eksamen.  Jeg mistenker dog at
3208 "andre aktørers rolle og muligheter til ..." burde vært oversatt til
3209 "rolla til andre aktørar og deira høve til ..." eller noe slikt, men
3210 det er kanskje flisespikking.  Det understreker vel bare at det alltid
3211 trengs korrekturlesning etter automatisk oversettelse.</p>
3212
3213       </div>
3214       <div class="tags">
3215
3216
3217         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stavekontroll">stavekontroll</a>.
3218
3219
3220       </div>
3221     </div>
3222     <div class="padding"></div>
3223
3224     <div class="entry">
3225       <div class="title">
3226         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Detecting_NFS_hangs_on_Linux_without_hanging_yourself___.html">Detecting NFS hangs on Linux without hanging yourself...</a>
3227       </div>
3228       <div class="date">
3229          9th March 2017
3230       </div>
3231       <div class="body">
3232         <p>Over the years, administrating thousand of NFS mounting linux
3233 computers at the time, I often needed a way to detect if the machine
3234 was experiencing NFS hang.  If you try to use <tt>df</tt> or look at a
3235 file or directory affected by the hang, the process (and possibly the
3236 shell) will hang too.  So you want to be able to detect this without
3237 risking the detection process getting stuck too.  It has not been
3238 obvious how to do this.  When the hang has lasted a while, it is
3239 possible to find messages like these in dmesg:</p>
3240
3241 <p><blockquote>
3242 nfs: server nfsserver not responding, still trying
3243 <br>nfs: server nfsserver OK
3244 </blockquote></p>
3245
3246 <p>It is hard to know if the hang is still going on, and it is hard to
3247 be sure looking in dmesg is going to work.  If there are lots of other
3248 messages in dmesg the lines might have rotated out of site before they
3249 are noticed.</p>
3250
3251 <p>While reading through the nfs client implementation in linux kernel
3252 code, I came across some statistics that seem to give a way to detect
3253 it.  The om_timeouts sunrpc value in the kernel will increase every
3254 time the above log entry is inserted into dmesg.  And after digging a
3255 bit further, I discovered that this value show up in
3256 /proc/self/mountstats on Linux.</p>
3257
3258 <p>The mountstats content seem to be shared between files using the
3259 same file system context, so it is enough to check one of the
3260 mountstats files to get the state of the mount point for the machine.
3261 I assume this will not show lazy umounted NFS points, nor NFS mount
3262 points in a different process context (ie with a different filesystem
3263 view), but that does not worry me.</p>
3264
3265 <p>The content for a NFS mount point look similar to this:</p>
3266
3267 <p><blockquote><pre>
3268 [...]
3269 device /dev/mapper/Debian-var mounted on /var with fstype ext3
3270 device nfsserver:/mnt/nfsserver/home0 mounted on /mnt/nfsserver/home0 with fstype nfs statvers=1.1
3271         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
3272         age:    7863311
3273         caps:   caps=0x3fe7,wtmult=4096,dtsize=8192,bsize=0,namlen=255
3274         sec:    flavor=1,pseudoflavor=1
3275         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
3276         bytes:  166253035039 219519120027 0 0 40783504807 185466229638 11677877 45561809
3277         RPC iostats version: 1.0  p/v: 100003/3 (nfs)
3278         xprt:   tcp 925 1 6810 0 0 111505412 111480497 109 2672418560317 0 248 53869103 22481820
3279         per-op statistics
3280                 NULL: 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
3281              GETATTR: 61063106 61063108 0 9621383060 6839064400 453650 77291321 78926132
3282              SETATTR: 463469 463470 0 92005440 66739536 63787 603235 687943
3283               LOOKUP: 17021657 17021657 0 3354097764 4013442928 57216 35125459 35566511
3284               ACCESS: 14281703 14290009 5 2318400592 1713803640 1709282 4865144 7130140
3285             READLINK: 125 125 0 20472 18620 0 1112 1118
3286                 READ: 4214236 4214237 0 715608524 41328653212 89884 22622768 22806693
3287                WRITE: 8479010 8494376 22 187695798568 1356087148 178264904 51506907 231671771
3288               CREATE: 171708 171708 0 38084748 46702272 873 1041833 1050398
3289                MKDIR: 3680 3680 0 773980 993920 26 23990 24245
3290              SYMLINK: 903 903 0 233428 245488 6 5865 5917
3291                MKNOD: 80 80 0 20148 21760 0 299 304
3292               REMOVE: 429921 429921 0 79796004 61908192 3313 2710416 2741636
3293                RMDIR: 3367 3367 0 645112 484848 22 5782 6002
3294               RENAME: 466201 466201 0 130026184 121212260 7075 5935207 5961288
3295                 LINK: 289155 289155 0 72775556 67083960 2199 2565060 2585579
3296              READDIR: 2933237 2933237 0 516506204 13973833412 10385 3190199 3297917
3297          READDIRPLUS: 1652839 1652839 0 298640972 6895997744 84735 14307895 14448937
3298               FSSTAT: 6144 6144 0 1010516 1032192 51 9654 10022
3299               FSINFO: 2 2 0 232 328 0 1 1
3300             PATHCONF: 1 1 0 116 140 0 0 0
3301               COMMIT: 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
3302
3303 device binfmt_misc mounted on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc with fstype binfmt_misc
3304 [...]
3305 </pre></blockquote></p>
3306
3307 <p>The key number to look at is the third number in the per-op list.
3308 It is the number of NFS timeouts experiences per file system
3309 operation.  Here 22 write timeouts and 5 access timeouts.  If these
3310 numbers are increasing, I believe the machine is experiencing NFS
3311 hang.  Unfortunately the timeout value do not start to increase right
3312 away.  The NFS operations need to time out first, and this can take a
3313 while.  The exact timeout value depend on the setup.  For example the
3314 defaults for TCP and UDP mount points are quite different, and the
3315 timeout value is affected by the soft, hard, timeo and retrans NFS
3316 mount options.</p>
3317
3318 <p>The only way I have been able to get working on Debian and RedHat
3319 Enterprise Linux for getting the timeout count is to peek in /proc/.
3320 But according to
3321 <ahref="http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19253-01/816-4555/netmonitor-12/index.html">Solaris
3322 10 System Administration Guide: Network Services</a>, the 'nfsstat -c'
3323 command can be used to get these timeout values.  But this do not work
3324 on Linux, as far as I can tell.  I
3325 <ahref="http://bugs.debian.org/857043">asked Debian about this</a>,
3326 but have not seen any replies yet.</p>
3327
3328 <p>Is there a better way to figure out if a Linux NFS client is
3329 experiencing NFS hangs?  Is there a way to detect which processes are
3330 affected?  Is there a way to get the NFS mount going quickly once the
3331 network problem causing the NFS hang has been cleared?  I would very
3332 much welcome some clues, as we regularly run into NFS hangs.</p>
3333
3334       </div>
3335       <div class="tags">
3336
3337
3338         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sysadmin">sysadmin</a>.
3339
3340
3341       </div>
3342     </div>
3343     <div class="padding"></div>
3344
3345     <div class="entry">
3346       <div class="title">
3347         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Norwegian_Bokm_l_translation_of_The_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook_complete__proofreading_in_progress.html">Norwegian Bokmål translation of The Debian Administrator's Handbook complete, proofreading in progress</a>
3348       </div>
3349       <div class="date">
3350          3rd March 2017
3351       </div>
3352       <div class="body">
3353         <p>For almost a year now, we have been working on making a Norwegian
3354 Bokmål edition of <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/">The Debian
3355 Administrator's Handbook</a>.  Now, thanks to the tireless effort of
3356 Ole-Erik, Ingrid and Andreas, the initial translation is complete, and
3357 we are working on the proof reading to ensure consistent language and
3358 use of correct computer science terms.  The plan is to make the book
3359 available on paper, as well as in electronic form.  For that to
3360 happen, the proof reading must be completed and all the figures need
3361 to be translated.  If you want to help out, get in touch.</p>
3362
3363 <p><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-handbook/debian-handbook-nb-NO.pdf">A
3364
3365 fresh PDF edition</a> in A4 format (the final book will have smaller
3366 pages) of the book created every morning is available for
3367 proofreading.  If you find any errors, please
3368 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-handbook/">visit
3369 Weblate and correct the error</a>.  The
3370 <a href="http://l.github.io/debian-handbook/stat/nb-NO/index.html">state
3371 of the translation including figures</a> is a useful source for those
3372 provide Norwegian bokmål screen shots and figures.</p>
3373
3374       </div>
3375       <div class="tags">
3376
3377
3378         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3379
3380
3381       </div>
3382     </div>
3383     <div class="padding"></div>
3384
3385     <div class="entry">
3386       <div class="title">
3387         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Unlimited_randomness_with_the_ChaosKey_.html">Unlimited randomness with the ChaosKey?</a>
3388       </div>
3389       <div class="date">
3390          1st March 2017
3391       </div>
3392       <div class="body">
3393         <p>A few days ago I ordered a small batch of
3394 <a href="http://altusmetrum.org/ChaosKey/">the ChaosKey</a>, a small
3395 USB dongle for generating entropy created by Bdale Garbee and Keith
3396 Packard.  Yesterday it arrived, and I am very happy to report that it
3397 work great!  According to its designers, to get it to work out of the
3398 box, you need the Linux kernel version 4.1 or later.  I tested on a
3399 Debian Stretch machine (kernel version 4.9), and there it worked just
3400 fine, increasing the available entropy very quickly.  I wrote a small
3401 test oneliner to test.  It first print the current entropy level,
3402 drain /dev/random, and then print the entropy level for five seconds.
3403 Here is the situation without the ChaosKey inserted:</p>
3404
3405 <blockquote><pre>
3406 % cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
3407   dd bs=1M if=/dev/random of=/dev/null count=1; \
3408   for n in $(seq 1 5); do \
3409      cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
3410      sleep 1; \
3411   done
3412 300
3413 0+1 oppføringer inn
3414 0+1 oppføringer ut
3415 28 byte kopiert, 0,000264565 s, 106 kB/s
3416 4
3417 8
3418 12
3419 17
3420 21
3421 %
3422 </pre></blockquote>
3423
3424 <p>The entropy level increases by 3-4 every second.  In such case any
3425 application requiring random bits (like a HTTPS enabled web server)
3426 will halt and wait for more entrpy.  And here is the situation with
3427 the ChaosKey inserted:</p>
3428
3429 <blockquote><pre>
3430 % cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
3431   dd bs=1M if=/dev/random of=/dev/null count=1; \
3432   for n in $(seq 1 5); do \
3433      cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
3434      sleep 1; \
3435   done
3436 1079
3437 0+1 oppføringer inn
3438 0+1 oppføringer ut
3439 104 byte kopiert, 0,000487647 s, 213 kB/s
3440 433
3441 1028
3442 1031
3443 1035
3444 1038
3445 %
3446 </pre></blockquote>
3447
3448 <p>Quite the difference. :) I bought a few more than I need, in case
3449 someone want to buy one here in Norway. :)</p>
3450
3451 <p>Update: The dongle was presented at Debconf last year.  You might
3452 find <a href="https://debconf16.debconf.org/talks/94/">the talk
3453 recording illuminating</a>.  It explains exactly what the source of
3454 randomness is, if you are unable to spot it from the schema drawing
3455 available from the ChaosKey web site linked at the start of this blog
3456 post.</p>
3457
3458       </div>
3459       <div class="tags">
3460
3461
3462         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3463
3464
3465       </div>
3466     </div>
3467     <div class="padding"></div>
3468
3469     <div class="entry">
3470       <div class="title">
3471         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Where_did_that_package_go___mdash__geolocated_IP_traceroute.html">Where did that package go? &mdash; geolocated IP traceroute</a>
3472       </div>
3473       <div class="date">
3474          9th January 2017
3475       </div>
3476       <div class="body">
3477         <p>Did you ever wonder where the web trafic really flow to reach the
3478 web servers, and who own the network equipment it is flowing through?
3479 It is possible to get a glimpse of this from using traceroute, but it
3480 is hard to find all the details.  Many years ago, I wrote a system to
3481 map the Norwegian Internet (trying to figure out if our plans for a
3482 network game service would get low enough latency, and who we needed
3483 to talk to about setting up game servers close to the users.  Back
3484 then I used traceroute output from many locations (I asked my friends
3485 to run a script and send me their traceroute output) to create the
3486 graph and the map.  The output from traceroute typically look like
3487 this:
3488
3489 <p><pre>
3490 traceroute to www.stortinget.no (85.88.67.10), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
3491  1  uio-gw10.uio.no (129.240.202.1)  0.447 ms  0.486 ms  0.621 ms
3492  2  uio-gw8.uio.no (129.240.24.229)  0.467 ms  0.578 ms  0.675 ms
3493  3  oslo-gw1.uninett.no (128.39.65.17)  0.385 ms  0.373 ms  0.358 ms
3494  4  te3-1-2.br1.fn3.as2116.net (193.156.90.3)  1.174 ms  1.172 ms  1.153 ms
3495  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
3496  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
3497  7  89.191.10.146 (89.191.10.146)  0.931 ms  0.917 ms  0.955 ms
3498  8  * * *
3499  9  * * *
3500 [...]
3501 </pre></p>
3502
3503 <p>This show the DNS names and IP addresses of (at least some of the)
3504 network equipment involved in getting the data traffic from me to the
3505 www.stortinget.no server, and how long it took in milliseconds for a
3506 package to reach the equipment and return to me.  Three packages are
3507 sent, and some times the packages do not follow the same path.  This
3508 is shown for hop 5, where three different IP addresses replied to the
3509 traceroute request.</p>
3510
3511 <p>There are many ways to measure trace routes.  Other good traceroute
3512 implementations I use are traceroute (using ICMP packages) mtr (can do
3513 both ICMP, UDP and TCP) and scapy (python library with ICMP, UDP, TCP
3514 traceroute and a lot of other capabilities).  All of them are easily
3515 available in <a href="https://www.debian.org/">Debian</a>.</p>
3516
3517 <p>This time around, I wanted to know the geographic location of
3518 different route points, to visualize how visiting a web page spread
3519 information about the visit to a lot of servers around the globe.  The
3520 background is that a web site today often will ask the browser to get
3521 from many servers the parts (for example HTML, JSON, fonts,
3522 JavaScript, CSS, video) required to display the content.  This will
3523 leak information about the visit to those controlling these servers
3524 and anyone able to peek at the data traffic passing by (like your ISP,
3525 the ISPs backbone provider, FRA, GCHQ, NSA and others).</p>
3526
3527 <p>Lets pick an example, the Norwegian parliament web site
3528 www.stortinget.no.  It is read daily by all members of parliament and
3529 their staff, as well as political journalists, activits and many other
3530 citizens of Norway.  A visit to the www.stortinget.no web site will
3531 ask your browser to contact 8 other servers: ajax.googleapis.com,
3532 insights.hotjar.com, script.hotjar.com, static.hotjar.com,
3533 stats.g.doubleclick.net, www.google-analytics.com,
3534 www.googletagmanager.com and www.netigate.se.  I extracted this by
3535 asking <a href="http://phantomjs.org/">PhantomJS</a> to visit the
3536 Stortinget web page and tell me all the URLs PhantomJS downloaded to
3537 render the page (in HAR format using
3538 <a href="https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/blob/master/examples/netsniff.js">their
3539 netsniff example</a>.  I am very grateful to Gorm for showing me how
3540 to do this).  My goal is to visualize network traces to all IP
3541 addresses behind these DNS names, do show where visitors personal
3542 information is spread when visiting the page.</p>
3543
3544 <p align="center"><a href="www.stortinget.no-geoip.kml"><img
3545 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>
3546
3547 <p>When I had a look around for options, I could not find any good
3548 free software tools to do this, and decided I needed my own traceroute
3549 wrapper outputting KML based on locations looked up using GeoIP.  KML
3550 is easy to work with and easy to generate, and understood by several
3551 of the GIS tools I have available.  I got good help from by NUUG
3552 colleague Anders Einar with this, and the result can be seen in
3553 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/kmltraceroute">my
3554 kmltraceroute git repository</a>.  Unfortunately, the quality of the
3555 free GeoIP databases I could find (and the for-pay databases my
3556 friends had access to) is not up to the task.  The IP addresses of
3557 central Internet infrastructure would typically be placed near the
3558 controlling companies main office, and not where the router is really
3559 located, as you can see from <a href="www.stortinget.no-geoip.kml">the
3560 KML file I created</a> using the GeoLite City dataset from MaxMind.
3561
3562 <p align="center"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-scapy.svg"><img
3563 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>
3564
3565 <p>I also had a look at the visual traceroute graph created by
3566 <a href="http://www.secdev.org/projects/scapy/">the scrapy project</a>,
3567 showing IP network ownership (aka AS owner) for the IP address in
3568 question.
3569 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-scapy.svg">The
3570 graph display a lot of useful information about the traceroute in SVG
3571 format</a>, and give a good indication on who control the network
3572 equipment involved, but it do not include geolocation.  This graph
3573 make it possible to see the information is made available at least for
3574 UNINETT, Catchcom, Stortinget, Nordunet, Google, Amazon, Telia, Level
3575 3 Communications and NetDNA.</p>
3576
3577 <p align="center"><a href="https://geotraceroute.com/index.php?node=4&host=www.stortinget.no"><img
3578 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>
3579
3580 <p>In the process, I came across the
3581 <a href="https://geotraceroute.com/">web service GeoTraceroute</a> by
3582 Salim Gasmi.  Its methology of combining guesses based on DNS names,
3583 various location databases and finally use latecy times to rule out
3584 candidate locations seemed to do a very good job of guessing correct
3585 geolocation.  But it could only do one trace at the time, did not have
3586 a sensor in Norway and did not make the geolocations easily available
3587 for postprocessing.  So I contacted the developer and asked if he
3588 would be willing to share the code (he refused until he had time to
3589 clean it up), but he was interested in providing the geolocations in a
3590 machine readable format, and willing to set up a sensor in Norway.  So
3591 since yesterday, it is possible to run traces from Norway in this
3592 service thanks to a sensor node set up by
3593 <a href="https://www.nuug.no/">the NUUG assosiation</a>, and get the
3594 trace in KML format for further processing.</p>
3595
3596 <p align="center"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-geotraceroute-kml-join.kml"><img
3597 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>
3598
3599 <p>Here we can see a lot of trafic passes Sweden on its way to
3600 Denmark, Germany, Holland and Ireland.  Plenty of places where the
3601 Snowden confirmations verified the traffic is read by various actors
3602 without your best interest as their top priority.</p>
3603
3604 <p>Combining KML files is trivial using a text editor, so I could loop
3605 over all the hosts behind the urls imported by www.stortinget.no and
3606 ask for the KML file from GeoTraceroute, and create a combined KML
3607 file with all the traces (unfortunately only one of the IP addresses
3608 behind the DNS name is traced this time.  To get them all, one would
3609 have to request traces using IP number instead of DNS names from
3610 GeoTraceroute).  That might be the next step in this project.</p>
3611
3612 <p>Armed with these tools, I find it a lot easier to figure out where
3613 the IP traffic moves and who control the boxes involved in moving it.
3614 And every time the link crosses for example the Swedish border, we can
3615 be sure Swedish Signal Intelligence (FRA) is listening, as GCHQ do in
3616 Britain and NSA in USA and cables around the globe.  (Hm, what should
3617 we tell them? :) Keep that in mind if you ever send anything
3618 unencrypted over the Internet.</p>
3619
3620 <p>PS: KML files are drawn using
3621 <a href="http://ivanrublev.me/kml/">the KML viewer from Ivan
3622 Rublev<a/>, as it was less cluttered than the local Linux application
3623 Marble.  There are heaps of other options too.</p>
3624
3625 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3626 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3627 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3628
3629       </div>
3630       <div class="tags">
3631
3632
3633         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kart">kart</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stortinget">stortinget</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
3634
3635
3636       </div>
3637     </div>
3638     <div class="padding"></div>
3639
3640     <div class="entry">
3641       <div class="title">
3642         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Appstream_just_learned_how_to_map_hardware_to_packages_too_.html">Appstream just learned how to map hardware to packages too!</a>
3643       </div>
3644       <div class="date">
3645         23rd December 2016
3646       </div>
3647       <div class="body">
3648         <p>I received a very nice Christmas present today.  As my regular
3649 readers probably know, I have been working on the
3650 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">the Isenkram
3651 system</a> for many years.  The goal of the Isenkram system is to make
3652 it easier for users to figure out what to install to get a given piece
3653 of hardware to work in Debian, and a key part of this system is a way
3654 to map hardware to packages.  Isenkram have its own mapping database,
3655 and also uses data provided by each package using the AppStream
3656 metadata format.  And today,
3657 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/appstream">AppStream</a> in
3658 Debian learned to look up hardware the same way Isenkram is doing it,
3659 ie using fnmatch():</p>
3660
3661 <p><pre>
3662 % appstreamcli what-provides modalias \
3663   usb:v1130p0202d0100dc00dsc00dp00ic03isc00ip00in00
3664 Identifier: pymissile [generic]
3665 Name: pymissile
3666 Summary: Control original Striker USB Missile Launcher
3667 Package: pymissile
3668 % appstreamcli what-provides modalias usb:v0694p0002d0000
3669 Identifier: libnxt [generic]
3670 Name: libnxt
3671 Summary: utility library for talking to the LEGO Mindstorms NXT brick
3672 Package: libnxt
3673 ---
3674 Identifier: t2n [generic]
3675 Name: t2n
3676 Summary: Simple command-line tool for Lego NXT
3677 Package: t2n
3678 ---
3679 Identifier: python-nxt [generic]
3680 Name: python-nxt
3681 Summary: Python driver/interface/wrapper for the Lego Mindstorms NXT robot
3682 Package: python-nxt
3683 ---
3684 Identifier: nbc [generic]
3685 Name: nbc
3686 Summary: C compiler for LEGO Mindstorms NXT bricks
3687 Package: nbc
3688 %
3689 </pre></p>
3690
3691 <p>A similar query can be done using the combined AppStream and
3692 Isenkram databases using the isenkram-lookup tool:</p>
3693
3694 <p><pre>
3695 % isenkram-lookup usb:v1130p0202d0100dc00dsc00dp00ic03isc00ip00in00
3696 pymissile
3697 % isenkram-lookup usb:v0694p0002d0000
3698 libnxt
3699 nbc
3700 python-nxt
3701 t2n
3702 %
3703 </pre></p>
3704
3705 <p>You can find modalias values relevant for your machine using
3706 <tt>cat $(find /sys/devices/ -name modalias)</tt>.
3707
3708 <p>If you want to make this system a success and help Debian users
3709 make the most of the hardware they have, please
3710 help<a href="https://wiki.debian.org/AppStream/Guidelines">add
3711 AppStream metadata for your package following the guidelines</a>
3712 documented in the wiki.  So far only 11 packages provide such
3713 information, among the several hundred hardware specific packages in
3714 Debian. The Isenkram database on the other hand contain 101 packages,
3715 mostly related to USB dongles.  Most of the packages with hardware
3716 mapping in AppStream are LEGO Mindstorms related, because I have, as
3717 part of my involvement in
3718 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">the Debian LEGO
3719 team</a> given priority to making sure LEGO users get proposed the
3720 complete set of packages in Debian for that particular hardware.  The
3721 team also got a nice Christmas present today.  The
3722 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/nxt-firmware">nxt-firmware
3723 package</a> made it into Debian.  With this package in place, it is
3724 now possible to use the LEGO Mindstorms NXT unit with only free
3725 software, as the nxt-firmware package contain the source and firmware
3726 binaries for the NXT brick.</p>
3727
3728 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3729 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3730 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3731
3732       </div>
3733       <div class="tags">
3734
3735
3736         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
3737
3738
3739       </div>
3740     </div>
3741     <div class="padding"></div>
3742
3743     <div class="entry">
3744       <div class="title">
3745         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Isenkram_updated_with_a_lot_more_hardware_package_mappings.html">Isenkram updated with a lot more hardware-package mappings</a>
3746       </div>
3747       <div class="date">
3748         20th December 2016
3749       </div>
3750       <div class="body">
3751         <p><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">The Isenkram
3752 system</a> I wrote two years ago to make it easier in Debian to find
3753 and install packages to get your hardware dongles to work, is still
3754 going strong.  It is a system to look up the hardware present on or
3755 connected to the current system, and map the hardware to Debian
3756 packages.  It can either be done using the tools in isenkram-cli or
3757 using the user space daemon in the isenkram package.  The latter will
3758 notify you, when inserting new hardware, about what packages to
3759 install to get the dongle working.  It will even provide a button to
3760 click on to ask packagekit to install the packages.</p>
3761
3762 <p>Here is an command line example from my Thinkpad laptop:</p>
3763
3764 <p><pre>
3765 % isenkram-lookup
3766 bluez
3767 cheese
3768 ethtool
3769 fprintd
3770 fprintd-demo
3771 gkrellm-thinkbat
3772 hdapsd
3773 libpam-fprintd
3774 pidgin-blinklight
3775 thinkfan
3776 tlp
3777 tp-smapi-dkms
3778 tp-smapi-source
3779 tpb
3780 %
3781 </pre></p>
3782
3783 <p>It can also list the firware package providing firmware requested
3784 by the load kernel modules, which in my case is an empty list because
3785 I have all the firmware my machine need:
3786
3787 <p><pre>
3788 % /usr/sbin/isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
3789 info: did not find any firmware files requested by loaded kernel modules.  exiting
3790 %
3791 </pre></p>
3792
3793 <p>The last few days I had a look at several of the around 250
3794 packages in Debian with udev rules.  These seem like good candidates
3795 to install when a given hardware dongle is inserted, and I found
3796 several that should be proposed by isenkram.  I have not had time to
3797 check all of them, but am happy to report that now there are 97
3798 packages packages mapped to hardware by Isenkram.  11 of these
3799 packages provide hardware mapping using AppStream, while the rest are
3800 listed in the modaliases file provided in isenkram.</p>
3801
3802 <p>These are the packages with hardware mappings at the moment.  The
3803 <strong>marked packages</strong> are also announcing their hardware
3804 support using AppStream, for everyone to use:</p>
3805
3806 <p>air-quality-sensor, alsa-firmware-loaders, argyll,
3807 <strong>array-info</strong>, avarice, avrdude, b43-fwcutter,
3808 bit-babbler, bluez, bluez-firmware, <strong>brltty</strong>,
3809 <strong>broadcom-sta-dkms</strong>, calibre, cgminer, cheese, colord,
3810 <strong>colorhug-client</strong>, dahdi-firmware-nonfree, dahdi-linux,
3811 dfu-util, dolphin-emu, ekeyd, ethtool, firmware-ipw2x00, fprintd,
3812 fprintd-demo, <strong>galileo</strong>, gkrellm-thinkbat, gphoto2,
3813 gpsbabel, gpsbabel-gui, gpsman, gpstrans, gqrx-sdr, gr-fcdproplus,
3814 gr-osmosdr, gtkpod, hackrf, hdapsd, hdmi2usb-udev, hpijs-ppds, hplip,
3815 ipw3945-source, ipw3945d, kde-config-tablet, kinect-audio-setup,
3816 <strong>libnxt</strong>, libpam-fprintd, <strong>lomoco</strong>,
3817 madwimax, minidisc-utils, mkgmap, msi-keyboard, mtkbabel,
3818 <strong>nbc</strong>, <strong>nqc</strong>, nut-hal-drivers, ola,
3819 open-vm-toolbox, open-vm-tools, openambit, pcgminer, pcmciautils,
3820 pcscd, pidgin-blinklight, printer-driver-splix,
3821 <strong>pymissile</strong>, python-nxt, qlandkartegt,
3822 qlandkartegt-garmin, rosegarden, rt2x00-source, sispmctl,
3823 soapysdr-module-hackrf, solaar, squeak-plugins-scratch, sunxi-tools,
3824 <strong>t2n</strong>, thinkfan, thinkfinger-tools, tlp, tp-smapi-dkms,
3825 tp-smapi-source, tpb, tucnak, uhd-host, usbmuxd, viking,
3826 virtualbox-ose-guest-x11, w1retap, xawtv, xserver-xorg-input-vmmouse,
3827 xserver-xorg-input-wacom, xserver-xorg-video-qxl,
3828 xserver-xorg-video-vmware, yubikey-personalization and
3829 zd1211-firmware</p>
3830
3831 <p>If you know of other packages, please let me know with a wishlist
3832 bug report against the isenkram-cli package, and ask the package
3833 maintainer to
3834 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/AppStream/Guidelines">add AppStream
3835 metadata according to the guidelines</a> to provide the information
3836 for everyone.  In time, I hope to get rid of the isenkram specific
3837 hardware mapping and depend exclusively on AppStream.</p>
3838
3839 <p>Note, the AppStream metadata for broadcom-sta-dkms is matching too
3840 much hardware, and suggest that the package with with any ethernet
3841 card.  See <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/838735">bug #838735</a> for
3842 the details.  I hope the maintainer find time to address it soon.  In
3843 the mean time I provide an override in isenkram.</p>
3844
3845       </div>
3846       <div class="tags">
3847
3848
3849         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
3850
3851
3852       </div>
3853     </div>
3854     <div class="padding"></div>
3855
3856     <div class="entry">
3857       <div class="title">
3858         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Oolite__a_life_in_space_as_vagabond_and_mercenary___nice_free_software.html">Oolite, a life in space as vagabond and mercenary - nice free software</a>
3859       </div>
3860       <div class="date">
3861         11th December 2016
3862       </div>
3863       <div class="body">
3864         <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-12-11-nice-oolite.png"/></p>
3865
3866 <p>In my early years, I played
3867 <a href="http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Classic_Elite">the epic game
3868 Elite</a> on my PC.  I spent many months trading and fighting in
3869 space, and reached the 'elite' fighting status before I moved on.  The
3870 original Elite game was available on Commodore 64 and the IBM PC
3871 edition I played had a 64 KB executable.  I am still impressed today
3872 that the authors managed to squeeze both a 3D engine and details about
3873 more than 2000 planet systems across 7 galaxies into a binary so
3874 small.</p>
3875
3876 <p>I have known about <a href="http://www.oolite.org/">the free
3877 software game Oolite inspired by Elite</a> for a while, but did not
3878 really have time to test it properly until a few days ago.  It was
3879 great to discover that my old knowledge about trading routes were
3880 still valid.  But my fighting and flying abilities were gone, so I had
3881 to retrain to be able to dock on a space station.  And I am still not
3882 able to make much resistance when I am attacked by pirates, so I
3883 bougth and mounted the most powerful laser in the rear to be able to
3884 put up at least some resistance while fleeing for my life. :)</p>
3885
3886 <p>When playing Elite in the late eighties, I had to discover
3887 everything on my own, and I had long lists of prices seen on different
3888 planets to be able to decide where to trade what.  This time I had the
3889 advantages of the
3890 <a href="http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Main_Page">Elite wiki</a>,
3891 where information about each planet is easily available with common
3892 price ranges and suggested trading routes.  This improved my ability
3893 to earn money and I have been able to earn enough to buy a lot of
3894 useful equipent in a few days.  I believe I originally played for
3895 months before I could get a docking computer, while now I could get it
3896 after less then a week.</p>
3897
3898 <p>If you like science fiction and dreamed of a life as a vagabond in
3899 space, you should try out Oolite.  It is available for Linux, MacOSX
3900 and Windows, and is included in Debian and derivatives since 2011.</p>
3901
3902 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3903 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3904 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3905
3906       </div>
3907       <div class="tags">
3908
3909
3910         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
3911
3912
3913       </div>
3914     </div>
3915     <div class="padding"></div>
3916
3917     <div class="entry">
3918       <div class="title">
3919         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Quicker_Debian_installations_using_eatmydata.html">Quicker Debian installations using eatmydata</a>
3920       </div>
3921       <div class="date">
3922         25th November 2016
3923       </div>
3924       <div class="body">
3925         <p>Two years ago, I did some experiments with eatmydata and the Debian
3926 installation system, observing how using
3927 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Speeding_up_the_Debian_installer_using_eatmydata_and_dpkg_divert.html">eatmydata
3928 could speed up the installation</a> quite a bit.  My testing measured
3929 speedup around 20-40 percent for Debian Edu, where we install around
3930 1000 packages from within the installer.  The eatmydata package
3931 provide a way to disable/delay file system flushing.  This is a bit
3932 risky in the general case, as files that should be stored on disk will
3933 stay only in memory a bit longer than expected, causing problems if a
3934 machine crashes at an inconvenient time.  But for an installation, if
3935 the machine crashes during installation the process is normally
3936 restarted, and avoiding disk operations as much as possible to speed
3937 up the process make perfect sense.
3938
3939 <p>I added code in the Debian Edu specific installation code to enable
3940 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/libeatmydata">eatmydata</a>,
3941 but did not have time to push it any further.  But a few months ago I
3942 picked it up again and worked with the libeatmydata package maintainer
3943 Mattia Rizzolo to make it easier for everyone to get this installation
3944 speedup in Debian.  Thanks to our cooperation There is now an
3945 eatmydata-udeb package in Debian testing and unstable, and simply
3946 enabling/installing it in debian-installer (d-i) is enough to get the
3947 quicker installations.  It can be enabled using preseeding.  The
3948 following untested kernel argument should do the trick:</p>
3949
3950 <blockquote><pre>
3951 preseed/early_command="anna-install eatmydata-udeb"
3952 </pre></blockquote>
3953
3954 <p>This should ask d-i to install the package inside the d-i
3955 environment early in the installation sequence.  Having it installed
3956 in d-i in turn will make sure the relevant scripts are called just
3957 after debootstrap filled /target/ with the freshly installed Debian
3958 system to configure apt to run dpkg with eatmydata.  This is enough to
3959 speed up the installation process.  There is a proposal to
3960 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/841153">extend the idea a bit further
3961 by using /etc/ld.so.preload instead of apt.conf</a>, but I have not
3962 tested its impact.</p>
3963
3964
3965       </div>
3966       <div class="tags">
3967
3968
3969         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3970
3971
3972       </div>
3973     </div>
3974     <div class="padding"></div>
3975
3976     <div class="entry">
3977       <div class="title">
3978         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Oversette_bokm_l_til_nynorsk__enklere_enn_du_tror_takket_v_re_Apertium.html">Oversette bokmål til nynorsk, enklere enn du tror takket være Apertium</a>
3979       </div>
3980       <div class="date">
3981         24th November 2016
3982       </div>
3983       <div class="body">
3984         <p>I Norge er det mange som trenger å skrive både bokmål og nynorsk.
3985 Eksamensoppgaver, offentlige brev og nyheter er eksempler på tekster
3986 der det er krav om skriftspråk.  I tillegg til alle skoleoppgavene som
3987 elever over det ganske land skal levere inn hvert år.  Det mange ikke
3988 vet er at selv om de kommersielle alternativene
3989 <a href="https://translate.google.com/">Google Translate</a> og
3990 <a href="https://www.bing.com/translator/">Bing Translator</a> ikke kan
3991 bidra med å oversette mellom bokmål og nynorsk, så finnes det et
3992 utmerket fri programvarealternativ som kan.  Oversetterverktøyet
3993 Apertium har støtte for en rekke språkkombinasjoner, og takket være
3994 den utrettelige innsatsen til blant annet Kevin Brubeck Unhammer, kan
3995 en bruke webtjenesten til å fylle inn en tekst på bokmål eller
3996 nynorsk, og få den automatoversatt til det andre skriftspråket.
3997 Resultatet er ikke perfekt, men et svært godt utgangspunkt.  Av og til
3998 er resultatet så bra at det kan benyttes uten endringer.  Jeg vet
3999 f.eks. at store deler av Joomla ble oversatt til nynorsk ved hjelp
4000 Apertium.  Høres det ut som noe du kan ha bruk for?  Besøk i så fall
4001 <a href="https://www.apertium.org/">Apertium.org</a> og fyll inn
4002 teksten din i webskjemaet der.
4003
4004 <p>Hvis du trenger maskinell tilgang til den bakenforliggende
4005 teknologien kan du enten installere pakken
4006 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/apertium-nno-nob">apertium-nno-nob</a>
4007 på en Debian-maskin eller bruke web-API-et tilgjengelig fra
4008 api.apertium.org.  Se
4009 <a href="http://wiki.apertium.org/wiki/Apertium-apy">API-dokumentasjonen</a>
4010 for detaljer om web-API-et.  Her kan du se hvordan resultatet blir for
4011 denne teksten som ble skrevet på bokmål over maskinoversatt til
4012 nynorsk.</p>
4013
4014 <hr/>
4015
4016 <p>I Noreg er det mange som treng å skriva både bokmål og nynorsk.
4017 Eksamensoppgåver, offentlege brev og nyhende er døme på tekster der
4018 det er krav om skriftspråk.  I tillegg til alle skuleoppgåvene som
4019 elevar over det ganske land skal levera inn kvart år.  Det mange ikkje
4020 veit er at sjølv om dei kommersielle alternativa
4021 <a href="https://translate.google.com/">Google *Translate</a> og
4022 <a href="https://www.bing.com/translator/">Bing *Translator</a> ikkje
4023 kan bidra med å omsetja mellom bokmål og nynorsk, så finst det eit
4024 utmerka fri programvarealternativ som kan.  Omsetjarverktøyet
4025 *Apertium har støtte for ei rekkje språkkombinasjonar, og takka vera
4026 den utrøyttelege innsatsen til blant anna Kevin Brubeck Unhammer, kan
4027 ein bruka *webtjenesten til å fylla inn ei tekst på bokmål eller
4028 nynorsk, og få den *automatoversatt til det andre skriftspråket.
4029 Resultatet er ikkje perfekt, men eit svært godt utgangspunkt.  Av og
4030 til er resultatet så bra at det kan nyttast utan endringar.  Eg veit
4031 t.d. at store delar av *Joomla vart omsett til nynorsk ved hjelp
4032 *Apertium.  Høyrast det ut som noko du kan ha bruk for?  Besøk i så
4033 fall <a href="https://www.apertium.org/">*Apertium.org</a> og fyll inn
4034 teksta di i *webskjemaet der.
4035
4036 <p>Viss du treng *maskinell tilgjenge til den *bakenforliggende
4037 teknologien kan du anten installera pakken
4038 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/apertium-nno-nob">*apertium-*nno-*nob</a>
4039 på ein *Debian-maskin eller bruka *web-*API-eit tilgjengeleg frå
4040 *api.*apertium.org.  Sjå
4041 <a href="http://wiki.apertium.org/wiki/Apertium-apy">*API-dokumentasjonen</a>
4042 for detaljar om *web-*API-eit.  Her kan du sjå korleis resultatet vert
4043 for denne teksta som vart skreva på bokmål over *maskinoversatt til
4044 nynorsk.</p>
4045
4046       </div>
4047       <div class="tags">
4048
4049
4050         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stavekontroll">stavekontroll</a>.
4051
4052
4053       </div>
4054     </div>
4055     <div class="padding"></div>
4056
4057     <div class="entry">
4058       <div class="title">
4059         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Coz_profiler_for_multi_threaded_software_is_now_in_Debian.html">Coz profiler for multi-threaded software is now in Debian</a>
4060       </div>
4061       <div class="date">
4062         13th November 2016
4063       </div>
4064       <div class="body">
4065         <p><a href="http://coz-profiler.org/">The Coz profiler</a>, a nice
4066 profiler able to run benchmarking experiments on the instrumented
4067 multi-threaded program, finally
4068 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/coz-profiler">made it into
4069 Debian unstable yesterday</A>.  Lluís Vilanova and I have spent many
4070 months since
4071 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Coz_can_help_you_find_bottlenecks_in_multi_threaded_software___nice_free_software.html">I
4072 blogged about the coz tool</a> in August working with upstream to make
4073 it suitable for Debian.  There are still issues with clang
4074 compatibility, inline assembly only working x86 and minimized
4075 JavaScript libraries.</p>
4076
4077 <p>To test it, install 'coz-profiler' using apt and run it like this:</p>
4078
4079 <p><blockquote>
4080 <tt>coz run --- /path/to/binary-with-debug-info</tt>
4081 </blockquote></p>
4082
4083 <p>This will produce a profile.coz file in the current working
4084 directory with the profiling information.  This is then given to a
4085 JavaScript application provided in the package and available from
4086 <a href="http://plasma-umass.github.io/coz/">a project web page</a>.
4087 To start the local copy, invoke it in a browser like this:</p>
4088
4089 <p><blockquote>
4090 <tt>sensible-browser /usr/share/coz-profiler/viewer/index.htm</tt>
4091 </blockquote></p>
4092
4093 <p>See the project home page and the
4094 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/summer2016/curtsinger">USENIX
4095 ;login: article on Coz</a> for more information on how it is
4096 working.</p>
4097
4098       </div>
4099       <div class="tags">
4100
4101
4102         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4103
4104
4105       </div>
4106     </div>
4107     <div class="padding"></div>
4108
4109     <div class="entry">
4110       <div class="title">
4111         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/My_own_self_balancing_Lego_Segway.html">My own self balancing Lego Segway</a>
4112       </div>
4113       <div class="date">
4114          4th November 2016
4115       </div>
4116       <div class="body">
4117         <p>A while back I received a Gyro sensor for the NXT
4118 <a href="mindstorms.lego.com">Mindstorms</a> controller as a birthday
4119 present.  It had been on my wishlist for a while, because I wanted to
4120 build a Segway like balancing lego robot.  I had already built
4121 <a href="http://www.nxtprograms.com/NXT2/segway/">a simple balancing
4122 robot</a> with the kids, using the light/color sensor included in the
4123 NXT kit as the balance sensor, but it was not working very well.  It
4124 could balance for a while, but was very sensitive to the light
4125 condition in the room and the reflective properties of the surface and
4126 would fall over after a short while.  I wanted something more robust,
4127 and had
4128 <a href="https://www.hitechnic.com/cgi-bin/commerce.cgi?preadd=action&key=NGY1044">the
4129 gyro sensor from HiTechnic</a> I believed would solve it on my
4130 wishlist for some years before it suddenly showed up as a gift from my
4131 loved ones. :)</p>
4132
4133 <p>Unfortunately I have not had time to sit down and play with it
4134 since then.  But that changed some days ago, when I was searching for
4135 lego segway information and came across a recipe from HiTechnic for
4136 building
4137 <a href="http://www.hitechnic.com/blog/gyro-sensor/htway/">the
4138 HTWay</a>, a segway like balancing robot.  Build instructions and
4139 <a href="https://www.hitechnic.com/upload/786-HTWayC.nxc">source
4140 code</a> was included, so it was just a question of putting it all
4141 together.  And thanks to the great work of many Debian developers, the
4142 compiler needed to build the source for the NXT is already included in
4143 Debian, so I was read to go in less than an hour.  The resulting robot
4144 do not look very impressive in its simplicity:</p>
4145
4146 <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-11-04-lego-htway-robot.jpeg"></p>
4147
4148 <p>Because I lack the infrared sensor used to control the robot in the
4149 design from HiTechnic, I had to comment out the last task
4150 (taskControl).  I simply placed /* and */ around it get the program
4151 working without that sensor present.  Now it balances just fine until
4152 the battery status run low:</p>
4153
4154 <p align="center"><video width="70%" controls="true">
4155    <source src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-11-04-lego-htway-balancing.ogv" type="video/ogg">
4156 </video></p>
4157
4158 <p>Now we would like to teach it how to follow a line and take remote
4159 control instructions using the included Bluetooth receiver in the NXT.</p>
4160
4161 <p>If you, like me, love LEGO and want to make sure we find the tools
4162 they need to work with LEGO in Debian and all our derivative
4163 distributions like Ubuntu, check out
4164 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">the LEGO designers
4165 project page</a> and join the Debian LEGO team.  Personally I own a
4166 RCX and NXT controller (no EV3), and would like to make sure the
4167 Debian tools needed to program the systems I own work as they
4168 should.</p>
4169
4170       </div>
4171       <div class="tags">
4172
4173
4174         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lego">lego</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
4175
4176
4177       </div>
4178     </div>
4179     <div class="padding"></div>
4180
4181     <div class="entry">
4182       <div class="title">
4183         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Experience_and_updated_recipe_for_using_the_Signal_app_without_a_mobile_phone.html">Experience and updated recipe for using the Signal app without a mobile phone</a>
4184       </div>
4185       <div class="date">
4186         10th October 2016
4187       </div>
4188       <div class="body">
4189         <p>In July
4190 <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
4191 wrote how to get the Signal Chrome/Chromium app working</a> without
4192 the ability to receive SMS messages (aka without a cell phone).  It is
4193 time to share some experiences and provide an updated setup.</p>
4194
4195 <p>The Signal app have worked fine for several months now, and I use
4196 it regularly to chat with my loved ones.  I had a major snag at the
4197 end of my summer vacation, when the the app completely forgot my
4198 setup, identity and keys.  The reason behind this major mess was
4199 running out of disk space.  To avoid that ever happening again I have
4200 started storing everything in <tt>userdata/</tt> in git, to be able to
4201 roll back to an earlier version if the files are wiped by mistake.  I
4202 had to use it once after introducing the git backup.  When rolling
4203 back to an earlier version, one need to use the 'reset session' option
4204 in Signal to get going, and notify the people you talk with about the
4205 problem.  I assume there is some sequence number tracking in the
4206 protocol to detect rollback attacks.  The git repository is rather big
4207 (674 MiB so far), but I have not tried to figure out if some of the
4208 content can be added to a .gitignore file due to lack of spare
4209 time.</p>
4210
4211 <p>I've also hit the 90 days timeout blocking, and noticed that this
4212 make it impossible to send messages using Signal.  I could still
4213 receive them, but had to patch the code with a new timestamp to send.
4214 I believe the timeout is added by the developers to force people to
4215 upgrade to the latest version of the app, even when there is no
4216 protocol changes, to reduce the version skew among the user base and
4217 thus try to keep the number of support requests down.</p>
4218
4219 <p>Since my original recipe, the Signal source code changed slightly,
4220 making the old patch fail to apply cleanly.  Below is an updated
4221 patch, including the shell wrapper I use to start Signal.  The
4222 original version required a new user to locate the JavaScript console
4223 and call a function from there.  I got help from a friend with more
4224 JavaScript knowledge than me to modify the code to provide a GUI
4225 button instead.  This mean that to get started you just need to run
4226 the wrapper and click the 'Register without mobile phone' to get going
4227 now.  I've also modified the timeout code to always set it to 90 days
4228 in the future, to avoid having to patch the code regularly.</p>
4229
4230 <p>So, the updated recipe for Debian Jessie:</p>
4231
4232 <ol>
4233
4234 <li>First, install required packages to get the source code and the
4235 browser you need.  Signal only work with Chrome/Chromium, as far as I
4236 know, so you need to install it.
4237
4238 <pre>
4239 apt install git tor chromium
4240 git clone https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Desktop.git
4241 </pre></li>
4242
4243 <li>Modify the source code using command listed in the the patch
4244 block below.</li>
4245
4246 <li>Start Signal using the run-signal-app wrapper (for example using
4247 <tt>`pwd`/run-signal-app</tt>).
4248
4249 <li>Click on the 'Register without mobile phone', will in a phone
4250 number you can receive calls to the next minute, receive the
4251 verification code and enter it into the form field and press
4252 'Register'.  Note, the phone number you use will be user Signal
4253 username, ie the way others can find you on Signal.</li>
4254
4255 <li>You can now use Signal to contact others.  Note, new contacts do
4256 not show up in the contact list until you restart Signal, and there is
4257 no way to assign names to Contacts.  There is also no way to create or
4258 update chat groups.  I suspect this is because the web app do not have
4259 a associated contact database.</li>
4260
4261 </ol>
4262
4263 <p>I am still a bit uneasy about using Signal, because of the way its
4264 main author moxie0 reject federation and accept dependencies to major
4265 corporations like Google (part of the code is fetched from Google) and
4266 Amazon (the central coordination point is owned by Amazon).  See for
4267 example
4268 <a href="https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37">the
4269 LibreSignal issue tracker</a> for a thread documenting the authors
4270 view on these issues.  But the network effect is strong in this case,
4271 and several of the people I want to communicate with already use
4272 Signal.  Perhaps we can all move to <a href="https://ring.cx/">Ring</a>
4273 once it <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/830265">work on my
4274 laptop</a>?  It already work on Windows and Android, and is included
4275 in <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/ring">Debian</a> and
4276 <a href="https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ring">Ubuntu</a>, but not
4277 working on Debian Stable.</p>
4278
4279 <p>Anyway, this is the patch I apply to the Signal code to get it
4280 working.  It switch to the production servers, disable to timeout,
4281 make registration easier and add the shell wrapper:</p>
4282
4283 <pre>
4284 cd Signal-Desktop; cat &lt;&lt;EOF | patch -p1
4285 diff --git a/js/background.js b/js/background.js
4286 index 24b4c1d..579345f 100644
4287 --- a/js/background.js
4288 +++ b/js/background.js
4289 @@ -33,9 +33,9 @@
4290          });
4291      });
4292
4293 -    var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-staging.whispersystems.org';
4294 +    var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-ca.whispersystems.org';
4295      var SERVER_PORTS = [80, 4433, 8443];
4296 -    var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments-staging.s3.amazonaws.com';
4297 +    var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments.s3.amazonaws.com';
4298      var messageReceiver;
4299      window.getSocketStatus = function() {
4300          if (messageReceiver) {
4301 diff --git a/js/expire.js b/js/expire.js
4302 index 639aeae..beb91c3 100644
4303 --- a/js/expire.js
4304 +++ b/js/expire.js
4305 @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
4306  ;(function() {
4307      'use strict';
4308 -    var BUILD_EXPIRATION = 0;
4309 +    var BUILD_EXPIRATION = Date.now() + (90 * 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000);
4310
4311      window.extension = window.extension || {};
4312
4313 diff --git a/js/views/install_view.js b/js/views/install_view.js
4314 index 7816f4f..1d6233b 100644
4315 --- a/js/views/install_view.js
4316 +++ b/js/views/install_view.js
4317 @@ -38,7 +38,8 @@
4318              return {
4319                  'click .step1': this.selectStep.bind(this, 1),
4320                  'click .step2': this.selectStep.bind(this, 2),
4321 -                'click .step3': this.selectStep.bind(this, 3)
4322 +                'click .step3': this.selectStep.bind(this, 3),
4323 +                'click .callreg': function() { extension.install('standalone') },
4324              };
4325          },
4326          clearQR: function() {
4327 diff --git a/options.html b/options.html
4328 index dc0f28e..8d709f6 100644
4329 --- a/options.html
4330 +++ b/options.html
4331 @@ -14,7 +14,10 @@
4332          &lt;div class='nav'>
4333            &lt;h1>{{ installWelcome }}&lt;/h1>
4334            &lt;p>{{ installTagline }}&lt;/p>
4335 -          &lt;div> &lt;a class='button step2'>{{ installGetStartedButton }}&lt;/a> &lt;/div>
4336 +          &lt;div> &lt;a class='button step2'>{{ installGetStartedButton }}&lt;/a>
4337 +           &lt;br> &lt;a class="button callreg">Register without mobile phone&lt;/a>
4338 +
4339 +         &lt;/div>
4340            &lt;span class='dot step1 selected'>&lt;/span>
4341            &lt;span class='dot step2'>&lt;/span>
4342            &lt;span class='dot step3'>&lt;/span>
4343 --- /dev/null   2016-10-07 09:55:13.730181472 +0200
4344 +++ b/run-signal-app   2016-10-10 08:54:09.434172391 +0200
4345 @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@
4346 +#!/bin/sh
4347 +set -e
4348 +cd $(dirname $0)
4349 +mkdir -p userdata
4350 +userdata="`pwd`/userdata"
4351 +if [ -d "$userdata" ] && [ ! -d "$userdata/.git" ] ; then
4352 +    (cd $userdata && git init)
4353 +fi
4354 +(cd $userdata && git add . && git commit -m "Current status." || true)
4355 +exec chromium \
4356 +  --proxy-server="socks://localhost:9050" \
4357 +  --user-data-dir=$userdata --load-and-launch-app=`pwd`
4358 EOF
4359 chmod a+rx run-signal-app
4360 </pre>
4361
4362 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
4363 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
4364 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
4365
4366       </div>
4367       <div class="tags">
4368
4369
4370         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
4371
4372
4373       </div>
4374     </div>
4375     <div class="padding"></div>
4376
4377     <div class="entry">
4378       <div class="title">
4379         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Isenkram__Appstream_and_udev_make_life_as_a_LEGO_builder_easier.html">Isenkram, Appstream and udev make life as a LEGO builder easier</a>
4380       </div>
4381       <div class="date">
4382          7th October 2016
4383       </div>
4384       <div class="body">
4385         <p><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">The Isenkram
4386 system</a> provide a practical and easy way to figure out which
4387 packages support the hardware in a given machine.  The command line
4388 tool <tt>isenkram-lookup</tt> and the tasksel options provide a
4389 convenient way to list and install packages relevant for the current
4390 hardware during system installation, both user space packages and
4391 firmware packages. The GUI background daemon on the other hand provide
4392 a pop-up proposing to install packages when a new dongle is inserted
4393 while using the computer.  For example, if you plug in a smart card
4394 reader, the system will ask if you want to install <tt>pcscd</tt> if
4395 that package isn't already installed, and if you plug in a USB video
4396 camera the system will ask if you want to install <tt>cheese</tt> if
4397 cheese is currently missing.  This already work just fine.</p>
4398
4399 <p>But Isenkram depend on a database mapping from hardware IDs to
4400 package names.  When I started no such database existed in Debian, so
4401 I made my own data set and included it with the isenkram package and
4402 made isenkram fetch the latest version of this database from git using
4403 http.  This way the isenkram users would get updated package proposals
4404 as soon as I learned more about hardware related packages.</p>
4405
4406 <p>The hardware is identified using modalias strings.  The modalias
4407 design is from the Linux kernel where most hardware descriptors are
4408 made available as a strings that can be matched using filename style
4409 globbing.  It handle USB, PCI, DMI and a lot of other hardware related
4410 identifiers.</p>
4411
4412 <p>The downside to the Isenkram specific database is that there is no
4413 information about relevant distribution / Debian version, making
4414 isenkram propose obsolete packages too.  But along came AppStream, a
4415 cross distribution mechanism to store and collect metadata about
4416 software packages.  When I heard about the proposal, I contacted the
4417 people involved and suggested to add a hardware matching rule using
4418 modalias strings in the specification, to be able to use AppStream for
4419 mapping hardware to packages.  This idea was accepted and AppStream is
4420 now a great way for a package to announce the hardware it support in a
4421 distribution neutral way.  I wrote
4422 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_appstream_with_isenkram_to_install_hardware_related_packages_in_Debian.html">a
4423 recipe on how to add such meta-information</a> in a blog post last
4424 December.  If you have a hardware related package in Debian, please
4425 announce the relevant hardware IDs using AppStream.</p>
4426
4427 <p>In Debian, almost all packages that can talk to a LEGO Mindestorms
4428 RCX or NXT unit, announce this support using AppStream.  The effect is
4429 that when you insert such LEGO robot controller into your Debian
4430 machine, Isenkram will propose to install the packages needed to get
4431 it working.  The intention is that this should allow the local user to
4432 start programming his robot controller right away without having to
4433 guess what packages to use or which permissions to fix.</p>
4434
4435 <p>But when I sat down with my son the other day to program our NXT
4436 unit using his Debian Stretch computer, I discovered something
4437 annoying.  The local console user (ie my son) did not get access to
4438 the USB device for programming the unit.  This used to work, but no
4439 longer in Jessie and Stretch.  After some investigation and asking
4440 around on #debian-devel, I discovered that this was because udev had
4441 changed the mechanism used to grant access to local devices.  The
4442 ConsoleKit mechanism from <tt>/lib/udev/rules.d/70-udev-acl.rules</tt>
4443 no longer applied, because LDAP users no longer was added to the
4444 plugdev group during login.  Michael Biebl told me that this method
4445 was obsolete and the new method used ACLs instead.  This was good
4446 news, as the plugdev mechanism is a mess when using a remote user
4447 directory like LDAP.  Using ACLs would make sure a user lost device
4448 access when she logged out, even if the user left behind a background
4449 process which would retain the plugdev membership with the ConsoleKit
4450 setup.  Armed with this knowledge I moved on to fix the access problem
4451 for the LEGO Mindstorms related packages.</p>
4452
4453 <p>The new system uses a udev tag, 'uaccess'.  It can either be
4454 applied directly for a device, or is applied in
4455 /lib/udev/rules.d/70-uaccess.rules for classes of devices.  As the
4456 LEGO Mindstorms udev rules did not have a class, I decided to add the
4457 tag directly in the udev rules files included in the packages.  Here
4458 is one example.  For the nqc C compiler for the RCX, the
4459 <tt>/lib/udev/rules.d/60-nqc.rules</tt> file now look like this:
4460
4461 <p><pre>
4462 SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ACTION=="add", ATTR{idVendor}=="0694", ATTR{idProduct}=="0001", \
4463     SYMLINK+="rcx-%k", TAG+="uaccess"
4464 </pre></p>
4465
4466 <p>The key part is the 'TAG+="uaccess"' at the end.  I suspect all
4467 packages using plugdev in their /lib/udev/rules.d/ files should be
4468 changed to use this tag (either directly or indirectly via
4469 <tt>70-uaccess.rules</tt>).  Perhaps a lintian check should be created
4470 to detect this?</p>
4471
4472 <p>I've been unable to find good documentation on the uaccess feature.
4473 It is unclear to me if the uaccess tag is an internal implementation
4474 detail like the udev-acl tag used by
4475 <tt>/lib/udev/rules.d/70-udev-acl.rules</tt>.  If it is, I guess the
4476 indirect method is the preferred way.  Michael
4477 <a href="https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/4288">asked for more
4478 documentation from the systemd project</a> and I hope it will make
4479 this clearer.  For now I use the generic classes when they exist and
4480 is already handled by <tt>70-uaccess.rules</tt>, and add the tag
4481 directly if no such class exist.</p>
4482
4483 <p>To learn more about the isenkram system, please check out
4484 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">my
4485 blog posts tagged isenkram</a>.</p>
4486
4487 <p>To help out making life for LEGO constructors in Debian easier,
4488 please join us on our IRC channel
4489 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">#debian-lego</a> and join
4490 the <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/debian-lego/">Debian
4491 LEGO team</a> in the Alioth project we created yesterday.  A mailing
4492 list is not yet created, but we are working on it. :)</p>
4493
4494 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
4495 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
4496 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
4497
4498       </div>
4499       <div class="tags">
4500
4501
4502         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lego">lego</a>.
4503
4504
4505       </div>
4506     </div>
4507     <div class="padding"></div>
4508
4509     <div class="entry">
4510       <div class="title">
4511         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_draft_Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_The_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook_now_public.html">First draft Norwegian Bokmål edition of The Debian Administrator's Handbook now public</a>
4512       </div>
4513       <div class="date">
4514         30th August 2016
4515       </div>
4516       <div class="body">
4517         <p>In April we
4518 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_a_Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_The_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook.html">started
4519 to work</a> on a Norwegian Bokmål edition of the "open access" book on
4520 how to set up and administrate a Debian system.  Today I am happy to
4521 report that the first draft is now publicly available.  You can find
4522 it on <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/get/">get the Debian
4523 Administrator's Handbook page</a> (under Other languages).  The first
4524 eight chapters have a first draft translation, and we are working on
4525 proofreading the content.  If you want to help out, please start
4526 contributing using
4527 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-handbook/">the
4528 hosted weblate project page</a>, and get in touch using
4529 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/debian-handbook-translators">the
4530 translators mailing list</a>.  Please also check out
4531 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/contribute/">the instructions for
4532 contributors</a>.  A good way to contribute is to proofread the text
4533 and update weblate if you find errors.</p>
4534
4535 <p>Our goal is still to make the Norwegian book available on paper as well as
4536 electronic form.</p>
4537
4538       </div>
4539       <div class="tags">
4540
4541
4542         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4543
4544
4545       </div>
4546     </div>
4547     <div class="padding"></div>
4548
4549     <div class="entry">
4550       <div class="title">
4551         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Coz_can_help_you_find_bottlenecks_in_multi_threaded_software___nice_free_software.html">Coz can help you find bottlenecks in multi-threaded software - nice free software</a>
4552       </div>
4553       <div class="date">
4554         11th August 2016
4555       </div>
4556       <div class="body">
4557         <p>This summer, I read a great article
4558 "<a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/summer2016/curtsinger">coz:
4559 This Is the Profiler You're Looking For</a>" in USENIX ;login: about
4560 how to profile multi-threaded programs.  It presented a system for
4561 profiling software by running experiences in the running program,
4562 testing how run time performance is affected by "speeding up" parts of
4563 the code to various degrees compared to a normal run.  It does this by
4564 slowing down parallel threads while the "faster up" code is running
4565 and measure how this affect processing time.  The processing time is
4566 measured using probes inserted into the code, either using progress
4567 counters (COZ_PROGRESS) or as latency meters (COZ_BEGIN/COZ_END).  It
4568 can also measure unmodified code by measuring complete the program
4569 runtime and running the program several times instead.</p>
4570
4571 <p>The project and presentation was so inspiring that I would like to
4572 get the system into Debian.  I
4573 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=830708">created
4574 a WNPP request for it</a> and contacted upstream to try to make the
4575 system ready for Debian by sending patches.  The build process need to
4576 be changed a bit to avoid running 'git clone' to get dependencies, and
4577 to include the JavaScript web page used to visualize the collected
4578 profiling information included in the source package.
4579 But I expect that should work out fairly soon.</p>
4580
4581 <p>The way the system work is fairly simple.  To run an coz experiment
4582 on a binary with debug symbols available, start the program like this:
4583
4584 <p><blockquote><pre>
4585 coz run --- program-to-run
4586 </pre></blockquote></p>
4587
4588 <p>This will create a text file profile.coz with the instrumentation
4589 information.  To show what part of the code affect the performance
4590 most, use a web browser and either point it to
4591 <a href="http://plasma-umass.github.io/coz/">http://plasma-umass.github.io/coz/</a>
4592 or use the copy from git (in the gh-pages branch).  Check out this web
4593 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
4594 profiling more useful you include &lt;coz.h&gt; and insert the
4595 COZ_PROGRESS or COZ_BEGIN and COZ_END at appropriate places in the
4596 code, rebuild and run the profiler.  This allow coz to do more
4597 targeted experiments.</p>
4598
4599 <p>A video published by ACM
4600 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jE0V-p1odPg">presenting the
4601 Coz profiler</a> is available from Youtube.  There is also a paper
4602 from the 25th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles available
4603 titled
4604 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc16/technical-sessions/presentation/curtsinger">Coz:
4605 finding code that counts with causal profiling</a>.</p>
4606
4607 <p><a href="https://github.com/plasma-umass/coz">The source code</a>
4608 for Coz is available from github.  It will only build with clang
4609 because it uses a
4610 <a href="https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=55606">C++
4611 feature missing in GCC</a>, but I've submitted
4612 <a href="https://github.com/plasma-umass/coz/pull/67">a patch to solve
4613 it</a> and hope it will be included in the upstream source soon.</p>
4614
4615 <p>Please get in touch if you, like me, would like to see this piece
4616 of software in Debian.  I would very much like some help with the
4617 packaging effort, as I lack the in depth knowledge on how to package
4618 C++ libraries.</p>
4619
4620       </div>
4621       <div class="tags">
4622
4623
4624         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
4625
4626
4627       </div>
4628     </div>
4629     <div class="padding"></div>
4630
4631     <div class="entry">
4632       <div class="title">
4633         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Unlocking_HTC_Desire_HD_on_Linux_using_unruu_and_fastboot.html">Unlocking HTC Desire HD on Linux using unruu and fastboot</a>
4634       </div>
4635       <div class="date">
4636          7th July 2016
4637       </div>
4638       <div class="body">
4639         <p>Yesterday, I tried to unlock a HTC Desire HD phone, and it proved
4640 to be a slight challenge.  Here is the recipe if I ever need to do it
4641 again.  It all started by me wanting to try the recipe to set up
4642 <a href="https://blog.torproject.org/blog/mission-impossible-hardening-android-security-and-privacy">an
4643 hardened Android installation</a> from the Tor project blog on a
4644 device I had access to.  It is a old mobile phone with a broken
4645 microphone The initial idea had been to just
4646 <a href="http://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w/Install_CM_for_ace">install
4647 CyanogenMod on it</a>, but did not quite find time to start on it
4648 until a few days ago.</p>
4649
4650 <p>The unlock process is supposed to be simple: (1) Boot into the boot
4651 loader (press volume down and power at the same time), (2) select
4652 'fastboot' before (3) connecting the device via USB to a Linux
4653 machine, (4) request the device identifier token by running 'fastboot
4654 oem get_identifier_token', (5) request the device unlocking key using
4655 the <a href="http://www.htcdev.com/bootloader/">HTC developer web
4656 site</a> and unlock the phone using the key file emailed to you.</p>
4657
4658 <p>Unfortunately, this only work fi you have hboot version 2.00.0029
4659 or newer, and the device I was working on had 2.00.0027.  This
4660 apparently can be easily fixed by downloading a Windows program and
4661 running it on your Windows machine, if you accept the terms Microsoft
4662 require you to accept to use Windows - which I do not.  So I had to
4663 come up with a different approach.  I got a lot of help from AndyCap
4664 on #nuug, and would not have been able to get this working without
4665 him.</p>
4666
4667 <p>First I needed to extract the hboot firmware from
4668 <a href="http://www.htcdev.com/ruu/PD9810000_Ace_Sense30_S_hboot_2.00.0029.exe">the
4669 windows binary for HTC Desire HD</a> downloaded as 'the RUU' from HTC.
4670 For this there is is <a href="https://github.com/kmdm/unruu/">a github
4671 project named unruu</a> using libunshield.  The unshield tool did not
4672 recognise the file format, but unruu worked and extracted rom.zip,
4673 containing the new hboot firmware and a text file describing which
4674 devices it would work for.</p>
4675
4676 <p>Next, I needed to get the new firmware into the device.  For this I
4677 followed some instructions
4678 <a href="http://www.htc1guru.com/2013/09/new-ruu-zips-posted/">available
4679 from HTC1Guru.com</a>, and ran these commands as root on a Linux
4680 machine with Debian testing:</p>
4681
4682 <p><pre>
4683 adb reboot-bootloader
4684 fastboot oem rebootRUU
4685 fastboot flash zip rom.zip
4686 fastboot flash zip rom.zip
4687 fastboot reboot
4688 </pre></p>
4689
4690 <p>The flash command apparently need to be done twice to take effect,
4691 as the first is just preparations and the second one do the flashing.
4692 The adb command is just to get to the boot loader menu, so turning the
4693 device on while holding volume down and the power button should work
4694 too.</p>
4695
4696 <p>With the new hboot version in place I could start following the
4697 instructions on the HTC developer web site.  I got the device token
4698 like this:</p>
4699
4700 <p><pre>
4701 fastboot oem get_identifier_token 2>&1 | sed 's/(bootloader) //'
4702 </pre>
4703
4704 <p>And once I got the unlock code via email, I could use it like
4705 this:</p>
4706
4707 <p><pre>
4708 fastboot flash unlocktoken Unlock_code.bin
4709 </pre></p>
4710
4711 <p>And with that final step in place, the phone was unlocked and I
4712 could start stuffing the software of my own choosing into the device.
4713 So far I only inserted a replacement recovery image to wipe the phone
4714 before I start.  We will see what happen next.  Perhaps I should
4715 install <a href="https://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> on it. :)</p>
4716
4717       </div>
4718       <div class="tags">
4719
4720
4721         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
4722
4723
4724       </div>
4725     </div>
4726     <div class="padding"></div>
4727
4728     <div class="entry">
4729       <div class="title">
4730         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_use_the_Signal_app_if_you_only_have_a_land_line__ie_no_mobile_phone_.html">How to use the Signal app if you only have a land line (ie no mobile phone)</a>
4731       </div>
4732       <div class="date">
4733          3rd July 2016
4734       </div>
4735       <div class="body">
4736         <p>For a while now, I have wanted to test
4737 <a href="https://whispersystems.org/">the Signal app</a>, as it is
4738 said to provide end to end encrypted communication and several of my
4739 friends and family are already using it.  As I by choice do not own a
4740 mobile phone, this proved to be harder than expected.  And I wanted to
4741 have the source of the client and know that it was the code used on my
4742 machine.  But yesterday I managed to get it working.  I used the
4743 Github source, compared it to the source in
4744 <a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/signal-private-messenger/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk?hl=en-US">the
4745 Signal Chrome app</a> available from the Chrome web store, applied
4746 patches to use the production Signal servers, started the app and
4747 asked for the hidden "register without a smart phone" form.  Here is
4748 the recipe how I did it.</p>
4749
4750 <p>First, I fetched the Signal desktop source from Github, using
4751
4752 <pre>
4753 git clone https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Desktop.git
4754 </pre>
4755
4756 <p>Next, I patched the source to use the production servers, to be
4757 able to talk to other Signal users:</p>
4758
4759 <pre>
4760 cat &lt;&lt;EOF | patch -p0
4761 diff -ur ./js/background.js userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/background.js
4762 --- ./js/background.js  2016-06-29 13:43:15.630344628 +0200
4763 +++ userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/background.js    2016-06-29 14:06:29.530300934 +0200
4764 @@ -47,8 +47,8 @@
4765          });
4766      });
4767
4768 -    var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-staging.whispersystems.org';
4769 -    var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments-staging.s3.amazonaws.com';
4770 +    var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-ca.whispersystems.org:4433';
4771 +    var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments.s3.amazonaws.com';
4772      var messageReceiver;
4773      window.getSocketStatus = function() {
4774          if (messageReceiver) {
4775 diff -ur ./js/expire.js userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/expire.js
4776 --- ./js/expire.js      2016-06-29 13:43:15.630344628 +0200
4777 +++ userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/expire.js2016-06-29 14:06:29.530300934 +0200
4778 @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
4779  ;(function() {
4780      'use strict';
4781 -    var BUILD_EXPIRATION = 0;
4782 +    var BUILD_EXPIRATION = 1474492690000;
4783
4784      window.extension = window.extension || {};
4785
4786 EOF
4787 </pre>
4788
4789 <p>The first part is changing the servers, and the second is updating
4790 an expiration timestamp.  This timestamp need to be updated regularly.
4791 It is set 90 days in the future by the build process (Gruntfile.js).
4792 The value is seconds since 1970 times 1000, as far as I can tell.</p>
4793
4794 <p>Based on a tip and good help from the #nuug IRC channel, I wrote a
4795 script to launch Signal in Chromium.</p>
4796
4797 <pre>
4798 #!/bin/sh
4799 cd $(dirname $0)
4800 mkdir -p userdata
4801 exec chromium \
4802   --proxy-server="socks://localhost:9050" \
4803   --user-data-dir=`pwd`/userdata --load-and-launch-app=`pwd`
4804 </pre>
4805
4806 <p> The script start the app and configure Chromium to use the Tor
4807 SOCKS5 proxy to make sure those controlling the Signal servers (today
4808 Amazon and Whisper Systems) as well as those listening on the lines
4809 will have a harder time location my laptop based on the Signal
4810 connections if they use source IP address.</p>
4811
4812 <p>When the script starts, one need to follow the instructions under
4813 "Standalone Registration" in the CONTRIBUTING.md file in the git
4814 repository.  I right clicked on the Signal window to get up the
4815 Chromium debugging tool, visited the 'Console' tab and wrote
4816 'extension.install("standalone")' on the console prompt to get the
4817 registration form.  Then I entered by land line phone number and
4818 pressed 'Call'.  5 seconds later the phone rang and a robot voice
4819 repeated the verification code three times.  After entering the number
4820 into the verification code field in the form, I could start using
4821 Signal from my laptop.
4822
4823 <p>As far as I can tell, The Signal app will leak who is talking to
4824 whom and thus who know who to those controlling the central server,
4825 but such leakage is hard to avoid with a centrally controlled server
4826 setup.  It is something to keep in mind when using Signal - the
4827 content of your chats are harder to intercept, but the meta data
4828 exposing your contact network is available to people you do not know.
4829 So better than many options, but not great.  And sadly the usage is
4830 connected to my land line, thus allowing those controlling the server
4831 to associate it to my home and person.  I would prefer it if only
4832 those I knew could tell who I was on Signal.  There are options
4833 avoiding such information leakage, but most of my friends are not
4834 using them, so I am stuck with Signal for now.</p>
4835
4836 <p><strong>Update 2017-01-10</strong>: There is an updated blog post
4837 on this topic in
4838 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Experience_and_updated_recipe_for_using_the_Signal_app_without_a_mobile_phone.html">Experience
4839 and updated recipe for using the Signal app without a mobile
4840 phone</a>.</p>
4841
4842       </div>
4843       <div class="tags">
4844
4845
4846         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
4847
4848
4849       </div>
4850     </div>
4851     <div class="padding"></div>
4852
4853     <div class="entry">
4854       <div class="title">
4855         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_new__best__multimedia_player_in_Debian_.html">The new "best" multimedia player in Debian?</a>
4856       </div>
4857       <div class="date">
4858          6th June 2016
4859       </div>
4860       <div class="body">
4861         <p>When I set out a few weeks ago to figure out
4862 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_best_multimedia_player_in_Debian_.html">which
4863 multimedia player in Debian claimed to support most file formats /
4864 MIME types</a>, I was a bit surprised how varied the sets of MIME types
4865 the various players claimed support for.  The range was from 55 to 130
4866 MIME types.  I suspect most media formats are supported by all
4867 players, but this is not really reflected in the MimeTypes values in
4868 their desktop files.  There are probably also some bogus MIME types
4869 listed, but it is hard to identify which one this is.</p>
4870
4871 <p>Anyway, in the mean time I got in touch with upstream for some of
4872 the players suggesting to add more MIME types to their desktop files,
4873 and decided to spend some time myself improving the situation for my
4874 favorite media player VLC.  The fixes for VLC entered Debian unstable
4875 yesterday. The complete list of MIME types can be seen on the
4876 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMultimedia/PlayerSupport">Multimedia
4877 player MIME type support status</a> Debian wiki page.</p>
4878
4879 <p>The new "best" multimedia player in Debian?  It is VLC, followed by
4880 totem, parole, kplayer, gnome-mpv, mpv, smplayer, mplayer-gui and
4881 kmplayer.  I am sure some of the other players desktop files support
4882 several of the formats currently listed as working only with vlc,
4883 toten and parole.</p>
4884
4885 <p>A sad observation is that only 14 MIME types are listed as
4886 supported by all the tested multimedia players in Debian in their
4887 desktop files: audio/mpeg, audio/vnd.rn-realaudio, audio/x-mpegurl,
4888 audio/x-ms-wma, audio/x-scpls, audio/x-wav, video/mp4, video/mpeg,
4889 video/quicktime, video/vnd.rn-realvideo, video/x-matroska,
4890 video/x-ms-asf, video/x-ms-wmv and video/x-msvideo.  Personally I find
4891 it sad that video/ogg and video/webm is not supported by all the media
4892 players in Debian.  As far as I can tell, all of them can handle both
4893 formats.</p>
4894
4895       </div>
4896       <div class="tags">
4897
4898
4899         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
4900
4901
4902       </div>
4903     </div>
4904     <div class="padding"></div>
4905
4906     <div class="entry">
4907       <div class="title">
4908         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_program_should_be_able_to_open_its_own_files_on_Linux.html">A program should be able to open its own files on Linux</a>
4909       </div>
4910       <div class="date">
4911          5th June 2016
4912       </div>
4913       <div class="body">
4914         <p>Many years ago, when koffice was fresh and with few users, I
4915 decided to test its presentation tool when making the slides for a
4916 talk I was giving for NUUG on Japhar, a free Java virtual machine.  I
4917 wrote the first draft of the slides, saved the result and went to bed
4918 the day before I would give the talk.  The next day I took a plane to
4919 the location where the meeting should take place, and on the plane I
4920 started up koffice again to polish the talk a bit, only to discover
4921 that kpresenter refused to load its own data file.  I cursed a bit and
4922 started making the slides again from memory, to have something to
4923 present when I arrived.  I tested that the saved files could be
4924 loaded, and the day seemed to be rescued.  I continued to polish the
4925 slides until I suddenly discovered that the saved file could no longer
4926 be loaded into kpresenter.  In the end I had to rewrite the slides
4927 three times, condensing the content until the talk became shorter and
4928 shorter.  After the talk I was able to pinpoint the problem &ndash;
4929 kpresenter wrote inline images in a way itself could not understand.
4930 Eventually that bug was fixed and kpresenter ended up being a great
4931 program to make slides.  The point I'm trying to make is that we
4932 expect a program to be able to load its own data files, and it is
4933 embarrassing to its developers if it can't.</p>
4934
4935 <p>Did you ever experience a program failing to load its own data
4936 files from the desktop file browser?  It is not a uncommon problem.  A
4937 while back I discovered that the screencast recorder
4938 gtk-recordmydesktop would save an Ogg Theora video file the KDE file
4939 browser would refuse to open.  No video player claimed to understand
4940 such file.  I tracked down the cause being <tt>file --mime-type</tt>
4941 returning the application/ogg MIME type, which no video player I had
4942 installed listed as a MIME type they would understand.  I asked for
4943 <a href="http://bugs.gw.com/view.php?id=382">file to change its
4944 behavour</a> and use the MIME type video/ogg instead.  I also asked
4945 several video players to add video/ogg to their desktop files, to give
4946 the file browser an idea what to do about Ogg Theora files.  After a
4947 while, the desktop file browsers in Debian started to handle the
4948 output from gtk-recordmydesktop properly.</p>
4949
4950 <p>But history repeats itself.  A few days ago I tested the music
4951 system Rosegarden again, and I discovered that the KDE and xfce file
4952 browsers did not know what to do with the Rosegarden project files
4953 (*.rg).  I've reported <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/825993">the
4954 rosegarden problem to BTS</a> and a fix is commited to git and will be
4955 included in the next upload.  To increase the chance of me remembering
4956 how to fix the problem next time some program fail to load its files
4957 from the file browser, here are some notes on how to fix it.</p>
4958
4959 <p>The file browsers in Debian in general operates on MIME types.
4960 There are two sources for the MIME type of a given file.  The output from
4961 <tt>file --mime-type</tt> mentioned above, and the content of the
4962 shared MIME type registry (under /usr/share/mime/).  The file MIME
4963 type is mapped to programs supporting the MIME type, and this
4964 information is collected from
4965 <a href="https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/desktop-entry-spec/">the
4966 desktop files</a> available in /usr/share/applications/.  If there is
4967 one desktop file claiming support for the MIME type of the file, it is
4968 activated when asking to open a given file.  If there are more, one
4969 can normally select which one to use by right-clicking on the file and
4970 selecting the wanted one using 'Open with' or similar.  In general
4971 this work well.  But it depend on each program picking a good MIME
4972 type (preferably
4973 <a href="http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/media-types.xhtml">a
4974 MIME type registered with IANA</a>), file and/or the shared MIME
4975 registry recognizing the file and the desktop file to list the MIME
4976 type in its list of supported MIME types.</p>
4977
4978 <p>The <tt>/usr/share/mime/packages/rosegarden.xml</tt> entry for
4979 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/shared-mime-info-spec">the
4980 Shared MIME database</a> look like this:</p>
4981
4982 <p><blockquote><pre>
4983 &lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?&gt;
4984 &lt;mime-info xmlns="http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/shared-mime-info"&gt;
4985   &lt;mime-type type="audio/x-rosegarden"&gt;
4986     &lt;sub-class-of type="application/x-gzip"/&gt;
4987     &lt;comment&gt;Rosegarden project file&lt;/comment&gt;
4988     &lt;glob pattern="*.rg"/&gt;
4989   &lt;/mime-type&gt;
4990 &lt;/mime-info&gt;
4991 </pre></blockquote></p>
4992
4993 <p>This states that audio/x-rosegarden is a kind of application/x-gzip
4994 (it is a gzipped XML file).  Note, it is much better to use an
4995 official MIME type registered with IANA than it is to make up ones own
4996 unofficial ones like the x-rosegarden type used by rosegarden.</p>
4997
4998 <p>The desktop file of the rosegarden program failed to list
4999 audio/x-rosegarden in its list of supported MIME types, causing the
5000 file browsers to have no idea what to do with *.rg files:</p>
5001
5002 <p><blockquote><pre>
5003 % grep Mime /usr/share/applications/rosegarden.desktop
5004 MimeType=audio/x-rosegarden-composition;audio/x-rosegarden-device;audio/x-rosegarden-project;audio/x-rosegarden-template;audio/midi;
5005 X-KDE-NativeMimeType=audio/x-rosegarden-composition
5006 %
5007 </pre></blockquote></p>
5008
5009 <p>The fix was to add "audio/x-rosegarden;" at the end of the
5010 MimeType= line.</p>
5011
5012 <p>If you run into a file which fail to open the correct program when
5013 selected from the file browser, please check out the output from
5014 <tt>file --mime-type</tt> for the file, ensure the file ending and
5015 MIME type is registered somewhere under /usr/share/mime/ and check
5016 that some desktop file under /usr/share/applications/ is claiming
5017 support for this MIME type.  If not, please report a bug to have it
5018 fixed. :)</p>
5019
5020       </div>
5021       <div class="tags">
5022
5023
5024         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5025
5026
5027       </div>
5028     </div>
5029     <div class="padding"></div>
5030
5031     <div class="entry">
5032       <div class="title">
5033         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Isenkram_with_PackageKit_support___new_version_0_23_available_in_Debian_unstable.html">Isenkram with PackageKit support - new version 0.23 available in Debian unstable</a>
5034       </div>
5035       <div class="date">
5036         25th May 2016
5037       </div>
5038       <div class="body">
5039         <p><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/isenkram">The isenkram
5040 system</a> is a user-focused solution in Debian for handling hardware
5041 related packages.  The idea is to have a database of mappings between
5042 hardware and packages, and pop up a dialog suggesting for the user to
5043 install the packages to use a given hardware dongle.  Some use cases
5044 are when you insert a Yubikey, it proposes to install the software
5045 needed to control it; when you insert a braille reader list it
5046 proposes to install the packages needed to send text to the reader;
5047 and when you insert a ColorHug screen calibrator it suggests to
5048 install the driver for it.  The system work well, and even have a few
5049 command line tools to install firmware packages and packages for the
5050 hardware already in the machine (as opposed to hotpluggable hardware).</p>
5051
5052 <p>The system was initially written using aptdaemon, because I found
5053 good documentation and example code on how to use it.  But aptdaemon
5054 is going away and is generally being replaced by
5055 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/software/PackageKit/">PackageKit</a>,
5056 so Isenkram needed a rewrite.  And today, thanks to the great patch
5057 from my college Sunil Mohan Adapa in the FreedomBox project, the
5058 rewrite finally took place.  I've just uploaded a new version of
5059 Isenkram into Debian Unstable with the patch included, and the default
5060 for the background daemon is now to use PackageKit.  To check it out,
5061 install the <tt>isenkram</tt> package and insert some hardware dongle
5062 and see if it is recognised.</p>
5063
5064 <p>If you want to know what kind of packages isenkram would propose for
5065 the machine it is running on, you can check out the isenkram-lookup
5066 program.  This is what it look like on a Thinkpad X230:</p>
5067
5068 <p><blockquote><pre>
5069 % isenkram-lookup
5070 bluez
5071 cheese
5072 fprintd
5073 fprintd-demo
5074 gkrellm-thinkbat
5075 hdapsd
5076 libpam-fprintd
5077 pidgin-blinklight
5078 thinkfan
5079 tleds
5080 tp-smapi-dkms
5081 tp-smapi-source
5082 tpb
5083 %p
5084 </pre></blockquote></p>
5085
5086 <p>The hardware mappings come from several places.  The preferred way
5087 is for packages to announce their hardware support using
5088 <a href="https://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/">the
5089 cross distribution appstream system</a>.
5090 See
5091 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">previous
5092 blog posts about isenkram</a> to learn how to do that.</p>
5093
5094       </div>
5095       <div class="tags">
5096
5097
5098         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
5099
5100
5101       </div>
5102     </div>
5103     <div class="padding"></div>
5104
5105     <div class="entry">
5106       <div class="title">
5107         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Discharge_rate_estimate_in_new_battery_statistics_collector_for_Debian.html">Discharge rate estimate in new battery statistics collector for Debian</a>
5108       </div>
5109       <div class="date">
5110         23rd May 2016
5111       </div>
5112       <div class="body">
5113         <p>Yesterday I updated the
5114 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats
5115 package in Debian</a> with a few patches sent to me by skilled and
5116 enterprising users.  There were some nice user and visible changes.
5117 First of all, both desktop menu entries now work.  A design flaw in
5118 one of the script made the history graph fail to show up (its PNG was
5119 dumped in ~/.xsession-errors) if no controlling TTY was available.
5120 The script worked when called from the command line, but not when
5121 called from the desktop menu.  I changed this to look for a DISPLAY
5122 variable or a TTY before deciding where to draw the graph, and now the
5123 graph window pop up as expected.</p>
5124
5125 <p>The next new feature is a discharge rate estimator in one of the
5126 graphs (the one showing the last few hours).  New is also the user of
5127 colours showing charging in blue and discharge in red.  The percentages
5128 of this graph is relative to last full charge, not battery design
5129 capacity.</p>
5130
5131 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-05-23-battery-stats-rate.png"/></p>
5132
5133 <p>The other graph show the entire history of the collected battery
5134 statistics, comparing it to the design capacity of the battery to
5135 visualise how the battery life time get shorter over time.  The red
5136 line in this graph is what the previous graph considers 100 percent:
5137
5138 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-05-23-battery-stats-history.png"/></p>
5139
5140 <p>In this graph you can see that I only charge the battery to 80
5141 percent of last full capacity, and how the capacity of the battery is
5142 shrinking. :(</p>
5143
5144 <p>The last new feature is in the collector, which now will handle
5145 more hardware models.  On some hardware, Linux power supply
5146 information is stored in /sys/class/power_supply/ACAD/, while the
5147 collector previously only looked in /sys/class/power_supply/AC/.  Now
5148 both are checked to figure if there is power connected to the
5149 machine.</p>
5150
5151 <p>If you are interested in how your laptop battery is doing, please
5152 check out the
5153 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats</a>
5154 in Debian unstable, or rebuild it on Jessie to get it working on
5155 Debian stable. :) The upstream source is available from <a
5156 href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">github</a>.
5157 Patches are very welcome.</p>
5158
5159 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
5160 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
5161 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
5162
5163       </div>
5164       <div class="tags">
5165
5166
5167         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5168
5169
5170       </div>
5171     </div>
5172     <div class="padding"></div>
5173
5174     <div class="entry">
5175       <div class="title">
5176         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_now_with_ZFS_on_Linux_included.html">Debian now with ZFS on Linux included</a>
5177       </div>
5178       <div class="date">
5179         12th May 2016
5180       </div>
5181       <div class="body">
5182         <p>Today, after many years of hard work from many people,
5183 <a href="http://zfsonlinux.org/">ZFS for Linux</a> finally entered
5184 Debian.  The package status can be seen on
5185 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/zfs-linux">the package tracker
5186 for zfs-linux</a>.  and
5187 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=pkg-zfsonlinux-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
5188 team status page</a>. If you want to help out, please join us.
5189 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-zfsonlinux/zfs.git">The
5190 source code</a> is available via git on Alioth.  It would also be
5191 great if you could help out with
5192 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/dkms">the dkms package</a>, as
5193 it is an important piece of the puzzle to get ZFS working.</p>
5194
5195       </div>
5196       <div class="tags">
5197
5198
5199         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5200
5201
5202       </div>
5203     </div>
5204     <div class="padding"></div>
5205
5206     <div class="entry">
5207       <div class="title">
5208         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_best_multimedia_player_in_Debian_.html">What is the best multimedia player in Debian?</a>
5209       </div>
5210       <div class="date">
5211          8th May 2016
5212       </div>
5213       <div class="body">
5214         <p><strong>Where I set out to figure out which multimedia player in
5215 Debian claim support for most file formats.</strong></p>
5216
5217 <p>A few years ago, I had a look at the media support for Browser
5218 plugins in Debian, to get an idea which plugins to include in Debian
5219 Edu.  I created a script to extract the set of supported MIME types
5220 for each plugin, and used this to find out which multimedia browser
5221 plugin supported most file formats / media types.
5222 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">The
5223 result</a> can still be seen on the Debian wiki, even though it have
5224 not been updated for a while.  But browser plugins are less relevant
5225 these days, so I thought it was time to look at standalone
5226 players.</p>
5227
5228 <p>A few days ago I was tired of VLC not being listed as a viable
5229 player when I wanted to play videos from the Norwegian National
5230 Broadcasting Company, and decided to investigate why.  The cause is a
5231 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/822245">missing MIME type in the VLC
5232 desktop file</a>.  In the process I wrote a script to compare the set
5233 of MIME types announced in the desktop file and the browser plugin,
5234 only to discover that there is quite a large difference between the
5235 two for VLC.  This discovery made me dig up the script I used to
5236 compare browser plugins, and adjust it to compare desktop files
5237 instead, to try to figure out which multimedia player in Debian
5238 support most file formats.</p>
5239
5240 <p>The result can be seen on the Debian Wiki, as
5241 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMultimedia/PlayerSupport">a
5242 table listing all MIME types supported by one of the packages included
5243 in the table</a>, with the package supporting most MIME types being
5244 listed first in the table.</p>
5245
5246 </p>The best multimedia player in Debian?  It is totem, followed by
5247 parole, kplayer, mpv, vlc, smplayer mplayer-gui gnome-mpv and
5248 kmplayer.  Time for the other players to update their announced MIME
5249 support?</p>
5250
5251       </div>
5252       <div class="tags">
5253
5254
5255         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
5256
5257
5258       </div>
5259     </div>
5260     <div class="padding"></div>
5261
5262     <div class="entry">
5263       <div class="title">
5264         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Pyra___handheld_computer_with_Debian_preinstalled.html">The Pyra - handheld computer with Debian preinstalled</a>
5265       </div>
5266       <div class="date">
5267          4th May 2016
5268       </div>
5269       <div class="body">
5270         A friend of mine made me aware of
5271 <a href="https://pyra-handheld.com/boards/pages/pyra/">The Pyra</a>, a
5272 handheld computer which will be delivered with Debian preinstalled.  I
5273 would love to get one of those for my birthday. :)</p>
5274
5275 <p>The machine is a complete ARM-based PC with micro HDMI, SATA, USB
5276 plugs and many others connectors, and include a full keyboard and a 5"
5277 LCD touch screen.  The 6000mAh battery is claimed to provide a whole
5278 day of battery life time, but I have not seen any independent tests
5279 confirming this.  The vendor is still collecting preorders, and the
5280 last I heard last night was that 22 more orders were needed before
5281 production started.</p>
5282
5283 <p>As far as I know, this is the first handheld preinstalled with
5284 Debian.  Please let me know if you know of any others.  Is it the
5285 first computer being sold with Debian preinstalled?</p>
5286
5287       </div>
5288       <div class="tags">
5289
5290
5291         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5292
5293
5294       </div>
5295     </div>
5296     <div class="padding"></div>
5297
5298     <div class="entry">
5299       <div class="title">
5300         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_a_Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_The_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook.html">Lets make a Norwegian Bokmål edition of The Debian Administrator's Handbook</a>
5301       </div>
5302       <div class="date">
5303         10th April 2016
5304       </div>
5305       <div class="body">
5306         <p>During this weekends
5307 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Oslo__Takk_for_feilfiksingsfesten.shtml">bug
5308 squashing party and developer gathering</a>, we decided to do our part
5309 to make sure there are good books about Debian available in Norwegian
5310 Bokmål, and got in touch with the people behind the
5311 <a href="http://debian-handbook.info/">Debian Administrator's Handbook
5312 project</a> to get started.  If you want to help out, please start
5313 contributing using
5314 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-handbook/">the
5315 hosted weblate project page</a>, and get in touch using
5316 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/debian-handbook-translators">the
5317 translators mailing list</a>.  Please also check out
5318 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/contribute/">the instructions for
5319 contributors</a>.</p>
5320
5321 <p>The book is already available on paper in English, French and
5322 Japanese, and our goal is to get it available on paper in Norwegian
5323 Bokmål too.  In addition to the paper edition, there are also EPUB and
5324 Mobi versions available.  And there are incomplete translations
5325 available for many more languages.</p>
5326
5327       </div>
5328       <div class="tags">
5329
5330
5331         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5332
5333
5334       </div>
5335     </div>
5336     <div class="padding"></div>
5337
5338     <div class="entry">
5339       <div class="title">
5340         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/One_in_two_hundred_Debian_users_using_ZFS_on_Linux_.html">One in two hundred Debian users using ZFS on Linux?</a>
5341       </div>
5342       <div class="date">
5343          7th April 2016
5344       </div>
5345       <div class="body">
5346         <p>Just for fun I had a look at the popcon number of ZFS related
5347 packages in Debian, and was quite surprised with what I found.  I use
5348 ZFS myself at home, but did not really expect many others to do so.
5349 But I might be wrong.</p>
5350
5351 <p>According to
5352 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=spl-linux">the popcon
5353 results for spl-linux</a>, there are 1019 Debian installations, or
5354 0.53% of the population, with the package installed.  As far as I know
5355 the only use of the spl-linux package is as a support library for ZFS
5356 on Linux, so I use it here as proxy for measuring the number of ZFS
5357 installation on Linux in Debian.  In the kFreeBSD variant of Debian
5358 the ZFS feature is already available, and there
5359 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=zfsutils">the popcon
5360 results for zfsutils</a> show 1625 Debian installations or 0.84% of
5361 the population.  So I guess I am not alone in using ZFS on Debian.</p>
5362
5363 <p>But even though the Debian project leader Lucas Nussbaum
5364 <a href="https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2015/04/msg00006.html">announced
5365 in April 2015</a> that the legal obstacles blocking ZFS on Debian were
5366 cleared, the package is still not in Debian.  The package is again in
5367 the NEW queue.  Several uploads have been rejected so far because the
5368 debian/copyright file was incomplete or wrong, but there is no reason
5369 to give up.  The current status can be seen on
5370 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=pkg-zfsonlinux-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
5371 team status page</a>, and
5372 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-zfsonlinux/zfs.git">the
5373 source code</a> is available on Alioth.</p>
5374
5375 <p>As I want ZFS to be included in next version of Debian to make sure
5376 my home server can function in the future using only official Debian
5377 packages, and the current blocker is to get the debian/copyright file
5378 accepted by the FTP masters in Debian, I decided a while back to try
5379 to help out the team.  This was the background for my blog post about
5380 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Creating__updating_and_checking_debian_copyright_semi_automatically.html">creating,
5381 updating and checking debian/copyright semi-automatically</a>, and I
5382 used the techniques I explored there to try to find any errors in the
5383 copyright file.  It is not very easy to check every one of the around
5384 2000 files in the source package, but I hope we this time got it
5385 right.  If you want to help out, check out the git source and try to
5386 find missing entries in the debian/copyright file.</p>
5387
5388       </div>
5389       <div class="tags">
5390
5391
5392         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5393
5394
5395       </div>
5396     </div>
5397     <div class="padding"></div>
5398
5399     <div class="entry">
5400       <div class="title">
5401         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Full_battery_stats_collector_is_now_available_in_Debian.html">Full battery stats collector is now available in Debian</a>
5402       </div>
5403       <div class="date">
5404         23rd March 2016
5405       </div>
5406       <div class="body">
5407         <p>Since this morning, the battery-stats package in Debian include an
5408 extended collector that will collect the complete battery history for
5409 later processing and graphing.  The original collector store the
5410 battery level as percentage of last full level, while the new
5411 collector also record battery vendor, model, serial number, design
5412 full level, last full level and current battery level.  This make it
5413 possible to predict the lifetime of the battery as well as visualise
5414 the energy flow when the battery is charging or discharging.</p>
5415
5416 <p>The new tools are available in <tt>/usr/share/battery-stats/</tt>
5417 in the version 0.5.1 package in unstable.  Get the new battery level graph
5418 and lifetime prediction by running:
5419
5420 <p><pre>
5421 /usr/share/battery-stats/battery-stats-graph /var/log/battery-stats.csv
5422 </pre></p>
5423
5424 <p>Or select the 'Battery Level Graph' from your application menu.</p>
5425
5426 <p>The flow in/out of the battery can be seen by running (no menu
5427 entry yet):</p>
5428
5429 <p><pre>
5430 /usr/share/battery-stats/battery-stats-graph-flow
5431 </pre></p>
5432
5433 <p>I'm not quite happy with the way the data is visualised, at least
5434 when there are few data points.  The graphs look a bit better with a
5435 few years of data.</p>
5436
5437 <p>A while back one important feature I use in the battery stats
5438 collector broke in Debian.  The scripts in
5439 <tt>/usr/lib/pm-utils/power.d/</tt> were no longer executed.  I
5440 suspect it happened when Jessie started using systemd, but I do not
5441 know.  The issue is reported as
5442 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/818649">bug #818649</a> against
5443 pm-utils.  I managed to work around it by adding an udev rule to call
5444 the collector script every time the power connector is connected and
5445 disconnected.  With this fix in place it was finally time to make a
5446 new release of the package, and get it into Debian.</p>
5447
5448 <p>If you are interested in how your laptop battery is doing, please
5449 check out the
5450 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats</a>
5451 in Debian unstable, or rebuild it on Jessie to get it working on
5452 Debian stable. :) The upstream source is available from
5453 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">github</a>.
5454 As always, patches are very welcome.</p>
5455
5456       </div>
5457       <div class="tags">
5458
5459
5460         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5461
5462
5463       </div>
5464     </div>
5465     <div class="padding"></div>
5466
5467     <div class="entry">
5468       <div class="title">
5469         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Making_battery_measurements_a_little_easier_in_Debian.html">Making battery measurements a little easier in Debian</a>
5470       </div>
5471       <div class="date">
5472         15th March 2016
5473       </div>
5474       <div class="body">
5475         <p>Back in September, I blogged about
5476 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_life_and_death_of_a_laptop_battery.html">the
5477 system I wrote to collect statistics about my laptop battery</a>, and
5478 how it showed the decay and death of this battery (now replaced).  I
5479 created a simple deb package to handle the collection and graphing,
5480 but did not want to upload it to Debian as there were already
5481 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">a battery-stats
5482 package in Debian</a> that should do the same thing, and I did not see
5483 a point of uploading a competing package when battery-stats could be
5484 fixed instead.  I reported a few bugs about its non-function, and
5485 hoped someone would step in and fix it.  But no-one did.</p>
5486
5487 <p>I got tired of waiting a few days ago, and took matters in my own
5488 hands.  The end result is that I am now the new upstream developer of
5489 battery stats (<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">available from github</a>) and part of the team maintaining
5490 battery-stats in Debian, and the package in Debian unstable is finally
5491 able to collect battery status using the <tt>/sys/class/power_supply/</tt>
5492 information provided by the Linux kernel.  If you install the
5493 battery-stats package from unstable now, you will be able to get a
5494 graph of the current battery fill level, to get some idea about the
5495 status of the battery.  The source package build and work just fine in
5496 Debian testing and stable (and probably oldstable too, but I have not
5497 tested).  The default graph you get for that system look like this:</p>
5498
5499 <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>
5500
5501 <p>My plans for the future is to merge my old scripts into the
5502 battery-stats package, as my old scripts collected a lot more details
5503 about the battery.  The scripts are merged into the upstream
5504 battery-stats git repository already, but I am not convinced they work
5505 yet, as I changed a lot of paths along the way.  Will have to test a
5506 bit more before I make a new release.</p>
5507
5508 <p>I will also consider changing the file format slightly, as I
5509 suspect the way I combine several values into one field might make it
5510 impossible to know the type of the value when using it for processing
5511 and graphing.</p>
5512
5513 <p>If you would like I would like to keep an close eye on your laptop
5514 battery, check out the battery-stats package in
5515 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">Debian</a> and
5516 on
5517 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">github</a>.
5518 I would love some help to improve the system further.</p>
5519
5520       </div>
5521       <div class="tags">
5522
5523
5524         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5525
5526
5527       </div>
5528     </div>
5529     <div class="padding"></div>
5530
5531     <div class="entry">
5532       <div class="title">
5533         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Creating__updating_and_checking_debian_copyright_semi_automatically.html">Creating, updating and checking debian/copyright semi-automatically</a>
5534       </div>
5535       <div class="date">
5536         19th February 2016
5537       </div>
5538       <div class="body">
5539         <p>Making packages for Debian requires quite a lot of attention to
5540 details.  And one of the details is the content of the
5541 debian/copyright file, which should list all relevant licenses used by
5542 the code in the package in question, preferably in
5543 <a href="https://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/">machine
5544 readable DEP5 format</a>.</p>
5545
5546 <p>For large packages with lots of contributors it is hard to write
5547 and update this file manually, and if you get some detail wrong, the
5548 package is normally rejected by the ftpmasters.  So getting it right
5549 the first time around get the package into Debian faster, and save
5550 both you and the ftpmasters some work..  Today, while trying to figure
5551 out what was wrong with
5552 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=686447">the
5553 zfsonlinux copyright file</a>, I decided to spend some time on
5554 figuring out the options for doing this job automatically, or at least
5555 semi-automatically.</p>
5556
5557 <p>Lucikly, there are at least two tools available for generating the
5558 file based on the code in the source package,
5559 <tt><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/debmake">debmake</a></tt>
5560 and <tt><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cme">cme</a></tt>.  I'm
5561 not sure which one of them came first, but both seem to be able to
5562 create a sensible draft file.  As far as I can tell, none of them can
5563 be trusted to get the result just right, so the content need to be
5564 polished a bit before the file is OK to upload.  I found the debmake
5565 option in
5566 <a href="http://goofying-with-debian.blogspot.com/2014/07/debmake-checking-source-against-dep-5.html">a
5567 blog posts from 2014</a>.
5568
5569 <p>To generate using debmake, use the -cc option:
5570
5571 <p><pre>
5572 debmake -cc > debian/copyright
5573 </pre></p>
5574
5575 <p>Note there are some problems with python and non-ASCII names, so
5576 this might not be the best option.</p>
5577
5578 <p>The cme option is based on a config parsing library, and I found
5579 this approach in
5580 <a href="https://ddumont.wordpress.com/2015/04/05/improving-creation-of-debian-copyright-file/">a
5581 blog post from 2015</a>.  To generate using cme, use the 'update
5582 dpkg-copyright' option:
5583
5584 <p><pre>
5585 cme update dpkg-copyright
5586 </pre></p>
5587
5588 <p>This will create or update debian/copyright.  The cme tool seem to
5589 handle UTF-8 names better than debmake.</p>
5590
5591 <p>When the copyright file is created, I would also like some help to
5592 check if the file is correct.  For this I found two good options,
5593 <tt>debmake -k</tt> and <tt>license-reconcile</tt>.  The former seem
5594 to focus on license types and file matching, and is able to detect
5595 ineffective blocks in the copyright file.  The latter reports missing
5596 copyright holders and years, but was confused by inconsistent license
5597 names (like CDDL vs. CDDL-1.0).  I suspect it is good to use both and
5598 fix all issues reported by them before uploading.  But I do not know
5599 if the tools and the ftpmasters agree on what is important to fix in a
5600 copyright file, so the package might still be rejected.</p>
5601
5602 <p>The devscripts tool <tt>licensecheck</tt> deserve mentioning.  It
5603 will read through the source and try to find all copyright statements.
5604 It is not comparing the result to the content of debian/copyright, but
5605 can be useful when verifying the content of the copyright file.</p>
5606
5607 <p>Are you aware of better tools in Debian to create and update
5608 debian/copyright file.  Please let me know, or blog about it on
5609 planet.debian.org.</p>
5610
5611 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
5612 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
5613 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
5614
5615 <p><strong>Update 2016-02-20</strong>: I got a tip from Mike Gabriel
5616 on how to use licensecheck and cdbs to create a draft copyright file
5617
5618 <p><pre>
5619 licensecheck --copyright -r `find * -type f` | \
5620   /usr/lib/cdbs/licensecheck2dep5 > debian/copyright.auto
5621 </pre></p>
5622
5623 <p>He mentioned that he normally check the generated file into the
5624 version control system to make it easier to discover license and
5625 copyright changes in the upstream source.  I will try to do the same
5626 with my packages in the future.</p>
5627
5628 <p><strong>Update 2016-02-21</strong>: The cme author recommended
5629 against using -quiet for new users, so I removed it from the proposed
5630 command line.</p>
5631
5632       </div>
5633       <div class="tags">
5634
5635
5636         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5637
5638
5639       </div>
5640     </div>
5641     <div class="padding"></div>
5642
5643     <div class="entry">
5644       <div class="title">
5645         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_appstream_in_Debian_to_locate_packages_with_firmware_and_mime_type_support.html">Using appstream in Debian to locate packages with firmware and mime type support</a>
5646       </div>
5647       <div class="date">
5648          4th February 2016
5649       </div>
5650       <div class="body">
5651         <p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-11">appstream system</a>
5652 is taking shape in Debian, and one provided feature is a very
5653 convenient way to tell you which package to install to make a given
5654 firmware file available when the kernel is looking for it.  This can
5655 be done using apt-file too, but that is for someone else to blog
5656 about. :)</p>
5657
5658 <p>Here is a small recipe to find the package with a given firmware
5659 file, in this example I am looking for ctfw-3.2.3.0.bin, randomly
5660 picked from the set of firmware announced using appstream in Debian
5661 unstable.  In general you would be looking for the firmware requested
5662 by the kernel during kernel module loading.  To find the package
5663 providing the example file, do like this:</p>
5664
5665 <blockquote><pre>
5666 % apt install appstream
5667 [...]
5668 % apt update
5669 [...]
5670 % appstreamcli what-provides firmware:runtime ctfw-3.2.3.0.bin | \
5671   awk '/Package:/ {print $2}'
5672 firmware-qlogic
5673 %
5674 </pre></blockquote>
5675
5676 <p>See <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/AppStream/Guidelines">the
5677 appstream wiki</a> page to learn how to embed the package metadata in
5678 a way appstream can use.</p>
5679
5680 <p>This same approach can be used to find any package supporting a
5681 given MIME type.  This is very useful when you get a file you do not
5682 know how to handle.  First find the mime type using <tt>file
5683 --mime-type</tt>, and next look up the package providing support for
5684 it.  Lets say you got an SVG file.  Its MIME type is image/svg+xml,
5685 and you can find all packages handling this type like this:</p>
5686
5687 <blockquote><pre>
5688 % apt install appstream
5689 [...]
5690 % apt update
5691 [...]
5692 % appstreamcli what-provides mimetype image/svg+xml | \
5693   awk '/Package:/ {print $2}'
5694 bkchem
5695 phototonic
5696 inkscape
5697 shutter
5698 tetzle
5699 geeqie
5700 xia
5701 pinta
5702 gthumb
5703 karbon
5704 comix
5705 mirage
5706 viewnior
5707 postr
5708 ristretto
5709 kolourpaint4
5710 eog
5711 eom
5712 gimagereader
5713 midori
5714 %
5715 </pre></blockquote>
5716
5717 <p>I believe the MIME types are fetched from the desktop file for
5718 packages providing appstream metadata.</p>
5719
5720       </div>
5721       <div class="tags">
5722
5723
5724         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5725
5726
5727       </div>
5728     </div>
5729     <div class="padding"></div>
5730
5731     <div class="entry">
5732       <div class="title">
5733         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Creepy__visualise_geotagged_social_media_information___nice_free_software.html">Creepy, visualise geotagged social media information - nice free software</a>
5734       </div>
5735       <div class="date">
5736         24th January 2016
5737       </div>
5738       <div class="body">
5739         <p>Most people seem not to realise that every time they walk around
5740 with the computerised radio beacon known as a mobile phone their
5741 position is tracked by the phone company and often stored for a long
5742 time (like every time a SMS is received or sent).  And if their
5743 computerised radio beacon is capable of running programs (often called
5744 mobile apps) downloaded from the Internet, these programs are often
5745 also capable of tracking their location (if the app requested access
5746 during installation).  And when these programs send out information to
5747 central collection points, the location is often included, unless
5748 extra care is taken to not send the location.  The provided
5749 information is used by several entities, for good and bad (what is
5750 good and bad, depend on your point of view).  What is certain, is that
5751 the private sphere and the right to free movement is challenged and
5752 perhaps even eradicated for those announcing their location this way,
5753 when they share their whereabouts with private and public
5754 entities.</p>
5755
5756 <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-01-24-nice-creepy-desktop-window.png"></p>
5757
5758 <p>The phone company logs provide a register of locations to check out
5759 when one want to figure out what the tracked person was doing.  It is
5760 unavailable for most of us, but provided to selected government
5761 officials, company staff, those illegally buying information from
5762 unfaithful servants and crackers stealing the information.  But the
5763 public information can be collected and analysed, and a free software
5764 tool to do so is called
5765 <a href="http://www.geocreepy.com/">Creepy or Cree.py</a>.  I
5766 discovered it when I read
5767 <a href="http://www.aftenposten.no/kultur/Slik-kan-du-bli-overvaket-pa-Twitter-og-Instagram-uten-a-ane-det-7787884.html">an
5768 article about Creepy</a> in the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten i
5769 November 2014, and decided to check if it was available in Debian.
5770 The python program was in Debian, but
5771 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/creepy">the version in
5772 Debian</a> was completely broken and practically unmaintained.  I
5773 uploaded a new version which did not work quite right, but did not
5774 have time to fix it then.  This Christmas I decided to finally try to
5775 get Creepy operational in Debian.  Now a fixed version is available in
5776 Debian unstable and testing, and almost all Debian specific patches
5777 are now included
5778 <a href="https://github.com/jkakavas/creepy">upstream</a>.</p>
5779
5780 <p>The Creepy program visualises geolocation information fetched from
5781 Twitter, Instagram, Flickr and Google+, and allow one to get a
5782 complete picture of every social media message posted recently in a
5783 given area, or track the movement of a given individual across all
5784 these services.  Earlier it was possible to use the search API of at
5785 least some of these services without identifying oneself, but these
5786 days it is impossible.  This mean that to use Creepy, you need to
5787 configure it to log in as yourself on these services, and provide
5788 information to them about your search interests.  This should be taken
5789 into account when using Creepy, as it will also share information
5790 about yourself with the services.</p>
5791
5792 <p>The picture above show the twitter messages sent from (or at least
5793 geotagged with a position from) the city centre of Oslo, the capital
5794 of Norway.  One useful way to use Creepy is to first look at
5795 information tagged with an area of interest, and next look at all the
5796 information provided by one or more individuals who was in the area.
5797 I tested it by checking out which celebrity provide their location in
5798 twitter messages by checkout out who sent twitter messages near a
5799 Norwegian TV station, and next could track their position over time,
5800 making it possible to locate their home and work place, among other
5801 things.  A similar technique have been
5802 <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/maxseddon/does-this-soldiers-instagram-account-prove-russia-is-covertl">used
5803 to locate Russian soldiers in Ukraine</a>, and it is both a powerful
5804 tool to discover lying governments, and a useful tool to help people
5805 understand the value of the private information they provide to the
5806 public.</p>
5807
5808 <p>The package is not trivial to backport to Debian Stable/Jessie, as
5809 it depend on several python modules currently missing in Jessie (at
5810 least python-instagram, python-flickrapi and
5811 python-requests-toolbelt).</p>
5812
5813 <p>(I have uploaded
5814 <a href="https://screenshots.debian.net/package/creepy">the image to
5815 screenshots.debian.net</a> and licensed it under the same terms as the
5816 Creepy program in Debian.)</p>
5817
5818       </div>
5819       <div class="tags">
5820
5821
5822         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
5823
5824
5825       </div>
5826     </div>
5827     <div class="padding"></div>
5828
5829     <div class="entry">
5830       <div class="title">
5831         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Always_download_Debian_packages_using_Tor___the_simple_recipe.html">Always download Debian packages using Tor - the simple recipe</a>
5832       </div>
5833       <div class="date">
5834         15th January 2016
5835       </div>
5836       <div class="body">
5837         <p>During his DebConf15 keynote, Jacob Appelbaum
5838 <a href="https://summit.debconf.org/debconf15/meeting/331/what-is-to-be-done/">observed
5839 that those listening on the Internet lines would have good reason to
5840 believe a computer have a given security hole</a> if it download a
5841 security fix from a Debian mirror.  This is a good reason to always
5842 use encrypted connections to the Debian mirror, to make sure those
5843 listening do not know which IP address to attack.  In August, Richard
5844 Hartmann observed that encryption was not enough, when it was possible
5845 to interfere download size to security patches or the fact that
5846 download took place shortly after a security fix was released, and
5847 <a href="http://richardhartmann.de/blog/posts/2015/08/24-Tor-enabled_Debian_mirror/">proposed
5848 to always use Tor to download packages from the Debian mirror</a>.  He
5849 was not the first to propose this, as the
5850 <tt><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/apt-transport-tor">apt-transport-tor</a></tt>
5851 package by Tim Retout already existed to make it easy to convince apt
5852 to use <a href="https://www.torproject.org/">Tor</a>, but I was not
5853 aware of that package when I read the blog post from Richard.</p>
5854
5855 <p>Richard discussed the idea with Peter Palfrader, one of the Debian
5856 sysadmins, and he set up a Tor hidden service on one of the central
5857 Debian mirrors using the address vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion, thus making
5858 it possible to download packages directly between two tor nodes,
5859 making sure the network traffic always were encrypted.</p>
5860
5861 <p>Here is a short recipe for enabling this on your machine, by
5862 installing <tt>apt-transport-tor</tt> and replacing http and https
5863 urls with tor+http and tor+https, and using the hidden service instead
5864 of the official Debian mirror site.  I recommend installing
5865 <tt>etckeeper</tt> before you start to have a history of the changes
5866 done in /etc/.</p>
5867
5868 <blockquote><pre>
5869 apt install apt-transport-tor
5870 sed -i 's% http://ftp.debian.org/% tor+http://vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion/%' /etc/apt/sources.list
5871 sed -i 's% http% tor+http%' /etc/apt/sources.list
5872 </pre></blockquote>
5873
5874 <p>If you have more sources listed in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/, run
5875 the sed commands for these too.  The sed command is assuming your are
5876 using the ftp.debian.org Debian mirror.  Adjust the command (or just
5877 edit the file manually) to match your mirror.</p>
5878
5879 <p>This work in Debian Jessie and later.  Note that tools like
5880 <tt>apt-file</tt> only recently started using the apt transport
5881 system, and do not work with these tor+http URLs.  For
5882 <tt>apt-file</tt> you need the version currently in experimental,
5883 which need a recent apt version currently only in unstable.  So if you
5884 need a working <tt>apt-file</tt>, this is not for you.</p>
5885
5886 <p>Another advantage from this change is that your machine will start
5887 using Tor regularly and at fairly random intervals (every time you
5888 update the package lists or upgrade or install a new package), thus
5889 masking other Tor traffic done from the same machine.  Using Tor will
5890 become normal for the machine in question.</p>
5891
5892 <p>On <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox</a>, APT
5893 is set up by default to use <tt>apt-transport-tor</tt> when Tor is
5894 enabled.  It would be great if it was the default on any Debian
5895 system.</p>
5896
5897       </div>
5898       <div class="tags">
5899
5900
5901         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
5902
5903
5904       </div>
5905     </div>
5906     <div class="padding"></div>
5907
5908     <div class="entry">
5909       <div class="title">
5910         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/OpenALPR__find_car_license_plates_in_video_streams___nice_free_software.html">OpenALPR, find car license plates in video streams - nice free software</a>
5911       </div>
5912       <div class="date">
5913         23rd December 2015
5914       </div>
5915       <div class="body">
5916         <p>When I was a kid, we used to collect "car numbers", as we used to
5917 call the car license plate numbers in those days.  I would write the
5918 numbers down in my little book and compare notes with the other kids
5919 to see how many region codes we had seen and if we had seen some
5920 exotic or special region codes and numbers.  It was a fun game to pass
5921 time, as we kids have plenty of it.</p>
5922
5923 <p>A few days I came across
5924 <a href="https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr">the OpenALPR
5925 project</a>, a free software project to automatically discover and
5926 report license plates in images and video streams, and provide the
5927 "car numbers" in a machine readable format.  I've been looking for
5928 such system for a while now, because I believe it is a bad idea that the
5929 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number_plate_recognition">automatic
5930 number plate recognition</a> tool only is available in the hands of
5931 the powerful, and want it to be available also for the powerless to
5932 even the score when it comes to surveillance and sousveillance.  I
5933 discovered the developer
5934 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/747509">wanted to get the tool into
5935 Debian</a>, and as I too wanted it to be in Debian, I volunteered to
5936 help him get it into shape to get the package uploaded into the Debian
5937 archive.</p>
5938
5939 <p>Today we finally managed to get the package into shape and uploaded
5940 it into Debian, where it currently
5941 <a href="https://ftp-master.debian.org//new/openalpr_2.2.1-1.html">waits
5942 in the NEW queue</a> for review by the Debian ftpmasters.</p>
5943
5944 <p>I guess you are wondering why on earth such tool would be useful
5945 for the common folks, ie those not running a large government
5946 surveillance system?  Well, I plan to put it in a computer on my bike
5947 and in my car, tracking the cars nearby and allowing me to be notified
5948 when number plates on my watch list are discovered.  Another use case
5949 was suggested by a friend of mine, who wanted to set it up at his home
5950 to open the car port automatically when it discovered the plate on his
5951 car.  When I mentioned it perhaps was a bit foolhardy to allow anyone
5952 capable of placing his license plate number of a piece of cardboard to
5953 open his car port, men replied that it was always unlocked anyway.  I
5954 guess for such use case it make sense.  I am sure there are other use
5955 cases too, for those with imagination and a vision.</p>
5956
5957 <p>If you want to build your own version of the Debian package, check
5958 out the upstream git source and symlink ./distros/debian to ./debian/
5959 before running "debuild" to build the source.  Or wait a bit until the
5960 package show up in unstable.</p>
5961
5962       </div>
5963       <div class="tags">
5964
5965
5966         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
5967
5968
5969       </div>
5970     </div>
5971     <div class="padding"></div>
5972
5973     <div class="entry">
5974       <div class="title">
5975         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_appstream_with_isenkram_to_install_hardware_related_packages_in_Debian.html">Using appstream with isenkram to install hardware related packages in Debian</a>
5976       </div>
5977       <div class="date">
5978         20th December 2015
5979       </div>
5980       <div class="body">
5981         <p>Around three years ago, I created
5982 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">the isenkram
5983 system</a> to get a more practical solution in Debian for handing
5984 hardware related packages.  A GUI system in the isenkram package will
5985 present a pop-up dialog when some hardware dongle supported by
5986 relevant packages in Debian is inserted into the machine.  The same
5987 lookup mechanism to detect packages is available as command line
5988 tools in the isenkram-cli package.  In addition to mapping hardware,
5989 it will also map kernel firmware files to packages and make it easy to
5990 install needed firmware packages automatically.  The key for this
5991 system to work is a good way to map hardware to packages, in other
5992 words, allow packages to announce what hardware they will work
5993 with.</p>
5994
5995 <p>I started by providing data files in the isenkram source, and
5996 adding code to download the latest version of these data files at run
5997 time, to ensure every user had the most up to date mapping available.
5998 I also added support for storing the mapping in the Packages file in
5999 the apt repositories, but did not push this approach because while I
6000 was trying to figure out how to best store hardware/package mappings,
6001 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/">the
6002 appstream system</a> was announced.  I got in touch and suggested to
6003 add the hardware mapping into that data set to be able to use
6004 appstream as a data source, and this was accepted at least for the
6005 Debian version of appstream.</p>
6006
6007 <p>A few days ago using appstream in Debian for this became possible,
6008 and today I uploaded a new version 0.20 of isenkram adding support for
6009 appstream as a data source for mapping hardware to packages.  The only
6010 package so far using appstream to announce its hardware support is my
6011 pymissile package.  I got help from Matthias Klumpp with figuring out
6012 how do add the required
6013 <a href="https://appstream.debian.org/html/sid/main/metainfo/pymissile.html">metadata
6014 in pymissile</a>.  I added a file debian/pymissile.metainfo.xml with
6015 this content:</p>
6016
6017 <blockquote><pre>
6018 &lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?&gt;
6019 &lt;component&gt;
6020   &lt;id&gt;pymissile&lt;/id&gt;
6021   &lt;metadata_license&gt;MIT&lt;/metadata_license&gt;
6022   &lt;name&gt;pymissile&lt;/name&gt;
6023   &lt;summary&gt;Control original Striker USB Missile Launcher&lt;/summary&gt;
6024   &lt;description&gt;
6025     &lt;p&gt;
6026       Pymissile provides a curses interface to control an original
6027       Marks and Spencer / Striker USB Missile Launcher, as well as a
6028       motion control script to allow a webcamera to control the
6029       launcher.
6030     &lt;/p&gt;
6031   &lt;/description&gt;
6032   &lt;provides&gt;
6033     &lt;modalias&gt;usb:v1130p0202d*&lt;/modalias&gt;
6034   &lt;/provides&gt;
6035 &lt;/component&gt;
6036 </pre></blockquote>
6037
6038 <p>The key for isenkram is the component/provides/modalias value,
6039 which is a glob style match rule for hardware specific strings
6040 (modalias strings) provided by the Linux kernel.  In this case, it
6041 will map to all USB devices with vendor code 1130 and product code
6042 0202.</p>
6043
6044 <p>Note, it is important that the license of all the metadata files
6045 are compatible to have permissions to aggregate them into archive wide
6046 appstream files.  Matthias suggested to use MIT or BSD licenses for
6047 these files.  A challenge is figuring out a good id for the data, as
6048 it is supposed to be globally unique and shared across distributions
6049 (in other words, best to coordinate with upstream what to use).  But
6050 it can be changed later or, so we went with the package name as
6051 upstream for this project is dormant.</p>
6052
6053 <p>To get the metadata file installed in the correct location for the
6054 mirror update scripts to pick it up and include its content the
6055 appstream data source, the file must be installed in the binary
6056 package under /usr/share/appdata/.  I did this by adding the following
6057 line to debian/pymissile.install:</p>
6058
6059 <blockquote><pre>
6060 debian/pymissile.metainfo.xml usr/share/appdata
6061 </pre></blockquote>
6062
6063 <p>With that in place, the command line tool isenkram-lookup will list
6064 all packages useful on the current computer automatically, and the GUI
6065 pop-up handler will propose to install the package not already
6066 installed if a hardware dongle is inserted into the machine in
6067 question.</p>
6068
6069 <p>Details of the modalias field in appstream is available from the
6070 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-11">DEP-11</a> proposal.</p>
6071
6072 <p>To locate the modalias values of all hardware present in a machine,
6073 try running this command on the command line:</p>
6074
6075 <blockquote><pre>
6076 cat $(find /sys/devices/|grep modalias)
6077 </pre></blockquote>
6078
6079 <p>To learn more about the isenkram system, please check out
6080 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">my
6081 blog posts tagged isenkram</a>.</p>
6082
6083       </div>
6084       <div class="tags">
6085
6086
6087         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
6088
6089
6090       </div>
6091     </div>
6092     <div class="padding"></div>
6093
6094     <div class="entry">
6095       <div class="title">
6096         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_GNU_General_Public_License_is_not_magic_pixie_dust.html">The GNU General Public License is not magic pixie dust</a>
6097       </div>
6098       <div class="date">
6099         30th November 2015
6100       </div>
6101       <div class="body">
6102         <p>A blog post from my fellow Debian developer Paul Wise titled
6103 "<a href="http://bonedaddy.net/pabs3/log/2015/11/27/sfc-supporter/">The
6104 GPL is not magic pixie dust</a>" explain the importance of making sure
6105 the <a href="http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html">GPL</a> is enforced.
6106 I quote the blog post from Paul in full here with his permission:<p>
6107
6108 <blockquote>
6109
6110 <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>
6111
6112 <blockquote>
6113 The GPL is not magic pixie dust. It does not work by itself.<br/>
6114
6115 The first step is to choose a
6116 <a href="https://copyleft.org/">copyleft</a> license for your
6117 code.<br/>
6118
6119 The next step is, when someone fails to follow that copyleft license,
6120 <b>it must be enforced</b><br/>
6121
6122 and its a simple fact of our modern society that such type of
6123 work<br/>
6124
6125 is incredibly expensive to do and incredibly difficult to do.
6126 </blockquote>
6127
6128 <p><small>-- <a href="http://ebb.org/bkuhn/">Bradley Kuhn</a>, in
6129 <a href="http://faif.us/" title="Free as in Freedom">FaiF</a>
6130 <a href="http://faif.us/cast/2015/nov/24/0x57/">episode
6131 0x57</a></small></p>
6132
6133 <p>As the Debian Website
6134 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/794116">used</a>
6135 <a href="https://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/webwml/webwml/english/intro/free.wml?r1=1.24&amp;r2=1.25">to</a>
6136 imply, public domain and permissively licensed software can lead to
6137 the production of more proprietary software as people discover useful
6138 software, extend it and or incorporate it into their hardware or
6139 software products.  Copyleft licenses such as the GNU GPL were created
6140 to close off this avenue to the production of proprietary software but
6141 such licenses are not enough.  With the ongoing adoption of Free
6142 Software by individuals and groups, inevitably the community's
6143 expectations of license compliance are violated, usually out of
6144 ignorance of the way Free Software works, but not always.  As Karen
6145 and Bradley explained in <a href="http://faif.us/" title="Free as in
6146 Freedom">FaiF</a>
6147 <a href="http://faif.us/cast/2015/nov/24/0x57/">episode 0x57</a>,
6148 copyleft is nothing if no-one is willing and able to stand up in court
6149 to protect it.  The reality of today's world is that legal
6150 representation is expensive, difficult and time consuming.  With
6151 <a href="http://gpl-violations.org/">gpl-violations.org</a> in hiatus
6152 <a href="http://gpl-violations.org/news/20151027-homepage-recovers/">until</a>
6153 some time in 2016, the <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/">Software
6154 Freedom Conservancy</a> (a tax-exempt charity) is the major defender
6155 of the Linux project, Debian and other groups against GPL violations.
6156 In March the SFC supported a
6157 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/mar/05/vmware-lawsuit/">lawsuit
6158 by Christoph Hellwig</a> against VMware for refusing to
6159 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/linux-compliance/vmware-lawsuit-faq.html">comply
6160 with the GPL</a> in relation to their use of parts of the Linux
6161 kernel.  Since then two of their sponsors pulled corporate funding and
6162 conferences
6163 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/nov/24/faif-carols-fundraiser/">blocked
6164 or cancelled their talks</a>.  As a result they have decided to rely
6165 less on corporate funding and more on the broad community of
6166 individuals who support Free Software and copyleft.  So the SFC has
6167 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/nov/23/2015fundraiser/">launched</a>
6168 a <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/">campaign</a> to create
6169 a community of folks who stand up for copyleft and the GPL by
6170 supporting their work on promoting and supporting copyleft and Free
6171 Software.</p>
6172
6173 <p>If you support Free Software,
6174 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/nov/26/like-what-I-do/">like</a>
6175 what the SFC do, agree with their
6176 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/linux-compliance/principles.html">compliance
6177 principles</a>, are happy about their
6178 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/">successes</a> in 2015,
6179 work on a project that is an SFC
6180 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/members/current/">member</a> and or
6181 just want to stand up for copyleft, please join
6182 <a href="https://identi.ca/cwebber/image/JQGPA4qbTyyp3-MY8QpvuA">Christopher
6183 Allan Webber</a>,
6184 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/nov/24/faif-carols-fundraiser/">Carol
6185 Smith</a>,
6186 <a href="http://www.jonobacon.org/2015/11/25/supporting-software-freedom-conservancy/">Jono
6187 Bacon</a>, myself and
6188 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/sponsors/#supporters">others</a> in
6189 becoming a
6190 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/">supporter</a>.  For the
6191 next week your donation will be
6192 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/nov/27/black-friday/">matched</a>
6193 by an anonymous donor.  Please also consider asking your employer to
6194 match your donation or become a sponsor of SFC.  Don't forget to
6195 spread the word about your support for SFC via email, your blog and or
6196 social media accounts.</p>
6197
6198 </blockquote>
6199
6200 <p>I agree with Paul on this topic and just signed up as a Supporter
6201 of Software Freedom Conservancy myself.  Perhaps you should be a
6202 supporter too?</p>
6203
6204       </div>
6205       <div class="tags">
6206
6207
6208         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>.
6209
6210
6211       </div>
6212     </div>
6213     <div class="padding"></div>
6214
6215     <div class="entry">
6216       <div class="title">
6217         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/PGP_key_transition_statement_for_key_EE4E02F9.html">PGP key transition statement for key EE4E02F9</a>
6218       </div>
6219       <div class="date">
6220         17th November 2015
6221       </div>
6222       <div class="body">
6223         <p>I've needed a new OpenPGP key for a while, but have not had time to
6224 set it up properly.  I wanted to generate it offline and have it
6225 available on <a href="http://shop.kernelconcepts.de/#openpgp">a OpenPGP
6226 smart card</a> for daily use, and learning how to do it and finding
6227 time to sit down with an offline machine almost took forever.  But
6228 finally I've been able to complete the process, and have now moved
6229 from my old GPG key to a new GPG key.  See
6230 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-11-17-new-gpg-key-transition.txt">the
6231 full transition statement, signed with both my old and new key</a> for
6232 the details.  This is my new key:</p>
6233
6234 <pre>
6235 pub   3936R/<a href="http://pgp.cs.uu.nl/stats/111D6B29EE4E02F9.html">111D6B29EE4E02F9</a> 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-14]
6236       Key fingerprint = 3AC7 B2E3 ACA5 DF87 78F1  D827 111D 6B29 EE4E 02F9
6237 uid                  Petter Reinholdtsen &lt;pere@hungry.com&gt;
6238 uid                  Petter Reinholdtsen &lt;pere@debian.org&gt;
6239 sub   4096R/87BAFB0E 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-02]
6240 sub   4096R/F91E6DE9 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-02]
6241 sub   4096R/A0439BAB 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-02]
6242 </pre>
6243
6244 <p>The key can be downloaded from the OpenPGP key servers, signed by
6245 my old key.</p>
6246
6247 <p>If you signed my old key
6248 (<a href="http://pgp.cs.uu.nl/stats/DB4CCC4B2A30D729.html">DB4CCC4B2A30D729</a>),
6249 I'd very much appreciate a signature on my new key, details and
6250 instructions in the transition statement. I m happy to reciprocate if
6251 you have a similarly signed transition statement to present.</p>
6252
6253       </div>
6254       <div class="tags">
6255
6256
6257         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
6258
6259
6260       </div>
6261     </div>
6262     <div class="padding"></div>
6263
6264     <div class="entry">
6265       <div class="title">
6266         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_life_and_death_of_a_laptop_battery.html">The life and death of a laptop battery</a>
6267       </div>
6268       <div class="date">
6269         24th September 2015
6270       </div>
6271       <div class="body">
6272         <p>When I get a new laptop, the battery life time at the start is OK.
6273 But this do not last.  The last few laptops gave me a feeling that
6274 within a year, the life time is just a fraction of what it used to be,
6275 and it slowly become painful to use the laptop without power connected
6276 all the time.  Because of this, when I got a new Thinkpad X230 laptop
6277 about two years ago, I decided to monitor its battery state to have
6278 more hard facts when the battery started to fail.</p>
6279
6280 <img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-09-24-laptop-battery-graph.png"/>
6281
6282 <p>First I tried to find a sensible Debian package to record the
6283 battery status, assuming that this must be a problem already handled
6284 by someone else.  I found
6285 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats</a>,
6286 which collects statistics from the battery, but it was completely
6287 broken.  I sent a few suggestions to the maintainer, but decided to
6288 write my own collector as a shell script while I waited for feedback
6289 from him.  Via
6290 <a href="http://www.ifweassume.com/2013/08/the-de-evolution-of-my-laptop-battery.html">a
6291 blog post about the battery development on a MacBook Air</a> I also
6292 discovered
6293 <a href="https://github.com/jradavenport/batlog.git">batlog</a>, not
6294 available in Debian.</p>
6295
6296 <p>I started my collector 2013-07-15, and it has been collecting
6297 battery stats ever since. Now my
6298 /var/log/hjemmenett-battery-status.log file contain around 115,000
6299 measurements, from the time the battery was working great until now,
6300 when it is unable to charge above 7% of original capacity.  My
6301 collector shell script is quite simple and look like this:</p>
6302
6303 <pre>
6304 #!/bin/sh
6305 # Inspired by
6306 # http://www.ifweassume.com/2013/08/the-de-evolution-of-my-laptop-battery.html
6307 # See also
6308 # http://blog.sleeplessbeastie.eu/2013/01/02/debian-how-to-monitor-battery-capacity/
6309 logfile=/var/log/hjemmenett-battery-status.log
6310
6311 files="manufacturer model_name technology serial_number \
6312     energy_full energy_full_design energy_now cycle_count status"
6313
6314 if [ ! -e "$logfile" ] ; then
6315     (
6316         printf "timestamp,"
6317         for f in $files; do
6318             printf "%s," $f
6319         done
6320         echo
6321     ) > "$logfile"
6322 fi
6323
6324 log_battery() {
6325     # Print complete message in one echo call, to avoid race condition
6326     # when several log processes run in parallel.
6327     msg=$(printf "%s," $(date +%s); \
6328         for f in $files; do \
6329             printf "%s," $(cat $f); \
6330         done)
6331     echo "$msg"
6332 }
6333
6334 cd /sys/class/power_supply
6335
6336 for bat in BAT*; do
6337     (cd $bat && log_battery >> "$logfile")
6338 done
6339 </pre>
6340
6341 <p>The script is called when the power management system detect a
6342 change in the power status (power plug in or out), and when going into
6343 and out of hibernation and suspend.  In addition, it collect a value
6344 every 10 minutes.  This make it possible for me know when the battery
6345 is discharging, charging and how the maximum charge change over time.
6346 The code for the Debian package
6347 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-status">is now
6348 available on github</a>.</p>
6349
6350 <p>The collected log file look like this:</p>
6351
6352 <pre>
6353 timestamp,manufacturer,model_name,technology,serial_number,energy_full,energy_full_design,energy_now,cycle_count,status,
6354 1376591133,LGC,45N1025,Li-ion,974,62800000,62160000,39050000,0,Discharging,
6355 [...]
6356 1443090528,LGC,45N1025,Li-ion,974,4900000,62160000,4900000,0,Full,
6357 1443090601,LGC,45N1025,Li-ion,974,4900000,62160000,4900000,0,Full,
6358 </pre>
6359
6360 <p>I wrote a small script to create a graph of the charge development
6361 over time.  This graph depicted above show the slow death of my laptop
6362 battery.</p>
6363
6364 <p>But why is this happening?  Why are my laptop batteries always
6365 dying in a year or two, while the batteries of space probes and
6366 satellites keep working year after year.  If we are to believe
6367 <a href="http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_prolong_lithium_based_batteries">Battery
6368 University</a>, the cause is me charging the battery whenever I have a
6369 chance, and the fix is to not charge the Lithium-ion batteries to 100%
6370 all the time, but to stay below 90% of full charge most of the time.
6371 I've been told that the Tesla electric cars
6372 <a href="http://my.teslamotors.com/de_CH/forum/forums/battery-charge-limit">limit
6373 the charge of their batteries to 80%</a>, with the option to charge to
6374 100% when preparing for a longer trip (not that I would want a car
6375 like Tesla where rights to privacy is abandoned, but that is another
6376 story), which I guess is the option we should have for laptops on
6377 Linux too.</p>
6378
6379 <p>Is there a good and generic way with Linux to tell the battery to
6380 stop charging at 80%, unless requested to charge to 100% once in
6381 preparation for a longer trip?  I found
6382 <a href="http://askubuntu.com/questions/34452/how-can-i-limit-battery-charging-to-80-capacity">one
6383 recipe on askubuntu for Ubuntu to limit charging on Thinkpad to
6384 80%</a>, but could not get it to work (kernel module refused to
6385 load).</p>
6386
6387 <p>I wonder why the battery capacity was reported to be more than 100%
6388 at the start.  I also wonder why the "full capacity" increases some
6389 times, and if it is possible to repeat the process to get the battery
6390 back to design capacity.  And I wonder if the discharge and charge
6391 speed change over time, or if this stay the same.  I did not yet try
6392 to write a tool to calculate the derivative values of the battery
6393 level, but suspect some interesting insights might be learned from
6394 those.</p>
6395
6396 <p>Update 2015-09-24: I got a tip to install the packages
6397 acpi-call-dkms and tlp (unfortunately missing in Debian stable)
6398 packages instead of the tp-smapi-dkms package I had tried to use
6399 initially, and use 'tlp setcharge 40 80' to change when charging start
6400 and stop.  I've done so now, but expect my existing battery is toast
6401 and need to be replaced.  The proposal is unfortunately Thinkpad
6402 specific.</p>
6403
6404       </div>
6405       <div class="tags">
6406
6407
6408         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6409
6410
6411       </div>
6412     </div>
6413     <div class="padding"></div>
6414
6415     <div class="entry">
6416       <div class="title">
6417         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_laptop___some_more_clues_and_ideas_based_on_feedback.html">New laptop - some more clues and ideas based on feedback</a>
6418       </div>
6419       <div class="date">
6420          5th July 2015
6421       </div>
6422       <div class="body">
6423         <p>Several people contacted me after my previous blog post about my
6424 need for a new laptop, and provided very useful feedback.  I wish to
6425 thank every one of these.  Several pointed me to the possibility of
6426 fixing my X230, and I am already in the process of getting Lenovo to
6427 do so thanks to the on site, next day support contract covering the
6428 machine.  But the battery is almost useless (I expect to replace it
6429 with a non-official battery) and I do not expect the machine to live
6430 for many more years, so it is time to plan its replacement.  If I did
6431 not have a support contract, it was suggested to find replacement parts
6432 using <a href="http://www.francecrans.com/">FrancEcrans</a>, but it
6433 might present a language barrier as I do not understand French.</p>
6434
6435 <p>One tip I got was to use the
6436 <a href="https://skinflint.co.uk/?cat=nb">Skinflint</a> web service to
6437 compare laptop models.  It seem to have more models available than
6438 prisjakt.no.  Another tip I got from someone I know have similar
6439 keyboard preferences was that the HP EliteBook 840 keyboard is not
6440 very good, and this matches my experience with earlier EliteBook
6441 keyboards I tested.  Because of this, I will not consider it any further.
6442
6443 <p>When I wrote my blog post, I was not aware of Thinkpad X250, the
6444 newest Thinkpad X model.  The keyboard reintroduces mouse buttons
6445 (which is missing from the X240), and is working fairly well with
6446 Debian Sid/Unstable according to
6447 <a href="http://www.corsac.net/X250/">Corsac.net</a>.  The reports I
6448 got on the keyboard quality are not consistent.  Some say the keyboard
6449 is good, others say it is ok, while others say it is not very good.
6450 Those with experience from X41 and and X60 agree that the X250
6451 keyboard is not as good as those trusty old laptops, and suggest I
6452 keep and fix my X230 instead of upgrading, or get a used X230 to
6453 replace it.  I'm also told that the X250 lack leds for caps lock, disk
6454 activity and battery status, which is very convenient on my X230.  I'm
6455 also told that the CPU fan is running very often, making it a bit
6456 noisy.  In any case, the X250 do not work out of the box with Debian
6457 Stable/Jessie, one of my requirements.</p>
6458
6459 <p>I have also gotten a few vendor proposals, one was
6460 <a href="http://pro-star.com">Pro-Star</a>, another was
6461 <a href="http://shop.gluglug.org.uk/product/libreboot-x200/">Libreboot</a>.
6462 The latter look very attractive to me.</p>
6463
6464 <p>Again, thank you all for the very useful feedback.  It help a lot
6465 as I keep looking for a replacement.</p>
6466
6467 <p>Update 2015-07-06: I was recommended to check out the
6468 <a href="">lapstore.de</a> web shop for used laptops.  They got several
6469 different
6470 <a href="http://www.lapstore.de/f.php/shop/lapstore/f/411/lang/x/kw/Lenovo_ThinkPad_X_Serie/">old
6471 thinkpad X models</a>, and provide one year warranty.</p>
6472
6473       </div>
6474       <div class="tags">
6475
6476
6477         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6478
6479
6480       </div>
6481     </div>
6482     <div class="padding"></div>
6483
6484     <div class="entry">
6485       <div class="title">
6486         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_to_find_a_new_laptop__as_the_old_one_is_broken_after_only_two_years.html">Time to find a new laptop, as the old one is broken after only two years</a>
6487       </div>
6488       <div class="date">
6489          3rd July 2015
6490       </div>
6491       <div class="body">
6492         <p>My primary work horse laptop is failing, and will need a
6493 replacement soon.  The left 5 cm of the screen on my Thinkpad X230
6494 started flickering yesterday, and I suspect the cause is a broken
6495 cable, as changing the angle of the screen some times get rid of the
6496 flickering.</p>
6497
6498 <p>My requirements have not really changed since I bought it, and is
6499 still as
6500 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html">I
6501 described them in 2013</a>.  The last time I bought a laptop, I had
6502 good help from
6503 <a href="http://www.prisjakt.no/category.php?k=353">prisjakt.no</a>
6504 where I could select at least a few of the requirements (mouse pin,
6505 wifi, weight) and go through the rest manually.  Three button mouse
6506 and a good keyboard is not available as an option, and all the three
6507 laptop models proposed today (Thinkpad X240, HP EliteBook 820 G1 and
6508 G2) lack three mouse buttons).  It is also unclear to me how good the
6509 keyboard on the HP EliteBooks are.  I hope Lenovo have not messed up
6510 the keyboard, even if the quality and robustness in the X series have
6511 deteriorated since X41.</p>
6512
6513 <p>I wonder how I can find a sensible laptop when none of the options
6514 seem sensible to me?  Are there better services around to search the
6515 set of available laptops for features?  Please send me an email if you
6516 have suggestions.</p>
6517
6518 <p>Update 2015-07-23: I got a suggestion to check out the FSF
6519 <a href="http://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/endorsement/respects-your-freedom">list
6520 of endorsed hardware</a>, which is useful background information.</p>
6521
6522       </div>
6523       <div class="tags">
6524
6525
6526         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6527
6528
6529       </div>
6530     </div>
6531     <div class="padding"></div>
6532
6533     <div class="entry">
6534       <div class="title">
6535         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_stay_with_sysvinit_in_Debian_Jessie.html">How to stay with sysvinit in Debian Jessie</a>
6536       </div>
6537       <div class="date">
6538         22nd November 2014
6539       </div>
6540       <div class="body">
6541         <p>By now, it is well known that Debian Jessie will not be using
6542 sysvinit as its boot system by default.  But how can one keep using
6543 sysvinit in Jessie?  It is fairly easy, and here are a few recipes,
6544 courtesy of
6545 <a href="http://www.vitavonni.de/blog/201410/2014102101-avoiding-systemd.html">Erich
6546 Schubert</a> and
6547 <a href="http://smcv.pseudorandom.co.uk/2014/still_universal/">Simon
6548 McVittie</a>.
6549
6550 <p>If you already are using Wheezy and want to upgrade to Jessie and
6551 keep sysvinit as your boot system, create a file
6552 <tt>/etc/apt/preferences.d/use-sysvinit</tt> with this content before
6553 you upgrade:</p>
6554
6555 <p><blockquote><pre>
6556 Package: systemd-sysv
6557 Pin: release o=Debian
6558 Pin-Priority: -1
6559 </pre></blockquote><p>
6560
6561 <p>This file content will tell apt and aptitude to not consider
6562 installing systemd-sysv as part of any installation and upgrade
6563 solution when resolving dependencies, and thus tell it to avoid
6564 systemd as a default boot system.  The end result should be that the
6565 upgraded system keep using sysvinit.</p>
6566
6567 <p>If you are installing Jessie for the first time, there is no way to
6568 get sysvinit installed by default (debootstrap used by
6569 debian-installer have no option for this), but one can tell the
6570 installer to switch to sysvinit before the first boot.  Either by
6571 using a kernel argument to the installer, or by adding a line to the
6572 preseed file used.  First, the kernel command line argument:
6573
6574 <p><blockquote><pre>
6575 preseed/late_command="in-target apt-get install --purge -y sysvinit-core"
6576 </pre></blockquote><p>
6577
6578 <p>Next, the line to use in a preseed file:</p>
6579
6580 <p><blockquote><pre>
6581 d-i preseed/late_command string in-target apt-get install -y sysvinit-core
6582 </pre></blockquote><p>
6583
6584 <p>One can of course also do this after the first boot by installing
6585 the sysvinit-core package.</p>
6586
6587 <p>I recommend only using sysvinit if you really need it, as the
6588 sysvinit boot sequence in Debian have several hardware specific bugs
6589 on Linux caused by the fact that it is unpredictable when hardware
6590 devices show up during boot.  But on the other hand, the new default
6591 boot system still have a few rough edges I hope will be fixed before
6592 Jessie is released.</p>
6593
6594 <p>Update 2014-11-26: Inspired by
6595 <ahref="https://www.mirbsd.org/permalinks/wlog-10-tg_e20141125-tg.htm#e20141125-tg_wlog-10-tg">a
6596 blog post by Torsten Glaser</a>, added --purge to the preseed
6597 line.</p>
6598
6599       </div>
6600       <div class="tags">
6601
6602
6603         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6604
6605
6606       </div>
6607     </div>
6608     <div class="padding"></div>
6609
6610     <div class="entry">
6611       <div class="title">
6612         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Debian_package_for_SMTP_via_Tor__aka_SMTorP__using_exim4.html">A Debian package for SMTP via Tor (aka SMTorP) using exim4</a>
6613       </div>
6614       <div class="date">
6615         10th November 2014
6616       </div>
6617       <div class="body">
6618         <p>The right to communicate with your friends and family in private,
6619 without anyone snooping, is a right every citicen have in a liberal
6620 democracy.  But this right is under serious attack these days.</p>
6621
6622 <p>A while back it occurred to me that one way to make the dragnet
6623 surveillance conducted by NSA, GCHQ, FRA and others (and confirmed by
6624 the whisleblower Snowden) more expensive for Internet email,
6625 is to deliver all email using SMTP via Tor.  Such SMTP option would be
6626 a nice addition to the FreedomBox project if we could send email
6627 between FreedomBox machines without leaking metadata about the emails
6628 to the people peeking on the wire.  I
6629 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/2014-October/006493.html">proposed
6630 this on the FreedomBox project mailing list in October</a> and got a
6631 lot of useful feedback and suggestions.  It also became obvious to me
6632 that this was not a novel idea, as the same idea was tested and
6633 documented by Johannes Berg as early as 2006, and both
6634 <a href="https://github.com/pagekite/Mailpile/wiki/SMTorP">the
6635 Mailpile</a> and <a href="http://dee.su/cables">the Cables</a> systems
6636 propose a similar method / protocol to pass emails between users.</p>
6637
6638 <p>To implement such system one need to set up a Tor hidden service
6639 providing the SMTP protocol on port 25, and use email addresses
6640 looking like username@hidden-service-name.onion.  With such addresses
6641 the connections to port 25 on hidden-service-name.onion using Tor will
6642 go to the correct SMTP server.  To do this, one need to configure the
6643 Tor daemon to provide the hidden service and the mail server to accept
6644 emails for this .onion domain.  To learn more about Exim configuration
6645 in Debian and test the design provided by Johannes Berg in his FAQ, I
6646 set out yesterday to create a Debian package for making it trivial to
6647 set up such SMTP over Tor service based on Debian.  Getting it to work
6648 were fairly easy, and
6649 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/exim4-smtorp">the
6650 source code for the Debian package</a> is available from github.  I
6651 plan to move it into Debian if further testing prove this to be a
6652 useful approach.</p>
6653
6654 <p>If you want to test this, set up a blank Debian machine without any
6655 mail system installed (or run <tt>apt-get purge exim4-config</tt> to
6656 get rid of exim4).  Install tor, clone the git repository mentioned
6657 above, build the deb and install it on the machine.  Next, run
6658 <tt>/usr/lib/exim4-smtorp/setup-exim-hidden-service</tt> and follow
6659 the instructions to get the service up and running.  Restart tor and
6660 exim when it is done, and test mail delivery using swaks like
6661 this:</p>
6662
6663 <p><blockquote><pre>
6664 torsocks swaks --server dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion \
6665   --to fbx@dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion
6666 </pre></blockquote></p>
6667
6668 <p>This will test the SMTP delivery using tor.  Replace the email
6669 address with your own address to test your server. :)</p>
6670
6671 <p>The setup procedure is still to complex, and I hope it can be made
6672 easier and more automatic.  Especially the tor setup need more work.
6673 Also, the package include a tor-smtp tool written in C, but its task
6674 should probably be rewritten in some script language to make the deb
6675 architecture independent.  It would probably also make the code easier
6676 to review.  The tor-smtp tool currently need to listen on a socket for
6677 exim to talk to it and is started using xinetd.  It would be better if
6678 no daemon and no socket is needed.  I suspect it is possible to get
6679 exim to run a command line tool for delivery instead of talking to a
6680 socket, and hope to figure out how in a future version of this
6681 system.</p>
6682
6683 <p>Until I wipe my test machine, I can be reached using the
6684 <tt>fbx@dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion</tt> mail address, deliverable over
6685 SMTorP. :)</p>
6686
6687       </div>
6688       <div class="tags">
6689
6690
6691         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
6692
6693
6694       </div>
6695     </div>
6696     <div class="padding"></div>
6697
6698     <div class="entry">
6699       <div class="title">
6700         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/listadmin__the_quick_way_to_moderate_mailman_lists___nice_free_software.html">listadmin, the quick way to moderate mailman lists - nice free software</a>
6701       </div>
6702       <div class="date">
6703         22nd October 2014
6704       </div>
6705       <div class="body">
6706         <p>If you ever had to moderate a mailman list, like the ones on
6707 alioth.debian.org, you know the web interface is fairly slow to
6708 operate.  First you visit one web page, enter the moderation password
6709 and get a new page shown with a list of all the messages to moderate
6710 and various options for each email address.  This take a while for
6711 every list you moderate, and you need to do it regularly to do a good
6712 job as a list moderator.  But there is a quick alternative,
6713 <a href="http://heim.ifi.uio.no/kjetilho/hacks/#listadmin">the
6714 listadmin program</a>.  It allow you to check lists for new messages
6715 to moderate in a fraction of a second.  Here is a test run on two
6716 lists I recently took over:</p>
6717
6718 <p><blockquote><pre>
6719 % time listadmin xiph
6720 fetching data for pkg-xiph-commits@lists.alioth.debian.org ... nothing in queue
6721 fetching data for pkg-xiph-maint@lists.alioth.debian.org ... nothing in queue
6722
6723 real    0m1.709s
6724 user    0m0.232s
6725 sys     0m0.012s
6726 %
6727 </pre></blockquote></p>
6728
6729 <p>In 1.7 seconds I had checked two mailing lists and confirmed that
6730 there are no message in the moderation queue.  Every morning I
6731 currently moderate 68 mailman lists, and it normally take around two
6732 minutes.  When I took over the two pkg-xiph lists above a few days
6733 ago, there were 400 emails waiting in the moderator queue.  It took me
6734 less than 15 minutes to process them all using the listadmin
6735 program.</p>
6736
6737 <p>If you install
6738 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/listadmin">the listadmin
6739 package</a> from Debian and create a file <tt>~/.listadmin.ini</tt>
6740 with content like this, the moderation task is a breeze:</p>
6741
6742 <p><blockquote><pre>
6743 username username@example.org
6744 spamlevel 23
6745 default discard
6746 discard_if_reason "Posting restricted to members only. Remove us from your mail list."
6747
6748 password secret
6749 adminurl https://{domain}/mailman/admindb/{list}
6750 mailman-list@lists.example.com
6751
6752 password hidden
6753 other-list@otherserver.example.org
6754 </pre></blockquote></p>
6755
6756 <p>There are other options to set as well.  Check the manual page to
6757 learn the details.</p>
6758
6759 <p>If you are forced to moderate lists on a mailman installation where
6760 the SSL certificate is self signed or not properly signed by a
6761 generally accepted signing authority, you can set a environment
6762 variable when calling listadmin to disable SSL verification:</p>
6763
6764 <p><blockquote><pre>
6765 PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=0 listadmin
6766 </pre></blockquote></p>
6767
6768 <p>If you want to moderate a subset of the lists you take care of, you
6769 can provide an argument to the listadmin script like I do in the
6770 initial screen dump (the xiph argument).  Using an argument, only
6771 lists matching the argument string will be processed.  This make it
6772 quick to accept messages if you notice the moderation request in your
6773 email.</p>
6774
6775 <p>Without the listadmin program, I would never be the moderator of 68
6776 mailing lists, as I simply do not have time to spend on that if the
6777 process was any slower. The listadmin program have saved me hours of
6778 time I could spend elsewhere over the years.  It truly is nice free
6779 software.</p>
6780
6781 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
6782 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
6783 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
6784
6785 <p>Update 2014-10-27: Added missing 'username' statement in
6786 configuration example.  Also, I've been told that the
6787 PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=0 setting do not work for everyone.  Not
6788 sure why.</p>
6789
6790       </div>
6791       <div class="tags">
6792
6793
6794         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
6795
6796
6797       </div>
6798     </div>
6799     <div class="padding"></div>
6800
6801     <div class="entry">
6802       <div class="title">
6803         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Jessie__PXE_and_automatic_firmware_installation.html">Debian Jessie, PXE and automatic firmware installation</a>
6804       </div>
6805       <div class="date">
6806         17th October 2014
6807       </div>
6808       <div class="body">
6809         <p>When PXE installing laptops with Debian, I often run into the
6810 problem that the WiFi card require some firmware to work properly.
6811 And it has been a pain to fix this using preseeding in Debian.
6812 Normally something more is needed.  But thanks to
6813 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/i/isenkram.html">my isenkram
6814 package</a> and its recent tasksel extension, it has now become easy
6815 to do this using simple preseeding.</p>
6816
6817 <p>The isenkram-cli package provide tasksel tasks which will install
6818 firmware for the hardware found in the machine (actually, requested by
6819 the kernel modules for the hardware).  (It can also install user space
6820 programs supporting the hardware detected, but that is not the focus
6821 of this story.)</p>
6822
6823 <p>To get this working in the default installation, two preeseding
6824 values are needed.  First, the isenkram-cli package must be installed
6825 into the target chroot (aka the hard drive) before tasksel is executed
6826 in the pkgsel step of the debian-installer system.  This is done by
6827 preseeding the base-installer/includes debconf value to include the
6828 isenkram-cli package.  The package name is next passed to debootstrap
6829 for installation.  With the isenkram-cli package in place, tasksel
6830 will automatically use the isenkram tasks to detect hardware specific
6831 packages for the machine being installed and install them, because
6832 isenkram-cli contain tasksel tasks.</p>
6833
6834 <p>Second, one need to enable the non-free APT repository, because
6835 most firmware unfortunately is non-free.  This is done by preseeding
6836 the apt-mirror-setup step.  This is unfortunate, but for a lot of
6837 hardware it is the only option in Debian.</p>
6838
6839 <p>The end result is two lines needed in your preseeding file to get
6840 firmware installed automatically by the installer:</p>
6841
6842 <p><blockquote><pre>
6843 base-installer base-installer/includes string isenkram-cli
6844 apt-mirror-setup apt-setup/non-free boolean true
6845 </pre></blockquote></p>
6846
6847 <p>The current version of isenkram-cli in testing/jessie will install
6848 both firmware and user space packages when using this method.  It also
6849 do not work well, so use version 0.15 or later.  Installing both
6850 firmware and user space packages might give you a bit more than you
6851 want, so I decided to split the tasksel task in two, one for firmware
6852 and one for user space programs.  The firmware task is enabled by
6853 default, while the one for user space programs is not.  This split is
6854 implemented in the package currently in unstable.</p>
6855
6856 <p>If you decide to give this a go, please let me know (via email) how
6857 this recipe work for you. :)</p>
6858
6859 <p>So, I bet you are wondering, how can this work.  First and
6860 foremost, it work because tasksel is modular, and driven by whatever
6861 files it find in /usr/lib/tasksel/ and /usr/share/tasksel/.  So the
6862 isenkram-cli package place two files for tasksel to find.  First there
6863 is the task description file (/usr/share/tasksel/descs/isenkram.desc):</p>
6864
6865 <p><blockquote><pre>
6866 Task: isenkram-packages
6867 Section: hardware
6868 Description: Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)
6869  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific packages are
6870  proposed.
6871 Test-new-install: show show
6872 Relevance: 8
6873 Packages: for-current-hardware
6874
6875 Task: isenkram-firmware
6876 Section: hardware
6877 Description: Hardware specific firmware packages (autodetected by isenkram)
6878  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific firmware
6879  packages are proposed.
6880 Test-new-install: mark show
6881 Relevance: 8
6882 Packages: for-current-hardware-firmware
6883 </pre></blockquote></p>
6884
6885 <p>The key parts are Test-new-install which indicate how the task
6886 should be handled and the Packages line referencing to a script in
6887 /usr/lib/tasksel/packages/.  The scripts use other scripts to get a
6888 list of packages to install.  The for-current-hardware-firmware script
6889 look like this to list relevant firmware for the machine:
6890
6891 <p><blockquote><pre>
6892 #!/bin/sh
6893 #
6894 PATH=/usr/sbin:$PATH
6895 export PATH
6896 isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
6897 </pre></blockquote></p>
6898
6899 <p>With those two pieces in place, the firmware is installed by
6900 tasksel during the normal d-i run. :)</p>
6901
6902 <p>If you want to test what tasksel will install when isenkram-cli is
6903 installed, run <tt>DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical tasksel --test
6904 --new-install</tt> to get the list of packages that tasksel would
6905 install.</p>
6906
6907 <p><a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/">Debian Edu</a> will be
6908 pilots in testing this feature, as isenkram is used there now to
6909 install firmware, replacing the earlier scripts.</p>
6910
6911       </div>
6912       <div class="tags">
6913
6914
6915         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sysadmin">sysadmin</a>.
6916
6917
6918       </div>
6919     </div>
6920     <div class="padding"></div>
6921
6922     <div class="entry">
6923       <div class="title">
6924         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ubuntu_used_to_show_the_bread_prizes_at_ICA_Storo.html">Ubuntu used to show the bread prizes at ICA Storo</a>
6925       </div>
6926       <div class="date">
6927          4th October 2014
6928       </div>
6929       <div class="body">
6930         <p>Today I came across an unexpected Ubuntu boot screen.  Above the
6931 bread shelf on the ICA shop at Storo in Oslo, the grub menu of Ubuntu
6932 with Linux kernel 3.2.0-23 (ie probably version 12.04 LTS) was stuck
6933 on a screen normally showing the bread types and prizes:</p>
6934
6935 <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2014-10-04-ubuntu-ica-storo-crop.jpeg"></p>
6936
6937 <p>If it had booted as it was supposed to, I would never had known
6938 about this hidden Linux installation.  It is interesting what
6939 <a href="http://revealingerrors.com/">errors can reveal</a>.</p>
6940
6941       </div>
6942       <div class="tags">
6943
6944
6945         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6946
6947
6948       </div>
6949     </div>
6950     <div class="padding"></div>
6951
6952     <div class="entry">
6953       <div class="title">
6954         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_lsdvd_release_version_0_17_is_ready.html">New lsdvd release version 0.17 is ready</a>
6955       </div>
6956       <div class="date">
6957          4th October 2014
6958       </div>
6959       <div class="body">
6960         <p>The <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/">lsdvd project</a>
6961 got a new set of developers a few weeks ago, after the original
6962 developer decided to step down and pass the project to fresh blood.
6963 This project is now maintained by Petter Reinholdtsen and Steve
6964 Dibb.</p>
6965
6966 <p>I just wrapped up
6967 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/mailman/message/32896061/">a
6968 new lsdvd release</a>, available in git or from
6969 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/projects/lsdvd/files/lsdvd/">the
6970 download page</a>.  This is the changelog dated 2014-10-03 for version
6971 0.17.</p>
6972
6973 <ul>
6974
6975  <li>Ignore 'phantom' audio, subtitle tracks</li>
6976  <li>Check for garbage in the program chains, which indicate that a track is
6977    non-existant, to work around additional copy protection</li>
6978  <li>Fix displaying content type for audio tracks, subtitles</li>
6979  <li>Fix pallete display of first entry</li>
6980  <li>Fix include orders</li>
6981  <li>Ignore read errors in titles that would not be displayed anyway</li>
6982  <li>Fix the chapter count</li>
6983  <li>Make sure the array size and the array limit used when initialising
6984    the palette size is the same.</li>
6985  <li>Fix array printing.</li>
6986  <li>Correct subsecond calculations.</li>
6987  <li>Add sector information to the output format.</li>
6988  <li>Clean up code to be closer to ANSI C and compile without warnings
6989    with more GCC compiler warnings.</li>
6990
6991 </ul>
6992
6993 <p>This change bring together patches for lsdvd in use in various
6994 Linux and Unix distributions, as well as patches submitted to the
6995 project the last nine years.  Please check it out. :)</p>
6996
6997       </div>
6998       <div class="tags">
6999
7000
7001         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lsdvd">lsdvd</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>.
7002
7003
7004       </div>
7005     </div>
7006     <div class="padding"></div>
7007
7008     <div class="entry">
7009       <div class="title">
7010         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_test_Debian_Edu_Jessie_despite_some_fatal_problems_with_the_installer.html">How to test Debian Edu Jessie despite some fatal problems with the installer</a>
7011       </div>
7012       <div class="date">
7013         26th September 2014
7014       </div>
7015       <div class="body">
7016         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
7017 project</a> provide a Linux solution for schools, including a
7018 powerful desktop with education software, a central server providing
7019 web pages, user database, user home directories, central login and PXE
7020 boot of both  clients without disk and the installation to install Debian
7021 Edu on machines with disk (and a few other services perhaps to small
7022 to mention here).  We in the Debian Edu team are currently working on
7023 the Jessie based version, trying to get everything in shape before the
7024 freeze, to avoid having to maintain our own package repository in the
7025 future.  The
7026 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie">current
7027 status</a> can be seen on the Debian wiki, and there is still heaps of
7028 work left.  Some fatal problems block testing, breaking the installer,
7029 but it is possible to work around these to get anyway.  Here is a
7030 recipe on how to get the installation limping along.</p>
7031
7032 <p>First, download the test ISO via
7033 <a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.no/cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso">ftp</a>,
7034 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.no/cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso">http</a>
7035 or rsync (use
7036 ftp.skolelinux.org::cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso).
7037 The ISO build was broken on Tuesday, so we do not get a new ISO every
7038 12 hours or so, but thankfully the ISO we already got we are able to
7039 install with some tweaking.</p>
7040
7041 <p>When you get to the Debian Edu profile question, go to tty2
7042 (use Alt-Ctrl-F2), run</p>
7043
7044 <p><blockquote><pre>
7045 nano /usr/bin/edu-eatmydata-install
7046 </pre></blockquote></p>
7047
7048 <p>and add 'exit 0' as the second line, disabling the eatmydata
7049 optimization.  Return to the installation, select the profile you want
7050 and continue.  Without this change, exim4-config will fail to install
7051 due to a known bug in eatmydata.</p>
7052
7053 <p>When you get the grub question at the end, answer /dev/sda (or if
7054 this do not work, figure out what your correct value would be.  All my
7055 test machines need /dev/sda, so I have no advice if it do not fit
7056 your need.</p>
7057
7058 <p>If you installed a profile including a graphical desktop, log in as
7059 root after the initial boot from hard drive, and install the
7060 education-desktop-XXX metapackage.  XXX can be kde, gnome, lxde, xfce
7061 or mate.  If you want several desktop options, install more than one
7062 metapackage.  Once this is done, reboot and you should have a working
7063 graphical login screen.  This workaround should no longer be needed
7064 once the education-tasks package version 1.801 enter testing in two
7065 days.</p>
7066
7067 <p>I believe the ISO build will start working on two days when the new
7068 tasksel package enter testing and Steve McIntyre get a chance to
7069 update the debian-cd git repository.  The eatmydata, grub and desktop
7070 issues are already fixed in unstable and testing, and should show up
7071 on the ISO as soon as the ISO build start working again.  Well the
7072 eatmydata optimization is really just disabled.  The proper fix
7073 require an upload by the eatmydata maintainer applying the patch
7074 provided in bug <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/702711">#702711</a>.
7075 The rest have proper fixes in unstable.</p>
7076
7077 <p>I hope this get you going with the installation testing, as we are
7078 quickly running out of time trying to get our Jessie based
7079 installation ready before the distribution freeze in a month.</p>
7080
7081       </div>
7082       <div class="tags">
7083
7084
7085         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7086
7087
7088       </div>
7089     </div>
7090     <div class="padding"></div>
7091
7092     <div class="entry">
7093       <div class="title">
7094         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Suddenly_I_am_the_new_upstream_of_the_lsdvd_command_line_tool.html">Suddenly I am the new upstream of the lsdvd command line tool</a>
7095       </div>
7096       <div class="date">
7097         25th September 2014
7098       </div>
7099       <div class="body">
7100         <p>I use the <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/">lsdvd tool</a>
7101 to handle my fairly large DVD collection.  It is a nice command line
7102 tool to get details about a DVD, like title, tracks, track length,
7103 etc, in XML, Perl or human readable format.  But lsdvd have not seen
7104 any new development since 2006 and had a few irritating bugs affecting
7105 its use with some DVDs.  Upstream seemed to be dead, and in January I
7106 sent a small probe asking for a version control repository for the
7107 project, without any reply.  But I use it regularly and would like to
7108 get <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/lsdvd">an updated version
7109 into Debian</a>.  So two weeks ago I tried harder to get in touch with
7110 the project admin, and after getting a reply from him explaining that
7111 he was no longer interested in the project, I asked if I could take
7112 over.  And yesterday, I became project admin.</p>
7113
7114 <p>I've been in touch with a Gentoo developer and the Debian
7115 maintainer interested in joining forces to maintain the upstream
7116 project, and I hope we can get a new release out fairly quickly,
7117 collecting the patches spread around on the internet into on place.
7118 I've added the relevant Debian patches to the freshly created git
7119 repository, and expect the Gentoo patches to make it too.  If you got
7120 a DVD collection and care about command line tools, check out
7121 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/git/ci/master/tree/">the git source</a> and join
7122 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/mailman/">the project mailing
7123 list</a>. :)</p>
7124
7125       </div>
7126       <div class="tags">
7127
7128
7129         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lsdvd">lsdvd</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>.
7130
7131
7132       </div>
7133     </div>
7134     <div class="padding"></div>
7135
7136     <div class="entry">
7137       <div class="title">
7138         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Speeding_up_the_Debian_installer_using_eatmydata_and_dpkg_divert.html">Speeding up the Debian installer using eatmydata and dpkg-divert</a>
7139       </div>
7140       <div class="date">
7141         16th September 2014
7142       </div>
7143       <div class="body">
7144         <p>The <a href="https://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> installer could be
7145 a lot quicker.  When we install more than 2000 packages in
7146 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a> using
7147 tasksel in the installer, unpacking the binary packages take forever.
7148 A part of the slow I/O issue was discussed in
7149 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/613428">bug #613428</a> about too
7150 much file system sync-ing done by dpkg, which is the package
7151 responsible for unpacking the binary packages.  Other parts (like code
7152 executed by postinst scripts) might also sync to disk during
7153 installation.  All this sync-ing to disk do not really make sense to
7154 me.  If the machine crash half-way through, I start over, I do not try
7155 to salvage the half installed system.  So the failure sync-ing is
7156 supposed to protect against, hardware or system crash, is not really
7157 relevant while the installer is running.</p>
7158
7159 <p>A few days ago, I thought of a way to get rid of all the file
7160 system sync()-ing in a fairly non-intrusive way, without the need to
7161 change the code in several packages.  The idea is not new, but I have
7162 not heard anyone propose the approach using dpkg-divert before.  It
7163 depend on the small and clever package
7164 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/eatmydata">eatmydata</a>, which
7165 uses LD_PRELOAD to replace the system functions for syncing data to
7166 disk with functions doing nothing, thus allowing programs to live
7167 dangerous while speeding up disk I/O significantly.  Instead of
7168 modifying the implementation of dpkg, apt and tasksel (which are the
7169 packages responsible for selecting, fetching and installing packages),
7170 it occurred to me that we could just divert the programs away, replace
7171 them with a simple shell wrapper calling
7172 "eatmydata&nbsp;$program&nbsp;$@", to get the same effect.
7173 Two days ago I decided to test the idea, and wrapped up a simple
7174 implementation for the Debian Edu udeb.</p>
7175
7176 <p>The effect was stunning.  In my first test it reduced the running
7177 time of the pkgsel step (installing tasks) from 64 to less than 44
7178 minutes (20 minutes shaved off the installation) on an old Dell
7179 Latitude D505 machine.  I am not quite sure what the optimised time
7180 would have been, as I messed up the testing a bit, causing the debconf
7181 priority to get low enough for two questions to pop up during
7182 installation.  As soon as I saw the questions I moved the installation
7183 along, but do not know how long the question were holding up the
7184 installation.  I did some more measurements using Debian Edu Jessie,
7185 and got these results.  The time measured is the time stamp in
7186 /var/log/syslog between the "pkgsel: starting tasksel" and the
7187 "pkgsel: finishing up" lines, if you want to do the same measurement
7188 yourself.  In Debian Edu, the tasksel dialog do not show up, and the
7189 timing thus do not depend on how quickly the user handle the tasksel
7190 dialog.</p>
7191
7192 <p><table>
7193
7194 <tr>
7195 <th>Machine/setup</th>
7196 <th>Original tasksel</th>
7197 <th>Optimised tasksel</th>
7198 <th>Reduction</th>
7199 </tr>
7200
7201 <tr>
7202 <td>Latitude D505 Main+LTSP LXDE</td>
7203 <td>64 min (07:46-08:50)</td>
7204 <td><44 min (11:27-12:11)</td>
7205 <td>>20 min 18%</td>
7206 </tr>
7207
7208 <tr>
7209 <td>Latitude D505 Roaming LXDE</td>
7210 <td>57 min (08:48-09:45)</td>
7211 <td>34 min (07:43-08:17)</td>
7212 <td>23 min 40%</td>
7213 </tr>
7214
7215 <tr>
7216 <td>Latitude D505 Minimal</td>
7217 <td>22 min (10:37-10:59)</td>
7218 <td>11 min (11:16-11:27)</td>
7219 <td>11 min 50%</td>
7220 </tr>
7221
7222 <tr>
7223 <td>Thinkpad X200 Minimal</td>
7224 <td>6 min (08:19-08:25)</td>
7225 <td>4 min (08:04-08:08)</td>
7226 <td>2 min 33%</td>
7227 </tr>
7228
7229 <tr>
7230 <td>Thinkpad X200 Roaming KDE</td>
7231 <td>19 min (09:21-09:40)</td>
7232 <td>15 min (10:25-10:40)</td>
7233 <td>4 min 21%</td>
7234 </tr>
7235
7236 </table></p>
7237
7238 <p>The test is done using a netinst ISO on a USB stick, so some of the
7239 time is spent downloading packages.  The connection to the Internet
7240 was 100Mbit/s during testing, so downloading should not be a
7241 significant factor in the measurement.  Download typically took a few
7242 seconds to a few minutes, depending on the amount of packages being
7243 installed.</p>
7244
7245 <p>The speedup is implemented by using two hooks in
7246 <a href="https://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/">Debian
7247 Installer</a>, the pre-pkgsel.d hook to set up the diverts, and the
7248 finish-install.d hook to remove the divert at the end of the
7249 installation.  I picked the pre-pkgsel.d hook instead of the
7250 post-base-installer.d hook because I test using an ISO without the
7251 eatmydata package included, and the post-base-installer.d hook in
7252 Debian Edu can only operate on packages included in the ISO.  The
7253 negative effect of this is that I am unable to activate this
7254 optimization for the kernel installation step in d-i.  If the code is
7255 moved to the post-base-installer.d hook, the speedup would be larger
7256 for the entire installation.</p>
7257
7258 <p>I've implemented this in the
7259 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/debian-edu-install">debian-edu-install</a>
7260 git repository, and plan to provide the optimization as part of the
7261 Debian Edu installation.  If you want to test this yourself, you can
7262 create two files in the installer (or in an udeb).  One shell script
7263 need do go into /usr/lib/pre-pkgsel.d/, with content like this:</p>
7264
7265 <p><blockquote><pre>
7266 #!/bin/sh
7267 set -e
7268 . /usr/share/debconf/confmodule
7269 info() {
7270     logger -t my-pkgsel "info: $*"
7271 }
7272 error() {
7273     logger -t my-pkgsel "error: $*"
7274 }
7275 override_install() {
7276     apt-install eatmydata || true
7277     if [ -x /target/usr/bin/eatmydata ] ; then
7278         for bin in dpkg apt-get aptitude tasksel ; do
7279             file=/usr/bin/$bin
7280             # Test that the file exist and have not been diverted already.
7281             if [ -f /target$file ] ; then
7282                 info "diverting $file using eatmydata"
7283                 printf "#!/bin/sh\neatmydata $bin.distrib \"\$@\"\n" \
7284                     > /target$file.edu
7285                 chmod 755 /target$file.edu
7286                 in-target dpkg-divert --package debian-edu-config \
7287                     --rename --quiet --add $file
7288                 ln -sf ./$bin.edu /target$file
7289             else
7290                 error "unable to divert $file, as it is missing."
7291             fi
7292         done
7293     else
7294         error "unable to find /usr/bin/eatmydata after installing the eatmydata pacage"
7295     fi
7296 }
7297
7298 override_install
7299 </pre></blockquote></p>
7300
7301 <p>To clean up, another shell script should go into
7302 /usr/lib/finish-install.d/ with code like this:
7303
7304 <p><blockquote><pre>
7305 #! /bin/sh -e
7306 . /usr/share/debconf/confmodule
7307 error() {
7308     logger -t my-finish-install "error: $@"
7309 }
7310 remove_install_override() {
7311     for bin in dpkg apt-get aptitude tasksel ; do
7312         file=/usr/bin/$bin
7313         if [ -x /target$file.edu ] ; then
7314             rm /target$file
7315             in-target dpkg-divert --package debian-edu-config \
7316                 --rename --quiet --remove $file
7317             rm /target$file.edu
7318         else
7319             error "Missing divert for $file."
7320         fi
7321     done
7322     sync # Flush file buffers before continuing
7323 }
7324
7325 remove_install_override
7326 </pre></blockquote></p>
7327
7328 <p>In Debian Edu, I placed both code fragments in a separate script
7329 edu-eatmydata-install and call it from the pre-pkgsel.d and
7330 finish-install.d scripts.</p>
7331
7332 <p>By now you might ask if this change should get into the normal
7333 Debian installer too?  I suspect it should, but am not sure the
7334 current debian-installer coordinators find it useful enough.  It also
7335 depend on the side effects of the change.  I'm not aware of any, but I
7336 guess we will see if the change is safe after some more testing.
7337 Perhaps there is some package in Debian depending on sync() and
7338 fsync() having effect?  Perhaps it should go into its own udeb, to
7339 allow those of us wanting to enable it to do so without affecting
7340 everyone.</p>
7341
7342 <p>Update 2014-09-24: Since a few days ago, enabling this optimization
7343 will break installation of all programs using gnutls because of
7344 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/702711">bug #702711</a>.  An updated
7345 eatmydata package in Debian will solve it.</p>
7346
7347 <p>Update 2014-10-17: The bug mentioned above is fixed in testing and
7348 the optimization work again.  And I have discovered that the
7349 dpkg-divert trick is not really needed and implemented a slightly
7350 simpler approach as part of the debian-edu-install package.  See
7351 tools/edu-eatmydata-install in the source package.</p>
7352
7353 <p>Update 2014-11-11: Unfortunately, a new
7354 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/765738">bug #765738</a> in eatmydata only
7355 triggering on i386 made it into testing, and broke this installation
7356 optimization again.  If <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/768893">unblock
7357 request 768893</a> is accepted, it should be working again.</p>
7358
7359       </div>
7360       <div class="tags">
7361
7362
7363         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7364
7365
7366       </div>
7367     </div>
7368     <div class="padding"></div>
7369
7370     <div class="entry">
7371       <div class="title">
7372         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Good_bye_subkeys_pgp_net__welcome_pool_sks_keyservers_net.html">Good bye subkeys.pgp.net, welcome pool.sks-keyservers.net</a>
7373       </div>
7374       <div class="date">
7375         10th September 2014
7376       </div>
7377       <div class="body">
7378         <p>Yesterday, I had the pleasure of attending a talk with the
7379 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a> about
7380 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20140909-sks-keyservers/">the
7381 OpenPGP keyserver pool sks-keyservers.net</a>, and was very happy to
7382 learn that there is a large set of publicly available key servers to
7383 use when looking for peoples public key.  So far I have used
7384 subkeys.pgp.net, and some times wwwkeys.nl.pgp.net when the former
7385 were misbehaving, but those days are ended.  The servers I have used
7386 up until yesterday have been slow and some times unavailable.  I hope
7387 those problems are gone now.</p>
7388
7389 <p>Behind the round robin DNS entry of the
7390 <a href="https://sks-keyservers.net/">sks-keyservers.net</a> service
7391 there is a pool of more than 100 keyservers which are checked every
7392 day to ensure they are well connected and up to date.  It must be
7393 better than what I have used so far. :)</p>
7394
7395 <p>Yesterdays speaker told me that the service is the default
7396 keyserver provided by the default configuration in GnuPG, but this do
7397 not seem to be used in Debian.  Perhaps it should?</p>
7398
7399 <p>Anyway, I've updated my ~/.gnupg/options file to now include this
7400 line:</p>
7401
7402 <p><blockquote><pre>
7403 keyserver pool.sks-keyservers.net
7404 </pre></blockquote></p>
7405
7406 <p>With GnuPG version 2 one can also locate the keyserver using SRV
7407 entries in DNS.  Just for fun, I did just that at work, so now every
7408 user of GnuPG at the University of Oslo should find a OpenGPG
7409 keyserver automatically should their need it:</p>
7410
7411 <p><blockquote><pre>
7412 % host -t srv _pgpkey-http._tcp.uio.no
7413 _pgpkey-http._tcp.uio.no has SRV record 0 100 11371 pool.sks-keyservers.net.
7414 %
7415 </pre></blockquote></p>
7416
7417 <p>Now if only
7418 <a href="http://ietfreport.isoc.org/idref/draft-shaw-openpgp-hkp/">the
7419 HKP lookup protocol</a> supported finding signature paths, I would be
7420 very happy.  It can look up a given key or search for a user ID, but I
7421 normally do not want that, but to find a trust path from my key to
7422 another key.  Given a user ID or key ID, I would like to find (and
7423 download) the keys representing a signature path from my key to the
7424 key in question, to be able to get a trust path between the two keys.
7425 This is as far as I can tell not possible today.  Perhaps something
7426 for a future version of the protocol?</p>
7427
7428       </div>
7429       <div class="tags">
7430
7431
7432         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
7433
7434
7435       </div>
7436     </div>
7437     <div class="padding"></div>
7438
7439     <div class="entry">
7440       <div class="title">
7441         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/From_English_wiki_to_translated_PDF_and_epub_via_Docbook.html">From English wiki to translated PDF and epub via Docbook</a>
7442       </div>
7443       <div class="date">
7444         17th June 2014
7445       </div>
7446       <div class="body">
7447         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
7448 project</a> provide an instruction manual for teachers, system
7449 administrators and other users that contain useful tips for setting up
7450 and maintaining a Debian Edu installation.  This text is about how the
7451 text processing of this manual is handled in the project.</p>
7452
7453 <p>One goal of the project is to provide information in the native
7454 language of its users, and for this we need to handle translations.
7455 But we also want to make sure each language contain the same
7456 information, so for this we need a good way to keep the translations
7457 in sync.  And we want it to be easy for our users to improve the
7458 documentation, avoiding the need to learn special formats or tools to
7459 contribute, and the obvious way to do this is to make it possible to
7460 edit the documentation using a web browser.  We also want it to be
7461 easy for translators to keep the translation up to date, and give them
7462 help in figuring out what need to be translated. Here is the list of
7463 tools and the process we have found trying to reach all these
7464 goals.</p>
7465
7466 <p>We maintain the authoritative source of our manual in the
7467 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/">Debian
7468 wiki</a>, as several wiki pages written in English.  It consist of one
7469 front page with references to the different chapters, several pages
7470 for each chapter, and finally one "collection page" gluing all the
7471 chapters together into one large web page (aka
7472 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/AllInOne">the
7473 AllInOne page</a>).  The AllInOne page is the one used for further
7474 processing and translations.  Thanks to the fact that the
7475 <a href="http://moinmo.in/">MoinMoin</a> installation on
7476 wiki.debian.org support exporting pages in
7477 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">the Docbook format</a>, we can fetch
7478 the list of pages to export using the raw version of the AllInOne
7479 page, loop over each of them to generate a Docbook XML version of the
7480 manual.  This process also download images and transform image
7481 references to use the locally downloaded images.  The generated
7482 Docbook XML files are slightly broken, so some post-processing is done
7483 using the <tt>documentation/scripts/get_manual</tt> program, and the
7484 result is a nice Docbook XML file (debian-edu-wheezy-manual.xml) and
7485 a handfull of images.  The XML file can now be used to generate PDF, HTML
7486 and epub versions of the English manual.  This is the basic step of
7487 our process, making PDF (using dblatex), HTML (using xsltproc) and
7488 epub (using dbtoepub) version from Docbook XML, and the resulting files
7489 are placed in the debian-edu-doc-en binary package.</p>
7490
7491 <p>But English documentation is not enough for us.  We want translated
7492 documentation too, and we want to make it easy for translators to
7493 track the English original.  For this we use the
7494 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/poxml.html">poxml</a> package,
7495 which allow us to transform the English Docbook XML file into a
7496 translation file (a .pot file), usable with the normal gettext based
7497 translation tools used by those translating free software.  The pot
7498 file is used to create and maintain translation files (several .po
7499 files), which the translations update with the native language
7500 translations of all titles, paragraphs and blocks of text in the
7501 original.  The next step is combining the original English Docbook XML
7502 and the translation file (say debian-edu-wheezy-manual.nb.po), to
7503 create a translated Docbook XML file (in this case
7504 debian-edu-wheezy-manual.nb.xml).  This translated (or partly
7505 translated, if the translation is not complete) Docbook XML file can
7506 then be used like the original to create a PDF, HTML and epub version
7507 of the documentation.</p>
7508
7509 <p>The translators use different tools to edit the .po files.  We
7510 recommend using
7511 <a href="http://www.kde.org/applications/development/lokalize/">lokalize</a>,
7512 while some use emacs and vi, others can use web based editors like
7513 <a href="http://pootle.translatehouse.org/">Poodle</a> or
7514 <a href="https://www.transifex.com/">Transifex</a>.  All we care about
7515 is where the .po file end up, in our git repository.  Updated
7516 translations can either be committed directly to git, or submitted as
7517 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/src:debian-edu-doc">bug reports
7518 against the debian-edu-doc package</a>.</p>
7519
7520 <p>One challenge is images, which both might need to be translated (if
7521 they show translated user applications), and are needed in different
7522 formats when creating PDF and HTML versions (epub is a HTML version in
7523 this regard).  For this we transform the original PNG images to the
7524 needed density and format during build, and have a way to provide
7525 translated images by storing translated versions in
7526 images/$LANGUAGECODE/.  I am a bit unsure about the details here.  The
7527 package maintainers know more.</p>
7528
7529 <p>If you wonder what the result look like, we provide
7530 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/">the content
7531 of the documentation packages on the web</a>.  See for example the
7532 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/it/debian-edu-wheezy-manual.pdf">Italian
7533 PDF version</a> or the
7534 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/de/debian-edu-wheezy-manual.html">German
7535 HTML version</a>.  We do not yet build the epub version by default,
7536 but perhaps it will be done in the future.</p>
7537
7538 <p>To learn more, check out
7539 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/debian-edu-doc.html">the
7540 debian-edu-doc package</a>,
7541 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/">the
7542 manual on the wiki</a> and
7543 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/Translations">the
7544 translation instructions</a> in the manual.</p>
7545
7546       </div>
7547       <div class="tags">
7548
7549
7550         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7551
7552
7553       </div>
7554     </div>
7555     <div class="padding"></div>
7556
7557     <div class="entry">
7558       <div class="title">
7559         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Install_hardware_dependent_packages_using_tasksel__Isenkram_0_7_.html">Install hardware dependent packages using tasksel (Isenkram 0.7)</a>
7560       </div>
7561       <div class="date">
7562         23rd April 2014
7563       </div>
7564       <div class="body">
7565         <p>It would be nice if it was easier in Debian to get all the hardware
7566 related packages relevant for the computer installed automatically.
7567 So I implemented one, using
7568 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">my Isenkram
7569 package</a>.  To use it, install the tasksel and isenkram packages and
7570 run tasksel as user root.  You should be presented with a new option,
7571 "Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)".  When you
7572 select it, tasksel will install the packages isenkram claim is fit for
7573 the current hardware, hot pluggable or not.<p>
7574
7575 <p>The implementation is in two files, one is the tasksel menu entry
7576 description, and the other is the script used to extract the list of
7577 packages to install.  The first part is in
7578 <tt>/usr/share/tasksel/descs/isenkram.desc</tt> and look like
7579 this:</p>
7580
7581 <p><blockquote><pre>
7582 Task: isenkram
7583 Section: hardware
7584 Description: Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)
7585  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific packages are
7586  proposed.
7587 Test-new-install: mark show
7588 Relevance: 8
7589 Packages: for-current-hardware
7590 </pre></blockquote></p>
7591
7592 <p>The second part is in
7593 <tt>/usr/lib/tasksel/packages/for-current-hardware</tt> and look like
7594 this:</p>
7595
7596 <p><blockquote><pre>
7597 #!/bin/sh
7598 #
7599 (
7600     isenkram-lookup
7601     isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
7602 ) | sort -u
7603 </pre></blockquote></p>
7604
7605 <p>All in all, a very short and simple implementation making it
7606 trivial to install the hardware dependent package we all may want to
7607 have installed on our machines.  I've not been able to find a way to
7608 get tasksel to tell you exactly which packages it plan to install
7609 before doing the installation.  So if you are curious or careful,
7610 check the output from the isenkram-* command line tools first.</p>
7611
7612 <p>The information about which packages are handling which hardware is
7613 fetched either from the isenkram package itself in
7614 /usr/share/isenkram/, from git.debian.org or from the APT package
7615 database (using the Modaliases header).  The APT package database
7616 parsing have caused a nasty resource leak in the isenkram daemon (bugs
7617 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/719837">#719837</a> and
7618 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/730704">#730704</a>).  The cause is in
7619 the python-apt code (bug
7620 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/745487">#745487</a>), but using a
7621 workaround I was able to get rid of the file descriptor leak and
7622 reduce the memory leak from ~30 MiB per hardware detection down to
7623 around 2 MiB per hardware detection.  It should make the desktop
7624 daemon a lot more useful.  The fix is in version 0.7 uploaded to
7625 unstable today.</p>
7626
7627 <p>I believe the current way of mapping hardware to packages in
7628 Isenkram is is a good draft, but in the future I expect isenkram to
7629 use the AppStream data source for this.  A proposal for getting proper
7630 AppStream support into Debian is floating around as
7631 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-11">DEP-11</a>, and
7632 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2014/Projects#SummerOfCode2014.2FProjects.2FAppStreamDEP11Implementation.AppStream.2FDEP-11_for_the_Debian_Archive">GSoC
7633 project</a> will take place this summer to improve the situation.  I
7634 look forward to seeing the result, and welcome patches for isenkram to
7635 start using the information when it is ready.</p>
7636
7637 <p>If you want your package to map to some specific hardware, either
7638 add a "Xb-Modaliases" header to your control file like I did in
7639 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pymissile">the pymissile
7640 package</a> or submit a bug report with the details to the isenkram
7641 package.  See also
7642 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">all my
7643 blog posts tagged isenkram</a> for details on the notation.  I expect
7644 the information will be migrated to AppStream eventually, but for the
7645 moment I got no better place to store it.</p>
7646
7647       </div>
7648       <div class="tags">
7649
7650
7651         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
7652
7653
7654       </div>
7655     </div>
7656     <div class="padding"></div>
7657
7658     <div class="entry">
7659       <div class="title">
7660         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/FreedomBox_milestone___all_packages_now_in_Debian_Sid.html">FreedomBox milestone - all packages now in Debian Sid</a>
7661       </div>
7662       <div class="date">
7663         15th April 2014
7664       </div>
7665       <div class="body">
7666         <p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox
7667 project</a> is working on providing the software and hardware to make
7668 it easy for non-technical people to host their data and communication
7669 at home, and being able to communicate with their friends and family
7670 encrypted and away from prying eyes.  It is still going strong, and
7671 today a major mile stone was reached.</p>
7672
7673 <p>Today, the last of the packages currently used by the project to
7674 created the system images were accepted into Debian Unstable.  It was
7675 the freedombox-setup package, which is used to configure the images
7676 during build and on the first boot.  Now all one need to get going is
7677 the build code from the freedom-maker git repository and packages from
7678 Debian.  And once the freedombox-setup package enter testing, we can
7679 build everything directly from Debian. :)</p>
7680
7681 <p>Some key packages used by Freedombox are
7682 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/freedombox-setup">freedombox-setup</a>,
7683 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/plinth">plinth</a>,
7684 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pagekite">pagekite</a>,
7685 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/tor">tor</a>,
7686 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/privoxy">privoxy</a>,
7687 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/owncloud">owncloud</a> and
7688 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/dnsmasq">dnsmasq</a>.  There
7689 are plans to integrate more packages into the setup.  User
7690 documentation is maintained on the Debian wiki.  Please
7691 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/Manual/Jessie">check out
7692 the manual</a> and help us improve it.</p>
7693
7694 <p>To test for yourself and create boot images with the FreedomBox
7695 setup, run this on a Debian machine using a user with sudo rights to
7696 become root:</p>
7697
7698 <p><pre>
7699 sudo apt-get install git vmdebootstrap mercurial python-docutils \
7700   mktorrent extlinux virtualbox qemu-user-static binfmt-support \
7701   u-boot-tools
7702 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/freedombox/freedom-maker.git \
7703   freedom-maker
7704 make -C freedom-maker dreamplug-image raspberry-image virtualbox-image
7705 </pre></p>
7706
7707 <p>Root access is needed to run debootstrap and mount loopback
7708 devices.  See the README in the freedom-maker git repo for more
7709 details on the build.  If you do not want all three images, trim the
7710 make line.  Note that the virtualbox-image target is not really
7711 virtualbox specific.  It create a x86 image usable in kvm, qemu,
7712 vmware and any other x86 virtual machine environment.  You might need
7713 the version of vmdebootstrap in Jessie to get the build working, as it
7714 include fixes for a race condition with kpartx.</p>
7715
7716 <p>If you instead want to install using a Debian CD and the preseed
7717 method, boot a Debian Wheezy ISO and use this boot argument to load
7718 the preseed values:</p>
7719
7720 <p><pre>
7721 url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat</a>
7722 </pre></p>
7723
7724 <p>I have not tested it myself the last few weeks, so I do not know if
7725 it still work.</p>
7726
7727 <p>If you wonder how to help, one task you could look at is using
7728 systemd as the boot system.  It will become the default for Linux in
7729 Jessie, so we need to make sure it is usable on the Freedombox.  I did
7730 a simple test a few weeks ago, and noticed dnsmasq failed to start
7731 during boot when using systemd.  I suspect there are other problems
7732 too. :) To detect problems, there is a test suite included, which can
7733 be run from the plinth web interface.</p>
7734
7735 <p>Give it a go and let us know how it goes on the mailing list, and help
7736 us get the new release published. :) Please join us on
7737 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC (#freedombox on
7738 irc.debian.org)</a> and
7739 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
7740 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
7741
7742       </div>
7743       <div class="tags">
7744
7745
7746         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
7747
7748
7749       </div>
7750     </div>
7751     <div class="padding"></div>
7752
7753     <div class="entry">
7754       <div class="title">
7755         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/S3QL__a_locally_mounted_cloud_file_system___nice_free_software.html">S3QL, a locally mounted cloud file system - nice free software</a>
7756       </div>
7757       <div class="date">
7758          9th April 2014
7759       </div>
7760       <div class="body">
7761         <p>For a while now, I have been looking for a sensible offsite backup
7762 solution for use at home.  My requirements are simple, it must be
7763 cheap and locally encrypted (in other words, I keep the encryption
7764 keys, the storage provider do not have access to my private files).
7765 One idea me and my friends had many years ago, before the cloud
7766 storage providers showed up, was to use Google mail as storage,
7767 writing a Linux block device storing blocks as emails in the mail
7768 service provided by Google, and thus get heaps of free space.  On top
7769 of this one can add encryption, RAID and volume management to have
7770 lots of (fairly slow, I admit that) cheap and encrypted storage.  But
7771 I never found time to implement such system.  But the last few weeks I
7772 have looked at a system called
7773 <a href="https://bitbucket.org/nikratio/s3ql/">S3QL</a>, a locally
7774 mounted network backed file system with the features I need.</p>
7775
7776 <p>S3QL is a fuse file system with a local cache and cloud storage,
7777 handling several different storage providers, any with Amazon S3,
7778 Google Drive or OpenStack API.  There are heaps of such storage
7779 providers.  S3QL can also use a local directory as storage, which
7780 combined with sshfs allow for file storage on any ssh server.  S3QL
7781 include support for encryption, compression, de-duplication, snapshots
7782 and immutable file systems, allowing me to mount the remote storage as
7783 a local mount point, look at and use the files as if they were local,
7784 while the content is stored in the cloud as well.  This allow me to
7785 have a backup that should survive fire.  The file system can not be
7786 shared between several machines at the same time, as only one can
7787 mount it at the time, but any machine with the encryption key and
7788 access to the storage service can mount it if it is unmounted.</p>
7789
7790 <p>It is simple to use.  I'm using it on Debian Wheezy, where the
7791 package is included already.  So to get started, run <tt>apt-get
7792 install s3ql</tt>.  Next, pick a storage provider.  I ended up picking
7793 Greenqloud, after reading their nice recipe on
7794 <a href="https://greenqloud.zendesk.com/entries/44611757-How-To-Use-S3QL-to-mount-a-StorageQloud-bucket-on-Debian-Wheezy">how
7795 to use S3QL with their Amazon S3 service</a>, because I trust the laws
7796 in Iceland more than those in USA when it come to keeping my personal
7797 data safe and private, and thus would rather spend money on a company
7798 in Iceland.  Another nice recipe is available from the article
7799 <a href="http://www.admin-magazine.com/HPC/Articles/HPC-Cloud-Storage">S3QL
7800 Filesystem for HPC Storage</a> by Jeff Layton in the HPC section of
7801 Admin magazine.  When the provider is picked, figure out how to get
7802 the API key needed to connect to the storage API.  With Greencloud,
7803 the key did not show up until I had added payment details to my
7804 account.</p>
7805
7806 <p>Armed with the API access details, it is time to create the file
7807 system.  First, create a new bucket in the cloud.  This bucket is the
7808 file system storage area.  I picked a bucket name reflecting the
7809 machine that was going to store data there, but any name will do.
7810 I'll refer to it as <tt>bucket-name</tt> below.  In addition, one need
7811 the API login and password, and a locally created password.  Store it
7812 all in ~root/.s3ql/authinfo2 like this:
7813
7814 <p><blockquote><pre>
7815 [s3c]
7816 storage-url: s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
7817 backend-login: API-login
7818 backend-password: API-password
7819 fs-passphrase: local-password
7820 </pre></blockquote></p>
7821
7822 <p>I create my local passphrase using <tt>pwget 50</tt> or similar,
7823 but any sensible way to create a fairly random password should do it.
7824 Armed with these details, it is now time to run mkfs, entering the API
7825 details and password to create it:</p>
7826
7827 <p><blockquote><pre>
7828 # mkdir -m 700 /var/lib/s3ql-cache
7829 # mkfs.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
7830   --ssl s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
7831 Enter backend login:
7832 Enter backend password:
7833 Before using S3QL, make sure to read the user's guide, especially
7834 the 'Important Rules to Avoid Loosing Data' section.
7835 Enter encryption password:
7836 Confirm encryption password:
7837 Generating random encryption key...
7838 Creating metadata tables...
7839 Dumping metadata...
7840 ..objects..
7841 ..blocks..
7842 ..inodes..
7843 ..inode_blocks..
7844 ..symlink_targets..
7845 ..names..
7846 ..contents..
7847 ..ext_attributes..
7848 Compressing and uploading metadata...
7849 Wrote 0.00 MB of compressed metadata.
7850 # </pre></blockquote></p>
7851
7852 <p>The next step is mounting the file system to make the storage available.
7853
7854 <p><blockquote><pre>
7855 # mount.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
7856   --ssl --allow-root s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name /s3ql
7857 Using 4 upload threads.
7858 Downloading and decompressing metadata...
7859 Reading metadata...
7860 ..objects..
7861 ..blocks..
7862 ..inodes..
7863 ..inode_blocks..
7864 ..symlink_targets..
7865 ..names..
7866 ..contents..
7867 ..ext_attributes..
7868 Mounting filesystem...
7869 # df -h /s3ql
7870 Filesystem                              Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
7871 s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name  1.0T     0  1.0T   0% /s3ql
7872 #
7873 </pre></blockquote></p>
7874
7875 <p>The file system is now ready for use.  I use rsync to store my
7876 backups in it, and as the metadata used by rsync is downloaded at
7877 mount time, no network traffic (and storage cost) is triggered by
7878 running rsync.  To unmount, one should not use the normal umount
7879 command, as this will not flush the cache to the cloud storage, but
7880 instead running the umount.s3ql command like this:
7881
7882 <p><blockquote><pre>
7883 # umount.s3ql /s3ql
7884 #
7885 </pre></blockquote></p>
7886
7887 <p>There is a fsck command available to check the file system and
7888 correct any problems detected.  This can be used if the local server
7889 crashes while the file system is mounted, to reset the "already
7890 mounted" flag.  This is what it look like when processing a working
7891 file system:</p>
7892
7893 <p><blockquote><pre>
7894 # fsck.s3ql --force --ssl s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
7895 Using cached metadata.
7896 File system seems clean, checking anyway.
7897 Checking DB integrity...
7898 Creating temporary extra indices...
7899 Checking lost+found...
7900 Checking cached objects...
7901 Checking names (refcounts)...
7902 Checking contents (names)...
7903 Checking contents (inodes)...
7904 Checking contents (parent inodes)...
7905 Checking objects (reference counts)...
7906 Checking objects (backend)...
7907 ..processed 5000 objects so far..
7908 ..processed 10000 objects so far..
7909 ..processed 15000 objects so far..
7910 Checking objects (sizes)...
7911 Checking blocks (referenced objects)...
7912 Checking blocks (refcounts)...
7913 Checking inode-block mapping (blocks)...
7914 Checking inode-block mapping (inodes)...
7915 Checking inodes (refcounts)...
7916 Checking inodes (sizes)...
7917 Checking extended attributes (names)...
7918 Checking extended attributes (inodes)...
7919 Checking symlinks (inodes)...
7920 Checking directory reachability...
7921 Checking unix conventions...
7922 Checking referential integrity...
7923 Dropping temporary indices...
7924 Backing up old metadata...
7925 Dumping metadata...
7926 ..objects..
7927 ..blocks..
7928 ..inodes..
7929 ..inode_blocks..
7930 ..symlink_targets..
7931 ..names..
7932 ..contents..
7933 ..ext_attributes..
7934 Compressing and uploading metadata...
7935 Wrote 0.89 MB of compressed metadata.
7936 #
7937 </pre></blockquote></p>
7938
7939 <p>Thanks to the cache, working on files that fit in the cache is very
7940 quick, about the same speed as local file access.  Uploading large
7941 amount of data is to me limited by the bandwidth out of and into my
7942 house.  Uploading 685 MiB with a 100 MiB cache gave me 305 kiB/s,
7943 which is very close to my upload speed, and downloading the same
7944 Debian installation ISO gave me 610 kiB/s, close to my download speed.
7945 Both were measured using <tt>dd</tt>.  So for me, the bottleneck is my
7946 network, not the file system code.  I do not know what a good cache
7947 size would be, but suspect that the cache should e larger than your
7948 working set.</p>
7949
7950 <p>I mentioned that only one machine can mount the file system at the
7951 time.  If another machine try, it is told that the file system is
7952 busy:</p>
7953
7954 <p><blockquote><pre>
7955 # mount.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
7956   --ssl --allow-root s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name /s3ql
7957 Using 8 upload threads.
7958 Backend reports that fs is still mounted elsewhere, aborting.
7959 #
7960 </pre></blockquote></p>
7961
7962 <p>The file content is uploaded when the cache is full, while the
7963 metadata is uploaded once every 24 hour by default.  To ensure the
7964 file system content is flushed to the cloud, one can either umount the
7965 file system, or ask S3QL to flush the cache and metadata using
7966 s3qlctrl:
7967
7968 <p><blockquote><pre>
7969 # s3qlctrl upload-meta /s3ql
7970 # s3qlctrl flushcache /s3ql
7971 #
7972 </pre></blockquote></p>
7973
7974 <p>If you are curious about how much space your data uses in the
7975 cloud, and how much compression and deduplication cut down on the
7976 storage usage, you can use s3qlstat on the mounted file system to get
7977 a report:</p>
7978
7979 <p><blockquote><pre>
7980 # s3qlstat /s3ql
7981 Directory entries:    9141
7982 Inodes:               9143
7983 Data blocks:          8851
7984 Total data size:      22049.38 MB
7985 After de-duplication: 21955.46 MB (99.57% of total)
7986 After compression:    21877.28 MB (99.22% of total, 99.64% of de-duplicated)
7987 Database size:        2.39 MB (uncompressed)
7988 (some values do not take into account not-yet-uploaded dirty blocks in cache)
7989 #
7990 </pre></blockquote></p>
7991
7992 <p>I mentioned earlier that there are several possible suppliers of
7993 storage.  I did not try to locate them all, but am aware of at least
7994 <a href="https://www.greenqloud.com/">Greenqloud</a>,
7995 <a href="http://drive.google.com/">Google Drive</a>,
7996 <a href="http://aws.amazon.com/s3/">Amazon S3 web serivces</a>,
7997 <a href="http://www.rackspace.com/">Rackspace</a> and
7998 <a href="http://crowncloud.net/">Crowncloud</A>.  The latter even
7999 accept payment in Bitcoin.  Pick one that suit your need.  Some of
8000 them provide several GiB of free storage, but the prize models are
8001 quite different and you will have to figure out what suits you
8002 best.</p>
8003
8004 <p>While researching this blog post, I had a look at research papers
8005 and posters discussing the S3QL file system.  There are several, which
8006 told me that the file system is getting a critical check by the
8007 science community and increased my confidence in using it.  One nice
8008 poster is titled
8009 "<a href="http://www.lanl.gov/orgs/adtsc/publications/science_highlights_2013/docs/pg68_69.pdf">An
8010 Innovative Parallel Cloud Storage System using OpenStack’s SwiftObject
8011 Store and Transformative Parallel I/O Approach</a>" by Hsing-Bung
8012 Chen, Benjamin McClelland, David Sherrill, Alfred Torrez, Parks Fields
8013 and Pamela Smith.  Please  have a look.</p>
8014
8015 <p>Given my problems with different file systems earlier, I decided to
8016 check out the mounted S3QL file system to see if it would be usable as
8017 a home directory (in other word, that it provided POSIX semantics when
8018 it come to locking and umask handling etc).  Running
8019 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_if_a_file_system_can_be_used_for_home_directories___.html">my
8020 test code to check file system semantics</a>, I was happy to discover that
8021 no error was found.  So the file system can be used for home
8022 directories, if one chooses to do so.</p>
8023
8024 <p>If you do not want a locally file system, and want something that
8025 work without the Linux fuse file system, I would like to mention the
8026 <a href="http://www.tarsnap.com/">Tarsnap service</a>, which also
8027 provide locally encrypted backup using a command line client.  It have
8028 a nicer access control system, where one can split out read and write
8029 access, allowing some systems to write to the backup and others to
8030 only read from it.</p>
8031
8032 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
8033 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
8034 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
8035
8036       </div>
8037       <div class="tags">
8038
8039
8040         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
8041
8042
8043       </div>
8044     </div>
8045     <div class="padding"></div>
8046
8047     <div class="entry">
8048       <div class="title">
8049         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Freedombox_on_Dreamplug__Raspberry_Pi_and_virtual_x86_machine.html">Freedombox on Dreamplug, Raspberry Pi and virtual x86 machine</a>
8050       </div>
8051       <div class="date">
8052         14th March 2014
8053       </div>
8054       <div class="body">
8055         <p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox
8056 project</a> is working on providing the software and hardware for
8057 making it easy for non-technical people to host their data and
8058 communication at home, and being able to communicate with their
8059 friends and family encrypted and away from prying eyes.  It has been
8060 going on for a while, and is slowly progressing towards a new test
8061 release (0.2).</p>
8062
8063 <p>And what day could be better than the Pi day to announce that the
8064 new version will provide "hard drive" / SD card / USB stick images for
8065 Dreamplug, Raspberry Pi and VirtualBox (or any other virtualization
8066 system), and can also be installed using a Debian installer preseed
8067 file.  The Debian based Freedombox is now based on Debian Jessie,
8068 where most of the needed packages used are already present.  Only one,
8069 the freedombox-setup package, is missing.  To try to build your own
8070 boot image to test the current status, fetch the freedom-maker scripts
8071 and build using
8072 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/vmdebootstrap">vmdebootstrap</a>
8073 with a user with sudo access to become root:
8074
8075 <pre>
8076 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/freedombox/freedom-maker.git \
8077   freedom-maker
8078 sudo apt-get install git vmdebootstrap mercurial python-docutils \
8079   mktorrent extlinux virtualbox qemu-user-static binfmt-support \
8080   u-boot-tools
8081 make -C freedom-maker dreamplug-image raspberry-image virtualbox-image
8082 </pre>
8083
8084 <p>Root access is needed to run debootstrap and mount loopback
8085 devices.  See the README for more details on the build. If you do not
8086 want all three images, trim the make line.  But note that thanks to <a
8087 href="https://bugs.debian.org/741407">a race condition in
8088 vmdebootstrap</a>, the build might fail without the patch to the
8089 kpartx call.</p>
8090
8091 <p>If you instead want to install using a Debian CD and the preseed
8092 method, boot a Debian Wheezy ISO and use this boot argument to load
8093 the preseed values:</p>
8094
8095 <pre>
8096 url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat</a>
8097 </pre>
8098
8099 <p>But note that due to <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/740673">a
8100 recently introduced bug in apt in Jessie</a>, the installer will
8101 currently hang while setting up APT sources.  Killing the
8102 '<tt>apt-cdrom ident</tt>' process when it hang a few times during the
8103 installation will get the installation going.  This affect all
8104 installations in Jessie, and I expect it will be fixed soon.</p>
8105
8106 <p>Give it a go and let us know how it goes on the mailing list, and help
8107 us get the new release published. :) Please join us on
8108 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC (#freedombox on
8109 irc.debian.org)</a> and
8110 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
8111 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
8112
8113       </div>
8114       <div class="tags">
8115
8116
8117         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
8118
8119
8120       </div>
8121     </div>
8122     <div class="padding"></div>
8123
8124     <div class="entry">
8125       <div class="title">
8126         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_home_and_release_1_0_for_netgroup_and_innetgr__aka_ng_utils_.html">New home and release 1.0 for netgroup and innetgr (aka ng-utils)</a>
8127       </div>
8128       <div class="date">
8129         22nd February 2014
8130       </div>
8131       <div class="body">
8132         <p>Many years ago, I wrote a GPL licensed version of the netgroup and
8133 innetgr tools, because I needed them in
8134 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a>.  I called the project
8135 ng-utils, and it has served me well.  I placed the project under the
8136 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/">Hungry Programmer</a> umbrella, and it was maintained in our CVS
8137 repository.  But many years ago, the CVS repository was dropped (lost,
8138 not migrated to new hardware, not sure), and the project have lacked a
8139 proper home since then.</p>
8140
8141 <p>Last summer, I had a look at the package and made a new release
8142 fixing a irritating crash bug, but was unable to store the changes in
8143 a proper source control system.  I applied for a project on
8144 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/">Alioth</a>, but did not have time
8145 to follow up on it.  Until today. :)</p>
8146
8147 <p>After many hours of cleaning and migration, the ng-utils project
8148 now have a new home, and a git repository with the highlight of the
8149 history of the project.  I published all release tarballs and imported
8150 them into the git repository.  As the project is really stable and not
8151 expected to gain new features any time soon, I decided to make a new
8152 release and call it 1.0.  Visit the new project home on
8153 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/ng-utils/">https://alioth.debian.org/projects/ng-utils/</a>
8154 if you want to check it out.  The new version is also uploaded into
8155 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/ng-utils.html">Debian Unstable</a>.</p>
8156
8157       </div>
8158       <div class="tags">
8159
8160
8161         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8162
8163
8164       </div>
8165     </div>
8166     <div class="padding"></div>
8167
8168     <div class="entry">
8169       <div class="title">
8170         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_sysvinit_from_experimental_in_Debian_Hurd.html">Testing sysvinit from experimental in Debian Hurd</a>
8171       </div>
8172       <div class="date">
8173          3rd February 2014
8174       </div>
8175       <div class="body">
8176         <p>A few days ago I decided to try to help the Hurd people to get
8177 their changes into sysvinit, to allow them to use the normal sysvinit
8178 boot system instead of their old one.  This follow up on the
8179 <a href="https://teythoon.cryptobitch.de//categories/gsoc.html">great
8180 Google Summer of Code work</a> done last summer by Justus Winter to
8181 get Debian on Hurd working more like Debian on Linux.  To get started,
8182 I downloaded a prebuilt hard disk image from
8183 <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>,
8184 and started it using virt-manager.</p>
8185
8186 <p>The first think I had to do after logging in (root without any
8187 password) was to get the network operational.  I followed
8188 <a href="https://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/hurd-install">the
8189 instructions on the Debian GNU/Hurd ports page</a> and ran these
8190 commands as root to get the machine to accept a IP address from the
8191 kvm internal DHCP server:</p>
8192
8193 <p><blockquote><pre>
8194 settrans -fgap /dev/netdde /hurd/netdde
8195 kill $(ps -ef|awk '/[p]finet/ { print $2}')
8196 kill $(ps -ef|awk '/[d]evnode/ { print $2}')
8197 dhclient /dev/eth0
8198 </pre></blockquote></p>
8199
8200 <p>After this, the machine had internet connectivity, and I could
8201 upgrade it and install the sysvinit packages from experimental and
8202 enable it as the default boot system in Hurd.</p>
8203
8204 <p>But before I did that, I set a password on the root user, as ssh is
8205 running on the machine it for ssh login to work a password need to be
8206 set.  Also, note that a bug somewhere in openssh on Hurd block
8207 compression from working.  Remember to turn that off on the client
8208 side.</p>
8209
8210 <p>Run these commands as root to upgrade and test the new sysvinit
8211 stuff:</p>
8212
8213 <p><blockquote><pre>
8214 cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/experimental.list &lt;&lt;EOF
8215 deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ experimental main
8216 EOF
8217 apt-get update
8218 apt-get dist-upgrade
8219 apt-get install -t experimental initscripts sysv-rc sysvinit \
8220     sysvinit-core sysvinit-utils
8221 update-alternatives --config runsystem
8222 </pre></blockquote></p>
8223
8224 <p>To reboot after switching boot system, you have to use
8225 <tt>reboot-hurd</tt> instead of just <tt>reboot</tt>, as there is not
8226 yet a sysvinit process able to receive the signals from the normal
8227 'reboot' command.  After switching to sysvinit as the boot system,
8228 upgrading every package and rebooting, the network come up with DHCP
8229 after boot as it should, and the settrans/pkill hack mentioned at the
8230 start is no longer needed.  But for some strange reason, there are no
8231 longer any login prompt in the virtual console, so I logged in using
8232 ssh instead.
8233
8234 <p>Note that there are some race conditions in Hurd making the boot
8235 fail some times.  No idea what the cause is, but hope the Hurd porters
8236 figure it out.  At least Justus said on IRC (#debian-hurd on
8237 irc.debian.org) that they are aware of the problem.  A way to reduce
8238 the impact is to upgrade to the Hurd packages built by Justus by
8239 adding this repository to the machine:</p>
8240
8241 <p><blockquote><pre>
8242 cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hurd-ci.list &lt;&lt;EOF
8243 deb http://darnassus.sceen.net/~teythoon/hurd-ci/ sid main
8244 EOF
8245 </pre></blockquote></p>
8246
8247 <p>At the moment the prebuilt virtual machine get some packages from
8248 http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian, because some of the packages in
8249 unstable do not yet include the required patches that are lingering in
8250 BTS.  This is the completely list of "unofficial" packages installed:</p>
8251
8252 <p><blockquote><pre>
8253 # aptitude search '?narrow(?version(CURRENT),?origin(Debian Ports))'
8254 i   emacs                   - GNU Emacs editor (metapackage)
8255 i   gdb                     - GNU Debugger
8256 i   hurd-recommended        - Miscellaneous translators
8257 i   isc-dhcp-client         - ISC DHCP client
8258 i   isc-dhcp-common         - common files used by all the isc-dhcp* packages
8259 i   libc-bin                - Embedded GNU C Library: Binaries
8260 i   libc-dev-bin            - Embedded GNU C Library: Development binaries
8261 i   libc0.3                 - Embedded GNU C Library: Shared libraries
8262 i A libc0.3-dbg             - Embedded GNU C Library: detached debugging symbols
8263 i   libc0.3-dev             - Embedded GNU C Library: Development Libraries and Hea
8264 i   multiarch-support       - Transitional package to ensure multiarch compatibilit
8265 i A x11-common              - X Window System (X.Org) infrastructure
8266 i   xorg                    - X.Org X Window System
8267 i A xserver-xorg            - X.Org X server
8268 i A xserver-xorg-input-all  - X.Org X server -- input driver metapackage
8269 #
8270 </pre></blockquote></p>
8271
8272 <p>All in all, testing hurd has been an interesting experience. :)
8273 X.org did not work out of the box and I never took the time to follow
8274 the porters instructions to fix it.  This time I was interested in the
8275 command line stuff.<p>
8276
8277       </div>
8278       <div class="tags">
8279
8280
8281         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8282
8283
8284       </div>
8285     </div>
8286     <div class="padding"></div>
8287
8288     <div class="entry">
8289       <div class="title">
8290         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_chrpath_release_0_16.html">New chrpath release 0.16</a>
8291       </div>
8292       <div class="date">
8293         14th January 2014
8294       </div>
8295       <div class="body">
8296         <p><a href="http://www.coverity.com/">Coverity</a> is a nice tool to
8297 find problems in C, C++ and Java code using static source code
8298 analysis.  It can detect a lot of different problems, and is very
8299 useful to find memory and locking bugs in the error handling part of
8300 the source.  The company behind it provide
8301 <a href="https://scan.coverity.com/">check of free software projects as
8302 a community service</a>, and many hundred free software projects are
8303 already checked.  A few days ago I decided to have a closer look at
8304 the Coverity system, and discovered that the
8305 <a href="http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/">gnash</a> and
8306 <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/ipmitool/">ipmitool</a>
8307 projects I am involved with was already registered.  But these are
8308 fairly big, and I would also like to have a small and easy project to
8309 check, and decided to <a href="http://scan.coverity.com/projects/1179">request
8310 checking of the chrpath project</a>.  It was
8311 added to the checker and discovered seven potential defects.  Six of
8312 these were real, mostly resource "leak" when the program detected an
8313 error.  Nothing serious, as the resources would be released a fraction
8314 of a second later when the program exited because of the error, but it
8315 is nice to do it right in case the source of the program some time in
8316 the future end up in a library.  Having fixed all defects and added
8317 <a href="https://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/chrpath-devel">a
8318 mailing list for the chrpath developers</a>, I decided it was time to
8319 publish a new release.  These are the release notes:</p>
8320
8321 <p>New in 0.16 released 2014-01-14:</p>
8322
8323 <ul>
8324
8325   <li>Fixed all minor bugs discovered by Coverity.</li>
8326   <li>Updated config.sub and config.guess from the GNU project.</li>
8327   <li>Mention new project mailing list in the documentation.</li>
8328
8329 </ul>
8330
8331 <p>You can
8332 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/frs/?group_id=31052">download the
8333 new version 0.16 from alioth</a>.  Please let us know via the Alioth
8334 project if something is wrong with the new release.  The test suite
8335 did not discover any old errors, so if you find a new one, please also
8336 include a test suite check.</p>
8337
8338       </div>
8339       <div class="tags">
8340
8341
8342         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/chrpath">chrpath</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8343
8344
8345       </div>
8346     </div>
8347     <div class="padding"></div>
8348
8349     <div class="entry">
8350       <div class="title">
8351         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_chrpath_release_0_15.html">New chrpath release 0.15</a>
8352       </div>
8353       <div class="date">
8354         24th November 2013
8355       </div>
8356       <div class="body">
8357         <p>After many years break from the package and a vain hope that
8358 development would be continued by someone else, I finally pulled my
8359 acts together this morning and wrapped up a new release of chrpath,
8360 the command line tool to modify the rpath and runpath of already
8361 compiled ELF programs.  The update was triggered by the persistence of
8362 Isha Vishnoi at IBM, which needed a new config.guess file to get
8363 support for the ppc64le architecture (powerpc 64-bit Little Endian) he
8364 is working on.  I checked the
8365 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/chrpath">Debian</a>,
8366 <a href="https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/chrpath">Ubuntu</a> and
8367 <a href="https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/acls/name/chrpath">Fedora</a>
8368 packages for interesting patches (failed to find the source from
8369 OpenSUSE and Mandriva packages), and found quite a few nice fixes.
8370 These are the release notes:</p>
8371
8372 <p>New in 0.15 released 2013-11-24:</p>
8373
8374 <ul>
8375
8376   <li>Updated config.sub and config.guess from the GNU project to work
8377    with newer architectures.  Thanks to isha vishnoi for the heads
8378    up.</li>
8379
8380   <li>Updated README with current URLs.</li>
8381
8382   <li>Added byteswap fix found in Ubuntu, credited Jeremy Kerr and
8383    Matthias Klose.</li>
8384
8385   <li>Added missing help for -k|--keepgoing option, using patch by
8386    Petr Machata found in Fedora.</li>
8387
8388   <li>Rewrite removal of RPATH/RUNPATH to make sure the entry in
8389    .dynamic is a NULL terminated string.  Based on patch found in
8390    Fedora credited Axel Thimm and Christian Krause.</li>
8391
8392 </ul>
8393
8394 <p>You can
8395 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/frs/?group_id=31052">download the
8396 new version 0.15 from alioth</a>.  Please let us know via the Alioth
8397 project if something is wrong with the new release.  The test suite
8398 did not discover any old errors, so if you find a new one, please also
8399 include a testsuite check.</p>
8400
8401       </div>
8402       <div class="tags">
8403
8404
8405         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/chrpath">chrpath</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8406
8407
8408       </div>
8409     </div>
8410     <div class="padding"></div>
8411
8412     <div class="entry">
8413       <div class="title">
8414         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_init_d_boot_script_example_for_rsyslog.html">Debian init.d boot script example for rsyslog</a>
8415       </div>
8416       <div class="date">
8417          2nd November 2013
8418       </div>
8419       <div class="body">
8420         <p>If one of the points of switching to a new init system in Debian is
8421 <a href="http://thomas.goirand.fr/blog/?p=147">to get rid of huge
8422 init.d scripts</a>, I doubt we need to switch away from sysvinit and
8423 init.d scripts at all.  Here is an example init.d script, ie a rewrite
8424 of /etc/init.d/rsyslog:</p>
8425
8426 <p><pre>
8427 #!/lib/init/init-d-script
8428 ### BEGIN INIT INFO
8429 # Provides:          rsyslog
8430 # Required-Start:    $remote_fs $time
8431 # Required-Stop:     umountnfs $time
8432 # X-Stop-After:      sendsigs
8433 # Default-Start:     2 3 4 5
8434 # Default-Stop:      0 1 6
8435 # Short-Description: enhanced syslogd
8436 # Description:       Rsyslog is an enhanced multi-threaded syslogd.
8437 #                    It is quite compatible to stock sysklogd and can be
8438 #                    used as a drop-in replacement.
8439 ### END INIT INFO
8440 DESC="enhanced syslogd"
8441 DAEMON=/usr/sbin/rsyslogd
8442 </pre></p>
8443
8444 <p>Pretty minimalistic to me... For the record, the original sysv-rc
8445 script was 137 lines, and the above is just 15 lines, most of it meta
8446 info/comments.</p>
8447
8448 <p>How to do this, you ask?  Well, one create a new script
8449 /lib/init/init-d-script looking something like this:
8450
8451 <p><pre>
8452 #!/bin/sh
8453
8454 # Define LSB log_* functions.
8455 # Depend on lsb-base (>= 3.2-14) to ensure that this file is present
8456 # and status_of_proc is working.
8457 . /lib/lsb/init-functions
8458
8459 #
8460 # Function that starts the daemon/service
8461
8462 #
8463 do_start()
8464 {
8465         # Return
8466         #   0 if daemon has been started
8467         #   1 if daemon was already running
8468         #   2 if daemon could not be started
8469         start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --exec $DAEMON --test > /dev/null \
8470                 || return 1
8471         start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --exec $DAEMON -- \
8472                 $DAEMON_ARGS \
8473                 || return 2
8474         # Add code here, if necessary, that waits for the process to be ready
8475         # to handle requests from services started subsequently which depend
8476         # on this one.  As a last resort, sleep for some time.
8477 }
8478
8479 #
8480 # Function that stops the daemon/service
8481 #
8482 do_stop()
8483 {
8484         # Return
8485         #   0 if daemon has been stopped
8486         #   1 if daemon was already stopped
8487         #   2 if daemon could not be stopped
8488         #   other if a failure occurred
8489         start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --retry=TERM/30/KILL/5 --pidfile $PIDFILE --name $NAME
8490         RETVAL="$?"
8491         [ "$RETVAL" = 2 ] && return 2
8492         # Wait for children to finish too if this is a daemon that forks
8493         # and if the daemon is only ever run from this initscript.
8494         # If the above conditions are not satisfied then add some other code
8495         # that waits for the process to drop all resources that could be
8496         # needed by services started subsequently.  A last resort is to
8497         # sleep for some time.
8498         start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --oknodo --retry=0/30/KILL/5 --exec $DAEMON
8499         [ "$?" = 2 ] && return 2
8500         # Many daemons don't delete their pidfiles when they exit.
8501         rm -f $PIDFILE
8502         return "$RETVAL"
8503 }
8504
8505 #
8506 # Function that sends a SIGHUP to the daemon/service
8507 #
8508 do_reload() {
8509         #
8510         # If the daemon can reload its configuration without
8511         # restarting (for example, when it is sent a SIGHUP),
8512         # then implement that here.
8513         #
8514         start-stop-daemon --stop --signal 1 --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --name $NAME
8515         return 0
8516 }
8517
8518 SCRIPTNAME=$1
8519 scriptbasename="$(basename $1)"
8520 echo "SN: $scriptbasename"
8521 if [ "$scriptbasename" != "init-d-library" ] ; then
8522     script="$1"
8523     shift
8524     . $script
8525 else
8526     exit 0
8527 fi
8528
8529 NAME=$(basename $DAEMON)
8530 PIDFILE=/var/run/$NAME.pid
8531
8532 # Exit if the package is not installed
8533 #[ -x "$DAEMON" ] || exit 0
8534
8535 # Read configuration variable file if it is present
8536 [ -r /etc/default/$NAME ] && . /etc/default/$NAME
8537
8538 # Load the VERBOSE setting and other rcS variables
8539 . /lib/init/vars.sh
8540
8541 case "$1" in
8542   start)
8543         [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_daemon_msg "Starting $DESC" "$NAME"
8544         do_start
8545         case "$?" in
8546                 0|1) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 0 ;;
8547                 2) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 1 ;;
8548         esac
8549         ;;
8550   stop)
8551         [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_daemon_msg "Stopping $DESC" "$NAME"
8552         do_stop
8553         case "$?" in
8554                 0|1) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 0 ;;
8555                 2) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 1 ;;
8556         esac
8557         ;;
8558   status)
8559         status_of_proc "$DAEMON" "$NAME" && exit 0 || exit $?
8560         ;;
8561   #reload|force-reload)
8562         #
8563         # If do_reload() is not implemented then leave this commented out
8564         # and leave 'force-reload' as an alias for 'restart'.
8565         #
8566         #log_daemon_msg "Reloading $DESC" "$NAME"
8567         #do_reload
8568         #log_end_msg $?
8569         #;;
8570   restart|force-reload)
8571         #
8572         # If the "reload" option is implemented then remove the
8573         # 'force-reload' alias
8574         #
8575         log_daemon_msg "Restarting $DESC" "$NAME"
8576         do_stop
8577         case "$?" in
8578           0|1)
8579                 do_start
8580                 case "$?" in
8581                         0) log_end_msg 0 ;;
8582                         1) log_end_msg 1 ;; # Old process is still running
8583                         *) log_end_msg 1 ;; # Failed to start
8584                 esac
8585                 ;;
8586           *)
8587                 # Failed to stop
8588                 log_end_msg 1
8589                 ;;
8590         esac
8591         ;;
8592   *)
8593         echo "Usage: $SCRIPTNAME {start|stop|status|restart|force-reload}" >&2
8594         exit 3
8595         ;;
8596 esac
8597
8598 :
8599 </pre></p>
8600
8601 <p>It is based on /etc/init.d/skeleton, and could be improved quite a
8602 lot.  I did not really polish the approach, so it might not always
8603 work out of the box, but you get the idea.  I did not try very hard to
8604 optimize it nor make it more robust either.</p>
8605
8606 <p>A better argument for switching init system in Debian than reducing
8607 the size of init scripts (which is a good thing to do anyway), is to
8608 get boot system that is able to handle the kernel events sensibly and
8609 robustly, and do not depend on the boot to run sequentially.  The boot
8610 and the kernel have not behaved sequentially in years.</p>
8611
8612       </div>
8613       <div class="tags">
8614
8615
8616         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8617
8618
8619       </div>
8620     </div>
8621     <div class="padding"></div>
8622
8623     <div class="entry">
8624       <div class="title">
8625         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Browser_plugin_for_SPICE__spice_xpi__uploaded_to_Debian.html">Browser plugin for SPICE (spice-xpi) uploaded to Debian</a>
8626       </div>
8627       <div class="date">
8628          1st November 2013
8629       </div>
8630       <div class="body">
8631         <p><a href="http://www.spice-space.org/">The SPICE protocol</a> for
8632 remote display access is the preferred solution with oVirt and RedHat
8633 Enterprise Virtualization, and I was sad to discover the other day
8634 that the browser plugin needed to use these systems seamlessly was
8635 missing in Debian.  The <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/668284">request
8636 for a package</a> was from 2012-04-10 with no progress since
8637 2013-04-01, so I decided to wrap up a package based on the great work
8638 from Cajus Pollmeier and put it in a collab-maint maintained git
8639 repository to get a package I could use.  I would very much like
8640 others to help me maintain the package (or just take over, I do not
8641 mind), but as no-one had volunteered so far, I just uploaded it to
8642 NEW.  I hope it will be available in Debian in a few days.</p>
8643
8644 <p>The source is now available from
8645 <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>
8646
8647       </div>
8648       <div class="tags">
8649
8650
8651         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8652
8653
8654       </div>
8655     </div>
8656     <div class="padding"></div>
8657
8658     <div class="entry">
8659       <div class="title">
8660         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Teaching_vmdebootstrap_to_create_Raspberry_Pi_SD_card_images.html">Teaching vmdebootstrap to create Raspberry Pi SD card images</a>
8661       </div>
8662       <div class="date">
8663         27th October 2013
8664       </div>
8665       <div class="body">
8666         <p>The
8667 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/v/vmdebootstrap.html">vmdebootstrap</a>
8668 program is a a very nice system to create virtual machine images.  It
8669 create a image file, add a partition table, mount it and run
8670 debootstrap in the mounted directory to create a Debian system on a
8671 stick.  Yesterday, I decided to try to teach it how to make images for
8672 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi">Raspberry Pi</a>, as part
8673 of a plan to simplify the build system for
8674 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the FreedomBox
8675 project</a>.  The FreedomBox project already uses vmdebootstrap for
8676 the virtualbox images, but its current build system made multistrap
8677 based system for Dreamplug images, and it is lacking support for
8678 Raspberry Pi.</p>
8679
8680 <p>Armed with the knowledge on how to build "foreign" (aka non-native
8681 architecture) chroots for Raspberry Pi, I dived into the vmdebootstrap
8682 code and adjusted it to be able to build armel images on my amd64
8683 Debian laptop.  I ended up giving vmdebootstrap five new options,
8684 allowing me to replicate the image creation process I use to make
8685 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Raspberry_Pi_based_batman_adv_Mesh_network_node.html">Debian
8686 Jessie based mesh node images for the Raspberry Pi</a>.  First, the
8687 <tt>--foreign /path/to/binfm_handler</tt> option tell vmdebootstrap to
8688 call debootstrap with --foreign and to copy the handler into the
8689 generated chroot before running the second stage.  This allow
8690 vmdebootstrap to create armel images on an amd64 host.  Next I added
8691 two new options <tt>--bootsize size</tt> and <tt>--boottype
8692 fstype</tt> to teach it to create a separate /boot/ partition with the
8693 given file system type, allowing me to create an image with a vfat
8694 partition for the /boot/ stuff.  I also added a <tt>--variant
8695 variant</tt> option to allow me to create smaller images without the
8696 Debian base system packages installed.  Finally, I added an option
8697 <tt>--no-extlinux</tt> to tell vmdebootstrap to not install extlinux
8698 as a boot loader.  It is not needed on the Raspberry Pi and probably
8699 most other non-x86 architectures.  The changes were accepted by the
8700 upstream author of vmdebootstrap yesterday and today, and is now
8701 available from
8702 <a href="http://git.liw.fi/cgi-bin/cgit/cgit.cgi/vmdebootstrap/">the
8703 upstream project page</a>.</p>
8704
8705 <p>To use it to build a Raspberry Pi image using Debian Jessie, first
8706 create a small script (the customize script) to add the non-free
8707 binary blob needed to boot the Raspberry Pi and the APT source
8708 list:</p>
8709
8710 <p><pre>
8711 #!/bin/sh
8712 set -e # Exit on first error
8713 rootdir="$1"
8714 cd "$rootdir"
8715 cat &lt;&lt;EOF > etc/apt/sources.list
8716 deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ jessie main contrib non-free
8717 EOF
8718 # Install non-free binary blob needed to boot Raspberry Pi.  This
8719 # install a kernel somewhere too.
8720 wget https://raw.github.com/Hexxeh/rpi-update/master/rpi-update \
8721     -O $rootdir/usr/bin/rpi-update
8722 chmod a+x $rootdir/usr/bin/rpi-update
8723 mkdir -p $rootdir/lib/modules
8724 touch $rootdir/boot/start.elf
8725 chroot $rootdir rpi-update
8726 </pre></p>
8727
8728 <p>Next, fetch the latest vmdebootstrap script and call it like this
8729 to build the image:</p>
8730
8731 <pre>
8732 sudo ./vmdebootstrap \
8733     --variant minbase \
8734     --arch armel \
8735     --distribution jessie \
8736     --mirror http://http.debian.net/debian \
8737     --image test.img \
8738     --size 600M \
8739     --bootsize 64M \
8740     --boottype vfat \
8741     --log-level debug \
8742     --verbose \
8743     --no-kernel \
8744     --no-extlinux \
8745     --root-password raspberry \
8746     --hostname raspberrypi \
8747     --foreign /usr/bin/qemu-arm-static \
8748     --customize `pwd`/customize \
8749     --package netbase \
8750     --package git-core \
8751     --package binutils \
8752     --package ca-certificates \
8753     --package wget \
8754     --package kmod
8755 </pre></p>
8756
8757 <p>The list of packages being installed are the ones needed by
8758 rpi-update to make the image bootable on the Raspberry Pi, with the
8759 exception of netbase, which is needed by debootstrap to find
8760 /etc/hosts with the minbase variant.  I really wish there was a way to
8761 set up an Raspberry Pi using only packages in the Debian archive, but
8762 that is not possible as far as I know, because it boots from the GPU
8763 using a non-free binary blob.</p>
8764
8765 <p>The build host need debootstrap, kpartx and qemu-user-static and
8766 probably a few others installed.  I have not checked the complete
8767 build dependency list.</p>
8768
8769 <p>The resulting image will not use the hardware floating point unit
8770 on the Raspberry PI, because the armel architecture in Debian is not
8771 optimized for that use.  So the images created will be a bit slower
8772 than <a href="http://www.raspbian.org/">Raspbian</a> based images.</p>
8773
8774       </div>
8775       <div class="tags">
8776
8777
8778         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/mesh network">mesh network</a>.
8779
8780
8781       </div>
8782     </div>
8783     <div class="padding"></div>
8784
8785     <div class="entry">
8786       <div class="title">
8787         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Good_causes__Debian_Outreach_Program_for_Women__EFF_documenting_the_spying_and_Open_access_in_Norway.html">Good causes: Debian Outreach Program for Women, EFF documenting the spying and Open access in Norway</a>
8788       </div>
8789       <div class="date">
8790         15th October 2013
8791       </div>
8792       <div class="body">
8793         <p>The last few days I came across a few good causes that should get
8794 wider attention.  I recommend signing and donating to each one of
8795 these. :)</p>
8796
8797 <p>Via <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2013/18/">Debian
8798 Project News for 2013-10-14</a> I came across the Outreach Program for
8799 Women program which is a Google Summer of Code like initiative to get
8800 more women involved in free software.  One debian sponsor has offered
8801 to match <a href="http://debian.ch/opw2013">any donation done to Debian
8802 earmarked</a> for this initiative.  I donated a few minutes ago, and
8803 hope you will to. :)</p>
8804
8805 <p>And the Electronic Frontier Foundation just announced plans to
8806 create <a href="https://supporters.eff.org/donate/nsa-videos">video
8807 documentaries about the excessive spying</a> on every Internet user that
8808 take place these days, and their need to fund the work.  I've already
8809 donated.  Are you next?</p>
8810
8811 <p>For my Norwegian audience, the organisation Studentenes og
8812 Akademikernes Internasjonale Hjelpefond is collecting signatures for a
8813 statement under the heading
8814 <a href="http://saih.no/Bloggers_United/">Bloggers United for Open
8815 Access</a> for those of us asking for more focus on open access in the
8816 Norwegian government.  So far 499 signatures.  I hope you will sign it
8817 too.</p>
8818
8819       </div>
8820       <div class="tags">
8821
8822
8823         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
8824
8825
8826       </div>
8827     </div>
8828     <div class="padding"></div>
8829
8830     <div class="entry">
8831       <div class="title">
8832         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Videos_about_the_Freedombox_project___for_inspiration_and_learning.html">Videos about the Freedombox project - for inspiration and learning</a>
8833       </div>
8834       <div class="date">
8835         27th September 2013
8836       </div>
8837       <div class="body">
8838         <p>The <a href="http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/">Freedombox
8839 project</a> have been going on for a while, and have presented the
8840 vision, ideas and solution several places.  Here is a little
8841 collection of videos of talks and presentation of the project.</p>
8842
8843 <ul>
8844
8845 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukvUz5taxvA">FreedomBox -
8846 2,5 minute marketing film</a> (Youtube)</li>
8847
8848 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzW25QTVWsE">Eben Moglen
8849 discusses the Freedombox on CBS news 2011</a> (Youtube)</li>
8850
8851 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ae8SZbxfE0g">Eben Moglen -
8852 Freedom in the Cloud - Software Freedom, Privacy and and Security for
8853 Web 2.0 and Cloud computing at ISOC-NY Public Meeting 2010</a>
8854 (Youtube)</li>
8855
8856 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNaIji_3xBE">Fosdem 2011
8857 Keynote by Eben Moglen presenting the Freedombox</a> (Youtube)</li>
8858
8859 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bDDUyJSQ9s">Presentation of
8860 the Freedombox by James Vasile at Elevate in Gratz 2011</a> (Youtube)</li>
8861
8862 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQTmnk27g9s"> Freedombox -
8863 Discovery, Identity, and Trust by Nick Daly at Freedombox Hackfest New
8864 York City in 2012</a> (Youtube)</li>
8865
8866 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkbSB4Ba7Ck">Introduction
8867 to the Freedombox at Freedombox Hackfest New York City in 2012</a>
8868 (Youtube)</li>
8869
8870 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-P2Jaeg0aQ">Freedom, Out
8871 of the Box! by Bdale Garbee at linux.conf.au Ballarat, 2012</a> (Youtube) </li>
8872
8873 <li><a href="https://archive.fosdem.org/2013/schedule/event/freedombox/">Freedombox
8874 1.0 by Eben Moglen and Bdale Garbee at Fosdem 2013</a> (FOSDEM) </li>
8875
8876 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1LpYX2zVYg">What is the
8877 FreedomBox today by Bdale Garbee at Debconf13 in Vaumarcus
8878 2013</a> (Youtube)</li>
8879
8880 </ul>
8881
8882 <p>A larger list is available from
8883 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/TalksAndPresentations">the
8884 Freedombox Wiki</a>.</p>
8885
8886 <p>On other news, I am happy to report that Freedombox based on Debian
8887 Jessie is coming along quite well, and soon both Owncloud and using
8888 Tor should be available for testers of the Freedombox solution. :) In
8889 a few weeks I hope everything needed to test it is included in Debian.
8890 The withsqlite package is already in Debian, and the plinth package is
8891 pending in NEW.  The third and vital part of that puzzle is the
8892 metapackage/setup framework, which is still pending an upload.  Join
8893 us on <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC
8894 (#freedombox on irc.debian.org)</a> and
8895 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
8896 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
8897
8898       </div>
8899       <div class="tags">
8900
8901
8902         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
8903
8904
8905       </div>
8906     </div>
8907     <div class="padding"></div>
8908
8909     <div class="entry">
8910       <div class="title">
8911         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Recipe_to_test_the_Freedombox_project_on_amd64_or_Raspberry_Pi.html">Recipe to test the Freedombox project on amd64 or Raspberry Pi</a>
8912       </div>
8913       <div class="date">
8914         10th September 2013
8915       </div>
8916       <div class="body">
8917         <p>I was introduced to the
8918 <a href="http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/">Freedombox project</a>
8919 in 2010, when Eben Moglen presented his vision about serving the need
8920 of non-technical people to keep their personal information private and
8921 within the legal protection of their own homes.  The idea is to give
8922 people back the power over their network and machines, and return
8923 Internet back to its intended peer-to-peer architecture.  Instead of
8924 depending on a central service, the Freedombox will give everyone
8925 control over their own basic infrastructure.</p>
8926
8927 <p>I've intended to join the effort since then, but other tasks have
8928 taken priority.  But this summers nasty news about the misuse of trust
8929 and privilege exercised by the "western" intelligence gathering
8930 communities increased my eagerness to contribute to a point where I
8931 actually started working on the project a while back.</p>
8932
8933 <p>The <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/freedombox/">initial
8934 Debian initiative</a> based on the vision from Eben Moglen, is to
8935 create a simple and cheap Debian based appliance that anyone can hook
8936 up in their home and get access to secure and private services and
8937 communication.  The initial deployment platform have been the
8938 <a href="http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/t-dreamplugdetails.aspx">Dreamplug</a>,
8939 which is a piece of hardware I do not own.  So to be able to test what
8940 the current Freedombox setup look like, I had to come up with a way to install
8941 it on some hardware I do have access to.  I have rewritten the
8942 <a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/freedom-maker">freedom-maker</a>
8943 image build framework to use .deb packages instead of only copying
8944 setup into the boot images, and thanks to this rewrite I am able to
8945 set up any machine supported by Debian Wheezy as a Freedombox, using
8946 the previously mentioned deb (and a few support debs for packages
8947 missing in Debian).</p>
8948
8949 <p>The current Freedombox setup consist of a set of bootstrapping
8950 scripts
8951 (<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/freedombox-setup">freedombox-setup</a>),
8952 and a administrative web interface
8953 (<a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/Plinth">plinth</a> + exmachina +
8954 withsqlite), as well as a privacy enhancing proxy based on
8955 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/privoxy">privoxy</a>
8956 (freedombox-privoxy).  There is also a web/javascript based XMPP
8957 client (<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/jwchat">jwchat</a>)
8958 trying (unsuccessfully so far) to talk to the XMPP server
8959 (<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/ejabberd">ejabberd</a>).  The
8960 web interface is pluggable, and the goal is to use it to enable OpenID
8961 services, mesh network connectivity, use of TOR, etc, etc.  Not much of
8962 this is really working yet, see
8963 <a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/freedombox-todos/blob/master/TODO">the
8964 project TODO</a> for links to GIT repositories.  Most of the code is
8965 on github at the moment.  The HTTP proxy is operational out of the
8966 box, and the admin web interface can be used to add/remove plinth
8967 users.  I've not been able to do anything else with it so far, but
8968 know there are several branches spread around github and other places
8969 with lots of half baked features.</p>
8970
8971 <p>Anyway, if you want to have a look at the current state, the
8972 following recipes should work to give you a test machine to poke
8973 at.</p>
8974
8975 <p><strong>Debian Wheezy amd64</strong></p>
8976
8977 <ol>
8978
8979 <li>Fetch normal Debian Wheezy installation ISO.</li>
8980 <li>Boot from it, either as CD or USB stick.</li>
8981 <li><p>Press [tab] on the boot prompt and add this as a boot argument
8982 to the Debian installer:<p>
8983 <pre>url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-wheezy.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-wheezy.dat</a></pre></li>
8984
8985 <li>Answer the few language/region/password questions and pick disk to
8986 install on.</li>
8987
8988 <li>When the installation is finished and the machine have rebooted a
8989 few times, your Freedombox is ready for testing.</li>
8990
8991 </ol>
8992
8993 <p><strong>Raspberry Pi Raspbian</strong></p>
8994
8995 <ol>
8996
8997 <li>Fetch a Raspbian SD card image, create SD card.</li>
8998 <li>Boot from SD card, extend file system to fill the card completely.</li>
8999 <li><p>Log in and add this to /etc/sources.list:</p>
9000 <pre>
9001 deb <a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox</a> wheezy main
9002 </pre></li>
9003 <li><p>Run this as root:</p>
9004 <pre>
9005 wget -O - http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/BE1A583D.asc | \
9006    apt-key add -
9007 apt-get update
9008 apt-get install freedombox-setup
9009 /usr/lib/freedombox/setup
9010 </pre></li>
9011 <li>Reboot into your freshly created Freedombox.</li>
9012
9013 </ol>
9014
9015 <p>You can test it on other architectures too, but because the
9016 freedombox-privoxy package is binary, it will only work as intended on
9017 the architectures where I have had time to build the binary and put it
9018 in my APT repository.  But do not let this stop you.  It is only a
9019 short "<tt>apt-get source -b freedombox-privoxy</tt>" away. :)</p>
9020
9021 <p>Note that by default Freedombox is a DHCP server on the
9022 192.168.1.0/24 subnet, so if this is your subnet be careful and turn
9023 off the DHCP server by running "<tt>update-rc.d isc-dhcp-server
9024 disable</tt>" as root.</p>
9025
9026 <p>Please let me know if this works for you, or if you have any
9027 problems.  We gather on the IRC channel
9028 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">#freedombox</a> on
9029 irc.debian.org and the
9030 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">project
9031 mailing list</a>.</p>
9032
9033 <p>Once you get your freedombox operational, you can visit
9034 <tt>http://your-host-name:8001/</tt> to see the state of the plint
9035 welcome screen (dead end - do not be surprised if you are unable to
9036 get past it), and next visit <tt>http://your-host-name:8001/help/</tt>
9037 to look at the rest of plinth.  The default user is 'admin' and the
9038 default password is 'secret'.</p>
9039
9040       </div>
9041       <div class="tags">
9042
9043
9044         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
9045
9046
9047       </div>
9048     </div>
9049     <div class="padding"></div>
9050
9051     <div class="entry">
9052       <div class="title">
9053         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Intel_180_SSD_disk_with_Lenovo_firmware_can_not_use_Intel_firmware.html">Intel 180 SSD disk with Lenovo firmware can not use Intel firmware</a>
9054       </div>
9055       <div class="date">
9056         18th August 2013
9057       </div>
9058       <div class="body">
9059         <p>Earlier, I reported about
9060 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_fix_a_Thinkpad_X230_with_a_broken_180_GB_SSD_disk.html">my
9061 problems using an Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB disk</a>.  Friday I was
9062 told by IBM that the original disk should be thrown away.  And as
9063 there no longer was a problem if I bricked the firmware, I decided
9064 today to try to install Intel firmware to replace the Lenovo firmware
9065 currently on the disk.</p>
9066
9067 <p>I searched the Intel site for firmware, and found
9068 <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>
9069 (aka Intel SATA Solid-State Drive Firmware Update Tool) which
9070 according to the site should contain the latest firmware for SSD
9071 disks.  I inserted the broken disk in one of my spare laptops and
9072 booted the ISO from a USB stick.  The disk was recognized, but the
9073 program claimed the newest firmware already were installed and refused
9074 to insert any Intel firmware.  So no change, and the disk is still
9075 unable to handle write load. :( I guess the only way to get them
9076 working would be if Lenovo releases new firmware.  No idea how likely
9077 that is.  Anyway, just blogging about this test for completeness.  I
9078 got a working Samsung disk, and see no point in spending more time on
9079 the broken disks.</p>
9080
9081       </div>
9082       <div class="tags">
9083
9084
9085         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9086
9087
9088       </div>
9089     </div>
9090     <div class="padding"></div>
9091
9092     <div class="entry">
9093       <div class="title">
9094         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_fix_a_Thinkpad_X230_with_a_broken_180_GB_SSD_disk.html">How to fix a Thinkpad X230 with a broken 180 GB SSD disk</a>
9095       </div>
9096       <div class="date">
9097         17th July 2013
9098       </div>
9099       <div class="body">
9100         <p>Today I switched to
9101 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html">my
9102 new laptop</a>.  I've previously written about the problems I had with
9103 my new Thinkpad X230, which was delivered with an
9104 <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
9105 GB Intel SSD disk with Lenovo firmware</a> that did not handle
9106 sustained writes.  My hardware supplier have been very forthcoming in
9107 trying to find a solution, and after first trying with another
9108 identical 180 GB disks they decided to send me a 256 GB Samsung SSD
9109 disk instead to fix it once and for all.  The Samsung disk survived
9110 the installation of Debian with encrypted disks (filling the disk with
9111 random data during installation killed the first two), and I thus
9112 decided to trust it with my data.  I have installed it as a Debian Edu
9113 Wheezy roaming workstation hooked up with my Debian Edu Squeeze main
9114 server at home using Kerberos and LDAP, and will use it as my work
9115 station from now on.</p>
9116
9117 <p>As this is a solid state disk with no moving parts, I believe the
9118 Debian Wheezy default installation need to be tuned a bit to increase
9119 performance and increase life time of the disk.  The Linux kernel and
9120 user space applications do not yet adjust automatically to such
9121 environment.  To make it easier for my self, I created a draft Debian
9122 package <tt>ssd-setup</tt> to handle this tuning.  The
9123 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/ssd-setup.git">source
9124 for the ssd-setup package</a> is available from collab-maint, and it
9125 is set up to adjust the setup of the machine by just installing the
9126 package.  If there is any non-SSD disk in the machine, the package
9127 will refuse to install, as I did not try to write any logic to sort
9128 file systems in SSD and non-SSD file systems.</p>
9129
9130 <p>I consider the package a draft, as I am a bit unsure how to best
9131 set up Debian Wheezy with an SSD.  It is adjusted to my use case,
9132 where I set up the machine with one large encrypted partition (in
9133 addition to /boot), put LVM on top of this and set up partitions on
9134 top of this again.  See the README file in the package source for the
9135 references I used to pick the settings.  At the moment these
9136 parameters are tuned:</p>
9137
9138 <ul>
9139
9140 <li>Set up cryptsetup to pass TRIM commands to the physical disk
9141     (adding discard to /etc/crypttab)</li>
9142
9143 <li>Set up LVM to pass on TRIM commands to the underlying device (in
9144     this case a cryptsetup partition) by changing issue_discards from
9145     0 to 1 in /etc/lvm/lvm.conf.</li>
9146
9147 <li>Set relatime as a file system option for ext3 and ext4 file
9148     systems.</li>
9149
9150 <li>Tell swap to use TRIM commands by adding 'discard' to
9151     /etc/fstab.</li>
9152
9153 <li>Change I/O scheduler from cfq to deadline using a udev rule.</li>
9154
9155 <li>Run fstrim on every ext3 and ext4 file system every night (from
9156     cron.daily).</li>
9157
9158 <li>Adjust sysctl values vm.swappiness to 1 and vm.vfs_cache_pressure
9159     to 50 to reduce the kernel eagerness to swap out processes.</li>
9160
9161 </ul>
9162
9163 <p>During installation, I cancelled the part where the installer fill
9164 the disk with random data, as this would kill the SSD performance for
9165 little gain.  My goal with the encrypted file system is to ensure
9166 those stealing my laptop end up with a brick and not a working
9167 computer.  I have no hope in keeping the really resourceful people
9168 from getting the data on the disk (see
9169 <a href="http://xkcd.com/538/">XKCD #538</a> for an explanation why).
9170 Thus I concluded that adding the discard option to crypttab is the
9171 right thing to do.</p>
9172
9173 <p>I considered using the noop I/O scheduler, as several recommended
9174 it for SSD, but others recommended deadline and a benchmark I found
9175 indicated that deadline might be better for interactive use.</p>
9176
9177 <p>I also considered using the 'discard' file system option for ext3
9178 and ext4, but read that it would give a performance hit ever time a
9179 file is removed, and thought it best to that that slowdown once a day
9180 instead of during my work.</p>
9181
9182 <p>My package do not set up tmpfs on /var/run, /var/lock and /tmp, as
9183 this is already done by Debian Edu.</p>
9184
9185 <p>I have not yet started on the user space tuning.  I expect
9186 iceweasel need some tuning, and perhaps other applications too, but
9187 have not yet had time to investigate those parts.</p>
9188
9189 <p>The package should work on Ubuntu too, but I have not yet tested it
9190 there.</p>
9191
9192 <p>As for the answer to the question in the title of this blog post,
9193 as far as I know, the only solution I know about is to replace the
9194 disk.  It might be possible to flash it with Intel firmware instead of
9195 the Lenovo firmware.  But I have not tried and did not want to do so
9196 without approval from Lenovo as I wanted to keep the warranty on the
9197 disk until a solution was found and they wanted the broken disks
9198 back.</p>
9199
9200       </div>
9201       <div class="tags">
9202
9203
9204         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9205
9206
9207       </div>
9208     </div>
9209     <div class="padding"></div>
9210
9211     <div class="entry">
9212       <div class="title">
9213         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Intel_SSD_520_Series_180_GB_with_Lenovo_firmware_still_lock_up_from_sustained_writes.html">Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB with Lenovo firmware still lock up from sustained writes</a>
9214       </div>
9215       <div class="date">
9216         10th July 2013
9217       </div>
9218       <div class="body">
9219         <p>A few days ago, I wrote about
9220 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html">the
9221 problems I experienced with my new X230 and its SSD disk</a>, which
9222 was dying during installation because it is unable to cope with
9223 sustained write.  My supplier is in contact with
9224 <a href="http://www.lenovo.com/">Lenovo</a>, and they wanted to send a
9225 replacement disk to try to fix the problem.  They decided to send an
9226 identical model, so my hopes for a permanent fix was slim.</p>
9227
9228 <p>Anyway, today I got the replacement disk and tried to install
9229 Debian Edu Wheezy with encrypted disk on it.  The new disk have the
9230 same firmware version as the original.  This time my hope raised
9231 slightly as the installation progressed, as the original disk used to
9232 die after 4-7% of the disk was written to, while this time it kept
9233 going past 10%, 20%, 40% and even past 50%.  But around 60%, the disk
9234 died again and I was back on square one.  I still do not have a new
9235 laptop with a disk I can trust.  I can not live with a disk that might
9236 lock up when I download a new
9237 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> ISO or
9238 other large files.  I look forward to hearing from my supplier with
9239 the next proposal from Lenovo.</p>
9240
9241 <p>The original disk is marked Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB,
9242 11S0C38722Z1ZNME35X1TR, ISN: CVCV321407HB180EGN, SA: G57560302, FW:
9243 LF1i, 29MAY2013, PBA: G39779-300, LBA 351,651,888, LI P/N: 0C38722,
9244 Pb-free 2LI, LC P/N: 16-200366, WWN: 55CD2E40002756C4, Model:
9245 SSDSC2BW180A3L 2.5" 6Gb/s SATA SSD 180G 5V 1A, ASM P/N 0C38732, FRU
9246 P/N 45N8295, P0C38732.</p>
9247
9248 <p>The replacement disk is marked Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB,
9249 11S0C38722Z1ZNDE34N0L0, ISN: CVCV315306RK180EGN, SA: G57560-302, FW:
9250 LF1i, 22APR2013, PBA: G39779-300, LBA 351,651,888, LI P/N: 0C38722,
9251 Pb-free 2LI, LC P/N: 16-200366, WWN: 55CD2E40000AB69E, Model:
9252 SSDSC2BW180A3L 2.5" 6Gb/s SATA SSD 180G 5V 1A, ASM P/N 0C38732, FRU
9253 P/N 45N8295, P0C38732.</p>
9254
9255 <p>The only difference is in the first number (serial number?), ISN,
9256 SA, date and WNPP values.  Mentioning all the details here in case
9257 someone is able to use the information to find a way to identify the
9258 failing disk among working ones (if any such working disk actually
9259 exist).</p>
9260
9261       </div>
9262       <div class="tags">
9263
9264
9265         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9266
9267
9268       </div>
9269     </div>
9270     <div class="padding"></div>
9271
9272     <div class="entry">
9273       <div class="title">
9274         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/July_13th__Debian_Ubuntu_BSP_and_Skolelinux_Debian_Edu_developer_gathering_in_Oslo.html">July 13th: Debian/Ubuntu BSP and Skolelinux/Debian Edu developer gathering in Oslo</a>
9275       </div>
9276       <div class="date">
9277          9th July 2013
9278       </div>
9279       <div class="body">
9280         <p>The upcoming Saturday, 2013-07-13, we are organising a combined
9281 Debian Edu developer gathering and Debian and Ubuntu bug squashing
9282 party in Oslo.  It is organised by <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the
9283 member assosiation NUUG</a> and
9284 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">the Debian Edu / Skolelinux
9285 project</a> together with <a href="http://bitraf.no/">the hack space
9286 Bitraf</a>.</p>
9287
9288 <p>It starts 10:00 and continue until late evening.  Everyone is
9289 welcome, and there is no fee to participate.  There is on the other
9290 hand limited space, and only room for 30 people.  Please put your name
9291 on <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/BSP/2013/07/13/no/Oslo">the event
9292 wiki page</a> if you plan to join us.</p>
9293
9294       </div>
9295       <div class="tags">
9296
9297
9298         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
9299
9300
9301       </div>
9302     </div>
9303     <div class="padding"></div>
9304
9305     <div class="entry">
9306       <div class="title">
9307         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html">The Thinkpad is dead, long live the Thinkpad X230?</a>
9308       </div>
9309       <div class="date">
9310          5th July 2013
9311       </div>
9312       <div class="body">
9313         <p>Half a year ago, I reported that I had to find a
9314 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html">replacement
9315 for my trusty old Thinkpad X41</a>.  Unfortunately I did not have much
9316 time to spend on it, and it took a while to find a model I believe
9317 will do the job, but two days ago the replacement finally arrived.  I
9318 ended up picking a
9319 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/lenovo_thinkpad_x230">Thinkpad X230</a>
9320 with SSD disk (NZDAJMN).  I first test installed Debian Edu Wheezy as
9321 a roaming workstation, and it seemed to work flawlessly.  But my
9322 second installation with encrypted disk was not as successful.  More
9323 on that below.</p>
9324
9325 <p>I had a hard time trying to track down a good laptop, as my most
9326 important requirements (robust and with a good keyboard) are never
9327 listed in the feature list.  But I did get good help from the search
9328 feature at <a href="http://www.prisjakt.no/">Prisjakt</a>, which
9329 allowed me to limit the list of interesting laptops based on my other
9330 requirements.  A bit surprising that SSD disk are not disks according
9331 to that search interface, so I had to drop specifying the number of
9332 disks from my search parameters.  I also asked around among friends to
9333 get their impression on keyboards and robustness.</p>
9334
9335 <p>So the new laptop arrived, and it is quite a lot wider than the
9336 X41.  I am not quite convinced about the keyboard, as it is
9337 significantly wider than my old keyboard, and I have to stretch my
9338 hand a lot more to reach the edges.  But the key response is fairly
9339 good and the individual key shape is fairly easy to handle, so I hope
9340 I will get used to it.  My old X40 was starting to fail, and I really
9341 needed a new laptop now. :)</p>
9342
9343 <p>Turning off the touch pad was simple.  All it took was a quick
9344 visit to the BIOS during boot it disable it.</p>
9345
9346 <p>But there is a fatal problem with the laptop.  The 180 GB SSD disk
9347 lock up during load.  And this happen when installing Debian Wheezy
9348 with encrypted disk, while the disk is being filled with random data.
9349 I also tested to install Ubuntu Raring, and it happen there too if I
9350 reenable the code to fill the disk with random data (it is disabled by
9351 default in Ubuntu).  And the bug with is already known.  It was
9352 reported to Debian as <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/691427">BTS
9353 report #691427 2012-10-25</a> (journal commit I/O error on brand-new
9354 Thinkpad T430s ext4 on lvm on SSD).  It is also reported to the Linux
9355 kernel developers as
9356 <a href="https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=51861">Kernel bugzilla
9357 report #51861 2012-12-20</a> (Intel SSD 520 stops working under load
9358 (SSDSC2BW180A3L in Lenovo ThinkPad T430s)). It is also reported on the
9359 Lenovo forums, both for
9360 <a href="http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T400-T500-and-newer-T-series/T430s-Intel-SSD-520-180GB-issue/m-p/1070549">T430
9361 2012-11-10</a> and for
9362 <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
9363 03-20-2013</a>.  The problem do not only affect installation.  The
9364 reports state that the disk lock up during use if many writes are done
9365 on the disk, so it is much no use to work around the installation
9366 problem and end up with a computer that can lock up at any moment.
9367 There is even a
9368 <a href="https://git.efficios.com/?p=test-ssd.git">small C program
9369 available</a> that will lock up the hard drive after running a few
9370 minutes by writing to a file.</p>
9371
9372 <p>I've contacted my supplier and asked how to handle this, and after
9373 contacting PCHELP Norway (request 01D1FDP) which handle support
9374 requests for Lenovo, his first suggestion was to upgrade the disk
9375 firmware.  Unfortunately there is no newer firmware available from
9376 Lenovo, as my disk already have the most recent one (version LF1i).  I
9377 hope to hear more from him today and hope the problem can be
9378 fixed. :)</p>
9379
9380       </div>
9381       <div class="tags">
9382
9383
9384         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9385
9386
9387       </div>
9388     </div>
9389     <div class="padding"></div>
9390
9391     <div class="entry">
9392       <div class="title">
9393         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230.html">The Thinkpad is dead, long live the Thinkpad X230</a>
9394       </div>
9395       <div class="date">
9396          4th July 2013
9397       </div>
9398       <div class="body">
9399         <p>Half a year ago, I reported that I had to find a replacement for my
9400 trusty old Thinkpad X41.  Unfortunately I did not have much time to
9401 spend on it, but today the replacement finally arrived.  I ended up
9402 picking a <a href="http://www.linlap.com/lenovo_thinkpad_x230">Thinkpad
9403 X230</a> with SSD disk (NZDAJMN).  I first test installed Debian Edu
9404 Wheezy as a roaming workstation, and it worked flawlessly.  As I write
9405 this, it is installing what I hope will be a more final installation,
9406 with a encrypted hard drive to ensure any dope head stealing it end up
9407 with an expencive door stop.</p>
9408
9409 <p>I had a hard time trying to track down a good laptop, as my most
9410 important requirements (robust and with a good keyboard) are never
9411 listed in the feature list.  But I did get good help from the search
9412 feature at <ahref="http://www.prisjakt.no/">Prisjakt</a>, which
9413 allowed me to limit the list of interesting laptops based on my other
9414 requirements.  A bit surprising that SSD disk are not disks, so I had
9415 to drop number of disks from my search parameters.</p>
9416
9417 <p>I am not quite convinced about the keyboard, as it is significantly
9418 wider than my old keyboard, and I have to stretch my hand a lot more
9419 to reach the edges.  But the key response is fairly good and the
9420 individual key shape is fairly easy to handle, so I hope I will get
9421 used to it.  My old X40 was starting to fail, and I really needed a
9422 new laptop now. :)</p>
9423
9424 <p>I look forward to figuring out how to turn off the touch pad.</p>
9425
9426       </div>
9427       <div class="tags">
9428
9429
9430         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9431
9432
9433       </div>
9434     </div>
9435     <div class="padding"></div>
9436
9437     <div class="entry">
9438       <div class="title">
9439         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatically_locate_and_install_required_firmware_packages_on_Debian__Isenkram_0_4_.html">Automatically locate and install required firmware packages on Debian (Isenkram 0.4)</a>
9440       </div>
9441       <div class="date">
9442         25th June 2013
9443       </div>
9444       <div class="body">
9445         <p>It annoys me when the computer fail to do automatically what it is
9446 perfectly capable of, and I have to do it manually to get things
9447 working.  One such task is to find out what firmware packages are
9448 needed to get the hardware on my computer working.  Most often this
9449 affect the wifi card, but some times it even affect the RAID
9450 controller or the ethernet card.  Today I pushed version 0.4 of the
9451 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">Isenkram package</a>
9452 including a new script isenkram-autoinstall-firmware handling the
9453 process of asking all the loaded kernel modules what firmware files
9454 they want, find debian packages providing these files and install the
9455 debian packages.  Here is a test run on my laptop:</p>
9456
9457 <p><pre>
9458 # isenkram-autoinstall-firmware
9459 info: kernel drivers requested extra firmware: ipw2200-bss.fw ipw2200-ibss.fw ipw2200-sniffer.fw
9460 info: fetching http://http.debian.net/debian/dists/squeeze/Contents-i386.gz
9461 info: locating packages with the requested firmware files
9462 info: Updating APT sources after adding non-free APT source
9463 info: trying to install firmware-ipw2x00
9464 firmware-ipw2x00
9465 firmware-ipw2x00
9466 Preconfiguring packages ...
9467 Selecting previously deselected package firmware-ipw2x00.
9468 (Reading database ... 259727 files and directories currently installed.)
9469 Unpacking firmware-ipw2x00 (from .../firmware-ipw2x00_0.28+squeeze1_all.deb) ...
9470 Setting up firmware-ipw2x00 (0.28+squeeze1) ...
9471 #
9472 </pre></p>
9473
9474 <p>When all the requested firmware is present, a simple message is
9475 printed instead:</p>
9476
9477 <p><pre>
9478 # isenkram-autoinstall-firmware
9479 info: did not find any firmware files requested by loaded kernel modules.  exiting
9480 #
9481 </pre></p>
9482
9483 <p>It could use some polish, but it is already working well and saving
9484 me some time when setting up new machines. :)</p>
9485
9486 <p>So, how does it work?  It look at the set of currently loaded
9487 kernel modules, and look up each one of them using modinfo, to find
9488 the firmware files listed in the module meta-information.  Next, it
9489 download the Contents file from a nearby APT mirror, and search for
9490 the firmware files in this file to locate the package with the
9491 requested firmware file.  If the package is in the non-free section, a
9492 non-free APT source is added and the package is installed using
9493 <tt>apt-get install</tt>.  The end result is a slightly better working
9494 machine.</p>
9495
9496 <p>I hope someone find time to implement a more polished version of
9497 this script as part of the hw-detect debian-installer module, to
9498 finally fix <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/655507">BTS report
9499 #655507</a>.  There really is no need to insert USB sticks with
9500 firmware during a PXE install when the packages already are available
9501 from the nearby Debian mirror.</p>
9502
9503       </div>
9504       <div class="tags">
9505
9506
9507         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
9508
9509
9510       </div>
9511     </div>
9512     <div class="padding"></div>
9513
9514     <div class="entry">
9515       <div class="title">
9516         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Fixing_the_Linux_black_screen_of_death_on_machines_with_Intel_HD_video.html">Fixing the Linux black screen of death on machines with Intel HD video</a>
9517       </div>
9518       <div class="date">
9519         11th June 2013
9520       </div>
9521       <div class="body">
9522         <p>When installing RedHat, Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu on some machines,
9523 the screen just turn black when Linux boot, either during installation
9524 or on first boot from the hard disk.  I've seen it once in a while the
9525 last few years, but only recently understood the cause.  I've seen it
9526 on HP laptops, and on my latest acquaintance the Packard Bell laptop.
9527 The reason seem to be in the wiring of some laptops.  The system to
9528 control the screen background light is inverted, so when Linux try to
9529 turn the brightness fully on, it end up turning it off instead.  I do
9530 not know which Linux drivers are affected, but this post is about the
9531 i915 driver used by the
9532 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Packard Bell
9533 EasyNote LV</a>, Thinkpad X40 and many other laptops.</p>
9534
9535 <p>The problem can be worked around two ways.  Either by adding
9536 i915.invert_brightness=1 as a kernel option, or by adding a file in
9537 /etc/modprobe.d/ to tell modprobe to add the invert_brightness=1
9538 option when it load the i915 kernel module.  On Debian and Ubuntu, it
9539 can be done by running these commands as root:</p>
9540
9541 <pre>
9542 echo options i915 invert_brightness=1 | tee /etc/modprobe.d/i915.conf
9543 update-initramfs -u -k all
9544 </pre>
9545
9546 <p>Since March 2012 there is
9547 <a href="http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=4dca20efb1a9c2efefc28ad2867e5d6c3f5e1955">a
9548 mechanism in the Linux kernel</a> to tell the i915 driver which
9549 hardware have this problem, and get the driver to invert the
9550 brightness setting automatically.  To use it, one need to add a row in
9551 <a href="http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_display.c">the
9552 intel_quirks array</a> in the driver source
9553 <tt>drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_display.c</tt> (look for "<tt>static
9554 struct intel_quirk intel_quirks</tt>"), specifying the PCI device
9555 number (vendor number 8086 is assumed) and subdevice vendor and device
9556 number.</p>
9557
9558 <p>My Packard Bell EasyNote LV got this output from <tt>lspci
9559 -vvnn</tt> for the video card in question:</p>
9560
9561 <p><pre>
9562 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation \
9563     3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller [8086:0156] \
9564     (rev 09) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
9565  Subsystem: Acer Incorporated [ALI] Device [1025:0688]
9566  Control: I/O+ Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- \
9567     ParErr- Stepping- SE RR- FastB2B- DisINTx+
9568  Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort- \
9569     <TAbort- <MAbort->SERR- <PERR- INTx-
9570  Latency: 0
9571  Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 42
9572  Region 0: Memory at c2000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4M]
9573  Region 2: Memory at b0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
9574  Region 4: I/O ports at 4000 [size=64]
9575  Expansion ROM at <unassigned> [disabled]
9576  Capabilities: <access denied>
9577  Kernel driver in use: i915
9578 </pre></p>
9579
9580 <p>The resulting intel_quirks entry would then look like this:</p>
9581
9582 <p><pre>
9583 struct intel_quirk intel_quirks[] = {
9584        ...
9585         /* Packard Bell EasyNote LV11HC needs invert brightness quirk */
9586         { 0x0156, 0x1025, 0x0688, quirk_invert_brightness },
9587        ...
9588 }
9589 </pre></p>
9590
9591 <p>According to the kernel module instructions (as seen using
9592 <tt>modinfo i915</tt>), information about hardware needing the
9593 invert_brightness flag should be sent to the
9594 <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/dri-devel">dri-devel
9595 (at) lists.freedesktop.org</a> mailing list to reach the kernel
9596 developers.  But my email about the laptop sent 2013-06-03 have not
9597 yet shown up in
9598 <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2013-June/thread.html">the
9599 web archive for the mailing list</a>, so I suspect they do not accept
9600 emails from non-subscribers.  Because of this, I sent my patch also to
9601 the Debian bug tracking system instead as
9602 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/710938">BTS report #710938</a>, to make
9603 sure the patch is not lost.</p>
9604
9605 <p>Unfortunately, it is not enough to fix the kernel to get Laptops
9606 with this problem working properly with Linux.  If you use Gnome, your
9607 worries should be over at this point.  But if you use KDE, there is
9608 something in KDE ignoring the invert_brightness setting and turning on
9609 the screen during login.  I've reported it to Debian as
9610 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/711237">BTS report #711237</a>, and
9611 have no idea yet how to figure out exactly what subsystem is doing
9612 this.  Perhaps you can help?  Perhaps you know what the Gnome
9613 developers did to handle this, and this can give a clue to the KDE
9614 developers?  Or you know where in KDE the screen brightness is changed
9615 during login?  If so, please update the BTS report (or get in touch if
9616 you do not know how to update BTS).</p>
9617
9618 <p>Update 2013-07-19: The correct fix for this machine seem to be
9619 acpi_backlight=vendor, to disable ACPI backlight support completely,
9620 as the ACPI information on the machine is trash and it is better to
9621 leave it to the intel video driver to control the screen
9622 backlight.</p>
9623
9624       </div>
9625       <div class="tags">
9626
9627
9628         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9629
9630
9631       </div>
9632     </div>
9633     <div class="padding"></div>
9634
9635     <div class="entry">
9636       <div class="title">
9637         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_install_Linux_on_a_Packard_Bell_Easynote_LV_preinstalled_with_Windows_8.html">How to install Linux on a Packard Bell Easynote LV preinstalled with Windows 8</a>
9638       </div>
9639       <div class="date">
9640         27th May 2013
9641       </div>
9642       <div class="body">
9643         <p>Two days ago, I asked
9644 <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
9645 I could install Linux on a Packard Bell EasyNote LV computer
9646 preinstalled with Windows 8</a>.  I found a solution, but am horrified
9647 with the obstacles put in the way of Linux users on a laptop with UEFI
9648 and Windows 8.</p>
9649
9650 <p>I never found out if the cause of my problems were the use of UEFI
9651 secure booting or fast boot.  I suspect fast boot was the problem,
9652 causing the firmware to boot directly from HD without considering any
9653 key presses and alternative devices, but do not know UEFI settings
9654 enough to tell.</p>
9655
9656 <p>There is no way to install Linux on the machine in question without
9657 opening the box and disconnecting the hard drive!  This is as far as I
9658 can tell, the only way to get access to the firmware setup menu
9659 without accepting the Windows 8 license agreement.  I am told (and
9660 found description on how to) that it is possible to configure the
9661 firmware setup once booted into Windows 8.  But as I believe the terms
9662 of that agreement are completely unacceptable, accepting the license
9663 was never an alternative.  I do not enter agreements I do not intend
9664 to follow.</p>
9665
9666 <p>I feared I had to return the laptops and ask for a refund, and
9667 waste many hours on this, but luckily there was a way to get it to
9668 work.  But I would not recommend it to anyone planning to run Linux on
9669 it, and I have become sceptical to Windows 8 certified laptops.  Is
9670 this the way Linux will be forced out of the market place, by making
9671 it close to impossible for "normal" users to install Linux without
9672 accepting the Microsoft Windows license terms?  Or at least not
9673 without risking to loose the warranty?</p>
9674
9675 <p>I've updated the
9676 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Linux Laptop
9677 wiki page for Packard Bell EasyNote LV</a>, to ensure the next person
9678 do not have to struggle as much as I did to get Linux into the
9679 machine.</p>
9680
9681 <p>Thanks to Bob Rosbag, Florian Weimer, Philipp Kern, Ben Hutching,
9682 Michael Tokarev and others for feedback and ideas.</p>
9683
9684       </div>
9685       <div class="tags">
9686
9687
9688         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9689
9690
9691       </div>
9692     </div>
9693     <div class="padding"></div>
9694
9695     <div class="entry">
9696       <div class="title">
9697         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_can_I_install_Linux_on_a_Packard_Bell_Easynote_LV_preinstalled_with_Windows_8_.html">How can I install Linux on a Packard Bell Easynote LV preinstalled with Windows 8?</a>
9698       </div>
9699       <div class="date">
9700         25th May 2013
9701       </div>
9702       <div class="body">
9703         <p>I've run into quite a problem the last few days.  I bought three
9704 new laptops for my parents and a few others.  I bought Packard Bell
9705 Easynote LV to run Kubuntu on and use as their home computer.  But I
9706 am completely unable to figure out how to install Linux on it.  The
9707 computer is preinstalled with Windows 8, and I suspect it uses UEFI
9708 instead of a BIOS to boot.</p>
9709
9710 <p>The problem is that I am unable to get it to PXE boot, and unable
9711 to get it to boot the Linux installer from my USB stick.  I have yet
9712 to try the DVD install, and still hope it will work.  when I turn on
9713 the computer, there is no information on what buttons to press to get
9714 the normal boot menu.  I expect to get some boot menu to select PXE or
9715 USB stick booting.  When booting, it first ask for the language to
9716 use, then for some regional settings, and finally if I will accept the
9717 Windows 8 terms of use.  As these terms are completely unacceptable to
9718 me, I have no other choice but to turn off the computer and try again
9719 to get it to boot the Linux installer.</p>
9720
9721 <p>I have gathered my findings so far on a Linlap page about the
9722 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Packard Bell
9723 EasyNote LV</a> model.  If you have any idea how to get Linux
9724 installed on this machine, please get in touch or update that wiki
9725 page.  If I can't find a way to install Linux, I will have to return
9726 the laptop to the seller and find another machine for my parents.</p>
9727
9728 <p>I wonder, is this the way Linux will be forced out of the market
9729 using UEFI and "secure boot" by making it impossible to install Linux
9730 on new Laptops?</p>
9731
9732       </div>
9733       <div class="tags">
9734
9735
9736         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9737
9738
9739       </div>
9740     </div>
9741     <div class="padding"></div>
9742
9743     <div class="entry">
9744       <div class="title">
9745         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_transform_a_Debian_based_system_to_a_Debian_Edu_installation.html">How to transform a Debian based system to a Debian Edu installation</a>
9746       </div>
9747       <div class="date">
9748         17th May 2013
9749       </div>
9750       <div class="body">
9751         <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> is
9752 an operating system based on Debian intended for use in schools.  It
9753 contain a turn-key solution for the computer network provided to
9754 pupils in the primary schools.  It provide both the central server,
9755 network boot servers and desktop environments with heaps of
9756 educational software.  The project was founded almost 12 years ago,
9757 2001-07-02.  If you want to support the project, which is in need for
9758 cash to fund developer gatherings and other project related activity,
9759 <a href="http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">please
9760 donate some money</a>.
9761
9762 <p>A topic that come up again and again on the Debian Edu mailing
9763 lists and elsewhere, is the question on how to transform a Debian or
9764 Ubuntu installation into a Debian Edu installation.  It isn't very
9765 hard, and last week I wrote a script to replicate the steps done by
9766 the Debian Edu installer.</p>
9767
9768 <p>The script,
9769 <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/>
9770 in the debian-edu-config package, will go through these six steps and
9771 transform an existing Debian Wheezy or Ubuntu (untested) installation
9772 into a Debian Edu Workstation:</p>
9773
9774 <ol>
9775
9776 <li>Add skolelinux related APT sources.</li>
9777 <li>Create /etc/debian-edu/config with the wanted configuration.</li>
9778 <li>Install debian-edu-install to load preseeding values and pull in
9779     our configuration.</li>
9780 <li>Preseed debconf database with profile setup in
9781     /etc/debian-edu/config, and run tasksel to install packages
9782     according to the profile specified in the config above,
9783     overriding some of the Debian automation machinery.</li>
9784 <li>Run debian-edu-cfengine-D installation to configure everything
9785     that could not be done using preseeding.</li>
9786 <li>Ask for a reboot to enable all the configuration changes.</li>
9787
9788 </ol>
9789
9790 <p>There are some steps in the Debian Edu installation that can not be
9791 replicated like this.  Disk partitioning and LVM setup, for example.
9792 So this script just assume there is enough disk space to install all
9793 the needed packages.</p>
9794
9795 <p>The script was created to help a Debian Edu student working on
9796 setting up <a href="http://www.raspberrypi.org">Raspberry Pi</a> as a
9797 Debian Edu client, and using it he can take the existing
9798 <a href="http://www.raspbian.org/FrontPage‎">Raspbian</a> installation and
9799 transform it into a fully functioning Debian Edu Workstation (or
9800 Roaming Workstation, or whatever :).</p>
9801
9802 <p>The default setting in the script is to create a KDE Workstation.
9803 If a LXDE based Roaming workstation is wanted instead, modify the
9804 PROFILE and DESKTOP values at the top to look like this instead:</p>
9805
9806 <p><pre>
9807 PROFILE="Roaming-Workstation"
9808 DESKTOP="lxde"
9809 </pre></p>
9810
9811 <p>The script could even become useful to set up Debian Edu servers in
9812 the cloud, by starting with a virtual Debian installation at some
9813 virtual hosting service and setting up all the services on first
9814 boot.</p>
9815
9816       </div>
9817       <div class="tags">
9818
9819
9820         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9821
9822
9823       </div>
9824     </div>
9825     <div class="padding"></div>
9826
9827     <div class="entry">
9828       <div class="title">
9829         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian__the_Linux_distribution_of_choice_for_LEGO_designers_.html">Debian, the Linux distribution of choice for LEGO designers?</a>
9830       </div>
9831       <div class="date">
9832         11th May 2013
9833       </div>
9834       <div class="body">
9835         <P>In January,
9836 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_IRC_channel_for_LEGO_designers_using_Debian.html">I
9837 announced a</a> new <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">IRC
9838 channel #debian-lego</a>, for those of us in the Debian and Linux
9839 community interested in <a href="http://www.lego.com/">LEGO</a>, the
9840 marvellous construction system from Denmark.  We also created
9841 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">a wiki page</a> to have
9842 a place to take notes and write down our plans and hopes.  And several
9843 people showed up to help.  I was very happy to see the effect of my
9844 call.  Since the small start, we have a debtags tag
9845 <a href="http://debtags.debian.net/search/bytag?wl=hardware::hobby:lego">hardware::hobby:lego</a>
9846 tag for LEGO related packages, and now count 10 packages related to
9847 LEGO and <a href="http://mindstorms.lego.com/">Mindstorms</a>:</p>
9848
9849 <p><table>
9850 <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>
9851 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/leocad">leocad</a></td><td>virtual brick CAD software</td></tr>
9852 <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>
9853 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/lnpd">lnpd</a></td><td>daemon for LNP communication with BrickOS</td></tr>
9854 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/nbc">nbc</a></td><td>compiler for LEGO Mindstorms NXT bricks</td></tr>
9855 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/nqc">nqc</a></td><td>Not Quite C compiler for LEGO Mindstorms RCX</td></tr>
9856 <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>
9857 <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>
9858 <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>
9859 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/t2n">t2n</a></td><td>simple command-line tool for Lego NXT</td></tr>
9860 </table></p>
9861
9862 <p>Some of these are available in Wheezy, and all but one are
9863 currently available in Jessie/testing.  leocad is so far only
9864 available in experimental.</p>
9865
9866 <p>If you care about LEGO in Debian, please join us on IRC and help
9867 adding the rest of the great free software tools available on Linux
9868 for LEGO designers.</p>
9869
9870       </div>
9871       <div class="tags">
9872
9873
9874         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lego">lego</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
9875
9876
9877       </div>
9878     </div>
9879     <div class="padding"></div>
9880
9881     <div class="entry">
9882       <div class="title">
9883         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_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>
9884       </div>
9885       <div class="date">
9886          5th May 2013
9887       </div>
9888       <div class="body">
9889         <p>When I woke up this morning, I was very happy to see that the
9890 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2013/20130504">release announcement
9891 for Debian Wheezy</a> was waiting in my mail box.  This is a great
9892 Debian release, and I expect to move my machines at home over to it fairly
9893 soon.</p>
9894
9895 <p>The new debian release contain heaps of new stuff, and one program
9896 in particular make me very happy to see included.  The
9897 <a href="http://scratch.mit.edu/">Scratch</a> program, made famous by
9898 the <a href="http://www.code.org/">Teach kids code</a> movement, is
9899 included for the first time.  Alongside similar programs like
9900 <a href="http://edu.kde.org/kturtle/">kturtle</a> and
9901 <a href="http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Turtle_Art">turtleart</a>,
9902 it allow for visual programming where syntax errors can not happen,
9903 and a friendly programming environment for learning to control the
9904 computer.  Scratch will also be included in the next release of Debian
9905 Edu.</a>
9906
9907 <p>And now that Wheezy is wrapped up, we can wrap up the next Debian
9908 Edu/Skolelinux release too.  The
9909 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/2013/04/msg00132.html">first
9910 alpha release</a> went out last week, and the next should soon
9911 follow.<p>
9912
9913       </div>
9914       <div class="tags">
9915
9916
9917         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9918
9919
9920       </div>
9921     </div>
9922     <div class="padding"></div>
9923
9924     <div class="entry">
9925       <div class="title">
9926         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Isenkram_0_2_finally_in_the_Debian_archive.html">Isenkram 0.2 finally in the Debian archive</a>
9927       </div>
9928       <div class="date">
9929          3rd April 2013
9930       </div>
9931       <div class="body">
9932         <p>Today the <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">Isenkram
9933 package</a> finally made it into the archive, after lingering in NEW
9934 for many months.  I uploaded it to the Debian experimental suite
9935 2013-01-27, and today it was accepted into the archive.</p>
9936
9937 <p>Isenkram is a system for suggesting to users what packages to
9938 install to work with a pluggable hardware device.  The suggestion pop
9939 up when the device is plugged in.  For example if a Lego Mindstorm NXT
9940 is inserted, it will suggest to install the program needed to program
9941 the NXT controller.  Give it a go, and report bugs and suggestions to
9942 BTS. :)</p>
9943
9944       </div>
9945       <div class="tags">
9946
9947
9948         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
9949
9950
9951       </div>
9952     </div>
9953     <div class="padding"></div>
9954
9955     <div class="entry">
9956       <div class="title">
9957         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Bitcoin_GUI_now_available_from_Debian_unstable__and_Ubuntu_raring_.html">Bitcoin GUI now available from Debian/unstable (and Ubuntu/raring)</a>
9958       </div>
9959       <div class="date">
9960          2nd February 2013
9961       </div>
9962       <div class="body">
9963         <p>My
9964 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_backport_bitcoin_qt_version_0_7_2_2_to_Debian_Squeeze.html">last
9965 bitcoin related blog post</a> mentioned that the new
9966 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">bitcoin package</a> for
9967 Debian was waiting in NEW.  It was accepted by the Debian ftp-masters
9968 2013-01-19, and have been available in unstable since then.  It was
9969 automatically copied to Ubuntu, and is available in their Raring
9970 version too.</p>
9971
9972 <p>But there is a strange problem with the build that block this new
9973 version from being available on the i386 and kfreebsd-i386
9974 architectures.  For some strange reason, the autobuilders in Debian
9975 for these architectures fail to run the test suite on these
9976 architectures (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/672524">BTS #672524</a>).
9977 We are so far unable to reproduce it when building it manually, and
9978 no-one have been able to propose a fix.  If you got an idea what is
9979 failing, please let us know via the BTS.</p>
9980
9981 <p>One feature that is annoying me with of the bitcoin client, because
9982 I often run low on disk space, is the fact that the client will exit
9983 if it run short on space (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/696715">BTS
9984 #696715</a>).  So make sure you have enough disk space when you run
9985 it. :)</p>
9986
9987 <p>As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
9988 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
9989 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
9990
9991       </div>
9992       <div class="tags">
9993
9994
9995         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9996
9997
9998       </div>
9999     </div>
10000     <div class="padding"></div>
10001
10002     <div class="entry">
10003       <div class="title">
10004         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html">Welcome to the world, Isenkram!</a>
10005       </div>
10006       <div class="date">
10007         22nd January 2013
10008       </div>
10009       <div class="body">
10010         <p>Yesterday, I
10011 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_prototype_ready_making_hardware_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">asked
10012 for testers</a> for my prototype for making Debian better at handling
10013 pluggable hardware devices, which I
10014 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">set
10015 out to create</a> earlier this month.  Several valuable testers showed
10016 up, and caused me to really want to to open up the development to more
10017 people.  But before I did this, I want to come up with a sensible name
10018 for this project.  Today I finally decided on a new name, and I have
10019 renamed the project from hw-support-handler to this new name.  In the
10020 process, I moved the source to git and made it available as a
10021 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/isenkram.git">collab-maint</a>
10022 repository in Debian.  The new name?  It is <strong>Isenkram</strong>.
10023 To fetch and build the latest version of the source, use</p>
10024
10025 <pre>
10026 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/collab-maint/isenkram.git
10027 cd isenkram && git-buildpackage -us -uc
10028 </pre>
10029
10030 <p>I have not yet adjusted all files to use the new name yet.  If you
10031 want to hack on the source or improve the package, please go ahead.
10032 But please talk to me first on IRC or via email before you do major
10033 changes, to make sure we do not step on each others toes. :)</p>
10034
10035 <p>If you wonder what 'isenkram' is, it is a Norwegian word for iron
10036 stuff, typically meaning tools, nails, screws, etc.  Typical hardware
10037 stuff, in other words.  I've been told it is the Norwegian variant of
10038 the German word eisenkram, for those that are familiar with that
10039 word.</p>
10040
10041 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-26</strong>: Added -us -us to build
10042 instructions, to avoid confusing people with an error from the signing
10043 process.</p>
10044
10045 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-27</strong>: Switch to HTTP URL for the git
10046 clone argument to avoid the need for authentication.</p>
10047
10048       </div>
10049       <div class="tags">
10050
10051
10052         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
10053
10054
10055       </div>
10056     </div>
10057     <div class="padding"></div>
10058
10059     <div class="entry">
10060       <div class="title">
10061         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_prototype_ready_making_hardware_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">First prototype ready making hardware easier to use in Debian</a>
10062       </div>
10063       <div class="date">
10064         21st January 2013
10065       </div>
10066       <div class="body">
10067         <p>Early this month I set out to try to
10068 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">improve
10069 the Debian support for pluggable hardware devices</a>.  Now my
10070 prototype is working, and it is ready for a larger audience.  To test
10071 it, fetch the
10072 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">source
10073 from the Debian Edu subversion repository</a>, build and install the
10074 package.  You might have to log out and in again activate the
10075 autostart script.</p>
10076
10077 <p>The design is simple:</p>
10078
10079 <ul>
10080
10081 <li>Add desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ causing a program
10082 hw-support-handlerd to start when the user log in.</li>
10083
10084 <li>This program listen for kernel events about new hardware (directly
10085 from the kernel like udev does), not using HAL dbus events as I
10086 initially did.</li>
10087
10088 <li>When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware modalias in
10089 the APT database, a database
10090 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=markup">available
10091 via HTTP</a> and a database available as part of the package.</li>
10092
10093 <li>If a package is mapped to the hardware in question, the package
10094 isn't installed yet and this is the first time the hardware was
10095 plugged in, show a desktop notification suggesting to install the
10096 package or packages.</li>
10097
10098 <li>If the user click on the 'install package now' button, ask
10099 aptdaemon via the PackageKit API to install the requrired package.</li>
10100
10101 <li>aptdaemon ask for root password or sudo password, and install the
10102 package while showing progress information in a window.</li>
10103
10104 </ul>
10105
10106 <p>I still need to come up with a better name for the system.  Here
10107 are some screen shots showing the prototype in action.  First the
10108 notification, then the password request, and finally the request to
10109 approve all the dependencies.  Sorry for the Norwegian Bokmål GUI.</p>
10110
10111 <p><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-1-notification.png">
10112 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-2-password.png">
10113 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-3-dependencies.png">
10114 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-4-installing.png">
10115 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-5-installing-details.png" width="70%"></p>
10116
10117 <p>The prototype still need to be improved with longer timeouts, but
10118 is already useful.  The database of hardware to package mappings also
10119 need more work.  It is currently compatible with the Ubuntu way of
10120 storing such information in the package control file, but could be
10121 changed to use other formats instead or in addition to the current
10122 method.  I've dropped the use of discover for this mapping, as the
10123 modalias approach is more flexible and easier to use on Linux as long
10124 as the Linux kernel expose its modalias strings directly.</p>
10125
10126 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-21 16:50</strong>: Due to popular demand,
10127 here is the command required to check out and build the source: Use
10128 '<tt>svn checkout
10129 svn://svn.debian.org/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/; cd
10130 hw-support-handler; debuild</tt>'.  If you lack debuild, install the
10131 devscripts package.</p>
10132
10133 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-23 12:00</strong>: The project is now
10134 renamed to Isenkram and the source moved from the Debian Edu
10135 subversion repository to a Debian collab-maint git repository.  See
10136 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html">build
10137 instructions</a> for details.</p>
10138
10139       </div>
10140       <div class="tags">
10141
10142
10143         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
10144
10145
10146       </div>
10147     </div>
10148     <div class="padding"></div>
10149
10150     <div class="entry">
10151       <div class="title">
10152         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html">Thank you Thinkpad X41, for your long and trustworthy service</a>
10153       </div>
10154       <div class="date">
10155         19th January 2013
10156       </div>
10157       <div class="body">
10158         <p>This Christmas my trusty old laptop died.  It died quietly and
10159 suddenly in bed.  With a quiet whimper, it went completely quiet and
10160 black.  The power button was no longer able to turn it on.  It was a
10161 IBM Thinkpad X41, and the best laptop I ever had.  Better than both
10162 Thinkpads X30, X31, X40, X60, X61 and X61S.  Far better than the
10163 Compaq I had before that.  Now I need to find a replacement.  To keep
10164 going during Christmas, I moved the one year old SSD disk to my old
10165 X40 where it fitted (only one I had left that could use it), but it is
10166 not a durable solution.
10167
10168 <p>My laptop needs are fairly modest.  This is my wishlist from when I
10169 got a new one more than 10 years ago.  It still holds true.:)</p>
10170
10171 <ul>
10172
10173 <li>Lightweight (around 1 kg) and small volume (preferably smaller
10174   than A4).</li>
10175 <li>Robust, it will be in my backpack every day.</li>
10176 <li>Three button mouse and a mouse pin instead of touch pad.</li>
10177 <li>Long battery life time.  Preferable a week.</li>
10178 <li>Internal WIFI network card.</li>
10179 <li>Internal Twisted Pair network card.</li>
10180 <li>Some USB slots (2-3 is plenty)</li>
10181 <li>Good keyboard - similar to the Thinkpad.</li>
10182 <li>Video resolution at least 1024x768, with size around 12" (A4 paper
10183 size).</li>
10184 <li>Hardware supported by Debian Stable, ie the default kernel and
10185   X.org packages.</li>
10186 <li>Quiet, preferably fan free (or at least not using the fan most of
10187   the time).
10188
10189 </ul>
10190
10191 <p>You will notice that there are no RAM and CPU requirements in the
10192 list.  The reason is simply that the specifications on laptops the
10193 last 10-15 years have been sufficient for my needs, and I have to look
10194 at other features to choose my laptop.  But are there still made as
10195 robust laptops as my X41?  The Thinkpad X60/X61 proved to be less
10196 robust, and Thinkpads seem to be heading in the wrong direction since
10197 Lenovo took over.  But I've been told that X220 and X1 Carbon might
10198 still be useful.</p>
10199
10200 <p>Perhaps I should rethink my needs, and look for a pad with an
10201 external keyboard?  I'll have to check the
10202 <a href="http://www.linux-laptop.net/">Linux Laptops site</a> for
10203 well-supported laptops, or perhaps just buy one preinstalled from one
10204 of the vendors listed on the <a href="http://linuxpreloaded.com/">Linux
10205 Pre-loaded site</a>.</p>
10206
10207       </div>
10208       <div class="tags">
10209
10210
10211         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10212
10213
10214       </div>
10215     </div>
10216     <div class="padding"></div>
10217
10218     <div class="entry">
10219       <div class="title">
10220         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_find_a_browser_plugin_supporting_a_given_MIME_type.html">How to find a browser plugin supporting a given MIME type</a>
10221       </div>
10222       <div class="date">
10223         18th January 2013
10224       </div>
10225       <div class="body">
10226         <p>Some times I try to figure out which Iceweasel browser plugin to
10227 install to get support for a given MIME type.  Thanks to
10228 <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MozillaTeam/Plugins">specifications
10229 done by Ubuntu</a> and Mozilla, it is possible to do this in Debian.
10230 Unfortunately, not very many packages provide the needed meta
10231 information, Anyway, here is a small script to look up all browser
10232 plugin packages announcing ther MIME support using this specification:</p>
10233
10234 <pre>
10235 #!/usr/bin/python
10236 import sys
10237 import apt
10238 def pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
10239     cache = apt.Cache()
10240     cache.open(None)
10241     thepkgs = []
10242     for pkg in cache:
10243         version = pkg.candidate
10244         if version is None:
10245             version = pkg.installed
10246         if version is None:
10247             continue
10248         record = version.record
10249         if not record.has_key('Npp-MimeType'):
10250             continue
10251         mime_types = record['Npp-MimeType'].split(',')
10252         for t in mime_types:
10253             t = t.rstrip().strip()
10254             if t == mimetype:
10255                 thepkgs.append(pkg.name)
10256     return thepkgs
10257 mimetype = "audio/ogg"
10258 if 1 < len(sys.argv):
10259     mimetype = sys.argv[1]
10260 print "Browser plugin packages supporting %s:" % mimetype
10261 for pkg in pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
10262     print "  %s" %pkg
10263 </pre>
10264
10265 <p>It can be used like this to look up a given MIME type:</p>
10266
10267 <pre>
10268 % ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype
10269 Browser plugin packages supporting audio/ogg:
10270   gecko-mediaplayer
10271 % ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype application/x-shockwave-flash
10272 Browser plugin packages supporting application/x-shockwave-flash:
10273   browser-plugin-gnash
10274 %
10275 </pre>
10276
10277 <p>In Ubuntu this mechanism is combined with support in the browser
10278 itself to query for plugins and propose to install the needed
10279 packages.  It would be great if Debian supported such feature too.  Is
10280 anyone working on adding it?</p>
10281
10282 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-18 14:20</strong>: The Debian BTS
10283 request for icweasel support for this feature is
10284 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/484010">#484010</a> from 2008 (and
10285 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/698426">#698426</a> from today).  Lack
10286 of manpower and wish for a different design is the reason thus feature
10287 is not yet in iceweasel from Debian.</p>
10288
10289       </div>
10290       <div class="tags">
10291
10292
10293         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10294
10295
10296       </div>
10297     </div>
10298     <div class="padding"></div>
10299
10300     <div class="entry">
10301       <div class="title">
10302         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_most_supported_MIME_type_in_Debian_.html">What is the most supported MIME type in Debian?</a>
10303       </div>
10304       <div class="date">
10305         16th January 2013
10306       </div>
10307       <div class="body">
10308         <p>The <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/AppStreamDebianProposal">DEP-11
10309 proposal to add AppStream information to the Debian archive</a>, is a
10310 proposal to make it possible for a Desktop application to propose to
10311 the user some package to install to gain support for a given MIME
10312 type, font, library etc. that is currently missing.  With such
10313 mechanism in place, it would be possible for the desktop to
10314 automatically propose and install leocad if some LDraw file is
10315 downloaded by the browser.</p>
10316
10317 <p>To get some idea about the current content of the archive, I decided
10318 to write a simple program to extract all .desktop files from the
10319 Debian archive and look up the claimed MIME support there.  The result
10320 can be found on the
10321 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/pub/AppStreamTest">Skolelinux FTP
10322 site</a>.  Using the collected information, it become possible to
10323 answer the question in the title.  Here are the 20 most supported MIME
10324 types in Debian stable (Squeeze), testing (Wheezy) and unstable (Sid).
10325 The complete list is available from the link above.</p>
10326
10327 <p><strong>Debian Stable:</strong></p>
10328
10329 <pre>
10330   count MIME type
10331   ----- -----------------------
10332      32 text/plain
10333      30 audio/mpeg
10334      29 image/png
10335      28 image/jpeg
10336      27 application/ogg
10337      26 audio/x-mp3
10338      25 image/tiff
10339      25 image/gif
10340      22 image/bmp
10341      22 audio/x-wav
10342      20 audio/x-flac
10343      19 audio/x-mpegurl
10344      18 video/x-ms-asf
10345      18 audio/x-musepack
10346      18 audio/x-mpeg
10347      18 application/x-ogg
10348      17 video/mpeg
10349      17 audio/x-scpls
10350      17 audio/ogg
10351      16 video/x-ms-wmv
10352 </pre>
10353
10354 <p><strong>Debian Testing:</strong></p>
10355
10356 <pre>
10357   count MIME type
10358   ----- -----------------------
10359      33 text/plain
10360      32 image/png
10361      32 image/jpeg
10362      29 audio/mpeg
10363      27 image/gif
10364      26 image/tiff
10365      26 application/ogg
10366      25 audio/x-mp3
10367      22 image/bmp
10368      21 audio/x-wav
10369      19 audio/x-mpegurl
10370      19 audio/x-mpeg
10371      18 video/mpeg
10372      18 audio/x-scpls
10373      18 audio/x-flac
10374      18 application/x-ogg
10375      17 video/x-ms-asf
10376      17 text/html
10377      17 audio/x-musepack
10378      16 image/x-xbitmap
10379 </pre>
10380
10381 <p><strong>Debian Unstable:</strong></p>
10382
10383 <pre>
10384   count MIME type
10385   ----- -----------------------
10386      31 text/plain
10387      31 image/png
10388      31 image/jpeg
10389      29 audio/mpeg
10390      28 application/ogg
10391      27 image/gif
10392      26 image/tiff
10393      26 audio/x-mp3
10394      23 audio/x-wav
10395      22 image/bmp
10396      21 audio/x-flac
10397      20 audio/x-mpegurl
10398      19 audio/x-mpeg
10399      18 video/x-ms-asf
10400      18 video/mpeg
10401      18 audio/x-scpls
10402      18 application/x-ogg
10403      17 audio/x-musepack
10404      16 video/x-ms-wmv
10405      16 video/x-msvideo
10406 </pre>
10407
10408 <p>I am told that PackageKit can provide an API to access the kind of
10409 information mentioned in DEP-11.  I have not yet had time to look at
10410 it, but hope the PackageKit people in Debian are on top of these
10411 issues.</p>
10412
10413 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-16 13:35</strong>: Updated numbers after
10414 discovering a typo in my script.</p>
10415
10416       </div>
10417       <div class="tags">
10418
10419
10420         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10421
10422
10423       </div>
10424     </div>
10425     <div class="padding"></div>
10426
10427     <div class="entry">
10428       <div class="title">
10429         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_modalias_info_to_find_packages_handling_my_hardware.html">Using modalias info to find packages handling my hardware</a>
10430       </div>
10431       <div class="date">
10432         15th January 2013
10433       </div>
10434       <div class="body">
10435         <p>Yesterday, I wrote about the
10436 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Modalias_strings___a_practical_way_to_map__stuff__to_hardware.html">modalias
10437 values provided by the Linux kernel</a> following my hope for
10438 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">better
10439 dongle support in Debian</a>.  Using this knowledge, I have tested how
10440 modalias values attached to package names can be used to map packages
10441 to hardware.  This allow the system to look up and suggest relevant
10442 packages when I plug in some new hardware into my machine, and replace
10443 discover and discover-data as the database used to map hardware to
10444 packages.</p>
10445
10446 <p>I create a modaliases file with entries like the following,
10447 containing package name, kernel module name (if relevant, otherwise
10448 the package name) and globs matching the relevant hardware
10449 modalias.</p>
10450
10451 <p><blockquote>
10452 Package: package-name
10453 <br>Modaliases: module(modaliasglob, modaliasglob, modaliasglob)</p>
10454 </blockquote></p>
10455
10456 <p>It is fairly trivial to write code to find the relevant packages
10457 for a given modalias value using this file.</p>
10458
10459 <p>An entry like this would suggest the video and picture application
10460 cheese for many USB web cameras (interface bus class 0E01):</p>
10461
10462 <p><blockquote>
10463 Package: cheese
10464 <br>Modaliases: cheese(usb:v*p*d*dc*dsc*dp*ic0Eisc01ip*)</p>
10465 </blockquote></p>
10466
10467 <p>An entry like this would suggest the pcmciautils package when a
10468 CardBus bridge (bus class 0607) PCI device is present:</p>
10469
10470 <p><blockquote>
10471 Package: pcmciautils
10472 <br>Modaliases: pcmciautils(pci:v*d*sv*sd*bc06sc07i*)
10473 </blockquote></p>
10474
10475 <p>An entry like this would suggest the package colorhug-client when
10476 plugging in a ColorHug with USB IDs 04D8:F8DA:</p>
10477
10478 <p><blockquote>
10479 Package: colorhug-client
10480 <br>Modaliases: colorhug-client(usb:v04D8pF8DAd*)</p>
10481 </blockquote></p>
10482
10483 <p>I believe the format is compatible with the format of the Packages
10484 file in the Debian archive.  Ubuntu already uses their Packages file
10485 to store their mappings from packages to hardware.</p>
10486
10487 <p>By adding a XB-Modaliases: header in debian/control, any .deb can
10488 announce the hardware it support in a way my prototype understand.
10489 This allow those publishing packages in an APT source outside the
10490 Debian archive as well as those backporting packages to make sure the
10491 hardware mapping are included in the package meta information.  I've
10492 tested such header in the pymissile package, and its modalias mapping
10493 is working as it should with my prototype.  It even made it to Ubuntu
10494 Raring.</p>
10495
10496 <p>To test if it was possible to look up supported hardware using only
10497 the shell tools available in the Debian installer, I wrote a shell
10498 implementation of the lookup code.  The idea is to create files for
10499 each modalias and let the shell do the matching.  Please check out and
10500 try the
10501 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/hw-support-lookup?view=co">hw-support-lookup</a>
10502 shell script.  It run without any extra dependencies and fetch the
10503 hardware mappings from the Debian archive and the subversion
10504 repository where I currently work on my prototype.</p>
10505
10506 <p>When I use it on a machine with a yubikey inserted, it suggest to
10507 install yubikey-personalization:</p>
10508
10509 <p><blockquote>
10510 % ./hw-support-lookup
10511 <br>yubikey-personalization
10512 <br>%
10513 </blockquote></p>
10514
10515 <p>When I run it on my Thinkpad X40 with a PCMCIA/CardBus slot, it
10516 propose to install the pcmciautils package:</p>
10517
10518 <p><blockquote>
10519 % ./hw-support-lookup
10520 <br>pcmciautils
10521 <br>%
10522 </blockquote></p>
10523
10524 <p>If you know of any hardware-package mapping that should be added to
10525 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=co">my
10526 database</a>, please tell me about it.</p>
10527
10528 <p>It could be possible to generate several of the mappings between
10529 packages and hardware.  One source would be to look at packages with
10530 kernel modules, ie packages with *.ko files in /lib/modules/, and
10531 extract their modalias information.  Another would be to look at
10532 packages with udev rules, ie packages with files in
10533 /lib/udev/rules.d/, and extract their vendor/model information to
10534 generate a modalias matching rule.  I have not tested any of these to
10535 see if it work.</p>
10536
10537 <p>If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
10538 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
10539 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
10540 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-devel">#debian-devel</a>.</p>
10541
10542       </div>
10543       <div class="tags">
10544
10545
10546         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
10547
10548
10549       </div>
10550     </div>
10551     <div class="padding"></div>
10552
10553     <div class="entry">
10554       <div class="title">
10555         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Modalias_strings___a_practical_way_to_map__stuff__to_hardware.html">Modalias strings - a practical way to map "stuff" to hardware</a>
10556       </div>
10557       <div class="date">
10558         14th January 2013
10559       </div>
10560       <div class="body">
10561         <p>While looking into how to look up Debian packages based on hardware
10562 information, to find the packages that support a given piece of
10563 hardware, I refreshed my memory regarding modalias values, and decided
10564 to document the details.  Here are my findings so far, also available
10565 in
10566 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">the
10567 Debian Edu subversion repository</a>:
10568
10569 <p><strong>Modalias decoded</strong></p>
10570
10571 <p>This document try to explain what the different types of modalias
10572 values stands for.  It is in part based on information from
10573 &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias">https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias</a> &gt;,
10574 &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;,
10575 &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
10576 &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;.
10577
10578 <p>The modalias entries for a given Linux machine can be found using
10579 this shell script:</p>
10580
10581 <pre>
10582 find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -0 cat | sort -u
10583 </pre>
10584
10585 <p>The supported modalias globs for a given kernel module can be found
10586 using modinfo:</p>
10587
10588 <pre>
10589 % /sbin/modinfo psmouse | grep alias:
10590 alias:          serio:ty05pr*id*ex*
10591 alias:          serio:ty01pr*id*ex*
10592 %
10593 </pre>
10594
10595 <p><strong>PCI subtype</strong></p>
10596
10597 <p>A typical PCI entry can look like this.  This is an Intel Host
10598 Bridge memory controller:</p>
10599
10600 <p><blockquote>
10601 pci:v00008086d00002770sv00001028sd000001ADbc06sc00i00
10602 </blockquote></p>
10603
10604 <p>This represent these values:</p>
10605
10606 <pre>
10607  v   00008086  (vendor)
10608  d   00002770  (device)
10609  sv  00001028  (subvendor)
10610  sd  000001AD  (subdevice)
10611  bc  06        (bus class)
10612  sc  00        (bus subclass)
10613  i   00        (interface)
10614 </pre>
10615
10616 <p>The vendor/device values are the same values outputted from 'lspci
10617 -n' as 8086:2770.  The bus class/subclass is also shown by lspci as
10618 0600.  The 0600 class is a host bridge.  Other useful bus values are
10619 0300 (VGA compatible card) and 0200 (Ethernet controller).</p>
10620
10621 <p>Not sure how to figure out the interface value, nor what it
10622 means.</p>
10623
10624 <p><strong>USB subtype</strong></p>
10625
10626 <p>Some typical USB entries can look like this.  This is an internal
10627 USB hub in a laptop:</p>
10628
10629 <p><blockquote>
10630 usb:v1D6Bp0001d0206dc09dsc00dp00ic09isc00ip00
10631 </blockquote></p>
10632
10633 <p>Here is the values included in this alias:</p>
10634
10635 <pre>
10636  v    1D6B  (device vendor)
10637  p    0001  (device product)
10638  d    0206  (bcddevice)
10639  dc     09  (device class)
10640  dsc    00  (device subclass)
10641  dp     00  (device protocol)
10642  ic     09  (interface class)
10643  isc    00  (interface subclass)
10644  ip     00  (interface protocol)
10645 </pre>
10646
10647 <p>The 0900 device class/subclass means hub.  Some times the relevant
10648 class is in the interface class section.  For a simple USB web camera,
10649 these alias entries show up:</p>
10650
10651 <p><blockquote>
10652 usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc01ip00
10653 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc02ip00
10654 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc01ip00
10655 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc02ip00
10656 </blockquote></p>
10657
10658 <p>Interface class 0E01 is video control, 0E02 is video streaming (aka
10659 camera), 0101 is audio control device and 0102 is audio streaming (aka
10660 microphone).  Thus this is a camera with microphone included.</p>
10661
10662 <p><strong>ACPI subtype</strong></p>
10663
10664 <p>The ACPI type is used for several non-PCI/USB stuff.  This is an IR
10665 receiver in a Thinkpad X40:</p>
10666
10667 <p><blockquote>
10668 acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
10669 </blockquote></p>
10670
10671 <p>The values between the colons are IDs.</p>
10672
10673 <p><strong>DMI subtype</strong></p>
10674
10675 <p>The DMI table contain lots of information about the computer case
10676 and model.  This is an entry for a IBM Thinkpad X40, fetched from
10677 /sys/devices/virtual/dmi/id/modalias:</p>
10678
10679 <p><blockquote>
10680 dmi:bvnIBM:bvr1UETB6WW(1.66):bd06/15/2005:svnIBM:pn2371H4G:pvrThinkPadX40:rvnIBM:rn2371H4G:rvrNotAvailable:cvnIBM:ct10:cvrNotAvailable:
10681 </blockquote></p>
10682
10683 <p>The values present are</p>
10684
10685 <pre>
10686  bvn  IBM            (BIOS vendor)
10687  bvr  1UETB6WW(1.66) (BIOS version)
10688  bd   06/15/2005     (BIOS date)
10689  svn  IBM            (system vendor)
10690  pn   2371H4G        (product name)
10691  pvr  ThinkPadX40    (product version)
10692  rvn  IBM            (board vendor)
10693  rn   2371H4G        (board name)
10694  rvr  NotAvailable   (board version)
10695  cvn  IBM            (chassis vendor)
10696  ct   10             (chassis type)
10697  cvr  NotAvailable   (chassis version)
10698 </pre>
10699
10700 <p>The chassis type 10 is Notebook.  Other interesting values can be
10701 found in the dmidecode source:</p>
10702
10703 <pre>
10704   3 Desktop
10705   4 Low Profile Desktop
10706   5 Pizza Box
10707   6 Mini Tower
10708   7 Tower
10709   8 Portable
10710   9 Laptop
10711  10 Notebook
10712  11 Hand Held
10713  12 Docking Station
10714  13 All In One
10715  14 Sub Notebook
10716  15 Space-saving
10717  16 Lunch Box
10718  17 Main Server Chassis
10719  18 Expansion Chassis
10720  19 Sub Chassis
10721  20 Bus Expansion Chassis
10722  21 Peripheral Chassis
10723  22 RAID Chassis
10724  23 Rack Mount Chassis
10725  24 Sealed-case PC
10726  25 Multi-system
10727  26 CompactPCI
10728  27 AdvancedTCA
10729  28 Blade
10730  29 Blade Enclosing
10731 </pre>
10732
10733 <p>The chassis type values are not always accurately set in the DMI
10734 table.  For example my home server is a tower, but the DMI modalias
10735 claim it is a desktop.</p>
10736
10737 <p><strong>SerIO subtype</strong></p>
10738
10739 <p>This type is used for PS/2 mouse plugs.  One example is from my
10740 test machine:</p>
10741
10742 <p><blockquote>
10743 serio:ty01pr00id00ex00
10744 </blockquote></p>
10745
10746 <p>The values present are</p>
10747
10748 <pre>
10749   ty  01  (type)
10750   pr  00  (prototype)
10751   id  00  (id)
10752   ex  00  (extra)
10753 </pre>
10754
10755 <p>This type is supported by the psmouse driver.  I am not sure what
10756 the valid values are.</p>
10757
10758 <p><strong>Other subtypes</strong></p>
10759
10760 <p>There are heaps of other modalias subtypes according to
10761 file2alias.c.  There is the rest of the list from that source: amba,
10762 ap, bcma, ccw, css, eisa, hid, i2c, ieee1394, input, ipack, isapnp,
10763 mdio, of, parisc, pcmcia, platform, scsi, sdio, spi, ssb, vio, virtio,
10764 vmbus, x86cpu and zorro.  I did not spend time documenting all of
10765 these, as they do not seem relevant for my intended use with mapping
10766 hardware to packages when new stuff is inserted during run time.</p>
10767
10768 <p><strong>Looking up kernel modules using modalias values</strong></p>
10769
10770 <p>To check which kernel modules provide support for a given modalias,
10771 one can use the following shell script:</p>
10772
10773 <pre>
10774   for id in $(find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -0 cat | sort -u); do \
10775     echo "$id" ; \
10776     /sbin/modprobe --show-depends "$id"|sed 's/^/  /' ; \
10777   done
10778 </pre>
10779
10780 <p>The output can look like this (only the first few entries as the
10781 list is very long on my test machine):</p>
10782
10783 <pre>
10784   acpi:ACPI0003:
10785     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/acpi/ac.ko
10786   acpi:device:
10787   FATAL: Module acpi:device: not found.
10788   acpi:IBM0068:
10789     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/char/nvram.ko
10790     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/leds/led-class.ko
10791     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/net/rfkill/rfkill.ko
10792     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/platform/x86/thinkpad_acpi.ko
10793   acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
10794     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/lib/crc-ccitt.ko
10795     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/net/irda/irda.ko
10796     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/net/irda/nsc-ircc.ko
10797   [...]
10798 </pre>
10799
10800 <p>If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
10801 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
10802 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
10803 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-devel">#debian-devel</a>.</p>
10804
10805 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-15:</strong> Rewrite "cat $(find ...)" to
10806 "find ... -print0 | xargs -0 cat" to make sure it handle directories
10807 in /sys/ with space in them.</p>
10808
10809       </div>
10810       <div class="tags">
10811
10812
10813         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
10814
10815
10816       </div>
10817     </div>
10818     <div class="padding"></div>
10819
10820     <div class="entry">
10821       <div class="title">
10822         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Moved_the_pymissile_Debian_packaging_to_collab_maint.html">Moved the pymissile Debian packaging to collab-maint</a>
10823       </div>
10824       <div class="date">
10825         10th January 2013
10826       </div>
10827       <div class="body">
10828         <p>As part of my investigation on how to improve the support in Debian
10829 for hardware dongles, I dug up my old Mark and Spencer USB Rocket
10830 Launcher and updated the Debian package
10831 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pymissile">pymissile</a> to make
10832 sure udev will fix the device permissions when it is plugged in.  I
10833 also added a "Modaliases" header to test it in the Debian archive and
10834 hopefully make the package be proposed by jockey in Ubuntu when a user
10835 plug in his rocket launcher.  In the process I moved the source to a
10836 git repository under collab-maint, to make it easier for any DD to
10837 contribute.  <a href="http://code.google.com/p/pymissile/">Upstream</a>
10838 is not very active, but the software still work for me even after five
10839 years of relative silence.  The new git repository is not listed in
10840 the uploaded package yet, because I want to test the other changes a
10841 bit more before I upload the new version.  If you want to check out
10842 the new version with a .desktop file included, visit the
10843 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/pymissile.git">gitweb
10844 view</a> or use "<tt>git clone
10845 git://anonscm.debian.org/collab-maint/pymissile.git</tt>".</p>
10846
10847       </div>
10848       <div class="tags">
10849
10850
10851         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
10852
10853
10854       </div>
10855     </div>
10856     <div class="padding"></div>
10857
10858     <div class="entry">
10859       <div class="title">
10860         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">Lets make hardware dongles easier to use in Debian</a>
10861       </div>
10862       <div class="date">
10863          9th January 2013
10864       </div>
10865       <div class="body">
10866         <p>One thing that annoys me with Debian and Linux distributions in
10867 general, is that there is a great package management system with the
10868 ability to automatically install software packages by downloading them
10869 from the distribution mirrors, but no way to get it to automatically
10870 install the packages I need to use the hardware I plug into my
10871 machine.  Even if the package to use it is easily available from the
10872 Linux distribution.  When I plug in a LEGO Mindstorms NXT, it could
10873 suggest to automatically install the python-nxt, nbc and t2n packages
10874 I need to talk to it.  When I plug in a Yubikey, it could propose the
10875 yubikey-personalization package.  The information required to do this
10876 is available, but no-one have pulled all the pieces together.</p>
10877
10878 <p>Some years ago, I proposed to
10879 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg01206.html">use
10880 the discover subsystem to implement this</a>.  The idea is fairly
10881 simple:
10882
10883 <ul>
10884
10885 <li>Add a desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ pointing to a program
10886   starting when a user log in.</li>
10887
10888 <li>Set this program up to listen for kernel events emitted when new
10889   hardware is inserted into the computer.</li>
10890
10891 <li>When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware ID in a
10892   database mapping to packages, and take note of any non-installed
10893   packages.</li>
10894
10895 <li>Show a message to the user proposing to install the discovered
10896   package, and make it easy to install it.</li>
10897
10898 </ul>
10899
10900 <p>I am not sure what the best way to implement this is, but my
10901 initial idea was to use dbus events to discover new hardware, the
10902 discover database to find packages and
10903 <a href="http://www.packagekit.org/">PackageKit</a> to install
10904 packages.</p>
10905
10906 <p>Yesterday, I found time to try to implement this idea, and the
10907 draft package is now checked into
10908 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">the
10909 Debian Edu subversion repository</a>.  In the process, I updated the
10910 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover-data.html">discover-data</a>
10911 package to map the USB ids of LEGO Mindstorms and Yubikey devices to
10912 the relevant packages in Debian, and uploaded a new version
10913 2.2013.01.09 to unstable.  I also discovered that the current
10914 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover.html">discover</a>
10915 package in Debian no longer discovered any USB devices, because
10916 /proc/bus/usb/devices is no longer present.  I ported it to use
10917 libusb as a fall back option to get it working.  The fixed package
10918 version 2.1.2-6 is now in experimental (didn't upload it to unstable
10919 because of the freeze).</p>
10920
10921 <p>With this prototype in place, I can insert my Yubikey, and get this
10922 desktop notification to show up (only once, the first time it is
10923 inserted):</p>
10924
10925 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-09-hw-autoinstall.png"></p>
10926
10927 <p>For this prototype to be really useful, some way to automatically
10928 install the proposed packages by pressing the "Please install
10929 program(s)" button should to be implemented.</p>
10930
10931 <p>If this idea seem useful to you, and you want to help make it
10932 happen, please help me update the discover-data database with mappings
10933 from hardware to Debian packages.  Check if 'discover-pkginstall -l'
10934 list the package you would like to have installed when a given
10935 hardware device is inserted into your computer, and report bugs using
10936 reportbug if it isn't.  Or, if you know of a better way to provide
10937 such mapping, please let me know.</p>
10938
10939 <p>This prototype need more work, and there are several questions that
10940 should be considered before it is ready for production use.  Is dbus
10941 the correct way to detect new hardware?  At the moment I look for HAL
10942 dbus events on the system bus, because that is the events I could see
10943 on my Debian Squeeze KDE desktop.  Are there better events to use?
10944 How should the user be notified?  Is the desktop notification
10945 mechanism the best option, or should the background daemon raise a
10946 popup instead?  How should packages be installed?  When should they
10947 not be installed?</p>
10948
10949 <p>If you want to help getting such feature implemented in Debian,
10950 please send me an email. :)</p>
10951
10952       </div>
10953       <div class="tags">
10954
10955
10956         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
10957
10958
10959       </div>
10960     </div>
10961     <div class="padding"></div>
10962
10963     <div class="entry">
10964       <div class="title">
10965         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_IRC_channel_for_LEGO_designers_using_Debian.html">New IRC channel for LEGO designers using Debian</a>
10966       </div>
10967       <div class="date">
10968          2nd January 2013
10969       </div>
10970       <div class="body">
10971         <p>During Christmas, I have worked a bit on the Debian support for
10972 <a href="http://mindstorms.lego.com/en-us/Default.aspx">LEGO Mindstorm
10973 NXT</a>.  My son and I have played a bit with my NXT set, and I
10974 discovered I had to build all the tools myself because none were
10975 already in Debian Squeeze.  If Debian support for LEGO is something
10976 you care about, please join me on the IRC channel
10977 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">#debian-lego</a> (server
10978 irc.debian.org).  There is a lot that could be done to improve the
10979 Debian support for LEGO designers.  For example both CAD software
10980 and Mindstorm compilers are missing. :)</p>
10981
10982 <p>Update 2012-01-03: A
10983 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">project page</a>
10984 including links to Lego related packages is now available.</p>
10985
10986       </div>
10987       <div class="tags">
10988
10989
10990         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lego">lego</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
10991
10992
10993       </div>
10994     </div>
10995     <div class="padding"></div>
10996
10997     <div class="entry">
10998       <div class="title">
10999         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_backport_bitcoin_qt_version_0_7_2_2_to_Debian_Squeeze.html">How to backport bitcoin-qt version 0.7.2-2 to Debian Squeeze</a>
11000       </div>
11001       <div class="date">
11002         25th December 2012
11003       </div>
11004       <div class="body">
11005         <p>Let me start by wishing you all marry Christmas and a happy new
11006 year!  I hope next year will prove to be a good year.</p>
11007
11008 <p><a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">Bitcoin</a>, the digital
11009 decentralised "currency" that allow people to transfer bitcoins
11010 between each other with minimal overhead, is a very interesting
11011 experiment.  And as I wrote a few days ago, the bitcoin situation in
11012 <a href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> is about to improve a bit.
11013 The <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">new debian source
11014 package</a> (version 0.7.2-2) was uploaded yesterday, and is waiting
11015 in <a href="http://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html">the NEW queue</A>
11016 for one of the ftpmasters to approve the new bitcoin-qt package
11017 name.</p>
11018
11019 <p>And thanks to the great work of Jonas and the rest of the bitcoin
11020 team in Debian, you can easily test the package in Debian Squeeze
11021 using the following steps to get a set of working packages:</p>
11022
11023 <blockquote><pre>
11024 git clone git://git.debian.org/git/collab-maint/bitcoin
11025 cd bitcoin
11026 DEB_MAINTAINER_MODE=1 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp fakeroot debian/rules clean
11027 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp git-buildpackage --git-ignore-new
11028 </pre></blockquote>
11029
11030 <p>You might have to install some build dependencies as well.  The
11031 list of commands should give you two packages, bitcoind and
11032 bitcoin-qt, ready for use in a Squeeze environment.  Note that the
11033 client will download the complete set of bitcoin "blocks", which need
11034 around 5.6 GiB of data on my machine at the moment.  Make sure your
11035 ~/.bitcoin/ directory have lots of spare room if you want to download
11036 all the blocks.  The client will warn if the disk is getting full, so
11037 there is not really a problem if you got too little room, but you will
11038 not be able to get all the features out of the client.</p>
11039
11040 <p>As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
11041 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
11042 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
11043
11044       </div>
11045       <div class="tags">
11046
11047
11048         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
11049
11050
11051       </div>
11052     </div>
11053     <div class="padding"></div>
11054
11055     <div class="entry">
11056       <div class="title">
11057         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_word_on_bitcoin_support_in_Debian.html">A word on bitcoin support in Debian</a>
11058       </div>
11059       <div class="date">
11060         21st December 2012
11061       </div>
11062       <div class="body">
11063         <p>It has been a while since I wrote about
11064 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">bitcoin</a>, the decentralised
11065 peer-to-peer based crypto-currency, and the reason is simply that I
11066 have been busy elsewhere.  But two days ago, I started looking at the
11067 state of <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">bitcoin in
11068 Debian</a> again to try to recover my old bitcoin wallet.  The package
11069 is now maintained by a
11070 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-bitcoin/">team of
11071 people</a>, and the grunt work had already been done by this team.  We
11072 owe a huge thank you to all these team members. :)
11073 But I was sad to discover that the bitcoin client is missing in
11074 Wheezy.  It is only available in Sid (and an outdated client from
11075 backports).  The client had several RC bugs registered in BTS blocking
11076 it from entering testing.  To try to help the team and improve the
11077 situation, I spent some time providing patches and triaging the bug
11078 reports.  I also had a look at the bitcoin package available from Matt
11079 Corallo in a
11080 <a href="https://launchpad.net/~bitcoin/+archive/bitcoin">PPA for
11081 Ubuntu</a>, and moved the useful pieces from that version into the
11082 Debian package.</p>
11083
11084 <p>After checking with the main package maintainer Jonas Smedegaard on
11085 IRC, I pushed several patches into the collab-maint git repository to
11086 improve the package.  It now contains fixes for the RC issues (not from
11087 me, but fixed by Scott Howard), build rules for a Qt GUI client
11088 package, konqueror support for the bitcoin: URI and bash completion
11089 setup.  As I work on Debian Squeeze, I also created
11090 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-bitcoin-devel/Week-of-Mon-20121217/000041.html">a
11091 patch to backport</a> the latest version.  Jonas is going to look at
11092 it and try to integrate it into the git repository before uploading a
11093 new version to unstable.
11094
11095 <p>I would very much like bitcoin to succeed, to get rid of the
11096 centralized control currently exercised in the monetary system.  I
11097 find it completely unacceptable that the USA government is collecting
11098 transaction data for almost all international money transfers (most are done in USD and transaction logs shipped to the spooks), and
11099 that the major credit card companies can block legal money
11100 transactions to Wikileaks.  But for bitcoin to succeed, more people
11101 need to use bitcoins, and more people need to accept bitcoins when
11102 they sell products and services.  Improving the bitcoin support in
11103 Debian is a small step in the right direction, but not enough.
11104 Unfortunately the user experience when browsing the web and wanting to
11105 pay with bitcoin is still not very good.  The bitcoin: URI is a step
11106 in the right direction, but need to work in most or every browser in
11107 use.  Also the bitcoin-qt client is too heavy to fire up to do a
11108 quick transaction.  I believe there are other clients available, but
11109 have not tested them.</p>
11110
11111 <p>My
11112 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html">experiment
11113 with bitcoins</a> showed that at least some of my readers use bitcoin.
11114 I received 20.15 BTC so far on the address I provided in my blog two
11115 years ago, as can be
11116 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">seen
11117 on the blockexplorer service</a>.  Thank you everyone for your
11118 donation.  The blockexplorer service demonstrates quite well that
11119 bitcoin is not quite anonymous and untracked. :) I wonder if the
11120 number of users have gone up since then.  If you use bitcoin and want
11121 to show your support of my activity, please send Bitcoin donations to
11122 the same address as last time,
11123 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
11124
11125       </div>
11126       <div class="tags">
11127
11128
11129         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
11130
11131
11132       </div>
11133     </div>
11134     <div class="padding"></div>
11135
11136     <div class="entry">
11137       <div class="title">
11138         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Git_repository_for_song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">Git repository for song book for Computer Scientists</a>
11139       </div>
11140       <div class="date">
11141          7th September 2012
11142       </div>
11143       <div class="body">
11144         <p>As I
11145 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">mentioned
11146 this summer</a>, I have created a Computer Science song book a few
11147 years ago, and today I finally found time to create a public
11148 <a href="https://gitorious.org/pere-cs-songbook/pere-cs-songbook">Gitorious
11149 repository for the project</a>.</p>
11150
11151 <p>If you want to help out, please clone the source and submit patches
11152 to the HTML version.  To generate the PDF and PostScript version,
11153 please use prince XML, or let me know about a useful free software
11154 processor capable of creating a good looking PDF from the HTML.</p>
11155
11156 <p>Want to sing?  You can still find the song book in HTML, PDF and
11157 PostScript formats at
11158 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/">Petter's Computer
11159 Science Songbook</a>.</p>
11160
11161       </div>
11162       <div class="tags">
11163
11164
11165         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>.
11166
11167
11168       </div>
11169     </div>
11170     <div class="padding"></div>
11171
11172     <div class="entry">
11173       <div class="title">
11174         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gratulerer_med_19__rsdagen__Debian_.html">Gratulerer med 19-årsdagen, Debian!</a>
11175       </div>
11176       <div class="date">
11177         16th August 2012
11178       </div>
11179       <div class="body">
11180         <p>I dag fyller
11181 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120813">Debian-prosjektet 19
11182 år</a>.  Jeg har fulgt det de siste 12 årene, og er veldig glad for å kunne
11183 si gratulerer med dagen, Debian!</p>
11184
11185       </div>
11186       <div class="tags">
11187
11188
11189         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>.
11190
11191
11192       </div>
11193     </div>
11194     <div class="padding"></div>
11195
11196     <div class="entry">
11197       <div class="title">
11198         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">Song book for Computer Scientists</a>
11199       </div>
11200       <div class="date">
11201         24th June 2012
11202       </div>
11203       <div class="body">
11204         <p>Many years ago, while studying Computer Science at the
11205 <a href="http://www.uit.no/">University of Tromsø</a>, I started
11206 collecting computer related songs for use at parties.  The original
11207 version was written in LaTeX, but a few years ago I got help from
11208 Håkon W. Lie, one of the inventors of W3C CSS, to convert it to HTML
11209 while keeping the ability to create a nice book in PDF format.  I have
11210 not had time to maintain the book for a while now, and guess I should
11211 put it up on some public version control repository where others can
11212 help me extend and update the book.  If anyone is volunteering to help
11213 me with this, send me an email.  Also let me know if there are songs
11214 missing in my book.</p>
11215
11216 <p>I have not mentioned the book on my blog so far, and it occured to
11217 me today that I really should let all my readers share the joys of
11218 singing out load about programming, computers and computer networks.
11219 Especially now that <a href="http://debconf12.debconf.org/">Debconf
11220 12</a> is about to start (and I am not going).  Want to sing?  Check
11221 out <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/">Petter's
11222 Computer Science Songbook</a>.
11223
11224       </div>
11225       <div class="tags">
11226
11227
11228         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>.
11229
11230
11231       </div>
11232     </div>
11233     <div class="padding"></div>
11234
11235     <div class="entry">
11236       <div class="title">
11237         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatically_upgrading_server_firmware_on_Dell_PowerEdge.html">Automatically upgrading server firmware on Dell PowerEdge</a>
11238       </div>
11239       <div class="date">
11240         21st November 2011
11241       </div>
11242       <div class="body">
11243         <p>At work we have heaps of servers.  I believe the total count is
11244 around 1000 at the moment.  To be able to get help from the vendors
11245 when something go wrong, we want to keep the firmware on the servers
11246 up to date.  If the firmware isn't the latest and greatest, the
11247 vendors typically refuse to start debugging any problems until the
11248 firmware is upgraded.  So before every reboot, we want to upgrade the
11249 firmware, and we would really like everyone handling servers at the
11250 university to do this themselves when they plan to reboot a machine.
11251 For that to happen we at the unix server admin group need to provide
11252 the tools to do so.</p>
11253
11254 <p>To make firmware upgrading easier, I am working on a script to
11255 fetch and install the latest firmware for the servers we got.  Most of
11256 our hardware are from Dell and HP, so I have focused on these servers
11257 so far.  This blog post is about the Dell part.</P>
11258
11259 <p>On the Dell FTP site I was lucky enough to find
11260 <a href="ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz">an XML file</a>
11261 with firmware information for all 11th generation servers, listing
11262 which firmware should be used on a given model and where on the FTP
11263 site I can find it.  Using a simple perl XML parser I can then
11264 download the shell scripts Dell provides to do firmware upgrades from
11265 within Linux and reboot when all the firmware is primed and ready to
11266 be activated on the first reboot.</p>
11267
11268 <p>This is the Dell related fragment of the perl code I am working on.
11269 Are there anyone working on similar tools for firmware upgrading all
11270 servers at a site?  Please get in touch and lets share resources.</p>
11271
11272 <p><pre>
11273 #!/usr/bin/perl
11274 use strict;
11275 use warnings;
11276 use File::Temp qw(tempdir);
11277 BEGIN {
11278     # Install needed RHEL packages if missing
11279     my %rhelmodules = (
11280         'XML::Simple' => 'perl-XML-Simple',
11281         );
11282     for my $module (keys %rhelmodules) {
11283         eval "use $module;";
11284         if ($@) {
11285             my $pkg = $rhelmodules{$module};
11286             system("yum install -y $pkg");
11287             eval "use $module;";
11288         }
11289     }
11290 }
11291 my $errorsto = 'pere@hungry.com';
11292
11293 upgrade_dell();
11294
11295 exit 0;
11296
11297 sub run_firmware_script {
11298     my ($opts, $script) = @_;
11299     unless ($script) {
11300         print STDERR "fail: missing script name\n";
11301         exit 1
11302     }
11303     print STDERR "Running $script\n\n";
11304
11305     if (0 == system("sh $script $opts")) { # FIXME correct exit code handling
11306         print STDERR "success: firmware script ran succcessfully\n";
11307     } else {
11308         print STDERR "fail: firmware script returned error\n";
11309     }
11310 }
11311
11312 sub run_firmware_scripts {
11313     my ($opts, @dirs) = @_;
11314     # Run firmware packages
11315     for my $dir (@dirs) {
11316         print STDERR "info: Running scripts in $dir\n";
11317         opendir(my $dh, $dir) or die "Unable to open directory $dir: $!";
11318         while (my $s = readdir $dh) {
11319             next if $s =~ m/^\.\.?/;
11320             run_firmware_script($opts, "$dir/$s");
11321         }
11322         closedir $dh;
11323     }
11324 }
11325
11326 sub download {
11327     my $url = shift;
11328     print STDERR "info: Downloading $url\n";
11329     system("wget --quiet \"$url\"");
11330 }
11331
11332 sub upgrade_dell {
11333     my @dirs;
11334     my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
11335     chomp $product;
11336
11337     if ($product =~ m/PowerEdge/) {
11338
11339         # on RHEL, these pacakges are needed by the firwmare upgrade scripts
11340         system('yum install -y compat-libstdc++-33.i686 libstdc++.i686 libxml2.i686 procmail');
11341
11342         my $tmpdir = tempdir(
11343             CLEANUP => 1
11344             );
11345         chdir($tmpdir);
11346         fetch_dell_fw('catalog/Catalog.xml.gz');
11347         system('gunzip Catalog.xml.gz');
11348         my @paths = fetch_dell_fw_list('Catalog.xml');
11349         # -q is quiet, disabling interactivity and reducing console output
11350         my $fwopts = "-q";
11351         if (@paths) {
11352             for my $url (@paths) {
11353                 fetch_dell_fw($url);
11354             }
11355             run_firmware_scripts($fwopts, $tmpdir);
11356         } else {
11357             print STDERR "error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
11358             print STDERR "error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
11359         }
11360         chdir('/');
11361     } else {
11362         print STDERR "error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
11363         print STDERR "error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
11364     }
11365 }
11366
11367 sub fetch_dell_fw {
11368     my $path = shift;
11369     my $url = "ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/$path";
11370     download($url);
11371 }
11372
11373 # Using ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz, figure out which
11374 # firmware packages to download from Dell.  Only work for Linux
11375 # machines and 11th generation Dell servers.
11376 sub fetch_dell_fw_list {
11377     my $filename = shift;
11378
11379     my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
11380     chomp $product;
11381     my ($mybrand, $mymodel) = split(/\s+/, $product);
11382
11383     print STDERR "Finding firmware bundles for $mybrand $mymodel\n";
11384
11385     my $xml = XMLin($filename);
11386     my @paths;
11387     for my $bundle (@{$xml->{SoftwareBundle}}) {
11388         my $brand = $bundle->{TargetSystems}->{Brand}->{Display}->{content};
11389         my $model = $bundle->{TargetSystems}->{Brand}->{Model}->{Display}->{content};
11390         my $oscode;
11391         if ("ARRAY" eq ref $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}) {
11392             $oscode = $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}[0]->{osCode};
11393         } else {
11394             $oscode = $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}->{osCode};
11395         }
11396         if ($mybrand eq $brand && $mymodel eq $model && "LIN" eq $oscode)
11397         {
11398             @paths = map { $_->{path} } @{$bundle->{Contents}->{Package}};
11399         }
11400     }
11401     for my $component (@{$xml->{SoftwareComponent}}) {
11402         my $componenttype = $component->{ComponentType}->{value};
11403
11404         # Drop application packages, only firmware and BIOS
11405         next if 'APAC' eq $componenttype;
11406
11407         my $cpath = $component->{path};
11408         for my $path (@paths) {
11409             if ($cpath =~ m%/$path$%) {
11410                 push(@paths, $cpath);
11411             }
11412         }
11413     }
11414     return @paths;
11415 }
11416 </pre>
11417
11418 <p>The code is only tested on RedHat Enterprise Linux, but I suspect
11419 it could work on other platforms with some tweaking.  Anyone know a
11420 index like Catalog.xml is available from HP for HP servers?  At the
11421 moment I maintain a similar list manually and it is quickly getting
11422 outdated.</p>
11423
11424       </div>
11425       <div class="tags">
11426
11427
11428         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
11429
11430
11431       </div>
11432     </div>
11433     <div class="padding"></div>
11434
11435     <div class="entry">
11436       <div class="title">
11437         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_is_booting_into_runlevel_1_different_from_single_user_boots_.html">How is booting into runlevel 1 different from single user boots?</a>
11438       </div>
11439       <div class="date">
11440          4th August 2011
11441       </div>
11442       <div class="body">
11443         <p>Wouter Verhelst have some
11444 <a href="http://grep.be/blog/en/retorts/pere_kubuntu_boot">interesting
11445 comments and opinions</a> on my blog post on
11446 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_should_start_from__etc_rcS_d__in_Debian____almost_nothing.html">the
11447 need to clean up /etc/rcS.d/ in Debian</a> and my blog post about
11448 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_missing_in_the_Debian_desktop__or_why_my_parents_use_Kubuntu.html">the
11449 default KDE desktop in Debian</a>.  I only have time to address one
11450 small piece of his comment now, and though it best to address the
11451 misunderstanding he bring forward:</p>
11452
11453 <p><blockquote>
11454 Currently, a system admin has four options: [...] boot to a
11455 single-user system (by adding 'single' to the kernel command line;
11456 this runs rcS and rc1 scripts)
11457 </blockquote></p>
11458
11459 <p>This make me believe Wouter believe booting into single user mode
11460 and booting into runlevel 1 is the same.  I am not surprised he
11461 believe this, because it would make sense and is a quite sensible
11462 thing to believe.  But because the boot in Debian is slightly broken,
11463 runlevel 1 do not work properly and it isn't the same as single user
11464 mode.  I'll try to explain what is actually happing, but it is a bit
11465 hard to explain.</p>
11466
11467 <p>Single user mode is defined like this in /etc/inittab:
11468 "<tt>~~:S:wait:/sbin/sulogin</tt>".  This means the only thing that is
11469 executed in single user mode is sulogin.  Single user mode is a boot
11470 state "between" the runlevels, and when booting into single user mode,
11471 only the scripts in /etc/rcS.d/ are executed before the init process
11472 enters the single user state.  When switching to runlevel 1, the state
11473 is in fact not ending in runlevel 1, but it passes through runlevel 1
11474 and end up in the single user mode (see /etc/rc1.d/S03single, which
11475 runs "init -t1 S" to switch to single user mode at the end of runlevel
11476 1.  It is confusing that the 'S' (single user) init mode is not the
11477 mode enabled by /etc/rcS.d/ (which is more like the initial boot
11478 mode).</p>
11479
11480 <p>This summary might make it clearer.  When booting for the first
11481 time into single user mode, the following commands are executed:
11482 "<tt>/etc/init.d/rc S; /sbin/sulogin</tt>".  When booting into
11483 runlevel 1, the following commands are executed: "<tt>/etc/init.d/rc
11484 S; /etc/init.d/rc 1; /sbin/sulogin</tt>".  A problem show up when
11485 trying to continue after visiting single user mode.  Not all services
11486 are started again as they should, causing the machine to end up in an
11487 unpredicatble state.  This is why Debian admins recommend rebooting
11488 after visiting single user mode.</p>
11489
11490 <p>A similar problem with runlevel 1 is caused by the amount of
11491 scripts executed from /etc/rcS.d/.  When switching from say runlevel 2
11492 to runlevel 1, the services started from /etc/rcS.d/ are not properly
11493 stopped when passing through the scripts in /etc/rc1.d/, and not
11494 started again when switching away from runlevel 1 to the runlevels
11495 2-5.  I believe the problem is best fixed by moving all the scripts
11496 out of /etc/rcS.d/ that are not <strong>required</strong> to get a
11497 functioning single user mode during boot.</p>
11498
11499 <p>I have spent several years investigating the Debian boot system,
11500 and discovered this problem a few years ago.  I suspect it originates
11501 from when sysvinit was introduced into Debian, a long time ago.</p>
11502
11503       </div>
11504       <div class="tags">
11505
11506
11507         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
11508
11509
11510       </div>
11511     </div>
11512     <div class="padding"></div>
11513
11514     <div class="entry">
11515       <div class="title">
11516         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_should_start_from__etc_rcS_d__in_Debian____almost_nothing.html">What should start from /etc/rcS.d/ in Debian? - almost nothing</a>
11517       </div>
11518       <div class="date">
11519         30th July 2011
11520       </div>
11521       <div class="body">
11522         <p>In the Debian boot system, several packages include scripts that
11523 are started from /etc/rcS.d/.  In fact, there is a bite more of them
11524 than make sense, and this causes a few problems.  What kind of
11525 problems, you might ask.  There are at least two problems.  The first
11526 is that it is not possible to recover a machine after switching to
11527 runlevel 1.  One need to actually reboot to get the machine back to
11528 the expected state.  The other is that single user boot will sometimes
11529 run into problems because some of the subsystems are activated before
11530 the root login is presented, causing problems when trying to recover a
11531 machine from a problem in that subsystem.  A minor additional point is
11532 that moving more scripts out of rcS.d/ and into the other rc#.d/
11533 directories will increase the amount of scripts that can run in
11534 parallel during boot, and thus decrease the boot time.</p>
11535
11536 <p>So, which scripts should start from rcS.d/.  In short, only the
11537 scripts that _have_ to execute before the root login prompt is
11538 presented during a single user boot should go there.  Everything else
11539 should go into the numeric runlevels.  This means things like
11540 lm-sensors, fuse and x11-common should not run from rcS.d, but from
11541 the numeric runlevels.  Today in Debian, there are around 115 init.d
11542 scripts that are started from rcS.d/, and most of them should be moved
11543 out.  Do your package have one of them?  Please help us make single
11544 user and runlevel 1 better by moving it.</p>
11545
11546 <p>Scripts setting up the screen, keyboard, system partitions
11547 etc. should still be started from rcS.d/, but there is for example no
11548 need to have the network enabled before the single user login prompt
11549 is presented.</p>
11550
11551 <p>As always, things are not so easy to fix as they sound.  To keep
11552 Debian systems working while scripts migrate and during upgrades, the
11553 scripts need to be moved from rcS.d/ to rc2.d/ in reverse dependency
11554 order, ie the scripts that nothing in rcS.d/ depend on can be moved,
11555 and the next ones can only be moved when their dependencies have been
11556 moved first.  This migration must be done sequentially while we ensure
11557 that the package system upgrade packages in the right order to keep
11558 the system state correct.  This will require some coordination when it
11559 comes to network related packages, but most of the packages with
11560 scripts that should migrate do not have anything in rcS.d/ depending
11561 on them.  Some packages have already been updated, like the sudo
11562 package, while others are still left to do.  I wish I had time to work
11563 on this myself, but real live constrains make it unlikely that I will
11564 find time to push this forward.</p>
11565
11566       </div>
11567       <div class="tags">
11568
11569
11570         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
11571
11572
11573       </div>
11574     </div>
11575     <div class="padding"></div>
11576
11577     <div class="entry">
11578       <div class="title">
11579         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_missing_in_the_Debian_desktop__or_why_my_parents_use_Kubuntu.html">What is missing in the Debian desktop, or why my parents use Kubuntu</a>
11580       </div>
11581       <div class="date">
11582         29th July 2011
11583       </div>
11584       <div class="body">
11585         <p>While at Debconf11, I have several times during discussions
11586 mentioned the issues I believe should be improved in Debian for its
11587 desktop to be useful for more people.  The use case for this is my
11588 parents, which are currently running Kubuntu which solve the
11589 issues.</p>
11590
11591 <p>I suspect these four missing features are not very hard to
11592 implement.  After all, they are present in Ubuntu, so if we wanted to
11593 do this in Debian we would have a source.</p>
11594
11595 <ol>
11596
11597 <li><strong>Simple GUI based upgrade of packages.</strong> When there
11598 are new packages available for upgrades, a icon in the KDE status bar
11599 indicate this, and clicking on it will activate the simple upgrade
11600 tool to handle it.  I have no problem guiding both of my parents
11601 through the process over the phone.  If a kernel reboot is required,
11602 this too is indicated by the status bars and the upgrade tool.  Last
11603 time I checked, nothing with the same features was working in KDE in
11604 Debian.</li>
11605
11606 <li><strong>Simple handling of missing Firefox browser
11607 plugins.</strong> When the browser encounter a MIME type it do not
11608 currently have a handler for, it will ask the user if the system
11609 should search for a package that would add support for this MIME type,
11610 and if the user say yes, the APT sources will be searched for packages
11611 advertising the MIME type in their control file (visible in the
11612 Packages file in the APT archive).  If one or more packages are found,
11613 it is a simple click of the mouse to add support for the missing mime
11614 type.  If the package require the user to accept some non-free
11615 license, this is explained to the user.  The entire process make it
11616 more clear to the user why something do not work in the browser, and
11617 make the chances higher for the user to blame the web page authors and
11618 not the browser for any missing features.</li>
11619
11620 <li><strong>Simple handling of missing multimedia codec/format
11621 handlers.</strong> When the media players encounter a format or codec
11622 it is not supporting, a dialog pop up asking the user if the system
11623 should search for a package that would add support for it.  This
11624 happen with things like MP3, Windows Media or H.264.  The selection
11625 and installation procedure is very similar to the Firefox browser
11626 plugin handling.  This is as far as I know implemented using a
11627 gstreamer hook.  The end result is that the user easily get access to
11628 the codecs that are present from the APT archives available, while
11629 explaining more on why a given format is unsupported by Ubuntu.</li>
11630
11631 <li><strong>Better browser handling of some MIME types.</strong> When
11632 displaying a text/plain file in my Debian browser, it will propose to
11633 start emacs to show it.  If I remember correctly, when doing the same
11634 in Kunbutu it show the file as a text file in the browser.  At least I
11635 know Opera will show text files within the browser.  I much prefer the
11636 latter behaviour.</li>
11637
11638 </ol>
11639
11640 <p>There are other nice features as well, like the simplified suite
11641 upgrader, but given that I am the one mostly doing the dist-upgrade,
11642 it do not matter much.</p>
11643
11644 <p>I really hope we could get these features in place for the next
11645 Debian release.  It would require the coordinated effort of several
11646 maintainers, but would make the end user experience a lot better.</p>
11647
11648       </div>
11649       <div class="tags">
11650
11651
11652         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
11653
11654
11655       </div>
11656     </div>
11657     <div class="padding"></div>
11658
11659     <div class="entry">
11660       <div class="title">
11661         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Perl_modules_used_by_FixMyStreet_which_are_missing_in_Debian_Squeeze.html">Perl modules used by FixMyStreet which are missing in Debian/Squeeze</a>
11662       </div>
11663       <div class="date">
11664         26th July 2011
11665       </div>
11666       <div class="body">
11667         <p>The Norwegian <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</A>
11668 site is build on Debian/Squeeze, and this platform was chosen because
11669 I am most familiar with Debian (being a Debian Developer for around 10
11670 years) because it is the latest stable Debian release which should get
11671 security support for a few years.</p>
11672
11673 <p>The web service is written in Perl, and depend on some perl modules
11674 that are missing in Debian at the moment.  It would be great if these
11675 modules were added to the Debian archive, allowing anyone to set up
11676 their own <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com">FixMyStreet</a> clone
11677 in their own country using only Debian packages.  The list of modules
11678 missing in Debian/Squeeze isn't very long, and I hope the perl group
11679 will find time to package the 12 modules Catalyst::Plugin::SmartURI,
11680 Catalyst::Plugin::Unicode::Encoding, Catalyst::View::TT, Devel::Hide,
11681 Sort::Key, Statistics::Distributions, Template::Plugin::Comma,
11682 Template::Plugin::DateTime::Format, Term::Size::Any, Term::Size::Perl,
11683 URI::SmartURI and Web::Scraper to make the maintenance of FixMyStreet
11684 easier in the future.</p>
11685
11686 <p>Thanks to the great tools in Debian, getting the missing modules
11687 installed on my server was a simple call to 'cpan2deb Module::Name'
11688 and 'dpkg -i' to install the resulting package.  But this leave me
11689 with the responsibility of tracking security problems, which I really
11690 do not have time for.</p>
11691
11692       </div>
11693       <div class="tags">
11694
11695
11696         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami</a>.
11697
11698
11699       </div>
11700     </div>
11701     <div class="padding"></div>
11702
11703     <div class="entry">
11704       <div class="title">
11705         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Norwegian_FixMyStreet_have_kept_me_busy_the_last_few_weeks.html">A Norwegian FixMyStreet have kept me busy the last few weeks</a>
11706       </div>
11707       <div class="date">
11708          3rd April 2011
11709       </div>
11710       <div class="body">
11711         <p>Here is a small update for my English readers.  Most of my blog
11712 posts have been in Norwegian the last few weeks, so here is a short
11713 update in English.</p>
11714
11715 <p>The kids still keep me too busy to get much free software work
11716 done, but I did manage to organise a project to get a Norwegian port
11717 of the British service
11718 <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com/">FixMyStreet</a> up and running,
11719 and it has been running for a month now.  The entire project has been
11720 organised by me and two others.  Around Christmas we gathered sponsors
11721 to fund the development work.  In January I drafted a contract with
11722 <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a> on what to develop,
11723 and in February the development took place.  Most of it involved
11724 converting the source to use GPS coordinates instead of British
11725 easting/northing, and the resulting code should be a lot easier to get
11726 running in any country by now.  The Norwegian
11727 <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a> is using
11728 <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/">OpenStreetmap</a> as the map
11729 source and the source for administrative borders in Norway, and
11730 support for this had to be added/fixed.</p>
11731
11732 <p>The Norwegian version went live March 3th, and we spent the weekend
11733 polishing the system before we announced it March 7th.  The system is
11734 running on a KVM instance of Debian/Squeeze, and has seen almost 3000
11735 problem reports in a few weeks.  Soon we hope to announce the Android
11736 and iPhone versions making it even easier to report problems with the
11737 public infrastructure.</p>
11738
11739 <p>Perhaps something to consider for those of you in countries without
11740 such service?</p>
11741
11742       </div>
11743       <div class="tags">
11744
11745
11746         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kart">kart</a>.
11747
11748
11749       </div>
11750     </div>
11751     <div class="padding"></div>
11752
11753     <div class="entry">
11754       <div class="title">
11755         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_NVD_and_CPE_to_track_CVEs_in_locally_maintained_software.html">Using NVD and CPE to track CVEs in locally maintained software</a>
11756       </div>
11757       <div class="date">
11758         28th January 2011
11759       </div>
11760       <div class="body">
11761         <p>The last few days I have looked at ways to track open security
11762 issues here at my work with the University of Oslo.  My idea is that
11763 it should be possible to use the information about security issues
11764 available on the Internet, and check our locally
11765 maintained/distributed software against this information.  It should
11766 allow us to verify that no known security issues are forgotten.  The
11767 CVE database listing vulnerabilities seem like a great central point,
11768 and by using the package lists from Debian mapped to CVEs provided by
11769 the testing security team, I believed it should be possible to figure
11770 out which security holes were present in our free software
11771 collection.</p>
11772
11773 <p>After reading up on the topic, it became obvious that the first
11774 building block is to be able to name software packages in a unique and
11775 consistent way across data sources.  I considered several ways to do
11776 this, for example coming up with my own naming scheme like using URLs
11777 to project home pages or URLs to the Freshmeat entries, or using some
11778 existing naming scheme.  And it seem like I am not the first one to
11779 come across this problem, as MITRE already proposed and implemented a
11780 solution.  Enter the <a href="http://cpe.mitre.org/index.html">Common
11781 Platform Enumeration</a> dictionary, a vocabulary for referring to
11782 software, hardware and other platform components.  The CPE ids are
11783 mapped to CVEs in the <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/">National
11784 Vulnerability Database</a>, allowing me to look up know security
11785 issues for any CPE name.  With this in place, all I need to do is to
11786 locate the CPE id for the software packages we use at the university.
11787 This is fairly trivial (I google for 'cve cpe $package' and check the
11788 NVD entry if a CVE for the package exist).</p>
11789
11790 <p>To give you an example.  The GNU gzip source package have the CPE
11791 name cpe:/a:gnu:gzip.  If the old version 1.3.3 was the package to
11792 check out, one could look up
11793 <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
11794 in NVD</a> and get a list of 6 security holes with public CVE entries.
11795 The most recent one is
11796 <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2010-0001">CVE-2010-0001</a>,
11797 and at the bottom of the NVD page for this vulnerability the complete
11798 list of affected versions is provided.</p>
11799
11800 <p>The NVD database of CVEs is also available as a XML dump, allowing
11801 for offline processing of issues.  Using this dump, I've written a
11802 small script taking a list of CPEs as input and list all CVEs
11803 affecting the packages represented by these CPEs.  One give it CPEs
11804 with version numbers as specified above and get a list of open
11805 security issues out.</p>
11806
11807 <p>Of course for this approach to be useful, the quality of the NVD
11808 information need to be high.  For that to happen, I believe as many as
11809 possible need to use and contribute to the NVD database.  I notice
11810 RHEL is providing
11811 <a href="https://www.redhat.com/security/data/metrics/rhsamapcpe.txt">a
11812 map from CVE to CPE</a>, indicating that they are using the CPE
11813 information.  I'm not aware of Debian and Ubuntu doing the same.</p>
11814
11815 <p>To get an idea about the quality for free software, I spent some
11816 time making it possible to compare the CVE database from Debian with
11817 the CVE database in NVD.  The result look fairly good, but there are
11818 some inconsistencies in NVD (same software package having several
11819 CPEs), and some inaccuracies (NVD not mentioning buggy packages that
11820 Debian believe are affected by a CVE).  Hope to find time to improve
11821 the quality of NVD, but that require being able to get in touch with
11822 someone maintaining it.  So far my three emails with questions and
11823 corrections have not seen any reply, but I hope contact can be
11824 established soon.</p>
11825
11826 <p>An interesting application for CPEs is cross platform package
11827 mapping.  It would be useful to know which packages in for example
11828 RHEL, OpenSuSe and Mandriva are missing from Debian and Ubuntu, and
11829 this would be trivial if all linux distributions provided CPE entries
11830 for their packages.</p>
11831
11832       </div>
11833       <div class="tags">
11834
11835
11836         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
11837
11838
11839       </div>
11840     </div>
11841     <div class="padding"></div>
11842
11843     <div class="entry">
11844       <div class="title">
11845         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Which_module_is_loaded_for_a_given_PCI_and_USB_device_.html">Which module is loaded for a given PCI and USB device?</a>
11846       </div>
11847       <div class="date">
11848         23rd January 2011
11849       </div>
11850       <div class="body">
11851         <p>In the
11852 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/discover-data">discover-data</a>
11853 package in Debian, there is a script to report useful information
11854 about the running hardware for use when people report missing
11855 information.  One part of this script that I find very useful when
11856 debugging hardware problems, is the part mapping loaded kernel module
11857 to the PCI device it claims.  It allow me to quickly see if the kernel
11858 module I expect is driving the hardware I am struggling with.  To see
11859 the output, make sure discover-data is installed and run
11860 <tt>/usr/share/bug/discover-data 3>&1</tt>.  The relevant output on
11861 one of my machines like this:</p>
11862
11863 <pre>
11864 loaded modules:
11865 10de:03eb i2c_nforce2
11866 10de:03f1 ohci_hcd
11867 10de:03f2 ehci_hcd
11868 10de:03f0 snd_hda_intel
11869 10de:03ec pata_amd
11870 10de:03f6 sata_nv
11871 1022:1103 k8temp
11872 109e:036e bttv
11873 109e:0878 snd_bt87x
11874 11ab:4364 sky2
11875 </pre>
11876
11877 <p>The code in question look like this, slightly modified for
11878 readability and to drop the output to file descriptor 3:</p>
11879
11880 <pre>
11881 if [ -d /sys/bus/pci/devices/ ] ; then
11882     echo loaded pci modules:
11883     (
11884         cd /sys/bus/pci/devices/
11885         for address in * ; do
11886             if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
11887                 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
11888                 if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
11889                     address=$(echo $address |sed s/0000://)
11890                     id=`lspci -n -s $address | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $3}'`
11891                     echo "$id $module"
11892                 fi
11893             fi
11894         done
11895     )
11896     echo
11897 fi
11898 </pre>
11899
11900 <p>Similar code could be used to extract USB device module
11901 mappings:</p>
11902
11903 <pre>
11904 if [ -d /sys/bus/usb/devices/ ] ; then
11905     echo loaded usb modules:
11906     (
11907         cd /sys/bus/usb/devices/
11908         for address in * ; do
11909             if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
11910                 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
11911                 if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
11912                     address=$(echo $address |sed s/0000://)
11913                     id=$(lsusb -s $address | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $6}')
11914                     if [ "$id" ] ; then
11915                         echo "$id $module"
11916                     fi
11917                 fi
11918             fi
11919         done
11920     )
11921     echo
11922 fi
11923 </pre>
11924
11925 <p>This might perhaps be something to include in other tools as
11926 well.</p>
11927
11928       </div>
11929       <div class="tags">
11930
11931
11932         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
11933
11934
11935       </div>
11936     </div>
11937     <div class="padding"></div>
11938
11939     <div class="entry">
11940       <div class="title">
11941         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_test_if_a_laptop_is_working_with_Linux.html">How to test if a laptop is working with Linux</a>
11942       </div>
11943       <div class="date">
11944         22nd December 2010
11945       </div>
11946       <div class="body">
11947         <p>The last few days I have spent at work here at the <a
11948 href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a> testing if the new
11949 batch of computers will work with Linux.  Every year for the last few
11950 years the university have organised shared bid of a few thousand
11951 computers, and this year HP won the bid.  Two different desktops and
11952 five different laptops are on the list this year.  We in the UNIX
11953 group want to know which one of these computers work well with RHEL
11954 and Ubuntu, the two Linux distributions we currently handle at the
11955 university.</p>
11956
11957 <p>My test method is simple, and I share it here to get feedback and
11958 perhaps inspire others to test hardware as well.  To test, I PXE
11959 install the OS version of choice, and log in as my normal user and run
11960 a few applications and plug in selected pieces of hardware.  When
11961 something fail, I make a note about this in the test matrix and move
11962 on.  If I have some spare time I try to report the bug to the OS
11963 vendor, but as I only have the machines for a short time, I rarely
11964 have the time to do this for all the problems I find.</p>
11965
11966 <p>Anyway, to get to the point of this post.  Here is the simple tests
11967 I perform on a new model.</p>
11968
11969 <ul>
11970
11971 <li>Is PXE installation working?  I'm testing with RHEL6, Ubuntu Lucid
11972 and Ubuntu Maverik at the moment.  If I feel like it, I also test with
11973 RHEL5 and Debian Edu/Squeeze.</li>
11974
11975 <li>Is X.org working?  If the graphical login screen show up after
11976 installation, X.org is working.</li>
11977
11978 <li>Is hardware accelerated OpenGL working?  Running glxgears (in
11979 package mesa-utils on Ubuntu) and writing down the frames per second
11980 reported by the program.</li>
11981
11982 <li>Is sound working?  With Gnome and KDE, a sound is played when
11983 logging in, and if I can hear this the test is successful.  If there
11984 are several audio exits on the machine, I try them all and check if
11985 the Gnome/KDE audio mixer can control where to send the sound.  I
11986 normally test this by playing
11987 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20101012-chef/ ">a HTML5
11988 video</a> in Firefox/Iceweasel.</li>
11989
11990 <li>Is the USB subsystem working?  I test this by plugging in a USB
11991 memory stick and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.</li>
11992
11993 <li>Is the CD/DVD player working?  I test this by inserting any CD/DVD
11994 I have lying around, and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.</li>
11995
11996 <li>Is any built in camera working?  Test using cheese, and see if a
11997 picture from the v4l device show up.</li>
11998
11999 <li>Is bluetooth working?  Use the Gnome/KDE browsing tool to see if
12000 any bluetooth devices are discovered.  In my office, I normally see a
12001 few.</li>
12002
12003 <li>For laptops, is the SD or Compaq Flash reader working.  I have
12004 memory modules lying around, and stick them in and see if Gnome/KDE
12005 notice this.</li>
12006
12007 <li>For laptops, is suspend/hibernate working?  I'm testing if the
12008 special button work, and if the laptop continue to work after
12009 resume.</li>
12010
12011 <li>For laptops, is the extra buttons working, like audio level,
12012 adjusting background light, switching on/off external video output,
12013 switching on/off wifi, bluetooth, etc?  The set of buttons differ from
12014 laptop to laptop, so I just write down which are working and which are
12015 not.</li>
12016
12017 <li>Some laptops have smart card readers, finger print readers,
12018 acceleration sensors etc.  I rarely test these, as I do not know how
12019 to quickly test if they are working or not, so I only document their
12020 existence.</li>
12021
12022 </ul>
12023
12024 <p>By now I suspect you are really curious what the test results are
12025 for the HP machines I am testing.  I'm not done yet, so I will report
12026 the test results later.  For now I can report that HP 8100 Elite work
12027 fine, and hibernation fail with HP EliteBook 8440p on Ubuntu Lucid,
12028 and audio fail on RHEL6.  Ubuntu Maverik worked with 8440p.  As you
12029 can see, I have most machines left to test.  One interesting
12030 observation is that Ubuntu Lucid has almost twice the frame rate than
12031 RHEL6 with glxgears.  No idea why.</p>
12032
12033       </div>
12034       <div class="tags">
12035
12036
12037         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
12038
12039
12040       </div>
12041     </div>
12042     <div class="padding"></div>
12043
12044     <div class="entry">
12045       <div class="title">
12046         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_thoughts_on_BitCoins.html">Some thoughts on BitCoins</a>
12047       </div>
12048       <div class="date">
12049         11th December 2010
12050       </div>
12051       <div class="body">
12052         <p>As I continue to explore
12053 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin</a>, I've starting to wonder
12054 what properties the system have, and how it will be affected by laws
12055 and regulations here in Norway.  Here are some random notes.</p>
12056
12057 <p>One interesting thing to note is that since the transactions are
12058 verified using a peer to peer network, all details about a transaction
12059 is known to everyone.  This means that if a BitCoin address has been
12060 published like I did with mine in my initial post about BitCoin, it is
12061 possible for everyone to see how many BitCoins have been transfered to
12062 that address.  There is even a web service to look at the details for
12063 all transactions.  There I can see that my address
12064 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a>
12065 have received 16.06 Bitcoin, the
12066 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3">1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3</a>
12067 address of Simon Phipps have received 181.97 BitCoin and the address
12068 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt">1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt</A>
12069 of EFF have received 2447.38 BitCoins so far.  Thank you to each and
12070 every one of you that donated bitcoins to support my activity. The
12071 fact that anyone can see how much money was transfered to a given
12072 address make it more obvious why the BitCoin community recommend to
12073 generate and hand out a new address for each transaction.  I'm told
12074 there is no way to track which addresses belong to a given person or
12075 organisation without the person or organisation revealing it
12076 themselves, as Simon, EFF and I have done.</p>
12077
12078 <p>In Norway, and in most other countries, there are laws and
12079 regulations limiting how much money one can transfer across the border
12080 without declaring it.  There are money laundering, tax and accounting
12081 laws and regulations I would expect to apply to the use of BitCoin.
12082 If the Skolelinux foundation
12083 (<a href="http://linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">SLX
12084 Debian Labs</a>) were to accept donations in BitCoin in addition to
12085 normal bank transfers like EFF is doing, how should this be accounted?
12086 Given that it is impossible to know if money can cross the border or
12087 not, should everything or nothing be declared?  What exchange rate
12088 should be used when calculating taxes?  Would receivers have to pay
12089 income tax if the foundation were to pay Skolelinux contributors in
12090 BitCoin?  I have no idea, but it would be interesting to know.</p>
12091
12092 <p>For a currency to be useful and successful, it must be trusted and
12093 accepted by a lot of users.  It must be possible to get easy access to
12094 the currency (as a wage or using currency exchanges), and it must be
12095 easy to spend it.  At the moment BitCoin seem fairly easy to get
12096 access to, but there are very few places to spend it.  I am not really
12097 a regular user of any of the vendor types currently accepting BitCoin,
12098 so I wonder when my kind of shop would start accepting BitCoins.  I
12099 would like to buy electronics, travels and subway tickets, not herbs
12100 and books. :) The currency is young, and this will improve over time
12101 if it become popular, but I suspect regular banks will start to lobby
12102 to get BitCoin declared illegal if it become popular.  I'm sure they
12103 will claim it is helping fund terrorism and money laundering (which
12104 probably would be true, as is any currency in existence), but I
12105 believe the problems should be solved elsewhere and not by blaming
12106 currencies.</p>
12107
12108 <p>The process of creating new BitCoins is called mining, and it is
12109 CPU intensive process that depend on a bit of luck as well (as one is
12110 competing against all the other miners currently spending CPU cycles
12111 to see which one get the next lump of cash).  The "winner" get 50
12112 BitCoin when this happen.  Yesterday I came across the obvious way to
12113 join forces to increase ones changes of getting at least some coins,
12114 by coordinating the work on mining BitCoins across several machines
12115 and people, and sharing the result if one is lucky and get the 50
12116 BitCoins.  Check out
12117 <a href="http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/bitcoin-pool/">BitCoin Pool</a>
12118 if this sounds interesting.  I have not had time to try to set up a
12119 machine to participate there yet, but have seen that running on ones
12120 own for a few days have not yield any BitCoins througth mining
12121 yet.</p>
12122
12123 <p>Update 2010-12-15: Found an <a
12124 href="http://inertia.posterous.com/reply-to-the-underground-economist-why-bitcoi">interesting
12125 criticism</a> of bitcoin.  Not quite sure how valid it is, but thought
12126 it was interesting to read.  The arguments presented seem to be
12127 equally valid for gold, which was used as a currency for many years.</p>
12128
12129       </div>
12130       <div class="tags">
12131
12132
12133         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
12134
12135
12136       </div>
12137     </div>
12138     <div class="padding"></div>
12139
12140     <div class="entry">
12141       <div class="title">
12142         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html">Now accepting bitcoins - anonymous and distributed p2p crypto-money</a>
12143       </div>
12144       <div class="date">
12145         10th December 2010
12146       </div>
12147       <div class="body">
12148         <p>With this weeks lawless
12149 <a href="http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/06/wikileaks/index.html">governmental
12150 attacks</a> on Wikileak and
12151 <a href="http://www.salon.com/technology/dan_gillmor/2010/12/06/war_on_speech">free
12152 speech</a>, it has become obvious that PayPal, visa and mastercard can
12153 not be trusted to handle money transactions.
12154 A blog post from
12155 <a href="http://webmink.com/2010/12/06/now-accepting-bitcoin/">Simon
12156 Phipps on bitcoin</a> reminded me about a project that a friend of
12157 mine mentioned earlier.  I decided to follow Simon's example, and get
12158 involved with <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin</a>.  I got
12159 some help from my friend to get it all running, and he even handed me
12160 some bitcoins to get started.  I even donated a few bitcoins to Simon
12161 for helping me remember BitCoin.</p>
12162
12163 <p>So, what is bitcoins, you probably wonder?  It is a digital
12164 crypto-currency, decentralised and handled using peer-to-peer
12165 networks.  It allows anonymous transactions and prohibits central
12166 control over the transactions, making it impossible for governments
12167 and companies alike to block donations and other transactions.  The
12168 source is free software, and while the key dependency wxWidgets 2.9
12169 for the graphical user interface is missing in Debian, the command
12170 line client builds just fine.  Hopefully Jonas
12171 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/578157">will get the package into
12172 Debian</a> soon.</p>
12173
12174 <p>Bitcoins can be converted to other currencies, like USD and EUR.
12175 There are <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/trade">companies accepting
12176 bitcoins</a> when selling services and goods, and there are even
12177 currency "stock" markets where the exchange rate is decided.  There
12178 are not many users so far, but the concept seems promising.  If you
12179 want to get started and lack a friend with any bitcoins to spare,
12180 you can even get
12181 <a href="https://freebitcoins.appspot.com/">some for free</a> (0.05
12182 bitcoin at the time of writing).  Use
12183 <a href="http://www.bitcoinwatch.com/">BitcoinWatch</a> to keep an eye
12184 on the current exchange rates.</p>
12185
12186 <p>As an experiment, I have decided to set up bitcoind on one of my
12187 machines.  If you want to support my activity, please send Bitcoin
12188 donations to the address
12189 <b>15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</b>.  Thank you!</p>
12190
12191       </div>
12192       <div class="tags">
12193
12194
12195         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
12196
12197
12198       </div>
12199     </div>
12200     <div class="padding"></div>
12201
12202     <div class="entry">
12203       <div class="title">
12204         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_isn_t_Debian_Edu_using_VLC_.html">Why isn't Debian Edu using VLC?</a>
12205       </div>
12206       <div class="date">
12207         27th November 2010
12208       </div>
12209       <div class="body">
12210         <p>In the latest issue of Linux Journal, the readers choices were
12211 presented, and the winner among the multimedia player were VLC.
12212 Personally, I like VLC, and it is my player of choice when I first try
12213 to play a video file or stream.  Only if VLC fail will I drag out
12214 gmplayer to see if it can do better.  The reason is mostly the failure
12215 model and trust.  When VLC fail, it normally pop up a error message
12216 reporting the problem.  When mplayer fail, it normally segfault or
12217 just hangs.  The latter failure mode drain my trust in the program.<p>
12218
12219 <p>But even if VLC is my player of choice, we have choosen to use
12220 mplayer in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
12221 Edu/Skolelinux</a>.  The reason is simple.  We need a good browser
12222 plugin to play web videos seamlessly, and the VLC browser plugin is
12223 not very good.  For example, it lack in-line control buttons, so there
12224 is no way for the user to pause the video.  Also, when I
12225 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">last
12226 tested the browser plugins</a> available in Debian, the VLC plugin
12227 failed on several video pages where mplayer based plugins worked.  If
12228 the browser plugin for VLC was as good as the gecko-mediaplayer
12229 package (which uses mplayer), we would switch.</P>
12230
12231 <p>While VLC is a good player, its user interface is slightly
12232 annoying.  The most annoying feature is its inconsistent use of
12233 keyboard shortcuts.  When the player is in full screen mode, its
12234 shortcuts are different from when it is playing the video in a window.
12235 For example, space only work as pause when in full screen mode.  I
12236 wish it had consisten shortcuts and that space also would work when in
12237 window mode.  Another nice shortcut in gmplayer is [enter] to restart
12238 the current video.  It is very nice when playing short videos from the
12239 web and want to restart it when new people arrive to have a look at
12240 what is going on.</p>
12241
12242       </div>
12243       <div class="tags">
12244
12245
12246         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
12247
12248
12249       </div>
12250     </div>
12251     <div class="padding"></div>
12252
12253     <div class="entry">
12254       <div class="title">
12255         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades_of_the_Gnome_and_KDE_desktop__now_with_apt_get_autoremove.html">Lenny->Squeeze upgrades of the Gnome and KDE desktop, now with apt-get autoremove</a>
12256       </div>
12257       <div class="date">
12258         22nd November 2010
12259       </div>
12260       <div class="body">
12261         <p>Michael Biebl suggested to me on IRC, that I changed my automated
12262 upgrade testing of the
12263 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
12264 Gnome and KDE Desktop</a> to do <tt>apt-get autoremove</tt> when using apt-get.
12265 This seem like a very good idea, so I adjusted by test scripts and
12266 can now present the updated result from today:</p>
12267
12268 <p>This is for Gnome:</p>
12269
12270 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
12271
12272 <blockquote><p>
12273   apache2.2-bin
12274   aptdaemon
12275   baobab
12276   binfmt-support
12277   browser-plugin-gnash
12278   cheese-common
12279   cli-common
12280   cups-pk-helper
12281   dmz-cursor-theme
12282   empathy
12283   empathy-common
12284   freedesktop-sound-theme
12285   freeglut3
12286   gconf-defaults-service
12287   gdm-themes
12288   gedit-plugins
12289   geoclue
12290   geoclue-hostip
12291   geoclue-localnet
12292   geoclue-manual
12293   geoclue-yahoo
12294   gnash
12295   gnash-common
12296   gnome
12297   gnome-backgrounds
12298   gnome-cards-data
12299   gnome-codec-install
12300   gnome-core
12301   gnome-desktop-environment
12302   gnome-disk-utility
12303   gnome-screenshot
12304   gnome-search-tool
12305   gnome-session-canberra
12306   gnome-system-log
12307   gnome-themes-extras
12308   gnome-themes-more
12309   gnome-user-share
12310   gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
12311   gstreamer0.10-tools
12312   gtk2-engines
12313   gtk2-engines-pixbuf
12314   gtk2-engines-smooth
12315   hamster-applet
12316   libapache2-mod-dnssd
12317   libapr1
12318   libaprutil1
12319   libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3
12320   libaprutil1-ldap
12321   libart2.0-cil
12322   libboost-date-time1.42.0
12323   libboost-python1.42.0
12324   libboost-thread1.42.0
12325   libchamplain-0.4-0
12326   libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0
12327   libcheese-gtk18
12328   libclutter-gtk-0.10-0
12329   libcryptui0
12330   libdiscid0
12331   libelf1
12332   libepc-1.0-2
12333   libepc-common
12334   libepc-ui-1.0-2
12335   libfreerdp-plugins-standard
12336   libfreerdp0
12337   libgconf2.0-cil
12338   libgdata-common
12339   libgdata7
12340   libgdu-gtk0
12341   libgee2
12342   libgeoclue0
12343   libgexiv2-0
12344   libgif4
12345   libglade2.0-cil
12346   libglib2.0-cil
12347   libgmime2.4-cil
12348   libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
12349   libgnome2.24-cil
12350   libgnomepanel2.24-cil
12351   libgpod-common
12352   libgpod4
12353   libgtk2.0-cil
12354   libgtkglext1
12355   libgtksourceview2.0-common
12356   libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
12357   libmono-addins0.2-cil
12358   libmono-cairo2.0-cil
12359   libmono-corlib2.0-cil
12360   libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil
12361   libmono-posix2.0-cil
12362   libmono-security2.0-cil
12363   libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
12364   libmono-system2.0-cil
12365   libmtp8
12366   libmusicbrainz3-6
12367   libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil
12368   libndesk-dbus1.0-cil
12369   libopal3.6.8
12370   libpolkit-gtk-1-0
12371   libpt2.6.7
12372   libpython2.6
12373   librpm1
12374   librpmio1
12375   libsdl1.2debian
12376   libsrtp0
12377   libssh-4
12378   libtelepathy-farsight0
12379   libtelepathy-glib0
12380   libtidy-0.99-0
12381   media-player-info
12382   mesa-utils
12383   mono-2.0-gac
12384   mono-gac
12385   mono-runtime
12386   nautilus-sendto
12387   nautilus-sendto-empathy
12388   p7zip-full
12389   pkg-config
12390   python-aptdaemon
12391   python-aptdaemon-gtk
12392   python-axiom
12393   python-beautifulsoup
12394   python-bugbuddy
12395   python-clientform
12396   python-coherence
12397   python-configobj
12398   python-crypto
12399   python-cupshelpers
12400   python-elementtree
12401   python-epsilon
12402   python-evolution
12403   python-feedparser
12404   python-gdata
12405   python-gdbm
12406   python-gst0.10
12407   python-gtkglext1
12408   python-gtksourceview2
12409   python-httplib2
12410   python-louie
12411   python-mako
12412   python-markupsafe
12413   python-mechanize
12414   python-nevow
12415   python-notify
12416   python-opengl
12417   python-openssl
12418   python-pam
12419   python-pkg-resources
12420   python-pyasn1
12421   python-pysqlite2
12422   python-rdflib
12423   python-serial
12424   python-tagpy
12425   python-twisted-bin
12426   python-twisted-conch
12427   python-twisted-core
12428   python-twisted-web
12429   python-utidylib
12430   python-webkit
12431   python-xdg
12432   python-zope.interface
12433   remmina
12434   remmina-plugin-data
12435   remmina-plugin-rdp
12436   remmina-plugin-vnc
12437   rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
12438   rhythmbox-plugins
12439   rpm-common
12440   rpm2cpio
12441   seahorse-plugins
12442   shotwell
12443   software-center
12444   system-config-printer-udev
12445   telepathy-gabble
12446   telepathy-mission-control-5
12447   telepathy-salut
12448   tomboy
12449   totem
12450   totem-coherence
12451   totem-mozilla
12452   totem-plugins
12453   transmission-common
12454   xdg-user-dirs
12455   xdg-user-dirs-gtk
12456   xserver-xephyr
12457 </p></blockquote>
12458
12459 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
12460
12461 <blockquote><p>
12462   cheese
12463   ekiga
12464   eog
12465   epiphany-extensions
12466   evolution-exchange
12467   fast-user-switch-applet
12468   file-roller
12469   gcalctool
12470   gconf-editor
12471   gdm
12472   gedit
12473   gedit-common
12474   gnome-games
12475   gnome-games-data
12476   gnome-nettool
12477   gnome-system-tools
12478   gnome-themes
12479   gnuchess
12480   gucharmap
12481   guile-1.8-libs
12482   libavahi-ui0
12483   libdmx1
12484   libgalago3
12485   libgtk-vnc-1.0-0
12486   libgtksourceview2.0-0
12487   liblircclient0
12488   libsdl1.2debian-alsa
12489   libspeexdsp1
12490   libsvga1
12491   rhythmbox
12492   seahorse
12493   sound-juicer
12494   system-config-printer
12495   totem-common
12496   transmission-gtk
12497   vinagre
12498   vino
12499 </p></blockquote>
12500
12501 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
12502
12503 <blockquote><p>
12504   gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
12505 </p></blockquote>
12506
12507 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
12508
12509 <blockquote><p>
12510 [nothing]
12511 </p></blockquote>
12512
12513 <p>This is for KDE:</p>
12514
12515 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
12516
12517 <blockquote><p>
12518   ksmserver
12519 </p></blockquote>
12520
12521 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
12522
12523 <blockquote><p>
12524   kwin
12525   network-manager-kde
12526 </p></blockquote>
12527
12528 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
12529
12530 <blockquote><p>
12531   arts
12532   dolphin
12533   freespacenotifier
12534   google-gadgets-gst
12535   google-gadgets-xul
12536   kappfinder
12537   kcalc
12538   kcharselect
12539   kde-core
12540   kde-plasma-desktop
12541   kde-standard
12542   kde-window-manager
12543   kdeartwork
12544   kdeartwork-emoticons
12545   kdeartwork-style
12546   kdeartwork-theme-icon
12547   kdebase
12548   kdebase-apps
12549   kdebase-workspace
12550   kdebase-workspace-bin
12551   kdebase-workspace-data
12552   kdeeject
12553   kdelibs
12554   kdeplasma-addons
12555   kdeutils
12556   kdewallpapers
12557   kdf
12558   kfloppy
12559   kgpg
12560   khelpcenter4
12561   kinfocenter
12562   konq-plugins-l10n
12563   konqueror-nsplugins
12564   kscreensaver
12565   kscreensaver-xsavers
12566   ktimer
12567   kwrite
12568   libgle3
12569   libkde4-ruby1.8
12570   libkonq5
12571   libkonq5-templates
12572   libnetpbm10
12573   libplasma-ruby
12574   libplasma-ruby1.8
12575   libqt4-ruby1.8
12576   marble-data
12577   marble-plugins
12578   netpbm
12579   nuvola-icon-theme
12580   plasma-dataengines-workspace
12581   plasma-desktop
12582   plasma-desktopthemes-artwork
12583   plasma-runners-addons
12584   plasma-scriptengine-googlegadgets
12585   plasma-scriptengine-python
12586   plasma-scriptengine-qedje
12587   plasma-scriptengine-ruby
12588   plasma-scriptengine-webkit
12589   plasma-scriptengines
12590   plasma-wallpapers-addons
12591   plasma-widget-folderview
12592   plasma-widget-networkmanagement
12593   ruby
12594   sweeper
12595   update-notifier-kde
12596   xscreensaver-data-extra
12597   xscreensaver-gl
12598   xscreensaver-gl-extra
12599   xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
12600 </p></blockquote>
12601
12602 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
12603
12604 <blockquote><p>
12605   ark
12606   google-gadgets-common
12607   google-gadgets-qt
12608   htdig
12609   kate
12610   kdebase-bin
12611   kdebase-data
12612   kdepasswd
12613   kfind
12614   klipper
12615   konq-plugins
12616   konqueror
12617   ksysguard
12618   ksysguardd
12619   libarchive1
12620   libcln6
12621   libeet1
12622   libeina-svn-06
12623   libggadget-1.0-0b
12624   libggadget-qt-1.0-0b
12625   libgps19
12626   libkdecorations4
12627   libkephal4
12628   libkonq4
12629   libkonqsidebarplugin4a
12630   libkscreensaver5
12631   libksgrd4
12632   libksignalplotter4
12633   libkunitconversion4
12634   libkwineffects1a
12635   libmarblewidget4
12636   libntrack-qt4-1
12637   libntrack0
12638   libplasma-geolocation-interface4
12639   libplasmaclock4a
12640   libplasmagenericshell4
12641   libprocesscore4a
12642   libprocessui4a
12643   libqalculate5
12644   libqedje0a
12645   libqtruby4shared2
12646   libqzion0a
12647   libruby1.8
12648   libscim8c2a
12649   libsmokekdecore4-3
12650   libsmokekdeui4-3
12651   libsmokekfile3
12652   libsmokekhtml3
12653   libsmokekio3
12654   libsmokeknewstuff2-3
12655   libsmokeknewstuff3-3
12656   libsmokekparts3
12657   libsmokektexteditor3
12658   libsmokekutils3
12659   libsmokenepomuk3
12660   libsmokephonon3
12661   libsmokeplasma3
12662   libsmokeqtcore4-3
12663   libsmokeqtdbus4-3
12664   libsmokeqtgui4-3
12665   libsmokeqtnetwork4-3
12666   libsmokeqtopengl4-3
12667   libsmokeqtscript4-3
12668   libsmokeqtsql4-3
12669   libsmokeqtsvg4-3
12670   libsmokeqttest4-3
12671   libsmokeqtuitools4-3
12672   libsmokeqtwebkit4-3
12673   libsmokeqtxml4-3
12674   libsmokesolid3
12675   libsmokesoprano3
12676   libtaskmanager4a
12677   libtidy-0.99-0
12678   libweather-ion4a
12679   libxklavier16
12680   libxxf86misc1
12681   okteta
12682   oxygencursors
12683   plasma-dataengines-addons
12684   plasma-scriptengine-superkaramba
12685   plasma-widget-lancelot
12686   plasma-widgets-addons
12687   plasma-widgets-workspace
12688   polkit-kde-1
12689   ruby1.8
12690   systemsettings
12691   update-notifier-common
12692 </p></blockquote>
12693
12694 <p>Running apt-get autoremove made the results using apt-get and
12695 aptitude a bit more similar, but there are still quite a lott of
12696 differences.  I have no idea what packages should be installed after
12697 the upgrade, but hope those that do can have a look.</p>
12698
12699       </div>
12700       <div class="tags">
12701
12702
12703         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
12704
12705
12706       </div>
12707     </div>
12708     <div class="padding"></div>
12709
12710     <div class="entry">
12711       <div class="title">
12712         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Migrating_Xen_virtual_machines_using_LVM_to_KVM_using_disk_images.html">Migrating Xen virtual machines using LVM to KVM using disk images</a>
12713       </div>
12714       <div class="date">
12715         22nd November 2010
12716       </div>
12717       <div class="body">
12718         <p>Most of the computers in use by the
12719 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux project</a>
12720 are virtual machines.  And they have been Xen machines running on a
12721 fairly old IBM eserver xseries 345 machine, and we wanted to migrate
12722 them to KVM on a newer Dell PowerEdge 2950 host machine.  This was a
12723 bit harder that it could have been, because we set up the Xen virtual
12724 machines to get the virtual partitions from LVM, which as far as I
12725 know is not supported by KVM.  So to migrate, we had to convert
12726 several LVM logical volumes to partitions on a virtual disk file.</p>
12727
12728 <p>I found
12729 <a href="http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM">a
12730 nice recipe</a> to do this, and wrote the following script to do the
12731 migration.  It uses qemu-img from the qemu package to make the disk
12732 image, parted to partition it, losetup and kpartx to present the disk
12733 image partions as devices, and dd to copy the data.  I NFS mounted the
12734 new servers storage area on the old server to do the migration.</p>
12735
12736 <pre>
12737 #!/bin/sh
12738
12739 # Based on
12740 # http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM
12741
12742 set -e
12743 set -x
12744
12745 if [ -z "$1" ] ; then
12746     echo "Usage: $0 &lt;hostname&gt;"
12747     exit 1
12748 else
12749     host="$1"
12750 fi
12751
12752 if [ ! -e /dev/vg_data/$host-disk ] ; then
12753     echo "error: unable to find LVM volume for $host"
12754     exit 1
12755 fi
12756
12757 # Partitions need to be a bit bigger than the LVM LVs.  not sure why.
12758 disksize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-disk | awk '{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }')
12759 swapsize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-swap | awk '{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }')
12760 totalsize=$(( ( $disksize + $swapsize ) ))
12761
12762 img=$host.img
12763 #dd if=/dev/zero of=$img bs=1M count=$(( $disksize + $swapsize ))
12764 qemu-img create $img ${totalsize}MMaking room on the Debian Edu/Sqeeze DVD
12765
12766 parted $img mklabel msdos
12767 parted $img mkpart primary linux-swap 0 $disksize
12768 parted $img mkpart primary ext2 $disksize $totalsize
12769 parted $img set 1 boot on
12770
12771 modprobe dm-mod
12772 losetup /dev/loop0 $img
12773 kpartx -a /dev/loop0
12774
12775 dd if=/dev/vg_data/$host-disk of=/dev/mapper/loop0p1 bs=1M
12776 fsck.ext3 -f /dev/mapper/loop0p1 || true
12777 mkswap /dev/mapper/loop0p2
12778
12779 kpartx -d /dev/loop0
12780 losetup -d /dev/loop0
12781 </pre>
12782
12783 <p>The script is perhaps so simple that it is not copyrightable, but
12784 if it is, it is licenced using GPL v2 or later at your discretion.</p>
12785
12786 <p>After doing this, I booted a Debian CD in rescue mode in KVM with
12787 the new disk image attached, installed grub-pc and linux-image-686 and
12788 set up grub to boot from the disk image.  After this, the KVM machines
12789 seem to work just fine.</p>
12790
12791       </div>
12792       <div class="tags">
12793
12794
12795         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
12796
12797
12798       </div>
12799     </div>
12800     <div class="padding"></div>
12801
12802     <div class="entry">
12803       <div class="title">
12804         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__apt_vs_aptitude_with_the_Gnome_and_KDE_desktop.html">Lenny->Squeeze upgrades, apt vs aptitude with the Gnome and KDE desktop</a>
12805       </div>
12806       <div class="date">
12807         20th November 2010
12808       </div>
12809       <div class="body">
12810         <p>I'm still running upgrade testing of the
12811 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
12812 Gnome and KDE Desktop</a>, but have not had time to spend on reporting the
12813 status.  Here is a short update based on a test I ran 20101118.</p>
12814
12815 <p>I still do not know what a correct migration should look like, so I
12816 report any differences between apt and aptitude and hope someone else
12817 can see if anything should be changed.</p>
12818
12819 <p>This is for Gnome:</p>
12820
12821 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
12822
12823 <blockquote><p>
12824   apache2.2-bin aptdaemon at-spi baobab binfmt-support
12825   browser-plugin-gnash cheese-common cli-common cpp-4.3 cups-pk-helper
12826   dmz-cursor-theme empathy empathy-common finger
12827   freedesktop-sound-theme freeglut3 gconf-defaults-service gdm-themes
12828   gedit-plugins geoclue geoclue-hostip geoclue-localnet geoclue-manual
12829   geoclue-yahoo gnash gnash-common gnome gnome-backgrounds
12830   gnome-cards-data gnome-codec-install gnome-core
12831   gnome-desktop-environment gnome-disk-utility gnome-screenshot
12832   gnome-search-tool gnome-session-canberra gnome-spell
12833   gnome-system-log gnome-themes-extras gnome-themes-more
12834   gnome-user-share gs-common gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
12835   gstreamer0.10-tools gtk2-engines gtk2-engines-pixbuf
12836   gtk2-engines-smooth hal-info hamster-applet libapache2-mod-dnssd
12837   libapr1 libaprutil1 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3 libaprutil1-ldap
12838   libart2.0-cil libatspi1.0-0 libboost-date-time1.42.0
12839   libboost-python1.42.0 libboost-thread1.42.0 libchamplain-0.4-0
12840   libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0 libcheese-gtk18 libclutter-gtk-0.10-0
12841   libcryptui0 libcupsys2 libdiscid0 libeel2-data libelf1 libepc-1.0-2
12842   libepc-common libepc-ui-1.0-2 libfreerdp-plugins-standard
12843   libfreerdp0 libgail-common libgconf2.0-cil libgdata-common libgdata7
12844   libgdl-1-common libgdu-gtk0 libgee2 libgeoclue0 libgexiv2-0 libgif4
12845   libglade2.0-cil libglib2.0-cil libgmime2.4-cil libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
12846   libgnome2.24-cil libgnomepanel2.24-cil libgnomeprint2.2-data
12847   libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod-common libgpod4
12848   libgtk2.0-cil libgtkglext1 libgtksourceview-common
12849   libgtksourceview2.0-common libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
12850   libmono-addins0.2-cil libmono-cairo2.0-cil libmono-corlib2.0-cil
12851   libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil libmono-posix2.0-cil
12852   libmono-security2.0-cil libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
12853   libmono-system2.0-cil libmtp8 libmusicbrainz3-6
12854   libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil libndesk-dbus1.0-cil libopal3.6.8
12855   libpolkit-gtk-1-0 libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
12856   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libpt2.6.7 libpython2.6 librpm1 librpmio1
12857   libsdl1.2debian libservlet2.4-java libsrtp0 libssh-4
12858   libtelepathy-farsight0 libtelepathy-glib0 libtidy-0.99-0
12859   libxalan2-java libxerces2-java media-player-info mesa-utils
12860   mono-2.0-gac mono-gac mono-runtime nautilus-sendto
12861   nautilus-sendto-empathy openoffice.org-writer2latex
12862   openssl-blacklist p7zip p7zip-full pkg-config python-4suite-xml
12863   python-aptdaemon python-aptdaemon-gtk python-axiom
12864   python-beautifulsoup python-bugbuddy python-clientform
12865   python-coherence python-configobj python-crypto python-cupshelpers
12866   python-cupsutils python-eggtrayicon python-elementtree
12867   python-epsilon python-evolution python-feedparser python-gdata
12868   python-gdbm python-gst0.10 python-gtkglext1 python-gtkmozembed
12869   python-gtksourceview2 python-httplib2 python-louie python-mako
12870   python-markupsafe python-mechanize python-nevow python-notify
12871   python-opengl python-openssl python-pam python-pkg-resources
12872   python-pyasn1 python-pysqlite2 python-rdflib python-serial
12873   python-tagpy python-twisted-bin python-twisted-conch
12874   python-twisted-core python-twisted-web python-utidylib python-webkit
12875   python-xdg python-zope.interface remmina remmina-plugin-data
12876   remmina-plugin-rdp remmina-plugin-vnc rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
12877   rhythmbox-plugins rpm-common rpm2cpio seahorse-plugins shotwell
12878   software-center svgalibg1 system-config-printer-udev
12879   telepathy-gabble telepathy-mission-control-5 telepathy-salut tomboy
12880   totem totem-coherence totem-mozilla totem-plugins
12881   transmission-common xdg-user-dirs xdg-user-dirs-gtk xserver-xephyr
12882   zip
12883 </p></blockquote>
12884
12885 Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude
12886
12887 <blockquote><p>
12888   arj bluez-utils cheese dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop ekiga eog
12889   epiphany-extensions epiphany-gecko evolution-exchange
12890   fast-user-switch-applet file-roller gcalctool gconf-editor gdm gedit
12891   gedit-common gnome-app-install gnome-games gnome-games-data
12892   gnome-nettool gnome-system-tools gnome-themes gnome-utils
12893   gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager gnuchess gucharmap
12894   guile-1.8-libs hal libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5
12895   libavahi-ui0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7
12896   libcucul0 libcurl3 libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdmx1 libdvdread3
12897   libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1
12898   libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3 libfaad0 libgadu3
12899   libgalago3 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
12900   libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
12901   libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
12902   libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtk-vnc-1.0-0
12903   libgtkhtml2-0 libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgtksourceview2.0-0
12904   libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
12905   libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libkpathsea4 liblircclient0 libltdl3 liblwres50
12906   libmagick++10 libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmozjs1d libmpfr1ldbl libmtp7
12907   libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0
12908   libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpisock9
12909   libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8
12910   libsdl1.2debian-alsa libsensors3 libsexy2 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
12911   libspeexdsp1 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libsvga1
12912   libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0
12913   libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12
12914   libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common rhythmbox seahorse
12915   sound-juicer swfdec-gnome system-config-printer totem-common
12916   totem-gstreamer transmission-gtk vinagre vino w3c-dtd-xhtml wodim
12917 </p></blockquote>
12918
12919 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
12920
12921 <blockquote><p>
12922   gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
12923 </p></blockquote>
12924
12925 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
12926
12927 <blockquote><p>
12928 [nothing]
12929 </p></blockquote>
12930
12931 <p>This is for KDE:</p>
12932
12933 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
12934
12935 <blockquote><p>
12936   autopoint bomber bovo cantor cantor-backend-kalgebra cpp-4.3 dcoprss
12937   edict espeak espeak-data eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
12938   ghostscript-x git gnome-audio gnugo granatier gs-common
12939   gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio indi kaddressbook-plugins kalgebra
12940   kalzium-data kanjidic kapman kate-plugins kblocks kbreakout kbstate
12941   kde-icons-mono kdeaccessibility kdeaddons-kfile-plugins
12942   kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
12943   kdeedu kdeedu-data kdeedu-kvtml-data kdegames kdegames-card-data
12944   kdegames-mahjongg-data kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc
12945   kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
12946   kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdessh kdetoys kdewebdev
12947   kdiamond kdnssd kfilereplace kfourinline kgeography-data kigo
12948   killbots kiriki klettres-data kmoon kmrml knewsticker-scripts
12949   kollision kpf krosspython ksirk ksmserver ksquares kstars-data
12950   ksudoku kubrick kweather libasound2-plugins libboost-python1.42.0
12951   libcfitsio3 libconvert-binhex-perl libcrypt-ssleay-perl libdb4.6++
12952   libdjvulibre-text libdotconf1.0 liberror-perl libespeak1
12953   libfinance-quote-perl libgail-common libgsl0ldbl libhtml-parser-perl
12954   libhtml-tableextract-perl libhtml-tagset-perl libhtml-tree-perl
12955   libio-stringy-perl libkdeedu4 libkdegames5 libkiten4 libkpathsea5
12956   libkrossui4 libmailtools-perl libmime-tools-perl
12957   libnews-nntpclient-perl libopenbabel3 libportaudio2 libpulse-browse0
12958   libservlet2.4-java libspeechd2 libtiff-tools libtimedate-perl
12959   libunistring0 liburi-perl libwww-perl libxalan2-java libxerces2-java
12960   lirc luatex marble networkstatus noatun-plugins
12961   openoffice.org-writer2latex palapeli palapeli-data parley
12962   parley-data poster psutils pulseaudio pulseaudio-esound-compat
12963   pulseaudio-module-x11 pulseaudio-utils quanta-data rocs rsync
12964   speech-dispatcher step svgalibg1 texlive-binaries texlive-luatex
12965   ttf-sazanami-gothic
12966 </p></blockquote>
12967
12968 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
12969
12970 <blockquote><p>
12971   amor artsbuilder atlantik atlantikdesigner blinken bluez-utils cvs
12972   dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop imlib-base imlib11 kalzium kanagram kandy
12973   kasteroids katomic kbackgammon kbattleship kblackbox kbounce kbruch
12974   kcron kdat kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data kdeprint kdict kdvi kedit
12975   keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs kgeography kghostview
12976   kgoldrunner khangman khexedit kiconedit kig kimagemapeditor
12977   kitchensync kiten kjumpingcube klatin klettres klickety klines
12978   klinkstatus kmag kmahjongg kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmines
12979   kmousetool kmouth kmplot knetwalk kodo kolf kommander konquest kooka
12980   kpager kpat kpdf kpercentage kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler krec
12981   kregexpeditor kreversi ksame ksayit kshisen ksig ksim ksirc ksirtet
12982   ksmiletris ksnake ksokoban kspaceduel kstars ksvg ksysv kteatime
12983   ktip ktnef ktouch ktron kttsd ktuberling kturtle ktux kuickshow
12984   kverbos kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kwordquiz
12985   kworldclock kxsldbg libakode2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
12986   libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
12987   libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2
12988   libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0
12989   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
12990   libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0 libicu38
12991   libiec61883-0 libindex0 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
12992   libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1 libkdeedu3
12993   libkdegames1 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
12994   libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
12995   libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick10
12996   libmimelib1c2a libmodplug0c2 libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libmpfr1ldbl
12997   libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9 libpoppler-glib3
12998   libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 librss1 libsensors3
12999   libsmbios2 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90
13000   libtalloc1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 lskat
13001   mpeglib network-manager-kde noatun pmount tex-common texlive-base
13002   texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended tidy
13003   ttf-dustin ttf-kochi-gothic ttf-sjfonts
13004 </p></blockquote>
13005
13006 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
13007
13008 <blockquote><p>
13009   dolphin kde-core kde-plasma-desktop kde-standard kde-window-manager
13010   kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-apps kdebase-workspace
13011   kdebase-workspace-bin kdebase-workspace-data kdeutils kscreensaver
13012   kscreensaver-xsavers libgle3 libkonq5 libkonq5-templates libnetpbm10
13013   netpbm plasma-widget-folderview plasma-widget-networkmanagement
13014   xscreensaver-data-extra xscreensaver-gl xscreensaver-gl-extra
13015   xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
13016 </p></blockquote>
13017
13018 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
13019
13020 <blockquote><p>
13021   kdebase-bin konq-plugins konqueror
13022 </p></blockquote>
13023
13024       </div>
13025       <div class="tags">
13026
13027
13028         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
13029
13030
13031       </div>
13032     </div>
13033     <div class="padding"></div>
13034
13035     <div class="entry">
13036       <div class="title">
13037         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_buildbot_slave_and_Debian_kfreebsd.html">Gnash buildbot slave and Debian kfreebsd</a>
13038       </div>
13039       <div class="date">
13040         20th November 2010
13041       </div>
13042       <div class="body">
13043         <p>Answering
13044 <a href="http://www.listware.net/201011/gnash-dev/67431-gnash-dev-buildbot-looking-for-slaves.html">the
13045 call from the Gnash project</a> for
13046 <a href="http://www.gnashdev.org:8010">buildbot</a> slaves to test the
13047 current source, I have set up a virtual KVM machine on the Debian
13048 Edu/Skolelinux virtualization host to test the git source on
13049 Debian/Squeeze.  I hope this can help the developers in getting new
13050 releases out more often.</p>
13051
13052 <p>As the developers want less main-stream build platforms tested to,
13053 I have considered setting up a <a
13054 href="http://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/">Debian/kfreebsd</a>
13055 machine as well.  I have also considered using the kfreebsd
13056 architecture in Debian as a file server in NUUG to get access to the 5
13057 TB zfs volume we currently use to store DV video.  Because of this, I
13058 finally got around to do a test installation of Debian/Squeeze with
13059 kfreebsd.  Installation went fairly smooth, thought I noticed some
13060 visual glitches in the cdebconf dialogs (black cursor left on the
13061 screen at random locations).  Have not gotten very far with the
13062 testing.  Noticed cfdisk did not work, but fdisk did so it was not a
13063 fatal problem.  Have to spend some more time on it to see if it is
13064 useful as a file server for NUUG.  Will try to find time to set up a
13065 gnash buildbot slave on the Debian Edu/Skolelinux this weekend.</p>
13066
13067       </div>
13068       <div class="tags">
13069
13070
13071         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
13072
13073
13074       </div>
13075     </div>
13076     <div class="padding"></div>
13077
13078     <div class="entry">
13079       <div class="title">
13080         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_in_3D.html">Debian in 3D</a>
13081       </div>
13082       <div class="date">
13083          9th November 2010
13084       </div>
13085       <div class="body">
13086         <p><img src="http://thingiverse-production.s3.amazonaws.com/renders/23/e0/c4/f9/2b/debswagtdose_preview_medium.jpg"></p>
13087
13088 <p>3D printing is just great.  I just came across this Debian logo in
13089 3D linked in from
13090 <a href="http://blog.thingiverse.com/2010/11/09/participatory-branding/">the
13091 thingiverse blog</a>.</p>
13092
13093       </div>
13094       <div class="tags">
13095
13096
13097         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
13098
13099
13100       </div>
13101     </div>
13102     <div class="padding"></div>
13103
13104     <div class="entry">
13105       <div class="title">
13106         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_updates_2010_10_24.html">Software updates 2010-10-24</a>
13107       </div>
13108       <div class="date">
13109         24th October 2010
13110       </div>
13111       <div class="body">
13112         <p>Some updates.</p>
13113
13114 <p>My <a href="http://pledgebank.com/gnash-avm2">gnash pledge</a> to
13115 raise money for the project is going well.  The lower limit of 10
13116 signers was reached in 24 hours, and so far 13 people have signed it.
13117 More signers and more funding is most welcome, and I am really curious
13118 how far we can get before the time limit of December 24 is reached.
13119 :)</p>
13120
13121 <p>On the #gnash IRC channel on irc.freenode.net, I was just tipped
13122 about what appear to be a great code coverage tool capable of
13123 generating code coverage stats without any changes to the source code.
13124 It is called
13125 <a href="http://simonkagstrom.github.com/kcov/index.html">kcov</a>,
13126 and can be used using <tt>kcov &lt;directory&gt; &lt;binary&gt;</tt>.
13127 It is missing in Debian, but the git source built just fine in Squeeze
13128 after I installed libelf-dev, libdwarf-dev, pkg-config and
13129 libglib2.0-dev.  Failed to build in Lenny, but suspect that is
13130 solvable.  I hope kcov make it into Debian soon.</p>
13131
13132 <p>Finally found time to wrap up the release notes for <a
13133 href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2010/10/msg00002.html">a
13134 new alpha release of Debian Edu</a>, and just published the second
13135 alpha test release of the Squeeze based Debian Edu /
13136 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a>
13137 release.  Give it a try if you need a complete linux solution for your
13138 school, including central infrastructure server, workstations, thin
13139 client servers and diskless workstations.  A nice touch added
13140 yesterday is RDP support on the thin client servers, for windows
13141 clients to get a Linux desktop on request.</p>
13142
13143       </div>
13144       <div class="tags">
13145
13146
13147         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>.
13148
13149
13150       </div>
13151     </div>
13152     <div class="padding"></div>
13153
13154     <div class="entry">
13155       <div class="title">
13156         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_notes_on_Flash_in_Debian_and_Debian_Edu.html">Some notes on Flash in Debian and Debian Edu</a>
13157       </div>
13158       <div class="date">
13159          4th September 2010
13160       </div>
13161       <div class="body">
13162         <p>In the <a href="http://popcon.debian.org/unknown/by_vote">Debian
13163 popularity-contest numbers</a>, the adobe-flashplugin package the
13164 second most popular used package that is missing in Debian.  The sixth
13165 most popular is flashplayer-mozilla.  This is a clear indication that
13166 working flash is important for Debian users.  Around 10 percent of the
13167 users submitting data to popcon.debian.org have this package
13168 installed.</p>
13169
13170 <p>In the report written by Lars Risan in August 2008
13171 («<a href="http://wiki.skolelinux.no/Dokumentasjon/Rapporter?action=AttachFile&do=view&target=Skolelinux_i_bruk_rapport_1.0.pdf">Skolelinux
13172 i bruk – Rapport for Hurum kommune, Universitetet i Agder og
13173 stiftelsen SLX Debian Labs</a>»), one of the most important problems
13174 schools experienced with <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
13175 Edu/Skolelinux</a> was the lack of working Flash.  A lot of educational
13176 web sites require Flash to work, and lacking working Flash support in
13177 the web browser and the problems with installing it was perceived as a
13178 good reason to stay with Windows.</p>
13179
13180 <p>I once saw a funny and sad comment in a web forum, where Linux was
13181 said to be the retarded cousin that did not really understand
13182 everything you told him but could work fairly well.  This was a
13183 comment regarding the problems Linux have with proprietary formats and
13184 non-standard web pages, and is sad because it exposes a fairly common
13185 understanding of whose fault it is if web pages that only work in for
13186 example Internet Explorer 6 fail to work on Firefox, and funny because
13187 it explain very well how annoying it is for users when Linux
13188 distributions do not work with the documents they receive or the web
13189 pages they want to visit.</p>
13190
13191 <p>This is part of the reason why I believe it is important for Debian
13192 and Debian Edu to have a well working Flash implementation in the
13193 distribution, to get at least popular sites as Youtube and Google
13194 Video to working out of the box.  For Squeeze, Debian have the chance
13195 to include the latest version of Gnash that will make this happen, as
13196 the new release 0.8.8 was published a few weeks ago and is resting in
13197 unstable.  The new version work with more sites that version 0.8.7.
13198 The Gnash maintainers have asked for a freeze exception, but the
13199 release team have not had time to reply to it yet.  I hope they agree
13200 with me that Flash is important for the Debian desktop users, and thus
13201 accept the new package into Squeeze.</p>
13202
13203       </div>
13204       <div class="tags">
13205
13206
13207         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
13208
13209
13210       </div>
13211     </div>
13212     <div class="padding"></div>
13213
13214     <div class="entry">
13215       <div class="title">
13216         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Circular_package_dependencies_harms_apt_recovery.html">Circular package dependencies harms apt recovery</a>
13217       </div>
13218       <div class="date">
13219         27th July 2010
13220       </div>
13221       <div class="body">
13222         <p>I discovered this while doing
13223 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">automated
13224 testing of upgrades from Debian Lenny to Squeeze</a>.  A few packages
13225 in Debian still got circular dependencies, and it is often claimed
13226 that apt and aptitude should be able to handle this just fine, but
13227 some times these dependency loops causes apt to fail.</p>
13228
13229 <p>An example is from todays
13230 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing//test-20100727-lenny-squeeze-kde-aptitude.txt">upgrade
13231 of KDE using aptitude</a>.  In it, a bug in kdebase-workspace-data
13232 causes perl-modules to fail to upgrade.  The cause is simple.  If a
13233 package fail to unpack, then only part of packages with the circular
13234 dependency might end up being unpacked when unpacking aborts, and the
13235 ones already unpacked will fail to configure in the recovery phase
13236 because its dependencies are unavailable.</p>
13237
13238 <p>In this log, the problem manifest itself with this error:</p>
13239
13240 <blockquote><pre>
13241 dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of perl-modules:
13242  perl-modules depends on perl (>= 5.10.1-1); however:
13243   Version of perl on system is 5.10.0-19lenny2.
13244 dpkg: error processing perl-modules (--configure):
13245  dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
13246 </pre></blockquote>
13247
13248 <p>The perl/perl-modules circular dependency is already
13249 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/527917">reported as a bug</a>, and will
13250 hopefully be solved as soon as possible, but it is not the only one,
13251 and each one of these loops in the dependency tree can cause similar
13252 failures.  Of course, they only occur when there are bugs in other
13253 packages causing the unpacking to fail, but it is rather nasty when
13254 the failure of one package causes the problem to become worse because
13255 of dependency loops.</p>
13256
13257 <p>Thanks to
13258 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/06/msg00116.html">the
13259 tireless effort by Bill Allombert</a>, the number of circular
13260 dependencies
13261 <a href="http://debian.semistable.com/debgraph.out.html">left in Debian
13262 is dropping</a>, and perhaps it will reach zero one day. :)</p>
13263
13264 <p>Todays testing also exposed a bug in
13265 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/590605">update-notifier</a> and
13266 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/590604">different behaviour</a> between
13267 apt-get and aptitude, the latter possibly caused by some circular
13268 dependency.  Reported both to BTS to try to get someone to look at
13269 it.</p>
13270
13271       </div>
13272       <div class="tags">
13273
13274
13275         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
13276
13277
13278       </div>
13279     </div>
13280     <div class="padding"></div>
13281
13282     <div class="entry">
13283       <div class="title">
13284         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_are_they_searching_for___PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_in_LDAP.html">What are they searching for - PowerDNS and ISC DHCP in LDAP</a>
13285       </div>
13286       <div class="date">
13287         17th July 2010
13288       </div>
13289       <div class="body">
13290         <p>This is a
13291 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">followup</a>
13292 on my
13293 <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
13294 work</a> on
13295 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">merging
13296 all</a> the computer related LDAP objects in Debian Edu.</p>
13297
13298 <p>As a step to try to see if it possible to merge the DNS and DHCP
13299 LDAP objects, I have had a look at how the packages pdns-backend-ldap
13300 and dhcp3-server-ldap in Debian use the LDAP server.  The two
13301 implementations are quite different in how they use LDAP.</p>
13302
13303 To get this information, I started slapd with debugging enabled and
13304 dumped the debug output to a file to get the LDAP searches performed
13305 on a Debian Edu main-server.  Here is a summary.
13306
13307 <p><strong>powerdns</strong></p>
13308
13309 <a href="http://www.linuxnetworks.de/doc/index.php/PowerDNS_LDAP_Backend">Clues
13310 on how to</a> set up PowerDNS to use a LDAP backend is available on
13311 the web.
13312
13313 <p>PowerDNS have two modes of operation using LDAP as its backend.
13314 One "strict" mode where the forward and reverse DNS lookups are done
13315 using the same LDAP objects, and a "tree" mode where the forward and
13316 reverse entries are in two different subtrees in LDAP with a structure
13317 based on the DNS names, as in tjener.intern and
13318 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa.</p>
13319
13320 <p>In tree mode, the server is set up to use a LDAP subtree as its
13321 base, and uses a "base" scoped search for the DNS name by adding
13322 "dc=tjener,dc=intern," to the base with a filter for
13323 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" for the forward entry and
13324 "dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa," with a filter for
13325 "(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)" for the reverse entry.  For
13326 forward entries, it is looking for attributes named dnsttl, arecord,
13327 nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord,
13328 txtrecord, rprecord, afsdbrecord, keyrecord, aaaarecord, locrecord,
13329 srvrecord, naptrrecord, kxrecord, certrecord, dsrecord, sshfprecord,
13330 ipseckeyrecord, rrsigrecord, nsecrecord, dnskeyrecord, dhcidrecord,
13331 spfrecord and modifytimestamp.  For reverse entries it is looking for
13332 the attributes dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord,
13333 ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord,
13334 locrecord, srvrecord, naptrrecord and modifytimestamp.  The equivalent
13335 ldapsearch commands could look like this:</p>
13336
13337 <blockquote><pre>
13338 ldapsearch -h ldap \
13339   -b dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
13340   -s base -x '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
13341   cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
13342   rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
13343   nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
13344   rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
13345
13346 ldapsearch -h ldap \
13347   -b dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
13348   -s base -x '(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)'
13349   dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord soarecord ptrrecord \
13350   hinforecord mxrecord txtrecord rprecord aaaarecord locrecord \
13351   srvrecord naptrrecord modifytimestamp
13352 </pre></blockquote>
13353
13354 <p>In Debian Edu/Lenny, the PowerDNS tree mode is used with
13355 ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no as the base, and these are two
13356 example LDAP objects used there.  In addition to these objects, the
13357 parent objects all th way up to ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
13358 also exist.</p>
13359
13360 <blockquote><pre>
13361 dn: dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
13362 objectclass: top
13363 objectclass: dnsdomain
13364 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
13365 dc: tjener
13366 arecord: 10.0.2.2
13367 associateddomain: tjener.intern
13368
13369 dn: dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
13370 objectclass: top
13371 objectclass: dnsdomain2
13372 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
13373 dc: 2
13374 ptrrecord: tjener.intern
13375 associateddomain: 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa
13376 </pre></blockquote>
13377
13378 <p>In strict mode, the server behaves differently.  When looking for
13379 forward DNS entries, it is doing a "subtree" scoped search with the
13380 same base as in the tree mode for a object with filter
13381 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" and requests the attributes dnsttl,
13382 arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord,
13383 mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord, locrecord, srvrecord,
13384 naptrrecord and modifytimestamp.  For reverse entires it also do a
13385 subtree scoped search but this time the filter is "(arecord=10.0.2.2)"
13386 and the requested attributes are associateddomain, dnsttl and
13387 modifytimestamp.  In short, in strict mode the objects with ptrrecord
13388 go away, and the arecord attribute in the forward object is used
13389 instead.</p>
13390
13391 <p>The forward and reverse searches can be simulated using ldapsearch
13392 like this:</p>
13393
13394 <blockquote><pre>
13395 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
13396   '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
13397   cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
13398   rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
13399   nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
13400   rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
13401
13402 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
13403   '(arecord=10.0.2.2)' associateddomain dnsttl modifytimestamp
13404 </pre></blockquote>
13405
13406 <p>In addition to the forward and reverse searches , there is also a
13407 search for SOA records, which behave similar to the forward and
13408 reverse lookups.</p>
13409
13410 <p>A thing to note with the PowerDNS behaviour is that it do not
13411 specify any objectclass names, and instead look for the attributes it
13412 need to generate a DNS reply.  This make it able to work with any
13413 objectclass that provide the needed attributes.</p>
13414
13415 <p>The attributes are normally provided in the cosine (RFC 1274) and
13416 dnsdomain2 schemas.  The latter is used for reverse entries like
13417 ptrrecord and recent DNS additions like aaaarecord and srvrecord.</p>
13418
13419 <p>In Debian Edu, we have created DNS objects using the object classes
13420 dcobject (for dc), dnsdomain or dnsdomain2 (structural, for the DNS
13421 attributes) and domainrelatedobject (for associatedDomain).  The use
13422 of structural object classes make it impossible to combine these
13423 classes with the object classes used by DHCP.</p>
13424
13425 <p>There are other schemas that could be used too, for example the
13426 dnszone structural object class used by Gosa and bind-sdb for the DNS
13427 attributes combined with the domainrelatedobject object class, but in
13428 this case some unused attributes would have to be included as well
13429 (zonename and relativedomainname).</p>
13430
13431 <p>My proposal for Debian Edu would be to switch PowerDNS to strict
13432 mode and not use any of the existing objectclasses (dnsdomain,
13433 dnsdomain2 and dnszone) when one want to combine the DNS information
13434 with DHCP information, and instead create a auxiliary object class
13435 defined something like this (using the attributes defined for
13436 dnsdomain and dnsdomain2 or dnszone):</p>
13437
13438 <blockquote><pre>
13439 objectclass ( some-oid NAME 'dnsDomainAux'
13440     SUP top
13441     AUXILIARY
13442     MAY ( ARecord $ MDRecord $ MXRecord $ NSRecord $ SOARecord $ CNAMERecord $
13443           DNSTTL $ DNSClass $ PTRRecord $ HINFORecord $ MINFORecord $
13444           TXTRecord $ SIGRecord $ KEYRecord $ AAAARecord $ LOCRecord $
13445           NXTRecord $ SRVRecord $ NAPTRRecord $ KXRecord $ CERTRecord $
13446           A6Record $ DNAMERecord
13447     ))
13448 </pre></blockquote>
13449
13450 <p>This will allow any object to become a DNS entry when combined with
13451 the domainrelatedobject object class, and allow any entity to include
13452 all the attributes PowerDNS wants.  I've sent an email to the PowerDNS
13453 developers asking for their view on this schema and if they are
13454 interested in providing such schema with PowerDNS, and I hope my
13455 message will be accepted into their mailing list soon.</p>
13456
13457 <p><strong>ISC dhcp</strong></p>
13458
13459 <p>The DHCP server searches for specific objectclass and requests all
13460 the object attributes, and then uses the attributes it want.  This
13461 make it harder to figure out exactly what attributes are used, but
13462 thanks to the working example in Debian Edu I can at least get an idea
13463 what is needed without having to read the source code.</p>
13464
13465 <p>In the DHCP server configuration, the LDAP base to use and the
13466 search filter to use to locate the correct dhcpServer entity is
13467 stored.  These are the relevant entries from
13468 /etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf:</p>
13469
13470 <blockquote><pre>
13471 ldap-base-dn "dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no";
13472 ldap-dhcp-server-cn "dhcp";
13473 </pre></blockquote>
13474
13475 <p>The DHCP server uses this information to nest all the DHCP
13476 configuration it need.  The cn "dhcp" is located using the given LDAP
13477 base and the filter "(&(objectClass=dhcpServer)(cn=dhcp))".  The
13478 search result is this entry:</p>
13479
13480 <blockquote><pre>
13481 dn: cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
13482 cn: dhcp
13483 objectClass: top
13484 objectClass: dhcpServer
13485 dhcpServiceDN: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
13486 </pre></blockquote>
13487
13488 <p>The content of the dhcpServiceDN attribute is next used to locate the
13489 subtree with DHCP configuration.  The DHCP configuration subtree base
13490 is located using a base scope search with base "cn=DHCP
13491 Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" and filter
13492 "(&(objectClass=dhcpService)(|(dhcpPrimaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)(dhcpSecondaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)))".
13493 The search result is this entry:</p>
13494
13495 <blockquote><pre>
13496 dn: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
13497 cn: DHCP Config
13498 objectClass: top
13499 objectClass: dhcpService
13500 objectClass: dhcpOptions
13501 dhcpPrimaryDN: cn=dhcp, dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
13502 dhcpStatements: ddns-update-style none
13503 dhcpStatements: authoritative
13504 dhcpOption: smtp-server code 69 = array of ip-address
13505 dhcpOption: www-server code 72 = array of ip-address
13506 dhcpOption: wpad-url code 252 = text
13507 </pre></blockquote>
13508
13509 <p>Next, the entire subtree is processed, one level at the time.  When
13510 all the DHCP configuration is loaded, it is ready to receive requests.
13511 The subtree in Debian Edu contain objects with object classes
13512 top/dhcpService/dhcpOptions, top/dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions,
13513 top/dhcpSubnet, top/dhcpGroup and top/dhcpHost.  These provide options
13514 and information about netmasks, dynamic range etc.  Leaving out the
13515 details here because it is not relevant for the focus of my
13516 investigation, which is to see if it is possible to merge dns and dhcp
13517 related computer objects.</p>
13518
13519 <p>When a DHCP request come in, LDAP is searched for the MAC address
13520 of the client (00:00:00:00:00:00 in this example), using a subtree
13521 scoped search with "cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" as
13522 the base and "(&(objectClass=dhcpHost)(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet
13523 00:00:00:00:00:00))" as the filter.  This is what a host object look
13524 like:</p>
13525
13526 <blockquote><pre>
13527 dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
13528 cn: hostname
13529 objectClass: top
13530 objectClass: dhcpHost
13531 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
13532 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname
13533 </pre></blockquote>
13534
13535 <p>There is less flexiblity in the way LDAP searches are done here.
13536 The object classes need to have fixed names, and the configuration
13537 need to be stored in a fairly specific LDAP structure.  On the
13538 positive side, the invidiual dhcpHost entires can be anywhere without
13539 the DN pointed to by the dhcpServer entries.  The latter should make
13540 it possible to group all host entries in a subtree next to the
13541 configuration entries, and this subtree can also be shared with the
13542 DNS server if the schema proposed above is combined with the dhcpHost
13543 structural object class.
13544
13545 <p><strong>Conclusion</strong></p>
13546
13547 <p>The PowerDNS implementation seem to be very flexible when it come
13548 to which LDAP schemas to use.  While its "tree" mode is rigid when it
13549 come to the the LDAP structure, the "strict" mode is very flexible,
13550 allowing DNS objects to be stored anywhere under the base cn specified
13551 in the configuration.</p>
13552
13553 <p>The DHCP implementation on the other hand is very inflexible, both
13554 regarding which LDAP schemas to use and which LDAP structure to use.
13555 I guess one could implement ones own schema, as long as the
13556 objectclasses and attributes have the names used, but this do not
13557 really help when the DHCP subtree need to have a fairly fixed
13558 structure.</p>
13559
13560 <p>Based on the observed behaviour, I suspect a LDAP structure like
13561 this might work for Debian Edu:</p>
13562
13563 <blockquote><pre>
13564 ou=services
13565   cn=machine-info (dhcpService) - dhcpServiceDN points here
13566     cn=dhcp (dhcpServer)
13567     cn=dhcp-internal (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
13568       cn=10.0.2.0 (dhcpSubnet)
13569         cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
13570     cn=dhcp-thinclients (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
13571       cn=192.168.0.0 (dhcpSubnet)
13572         cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
13573     ou=machines - PowerDNS base points here
13574       cn=hostname (dhcpHost/domainrelatedobject/dnsDomainAux)
13575 </pre></blockquote>
13576
13577 <P>This is not tested yet.  If the DHCP server require the dhcpHost
13578 entries to be in the dhcpGroup subtrees, the entries can be stored
13579 there instead of a common machines subtree, and the PowerDNS base
13580 would have to be moved one level up to the machine-info subtree.</p>
13581
13582 <p>The combined object under the machines subtree would look something
13583 like this:</p>
13584
13585 <blockquote><pre>
13586 dn: dc=hostname,ou=machines,cn=machine-info,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
13587 dc: hostname
13588 objectClass: top
13589 objectClass: dhcpHost
13590 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
13591 objectclass: dnsDomainAux
13592 associateddomain: hostname.intern
13593 arecord: 10.11.12.13
13594 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
13595 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname.intern
13596 </pre></blockquote>
13597
13598 </p>One could even add the LTSP configuration associated with a given
13599 machine, as long as the required attributes are available in a
13600 auxiliary object class.</p>
13601
13602       </div>
13603       <div class="tags">
13604
13605
13606         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
13607
13608
13609       </div>
13610     </div>
13611     <div class="padding"></div>
13612
13613     <div class="entry">
13614       <div class="title">
13615         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">Combining PowerDNS and ISC DHCP LDAP objects</a>
13616       </div>
13617       <div class="date">
13618         14th July 2010
13619       </div>
13620       <div class="body">
13621         <p>For a while now, I have wanted to find a way to change the DNS and
13622 DHCP services in Debian Edu to use the same LDAP objects for a given
13623 computer, to avoid the possibility of having a inconsistent state for
13624 a computer in LDAP (as in DHCP but no DNS entry or the other way
13625 around) and make it easier to add computers to LDAP.</p>
13626
13627 <p>I've looked at how powerdns and dhcpd is using LDAP, and using this
13628 information finally found a solution that seem to work.</p>
13629
13630 <p>The old setup required three LDAP objects for a given computer.
13631 One forward DNS entry, one reverse DNS entry and one DHCP entry.  If
13632 we switch powerdns to use its strict LDAP method (ldap-method=strict
13633 in pdns-debian-edu.conf), the forward and reverse DNS entries are
13634 merged into one while making it impossible to transfer the reverse map
13635 to a slave DNS server.</p>
13636
13637 <p>If we also replace the object class used to get the DNS related
13638 attributes to one allowing these attributes to be combined with the
13639 dhcphost object class, we can merge the DNS and DHCP entries into one.
13640 I've written such object class in the dnsdomainaux.schema file (need
13641 proper OIDs, but that is a minor issue), and tested the setup.  It
13642 seem to work.</p>
13643
13644 <p>With this test setup in place, we can get away with one LDAP object
13645 for both DNS and DHCP, and even the LTSP configuration I suggested in
13646 an earlier email.  The combined LDAP object will look something like
13647 this:</p>
13648
13649 <blockquote><pre>
13650   dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
13651   cn: hostname
13652   objectClass: dhcphost
13653   objectclass: domainrelatedobject
13654   objectclass: dnsdomainaux
13655   associateddomain: hostname.intern
13656   arecord: 10.11.12.13
13657   dhcphwaddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
13658   dhcpstatements: fixed-address hostname
13659   ldapconfigsound: Y
13660 </pre></blockquote>
13661
13662 <p>The DNS server uses the associateddomain and arecord entries, while
13663 the DHCP server uses the dhcphwaddress and dhcpstatements entries
13664 before asking DNS to resolve the fixed-adddress.  LTSP will use
13665 dhcphwaddress or associateddomain and the ldapconfig* attributes.</p>
13666
13667 <p>I am not yet sure if I can get the DHCP server to look for its
13668 dhcphost in a different location, to allow us to put the objects
13669 outside the "DHCP Config" subtree, but hope to figure out a way to do
13670 that.  If I can't figure out a way to do that, we can still get rid of
13671 the hosts subtree and move all its content into the DHCP Config tree
13672 (which probably should be renamed to be more related to the new
13673 content.  I suspect cn=dnsdhcp,ou=services or something like that
13674 might be a good place to put it.</p>
13675
13676 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
13677 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
13678
13679       </div>
13680       <div class="tags">
13681
13682
13683         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
13684
13685
13686       </div>
13687     </div>
13688     <div class="padding"></div>
13689
13690     <div class="entry">
13691       <div class="title">
13692         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_storing_LTSP_configuration_in_LDAP.html">Idea for storing LTSP configuration in LDAP</a>
13693       </div>
13694       <div class="date">
13695         11th July 2010
13696       </div>
13697       <div class="body">
13698         <p>Vagrant mentioned on IRC today that ltsp_config now support
13699 sourcing files from /usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ on the thin
13700 clients, and that this can be used to fetch configuration from LDAP if
13701 Debian Edu choose to store configuration there.</p>
13702
13703 <p>Armed with this information, I got inspired and wrote a test module
13704 to get configuration from LDAP.  The idea is to look up the MAC
13705 address of the client in LDAP, and look for attributes on the form
13706 ltspconfigsetting=value, and use this to export SETTING=value to the
13707 LTSP clients.</p>
13708
13709 <p>The goal is to be able to store the LTSP configuration attributes
13710 in a "computer" LDAP object used by both DNS and DHCP, and thus
13711 allowing us to store all information about a computer in one place.</p>
13712
13713 <p>This is a untested draft implementation, and I welcome feedback on
13714 this approach.  A real LDAP schema for the ltspClientAux objectclass
13715 need to be written.  Comments, suggestions, etc?</p>
13716
13717 <blockquote><pre>
13718 # Store in /opt/ltsp/$arch/usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ldap-config
13719 #
13720 # Fetch LTSP client settings from LDAP based on MAC address
13721 #
13722 # Uses ethernet address as stored in the dhcpHost objectclass using
13723 # the dhcpHWAddress attribute or ethernet address stored in the
13724 # ieee802Device objectclass with the macAddress attribute.
13725 #
13726 # This module is written to be schema agnostic, and only depend on the
13727 # existence of attribute names.
13728 #
13729 # The LTSP configuration variables are saved directly using a
13730 # ltspConfig prefix and uppercasing the rest of the attribute name.
13731 # To set the SERVER variable, set the ltspConfigServer attribute.
13732 #
13733 # Some LDAP schema should be created with all the relevant
13734 # configuration settings.  Something like this should work:
13735 #
13736 # objectclass ( 1.1.2.2 NAME 'ltspClientAux'
13737 #     SUP top
13738 #     AUXILIARY
13739 #     MAY ( ltspConfigServer $ ltsConfigSound $ ... )
13740
13741 LDAPSERVER=$(debian-edu-ldapserver)
13742 if [ "$LDAPSERVER" ] ; then
13743     LDAPBASE=$(debian-edu-ldapserver -b)
13744     for MAC in $(LANG=C ifconfig |grep -i hwaddr| awk '{print $5}'|sort -u) ; do
13745         filter="(|(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet $MAC)(macAddress=$MAC))"
13746         ldapsearch -h "$LDAPSERVER" -b "$LDAPBASE" -v -x "$filter" | \
13747             grep '^ltspConfig' | while read attr value ; do
13748             # Remove prefix and convert to upper case
13749             attr=$(echo $attr | sed 's/^ltspConfig//i' | tr a-z A-Z)
13750             # bass value on to clients
13751             eval "$attr=$value; export $attr"
13752         done
13753     done
13754 fi
13755 </pre></blockquote>
13756
13757 <p>I'm not sure this shell construction will work, because I suspect
13758 the while block might end up in a subshell causing the variables set
13759 there to not show up in ltsp-config, but if that is the case I am sure
13760 the code can be restructured to make sure the variables are passed on.
13761 I expect that can be solved with some testing. :)</p>
13762
13763 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
13764 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
13765
13766 <p>Update 2010-07-17: I am aware of another effort to store LTSP
13767 configuration in LDAP that was created around year 2000 by
13768 <a href="http://www.pcxperience.com/thinclient/documentation/ldap.html">PC
13769 Xperience, Inc., 2000</a>.  I found its
13770 <a href="http://people.redhat.com/alikins/ltsp/ldap/">files</a> on a
13771 personal home page over at redhat.com.</p>
13772
13773       </div>
13774       <div class="tags">
13775
13776
13777         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
13778
13779
13780       </div>
13781     </div>
13782     <div class="padding"></div>
13783
13784     <div class="entry">
13785       <div class="title">
13786         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/jXplorer__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">jXplorer, a very nice LDAP GUI</a>
13787       </div>
13788       <div class="date">
13789          9th July 2010
13790       </div>
13791       <div class="body">
13792         <p>Since
13793 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">my
13794 last post</a> about available LDAP tools in Debian, I was told about a
13795 LDAP GUI that is even better than luma.  The java application
13796 <a href="http://jxplorer.org/">jXplorer</a> is claimed to be capable of
13797 moving LDAP objects and subtrees using drag-and-drop, and can
13798 authenticate using Kerberos.  I have only tested the Kerberos
13799 authentication, but do not have a LDAP setup allowing me to rewrite
13800 LDAP with my test user yet.  It is
13801 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/j/jxplorer.html">available in
13802 Debian</a> testing and unstable at the moment.  The only problem I
13803 have with it is how it handle errors.  If something go wrong, its
13804 non-intuitive behaviour require me to go through some query work list
13805 and remove the failing query.  Nothing big, but very annoying.</p>
13806
13807       </div>
13808       <div class="tags">
13809
13810
13811         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
13812
13813
13814       </div>
13815     </div>
13816     <div class="padding"></div>
13817
13818     <div class="entry">
13819       <div class="title">
13820         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__apt_vs_aptitude_with_the_Gnome_desktop.html">Lenny->Squeeze upgrades, apt vs aptitude with the Gnome desktop</a>
13821       </div>
13822       <div class="date">
13823          3rd July 2010
13824       </div>
13825       <div class="body">
13826         <p>Here is a short update on my <a
13827 href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">my
13828 Debian Lenny->Squeeze upgrade testing</a>.  Here is a summary of the
13829 difference for Gnome when it is upgraded by apt-get and aptitude.  I'm
13830 not reporting the status for KDE, because the upgrade crashes when
13831 aptitude try because of missing conflicts
13832 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#584861</a> and
13833 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/585716">#585716</a>).</p>
13834
13835 <p>At the end of the upgrade test script, dpkg -l is executed to get a
13836 complete list of the installed packages.  Based on this I see these
13837 differences when I did a test run today.  As usual, I do not really
13838 know what the correct set of packages would be, but thought it best to
13839 publish the difference.</p>
13840
13841 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
13842
13843 <blockquote><p>
13844   at-spi cpp-4.3 finger gnome-spell gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
13845   libatspi1.0-0 libcupsys2 libeel2-data libgail-common libgdl-1-common
13846   libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin
13847   libgtksourceview-common libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
13848   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libservlet2.4-java libxalan2-java
13849   libxerces2-java openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
13850   python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gtkhtml2
13851   python-gtkmozembed svgalibg1 xserver-xephyr zip
13852 </p></blockquote>
13853
13854 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
13855
13856 <blockquote><p>
13857   bluez-utils dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop epiphany-gecko
13858   gnome-app-install gnome-mount gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager
13859   libao2 libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libbind9-50
13860   libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcurl3
13861   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9
13862   libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3
13863   libfaad0 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
13864   libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
13865   libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
13866   libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
13867   libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50
13868   libisccfg50 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick++10
13869   libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4
13870   libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5
13871   libparted1.8-10 libpisock9 libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3
13872   libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8 libsensors3 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
13873   libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1
13874   libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0 libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj
13875   libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3
13876   mysql-common swfdec-gnome totem-gstreamer wodim
13877 </p></blockquote>
13878
13879 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
13880
13881 <blockquote><p>
13882   gnome gnome-desktop-environment hamster-applet python-gnomeapplet
13883   python-gnomekeyring python-wnck rhythmbox-plugins xorg
13884   xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
13885   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
13886   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-video-all
13887   xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark xserver-xorg-video-ati
13888   xserver-xorg-video-chips xserver-xorg-video-cirrus
13889   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
13890   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
13891   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-mach64
13892   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
13893   xserver-xorg-video-nouveau xserver-xorg-video-nv
13894   xserver-xorg-video-r128 xserver-xorg-video-radeon
13895   xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd xserver-xorg-video-rendition
13896   xserver-xorg-video-s3 xserver-xorg-video-s3virge
13897   xserver-xorg-video-savage xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion
13898   xserver-xorg-video-sis xserver-xorg-video-sisusb
13899   xserver-xorg-video-tdfx xserver-xorg-video-tga
13900   xserver-xorg-video-trident xserver-xorg-video-tseng
13901   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vmware
13902   xserver-xorg-video-voodoo
13903 </p></blockquote>
13904
13905 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
13906
13907 <blockquote><p>
13908   deskbar-applet xserver-xorg xserver-xorg-core
13909   xserver-xorg-input-wacom xserver-xorg-video-intel
13910   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome
13911 </p></blockquote>
13912
13913 <p>I was told on IRC that the xorg-xserver package was
13914 <a href="http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-xorg/xserver/xorg-server.git;a=commit;h=9c8080d06c457932d3bfec021c69ac000aa60120">changed
13915 in git</a> today to try to get apt-get to not remove xorg completely.
13916 No idea when it hits Squeeze, but when it does I hope it will reduce
13917 the difference somewhat.
13918
13919       </div>
13920       <div class="tags">
13921
13922
13923         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
13924
13925
13926       </div>
13927     </div>
13928     <div class="padding"></div>
13929
13930     <div class="entry">
13931       <div class="title">
13932         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">LUMA, a very nice LDAP GUI</a>
13933       </div>
13934       <div class="date">
13935         28th June 2010
13936       </div>
13937       <div class="body">
13938         <p>The last few days I have been looking into the status of the LDAP
13939 directory in Debian Edu, and in the process I started to miss a GUI
13940 tool to browse the LDAP tree.  The only one I was able to find in
13941 Debian/Squeeze and Lenny is
13942 <a href="http://luma.sourceforge.net/">LUMA</a>, which has proved to
13943 be a great tool to get a overview of the current LDAP directory
13944 populated by default in Skolelinux.  Thanks to it, I have been able to
13945 find empty and obsolete subtrees, misplaced objects and duplicate
13946 objects.  It will be installed by default in Debian/Squeeze.  If you
13947 are working with LDAP, give it a go. :)</p>
13948
13949 <p>I did notice one problem with it I have not had time to report to
13950 the BTS yet.  There is no .desktop file in the package, so the tool do
13951 not show up in the Gnome and KDE menus, but only deep down in in the
13952 Debian submenu in KDE.  I hope that can be fixed before Squeeze is
13953 released.</p>
13954
13955 <p>I have not yet been able to get it to modify the tree yet.  I would
13956 like to move objects and remove subtrees directly in the GUI, but have
13957 not found a way to do that with LUMA yet.  So in the mean time, I use
13958 <a href="http://www.lichteblau.com/ldapvi/">ldapvi</a> for that.</p>
13959
13960 <p>If you have tips on other GUI tools for LDAP that might be useful
13961 in Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
13962
13963 <p>Update 2010-06-29: Ross Reedstrom tipped us about the
13964 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/g/gq.html">gq</a> package as a
13965 useful GUI alternative.  It seem like a good tool, but is unmaintained
13966 in Debian and got a RC bug keeping it out of Squeeze.  Unless that
13967 changes, it will not be an option for Debian Edu based on Squeeze.</p>
13968
13969       </div>
13970       <div class="tags">
13971
13972
13973         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
13974
13975
13976       </div>
13977     </div>
13978     <div class="padding"></div>
13979
13980     <div class="entry">
13981       <div class="title">
13982         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_a_change_to_LDAP_schemas_allowing_DNS_and_DHCP_info_to_be_combined_into_one_object.html">Idea for a change to LDAP schemas allowing DNS and DHCP info to be combined into one object</a>
13983       </div>
13984       <div class="date">
13985         24th June 2010
13986       </div>
13987       <div class="body">
13988         <p>A while back, I
13989 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">complained
13990 about the fact</a> that it is not possible with the provided schemas
13991 for storing DNS and DHCP information in LDAP to combine the two sets
13992 of information into one LDAP object representing a computer.</p>
13993
13994 <p>In the mean time, I discovered that a simple fix would be to make
13995 the dhcpHost object class auxiliary, to allow it to be combined with
13996 the dNSDomain object class, and thus forming one object for one
13997 computer when storing both DHCP and DNS information in LDAP.</p>
13998
13999 <p>If I understand this correctly, it is not safe to do this change
14000 without also changing the assigned number for the object class, and I
14001 do not know enough about LDAP schema design to do that properly for
14002 Debian Edu.</p>
14003
14004 <p>Anyway, for future reference, this is how I believe we could change
14005 the
14006 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dhc-ldap-schema-00">DHCP
14007 schema</a> to solve at least part of the problem with the LDAP schemas
14008 available today from IETF.</p>
14009
14010 <pre>
14011 --- dhcp.schema    (revision 65192)
14012 +++ dhcp.schema    (working copy)
14013 @@ -376,7 +376,7 @@
14014  objectclass ( 2.16.840.1.113719.1.203.6.6
14015         NAME 'dhcpHost'
14016         DESC 'This represents information about a particular client'
14017 -       SUP top
14018 +       SUP top AUXILIARY
14019         MUST cn
14020         MAY  (dhcpLeaseDN $ dhcpHWAddress $ dhcpOptionsDN $ dhcpStatements $ dhcpComments $ dhcpOption)
14021         X-NDS_CONTAINMENT ('dhcpService' 'dhcpSubnet' 'dhcpGroup') )
14022 </pre>
14023
14024 <p>I very much welcome clues on how to do this properly for Debian
14025 Edu/Squeeze.  We provide the DHCP schema in our debian-edu-config
14026 package, and should thus be free to rewrite it as we see fit.</p>
14027
14028 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
14029 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
14030
14031       </div>
14032       <div class="tags">
14033
14034
14035         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
14036
14037
14038       </div>
14039     </div>
14040     <div class="padding"></div>
14041
14042     <div class="entry">
14043       <div class="title">
14044         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Calling_tasksel_like_the_installer__while_still_getting_useful_output.html">Calling tasksel like the installer, while still getting useful output</a>
14045       </div>
14046       <div class="date">
14047         16th June 2010
14048       </div>
14049       <div class="body">
14050         <p>A few times I have had the need to simulate the way tasksel
14051 installs packages during the normal debian-installer run.  Until now,
14052 I have ended up letting tasksel do the work, with the annoying problem
14053 of not getting any feedback at all when something fails (like a
14054 conffile question from dpkg or a download that fails), using code like
14055 this:
14056
14057 <blockquote><pre>
14058 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
14059 tasksel --new-install
14060 </pre></blockquote>
14061
14062 This would invoke tasksel, let its automatic task selection pick the
14063 tasks to install, and continue to install the requested tasks without
14064 any output what so ever.
14065
14066 Recently I revisited this problem while working on the automatic
14067 package upgrade testing, because tasksel would some times hang without
14068 any useful feedback, and I want to see what is going on when it
14069 happen.  Then it occured to me, I can parse the output from tasksel
14070 when asked to run in test mode, and use that aptitude command line
14071 printed by tasksel then to simulate the tasksel run.  I ended up using
14072 code like this:
14073
14074 <blockquote><pre>
14075 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
14076 cmd="$(in_target tasksel -t --new-install | sed 's/debconf-apt-progress -- //')"
14077 $cmd
14078 </pre></blockquote>
14079
14080 <p>The content of $cmd is typically something like "<tt>aptitude -q
14081 --without-recommends -o APT::Install-Recommends=no -y install
14082 ~t^desktop$ ~t^gnome-desktop$ ~t^laptop$ ~pstandard ~prequired
14083 ~pimportant</tt>", which will install the gnome desktop task, the
14084 laptop task and all packages with priority standard , required and
14085 important, just like tasksel would have done it during
14086 installation.</p>
14087
14088 <p>A better approach is probably to extend tasksel to be able to
14089 install packages without using debconf-apt-progress, for use cases
14090 like this.</p>
14091
14092       </div>
14093       <div class="tags">
14094
14095
14096         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
14097
14098
14099       </div>
14100     </div>
14101     <div class="padding"></div>
14102
14103     <div class="entry">
14104       <div class="title">
14105         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__removals_by_apt_and_aptitude.html">Lenny->Squeeze upgrades, removals by apt and aptitude</a>
14106       </div>
14107       <div class="date">
14108         13th June 2010
14109       </div>
14110       <div class="body">
14111         <p>My
14112 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">testing
14113 of Debian upgrades</a> from Lenny to Squeeze continues, and I've
14114 finally made the upgrade logs available from
14115 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/</a>.
14116 I am now testing dist-upgrade of Gnome and KDE in a chroot using both
14117 apt and aptitude, and found their differences interesting.  This time
14118 I will only focus on their removal plans.</p>
14119
14120 <p>After installing a Gnome desktop and the laptop task, apt-get wants
14121 to remove 72 packages when dist-upgrading from Lenny to Squeeze.  The
14122 surprising part is that it want to remove xorg and all
14123 xserver-xorg-video* drivers.  Clearly not a good choice, but I am not
14124 sure why.  When asking aptitude to do the same, it want to remove 129
14125 packages, but most of them are library packages I suspect are no
14126 longer needed.  Both of them want to remove bluetooth packages, which
14127 I do not know.  Perhaps these bluetooth packages are obsolete?</p>
14128
14129 <p>For KDE, apt-get want to remove 82 packages, among them kdebase
14130 which seem like a bad idea and xorg the same way as with Gnome. Asking
14131 aptitude for the same, it wants to remove 192 packages, none which are
14132 too surprising.</p>
14133
14134 <p>I guess the removal of xorg during upgrades should be investigated
14135 and avoided, and perhaps others as well.  Here are the complete list
14136 of planned removals.  The complete logs is available from the URL
14137 above.  Note if you want to repeat these tests, that the upgrade test
14138 for kde+apt-get hung in the tasksel setup because of dpkg asking
14139 conffile questions.  No idea why.  I worked around it by using
14140 '<tt>echo >> /proc/<em>pidofdpkg</em>/fd/0</tt>' to tell dpkg to
14141 continue.</p>
14142
14143 <p><b>apt-get gnome 72</b>
14144 <br>bluez-gnome cupsddk-drivers deskbar-applet gnome
14145   gnome-desktop-environment gnome-network-admin gtkhtml3.14
14146   iceweasel-gnome-support libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libgdl-1-0
14147   libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libmetacity0 libslab0 libxcb-xlib0
14148   nautilus-cd-burner python-gnome2-desktop python-gnome2-extras
14149   serpentine swfdec-mozilla update-manager xorg xserver-xorg
14150   xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
14151   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
14152   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
14153   xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
14154   xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
14155   xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
14156   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
14157   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
14158   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
14159   xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
14160   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
14161   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
14162   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
14163   xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
14164   xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
14165   xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
14166   xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
14167   xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
14168   xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
14169   xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
14170   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
14171   xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9
14172   xulrunner-1.9-gnome-support</p>
14173
14174 <p><b>aptitude gnome 129</b>
14175
14176 <br>bluez-gnome bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers dhcdbd
14177   djvulibre-desktop finger gnome-app-install gnome-mount
14178   gnome-network-admin gnome-spell gnome-vfs-obexftp
14179   gnome-volume-manager gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs gtkhtml3.14 libao2
14180   libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
14181   libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcupsys2 libcurl3 libdatrie0
14182   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20
14183   libeel2-data libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libfaad0 libgail-common
14184   libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libgdl-1-0 libgdl-1-common
14185   libggz2 libggzcore9 libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0
14186   libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libgnomeprint2.2-0
14187   libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgnomeprintui2.2-common
14188   libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
14189   libgtksourceview-common libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6
14190   libhesiod0 libicu38 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 libmagick++10
14191   libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmetacity0 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off
14192   libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2
14193   libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10
14194   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libraw1394-8
14195   libsensors3 libslab0 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8 libssh2-1
14196   libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10
14197   libtrackerclient0 libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0
14198   libxerces2-java libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6
14199   libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common nautilus-cd-burner
14200   openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
14201   python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gnome2-desktop
14202   python-gnome2-extras python-gtkhtml2 python-gtkmozembed
14203   python-numeric python-sexy serpentine svgalibg1 swfdec-gnome
14204   swfdec-mozilla totem-gstreamer update-manager wodim
14205   xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
14206   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
14207   zip</p>
14208
14209 <p><b>apt-get kde 82</b>
14210
14211 <br>cupsddk-drivers karm kaudiocreator kcoloredit kcontrol kde kde-core
14212   kdeaddons kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-bin kdebase-bin-kde3
14213   kdebase-kio-plugins kdesktop kdeutils khelpcenter kicker
14214   kicker-applets knewsticker kolourpaint konq-plugins konqueror korn
14215   kpersonalizer kscreensaver ksplash libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libkiten1
14216   libxcb-xlib0 quanta superkaramba texlive-base-bin xorg xserver-xorg
14217   xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
14218   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
14219   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
14220   xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
14221   xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
14222   xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
14223   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
14224   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
14225   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
14226   xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
14227   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
14228   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
14229   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
14230   xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
14231   xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
14232   xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
14233   xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
14234   xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
14235   xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
14236   xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
14237   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
14238   xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9</p>
14239
14240 <p><b>aptitude kde 192</b>
14241 <br>bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers cvs dcoprss dhcdbd
14242   djvulibre-desktop dosfstools eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
14243   ghostscript-x imlib-base imlib11 indi kandy karm kasteroids
14244   kaudiocreator kbackgammon kbstate kcoloredit kcontrol kcron kdat
14245   kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
14246   kdebase-bin-kde3 kdebase-kio-plugins kdeedu-data
14247   kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data
14248   kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
14249   kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdeprint kdesktop kdessh
14250   kdict kdnssd kdvi kedit keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs
14251   kghostview khelpcenter khexedit kiconedit kitchensync klatin
14252   klickety kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmoon kmrml kodo kolourpaint
14253   kooka korn kpager kpdf kpercentage kpf kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler
14254   krec kregexpeditor ksayit ksim ksirc ksirtet ksmiletris ksmserver
14255   ksnake ksokoban ksplash ksvg ksysv ktip ktnef kuickshow kverbos
14256   kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kworldclock
14257   kxsldbg libakode2 libao2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
14258   libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
14259   libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
14260   libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0 libdatrie0
14261   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
14262   libgail-common libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0
14263   libicu38 libiec61883-0 libindex0 libiw29 libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1
14264   libkdeedu3 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkiten1 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
14265   libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
14266   libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 libmagick10 libmimelib1c2a
14267   libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9
14268   libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 libsmbios2
14269   libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libtalloc1 libtiff-tools
14270   libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0 libxerces2-java
14271   libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 mpeglib networkstatus
14272   openoffice.org-writer2latex pmount poster psutils quanta quanta-data
14273   superkaramba svgalibg1 tex-common texlive-base texlive-base-bin
14274   texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended
14275   xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
14276   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
14277   xulrunner-1.9</p>
14278
14279
14280       </div>
14281       <div class="tags">
14282
14283
14284         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
14285
14286
14287       </div>
14288     </div>
14289     <div class="padding"></div>
14290
14291     <div class="entry">
14292       <div class="title">
14293         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">Automatic upgrade testing from Lenny to Squeeze</a>
14294       </div>
14295       <div class="date">
14296         11th June 2010
14297       </div>
14298       <div class="body">
14299         <p>The last few days I have done some upgrade testing in Debian, to
14300 see if the upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze will go smoothly.  A few bugs
14301 have been discovered and reported in the process
14302 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/585410">#585410</a> in nagios3-cgi,
14303 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584879">#584879</a> already fixed in
14304 enscript and <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#584861</a> in
14305 kdebase-workspace-data), and to get a more regular testing going on, I
14306 am working on a script to automate the test.</p>
14307
14308 <p>The idea is to create a Lenny chroot and use tasksel to install a
14309 Gnome or KDE desktop installation inside the chroot before upgrading
14310 it.  To ensure no services are started in the chroot, a policy-rc.d
14311 script is inserted.  To make sure tasksel believe it is to install a
14312 desktop on a laptop, the tasksel tests are replaced in the chroot
14313 (only acceptable because this is a throw-away chroot).</p>
14314
14315 <p>A naive upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze using aptitude dist-upgrade
14316 currently always fail because udev refuses to upgrade with the kernel
14317 in Lenny, so to avoid that problem the file /etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
14318 is created.  The bug report
14319 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/566000">#566000</a> make me suspect
14320 this problem do not trigger in a chroot, but I touch the file anyway
14321 to make sure the upgrade go well.  Testing on virtual and real
14322 hardware have failed me because of udev so far, and creating this file
14323 do the trick in such settings anyway.  This is a
14324 <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/debian-26/failed-dist-upgrade-due-to-udev-config_sysfs_deprecated-nonsense-804130/">known
14325 issue</a> and the current udev behaviour is intended by the udev
14326 maintainer because he lack the resources to rewrite udev to keep
14327 working with old kernels or something like that.  I really wish the
14328 udev upstream would keep udev backwards compatible, to avoid such
14329 upgrade problem, but given that they fail to do so, I guess
14330 documenting the way out of this mess is the best option we got for
14331 Debian Squeeze.</p>
14332
14333 <p>Anyway, back to the task at hand, testing upgrades.  This test
14334 script, which I call <tt>upgrade-test</tt> for now, is doing the
14335 trick:</p>
14336
14337 <blockquote><pre>
14338 #!/bin/sh
14339 set -ex
14340
14341 if [ "$1" ] ; then
14342     desktop=$1
14343 else
14344     desktop=gnome
14345 fi
14346
14347 from=lenny
14348 to=squeeze
14349
14350 exec &lt; /dev/null
14351 unset LANG
14352 mirror=http://ftp.skolelinux.org/debian
14353 tmpdir=chroot-$from-upgrade-$to-$desktop
14354 fuser -mv .
14355 debootstrap $from $tmpdir $mirror
14356 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
14357 cat > $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d &lt;&lt;EOF
14358 #!/bin/sh
14359 exit 101
14360 EOF
14361 chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d
14362 exit_cleanup() {
14363     umount $tmpdir/proc
14364 }
14365 mount -t proc proc $tmpdir/proc
14366 # Make sure proc is unmounted also on failure
14367 trap exit_cleanup EXIT INT
14368
14369 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y install debconf-utils
14370
14371 # Make sure tasksel autoselection trigger.  It need the test scripts
14372 # to return the correct answers.
14373 echo tasksel tasksel/desktop multiselect $desktop | \
14374     chroot $tmpdir debconf-set-selections
14375
14376 # Include the desktop and laptop task
14377 for test in desktop laptop ; do
14378     echo > $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test &lt;&lt;EOF
14379 #!/bin/sh
14380 exit 2
14381 EOF
14382     chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test
14383 done
14384
14385 DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
14386 DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical
14387 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND DEBIAN_PRIORITY
14388 chroot $tmpdir tasksel --new-install
14389
14390 echo deb $mirror $to main > $tmpdir/etc/apt/sources.list
14391 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
14392 touch $tmpdir/etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
14393 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y dist-upgrade
14394 fuser -mv
14395 </pre></blockquote>
14396
14397 <p>I suspect it would be useful to test upgrades with both apt-get and
14398 with aptitude, but I have not had time to look at how they behave
14399 differently so far.  I hope to get a cron job running to do the test
14400 regularly and post the result on the web.  The Gnome upgrade currently
14401 work, while the KDE upgrade fail because of the bug in
14402 kdebase-workspace-data</p>
14403
14404 <p>I am not quite sure what kind of extract from the huge upgrade logs
14405 (KDE 167 KiB, Gnome 516 KiB) it make sense to include in this blog
14406 post, so I will refrain from trying.  I can report that for Gnome,
14407 aptitude report 760 packages upgraded, 448 newly installed, 129 to
14408 remove and 1 not upgraded and 1024MB need to be downloaded while for
14409 KDE the same numbers are 702 packages upgraded, 507 newly installed,
14410 193 to remove and 0 not upgraded and 1117MB need to be downloaded</p>
14411
14412 <p>I am very happy to notice that the Gnome desktop + laptop upgrade
14413 is able to migrate to dependency based boot sequencing and parallel
14414 booting without a hitch.  Was unsure if there were still bugs with
14415 packages failing to clean up their obsolete init.d script during
14416 upgrades, and no such problem seem to affect the Gnome desktop+laptop
14417 packages.</p>
14418
14419       </div>
14420       <div class="tags">
14421
14422
14423         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
14424
14425
14426       </div>
14427     </div>
14428     <div class="padding"></div>
14429
14430     <div class="entry">
14431       <div class="title">
14432         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Upstart_or_sysvinit___as_init_d_scripts_see_it.html">Upstart or sysvinit - as init.d scripts see it</a>
14433       </div>
14434       <div class="date">
14435          6th June 2010
14436       </div>
14437       <div class="body">
14438         <p>If Debian is to migrate to upstart on Linux, I expect some init.d
14439 scripts to migrate (some of) their operations to upstart job while
14440 keeping the init.d for hurd and kfreebsd.  The packages with such
14441 needs will need a way to get their init.d scripts to behave
14442 differently when used with sysvinit and with upstart.  Because of
14443 this, I had a look at the environment variables set when a init.d
14444 script is running under upstart, and when it is not.</p>
14445
14446 <p>With upstart, I notice these environment variables are set when a
14447 script is started from rcS.d/ (ignoring some irrelevant ones like
14448 COLUMNS):</p>
14449
14450 <blockquote><pre>
14451 DEFAULT_RUNLEVEL=2
14452 previous=N
14453 PREVLEVEL=
14454 RUNLEVEL=
14455 runlevel=S
14456 UPSTART_EVENTS=startup
14457 UPSTART_INSTANCE=
14458 UPSTART_JOB=rc-sysinit
14459 </pre></blockquote>
14460
14461 <p>With sysvinit, these environment variables are set for the same
14462 script.</p>
14463
14464 <blockquote><pre>
14465 INIT_VERSION=sysvinit-2.88
14466 previous=N
14467 PREVLEVEL=N
14468 RUNLEVEL=S
14469 runlevel=S
14470 </pre></blockquote>
14471
14472 <p>The RUNLEVEL and PREVLEVEL environment variables passed on from
14473 sysvinit are not set by upstart.  Not sure if it is intentional or not
14474 to not be compatible with sysvinit in this regard.</p>
14475
14476 <p>For scripts needing to behave differently when upstart is used,
14477 looking for the UPSTART_JOB environment variable seem to be a good
14478 choice.</p>
14479
14480       </div>
14481       <div class="tags">
14482
14483
14484         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
14485
14486
14487       </div>
14488     </div>
14489     <div class="padding"></div>
14490
14491     <div class="entry">
14492       <div class="title">
14493         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_manual_for_standards_wars___.html">A manual for standards wars...</a>
14494       </div>
14495       <div class="date">
14496          6th June 2010
14497       </div>
14498       <div class="body">
14499         <p>Via the
14500 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/robweir/antic-atom/~3/QzU4RgoAGMg/weekly-links-10.html">blog
14501 of Rob Weir</a> I came across the very interesting essay named
14502 <a href="http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/shapiro/wars.pdf">The Art of
14503 Standards Wars</a> (PDF 25 pages).  I recommend it for everyone
14504 following the standards wars of today.</p>
14505
14506       </div>
14507       <div class="tags">
14508
14509
14510         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
14511
14512
14513       </div>
14514     </div>
14515     <div class="padding"></div>
14516
14517     <div class="entry">
14518       <div class="title">
14519         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sitesummary_tip__Listing_computer_hardware_models_used_at_site.html">Sitesummary tip: Listing computer hardware models used at site</a>
14520       </div>
14521       <div class="date">
14522          3rd June 2010
14523       </div>
14524       <div class="body">
14525         <p>When using sitesummary at a site to track machines, it is possible
14526 to get a list of the machine types in use thanks to the DMI
14527 information extracted from each machine.  The script to do so is
14528 included in the sitesummary package, and here is example output from
14529 the Skolelinux build servers:</p>
14530
14531 <blockquote><pre>
14532 maintainer:~# /usr/lib/sitesummary/hardware-model-summary
14533   vendor                    count
14534   Dell Computer Corporation     1
14535     PowerEdge 1750              1
14536   IBM                           1
14537     eserver xSeries 345 -[8670M1X]-     1
14538   Intel                         2
14539   [no-dmi-info]                 3
14540 maintainer:~#
14541 </pre></blockquote>
14542
14543 <p>The quality of the report depend on the quality of the DMI tables
14544 provided in each machine.  Here there are Intel machines without model
14545 information listed with Intel as vendor and no model, and virtual Xen
14546 machines listed as [no-dmi-info].  One can add -l as a command line
14547 option to list the individual machines.</p>
14548
14549 <p>A larger list is
14550 <a href="http://narvikskolen.no/sitesummary/">available from the the
14551 city of Narvik</a>, which uses Skolelinux on all their shools and also
14552 provide the basic sitesummary report publicly.  In their report there
14553 are ~1400 machines. I know they use both Ubuntu and Skolelinux on
14554 their machines, and as sitesummary is available in both distributions,
14555 it is trivial to get all of them to report to the same central
14556 collector.</p>
14557
14558       </div>
14559       <div class="tags">
14560
14561
14562         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary</a>.
14563
14564
14565       </div>
14566     </div>
14567     <div class="padding"></div>
14568
14569     <div class="entry">
14570       <div class="title">
14571         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/KDM_fail_at_boot_with_NVidia_cards___and_no_one_try_to_fix_it_.html">KDM fail at boot with NVidia cards - and no one try to fix it?</a>
14572       </div>
14573       <div class="date">
14574          1st June 2010
14575       </div>
14576       <div class="body">
14577         <p>It is strange to watch how a bug in Debian causing KDM to fail to
14578 start at boot when an NVidia video card is used is handled.  The
14579 problem seem to be that the nvidia X.org driver uses a long time to
14580 initialize, and this duration is longer than kdm is configured to
14581 wait.</p>
14582
14583 <p>I came across two bugs related to this issue,
14584 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">#583312</a> initially filed
14585 against initscripts and passed on to nvidia-glx when it became obvious
14586 that the nvidia drivers were involved, and
14587 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/524751">#524751</a> initially filed against
14588 kdm and passed on to src:nvidia-graphics-drivers for unknown reasons.</p>
14589
14590 <p>To me, it seem that no-one is interested in actually solving the
14591 problem nvidia video card owners experience and make sure the Debian
14592 distribution work out of the box for these users.  The nvidia driver
14593 maintainers expect kdm to be set up to wait longer, while kdm expect
14594 the nvidia driver maintainers to fix the driver to start faster, and
14595 while they wait for each other I guess the users end up switching to a
14596 distribution that work for them.  I have no idea what the solution is,
14597 but I am pretty sure that waiting for each other is not it.</p>
14598
14599 <p>I wonder why we end up handling bugs this way.</p>
14600
14601       </div>
14602       <div class="tags">
14603
14604
14605         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
14606
14607
14608       </div>
14609     </div>
14610     <div class="padding"></div>
14611
14612     <div class="entry">
14613       <div class="title">
14614         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellized_boot_seem_to_hold_up_well_in_Debian_testing.html">Parallellized boot seem to hold up well in Debian/testing</a>
14615       </div>
14616       <div class="date">
14617         27th May 2010
14618       </div>
14619       <div class="body">
14620         <p>A few days ago, parallel booting was enabled in Debian/testing.
14621 The feature seem to hold up pretty well, but three fairly serious
14622 issues are known and should be solved:
14623
14624 <p><ul>
14625
14626 <li>The wicd package seen to
14627 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/508289">break NFS mounting</a> and
14628 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/581586">network setup</a> when
14629 parallel booting is enabled.  No idea why, but the wicd maintainer
14630 seem to be on the case.</li>
14631
14632 <li>The nvidia X driver seem to
14633 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">have a race condition</a>
14634 triggered more easily when parallel booting is in effect.  The
14635 maintainer is on the case.</li>
14636
14637 <li>The sysv-rc package fail to properly enable dependency based boot
14638 sequencing (the shutdown is broken) when old file-rc users
14639 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/575080">try to switch back</a> to
14640 sysv-rc.  One way to solve it would be for file-rc to create
14641 /etc/init.d/.legacy-bootordering, and another is to try to make
14642 sysv-rc more robust.  Will investigate some more and probably upload a
14643 workaround in sysv-rc to help those trying to move from file-rc to
14644 sysv-rc get a working shutdown.</li>
14645
14646 </ul></p>
14647
14648 <p>All in all not many surprising issues, and all of them seem
14649 solvable before Squeeze is released.  In addition to these there are
14650 some packages with bugs in their dependencies and run level settings,
14651 which I expect will be fixed in a reasonable time span.</p>
14652
14653 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
14654 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
14655 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
14656 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
14657
14658 <p>Update: Correct bug number to file-rc issue.</p>
14659
14660       </div>
14661       <div class="tags">
14662
14663
14664         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
14665
14666
14667       </div>
14668     </div>
14669     <div class="padding"></div>
14670
14671     <div class="entry">
14672       <div class="title">
14673         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/More_flexible_firmware_handling_in_debian_installer.html">More flexible firmware handling in debian-installer</a>
14674       </div>
14675       <div class="date">
14676         22nd May 2010
14677       </div>
14678       <div class="body">
14679         <p>After a long break from debian-installer development, I finally
14680 found time today to return to the project.  Having to spend less time
14681 working dependency based boot in debian, as it is almost complete now,
14682 definitely helped freeing some time.</p>
14683
14684 <p>A while back, I ran into a problem while working on Debian Edu.  We
14685 include some firmware packages on the Debian Edu CDs, those needed to
14686 get disk and network controllers working.  Without having these
14687 firmware packages available during installation, it is impossible to
14688 install Debian Edu on the given machine, and because our target group
14689 are non-technical people, asking them to provide firmware packages on
14690 an external medium is a support pain.  Initially, I expected it to be
14691 enough to include the firmware packages on the CD to get
14692 debian-installer to find and use them.  This proved to be wrong.
14693 Next, I hoped it was enough to symlink the relevant firmware packages
14694 to some useful location on the CD (tried /cdrom/ and
14695 /cdrom/firmware/).  This also proved to not work, and at this point I
14696 found time to look at the debian-installer code to figure out what was
14697 going to work.</p>
14698
14699 <p>The firmware loading code is in the hw-detect package, and a closer
14700 look revealed that it would only look for firmware packages outside
14701 the installation media, so the CD was never checked for firmware
14702 packages.  It would only check USB sticks, floppies and other
14703 "external" media devices.  Today I changed it to also look in the
14704 /cdrom/firmware/ directory on the mounted CD or DVD, which should
14705 solve the problem I ran into with Debian edu.  I also changed it to
14706 look in /firmware/, to make sure the installer also find firmware
14707 provided in the initrd when booting the installer via PXE, to allow us
14708 to provide the same feature in the PXE setup included in Debian
14709 Edu.</p>
14710
14711 <p>To make sure firmware deb packages with a license questions are not
14712 activated without asking if the license is accepted, I extended
14713 hw-detect to look for preinst scripts in the firmware packages, and
14714 run these before activating the firmware during installation.  The
14715 license question is asked using debconf in the preinst, so this should
14716 solve the issue for the firmware packages I have looked at so far.</p>
14717
14718 <p>If you want to discuss the details of these features, please
14719 contact us on debian-boot@lists.debian.org.</p>
14720
14721       </div>
14722       <div class="tags">
14723
14724
14725         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
14726
14727
14728       </div>
14729     </div>
14730     <div class="padding"></div>
14731
14732     <div class="entry">
14733       <div class="title">
14734         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellized_boot_is_now_the_default_in_Debian_unstable.html">Parallellized boot is now the default in Debian/unstable</a>
14735       </div>
14736       <div class="date">
14737         14th May 2010
14738       </div>
14739       <div class="body">
14740         <p>Since this evening, parallel booting is the default in
14741 Debian/unstable for machines using dependency based boot sequencing.
14742 Apparently the testing of concurrent booting has been wider than
14743 expected, if I am to believe the
14744 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
14745 on debian-devel@</a>, and I concluded a few days ago to move forward
14746 with the feature this weekend, to give us some time to detect any
14747 remaining problems before Squeeze is frozen.  If serious problems are
14748 detected, it is simple to change the default back to sequential boot.
14749 The upload of the new sysvinit package also activate a new upstream
14750 version.</p>
14751
14752 More information about
14753 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
14754 based boot sequencing</a> is available from the Debian wiki.  It is
14755 currently possible to disable parallel booting when one run into
14756 problems caused by it, by adding this line to /etc/default/rcS:</p>
14757
14758 <blockquote><pre>
14759 CONCURRENCY=none
14760 </pre></blockquote>
14761
14762 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
14763 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
14764 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
14765 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
14766
14767       </div>
14768       <div class="tags">
14769
14770
14771         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
14772
14773
14774       </div>
14775     </div>
14776     <div class="padding"></div>
14777
14778     <div class="entry">
14779       <div class="title">
14780         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sitesummary_tip__Listing_MAC_address_of_all_clients.html">Sitesummary tip: Listing MAC address of all clients</a>
14781       </div>
14782       <div class="date">
14783         14th May 2010
14784       </div>
14785       <div class="body">
14786         <p>In the recent Debian Edu versions, the
14787 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary">sitesummary
14788 system</a> is used to keep track of the machines in the school
14789 network.  Each machine will automatically report its status to the
14790 central server after boot and once per night.  The network setup is
14791 also reported, and using this information it is possible to get the
14792 MAC address of all network interfaces in the machines.  This is useful
14793 to update the DHCP configuration.</p>
14794
14795 <p>To give some idea how to use sitesummary, here is a one-liner to
14796 ist all MAC addresses of all machines reporting to sitesummary.  Run
14797 this on the collector host:</p>
14798
14799 <blockquote><pre>
14800 perl -MSiteSummary -e 'for_all_hosts(sub { print join(" ", get_macaddresses(shift)), "\n"; });'
14801 </pre></blockquote>
14802
14803 <p>This will list all MAC addresses assosiated with all machine, one
14804 line per machine and with space between the MAC addresses.</p>
14805
14806 <p>To allow system administrators easier job at adding static DHCP
14807 addresses for hosts, it would be possible to extend this to fetch
14808 machine information from sitesummary and update the DHCP and DNS
14809 tables in LDAP using this information.  Such tool is unfortunately not
14810 written yet.</p>
14811
14812       </div>
14813       <div class="tags">
14814
14815
14816         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary</a>.
14817
14818
14819       </div>
14820     </div>
14821     <div class="padding"></div>
14822
14823     <div class="entry">
14824       <div class="title">
14825         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/systemd__an_interesting_alternative_to_upstart.html">systemd, an interesting alternative to upstart</a>
14826       </div>
14827       <div class="date">
14828         13th May 2010
14829       </div>
14830       <div class="body">
14831         <p>The last few days a new boot system called
14832 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd">systemd</a>
14833 has been
14834 <a href="http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html">introduced</a>
14835
14836 to the free software world.  I have not yet had time to play around
14837 with it, but it seem to be a very interesting alternative to
14838 <a href="http://upstart.ubuntu.com/">upstart</a>, and might prove to be
14839 a good alternative for Debian when we are able to switch to an event
14840 based boot system.  Tollef is
14841 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/580814">in the process</a> of getting
14842 systemd into Debian, and I look forward to seeing how well it work.  I
14843 like the fact that systemd handles init.d scripts with dependency
14844 information natively, allowing them to run in parallel where upstart
14845 at the moment do not.</p>
14846
14847 <p>Unfortunately do systemd have the same problem as upstart regarding
14848 platform support.  It only work on recent Linux kernels, and also need
14849 some new kernel features enabled to function properly.  This means
14850 kFreeBSD and Hurd ports of Debian will need a port or a different boot
14851 system.  Not sure how that will be handled if systemd proves to be the
14852 way forward.</p>
14853
14854 <p>In the mean time, based on the
14855 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
14856 on debian-devel@</a> regarding parallel booting in Debian, I have
14857 decided to enable full parallel booting as the default in Debian as
14858 soon as possible (probably this weekend or early next week), to see if
14859 there are any remaining serious bugs in the init.d dependencies.  A
14860 new version of the sysvinit package implementing this change is
14861 already in experimental.  If all go well, Squeeze will be released
14862 with parallel booting enabled by default.</p>
14863
14864       </div>
14865       <div class="tags">
14866
14867
14868         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
14869
14870
14871       </div>
14872     </div>
14873     <div class="padding"></div>
14874
14875     <div class="entry">
14876       <div class="title">
14877         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellizing_the_boot_in_Debian_Squeeze___ready_for_wider_testing.html">Parallellizing the boot in Debian Squeeze - ready for wider testing</a>
14878       </div>
14879       <div class="date">
14880          6th May 2010
14881       </div>
14882       <div class="body">
14883         <p>These days, the init.d script dependencies in Squeeze are quite
14884 complete, so complete that it is actually possible to run all the
14885 init.d scripts in parallell based on these dependencies.  If you want
14886 to test your Squeeze system, make sure
14887 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
14888 based boot sequencing</a> is enabled, and add this line to
14889 /etc/default/rcS:</p>
14890
14891 <blockquote><pre>
14892 CONCURRENCY=makefile
14893 </pre></blockquote>
14894
14895 <p>That is it.  It will cause sysv-rc to use the startpar tool to run
14896 scripts in parallel using the dependency information stored in
14897 /etc/init.d/.depend.boot, /etc/init.d/.depend.start and
14898 /etc/init.d/.depend.stop to order the scripts.  Startpar is configured
14899 to try to start the kdm and gdm scripts as early as possible, and will
14900 start the facilities required by kdm or gdm as early as possible to
14901 make this happen.</p>
14902
14903 <p>Give it a try, and see if you like the result.  If some services
14904 fail to start properly, it is most likely because they have incomplete
14905 init.d script dependencies in their startup script (or some of their
14906 dependent scripts have incomplete dependencies).  Report bugs and get
14907 the package maintainers to fix it. :)</p>
14908
14909 <p>Running scripts in parallel could be the default in Debian when we
14910 manage to get the init.d script dependencies complete and correct.  I
14911 expect we will get there in Squeeze+1, if we get manage to test and
14912 fix the remaining issues.</p>
14913
14914 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
14915 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
14916 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
14917 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
14918
14919       </div>
14920       <div class="tags">
14921
14922
14923         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
14924
14925
14926       </div>
14927     </div>
14928     <div class="padding"></div>
14929
14930     <div class="entry">
14931       <div class="title">
14932         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_has_switched_to_dependency_based_boot_sequencing.html">Debian has switched to dependency based boot sequencing</a>
14933       </div>
14934       <div class="date">
14935         27th July 2009
14936       </div>
14937       <div class="body">
14938         <p>Since this evening, with the upload of sysvinit version 2.87dsf-2,
14939 and the upload of insserv version 1.12.0-10 yesterday, Debian unstable
14940 have been migrated to using dependency based boot sequencing.  This
14941 conclude work me and others have been doing for the last three days.
14942 It feels great to see this finally part of the default Debian
14943 installation.  Now we just need to weed out the last few problems that
14944 are bound to show up, to get everything ready for Squeeze.</p>
14945
14946 <p>The next step is migrating /sbin/init from sysvinit to upstart, and
14947 fixing the more fundamental problem of handing the event based
14948 non-predictable kernel in the early boot.</p>
14949
14950       </div>
14951       <div class="tags">
14952
14953
14954         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
14955
14956
14957       </div>
14958     </div>
14959     <div class="padding"></div>
14960
14961     <div class="entry">
14962       <div class="title">
14963         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Taking_over_sysvinit_development.html">Taking over sysvinit development</a>
14964       </div>
14965       <div class="date">
14966         22nd July 2009
14967       </div>
14968       <div class="body">
14969         <p>After several years of frustration with the lack of activity from
14970 the existing sysvinit upstream developer, I decided a few weeks ago to
14971 take over the package and become the new upstream.  The number of
14972 patches to track for the Debian package was becoming a burden, and the
14973 lack of synchronization between the distribution made it hard to keep
14974 the package up to date.</p>
14975
14976 <p>On the new sysvinit team is the SuSe maintainer Dr. Werner Fink,
14977 and my Debian co-maintainer Kel Modderman.  About 10 days ago, I made
14978 a new upstream tarball with version number 2.87dsf (for Debian, SuSe
14979 and Fedora), based on the patches currently in use in these
14980 distributions.  We Debian maintainers plan to move to this tarball as
14981 the new upstream as soon as we find time to do the merge.  Since the
14982 new tarball was created, we agreed with Werner at SuSe to make a new
14983 upstream project at <a href="http://savannah.nongnu.org/">Savannah</a>, and continue
14984 development there.  The project is registered and currently waiting
14985 for approval by the Savannah administrators, and as soon as it is
14986 approved, we will import the old versions from svn and continue
14987 working on the future release.</p>
14988
14989 <p>It is a bit ironic that this is done now, when some of the involved
14990 distributions are moving to upstart as a syvinit replacement.</p>
14991
14992       </div>
14993       <div class="tags">
14994
14995
14996         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
14997
14998
14999       </div>
15000     </div>
15001     <div class="padding"></div>
15002
15003     <div class="entry">
15004       <div class="title">
15005         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_boots_quicker_and_quicker.html">Debian boots quicker and quicker</a>
15006       </div>
15007       <div class="date">
15008         24th June 2009
15009       </div>
15010       <div class="body">
15011         <p>I spent Monday and tuesday this week in London with a lot of the
15012 people involved in the boot system on Debian and Ubuntu, to see if we
15013 could find more ways to speed up the boot system.  This was an Ubuntu
15014 funded
15015 <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FoundationsTeam/BootPerformance/DebianUbuntuSprint">developer
15016 gathering</a>. It was quite productive.  We also discussed the future
15017 of boot systems, and ways to handle the increasing number of boot
15018 issues introduced by the Linux kernel becoming more and more
15019 asynchronous and event base.  The Ubuntu approach using udev and
15020 upstart might be a good way forward.  Time will show.</p>
15021
15022 <p>Anyway, there are a few ways at the moment to speed up the boot
15023 process in Debian.  All of these should be applied to get a quick
15024 boot:</p>
15025
15026 <ul>
15027
15028 <li>Use dash as /bin/sh.</li>
15029
15030 <li>Disable the init.d/hwclock*.sh scripts and make sure the hardware
15031    clock is in UTC.</li>
15032
15033 <li>Install and activate the insserv package to enable
15034    <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
15035    based boot sequencing</a>, and enable concurrent booting.</li>
15036
15037 </ul>
15038
15039 These points are based on the Google summer of code work done by
15040 <a href="http://initscripts-ng.alioth.debian.org/soc2006-bootsystem/">Carlos
15041 Villegas</a>.
15042
15043 <p>Support for makefile-style concurrency during boot was uploaded to
15044 unstable yesterday.  When we tested it, we were able to cut 6 seconds
15045 from the boot sequence.  It depend on very correct dependency
15046 declaration in all init.d scripts, so I expect us to find edge cases
15047 where the dependences in some scripts are slightly wrong when we start
15048 using this.</p>
15049
15050 <p>On our IRC channel for this effort, #pkg-sysvinit, a new idea was
15051 introduced by Raphael Geissert today, one that could affect the
15052 startup speed as well.  Instead of starting some scripts concurrently
15053 from rcS.d/ and another set of scripts from rc2.d/, it would be
15054 possible to run a of them in the same process.  A quick way to test
15055 this would be to enable insserv and run 'mv /etc/rc2.d/S* /etc/rcS.d/;
15056 insserv'.  Will need to test if that work. :)</p>
15057
15058       </div>
15059       <div class="tags">
15060
15061
15062         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
15063
15064
15065       </div>
15066     </div>
15067     <div class="padding"></div>
15068
15069     <div class="entry">
15070       <div class="title">
15071         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/BSAs_p_stander_om_piratkopiering_m_ter_motstand.html">BSAs påstander om piratkopiering møter motstand</a>
15072       </div>
15073       <div class="date">
15074         17th May 2009
15075       </div>
15076       <div class="body">
15077         <p>Hvert år de siste årene har BSA, lobbyfronten til de store
15078 programvareselskapene som Microsoft og Apple, publisert en rapport der
15079 de gjetter på hvor mye piratkopiering påfører i tapte inntekter i
15080 ulike land rundt om i verden.  Resultatene er tendensiøse.  For noen
15081 dager siden kom
15082 <a href="http://global.bsa.org/globalpiracy2008/studies/globalpiracy2008.pdf">siste
15083 rapport</a>, og det er flere kritiske kommentarer publisert de siste
15084 dagene.  Et spesielt interessant kommentar fra Sverige,
15085 <a href="http://www.idg.se/2.1085/1.229795/bsa-hoftade-sverigesiffror">BSA
15086 höftade Sverigesiffror</a>, oppsummeres slik:</p>
15087
15088 <blockquote>
15089 I sin senaste rapport slår BSA fast att 25 procent av all mjukvara i
15090 Sverige är piratkopierad. Det utan att ha pratat med ett enda svenskt
15091 företag. "Man bör nog kanske inte se de här siffrorna som helt
15092 exakta", säger BSAs Sverigechef John Hugosson.
15093 </blockquote>
15094
15095 <p>Mon tro om de er like metodiske når de gjetter på andelen piratkopiering i Norge?  To andre kommentarer er <a
15096 href="http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/comment/2242134/bsa-piracy-figures-shot-reality">BSA
15097 piracy figures need a shot of reality</a> og <a
15098 href="http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/3958/125/">Does The WIPO
15099 Copyright Treaty Work?</a></p>
15100
15101 <p>Fant lenkene via <a
15102 href="http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/17/1632242">oppslag
15103 på Slashdot</a>.</p>
15104
15105       </div>
15106       <div class="tags">
15107
15108
15109         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bsa">bsa</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fildeling">fildeling</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>.
15110
15111
15112       </div>
15113     </div>
15114     <div class="padding"></div>
15115
15116     <div class="entry">
15117       <div class="title">
15118         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IDG_mener_linux_i_servermarkedet_vil_vokse_med_21__i_2009.html">IDG mener linux i servermarkedet vil vokse med 21% i 2009</a>
15119       </div>
15120       <div class="date">
15121          7th May 2009
15122       </div>
15123       <div class="body">
15124         <p>Kom over
15125 <a href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10216873-16.html">interessante
15126 tall</a> fra IDG om utviklingen av linuxservermarkedet.  Fikk meg til
15127 å tenke på antall tjenermaskiner ved Universitetet i Oslo der jeg
15128 jobber til daglig.  En rask opptelling forteller meg at vi har 490
15129 (61%) fysiske unix-tjener (mest linux men også noen solaris) og 196
15130 (25%) windowstjenere, samt 112 (14%) virtuelle unix-tjenere.  Med den
15131 bakgrunnskunnskapen kan jeg godt tro at IDG er inne på noe.</p>
15132
15133       </div>
15134       <div class="tags">
15135
15136
15137         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
15138
15139
15140       </div>
15141     </div>
15142     <div class="padding"></div>
15143
15144     <div class="entry">
15145       <div class="title">
15146         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Kryptert_harddisk___naturligvis.html">Kryptert harddisk - naturligvis</a>
15147       </div>
15148       <div class="date">
15149          2nd May 2009
15150       </div>
15151       <div class="body">
15152         <p><a href="http://www.dagensit.no/trender/article1658676.ece">Dagens
15153 IT melder</a> at Intel hevder at det er dyrt å miste en datamaskin,
15154 når en tar tap av arbeidstid, fortrolige dokumenter,
15155 personopplysninger og alt annet det innebærer.  Det er ingen tvil om
15156 at det er en kostbar affære å miste sin datamaskin, og det er årsaken
15157 til at jeg har kryptert harddisken på både kontormaskinen og min
15158 bærbare.  Begge inneholder personopplysninger jeg ikke ønsker skal
15159 komme på avveie, den første informasjon relatert til jobben min ved
15160 Universitetet i Oslo, og den andre relatert til blant annet
15161 foreningsarbeide.  Kryptering av diskene gjør at det er lite
15162 sannsynlig at dophoder som kan finne på å rappe maskinene får noe ut
15163 av dem.  Maskinene låses automatisk etter noen minutter uten bruk,
15164 og en reboot vil gjøre at de ber om passord før de vil starte opp.
15165 Jeg bruker Debian på begge maskinene, og installasjonssystemet der
15166 gjør det trivielt å sette opp krypterte disker.  Jeg har LVM på toppen
15167 av krypterte partisjoner, slik at alt av datapartisjoner er kryptert.
15168 Jeg anbefaler alle å kryptere diskene på sine bærbare.  Kostnaden når
15169 det er gjort slik jeg gjør det er minimale, og gevinstene er
15170 betydelige.  En bør dog passe på passordet.  Hvis det går tapt, må
15171 maskinen reinstalleres og alt er tapt.</p>
15172
15173 <p>Krypteringen vil ikke stoppe kompetente angripere som f.eks. kjøler
15174 ned minnebrikkene før maskinen rebootes med programvare for å hente ut
15175 krypteringsnøklene.  Kostnaden med å forsvare seg mot slike angripere
15176 er for min del høyere enn gevinsten.  Jeg tror oddsene for at
15177 f.eks. etteretningsorganisasjoner har glede av å titte på mine
15178 maskiner er minimale, og ulempene jeg ville oppnå ved å forsøke å
15179 gjøre det vanskeligere for angripere med kompetanse og ressurser er
15180 betydelige.</p>
15181
15182       </div>
15183       <div class="tags">
15184
15185
15186         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
15187
15188
15189       </div>
15190     </div>
15191     <div class="padding"></div>
15192
15193     <div class="entry">
15194       <div class="title">
15195         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Two_projects_that_have_improved_the_quality_of_free_software_a_lot.html">Two projects that have improved the quality of free software a lot</a>
15196       </div>
15197       <div class="date">
15198          2nd May 2009
15199       </div>
15200       <div class="body">
15201         <p>There are two software projects that have had huge influence on the
15202 quality of free software, and I wanted to mention both in case someone
15203 do not yet know them.</p>
15204
15205 <p>The first one is <a href="http://valgrind.org/">valgrind</a>, a
15206 tool to detect and expose errors in the memory handling of programs.
15207 It is easy to use, all one need to do is to run 'valgrind program',
15208 and it will report any problems on stdout.  It is even better if the
15209 program include debug information.  With debug information, it is able
15210 to report the source file name and line number where the problem
15211 occurs.  It can report things like 'reading past memory block in file
15212 X line N, the memory block was allocated in file Y, line M', and
15213 'using uninitialised value in control logic'.  This tool has made it
15214 trivial to investigate reproducible crash bugs in programs, and have
15215 reduced the number of this kind of bugs in free software a lot.
15216
15217 <p>The second one is
15218 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coverity">Coverity</a> which is
15219 a source code checker.  It is able to process the source of a program
15220 and find problems in the logic without running the program.  It
15221 started out as the Stanford Checker and became well known when it was
15222 used to find bugs in the Linux kernel.  It is now a commercial tool
15223 and the company behind it is running
15224 <a href="http://www.scan.coverity.com/">a community service</a> for the
15225 free software community, where a lot of free software projects get
15226 their source checked for free.  Several thousand defects have been
15227 found and fixed so far.  It can find errors like 'lock L taken in file
15228 X line N is never released if exiting in line M', or 'the code in file
15229 Y lines O to P can never be executed'.  The projects included in the
15230 community service project have managed to get rid of a lot of
15231 reliability problems thanks to Coverity.</p>
15232
15233 <p>I believe tools like this, that are able to automatically find
15234 errors in the source, are vital to improve the quality of software and
15235 make sure we can get rid of the crashing and failing software we are
15236 surrounded by today.</p>
15237
15238       </div>
15239       <div class="tags">
15240
15241
15242         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
15243
15244
15245       </div>
15246     </div>
15247     <div class="padding"></div>
15248
15249     <div class="entry">
15250       <div class="title">
15251         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/No_patch_is_not_better_than_a_useless_patch.html">No patch is not better than a useless patch</a>
15252       </div>
15253       <div class="date">
15254         28th April 2009
15255       </div>
15256       <div class="body">
15257         <p>Julien Blache
15258 <a href="http://blog.technologeek.org/2009/04/12/214">claim that no
15259 patch is better than a useless patch</a>.  I completely disagree, as a
15260 patch allow one to discuss a concrete and proposed solution, and also
15261 prove that the issue at hand is important enough for someone to spent
15262 time on fixing it.  No patch do not provide any of these positive
15263 properties.</p>
15264
15265       </div>
15266       <div class="tags">
15267
15268
15269         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
15270
15271
15272       </div>
15273     </div>
15274     <div class="padding"></div>
15275
15276     <div class="entry">
15277       <div class="title">
15278         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Standardize_on_protocols_and_formats__not_vendors_and_applications.html">Standardize on protocols and formats, not vendors and applications</a>
15279       </div>
15280       <div class="date">
15281         30th March 2009
15282       </div>
15283       <div class="body">
15284         <p>Where I work at the University of Oslo, one decision stand out as a
15285 very good one to form a long lived computer infrastructure.  It is the
15286 simple one, lost by many in todays computer industry: Standardize on
15287 open network protocols and open exchange/storage formats, not applications.
15288 Applications come and go, while protocols and files tend to stay, and
15289 thus one want to make it easy to change application and vendor, while
15290 avoiding conversion costs and locking users to a specific platform or
15291 application.</p>
15292
15293 <p>This approach make it possible to replace the client applications
15294 independently of the server applications.  One can even allow users to
15295 use several different applications as long as they handle the selected
15296 protocol and format.  In the normal case, only one client application
15297 is recommended and users only get help if they choose to use this
15298 application, but those that want to deviate from the easy path are not
15299 blocked from doing so.</p>
15300
15301 <p>It also allow us to replace the server side without forcing the
15302 users to replace their applications, and thus allow us to select the
15303 best server implementation at any moment, when scale and resouce
15304 requirements change.</p>
15305
15306 <p>I strongly recommend standardizing - on open network protocols and
15307 open formats, but I would never recommend standardizing on a single
15308 application that do not use open network protocol or open formats.</p>
15309
15310       </div>
15311       <div class="tags">
15312
15313
15314         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
15315
15316
15317       </div>
15318     </div>
15319     <div class="padding"></div>
15320
15321     <div class="entry">
15322       <div class="title">
15323         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Returning_from_Skolelinux_developer_gathering.html">Returning from Skolelinux developer gathering</a>
15324       </div>
15325       <div class="date">
15326         29th March 2009
15327       </div>
15328       <div class="body">
15329         <p>I'm sitting on the train going home from this weekends Debian
15330 Edu/Skolelinux development gathering.  I got a bit done tuning the
15331 desktop, and looked into the dynamic service location protocol
15332 implementation avahi.  It look like it could be useful for us.  Almost
15333 30 people participated, and I believe it was a great environment to
15334 get to know the Skolelinux system.  Walter Bender, involved in the
15335 development of the Sugar educational platform, presented his stuff and
15336 also helped me improve my OLPC installation.  He also showed me that
15337 his Turtle Art application can be used in standalone mode, and we
15338 agreed that I would help getting it packaged for Debian.  As a
15339 standalone application it would be great for Debian Edu.  We also
15340 tried to get the video conferencing working with two OLPCs, but that
15341 proved to be too hard for us.  The application seem to need more work
15342 before it is ready for me.  I look forward to getting home and relax
15343 now. :)</p>
15344
15345       </div>
15346       <div class="tags">
15347
15348
15349         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
15350
15351
15352       </div>
15353     </div>
15354     <div class="padding"></div>
15355
15356     <div class="entry">
15357       <div class="title">
15358         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">Time for new  LDAP schemas replacing RFC 2307?</a>
15359       </div>
15360       <div class="date">
15361         29th March 2009
15362       </div>
15363       <div class="body">
15364         <p>The state of standardized LDAP schemas on Linux is far from
15365 optimal.  There is RFC 2307 documenting one way to store NIS maps in
15366 LDAP, and a modified version of this normally called RFC 2307bis, with
15367 some modifications to be compatible with Active Directory.  The RFC
15368 specification handle the content of a lot of system databases, but do
15369 not handle DNS zones and DHCP configuration.</p>
15370
15371 <p>In <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux</a>,
15372 we would like to store information about users, SMB clients/hosts,
15373 filegroups, netgroups (users and hosts), DHCP and DNS configuration,
15374 and LTSP configuration in LDAP.  These objects have a lot in common,
15375 but with the current LDAP schemas it is not possible to have one
15376 object per entity.  For example, one need to have at least three LDAP
15377 objects for a given computer, one with the SMB related stuff, one with
15378 DNS information and another with DHCP information.  The schemas
15379 provided for DNS and DHCP are impossible to combine into one LDAP
15380 object.  In addition, it is impossible to implement quick queries for
15381 netgroup membership, because of the way NIS triples are implemented.
15382 It just do not scale.  I believe it is time for a few RFC
15383 specifications to cleam up this mess.</p>
15384
15385 <p>I would like to have one LDAP object representing each computer in
15386 the network, and this object can then keep the SMB (ie host key), DHCP
15387 (mac address/name) and DNS (name/IP address) settings in one place.
15388 It need to be efficently stored to make sure it scale well.</p>
15389
15390 <p>I would also like to have a quick way to map from a user or
15391 computer and to the net group this user or computer is a member.</p>
15392
15393 <p>Active Directory have done a better job than unix heads like myself
15394 in this regard, and the unix side need to catch up.  Time to start a
15395 new IETF work group?</p>
15396
15397       </div>
15398       <div class="tags">
15399
15400
15401         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
15402
15403
15404       </div>
15405     </div>
15406     <div class="padding"></div>
15407
15408     <div class="entry">
15409       <div class="title">
15410         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Endelig_er_Debian_Lenny_gitt_ut.html">Endelig er Debian Lenny gitt ut</a>
15411       </div>
15412       <div class="date">
15413         15th February 2009
15414       </div>
15415       <div class="body">
15416         <p>Endelig er <a href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian</a>
15417 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2009/20090214">Lenny</a> gitt ut.
15418 Et langt steg videre for Debian-prosjektet, og en rekke nye
15419 programpakker blir nå tilgjengelig for de av oss som bruker den
15420 stabile utgaven av Debian.  Neste steg er nå å få
15421 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a> /
15422 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/">Debian Edu</a> ferdig
15423 oppdatert for den nye utgaven, slik at en oppdatert versjon kan
15424 slippes løs på skolene.  Takk til alle debian-utviklerne som har
15425 gjort dette mulig.  Endelig er f.eks. fungerende avhengighetsstyrt
15426 bootsekvens tilgjengelig i stabil utgave, vha pakken
15427 <tt>insserv</tt>.</p>
15428
15429       </div>
15430       <div class="tags">
15431
15432
15433         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>.
15434
15435
15436       </div>
15437     </div>
15438     <div class="padding"></div>
15439
15440     <div class="entry">
15441       <div class="title">
15442         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Devcamp_brought_us_closer_to_the_Lenny_based_Debian_Edu_release.html">Devcamp brought us closer to the Lenny based Debian Edu release</a>
15443       </div>
15444       <div class="date">
15445          7th December 2008
15446       </div>
15447       <div class="body">
15448         <p>This weekend we had a small developer gathering for Debian Edu in
15449 Oslo.  Most of Saturday was used for the general assemly for the
15450 member organization, but the rest of the weekend I used to tune the
15451 LTSP installation.  LTSP now work out of the box on the 10-network.
15452 Acer Aspire One proved to be a very nice thin client, with both
15453 screen, mouse and keybard in a small box.  Was working on getting the
15454 diskless workstation setup configured out of the box, but did not
15455 finish it before the weekend was up.</p>
15456
15457 <p>Did not find time to look at the 4 VGA cards in one box we got from
15458 the Brazilian group, so that will have to wait for the next
15459 development gathering.  Would love to have the Debian Edu installer
15460 automatically detect and configure a multiseat setup when it find one
15461 of these cards.</p>
15462
15463       </div>
15464       <div class="tags">
15465
15466
15467         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ltsp">ltsp</a>.
15468
15469
15470       </div>
15471     </div>
15472     <div class="padding"></div>
15473
15474     <div class="entry">
15475       <div class="title">
15476         <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_sorry_state_of_multimedia_browser_plugins_in_Debian.html">The sorry state of multimedia browser plugins in Debian</a>
15477       </div>
15478       <div class="date">
15479         25th November 2008
15480       </div>
15481       <div class="body">
15482         <p>Recently I have spent some time evaluating the multimedia browser
15483 plugins available in Debian Lenny, to see which one we should use by
15484 default in Debian Edu.  We need an embedded video playing plugin with
15485 control buttons to pause or stop the video, and capable of streaming
15486 all the multimedia content available on the web.  The test results and
15487 notes are available on
15488 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">the
15489 Debian wiki</a>.  I was surprised how few of the plugins are able to
15490 fill this need.  My personal video player favorite, VLC, has a really
15491 bad plugin which fail on a lot of the test pages.  A lot of the MIME
15492 types I would expect to work with any free software player (like
15493 video/ogg), just do not work.  And simple formats like the
15494 audio/x-mplegurl format (m3u playlists), just isn't supported by the
15495 totem and vlc plugins.  I hope the situation will improve soon.  No
15496 wonder sites use the proprietary Adobe flash to play video.</p>
15497
15498 <p>For Lenny, we seem to end up with the mplayer plugin.  It seem to
15499 be the only one fitting our needs. :/</p>
15500
15501       </div>
15502       <div class="tags">
15503
15504
15505         Tags: <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
15506
15507
15508       </div>
15509     </div>
15510     <div class="padding"></div>
15511
15512     <p style="text-align: right;"><a href="debian.rss"><img src="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/xml.gif" alt="RSS Feed" width="36" height="14" /></a></p>
15513     <div id="sidebar">
15514
15515
15516
15517 <h2>Archive</h2>
15518 <ul>
15519
15520 <li>2023
15521 <ul>
15522
15523 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2023/01/">January (3)</a></li>
15524
15525 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2023/02/">February (1)</a></li>
15526
15527 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2023/04/">April (2)</a></li>
15528
15529 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2023/05/">May (1)</a></li>
15530
15531 </ul></li>
15532
15533 <li>2022
15534 <ul>
15535
15536 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2022/02/">February (1)</a></li>
15537
15538 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2022/03/">March (3)</a></li>
15539
15540 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2022/04/">April (2)</a></li>
15541
15542 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2022/06/">June (2)</a></li>
15543
15544 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2022/07/">July (1)</a></li>
15545
15546 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2022/09/">September (1)</a></li>
15547
15548 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2022/10/">October (1)</a></li>
15549
15550 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2022/12/">December (1)</a></li>
15551
15552 </ul></li>
15553
15554 <li>2021
15555 <ul>
15556
15557 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2021/01/">January (2)</a></li>
15558
15559 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2021/02/">February (1)</a></li>
15560
15561 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2021/05/">May (1)</a></li>
15562
15563 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2021/06/">June (1)</a></li>
15564
15565 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2021/07/">July (3)</a></li>
15566
15567 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2021/08/">August (1)</a></li>
15568
15569 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2021/09/">September (1)</a></li>
15570
15571 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2021/10/">October (1)</a></li>
15572
15573 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2021/12/">December (1)</a></li>
15574
15575 </ul></li>
15576
15577 <li>2020
15578 <ul>
15579
15580 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2020/02/">February (2)</a></li>
15581
15582 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2020/03/">March (2)</a></li>
15583
15584 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2020/04/">April (2)</a></li>
15585
15586 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2020/05/">May (3)</a></li>
15587
15588 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2020/06/">June (2)</a></li>
15589
15590 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2020/07/">July (1)</a></li>
15591
15592 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2020/09/">September (1)</a></li>
15593
15594 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2020/10/">October (1)</a></li>
15595
15596 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2020/11/">November (1)</a></li>
15597
15598 </ul></li>
15599
15600 <li>2019
15601 <ul>
15602
15603 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2019/01/">January (4)</a></li>
15604
15605 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2019/02/">February (3)</a></li>
15606
15607 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2019/03/">March (3)</a></li>
15608
15609 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2019/05/">May (2)</a></li>
15610
15611 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2019/06/">June (5)</a></li>
15612
15613 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2019/07/">July (2)</a></li>
15614
15615 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2019/08/">August (1)</a></li>
15616
15617 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2019/09/">September (1)</a></li>
15618
15619 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2019/11/">November (1)</a></li>
15620
15621 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2019/12/">December (4)</a></li>
15622
15623 </ul></li>
15624
15625 <li>2018
15626 <ul>
15627
15628 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/01/">January (1)</a></li>
15629
15630 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/02/">February (5)</a></li>
15631
15632 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/03/">March (5)</a></li>
15633
15634 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/04/">April (3)</a></li>
15635
15636 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/06/">June (2)</a></li>
15637
15638 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/07/">July (5)</a></li>
15639
15640 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/08/">August (3)</a></li>
15641
15642 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/09/">September (3)</a></li>
15643
15644 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/10/">October (5)</a></li>
15645
15646 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/11/">November (2)</a></li>
15647
15648 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/12/">December (4)</a></li>
15649
15650 </ul></li>
15651
15652 <li>2017
15653 <ul>
15654
15655 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/01/">January (4)</a></li>
15656
15657 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/02/">February (3)</a></li>
15658
15659 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/03/">March (5)</a></li>
15660
15661 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/04/">April (2)</a></li>
15662
15663 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/06/">June (5)</a></li>
15664
15665 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/07/">July (1)</a></li>
15666
15667 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/08/">August (1)</a></li>
15668
15669 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/09/">September (3)</a></li>
15670
15671 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/10/">October (5)</a></li>
15672
15673 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/11/">November (3)</a></li>
15674
15675 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/12/">December (4)</a></li>
15676
15677 </ul></li>
15678
15679 <li>2016
15680 <ul>
15681
15682 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/01/">January (3)</a></li>
15683
15684 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/02/">February (2)</a></li>
15685
15686 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/03/">March (3)</a></li>
15687
15688 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/04/">April (8)</a></li>
15689
15690 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/05/">May (8)</a></li>
15691
15692 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/06/">June (2)</a></li>
15693
15694 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/07/">July (2)</a></li>
15695
15696 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/08/">August (5)</a></li>
15697
15698 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/09/">September (2)</a></li>
15699
15700 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/10/">October (3)</a></li>
15701
15702 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/11/">November (8)</a></li>
15703
15704 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/12/">December (5)</a></li>
15705
15706 </ul></li>
15707
15708 <li>2015
15709 <ul>
15710
15711 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/01/">January (7)</a></li>
15712
15713 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/02/">February (6)</a></li>
15714
15715 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/03/">March (1)</a></li>
15716
15717 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/04/">April (4)</a></li>
15718
15719 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/05/">May (3)</a></li>
15720
15721 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/06/">June (4)</a></li>
15722
15723 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/07/">July (6)</a></li>
15724
15725 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/08/">August (2)</a></li>
15726
15727 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/09/">September (2)</a></li>
15728
15729 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/10/">October (9)</a></li>
15730
15731 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/11/">November (6)</a></li>
15732
15733 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/12/">December (3)</a></li>
15734
15735 </ul></li>
15736
15737 <li>2014
15738 <ul>
15739
15740 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/01/">January (2)</a></li>
15741
15742 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/02/">February (3)</a></li>
15743
15744 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/03/">March (8)</a></li>
15745
15746 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/04/">April (7)</a></li>
15747
15748 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/05/">May (1)</a></li>
15749
15750 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/06/">June (2)</a></li>
15751
15752 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/07/">July (2)</a></li>
15753
15754 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/08/">August (2)</a></li>
15755
15756 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/09/">September (5)</a></li>
15757
15758 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/10/">October (6)</a></li>
15759
15760 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/11/">November (3)</a></li>
15761
15762 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/12/">December (5)</a></li>
15763
15764 </ul></li>
15765
15766 <li>2013
15767 <ul>
15768
15769 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/01/">January (11)</a></li>
15770
15771 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/02/">February (9)</a></li>
15772
15773 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/03/">March (9)</a></li>
15774
15775 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/04/">April (6)</a></li>
15776
15777 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/05/">May (9)</a></li>
15778
15779 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/06/">June (10)</a></li>
15780
15781 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/07/">July (7)</a></li>
15782
15783 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/08/">August (3)</a></li>
15784
15785 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/09/">September (5)</a></li>
15786
15787 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/10/">October (7)</a></li>
15788
15789 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/11/">November (9)</a></li>
15790
15791 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/12/">December (3)</a></li>
15792
15793 </ul></li>
15794
15795 <li>2012
15796 <ul>
15797
15798 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/01/">January (7)</a></li>
15799
15800 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/02/">February (10)</a></li>
15801
15802 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/03/">March (17)</a></li>
15803
15804 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/04/">April (12)</a></li>
15805
15806 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/05/">May (12)</a></li>
15807
15808 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/06/">June (20)</a></li>
15809
15810 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/07/">July (17)</a></li>
15811
15812 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/08/">August (6)</a></li>
15813
15814 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/09/">September (9)</a></li>
15815
15816 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/10/">October (17)</a></li>
15817
15818 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/11/">November (10)</a></li>
15819
15820 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/12/">December (7)</a></li>
15821
15822 </ul></li>
15823
15824 <li>2011
15825 <ul>
15826
15827 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/01/">January (16)</a></li>
15828
15829 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/02/">February (6)</a></li>
15830
15831 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/03/">March (6)</a></li>
15832
15833 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/04/">April (7)</a></li>
15834
15835 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/05/">May (3)</a></li>
15836
15837 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/06/">June (2)</a></li>
15838
15839 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/07/">July (7)</a></li>
15840
15841 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/08/">August (6)</a></li>
15842
15843 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/09/">September (4)</a></li>
15844
15845 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/10/">October (2)</a></li>
15846
15847 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/11/">November (3)</a></li>
15848
15849 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/12/">December (1)</a></li>
15850
15851 </ul></li>
15852
15853 <li>2010
15854 <ul>
15855
15856 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/01/">January (2)</a></li>
15857
15858 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/02/">February (1)</a></li>
15859
15860 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/03/">March (3)</a></li>
15861
15862 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/04/">April (3)</a></li>
15863
15864 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/05/">May (9)</a></li>
15865
15866 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/06/">June (14)</a></li>
15867
15868 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/07/">July (12)</a></li>
15869
15870 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/08/">August (13)</a></li>
15871
15872 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/09/">September (7)</a></li>
15873
15874 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/10/">October (9)</a></li>
15875
15876 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/11/">November (13)</a></li>
15877
15878 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/12/">December (12)</a></li>
15879
15880 </ul></li>
15881
15882 <li>2009
15883 <ul>
15884
15885 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/01/">January (8)</a></li>
15886
15887 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/02/">February (8)</a></li>
15888
15889 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/03/">March (12)</a></li>
15890
15891 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/04/">April (10)</a></li>
15892
15893 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/05/">May (9)</a></li>
15894
15895 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/06/">June (3)</a></li>
15896
15897 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/07/">July (4)</a></li>
15898
15899 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/08/">August (3)</a></li>
15900
15901 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/09/">September (1)</a></li>
15902
15903 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/10/">October (2)</a></li>
15904
15905 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/11/">November (3)</a></li>
15906
15907 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/12/">December (3)</a></li>
15908
15909 </ul></li>
15910
15911 <li>2008
15912 <ul>
15913
15914 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/11/">November (5)</a></li>
15915
15916 <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/12/">December (7)</a></li>
15917
15918 </ul></li>
15919
15920 </ul>
15921
15922
15923
15924 <h2>Tags</h2>
15925 <ul>
15926
15927  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer (19)</a></li>
15928
15929  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/amiga">amiga (1)</a></li>
15930
15931  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/aros">aros (1)</a></li>
15932
15933  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bankid">bankid (4)</a></li>
15934
15935  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/betalkontant">betalkontant (9)</a></li>
15936
15937  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin (12)</a></li>
15938
15939  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem (17)</a></li>
15940
15941  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bsa">bsa (2)</a></li>
15942
15943  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/chrpath">chrpath (2)</a></li>
15944
15945  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian (191)</a></li>
15946
15947  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu (159)</a></li>
15948
15949  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook (9)</a></li>
15950
15951  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan (11)</a></li>
15952
15953  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/dld">dld (18)</a></li>
15954
15955  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook (30)</a></li>
15956
15957  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/drivstoffpriser">drivstoffpriser (4)</a></li>
15958
15959  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english (447)</a></li>
15960
15961  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami (23)</a></li>
15962
15963  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fildeling">fildeling (14)</a></li>
15964
15965  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture (34)</a></li>
15966
15967  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox (9)</a></li>
15968
15969  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen (20)</a></li>
15970
15971  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264 (20)</a></li>
15972
15973  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju (43)</a></li>
15974
15975  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram (16)</a></li>
15976
15977  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kart">kart (23)</a></li>
15978
15979  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kodi">kodi (4)</a></li>
15980
15981  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap (9)</a></li>
15982
15983  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lego">lego (5)</a></li>
15984
15985  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lenker">lenker (8)</a></li>
15986
15987  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/linuxcnc">linuxcnc (4)</a></li>
15988
15989  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lsdvd">lsdvd (2)</a></li>
15990
15991  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ltsp">ltsp (1)</a></li>
15992
15993  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/madewithcc">madewithcc (3)</a></li>
15994
15995  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/mesh network">mesh network (8)</a></li>
15996
15997  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia (45)</a></li>
15998
15999  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software (14)</a></li>
16000
16001  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/noark5">noark5 (23)</a></li>
16002
16003  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk (320)</a></li>
16004
16005  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug (198)</a></li>
16006
16007  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn (40)</a></li>
16008
16009  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/open311">open311 (2)</a></li>
16010
16011  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opensnitch">opensnitch (3)</a></li>
16012
16013  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett (75)</a></li>
16014
16015  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern (114)</a></li>
16016
16017  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/raid">raid (2)</a></li>
16018
16019  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reactos">reactos (1)</a></li>
16020
16021  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reprap">reprap (11)</a></li>
16022
16023  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rfid">rfid (3)</a></li>
16024
16025  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot (17)</a></li>
16026
16027  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rss">rss (1)</a></li>
16028
16029  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ruter">ruter (7)</a></li>
16030
16031  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/scraperwiki">scraperwiki (2)</a></li>
16032
16033  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet (59)</a></li>
16034
16035  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary (4)</a></li>
16036
16037  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/skepsis">skepsis (5)</a></li>
16038
16039  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard (74)</a></li>
16040
16041  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stavekontroll">stavekontroll (7)</a></li>
16042
16043  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stortinget">stortinget (14)</a></li>
16044
16045  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance (64)</a></li>
16046
16047  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sysadmin">sysadmin (5)</a></li>
16048
16049  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/usenix">usenix (2)</a></li>
16050
16051  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/valg">valg (9)</a></li>
16052
16053  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/verkidetfri">verkidetfri (20)</a></li>
16054
16055  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video (78)</a></li>
16056
16057  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/vitenskap">vitenskap (4)</a></li>
16058
16059  <li><a href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web (42)</a></li>
16060
16061 </ul>
16062
16063
16064     </div>
16065     <p style="text-align: right">
16066  Created by <a href="http://steve.org.uk/Software/chronicle">Chronicle v4.6</a>
16067 </p>
16068
16069   </body>
16070 </html>