1 <?xml version=
"1.0" encoding=
"utf-8"?>
2 <rss version='
2.0' xmlns:lj='http://www.livejournal.org/rss/lj/
1.0/'
>
4 <title>Petter Reinholdtsen - Entries tagged english
</title>
5 <description>Entries tagged english
</description>
6 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/
</link>
10 <title>The SysVinit upstream project just migrated to git
</title>
11 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_SysVinit_upstream_project_just_migrated_to_git.html
</link>
12 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_SysVinit_upstream_project_just_migrated_to_git.html
</guid>
13 <pubDate>Sun,
18 Feb
2018 09:
20:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
14 <description><p
>Surprising as it might sound, there are still computers using the
15 traditional Sys V init system, and there probably will be until
16 systemd start working on Hurd and FreeBSD.
17 <a href=
"https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/sysvinit
">The upstream
18 project still exist
</a
>, though, and up until today, the upstream
19 source was available from Savannah via subversion. I am happy to
20 report that this just changed.
</p
>
22 <p
>The upstream source is now in Git, and consist of three
23 repositories:
</p
>
27 <li
><a href=
"http://git.savannah.nongnu.org/cgit/sysvinit.git
">sysvinit
</a
></li
>
28 <li
><a href=
"http://git.savannah.nongnu.org/cgit/sysvinit/insserv.git
">insserv
</a
></li
>
29 <li
><a href=
"http://git.savannah.nongnu.org/cgit/sysvinit/startpar.git
">startpar
</a
></li
>
33 <p
>I do not really spend much time on the project these days, and I
34 has mostly retired, but found it best to migrate the source to a good
35 version control system to help those willing to move it forward.
</p
>
37 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
38 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
39 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
44 <title>Using VLC to stream bittorrent sources
</title>
45 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_VLC_to_stream_bittorrent_sources.html
</link>
46 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_VLC_to_stream_bittorrent_sources.html
</guid>
47 <pubDate>Wed,
14 Feb
2018 08:
00:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
48 <description><p
>A few days ago, a new major version of
49 <a href=
"https://www.videolan.org/
">VLC
</a
> was announced, and I
50 decided to check out if it now supported streaming over
51 <a href=
"http://bittorrent.org/
">bittorrent
</a
> and
52 <a href=
"https://webtorrent.io
">webtorrent
</a
>. Bittorrent is one of
53 the most efficient ways to distribute large files on the Internet, and
54 Webtorrent is a variant of Bittorrent using
55 <a href=
"https://webrtc.org
">WebRTC
</a
> as its transport channel,
56 allowing web pages to stream and share files using the same technique.
57 The network protocols are similar but not identical, so a client
58 supporting one of them can not talk to a client supporting the other.
59 I was a bit surprised with what I discovered when I started to look.
61 <a href=
"https://www.videolan.org/vlc/releases/
3.0.0.html
">the release
62 notes
</a
> did not help answering this question, so I started searching
63 the web. I found several news articles from
2013, most of them
64 tracing the news from Torrentfreak
65 (
"<a href=https://torrentfreak.com/open-source-giant-vlc-mulls-bittorrent-support-
130211/
">Open
66 Source Giant VLC Mulls BitTorrent Streaming Support
</a
>"), about a
67 initiative to pay someone to create a VLC patch for bittorrent
68 support. To figure out what happend with this initiative, I headed
69 over to the #videolan IRC channel and asked if there were some bug or
70 feature request tickets tracking such feature. I got an answer from
71 lead developer Jean-Babtiste Kempf, telling me that there was a patch
72 but neither he nor anyone else knew where it was. So I searched a bit
73 more, and came across an independent
74 <a href=
"https://github.com/johang/vlc-bittorrent
">VLC plugin to add
75 bittorrent support
</a
>, created by Johan Gunnarsson in
2016/
2017.
76 Again according to Jean-Babtiste, this is not the patch he was talking
79 <p
>Anyway, to test the plugin, I made a working Debian package from
80 the git repository, with some modifications. After installing this
81 package, I could stream videos from
82 <a href=
"https://www.archive.org/
">The Internet Archive
</a
> using VLC
83 commands like this:
</p
>
85 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
86 vlc https://archive.org/download/LoveNest/LoveNest_archive.torrent
87 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
89 <p
>The plugin is supposed to handle magnet links too, but since The
90 Internet Archive do not have magnet links and I did not want to spend
91 time tracking down another source, I have not tested it. It can take
92 quite a while before the video start playing without any indication of
93 what is going on from VLC. It took
10-
20 seconds when I measured it.
94 Some times the plugin seem unable to find the correct video file to
95 play, and show the metadata XML file name in the VLC status line. I
96 have no idea why.
</p
>
98 <p
>I have created a
<a href=
"https://bugs.debian.org/
890360">request for
99 a new package in Debian (RFP)
</a
> and
100 <a href=
"https://github.com/johang/vlc-bittorrent/issues/
1">asked if
101 the upstream author is willing to help make this happen
</a
>. Now we
102 wait to see what come out of this. I do not want to maintain a
103 package that is not maintained upstream, nor do I really have time to
104 maintain more packages myself, so I might leave it at this. But I
105 really hope someone step up to do the packaging, and hope upstream is
106 still maintaining the source. If you want to help, please update the
107 RFP request or the upstream issue.
</p
>
109 <p
>I have not found any traces of webtorrent support for VLC.
</p
>
111 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
112 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
113 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
118 <title>Version
3.1 of Cura, the
3D print slicer, is now in Debian
</title>
119 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Version_3_1_of_Cura__the_3D_print_slicer__is_now_in_Debian.html
</link>
120 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Version_3_1_of_Cura__the_3D_print_slicer__is_now_in_Debian.html
</guid>
121 <pubDate>Tue,
13 Feb
2018 06:
20:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
122 <description><p
>A new version of the
123 <a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cura
">3D printer slicer
124 software Cura
</a
>, version
3.1.0, is now available in Debian Testing
125 (aka Buster) and Debian Unstable (aka Sid). I hope you find it
126 useful. It was uploaded the last few days, and the last update will
127 enter testing tomorrow. See the
128 <a href=
"https://ultimaker.com/en/products/cura-software/release-notes
">release
129 notes
</a
> for the list of bug fixes and new features. Version
3.2
130 was announced
6 days ago. We will try to get it into Debian as
133 <p
>More information related to
3D printing is available on the
134 <a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/
3DPrinting
">3D printing
</a
> and
135 <a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/
3D-printer
">3D printer
</a
> wiki pages
138 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
139 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
140 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
145 <title>How hard can æ, ø and å be?
</title>
146 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_hard_can______and___be_.html
</link>
147 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_hard_can______and___be_.html
</guid>
148 <pubDate>Sun,
11 Feb
2018 17:
10:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
149 <description><img src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2018-
02-
11-peppes-unicode.jpeg
" align=
"right
"/
>
151 <p
>We write
2018, and it is
30 years since Unicode was introduced.
152 Most of us in Norway have come to expect the use of our alphabet to
153 just work with any computer system. But it is apparently beyond reach
154 of the computers printing recites at a restaurant. Recently I visited
155 a Peppes pizza resturant, and noticed a few details on the recite.
156 Notice how
'ø
' and
'å
' are replaced with strange symbols in
157 'Servitør
',
'Å BETALE
',
'Beløp pr. gjest
',
'Takk for besøket.
' and
'Vi
158 gleder oss til å se deg igjen
'.
</p
>
160 <p
>I would say that this state is passed sad and over in embarrassing.
</p
>
162 <p
>I removed personal and private information to be nice.
</p
>
164 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
165 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
166 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
171 <title>Legal to share more than
11,
000 movies listed on IMDB?
</title>
172 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Legal_to_share_more_than_11_000_movies_listed_on_IMDB_.html
</link>
173 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Legal_to_share_more_than_11_000_movies_listed_on_IMDB_.html
</guid>
174 <pubDate>Sun,
7 Jan
2018 23:
30:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
175 <description><p
>I
've continued to track down list of movies that are legal to
176 distribute on the Internet, and identified more than
11,
000 title IDs
177 in The Internet Movie Database (IMDB) so far. Most of them (
57%) are
178 feature films from USA published before
1923. I
've also tracked down
179 more than
24,
000 movies I have not yet been able to map to IMDB title
180 ID, so the real number could be a lot higher. According to the front
181 web page for
<a href=
"https://retrofilmvault.com/
">Retro Film
182 Vault
</A
>, there are
44,
000 public domain films, so I guess there are
183 still some left to identify.
</p
>
185 <p
>The complete data set is available from
186 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/public-domain-free-imdb
">a
187 public git repository
</a
>, including the scripts used to create it.
188 Most of the data is collected using web scraping, for example from the
189 "product catalog
" of companies selling copies of public domain movies,
190 but any source I find believable is used. I
've so far had to throw
191 out three sources because I did not trust the public domain status of
192 the movies listed.
</p
>
194 <p
>Anyway, this is the summary of the
28 collected data sources so
198 2352 entries (
66 unique) with and
15983 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-archive-org-search.json
199 2302 entries (
120 unique) with and
0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-archive-org-wikidata.json
200 195 entries (
63 unique) with and
200 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-cinemovies.json
201 89 entries (
52 unique) with and
38 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-creative-commons.json
202 344 entries (
28 unique) with and
655 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-fesfilm.json
203 668 entries (
209 unique) with and
1064 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-filmchest-com.json
204 830 entries (
21 unique) with and
0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-icheckmovies-archive-mochard.json
205 19 entries (
19 unique) with and
0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-imdb-c-expired-gb.json
206 6822 entries (
6669 unique) with and
0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-imdb-c-expired-us.json
207 137 entries (
0 unique) with and
0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-imdb-externlist.json
208 1205 entries (
57 unique) with and
0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-imdb-pd.json
209 84 entries (
20 unique) with and
167 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-infodigi-pd.json
210 158 entries (
135 unique) with and
0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-letterboxd-looney-tunes.json
211 113 entries (
4 unique) with and
0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-letterboxd-pd.json
212 182 entries (
100 unique) with and
0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-letterboxd-silent.json
213 229 entries (
87 unique) with and
1 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-manual.json
214 44 entries (
2 unique) with and
64 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-openflix.json
215 291 entries (
33 unique) with and
474 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-profilms-pd.json
216 211 entries (
7 unique) with and
0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomainmovies-info.json
217 1232 entries (
57 unique) with and
1875 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomainmovies-net.json
218 46 entries (
13 unique) with and
81 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomainreview.json
219 698 entries (
64 unique) with and
118 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomaintorrents.json
220 1758 entries (
882 unique) with and
3786 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-retrofilmvault.json
221 16 entries (
0 unique) with and
0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-thehillproductions.json
222 63 entries (
16 unique) with and
141 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-vodo.json
223 11583 unique IMDB title IDs in total,
8724 only in one list,
24647 without IMDB title ID
224 </pre
></p
>
226 <p
> I keep finding more data sources. I found the cinemovies source
227 just a few days ago, and as you can see from the summary, it extended
228 my list with
63 movies. Check out the mklist-* scripts in the git
229 repository if you are curious how the lists are created. Many of the
230 titles are extracted using searches on IMDB, where I look for the
231 title and year, and accept search results with only one movie listed
232 if the year matches. This allow me to automatically use many lists of
233 movies without IMDB title ID references at the cost of increasing the
234 risk of wrongly identify a IMDB title ID as public domain. So far my
235 random manual checks have indicated that the method is solid, but I
236 really wish all lists of public domain movies would include unique
237 movie identifier like the IMDB title ID. It would make the job of
238 counting movies in the public domain a lot easier.
</p
>
240 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
241 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
242 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
247 <title>Cura, the nice
3D print slicer, is now in Debian Unstable
</title>
248 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Cura__the_nice_3D_print_slicer__is_now_in_Debian_Unstable.html
</link>
249 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Cura__the_nice_3D_print_slicer__is_now_in_Debian_Unstable.html
</guid>
250 <pubDate>Sun,
17 Dec
2017 07:
00:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
251 <description><p
>After several months of working and waiting, I am happy to report
252 that the nice and user friendly
3D printer slicer software Cura just
253 entered Debian Unstable. It consist of five packages,
254 <a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cura
">cura
</a
>,
255 <a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cura-engine
">cura-engine
</a
>,
256 <a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/libarcus
">libarcus
</a
>,
257 <a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/fdm-materials
">fdm-materials
</a
>,
258 <a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/libsavitar
">libsavitar
</a
> and
259 <a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/uranium
">uranium
</a
>. The last
260 two, uranium and cura, entered Unstable yesterday. This should make
261 it easier for Debian users to print on at least the Ultimaker class of
262 3D printers. My nearest
3D printer is an Ultimaker
2+, so it will
263 make life easier for at least me. :)
</p
>
265 <p
>The work to make this happen was done by Gregor Riepl, and I was
266 happy to assist him in sponsoring the packages. With the introduction
267 of Cura, Debian is up to three
3D printer slicers at your service,
268 Cura, Slic3r and Slic3r Prusa. If you own or have access to a
3D
269 printer, give it a go. :)
</p
>
271 <p
>The
3D printer software is maintained by the
3D printer Debian
272 team, flocking together on the
273 <a href=
"http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/
3dprinter-general
">3dprinter-general
</a
>
275 <a href=
"irc://irc.debian.org/#debian-
3dprinting
">#debian-
3dprinting
</a
>
276 IRC channel.
</p
>
278 <p
>The next step for Cura in Debian is to update the cura package to
279 version
3.0.3 and then update the entire set of packages to version
280 3.1.0 which showed up the last few days.
</p
>
285 <title>Idea for finding all public domain movies in the USA
</title>
286 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_finding_all_public_domain_movies_in_the_USA.html
</link>
287 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_finding_all_public_domain_movies_in_the_USA.html
</guid>
288 <pubDate>Wed,
13 Dec
2017 10:
15:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
289 <description><p
>While looking at
290 <a href=
"http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/cce/
">the scanned copies
291 for the copyright renewal entries for movies published in the USA
</a
>,
292 an idea occurred to me. The number of renewals are so few per year, it
293 should be fairly quick to transcribe them all and add references to
294 the corresponding IMDB title ID. This would give the (presumably)
295 complete list of movies published
28 years earlier that did _not_
296 enter the public domain for the transcribed year. By fetching the
297 list of USA movies published
28 years earlier and subtract the movies
298 with renewals, we should be left with movies registered in IMDB that
299 are now in the public domain. For the year
1955 (which is the one I
300 have looked at the most), the total number of pages to transcribe is
301 21. For the
28 years from
1950 to
1978, it should be in the range
302 500-
600 pages. It is just a few days of work, and spread among a
303 small group of people it should be doable in a few weeks of spare
306 <p
>A typical copyright renewal entry look like this (the first one
307 listed for
1955):
</p
>
309 <p
><blockquote
>
310 ADAM AND EVIL, a photoplay in seven reels by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
311 Distribution Corp. (c)
17Aug27; L24293. Loew
's Incorporated (PWH);
313 </blockquote
></p
>
315 <p
>The movie title as well as registration and renewal dates are easy
316 enough to locate by a program (split on first comma and look for
317 DDmmmYY). The rest of the text is not required to find the movie in
318 IMDB, but is useful to confirm the correct movie is found. I am not
319 quite sure what the L and R numbers mean, but suspect they are
320 reference numbers into the archive of the US Copyright Office.
</p
>
322 <p
>Tracking down the equivalent IMDB title ID is probably going to be
323 a manual task, but given the year it is fairly easy to search for the
324 movie title using for example
325 <a href=
"http://www.imdb.com/find?q=adam+and+evil+
1927&s=all
">http://www.imdb.com/find?q=adam+and+evil+
1927&s=all
</a
>.
326 Using this search, I find that the equivalent IMDB title ID for the
327 first renewal entry from
1955 is
328 <a href=
"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0017588/
">http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0017588/
</a
>.
</p
>
330 <p
>I suspect the best way to do this would be to make a specialised
331 web service to make it easy for contributors to transcribe and track
332 down IMDB title IDs. In the web service, once a entry is transcribed,
333 the title and year could be extracted from the text, a search in IMDB
334 conducted for the user to pick the equivalent IMDB title ID right
335 away. By spreading out the work among volunteers, it would also be
336 possible to make at least two persons transcribe the same entries to
337 be able to discover any typos introduced. But I will need help to
338 make this happen, as I lack the spare time to do all of this on my
339 own. If you would like to help, please get in touch. Perhaps you can
340 draft a web service for crowd sourcing the task?
</p
>
342 <p
>Note, Project Gutenberg already have some
343 <a href=
"http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=copyright+office+renewals
">transcribed
344 copies of the US Copyright Office renewal protocols
</a
>, but I have
345 not been able to find any film renewals there, so I suspect they only
346 have copies of renewal for written works. I have not been able to find
347 any transcribed versions of movie renewals so far. Perhaps they exist
350 <p
>I would love to figure out methods for finding all the public
351 domain works in other countries too, but it is a lot harder. At least
352 for Norway and Great Britain, such work involve tracking down the
353 people involved in making the movie and figuring out when they died.
354 It is hard enough to figure out who was part of making a movie, but I
355 do not know how to automate such procedure without a registry of every
356 person involved in making movies and their death year.
</p
>
358 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
359 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
360 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
365 <title>Is the short movie «Empty Socks» from
1927 in the public domain or not?
</title>
366 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_the_short_movie__Empty_Socks__from_1927_in_the_public_domain_or_not_.html
</link>
367 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_the_short_movie__Empty_Socks__from_1927_in_the_public_domain_or_not_.html
</guid>
368 <pubDate>Tue,
5 Dec
2017 12:
30:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
369 <description><p
>Three years ago, a presumed lost animation film,
370 <a href=
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empty_Socks
">Empty Socks from
371 1927</a
>, was discovered in the Norwegian National Library. At the
372 time it was discovered, it was generally assumed to be copyrighted by
373 The Walt Disney Company, and I blogged about
374 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Opphavsretts_status_for__Empty_Socks__fra_1927_.html
">my
375 reasoning to conclude
</a
> that it would would enter the Norwegian
376 equivalent of the public domain in
2053, based on my understanding of
377 Norwegian Copyright Law. But a few days ago, I came across
378 <a href=
"http://www.toonzone.net/forums/threads/exposed-disneys-repurchase-of-oswald-the-rabbit-a-sham
.4792291/
">a
379 blog post claiming the movie was already in the public domain
</a
>, at
380 least in USA. The reasoning is as follows: The film was released in
381 November or Desember
1927 (sources disagree), and presumably
382 registered its copyright that year. At that time, right holders of
383 movies registered by the copyright office received government
384 protection for there work for
28 years. After
28 years, the copyright
385 had to be renewed if the wanted the government to protect it further.
386 The blog post I found claim such renewal did not happen for this
387 movie, and thus it entered the public domain in
1956. Yet someone
388 claim the copyright was renewed and the movie is still copyright
389 protected. Can anyone help me to figure out which claim is correct?
390 I have not been able to find Empty Socks in Catalog of copyright
391 entries. Ser
.3 pt
.12-
13 v
.9-
12 1955-
1958 Motion Pictures
392 <a href=
"http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/cce/
1955r.html#film
">available
393 from the University of Pennsylvania
</a
>, neither in
394 <a href=
"https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp
.39015084451130;page=root;view=image;size=
100;seq=
83;num=
45">page
395 45 for the first half of
1955</a
>, nor in
396 <a href=
"https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp
.39015084451130;page=root;view=image;size=
100;seq=
175;num=
119">page
397 119 for the second half of
1955</a
>. It is of course possible that
398 the renewal entry was left out of the printed catalog by mistake. Is
399 there some way to rule out this possibility? Please help, and update
400 the wikipedia page with your findings.
402 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
403 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
404 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
409 <title>Metadata proposal for movies on the Internet Archive
</title>
410 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Metadata_proposal_for_movies_on_the_Internet_Archive.html
</link>
411 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Metadata_proposal_for_movies_on_the_Internet_Archive.html
</guid>
412 <pubDate>Tue,
28 Nov
2017 12:
00:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
413 <description><p
>It would be easier to locate the movie you want to watch in
414 <a href=
"https://www.archive.org/
">the Internet Archive
</a
>, if the
415 metadata about each movie was more complete and accurate. In the
416 archiving community, a well known saying state that good metadata is a
417 love letter to the future. The metadata in the Internet Archive could
418 use a face lift for the future to love us back. Here is a proposal
419 for a small improvement that would make the metadata more useful
420 today. I
've been unable to find any document describing the various
421 standard fields available when uploading videos to the archive, so
422 this proposal is based on my best quess and searching through several
423 of the existing movies.
</p
>
425 <p
>I have a few use cases in mind. First of all, I would like to be
426 able to count the number of distinct movies in the Internet Archive,
427 without duplicates. I would further like to identify the IMDB title
428 ID of the movies in the Internet Archive, to be able to look up a IMDB
429 title ID and know if I can fetch the video from there and share it
430 with my friends.
</p
>
432 <p
>Second, I would like the Butter data provider for The Internet
434 (
<a href=
"https://github.com/butterproviders/butter-provider-archive
">available
435 from github
</a
>), to list as many of the good movies as possible. The
436 plugin currently do a search in the archive with the following
437 parameters:
</p
>
440 collection:moviesandfilms
441 AND NOT collection:movie_trailers
442 AND -mediatype:collection
443 AND format:
"Archive BitTorrent
"
445 </pre
></p
>
447 <p
>Most of the cool movies that fail to show up in Butter do so
448 because the
'year
' field is missing. The
'year
' field is populated by
449 the year part from the
'date
' field, and should be when the movie was
450 released (date or year). Two such examples are
451 <a href=
"https://archive.org/details/SidneyOlcottsBen-hur1905
">Ben Hur
452 from
1905</a
> and
453 <a href=
"https://archive.org/details/Caminandes2GranDillama
">Caminandes
454 2: Gran Dillama from
2013</a
>, where the year metadata field is
457 So, my proposal is simply, for every movie in The Internet Archive
458 where an IMDB title ID exist, please fill in these metadata fields
459 (note, they can be updated also long after the video was uploaded, but
460 as far as I can tell, only by the uploader):
464 <dt
>mediatype
</dt
>
465 <dd
>Should be
'movie
' for movies.
</dd
>
467 <dt
>collection
</dt
>
468 <dd
>Should contain
'moviesandfilms
'.
</dd
>
470 <dt
>title
</dt
>
471 <dd
>The title of the movie, without the publication year.
</dd
>
473 <dt
>date
</dt
>
474 <dd
>The data or year the movie was released. This make the movie show
475 up in Butter, as well as make it possible to know the age of the
476 movie and is useful to figure out copyright status.
</dd
>
478 <dt
>director
</dt
>
479 <dd
>The director of the movie. This make it easier to know if the
480 correct movie is found in movie databases.
</dd
>
482 <dt
>publisher
</dt
>
483 <dd
>The production company making the movie. Also useful for
484 identifying the correct movie.
</dd
>
486 <dt
>links
</dt
>
488 <dd
>Add a link to the IMDB title page, for example like this:
&lt;a
489 href=
"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0028496/
"&gt;Movie in
490 IMDB
&lt;/a
&gt;. This make it easier to find duplicates and allow for
491 counting of number of unique movies in the Archive. Other external
492 references, like to TMDB, could be added like this too.
</dd
>
496 <p
>I did consider proposing a Custom field for the IMDB title ID (for
497 example
'imdb_title_url
',
'imdb_code
' or simply
'imdb
', but suspect it
498 will be easier to simply place it in the links free text field.
</p
>
501 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/public-domain-free-imdb
">a
502 list of IMDB title IDs for several thousand movies in the Internet
503 Archive
</a
>, but I also got a list of several thousand movies without
504 such IMDB title ID (and quite a few duplicates). It would be great if
505 this data set could be integrated into the Internet Archive metadata
506 to be available for everyone in the future, but with the current
507 policy of leaving metadata editing to the uploaders, it will take a
508 while before this happen. If you have uploaded movies into the
509 Internet Archive, you can help. Please consider following my proposal
510 above for your movies, to ensure that movie is properly
511 counted. :)
</p
>
513 <p
>The list is mostly generated using wikidata, which based on
514 Wikipedia articles make it possible to link between IMDB and movies in
515 the Internet Archive. But there are lots of movies without a
516 Wikipedia article, and some movies where only a collection page exist
517 (like for
<a href=
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caminandes
">the
518 Caminandes example above
</a
>, where there are three movies but only
519 one Wikidata entry).
</p
>
521 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
522 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
523 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
528 <title>Legal to share more than
3000 movies listed on IMDB?
</title>
529 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Legal_to_share_more_than_3000_movies_listed_on_IMDB_.html
</link>
530 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Legal_to_share_more_than_3000_movies_listed_on_IMDB_.html
</guid>
531 <pubDate>Sat,
18 Nov
2017 21:
20:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
532 <description><p
>A month ago, I blogged about my work to
533 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Locating_IMDB_IDs_of_movies_in_the_Internet_Archive_using_Wikidata.html
">automatically
534 check the copyright status of IMDB entries
</a
>, and try to count the
535 number of movies listed in IMDB that is legal to distribute on the
536 Internet. I have continued to look for good data sources, and
537 identified a few more. The code used to extract information from
538 various data sources is available in
539 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/public-domain-free-imdb
">a
540 git repository
</a
>, currently available from github.
</p
>
542 <p
>So far I have identified
3186 unique IMDB title IDs. To gain
543 better understanding of the structure of the data set, I created a
544 histogram of the year associated with each movie (typically release
545 year). It is interesting to notice where the peaks and dips in the
546 graph are located. I wonder why they are placed there. I suspect
547 World War II caused the dip around
1940, but what caused the peak
548 around
2010?
</p
>
550 <p align=
"center
"><img src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2017-
11-
18-verk-i-det-fri-filmer.png
" /
></p
>
552 <p
>I
've so far identified ten sources for IMDB title IDs for movies in
553 the public domain or with a free license. This is the statistics
554 reported when running
'make stats
' in the git repository:
</p
>
557 249 entries (
6 unique) with and
288 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-archive-org-butter.json
558 2301 entries (
540 unique) with and
0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-archive-org-wikidata.json
559 830 entries (
29 unique) with and
0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-icheckmovies-archive-mochard.json
560 2109 entries (
377 unique) with and
0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-imdb-pd.json
561 291 entries (
122 unique) with and
0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-letterboxd-pd.json
562 144 entries (
135 unique) with and
0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-manual.json
563 350 entries (
1 unique) with and
801 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomainmovies.json
564 4 entries (
0 unique) with and
124 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomainreview.json
565 698 entries (
119 unique) with and
118 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomaintorrents.json
566 8 entries (
8 unique) with and
196 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-vodo.json
567 3186 unique IMDB title IDs in total
570 <p
>The entries without IMDB title ID are candidates to increase the
571 data set, but might equally well be duplicates of entries already
572 listed with IMDB title ID in one of the other sources, or represent
573 movies that lack a IMDB title ID. I
've seen examples of all these
574 situations when peeking at the entries without IMDB title ID. Based
575 on these data sources, the lower bound for movies listed in IMDB that
576 are legal to distribute on the Internet is between
3186 and
4713.
578 <p
>It would be great for improving the accuracy of this measurement,
579 if the various sources added IMDB title ID to their metadata. I have
580 tried to reach the people behind the various sources to ask if they
581 are interested in doing this, without any replies so far. Perhaps you
582 can help me get in touch with the people behind VODO, Public Domain
583 Torrents, Public Domain Movies and Public Domain Review to try to
584 convince them to add more metadata to their movie entries?
</p
>
586 <p
>Another way you could help is by adding pages to Wikipedia about
587 movies that are legal to distribute on the Internet. If such page
588 exist and include a link to both IMDB and The Internet Archive, the
589 script used to generate free-movies-archive-org-wikidata.json should
590 pick up the mapping as soon as wikidata is updates.
</p
>
592 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
593 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
594 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
599 <title>Some notes on fault tolerant storage systems
</title>
600 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_notes_on_fault_tolerant_storage_systems.html
</link>
601 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_notes_on_fault_tolerant_storage_systems.html
</guid>
602 <pubDate>Wed,
1 Nov
2017 15:
35:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
603 <description><p
>If you care about how fault tolerant your storage is, you might
604 find these articles and papers interesting. They have formed how I
605 think of when designing a storage system.
</p
>
609 <li
>USENIX :login;
<a
610 href=
"https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/summer2017/ganesan
">Redundancy
611 Does Not Imply Fault Tolerance. Analysis of Distributed Storage
612 Reactions to Single Errors and Corruptions
</a
> by Aishwarya Ganesan,
613 Ramnatthan Alagappan, Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau, and Remzi
614 H. Arpaci-Dusseau
</li
>
617 <a href=
"http://www.zdnet.com/article/why-raid-
5-stops-working-in-
2009/
">Why
618 RAID
5 stops working in
2009</a
> by Robin Harris
</li
>
621 <a href=
"http://www.zdnet.com/article/why-raid-
6-stops-working-in-
2019/
">Why
622 RAID
6 stops working in
2019</a
> by Robin Harris
</li
>
624 <li
>USENIX FAST
'07
625 <a href=
"http://research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf
">Failure
626 Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population
</a
> by Eduardo Pinheiro,
627 Wolf-Dietrich Weber and Luiz André Barroso
</li
>
629 <li
>USENIX ;login:
<a
630 href=
"https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/articles/hughes12-
04.pdf
">Data
631 Integrity. Finding Truth in a World of Guesses and Lies
</a
> by Doug
634 <li
>USENIX FAST
'08
635 <a href=
"https://www.usenix.org/events/fast08/tech/full_papers/bairavasundaram/bairavasundaram_html/
">An
636 Analysis of Data Corruption in the Storage Stack
</a
> by
637 L. N. Bairavasundaram, G. R. Goodson, B. Schroeder, A. C.
638 Arpaci-Dusseau, and R. H. Arpaci-Dusseau
</li
>
640 <li
>USENIX FAST
'07 <a
641 href=
"https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/fast07/tech/schroeder/schroeder_html/
">Disk
642 failures in the real world: what does an MTTF of
1,
000,
000 hours mean
643 to you?
</a
> by B. Schroeder and G. A. Gibson.
</li
>
645 <li
>USENIX ;login:
<a
646 href=
"https://www.usenix.org/events/fast08/tech/full_papers/jiang/jiang_html/
">Are
647 Disks the Dominant Contributor for Storage Failures? A Comprehensive
648 Study of Storage Subsystem Failure Characteristics
</a
> by Weihang
649 Jiang, Chongfeng Hu, Yuanyuan Zhou, and Arkady Kanevsky
</li
>
651 <li
>SIGMETRICS
2007
652 <a href=
"http://research.cs.wisc.edu/adsl/Publications/latent-sigmetrics07.pdf
">An
653 analysis of latent sector errors in disk drives
</a
> by
654 L. N. Bairavasundaram, G. R. Goodson, S. Pasupathy, and J. Schindler
</li
>
658 <p
>Several of these research papers are based on data collected from
659 hundred thousands or millions of disk, and their findings are eye
660 opening. The short story is simply do not implicitly trust RAID or
661 redundant storage systems. Details matter. And unfortunately there
662 are few options on Linux addressing all the identified issues. Both
663 ZFS and Btrfs are doing a fairly good job, but have legal and
664 practical issues on their own. I wonder how cluster file systems like
665 Ceph do in this regard. After all, there is an old saying, you know
666 you have a distributed system when the crash of a computer you have
667 never heard of stops you from getting any work done. The same holds
668 true if fault tolerance do not work.
</p
>
670 <p
>Just remember, in the end, it do not matter how redundant, or how
671 fault tolerant your storage is, if you do not continuously monitor its
672 status to detect and replace failed disks.
</p
>
674 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
675 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
676 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
681 <title>Web services for writing academic LaTeX papers as a team
</title>
682 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Web_services_for_writing_academic_LaTeX_papers_as_a_team.html
</link>
683 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Web_services_for_writing_academic_LaTeX_papers_as_a_team.html
</guid>
684 <pubDate>Tue,
31 Oct
2017 21:
00:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
685 <description><p
>I was surprised today to learn that a friend in academia did not
686 know there are easily available web services available for writing
687 LaTeX documents as a team. I thought it was common knowledge, but to
688 make sure at least my readers are aware of it, I would like to mention
689 these useful services for writing LaTeX documents. Some of them even
690 provide a WYSIWYG editor to ease writing even further.
</p
>
692 <p
>There are two commercial services available,
693 <a href=
"https://sharelatex.com
">ShareLaTeX
</a
> and
694 <a href=
"https://overleaf.com
">Overleaf
</a
>. They are very easy to
695 use. Just start a new document, select which publisher to write for
696 (ie which LaTeX style to use), and start writing. Note, these two
697 have announced their intention to join forces, so soon it will only be
698 one joint service. I
've used both for different documents, and they
699 work just fine. While
700 <a href=
"https://github.com/sharelatex/sharelatex
">ShareLaTeX is free
701 software
</a
>, while the latter is not. According to
<a
702 href=
"https://www.overleaf.com/help/
17-is-overleaf-open-source
">a
703 announcement from Overleaf
</a
>, they plan to keep the ShareLaTeX code
704 base maintained as free software.
</p
>
706 But these two are not the only alternatives.
707 <a href=
"https://app.fiduswriter.org/
">Fidus Writer
</a
> is another free
708 software solution with
<a href=
"https://github.com/fiduswriter
">the
709 source available on github
</a
>. I have not used it myself. Several
710 others can be found on the nice
711 <a href=
"https://alternativeto.net/software/sharelatex/
">alterntiveTo
712 web service
</a
>.
714 <p
>If you like Google Docs or Etherpad, but would like to write
715 documents in LaTeX, you should check out these services. You can even
716 host your own, if you want to. :)
</p
>
718 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
719 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
720 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
725 <title>Locating IMDB IDs of movies in the Internet Archive using Wikidata
</title>
726 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Locating_IMDB_IDs_of_movies_in_the_Internet_Archive_using_Wikidata.html
</link>
727 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Locating_IMDB_IDs_of_movies_in_the_Internet_Archive_using_Wikidata.html
</guid>
728 <pubDate>Wed,
25 Oct
2017 12:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
729 <description><p
>Recently, I needed to automatically check the copyright status of a
730 set of
<a href=
"http://www.imdb.com/
">The Internet Movie database
731 (IMDB)
</a
> entries, to figure out which one of the movies they refer
732 to can be freely distributed on the Internet. This proved to be
733 harder than it sounds. IMDB for sure list movies without any
734 copyright protection, where the copyright protection has expired or
735 where the movie is lisenced using a permissive license like one from
736 Creative Commons. These are mixed with copyright protected movies,
737 and there seem to be no way to separate these classes of movies using
738 the information in IMDB.
</p
>
740 <p
>First I tried to look up entries manually in IMDB,
741 <a href=
"https://www.wikipedia.org/
">Wikipedia
</a
> and
742 <a href=
"https://www.archive.org/
">The Internet Archive
</a
>, to get a
743 feel how to do this. It is hard to know for sure using these sources,
744 but it should be possible to be reasonable confident a movie is
"out
745 of copyright
" with a few hours work per movie. As I needed to check
746 almost
20,
000 entries, this approach was not sustainable. I simply
747 can not work around the clock for about
6 years to check this data
750 <p
>I asked the people behind The Internet Archive if they could
751 introduce a new metadata field in their metadata XML for IMDB ID, but
752 was told that they leave it completely to the uploaders to update the
753 metadata. Some of the metadata entries had IMDB links in the
754 description, but I found no way to download all metadata files in bulk
755 to locate those ones and put that approach aside.
</p
>
757 <p
>In the process I noticed several Wikipedia articles about movies
758 had links to both IMDB and The Internet Archive, and it occured to me
759 that I could use the Wikipedia RDF data set to locate entries with
760 both, to at least get a lower bound on the number of movies on The
761 Internet Archive with a IMDB ID. This is useful based on the
762 assumption that movies distributed by The Internet Archive can be
763 legally distributed on the Internet. With some help from the RDF
764 community (thank you DanC), I was able to come up with this query to
765 pass to
<a href=
"https://query.wikidata.org/
">the SPARQL interface on
769 SELECT ?work ?imdb ?ia ?when ?label
772 ?work wdt:P31/wdt:P279* wd:Q11424.
773 ?work wdt:P345 ?imdb.
776 ?work wdt:P577 ?when.
777 ?work rdfs:label ?label.
778 FILTER(LANG(?label) =
"en
").
781 </pre
></p
>
783 <p
>If I understand the query right, for every film entry anywhere in
784 Wikpedia, it will return the IMDB ID and The Internet Archive ID, and
785 when the movie was released and its English title, if either or both
786 of the latter two are available. At the moment the result set contain
787 2338 entries. Of course, it depend on volunteers including both
788 correct IMDB and The Internet Archive IDs in the wikipedia articles
789 for the movie. It should be noted that the result will include
790 duplicates if the movie have entries in several languages. There are
791 some bogus entries, either because The Internet Archive ID contain a
792 typo or because the movie is not available from The Internet Archive.
793 I did not verify the IMDB IDs, as I am unsure how to do that
794 automatically.
</p
>
796 <p
>I wrote a small python script to extract the data set from Wikidata
797 and check if the XML metadata for the movie is available from The
798 Internet Archive, and after around
1.5 hour it produced a list of
2097
799 free movies and their IMDB ID. In total,
171 entries in Wikidata lack
800 the refered Internet Archive entry. I assume the
70 "disappearing
"
801 entries (ie
2338-
2097-
171) are duplicate entries.
</p
>
803 <p
>This is not too bad, given that The Internet Archive report to
804 contain
<a href=
"https://archive.org/details/feature_films
">5331
805 feature films
</a
> at the moment, but it also mean more than
3000
806 movies are missing on Wikipedia or are missing the pair of references
807 on Wikipedia.
</p
>
809 <p
>I was curious about the distribution by release year, and made a
810 little graph to show how the amount of free movies is spread over the
813 <p
><img src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2017-
10-
25-verk-i-det-fri-filmer.png
"></p
>
815 <p
>I expect the relative distribution of the remaining
3000 movies to
816 be similar.
</p
>
818 <p
>If you want to help, and want to ensure Wikipedia can be used to
819 cross reference The Internet Archive and The Internet Movie Database,
820 please make sure entries like this are listed under the
"External
821 links
" heading on the Wikipedia article for the movie:
</p
>
824 * {{Internet Archive film|id=FightingLady}}
825 * {{IMDb title|id=
0036823|title=The Fighting Lady}}
826 </pre
></p
>
828 <p
>Please verify the links on the final page, to make sure you did not
829 introduce a typo.
</p
>
831 <p
>Here is the complete list, if you want to correct the
171
832 identified Wikipedia entries with broken links to The Internet
833 Archive:
<a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1140317
">Q1140317
</a
>,
834 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q458656
">Q458656
</a
>,
835 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q458656
">Q458656
</a
>,
836 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q470560
">Q470560
</a
>,
837 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q743340
">Q743340
</a
>,
838 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q822580
">Q822580
</a
>,
839 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q480696
">Q480696
</a
>,
840 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q128761
">Q128761
</a
>,
841 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1307059
">Q1307059
</a
>,
842 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1335091
">Q1335091
</a
>,
843 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1537166
">Q1537166
</a
>,
844 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1438334
">Q1438334
</a
>,
845 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1479751
">Q1479751
</a
>,
846 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1497200
">Q1497200
</a
>,
847 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1498122
">Q1498122
</a
>,
848 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q865973
">Q865973
</a
>,
849 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q834269
">Q834269
</a
>,
850 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q841781
">Q841781
</a
>,
851 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q841781
">Q841781
</a
>,
852 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1548193
">Q1548193
</a
>,
853 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q499031
">Q499031
</a
>,
854 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1564769
">Q1564769
</a
>,
855 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1585239
">Q1585239
</a
>,
856 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1585569
">Q1585569
</a
>,
857 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1624236
">Q1624236
</a
>,
858 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4796595
">Q4796595
</a
>,
859 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4853469
">Q4853469
</a
>,
860 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4873046
">Q4873046
</a
>,
861 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q915016
">Q915016
</a
>,
862 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4660396
">Q4660396
</a
>,
863 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4677708
">Q4677708
</a
>,
864 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4738449
">Q4738449
</a
>,
865 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4756096
">Q4756096
</a
>,
866 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4766785
">Q4766785
</a
>,
867 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q880357
">Q880357
</a
>,
868 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q882066
">Q882066
</a
>,
869 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q882066
">Q882066
</a
>,
870 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q204191
">Q204191
</a
>,
871 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q204191
">Q204191
</a
>,
872 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1194170
">Q1194170
</a
>,
873 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q940014
">Q940014
</a
>,
874 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q946863
">Q946863
</a
>,
875 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q172837
">Q172837
</a
>,
876 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q573077
">Q573077
</a
>,
877 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1219005
">Q1219005
</a
>,
878 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1219599
">Q1219599
</a
>,
879 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1643798
">Q1643798
</a
>,
880 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1656352
">Q1656352
</a
>,
881 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1659549
">Q1659549
</a
>,
882 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1660007
">Q1660007
</a
>,
883 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1698154
">Q1698154
</a
>,
884 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1737980
">Q1737980
</a
>,
885 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1877284
">Q1877284
</a
>,
886 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1199354
">Q1199354
</a
>,
887 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1199354
">Q1199354
</a
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888 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1199451
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889 <a href=
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890 <a href=
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891 <a href=
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892 <a href=
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">Q4906454
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893 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q320219
">Q320219
</a
>,
894 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1148649
">Q1148649
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>,
895 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q645094
">Q645094
</a
>,
896 <a href=
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>,
897 <a href=
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898 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2677926
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>,
900 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2707305
">Q2707305
</a
>,
901 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2740725
">Q2740725
</a
>,
902 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2024780
">Q2024780
</a
>,
903 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2117418
">Q2117418
</a
>,
904 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2138984
">Q2138984
</a
>,
905 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1127992
">Q1127992
</a
>,
906 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1058087
">Q1058087
</a
>,
907 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1070484
">Q1070484
</a
>,
908 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1080080
">Q1080080
</a
>,
909 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1090813
">Q1090813
</a
>,
910 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1251918
">Q1251918
</a
>,
911 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1254110
">Q1254110
</a
>,
912 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1257070
">Q1257070
</a
>,
913 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1257079
">Q1257079
</a
>,
914 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1197410
">Q1197410
</a
>,
915 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1198423
">Q1198423
</a
>,
916 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q706951
">Q706951
</a
>,
917 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q723239
">Q723239
</a
>,
918 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2079261
">Q2079261
</a
>,
919 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1171364
">Q1171364
</a
>,
920 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q617858
">Q617858
</a
>,
921 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5166611
">Q5166611
</a
>,
922 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5166611
">Q5166611
</a
>,
923 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q324513
">Q324513
</a
>,
924 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q374172
">Q374172
</a
>,
925 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7533269
">Q7533269
</a
>,
926 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q970386
">Q970386
</a
>,
927 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q976849
">Q976849
</a
>,
928 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7458614
">Q7458614
</a
>,
929 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5347416
">Q5347416
</a
>,
930 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5460005
">Q5460005
</a
>,
931 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5463392
">Q5463392
</a
>,
932 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3038555
">Q3038555
</a
>,
933 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5288458
">Q5288458
</a
>,
934 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2346516
">Q2346516
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>,
935 <a href=
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>,
936 <a href=
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">Q5185497
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>,
937 <a href=
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>,
938 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5223127
">Q5223127
</a
>,
939 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5261159
">Q5261159
</a
>,
940 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1300759
">Q1300759
</a
>,
941 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5521241
">Q5521241
</a
>,
942 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7733434
">Q7733434
</a
>,
943 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7736264
">Q7736264
</a
>,
944 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7737032
">Q7737032
</a
>,
945 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7882671
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</a
>,
946 <a href=
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>,
947 <a href=
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948 <a href=
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>,
949 <a href=
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>,
950 <a href=
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951 <a href=
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">Q2649671
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>,
952 <a href=
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953 <a href=
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>,
954 <a href=
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955 <a href=
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956 <a href=
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957 <a href=
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958 <a href=
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>,
959 <a href=
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</a
>,
960 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2517672
">Q2517672
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>,
961 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2543165
">Q2543165
</a
>,
962 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q426628
">Q426628
</a
>,
963 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q426628
">Q426628
</a
>,
964 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q12126890
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>,
965 <a href=
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</a
>,
966 <a href=
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</a
>,
967 <a href=
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>,
968 <a href=
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</a
>,
969 <a href=
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</a
>,
970 <a href=
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971 <a href=
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>,
972 <a href=
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973 <a href=
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975 <a href=
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976 <a href=
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977 <a href=
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978 <a href=
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</a
>,
979 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3212086
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</a
>,
980 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3212086
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</a
>,
981 <a href=
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</a
>,
982 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q18218448
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</a
>,
983 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q18218448
">Q18218448
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984 <a href=
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985 <a href=
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</a
>,
986 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7416149
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</a
>,
987 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7239952
">Q7239952
</a
>,
988 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7317332
">Q7317332
</a
>,
989 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7783674
">Q7783674
</a
>,
990 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7783704
">Q7783704
</a
>,
991 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7857590
">Q7857590
</a
>,
992 <a href=
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">Q3372526
</a
>,
993 <a href=
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">Q3372642
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>,
994 <a href=
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">Q3372816
</a
>,
995 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3372909
">Q3372909
</a
>,
996 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7959649
">Q7959649
</a
>,
997 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7977485
">Q7977485
</a
>,
998 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7992684
">Q7992684
</a
>,
999 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3817966
">Q3817966
</a
>,
1000 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3821852
">Q3821852
</a
>,
1001 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3420907
">Q3420907
</a
>,
1002 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3429733
">Q3429733
</a
>,
1003 <a href=
"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q774474
">Q774474
</a
></p
>
1005 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1006 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1007 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
1012 <title>A one-way wall on the border?
</title>
1013 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_one_way_wall_on_the_border_.html
</link>
1014 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_one_way_wall_on_the_border_.html
</guid>
1015 <pubDate>Sat,
14 Oct
2017 22:
10:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
1016 <description><p
>I find it fascinating how many of the people being locked inside
1017 the proposed border wall between USA and Mexico support the idea. The
1018 proposal to keep Mexicans out reminds me of
1019 <a href=
"http://www.history.com/news/
10-things-you-may-not-know-about-the-berlin-wall
">the
1020 propaganda twist from the East Germany government
</a
> calling the wall
1021 the “Antifascist Bulwark” after erecting the Berlin Wall, claiming
1022 that the wall was erected to keep enemies from creeping into East
1023 Germany, while it was obvious to the people locked inside it that it
1024 was erected to keep the people from escaping.
</p
>
1026 <p
>Do the people in USA supporting this wall really believe it is a
1027 one way wall, only keeping people on the outside from getting in,
1028 while not keeping people in the inside from getting out?
</p
>
1030 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1031 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1032 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
1037 <title>Generating
3D prints in Debian using Cura and Slic3r(-prusa)
</title>
1038 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Generating_3D_prints_in_Debian_using_Cura_and_Slic3r__prusa_.html
</link>
1039 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Generating_3D_prints_in_Debian_using_Cura_and_Slic3r__prusa_.html
</guid>
1040 <pubDate>Mon,
9 Oct
2017 10:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
1041 <description><p
>At my nearby maker space,
1042 <a href=
"http://sonen.ifi.uio.no/
">Sonen
</a
>, I heard the story that it
1043 was easier to generate gcode files for theyr
3D printers (Ultimake
2+)
1044 on Windows and MacOS X than Linux, because the software involved had
1045 to be manually compiled and set up on Linux while premade packages
1046 worked out of the box on Windows and MacOS X. I found this annoying,
1047 as the software involved,
1048 <a href=
"https://github.com/Ultimaker/Cura
">Cura
</a
>, is free software
1049 and should be trivial to get up and running on Linux if someone took
1050 the time to package it for the relevant distributions. I even found
1051 <a href=
"https://bugs.debian.org/
706656">a request for adding into
1052 Debian
</a
> from
2013, which had seem some activity over the years but
1053 never resulted in the software showing up in Debian. So a few days
1054 ago I offered my help to try to improve the situation.
</p
>
1056 <p
>Now I am very happy to see that all the packages required by a
1057 working Cura in Debian are uploaded into Debian and waiting in the NEW
1058 queue for the ftpmasters to have a look. You can track the progress
1060 <a href=
"https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?email=
3dprinter-general%
40lists.alioth.debian.org
">the
1061 status page for the
3D printer team
</a
>.
</p
>
1063 <p
>The uploaded packages are a bit behind upstream, and was uploaded
1064 now to get slots in
<a href=
"https://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html
">the NEW
1065 queue
</a
> while we work up updating the packages to the latest
1066 upstream version.
</p
>
1068 <p
>On a related note, two competitors for Cura, which I found harder
1069 to use and was unable to configure correctly for Ultimaker
2+ in the
1070 short time I spent on it, are already in Debian. If you are looking
1071 for
3D printer
"slicers
" and want something already available in
1073 <a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/slic3r
">slic3r
</a
> and
1074 <a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/slic3r-prusa
">slic3r-prusa
</a
>.
1075 The latter is a fork of the former.
</p
>
1077 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1078 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1079 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
1084 <title>Visualizing GSM radio chatter using gr-gsm and Hopglass
</title>
1085 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Visualizing_GSM_radio_chatter_using_gr_gsm_and_Hopglass.html
</link>
1086 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Visualizing_GSM_radio_chatter_using_gr_gsm_and_Hopglass.html
</guid>
1087 <pubDate>Fri,
29 Sep
2017 10:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
1088 <description><p
>Every mobile phone announce its existence over radio to the nearby
1089 mobile cell towers. And this radio chatter is available for anyone
1090 with a radio receiver capable of receiving them. Details about the
1091 mobile phones with very good accuracy is of course collected by the
1092 phone companies, but this is not the topic of this blog post. The
1093 mobile phone radio chatter make it possible to figure out when a cell
1094 phone is nearby, as it include the SIM card ID (IMSI). By paying
1095 attention over time, one can see when a phone arrive and when it leave
1096 an area. I believe it would be nice to make this information more
1097 available to the general public, to make more people aware of how
1098 their phones are announcing their whereabouts to anyone that care to
1101 <p
>I am very happy to report that we managed to get something
1102 visualizing this information up and running for
1103 <a href=
"http://norwaymakers.org/osf17
">Oslo Skaperfestival
2017</a
>
1104 (Oslo Makers Festival) taking place today and tomorrow at Deichmanske
1105 library. The solution is based on the
1106 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Easier_recipe_to_observe_the_cell_phones_around_you.html
">simple
1107 recipe for listening to GSM chatter
</a
> I posted a few days ago, and
1108 will show up at the stand of
<a href=
"http://sonen.ifi.uio.no/
">Åpen
1109 Sone from the Computer Science department of the University of
1110 Oslo
</a
>. The presentation will show the nearby mobile phones (aka
1111 IMSIs) as dots in a web browser graph, with lines to the dot
1112 representing mobile base station it is talking to. It was working in
1113 the lab yesterday, and was moved into place this morning.
</p
>
1115 <p
>We set up a fairly powerful desktop machine using Debian
1116 Buster/Testing with several (five, I believe) RTL2838 DVB-T receivers
1117 connected and visualize the visible cell phone towers using an
1118 <a href=
"https://github.com/marlow925/hopglass
">English version of
1119 Hopglass
</a
>. A fairly powerfull machine is needed as the
1120 grgsm_livemon_headless processes from
1121 <a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/gr-gsm
">gr-gsm
</a
> converting
1122 the radio signal to data packages is quite CPU intensive.
</p
>
1124 <p
>The frequencies to listen to, are identified using a slightly
1125 patched scan-and-livemon (to set the --args values for each receiver),
1126 and the Hopglass data is generated using the
1127 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/IMSI-catcher/tree/meshviewer-output
">patches
1128 in my meshviewer-output branch
</a
>. For some reason we could not get
1129 more than four SDRs working. There is also a geographical map trying
1130 to show the location of the base stations, but I believe their
1131 coordinates are hardcoded to some random location in Germany, I
1132 believe. The code should be replaced with code to look up location in
1133 a text file, a sqlite database or one of the online databases
1135 <a href=
"https://github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher/issues/
14">the github
1136 issue for the topic
</a
>.
1138 <p
>If this sound interesting, visit the stand at the festival!
</p
>
1143 <title>Easier recipe to observe the cell phones around you
</title>
1144 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Easier_recipe_to_observe_the_cell_phones_around_you.html
</link>
1145 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Easier_recipe_to_observe_the_cell_phones_around_you.html
</guid>
1146 <pubDate>Sun,
24 Sep
2017 08:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
1147 <description><p
>A little more than a month ago I wrote
1148 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Simpler_recipe_on_how_to_make_a_simple__7_IMSI_Catcher_using_Debian.html
">how
1149 to observe the SIM card ID (aka IMSI number) of mobile phones talking
1150 to nearby mobile phone base stations using Debian GNU/Linux and a
1151 cheap USB software defined radio
</a
>, and thus being able to pinpoint
1152 the location of people and equipment (like cars and trains) with an
1153 accuracy of a few kilometer. Since then we have worked to make the
1154 procedure even simpler, and it is now possible to do this without any
1155 manual frequency tuning and without building your own packages.
</p
>
1157 <p
>The
<a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/gr-gsm
">gr-gsm
</a
>
1158 package is now included in Debian testing and unstable, and the
1159 IMSI-catcher code no longer require root access to fetch and decode
1160 the GSM data collected using gr-gsm.
</p
>
1162 <p
>Here is an updated recipe, using packages built by Debian and a git
1163 clone of two python scripts:
</p
>
1167 <li
>Start with a Debian machine running the Buster version (aka
1168 testing).
</li
>
1170 <li
>Run
'<tt
>apt install gr-gsm python-numpy python-scipy
1171 python-scapy
</tt
>' as root to install required packages.
</li
>
1173 <li
>Fetch the code decoding GSM packages using
'<tt
>git clone
1174 github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher.git
</tt
>'.
</li
>
1176 <li
>Insert USB software defined radio supported by GNU Radio.
</li
>
1178 <li
>Enter the IMSI-catcher directory and run
'<tt
>python
1179 scan-and-livemon
</tt
>' to locate the frequency of nearby base
1180 stations and start listening for GSM packages on one of them.
</li
>
1182 <li
>Enter the IMSI-catcher directory and run
'<tt
>python
1183 simple_IMSI-catcher.py
</tt
>' to display the collected information.
</li
>
1187 <p
>Note, due to a bug somewhere the scan-and-livemon program (actually
1188 <a href=
"https://github.com/ptrkrysik/gr-gsm/issues/
336">its underlying
1189 program grgsm_scanner
</a
>) do not work with the HackRF radio. It does
1190 work with RTL
8232 and other similar USB radio receivers you can get
1192 (
<a href=
"https://www.ebay.com/sch/items/?_nkw=rtl+
2832">for example
1193 from ebay
</a
>), so for now the solution is to scan using the RTL radio
1194 and only use HackRF for fetching GSM data.
</p
>
1196 <p
>As far as I can tell, a cell phone only show up on one of the
1197 frequencies at the time, so if you are going to track and count every
1198 cell phone around you, you need to listen to all the frequencies used.
1199 To listen to several frequencies, use the --numrecv argument to
1200 scan-and-livemon to use several receivers. Further, I am not sure if
1201 phones using
3G or
4G will show as talking GSM to base stations, so
1202 this approach might not see all phones around you. I typically see
1203 0-
400 IMSI numbers an hour when looking around where I live.
</p
>
1205 <p
>I
've tried to run the scanner on a
1206 <a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi
">Raspberry Pi
2 and
3
1207 running Debian Buster
</a
>, but the grgsm_livemon_headless process seem
1208 to be too CPU intensive to keep up. When GNU Radio print
'O
' to
1209 stdout, I am told there it is caused by a buffer overflow between the
1210 radio and GNU Radio, caused by the program being unable to read the
1211 GSM data fast enough. If you see a stream of
'O
's from the terminal
1212 where you started scan-and-livemon, you need a give the process more
1213 CPU power. Perhaps someone are able to optimize the code to a point
1214 where it become possible to set up RPi3 based GSM sniffers? I tried
1215 using Raspbian instead of Debian, but there seem to be something wrong
1216 with GNU Radio on raspbian, causing glibc to abort().
</p
>
1221 <title>Simpler recipe on how to make a simple $
7 IMSI Catcher using Debian
</title>
1222 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Simpler_recipe_on_how_to_make_a_simple__7_IMSI_Catcher_using_Debian.html
</link>
1223 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Simpler_recipe_on_how_to_make_a_simple__7_IMSI_Catcher_using_Debian.html
</guid>
1224 <pubDate>Wed,
9 Aug
2017 23:
59:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
1225 <description><p
>On friday, I came across an interesting article in the Norwegian
1226 web based ICT news magazine digi.no on
1227 <a href=
"https://www.digi.no/artikler/sikkerhetsforsker-lagde-enkel-imsi-catcher-for-
60-kroner-na-kan-mobiler-kartlegges-av-alle/
398588">how
1228 to collect the IMSI numbers of nearby cell phones
</a
> using the cheap
1229 DVB-T software defined radios. The article refered to instructions
1230 and
<a href=
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjwgNd_as30
">a recipe by
1231 Keld Norman on Youtube on how to make a simple $
7 IMSI Catcher
</a
>, and I decided to test them out.
</p
>
1233 <p
>The instructions said to use Ubuntu, install pip using apt (to
1234 bypass apt), use pip to install pybombs (to bypass both apt and pip),
1235 and the ask pybombs to fetch and build everything you need from
1236 scratch. I wanted to see if I could do the same on the most recent
1237 Debian packages, but this did not work because pybombs tried to build
1238 stuff that no longer build with the most recent openssl library or
1239 some other version skew problem. While trying to get this recipe
1240 working, I learned that the apt-
>pip-
>pybombs route was a long detour,
1241 and the only piece of software dependency missing in Debian was the
1242 gr-gsm package. I also found out that the lead upstream developer of
1243 gr-gsm (the name stand for GNU Radio GSM) project already had a set of
1244 Debian packages provided in an Ubuntu PPA repository. All I needed to
1245 do was to dget the Debian source package and built it.
</p
>
1247 <p
>The IMSI collector is a python script listening for packages on the
1248 loopback network device and printing to the terminal some specific GSM
1249 packages with IMSI numbers in them. The code is fairly short and easy
1250 to understand. The reason this work is because gr-gsm include a tool
1251 to read GSM data from a software defined radio like a DVB-T USB stick
1252 and other software defined radios, decode them and inject them into a
1253 network device on your Linux machine (using the loopback device by
1254 default). This proved to work just fine, and I
've been testing the
1255 collector for a few days now.
</p
>
1257 <p
>The updated and simpler recipe is thus to
</p
>
1261 <li
>start with a Debian machine running Stretch or newer,
</li
>
1263 <li
>build and install the gr-gsm package available from
1264 <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
>
1266 <li
>clone the git repostory from
<a href=
"https://github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher
">https://github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher
</a
>,
</li
>
1268 <li
>run grgsm_livemon and adjust the frequency until the terminal
1269 where it was started is filled with a stream of text (meaning you
1270 found a GSM station).
</li
>
1272 <li
>go into the IMSI-catcher directory and run
'sudo python simple_IMSI-catcher.py
' to extract the IMSI numbers.
</li
>
1276 <p
>To make it even easier in the future to get this sniffer up and
1277 running, I decided to package
1278 <a href=
"https://github.com/ptrkrysik/gr-gsm/
">the gr-gsm project
</a
>
1279 for Debian (
<a href=
"https://bugs.debian.org/
871055">WNPP
1280 #
871055</a
>), and the package was uploaded into the NEW queue today.
1281 Luckily the gnuradio maintainer has promised to help me, as I do not
1282 know much about gnuradio stuff yet.
</p
>
1284 <p
>I doubt this
"IMSI cacher
" is anywhere near as powerfull as
1285 commercial tools like
1286 <a href=
"https://www.thespyphone.com/portable-imsi-imei-catcher/
">The
1287 Spy Phone Portable IMSI / IMEI Catcher
</a
> or the
1288 <a href=
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingray_phone_tracker
">Harris
1289 Stingray
</a
>, but I hope the existance of cheap alternatives can make
1290 more people realise how their whereabouts when carrying a cell phone
1291 is easily tracked. Seeing the data flow on the screen, realizing that
1292 I live close to a police station and knowing that the police is also
1293 wearing cell phones, I wonder how hard it would be for criminals to
1294 track the position of the police officers to discover when there are
1295 police near by, or for foreign military forces to track the location
1296 of the Norwegian military forces, or for anyone to track the location
1297 of government officials...
</p
>
1299 <p
>It is worth noting that the data reported by the IMSI-catcher
1300 script mentioned above is only a fraction of the data broadcasted on
1301 the GSM network. It will only collect one frequency at the time,
1302 while a typical phone will be using several frequencies, and not all
1303 phones will be using the frequencies tracked by the grgsm_livemod
1304 program. Also, there is a lot of radio chatter being ignored by the
1305 simple_IMSI-catcher script, which would be collected by extending the
1306 parser code. I wonder if gr-gsm can be set up to listen to more than
1307 one frequency?
</p
>
1312 <title>Norwegian Bokmål edition of Debian Administrator
's Handbook is now available
</title>
1313 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook_is_now_available.html
</link>
1314 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook_is_now_available.html
</guid>
1315 <pubDate>Tue,
25 Jul
2017 21:
10:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
1316 <description><p align=
"center
"><img align=
"center
" src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2017-
07-
25-debian-handbook-nb-testprint.png
"/
></p
>
1318 <p
>I finally received a copy of the Norwegian Bokmål edition of
1319 "<a href=
"https://debian-handbook.info/
">The Debian Administrator
's
1320 Handbook
</a
>". This test copy arrived in the mail a few days ago, and
1321 I am very happy to hold the result in my hand. We spent around one and a half year translating it. This paperbook edition
1322 <a href=
"https://debian-handbook.info/get/#norwegian
">is available
1323 from lulu.com
</a
>. If you buy it quickly, you save
25% on the list
1324 price. The book is also available for download in electronic form as
1325 PDF, EPUB and Mobipocket, as can be
1326 <a href=
"https://debian-handbook.info/browse/nb-NO/stable/
">read online
1327 as a web page
</a
>.
</p
>
1329 <p
>This is the second book I publish (the first was the book
1330 "<a href=
"http://free-culture.cc/
">Free Culture
</a
>" by Lawrence Lessig
1332 <a href=
"http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-
22440520.html
">English
</a
>,
1333 <a href=
"http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/culture-libre/paperback/product-
22645082.html
">French
</a
>
1335 <a href=
"http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/fri-kultur/paperback/product-
22441576.html
">Norwegian
1336 Bokmål
</a
>), and I am very excited to finally wrap up this
1338 "<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
1339 for Debian-administratoren
</a
>" will be well received.
</p
>
1344 <title>Updated sales number for my Free Culture paper editions
</title>
1345 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Updated_sales_number_for_my_Free_Culture_paper_editions.html
</link>
1346 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Updated_sales_number_for_my_Free_Culture_paper_editions.html
</guid>
1347 <pubDate>Mon,
12 Jun
2017 11:
40:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
1348 <description><p
>It is pleasing to see that the work we put down in publishing new
1349 editions of the classic
<a href=
"http://www.free-culture.cc/
">Free
1350 Culture book
</a
> by the founder of the Creative Commons movement,
1351 Lawrence Lessig, is still being appreciated. I had a look at the
1352 latest sales numbers for the paper edition today. Not too impressive,
1353 but happy to see some buyers still exist. All the revenue from the
1354 books is sent to the
<a href=
"https://creativecommons.org/
">Creative
1355 Commons Corporation
</a
>, and they receive the largest cut if you buy
1356 directly from Lulu. Most books are sold via Amazon, with Ingram
1357 second and only a small fraction directly from Lulu. The ebook
1358 edition is available for free from
1359 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig
">Github
</a
>.
</p
>
1361 <table border=
"0">
1362 <tr
><th rowspan=
"2" valign=
"bottom
">Title / language
</th
><th colspan=
"3">Quantity
</th
></tr
>
1363 <tr
><th
>2016 jan-jun
</th
><th
>2016 jul-dec
</th
><th
>2017 jan-may
</th
></tr
>
1366 <td
><a href=
"http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/culture-libre/paperback/product-
22645082.html
">Culture Libre / French
</a
></td
>
1367 <td align=
"right
">3</td
>
1368 <td align=
"right
">6</td
>
1369 <td align=
"right
">15</td
>
1373 <td
><a href=
"http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/fri-kultur/paperback/product-
22441576.html
">Fri kultur / Norwegian
</a
></td
>
1374 <td align=
"right
">7</td
>
1375 <td align=
"right
">1</td
>
1376 <td align=
"right
">0</td
>
1380 <td
><a href=
"http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-
22440520.html
">Free Culture / English
</a
></td
>
1381 <td align=
"right
">14</td
>
1382 <td align=
"right
">27</td
>
1383 <td align=
"right
">16</td
>
1387 <td
>Total
</td
>
1388 <td align=
"right
">24</td
>
1389 <td align=
"right
">34</td
>
1390 <td align=
"right
">31</td
>
1395 <p
>A bit sad to see the low sales number on the Norwegian edition, and
1396 a bit surprising the English edition still selling so well.
</p
>
1398 <p
>If you would like to translate and publish the book in your native
1399 language, I would be happy to help make it happen. Please get in
1405 <title>Release
0.1.1 of free software archive system Nikita announced
</title>
1406 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Release_0_1_1_of_free_software_archive_system_Nikita_announced.html
</link>
1407 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Release_0_1_1_of_free_software_archive_system_Nikita_announced.html
</guid>
1408 <pubDate>Sat,
10 Jun
2017 00:
40:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
1409 <description><p
>I am very happy to report that the
1410 <a href=
"https://github.com/hiOA-ABI/nikita-noark5-core
">Nikita Noark
5
1411 core project
</a
> tagged its second release today. The free software
1412 solution is an implementation of the Norwegian archive standard Noark
1413 5 used by government offices in Norway. These were the changes in
1414 version
0.1.1 since version
0.1.0 (from NEWS.md):
1418 <li
>Continued work on the angularjs GUI, including document upload.
</li
>
1419 <li
>Implemented correspondencepartPerson, correspondencepartUnit and
1420 correspondencepartInternal
</li
>
1421 <li
>Applied for coverity coverage and started submitting code on
1422 regualr basis.
</li
>
1423 <li
>Started fixing bugs reported by coverity
</li
>
1424 <li
>Corrected and completed HATEOAS links to make sure entire API is
1425 available via URLs in _links.
</li
>
1426 <li
>Corrected all relation URLs to use trailing slash.
</li
>
1427 <li
>Add initial support for storing data in ElasticSearch.
</li
>
1428 <li
>Now able to receive and store uploaded files in the archive.
</li
>
1429 <li
>Changed JSON output for object lists to have relations in _links.
</li
>
1430 <li
>Improve JSON output for empty object lists.
</li
>
1431 <li
>Now uses correct MIME type application/vnd.noark5-v4+json.
</li
>
1432 <li
>Added support for docker container images.
</li
>
1433 <li
>Added simple API browser implemented in JavaScript/Angular.
</li
>
1434 <li
>Started on archive client implemented in JavaScript/Angular.
</li
>
1435 <li
>Started on prototype to show the public mail journal.
</li
>
1436 <li
>Improved performance by disabling Sprint FileWatcher.
</li
>
1437 <li
>Added support for
'arkivskaper
',
'saksmappe
' and
'journalpost
'.
</li
>
1438 <li
>Added support for some metadata codelists.
</li
>
1439 <li
>Added support for Cross-origin resource sharing (CORS).
</li
>
1440 <li
>Changed login method from Basic Auth to JSON Web Token (RFC
7519)
1442 <li
>Added support for GET-ing ny-* URLs.
</li
>
1443 <li
>Added support for modifying entities using PUT and eTag.
</li
>
1444 <li
>Added support for returning XML output on request.
</li
>
1445 <li
>Removed support for English field and class names, limiting ourself
1446 to the official names.
</li
>
1447 <li
>...
</li
>
1451 <p
>If this sound interesting to you, please contact us on IRC (#nikita
1452 on irc.freenode.net) or email
1453 (
<a href=
"https://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/nikita-noark
">nikita-noark
1454 mailing list).
</p
>
1459 <title>Idea for storing trusted timestamps in a Noark
5 archive
</title>
1460 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_storing_trusted_timestamps_in_a_Noark_5_archive.html
</link>
1461 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_storing_trusted_timestamps_in_a_Noark_5_archive.html
</guid>
1462 <pubDate>Wed,
7 Jun
2017 21:
40:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
1463 <description><p
><em
>This is a copy of
1464 <a href=
"https://lists.nuug.no/pipermail/nikita-noark/
2017-June/
000297.html
">an
1465 email I posted to the nikita-noark mailing list
</a
>. Please follow up
1466 there if you would like to discuss this topic. The background is that
1467 we are making a free software archive system based on the Norwegian
1468 <a href=
"https://www.arkivverket.no/forvaltning-og-utvikling/regelverk-og-standarder/noark-standarden
">Noark
1469 5 standard
</a
> for government archives.
</em
></p
>
1471 <p
>I
've been wondering a bit lately how trusted timestamps could be
1473 <a href=
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_timestamping
">Trusted
1474 timestamps
</a
> can be used to verify that some information
1475 (document/file/checksum/metadata) have not been changed since a
1476 specific time in the past. This is useful to verify the integrity of
1477 the documents in the archive.
</p
>
1479 <p
>Then it occured to me, perhaps the trusted timestamps could be
1480 stored as dokument variants (ie dokumentobjekt referered to from
1481 dokumentbeskrivelse) with the filename set to the hash it is
1484 <p
>Given a
"dokumentbeskrivelse
" with an associated
"dokumentobjekt
",
1485 a new dokumentobjekt is associated with
"dokumentbeskrivelse
" with the
1486 same attributes as the stamped dokumentobjekt except these
1487 attributes:
</p
>
1491 <li
>format -
> "RFC3161
"
1492 <li
>mimeType -
> "application/timestamp-reply
"
1493 <li
>formatDetaljer -
> "&lt;source URL for timestamp service
&gt;
"
1494 <li
>filenavn -
> "&lt;sjekksum
&gt;.tsr
"
1498 <p
>This assume a service following
1499 <a href=
"https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3161
">IETF RFC
3161</a
> is
1500 used, which specifiy the given MIME type for replies and the .tsr file
1501 ending for the content of such trusted timestamp. As far as I can
1502 tell from the Noark
5 specifications, it is OK to have several
1503 variants/renderings of a dokument attached to a given
1504 dokumentbeskrivelse objekt. It might be stretching it a bit to make
1505 some of these variants represent crypto-signatures useful for
1506 verifying the document integrity instead of representing the dokument
1509 <p
>Using the source of the service in formatDetaljer allow several
1510 timestamping services to be used. This is useful to spread the risk
1511 of key compromise over several organisations. It would only be a
1512 problem to trust the timestamps if all of the organisations are
1513 compromised.
</p
>
1515 <p
>The following oneliner on Linux can be used to generate the tsr
1516 file. $input is the path to the file to checksum, and $sha256 is the
1517 SHA-
256 checksum of the file (ie the
"<sjekksum
>.tsr
" value mentioned
1520 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
1521 openssl ts -query -data
"$inputfile
" -cert -sha256 -no_nonce \
1522 | curl -s -H
"Content-Type: application/timestamp-query
" \
1523 --data-binary
"@-
" http://zeitstempel.dfn.de
> $sha256.tsr
1524 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
1526 <p
>To verify the timestamp, you first need to download the public key
1527 of the trusted timestamp service, for example using this command:
</p
>
1529 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
1530 wget -O ca-cert.txt \
1531 https://pki.pca.dfn.de/global-services-ca/pub/cacert/chain.txt
1532 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
1534 <p
>Note, the public key should be stored alongside the timestamps in
1535 the archive to make sure it is also available
100 years from now. It
1536 is probably a good idea to standardise how and were to store such
1537 public keys, to make it easier to find for those trying to verify
1538 documents
100 or
1000 years from now. :)
</p
>
1540 <p
>The verification itself is a simple openssl command:
</p
>
1542 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
1543 openssl ts -verify -data $inputfile -in $sha256.tsr \
1544 -CAfile ca-cert.txt -text
1545 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
1547 <p
>Is there any reason this approach would not work? Is it somehow against
1548 the Noark
5 specification?
</p
>
1553 <title>Free software archive system Nikita now able to store documents
</title>
1554 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_software_archive_system_Nikita_now_able_to_store_documents.html
</link>
1555 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_software_archive_system_Nikita_now_able_to_store_documents.html
</guid>
1556 <pubDate>Sun,
19 Mar
2017 08:
00:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
1557 <description><p
>The
<a href=
"https://github.com/hiOA-ABI/nikita-noark5-core
">Nikita
1558 Noark
5 core project
</a
> is implementing the Norwegian standard for
1559 keeping an electronic archive of government documents.
1560 <a href=
"http://www.arkivverket.no/arkivverket/Offentlig-forvaltning/Noark/Noark-
5/English-version
">The
1561 Noark
5 standard
</a
> document the requirement for data systems used by
1562 the archives in the Norwegian government, and the Noark
5 web interface
1563 specification document a REST web service for storing, searching and
1564 retrieving documents and metadata in such archive. I
've been involved
1565 in the project since a few weeks before Christmas, when the Norwegian
1567 <a href=
"https://www.nuug.no/news/NOARK5_kjerne_som_fri_programvare_f_r_epostliste_hos_NUUG.shtml
">announced
1568 it supported the project
</a
>. I believe this is an important project,
1569 and hope it can make it possible for the government archives in the
1570 future to use free software to keep the archives we citizens depend
1571 on. But as I do not hold such archive myself, personally my first use
1572 case is to store and analyse public mail journal metadata published
1573 from the government. I find it useful to have a clear use case in
1574 mind when developing, to make sure the system scratches one of my
1577 <p
>If you would like to help make sure there is a free software
1578 alternatives for the archives, please join our IRC channel
1579 (
<a href=
"irc://irc.freenode.net/%
23nikita
"">#nikita on
1580 irc.freenode.net
</a
>) and
1581 <a href=
"https://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/nikita-noark
">the
1582 project mailing list
</a
>.
</p
>
1584 <p
>When I got involved, the web service could store metadata about
1585 documents. But a few weeks ago, a new milestone was reached when it
1586 became possible to store full text documents too. Yesterday, I
1587 completed an implementation of a command line tool
1588 <tt
>archive-pdf
</tt
> to upload a PDF file to the archive using this
1589 API. The tool is very simple at the moment, and find existing
1590 <a href=
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fonds
">fonds
</a
>, series and
1591 files while asking the user to select which one to use if more than
1592 one exist. Once a file is identified, the PDF is associated with the
1593 file and uploaded, using the title extracted from the PDF itself. The
1594 process is fairly similar to visiting the archive, opening a cabinet,
1595 locating a file and storing a piece of paper in the archive. Here is
1596 a test run directly after populating the database with test data using
1597 our API tester:
</p
>
1599 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
1600 ~/src//noark5-tester$ ./archive-pdf mangelmelding/mangler.pdf
1601 using arkiv: Title of the test fonds created
2017-
03-
18T23:
49:
32.103446
1602 using arkivdel: Title of the test series created
2017-
03-
18T23:
49:
32.103446
1604 0 - Title of the test case file created
2017-
03-
18T23:
49:
32.103446
1605 1 - Title of the test file created
2017-
03-
18T23:
49:
32.103446
1606 Select which mappe you want (or search term):
0
1607 Uploading mangelmelding/mangler.pdf
1608 PDF title: Mangler i spesifikasjonsdokumentet for NOARK
5 Tjenestegrensesnitt
1609 File
2017/
1: Title of the test case file created
2017-
03-
18T23:
49:
32.103446
1610 ~/src//noark5-tester$
1611 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
1613 <p
>You can see here how the fonds (arkiv) and serie (arkivdel) only had
1614 one option, while the user need to choose which file (mappe) to use
1615 among the two created by the API tester. The
<tt
>archive-pdf
</tt
>
1616 tool can be found in the git repository for the API tester.
</p
>
1618 <p
>In the project, I have been mostly working on
1619 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/noark5-tester
">the API
1620 tester
</a
> so far, while getting to know the code base. The API
1621 tester currently use
1622 <a href=
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HATEOAS
">the HATEOAS links
</a
>
1623 to traverse the entire exposed service API and verify that the exposed
1624 operations and objects match the specification, as well as trying to
1625 create objects holding metadata and uploading a simple XML file to
1626 store. The tester has proved very useful for finding flaws in our
1627 implementation, as well as flaws in the reference site and the
1628 specification.
</p
>
1630 <p
>The test document I uploaded is a summary of all the specification
1631 defects we have collected so far while implementing the web service.
1632 There are several unclear and conflicting parts of the specification,
1634 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/noark5-tester/tree/master/mangelmelding
">started
1635 writing down
</a
> the questions we get from implementing it. We use a
1636 format inspired by how
<a href=
"http://www.opengroup.org/austin/
">The
1637 Austin Group
</a
> collect defect reports for the POSIX standard with
1638 <a href=
"http://www.opengroup.org/austin/mantis.html
">their
1639 instructions for the MANTIS defect tracker system
</a
>, in lack of an official way to structure defect reports for Noark
5 (our first submitted defect report was a
<a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/noark5-tester/blob/master/mangelmelding/sendt/
2017-
03-
15-mangel-prosess.md
">request for a procedure for submitting defect reports
</a
> :).
1641 <p
>The Nikita project is implemented using Java and Spring, and is
1642 fairly easy to get up and running using Docker containers for those
1643 that want to test the current code base. The API tester is
1644 implemented in Python.
</p
>
1649 <title>Detecting NFS hangs on Linux without hanging yourself...
</title>
1650 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Detecting_NFS_hangs_on_Linux_without_hanging_yourself___.html
</link>
1651 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Detecting_NFS_hangs_on_Linux_without_hanging_yourself___.html
</guid>
1652 <pubDate>Thu,
9 Mar
2017 15:
20:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
1653 <description><p
>Over the years, administrating thousand of NFS mounting linux
1654 computers at the time, I often needed a way to detect if the machine
1655 was experiencing NFS hang. If you try to use
<tt
>df
</tt
> or look at a
1656 file or directory affected by the hang, the process (and possibly the
1657 shell) will hang too. So you want to be able to detect this without
1658 risking the detection process getting stuck too. It has not been
1659 obvious how to do this. When the hang has lasted a while, it is
1660 possible to find messages like these in dmesg:
</p
>
1662 <p
><blockquote
>
1663 nfs: server nfsserver not responding, still trying
1664 <br
>nfs: server nfsserver OK
1665 </blockquote
></p
>
1667 <p
>It is hard to know if the hang is still going on, and it is hard to
1668 be sure looking in dmesg is going to work. If there are lots of other
1669 messages in dmesg the lines might have rotated out of site before they
1670 are noticed.
</p
>
1672 <p
>While reading through the nfs client implementation in linux kernel
1673 code, I came across some statistics that seem to give a way to detect
1674 it. The om_timeouts sunrpc value in the kernel will increase every
1675 time the above log entry is inserted into dmesg. And after digging a
1676 bit further, I discovered that this value show up in
1677 /proc/self/mountstats on Linux.
</p
>
1679 <p
>The mountstats content seem to be shared between files using the
1680 same file system context, so it is enough to check one of the
1681 mountstats files to get the state of the mount point for the machine.
1682 I assume this will not show lazy umounted NFS points, nor NFS mount
1683 points in a different process context (ie with a different filesystem
1684 view), but that does not worry me.
</p
>
1686 <p
>The content for a NFS mount point look similar to this:
</p
>
1688 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
1690 device /dev/mapper/Debian-var mounted on /var with fstype ext3
1691 device nfsserver:/mnt/nfsserver/home0 mounted on /mnt/nfsserver/home0 with fstype nfs statvers=
1.1
1692 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
1694 caps: caps=
0x3fe7,wtmult=
4096,dtsize=
8192,bsize=
0,namlen=
255
1695 sec: flavor=
1,pseudoflavor=
1
1696 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
1697 bytes:
166253035039 219519120027 0 0 40783504807 185466229638 11677877 45561809
1698 RPC iostats version:
1.0 p/v:
100003/
3 (nfs)
1699 xprt: tcp
925 1 6810 0 0 111505412 111480497 109 2672418560317 0 248 53869103 22481820
1701 NULL:
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
1702 GETATTR:
61063106 61063108 0 9621383060 6839064400 453650 77291321 78926132
1703 SETATTR:
463469 463470 0 92005440 66739536 63787 603235 687943
1704 LOOKUP:
17021657 17021657 0 3354097764 4013442928 57216 35125459 35566511
1705 ACCESS:
14281703 14290009 5 2318400592 1713803640 1709282 4865144 7130140
1706 READLINK:
125 125 0 20472 18620 0 1112 1118
1707 READ:
4214236 4214237 0 715608524 41328653212 89884 22622768 22806693
1708 WRITE:
8479010 8494376 22 187695798568 1356087148 178264904 51506907 231671771
1709 CREATE:
171708 171708 0 38084748 46702272 873 1041833 1050398
1710 MKDIR:
3680 3680 0 773980 993920 26 23990 24245
1711 SYMLINK:
903 903 0 233428 245488 6 5865 5917
1712 MKNOD:
80 80 0 20148 21760 0 299 304
1713 REMOVE:
429921 429921 0 79796004 61908192 3313 2710416 2741636
1714 RMDIR:
3367 3367 0 645112 484848 22 5782 6002
1715 RENAME:
466201 466201 0 130026184 121212260 7075 5935207 5961288
1716 LINK:
289155 289155 0 72775556 67083960 2199 2565060 2585579
1717 READDIR:
2933237 2933237 0 516506204 13973833412 10385 3190199 3297917
1718 READDIRPLUS:
1652839 1652839 0 298640972 6895997744 84735 14307895 14448937
1719 FSSTAT:
6144 6144 0 1010516 1032192 51 9654 10022
1720 FSINFO:
2 2 0 232 328 0 1 1
1721 PATHCONF:
1 1 0 116 140 0 0 0
1722 COMMIT:
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
1724 device binfmt_misc mounted on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc with fstype binfmt_misc
1726 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
1728 <p
>The key number to look at is the third number in the per-op list.
1729 It is the number of NFS timeouts experiences per file system
1730 operation. Here
22 write timeouts and
5 access timeouts. If these
1731 numbers are increasing, I believe the machine is experiencing NFS
1732 hang. Unfortunately the timeout value do not start to increase right
1733 away. The NFS operations need to time out first, and this can take a
1734 while. The exact timeout value depend on the setup. For example the
1735 defaults for TCP and UDP mount points are quite different, and the
1736 timeout value is affected by the soft, hard, timeo and retrans NFS
1737 mount options.
</p
>
1739 <p
>The only way I have been able to get working on Debian and RedHat
1740 Enterprise Linux for getting the timeout count is to peek in /proc/.
1742 <ahref=
"http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19253-
01/
816-
4555/netmonitor-
12/index.html
">Solaris
1743 10 System Administration Guide: Network Services
</a
>, the
'nfsstat -c
'
1744 command can be used to get these timeout values. But this do not work
1745 on Linux, as far as I can tell. I
1746 <ahref=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
857043">asked Debian about this
</a
>,
1747 but have not seen any replies yet.
</p
>
1749 <p
>Is there a better way to figure out if a Linux NFS client is
1750 experiencing NFS hangs? Is there a way to detect which processes are
1751 affected? Is there a way to get the NFS mount going quickly once the
1752 network problem causing the NFS hang has been cleared? I would very
1753 much welcome some clues, as we regularly run into NFS hangs.
</p
>
1758 <title>How does it feel to be wiretapped, when you should be doing the wiretapping...
</title>
1759 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_does_it_feel_to_be_wiretapped__when_you_should_be_doing_the_wiretapping___.html
</link>
1760 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_does_it_feel_to_be_wiretapped__when_you_should_be_doing_the_wiretapping___.html
</guid>
1761 <pubDate>Wed,
8 Mar
2017 11:
50:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
1762 <description><p
>So the new president in the United States of America claim to be
1763 surprised to discover that he was wiretapped during the election
1764 before he was elected president. He even claim this must be illegal.
1765 Well, doh, if it is one thing the confirmations from Snowden
1766 documented, it is that the entire population in USA is wiretapped, one
1767 way or another. Of course the president candidates were wiretapped,
1768 alongside the senators, judges and the rest of the people in USA.
</p
>
1770 <p
>Next, the Federal Bureau of Investigation ask the Department of
1771 Justice to go public rejecting the claims that Donald Trump was
1772 wiretapped illegally. I fail to see the relevance, given that I am
1773 sure the surveillance industry in USA believe they have all the legal
1774 backing they need to conduct mass surveillance on the entire
1777 <p
>There is even the director of the FBI stating that he never saw an
1778 order requesting wiretapping of Donald Trump. That is not very
1779 surprising, given how the FISA court work, with all its activity being
1780 secret. Perhaps he only heard about it?
</p
>
1782 <p
>What I find most sad in this story is how Norwegian journalists
1783 present it. In a news reports the other day in the radio from the
1784 Norwegian National broadcasting Company (NRK), I heard the journalist
1785 claim that
'the FBI denies any wiretapping
', while the reality is that
1786 'the FBI denies any illegal wiretapping
'. There is a fundamental and
1787 important difference, and it make me sad that the journalists are
1788 unable to grasp it.
</p
>
1790 <p
><strong
>Update
2017-
03-
13:
</strong
> Look like
1791 <a href=
"https://theintercept.com/
2017/
03/
13/rand-paul-is-right-nsa-routinely-monitors-americans-communications-without-warrants/
">The
1792 Intercept report that US Senator Rand Paul confirm what I state above
</a
>.
</p
>
1797 <title>Norwegian Bokmål translation of The Debian Administrator
's Handbook complete, proofreading in progress
</title>
1798 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Norwegian_Bokm_l_translation_of_The_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook_complete__proofreading_in_progress.html
</link>
1799 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Norwegian_Bokm_l_translation_of_The_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook_complete__proofreading_in_progress.html
</guid>
1800 <pubDate>Fri,
3 Mar
2017 14:
50:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
1801 <description><p
>For almost a year now, we have been working on making a Norwegian
1802 Bokmål edition of
<a href=
"https://debian-handbook.info/
">The Debian
1803 Administrator
's Handbook
</a
>. Now, thanks to the tireless effort of
1804 Ole-Erik, Ingrid and Andreas, the initial translation is complete, and
1805 we are working on the proof reading to ensure consistent language and
1806 use of correct computer science terms. The plan is to make the book
1807 available on paper, as well as in electronic form. For that to
1808 happen, the proof reading must be completed and all the figures need
1809 to be translated. If you want to help out, get in touch.
</p
>
1811 <p
><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-handbook/debian-handbook-nb-NO.pdf
">A
1813 fresh PDF edition
</a
> in A4 format (the final book will have smaller
1814 pages) of the book created every morning is available for
1815 proofreading. If you find any errors, please
1816 <a href=
"https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-handbook/
">visit
1817 Weblate and correct the error
</a
>. The
1818 <a href=
"http://l.github.io/debian-handbook/stat/nb-NO/index.html
">state
1819 of the translation including figures
</a
> is a useful source for those
1820 provide Norwegian bokmål screen shots and figures.
</p
>
1825 <title>Unlimited randomness with the ChaosKey?
</title>
1826 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Unlimited_randomness_with_the_ChaosKey_.html
</link>
1827 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Unlimited_randomness_with_the_ChaosKey_.html
</guid>
1828 <pubDate>Wed,
1 Mar
2017 20:
50:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
1829 <description><p
>A few days ago I ordered a small batch of
1830 <a href=
"http://altusmetrum.org/ChaosKey/
">the ChaosKey
</a
>, a small
1831 USB dongle for generating entropy created by Bdale Garbee and Keith
1832 Packard. Yesterday it arrived, and I am very happy to report that it
1833 work great! According to its designers, to get it to work out of the
1834 box, you need the Linux kernel version
4.1 or later. I tested on a
1835 Debian Stretch machine (kernel version
4.9), and there it worked just
1836 fine, increasing the available entropy very quickly. I wrote a small
1837 test oneliner to test. It first print the current entropy level,
1838 drain /dev/random, and then print the entropy level for five seconds.
1839 Here is the situation without the ChaosKey inserted:
</p
>
1841 <blockquote
><pre
>
1842 % cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
1843 dd bs=
1M if=/dev/random of=/dev/null count=
1; \
1844 for n in $(seq
1 5); do \
1845 cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
1851 28 byte kopiert,
0,
000264565 s,
106 kB/s
1858 </pre
></blockquote
>
1860 <p
>The entropy level increases by
3-
4 every second. In such case any
1861 application requiring random bits (like a HTTPS enabled web server)
1862 will halt and wait for more entrpy. And here is the situation with
1863 the ChaosKey inserted:
</p
>
1865 <blockquote
><pre
>
1866 % cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
1867 dd bs=
1M if=/dev/random of=/dev/null count=
1; \
1868 for n in $(seq
1 5); do \
1869 cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
1875 104 byte kopiert,
0,
000487647 s,
213 kB/s
1882 </pre
></blockquote
>
1884 <p
>Quite the difference. :) I bought a few more than I need, in case
1885 someone want to buy one here in Norway. :)
</p
>
1887 <p
>Update: The dongle was presented at Debconf last year. You might
1888 find
<a href=
"https://debconf16.debconf.org/talks/
94/
">the talk
1889 recording illuminating
</a
>. It explains exactly what the source of
1890 randomness is, if you are unable to spot it from the schema drawing
1891 available from the ChaosKey web site linked at the start of this blog
1897 <title>Detect OOXML files with undefined behaviour?
</title>
1898 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Detect_OOXML_files_with_undefined_behaviour_.html
</link>
1899 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Detect_OOXML_files_with_undefined_behaviour_.html
</guid>
1900 <pubDate>Tue,
21 Feb
2017 00:
20:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
1901 <description><p
>I just noticed
1902 <a href=
"http://www.arkivrad.no/aktuelt/riksarkivarens-forskrift-pa-horing
">the
1903 new Norwegian proposal for archiving rules in the goverment
</a
> list
1904 <a href=
"http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-
376.htm
">ECMA-
376</a
>
1905 / ISO/IEC
29500 (aka OOXML) as valid formats to put in long term
1906 storage. Luckily such files will only be accepted based on
1907 pre-approval from the National Archive. Allowing OOXML files to be
1908 used for long term storage might seem like a good idea as long as we
1909 forget that there are plenty of ways for a
"valid
" OOXML document to
1910 have content with no defined interpretation in the standard, which
1911 lead to a question and an idea.
</p
>
1913 <p
>Is there any tool to detect if a OOXML document depend on such
1914 undefined behaviour? It would be useful for the National Archive (and
1915 anyone else interested in verifying that a document is well defined)
1916 to have such tool available when considering to approve the use of
1917 OOXML. I
'm aware of the
1918 <a href=
"https://github.com/arlm/officeotron/
">officeotron OOXML
1919 validator
</a
>, but do not know how complete it is nor if it will
1920 report use of undefined behaviour. Are there other similar tools
1921 available? Please send me an email if you know of any such tool.
</p
>
1926 <title>Ruling ignored our objections to the seizure of popcorn-time.no (#domstolkontroll)
</title>
1927 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ruling_ignored_our_objections_to_the_seizure_of_popcorn_time_no___domstolkontroll_.html
</link>
1928 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ruling_ignored_our_objections_to_the_seizure_of_popcorn_time_no___domstolkontroll_.html
</guid>
1929 <pubDate>Mon,
13 Feb
2017 21:
30:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
1930 <description><p
>A few days ago, we received the ruling from
1931 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_day_in_court_challenging_seizure_of_popcorn_time_no_for__domstolkontroll.html
">my
1932 day in court
</a
>. The case in question is a challenge of the seizure
1933 of the DNS domain popcorn-time.no. The ruling simply did not mention
1934 most of our arguments, and seemed to take everything ØKOKRIM said at
1935 face value, ignoring our demonstration and explanations. But it is
1936 hard to tell for sure, as we still have not seen most of the documents
1937 in the case and thus were unprepared and unable to contradict several
1938 of the claims made in court by the opposition. We are considering an
1939 appeal, but it is partly a question of funding, as it is costing us
1940 quite a bit to pay for our lawyer. If you want to help, please
1941 <a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/dns-beslag-donasjon.shtml
">donate to the
1942 NUUG defense fund
</a
>.
</p
>
1944 <p
>The details of the case, as far as we know it, is available in
1946 <a href=
"https://www.nuug.no/news/tags/dns-domenebeslag/
">the NUUG
1947 blog
</a
>. This also include
1948 <a href=
"https://www.nuug.no/news/Avslag_etter_rettslig_h_ring_om_DNS_beslaget___vurderer_veien_videre.shtml
">the
1949 ruling itself
</a
>.
</p
>
1954 <title>A day in court challenging seizure of popcorn-time.no for #domstolkontroll
</title>
1955 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_day_in_court_challenging_seizure_of_popcorn_time_no_for__domstolkontroll.html
</link>
1956 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_day_in_court_challenging_seizure_of_popcorn_time_no_for__domstolkontroll.html
</guid>
1957 <pubDate>Fri,
3 Feb
2017 11:
10:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
1958 <description><p align=
"center
"><img width=
"70%
" src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2017-
02-
01-popcorn-time-in-court.jpeg
"></p
>
1960 <p
>On Wednesday, I spent the entire day in court in Follo Tingrett
1961 representing
<a href=
"https://www.nuug.no/
">the member association
1962 NUUG
</a
>, alongside
<a href=
"https://www.efn.no/
">the member
1963 association EFN
</a
> and
<a href=
"http://www.imc.no
">the DNS registrar
1964 IMC
</a
>, challenging the seizure of the DNS name popcorn-time.no. It
1965 was interesting to sit in a court of law for the first time in my
1966 life. Our team can be seen in the picture above: attorney Ola
1967 Tellesbø, EFN board member Tom Fredrik Blenning, IMC CEO Morten Emil
1968 Eriksen and NUUG board member Petter Reinholdtsen.
</p
>
1970 <p
><a href=
"http://www.domstol.no/no/Enkelt-domstol/follo-tingrett/Nar-gar-rettssaken/Beramming/?cid=AAAA1701301512081262234UJFBVEZZZZZEJBAvtale
">The
1971 case at hand
</a
> is that the Norwegian National Authority for
1972 Investigation and Prosecution of Economic and Environmental Crime (aka
1973 Økokrim) decided on their own, to seize a DNS domain early last
1974 year, without following
1975 <a href=
"https://www.norid.no/no/regelverk/navnepolitikk/#link12
">the
1976 official policy of the Norwegian DNS authority
</a
> which require a
1977 court decision. The web site in question was a site covering Popcorn
1978 Time. And Popcorn Time is the name of a technology with both legal
1979 and illegal applications. Popcorn Time is a client combining
1980 searching a Bittorrent directory available on the Internet with
1981 downloading/distribute content via Bittorrent and playing the
1982 downloaded content on screen. It can be used illegally if it is used
1983 to distribute content against the will of the right holder, but it can
1984 also be used legally to play a lot of content, for example the
1986 <a href=
"https://archive.org/details/movies
">available from the
1987 Internet Archive
</a
> or the collection
1988 <a href=
"http://vodo.net/films/
">available from Vodo
</a
>. We created
1989 <a href=
"magnet:?xt=urn:btih:
86c1802af5a667ca56d3918aecb7d3c0f7173084
&dn=PresentasjonFolloTingrett.mov
&tr=udp%
3A%
2F%
2Fpublic.popcorn-tracker.org%
3A6969%
2Fannounce
">a
1990 video demonstrating legally use of Popcorn Time
</a
> and played it in
1991 Court. It can of course be downloaded using Bittorrent.
</p
>
1993 <p
>I did not quite know what to expect from a day in court. The
1994 government held on to their version of the story and we held on to
1995 ours, and I hope the judge is able to make sense of it all. We will
1996 know in two weeks time. Unfortunately I do not have high hopes, as
1997 the Government have the upper hand here with more knowledge about the
1998 case, better training in handling criminal law and in general higher
1999 standing in the courts than fairly unknown DNS registrar and member
2000 associations. It is expensive to be right also in Norway. So far the
2001 case have cost more than NOK
70 000,-. To help fund the case, NUUG
2002 and EFN have asked for donations, and managed to collect around NOK
25
2003 000,- so far. Given the presentation from the Government, I expect
2004 the government to appeal if the case go our way. And if the case do
2005 not go our way, I hope we have enough funding to appeal.
</p
>
2007 <p
>From the other side came two people from Økokrim. On the benches,
2008 appearing to be part of the group from the government were two people
2009 from the Simonsen Vogt Wiik lawyer office, and three others I am not
2010 quite sure who was. Økokrim had proposed to present two witnesses
2011 from The Motion Picture Association, but this was rejected because
2012 they did not speak Norwegian and it was a bit late to bring in a
2013 translator, but perhaps the two from MPA were present anyway. All
2014 seven appeared to know each other. Good to see the case is take
2015 seriously.
</p
>
2017 <p
>If you, like me, believe the courts should be involved before a DNS
2018 domain is hijacked by the government, or you believe the Popcorn Time
2019 technology have a lot of useful and legal applications, I suggest you
2020 too
<a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/dns-beslag-donasjon.shtml
">donate to
2021 the NUUG defense fund
</a
>. Both Bitcoin and bank transfer are
2022 available. If NUUG get more than we need for the legal action (very
2023 unlikely), the rest will be spend promoting free software, open
2024 standards and unix-like operating systems in Norway, so no matter what
2025 happens the money will be put to good use.
</p
>
2027 <p
>If you want to lean more about the case, I recommend you check out
2028 <a href=
"https://www.nuug.no/news/tags/dns-domenebeslag/
">the blog
2029 posts from NUUG covering the case
</a
>. They cover the legal arguments
2030 on both sides.
</p
>
2035 <title>Where did that package go?
&mdash; geolocated IP traceroute
</title>
2036 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Where_did_that_package_go___mdash__geolocated_IP_traceroute.html
</link>
2037 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Where_did_that_package_go___mdash__geolocated_IP_traceroute.html
</guid>
2038 <pubDate>Mon,
9 Jan
2017 12:
20:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
2039 <description><p
>Did you ever wonder where the web trafic really flow to reach the
2040 web servers, and who own the network equipment it is flowing through?
2041 It is possible to get a glimpse of this from using traceroute, but it
2042 is hard to find all the details. Many years ago, I wrote a system to
2043 map the Norwegian Internet (trying to figure out if our plans for a
2044 network game service would get low enough latency, and who we needed
2045 to talk to about setting up game servers close to the users. Back
2046 then I used traceroute output from many locations (I asked my friends
2047 to run a script and send me their traceroute output) to create the
2048 graph and the map. The output from traceroute typically look like
2051 <p
><pre
>
2052 traceroute to www.stortinget.no (
85.88.67.10),
30 hops max,
60 byte packets
2053 1 uio-gw10.uio.no (
129.240.202.1)
0.447 ms
0.486 ms
0.621 ms
2054 2 uio-gw8.uio.no (
129.240.24.229)
0.467 ms
0.578 ms
0.675 ms
2055 3 oslo-gw1.uninett.no (
128.39.65.17)
0.385 ms
0.373 ms
0.358 ms
2056 4 te3-
1-
2.br1.fn3.as2116.net (
193.156.90.3)
1.174 ms
1.172 ms
1.153 ms
2057 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
2058 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
2059 7 89.191.10.146 (
89.191.10.146)
0.931 ms
0.917 ms
0.955 ms
2063 </pre
></p
>
2065 <p
>This show the DNS names and IP addresses of (at least some of the)
2066 network equipment involved in getting the data traffic from me to the
2067 www.stortinget.no server, and how long it took in milliseconds for a
2068 package to reach the equipment and return to me. Three packages are
2069 sent, and some times the packages do not follow the same path. This
2070 is shown for hop
5, where three different IP addresses replied to the
2071 traceroute request.
</p
>
2073 <p
>There are many ways to measure trace routes. Other good traceroute
2074 implementations I use are traceroute (using ICMP packages) mtr (can do
2075 both ICMP, UDP and TCP) and scapy (python library with ICMP, UDP, TCP
2076 traceroute and a lot of other capabilities). All of them are easily
2077 available in
<a href=
"https://www.debian.org/
">Debian
</a
>.
</p
>
2079 <p
>This time around, I wanted to know the geographic location of
2080 different route points, to visualize how visiting a web page spread
2081 information about the visit to a lot of servers around the globe. The
2082 background is that a web site today often will ask the browser to get
2083 from many servers the parts (for example HTML, JSON, fonts,
2084 JavaScript, CSS, video) required to display the content. This will
2085 leak information about the visit to those controlling these servers
2086 and anyone able to peek at the data traffic passing by (like your ISP,
2087 the ISPs backbone provider, FRA, GCHQ, NSA and others).
</p
>
2089 <p
>Lets pick an example, the Norwegian parliament web site
2090 www.stortinget.no. It is read daily by all members of parliament and
2091 their staff, as well as political journalists, activits and many other
2092 citizens of Norway. A visit to the www.stortinget.no web site will
2093 ask your browser to contact
8 other servers: ajax.googleapis.com,
2094 insights.hotjar.com, script.hotjar.com, static.hotjar.com,
2095 stats.g.doubleclick.net, www.google-analytics.com,
2096 www.googletagmanager.com and www.netigate.se. I extracted this by
2097 asking
<a href=
"http://phantomjs.org/
">PhantomJS
</a
> to visit the
2098 Stortinget web page and tell me all the URLs PhantomJS downloaded to
2099 render the page (in HAR format using
2100 <a href=
"https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/blob/master/examples/netsniff.js
">their
2101 netsniff example
</a
>. I am very grateful to Gorm for showing me how
2102 to do this). My goal is to visualize network traces to all IP
2103 addresses behind these DNS names, do show where visitors personal
2104 information is spread when visiting the page.
</p
>
2106 <p align=
"center
"><a href=
"www.stortinget.no-geoip.kml
"><img
2107 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
>
2109 <p
>When I had a look around for options, I could not find any good
2110 free software tools to do this, and decided I needed my own traceroute
2111 wrapper outputting KML based on locations looked up using GeoIP. KML
2112 is easy to work with and easy to generate, and understood by several
2113 of the GIS tools I have available. I got good help from by NUUG
2114 colleague Anders Einar with this, and the result can be seen in
2115 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/kmltraceroute
">my
2116 kmltraceroute git repository
</a
>. Unfortunately, the quality of the
2117 free GeoIP databases I could find (and the for-pay databases my
2118 friends had access to) is not up to the task. The IP addresses of
2119 central Internet infrastructure would typically be placed near the
2120 controlling companies main office, and not where the router is really
2121 located, as you can see from
<a href=
"www.stortinget.no-geoip.kml
">the
2122 KML file I created
</a
> using the GeoLite City dataset from MaxMind.
2124 <p align=
"center
"><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2017-
01-
09-www.stortinget.no-scapy.svg
"><img
2125 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
>
2127 <p
>I also had a look at the visual traceroute graph created by
2128 <a href=
"http://www.secdev.org/projects/scapy/
">the scrapy project
</a
>,
2129 showing IP network ownership (aka AS owner) for the IP address in
2131 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2017-
01-
09-www.stortinget.no-scapy.svg
">The
2132 graph display a lot of useful information about the traceroute in SVG
2133 format
</a
>, and give a good indication on who control the network
2134 equipment involved, but it do not include geolocation. This graph
2135 make it possible to see the information is made available at least for
2136 UNINETT, Catchcom, Stortinget, Nordunet, Google, Amazon, Telia, Level
2137 3 Communications and NetDNA.
</p
>
2139 <p align=
"center
"><a href=
"https://geotraceroute.com/index.php?node=
4&host=www.stortinget.no
"><img
2140 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
>
2142 <p
>In the process, I came across the
2143 <a href=
"https://geotraceroute.com/
">web service GeoTraceroute
</a
> by
2144 Salim Gasmi. Its methology of combining guesses based on DNS names,
2145 various location databases and finally use latecy times to rule out
2146 candidate locations seemed to do a very good job of guessing correct
2147 geolocation. But it could only do one trace at the time, did not have
2148 a sensor in Norway and did not make the geolocations easily available
2149 for postprocessing. So I contacted the developer and asked if he
2150 would be willing to share the code (he refused until he had time to
2151 clean it up), but he was interested in providing the geolocations in a
2152 machine readable format, and willing to set up a sensor in Norway. So
2153 since yesterday, it is possible to run traces from Norway in this
2154 service thanks to a sensor node set up by
2155 <a href=
"https://www.nuug.no/
">the NUUG assosiation
</a
>, and get the
2156 trace in KML format for further processing.
</p
>
2158 <p align=
"center
"><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2017-
01-
09-www.stortinget.no-geotraceroute-kml-join.kml
"><img
2159 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
>
2161 <p
>Here we can see a lot of trafic passes Sweden on its way to
2162 Denmark, Germany, Holland and Ireland. Plenty of places where the
2163 Snowden confirmations verified the traffic is read by various actors
2164 without your best interest as their top priority.
</p
>
2166 <p
>Combining KML files is trivial using a text editor, so I could loop
2167 over all the hosts behind the urls imported by www.stortinget.no and
2168 ask for the KML file from GeoTraceroute, and create a combined KML
2169 file with all the traces (unfortunately only one of the IP addresses
2170 behind the DNS name is traced this time. To get them all, one would
2171 have to request traces using IP number instead of DNS names from
2172 GeoTraceroute). That might be the next step in this project.
</p
>
2174 <p
>Armed with these tools, I find it a lot easier to figure out where
2175 the IP traffic moves and who control the boxes involved in moving it.
2176 And every time the link crosses for example the Swedish border, we can
2177 be sure Swedish Signal Intelligence (FRA) is listening, as GCHQ do in
2178 Britain and NSA in USA and cables around the globe. (Hm, what should
2179 we tell them? :) Keep that in mind if you ever send anything
2180 unencrypted over the Internet.
</p
>
2182 <p
>PS: KML files are drawn using
2183 <a href=
"http://ivanrublev.me/kml/
">the KML viewer from Ivan
2184 Rublev
<a/
>, as it was less cluttered than the local Linux application
2185 Marble. There are heaps of other options too.
</p
>
2187 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2188 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2189 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
2194 <title>Introducing ical-archiver to split out old iCalendar entries
</title>
2195 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Introducing_ical_archiver_to_split_out_old_iCalendar_entries.html
</link>
2196 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Introducing_ical_archiver_to_split_out_old_iCalendar_entries.html
</guid>
2197 <pubDate>Wed,
4 Jan
2017 12:
20:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
2198 <description><p
>Do you have a large
<a href=
"https://icalendar.org/
">iCalendar
</a
>
2199 file with lots of old entries, and would like to archive them to save
2200 space and resources? At least those of us using KOrganizer know that
2201 turning on and off an event set become slower and slower the more
2202 entries are in the set. While working on migrating our calendars to a
2203 <a href=
"http://radicale.org/
">Radicale CalDAV server
</a
> on our
2204 <a href=
"https://freedomboxfoundation.org/
">Freedombox server
</a/
>, my
2205 loved one wondered if I could find a way to split up the calendar file
2206 she had in KOrganizer, and I set out to write a tool. I spent a few
2207 days writing and polishing the system, and it is now ready for general
2209 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/ical-archiver
">code for
2210 ical-archiver
</a
> is publicly available from a git repository on
2211 github. The system is written in Python and depend on
2212 <a href=
"http://eventable.github.io/vobject/
">the vobject Python
2213 module
</a
>.
</p
>
2215 <p
>To use it, locate the iCalendar file you want to operate on and
2216 give it as an argument to the ical-archiver script. This will
2217 generate a set of new files, one file per component type per year for
2218 all components expiring more than two years in the past. The vevent,
2219 vtodo and vjournal entries are handled by the script. The remaining
2220 entries are stored in a
'remaining
' file.
</p
>
2222 <p
>This is what a test run can look like:
2224 <p
><pre
>
2225 % ical-archiver t/
2004-
2016.ics
2229 Writing t/
2004-
2016.ics-subset-vevent-
2004.ics
2230 Writing t/
2004-
2016.ics-subset-vevent-
2005.ics
2231 Writing t/
2004-
2016.ics-subset-vevent-
2006.ics
2232 Writing t/
2004-
2016.ics-subset-vevent-
2007.ics
2233 Writing t/
2004-
2016.ics-subset-vevent-
2008.ics
2234 Writing t/
2004-
2016.ics-subset-vevent-
2009.ics
2235 Writing t/
2004-
2016.ics-subset-vevent-
2010.ics
2236 Writing t/
2004-
2016.ics-subset-vevent-
2011.ics
2237 Writing t/
2004-
2016.ics-subset-vevent-
2012.ics
2238 Writing t/
2004-
2016.ics-subset-vevent-
2013.ics
2239 Writing t/
2004-
2016.ics-subset-vevent-
2014.ics
2240 Writing t/
2004-
2016.ics-subset-vjournal-
2007.ics
2241 Writing t/
2004-
2016.ics-subset-vjournal-
2011.ics
2242 Writing t/
2004-
2016.ics-subset-vtodo-
2012.ics
2243 Writing t/
2004-
2016.ics-remaining.ics
2245 </pre
></p
>
2247 <p
>As you can see, the original file is untouched and new files are
2248 written with names derived from the original file. If you are happy
2249 with their content, the *-remaining.ics file can replace the original
2250 the the others can be archived or imported as historical calendar
2251 collections.
</p
>
2253 <p
>The script should probably be improved a bit. The error handling
2254 when discovering broken entries is not good, and I am not sure yet if
2255 it make sense to split different entry types into separate files or
2256 not. The program is thus likely to change. If you find it
2257 interesting, please get in touch. :)
</p
>
2259 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2260 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2261 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
2266 <title>Appstream just learned how to map hardware to packages too!
</title>
2267 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Appstream_just_learned_how_to_map_hardware_to_packages_too_.html
</link>
2268 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Appstream_just_learned_how_to_map_hardware_to_packages_too_.html
</guid>
2269 <pubDate>Fri,
23 Dec
2016 10:
30:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
2270 <description><p
>I received a very nice Christmas present today. As my regular
2271 readers probably know, I have been working on the
2272 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram
">the Isenkram
2273 system
</a
> for many years. The goal of the Isenkram system is to make
2274 it easier for users to figure out what to install to get a given piece
2275 of hardware to work in Debian, and a key part of this system is a way
2276 to map hardware to packages. Isenkram have its own mapping database,
2277 and also uses data provided by each package using the AppStream
2278 metadata format. And today,
2279 <a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/appstream
">AppStream
</a
> in
2280 Debian learned to look up hardware the same way Isenkram is doing it,
2281 ie using fnmatch():
</p
>
2283 <p
><pre
>
2284 % appstreamcli what-provides modalias \
2285 usb:v1130p0202d0100dc00dsc00dp00ic03isc00ip00in00
2286 Identifier: pymissile [generic]
2288 Summary: Control original Striker USB Missile Launcher
2290 % appstreamcli what-provides modalias usb:v0694p0002d0000
2291 Identifier: libnxt [generic]
2293 Summary: utility library for talking to the LEGO Mindstorms NXT brick
2296 Identifier: t2n [generic]
2298 Summary: Simple command-line tool for Lego NXT
2301 Identifier: python-nxt [generic]
2303 Summary: Python driver/interface/wrapper for the Lego Mindstorms NXT robot
2306 Identifier: nbc [generic]
2308 Summary: C compiler for LEGO Mindstorms NXT bricks
2311 </pre
></p
>
2313 <p
>A similar query can be done using the combined AppStream and
2314 Isenkram databases using the isenkram-lookup tool:
</p
>
2316 <p
><pre
>
2317 % isenkram-lookup usb:v1130p0202d0100dc00dsc00dp00ic03isc00ip00in00
2319 % isenkram-lookup usb:v0694p0002d0000
2325 </pre
></p
>
2327 <p
>You can find modalias values relevant for your machine using
2328 <tt
>cat $(find /sys/devices/ -name modalias)
</tt
>.
2330 <p
>If you want to make this system a success and help Debian users
2331 make the most of the hardware they have, please
2332 help
<a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/AppStream/Guidelines
">add
2333 AppStream metadata for your package following the guidelines
</a
>
2334 documented in the wiki. So far only
11 packages provide such
2335 information, among the several hundred hardware specific packages in
2336 Debian. The Isenkram database on the other hand contain
101 packages,
2337 mostly related to USB dongles. Most of the packages with hardware
2338 mapping in AppStream are LEGO Mindstorms related, because I have, as
2339 part of my involvement in
2340 <a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners
">the Debian LEGO
2341 team
</a
> given priority to making sure LEGO users get proposed the
2342 complete set of packages in Debian for that particular hardware. The
2343 team also got a nice Christmas present today. The
2344 <a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/nxt-firmware
">nxt-firmware
2345 package
</a
> made it into Debian. With this package in place, it is
2346 now possible to use the LEGO Mindstorms NXT unit with only free
2347 software, as the nxt-firmware package contain the source and firmware
2348 binaries for the NXT brick.
</p
>
2350 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2351 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2352 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
2357 <title>Isenkram updated with a lot more hardware-package mappings
</title>
2358 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Isenkram_updated_with_a_lot_more_hardware_package_mappings.html
</link>
2359 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Isenkram_updated_with_a_lot_more_hardware_package_mappings.html
</guid>
2360 <pubDate>Tue,
20 Dec
2016 11:
55:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
2361 <description><p
><a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram
">The Isenkram
2362 system
</a
> I wrote two years ago to make it easier in Debian to find
2363 and install packages to get your hardware dongles to work, is still
2364 going strong. It is a system to look up the hardware present on or
2365 connected to the current system, and map the hardware to Debian
2366 packages. It can either be done using the tools in isenkram-cli or
2367 using the user space daemon in the isenkram package. The latter will
2368 notify you, when inserting new hardware, about what packages to
2369 install to get the dongle working. It will even provide a button to
2370 click on to ask packagekit to install the packages.
</p
>
2372 <p
>Here is an command line example from my Thinkpad laptop:
</p
>
2374 <p
><pre
>
2391 </pre
></p
>
2393 <p
>It can also list the firware package providing firmware requested
2394 by the load kernel modules, which in my case is an empty list because
2395 I have all the firmware my machine need:
2397 <p
><pre
>
2398 % /usr/sbin/isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
2399 info: did not find any firmware files requested by loaded kernel modules. exiting
2401 </pre
></p
>
2403 <p
>The last few days I had a look at several of the around
250
2404 packages in Debian with udev rules. These seem like good candidates
2405 to install when a given hardware dongle is inserted, and I found
2406 several that should be proposed by isenkram. I have not had time to
2407 check all of them, but am happy to report that now there are
97
2408 packages packages mapped to hardware by Isenkram.
11 of these
2409 packages provide hardware mapping using AppStream, while the rest are
2410 listed in the modaliases file provided in isenkram.
</p
>
2412 <p
>These are the packages with hardware mappings at the moment. The
2413 <strong
>marked packages
</strong
> are also announcing their hardware
2414 support using AppStream, for everyone to use:
</p
>
2416 <p
>air-quality-sensor, alsa-firmware-loaders, argyll,
2417 <strong
>array-info
</strong
>, avarice, avrdude, b43-fwcutter,
2418 bit-babbler, bluez, bluez-firmware,
<strong
>brltty
</strong
>,
2419 <strong
>broadcom-sta-dkms
</strong
>, calibre, cgminer, cheese, colord,
2420 <strong
>colorhug-client
</strong
>, dahdi-firmware-nonfree, dahdi-linux,
2421 dfu-util, dolphin-emu, ekeyd, ethtool, firmware-ipw2x00, fprintd,
2422 fprintd-demo,
<strong
>galileo
</strong
>, gkrellm-thinkbat, gphoto2,
2423 gpsbabel, gpsbabel-gui, gpsman, gpstrans, gqrx-sdr, gr-fcdproplus,
2424 gr-osmosdr, gtkpod, hackrf, hdapsd, hdmi2usb-udev, hpijs-ppds, hplip,
2425 ipw3945-source, ipw3945d, kde-config-tablet, kinect-audio-setup,
2426 <strong
>libnxt
</strong
>, libpam-fprintd,
<strong
>lomoco
</strong
>,
2427 madwimax, minidisc-utils, mkgmap, msi-keyboard, mtkbabel,
2428 <strong
>nbc
</strong
>,
<strong
>nqc
</strong
>, nut-hal-drivers, ola,
2429 open-vm-toolbox, open-vm-tools, openambit, pcgminer, pcmciautils,
2430 pcscd, pidgin-blinklight, printer-driver-splix,
2431 <strong
>pymissile
</strong
>, python-nxt, qlandkartegt,
2432 qlandkartegt-garmin, rosegarden, rt2x00-source, sispmctl,
2433 soapysdr-module-hackrf, solaar, squeak-plugins-scratch, sunxi-tools,
2434 <strong
>t2n
</strong
>, thinkfan, thinkfinger-tools, tlp, tp-smapi-dkms,
2435 tp-smapi-source, tpb, tucnak, uhd-host, usbmuxd, viking,
2436 virtualbox-ose-guest-x11, w1retap, xawtv, xserver-xorg-input-vmmouse,
2437 xserver-xorg-input-wacom, xserver-xorg-video-qxl,
2438 xserver-xorg-video-vmware, yubikey-personalization and
2439 zd1211-firmware
</p
>
2441 <p
>If you know of other packages, please let me know with a wishlist
2442 bug report against the isenkram-cli package, and ask the package
2444 <a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/AppStream/Guidelines
">add AppStream
2445 metadata according to the guidelines
</a
> to provide the information
2446 for everyone. In time, I hope to get rid of the isenkram specific
2447 hardware mapping and depend exclusively on AppStream.
</p
>
2449 <p
>Note, the AppStream metadata for broadcom-sta-dkms is matching too
2450 much hardware, and suggest that the package with with any ethernet
2451 card. See
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
838735">bug #
838735</a
> for
2452 the details. I hope the maintainer find time to address it soon. In
2453 the mean time I provide an override in isenkram.
</p
>
2458 <title>Oolite, a life in space as vagabond and mercenary - nice free software
</title>
2459 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Oolite__a_life_in_space_as_vagabond_and_mercenary___nice_free_software.html
</link>
2460 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Oolite__a_life_in_space_as_vagabond_and_mercenary___nice_free_software.html
</guid>
2461 <pubDate>Sun,
11 Dec
2016 11:
40:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
2462 <description><p align=
"center
"><img width=
"70%
" src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2016-
12-
11-nice-oolite.png
"/
></p
>
2464 <p
>In my early years, I played
2465 <a href=
"http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Classic_Elite
">the epic game
2466 Elite
</a
> on my PC. I spent many months trading and fighting in
2467 space, and reached the
'elite
' fighting status before I moved on. The
2468 original Elite game was available on Commodore
64 and the IBM PC
2469 edition I played had a
64 KB executable. I am still impressed today
2470 that the authors managed to squeeze both a
3D engine and details about
2471 more than
2000 planet systems across
7 galaxies into a binary so
2474 <p
>I have known about
<a href=
"http://www.oolite.org/
">the free
2475 software game Oolite inspired by Elite
</a
> for a while, but did not
2476 really have time to test it properly until a few days ago. It was
2477 great to discover that my old knowledge about trading routes were
2478 still valid. But my fighting and flying abilities were gone, so I had
2479 to retrain to be able to dock on a space station. And I am still not
2480 able to make much resistance when I am attacked by pirates, so I
2481 bougth and mounted the most powerful laser in the rear to be able to
2482 put up at least some resistance while fleeing for my life. :)
</p
>
2484 <p
>When playing Elite in the late eighties, I had to discover
2485 everything on my own, and I had long lists of prices seen on different
2486 planets to be able to decide where to trade what. This time I had the
2488 <a href=
"http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Main_Page
">Elite wiki
</a
>,
2489 where information about each planet is easily available with common
2490 price ranges and suggested trading routes. This improved my ability
2491 to earn money and I have been able to earn enough to buy a lot of
2492 useful equipent in a few days. I believe I originally played for
2493 months before I could get a docking computer, while now I could get it
2494 after less then a week.
</p
>
2496 <p
>If you like science fiction and dreamed of a life as a vagabond in
2497 space, you should try out Oolite. It is available for Linux, MacOSX
2498 and Windows, and is included in Debian and derivatives since
2011.
</p
>
2500 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2501 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2502 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
2507 <title>Quicker Debian installations using eatmydata
</title>
2508 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Quicker_Debian_installations_using_eatmydata.html
</link>
2509 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Quicker_Debian_installations_using_eatmydata.html
</guid>
2510 <pubDate>Fri,
25 Nov
2016 14:
50:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
2511 <description><p
>Two years ago, I did some experiments with eatmydata and the Debian
2512 installation system, observing how using
2513 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Speeding_up_the_Debian_installer_using_eatmydata_and_dpkg_divert.html
">eatmydata
2514 could speed up the installation
</a
> quite a bit. My testing measured
2515 speedup around
20-
40 percent for Debian Edu, where we install around
2516 1000 packages from within the installer. The eatmydata package
2517 provide a way to disable/delay file system flushing. This is a bit
2518 risky in the general case, as files that should be stored on disk will
2519 stay only in memory a bit longer than expected, causing problems if a
2520 machine crashes at an inconvenient time. But for an installation, if
2521 the machine crashes during installation the process is normally
2522 restarted, and avoiding disk operations as much as possible to speed
2523 up the process make perfect sense.
2525 <p
>I added code in the Debian Edu specific installation code to enable
2526 <a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/libeatmydata
">eatmydata
</a
>,
2527 but did not have time to push it any further. But a few months ago I
2528 picked it up again and worked with the libeatmydata package maintainer
2529 Mattia Rizzolo to make it easier for everyone to get this installation
2530 speedup in Debian. Thanks to our cooperation There is now an
2531 eatmydata-udeb package in Debian testing and unstable, and simply
2532 enabling/installing it in debian-installer (d-i) is enough to get the
2533 quicker installations. It can be enabled using preseeding. The
2534 following untested kernel argument should do the trick:
</p
>
2536 <blockquote
><pre
>
2537 preseed/early_command=
"anna-install eatmydata-udeb
"
2538 </pre
></blockquote
>
2540 <p
>This should ask d-i to install the package inside the d-i
2541 environment early in the installation sequence. Having it installed
2542 in d-i in turn will make sure the relevant scripts are called just
2543 after debootstrap filled /target/ with the freshly installed Debian
2544 system to configure apt to run dpkg with eatmydata. This is enough to
2545 speed up the installation process. There is a proposal to
2546 <a href=
"https://bugs.debian.org/
841153">extend the idea a bit further
2547 by using /etc/ld.so.preload instead of apt.conf
</a
>, but I have not
2548 tested its impact.
</p
>
2554 <title>Coz profiler for multi-threaded software is now in Debian
</title>
2555 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Coz_profiler_for_multi_threaded_software_is_now_in_Debian.html
</link>
2556 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Coz_profiler_for_multi_threaded_software_is_now_in_Debian.html
</guid>
2557 <pubDate>Sun,
13 Nov
2016 12:
30:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
2558 <description><p
><a href=
"http://coz-profiler.org/
">The Coz profiler
</a
>, a nice
2559 profiler able to run benchmarking experiments on the instrumented
2560 multi-threaded program, finally
2561 <a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/coz-profiler
">made it into
2562 Debian unstable yesterday
</A
>. Lluís Vilanova and I have spent many
2564 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Coz_can_help_you_find_bottlenecks_in_multi_threaded_software___nice_free_software.html
">I
2565 blogged about the coz tool
</a
> in August working with upstream to make
2566 it suitable for Debian. There are still issues with clang
2567 compatibility, inline assembly only working x86 and minimized
2568 JavaScript libraries.
</p
>
2570 <p
>To test it, install
'coz-profiler
' using apt and run it like this:
</p
>
2572 <p
><blockquote
>
2573 <tt
>coz run --- /path/to/binary-with-debug-info
</tt
>
2574 </blockquote
></p
>
2576 <p
>This will produce a profile.coz file in the current working
2577 directory with the profiling information. This is then given to a
2578 JavaScript application provided in the package and available from
2579 <a href=
"http://plasma-umass.github.io/coz/
">a project web page
</a
>.
2580 To start the local copy, invoke it in a browser like this:
</p
>
2582 <p
><blockquote
>
2583 <tt
>sensible-browser /usr/share/coz-profiler/viewer/index.htm
</tt
>
2584 </blockquote
></p
>
2586 <p
>See the project home page and the
2587 <a href=
"https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/summer2016/curtsinger
">USENIX
2588 ;login: article on Coz
</a
> for more information on how it is
2594 <title>How to talk with your loved ones in private
</title>
2595 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_talk_with_your_loved_ones_in_private.html
</link>
2596 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_talk_with_your_loved_ones_in_private.html
</guid>
2597 <pubDate>Mon,
7 Nov
2016 10:
25:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
2598 <description><p
>A few days ago I ran a very biased and informal survey to get an
2599 idea about what options are being used to communicate with end to end
2600 encryption with friends and family. I explicitly asked people not to
2601 list options only used in a work setting. The background is the
2602 uneasy feeling I get when using Signal, a feeling shared by others as
2603 a blog post from Sander Venima about
2604 <a href=
"https://sandervenema.ch/
2016/
11/why-i-wont-recommend-signal-anymore/
">why
2605 he do not recommend Signal anymore
</a
> (with
2606 <a href=
"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=
12883410">feedback from
2607 the Signal author available from ycombinator
</a
>). I wanted an
2608 overview of the options being used, and hope to include those options
2609 in a less biased survey later on. So far I have not taken the time to
2610 look into the individual proposed systems. They range from text
2611 sharing web pages, via file sharing and email to instant messaging,
2612 VOIP and video conferencing. For those considering which system to
2613 use, it is also useful to have a look at
2614 <a href=
"https://www.eff.org/secure-messaging-scorecard
">the EFF Secure
2615 messaging scorecard
</a
> which is slightly out of date but still
2616 provide valuable information.
</p
>
2618 <p
>So, on to the list. There were some used by many, some used by a
2619 few, some rarely used ones and a few mentioned but without anyone
2620 claiming to use them. Notice the grouping is in reality quite random
2621 given the biased self selected set of participants. First the ones
2622 used by many:
</p
>
2626 <li
><a href=
"https://whispersystems.org/
">Signal
</a
></li
>
2627 <li
>Email w/
<a href=
"http://openpgp.org/
">OpenPGP
</a
> (Enigmail, GPGSuite,etc)
</li
>
2628 <li
><a href=
"https://www.whatsapp.com/
">Whatsapp
</a
></li
>
2629 <li
>IRC w/
<a href=
"https://otr.cypherpunks.ca/
">OTR
</a
></li
>
2630 <li
>XMPP w/
<a href=
"https://otr.cypherpunks.ca/
">OTR
</a
></li
>
2634 <p
>Then the ones used by a few.
</p
>
2638 <li
><a href=
"https://wiki.mumble.info/wiki/Main_Page
">Mumble
</a
></li
>
2639 <li
>iMessage (included in iOS from Apple)
</li
>
2640 <li
><a href=
"https://telegram.org/
">Telegram
</a
></li
>
2641 <li
><a href=
"https://jitsi.org/
">Jitsi
</a
></li
>
2642 <li
><a href=
"https://keybase.io/download
">Keybase file
</a
></li
>
2646 <p
>Then the ones used by even fewer people
</p
>
2650 <li
><a href=
"https://ring.cx/
">Ring
</a
></li
>
2651 <li
><a href=
"https://bitmessage.org/
">Bitmessage
</a
></li
>
2652 <li
><a href=
"https://wire.com/
">Wire
</a
></li
>
2653 <li
>VoIP w/
<a href=
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZRTP
">ZRTP
</a
> or controlled
<a href=
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Real-time_Transport_Protocol
">SRTP
</a
> (e.g using
<a href=
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSipSimple
">CSipSimple
</a
>,
<a href=
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linphone
">Linphone
</a
>)
</li
>
2654 <li
><a href=
"https://matrix.org/
">Matrix
</a
></li
>
2655 <li
><a href=
"https://kontalk.org/
">Kontalk
</a
></li
>
2656 <li
><a href=
"https://
0bin.net/
">0bin
</a
> (encrypted pastebin)
</li
>
2657 <li
><a href=
"https://appear.in
">Appear.in
</a
></li
>
2658 <li
><a href=
"https://riot.im/
">riot
</a
></li
>
2659 <li
><a href=
"https://www.wickr.com/
">Wickr Me
</a
></li
>
2663 <p
>And finally the ones mentioned by not marked as used by
2664 anyone. This might be a mistake, perhaps the person adding the entry
2665 forgot to flag it as used?
</p
>
2669 <li
>Email w/Certificates
<a href=
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S/MIME
">S/MIME
</a
></li
>
2670 <li
><a href=
"https://www.crypho.com/
">Crypho
</a
></li
>
2671 <li
><a href=
"https://cryptpad.fr/
">CryptPad
</a
></li
>
2672 <li
><a href=
"https://github.com/ricochet-im/ricochet
">ricochet
</a
></li
>
2676 <p
>Given the network effect it seem obvious to me that we as a society
2677 have been divided and conquered by those interested in keeping
2678 encrypted and secure communication away from the masses. The
2679 finishing remarks
<a href=
"https://vimeo.com/
97505679">from Aral Balkan
2680 in his talk
"Free is a lie
"</a
> about the usability of free software
2681 really come into effect when you want to communicate in private with
2682 your friends and family. We can not expect them to allow the
2683 usability of communication tool to block their ability to talk to
2684 their loved ones.
</p
>
2686 <p
>Note for example the option IRC w/OTR. Most IRC clients do not
2687 have OTR support, so in most cases OTR would not be an option, even if
2688 you wanted to. In my personal experience, about
1 in
20 I talk to
2689 have a IRC client with OTR. For private communication to really be
2690 available, most people to talk to must have the option in their
2691 currently used client. I can not simply ask my family to install an
2692 IRC client. I need to guide them through a technical multi-step
2693 process of adding extensions to the client to get them going. This is
2694 a non-starter for most.
</p
>
2696 <p
>I would like to be able to do video phone calls, audio phone calls,
2697 exchange instant messages and share files with my loved ones, without
2698 being forced to share with people I do not know. I do not want to
2699 share the content of the conversations, and I do not want to share who
2700 I communicate with or the fact that I communicate with someone.
2701 Without all these factors in place, my private life is being more or
2702 less invaded.
</p
>
2707 <title>My own self balancing Lego Segway
</title>
2708 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/My_own_self_balancing_Lego_Segway.html
</link>
2709 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/My_own_self_balancing_Lego_Segway.html
</guid>
2710 <pubDate>Fri,
4 Nov
2016 10:
15:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
2711 <description><p
>A while back I received a Gyro sensor for the NXT
2712 <a href=
"mindstorms.lego.com
">Mindstorms
</a
> controller as a birthday
2713 present. It had been on my wishlist for a while, because I wanted to
2714 build a Segway like balancing lego robot. I had already built
2715 <a href=
"http://www.nxtprograms.com/NXT2/segway/
">a simple balancing
2716 robot
</a
> with the kids, using the light/color sensor included in the
2717 NXT kit as the balance sensor, but it was not working very well. It
2718 could balance for a while, but was very sensitive to the light
2719 condition in the room and the reflective properties of the surface and
2720 would fall over after a short while. I wanted something more robust,
2722 <a href=
"https://www.hitechnic.com/cgi-bin/commerce.cgi?preadd=action
&key=NGY1044
">the
2723 gyro sensor from HiTechnic
</a
> I believed would solve it on my
2724 wishlist for some years before it suddenly showed up as a gift from my
2725 loved ones. :)
</p
>
2727 <p
>Unfortunately I have not had time to sit down and play with it
2728 since then. But that changed some days ago, when I was searching for
2729 lego segway information and came across a recipe from HiTechnic for
2731 <a href=
"http://www.hitechnic.com/blog/gyro-sensor/htway/
">the
2732 HTWay
</a
>, a segway like balancing robot. Build instructions and
2733 <a href=
"https://www.hitechnic.com/upload/
786-HTWayC.nxc
">source
2734 code
</a
> was included, so it was just a question of putting it all
2735 together. And thanks to the great work of many Debian developers, the
2736 compiler needed to build the source for the NXT is already included in
2737 Debian, so I was read to go in less than an hour. The resulting robot
2738 do not look very impressive in its simplicity:
</p
>
2740 <p align=
"center
"><img width=
"70%
" src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2016-
11-
04-lego-htway-robot.jpeg
"></p
>
2742 <p
>Because I lack the infrared sensor used to control the robot in the
2743 design from HiTechnic, I had to comment out the last task
2744 (taskControl). I simply placed /* and */ around it get the program
2745 working without that sensor present. Now it balances just fine until
2746 the battery status run low:
</p
>
2748 <p align=
"center
"><video width=
"70%
" controls=
"true
">
2749 <source src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2016-
11-
04-lego-htway-balancing.ogv
" type=
"video/ogg
">
2750 </video
></p
>
2752 <p
>Now we would like to teach it how to follow a line and take remote
2753 control instructions using the included Bluetooth receiver in the NXT.
</p
>
2755 <p
>If you, like me, love LEGO and want to make sure we find the tools
2756 they need to work with LEGO in Debian and all our derivative
2757 distributions like Ubuntu, check out
2758 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners
">the LEGO designers
2759 project page
</a
> and join the Debian LEGO team. Personally I own a
2760 RCX and NXT controller (no EV3), and would like to make sure the
2761 Debian tools needed to program the systems I own work as they
2767 <title>Experience and updated recipe for using the Signal app without a mobile phone
</title>
2768 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Experience_and_updated_recipe_for_using_the_Signal_app_without_a_mobile_phone.html
</link>
2769 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Experience_and_updated_recipe_for_using_the_Signal_app_without_a_mobile_phone.html
</guid>
2770 <pubDate>Mon,
10 Oct
2016 11:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
2771 <description><p
>In July
2772 <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
2773 wrote how to get the Signal Chrome/Chromium app working
</a
> without
2774 the ability to receive SMS messages (aka without a cell phone). It is
2775 time to share some experiences and provide an updated setup.
</p
>
2777 <p
>The Signal app have worked fine for several months now, and I use
2778 it regularly to chat with my loved ones. I had a major snag at the
2779 end of my summer vacation, when the the app completely forgot my
2780 setup, identity and keys. The reason behind this major mess was
2781 running out of disk space. To avoid that ever happening again I have
2782 started storing everything in
<tt
>userdata/
</tt
> in git, to be able to
2783 roll back to an earlier version if the files are wiped by mistake. I
2784 had to use it once after introducing the git backup. When rolling
2785 back to an earlier version, one need to use the
'reset session
' option
2786 in Signal to get going, and notify the people you talk with about the
2787 problem. I assume there is some sequence number tracking in the
2788 protocol to detect rollback attacks. The git repository is rather big
2789 (
674 MiB so far), but I have not tried to figure out if some of the
2790 content can be added to a .gitignore file due to lack of spare
2793 <p
>I
've also hit the
90 days timeout blocking, and noticed that this
2794 make it impossible to send messages using Signal. I could still
2795 receive them, but had to patch the code with a new timestamp to send.
2796 I believe the timeout is added by the developers to force people to
2797 upgrade to the latest version of the app, even when there is no
2798 protocol changes, to reduce the version skew among the user base and
2799 thus try to keep the number of support requests down.
</p
>
2801 <p
>Since my original recipe, the Signal source code changed slightly,
2802 making the old patch fail to apply cleanly. Below is an updated
2803 patch, including the shell wrapper I use to start Signal. The
2804 original version required a new user to locate the JavaScript console
2805 and call a function from there. I got help from a friend with more
2806 JavaScript knowledge than me to modify the code to provide a GUI
2807 button instead. This mean that to get started you just need to run
2808 the wrapper and click the
'Register without mobile phone
' to get going
2809 now. I
've also modified the timeout code to always set it to
90 days
2810 in the future, to avoid having to patch the code regularly.
</p
>
2812 <p
>So, the updated recipe for Debian Jessie:
</p
>
2816 <li
>First, install required packages to get the source code and the
2817 browser you need. Signal only work with Chrome/Chromium, as far as I
2818 know, so you need to install it.
2821 apt install git tor chromium
2822 git clone https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Desktop.git
2823 </pre
></li
>
2825 <li
>Modify the source code using command listed in the the patch
2826 block below.
</li
>
2828 <li
>Start Signal using the run-signal-app wrapper (for example using
2829 <tt
>`pwd`/run-signal-app
</tt
>).
2831 <li
>Click on the
'Register without mobile phone
', will in a phone
2832 number you can receive calls to the next minute, receive the
2833 verification code and enter it into the form field and press
2834 'Register
'. Note, the phone number you use will be user Signal
2835 username, ie the way others can find you on Signal.
</li
>
2837 <li
>You can now use Signal to contact others. Note, new contacts do
2838 not show up in the contact list until you restart Signal, and there is
2839 no way to assign names to Contacts. There is also no way to create or
2840 update chat groups. I suspect this is because the web app do not have
2841 a associated contact database.
</li
>
2845 <p
>I am still a bit uneasy about using Signal, because of the way its
2846 main author moxie0 reject federation and accept dependencies to major
2847 corporations like Google (part of the code is fetched from Google) and
2848 Amazon (the central coordination point is owned by Amazon). See for
2850 <a href=
"https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/
37">the
2851 LibreSignal issue tracker
</a
> for a thread documenting the authors
2852 view on these issues. But the network effect is strong in this case,
2853 and several of the people I want to communicate with already use
2854 Signal. Perhaps we can all move to
<a href=
"https://ring.cx/
">Ring
</a
>
2855 once it
<a href=
"https://bugs.debian.org/
830265">work on my
2856 laptop
</a
>? It already work on Windows and Android, and is included
2857 in
<a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/ring
">Debian
</a
> and
2858 <a href=
"https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ring
">Ubuntu
</a
>, but not
2859 working on Debian Stable.
</p
>
2861 <p
>Anyway, this is the patch I apply to the Signal code to get it
2862 working. It switch to the production servers, disable to timeout,
2863 make registration easier and add the shell wrapper:
</p
>
2866 cd Signal-Desktop; cat
&lt;
&lt;EOF | patch -p1
2867 diff --git a/js/background.js b/js/background.js
2868 index
24b4c1d.
.579345f
100644
2869 --- a/js/background.js
2870 +++ b/js/background.js
2875 - var SERVER_URL =
'https://textsecure-service-staging.whispersystems.org
';
2876 + var SERVER_URL =
'https://textsecure-service-ca.whispersystems.org
';
2877 var SERVER_PORTS = [
80,
4433,
8443];
2878 - var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL =
'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments-staging.s3.amazonaws.com
';
2879 + var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL =
'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments.s3.amazonaws.com
';
2880 var messageReceiver;
2881 window.getSocketStatus = function() {
2882 if (messageReceiver) {
2883 diff --git a/js/expire.js b/js/expire.js
2884 index
639aeae..beb91c3
100644
2889 'use strict
';
2890 - var BUILD_EXPIRATION =
0;
2891 + var BUILD_EXPIRATION = Date.now() + (
90 *
24 *
60 *
60 *
1000);
2893 window.extension = window.extension || {};
2895 diff --git a/js/views/install_view.js b/js/views/install_view.js
2896 index
7816f4f.
.1d6233b
100644
2897 --- a/js/views/install_view.js
2898 +++ b/js/views/install_view.js
2901 'click .step1
': this.selectStep.bind(this,
1),
2902 'click .step2
': this.selectStep.bind(this,
2),
2903 -
'click .step3
': this.selectStep.bind(this,
3)
2904 +
'click .step3
': this.selectStep.bind(this,
3),
2905 +
'click .callreg
': function() { extension.install(
'standalone
') },
2908 clearQR: function() {
2909 diff --git a/options.html b/options.html
2910 index dc0f28e.
.8d709f6
100644
2914 &lt;div class=
'nav
'>
2915 &lt;h1
>{{ installWelcome }}
&lt;/h1
>
2916 &lt;p
>{{ installTagline }}
&lt;/p
>
2917 -
&lt;div
> &lt;a class=
'button step2
'>{{ installGetStartedButton }}
&lt;/a
> &lt;/div
>
2918 +
&lt;div
> &lt;a class=
'button step2
'>{{ installGetStartedButton }}
&lt;/a
>
2919 +
&lt;br
> &lt;a class=
"button callreg
">Register without mobile phone
&lt;/a
>
2922 &lt;span class=
'dot step1 selected
'>&lt;/span
>
2923 &lt;span class=
'dot step2
'>&lt;/span
>
2924 &lt;span class=
'dot step3
'>&lt;/span
>
2925 --- /dev/null
2016-
10-
07 09:
55:
13.730181472 +
0200
2926 +++ b/run-signal-app
2016-
10-
10 08:
54:
09.434172391 +
0200
2932 +userdata=
"`pwd`/userdata
"
2933 +if [ -d
"$userdata
" ]
&& [ ! -d
"$userdata/.git
" ] ; then
2934 + (cd $userdata
&& git init)
2936 +(cd $userdata
&& git add .
&& git commit -m
"Current status.
" || true)
2938 + --proxy-server=
"socks://localhost:
9050" \
2939 + --user-data-dir=$userdata --load-and-launch-app=`pwd`
2941 chmod a+rx run-signal-app
2944 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2945 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2946 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
2951 <title>Isenkram, Appstream and udev make life as a LEGO builder easier
</title>
2952 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Isenkram__Appstream_and_udev_make_life_as_a_LEGO_builder_easier.html
</link>
2953 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Isenkram__Appstream_and_udev_make_life_as_a_LEGO_builder_easier.html
</guid>
2954 <pubDate>Fri,
7 Oct
2016 09:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
2955 <description><p
><a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram
">The Isenkram
2956 system
</a
> provide a practical and easy way to figure out which
2957 packages support the hardware in a given machine. The command line
2958 tool
<tt
>isenkram-lookup
</tt
> and the tasksel options provide a
2959 convenient way to list and install packages relevant for the current
2960 hardware during system installation, both user space packages and
2961 firmware packages. The GUI background daemon on the other hand provide
2962 a pop-up proposing to install packages when a new dongle is inserted
2963 while using the computer. For example, if you plug in a smart card
2964 reader, the system will ask if you want to install
<tt
>pcscd
</tt
> if
2965 that package isn
't already installed, and if you plug in a USB video
2966 camera the system will ask if you want to install
<tt
>cheese
</tt
> if
2967 cheese is currently missing. This already work just fine.
</p
>
2969 <p
>But Isenkram depend on a database mapping from hardware IDs to
2970 package names. When I started no such database existed in Debian, so
2971 I made my own data set and included it with the isenkram package and
2972 made isenkram fetch the latest version of this database from git using
2973 http. This way the isenkram users would get updated package proposals
2974 as soon as I learned more about hardware related packages.
</p
>
2976 <p
>The hardware is identified using modalias strings. The modalias
2977 design is from the Linux kernel where most hardware descriptors are
2978 made available as a strings that can be matched using filename style
2979 globbing. It handle USB, PCI, DMI and a lot of other hardware related
2980 identifiers.
</p
>
2982 <p
>The downside to the Isenkram specific database is that there is no
2983 information about relevant distribution / Debian version, making
2984 isenkram propose obsolete packages too. But along came AppStream, a
2985 cross distribution mechanism to store and collect metadata about
2986 software packages. When I heard about the proposal, I contacted the
2987 people involved and suggested to add a hardware matching rule using
2988 modalias strings in the specification, to be able to use AppStream for
2989 mapping hardware to packages. This idea was accepted and AppStream is
2990 now a great way for a package to announce the hardware it support in a
2991 distribution neutral way. I wrote
2992 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_appstream_with_isenkram_to_install_hardware_related_packages_in_Debian.html
">a
2993 recipe on how to add such meta-information
</a
> in a blog post last
2994 December. If you have a hardware related package in Debian, please
2995 announce the relevant hardware IDs using AppStream.
</p
>
2997 <p
>In Debian, almost all packages that can talk to a LEGO Mindestorms
2998 RCX or NXT unit, announce this support using AppStream. The effect is
2999 that when you insert such LEGO robot controller into your Debian
3000 machine, Isenkram will propose to install the packages needed to get
3001 it working. The intention is that this should allow the local user to
3002 start programming his robot controller right away without having to
3003 guess what packages to use or which permissions to fix.
</p
>
3005 <p
>But when I sat down with my son the other day to program our NXT
3006 unit using his Debian Stretch computer, I discovered something
3007 annoying. The local console user (ie my son) did not get access to
3008 the USB device for programming the unit. This used to work, but no
3009 longer in Jessie and Stretch. After some investigation and asking
3010 around on #debian-devel, I discovered that this was because udev had
3011 changed the mechanism used to grant access to local devices. The
3012 ConsoleKit mechanism from
<tt
>/lib/udev/rules.d/
70-udev-acl.rules
</tt
>
3013 no longer applied, because LDAP users no longer was added to the
3014 plugdev group during login. Michael Biebl told me that this method
3015 was obsolete and the new method used ACLs instead. This was good
3016 news, as the plugdev mechanism is a mess when using a remote user
3017 directory like LDAP. Using ACLs would make sure a user lost device
3018 access when she logged out, even if the user left behind a background
3019 process which would retain the plugdev membership with the ConsoleKit
3020 setup. Armed with this knowledge I moved on to fix the access problem
3021 for the LEGO Mindstorms related packages.
</p
>
3023 <p
>The new system uses a udev tag,
'uaccess
'. It can either be
3024 applied directly for a device, or is applied in
3025 /lib/udev/rules.d/
70-uaccess.rules for classes of devices. As the
3026 LEGO Mindstorms udev rules did not have a class, I decided to add the
3027 tag directly in the udev rules files included in the packages. Here
3028 is one example. For the nqc C compiler for the RCX, the
3029 <tt
>/lib/udev/rules.d/
60-nqc.rules
</tt
> file now look like this:
3031 <p
><pre
>
3032 SUBSYSTEM==
"usb
", ACTION==
"add
", ATTR{idVendor}==
"0694", ATTR{idProduct}==
"0001", \
3033 SYMLINK+=
"rcx-%k
", TAG+=
"uaccess
"
3034 </pre
></p
>
3036 <p
>The key part is the
'TAG+=
"uaccess
"' at the end. I suspect all
3037 packages using plugdev in their /lib/udev/rules.d/ files should be
3038 changed to use this tag (either directly or indirectly via
3039 <tt
>70-uaccess.rules
</tt
>). Perhaps a lintian check should be created
3040 to detect this?
</p
>
3042 <p
>I
've been unable to find good documentation on the uaccess feature.
3043 It is unclear to me if the uaccess tag is an internal implementation
3044 detail like the udev-acl tag used by
3045 <tt
>/lib/udev/rules.d/
70-udev-acl.rules
</tt
>. If it is, I guess the
3046 indirect method is the preferred way. Michael
3047 <a href=
"https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/
4288">asked for more
3048 documentation from the systemd project
</a
> and I hope it will make
3049 this clearer. For now I use the generic classes when they exist and
3050 is already handled by
<tt
>70-uaccess.rules
</tt
>, and add the tag
3051 directly if no such class exist.
</p
>
3053 <p
>To learn more about the isenkram system, please check out
3054 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/
">my
3055 blog posts tagged isenkram
</a
>.
</p
>
3057 <p
>To help out making life for LEGO constructors in Debian easier,
3058 please join us on our IRC channel
3059 <a href=
"irc://irc.debian.org/%
23debian-lego
">#debian-lego
</a
> and join
3060 the
<a href=
"https://alioth.debian.org/projects/debian-lego/
">Debian
3061 LEGO team
</a
> in the Alioth project we created yesterday. A mailing
3062 list is not yet created, but we are working on it. :)
</p
>
3064 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3065 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3066 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
3071 <title>First draft Norwegian Bokmål edition of The Debian Administrator
's Handbook now public
</title>
3072 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_draft_Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_The_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook_now_public.html
</link>
3073 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_draft_Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_The_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook_now_public.html
</guid>
3074 <pubDate>Tue,
30 Aug
2016 10:
10:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
3075 <description><p
>In April we
3076 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_a_Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_The_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook.html
">started
3077 to work
</a
> on a Norwegian Bokmål edition of the
"open access
" book on
3078 how to set up and administrate a Debian system. Today I am happy to
3079 report that the first draft is now publicly available. You can find
3080 it on
<a href=
"https://debian-handbook.info/get/
">get the Debian
3081 Administrator
's Handbook page
</a
> (under Other languages). The first
3082 eight chapters have a first draft translation, and we are working on
3083 proofreading the content. If you want to help out, please start
3085 <a href=
"https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-handbook/
">the
3086 hosted weblate project page
</a
>, and get in touch using
3087 <a href=
"http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/debian-handbook-translators
">the
3088 translators mailing list
</a
>. Please also check out
3089 <a href=
"https://debian-handbook.info/contribute/
">the instructions for
3090 contributors
</a
>. A good way to contribute is to proofread the text
3091 and update weblate if you find errors.
</p
>
3093 <p
>Our goal is still to make the Norwegian book available on paper as well as
3094 electronic form.
</p
>
3099 <title>Coz can help you find bottlenecks in multi-threaded software - nice free software
</title>
3100 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Coz_can_help_you_find_bottlenecks_in_multi_threaded_software___nice_free_software.html
</link>
3101 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Coz_can_help_you_find_bottlenecks_in_multi_threaded_software___nice_free_software.html
</guid>
3102 <pubDate>Thu,
11 Aug
2016 12:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
3103 <description><p
>This summer, I read a great article
3104 "<a href=
"https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/summer2016/curtsinger
">coz:
3105 This Is the Profiler You
're Looking For
</a
>" in USENIX ;login: about
3106 how to profile multi-threaded programs. It presented a system for
3107 profiling software by running experiences in the running program,
3108 testing how run time performance is affected by
"speeding up
" parts of
3109 the code to various degrees compared to a normal run. It does this by
3110 slowing down parallel threads while the
"faster up
" code is running
3111 and measure how this affect processing time. The processing time is
3112 measured using probes inserted into the code, either using progress
3113 counters (COZ_PROGRESS) or as latency meters (COZ_BEGIN/COZ_END). It
3114 can also measure unmodified code by measuring complete the program
3115 runtime and running the program several times instead.
</p
>
3117 <p
>The project and presentation was so inspiring that I would like to
3118 get the system into Debian. I
3119 <a href=
"https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=
830708">created
3120 a WNPP request for it
</a
> and contacted upstream to try to make the
3121 system ready for Debian by sending patches. The build process need to
3122 be changed a bit to avoid running
'git clone
' to get dependencies, and
3123 to include the JavaScript web page used to visualize the collected
3124 profiling information included in the source package.
3125 But I expect that should work out fairly soon.
</p
>
3127 <p
>The way the system work is fairly simple. To run an coz experiment
3128 on a binary with debug symbols available, start the program like this:
3130 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
3131 coz run --- program-to-run
3132 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
3134 <p
>This will create a text file profile.coz with the instrumentation
3135 information. To show what part of the code affect the performance
3136 most, use a web browser and either point it to
3137 <a href=
"http://plasma-umass.github.io/coz/
">http://plasma-umass.github.io/coz/
</a
>
3138 or use the copy from git (in the gh-pages branch). Check out this web
3139 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
3140 profiling more useful you include
&lt;coz.h
&gt; and insert the
3141 COZ_PROGRESS or COZ_BEGIN and COZ_END at appropriate places in the
3142 code, rebuild and run the profiler. This allow coz to do more
3143 targeted experiments.
</p
>
3145 <p
>A video published by ACM
3146 <a href=
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jE0V-p1odPg
">presenting the
3147 Coz profiler
</a
> is available from Youtube. There is also a paper
3148 from the
25th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles available
3150 <a href=
"https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc16/technical-sessions/presentation/curtsinger
">Coz:
3151 finding code that counts with causal profiling
</a
>.
</p
>
3153 <p
><a href=
"https://github.com/plasma-umass/coz
">The source code
</a
>
3154 for Coz is available from github. It will only build with clang
3156 <a href=
"https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=
55606">C++
3157 feature missing in GCC
</a
>, but I
've submitted
3158 <a href=
"https://github.com/plasma-umass/coz/pull/
67">a patch to solve
3159 it
</a
> and hope it will be included in the upstream source soon.
</p
>
3161 <p
>Please get in touch if you, like me, would like to see this piece
3162 of software in Debian. I would very much like some help with the
3163 packaging effort, as I lack the in depth knowledge on how to package
3164 C++ libraries.
</p
>
3169 <title>Sales number for the Free Culture translation, first half of
2016</title>
3170 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sales_number_for_the_Free_Culture_translation__first_half_of_2016.html
</link>
3171 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sales_number_for_the_Free_Culture_translation__first_half_of_2016.html
</guid>
3172 <pubDate>Fri,
5 Aug
2016 22:
45:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
3173 <description><p
>As my regular readers probably remember, the last year I published
3174 a French and Norwegian translation of the classic
3175 <a href=
"http://www.free-culture.cc/
">Free Culture book
</a
> by the
3176 founder of the Creative Commons movement, Lawrence Lessig. A bit less
3177 known is the fact that due to the way I created the translations,
3178 using docbook and po4a, I also recreated the English original. And
3179 because I already had created a new the PDF edition, I published it
3180 too. The revenue from the books are sent to the Creative Commons
3181 Corporation. In other words, I do not earn any money from this
3182 project, I just earn the warm fuzzy feeling that the text is available
3183 for a wider audience and more people can learn why the Creative
3184 Commons is needed.
</p
>
3186 <p
>Today, just for fun, I had a look at the sales number over at
3187 Lulu.com, which take care of payment, printing and shipping. Much to
3188 my surprise, the English edition is selling better than both the
3189 French and Norwegian edition, despite the fact that it has been
3190 available in English since it was first published. In total,
24 paper
3191 books was sold for USD $
19.99 between
2016-
01-
01 and
2016-
07-
31:
</p
>
3193 <table border=
"0">
3194 <tr
><th
>Title / language
</th
><th
>Quantity
</th
></tr
>
3195 <tr
><td
><a href=
"http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/culture-libre/paperback/product-
22645082.html
">Culture Libre / French
</a
></td
><td align=
"right
">3</td
></tr
>
3196 <tr
><td
><a href=
"http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/fri-kultur/paperback/product-
22441576.html
">Fri kultur / Norwegian
</a
></td
><td align=
"right
">7</td
></tr
>
3197 <tr
><td
><a href=
"http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-
22440520.html
">Free Culture / English
</a
></td
><td align=
"right
">14</td
></tr
>
3200 <p
>The books are available both from Lulu.com and from large book
3201 stores like Amazon and Barnes
&Noble. Most revenue, around $
10 per
3202 book, is sent to the Creative Commons project when the book is sold
3203 directly by Lulu.com. The other channels give less revenue. The
3204 summary from Lulu tell me
10 books was sold via the Amazon channel,
10
3205 via Ingram (what is this?) and
4 directly by Lulu. And Lulu.com tells
3206 me that the revenue sent so far this year is USD $
101.42. No idea
3207 what kind of sales numbers to expect, so I do not know if that is a
3208 good amount of sales for a
10 year old book or not. But it make me
3209 happy that the buyers find the book, and I hope they enjoy reading it
3210 as much as I did.
</p
>
3212 <p
>The ebook edition is available for free from
3213 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig
">Github
</a
>.
</p
>
3215 <p
>If you would like to translate and publish the book in your native
3216 language, I would be happy to help make it happen. Please get in
3222 <title>Techno TV broadcasting live across Norway and the Internet (#debconf16, #nuug) on @frikanalen
</title>
3223 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Techno_TV_broadcasting_live_across_Norway_and_the_Internet___debconf16___nuug__on__frikanalen.html
</link>
3224 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Techno_TV_broadcasting_live_across_Norway_and_the_Internet___debconf16___nuug__on__frikanalen.html
</guid>
3225 <pubDate>Mon,
1 Aug
2016 10:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
3226 <description><p
>Did you know there is a TV channel broadcasting talks from DebConf
3227 16 across an entire country? Or that there is a TV channel
3228 broadcasting talks by or about
3229 <a href=
"http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/
625529/
">Linus Torvalds
</a
>,
3230 <a href=
"http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/
625599/
">Tor
</a
>,
3231 <a href=
"http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/
624019/
">OpenID
</A
>,
3232 <a href=
"http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/
625624/
">Common Lisp
</a
>,
3233 <a href=
"http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/
625446/
">Civic Tech
</a
>,
3234 <a href=
"http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/
625090/
">EFF founder John Barlow
</a
>,
3235 <a href=
"http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/
625432/
">how to make
3D
3236 printer electronics
</a
> and many more fascinating topics? It works
3237 using only free software (all of it
3238 <a href=
"http://github.com/Frikanalen
">available from Github
</a
>), and
3239 is administrated using a web browser and a web API.
</p
>
3241 <p
>The TV channel is the Norwegian open channel
3242 <a href=
"http://www.frikanalen.no/
">Frikanalen
</a
>, and I am involved
3243 via
<a href=
"https://www.nuug.no/
">the NUUG member association
</a
> in
3244 running and developing the software for the channel. The channel is
3245 organised as a member organisation where its members can upload and
3246 broadcast what they want (think of it as Youtube for national
3247 broadcasting television). Individuals can broadcast too. The time
3248 slots are handled on a first come, first serve basis. Because the
3249 channel have almost no viewers and very few active members, we can
3250 experiment with TV technology without too much flack when we make
3251 mistakes. And thanks to the few active members, most of the slots on
3252 the schedule are free. I see this as an opportunity to spread
3253 knowledge about technology and free software, and have a script I run
3254 regularly to fill up all the open slots the next few days with
3255 technology related video. The end result is a channel I like to
3256 describe as Techno TV - filled with interesting talks and
3257 presentations.
</p
>
3259 <p
>It is available on channel
50 on the Norwegian national digital TV
3260 network (RiksTV). It is also available as a multicast stream on
3261 Uninett. And finally, it is available as
3262 <a href=
"http://beta.frikanalen.no/
">a WebM unicast stream
</a
> from
3263 Frikanalen and NUUG. Check it out. :)
</p
>
3268 <title>Unlocking HTC Desire HD on Linux using unruu and fastboot
</title>
3269 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Unlocking_HTC_Desire_HD_on_Linux_using_unruu_and_fastboot.html
</link>
3270 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Unlocking_HTC_Desire_HD_on_Linux_using_unruu_and_fastboot.html
</guid>
3271 <pubDate>Thu,
7 Jul
2016 11:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
3272 <description><p
>Yesterday, I tried to unlock a HTC Desire HD phone, and it proved
3273 to be a slight challenge. Here is the recipe if I ever need to do it
3274 again. It all started by me wanting to try the recipe to set up
3275 <a href=
"https://blog.torproject.org/blog/mission-impossible-hardening-android-security-and-privacy
">an
3276 hardened Android installation
</a
> from the Tor project blog on a
3277 device I had access to. It is a old mobile phone with a broken
3278 microphone The initial idea had been to just
3279 <a href=
"http://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w/Install_CM_for_ace
">install
3280 CyanogenMod on it
</a
>, but did not quite find time to start on it
3281 until a few days ago.
</p
>
3283 <p
>The unlock process is supposed to be simple: (
1) Boot into the boot
3284 loader (press volume down and power at the same time), (
2) select
3285 'fastboot
' before (
3) connecting the device via USB to a Linux
3286 machine, (
4) request the device identifier token by running
'fastboot
3287 oem get_identifier_token
', (
5) request the device unlocking key using
3288 the
<a href=
"http://www.htcdev.com/bootloader/
">HTC developer web
3289 site
</a
> and unlock the phone using the key file emailed to you.
</p
>
3291 <p
>Unfortunately, this only work fi you have hboot version
2.00.0029
3292 or newer, and the device I was working on had
2.00.0027. This
3293 apparently can be easily fixed by downloading a Windows program and
3294 running it on your Windows machine, if you accept the terms Microsoft
3295 require you to accept to use Windows - which I do not. So I had to
3296 come up with a different approach. I got a lot of help from AndyCap
3297 on #nuug, and would not have been able to get this working without
3300 <p
>First I needed to extract the hboot firmware from
3301 <a href=
"http://www.htcdev.com/ruu/PD9810000_Ace_Sense30_S_hboot_2.00
.0029.exe
">the
3302 windows binary for HTC Desire HD
</a
> downloaded as
'the RUU
' from HTC.
3303 For this there is is
<a href=
"https://github.com/kmdm/unruu/
">a github
3304 project named unruu
</a
> using libunshield. The unshield tool did not
3305 recognise the file format, but unruu worked and extracted rom.zip,
3306 containing the new hboot firmware and a text file describing which
3307 devices it would work for.
</p
>
3309 <p
>Next, I needed to get the new firmware into the device. For this I
3310 followed some instructions
3311 <a href=
"http://www.htc1guru.com/
2013/
09/new-ruu-zips-posted/
">available
3312 from HTC1Guru.com
</a
>, and ran these commands as root on a Linux
3313 machine with Debian testing:
</p
>
3315 <p
><pre
>
3316 adb reboot-bootloader
3317 fastboot oem rebootRUU
3318 fastboot flash zip rom.zip
3319 fastboot flash zip rom.zip
3321 </pre
></p
>
3323 <p
>The flash command apparently need to be done twice to take effect,
3324 as the first is just preparations and the second one do the flashing.
3325 The adb command is just to get to the boot loader menu, so turning the
3326 device on while holding volume down and the power button should work
3329 <p
>With the new hboot version in place I could start following the
3330 instructions on the HTC developer web site. I got the device token
3331 like this:
</p
>
3333 <p
><pre
>
3334 fastboot oem get_identifier_token
2>&1 | sed
's/(bootloader) //
'
3337 <p
>And once I got the unlock code via email, I could use it like
3340 <p
><pre
>
3341 fastboot flash unlocktoken Unlock_code.bin
3342 </pre
></p
>
3344 <p
>And with that final step in place, the phone was unlocked and I
3345 could start stuffing the software of my own choosing into the device.
3346 So far I only inserted a replacement recovery image to wipe the phone
3347 before I start. We will see what happen next. Perhaps I should
3348 install
<a href=
"https://www.debian.org/
">Debian
</a
> on it. :)
</p
>
3353 <title>How to use the Signal app if you only have a land line (ie no mobile phone)
</title>
3354 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_use_the_Signal_app_if_you_only_have_a_land_line__ie_no_mobile_phone_.html
</link>
3355 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_use_the_Signal_app_if_you_only_have_a_land_line__ie_no_mobile_phone_.html
</guid>
3356 <pubDate>Sun,
3 Jul
2016 14:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
3357 <description><p
>For a while now, I have wanted to test
3358 <a href=
"https://whispersystems.org/
">the Signal app
</a
>, as it is
3359 said to provide end to end encrypted communication and several of my
3360 friends and family are already using it. As I by choice do not own a
3361 mobile phone, this proved to be harder than expected. And I wanted to
3362 have the source of the client and know that it was the code used on my
3363 machine. But yesterday I managed to get it working. I used the
3364 Github source, compared it to the source in
3365 <a href=
"https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/signal-private-messenger/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk?hl=en-US
">the
3366 Signal Chrome app
</a
> available from the Chrome web store, applied
3367 patches to use the production Signal servers, started the app and
3368 asked for the hidden
"register without a smart phone
" form. Here is
3369 the recipe how I did it.
</p
>
3371 <p
>First, I fetched the Signal desktop source from Github, using
3374 git clone https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Desktop.git
3377 <p
>Next, I patched the source to use the production servers, to be
3378 able to talk to other Signal users:
</p
>
3381 cat
&lt;
&lt;EOF | patch -p0
3382 diff -ur ./js/background.js userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/
0.15.0_0/js/background.js
3383 --- ./js/background.js
2016-
06-
29 13:
43:
15.630344628 +
0200
3384 +++ userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/
0.15.0_0/js/background.js
2016-
06-
29 14:
06:
29.530300934 +
0200
3389 - var SERVER_URL =
'https://textsecure-service-staging.whispersystems.org
';
3390 - var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL =
'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments-staging.s3.amazonaws.com
';
3391 + var SERVER_URL =
'https://textsecure-service-ca.whispersystems.org:
4433';
3392 + var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL =
'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments.s3.amazonaws.com
';
3393 var messageReceiver;
3394 window.getSocketStatus = function() {
3395 if (messageReceiver) {
3396 diff -ur ./js/expire.js userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/
0.15.0_0/js/expire.js
3397 --- ./js/expire.js
2016-
06-
29 13:
43:
15.630344628 +
0200
3398 +++ userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/
0.15.0_0/js/expire.js2016-
06-
29 14:
06:
29.530300934 +
0200
3401 'use strict
';
3402 - var BUILD_EXPIRATION =
0;
3403 + var BUILD_EXPIRATION =
1474492690000;
3405 window.extension = window.extension || {};
3410 <p
>The first part is changing the servers, and the second is updating
3411 an expiration timestamp. This timestamp need to be updated regularly.
3412 It is set
90 days in the future by the build process (Gruntfile.js).
3413 The value is seconds since
1970 times
1000, as far as I can tell.
</p
>
3415 <p
>Based on a tip and good help from the #nuug IRC channel, I wrote a
3416 script to launch Signal in Chromium.
</p
>
3423 --proxy-server=
"socks://localhost:
9050" \
3424 --user-data-dir=`pwd`/userdata --load-and-launch-app=`pwd`
3427 <p
> The script start the app and configure Chromium to use the Tor
3428 SOCKS5 proxy to make sure those controlling the Signal servers (today
3429 Amazon and Whisper Systems) as well as those listening on the lines
3430 will have a harder time location my laptop based on the Signal
3431 connections if they use source IP address.
</p
>
3433 <p
>When the script starts, one need to follow the instructions under
3434 "Standalone Registration
" in the CONTRIBUTING.md file in the git
3435 repository. I right clicked on the Signal window to get up the
3436 Chromium debugging tool, visited the
'Console
' tab and wrote
3437 'extension.install(
"standalone
")
' on the console prompt to get the
3438 registration form. Then I entered by land line phone number and
3439 pressed
'Call
'.
5 seconds later the phone rang and a robot voice
3440 repeated the verification code three times. After entering the number
3441 into the verification code field in the form, I could start using
3442 Signal from my laptop.
3444 <p
>As far as I can tell, The Signal app will leak who is talking to
3445 whom and thus who know who to those controlling the central server,
3446 but such leakage is hard to avoid with a centrally controlled server
3447 setup. It is something to keep in mind when using Signal - the
3448 content of your chats are harder to intercept, but the meta data
3449 exposing your contact network is available to people you do not know.
3450 So better than many options, but not great. And sadly the usage is
3451 connected to my land line, thus allowing those controlling the server
3452 to associate it to my home and person. I would prefer it if only
3453 those I knew could tell who I was on Signal. There are options
3454 avoiding such information leakage, but most of my friends are not
3455 using them, so I am stuck with Signal for now.
</p
>
3457 <p
><strong
>Update
2017-
01-
10</strong
>: There is an updated blog post
3459 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Experience_and_updated_recipe_for_using_the_Signal_app_without_a_mobile_phone.html
">Experience
3460 and updated recipe for using the Signal app without a mobile
3461 phone
</a
>.
</p
>
3466 <title>The new
"best
" multimedia player in Debian?
</title>
3467 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_new__best__multimedia_player_in_Debian_.html
</link>
3468 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_new__best__multimedia_player_in_Debian_.html
</guid>
3469 <pubDate>Mon,
6 Jun
2016 12:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
3470 <description><p
>When I set out a few weeks ago to figure out
3471 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_best_multimedia_player_in_Debian_.html
">which
3472 multimedia player in Debian claimed to support most file formats /
3473 MIME types
</a
>, I was a bit surprised how varied the sets of MIME types
3474 the various players claimed support for. The range was from
55 to
130
3475 MIME types. I suspect most media formats are supported by all
3476 players, but this is not really reflected in the MimeTypes values in
3477 their desktop files. There are probably also some bogus MIME types
3478 listed, but it is hard to identify which one this is.
</p
>
3480 <p
>Anyway, in the mean time I got in touch with upstream for some of
3481 the players suggesting to add more MIME types to their desktop files,
3482 and decided to spend some time myself improving the situation for my
3483 favorite media player VLC. The fixes for VLC entered Debian unstable
3484 yesterday. The complete list of MIME types can be seen on the
3485 <a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMultimedia/PlayerSupport
">Multimedia
3486 player MIME type support status
</a
> Debian wiki page.
</p
>
3488 <p
>The new
"best
" multimedia player in Debian? It is VLC, followed by
3489 totem, parole, kplayer, gnome-mpv, mpv, smplayer, mplayer-gui and
3490 kmplayer. I am sure some of the other players desktop files support
3491 several of the formats currently listed as working only with vlc,
3492 toten and parole.
</p
>
3494 <p
>A sad observation is that only
14 MIME types are listed as
3495 supported by all the tested multimedia players in Debian in their
3496 desktop files: audio/mpeg, audio/vnd.rn-realaudio, audio/x-mpegurl,
3497 audio/x-ms-wma, audio/x-scpls, audio/x-wav, video/mp4, video/mpeg,
3498 video/quicktime, video/vnd.rn-realvideo, video/x-matroska,
3499 video/x-ms-asf, video/x-ms-wmv and video/x-msvideo. Personally I find
3500 it sad that video/ogg and video/webm is not supported by all the media
3501 players in Debian. As far as I can tell, all of them can handle both
3507 <title>A program should be able to open its own files on Linux
</title>
3508 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_program_should_be_able_to_open_its_own_files_on_Linux.html
</link>
3509 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_program_should_be_able_to_open_its_own_files_on_Linux.html
</guid>
3510 <pubDate>Sun,
5 Jun
2016 08:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
3511 <description><p
>Many years ago, when koffice was fresh and with few users, I
3512 decided to test its presentation tool when making the slides for a
3513 talk I was giving for NUUG on Japhar, a free Java virtual machine. I
3514 wrote the first draft of the slides, saved the result and went to bed
3515 the day before I would give the talk. The next day I took a plane to
3516 the location where the meeting should take place, and on the plane I
3517 started up koffice again to polish the talk a bit, only to discover
3518 that kpresenter refused to load its own data file. I cursed a bit and
3519 started making the slides again from memory, to have something to
3520 present when I arrived. I tested that the saved files could be
3521 loaded, and the day seemed to be rescued. I continued to polish the
3522 slides until I suddenly discovered that the saved file could no longer
3523 be loaded into kpresenter. In the end I had to rewrite the slides
3524 three times, condensing the content until the talk became shorter and
3525 shorter. After the talk I was able to pinpoint the problem
&ndash;
3526 kpresenter wrote inline images in a way itself could not understand.
3527 Eventually that bug was fixed and kpresenter ended up being a great
3528 program to make slides. The point I
'm trying to make is that we
3529 expect a program to be able to load its own data files, and it is
3530 embarrassing to its developers if it can
't.
</p
>
3532 <p
>Did you ever experience a program failing to load its own data
3533 files from the desktop file browser? It is not a uncommon problem. A
3534 while back I discovered that the screencast recorder
3535 gtk-recordmydesktop would save an Ogg Theora video file the KDE file
3536 browser would refuse to open. No video player claimed to understand
3537 such file. I tracked down the cause being
<tt
>file --mime-type
</tt
>
3538 returning the application/ogg MIME type, which no video player I had
3539 installed listed as a MIME type they would understand. I asked for
3540 <a href=
"http://bugs.gw.com/view.php?id=
382">file to change its
3541 behavour
</a
> and use the MIME type video/ogg instead. I also asked
3542 several video players to add video/ogg to their desktop files, to give
3543 the file browser an idea what to do about Ogg Theora files. After a
3544 while, the desktop file browsers in Debian started to handle the
3545 output from gtk-recordmydesktop properly.
</p
>
3547 <p
>But history repeats itself. A few days ago I tested the music
3548 system Rosegarden again, and I discovered that the KDE and xfce file
3549 browsers did not know what to do with the Rosegarden project files
3550 (*.rg). I
've reported
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
825993">the
3551 rosegarden problem to BTS
</a
> and a fix is commited to git and will be
3552 included in the next upload. To increase the chance of me remembering
3553 how to fix the problem next time some program fail to load its files
3554 from the file browser, here are some notes on how to fix it.
</p
>
3556 <p
>The file browsers in Debian in general operates on MIME types.
3557 There are two sources for the MIME type of a given file. The output from
3558 <tt
>file --mime-type
</tt
> mentioned above, and the content of the
3559 shared MIME type registry (under /usr/share/mime/). The file MIME
3560 type is mapped to programs supporting the MIME type, and this
3561 information is collected from
3562 <a href=
"https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/desktop-entry-spec/
">the
3563 desktop files
</a
> available in /usr/share/applications/. If there is
3564 one desktop file claiming support for the MIME type of the file, it is
3565 activated when asking to open a given file. If there are more, one
3566 can normally select which one to use by right-clicking on the file and
3567 selecting the wanted one using
'Open with
' or similar. In general
3568 this work well. But it depend on each program picking a good MIME
3570 <a href=
"http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/media-types.xhtml
">a
3571 MIME type registered with IANA
</a
>), file and/or the shared MIME
3572 registry recognizing the file and the desktop file to list the MIME
3573 type in its list of supported MIME types.
</p
>
3575 <p
>The
<tt
>/usr/share/mime/packages/rosegarden.xml
</tt
> entry for
3576 <a href=
"http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/shared-mime-info-spec
">the
3577 Shared MIME database
</a
> look like this:
</p
>
3579 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
3580 &lt;?xml version=
"1.0" encoding=
"UTF-
8"?
&gt;
3581 &lt;mime-info xmlns=
"http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/shared-mime-info
"&gt;
3582 &lt;mime-type type=
"audio/x-rosegarden
"&gt;
3583 &lt;sub-class-of type=
"application/x-gzip
"/
&gt;
3584 &lt;comment
&gt;Rosegarden project file
&lt;/comment
&gt;
3585 &lt;glob pattern=
"*.rg
"/
&gt;
3586 &lt;/mime-type
&gt;
3587 &lt;/mime-info
&gt;
3588 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
3590 <p
>This states that audio/x-rosegarden is a kind of application/x-gzip
3591 (it is a gzipped XML file). Note, it is much better to use an
3592 official MIME type registered with IANA than it is to make up ones own
3593 unofficial ones like the x-rosegarden type used by rosegarden.
</p
>
3595 <p
>The desktop file of the rosegarden program failed to list
3596 audio/x-rosegarden in its list of supported MIME types, causing the
3597 file browsers to have no idea what to do with *.rg files:
</p
>
3599 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
3600 % grep Mime /usr/share/applications/rosegarden.desktop
3601 MimeType=audio/x-rosegarden-composition;audio/x-rosegarden-device;audio/x-rosegarden-project;audio/x-rosegarden-template;audio/midi;
3602 X-KDE-NativeMimeType=audio/x-rosegarden-composition
3604 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
3606 <p
>The fix was to add
"audio/x-rosegarden;
" at the end of the
3607 MimeType= line.
</p
>
3609 <p
>If you run into a file which fail to open the correct program when
3610 selected from the file browser, please check out the output from
3611 <tt
>file --mime-type
</tt
> for the file, ensure the file ending and
3612 MIME type is registered somewhere under /usr/share/mime/ and check
3613 that some desktop file under /usr/share/applications/ is claiming
3614 support for this MIME type. If not, please report a bug to have it
3620 <title>Tor - from its creators mouth
11 years ago
</title>
3621 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Tor___from_its_creators_mouth_11_years_ago.html
</link>
3622 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Tor___from_its_creators_mouth_11_years_ago.html
</guid>
3623 <pubDate>Sat,
28 May
2016 14:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
3624 <description><p
>A little more than
11 years ago, one of the creators of Tor, and
3625 the current President of
<a href=
"https://www.torproject.org/
">the Tor
3626 project
</a
>, Roger Dingledine, gave a talk for the members of the
3627 <a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/
">Norwegian Unix User group
</a
> (NUUG). A
3628 video of the talk was recorded, and today, thanks to the great help
3629 from David Noble, I finally was able to publish the video of the talk
3630 on Frikanalen, the Norwegian open channel TV station where NUUG
3631 currently publishes its talks. You can
3632 <a href=
"http://frikanalen.no/se
">watch the live stream using a web
3633 browser
</a
> with WebM support, or check out the recording on the video
3634 on demand page for the talk
3635 "<a href=
"http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/
625599">Tor: Anonymous
3636 communication for the US Department of Defence...and you.
</a
>".
</p
>
3638 <p
>Here is the video included for those of you using browsers with
3639 HTML video and Ogg Theora support:
</p
>
3641 <p
><video width=
"70%
" poster=
"http://simula.gunkies.org/media/
625599/large_thumb/
20050421-tor-frikanalen.jpg
" controls
>
3642 <source src=
"http://simula.gunkies.org/media/
625599/theora/
20050421-tor-frikanalen.ogv
" type=
"video/ogg
"/
>
3643 </video
></p
>
3645 <p
>I guess the gist of the talk can be summarised quite simply: If you
3646 want to help the military in USA (and everyone else), use Tor. :)
</p
>
3651 <title>Isenkram with PackageKit support - new version
0.23 available in Debian unstable
</title>
3652 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Isenkram_with_PackageKit_support___new_version_0_23_available_in_Debian_unstable.html
</link>
3653 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Isenkram_with_PackageKit_support___new_version_0_23_available_in_Debian_unstable.html
</guid>
3654 <pubDate>Wed,
25 May
2016 10:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
3655 <description><p
><a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/isenkram
">The isenkram
3656 system
</a
> is a user-focused solution in Debian for handling hardware
3657 related packages. The idea is to have a database of mappings between
3658 hardware and packages, and pop up a dialog suggesting for the user to
3659 install the packages to use a given hardware dongle. Some use cases
3660 are when you insert a Yubikey, it proposes to install the software
3661 needed to control it; when you insert a braille reader list it
3662 proposes to install the packages needed to send text to the reader;
3663 and when you insert a ColorHug screen calibrator it suggests to
3664 install the driver for it. The system work well, and even have a few
3665 command line tools to install firmware packages and packages for the
3666 hardware already in the machine (as opposed to hotpluggable hardware).
</p
>
3668 <p
>The system was initially written using aptdaemon, because I found
3669 good documentation and example code on how to use it. But aptdaemon
3670 is going away and is generally being replaced by
3671 <a href=
"http://www.freedesktop.org/software/PackageKit/
">PackageKit
</a
>,
3672 so Isenkram needed a rewrite. And today, thanks to the great patch
3673 from my college Sunil Mohan Adapa in the FreedomBox project, the
3674 rewrite finally took place. I
've just uploaded a new version of
3675 Isenkram into Debian Unstable with the patch included, and the default
3676 for the background daemon is now to use PackageKit. To check it out,
3677 install the
<tt
>isenkram
</tt
> package and insert some hardware dongle
3678 and see if it is recognised.
</p
>
3680 <p
>If you want to know what kind of packages isenkram would propose for
3681 the machine it is running on, you can check out the isenkram-lookup
3682 program. This is what it look like on a Thinkpad X230:
</p
>
3684 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
3700 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
3702 <p
>The hardware mappings come from several places. The preferred way
3703 is for packages to announce their hardware support using
3704 <a href=
"https://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/
">the
3705 cross distribution appstream system
</a
>.
3707 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/
">previous
3708 blog posts about isenkram
</a
> to learn how to do that.
</p
>
3713 <title>Discharge rate estimate in new battery statistics collector for Debian
</title>
3714 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Discharge_rate_estimate_in_new_battery_statistics_collector_for_Debian.html
</link>
3715 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Discharge_rate_estimate_in_new_battery_statistics_collector_for_Debian.html
</guid>
3716 <pubDate>Mon,
23 May
2016 09:
35:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
3717 <description><p
>Yesterday I updated the
3718 <a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats
">battery-stats
3719 package in Debian
</a
> with a few patches sent to me by skilled and
3720 enterprising users. There were some nice user and visible changes.
3721 First of all, both desktop menu entries now work. A design flaw in
3722 one of the script made the history graph fail to show up (its PNG was
3723 dumped in ~/.xsession-errors) if no controlling TTY was available.
3724 The script worked when called from the command line, but not when
3725 called from the desktop menu. I changed this to look for a DISPLAY
3726 variable or a TTY before deciding where to draw the graph, and now the
3727 graph window pop up as expected.
</p
>
3729 <p
>The next new feature is a discharge rate estimator in one of the
3730 graphs (the one showing the last few hours). New is also the user of
3731 colours showing charging in blue and discharge in red. The percentages
3732 of this graph is relative to last full charge, not battery design
3735 <p align=
"center
"><img src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2016-
05-
23-battery-stats-rate.png
"/
></p
>
3737 <p
>The other graph show the entire history of the collected battery
3738 statistics, comparing it to the design capacity of the battery to
3739 visualise how the battery life time get shorter over time. The red
3740 line in this graph is what the previous graph considers
100 percent:
3742 <p align=
"center
"><img src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2016-
05-
23-battery-stats-history.png
"/
></p
>
3744 <p
>In this graph you can see that I only charge the battery to
80
3745 percent of last full capacity, and how the capacity of the battery is
3746 shrinking. :(
</p
>
3748 <p
>The last new feature is in the collector, which now will handle
3749 more hardware models. On some hardware, Linux power supply
3750 information is stored in /sys/class/power_supply/ACAD/, while the
3751 collector previously only looked in /sys/class/power_supply/AC/. Now
3752 both are checked to figure if there is power connected to the
3755 <p
>If you are interested in how your laptop battery is doing, please
3757 <a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats
">battery-stats
</a
>
3758 in Debian unstable, or rebuild it on Jessie to get it working on
3759 Debian stable. :) The upstream source is available from
<a
3760 href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats
">github
</a
>.
3761 Patches are very welcome.
</p
>
3763 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3764 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3765 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
3770 <title>French edition of Lawrence Lessigs book Cultura Libre on Amazon and Barnes
& Noble
</title>
3771 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/French_edition_of_Lawrence_Lessigs_book_Cultura_Libre_on_Amazon_and_Barnes___Noble.html
</link>
3772 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/French_edition_of_Lawrence_Lessigs_book_Cultura_Libre_on_Amazon_and_Barnes___Noble.html
</guid>
3773 <pubDate>Sat,
21 May
2016 10:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
3774 <description><p
>A few weeks ago the French paperback edition of Lawrence Lessigs
3775 2004 book Cultura Libre was published. Today I noticed that the book
3776 is now available from book stores. You can now buy it from
3777 <a href=
"http://www.amazon.com/Culture-Libre-French-Lawrence-Lessig/dp/
8269018260">Amazon
</a
>
3779 <a href=
"http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/culture-libre-lawrence-lessig/
1123776705">Barnes
3780 & Noble
</a
> ($?) and as always from
3781 <a href=
"http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/culture-libre/paperback/product-
22645082.html
">Lulu.com
</a
>
3782 ($
19.99). The revenue is donated to the Creative Commons project. If
3783 you buy from Lulu.com, they currently get $
10.59, while if you buy
3784 from one of the book stores most of the revenue go to the book store
3785 and the Creative Commons project get much (not sure how much
3788 <p
>I was a bit surprised to discover that there is a kindle edition
3789 sold by Amazon Digital Services LLC on Amazon. Not quite sure how
3790 that edition was created, but if you want to download a electronic
3791 edition (PDF, EPUB, Mobi) generated from the same files used to create
3792 the paperback edition, they are
3793 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig
">available
3794 from github
</a
>.
</p
>
3799 <title>I want the courts to be involved before the police can hijack a news site DNS domain (#domstolkontroll)
</title>
3800 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/I_want_the_courts_to_be_involved_before_the_police_can_hijack_a_news_site_DNS_domain___domstolkontroll_.html
</link>
3801 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/I_want_the_courts_to_be_involved_before_the_police_can_hijack_a_news_site_DNS_domain___domstolkontroll_.html
</guid>
3802 <pubDate>Thu,
19 May
2016 14:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
3803 <description><p
>I just donated to the
3804 <a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/dns-beslag-donasjon.shtml
">NUUG defence
3805 "fond
"</a
> to fund the effort in Norway to get the seizure of the news
3806 site popcorn-time.no tested in court. I hope everyone that agree with
3807 me will do the same.
</p
>
3809 <p
>Would you be worried if you knew the police in your country could
3810 hijack DNS domains of news sites covering free software system without
3811 talking to a judge first? I am. What if the free software system
3812 combined search engine lookups, bittorrent downloads and video playout
3813 and was called Popcorn Time? Would that affect your view? It still
3814 make me worried.
</p
>
3816 <p
>In March
2016, the Norwegian police seized (as in forced NORID to
3817 change the IP address pointed to by it to one controlled by the
3818 police) the DNS domain popcorn-time.no, without any supervision from
3819 the courts. I did not know about the web site back then, and assumed
3820 the courts had been involved, and was very surprised when I discovered
3821 that the police had hijacked the DNS domain without asking a judge for
3822 permission first. I was even more surprised when I had a look at
3823 <a href=
"https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://popcorn-time.no
">the web
3824 site content on the Internet Archive
</A
>, and only found news coverage
3825 about Popcorn Time, not any material published without the right
3826 holders permissions.
</p
>
3828 <p
>The seizure was widely covered in the Norwegian press (see for
3829 example
<a href=
"http://www.hegnar.no/Nyheter/Naeringsliv/
2016/
03/Popcorn-time.no-beslaglagt-av-OEkokrim
">Hegnar Online
</a
> and
3830 <a href=
"http://itavisen.no/
2016/
03/
08/okokrim-har-beslaglagt-popcorn-time-no/
">ITavisen
<a/
>
3832 <a href=
"http://www.nrk.no/kultur/okokrim-gar-til-aksjon-mot-popcorn-time-
1.12842452">NRK
</a
>),
3833 at first due to the press release sent out by Økokrim, but then based
3835 <a href=
"http://blogg.torvund.net/
2016/
03/
09/okokrims-beslag-i-domenet-popcorn-time-no/
">protests
3836 from the law professor Olav Torvund
</a
> and
3837 <a href=
"http://www.klassekampen.no/article/
20160311/ARTICLE/
160319995">lawyer
3838 Jon Wessel-Aas
</a
>. It even got some
3839 <a href=
"https://torrentfreak.com/norwegian-authorities-sued-over-popcorn-time-domain-seizure-
160418/
">coverage
3840 on TorrentFreak
</a
>.
</p
>
3843 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/NUUG_contests_Norwegian_police_DNS_seizure_of_popcorn_time_no.html
">
3844 wrote about the case a month ago
</a
>, when the
3845 <a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/
">Norwegian Unix User Group
</a
> (NUUG),
3846 where I am an active member, decided to ask the courts to test this seizure.
3847 The request was denied, but NUUG and its co-requestor EFN have not
3848 given up, and now they are rallying for support to get the seizure
3849 legally challenged. They accept both bank and Bitcoin transfer for
3850 those that want to support the request.
</p
>
3852 <p
>If you as me believe news sites about free software should not be
3853 censored, even if the free software have both legal and illegal
3854 applications, and that DNS hijacking should be tested by the courts, I
3855 suggest you
<a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/dns-beslag-donasjon.shtml
">show
3856 your support by donating to NUUG
</a
>.
</a
>
3861 <title>Debian now with ZFS on Linux included
</title>
3862 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_now_with_ZFS_on_Linux_included.html
</link>
3863 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_now_with_ZFS_on_Linux_included.html
</guid>
3864 <pubDate>Thu,
12 May
2016 07:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
3865 <description><p
>Today, after many years of hard work from many people,
3866 <a href=
"http://zfsonlinux.org/
">ZFS for Linux
</a
> finally entered
3867 Debian. The package status can be seen on
3868 <a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/zfs-linux
">the package tracker
3869 for zfs-linux
</a
>. and
3870 <a href=
"https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=pkg-zfsonlinux-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org
">the
3871 team status page
</a
>. If you want to help out, please join us.
3872 <a href=
"http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-zfsonlinux/zfs.git
">The
3873 source code
</a
> is available via git on Alioth. It would also be
3874 great if you could help out with
3875 <a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/dkms
">the dkms package
</a
>, as
3876 it is an important piece of the puzzle to get ZFS working.
</p
>
3881 <title>What is the best multimedia player in Debian?
</title>
3882 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_best_multimedia_player_in_Debian_.html
</link>
3883 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_best_multimedia_player_in_Debian_.html
</guid>
3884 <pubDate>Sun,
8 May
2016 09:
40:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
3885 <description><p
><strong
>Where I set out to figure out which multimedia player in
3886 Debian claim support for most file formats.
</strong
></p
>
3888 <p
>A few years ago, I had a look at the media support for Browser
3889 plugins in Debian, to get an idea which plugins to include in Debian
3890 Edu. I created a script to extract the set of supported MIME types
3891 for each plugin, and used this to find out which multimedia browser
3892 plugin supported most file formats / media types.
3893 <a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia
">The
3894 result
</a
> can still be seen on the Debian wiki, even though it have
3895 not been updated for a while. But browser plugins are less relevant
3896 these days, so I thought it was time to look at standalone
3899 <p
>A few days ago I was tired of VLC not being listed as a viable
3900 player when I wanted to play videos from the Norwegian National
3901 Broadcasting Company, and decided to investigate why. The cause is a
3902 <a href=
"https://bugs.debian.org/
822245">missing MIME type in the VLC
3903 desktop file
</a
>. In the process I wrote a script to compare the set
3904 of MIME types announced in the desktop file and the browser plugin,
3905 only to discover that there is quite a large difference between the
3906 two for VLC. This discovery made me dig up the script I used to
3907 compare browser plugins, and adjust it to compare desktop files
3908 instead, to try to figure out which multimedia player in Debian
3909 support most file formats.
</p
>
3911 <p
>The result can be seen on the Debian Wiki, as
3912 <a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMultimedia/PlayerSupport
">a
3913 table listing all MIME types supported by one of the packages included
3914 in the table
</a
>, with the package supporting most MIME types being
3915 listed first in the table.
</p
>
3917 </p
>The best multimedia player in Debian? It is totem, followed by
3918 parole, kplayer, mpv, vlc, smplayer mplayer-gui gnome-mpv and
3919 kmplayer. Time for the other players to update their announced MIME
3925 <title>The Pyra - handheld computer with Debian preinstalled
</title>
3926 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Pyra___handheld_computer_with_Debian_preinstalled.html
</link>
3927 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Pyra___handheld_computer_with_Debian_preinstalled.html
</guid>
3928 <pubDate>Wed,
4 May
2016 10:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
3929 <description>A friend of mine made me aware of
3930 <a href=
"https://pyra-handheld.com/boards/pages/pyra/
">The Pyra
</a
>, a
3931 handheld computer which will be delivered with Debian preinstalled. I
3932 would love to get one of those for my birthday. :)
</p
>
3934 <p
>The machine is a complete ARM-based PC with micro HDMI, SATA, USB
3935 plugs and many others connectors, and include a full keyboard and a
5"
3936 LCD touch screen. The
6000mAh battery is claimed to provide a whole
3937 day of battery life time, but I have not seen any independent tests
3938 confirming this. The vendor is still collecting preorders, and the
3939 last I heard last night was that
22 more orders were needed before
3940 production started.
</p
>
3942 <p
>As far as I know, this is the first handheld preinstalled with
3943 Debian. Please let me know if you know of any others. Is it the
3944 first computer being sold with Debian preinstalled?
</p
>
3949 <title>NUUG contests Norwegian police DNS seizure of popcorn-time.no
</title>
3950 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/NUUG_contests_Norwegian_police_DNS_seizure_of_popcorn_time_no.html
</link>
3951 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/NUUG_contests_Norwegian_police_DNS_seizure_of_popcorn_time_no.html
</guid>
3952 <pubDate>Mon,
18 Apr
2016 10:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
3953 <description><p
>It is days like today I am really happy to be a member of
3954 <a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/
">the Norwegian Unix User group
</a
>, a
3955 member association for those of us believing in free software, open
3956 standards and unix-like operating systems. NUUG announced today it
3958 <a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/news/Pressemelding__NUUG_og_EFN_begj_rer_rettslig_pr_ving_for_DNS_domenebeslag_av_popcorn_time_no.shtml
">try
3959 to bring the seizure of the DNS domain popcorn-time.no as
3960 unlawful
</a
>, to stand up for the principle that writing about a
3961 controversial topic is not infringing copyrights, and censuring web
3962 pages by hijacking DNS domain should be decided by the courts, not the
3963 police. The DNS domain was seized by the Norwegian National Authority
3964 for Investigation and Prosecution of Economic and Environmental Crime
3965 a month ago. I hope this bring more paying members to NUUG to give
3966 the association the financial muscle needed to bring this case as far
3967 as it must go to stop this kind of DNS hijacking.
</p
>
3972 <title>I.F. Stone - an inspiration for us all
</title>
3973 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/I_F__Stone___an_inspiration_for_us_all.html
</link>
3974 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/I_F__Stone___an_inspiration_for_us_all.html
</guid>
3975 <pubDate>Wed,
13 Apr
2016 21:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
3976 <description><p
>I first got to know I.F. Stone when I came across an article by Jon
3977 Schwarz on The Intercept
3978 <a href=
"https://theintercept.com/
2015/
05/
07/new-documentary-legacy-f-stone/
">about
3979 his extraordinary contribution to investigative journalism in
3980 USA
</a
>. The article is about a new documentary in two parts
3981 (
<a href=
"https://vimeo.com/
123974841">part one is
12 minutes
</a
> and
3982 <a href=
"https://vimeo.com/
123974842">part two is
30 minutes
</a
>), and
3983 I found both truly fascinating. It is amazing what he was able to
3984 find by digging up public sources and government papers. He
3985 documented lots of government abuse and cover ups, and I find
3986 <a href=
"http://www.ifstone.org/weekly.php
">his weekly news letters
</a
>
3987 inspiring to read even today.
</p
>
3989 <p
><blockquote
>
3990 All governments are run by liars and nothing they say should be believed.
3991 <br
>- I. F. Stone
3992 </blockquote
></p
>
3994 <p
>His starting point was that reporters should not assume governments
3995 and corporations are telling the truth, but verify all their claims as
3996 much as possible. I wonder how many Norwegian reporters can be said
3997 to follow the principles of I. F. Stone. They are definitely in short
3998 supply. If you, like me half a year ago, have never heard of him,
3999 check him out.
</p
>
4004 <title>A French paperback edition of the book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig is now available
</title>
4005 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_French_paperback_edition_of_the_book_Free_Culture_by_Lawrence_Lessig_is_now_available.html
</link>
4006 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_French_paperback_edition_of_the_book_Free_Culture_by_Lawrence_Lessig_is_now_available.html
</guid>
4007 <pubDate>Tue,
12 Apr
2016 10:
40:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
4008 <description><p
>I
'm happy to report that
4009 <a href=
"http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/culture-libre/paperback/product-
22645082.html
">the
4010 French paperback edition
</a
> of
4011 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig
">my
4012 project to translate
</a
> the
<a href=
"http://free-culture.cc/
">Free
4013 Culture
</a
> book by Lawrence Lessig is now available for sale on
4014 Lulu.com. Once I have formally verified my proof reading copy, which
4015 should be in the mail, the paperback edition should be available in
4016 book stores like Amazon and Barnes
& Noble too.
</p
>
4018 <p
>This French edition, Culture Libre, is the work of the
4019 <a href=
"http://dblatex.sourceforge.net/
">dblatex
</a
> developer Benoît
4020 Guillon, who created the PO file from the initial translation
4022 <a href=
"http://www.wikilivres.ca/wiki/Culture_libre
">the Wikilivres
4023 wiki pages
</a
> and completed and corrected the translation to match
4024 the original docbook edition my project is using, as well as
4025 coordinated the proof reading of the final result. I believe the end
4026 result look great, but I am biased and do not read French. In
4027 addition to the paperback edition, the book is available in PDF, EPUB
4028 and Mobi format from the github project page linked to above.
</p
>
4030 <p
>When enabling book store distribution on Lulu.com, I had to nearly
4031 triple the price to allow the book stores some profit. I also had to
4032 accept that I will get some revenue when a book is sold via Lulu.com.
4033 But because of the non-commercial clause in the book license
4034 (CC-BY-NC), this might be a problem. To bypass the problem I
4035 discussed how to handle the revenue with the author, and we agreed
4036 that the revenue for these editions go to the
4037 <a href=
"https://creativecommons.org/
">Creative Commons non-profit
4038 Corporation
</a
> who handle donations to the Creative Commons project.
4039 So far they have earned around USD
70 on sales of the
4040 <a href=
"http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-
22440520.html
">English
</a
>
4042 <a href=
"http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/fri-kultur/paperback/product-
22441576.html
">Norwegian
4043 Bokmål
</a
> editions, according to Lulu.com. They will get the revenue
4044 for the French edition too. Their revenue is higher if you buy the
4045 book directly from Lulu.com instead of via a book store, so I
4046 recommend you buy directly from Lulu.com.
</p
>
4048 <p
>Perhaps you would like to get the book published in your language?
4049 The translation is done using a web based translator service, so the
4050 technical bar to enter is fairly low. Get in touch if you would like
4051 to make this happen.
</p
>
4056 <title>Lets make a Norwegian Bokmål edition of The Debian Administrator
's Handbook
</title>
4057 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_a_Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_The_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook.html
</link>
4058 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_a_Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_The_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook.html
</guid>
4059 <pubDate>Sun,
10 Apr
2016 23:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
4060 <description><p
>During this weekends
4061 <a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/news/Oslo__Takk_for_feilfiksingsfesten.shtml
">bug
4062 squashing party and developer gathering
</a
>, we decided to do our part
4063 to make sure there are good books about Debian available in Norwegian
4064 Bokmål, and got in touch with the people behind the
4065 <a href=
"http://debian-handbook.info/
">Debian Administrator
's Handbook
4066 project
</a
> to get started. If you want to help out, please start
4068 <a href=
"https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-handbook/
">the
4069 hosted weblate project page
</a
>, and get in touch using
4070 <a href=
"http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/debian-handbook-translators
">the
4071 translators mailing list
</a
>. Please also check out
4072 <a href=
"https://debian-handbook.info/contribute/
">the instructions for
4073 contributors
</a
>.
</p
>
4075 <p
>The book is already available on paper in English, French and
4076 Japanese, and our goal is to get it available on paper in Norwegian
4077 Bokmål too. In addition to the paper edition, there are also EPUB and
4078 Mobi versions available. And there are incomplete translations
4079 available for many more languages.
</p
>
4084 <title>One in two hundred Debian users using ZFS on Linux?
</title>
4085 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/One_in_two_hundred_Debian_users_using_ZFS_on_Linux_.html
</link>
4086 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/One_in_two_hundred_Debian_users_using_ZFS_on_Linux_.html
</guid>
4087 <pubDate>Thu,
7 Apr
2016 22:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
4088 <description><p
>Just for fun I had a look at the popcon number of ZFS related
4089 packages in Debian, and was quite surprised with what I found. I use
4090 ZFS myself at home, but did not really expect many others to do so.
4091 But I might be wrong.
</p
>
4093 <p
>According to
4094 <a href=
"https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=spl-linux
">the popcon
4095 results for spl-linux
</a
>, there are
1019 Debian installations, or
4096 0.53% of the population, with the package installed. As far as I know
4097 the only use of the spl-linux package is as a support library for ZFS
4098 on Linux, so I use it here as proxy for measuring the number of ZFS
4099 installation on Linux in Debian. In the kFreeBSD variant of Debian
4100 the ZFS feature is already available, and there
4101 <a href=
"https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=zfsutils
">the popcon
4102 results for zfsutils
</a
> show
1625 Debian installations or
0.84% of
4103 the population. So I guess I am not alone in using ZFS on Debian.
</p
>
4105 <p
>But even though the Debian project leader Lucas Nussbaum
4106 <a href=
"https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/
2015/
04/msg00006.html
">announced
4107 in April
2015</a
> that the legal obstacles blocking ZFS on Debian were
4108 cleared, the package is still not in Debian. The package is again in
4109 the NEW queue. Several uploads have been rejected so far because the
4110 debian/copyright file was incomplete or wrong, but there is no reason
4111 to give up. The current status can be seen on
4112 <a href=
"https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=pkg-zfsonlinux-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org
">the
4113 team status page
</a
>, and
4114 <a href=
"http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-zfsonlinux/zfs.git
">the
4115 source code
</a
> is available on Alioth.
</p
>
4117 <p
>As I want ZFS to be included in next version of Debian to make sure
4118 my home server can function in the future using only official Debian
4119 packages, and the current blocker is to get the debian/copyright file
4120 accepted by the FTP masters in Debian, I decided a while back to try
4121 to help out the team. This was the background for my blog post about
4122 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Creating__updating_and_checking_debian_copyright_semi_automatically.html
">creating,
4123 updating and checking debian/copyright semi-automatically
</a
>, and I
4124 used the techniques I explored there to try to find any errors in the
4125 copyright file. It is not very easy to check every one of the around
4126 2000 files in the source package, but I hope we this time got it
4127 right. If you want to help out, check out the git source and try to
4128 find missing entries in the debian/copyright file.
</p
>
4133 <title>syslog-trusted-timestamp - chain of trusted timestamps for your syslog
</title>
4134 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/syslog_trusted_timestamp___chain_of_trusted_timestamps_for_your_syslog.html
</link>
4135 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/syslog_trusted_timestamp___chain_of_trusted_timestamps_for_your_syslog.html
</guid>
4136 <pubDate>Sat,
2 Apr
2016 09:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
4137 <description><p
>Two years ago, I had
4138 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Public_Trusted_Timestamping_services_for_everyone.html
">a
4139 look at trusted timestamping options available
</a
>, and among
4140 other things noted a still open
4141 <a href=
"https://bugs.debian.org/
742553">bug in the tsget script
</a
>
4142 included in openssl that made it harder than necessary to use openssl
4143 as a trusted timestamping client. A few days ago I was told
4144 <a href=
"https:/www.difi.no/
">the Norwegian government office DIFI
</a
> is
4145 close to releasing their own trusted timestamp service, and in the
4146 process I was happy to learn about a replacement for the tsget script
4147 using only curl:
</p
>
4149 <p
><pre
>
4150 openssl ts -query -data
"/etc/shells
" -cert -sha256 -no_nonce \
4151 | curl -s -H
"Content-Type: application/timestamp-query
" \
4152 --data-binary
"@-
" http://zeitstempel.dfn.de
> etc-shells.tsr
4153 openssl ts -reply -text -in etc-shells.tsr
4154 </pre
></p
>
4156 <p
>This produces a binary timestamp file (etc-shells.tsr) which can be
4157 used to verify that the content of the file /etc/shell with the
4158 calculated sha256 hash existed at the point in time when the request
4159 was made. The last command extract the content of the etc-shells.tsr
4160 in human readable form. The idea behind such timestamp is to be able
4161 to prove using cryptography that the content of a file have not
4162 changed since the file was stamped.
</p
>
4164 <p
>To verify that the file on disk match the public key signature in
4165 the timestamp file, run the following commands. It make sure you have
4166 the required certificate for the trusted timestamp service available
4167 and use it to compare the file content with the timestamp. In
4168 production, one should of course use a better method to verify the
4169 service certificate.
</p
>
4171 <p
><pre
>
4172 wget -O ca-cert.txt https://pki.pca.dfn.de/global-services-ca/pub/cacert/chain.txt
4173 openssl ts -verify -data /etc/shells -in etc-shells.tsr -CAfile ca-cert.txt -text
4174 </pre
></p
>
4176 <p
>Wikipedia have a lot more information about
4177 <a href=
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_timestamping
">trusted
4178 Timestamping
</a
> and
4179 <a href=
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linked_timestamping
">linked
4180 timestamping
</a
>, and there are several trusted timestamping services
4181 around, both as commercial services and as free and public services.
4183 <a href=
"https://www.pki.dfn.de/zeitstempeldienst/
">the
4184 zeitstempel.dfn.de service
</a
> mentioned above and
4185 <a href=
"https://freetsa.org/
">freetsa.org service
</a
> linked to from the
4186 wikipedia web site. I believe the DIFI service should show up on
4187 https://tsa.difi.no, but it is not available to the public at the
4188 moment. I hope this will change when it is into production. The
4189 <a href=
"https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3161
">RFC
3161</a
> trusted
4190 timestamping protocol standard is even implemented in LibreOffice,
4191 Microsoft Office and Adobe Acrobat, making it possible to verify when
4192 a document was created.
</p
>
4194 <p
>I would find it useful to be able to use such trusted timestamp
4195 service to make it possible to verify that my stored syslog files have
4196 not been tampered with. This is not a new idea. I found one example
4197 implemented on the Endian network appliances where
4198 <a href=
"http://help.endian.com/entries/
21518508-Enabling-Timestamping-on-log-files-
">the
4199 configuration of such feature was described in
2012</a
>.
</p
>
4201 <p
>But I could not find any free implementation of such feature when I
4202 searched, so I decided to try to
4203 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/syslog-trusted-timestamp
">build
4204 a prototype named syslog-trusted-timestamp
</a
>. My idea is to
4205 generate a timestamp of the old log files after they are rotated, and
4206 store the timestamp in the new log file just after rotation. This
4207 will form a chain that would make it possible to see if any old log
4208 files are tampered with. But syslog is bad at handling kilobytes of
4209 binary data, so I decided to base64 encode the timestamp and add an ID
4210 and line sequence numbers to the base64 data to make it possible to
4211 reassemble the timestamp file again. To use it, simply run it like
4214 <p
><pre
>
4215 syslog-trusted-timestamp /path/to/list-of-log-files
4216 </pre
></p
>
4218 <p
>This will send a timestamp from one or more timestamp services (not
4219 yet decided nor implemented) for each listed file to the syslog using
4220 logger(
1). To verify the timestamp, the same program is used with the
4221 --verify option:
</p
>
4223 <p
><pre
>
4224 syslog-trusted-timestamp --verify /path/to/log-file /path/to/log-with-timestamp
4225 </pre
></p
>
4227 <p
>The verification step is not yet well designed. The current
4228 implementation depend on the file path being unique and unchanging,
4229 and this is not a solid assumption. It also uses process number as
4230 timestamp ID, and this is bound to create ID collisions. I hope to
4231 have time to come up with a better way to handle timestamp IDs and
4232 verification later.
</p
>
4234 <p
>Please check out
4235 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/syslog-trusted-timestamp
">the
4236 prototype for syslog-trusted-timestamp on github
</a
> and send
4237 suggestions and improvement, or let me know if there already exist a
4238 similar system for timestamping logs already to allow me to join
4239 forces with others with the same interest.
</p
>
4241 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
4242 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
4243 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
4248 <title>Full battery stats collector is now available in Debian
</title>
4249 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Full_battery_stats_collector_is_now_available_in_Debian.html
</link>
4250 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Full_battery_stats_collector_is_now_available_in_Debian.html
</guid>
4251 <pubDate>Wed,
23 Mar
2016 22:
10:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
4252 <description><p
>Since this morning, the battery-stats package in Debian include an
4253 extended collector that will collect the complete battery history for
4254 later processing and graphing. The original collector store the
4255 battery level as percentage of last full level, while the new
4256 collector also record battery vendor, model, serial number, design
4257 full level, last full level and current battery level. This make it
4258 possible to predict the lifetime of the battery as well as visualise
4259 the energy flow when the battery is charging or discharging.
</p
>
4261 <p
>The new tools are available in
<tt
>/usr/share/battery-stats/
</tt
>
4262 in the version
0.5.1 package in unstable. Get the new battery level graph
4263 and lifetime prediction by running:
4265 <p
><pre
>
4266 /usr/share/battery-stats/battery-stats-graph /var/log/battery-stats.csv
4267 </pre
></p
>
4269 <p
>Or select the
'Battery Level Graph
' from your application menu.
</p
>
4271 <p
>The flow in/out of the battery can be seen by running (no menu
4272 entry yet):
</p
>
4274 <p
><pre
>
4275 /usr/share/battery-stats/battery-stats-graph-flow
4276 </pre
></p
>
4278 <p
>I
'm not quite happy with the way the data is visualised, at least
4279 when there are few data points. The graphs look a bit better with a
4280 few years of data.
</p
>
4282 <p
>A while back one important feature I use in the battery stats
4283 collector broke in Debian. The scripts in
4284 <tt
>/usr/lib/pm-utils/power.d/
</tt
> were no longer executed. I
4285 suspect it happened when Jessie started using systemd, but I do not
4286 know. The issue is reported as
4287 <a href=
"https://bugs.debian.org/
818649">bug #
818649</a
> against
4288 pm-utils. I managed to work around it by adding an udev rule to call
4289 the collector script every time the power connector is connected and
4290 disconnected. With this fix in place it was finally time to make a
4291 new release of the package, and get it into Debian.
</p
>
4293 <p
>If you are interested in how your laptop battery is doing, please
4295 <a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats
">battery-stats
</a
>
4296 in Debian unstable, or rebuild it on Jessie to get it working on
4297 Debian stable. :) The upstream source is available from
4298 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats
">github
</a
>.
4299 As always, patches are very welcome.
</p
>
4304 <title>UsingQR -
"Electronic
" paper invoices using JSON and QR codes
</title>
4305 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/UsingQR____Electronic__paper_invoices_using_JSON_and_QR_codes.html
</link>
4306 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/UsingQR____Electronic__paper_invoices_using_JSON_and_QR_codes.html
</guid>
4307 <pubDate>Sat,
19 Mar
2016 09:
40:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
4308 <description><p
>Back in
2013 I proposed
4309 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/_Electronic__paper_invoices___using_vCard_in_a_QR_code.html
">a
4310 way to make paper and PDF invoices easier to process electronically by
4311 adding a QR code with the key information about the invoice
</a
>. I
4312 suggested using vCard field definition, to get some standard format
4313 for name and address, but any format would work. I did not do
4314 anything about the proposal, but hoped someone one day would make
4315 something like it. It would make it possible to efficiently send
4316 machine readable invoices directly between seller and buyer.
</p
>
4318 <p
>This was the background when I came across a proposal and
4319 specification from the web based accounting and invoicing supplier
4320 <a href=
"http://www.visma.com/
">Visma
</a
> in Sweden called
4321 <a href=
"http://usingqr.com/
">UsingQR
</a
>. Their PDF invoices contain
4322 a QR code with the key information of the invoice in JSON format.
4323 This is the typical content of a QR code following the UsingQR
4324 specification (based on a real world example, some numbers replaced to
4325 get a more bogus entry). I
've reformatted the JSON to make it easier
4326 to read. Normally this is all on one long line:
</p
>
4328 <p
><img src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2016-
03-
19-qr-invoice.png
" align=
"right
"><pre
>
4330 "vh
":
500.00,
4335 "nme
":
"Din Leverandør
",
4336 "cc
":
"NO
",
4337 "cid
":
"997912345 MVA
",
4338 "iref
":
"12300001",
4339 "idt
":
"20151022",
4340 "ddt
":
"20151105",
4341 "due
":
2500.0000,
4342 "cur
":
"NOK
",
4343 "pt
":
"BBAN
",
4344 "acc
":
"17202612345",
4345 "bc
":
"BIENNOK1
",
4346 "adr
":
"0313 OSLO
"
4348 </pre
></p
>
4350 </p
>The interpretation of the fields can be found in the
4351 <a href=
"http://usingqr.com/wp-content/uploads/
2014/
06/UsingQR_specification1.pdf
">format
4352 specification
</a
> (revision
2 from june
2014). The format seem to
4353 have most of the information needed to handle accounting and payment
4354 of invoices, at least the fields I have needed so far here in
4357 <p
>Unfortunately, the site and document do not mention anything about
4358 the patent, trademark and copyright status of the format and the
4359 specification. Because of this, I asked the people behind it back in
4360 November to clarify. Ann-Christine Savlid (ann-christine.savlid (at)
4361 visma.com) replied that Visma had not applied for patent or trademark
4362 protection for this format, and that there were no copyright based
4363 usage limitations for the format. I urged her to make sure this was
4364 explicitly written on the web pages and in the specification, but
4365 unfortunately this has not happened yet. So I guess if there is
4366 submarine patents, hidden trademarks or a will to sue for copyright
4367 infringements, those starting to use the UsingQR format might be at
4368 risk, but if this happen there is some legal defense in the fact that
4369 the people behind the format claimed it was safe to do so. At least
4370 with patents, there is always
4371 <a href=
"http://www.paperspecs.com/paper-news/beware-the-qr-code-patent-trap/
">a
4372 chance of getting sued...
</a
></p
>
4374 <p
>I also asked if they planned to maintain the format in an
4375 independent standard organization to give others more confidence that
4376 they would participate in the standardization process on equal terms
4377 with Visma, but they had no immediate plans for this. Their plan was
4378 to work with banks to try to get more users of the format, and
4379 evaluate the way forward if the format proved to be popular. I hope
4380 they conclude that using an open standard organisation like
4381 <a href=
"http://www.ietf.org/
">IETF
</a
> is the correct place to
4382 maintain such specification.
</p
>
4384 <p
><strong
>Update
2016-
03-
20</strong
>: Via Twitter I became aware of
4385 <a href=
"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=
11319492">some comments
4386 about this blog post
</a
> that had several useful links and references to
4387 similar systems. In the Czech republic, the Czech Banking Association
4388 standard #
26, with short name SPAYD, uses QR codes with payment
4389 information. More information is available from the Wikipedia page on
4390 <a href=
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_Payment_Descriptor
">Short
4391 Payment Descriptor
</a
>. And in Germany, there is a system named
4392 <a href=
"http://www.bezahlcode.de/
">BezahlCode
</a
>,
4393 (
<a href=
"http://www.bezahlcode.de/wp-content/uploads/BezahlCode_TechDok.pdf
">specification
4394 v1.8
2013-
12-
05 available as PDF
</a
>), which uses QR codes with
4395 URL-like formatting using
"bank:
" as the URI schema/protocol to
4396 provide the payment information. There is also the
4397 <a href=
"http://www.ferd-net.de/front_content.php?idcat=
231">ZUGFeRD
</a
>
4398 file format that perhaps could be transfered using QR codes, but I am
4399 not sure if it is done already. Last, in Bolivia there are reports
4400 that tax information since november
2014 need to be printed in QR
4401 format on invoices. I have not been able to track down a
4402 specification for this format, because of my limited language skill
4408 <title>Making battery measurements a little easier in Debian
</title>
4409 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Making_battery_measurements_a_little_easier_in_Debian.html
</link>
4410 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Making_battery_measurements_a_little_easier_in_Debian.html
</guid>
4411 <pubDate>Tue,
15 Mar
2016 15:
00:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
4412 <description><p
>Back in September, I blogged about
4413 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_life_and_death_of_a_laptop_battery.html
">the
4414 system I wrote to collect statistics about my laptop battery
</a
>, and
4415 how it showed the decay and death of this battery (now replaced). I
4416 created a simple deb package to handle the collection and graphing,
4417 but did not want to upload it to Debian as there were already
4418 <a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats
">a battery-stats
4419 package in Debian
</a
> that should do the same thing, and I did not see
4420 a point of uploading a competing package when battery-stats could be
4421 fixed instead. I reported a few bugs about its non-function, and
4422 hoped someone would step in and fix it. But no-one did.
</p
>
4424 <p
>I got tired of waiting a few days ago, and took matters in my own
4425 hands. The end result is that I am now the new upstream developer of
4426 battery stats (
<a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats
">available from github
</a
>) and part of the team maintaining
4427 battery-stats in Debian, and the package in Debian unstable is finally
4428 able to collect battery status using the
<tt
>/sys/class/power_supply/
</tt
>
4429 information provided by the Linux kernel. If you install the
4430 battery-stats package from unstable now, you will be able to get a
4431 graph of the current battery fill level, to get some idea about the
4432 status of the battery. The source package build and work just fine in
4433 Debian testing and stable (and probably oldstable too, but I have not
4434 tested). The default graph you get for that system look like this:
</p
>
4436 <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
>
4438 <p
>My plans for the future is to merge my old scripts into the
4439 battery-stats package, as my old scripts collected a lot more details
4440 about the battery. The scripts are merged into the upstream
4441 battery-stats git repository already, but I am not convinced they work
4442 yet, as I changed a lot of paths along the way. Will have to test a
4443 bit more before I make a new release.
</p
>
4445 <p
>I will also consider changing the file format slightly, as I
4446 suspect the way I combine several values into one field might make it
4447 impossible to know the type of the value when using it for processing
4448 and graphing.
</p
>
4450 <p
>If you would like I would like to keep an close eye on your laptop
4451 battery, check out the battery-stats package in
4452 <a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats
">Debian
</a
> and
4454 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats
">github
</a
>.
4455 I would love some help to improve the system further.
</p
>
4460 <title>Creating, updating and checking debian/copyright semi-automatically
</title>
4461 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Creating__updating_and_checking_debian_copyright_semi_automatically.html
</link>
4462 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Creating__updating_and_checking_debian_copyright_semi_automatically.html
</guid>
4463 <pubDate>Fri,
19 Feb
2016 15:
00:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
4464 <description><p
>Making packages for Debian requires quite a lot of attention to
4465 details. And one of the details is the content of the
4466 debian/copyright file, which should list all relevant licenses used by
4467 the code in the package in question, preferably in
4468 <a href=
"https://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/
1.0/
">machine
4469 readable DEP5 format
</a
>.
</p
>
4471 <p
>For large packages with lots of contributors it is hard to write
4472 and update this file manually, and if you get some detail wrong, the
4473 package is normally rejected by the ftpmasters. So getting it right
4474 the first time around get the package into Debian faster, and save
4475 both you and the ftpmasters some work.. Today, while trying to figure
4476 out what was wrong with
4477 <a href=
"https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=
686447">the
4478 zfsonlinux copyright file
</a
>, I decided to spend some time on
4479 figuring out the options for doing this job automatically, or at least
4480 semi-automatically.
</p
>
4482 <p
>Lucikly, there are at least two tools available for generating the
4483 file based on the code in the source package,
4484 <tt
><a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/debmake
">debmake
</a
></tt
>
4485 and
<tt
><a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cme
">cme
</a
></tt
>. I
'm
4486 not sure which one of them came first, but both seem to be able to
4487 create a sensible draft file. As far as I can tell, none of them can
4488 be trusted to get the result just right, so the content need to be
4489 polished a bit before the file is OK to upload. I found the debmake
4491 <a href=
"http://goofying-with-debian.blogspot.com/
2014/
07/debmake-checking-source-against-dep-
5.html
">a
4492 blog posts from
2014</a
>.
4494 <p
>To generate using debmake, use the -cc option:
4496 <p
><pre
>
4497 debmake -cc
> debian/copyright
4498 </pre
></p
>
4500 <p
>Note there are some problems with python and non-ASCII names, so
4501 this might not be the best option.
</p
>
4503 <p
>The cme option is based on a config parsing library, and I found
4505 <a href=
"https://ddumont.wordpress.com/
2015/
04/
05/improving-creation-of-debian-copyright-file/
">a
4506 blog post from
2015</a
>. To generate using cme, use the
'update
4507 dpkg-copyright
' option:
4509 <p
><pre
>
4510 cme update dpkg-copyright
4511 </pre
></p
>
4513 <p
>This will create or update debian/copyright. The cme tool seem to
4514 handle UTF-
8 names better than debmake.
</p
>
4516 <p
>When the copyright file is created, I would also like some help to
4517 check if the file is correct. For this I found two good options,
4518 <tt
>debmake -k
</tt
> and
<tt
>license-reconcile
</tt
>. The former seem
4519 to focus on license types and file matching, and is able to detect
4520 ineffective blocks in the copyright file. The latter reports missing
4521 copyright holders and years, but was confused by inconsistent license
4522 names (like CDDL vs. CDDL-
1.0). I suspect it is good to use both and
4523 fix all issues reported by them before uploading. But I do not know
4524 if the tools and the ftpmasters agree on what is important to fix in a
4525 copyright file, so the package might still be rejected.
</p
>
4527 <p
>The devscripts tool
<tt
>licensecheck
</tt
> deserve mentioning. It
4528 will read through the source and try to find all copyright statements.
4529 It is not comparing the result to the content of debian/copyright, but
4530 can be useful when verifying the content of the copyright file.
</p
>
4532 <p
>Are you aware of better tools in Debian to create and update
4533 debian/copyright file. Please let me know, or blog about it on
4534 planet.debian.org.
</p
>
4536 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
4537 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
4538 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
4540 <p
><strong
>Update
2016-
02-
20</strong
>: I got a tip from Mike Gabriel
4541 on how to use licensecheck and cdbs to create a draft copyright file
4543 <p
><pre
>
4544 licensecheck --copyright -r `find * -type f` | \
4545 /usr/lib/cdbs/licensecheck2dep5
> debian/copyright.auto
4546 </pre
></p
>
4548 <p
>He mentioned that he normally check the generated file into the
4549 version control system to make it easier to discover license and
4550 copyright changes in the upstream source. I will try to do the same
4551 with my packages in the future.
</p
>
4553 <p
><strong
>Update
2016-
02-
21</strong
>: The cme author recommended
4554 against using -quiet for new users, so I removed it from the proposed
4555 command line.
</p
>
4560 <title>Using appstream in Debian to locate packages with firmware and mime type support
</title>
4561 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_appstream_in_Debian_to_locate_packages_with_firmware_and_mime_type_support.html
</link>
4562 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_appstream_in_Debian_to_locate_packages_with_firmware_and_mime_type_support.html
</guid>
4563 <pubDate>Thu,
4 Feb
2016 16:
40:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
4564 <description><p
>The
<a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-
11">appstream system
</a
>
4565 is taking shape in Debian, and one provided feature is a very
4566 convenient way to tell you which package to install to make a given
4567 firmware file available when the kernel is looking for it. This can
4568 be done using apt-file too, but that is for someone else to blog
4571 <p
>Here is a small recipe to find the package with a given firmware
4572 file, in this example I am looking for ctfw-
3.2.3.0.bin, randomly
4573 picked from the set of firmware announced using appstream in Debian
4574 unstable. In general you would be looking for the firmware requested
4575 by the kernel during kernel module loading. To find the package
4576 providing the example file, do like this:
</p
>
4578 <blockquote
><pre
>
4579 % apt install appstream
4583 % appstreamcli what-provides firmware:runtime ctfw-
3.2.3.0.bin | \
4584 awk
'/Package:/ {print $
2}
'
4587 </pre
></blockquote
>
4589 <p
>See
<a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/AppStream/Guidelines
">the
4590 appstream wiki
</a
> page to learn how to embed the package metadata in
4591 a way appstream can use.
</p
>
4593 <p
>This same approach can be used to find any package supporting a
4594 given MIME type. This is very useful when you get a file you do not
4595 know how to handle. First find the mime type using
<tt
>file
4596 --mime-type
</tt
>, and next look up the package providing support for
4597 it. Lets say you got an SVG file. Its MIME type is image/svg+xml,
4598 and you can find all packages handling this type like this:
</p
>
4600 <blockquote
><pre
>
4601 % apt install appstream
4605 % appstreamcli what-provides mimetype image/svg+xml | \
4606 awk
'/Package:/ {print $
2}
'
4628 </pre
></blockquote
>
4630 <p
>I believe the MIME types are fetched from the desktop file for
4631 packages providing appstream metadata.
</p
>
4636 <title>Creepy, visualise geotagged social media information - nice free software
</title>
4637 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Creepy__visualise_geotagged_social_media_information___nice_free_software.html
</link>
4638 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Creepy__visualise_geotagged_social_media_information___nice_free_software.html
</guid>
4639 <pubDate>Sun,
24 Jan
2016 10:
50:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
4640 <description><p
>Most people seem not to realise that every time they walk around
4641 with the computerised radio beacon known as a mobile phone their
4642 position is tracked by the phone company and often stored for a long
4643 time (like every time a SMS is received or sent). And if their
4644 computerised radio beacon is capable of running programs (often called
4645 mobile apps) downloaded from the Internet, these programs are often
4646 also capable of tracking their location (if the app requested access
4647 during installation). And when these programs send out information to
4648 central collection points, the location is often included, unless
4649 extra care is taken to not send the location. The provided
4650 information is used by several entities, for good and bad (what is
4651 good and bad, depend on your point of view). What is certain, is that
4652 the private sphere and the right to free movement is challenged and
4653 perhaps even eradicated for those announcing their location this way,
4654 when they share their whereabouts with private and public
4657 <p align=
"center
"><img width=
"70%
" src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2016-
01-
24-nice-creepy-desktop-window.png
"></p
>
4659 <p
>The phone company logs provide a register of locations to check out
4660 when one want to figure out what the tracked person was doing. It is
4661 unavailable for most of us, but provided to selected government
4662 officials, company staff, those illegally buying information from
4663 unfaithful servants and crackers stealing the information. But the
4664 public information can be collected and analysed, and a free software
4665 tool to do so is called
4666 <a href=
"http://www.geocreepy.com/
">Creepy or Cree.py
</a
>. I
4667 discovered it when I read
4668 <a href=
"http://www.aftenposten.no/kultur/Slik-kan-du-bli-overvaket-pa-Twitter-og-Instagram-uten-a-ane-det-
7787884.html
">an
4669 article about Creepy
</a
> in the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten i
4670 November
2014, and decided to check if it was available in Debian.
4671 The python program was in Debian, but
4672 <a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/creepy
">the version in
4673 Debian
</a
> was completely broken and practically unmaintained. I
4674 uploaded a new version which did not work quite right, but did not
4675 have time to fix it then. This Christmas I decided to finally try to
4676 get Creepy operational in Debian. Now a fixed version is available in
4677 Debian unstable and testing, and almost all Debian specific patches
4679 <a href=
"https://github.com/jkakavas/creepy
">upstream
</a
>.
</p
>
4681 <p
>The Creepy program visualises geolocation information fetched from
4682 Twitter, Instagram, Flickr and Google+, and allow one to get a
4683 complete picture of every social media message posted recently in a
4684 given area, or track the movement of a given individual across all
4685 these services. Earlier it was possible to use the search API of at
4686 least some of these services without identifying oneself, but these
4687 days it is impossible. This mean that to use Creepy, you need to
4688 configure it to log in as yourself on these services, and provide
4689 information to them about your search interests. This should be taken
4690 into account when using Creepy, as it will also share information
4691 about yourself with the services.
</p
>
4693 <p
>The picture above show the twitter messages sent from (or at least
4694 geotagged with a position from) the city centre of Oslo, the capital
4695 of Norway. One useful way to use Creepy is to first look at
4696 information tagged with an area of interest, and next look at all the
4697 information provided by one or more individuals who was in the area.
4698 I tested it by checking out which celebrity provide their location in
4699 twitter messages by checkout out who sent twitter messages near a
4700 Norwegian TV station, and next could track their position over time,
4701 making it possible to locate their home and work place, among other
4702 things. A similar technique have been
4703 <a href=
"http://www.buzzfeed.com/maxseddon/does-this-soldiers-instagram-account-prove-russia-is-covertl
">used
4704 to locate Russian soldiers in Ukraine
</a
>, and it is both a powerful
4705 tool to discover lying governments, and a useful tool to help people
4706 understand the value of the private information they provide to the
4709 <p
>The package is not trivial to backport to Debian Stable/Jessie, as
4710 it depend on several python modules currently missing in Jessie (at
4711 least python-instagram, python-flickrapi and
4712 python-requests-toolbelt).
</p
>
4714 <p
>(I have uploaded
4715 <a href=
"https://screenshots.debian.net/package/creepy
">the image to
4716 screenshots.debian.net
</a
> and licensed it under the same terms as the
4717 Creepy program in Debian.)
</p
>
4722 <title>Always download Debian packages using Tor - the simple recipe
</title>
4723 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Always_download_Debian_packages_using_Tor___the_simple_recipe.html
</link>
4724 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Always_download_Debian_packages_using_Tor___the_simple_recipe.html
</guid>
4725 <pubDate>Fri,
15 Jan
2016 00:
30:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
4726 <description><p
>During his DebConf15 keynote, Jacob Appelbaum
4727 <a href=
"https://summit.debconf.org/debconf15/meeting/
331/what-is-to-be-done/
">observed
4728 that those listening on the Internet lines would have good reason to
4729 believe a computer have a given security hole
</a
> if it download a
4730 security fix from a Debian mirror. This is a good reason to always
4731 use encrypted connections to the Debian mirror, to make sure those
4732 listening do not know which IP address to attack. In August, Richard
4733 Hartmann observed that encryption was not enough, when it was possible
4734 to interfere download size to security patches or the fact that
4735 download took place shortly after a security fix was released, and
4736 <a href=
"http://richardhartmann.de/blog/posts/
2015/
08/
24-Tor-enabled_Debian_mirror/
">proposed
4737 to always use Tor to download packages from the Debian mirror
</a
>. He
4738 was not the first to propose this, as the
4739 <tt
><a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/apt-transport-tor
">apt-transport-tor
</a
></tt
>
4740 package by Tim Retout already existed to make it easy to convince apt
4741 to use
<a href=
"https://www.torproject.org/
">Tor
</a
>, but I was not
4742 aware of that package when I read the blog post from Richard.
</p
>
4744 <p
>Richard discussed the idea with Peter Palfrader, one of the Debian
4745 sysadmins, and he set up a Tor hidden service on one of the central
4746 Debian mirrors using the address vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion, thus making
4747 it possible to download packages directly between two tor nodes,
4748 making sure the network traffic always were encrypted.
</p
>
4750 <p
>Here is a short recipe for enabling this on your machine, by
4751 installing
<tt
>apt-transport-tor
</tt
> and replacing http and https
4752 urls with tor+http and tor+https, and using the hidden service instead
4753 of the official Debian mirror site. I recommend installing
4754 <tt
>etckeeper
</tt
> before you start to have a history of the changes
4755 done in /etc/.
</p
>
4757 <blockquote
><pre
>
4758 apt install apt-transport-tor
4759 sed -i
's% http://ftp.debian.org/% tor+http://vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion/%
' /etc/apt/sources.list
4760 sed -i
's% http% tor+http%
' /etc/apt/sources.list
4761 </pre
></blockquote
>
4763 <p
>If you have more sources listed in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/, run
4764 the sed commands for these too. The sed command is assuming your are
4765 using the ftp.debian.org Debian mirror. Adjust the command (or just
4766 edit the file manually) to match your mirror.
</p
>
4768 <p
>This work in Debian Jessie and later. Note that tools like
4769 <tt
>apt-file
</tt
> only recently started using the apt transport
4770 system, and do not work with these tor+http URLs. For
4771 <tt
>apt-file
</tt
> you need the version currently in experimental,
4772 which need a recent apt version currently only in unstable. So if you
4773 need a working
<tt
>apt-file
</tt
>, this is not for you.
</p
>
4775 <p
>Another advantage from this change is that your machine will start
4776 using Tor regularly and at fairly random intervals (every time you
4777 update the package lists or upgrade or install a new package), thus
4778 masking other Tor traffic done from the same machine. Using Tor will
4779 become normal for the machine in question.
</p
>
4781 <p
>On
<a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox
">Freedombox
</a
>, APT
4782 is set up by default to use
<tt
>apt-transport-tor
</tt
> when Tor is
4783 enabled. It would be great if it was the default on any Debian
4789 <title>OpenALPR, find car license plates in video streams - nice free software
</title>
4790 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/OpenALPR__find_car_license_plates_in_video_streams___nice_free_software.html
</link>
4791 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/OpenALPR__find_car_license_plates_in_video_streams___nice_free_software.html
</guid>
4792 <pubDate>Wed,
23 Dec
2015 01:
00:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
4793 <description><p
>When I was a kid, we used to collect
"car numbers
", as we used to
4794 call the car license plate numbers in those days. I would write the
4795 numbers down in my little book and compare notes with the other kids
4796 to see how many region codes we had seen and if we had seen some
4797 exotic or special region codes and numbers. It was a fun game to pass
4798 time, as we kids have plenty of it.
</p
>
4800 <p
>A few days I came across
4801 <a href=
"https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr
">the OpenALPR
4802 project
</a
>, a free software project to automatically discover and
4803 report license plates in images and video streams, and provide the
4804 "car numbers
" in a machine readable format. I
've been looking for
4805 such system for a while now, because I believe it is a bad idea that the
4806 <a href=
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number_plate_recognition
">automatic
4807 number plate recognition
</a
> tool only is available in the hands of
4808 the powerful, and want it to be available also for the powerless to
4809 even the score when it comes to surveillance and sousveillance. I
4810 discovered the developer
4811 <a href=
"https://bugs.debian.org/
747509">wanted to get the tool into
4812 Debian
</a
>, and as I too wanted it to be in Debian, I volunteered to
4813 help him get it into shape to get the package uploaded into the Debian
4816 <p
>Today we finally managed to get the package into shape and uploaded
4817 it into Debian, where it currently
4818 <a href=
"https://ftp-master.debian.org//new/openalpr_2.2
.1-
1.html
">waits
4819 in the NEW queue
</a
> for review by the Debian ftpmasters.
</p
>
4821 <p
>I guess you are wondering why on earth such tool would be useful
4822 for the common folks, ie those not running a large government
4823 surveillance system? Well, I plan to put it in a computer on my bike
4824 and in my car, tracking the cars nearby and allowing me to be notified
4825 when number plates on my watch list are discovered. Another use case
4826 was suggested by a friend of mine, who wanted to set it up at his home
4827 to open the car port automatically when it discovered the plate on his
4828 car. When I mentioned it perhaps was a bit foolhardy to allow anyone
4829 capable of placing his license plate number of a piece of cardboard to
4830 open his car port, men replied that it was always unlocked anyway. I
4831 guess for such use case it make sense. I am sure there are other use
4832 cases too, for those with imagination and a vision.
</p
>
4834 <p
>If you want to build your own version of the Debian package, check
4835 out the upstream git source and symlink ./distros/debian to ./debian/
4836 before running
"debuild
" to build the source. Or wait a bit until the
4837 package show up in unstable.
</p
>
4842 <title>Using appstream with isenkram to install hardware related packages in Debian
</title>
4843 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_appstream_with_isenkram_to_install_hardware_related_packages_in_Debian.html
</link>
4844 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_appstream_with_isenkram_to_install_hardware_related_packages_in_Debian.html
</guid>
4845 <pubDate>Sun,
20 Dec
2015 12:
20:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
4846 <description><p
>Around three years ago, I created
4847 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram
">the isenkram
4848 system
</a
> to get a more practical solution in Debian for handing
4849 hardware related packages. A GUI system in the isenkram package will
4850 present a pop-up dialog when some hardware dongle supported by
4851 relevant packages in Debian is inserted into the machine. The same
4852 lookup mechanism to detect packages is available as command line
4853 tools in the isenkram-cli package. In addition to mapping hardware,
4854 it will also map kernel firmware files to packages and make it easy to
4855 install needed firmware packages automatically. The key for this
4856 system to work is a good way to map hardware to packages, in other
4857 words, allow packages to announce what hardware they will work
4860 <p
>I started by providing data files in the isenkram source, and
4861 adding code to download the latest version of these data files at run
4862 time, to ensure every user had the most up to date mapping available.
4863 I also added support for storing the mapping in the Packages file in
4864 the apt repositories, but did not push this approach because while I
4865 was trying to figure out how to best store hardware/package mappings,
4866 <a href=
"http://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/
">the
4867 appstream system
</a
> was announced. I got in touch and suggested to
4868 add the hardware mapping into that data set to be able to use
4869 appstream as a data source, and this was accepted at least for the
4870 Debian version of appstream.
</p
>
4872 <p
>A few days ago using appstream in Debian for this became possible,
4873 and today I uploaded a new version
0.20 of isenkram adding support for
4874 appstream as a data source for mapping hardware to packages. The only
4875 package so far using appstream to announce its hardware support is my
4876 pymissile package. I got help from Matthias Klumpp with figuring out
4877 how do add the required
4878 <a href=
"https://appstream.debian.org/html/sid/main/metainfo/pymissile.html
">metadata
4879 in pymissile
</a
>. I added a file debian/pymissile.metainfo.xml with
4880 this content:
</p
>
4882 <blockquote
><pre
>
4883 &lt;?xml version=
"1.0" encoding=
"UTF-
8"?
&gt;
4884 &lt;component
&gt;
4885 &lt;id
&gt;pymissile
&lt;/id
&gt;
4886 &lt;metadata_license
&gt;MIT
&lt;/metadata_license
&gt;
4887 &lt;name
&gt;pymissile
&lt;/name
&gt;
4888 &lt;summary
&gt;Control original Striker USB Missile Launcher
&lt;/summary
&gt;
4889 &lt;description
&gt;
4891 Pymissile provides a curses interface to control an original
4892 Marks and Spencer / Striker USB Missile Launcher, as well as a
4893 motion control script to allow a webcamera to control the
4896 &lt;/description
&gt;
4897 &lt;provides
&gt;
4898 &lt;modalias
&gt;usb:v1130p0202d*
&lt;/modalias
&gt;
4899 &lt;/provides
&gt;
4900 &lt;/component
&gt;
4901 </pre
></blockquote
>
4903 <p
>The key for isenkram is the component/provides/modalias value,
4904 which is a glob style match rule for hardware specific strings
4905 (modalias strings) provided by the Linux kernel. In this case, it
4906 will map to all USB devices with vendor code
1130 and product code
4909 <p
>Note, it is important that the license of all the metadata files
4910 are compatible to have permissions to aggregate them into archive wide
4911 appstream files. Matthias suggested to use MIT or BSD licenses for
4912 these files. A challenge is figuring out a good id for the data, as
4913 it is supposed to be globally unique and shared across distributions
4914 (in other words, best to coordinate with upstream what to use). But
4915 it can be changed later or, so we went with the package name as
4916 upstream for this project is dormant.
</p
>
4918 <p
>To get the metadata file installed in the correct location for the
4919 mirror update scripts to pick it up and include its content the
4920 appstream data source, the file must be installed in the binary
4921 package under /usr/share/appdata/. I did this by adding the following
4922 line to debian/pymissile.install:
</p
>
4924 <blockquote
><pre
>
4925 debian/pymissile.metainfo.xml usr/share/appdata
4926 </pre
></blockquote
>
4928 <p
>With that in place, the command line tool isenkram-lookup will list
4929 all packages useful on the current computer automatically, and the GUI
4930 pop-up handler will propose to install the package not already
4931 installed if a hardware dongle is inserted into the machine in
4934 <p
>Details of the modalias field in appstream is available from the
4935 <a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-
11">DEP-
11</a
> proposal.
</p
>
4937 <p
>To locate the modalias values of all hardware present in a machine,
4938 try running this command on the command line:
</p
>
4940 <blockquote
><pre
>
4941 cat $(find /sys/devices/|grep modalias)
4942 </pre
></blockquote
>
4944 <p
>To learn more about the isenkram system, please check out
4945 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/
">my
4946 blog posts tagged isenkram
</a
>.
</p
>
4951 <title>The GNU General Public License is not magic pixie dust
</title>
4952 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_GNU_General_Public_License_is_not_magic_pixie_dust.html
</link>
4953 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_GNU_General_Public_License_is_not_magic_pixie_dust.html
</guid>
4954 <pubDate>Mon,
30 Nov
2015 09:
55:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
4955 <description><p
>A blog post from my fellow Debian developer Paul Wise titled
4956 "<a href=
"http://bonedaddy.net/pabs3/log/
2015/
11/
27/sfc-supporter/
">The
4957 GPL is not magic pixie dust
</a
>" explain the importance of making sure
4958 the
<a href=
"http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
">GPL
</a
> is enforced.
4959 I quote the blog post from Paul in full here with his permission:
<p
>
4963 <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
>
4966 The GPL is not magic pixie dust. It does not work by itself.
<br/
>
4968 The first step is to choose a
4969 <a href=
"https://copyleft.org/
">copyleft
</a
> license for your
4972 The next step is, when someone fails to follow that copyleft license,
4973 <b
>it must be enforced
</b
><br/
>
4975 and its a simple fact of our modern society that such type of
4978 is incredibly expensive to do and incredibly difficult to do.
4981 <p
><small
>--
<a href=
"http://ebb.org/bkuhn/
">Bradley Kuhn
</a
>, in
4982 <a href=
"http://faif.us/
" title=
"Free as in Freedom
">FaiF
</a
>
4983 <a href=
"http://faif.us/cast/
2015/nov/
24/
0x57/
">episode
4984 0x57</a
></small
></p
>
4986 <p
>As the Debian Website
4987 <a href=
"https://bugs.debian.org/
794116">used
</a
>
4988 <a href=
"https://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/webwml/webwml/english/intro/free.wml?r1=
1.24&amp;r2=
1.25">to
</a
>
4989 imply, public domain and permissively licensed software can lead to
4990 the production of more proprietary software as people discover useful
4991 software, extend it and or incorporate it into their hardware or
4992 software products. Copyleft licenses such as the GNU GPL were created
4993 to close off this avenue to the production of proprietary software but
4994 such licenses are not enough. With the ongoing adoption of Free
4995 Software by individuals and groups, inevitably the community
's
4996 expectations of license compliance are violated, usually out of
4997 ignorance of the way Free Software works, but not always. As Karen
4998 and Bradley explained in
<a href=
"http://faif.us/
" title=
"Free as in
4999 Freedom
">FaiF
</a
>
5000 <a href=
"http://faif.us/cast/
2015/nov/
24/
0x57/
">episode
0x57</a
>,
5001 copyleft is nothing if no-one is willing and able to stand up in court
5002 to protect it. The reality of today
's world is that legal
5003 representation is expensive, difficult and time consuming. With
5004 <a href=
"http://gpl-violations.org/
">gpl-violations.org
</a
> in hiatus
5005 <a href=
"http://gpl-violations.org/news/
20151027-homepage-recovers/
">until
</a
>
5006 some time in
2016, the
<a href=
"https://sfconservancy.org/
">Software
5007 Freedom Conservancy
</a
> (a tax-exempt charity) is the major defender
5008 of the Linux project, Debian and other groups against GPL violations.
5009 In March the SFC supported a
5010 <a href=
"https://sfconservancy.org/news/
2015/mar/
05/vmware-lawsuit/
">lawsuit
5011 by Christoph Hellwig
</a
> against VMware for refusing to
5012 <a href=
"https://sfconservancy.org/linux-compliance/vmware-lawsuit-faq.html
">comply
5013 with the GPL
</a
> in relation to their use of parts of the Linux
5014 kernel. Since then two of their sponsors pulled corporate funding and
5016 <a href=
"https://sfconservancy.org/blog/
2015/nov/
24/faif-carols-fundraiser/
">blocked
5017 or cancelled their talks
</a
>. As a result they have decided to rely
5018 less on corporate funding and more on the broad community of
5019 individuals who support Free Software and copyleft. So the SFC has
5020 <a href=
"https://sfconservancy.org/news/
2015/nov/
23/
2015fundraiser/
">launched
</a
>
5021 a
<a href=
"https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/
">campaign
</a
> to create
5022 a community of folks who stand up for copyleft and the GPL by
5023 supporting their work on promoting and supporting copyleft and Free
5026 <p
>If you support Free Software,
5027 <a href=
"https://sfconservancy.org/blog/
2015/nov/
26/like-what-I-do/
">like
</a
>
5028 what the SFC do, agree with their
5029 <a href=
"https://sfconservancy.org/linux-compliance/principles.html
">compliance
5030 principles
</a
>, are happy about their
5031 <a href=
"https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/
">successes
</a
> in
2015,
5032 work on a project that is an SFC
5033 <a href=
"https://sfconservancy.org/members/current/
">member
</a
> and or
5034 just want to stand up for copyleft, please join
5035 <a href=
"https://identi.ca/cwebber/image/JQGPA4qbTyyp3-MY8QpvuA
">Christopher
5036 Allan Webber
</a
>,
5037 <a href=
"https://sfconservancy.org/blog/
2015/nov/
24/faif-carols-fundraiser/
">Carol
5039 <a href=
"http://www.jonobacon.org/
2015/
11/
25/supporting-software-freedom-conservancy/
">Jono
5040 Bacon
</a
>, myself and
5041 <a href=
"https://sfconservancy.org/sponsors/#supporters
">others
</a
> in
5043 <a href=
"https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/
">supporter
</a
>. For the
5044 next week your donation will be
5045 <a href=
"https://sfconservancy.org/news/
2015/nov/
27/black-friday/
">matched
</a
>
5046 by an anonymous donor. Please also consider asking your employer to
5047 match your donation or become a sponsor of SFC. Don
't forget to
5048 spread the word about your support for SFC via email, your blog and or
5049 social media accounts.
</p
>
5053 <p
>I agree with Paul on this topic and just signed up as a Supporter
5054 of Software Freedom Conservancy myself. Perhaps you should be a
5055 supporter too?
</p
>
5060 <title>PGP key transition statement for key EE4E02F9
</title>
5061 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/PGP_key_transition_statement_for_key_EE4E02F9.html
</link>
5062 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/PGP_key_transition_statement_for_key_EE4E02F9.html
</guid>
5063 <pubDate>Tue,
17 Nov
2015 10:
50:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
5064 <description><p
>I
've needed a new OpenPGP key for a while, but have not had time to
5065 set it up properly. I wanted to generate it offline and have it
5066 available on
<a href=
"http://shop.kernelconcepts.de/#openpgp
">a OpenPGP
5067 smart card
</a
> for daily use, and learning how to do it and finding
5068 time to sit down with an offline machine almost took forever. But
5069 finally I
've been able to complete the process, and have now moved
5070 from my old GPG key to a new GPG key. See
5071 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2015-
11-
17-new-gpg-key-transition.txt
">the
5072 full transition statement, signed with both my old and new key
</a
> for
5073 the details. This is my new key:
</p
>
5076 pub
3936R/
<a href=
"http://pgp.cs.uu.nl/stats/
111D6B29EE4E02F9.html
">111D6B29EE4E02F9
</a
> 2015-
11-
03 [expires:
2019-
11-
14]
5077 Key fingerprint =
3AC7 B2E3 ACA5 DF87
78F1 D827
111D
6B29 EE4E
02F9
5078 uid Petter Reinholdtsen
&lt;pere@hungry.com
&gt;
5079 uid Petter Reinholdtsen
&lt;pere@debian.org
&gt;
5080 sub
4096R/
87BAFB0E
2015-
11-
03 [expires:
2019-
11-
02]
5081 sub
4096R/F91E6DE9
2015-
11-
03 [expires:
2019-
11-
02]
5082 sub
4096R/A0439BAB
2015-
11-
03 [expires:
2019-
11-
02]
5085 <p
>The key can be downloaded from the OpenPGP key servers, signed by
5086 my old key.
</p
>
5088 <p
>If you signed my old key
5089 (
<a href=
"http://pgp.cs.uu.nl/stats/DB4CCC4B2A30D729.html
">DB4CCC4B2A30D729
</a
>),
5090 I
'd very much appreciate a signature on my new key, details and
5091 instructions in the transition statement. I m happy to reciprocate if
5092 you have a similarly signed transition statement to present.
</p
>
5097 <title>Is Pentagon deciding the Norwegian negotiating position on Internet governance?
</title>
5098 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_Pentagon_deciding_the_Norwegian_negotiating_position_on_Internet_governance_.html
</link>
5099 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_Pentagon_deciding_the_Norwegian_negotiating_position_on_Internet_governance_.html
</guid>
5100 <pubDate>Tue,
3 Nov
2015 13:
40:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
5101 <description><p
>In Norway, all government offices are required by law to keep a
5102 list of every document or letter arriving and leaving their offices.
5103 Internal notes should also be documented. The document list (called a mail
5104 journal -
"postjournal
" in Norwegian) is public information and thanks
5105 to the Norwegian Freedom of Information Act (Offentleglova) the mail
5106 journal is available for everyone. Most offices even publish the mail
5107 journal on their web pages, as PDFs or tables in web pages. The state-level offices even have a shared web based search service (called
5108 <a href=
"https://www.oep.no/
">Offentlig Elektronisk Postjournal -
5109 OEP
</a
>) to make it possible to search the entries in the list. Not
5110 all journal entries show up on OEP, and the search service is hard to
5111 use, but OEP does make it easier to find at least some interesting
5112 journal entries .
</p
>
5114 <p
>In
2012 I came across a document in the mail journal for the
5115 Norwegian Ministry of Transport and Communications on OEP that
5116 piqued my interest. The title of the document was
5117 "<a href=
"https://www.oep.no/search/resultSingle.html?journalPostId=
4192362">Internet
5118 Governance and how it affects national security
</a
>" (Norwegian:
5119 "Internet Governance og påvirkning på nasjonal sikkerhet
"). The
5120 document date was
2012-
05-
22, and it was said to be sent from the
5121 "Permanent Mission of Norway to the United Nations
". I asked for a
5122 copy, but my request was rejected with a reference to a legal clause said to authorize them to reject it
5123 (
<a href=
"http://lovdata.no/lov/
2006-
05-
19-
16/§
20">offentleglova §
20,
5124 letter c
</a
>) and an explanation that the document was exempt because
5125 of foreign policy interests as it contained information related to the
5126 Norwegian negotiating position, negotiating strategies or similar. I
5127 was told the information in the document related to the ongoing
5128 negotiation in the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). The
5129 explanation made sense to me in early January
2013, as a ITU
5130 conference in Dubay discussing Internet Governance
5131 (
<a href=
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Telecommunication_Union#World_Conference_on_International_Telecommunications_2012_
.28WCIT-
12.29">World
5132 Conference on International Telecommunications - WCIT-
12</a
>) had just
5134 <a href=
"http://www.digi.no/kommentarer/
2012/
12/
18/tvil-om-usas-rolle-pa-teletoppmote
">reportedly
5135 in chaos
</a
> when USA walked out of the negotiations and
25 countries
5136 including Norway refused to sign the new treaty. It seemed
5137 reasonable to believe talks were still going on a few weeks later.
5138 Norway was represented at the ITU meeting by two authorities, the
5139 <a href=
"http://www.nkom.no/
">Norwegian Communications Authority
</a
>
5140 and the
<a href=
"https://www.regjeringen.no/no/dep/sd/
">Ministry of
5141 Transport and Communications
</a
>. This might be the reason the letter
5142 was sent to the ministry. As I was unable to find the document in the
5143 mail journal of any Norwegian UN mission, I asked the ministry who had
5144 sent the document to the ministry, and was told that it was the Deputy
5145 Permanent Representative with the Permanent Mission of Norway in
5148 <p
>Three years later, I was still curious about the content of that
5149 document, and again asked for a copy, believing the negotiation was
5151 <a href=
"https://mimesbronn.no/request/kopi_av_dokumenter_i_sak_2012914
">I
5152 asked both the Ministry of Transport and Communications as the
5153 receiver
</a
> and
5154 <a href=
"https://mimesbronn.no/request/brev_om_internet_governance_og_p
">asked
5155 the Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva as the sender
</a
> for a
5156 copy, to see if they both agreed that it should be withheld from the
5157 public. The ministry upheld its rejection quoting the same law
5158 reference as before, while the permanent mission rejected it quoting a
5160 (
<a href=
"http://lovdata.no/lov/
2006-
05-
19-
16/§
20">offentleglova §
20
5161 letter b
</a
>), claiming that they were required to keep the
5162 content of the document from the public because it contained
5163 information given to Norway with the expressed or implied expectation
5164 that the information should not be made public. I asked the permanent
5165 mission for an explanation, and was told that the document contained
5166 an account from a meeting held in the Pentagon for a limited group of NATO
5167 nations where the organiser of the meeting did not intend the content
5168 of the meeting to be publicly known. They explained that giving me a
5169 copy might cause Norway to not get access to similar information in
5170 the future and thus hurt the future foreign interests of Norway. They
5171 also explained that the Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva was not
5172 the author of the document, they only got a copy of it, and because of
5173 this had not listed it in their mail journal.
</p
>
5175 <p
>Armed with this
5176 knowledge I asked the Ministry to reconsider and asked who was the
5177 author of the document, now realising that it was not same as the
5178 "sender
" according to Ministry of Transport and Communications. The
5179 ministry upheld its rejection but told me the name of the author of
5180 the document. According to
5181 <a href=
"https://www.regjeringen.no/no/aktuelt/unga69_rapport1/id2001204/
">a
5182 government report
</a
> the author was with the Permanent Mission of
5183 Norway in New York a bit more than a year later (
2014-
09-
22), so I
5184 guessed that might be the office responsible for writing and sending
5185 the report initially and
5186 <a href=
"https://www.mimesbronn.no/request/mote_2012_i_pentagon_om_itu
">asked
5187 them for a copy
</a
> but I was obviously wrong as I was told that the
5188 document was unknown to them and that the author did not work there
5189 when the document was written. Next, I asked the Permanent Mission of
5190 Norway in Geneva and the Foreign Ministry to reconsider and at least
5191 tell me who sent the document to Deputy Permanent Representative with
5192 the Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva. The Foreign Ministry also
5193 upheld its rejection, but told me that the person sending the document
5194 to Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva was the defence attaché with
5195 the Norwegian Embassy in Washington. I do not know if this is the
5196 same person as the author of the document.
</p
>
5198 <p
>If I understand the situation correctly, someone capable of
5199 inviting selected NATO nations to a meeting in Pentagon organised a
5200 meeting where someone representing the Norwegian defence attaché in
5201 Washington attended, and the account from this meeting is interpreted
5202 by the Ministry of Transport and Communications to expose Norways
5203 negotiating position, negotiating strategies and similar regarding the
5204 ITU negotiations on Internet Governance. It is truly amazing what can
5205 be derived from mere meta-data.
</p
>
5207 <p
>I wonder which NATO countries besides Norway attended this meeting?
5208 And what exactly was said and done at the meeting? Anyone know?
</p
>
5213 <title>New book,
"Fri kultur
" by @lessig, a Norwegian Bokmål translation of
"Free Culture
" from
2004</title>
5214 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_book___Fri_kultur__by__lessig__a_Norwegian_Bokm_l_translation_of__Free_Culture__from_2004.html
</link>
5215 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_book___Fri_kultur__by__lessig__a_Norwegian_Bokm_l_translation_of__Free_Culture__from_2004.html
</guid>
5216 <pubDate>Sat,
31 Oct
2015 09:
00:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
5217 <description><p
>People keep asking me where to get the various forms of the book I
5218 published last week, the Norwegian Bokmål edition of Lawrence Lessigs
5219 book
<a href=
"http://www.free-culture.cc/
">Free Culture
</a
>. It was
5220 published on paper via lulu.com, and is also available in PDF, ePub
5221 and MOBI format. I currently sell the paper edition for self cost
5222 from lulu.com, but might extend the distribution to book stores like
5223 Amazon and Barnes
& Noble later. This will double the price and force
5224 me to make a profit from selling the book. Anyway, here are links to
5225 get the book in different formats:
</p
>
5229 <li
><a href=
"http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/fri-kultur/paperback/product-
22406445.html
">Buy
5230 paper edition from lulu.com
</a
></li
>
5232 <li
><a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf
">Download
5233 PDF, size
7.9 MiB
</a
> (gratis/free)
</li
>
5235 <li
><a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub
">Download
5236 ePub, size
11 MiB
</a
> (gratis/free)
</li
>
5238 <li
><a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/archive/freeculture.nb.mobi
">Download
5239 MOBI, size
3.8 MiB
</a
> (gratis/free)
</li
>
5243 <p
>Note that the MOBI version have problems with the table of content,
5244 at least with the viewers I have been able to test. And the ePub file
5245 have several problems according to
5246 <a href=
"https://github.com/IDPF/epubcheck
">epubcheck
</a
>, but seem
5247 to display fine in the viewers I have tested. All the files needed to
5248 create the book in various forms are available from
5249 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig
">the
5250 github project page
</a
>.
</p
>
5252 <p
>The project got press coverage from the Norwegian IT news site
5253 digi.no. Check out the article
5254 "<a href=
"http://www.digi.no/juss_og_samfunn/
2015/
10/
29/vil-apne-politikernes-oyne-for-creative-commons
">Vil
5255 åpne politikernes øyne for Creative Commons
</a
>".
</li
>
5257 <p
>I
've
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture
">blogged
5258 about the project
</a
> as it moved along. The blogs document the translation
5259 progress and insights I had along the way.
</p
>
5264 <title>"Free Culture
" by @lessig - The background story for Creative Commons - new edition available
</title>
5265 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/_Free_Culture__by__lessig___The_background_story_for_Creative_Commons___new_edition_available.html
</link>
5266 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/_Free_Culture__by__lessig___The_background_story_for_Creative_Commons___new_edition_available.html
</guid>
5267 <pubDate>Fri,
23 Oct
2015 12:
10:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
5268 <description><p
><a href=
"http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-
22402863.html
">Click
5269 here to buy the book
</a
>.
</p
>
5271 <p
>In
2004, as the
<a href=
"https://creativecommons.org/
">Creative Commons
5272 movement
</a
> gained momentum, its creator Lawrence Lessig wrote the
5273 book
<a href=
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Culture_(book)
">Free
5274 Culture
</a
> to explain the problems with increasing copyright
5275 regulation and suggest some solutions. I read the book back then and
5276 was very moved by it. Reading the book inspired me and changed the
5277 way I looked on copyright law, and I would love it if more people
5278 would read it too.
</p
>
5280 <p
>Because of this, I decided in the summer of
2012 to translate it to
5281 Norwegian Bokmål and publish it for those of my friends and family
5282 that prefer to read books in Norwegian. I translated the book using
5283 docbook and a gettext PO file, and a byproduct of this process is a
5284 new edition of the English original. I
've been in touch with the
5285 author during by work, and he said it was fine with him if I also
5286 published an English version. So I decided to do so. Today, I made
5288 <a href=
"http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-
22402863.html
">available
5289 for sale on Lulu.com
</a
>, for those interested in a paper book. This
5292 <p align=
"center
"><a href=
"http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-
22402863.html
"><img align=
"center
" src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2015-
10-
23-free-culture-english-published-cover.png
"/
></a
></p
>
5294 <p
>The Norwegian Bokmål version will be available for purchase in a
5295 few days. I also plan to publish a French version in a few weeks or
5296 months, depending on the amount of people with knowledge of French to
5297 join the translation project. So far there is only one active
5298 person, but the French book is almost completely translated but
5299 need some proof reading.
</p
>
5301 <p
>The book is also available in PDF, ePub and MOBI formats from
5302 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig
">my
5303 github project page
</a
>. Note the ePub and MOBI versions have some
5304 formatting problems I believe is due to bugs in the docbook tool
5305 dbtoepub (Debian BTS issues
5306 <a href=
"https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=
795842">#
795842</a
>
5308 <a href=
"https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=
796871">#
796871</a
>),
5309 but I have not taken the time to investigate. I recommend the PDF and
5310 ePub version for now, as they seem to show up fine in the viewers I
5311 have available.
</p
>
5313 <p
>After the translation to Norwegian Bokmål was complete, I was able
5314 to secure some sponsoring from
5315 <a href=
"http://www.nuugfoundation.no/
">the NUUG Foundation
</a
> to
5316 print the book. This is the reason their logo is located on the back
5317 cover. I am very grateful for their contribution, and will use it to
5318 give a copy of the Norwegian edition to members of the Norwegian
5319 Parliament and other decision makers here in Norway.
</p
>
5324 <title>Lawrence Lessig interviewed Edward Snowden a year ago
</title>
5325 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lawrence_Lessig_interviewed_Edward_Snowden_a_year_ago.html
</link>
5326 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lawrence_Lessig_interviewed_Edward_Snowden_a_year_ago.html
</guid>
5327 <pubDate>Mon,
19 Oct
2015 11:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
5328 <description><p
>Last year,
<a href=
"https://lessig2016.us/
">US president candidate
5329 in the Democratic Party
</a
> Lawrence interviewed Edward Snowden. The
5330 one hour interview was
5331 <a href=
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_Sr96TFQQE
">published by
5332 Harvard Law School
2014-
10-
23 on Youtube
</a
>, and the meeting took
5333 place
2014-
10-
20.
</p
>
5335 <p
>The questions are very good, and there is lots of useful
5336 information to be learned and very interesting issues to think about
5337 being raised. Please check it out.
</p
>
5339 <iframe width=
"560" height=
"315" src=
"https://www.youtube.com/embed/o_Sr96TFQQE
" frameborder=
"0" allowfullscreen
></iframe
>
5341 <p
>I find it especially interesting to hear again that Snowden did try
5342 to bring up his reservations through the official channels without any
5343 luck. It is in sharp contrast to the answers made
2013-
11-
06 by the
5344 Norwegian prime minister Erna Solberg to the Norwegian Parliament,
5345 <a href=
"https://tale.holderdeord.no/speeches/s131106/
68">claiming
5346 Snowden is no Whistle-Blower
</a
> because he should have taken up his
5347 concerns internally and using official channels. It make me sad
5348 that this is the political leadership we have here in Norway.
</p
>
5353 <title>The Story of Aaron Swartz - Let us all weep!
</title>
5354 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Story_of_Aaron_Swartz___Let_us_all_weep_.html
</link>
5355 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Story_of_Aaron_Swartz___Let_us_all_weep_.html
</guid>
5356 <pubDate>Thu,
8 Oct
2015 12:
10:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
5357 <description><p
>The movie
"<a href=
"http://www.takepart.com/internets-own-boy
">The
5358 Internet
's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz
</a
>" is both inspiring
5359 and depressing at the same time. The work of Aaron Swartz has
5360 inspired me in my work, and I am grateful of all the improvements he
5361 was able to initiate or complete. I wish I am able to do as much good
5362 in my life as he did in his. Every minute of this
1:
45 long movie is
5363 inspiring in documenting how much impact a single person can have on
5364 improving the society and this world. And it is depressing in
5365 documenting how the law enforcement of USA (and other countries) is
5366 corrupted to a point where they can push a bright kid to his death for
5367 downloading too many scientific articles. Aaron is dead. Let us all
5370 <p
>The movie is also available on
5371 <a href=
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXr-
2hwTk58
">Youtube
</a
>. I
5372 wish there were Norwegian subtitles available, so I could show it to
5373 my parents.
</p
>
5378 <title>French Docbook/PDF/EPUB/MOBI edition of the Free Culture book
</title>
5379 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/French_Docbook_PDF_EPUB_MOBI_edition_of_the_Free_Culture_book.html
</link>
5380 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/French_Docbook_PDF_EPUB_MOBI_edition_of_the_Free_Culture_book.html
</guid>
5381 <pubDate>Thu,
1 Oct
2015 13:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
5382 <description><p
>As I wrap up the Norwegian version of
5383 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig
">Free
5384 Culture
</a
> book by Lawrence Lessig (still waiting for my final proof
5385 reading copy to arrive in the mail), my great
5386 <a href=
"http://dblatex.sourceforge.net/
">dblatex
</a
> helper and
5387 developer of the dblatex docbook processor, Benoît Guillon, decided a
5388 to try to create a French version of the book. He started with the
5389 French translation available from the
5390 <a href=
"http://www.wikilivres.ca/wiki/Culture_libre
">Wikilivres wiki
5391 pages
</a
>, and wrote a program to convert it into a PO file, allowing
5392 the translation to be integrated into the po4a based framework I use
5393 to create the Norwegian translation from the English edition. We meet
5394 on the
<a href=
"irc://irc.freenode.net/%
23dblatex
">#dblatex IRC
5395 channel
</a
> to discuss the work. If you want to help create a French
5397 <a href=
"https://github.com/marsgui/free-culture-lessig
">his git
5398 repository
</a
> and join us on IRC. If the French edition look good,
5399 we might publish it as a paper book on lulu.com. A French version of
5400 the drawings and the cover need to be provided for this to happen.
</p
>
5405 <title>The life and death of a laptop battery
</title>
5406 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_life_and_death_of_a_laptop_battery.html
</link>
5407 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_life_and_death_of_a_laptop_battery.html
</guid>
5408 <pubDate>Thu,
24 Sep
2015 16:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
5409 <description><p
>When I get a new laptop, the battery life time at the start is OK.
5410 But this do not last. The last few laptops gave me a feeling that
5411 within a year, the life time is just a fraction of what it used to be,
5412 and it slowly become painful to use the laptop without power connected
5413 all the time. Because of this, when I got a new Thinkpad X230 laptop
5414 about two years ago, I decided to monitor its battery state to have
5415 more hard facts when the battery started to fail.
</p
>
5417 <img src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2015-
09-
24-laptop-battery-graph.png
"/
>
5419 <p
>First I tried to find a sensible Debian package to record the
5420 battery status, assuming that this must be a problem already handled
5421 by someone else. I found
5422 <a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats
">battery-stats
</a
>,
5423 which collects statistics from the battery, but it was completely
5424 broken. I sent a few suggestions to the maintainer, but decided to
5425 write my own collector as a shell script while I waited for feedback
5427 <a href=
"http://www.ifweassume.com/
2013/
08/the-de-evolution-of-my-laptop-battery.html
">a
5428 blog post about the battery development on a MacBook Air
</a
> I also
5430 <a href=
"https://github.com/jradavenport/batlog.git
">batlog
</a
>, not
5431 available in Debian.
</p
>
5433 <p
>I started my collector
2013-
07-
15, and it has been collecting
5434 battery stats ever since. Now my
5435 /var/log/hjemmenett-battery-status.log file contain around
115,
000
5436 measurements, from the time the battery was working great until now,
5437 when it is unable to charge above
7% of original capacity. My
5438 collector shell script is quite simple and look like this:
</p
>
5443 # http://www.ifweassume.com/
2013/
08/the-de-evolution-of-my-laptop-battery.html
5445 # http://blog.sleeplessbeastie.eu/
2013/
01/
02/debian-how-to-monitor-battery-capacity/
5446 logfile=/var/log/hjemmenett-battery-status.log
5448 files=
"manufacturer model_name technology serial_number \
5449 energy_full energy_full_design energy_now cycle_count status
"
5451 if [ ! -e
"$logfile
" ] ; then
5453 printf
"timestamp,
"
5455 printf
"%s,
" $f
5458 )
> "$logfile
"
5462 # Print complete message in one echo call, to avoid race condition
5463 # when several log processes run in parallel.
5464 msg=$(printf
"%s,
" $(date +%s); \
5465 for f in $files; do \
5466 printf
"%s,
" $(cat $f); \
5468 echo
"$msg
"
5471 cd /sys/class/power_supply
5474 (cd $bat
&& log_battery
>> "$logfile
")
5478 <p
>The script is called when the power management system detect a
5479 change in the power status (power plug in or out), and when going into
5480 and out of hibernation and suspend. In addition, it collect a value
5481 every
10 minutes. This make it possible for me know when the battery
5482 is discharging, charging and how the maximum charge change over time.
5483 The code for the Debian package
5484 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-status
">is now
5485 available on github
</a
>.
</p
>
5487 <p
>The collected log file look like this:
</p
>
5490 timestamp,manufacturer,model_name,technology,serial_number,energy_full,energy_full_design,energy_now,cycle_count,status,
5491 1376591133,LGC,
45N1025,Li-ion,
974,
62800000,
62160000,
39050000,
0,Discharging,
5493 1443090528,LGC,
45N1025,Li-ion,
974,
4900000,
62160000,
4900000,
0,Full,
5494 1443090601,LGC,
45N1025,Li-ion,
974,
4900000,
62160000,
4900000,
0,Full,
5497 <p
>I wrote a small script to create a graph of the charge development
5498 over time. This graph depicted above show the slow death of my laptop
5501 <p
>But why is this happening? Why are my laptop batteries always
5502 dying in a year or two, while the batteries of space probes and
5503 satellites keep working year after year. If we are to believe
5504 <a href=
"http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_prolong_lithium_based_batteries
">Battery
5505 University
</a
>, the cause is me charging the battery whenever I have a
5506 chance, and the fix is to not charge the Lithium-ion batteries to
100%
5507 all the time, but to stay below
90% of full charge most of the time.
5508 I
've been told that the Tesla electric cars
5509 <a href=
"http://my.teslamotors.com/de_CH/forum/forums/battery-charge-limit
">limit
5510 the charge of their batteries to
80%
</a
>, with the option to charge to
5511 100% when preparing for a longer trip (not that I would want a car
5512 like Tesla where rights to privacy is abandoned, but that is another
5513 story), which I guess is the option we should have for laptops on
5514 Linux too.
</p
>
5516 <p
>Is there a good and generic way with Linux to tell the battery to
5517 stop charging at
80%, unless requested to charge to
100% once in
5518 preparation for a longer trip? I found
5519 <a href=
"http://askubuntu.com/questions/
34452/how-can-i-limit-battery-charging-to-
80-capacity
">one
5520 recipe on askubuntu for Ubuntu to limit charging on Thinkpad to
5521 80%
</a
>, but could not get it to work (kernel module refused to
5524 <p
>I wonder why the battery capacity was reported to be more than
100%
5525 at the start. I also wonder why the
"full capacity
" increases some
5526 times, and if it is possible to repeat the process to get the battery
5527 back to design capacity. And I wonder if the discharge and charge
5528 speed change over time, or if this stay the same. I did not yet try
5529 to write a tool to calculate the derivative values of the battery
5530 level, but suspect some interesting insights might be learned from
5533 <p
>Update
2015-
09-
24: I got a tip to install the packages
5534 acpi-call-dkms and tlp (unfortunately missing in Debian stable)
5535 packages instead of the tp-smapi-dkms package I had tried to use
5536 initially, and use
'tlp setcharge
40 80' to change when charging start
5537 and stop. I
've done so now, but expect my existing battery is toast
5538 and need to be replaced. The proposal is unfortunately Thinkpad
5544 <title>Book cover for the Free Culture book finally done
</title>
5545 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Book_cover_for_the_Free_Culture_book_finally_done.html
</link>
5546 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Book_cover_for_the_Free_Culture_book_finally_done.html
</guid>
5547 <pubDate>Thu,
3 Sep
2015 21:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
5548 <description><p
>Creating a good looking book cover proved harder than I expected.
5549 I wanted to create a cover looking similar to the original cover of
5551 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig
">Free
5552 Culture
</a
> book we are translating to Norwegian, and I wanted it in
5553 vector format for high resolution printing. But my inkscape knowledge
5554 were not nearly good enough to pull that off.
5556 <p
>But thanks to the great inkscape community, I was able to wrap up
5557 the cover yesterday evening. I asked on the
5558 <a href=
"irc://irc.freenode.net/%
23inkscape
">#inkscape IRC channel
</a
>
5559 on Freenode for help and clues, and Marc Jeanmougin (Mc-) volunteered
5560 to try to recreate it based on the PDF of the cover from the HTML
5561 version. Not only did he create a
5562 <a href=
"https://marc.jeanmougin.fr/share/copy1.svg
">SVG document with
5563 the original and his vector version side by side
</a
>, he even provided
5564 an
<a href=
"https://marc.jeanmougin.fr/share/out-
1.ogv
">instruction
5565 video
</a
> explaining how he did it
</a
>. But the instruction video is
5566 not easy to follow for an untrained inkscape user. The video is a
5567 recording on how he did it, and he is obviously very experienced as
5568 the menu selections are very quick and he mentioned on IRC that he did
5569 use some keyboard shortcuts that can
't be seen on the video, but it
5570 give a good idea about the inkscape operations to use to create the
5571 stripes with the embossed copyright sign in the center.
</p
>
5573 <p
>I took his SVG file, copied the vector image and re-sized it to fit
5574 on the cover I was drawing. I am happy with the end result, and the
5575 current english version look like this:
</p
>
5577 <img src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2015-
09-
03-free-culture-cover.png
" width=
"70%
" align=
"center
"/
>
5579 <p
>I am not quite sure about the text on the back, but guess it will
5580 do. I picked three quotes from the official site for the book, and
5581 hope it will work to trigger the interest of potential readers. The
5582 Norwegian cover will look the same, but with the texts and bar code
5583 replaced with the Norwegian version.
</p
>
5585 <p
>The book is very close to being ready for publication, and I expect
5586 to upload the final draft to Lulu in the next few days and order a
5587 final proof reading copy to verify that everything look like it should
5588 before allowing everyone to order their own copy of Free Culture, in
5589 English or Norwegian Bokmål. I
'm waiting to give the the productive
5590 proof readers a chance to complete their work.
</p
>
5595 <title>In my hand, a pocket book edition of the Norwegian Free Culture book!
</title>
5596 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/In_my_hand__a_pocket_book_edition_of_the_Norwegian_Free_Culture_book_.html
</link>
5597 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/In_my_hand__a_pocket_book_edition_of_the_Norwegian_Free_Culture_book_.html
</guid>
5598 <pubDate>Wed,
19 Aug
2015 22:
10:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
5599 <description><p
>Today, finally, my first printed draft edition of the Norwegian
5600 translation of Free Culture I have been working on for the last few
5601 years arrived in the mail. I had to fake a cover to get the interior
5602 printed, and the exterior of the book look awful, but that is
5603 irrelevant at this point. I asked for a printed pocket book version
5604 to get an idea about the font sizes and paper format as well as how
5605 good the figures and images look in print, but also to test what the
5606 pocket book version would look like. After receiving the
500 page
5607 pocket book, it became obvious to me that that pocket book size is too
5608 small for this book. I believe the book is too thick, and several
5609 tables and figures do not look good in the size they get with that
5610 small page sizes. I believe I will go with the
5.5x8.5 inch size
5611 instead. A surprise discovery from the paper version was how bad the
5612 URLs look in print. They are very hard to read in the colophon page.
5613 The URLs are red in the PDF, but light gray on paper. I need to
5614 change the color of links somehow to look better. But there is a
5615 printed book in my hand, and it feels great. :)
</p
>
5617 <p
>Now I only need to fix the cover, wrap up the postscript with the
5618 store behind the book, and collect the last corrections from the proof
5619 readers before the book is ready for proper printing. Cover artists
5620 willing to work for free and create a Creative Commons licensed vector
5621 file looking similar to the original is most welcome, as my skills as
5622 a graphics designer are mostly missing.
</p
>
5627 <title>First paper version of the Norwegian Free Culture book heading my way
</title>
5628 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_paper_version_of_the_Norwegian_Free_Culture_book_heading_my_way.html
</link>
5629 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_paper_version_of_the_Norwegian_Free_Culture_book_heading_my_way.html
</guid>
5630 <pubDate>Sun,
9 Aug
2015 10:
15:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
5631 <description><p
>Typesetting a book is harder than I hoped. As the translation is
5632 mostly done, and a volunteer proof reader was going to check the text
5633 on paper, it was time this summer to focus on formatting my translated
5634 <a href=
"http://www.docbook.org/
">docbook
</a
> based version of the
5635 <a href=
"http://free-culture.cc/
">Free Culture
</a
> book by Lawrence
5636 Lessig. I
've been trying to get both docboox-xsl+fop and dblatex to
5637 give me a good looking PDF, but in the end I went with dblatex, because
5638 its Debian maintainer and upstream developer were responsive and very
5639 helpful in solving my formatting challenges.
</p
>
5641 <p
>Last night, I finally managed to create a PDF that no longer made
5642 <a href=
"http://www.lulu.com/
">Lulu.com
</a
> complain after uploading,
5643 and I ordered a text version of the book on paper. It is lacking a
5644 proper book cover and is not tagged with the correct ISBN number, but
5645 should give me an idea what the finished book will look like.
</p
>
5647 <p
>Instead of using Lulu, I did consider printing the book using
5648 <a href=
"http://www.createspace.com/
">CreateSpace
</a
>, but ended up
5649 using Lulu because it had smaller book size options (CreateSpace seem
5650 to lack pocket book with extended distribution). I looked for a
5651 similar service in Norway, but have not seen anything so far. Please
5652 let me know if I am missing out on something here.
</p
>
5654 <p
>But I still struggle to decide the book size. Should I go for
5655 pocket book (
4.25x6.875 inches /
10.8x17.5 cm) with
556 pages, Digest
5656 (
5.5x8.5 inches /
14x21.6 cm) with
323 pages or US Trade (
6x8 inches /
5657 15.3x22.9 cm) with
280 pages? Fewer pager give a cheaper book, and a
5658 smaller book is easier to carry around. The test book I ordered was
5659 pocket book sized, to give me an idea how well that fit in my hand,
5660 but I suspect I will end up using a digest sized book in the end to
5661 bring the prize down further.
</p
>
5663 <p
>My biggest challenge at the moment is making nice cover art. My
5664 inkscape skills are not yet up to the task of replicating the original
5665 cover in SVG format. I also need to figure out what to write about
5666 the book on the back (will most likely use the same text as the
5667 description on web based book stores). I would love help with this,
5668 if you are willing to license the art source and final version using
5669 the same CC license as the book. My artistic skills are not really up
5670 to the task.
</p
>
5672 <p
>I plan to publish the book in both English and Norwegian and on
5673 paper, in PDF form as well as EPUB and MOBI format. The current
5674 status can as usual be found on
5675 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig
">github
</a
>
5676 in the archive/ directory. So far I have spent all time on making the
5677 PDF version look good. Someone should probably do the same with the
5678 dbtoepub generated e-book. Help is definitely needed here, as I
5679 expect to run out of steem before I find time to improve the epub
5680 formatting.
</p
>
5682 <p
>Please let me know via github if you find typos in the book or
5683 discover translations that should be improved. The final proof
5684 reading is being done right now, and I expect to publish the finished
5685 result in a few months.
</p
>
5690 <title>Typesetting DocBook footnotes as endnotes with dblatex
</title>
5691 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Typesetting_DocBook_footnotes_as_endnotes_with_dblatex.html
</link>
5692 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Typesetting_DocBook_footnotes_as_endnotes_with_dblatex.html
</guid>
5693 <pubDate>Thu,
16 Jul
2015 18:
10:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
5694 <description><p
>I
'm still working on the Norwegian version of the
5695 <a href=
"http://free-culture.cc/
">Free Culture book by Lawrence
5696 Lessig
</a
>, and is now working on the final typesetting and layout.
5697 One of the features I want to get the structure similar to the
5698 original book is to typeset the footnotes as endnotes in the notes
5699 chapter. Based on the
5700 <a href=
"https://bugs.debian.org/
685063">feedback from the Debian
5701 maintainer and the dblatex developer
</a
>, I came up with this recipe I
5702 would like to share with you. The proposal was to create a new LaTeX
5703 class file and add the LaTeX code there, but this is not always
5704 practical, when I want to be able to replace the class using a make
5705 file variable. So my proposal misuses the latex.begindocument XSL
5706 parameter value, to get a small fragment into the correct location in
5707 the generated LaTeX File.
</p
>
5709 <p
>First, decide where in the DocBook document to place the endnotes,
5710 and add this text there:
</p
>
5713 &lt;?latex \theendnotes ?
&gt;
5716 <p
>Next, create a xsl stylesheet file dblatex-endnotes.xsl to add the
5717 code needed to add the endnote instructions in the preamble of the
5718 generated LaTeX document, with content like this:
</p
>
5721 &lt;?xml version=
'1.0'?
&gt;
5722 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl=
"http://www.w3.org/
1999/XSL/Transform
" version=
'1.0'&gt;
5723 &lt;xsl:param name=
"latex.begindocument
"&gt;
5724 &lt;xsl:text
&gt;
5725 \usepackage{endnotes}
5726 \let\footnote=\endnote
5727 \def\enoteheading{\mbox{}\par\vskip-\baselineskip }
5729 &lt;/xsl:text
&gt;
5730 &lt;/xsl:param
&gt;
5731 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet
&gt;
5734 <p
>Finally, load this xsl file when running dblatex, for example like
5738 dblatex --xsl-user=dblatex-endnotes.xsl freeculture.nb.xml
5741 <p
>The end result can be seen on github, where
5742 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig
">my
5743 book project
</a
> is located.
</p
>
5748 <title>MPEG LA on
"Internet Broadcast AVC Video
" licensing and non-private use
</title>
5749 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/MPEG_LA_on__Internet_Broadcast_AVC_Video__licensing_and_non_private_use.html
</link>
5750 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/MPEG_LA_on__Internet_Broadcast_AVC_Video__licensing_and_non_private_use.html
</guid>
5751 <pubDate>Tue,
7 Jul
2015 09:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
5752 <description><p
>After asking the Norwegian Broadcasting Company (NRK)
5753 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Hva_gj_r_at_NRK_kan_distribuere_H_264_video_uten_patentavtale_med_MPEG_LA_.html
">why
5754 they can broadcast and stream H
.264 video without an agreement with
5755 the MPEG LA
</a
>, I was wiser, but still confused. So I asked MPEG LA
5756 if their understanding matched that of NRK. As far as I can tell, it
5759 <p
>I started by asking for more information about the various
5760 licensing classes and what exactly is covered by the
"Internet
5761 Broadcast AVC Video
" class that NRK pointed me at to explain why NRK
5762 did not need a license for streaming H
.264 video:
5764 <p
><blockquote
>
5766 <p
>According to
5767 <a href=
"http://www.mpegla.com/Lists/MPEG%
20LA%
20News%
20List/Attachments/
226/n-
10-
02-
02.pdf
">a
5768 MPEG LA press release dated
2010-
02-
02</a
>, there is no charge when
5769 using MPEG AVC/H
.264 according to the terms of
"Internet Broadcast AVC
5770 Video
". I am trying to understand exactly what the terms of
"Internet
5771 Broadcast AVC Video
" is, and wondered if you could help me. What
5772 exactly is covered by these terms, and what is not?
</p
>
5774 <p
>The only source of more information I have been able to find is a
5776 <a href=
"http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/avc/Documents/avcweb.pdf
">AVC
5777 Patent Portfolio License Briefing
</a
>, which states this about the
5781 <li
>Where End User pays for AVC Video
5783 <li
>Subscription (not limited by title) –
100,
000 or fewer
5784 subscribers/yr = no royalty;
&gt;
100,
000 to
250,
000 subscribers/yr =
5785 $
25,
000;
&gt;
250,
000 to
500,
000 subscribers/yr = $
50,
000;
&gt;
500,
000 to
5786 1M subscribers/yr = $
75,
000;
&gt;
1M subscribers/yr = $
100,
000</li
>
5788 <li
>Title-by-Title -
12 minutes or less = no royalty;
&gt;
12 minutes in
5789 length = lower of (a)
2% or (b) $
0.02 per title
</li
>
5790 </ul
></li
>
5792 <li
>Where remuneration is from other sources
5794 <li
>Free Television - (a) one-time $
2,
500 per transmission encoder or
5795 (b) annual fee starting at $
2,
500 for
&gt;
100,
000 HH rising to
5796 maximum $
10,
000 for
&gt;
1,
000,
000 HH
</li
>
5798 <li
>Internet Broadcast AVC Video (not title-by-title, not subscription)
5799 – no royalty for life of the AVC Patent Portfolio License
</li
>
5800 </ul
></li
>
5803 <p
>Am I correct in assuming that the four categories listed is the
5804 categories used when selecting licensing terms, and that
"Internet
5805 Broadcast AVC Video
" is the category for things that do not fall into
5806 one of the other three categories? Can you point me to a good source
5807 explaining what is ment by
"title-by-title
" and
"Free Television
" in
5808 the license terms for AVC/H
.264?
</p
>
5810 <p
>Will a web service providing H
.264 encoded video content in a
5811 "video on demand
" fashing similar to Youtube and Vimeo, where no
5812 subscription is required and no payment is required from end users to
5813 get access to the videos, fall under the terms of the
"Internet
5814 Broadcast AVC Video
", ie no royalty for life of the AVC Patent
5815 Portfolio license? Does it matter if some users are subscribed to get
5816 access to personalized services?
</p
>
5818 <p
>Note, this request and all answers will be published on the
5820 </blockquote
></p
>
5822 <p
>The answer came quickly from Benjamin J. Myers, Licensing Associate
5823 with the MPEG LA:
</p
>
5825 <p
><blockquote
>
5826 <p
>Thank you for your message and for your interest in MPEG LA. We
5827 appreciate hearing from you and I will be happy to assist you.
</p
>
5829 <p
>As you are aware, MPEG LA offers our AVC Patent Portfolio License
5830 which provides coverage under patents that are essential for use of
5831 the AVC/H
.264 Standard (MPEG-
4 Part
10). Specifically, coverage is
5832 provided for end products and video content that make use of AVC/H
.264
5833 technology. Accordingly, the party offering such end products and
5834 video to End Users concludes the AVC License and is responsible for
5835 paying the applicable royalties.
</p
>
5837 <p
>Regarding Internet Broadcast AVC Video, the AVC License generally
5838 defines such content to be video that is distributed to End Users over
5839 the Internet free-of-charge. Therefore, if a party offers a service
5840 which allows users to upload AVC/H
.264 video to its website, and such
5841 AVC Video is delivered to End Users for free, then such video would
5842 receive coverage under the sublicense for Internet Broadcast AVC
5843 Video, which is not subject to any royalties for the life of the AVC
5844 License. This would also apply in the scenario where a user creates a
5845 free online account in order to receive a customized offering of free
5846 AVC Video content. In other words, as long as the End User is given
5847 access to or views AVC Video content at no cost to the End User, then
5848 no royalties would be payable under our AVC License.
</p
>
5850 <p
>On the other hand, if End Users pay for access to AVC Video for a
5851 specific period of time (e.g., one month, one year, etc.), then such
5852 video would constitute Subscription AVC Video. In cases where AVC
5853 Video is delivered to End Users on a pay-per-view basis, then such
5854 content would constitute Title-by-Title AVC Video. If a party offers
5855 Subscription or Title-by-Title AVC Video to End Users, then they would
5856 be responsible for paying the applicable royalties you noted below.
</p
>
5858 <p
>Finally, in the case where AVC Video is distributed for free
5859 through an
"over-the-air, satellite and/or cable transmission
", then
5860 such content would constitute Free Television AVC Video and would be
5861 subject to the applicable royalties.
</p
>
5863 <p
>For your reference, I have attached
5864 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2015-
07-
07-mpegla.pdf
">a
5865 .pdf copy of the AVC License
</a
>. You will find the relevant
5866 sublicense information regarding AVC Video in Sections
2.2 through
5867 2.5, and the corresponding royalties in Section
3.1.2 through
3.1.4.
5868 You will also find the definitions of Title-by-Title AVC Video,
5869 Subscription AVC Video, Free Television AVC Video, and Internet
5870 Broadcast AVC Video in Section
1 of the License. Please note that the
5871 electronic copy is provided for informational purposes only and cannot
5872 be used for execution.
</p
>
5874 <p
>I hope the above information is helpful. If you have additional
5875 questions or need further assistance with the AVC License, please feel
5876 free to contact me directly.
</p
>
5877 </blockquote
></p
>
5879 <p
>Having a fresh copy of the license text was useful, and knowing
5880 that the definition of Title-by-Title required payment per title made
5881 me aware that my earlier understanding of that phrase had been wrong.
5882 But I still had a few questions:
</p
>
5884 <p
><blockquote
>
5885 <p
>I have a small followup question. Would it be possible for me to get
5886 a license with MPEG LA even if there are no royalties to be paid? The
5887 reason I ask, is that some video related products have a copyright
5888 clause limiting their use without a license with MPEG LA. The clauses
5889 typically look similar to this:
5891 <p
><blockquote
>
5892 This product is licensed under the AVC patent portfolio license for
5893 the personal and non-commercial use of a consumer to (a) encode
5894 video in compliance with the AVC standard (
"AVC video
") and/or (b)
5895 decode AVC video that was encoded by a consumer engaged in a
5896 personal and non-commercial activity and/or AVC video that was
5897 obtained from a video provider licensed to provide AVC video. No
5898 license is granted or shall be implied for any other use. additional
5899 information may be obtained from MPEG LA L.L.C.
5900 </blockquote
></p
>
5902 <p
>It is unclear to me if this clause mean that I need to enter into
5903 an agreement with MPEG LA to use the product in question, even if
5904 there are no royalties to be paid to MPEG LA. I suspect it will
5905 differ depending on the jurisdiction, and mine is Norway. What is
5906 MPEG LAs view on this?
</p
>
5907 </blockquote
></p
>
5909 <p
>According to the answer, MPEG LA believe those using such tools for
5910 non-personal or commercial use need a license with them:
</p
>
5912 <p
><blockquote
>
5914 <p
>With regard to the Notice to Customers, I would like to begin by
5915 clarifying that the Notice from Section
7.1 of the AVC License
5918 <p
>THIS PRODUCT IS LICENSED UNDER THE AVC PATENT PORTFOLIO LICENSE FOR
5919 THE PERSONAL USE OF A CONSUMER OR OTHER USES IN WHICH IT DOES NOT
5920 RECEIVE REMUNERATION TO (i) ENCODE VIDEO IN COMPLIANCE WITH THE AVC
5921 STANDARD (
"AVC VIDEO
") AND/OR (ii) DECODE AVC VIDEO THAT WAS ENCODED
5922 BY A CONSUMER ENGAGED IN A PERSONAL ACTIVITY AND/OR WAS OBTAINED FROM
5923 A VIDEO PROVIDER LICENSED TO PROVIDE AVC VIDEO. NO LICENSE IS GRANTED
5924 OR SHALL BE IMPLIED FOR ANY OTHER USE. ADDITIONAL INFORMATION MAY BE
5925 OBTAINED FROM MPEG LA, L.L.C. SEE HTTP://WWW.MPEGLA.COM
</p
>
5927 <p
>The Notice to Customers is intended to inform End Users of the
5928 personal usage rights (for example, to watch video content) included
5929 with the product they purchased, and to encourage any party using the
5930 product for commercial purposes to contact MPEG LA in order to become
5931 licensed for such use (for example, when they use an AVC Product to
5932 deliver Title-by-Title, Subscription, Free Television or Internet
5933 Broadcast AVC Video to End Users, or to re-Sell a third party
's AVC
5934 Product as their own branded AVC Product).
</p
>
5936 <p
>Therefore, if a party is to be licensed for its use of an AVC
5937 Product to Sell AVC Video on a Title-by-Title, Subscription, Free
5938 Television or Internet Broadcast basis, that party would need to
5939 conclude the AVC License, even in the case where no royalties were
5940 payable under the License. On the other hand, if that party (either a
5941 Consumer or business customer) simply uses an AVC Product for their
5942 own internal purposes and not for the commercial purposes referenced
5943 above, then such use would be included in the royalty paid for the AVC
5944 Products by the licensed supplier.
</p
>
5946 <p
>Finally, I note that our AVC License provides worldwide coverage in
5947 countries that have AVC Patent Portfolio Patents, including
5950 <p
>I hope this clarification is helpful. If I may be of any further
5951 assistance, just let me know.
</p
>
5952 </blockquote
></p
>
5954 <p
>The mentioning of Norwegian patents made me a bit confused, so I
5955 asked for more information:
</p
>
5957 <p
><blockquote
>
5959 <p
>But one minor question at the end. If I understand you correctly,
5960 you state in the quote above that there are patents in the AVC Patent
5961 Portfolio that are valid in Norway. This make me believe I read the
5962 list available from
&lt;URL:
5963 <a href=
"http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/PatentList.aspx
">http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/PatentList.aspx
</a
>
5964 &gt; incorrectly, as I believed the
"NO
" prefix in front of patents
5965 were Norwegian patents, and the only one I could find under Mitsubishi
5966 Electric Corporation expired in
2012. Which patents are you referring
5967 to that are relevant for Norway?
</p
>
5969 </blockquote
></p
>
5971 <p
>Again, the quick answer explained how to read the list of patents
5972 in that list:
</p
>
5974 <p
><blockquote
>
5976 <p
>Your understanding is correct that the last AVC Patent Portfolio
5977 Patent in Norway expired on
21 October
2012. Therefore, where AVC
5978 Video is both made and Sold in Norway after that date, then no
5979 royalties would be payable for such AVC Video under the AVC License.
5980 With that said, our AVC License provides historic coverage for AVC
5981 Products and AVC Video that may have been manufactured or Sold before
5982 the last Norwegian AVC patent expired. I would also like to clarify
5983 that coverage is provided for the country of manufacture and the
5984 country of Sale that has active AVC Patent Portfolio Patents.
</p
>
5986 <p
>Therefore, if a party offers AVC Products or AVC Video for Sale in
5987 a country with active AVC Patent Portfolio Patents (for example,
5988 Sweden, Denmark, Finland, etc.), then that party would still need
5989 coverage under the AVC License even if such products or video are
5990 initially made in a country without active AVC Patent Portfolio
5991 Patents (for example, Norway). Similarly, a party would need to
5992 conclude the AVC License if they make AVC Products or AVC Video in a
5993 country with active AVC Patent Portfolio Patents, but eventually Sell
5994 such AVC Products or AVC Video in a country without active AVC Patent
5995 Portfolio Patents.
</p
>
5996 </blockquote
></p
>
5998 <p
>As far as I understand it, MPEG LA believe anyone using Adobe
5999 Premiere and other video related software with a H
.264 distribution
6000 license need a license agreement with MPEG LA to use such tools for
6001 anything non-private or commercial, while it is OK to set up a
6002 Youtube-like service as long as no-one pays to get access to the
6003 content. I still have no clear idea how this applies to Norway, where
6004 none of the patents MPEG LA is licensing are valid. Will the
6005 copyright terms take precedence or can those terms be ignored because
6006 the patents are not valid in Norway?
</p
>
6011 <title>New laptop - some more clues and ideas based on feedback
</title>
6012 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_laptop___some_more_clues_and_ideas_based_on_feedback.html
</link>
6013 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_laptop___some_more_clues_and_ideas_based_on_feedback.html
</guid>
6014 <pubDate>Sun,
5 Jul
2015 21:
40:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
6015 <description><p
>Several people contacted me after my previous blog post about my
6016 need for a new laptop, and provided very useful feedback. I wish to
6017 thank every one of these. Several pointed me to the possibility of
6018 fixing my X230, and I am already in the process of getting Lenovo to
6019 do so thanks to the on site, next day support contract covering the
6020 machine. But the battery is almost useless (I expect to replace it
6021 with a non-official battery) and I do not expect the machine to live
6022 for many more years, so it is time to plan its replacement. If I did
6023 not have a support contract, it was suggested to find replacement parts
6024 using
<a href=
"http://www.francecrans.com/
">FrancEcrans
</a
>, but it
6025 might present a language barrier as I do not understand French.
</p
>
6027 <p
>One tip I got was to use the
6028 <a href=
"https://skinflint.co.uk/?cat=nb
">Skinflint
</a
> web service to
6029 compare laptop models. It seem to have more models available than
6030 prisjakt.no. Another tip I got from someone I know have similar
6031 keyboard preferences was that the HP EliteBook
840 keyboard is not
6032 very good, and this matches my experience with earlier EliteBook
6033 keyboards I tested. Because of this, I will not consider it any further.
6035 <p
>When I wrote my blog post, I was not aware of Thinkpad X250, the
6036 newest Thinkpad X model. The keyboard reintroduces mouse buttons
6037 (which is missing from the X240), and is working fairly well with
6038 Debian Sid/Unstable according to
6039 <a href=
"http://www.corsac.net/X250/
">Corsac.net
</a
>. The reports I
6040 got on the keyboard quality are not consistent. Some say the keyboard
6041 is good, others say it is ok, while others say it is not very good.
6042 Those with experience from X41 and and X60 agree that the X250
6043 keyboard is not as good as those trusty old laptops, and suggest I
6044 keep and fix my X230 instead of upgrading, or get a used X230 to
6045 replace it. I
'm also told that the X250 lack leds for caps lock, disk
6046 activity and battery status, which is very convenient on my X230. I
'm
6047 also told that the CPU fan is running very often, making it a bit
6048 noisy. In any case, the X250 do not work out of the box with Debian
6049 Stable/Jessie, one of my requirements.
</p
>
6051 <p
>I have also gotten a few vendor proposals, one was
6052 <a href=
"http://pro-star.com
">Pro-Star
</a
>, another was
6053 <a href=
"http://shop.gluglug.org.uk/product/libreboot-x200/
">Libreboot
</a
>.
6054 The latter look very attractive to me.
</p
>
6056 <p
>Again, thank you all for the very useful feedback. It help a lot
6057 as I keep looking for a replacement.
</p
>
6059 <p
>Update
2015-
07-
06: I was recommended to check out the
6060 <a href=
"">lapstore.de
</a
> web shop for used laptops. They got several
6062 <a href=
"http://www.lapstore.de/f.php/shop/lapstore/f/
411/lang/x/kw/Lenovo_ThinkPad_X_Serie/
">old
6063 thinkpad X models
</a
>, and provide one year warranty.
</p
>
6068 <title>Time to find a new laptop, as the old one is broken after only two years
</title>
6069 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_to_find_a_new_laptop__as_the_old_one_is_broken_after_only_two_years.html
</link>
6070 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_to_find_a_new_laptop__as_the_old_one_is_broken_after_only_two_years.html
</guid>
6071 <pubDate>Fri,
3 Jul
2015 07:
10:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
6072 <description><p
>My primary work horse laptop is failing, and will need a
6073 replacement soon. The left
5 cm of the screen on my Thinkpad X230
6074 started flickering yesterday, and I suspect the cause is a broken
6075 cable, as changing the angle of the screen some times get rid of the
6076 flickering.
</p
>
6078 <p
>My requirements have not really changed since I bought it, and is
6080 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html
">I
6081 described them in
2013</a
>. The last time I bought a laptop, I had
6083 <a href=
"http://www.prisjakt.no/category.php?k=
353">prisjakt.no
</a
>
6084 where I could select at least a few of the requirements (mouse pin,
6085 wifi, weight) and go through the rest manually. Three button mouse
6086 and a good keyboard is not available as an option, and all the three
6087 laptop models proposed today (Thinkpad X240, HP EliteBook
820 G1 and
6088 G2) lack three mouse buttons). It is also unclear to me how good the
6089 keyboard on the HP EliteBooks are. I hope Lenovo have not messed up
6090 the keyboard, even if the quality and robustness in the X series have
6091 deteriorated since X41.
</p
>
6093 <p
>I wonder how I can find a sensible laptop when none of the options
6094 seem sensible to me? Are there better services around to search the
6095 set of available laptops for features? Please send me an email if you
6096 have suggestions.
</p
>
6098 <p
>Update
2015-
07-
23: I got a suggestion to check out the FSF
6099 <a href=
"http://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/endorsement/respects-your-freedom
">list
6100 of endorsed hardware
</a
>, which is useful background information.
</p
>
6105 <title>MakerCon Nordic videos now available on Frikanalen
</title>
6106 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/MakerCon_Nordic_videos_now_available_on_Frikanalen.html
</link>
6107 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/MakerCon_Nordic_videos_now_available_on_Frikanalen.html
</guid>
6108 <pubDate>Thu,
2 Jul
2015 14:
10:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
6109 <description><p
>Last oktober I was involved on behalf of
6110 <a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/
">NUUG
</a
> with recording the talks at
6111 <a href=
"http://www.makercon.no/
">MakerCon Nordic
</a
>, a conference for
6112 the Maker movement. Since then it has been the plan to publish the
6113 recordings on
<a href=
"http://www.frikanalen.no/
">Frikanalen
</a
>, which
6114 finally happened the last few days. A few talks are missing because
6115 the speakers asked the organizers to not publish them, but most of the
6116 talks are available. The talks are being broadcasted on RiksTV
6117 channel
50 and using multicast on Uninett, as well as being available
6118 from the Frikanalen web site. The unedited recordings are
6119 <a href=
"https://www.youtube.com/user/MakerConNordic/
">available on
6120 Youtube too
</a
>.
</p
>
6122 <p
>This is the list of talks available at the moment. Visit the
6123 <a href=
"http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/?q=makercon
">Frikanalen video
6124 pages
</a
> to view them.
</p
>
6128 <li
>Evolutionary algorithms as a design tool - from art
6129 to robotics (Kyrre Glette)
</li
>
6131 <li
>Make and break (Hans Gerhard Meier)
</li
>
6133 <li
>Making a one year school course for young makers
6134 (Olav Helland)
</li
>
6136 <li
>Innovation Inspiration - IPR Databases as a Source of
6137 Inspiration (Hege Langlo)
</li
>
6139 <li
>Making a toy for makers (Erik Torstensson)
</li
>
6141 <li
>How to make
3D printer electronics (Elias Bakken)
</li
>
6143 <li
>Hovering Clouds: Looking at online tool offerings for Product
6144 Design and
3D Printing (William Kempton)
</li
>
6146 <li
>Travelling maker stories (Øyvind Nydal Dahl)
</li
>
6148 <li
>Making the first Maker Faire in Sweden (Nils Olander)
</li
>
6150 <li
>Breaking the mold: Printing
1000’s of parts (Espen Sivertsen)
</li
>
6152 <li
>Ultimaker — and open source
3D printing (Erik de Bruijn)
</li
>
6154 <li
>Autodesk’s
3D Printing Platform: Sparking innovation (Hilde
6157 <li
>How Making is Changing the World – and How You Can Too!
6158 (Jennifer Turliuk)
</li
>
6160 <li
>Open-Source Adventuring: OpenROV, OpenExplorer and the Future of
6161 Connected Exploration (David Lang)
</li
>
6163 <li
>Making in Norway (Haakon Karlsen Jr., Graham Hayward and Jens
6166 <li
>The Impact of the Maker Movement (Mike Senese)
</li
>
6170 <p
>Part of the reason this took so long was that the scripts NUUG had
6171 to prepare a recording for publication were five years old and no
6172 longer worked with the current video processing tools (command line
6173 argument changes). In addition, we needed better audio normalization,
6174 which sent me on a detour to
6175 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Measuring_and_adjusting_the_loudness_of_a_TV_channel_using_bs1770gain.html
">package
6176 bs1770gain for Debian
</a
>. Now this is in place and it became a lot
6177 easier to publish NUUG videos on Frikanalen.
</p
>
6182 <title>Graphing the Norwegian company ownership structure
</title>
6183 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Graphing_the_Norwegian_company_ownership_structure.html
</link>
6184 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Graphing_the_Norwegian_company_ownership_structure.html
</guid>
6185 <pubDate>Mon,
15 Jun
2015 14:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
6186 <description><p
>It is a bit work to figure out the ownership structure of companies
6187 in Norway. The information is publicly available, but one need to
6188 recursively look up ownership for all owners to figure out the complete
6189 ownership graph of a given set of companies. To save me the work in
6190 the future, I wrote a script to do this automatically, outputting the
6191 ownership structure using the Graphviz/dotty format. The data source
6192 is web scraping from
<a href=
"http://www.proff.no/
">Proff
</a
>, because
6193 I failed to find a useful source directly from the official keepers of
6194 the ownership data,
<a href=
"http://www.brreg.no/
">Brønnøysundsregistrene
</a
>.
</p
>
6196 <p
>To get an ownership graph for a set of companies, fetch
6197 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/brreg-norway-ownership-graph
">the code from git
</a
> and run it using the organisation number. I
'm
6198 using the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet as an example here, as its
6199 ownership structure is very simple:
</p
>
6202 % time ./bin/eierskap-dotty
958033540 > dagbladet.dot
6210 <p
>The script accept several organisation numbers on the command line,
6211 allowing a cluster of companies to be graphed in the same image. The
6212 resulting dot file for the example above look like this. The edges
6213 are labeled with the ownership percentage, and the nodes uses the
6214 organisation number as their name and the name as the label:
</p
>
6219 "Aller Holding A/s
" -
> "910119877" [label=
"100%
"]
6220 "910119877" -
> "998689015" [label=
"100%
"]
6221 "998689015" -
> "958033540" [label=
"99%
"]
6222 "974530600" -
> "958033540" [label=
"1%
"]
6223 "958033540" [label=
"AS DAGBLADET
"]
6224 "998689015" [label=
"Berner Media Holding AS
"]
6225 "974530600" [label=
"Dagbladets Stiftelse
"]
6226 "910119877" [label=
"Aller Media AS
"]
6230 <p
>To view the ownership graph, run
"<tt
>dotty dagbladet.dot
</tt
>" or
6231 convert it to a PNG using
"<tt
>dot -T png dagbladet.dot
>
6232 dagbladet.png
</tt
>". The result can be seen below:
</p
>
6234 <img src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2015-
06-
15-ownership-graphs-norway-dagbladet.png
" width=
"80%
">
6236 <p
>Note that I suspect the
"Aller Holding A/S
" entry to be incorrect
6237 data in the official ownership register, as that name is not
6238 registered in the official company register for Norway. The ownership
6239 register is sensitive to typos and there seem to be no strict checking
6240 of the ownership links.
</p
>
6242 <p
>Let me know if you improve the script or find better data sources.
6243 The code is licensed according to GPL
2 or newer.
</p
>
6245 <p
>Update
2015-
06-
15: Since the initial post I
've been told that
6246 "<a href=
"http://www.proff.dk/firma/carl-allers-etablissement-aktieselskab/københavn-v/hovedkontorer/
13624518-
3/
">Aller
6247 Holding A/S
</a
>" is a Danish company, which explain why it did not
6248 have a Norwegian organisation number. I
've also been told that there
6249 is a
<a href=
"http://www.brreg.no/automatiske/webservices/
">web
6250 services API available
</a
> from Brønnøysundsregistrene, for those
6251 willing to accept the terms or pay the price.
</p
>
6256 <title>Measuring and adjusting the loudness of a TV channel using bs1770gain
</title>
6257 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Measuring_and_adjusting_the_loudness_of_a_TV_channel_using_bs1770gain.html
</link>
6258 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Measuring_and_adjusting_the_loudness_of_a_TV_channel_using_bs1770gain.html
</guid>
6259 <pubDate>Thu,
11 Jun
2015 13:
40:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
6260 <description><p
>Television loudness is the source of frustration for viewers
6261 everywhere. Some channels are very load, others are less loud, and
6262 ads tend to shout very high to get the attention of the viewers, and
6263 the viewers do not like this. This fact is well known to the TV
6264 channels. See for example the BBC white paper
6265 "<a href=
"http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rd/pubs/whp/whp-pdf-files/WHP202.pdf
">Terminology
6266 for loudness and level dBTP, LU, and all that
</a
>" from
2011 for a
6267 summary of the problem domain. To better address the need for even
6268 loadness, the TV channels got together several years ago to agree on a
6269 new way to measure loudness in digital files as one step in
6270 standardizing loudness. From this came the ITU-R standard BS
.1770,
6271 "<a href=
"http://www.itu.int/rec/R-REC-BS
.1770/en
">Algorithms to
6272 measure audio programme loudness and true-peak audio level
</a
>".
</p
>
6274 <p
>The ITU-R BS
.1770 specification describe an algorithm to measure
6275 loadness in LUFS (Loudness Units, referenced to Full Scale). But
6276 having a way to measure is not enough. To get the same loudness
6277 across TV channels, one also need to decide which value to standardize
6278 on. For European TV channels, this was done in the EBU Recommondaton
6279 R128,
"<a href=
"https://tech.ebu.ch/docs/r/r128.pdf
">Loudness
6280 normalisation and permitted maximum level of audio signals
</a
>", which
6281 specifies a recommended level of -
23 LUFS. In Norway, I have been
6282 told that NRK, TV2, MTG and SBS have decided among themselves to
6283 follow the R128 recommondation for playout from
2016-
03-
01.
</p
>
6285 <p
>There are free software available to measure and adjust the loudness
6286 level using the LUFS. In Debian, I am aware of a library named
6287 <a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/libebur128
">libebur128
</a
>
6288 able to measure the loudness and since yesterday morning a new binary
6289 named
<a href=
"http://bs1770gain.sourceforge.net
">bs1770gain
</a
>
6290 capable of both measuring and adjusting was uploaded and is waiting
6291 for NEW processing. I plan to maintain the latter in Debian under the
6292 <a href=
"https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?email=pkg-multimedia-maintainers%
40lists.alioth.debian.org
">Debian
6293 multimedia
</a
> umbrella.
</p
>
6295 <p
>The free software based TV channel I am involved in,
6296 <a href=
"http://www.frikanalen.no/
">Frikanalen
</a
>, plan to follow the
6297 R128 recommondation ourself as soon as we can adjust the software to
6298 do so, and the bs1770gain tool seem like a good fit for that part of
6299 the puzzle to measure loudness on new video uploaded to Frikanalen.
6300 Personally, I plan to use bs1770gain to adjust the loudness of videos
6301 I upload to Frikanalen on behalf of
<a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/
">the
6302 NUUG member organisation
</a
>. The program seem to be able to measure
6303 the LUFS value of any media file handled by ffmpeg, but I
've only
6304 successfully adjusted the LUFS value of WAV files. I suspect it
6305 should be able to adjust it for all the formats handled by ffmpeg.
</p
>
6310 <title>Norwegian citizens now required by law to give their fingerprint to the police
</title>
6311 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Norwegian_citizens_now_required_by_law_to_give_their_fingerprint_to_the_police.html
</link>
6312 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Norwegian_citizens_now_required_by_law_to_give_their_fingerprint_to_the_police.html
</guid>
6313 <pubDate>Sun,
10 May
2015 16:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
6314 <description><p
>5 days ago, the Norwegian Parliament decided, unanimously, that all
6315 citizens of Norway, no matter if they are suspected of something
6316 criminal or not, are
6317 <a href=
"https://www.holderdeord.no/votes/
1430838871e
">required to
6318 give fingerprints to the police
</a
> (vote details from Holder de
6319 ord). The law make it sound like it will be optional, but in a few
6320 years there will be no option any more. The ID will be required to
6321 vote, to get a bank account, a bank card, to change address on the
6322 post office, to receive an electronic ID or to get a drivers license
6323 and many other tasks required to function in Norway. The banks plan
6324 to stop providing their own ID on the bank cards when this new
6325 national ID is introduced, and the national road authorities plan to
6326 change the drivers license to no longer be usable as identity cards.
6327 In effect, to function as a citizen in Norway a national ID card will
6328 be required, and to get it one need to provide the fingerprints to
6329 the police.
</p
>
6331 <p
>In addition to handing the fingerprint to the police (which
6332 promised to not make a copy of the fingerprint image at that point in
6333 time, but say nothing about doing it later), a picture of the
6334 fingerprint will be stored on the RFID chip, along with a picture of
6335 the face and other information about the person. Some of the
6336 information will be encrypted, but the encryption will be the same
6337 system as currently used in the passports. The codes to decrypt will
6338 be available to a lot of government offices and their suppliers around
6339 the globe, but for those that do not know anyone in those circles it
6340 is good to know that
6341 <a href=
"http://www.theguardian.com/technology/
2006/nov/
17/news.homeaffairs
">the
6342 encryption is already broken
</a
>. And they
6343 <a href=
"http://www.networkworld.com/article/
2215057/wireless/bad-guys-could-read-rfid-passports-at-
217-feet--maybe-a-lot-more.html
">can
6344 be read from
70 meters away
</a
>. This can be mitigated a bit by
6345 keeping it in a Faraday cage (metal box or metal wire container), but
6346 one will be required to take it out of there often enough to expose
6347 ones private and personal information to a lot of people that have no
6348 business getting access to that information.
</p
>
6350 <p
>The new Norwegian national IDs are a vehicle for identity theft,
6351 and I feel sorry for us all having politicians accepting such invasion
6352 of privacy without any objections. So are the Norwegian passports,
6353 but it has been possible to function in Norway without those so far.
6354 That option is going away with the passing of the new law. In this, I
6355 envy the Germans, because for them it is optional how much biometric
6356 information is stored in their national ID.
</p
>
6358 <p
>And if forced collection of fingerprints was not bad enough, the
6359 information collected in the national ID card register can be handed
6360 over to foreign intelligence services and police authorities,
"when
6361 extradition is not considered disproportionate
".
</p
>
6363 <p
>Update
2015-
05-
12: For those unable to believe that the Parliament
6364 really could make such decision, I wrote
6365 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Blir_det_virkelig_krav_om_fingeravtrykk_i_nasjonale_ID_kort_.html
">a
6366 summary of the sources I have
</a
> for concluding the way I do
6367 (Norwegian Only, as the sources are all in Norwegian).
</p
>
6372 <title>What would it cost to store all phone calls in Norway?
</title>
6373 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_would_it_cost_to_store_all_phone_calls_in_Norway_.html
</link>
6374 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_would_it_cost_to_store_all_phone_calls_in_Norway_.html
</guid>
6375 <pubDate>Fri,
1 May
2015 19:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
6376 <description><p
>Many years ago, a friend of mine calculated how much it would cost
6377 to store the sound of all phone calls in Norway, and came up with the
6378 cost of around
20 million NOK (
2.4 mill EUR) for all the calls in a
6379 year. I got curious and wondered what the same calculation would look
6380 like today. To do so one need an idea of how much data storage is
6381 needed for each minute of sound, how many minutes all the calls in
6382 Norway sums up to, and the cost of data storage.
</p
>
6384 <p
>The
2005 numbers are from
6385 <a href=
"http://www.digi.no/analyser/
2005/
10/
04/vi-prater-stadig-mindre-i-roret
">digi.no
</a
>,
6386 the
2012 numbers are from
6387 <a href=
"http://www.nkom.no/aktuelt/nyheter/fortsatt-vekst-i-det-norske-ekommarkedet
">a
6388 NKOM report
</a
>, and I got the
2013 numbers after asking NKOM via
6389 email. I was told the numbers for
2014 will be presented May
20th,
6390 and decided not to wait for those, as I doubt they will be very
6391 different from the numbers from
2013.
</p
>
6393 <p
>The amount of data storage per minute sound depend on the wanted
6394 quality, and for phone calls it is generally believed that
8 Kbit/s is
6395 enough. See for example a
6396 <a href=
"http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/voice/voice-quality/
7934-bwidth-consume.html#topic1
">summary
6397 on voice quality from Cisco
</a
> for some alternatives.
8 Kbit/s is
60
6398 Kbytes/min, and this can be multiplied with the number of call minutes
6399 to get the storage requirements.
</p
>
6401 <p
>Storage prices varies a lot, depending on speed, backup strategies,
6402 availability requirements etc. But a simple way to calculate can be
6403 to use the price of a TiB-disk (around
1000 NOK /
120 EUR) and double
6404 it to take space, power and redundancy into account. It could be much
6405 higher with high speed and good redundancy requirements.
</p
>
6407 <p
>But back to the question, What would it cost to store all phone
6408 calls in Norway? Not much. Here is a small table showing the
6409 estimated cost, which is within the budget constraint of most medium
6410 and large organisations:
</p
>
6412 <table border=
"1">
6413 <tr
><th
>Year
</th
><th
>Call minutes
</th
><th
>Size
</th
><th
>Price in NOK / EUR
</th
></tr
>
6414 <tr
><td
>2005</td
><td align=
"right
">24 000 000 000</td
><td align=
"right
">1.3 PiB
</td
><td align=
"right
">3 mill /
358 000</td
></tr
>
6415 <tr
><td
>2012</td
><td align=
"right
">18 000 000 000</td
><td align=
"right
">1.0 PiB
</td
><td align=
"right
">2.2 mill /
262 000</td
></tr
>
6416 <tr
><td
>2013</td
><td align=
"right
">17 000 000 000</td
><td align=
"right
">950 TiB
</td
><td align=
"right
">2.1 mill /
250 000</td
></tr
>
6419 <p
>This is the cost of buying the storage. Maintenance need to be
6420 taken into account too, but calculating that is left as an exercise
6421 for the reader. But it is obvious to me from those numbers that
6422 recording the sound of all phone calls in Norway is not going to be
6423 stopped because it is too expensive. I wonder if someone already is
6424 collecting the data?
</p
>
6429 <title>First Jessie based Debian Edu beta release
</title>
6430 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Jessie_based_Debian_Edu_beta_release.html
</link>
6431 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Jessie_based_Debian_Edu_beta_release.html
</guid>
6432 <pubDate>Sun,
26 Apr
2015 14:
10:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
6433 <description><p
>I am happy to report that the Debian Edu team sent out
6434 <a href=
"https://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/
2015/
04/msg00000.html
">this
6435 announcement today
</a
>:
</p
>
6438 the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project is pleased to announce the first
6439 *beta* release of Debian Edu
"Jessie
" 8.0+edu0~b1, which for the first
6440 time is composed entirely of packages from the current Debian stable
6441 release, Debian
8 "Jessie
".
6443 (As most reading this will know, Debian
"Jessie
" hasn
't actually been
6444 released by now. The release is still in progress but should finish
6447 We expect to make a final release of Debian Edu
"Jessie
" in the coming
6448 weeks, timed with the first point release of Debian Jessie. Upgrades
6449 from this beta release of Debian Edu Jessie to the final release will
6450 be possible and encouraged!
6452 Please report feedback to debian-edu@lists.debian.org and/or submit
6453 bugs: http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs
6455 Debian Edu - sometimes also known as
"Skolelinux
" - is a complete
6456 operating system for schools, universities and other
6457 organisations. Through its pre- prepared installation profiles
6458 administrators can install servers, workstations and laptops which
6459 will work in harmony on the school network. With Debian Edu, the
6460 teachers themselves or their technical support staff can roll out a
6461 complete multi-user, multi-machine study environment within hours or
6464 Debian Edu is already in use at several hundred schools all over the
6465 world, particularly in Germany, Spain and Norway. Installations come
6466 with hundreds of applications pre-installed, plus the whole Debian
6467 archive of thousands of compatible packages within easy reach.
6469 For those who want to give Debian Edu Jessie a try, download and
6470 installation instructions are available, including detailed
6471 instructions in the manual explaining the first steps, such as setting
6472 up a network or adding users. Please note that the password for the
6473 user your prompted for during installation must have a length of at
6476 == Where to download ==
6478 A multi-architecture CD / usbstick image (
649 MiB) for network booting
6479 can be downloaded at the following locations:
6481 http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-
8.0+edu0~b1-CD.iso
6482 rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-
8.0+edu0~b1-CD.iso .
6484 The SHA1SUM of this image is:
54a524d16246cddd8d2cfd6ea52f2dd78c47ee0a
6486 Alternatively an extended DVD / usbstick image (
4.9 GiB) is also
6487 available, with more software included (saving additional download
6490 http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-
8.0+edu0~b1-USB.iso
6491 rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-
8.0+edu0~b1-USB.iso
6493 The SHA1SUM of this image is: fb1f1504a490c077a48653898f9d6a461cb3c636
6495 Sources are available from the Debian archive, see
6496 http://ftp.debian.org/debian-cd/
8.0.0/source/ for some download
6499 == Debian Edu Jessie manual in seven languages ==
6501 Please see https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie/ for
6502 the English version of the Debian Edu jessie manual.
6504 This manual has been fully translated to German, French, Italian,
6505 Danish, Dutch and Norwegian Bokmål. A partly translated version exists
6506 for Spanish. See http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/ for
6507 online version of the translated manual.
6509 More information about Debian
8 "Jessie
" itself is provided in the
6510 release notes and the installation manual:
6511 - http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/releasenotes
6512 - http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/installmanual
6515 == Errata / known problems ==
6517 It takes up to
15 minutes for a changed hostname to be updated via
6520 The hostname script fails to update LTSP server hostname (#
783087).
6522 Workaround: run update-hostname-from-ip on the client to update the
6523 hostname immediately.
6525 Check https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie for a possibly
6526 more current and complete list.
6528 == Some more details about Debian Edu
8.0+edu0~b1 Codename Jessie released
2015-
04-
25 ==
6530 === Software updates ===
6532 Everything which is new in Debian
8 Jessie, e.g.:
6534 * Linux kernel
3.16.7-ctk9; for the i386 architecture, support for
6535 i486 processors has been dropped; oldest supported ones: i586 (like
6536 Intel Pentium and AMD K5).
6538 * Desktop environments KDE Plasma Workspaces
4.11.13, GNOME
3.14,
6539 Xfce
4.12, LXDE
0.5.6
6540 * new optional desktop environment: MATE
1.8
6541 * KDE Plasma Workspaces is installed by default; to choose one of
6542 the others see the manual.
6543 * the browsers Iceweasel
31 ESR and Chromium
41
6547 * CUPS print system
1.7.5
6548 * new boot framework: systemd
6549 * Educational toolbox GCompris
14.12
6550 * Music creator Rosegarden
14.02
6551 * Image editor Gimp
2.8.14
6552 * Virtual stargazer Stellarium
0.13.1
6555 * New version of debian-installer from Debian Jessie.
6556 * Debian Jessie includes about
43000 packages available for installation.
6557 * More information about Debian
8 Jessie is provided in its release
6558 notes and the installation manual, see the link above.
6560 === Installation changes ===
6562 Installations done via PXE now also install firmware automatically
6563 for the hardware present.
6567 A number of bugs have been fixed in this release; the most noticeable
6568 from a user perspective:
6570 * Inserting incorrect DNS information in Gosa will no longer break
6571 DNS completely, but instead stop DNS updates until the incorrect
6572 information is corrected (
710362)
6574 * shutdown-at-night now shuts the system down if gdm3 is used (
775608).
6576 === Sugar desktop removed ===
6578 As the Sugar desktop was removed from Debian Jessie, it is also not
6579 available in Debian Edu jessie.
6582 == About Debian Edu / Skolelinux ==
6584 Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux, is a Linux distribution based on
6585 Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
6586 configured school network. Directly after installation a school server
6587 running all services needed for a school network is set up just
6588 waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
6589 Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
6590 initial installation of the main server from CD or USB stick all other
6591 machines can be installed via the network. The provided school server
6592 provides LDAP database and Kerberos authentication service,
6593 centralized home directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other
6594 services. The desktop contains more than
60 educational software
6595 packages and more are available from the Debian archive, and schools
6596 can choose between KDE, GNOME, LXDE, Xfce and MATE desktop
6601 The Debian Project was founded in
1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly
6602 free community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of
6603 the largest and most influential open source projects. Thousands of
6604 volunteers from all over the world work together to create and
6605 maintain Debian software. Available in
70 languages, and supporting a
6606 huge range of computer types, Debian calls itself the universal
6611 Thanks to everyone making Debian and Debian Edu / Skolelinux happen!
6618 <title>Debian Edu interview: Shirish Agarwal
</title>
6619 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Shirish_Agarwal.html
</link>
6620 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Shirish_Agarwal.html
</guid>
6621 <pubDate>Wed,
15 Apr
2015 09:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
6622 <description><p
>It was a surprise to me to learn that project to create a complete
6623 computer system for schools I
've involved in,
6624 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
</a
>, was
6625 being used in India. But apparently it is, and I managed to get an
6626 interview with one of the friends of the project there, Shirish
6629 <p
><strong
>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
</strong
></p
>
6631 <p
>My name is Shirish Agarwal. Based out of the educational and
6632 historical city of Pune, from the western state of Maharashtra, India.
6633 My bread comes from giving training, giving policy tips,
6634 installations on free software to mom and pop shops in different
6635 fields from Desktop publishing to retail shops as well as work with
6636 few software start-ups as well.
</p
>
6638 <p
><strong
>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
6639 project?
</strong
></p
>
6641 <p
>It started innocently enough. I have been using Debian for a few
6642 years and in one local minidebconf / debutsav I was asked if there was
6643 anything for schools or education. I had worked / played with free
6644 educational softwares such as Gcompris and Stellarium for my many
6645 nieces and nephews so researched and found Debian Edu or Skolelinux as
6646 it was known then. Since then I have started using the various
6647 education meta-packages provided by the project.
</p
>
6649 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
6650 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
6652 <p
>It
's closest I have seen where a package full of educational
6653 software are packed, which are free and open (both literally and
6654 figuratively). Even if I take the simplest software which is
6655 gcompris, the number of activities therein are amazing. Another one of
6656 the softwares that I have liked for a long time is stellarium. Even
6657 pysycache is cool except for couple of issues I encountered
6658 <a href=
"https://bugs.debian.org/
781841">#
781841</a
> and
6659 <a href=
"https://bugs.debian.org/
781842">#
781842</a
>.
</p
>
6661 <p
>I prefer software installed on the system over web based solutions,
6662 as a web site can disappear any time but the software on disk has the
6663 possibility of a larger life span. Of course with both it
's more a
6664 question if it has enough users who make it fun or sustainable or both
6665 for the developer per-se.
</p
>
6667 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
6668 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
6670 <p
>I do see that the Debian Edu team seems to be short-handed and I
6671 think more efforts should be made to make it popular and ask and take
6672 help from people and the larger community wherever possible.
</p
>
6674 <p
>I don
't see any disadvantage to use Skolelinux apart from the fact
6675 that most apps. are generic which is good or bad how you see it.
6676 However, saying that I do acknowledge the fact that the canvas is
6677 pretty big and there are lot of interesting ideas that could be done
6678 but for reasons not known not done or if done I don
't know about them.
6679 Let me share some of the ideas (these are more upstream based but
6680 still) I have had for a long time :
</p
>
6682 <p
>1. Classical maths question of two trains in opposing directions
6683 each running @x kmph/mph at y distance, when they will meet and how
6684 far would each travel and similar questions like these.
6686 <p
>The computer is a fantastic system where questions like these can
6687 be drawn, animated and the methodology and answers teased out in
6688 interactive manner. While sites such as the
6689 <a href=
"http://mathforum.org/dr.math/faq/faq.two.trains.html
">Ask
6690 Dr. Math FAQ on The Two Trains problem
</a
> (as an example or point of
6691 inspiration) can be used there is lot more that can be done. I dunno
6692 if there is a free software which does something like this. The idea
6693 being a blend of objects + animation + interaction which does
6694 this. The whole interaction could be gamified with points or sounds or
6695 colourful celebration whenever the user gets even part of the question
6696 or/and methodology right. That would help reinforce good behaviour.
6697 This understanding could be used to share/showcase everything from how
6698 the first wheel came to be, to evolution to how astronomy started,
6699 psychics and everything in-between.
</p
>
6701 <p
>One specific idea in the train part was having the Linux mascot on
6702 one train and the BSD or GNU mascot on the other train and they
6703 meeting somewhere in-between. Characters from blender movies could
6704 also be used.
</p
>
6706 <p
>2. Loads of crossword-puzzles with reference to subjects: We have
6707 enormous data sets in Wikipedia and Wikitionary. I don
't think it
6708 should be a big job to design crossword puzzles. Using categories and
6709 sub-categories it should be doable to have Q
&A single word answers
6710 from the existing data-sets. What would make it easy or hard could be
6711 the length of the word + existence of many or few vowels depending on
6712 the user
's input.
</p
>
6714 <p
>3. Jigsaw puzzles - We already have a great software called
6715 palapeli with number of slicers making it pretty interesting. What
6716 needs to be done is to download large number of public domain and
6717 copyleft images, tease and use IPTC tags to categorise them into
6718 nature, history etc. and let it loose. This could turn to be really
6719 huge collection of images. One source could be taken from
6720 commons.wikimedia.org, others could be huge collection of royalty-free
6721 stock photos. Potential is immense.
</p
>
6723 <p
>Apart from this, free software suffers in two directions, we lag
6724 both in development (of using new features per-se) and maintenance a
6725 lot. This is more so in educational software as these applications
6726 need to be timely and the opportunity cost of missing deadlines is
6727 immense. If we are able to solve issues of funding for development and
6728 maintenance of such software I don
't see any big difficulties. I know
6729 of few start-ups in and around India who would love to develop and
6730 maintain such software if funding issues could be solved.
</p
>
6732 <p
><strong
>Which free software do you use daily?
</strong
></p
>
6734 <p
>That would be huge list. Some of the softwares are obviously apt,
6735 aptitude, debdelta, leafpad, the shell of course (zsh nowadays),
6736 quassel for IRC. In games I use shisen-sho while card-games are evenly
6737 between kpat and Aiselriot. In desktops it
's a tie between
6738 gnome-flashback and mate.
</p
>
6740 <p
><strong
>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
6741 get schools to use free software?
</strong
></p
>
6743 <p
>I think it should first start with using specific FOSS apps. in
6744 whatever environment they are. If it
's MS-Windows or Mac so be it.
6745 Once they are habitual with the apps. and there is buy-in from the
6746 school management then it could be installed anywhere. Most of the
6747 people now understand the concept of a repository because of the
6748 various online stores so it isn
't hard to convince on that front.
</p
>
6750 <p
>What is harder is having enough people with technical skills and
6751 passion to service them. If you get buy-in from one or two teachers
6752 then ideas like above could also be asked to be done as a project as
6755 <p
>I think where we fall short more than anything is in marketing. For
6756 instance, Debian has this whole range of fonts in its archive but
6757 there isn
't even a page where all those different fonts in the La
6758 Ipsum format could be tried out for newcomers.
</p
>
6760 <p
>One of the issues faced constantly in installations is with updates
6761 and upgrades. People have this myth that each update and upgrade
6762 means the user interface will / has to change. I have seen this
6763 innumerable times. That perhaps is one of the reasons which browsers
6764 like Iceweasel / Firefox change user interfaces so much, not because
6765 it might be needed or be functional but because people believe that
6766 changed user interfaces are better. This, can easily be pointed with
6767 the user interfaces changed with almost every MS-Windows and Mac OS
6770 <p
>The problems with Debian Edu for deployment are many. The biggest
6771 is the huge gap between what is taught in schools and what Debian Edu
6774 <p
>Me and my friends did teach on week-ends in a government school for
6776 <a href=
"https://flossexperiences.wordpress.com/
2012/
10/
08/sharings/
">gathered
6777 some experience
</a
> there. Some of the things we learnt/discovered
6778 there was :
</p
>
6782 <li
>Most of the teachers are very territorial about their subjects
6783 and they do not want you to teach anything out of the
6784 portion/syllabus given.
</li
>
6786 <li
>They want any activity on the system in accordance to whatever
6787 is in the syllabus.
</li
>
6789 <li
>There are huge barriers both with the English language and at
6790 times with objects or whatever. An example, let
's say in gcompris
6791 you have objects falling down and you have to name them and let
's
6792 say the falling object is a hat or a fedora hat, this would not be
6793 as recognizable as say a
6794 <a href=
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puneri_Pagadi
">Puneri
6795 Pagdi
</a
> so there is need to inject local objects, words wherever
6796 possible. Especially for word-games there are so many hindi words
6797 which have become part of english vocabulary (for instance in
6798 parley), those could be made into a hinglish collection or
6799 something but that is something for upstream to do.
</li
>
6806 <title>I
'm going to the Open Source Developers
' Conference Nordic
2015!
</title>
6807 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/I_m_going_to_the_Open_Source_Developers__Conference_Nordic_2015_.html
</link>
6808 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/I_m_going_to_the_Open_Source_Developers__Conference_Nordic_2015_.html
</guid>
6809 <pubDate>Tue,
7 Apr
2015 10:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
6810 <description><p
>I am happy to let you all know that I
'm going to the
<a
6811 href=
"http://act.osdc.no/osdc2015no/
">Open Source Developers
'
6812 Conference Nordic
2015</a
>!
</p
>
6814 <p
>It take place Friday
8th to Sunday
10th of May in Oslo next to
6815 where I work, and I finally got around to submitting
6816 <a href=
"http://act.osdc.no/osdc2015no/talk/
6192">a talk proposal for
6817 it
</a
> (dead link for most people until the talk is accepted). As
6818 part of my involvement with the
6819 <a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/
">Norwegian Unix User Group member
6820 association
</a
> I have been slightly involved in the planning of this
6821 conference for a while now, with a focus on organising a Civic Hacking
6822 Hackathon with our friends
6823 over at
<a href=
"http://www.mysociety.org/
">mySociety
</a
> and
6824 <a href=
"http://www.holderdeord.no/
">Holder de ord
</a
>. This part is
6825 named the
'My Society
' track in the program. There is still space for
6826 more talks and participants. I hope to see you there.
</p
>
6828 <p
>Check out
<a href=
"http://act.osdc.no/osdc2015no/talks
">the talks
6829 submitted and accepted so far
</a
>.
</p
>
6834 <title>Proof reading the Norwegian translation of Free Culture by Lessig
</title>
6835 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Proof_reading_the_Norwegian_translation_of_Free_Culture_by_Lessig.html
</link>
6836 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Proof_reading_the_Norwegian_translation_of_Free_Culture_by_Lessig.html
</guid>
6837 <pubDate>Sat,
4 Apr
2015 09:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
6838 <description><p
>During eastern I had some time to continue working on the Norwegian
6839 <a href=
"http://www.docbook.org/
">docbook
</a
> version of the
2004 book
6840 <a href=
"http://free-culture.cc/
">Free Culture
</a
> by Lawrence Lessig.
6841 At the moment I am proof reading the finished text, looking for typos,
6842 inconsistent wordings and sentences that do not flow as they should.
6843 I
'm more than two thirds done with the text, and welcome others to
6844 check the text up to chapter
13. The current status is available on the
6845 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig
">github
</a
>
6846 project pages. You can also check out the
6847 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true
">PDF
</a
>,
6848 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true
">EPUB
</a
>
6849 and HTML version available in the
6850 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/tree/master/archive
">archive
6851 directory
</a
>.
</p
>
6853 <p
>Please report typos, bugs and improvements to the github project if
6854 you find any.
</p
>
6859 <title>Frikanalen, Norwegian TV channel for technical topics
</title>
6860 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Frikanalen__Norwegian_TV_channel_for_technical_topics.html
</link>
6861 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Frikanalen__Norwegian_TV_channel_for_technical_topics.html
</guid>
6862 <pubDate>Mon,
9 Mar
2015 11:
10:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
6863 <description><p
>The
<a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/
">Norwegian Unix User Group
</a
>,
6864 where I am a member, and where people interested in free software,
6865 open standards and UNIX like operating systems like Linux and the BSDs
6866 come together, record our monthly technical presentations on video.
6867 The purpose is to document the talks and spread them to a wider
6868 audience. For this, the the Norwegian nationwide open channel
6869 <a href=
"http://www.frikanalen.no/
">Frikanalen
</a
> is a useful venue.
6870 Since a few days ago, when I figured out the
6871 <a href=
"http://beta.frikanalen.no/api/
">REST API
</a
> to program the
6872 <a href=
"http://beta.frikanalen.tv/guide/
">channel time schedule
</a
>,
6873 the channel has been filled with NUUG talks, related recordings and
6874 some Creative Commons licensed TED talks (from archive.org). I fill
6875 all
"leftover bits
" on the channel with content from NUUG, which at
6876 the moment is almost
17 of
24 hours every day.
</p
>
6878 <p
>The list of NUUG videos
6879 <a href=
"http://beta.frikanalen.tv/organization/
82">uploaded so far
</a
>
6880 include things like a
6881 <a href=
"http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/
625090">one hour talk by John
6882 Perry Barlow when he visited Oslo
</a
>, a presentation of
6883 <a href=
"http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/
624275">Haiku, the BeOS
6884 re-implementation
</a
>, the
6885 <a href=
"http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/
624493">history of FiksGataMi,
6886 the Norwegian version of FixMyStreet
</a
>, the good old
6887 <a href=
"http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/
623566">Warriors of the net
6888 video
</A
> and many others.
</p
>
6890 <p
>We have a large backlog of NUUG talks not yet uploaded to
6891 Frikanalen, and plan to upload every useful bit to the channel to
6892 spread the word there. I also hope to find useful recordings from the
6893 Chaos Computer Club and Debian conferences and spread them on the
6894 channel as well. But this require locating the videos and their meta
6895 information (title, description, license, etc), and preparing the
6896 recordings for broadcast, and I have not yet had the spare time to
6897 focus on this. Perhaps you want to help. Please join us on IRC,
6898 <a href=
"irc://irc.freenode.net/%
23nuug
">#nuug on irc.freenode.net
</a
>
6899 if you want to help make this happen.
</p
>
6901 <p
>But as I said, already the channel is already almost exclusively
6902 filled with technical topics, and if you want to learn something new
6903 today, check out the
<a href=
"http://www.frikanalen.tv/se
">Ogg Theora
6904 web stream
</a
> or use one of the other ways to get access to the
6905 channel. Unfortunately the Ogg Theora recoding for distribution still
6906 do not properly sync the video and sound. It is generated by recoding
6907 a internal MPEG transport stream with MPEG4 coded video (ie H
.264) to
6908 Ogg Theora / Vorbis, and we have not been able to find a way that
6909 produces acceptable quality. Help needed, please get in touch if you
6910 know how to fix it using free software.
</p
>
6915 <title>The Citizenfour documentary on the Snowden confirmations to Norway
</title>
6916 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Citizenfour_documentary_on_the_Snowden_confirmations_to_Norway.html
</link>
6917 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Citizenfour_documentary_on_the_Snowden_confirmations_to_Norway.html
</guid>
6918 <pubDate>Sat,
28 Feb
2015 22:
10:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
6919 <description><p
>Today I was happy to learn that the documentary
6920 <a href=
"https://citizenfourfilm.com/
">Citizenfour
</a
> by
6921 <a href=
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Poitras
">Laura Poitras
</a
>
6922 finally will show up in Norway. According to the magazine
6923 <a href=
"http://montages.no/
">Montages
</a
>, a deal has finally been
6925 <a href=
"http://montages.no/nyheter/snowden-dokumentaren-citizenfour-far-norsk-kinodistribusjon/
">Cinema
6926 distribution in Norway
</a
> and the movie will have its premiere soon.
6927 This is great news. As part of my involvement with
6928 <a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/
">the Norwegian Unix User Group
</a
>, me and
6930 <a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/news/Dokumentar_om_Snowdenbekreftelsene_til_Norge_.shtml
">tried
6931 to get the movie to Norway
</a
> ourselves, but obviously
6932 <a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/news/Dokumentar_om_Snowdenbekreftelsene_endelig_til_Norge_.shtml
">we
6933 were too late
</a
> and Tor Fosse beat us to it. I am happy he did, as
6934 the movie will make its way to the public and we do not have to make
6935 it happen ourselves.
6936 <a href=
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiGwAvd5mvM
">The trailer
</a
>
6937 can be seen on youtube, if you are curious what kind of film this
6940 <p
>The whistle blower Edward Snowden really deserve political asylum
6941 here in Norway, but I am afraid he would not be safe.
</p
>
6946 <title>The Norwegian open channel Frikanalen -
24x7 on the Internet
</title>
6947 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Norwegian_open_channel_Frikanalen___24x7_on_the_Internet.html
</link>
6948 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Norwegian_open_channel_Frikanalen___24x7_on_the_Internet.html
</guid>
6949 <pubDate>Wed,
25 Feb
2015 09:
10:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
6950 <description><p
>The Norwegian nationwide open channel
6951 <a href=
"http://www.frikanalen.no/
">Frikanalen
</a
> is still going
6952 strong. It allow everyone to send the video they want on national
6953 television. It is a TV station administrated completely using a web
6954 browser, running only
<ahref=
"https://github.com/Frikanalen
">Free
6955 Software
</a
>, providing
<ahref=
"http://beta.frikanalen.tv/api
">a REST
6956 api
</a
> for administrators and members, and with distribution on the
6957 national DVB-T distribution network RiksTV. But only between
12:
00
6958 and
17:
30 Norwegian time. This has finally changed, after many years
6959 with limited distribution. A few weeks ago, we set up a Ogg Theora
6960 stream via icecast to allow everyone with Internet access to check out
6961 the channel the rest of the day. This is presented on
6962 <a href=
"http://www.frikanalen.tv/se
">the Frikanalen web site now
</a
>. And
6963 since a few days ago, the channel is also available
6964 via
<a href=
"https://www.uninett.no/iptv-tilgang
">multicast on
6965 UNINETT
</a
>, available for those using IPTV TVs and set-top boxes in
6966 the Norwegian National Research and Education network.
</p
>
6968 <p
>If you want to see what is on the channel, point your media player
6969 to one of these sources. The first should work with most players and
6970 browsers, while as far as I know, the multicast UDP stream only work
6974 <li
><a href=
"http://video.nuug.no/frikanalen.ogv
">http://video.nuug.no/frikanalen.ogv
</a
></li
>
6975 <li
>udp://@
224.17.43.129:
1234</li
>
6978 <p
>The Ogg Theora / icecast stream is not working well, as the video
6979 and audio is slightly out of sync. We have not been able to figure
6980 out how to fix it. It is generated by recoding a internal MPEG
6981 transport stream with MPEG4 coded video (ie H
.264) to Ogg Theora /
6982 Vorbis, and the result is less then stellar. If you have ideas how to
6983 fix it, please let us know on frikanalen (at) nuug.no. We currently
6984 use this with ffmpeg2theora
0.29:
</p
>
6986 <blockquote
><pre
>
6987 ./ffmpeg2theora.linux
&lt;OBE_gemini_URL.ts
&gt; -F
25 -x
720 -y
405 \
6988 --deinterlace --inputfps
25 -c
1 -H
48000 --keyint
8 --buf-delay
100 \
6989 --nosync -V
700 -o - | oggfwd video.nuug.no
8000 &lt;pw
&gt; /frikanalen.ogv
6990 </pre
></blockquote
>
6992 <p
>If you get the multicast UDP stream working, please let me know, as
6993 I am curious how far the multicast stream reach. It do not make it to
6994 my home network, nor any other commercially available network in
6995 Norway that I am aware of.
</p
>
7000 <title>Nude body scanner now present on Norwegian airport
</title>
7001 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Nude_body_scanner_now_present_on_Norwegian_airport.html
</link>
7002 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Nude_body_scanner_now_present_on_Norwegian_airport.html
</guid>
7003 <pubDate>Tue,
10 Feb
2015 15:
20:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
7004 <description><p
>Aftenposten, one of the largest newspapers in Norway, today report
7006 <a href=
"http://www.aftenposten.no/reise/Slik-skannes-kroppen-din-i-fremtidens-sikkerhetskontroll-
490666_1.snd
">three
7007 of the nude body scanners now is put to use at Gardermoen
</a
>, the
7008 main airport in Norway. This way the travelers can have their body
7009 photographed without cloths when visiting Norway. Of course this
7010 horrible news is presented with a positive spin, stating that
"now
7011 travelers can move past the security check point faster and more
7012 efficiently
", but fail to mention that the machines in question take
7013 pictures of their nude bodies and store them internally in the
7014 computer, while only presenting sketch figure of the body to the
7015 public. The article is written in a way that leave the impression
7016 that the new machines do not take these nude pictures and only create
7017 the sketch figures. In reality the same nude pictures are still
7018 taken, but not presented to everyone. They are still available for
7019 the owners of the system and the people doing maintenance of the
7020 scanners, as long as they are taken and stored.
</p
>
7022 <p
>Wikipedia have a more on
7023 <a href=
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_body_scanner
">Full body
7024 scanners
</a
>, including example images and a summary of the
7025 controversy about these scanners.
</p
>
7027 <p
>Personally I will decline to use these machines, as I believe strip
7028 searches of my body is a very intrusive attack on my privacy, and not
7029 something everyone should have to accept to travel.
</p
>
7034 <title>Nagios module to check if the Frikanalen video stream is working
</title>
7035 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Nagios_module_to_check_if_the_Frikanalen_video_stream_is_working.html
</link>
7036 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Nagios_module_to_check_if_the_Frikanalen_video_stream_is_working.html
</guid>
7037 <pubDate>Sun,
8 Feb
2015 13:
00:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
7038 <description><p
>When running a TV station with both broadcast and web stream
7039 distribution, it is useful to know that the stream is working. As I
7040 am involved in the Norwegian open channel
7041 <a href=
"http://www.frikanalen.no/
">Frikanalen
</a
> as part of my
7042 activity in the
<a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/
">NUUG member
7043 organisation
</a
>, I wrote a script to use mplayer to connect to a
7044 video stream, pick two images
35 seconds apart and compare them. If
7045 the images are missing or identical, something is probably wrong with
7046 the stream and an alarm should be triggered. The script is written as
7047 a Nagios plugin, allowing us to use Nagios to run the check regularly
7048 and sound the alarm when something is wrong. It is able to detect
7049 both a hanging and a broken video stream.
</p
>
7051 <p
>I just uploaded the code for the script into the
7052 <a href=
"https://github.com/Frikanalen/frikanalen/blob/master/nagios-plugin/check_video_stream_images
">Frikanalen
7053 git repository
</a
> on github. If you run a TV station with web
7054 streaming, perhaps you can find it useful too.
</p
>
7056 <p
>Last year, the Frikanalen public TV station transformed into using
7057 only Linux based free software to administrate, schedule and
7058 distribute the TV content. The
7059 <a href=
"https://github.com/Frikanalen
">source code for the entire TV
7060 station
</a
> is available from the Github project page. Everyone can
7061 use it to send their content on national TV, and we provide both a web
7062 GUI and
<a href=
"http://beta.frikanalen.tv/api/
">a web API
</a
> to
7063 <a href=
"http://beta.frikanalen.tv/login/?next=/members/video/
">add
</a
>
7064 and
<a href=
"http://beta.frikanalen.tv/members/plan/
">schedule
7065 content
</a
>. And thanks to last weeks developer gathering and
7066 following activity, we now have the schedule
7067 <a href=
"http://beta.frikanalen.tv/xmltv/
2015/
01/
01">available as
7068 XMLTV
</a
> too. Still a lot of work left to do, especially with the
7069 process to add videos and with the scheduling, so your contribution is
7070 most welcome. Perhaps you want to set up your own TV station?
</p
>
7072 <p
>Update
2015-
02-
25: Got a tip from Uninett about their
7073 <a href=
"https://scm.uninett.no/maalepaaler/qstream/
">qstream
7074 monitoring system
</a
>, which gather connection time, jitter, packet
7075 loss and burst bandwidth usage. It look useful to check if UDP
7076 streams are working as they should.
</p
>
7081 <title>Norwegian Bokmål subtitles for the FSF video User Liberation
</title>
7082 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Norwegian_Bokm_l_subtitles_for_the_FSF_video_User_Liberation.html
</link>
7083 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Norwegian_Bokm_l_subtitles_for_the_FSF_video_User_Liberation.html
</guid>
7084 <pubDate>Mon,
12 Jan
2015 21:
00:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
7085 <description><p
>A few days ago, the
<a href=
"https://www.fsf.org/
">Free Software
7086 Foundation
</a
> announced a new video
7087 <a href=
"https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/user-liberation-watch-and-share-our-new-video
">explaining
7088 Free software
</a
> in simple terms. The video named User Liberation is
7089 3 minutes long, and I recommend showing it to everyone you know as a
7090 way to explain what Free Software is all about. Unfortunately several
7091 of the people I know do not understand English and Spanish, so it did
7092 not make sense to show it to them.
</p
>
7094 <p
>But today I was told that
7095 <a href=
"https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/user-liberation-watch-and-share-our-new-video
">English
7096 subtitles were available
</a
> and set out to provide Norwegian Bokmål
7097 subtitles based on these. The result has been sent to FSF and made
7099 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/fsf-video-user-liberation-subtitles
">a
7100 git repository
</a
> provided by Github. Please let me know if you find
7101 errors or have improvements to the subtitles.
</p
>
7103 <p
>Update
2015-
02-
03: Since I publised this post, FSF created a
7105 <a href=
"http://libreplanet.org/wiki/Group:FSF/User_Liberation_Video_Translation
">project
7106 to track subtitles
</A
> for the video.
</p
>
7111 <title>Updated version of the Norwegian web service FiksGataMi
</title>
7112 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Updated_version_of_the_Norwegian_web_service_FiksGataMi.html
</link>
7113 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Updated_version_of_the_Norwegian_web_service_FiksGataMi.html
</guid>
7114 <pubDate>Tue,
30 Dec
2014 17:
55:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
7115 <description><p
>I am very happy that we in the
7116 <a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/
">Norwegian Unix User group (NUUG)
</a
>,
7117 spearheaded by Marius Halden from NUUG and Matthew Somerville from
7118 <a href=
"http://www.mysociety.org/
">mySociety
</a
>, finally managed to
7119 upgrade the code base for the Norwegian version of
7120 <a href=
"http://fixmystreet.org/
">FixMyStreet
</a
>. This
7121 was the first major update since
2011. The refurbished
7122 <a href=
"http://www.fiksgatami.no/
">FiksGataMi
</a
> is already live, and
7123 seem to hold up the pressure. The
7124 <a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/news/Pressemelding__FiksGataMi_i_oppdatert_og_mobilvennlig_klesdrakt.shtml
">press
7125 release and announcement
</a
> went out this morning.
</p
>
7127 <p
>FixMyStreet is a web platform for allowing the citizens to easily
7128 report problems with public infrastructure to the responsible
7129 authorities. Think of it as a shared mail client with map support,
7130 allowing everyone to see what already was reported and comment on the
7131 reports in public.
</p
>
7136 <title>Of course USA loses in cyber war - NSA and friends made sure it would happen
</title>
7137 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Of_course_USA_loses_in_cyber_war___NSA_and_friends_made_sure_it_would_happen.html
</link>
7138 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Of_course_USA_loses_in_cyber_war___NSA_and_friends_made_sure_it_would_happen.html
</guid>
7139 <pubDate>Fri,
19 Dec
2014 13:
10:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
7140 <description><p
>So, Sony caved in
7141 (
<a href=
"https://twitter.com/RobLowe/status/
545338568512917504">according
7142 to Rob Lowe
</a
>) and demonstrated that America lost its first cyberwar
7143 (
<a href=
"https://twitter.com/newtgingrich/status/
545339074975109122">according
7144 to Newt Gingrich
</a
>). It should not surprise anyone, after the
7145 whistle blower Edward Snowden documented that the government of USA
7146 and their allies for many years have done their best to make sure the
7147 technology used by its citizens is filled with security holes allowing
7148 the secret services to spy on its own population. No one in their
7149 right minds could believe that the ability to snoop on the people all
7150 over the globe could only be used by the personnel authorized to do so
7151 by the president of the United States of America. If the capabilities
7152 are there, they will be used by friend and foe alike, and now they are
7153 being used to bring Sony on its knees.
</p
>
7155 <p
>I doubt it will a lesson learned, and expect USA to lose its next
7156 cyber war too, given how eager the western intelligence communities
7157 (and probably the non-western too, but it is less in the news) seem to
7158 be to continue its current dragnet surveillance practice.
</p
>
7160 <p
>There is a reason why China and others are trying to move away from
7161 Windows to Linux and other alternatives, and it is not to avoid
7162 sending its hard earned dollars to Cayman Islands (or whatever
7163 <a href=
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_haven
">tax haven
</a
>
7164 Microsoft is using these days to collect the majority of its
7165 income. :)
</p
>
7170 <title>How to stay with sysvinit in Debian Jessie
</title>
7171 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_stay_with_sysvinit_in_Debian_Jessie.html
</link>
7172 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_stay_with_sysvinit_in_Debian_Jessie.html
</guid>
7173 <pubDate>Sat,
22 Nov
2014 01:
00:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
7174 <description><p
>By now, it is well known that Debian Jessie will not be using
7175 sysvinit as its boot system by default. But how can one keep using
7176 sysvinit in Jessie? It is fairly easy, and here are a few recipes,
7178 <a href=
"http://www.vitavonni.de/blog/
201410/
2014102101-avoiding-systemd.html
">Erich
7179 Schubert
</a
> and
7180 <a href=
"http://smcv.pseudorandom.co.uk/
2014/still_universal/
">Simon
7183 <p
>If you already are using Wheezy and want to upgrade to Jessie and
7184 keep sysvinit as your boot system, create a file
7185 <tt
>/etc/apt/preferences.d/use-sysvinit
</tt
> with this content before
7186 you upgrade:
</p
>
7188 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
7189 Package: systemd-sysv
7190 Pin: release o=Debian
7192 </pre
></blockquote
><p
>
7194 <p
>This file content will tell apt and aptitude to not consider
7195 installing systemd-sysv as part of any installation and upgrade
7196 solution when resolving dependencies, and thus tell it to avoid
7197 systemd as a default boot system. The end result should be that the
7198 upgraded system keep using sysvinit.
</p
>
7200 <p
>If you are installing Jessie for the first time, there is no way to
7201 get sysvinit installed by default (debootstrap used by
7202 debian-installer have no option for this), but one can tell the
7203 installer to switch to sysvinit before the first boot. Either by
7204 using a kernel argument to the installer, or by adding a line to the
7205 preseed file used. First, the kernel command line argument:
7207 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
7208 preseed/late_command=
"in-target apt-get install --purge -y sysvinit-core
"
7209 </pre
></blockquote
><p
>
7211 <p
>Next, the line to use in a preseed file:
</p
>
7213 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
7214 d-i preseed/late_command string in-target apt-get install -y sysvinit-core
7215 </pre
></blockquote
><p
>
7217 <p
>One can of course also do this after the first boot by installing
7218 the sysvinit-core package.
</p
>
7220 <p
>I recommend only using sysvinit if you really need it, as the
7221 sysvinit boot sequence in Debian have several hardware specific bugs
7222 on Linux caused by the fact that it is unpredictable when hardware
7223 devices show up during boot. But on the other hand, the new default
7224 boot system still have a few rough edges I hope will be fixed before
7225 Jessie is released.
</p
>
7227 <p
>Update
2014-
11-
26: Inspired by
7228 <ahref=
"https://www.mirbsd.org/permalinks/wlog-
10-tg_e20141125-tg.htm#e20141125-tg_wlog-
10-tg
">a
7229 blog post by Torsten Glaser
</a
>, added --purge to the preseed
7235 <title>A Debian package for SMTP via Tor (aka SMTorP) using exim4
</title>
7236 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Debian_package_for_SMTP_via_Tor__aka_SMTorP__using_exim4.html
</link>
7237 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Debian_package_for_SMTP_via_Tor__aka_SMTorP__using_exim4.html
</guid>
7238 <pubDate>Mon,
10 Nov
2014 13:
40:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
7239 <description><p
>The right to communicate with your friends and family in private,
7240 without anyone snooping, is a right every citicen have in a liberal
7241 democracy. But this right is under serious attack these days.
</p
>
7243 <p
>A while back it occurred to me that one way to make the dragnet
7244 surveillance conducted by NSA, GCHQ, FRA and others (and confirmed by
7245 the whisleblower Snowden) more expensive for Internet email,
7246 is to deliver all email using SMTP via Tor. Such SMTP option would be
7247 a nice addition to the FreedomBox project if we could send email
7248 between FreedomBox machines without leaking metadata about the emails
7249 to the people peeking on the wire. I
7250 <a href=
"http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/
2014-October/
006493.html
">proposed
7251 this on the FreedomBox project mailing list in October
</a
> and got a
7252 lot of useful feedback and suggestions. It also became obvious to me
7253 that this was not a novel idea, as the same idea was tested and
7254 documented by Johannes Berg as early as
2006, and both
7255 <a href=
"https://github.com/pagekite/Mailpile/wiki/SMTorP
">the
7256 Mailpile
</a
> and
<a href=
"http://dee.su/cables
">the Cables
</a
> systems
7257 propose a similar method / protocol to pass emails between users.
</p
>
7259 <p
>To implement such system one need to set up a Tor hidden service
7260 providing the SMTP protocol on port
25, and use email addresses
7261 looking like username@hidden-service-name.onion. With such addresses
7262 the connections to port
25 on hidden-service-name.onion using Tor will
7263 go to the correct SMTP server. To do this, one need to configure the
7264 Tor daemon to provide the hidden service and the mail server to accept
7265 emails for this .onion domain. To learn more about Exim configuration
7266 in Debian and test the design provided by Johannes Berg in his FAQ, I
7267 set out yesterday to create a Debian package for making it trivial to
7268 set up such SMTP over Tor service based on Debian. Getting it to work
7269 were fairly easy, and
7270 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/exim4-smtorp
">the
7271 source code for the Debian package
</a
> is available from github. I
7272 plan to move it into Debian if further testing prove this to be a
7273 useful approach.
</p
>
7275 <p
>If you want to test this, set up a blank Debian machine without any
7276 mail system installed (or run
<tt
>apt-get purge exim4-config
</tt
> to
7277 get rid of exim4). Install tor, clone the git repository mentioned
7278 above, build the deb and install it on the machine. Next, run
7279 <tt
>/usr/lib/exim4-smtorp/setup-exim-hidden-service
</tt
> and follow
7280 the instructions to get the service up and running. Restart tor and
7281 exim when it is done, and test mail delivery using swaks like
7284 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
7285 torsocks swaks --server dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion \
7286 --to fbx@dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion
7287 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
7289 <p
>This will test the SMTP delivery using tor. Replace the email
7290 address with your own address to test your server. :)
</p
>
7292 <p
>The setup procedure is still to complex, and I hope it can be made
7293 easier and more automatic. Especially the tor setup need more work.
7294 Also, the package include a tor-smtp tool written in C, but its task
7295 should probably be rewritten in some script language to make the deb
7296 architecture independent. It would probably also make the code easier
7297 to review. The tor-smtp tool currently need to listen on a socket for
7298 exim to talk to it and is started using xinetd. It would be better if
7299 no daemon and no socket is needed. I suspect it is possible to get
7300 exim to run a command line tool for delivery instead of talking to a
7301 socket, and hope to figure out how in a future version of this
7304 <p
>Until I wipe my test machine, I can be reached using the
7305 <tt
>fbx@dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion
</tt
> mail address, deliverable over
7306 SMTorP. :)
</p
>
7311 <title>First Jessie based Debian Edu released (alpha0)
</title>
7312 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Jessie_based_Debian_Edu_released__alpha0_.html
</link>
7313 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Jessie_based_Debian_Edu_released__alpha0_.html
</guid>
7314 <pubDate>Mon,
27 Oct
2014 20:
40:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
7315 <description><p
>I am happy to report that I on behalf of the Debian Edu team just
7317 <a href=
"https://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/
2014/
10/msg00000.html
">this
7318 announcement
</a
>:
</p
>
7321 The Debian Edu Team is pleased to announce the release of Debian Edu
7322 Jessie
8.0+edu0~alpha0
7324 Debian Edu is a complete operating system for schools. Through its
7325 various installation profiles you can install servers, workstations
7326 and laptops which will work together on the school network. With
7327 Debian Edu, the teachers themselves or their technical support can
7328 roll out a complete multi-user multi-machine study environment within
7329 hours or a few days. Debian Edu comes with hundreds of applications
7330 pre-installed, but you can always add more packages from Debian.
7332 For those who want to give Debian Edu Jessie a try, download and
7333 installation instructions are available, including detailed
7334 instructions in the manual[
1] explaining the first steps, such as
7335 setting up a network or adding users. Please note that the password
7336 for the user your prompted for during installation must have a length
7337 of at least
5 characters!
7339 [
1]
&lt;URL:
<a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie
">https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie
</a
> &gt;
7341 Would you like to give your school
's computer a longer life? Are you
7342 tired of sneaker administration, running from computer to computer
7343 reinstalling the operating system? Would you like to administrate all
7344 the computers in your school using only a couple of hours every week?
7345 Check out Debian Edu Jessie!
7347 Skolelinux is used by at least two hundred schools all over the world,
7348 mostly in Germany and Norway.
7350 About Debian Edu and Skolelinux
7351 ===============================
7353 Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux[
2], is a Linux distribution based
7354 on Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
7355 configured school network. Immediately after installation a school
7356 server running all services needed for a school network is set up just
7357 waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
7358 Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
7359 initial installation of the main server from CD or USB stick all other
7360 machines can be installed via the network. The provided school server
7361 provides LDAP database and Kerberos authentication service,
7362 centralized home directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other
7363 services. The desktop contains more than
60 educational software
7364 packages[
3] and more are available from the Debian archive, and
7365 schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE, Xfce and MATE desktop
7368 [
2]
&lt;URL:
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">http://www.skolelinux.org/
</a
> &gt;
7369 [
3]
&lt;URL:
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html
">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html
</a
> &gt;
7371 Full release notes and manual
7372 =============================
7374 Below the download URLs there is a list of some of the new features
7375 and bugfixes of Debian Edu
8.0+edu0~alpha0 Codename Jessie. The full
7376 list is part of the manual. (See the feature list in the manual[
4] for
7377 the English version.) For some languages manual translations are
7378 available, see the manual translation overview[
5].
7380 [
4]
&lt;URL:
<a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie/Features
">https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie/Features
</a
> &gt;
7381 [
5]
&lt;URL:
<a href=
"http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/
">http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/
</a
> &gt;
7386 To download the multiarch netinstall CD release (
624 MiB) you can use
7388 *
<a href=
"ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-
8.0+edu0~alpha0-CD.iso
">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-
8.0+edu0~alpha0-CD.iso
</a
>
7389 *
<a href=
"http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-
8.0+edu0~alpha0-CD.iso
">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-
8.0+edu0~alpha0-CD.iso
</a
>
7390 * rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-
8.0+edu0~alpha0-CD.iso .
7392 The SHA1SUM of this image is:
361188818e036ce67280a572f757de82ebfeb095
7394 New features for Debian Edu
8.0+edu0~alpha0 Codename Jessie released
2014-
10-
27
7395 ===============================================================================
7398 Installation changes
7399 --------------------
7401 * PXE installation now installs firmware automatically for the hardware present.
7406 Everything which is new in Debian Jessie
8.0, eg:
7408 * Linux kernel
3.16.x
7409 * Desktop environments KDE
"Plasma
" 4.11.12, GNOME
3.14, Xfce
4.10,
7410 LXDE
0.5.6 and MATE
1.8 (KDE
"Plasma
" is installed by default; to
7411 choose one of the others see manual.)
7412 * the browsers Iceweasel
31 ESR and Chromium
38
7413 * !LibreOffice
4.3.3
7416 * CUPS print system
1.7.5
7417 * new boot framework: systemd
7418 * Educational toolbox GCompris
14.07
7419 * Music creator Rosegarden
14.02
7420 * Image editor Gimp
2.8.14
7421 * Virtual stargazer Stellarium
0.13.0
7424 * New version of debian-installer from Debian Jessie.
7425 * Debian Jessie includes about
42000 packages available for
7427 * More information about Debian Jessie
8.0 is provided in the release
7428 notes[
6] and the installation manual[
7].
7430 [
6]
&lt;URL:
<a href=
"http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/releasenotes
">http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/releasenotes
</a
> &gt;
7431 [
7]
&lt;URL:
<a href=
"http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/installmanual
">http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/installmanual
</a
> &gt;
7436 * Inserting incorrect DNS information in Gosa will no longer break
7437 DNS completely, but instead stop DNS updates until the incorrect
7438 information is corrected (Debian bug #
710362)
7441 Documentation and translation updates
7442 -------------------------------------
7444 * The Debian Edu Jessie Manual is fully translated to German, French,
7445 Italian, Danish and Dutch. Partly translated versions exist for
7446 Norwegian Bokmal and Spanish.
7451 * Due to new Squid settings, powering off or rebooting the main
7452 server takes more time.
7453 * To manage printers localhost:
631 has to be used, currently www:
631
7456 Regressions / known problems
7457 ----------------------------
7459 * Installing LTSP chroot fails with a bug related to eatmydata about
7460 exim4-config failing to run its postinst (see Debian bug #
765694
7461 and Debian bug #
762103).
7462 * Munin collection is not properly configured on clients (Debian bug
7463 #
764594). The fix is available in a newer version of munin-node.
7464 * PXE setup for Main Server and Thin Client Server setup does not
7465 work when installing on a machine without direct Internet access.
7466 Will be fixed when Debian bug #
766960 is fixed in Jessie.
7468 See the status page[
8] for the complete list.
7470 [
8]
&lt;URL:
<a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie
">https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie
</a
> &gt;
7475 &lt;URL:
<a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs
">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs
</a
> &gt;
7480 The Debian Project was founded in
1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly
7481 free community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of
7482 the largest and most influential open source projects. Thousands of
7483 volunteers from all over the world work together to create and
7484 maintain Debian software. Available in
70 languages, and supporting a
7485 huge range of computer types, Debian calls itself the universal
7489 For further information, please visit the Debian web pages[
9] or send
7490 mail to press@debian.org.
7492 [
9]
&lt;URL:
<a href=
"http://www.debian.org/
">http://www.debian.org/
</a
> &gt;
7498 <title>I spent last weekend recording MakerCon Nordic
</title>
7499 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/I_spent_last_weekend_recording_MakerCon_Nordic.html
</link>
7500 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/I_spent_last_weekend_recording_MakerCon_Nordic.html
</guid>
7501 <pubDate>Thu,
23 Oct
2014 23:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
7502 <description><p
>I spent last weekend at
<a href=
"http://www.makercon.no/
">Makercon
7503 Nordic
</a
>, a great conference and workshop for makers in Norway and
7504 the surrounding countries. I had volunteered on behalf of the
7505 Norwegian Unix Users Group (NUUG) to video record the talks, and we
7506 had a great and exhausting time recording the entire day, two days in
7507 a row. There were only two of us, Hans-Petter and me, and we used the
7508 regular video equipment for NUUG, with a
7509 <a href=
"http://dvswitch.alioth.debian.org/wiki/
">dvswitch
</a
>, a
7510 camera and a VGA to DV convert box, and mixed video and slides
7513 <p
>Hans-Petter did the post-processing, consisting of uploading the
7514 around
180 GiB of raw video to Youtube, and the result is
7515 <a href=
"https://www.youtube.com/user/MakerConNordic/
">now becoming
7516 public
</a
> on the MakerConNordic account. The videos have the license
7517 NUUG always use on our recordings, which is
7518 <a href=
"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/
3.0/no/
">Creative
7519 Commons Navngivelse-Del på samme vilkår
3.0 Norge
</a
>. Many great
7520 talks available. Check it out! :)
</p
>
7525 <title>listadmin, the quick way to moderate mailman lists - nice free software
</title>
7526 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/listadmin__the_quick_way_to_moderate_mailman_lists___nice_free_software.html
</link>
7527 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/listadmin__the_quick_way_to_moderate_mailman_lists___nice_free_software.html
</guid>
7528 <pubDate>Wed,
22 Oct
2014 20:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
7529 <description><p
>If you ever had to moderate a mailman list, like the ones on
7530 alioth.debian.org, you know the web interface is fairly slow to
7531 operate. First you visit one web page, enter the moderation password
7532 and get a new page shown with a list of all the messages to moderate
7533 and various options for each email address. This take a while for
7534 every list you moderate, and you need to do it regularly to do a good
7535 job as a list moderator. But there is a quick alternative,
7536 <a href=
"http://heim.ifi.uio.no/kjetilho/hacks/#listadmin
">the
7537 listadmin program
</a
>. It allow you to check lists for new messages
7538 to moderate in a fraction of a second. Here is a test run on two
7539 lists I recently took over:
</p
>
7541 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
7542 % time listadmin xiph
7543 fetching data for pkg-xiph-commits@lists.alioth.debian.org ... nothing in queue
7544 fetching data for pkg-xiph-maint@lists.alioth.debian.org ... nothing in queue
7550 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
7552 <p
>In
1.7 seconds I had checked two mailing lists and confirmed that
7553 there are no message in the moderation queue. Every morning I
7554 currently moderate
68 mailman lists, and it normally take around two
7555 minutes. When I took over the two pkg-xiph lists above a few days
7556 ago, there were
400 emails waiting in the moderator queue. It took me
7557 less than
15 minutes to process them all using the listadmin
7560 <p
>If you install
7561 <a href=
"https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/listadmin
">the listadmin
7562 package
</a
> from Debian and create a file
<tt
>~/.listadmin.ini
</tt
>
7563 with content like this, the moderation task is a breeze:
</p
>
7565 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
7566 username username@example.org
7569 discard_if_reason
"Posting restricted to members only. Remove us from your mail list.
"
7572 adminurl https://{domain}/mailman/admindb/{list}
7573 mailman-list@lists.example.com
7576 other-list@otherserver.example.org
7577 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
7579 <p
>There are other options to set as well. Check the manual page to
7580 learn the details.
</p
>
7582 <p
>If you are forced to moderate lists on a mailman installation where
7583 the SSL certificate is self signed or not properly signed by a
7584 generally accepted signing authority, you can set a environment
7585 variable when calling listadmin to disable SSL verification:
</p
>
7587 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
7588 PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=
0 listadmin
7589 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
7591 <p
>If you want to moderate a subset of the lists you take care of, you
7592 can provide an argument to the listadmin script like I do in the
7593 initial screen dump (the xiph argument). Using an argument, only
7594 lists matching the argument string will be processed. This make it
7595 quick to accept messages if you notice the moderation request in your
7598 <p
>Without the listadmin program, I would never be the moderator of
68
7599 mailing lists, as I simply do not have time to spend on that if the
7600 process was any slower. The listadmin program have saved me hours of
7601 time I could spend elsewhere over the years. It truly is nice free
7604 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
7605 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
7606 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
7608 <p
>Update
2014-
10-
27: Added missing
'username
' statement in
7609 configuration example. Also, I
've been told that the
7610 PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=
0 setting do not work for everyone. Not
7616 <title>Debian Jessie, PXE and automatic firmware installation
</title>
7617 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Jessie__PXE_and_automatic_firmware_installation.html
</link>
7618 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Jessie__PXE_and_automatic_firmware_installation.html
</guid>
7619 <pubDate>Fri,
17 Oct
2014 14:
10:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
7620 <description><p
>When PXE installing laptops with Debian, I often run into the
7621 problem that the WiFi card require some firmware to work properly.
7622 And it has been a pain to fix this using preseeding in Debian.
7623 Normally something more is needed. But thanks to
7624 <a href=
"https://packages.qa.debian.org/i/isenkram.html
">my isenkram
7625 package
</a
> and its recent tasksel extension, it has now become easy
7626 to do this using simple preseeding.
</p
>
7628 <p
>The isenkram-cli package provide tasksel tasks which will install
7629 firmware for the hardware found in the machine (actually, requested by
7630 the kernel modules for the hardware). (It can also install user space
7631 programs supporting the hardware detected, but that is not the focus
7632 of this story.)
</p
>
7634 <p
>To get this working in the default installation, two preeseding
7635 values are needed. First, the isenkram-cli package must be installed
7636 into the target chroot (aka the hard drive) before tasksel is executed
7637 in the pkgsel step of the debian-installer system. This is done by
7638 preseeding the base-installer/includes debconf value to include the
7639 isenkram-cli package. The package name is next passed to debootstrap
7640 for installation. With the isenkram-cli package in place, tasksel
7641 will automatically use the isenkram tasks to detect hardware specific
7642 packages for the machine being installed and install them, because
7643 isenkram-cli contain tasksel tasks.
</p
>
7645 <p
>Second, one need to enable the non-free APT repository, because
7646 most firmware unfortunately is non-free. This is done by preseeding
7647 the apt-mirror-setup step. This is unfortunate, but for a lot of
7648 hardware it is the only option in Debian.
</p
>
7650 <p
>The end result is two lines needed in your preseeding file to get
7651 firmware installed automatically by the installer:
</p
>
7653 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
7654 base-installer base-installer/includes string isenkram-cli
7655 apt-mirror-setup apt-setup/non-free boolean true
7656 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
7658 <p
>The current version of isenkram-cli in testing/jessie will install
7659 both firmware and user space packages when using this method. It also
7660 do not work well, so use version
0.15 or later. Installing both
7661 firmware and user space packages might give you a bit more than you
7662 want, so I decided to split the tasksel task in two, one for firmware
7663 and one for user space programs. The firmware task is enabled by
7664 default, while the one for user space programs is not. This split is
7665 implemented in the package currently in unstable.
</p
>
7667 <p
>If you decide to give this a go, please let me know (via email) how
7668 this recipe work for you. :)
</p
>
7670 <p
>So, I bet you are wondering, how can this work. First and
7671 foremost, it work because tasksel is modular, and driven by whatever
7672 files it find in /usr/lib/tasksel/ and /usr/share/tasksel/. So the
7673 isenkram-cli package place two files for tasksel to find. First there
7674 is the task description file (/usr/share/tasksel/descs/isenkram.desc):
</p
>
7676 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
7677 Task: isenkram-packages
7679 Description: Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)
7680 Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific packages are
7682 Test-new-install: show show
7684 Packages: for-current-hardware
7686 Task: isenkram-firmware
7688 Description: Hardware specific firmware packages (autodetected by isenkram)
7689 Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific firmware
7690 packages are proposed.
7691 Test-new-install: mark show
7693 Packages: for-current-hardware-firmware
7694 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
7696 <p
>The key parts are Test-new-install which indicate how the task
7697 should be handled and the Packages line referencing to a script in
7698 /usr/lib/tasksel/packages/. The scripts use other scripts to get a
7699 list of packages to install. The for-current-hardware-firmware script
7700 look like this to list relevant firmware for the machine:
7702 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
7705 PATH=/usr/sbin:$PATH
7707 isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
7708 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
7710 <p
>With those two pieces in place, the firmware is installed by
7711 tasksel during the normal d-i run. :)
</p
>
7713 <p
>If you want to test what tasksel will install when isenkram-cli is
7714 installed, run
<tt
>DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical tasksel --test
7715 --new-install
</tt
> to get the list of packages that tasksel would
7718 <p
><a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/
">Debian Edu
</a
> will be
7719 pilots in testing this feature, as isenkram is used there now to
7720 install firmware, replacing the earlier scripts.
</p
>
7725 <title>Ubuntu used to show the bread prizes at ICA Storo
</title>
7726 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ubuntu_used_to_show_the_bread_prizes_at_ICA_Storo.html
</link>
7727 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ubuntu_used_to_show_the_bread_prizes_at_ICA_Storo.html
</guid>
7728 <pubDate>Sat,
4 Oct
2014 15:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
7729 <description><p
>Today I came across an unexpected Ubuntu boot screen. Above the
7730 bread shelf on the ICA shop at Storo in Oslo, the grub menu of Ubuntu
7731 with Linux kernel
3.2.0-
23 (ie probably version
12.04 LTS) was stuck
7732 on a screen normally showing the bread types and prizes:
</p
>
7734 <p align=
"center
"><img width=
"70%
" src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2014-
10-
04-ubuntu-ica-storo-crop.jpeg
"></p
>
7736 <p
>If it had booted as it was supposed to, I would never had known
7737 about this hidden Linux installation. It is interesting what
7738 <a href=
"http://revealingerrors.com/
">errors can reveal
</a
>.
</p
>
7743 <title>New lsdvd release version
0.17 is ready
</title>
7744 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_lsdvd_release_version_0_17_is_ready.html
</link>
7745 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_lsdvd_release_version_0_17_is_ready.html
</guid>
7746 <pubDate>Sat,
4 Oct
2014 08:
40:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
7747 <description><p
>The
<a href=
"https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/
">lsdvd project
</a
>
7748 got a new set of developers a few weeks ago, after the original
7749 developer decided to step down and pass the project to fresh blood.
7750 This project is now maintained by Petter Reinholdtsen and Steve
7753 <p
>I just wrapped up
7754 <a href=
"https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/mailman/message/
32896061/
">a
7755 new lsdvd release
</a
>, available in git or from
7756 <a href=
"https://sourceforge.net/projects/lsdvd/files/lsdvd/
">the
7757 download page
</a
>. This is the changelog dated
2014-
10-
03 for version
7762 <li
>Ignore
'phantom
' audio, subtitle tracks
</li
>
7763 <li
>Check for garbage in the program chains, which indicate that a track is
7764 non-existant, to work around additional copy protection
</li
>
7765 <li
>Fix displaying content type for audio tracks, subtitles
</li
>
7766 <li
>Fix pallete display of first entry
</li
>
7767 <li
>Fix include orders
</li
>
7768 <li
>Ignore read errors in titles that would not be displayed anyway
</li
>
7769 <li
>Fix the chapter count
</li
>
7770 <li
>Make sure the array size and the array limit used when initialising
7771 the palette size is the same.
</li
>
7772 <li
>Fix array printing.
</li
>
7773 <li
>Correct subsecond calculations.
</li
>
7774 <li
>Add sector information to the output format.
</li
>
7775 <li
>Clean up code to be closer to ANSI C and compile without warnings
7776 with more GCC compiler warnings.
</li
>
7780 <p
>This change bring together patches for lsdvd in use in various
7781 Linux and Unix distributions, as well as patches submitted to the
7782 project the last nine years. Please check it out. :)
</p
>
7787 <title>How to test Debian Edu Jessie despite some fatal problems with the installer
</title>
7788 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_test_Debian_Edu_Jessie_despite_some_fatal_problems_with_the_installer.html
</link>
7789 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_test_Debian_Edu_Jessie_despite_some_fatal_problems_with_the_installer.html
</guid>
7790 <pubDate>Fri,
26 Sep
2014 12:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
7791 <description><p
>The
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
7792 project
</a
> provide a Linux solution for schools, including a
7793 powerful desktop with education software, a central server providing
7794 web pages, user database, user home directories, central login and PXE
7795 boot of both clients without disk and the installation to install Debian
7796 Edu on machines with disk (and a few other services perhaps to small
7797 to mention here). We in the Debian Edu team are currently working on
7798 the Jessie based version, trying to get everything in shape before the
7799 freeze, to avoid having to maintain our own package repository in the
7801 <a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie
">current
7802 status
</a
> can be seen on the Debian wiki, and there is still heaps of
7803 work left. Some fatal problems block testing, breaking the installer,
7804 but it is possible to work around these to get anyway. Here is a
7805 recipe on how to get the installation limping along.
</p
>
7807 <p
>First, download the test ISO via
7808 <a href=
"ftp://ftp.skolelinux.no/cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-
1.iso
">ftp
</a
>,
7809 <a href=
"http://ftp.skolelinux.no/cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-
1.iso
">http
</a
>
7811 ftp.skolelinux.org::cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-
1.iso).
7812 The ISO build was broken on Tuesday, so we do not get a new ISO every
7813 12 hours or so, but thankfully the ISO we already got we are able to
7814 install with some tweaking.
</p
>
7816 <p
>When you get to the Debian Edu profile question, go to tty2
7817 (use Alt-Ctrl-F2), run
</p
>
7819 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
7820 nano /usr/bin/edu-eatmydata-install
7821 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
7823 <p
>and add
'exit
0' as the second line, disabling the eatmydata
7824 optimization. Return to the installation, select the profile you want
7825 and continue. Without this change, exim4-config will fail to install
7826 due to a known bug in eatmydata.
</p
>
7828 <p
>When you get the grub question at the end, answer /dev/sda (or if
7829 this do not work, figure out what your correct value would be. All my
7830 test machines need /dev/sda, so I have no advice if it do not fit
7831 your need.
</p
>
7833 <p
>If you installed a profile including a graphical desktop, log in as
7834 root after the initial boot from hard drive, and install the
7835 education-desktop-XXX metapackage. XXX can be kde, gnome, lxde, xfce
7836 or mate. If you want several desktop options, install more than one
7837 metapackage. Once this is done, reboot and you should have a working
7838 graphical login screen. This workaround should no longer be needed
7839 once the education-tasks package version
1.801 enter testing in two
7842 <p
>I believe the ISO build will start working on two days when the new
7843 tasksel package enter testing and Steve McIntyre get a chance to
7844 update the debian-cd git repository. The eatmydata, grub and desktop
7845 issues are already fixed in unstable and testing, and should show up
7846 on the ISO as soon as the ISO build start working again. Well the
7847 eatmydata optimization is really just disabled. The proper fix
7848 require an upload by the eatmydata maintainer applying the patch
7849 provided in bug
<a href=
"https://bugs.debian.org/
702711">#
702711</a
>.
7850 The rest have proper fixes in unstable.
</p
>
7852 <p
>I hope this get you going with the installation testing, as we are
7853 quickly running out of time trying to get our Jessie based
7854 installation ready before the distribution freeze in a month.
</p
>
7859 <title>Suddenly I am the new upstream of the lsdvd command line tool
</title>
7860 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Suddenly_I_am_the_new_upstream_of_the_lsdvd_command_line_tool.html
</link>
7861 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Suddenly_I_am_the_new_upstream_of_the_lsdvd_command_line_tool.html
</guid>
7862 <pubDate>Thu,
25 Sep
2014 11:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
7863 <description><p
>I use the
<a href=
"https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/
">lsdvd tool
</a
>
7864 to handle my fairly large DVD collection. It is a nice command line
7865 tool to get details about a DVD, like title, tracks, track length,
7866 etc, in XML, Perl or human readable format. But lsdvd have not seen
7867 any new development since
2006 and had a few irritating bugs affecting
7868 its use with some DVDs. Upstream seemed to be dead, and in January I
7869 sent a small probe asking for a version control repository for the
7870 project, without any reply. But I use it regularly and would like to
7871 get
<a href=
"https://packages.qa.debian.org/lsdvd
">an updated version
7872 into Debian
</a
>. So two weeks ago I tried harder to get in touch with
7873 the project admin, and after getting a reply from him explaining that
7874 he was no longer interested in the project, I asked if I could take
7875 over. And yesterday, I became project admin.
</p
>
7877 <p
>I
've been in touch with a Gentoo developer and the Debian
7878 maintainer interested in joining forces to maintain the upstream
7879 project, and I hope we can get a new release out fairly quickly,
7880 collecting the patches spread around on the internet into on place.
7881 I
've added the relevant Debian patches to the freshly created git
7882 repository, and expect the Gentoo patches to make it too. If you got
7883 a DVD collection and care about command line tools, check out
7884 <a href=
"https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/git/ci/master/tree/
">the git source
</a
> and join
7885 <a href=
"https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/mailman/
">the project mailing
7886 list
</a
>. :)
</p
>
7891 <title>Speeding up the Debian installer using eatmydata and dpkg-divert
</title>
7892 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Speeding_up_the_Debian_installer_using_eatmydata_and_dpkg_divert.html
</link>
7893 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Speeding_up_the_Debian_installer_using_eatmydata_and_dpkg_divert.html
</guid>
7894 <pubDate>Tue,
16 Sep
2014 14:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
7895 <description><p
>The
<a href=
"https://www.debian.org/
">Debian
</a
> installer could be
7896 a lot quicker. When we install more than
2000 packages in
7897 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Skolelinux / Debian Edu
</a
> using
7898 tasksel in the installer, unpacking the binary packages take forever.
7899 A part of the slow I/O issue was discussed in
7900 <a href=
"https://bugs.debian.org/
613428">bug #
613428</a
> about too
7901 much file system sync-ing done by dpkg, which is the package
7902 responsible for unpacking the binary packages. Other parts (like code
7903 executed by postinst scripts) might also sync to disk during
7904 installation. All this sync-ing to disk do not really make sense to
7905 me. If the machine crash half-way through, I start over, I do not try
7906 to salvage the half installed system. So the failure sync-ing is
7907 supposed to protect against, hardware or system crash, is not really
7908 relevant while the installer is running.
</p
>
7910 <p
>A few days ago, I thought of a way to get rid of all the file
7911 system sync()-ing in a fairly non-intrusive way, without the need to
7912 change the code in several packages. The idea is not new, but I have
7913 not heard anyone propose the approach using dpkg-divert before. It
7914 depend on the small and clever package
7915 <a href=
"https://packages.qa.debian.org/eatmydata
">eatmydata
</a
>, which
7916 uses LD_PRELOAD to replace the system functions for syncing data to
7917 disk with functions doing nothing, thus allowing programs to live
7918 dangerous while speeding up disk I/O significantly. Instead of
7919 modifying the implementation of dpkg, apt and tasksel (which are the
7920 packages responsible for selecting, fetching and installing packages),
7921 it occurred to me that we could just divert the programs away, replace
7922 them with a simple shell wrapper calling
7923 "eatmydata
&nbsp;$program
&nbsp;$@
", to get the same effect.
7924 Two days ago I decided to test the idea, and wrapped up a simple
7925 implementation for the Debian Edu udeb.
</p
>
7927 <p
>The effect was stunning. In my first test it reduced the running
7928 time of the pkgsel step (installing tasks) from
64 to less than
44
7929 minutes (
20 minutes shaved off the installation) on an old Dell
7930 Latitude D505 machine. I am not quite sure what the optimised time
7931 would have been, as I messed up the testing a bit, causing the debconf
7932 priority to get low enough for two questions to pop up during
7933 installation. As soon as I saw the questions I moved the installation
7934 along, but do not know how long the question were holding up the
7935 installation. I did some more measurements using Debian Edu Jessie,
7936 and got these results. The time measured is the time stamp in
7937 /var/log/syslog between the
"pkgsel: starting tasksel
" and the
7938 "pkgsel: finishing up
" lines, if you want to do the same measurement
7939 yourself. In Debian Edu, the tasksel dialog do not show up, and the
7940 timing thus do not depend on how quickly the user handle the tasksel
7943 <p
><table
>
7946 <th
>Machine/setup
</th
>
7947 <th
>Original tasksel
</th
>
7948 <th
>Optimised tasksel
</th
>
7949 <th
>Reduction
</th
>
7953 <td
>Latitude D505 Main+LTSP LXDE
</td
>
7954 <td
>64 min (
07:
46-
08:
50)
</td
>
7955 <td
><44 min (
11:
27-
12:
11)
</td
>
7956 <td
>>20 min
18%
</td
>
7960 <td
>Latitude D505 Roaming LXDE
</td
>
7961 <td
>57 min (
08:
48-
09:
45)
</td
>
7962 <td
>34 min (
07:
43-
08:
17)
</td
>
7963 <td
>23 min
40%
</td
>
7967 <td
>Latitude D505 Minimal
</td
>
7968 <td
>22 min (
10:
37-
10:
59)
</td
>
7969 <td
>11 min (
11:
16-
11:
27)
</td
>
7970 <td
>11 min
50%
</td
>
7974 <td
>Thinkpad X200 Minimal
</td
>
7975 <td
>6 min (
08:
19-
08:
25)
</td
>
7976 <td
>4 min (
08:
04-
08:
08)
</td
>
7977 <td
>2 min
33%
</td
>
7981 <td
>Thinkpad X200 Roaming KDE
</td
>
7982 <td
>19 min (
09:
21-
09:
40)
</td
>
7983 <td
>15 min (
10:
25-
10:
40)
</td
>
7984 <td
>4 min
21%
</td
>
7987 </table
></p
>
7989 <p
>The test is done using a netinst ISO on a USB stick, so some of the
7990 time is spent downloading packages. The connection to the Internet
7991 was
100Mbit/s during testing, so downloading should not be a
7992 significant factor in the measurement. Download typically took a few
7993 seconds to a few minutes, depending on the amount of packages being
7994 installed.
</p
>
7996 <p
>The speedup is implemented by using two hooks in
7997 <a href=
"https://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/
">Debian
7998 Installer
</a
>, the pre-pkgsel.d hook to set up the diverts, and the
7999 finish-install.d hook to remove the divert at the end of the
8000 installation. I picked the pre-pkgsel.d hook instead of the
8001 post-base-installer.d hook because I test using an ISO without the
8002 eatmydata package included, and the post-base-installer.d hook in
8003 Debian Edu can only operate on packages included in the ISO. The
8004 negative effect of this is that I am unable to activate this
8005 optimization for the kernel installation step in d-i. If the code is
8006 moved to the post-base-installer.d hook, the speedup would be larger
8007 for the entire installation.
</p
>
8009 <p
>I
've implemented this in the
8010 <a href=
"https://packages.qa.debian.org/debian-edu-install
">debian-edu-install
</a
>
8011 git repository, and plan to provide the optimization as part of the
8012 Debian Edu installation. If you want to test this yourself, you can
8013 create two files in the installer (or in an udeb). One shell script
8014 need do go into /usr/lib/pre-pkgsel.d/, with content like this:
</p
>
8016 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
8019 . /usr/share/debconf/confmodule
8021 logger -t my-pkgsel
"info: $*
"
8024 logger -t my-pkgsel
"error: $*
"
8026 override_install() {
8027 apt-install eatmydata || true
8028 if [ -x /target/usr/bin/eatmydata ] ; then
8029 for bin in dpkg apt-get aptitude tasksel ; do
8031 # Test that the file exist and have not been diverted already.
8032 if [ -f /target$file ] ; then
8033 info
"diverting $file using eatmydata
"
8034 printf
"#!/bin/sh\neatmydata $bin.distrib \
"\$@\
"\n
" \
8035 > /target$file.edu
8036 chmod
755 /target$file.edu
8037 in-target dpkg-divert --package debian-edu-config \
8038 --rename --quiet --add $file
8039 ln -sf ./$bin.edu /target$file
8041 error
"unable to divert $file, as it is missing.
"
8045 error
"unable to find /usr/bin/eatmydata after installing the eatmydata pacage
"
8050 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
8052 <p
>To clean up, another shell script should go into
8053 /usr/lib/finish-install.d/ with code like this:
8055 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
8057 . /usr/share/debconf/confmodule
8059 logger -t my-finish-install
"error: $@
"
8061 remove_install_override() {
8062 for bin in dpkg apt-get aptitude tasksel ; do
8064 if [ -x /target$file.edu ] ; then
8066 in-target dpkg-divert --package debian-edu-config \
8067 --rename --quiet --remove $file
8070 error
"Missing divert for $file.
"
8073 sync # Flush file buffers before continuing
8076 remove_install_override
8077 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
8079 <p
>In Debian Edu, I placed both code fragments in a separate script
8080 edu-eatmydata-install and call it from the pre-pkgsel.d and
8081 finish-install.d scripts.
</p
>
8083 <p
>By now you might ask if this change should get into the normal
8084 Debian installer too? I suspect it should, but am not sure the
8085 current debian-installer coordinators find it useful enough. It also
8086 depend on the side effects of the change. I
'm not aware of any, but I
8087 guess we will see if the change is safe after some more testing.
8088 Perhaps there is some package in Debian depending on sync() and
8089 fsync() having effect? Perhaps it should go into its own udeb, to
8090 allow those of us wanting to enable it to do so without affecting
8093 <p
>Update
2014-
09-
24: Since a few days ago, enabling this optimization
8094 will break installation of all programs using gnutls because of
8095 <a href=
"https://bugs.debian.org/
702711">bug #
702711</a
>. An updated
8096 eatmydata package in Debian will solve it.
</p
>
8098 <p
>Update
2014-
10-
17: The bug mentioned above is fixed in testing and
8099 the optimization work again. And I have discovered that the
8100 dpkg-divert trick is not really needed and implemented a slightly
8101 simpler approach as part of the debian-edu-install package. See
8102 tools/edu-eatmydata-install in the source package.
</p
>
8104 <p
>Update
2014-
11-
11: Unfortunately, a new
8105 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
765738">bug #
765738</a
> in eatmydata only
8106 triggering on i386 made it into testing, and broke this installation
8107 optimization again. If
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
768893">unblock
8108 request
768893</a
> is accepted, it should be working again.
</p
>
8113 <title>Good bye subkeys.pgp.net, welcome pool.sks-keyservers.net
</title>
8114 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Good_bye_subkeys_pgp_net__welcome_pool_sks_keyservers_net.html
</link>
8115 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Good_bye_subkeys_pgp_net__welcome_pool_sks_keyservers_net.html
</guid>
8116 <pubDate>Wed,
10 Sep
2014 13:
10:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
8117 <description><p
>Yesterday, I had the pleasure of attending a talk with the
8118 <a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/
">Norwegian Unix User Group
</a
> about
8119 <a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/
20140909-sks-keyservers/
">the
8120 OpenPGP keyserver pool sks-keyservers.net
</a
>, and was very happy to
8121 learn that there is a large set of publicly available key servers to
8122 use when looking for peoples public key. So far I have used
8123 subkeys.pgp.net, and some times wwwkeys.nl.pgp.net when the former
8124 were misbehaving, but those days are ended. The servers I have used
8125 up until yesterday have been slow and some times unavailable. I hope
8126 those problems are gone now.
</p
>
8128 <p
>Behind the round robin DNS entry of the
8129 <a href=
"https://sks-keyservers.net/
">sks-keyservers.net
</a
> service
8130 there is a pool of more than
100 keyservers which are checked every
8131 day to ensure they are well connected and up to date. It must be
8132 better than what I have used so far. :)
</p
>
8134 <p
>Yesterdays speaker told me that the service is the default
8135 keyserver provided by the default configuration in GnuPG, but this do
8136 not seem to be used in Debian. Perhaps it should?
</p
>
8138 <p
>Anyway, I
've updated my ~/.gnupg/options file to now include this
8141 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
8142 keyserver pool.sks-keyservers.net
8143 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
8145 <p
>With GnuPG version
2 one can also locate the keyserver using SRV
8146 entries in DNS. Just for fun, I did just that at work, so now every
8147 user of GnuPG at the University of Oslo should find a OpenGPG
8148 keyserver automatically should their need it:
</p
>
8150 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
8151 % host -t srv _pgpkey-http._tcp.uio.no
8152 _pgpkey-http._tcp.uio.no has SRV record
0 100 11371 pool.sks-keyservers.net.
8154 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
8156 <p
>Now if only
8157 <a href=
"http://ietfreport.isoc.org/idref/draft-shaw-openpgp-hkp/
">the
8158 HKP lookup protocol
</a
> supported finding signature paths, I would be
8159 very happy. It can look up a given key or search for a user ID, but I
8160 normally do not want that, but to find a trust path from my key to
8161 another key. Given a user ID or key ID, I would like to find (and
8162 download) the keys representing a signature path from my key to the
8163 key in question, to be able to get a trust path between the two keys.
8164 This is as far as I can tell not possible today. Perhaps something
8165 for a future version of the protocol?
</p
>
8170 <title>Do you need an agreement with MPEG-LA to publish and broadcast H
.264 video in Norway?
</title>
8171 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Do_you_need_an_agreement_with_MPEG_LA_to_publish_and_broadcast_H_264_video_in_Norway_.html
</link>
8172 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Do_you_need_an_agreement_with_MPEG_LA_to_publish_and_broadcast_H_264_video_in_Norway_.html
</guid>
8173 <pubDate>Mon,
25 Aug
2014 22:
10:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
8174 <description><p
>Two years later, I am still not sure if it is legal here in Norway
8175 to use or publish a video in H
.264 or MPEG4 format edited by the
8176 commercially licensed video editors, without limiting the use to
8177 create
"personal
" or
"non-commercial
" videos or get a license
8178 agreement with
<a href=
"http://www.mpegla.com
">MPEG LA
</a
>. If one
8179 want to publish and broadcast video in a non-personal or commercial
8180 setting, it might be that those tools can not be used, or that video
8181 format can not be used, without breaking their copyright license. I
8183 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Trenger_en_avtale_med_MPEG_LA_for___publisere_og_kringkaste_H_264_video_.html
">Back
8184 then
</a
>, I found that the copyright license terms for Adobe Premiere
8185 and Apple Final Cut Pro both specified that one could not use the
8186 program to produce anything else without a patent license from MPEG
8187 LA. The issue is not limited to those two products, though. Other
8188 much used products like those from Avid and Sorenson Media have terms
8189 of use are similar to those from Adobe and Apple. The complicating
8190 factor making me unsure if those terms have effect in Norway or not is
8191 that the patents in question are not valid in Norway, but copyright
8192 licenses are.
</p
>
8194 <p
>These are the terms for Avid Artist Suite, according to their
8195 <a href=
"http://www.avid.com/US/about-avid/legal-notices/legal-enduserlicense2
">published
8197 <a href=
"http://www.avid.com/static/resources/common/documents/corporate/LICENSE.pdf
">license
8198 text
</a
> (converted to lower case text for easier reading):
</p
>
8200 <p
><blockquote
>
8201 <p
>18.2. MPEG-
4. MPEG-
4 technology may be included with the
8202 software. MPEG LA, L.L.C. requires this notice:
</p
>
8204 <p
>This product is licensed under the MPEG-
4 visual patent portfolio
8205 license for the personal and non-commercial use of a consumer for (i)
8206 encoding video in compliance with the MPEG-
4 visual standard (“MPEG-
4
8207 video”) and/or (ii) decoding MPEG-
4 video that was encoded by a
8208 consumer engaged in a personal and non-commercial activity and/or was
8209 obtained from a video provider licensed by MPEG LA to provide MPEG-
4
8210 video. No license is granted or shall be implied for any other
8211 use. Additional information including that relating to promotional,
8212 internal and commercial uses and licensing may be obtained from MPEG
8213 LA, LLC. See http://www.mpegla.com. This product is licensed under
8214 the MPEG-
4 systems patent portfolio license for encoding in compliance
8215 with the MPEG-
4 systems standard, except that an additional license
8216 and payment of royalties are necessary for encoding in connection with
8217 (i) data stored or replicated in physical media which is paid for on a
8218 title by title basis and/or (ii) data which is paid for on a title by
8219 title basis and is transmitted to an end user for permanent storage
8220 and/or use, such additional license may be obtained from MPEG LA,
8221 LLC. See http://www.mpegla.com for additional details.
</p
>
8223 <p
>18.3. H
.264/AVC. H
.264/AVC technology may be included with the
8224 software. MPEG LA, L.L.C. requires this notice:
</p
>
8226 <p
>This product is licensed under the AVC patent portfolio license for
8227 the personal use of a consumer or other uses in which it does not
8228 receive remuneration to (i) encode video in compliance with the AVC
8229 standard (“AVC video”) and/or (ii) decode AVC video that was encoded
8230 by a consumer engaged in a personal activity and/or was obtained from
8231 a video provider licensed to provide AVC video. No license is granted
8232 or shall be implied for any other use. Additional information may be
8233 obtained from MPEG LA, L.L.C. See http://www.mpegla.com.
</p
>
8234 </blockquote
></p
>
8236 <p
>Note the requirement that the videos created can only be used for
8237 personal or non-commercial purposes.
</p
>
8239 <p
>The Sorenson Media software have
8240 <a href=
"http://www.sorensonmedia.com/terms/
">similar terms
</a
>:
</p
>
8242 <p
><blockquote
>
8244 <p
>With respect to a license from Sorenson pertaining to MPEG-
4 Video
8245 Decoders and/or Encoders: Any such product is licensed under the
8246 MPEG-
4 visual patent portfolio license for the personal and
8247 non-commercial use of a consumer for (i) encoding video in compliance
8248 with the MPEG-
4 visual standard (“MPEG-
4 video”) and/or (ii) decoding
8249 MPEG-
4 video that was encoded by a consumer engaged in a personal and
8250 non-commercial activity and/or was obtained from a video provider
8251 licensed by MPEG LA to provide MPEG-
4 video. No license is granted or
8252 shall be implied for any other use. Additional information including
8253 that relating to promotional, internal and commercial uses and
8254 licensing may be obtained from MPEG LA, LLC. See
8255 http://www.mpegla.com.
</p
>
8257 <p
>With respect to a license from Sorenson pertaining to MPEG-
4
8258 Consumer Recorded Data Encoder, MPEG-
4 Systems Internet Data Encoder,
8259 MPEG-
4 Mobile Data Encoder, and/or MPEG-
4 Unique Use Encoder: Any such
8260 product is licensed under the MPEG-
4 systems patent portfolio license
8261 for encoding in compliance with the MPEG-
4 systems standard, except
8262 that an additional license and payment of royalties are necessary for
8263 encoding in connection with (i) data stored or replicated in physical
8264 media which is paid for on a title by title basis and/or (ii) data
8265 which is paid for on a title by title basis and is transmitted to an
8266 end user for permanent storage and/or use. Such additional license may
8267 be obtained from MPEG LA, LLC. See http://www.mpegla.com for
8268 additional details.
</p
>
8270 </blockquote
></p
>
8272 <p
>Some free software like
8273 <a href=
"https://handbrake.fr/
">Handbrake
</A
> and
8274 <a href=
"http://ffmpeg.org/
">FFMPEG
</a
> uses GPL/LGPL licenses and do
8275 not have any such terms included, so for those, there is no
8276 requirement to limit the use to personal and non-commercial.
</p
>
8281 <title>Debian Edu interview: Bernd Zeitzen
</title>
8282 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Bernd_Zeitzen.html
</link>
8283 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Bernd_Zeitzen.html
</guid>
8284 <pubDate>Thu,
31 Jul
2014 08:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
8285 <description><p
>The complete and free “out of the box” software solution for
8286 schools,
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu /
8287 Skolelinux
</a
>, is used quite a lot in Germany, and one of the people
8288 involved is Bernd Zeitzen, who show up on the project mailing lists
8289 from time to time with interesting questions and tips on how to adjust
8290 the setup. I managed to interview him this summer.
</p
>
8292 <p
><strong
>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
</strong
></p
>
8294 <p
>My name is Bernd Zeitzen and I
'm married with Hedda, a self
8295 employed physiotherapist. My former profession is tool maker, but I
8296 haven
't worked for
30 years in this job.
30 years ago I started to
8297 support my wife and become her officeworker and a few years later the
8298 administrator for a small computer network, today based on Ubuntu
8299 Server (Samba, OpenVPN). For her daily work she has to use Windows
8300 Desktops because the software she needs to organize her business only
8301 works with Windows . :-(
</p
>
8303 <p
>In
1988 we started with one PC and DOS, then I learned to use
8304 Windows
98,
2000, XP, …,
8, Ubuntu, MacOSX. Today we are running a
8305 Linux server with
6 Windows clients and
10 persons (teacher of
8306 children with special needs, speech therapist, occupational therapist,
8307 psychologist and officeworkers) using our Samba shares via OpenVPN to
8308 work with the documentations of our patients.
</p
>
8310 <p
><strong
>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
8311 project?
</strong
></p
>
8313 <p
>Two years ago a friend of mine asked me, if I want to get a job in
8314 his school (
<a href=
"http://www.gymnasium-harsewinkel.de/
">Gymnasium
8315 Harsewinkel
</a
>). They started with Skolelinux / Debian Edu and they
8316 were looking for people to give support to the teachers using the
8317 software and the network and teaching the pupils increasing their
8318 computer skills in optional lessons. I
'm spending
4-
6 hours a week
8319 with this job.
</p
>
8321 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
8322 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
8324 <p
>The independence.
</p
>
8326 <p
>First: Every person is allowed to use, share and develop the
8327 software. Even if you are poor, you are allowed to use the software
8328 included in Skolelinux/Debian Edu and all the other Free Software.
</p
>
8330 <p
>Second: The software runs on old machines and this gives us the
8331 possibility to recycle computers, weeded out from offices. The
8332 servers and desktops are running for more than two years and they are
8333 working reliable.
</p
>
8335 <p
>We have two servers (one tjener and one terminal server),
45
8336 workstations in three classrooms and seven laptops as a mobile
8337 solution for all classrooms. These machines are all booting from the
8338 terminal server. In the moment we are installing
30 laptops as mobile
8339 workstations. Then the pupils have the possibility to work with these
8340 machines in their classrooms. Internet access is realized by a WLAN
8341 router, connected to the schools network. This is all done without a
8342 dedicated system administrator or a computer science teacher.
</p
>
8344 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
8345 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
8347 <p
>Teachers and pupils are Windows users.
&lt;Irony on
&gt; And Linux
8348 isn
't cool. It
's software for freaks using the command line.
&lt;Irony
8349 off
&gt; They don
't realize the stability of the system.
</p
>
8351 <p
><strong
>Which free software do you use daily?
</strong
></p
>
8353 <p
>Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, Ubuntu Server
12.04 (Samba,
8354 Apache, MySQL, Joomla!, … and Skolelinux / Debian Edu)
</p
>
8356 <p
><strong
>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
8357 get schools to use free software?
</strong
></p
>
8359 <p
>In Germany we have the situation: every school is free to decide
8360 which software they want to use. This decision is influenced by
8361 teachers who learned to use Windows and MS Office. They buy a PC with
8362 Windows preinstalled and an additional testing version of MS
8363 Office. They don
't know about the possibility to use Free Software
8364 instead. Another problem are the publisher of school books. They
8365 develop their software, added to the school books, for Windows.
</p
>
8370 <title>98.6 percent done with the Norwegian draft translation of Free Culture
</title>
8371 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/
98_6_percent_done_with_the_Norwegian_draft_translation_of_Free_Culture.html
</link>
8372 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/
98_6_percent_done_with_the_Norwegian_draft_translation_of_Free_Culture.html
</guid>
8373 <pubDate>Wed,
23 Jul
2014 22:
40:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
8374 <description><p
>This summer I finally had time to continue working on the Norwegian
8375 <a href=
"http://www.docbook.org/
">docbook
</a
> version of the
2004 book
8376 <a href=
"http://free-culture.cc/
">Free Culture
</a
> by Lawrence Lessig,
8377 to get a Norwegian text explaining the problems with todays copyright
8378 law. Yesterday, I finally completed translated the book text. There
8379 are still some foot/end notes left to translate, the colophon page
8380 need to be rewritten, and a few words and phrases still need to be
8381 translated, but the Norwegian text is ready for the first proof
8382 reading. :) More spell checking is needed, and several illustrations
8383 need to be cleaned up. The work stopped up because I had to give
8384 priority to other projects the last year, and the progress graph of
8385 the translation show this very well:
</p
>
8387 <p
><img width=
"80%
" align=
"center
" src=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png
"></p
>
8389 <p
>If you want to read the result, check out the
8390 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig
">github
</a
>
8391 project pages and the
8392 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true
">PDF
</a
>,
8393 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true
">EPUB
</a
>
8394 and HTML version available in the
8395 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/tree/master/archive
">archive
8396 directory
</a
>.
</p
>
8398 <p
>Please report typos, bugs and improvements to the github project if
8399 you find any.
</p
>
8404 <title>From English wiki to translated PDF and epub via Docbook
</title>
8405 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/From_English_wiki_to_translated_PDF_and_epub_via_Docbook.html
</link>
8406 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/From_English_wiki_to_translated_PDF_and_epub_via_Docbook.html
</guid>
8407 <pubDate>Tue,
17 Jun
2014 11:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
8408 <description><p
>The
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
8409 project
</a
> provide an instruction manual for teachers, system
8410 administrators and other users that contain useful tips for setting up
8411 and maintaining a Debian Edu installation. This text is about how the
8412 text processing of this manual is handled in the project.
</p
>
8414 <p
>One goal of the project is to provide information in the native
8415 language of its users, and for this we need to handle translations.
8416 But we also want to make sure each language contain the same
8417 information, so for this we need a good way to keep the translations
8418 in sync. And we want it to be easy for our users to improve the
8419 documentation, avoiding the need to learn special formats or tools to
8420 contribute, and the obvious way to do this is to make it possible to
8421 edit the documentation using a web browser. We also want it to be
8422 easy for translators to keep the translation up to date, and give them
8423 help in figuring out what need to be translated. Here is the list of
8424 tools and the process we have found trying to reach all these
8427 <p
>We maintain the authoritative source of our manual in the
8428 <a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/
">Debian
8429 wiki
</a
>, as several wiki pages written in English. It consist of one
8430 front page with references to the different chapters, several pages
8431 for each chapter, and finally one
"collection page
" gluing all the
8432 chapters together into one large web page (aka
8433 <a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/AllInOne
">the
8434 AllInOne page
</a
>). The AllInOne page is the one used for further
8435 processing and translations. Thanks to the fact that the
8436 <a href=
"http://moinmo.in/
">MoinMoin
</a
> installation on
8437 wiki.debian.org support exporting pages in
8438 <a href=
"http://www.docbook.org/
">the Docbook format
</a
>, we can fetch
8439 the list of pages to export using the raw version of the AllInOne
8440 page, loop over each of them to generate a Docbook XML version of the
8441 manual. This process also download images and transform image
8442 references to use the locally downloaded images. The generated
8443 Docbook XML files are slightly broken, so some post-processing is done
8444 using the
<tt
>documentation/scripts/get_manual
</tt
> program, and the
8445 result is a nice Docbook XML file (debian-edu-wheezy-manual.xml) and
8446 a handfull of images. The XML file can now be used to generate PDF, HTML
8447 and epub versions of the English manual. This is the basic step of
8448 our process, making PDF (using dblatex), HTML (using xsltproc) and
8449 epub (using dbtoepub) version from Docbook XML, and the resulting files
8450 are placed in the debian-edu-doc-en binary package.
</p
>
8452 <p
>But English documentation is not enough for us. We want translated
8453 documentation too, and we want to make it easy for translators to
8454 track the English original. For this we use the
8455 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/poxml.html
">poxml
</a
> package,
8456 which allow us to transform the English Docbook XML file into a
8457 translation file (a .pot file), usable with the normal gettext based
8458 translation tools used by those translating free software. The pot
8459 file is used to create and maintain translation files (several .po
8460 files), which the translations update with the native language
8461 translations of all titles, paragraphs and blocks of text in the
8462 original. The next step is combining the original English Docbook XML
8463 and the translation file (say debian-edu-wheezy-manual.nb.po), to
8464 create a translated Docbook XML file (in this case
8465 debian-edu-wheezy-manual.nb.xml). This translated (or partly
8466 translated, if the translation is not complete) Docbook XML file can
8467 then be used like the original to create a PDF, HTML and epub version
8468 of the documentation.
</p
>
8470 <p
>The translators use different tools to edit the .po files. We
8472 <a href=
"http://www.kde.org/applications/development/lokalize/
">lokalize
</a
>,
8473 while some use emacs and vi, others can use web based editors like
8474 <a href=
"http://pootle.translatehouse.org/
">Poodle
</a
> or
8475 <a href=
"https://www.transifex.com/
">Transifex
</a
>. All we care about
8476 is where the .po file end up, in our git repository. Updated
8477 translations can either be committed directly to git, or submitted as
8478 <a href=
"https://bugs.debian.org/src:debian-edu-doc
">bug reports
8479 against the debian-edu-doc package
</a
>.
</p
>
8481 <p
>One challenge is images, which both might need to be translated (if
8482 they show translated user applications), and are needed in different
8483 formats when creating PDF and HTML versions (epub is a HTML version in
8484 this regard). For this we transform the original PNG images to the
8485 needed density and format during build, and have a way to provide
8486 translated images by storing translated versions in
8487 images/$LANGUAGECODE/. I am a bit unsure about the details here. The
8488 package maintainers know more.
</p
>
8490 <p
>If you wonder what the result look like, we provide
8491 <a href=
"http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/
">the content
8492 of the documentation packages on the web
</a
>. See for example the
8493 <a href=
"http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/it/debian-edu-wheezy-manual.pdf
">Italian
8494 PDF version
</a
> or the
8495 <a href=
"http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/de/debian-edu-wheezy-manual.html
">German
8496 HTML version
</a
>. We do not yet build the epub version by default,
8497 but perhaps it will be done in the future.
</p
>
8499 <p
>To learn more, check out
8500 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/debian-edu-doc.html
">the
8501 debian-edu-doc package
</a
>,
8502 <a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/
">the
8503 manual on the wiki
</a
> and
8504 <a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/Translations
">the
8505 translation instructions
</a
> in the manual.
</p
>
8510 <title>Free software car computer solution?
</title>
8511 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_software_car_computer_solution_.html
</link>
8512 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_software_car_computer_solution_.html
</guid>
8513 <pubDate>Thu,
29 May
2014 18:
45:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
8514 <description><p
>Dear lazyweb. I
'm planning to set up a small Raspberry Pi computer
8515 in my car, connected to
8516 <a href=
"http://www.dx.com/p/
400a-
4-
0-tft-lcd-digital-monitor-for-vehicle-parking-reverse-camera-
1440x272-
12v-dc-
57776">a
8517 small screen
</a
> next to the rear mirror. I plan to hook it up with a
8518 GPS and a USB wifi card too. The idea is to get my own
8519 "<a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carputer
">Carputer
</a
>". But I
8520 wonder if someone already created a good free software solution for
8521 such car computer.
</p
>
8523 <p
>This is my current wish list for such system:
</p
>
8527 <li
>Work on Raspberry Pi.
</li
>
8529 <li
>Show current speed limit based on location, and warn if going too
8530 fast (for example using color codes yellow and red on the screen,
8531 or make a sound). This could be done either using either data from
8532 <a href=
"http://www.openstreetmap.org/
">Openstreetmap
</a
> or OCR
8533 info gathered from a dashboard camera.
</li
>
8535 <li
>Track automatic toll road passes and their cost, show total spent
8536 and make it possible to calculate toll costs for planned
8539 <li
>Collect GPX tracks for use with OpenStreetMap.
</li
>
8541 <li
>Automatically detect and use any wireless connection to connect
8542 to home server. Try IP over DNS
8543 (
<a href=
"http://dev.kryo.se/iodine/
">iodine
</a
>) or ICMP
8544 (
<a href=
"http://code.gerade.org/hans/
">Hans
</a
>) if direct
8545 connection do not work.
</li
>
8547 <li
>Set up mesh network to talk to other cars with the same system,
8548 or some standard car mesh protocol.
</li
>
8550 <li
>Warn when approaching speed cameras and speed camera ranges
8551 (speed calculated between two cameras).
</li
>
8553 <li
>Suport dashboard/front facing camera to discover speed limits and
8554 run OCR to track registration number of passing cars.
</li
>
8558 <p
>If you know of any free software car computer system supporting
8559 some or all of these features, please let me know.
</p
>
8564 <title>Half the Coverity issues in Gnash fixed in the next release
</title>
8565 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Half_the_Coverity_issues_in_Gnash_fixed_in_the_next_release.html
</link>
8566 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Half_the_Coverity_issues_in_Gnash_fixed_in_the_next_release.html
</guid>
8567 <pubDate>Tue,
29 Apr
2014 14:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
8568 <description><p
>I
've been following
<a href=
"http://www.getgnash.org/
">the Gnash
8569 project
</a
> for quite a while now. It is a free software
8570 implementation of Adobe Flash, both a standalone player and a browser
8571 plugin. Gnash implement support for the AVM1 format (and not the
8572 newer AVM2 format - see
8573 <a href=
"http://lightspark.github.io/
">Lightspark
</a
> for that one),
8574 allowing several flash based sites to work. Thanks to the friendly
8575 developers at Youtube, it also work with Youtube videos, because the
8576 Javascript code at Youtube detect Gnash and serve a AVM1 player to
8577 those users. :) Would be great if someone found time to implement AVM2
8578 support, but it has not happened yet. If you install both Lightspark
8579 and Gnash, Lightspark will invoke Gnash if it find a AVM1 flash file,
8580 so you can get both handled as free software. Unfortunately,
8581 Lightspark so far only implement a small subset of AVM2, and many
8582 sites do not work yet.
</p
>
8584 <p
>A few months ago, I started looking at
8585 <a href=
"http://scan.coverity.com/
">Coverity
</a
>, the static source
8586 checker used to find heaps and heaps of bugs in free software (thanks
8587 to the donation of a scanning service to free software projects by the
8588 company developing this non-free code checker), and Gnash was one of
8589 the projects I decided to check out. Coverity is able to find lock
8590 errors, memory errors, dead code and more. A few days ago they even
8591 extended it to also be able to find the heartbleed bug in OpenSSL.
8592 There are heaps of checks being done on the instrumented code, and the
8593 amount of bogus warnings is quite low compared to the other static
8594 code checkers I have tested over the years.
</p
>
8596 <p
>Since a few weeks ago, I
've been working with the other Gnash
8597 developers squashing bugs discovered by Coverity. I was quite happy
8598 today when I checked the current status and saw that of the
777 issues
8599 detected so far,
374 are marked as fixed. This make me confident that
8600 the next Gnash release will be more stable and more dependable than
8601 the previous one. Most of the reported issues were and are in the
8602 test suite, but it also found a few in the rest of the code.
</p
>
8604 <p
>If you want to help out, you find us on
8605 <a href=
"https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnash-dev
">the
8606 gnash-dev mailing list
</a
> and on
8607 <a href=
"irc://irc.freenode.net/#gnash
">the #gnash channel on
8608 irc.freenode.net IRC server
</a
>.
</p
>
8613 <title>Install hardware dependent packages using tasksel (Isenkram
0.7)
</title>
8614 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Install_hardware_dependent_packages_using_tasksel__Isenkram_0_7_.html
</link>
8615 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Install_hardware_dependent_packages_using_tasksel__Isenkram_0_7_.html
</guid>
8616 <pubDate>Wed,
23 Apr
2014 14:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
8617 <description><p
>It would be nice if it was easier in Debian to get all the hardware
8618 related packages relevant for the computer installed automatically.
8619 So I implemented one, using
8620 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram
">my Isenkram
8621 package
</a
>. To use it, install the tasksel and isenkram packages and
8622 run tasksel as user root. You should be presented with a new option,
8623 "Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)
". When you
8624 select it, tasksel will install the packages isenkram claim is fit for
8625 the current hardware, hot pluggable or not.
<p
>
8627 <p
>The implementation is in two files, one is the tasksel menu entry
8628 description, and the other is the script used to extract the list of
8629 packages to install. The first part is in
8630 <tt
>/usr/share/tasksel/descs/isenkram.desc
</tt
> and look like
8633 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
8636 Description: Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)
8637 Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific packages are
8639 Test-new-install: mark show
8641 Packages: for-current-hardware
8642 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
8644 <p
>The second part is in
8645 <tt
>/usr/lib/tasksel/packages/for-current-hardware
</tt
> and look like
8648 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
8653 isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
8655 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
8657 <p
>All in all, a very short and simple implementation making it
8658 trivial to install the hardware dependent package we all may want to
8659 have installed on our machines. I
've not been able to find a way to
8660 get tasksel to tell you exactly which packages it plan to install
8661 before doing the installation. So if you are curious or careful,
8662 check the output from the isenkram-* command line tools first.
</p
>
8664 <p
>The information about which packages are handling which hardware is
8665 fetched either from the isenkram package itself in
8666 /usr/share/isenkram/, from git.debian.org or from the APT package
8667 database (using the Modaliases header). The APT package database
8668 parsing have caused a nasty resource leak in the isenkram daemon (bugs
8669 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
719837">#
719837</a
> and
8670 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
730704">#
730704</a
>). The cause is in
8671 the python-apt code (bug
8672 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
745487">#
745487</a
>), but using a
8673 workaround I was able to get rid of the file descriptor leak and
8674 reduce the memory leak from ~
30 MiB per hardware detection down to
8675 around
2 MiB per hardware detection. It should make the desktop
8676 daemon a lot more useful. The fix is in version
0.7 uploaded to
8677 unstable today.
</p
>
8679 <p
>I believe the current way of mapping hardware to packages in
8680 Isenkram is is a good draft, but in the future I expect isenkram to
8681 use the AppStream data source for this. A proposal for getting proper
8682 AppStream support into Debian is floating around as
8683 <a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-
11">DEP-
11</a
>, and
8684 <a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2014/Projects#SummerOfCode2014.2FProjects
.2FAppStreamDEP11Implementation.AppStream
.2FDEP-
11_for_the_Debian_Archive
">GSoC
8685 project
</a
> will take place this summer to improve the situation. I
8686 look forward to seeing the result, and welcome patches for isenkram to
8687 start using the information when it is ready.
</p
>
8689 <p
>If you want your package to map to some specific hardware, either
8690 add a
"Xb-Modaliases
" header to your control file like I did in
8691 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/pymissile
">the pymissile
8692 package
</a
> or submit a bug report with the details to the isenkram
8694 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/
">all my
8695 blog posts tagged isenkram
</a
> for details on the notation. I expect
8696 the information will be migrated to AppStream eventually, but for the
8697 moment I got no better place to store it.
</p
>
8702 <title>FreedomBox milestone - all packages now in Debian Sid
</title>
8703 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/FreedomBox_milestone___all_packages_now_in_Debian_Sid.html
</link>
8704 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/FreedomBox_milestone___all_packages_now_in_Debian_Sid.html
</guid>
8705 <pubDate>Tue,
15 Apr
2014 22:
10:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
8706 <description><p
>The
<a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox
">Freedombox
8707 project
</a
> is working on providing the software and hardware to make
8708 it easy for non-technical people to host their data and communication
8709 at home, and being able to communicate with their friends and family
8710 encrypted and away from prying eyes. It is still going strong, and
8711 today a major mile stone was reached.
</p
>
8713 <p
>Today, the last of the packages currently used by the project to
8714 created the system images were accepted into Debian Unstable. It was
8715 the freedombox-setup package, which is used to configure the images
8716 during build and on the first boot. Now all one need to get going is
8717 the build code from the freedom-maker git repository and packages from
8718 Debian. And once the freedombox-setup package enter testing, we can
8719 build everything directly from Debian. :)
</p
>
8721 <p
>Some key packages used by Freedombox are
8722 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/freedombox-setup
">freedombox-setup
</a
>,
8723 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/plinth
">plinth
</a
>,
8724 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/pagekite
">pagekite
</a
>,
8725 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/tor
">tor
</a
>,
8726 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/privoxy
">privoxy
</a
>,
8727 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/owncloud
">owncloud
</a
> and
8728 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/dnsmasq
">dnsmasq
</a
>. There
8729 are plans to integrate more packages into the setup. User
8730 documentation is maintained on the Debian wiki. Please
8731 <a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/Manual/Jessie
">check out
8732 the manual
</a
> and help us improve it.
</p
>
8734 <p
>To test for yourself and create boot images with the FreedomBox
8735 setup, run this on a Debian machine using a user with sudo rights to
8736 become root:
</p
>
8738 <p
><pre
>
8739 sudo apt-get install git vmdebootstrap mercurial python-docutils \
8740 mktorrent extlinux virtualbox qemu-user-static binfmt-support \
8742 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/freedombox/freedom-maker.git \
8744 make -C freedom-maker dreamplug-image raspberry-image virtualbox-image
8745 </pre
></p
>
8747 <p
>Root access is needed to run debootstrap and mount loopback
8748 devices. See the README in the freedom-maker git repo for more
8749 details on the build. If you do not want all three images, trim the
8750 make line. Note that the virtualbox-image target is not really
8751 virtualbox specific. It create a x86 image usable in kvm, qemu,
8752 vmware and any other x86 virtual machine environment. You might need
8753 the version of vmdebootstrap in Jessie to get the build working, as it
8754 include fixes for a race condition with kpartx.
</p
>
8756 <p
>If you instead want to install using a Debian CD and the preseed
8757 method, boot a Debian Wheezy ISO and use this boot argument to load
8758 the preseed values:
</p
>
8760 <p
><pre
>
8761 url=
<a href=
"http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat
">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat
</a
>
8762 </pre
></p
>
8764 <p
>I have not tested it myself the last few weeks, so I do not know if
8765 it still work.
</p
>
8767 <p
>If you wonder how to help, one task you could look at is using
8768 systemd as the boot system. It will become the default for Linux in
8769 Jessie, so we need to make sure it is usable on the Freedombox. I did
8770 a simple test a few weeks ago, and noticed dnsmasq failed to start
8771 during boot when using systemd. I suspect there are other problems
8772 too. :) To detect problems, there is a test suite included, which can
8773 be run from the plinth web interface.
</p
>
8775 <p
>Give it a go and let us know how it goes on the mailing list, and help
8776 us get the new release published. :) Please join us on
8777 <a href=
"irc://irc.debian.org:
6667/%
23freedombox
">IRC (#freedombox on
8778 irc.debian.org)
</a
> and
8779 <a href=
"http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss
">the
8780 mailing list
</a
> if you want to help make this vision come true.
</p
>
8785 <title>S3QL, a locally mounted cloud file system - nice free software
</title>
8786 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/S3QL__a_locally_mounted_cloud_file_system___nice_free_software.html
</link>
8787 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/S3QL__a_locally_mounted_cloud_file_system___nice_free_software.html
</guid>
8788 <pubDate>Wed,
9 Apr
2014 11:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
8789 <description><p
>For a while now, I have been looking for a sensible offsite backup
8790 solution for use at home. My requirements are simple, it must be
8791 cheap and locally encrypted (in other words, I keep the encryption
8792 keys, the storage provider do not have access to my private files).
8793 One idea me and my friends had many years ago, before the cloud
8794 storage providers showed up, was to use Google mail as storage,
8795 writing a Linux block device storing blocks as emails in the mail
8796 service provided by Google, and thus get heaps of free space. On top
8797 of this one can add encryption, RAID and volume management to have
8798 lots of (fairly slow, I admit that) cheap and encrypted storage. But
8799 I never found time to implement such system. But the last few weeks I
8800 have looked at a system called
8801 <a href=
"https://bitbucket.org/nikratio/s3ql/
">S3QL
</a
>, a locally
8802 mounted network backed file system with the features I need.
</p
>
8804 <p
>S3QL is a fuse file system with a local cache and cloud storage,
8805 handling several different storage providers, any with Amazon S3,
8806 Google Drive or OpenStack API. There are heaps of such storage
8807 providers. S3QL can also use a local directory as storage, which
8808 combined with sshfs allow for file storage on any ssh server. S3QL
8809 include support for encryption, compression, de-duplication, snapshots
8810 and immutable file systems, allowing me to mount the remote storage as
8811 a local mount point, look at and use the files as if they were local,
8812 while the content is stored in the cloud as well. This allow me to
8813 have a backup that should survive fire. The file system can not be
8814 shared between several machines at the same time, as only one can
8815 mount it at the time, but any machine with the encryption key and
8816 access to the storage service can mount it if it is unmounted.
</p
>
8818 <p
>It is simple to use. I
'm using it on Debian Wheezy, where the
8819 package is included already. So to get started, run
<tt
>apt-get
8820 install s3ql
</tt
>. Next, pick a storage provider. I ended up picking
8821 Greenqloud, after reading their nice recipe on
8822 <a href=
"https://greenqloud.zendesk.com/entries/
44611757-How-To-Use-S3QL-to-mount-a-StorageQloud-bucket-on-Debian-Wheezy
">how
8823 to use S3QL with their Amazon S3 service
</a
>, because I trust the laws
8824 in Iceland more than those in USA when it come to keeping my personal
8825 data safe and private, and thus would rather spend money on a company
8826 in Iceland. Another nice recipe is available from the article
8827 <a href=
"http://www.admin-magazine.com/HPC/Articles/HPC-Cloud-Storage
">S3QL
8828 Filesystem for HPC Storage
</a
> by Jeff Layton in the HPC section of
8829 Admin magazine. When the provider is picked, figure out how to get
8830 the API key needed to connect to the storage API. With Greencloud,
8831 the key did not show up until I had added payment details to my
8834 <p
>Armed with the API access details, it is time to create the file
8835 system. First, create a new bucket in the cloud. This bucket is the
8836 file system storage area. I picked a bucket name reflecting the
8837 machine that was going to store data there, but any name will do.
8838 I
'll refer to it as
<tt
>bucket-name
</tt
> below. In addition, one need
8839 the API login and password, and a locally created password. Store it
8840 all in ~root/.s3ql/authinfo2 like this:
8842 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
8844 storage-url: s3c://s.greenqloud.com:
443/bucket-name
8845 backend-login: API-login
8846 backend-password: API-password
8847 fs-passphrase: local-password
8848 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
8850 <p
>I create my local passphrase using
<tt
>pwget
50</tt
> or similar,
8851 but any sensible way to create a fairly random password should do it.
8852 Armed with these details, it is now time to run mkfs, entering the API
8853 details and password to create it:
</p
>
8855 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
8856 # mkdir -m
700 /var/lib/s3ql-cache
8857 # mkfs.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
8858 --ssl s3c://s.greenqloud.com:
443/bucket-name
8859 Enter backend login:
8860 Enter backend password:
8861 Before using S3QL, make sure to read the user
's guide, especially
8862 the
'Important Rules to Avoid Loosing Data
' section.
8863 Enter encryption password:
8864 Confirm encryption password:
8865 Generating random encryption key...
8866 Creating metadata tables...
8876 Compressing and uploading metadata...
8877 Wrote
0.00 MB of compressed metadata.
8878 #
</pre
></blockquote
></p
>
8880 <p
>The next step is mounting the file system to make the storage available.
8882 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
8883 # mount.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
8884 --ssl --allow-root s3c://s.greenqloud.com:
443/bucket-name /s3ql
8885 Using
4 upload threads.
8886 Downloading and decompressing metadata...
8896 Mounting filesystem...
8898 Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
8899 s3c://s.greenqloud.com:
443/bucket-name
1.0T
0 1.0T
0% /s3ql
8901 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
8903 <p
>The file system is now ready for use. I use rsync to store my
8904 backups in it, and as the metadata used by rsync is downloaded at
8905 mount time, no network traffic (and storage cost) is triggered by
8906 running rsync. To unmount, one should not use the normal umount
8907 command, as this will not flush the cache to the cloud storage, but
8908 instead running the umount.s3ql command like this:
8910 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
8913 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
8915 <p
>There is a fsck command available to check the file system and
8916 correct any problems detected. This can be used if the local server
8917 crashes while the file system is mounted, to reset the
"already
8918 mounted
" flag. This is what it look like when processing a working
8919 file system:
</p
>
8921 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
8922 # fsck.s3ql --force --ssl s3c://s.greenqloud.com:
443/bucket-name
8923 Using cached metadata.
8924 File system seems clean, checking anyway.
8925 Checking DB integrity...
8926 Creating temporary extra indices...
8927 Checking lost+found...
8928 Checking cached objects...
8929 Checking names (refcounts)...
8930 Checking contents (names)...
8931 Checking contents (inodes)...
8932 Checking contents (parent inodes)...
8933 Checking objects (reference counts)...
8934 Checking objects (backend)...
8935 ..processed
5000 objects so far..
8936 ..processed
10000 objects so far..
8937 ..processed
15000 objects so far..
8938 Checking objects (sizes)...
8939 Checking blocks (referenced objects)...
8940 Checking blocks (refcounts)...
8941 Checking inode-block mapping (blocks)...
8942 Checking inode-block mapping (inodes)...
8943 Checking inodes (refcounts)...
8944 Checking inodes (sizes)...
8945 Checking extended attributes (names)...
8946 Checking extended attributes (inodes)...
8947 Checking symlinks (inodes)...
8948 Checking directory reachability...
8949 Checking unix conventions...
8950 Checking referential integrity...
8951 Dropping temporary indices...
8952 Backing up old metadata...
8962 Compressing and uploading metadata...
8963 Wrote
0.89 MB of compressed metadata.
8965 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
8967 <p
>Thanks to the cache, working on files that fit in the cache is very
8968 quick, about the same speed as local file access. Uploading large
8969 amount of data is to me limited by the bandwidth out of and into my
8970 house. Uploading
685 MiB with a
100 MiB cache gave me
305 kiB/s,
8971 which is very close to my upload speed, and downloading the same
8972 Debian installation ISO gave me
610 kiB/s, close to my download speed.
8973 Both were measured using
<tt
>dd
</tt
>. So for me, the bottleneck is my
8974 network, not the file system code. I do not know what a good cache
8975 size would be, but suspect that the cache should e larger than your
8976 working set.
</p
>
8978 <p
>I mentioned that only one machine can mount the file system at the
8979 time. If another machine try, it is told that the file system is
8982 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
8983 # mount.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
8984 --ssl --allow-root s3c://s.greenqloud.com:
443/bucket-name /s3ql
8985 Using
8 upload threads.
8986 Backend reports that fs is still mounted elsewhere, aborting.
8988 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
8990 <p
>The file content is uploaded when the cache is full, while the
8991 metadata is uploaded once every
24 hour by default. To ensure the
8992 file system content is flushed to the cloud, one can either umount the
8993 file system, or ask S3QL to flush the cache and metadata using
8996 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
8997 # s3qlctrl upload-meta /s3ql
8998 # s3qlctrl flushcache /s3ql
9000 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
9002 <p
>If you are curious about how much space your data uses in the
9003 cloud, and how much compression and deduplication cut down on the
9004 storage usage, you can use s3qlstat on the mounted file system to get
9007 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
9009 Directory entries:
9141
9012 Total data size:
22049.38 MB
9013 After de-duplication:
21955.46 MB (
99.57% of total)
9014 After compression:
21877.28 MB (
99.22% of total,
99.64% of de-duplicated)
9015 Database size:
2.39 MB (uncompressed)
9016 (some values do not take into account not-yet-uploaded dirty blocks in cache)
9018 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
9020 <p
>I mentioned earlier that there are several possible suppliers of
9021 storage. I did not try to locate them all, but am aware of at least
9022 <a href=
"https://www.greenqloud.com/
">Greenqloud
</a
>,
9023 <a href=
"http://drive.google.com/
">Google Drive
</a
>,
9024 <a href=
"http://aws.amazon.com/s3/
">Amazon S3 web serivces
</a
>,
9025 <a href=
"http://www.rackspace.com/
">Rackspace
</a
> and
9026 <a href=
"http://crowncloud.net/
">Crowncloud
</A
>. The latter even
9027 accept payment in Bitcoin. Pick one that suit your need. Some of
9028 them provide several GiB of free storage, but the prize models are
9029 quite different and you will have to figure out what suits you
9032 <p
>While researching this blog post, I had a look at research papers
9033 and posters discussing the S3QL file system. There are several, which
9034 told me that the file system is getting a critical check by the
9035 science community and increased my confidence in using it. One nice
9037 "<a href=
"http://www.lanl.gov/orgs/adtsc/publications/science_highlights_2013/docs/pg68_69.pdf
">An
9038 Innovative Parallel Cloud Storage System using OpenStack’s SwiftObject
9039 Store and Transformative Parallel I/O Approach
</a
>" by Hsing-Bung
9040 Chen, Benjamin McClelland, David Sherrill, Alfred Torrez, Parks Fields
9041 and Pamela Smith. Please have a look.
</p
>
9043 <p
>Given my problems with different file systems earlier, I decided to
9044 check out the mounted S3QL file system to see if it would be usable as
9045 a home directory (in other word, that it provided POSIX semantics when
9046 it come to locking and umask handling etc). Running
9047 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_if_a_file_system_can_be_used_for_home_directories___.html
">my
9048 test code to check file system semantics
</a
>, I was happy to discover that
9049 no error was found. So the file system can be used for home
9050 directories, if one chooses to do so.
</p
>
9052 <p
>If you do not want a locally file system, and want something that
9053 work without the Linux fuse file system, I would like to mention the
9054 <a href=
"http://www.tarsnap.com/
">Tarsnap service
</a
>, which also
9055 provide locally encrypted backup using a command line client. It have
9056 a nicer access control system, where one can split out read and write
9057 access, allowing some systems to write to the backup and others to
9058 only read from it.
</p
>
9060 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
9061 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
9062 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
9067 <title>ReactOS Windows clone - nice free software
</title>
9068 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ReactOS_Windows_clone___nice_free_software.html
</link>
9069 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ReactOS_Windows_clone___nice_free_software.html
</guid>
9070 <pubDate>Tue,
1 Apr
2014 12:
10:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
9071 <description><p
>Microsoft have announced that Windows XP reaches its end of life
9072 2014-
04-
08, in
7 days. But there are heaps of machines still running
9073 Windows XP, and depending on Windows XP to run their applications, and
9074 upgrading will be expensive, both when it comes to money and when it
9075 comes to the amount of effort needed to migrate from Windows XP to a
9076 new operating system. Some obvious options (buy new a Windows
9077 machine, buy a MacOSX machine, install Linux on the existing machine)
9078 are already well known and covered elsewhere. Most of them involve
9079 leaving the user applications installed on Windows XP behind and
9080 trying out replacements or updated versions. In this blog post I want
9081 to mention one strange bird that allow people to keep the hardware and
9082 the existing Windows XP applications and run them on a free software
9083 operating system that is Windows XP compatible.
</p
>
9085 <p
><a href=
"http://www.reactos.org/
">ReactOS
</a
> is a free software
9086 operating system (GNU GPL licensed) working on providing a operating
9087 system that is binary compatible with Windows, able to run windows
9088 programs directly and to use Windows drivers for hardware directly.
9089 The project goal is for Windows user to keep their existing machines,
9090 drivers and software, and gain the advantages from user a operating
9091 system without usage limitations caused by non-free licensing. It is
9092 a Windows clone running directly on the hardware, so quite different
9093 from the approach taken by
<a href=
"http://www.winehq.org/
">the Wine
9094 project
</a
>, which make it possible to run Windows binaries on
9097 <p
>The ReactOS project share code with the Wine project, so most
9098 shared libraries available on Windows are already implemented already.
9099 There is also a software manager like the one we are used to on Linux,
9100 allowing the user to install free software applications with a simple
9101 click directly from the Internet. Check out the
9102 <a href=
"http://www.reactos.org/screenshots
">screen shots on the
9103 project web site
</a
> for an idea what it look like (it looks just like
9104 Windows before metro).
</p
>
9106 <p
>I do not use ReactOS myself, preferring Linux and Unix like
9107 operating systems. I
've tested it, and it work fine in a virt-manager
9108 virtual machine. The browser, minesweeper, notepad etc is working
9109 fine as far as I can tell. Unfortunately, my main test application
9110 is the software included on a CD with the Lego Mindstorms NXT, which
9111 seem to install just fine from CD but fail to leave any binaries on
9112 the disk after the installation. So no luck with that test software.
9113 No idea why, but hope someone else figure out and fix the problem.
9114 I
've tried the ReactOS Live ISO on a physical machine, and it seemed
9115 to work just fine. If you like Windows and want to keep running your
9116 old Windows binaries, check it out by
9117 <a href=
"http://www.reactos.org/download
">downloading
</a
> the
9118 installation CD, the live CD or the preinstalled virtual machine
9124 <title>Debian Edu interview: Roger Marsal
</title>
9125 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Roger_Marsal.html
</link>
9126 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Roger_Marsal.html
</guid>
9127 <pubDate>Sun,
30 Mar
2014 11:
40:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
9128 <description><p
><a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
</a
>
9129 keep gaining new users. Some weeks ago, a person showed up on IRC,
9130 <a href=
"irc://irc.debian.org/#debian-edu
">#debian-edu
</a
>, with a
9131 wish to contribute, and I managed to get a interview with this great
9132 contributor Roger Marsal to learn more about his background.
</p
>
9134 <p
><strong
>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
</strong
></p
>
9136 <p
>My name is Roger Marsal, I
'm
27 years old (
1986 generation) and I
9137 live in Barcelona, Spain. I
've got a strong business background and I
9138 work as a patrimony manager and as a real estate agent. Additionally,
9139 I
've co-founded a British based tech company that is nowadays on the
9140 last development phase of a new social networking concept.
</p
>
9142 <p
>I
'm a Linux enthusiast that started its journey with Ubuntu four years
9143 ago and have recently switched to Debian seeking rock solid stability
9144 and as a necessary step to gain expertise.
</p
>
9146 <p
>In a nutshell, I spend my days working and learning as much as I
9147 can to face both my job, entrepreneur project and feed my Linux
9150 <p
><strong
>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
9151 project?
</strong
></p
>
9153 <p
>I discovered the
<a href=
"http://www.ltsp.org/
">LTSP
</a
> advantages
9154 with
"Ubuntu
12.04 alternate install
" and after a year of use I
9155 started looking for an alternative. Even though I highly value and
9156 respect the Ubuntu project, I thought it was necessary for me to
9157 change to a more robust and stable alternative. As far as I was using
9158 Debian on my personal laptop I thought it would be fine to install
9159 Debian and configure an LTSP server myself. Surprised, I discovered
9160 that the Debian project also supported a kind of Edubuntu equivalent,
9161 and after having some pain I obtained a Debian Edu network up and
9162 running. I just loved it.
</p
>
9164 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
9165 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
9167 <p
>I found a main advantage in that, once you know
"the tips and
9168 tricks
", a new installation just works out of the box. It
's the most
9169 complete alternative I
've found to create an LTSP network. All the
9170 other distributions seems to be made of plastic, Debian Edu seems to
9171 be made of steel.
</p
>
9173 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
9174 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
9176 <p
>I found two main disadvantages.
</p
>
9178 <p
>I
'm not an expert but I
've got notions and I had to spent a considerable
9179 amount of time trying to bring up a standard network topology. I
'm quite
9180 stubborn and I just worked until I did but I
'm sure many people with few
9181 resources (not big schools, but academies for example) would have switched
9182 or dropped.
</p
>
9184 <p
>It
's amazing how such a complex system like Debian Edu has achieved
9185 this out-of-the-box state. Even though tweaking without breaking gets
9186 more difficult, as more factors have to be considered. This can
9187 discourage many people too.
</p
>
9189 <p
><strong
>Which free software do you use daily?
</strong
></p
>
9191 <p
>I use Debian, Firefox, Okular, Inkscape, LibreOffice and
9192 Virtualbox.
</p
>
9195 <p
><strong
>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
9196 get schools to use free software?
</strong
></p
>
9198 <p
>I don
't think there is a need for a particular strategy. The free
9199 attribute in both
"freedom
" and
"no price
" meanings is what will
9200 really bring free software to schools. In my experience I can think of
9201 the
<a href=
"http://www.r-project.org/
">"R
" statistical language
</a
>; a
9202 few years a ago was an extremely nerd tool for university people.
9203 Today it
's being increasingly used to teach statistics at many
9204 different level of studies. I believe free and open software will
9205 increasingly gain popularity, but I
'm sure schools will be one of the
9206 first scenarios where this will happen.
</p
>
9211 <title>Public Trusted Timestamping services for everyone
</title>
9212 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Public_Trusted_Timestamping_services_for_everyone.html
</link>
9213 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Public_Trusted_Timestamping_services_for_everyone.html
</guid>
9214 <pubDate>Tue,
25 Mar
2014 12:
50:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
9215 <description><p
>Did you ever need to store logs or other files in a way that would
9216 allow it to be used as evidence in court, and needed a way to
9217 demonstrate without reasonable doubt that the file had not been
9218 changed since it was created? Or, did you ever need to document that
9219 a given document was received at some point in time, like some
9220 archived document or the answer to an exam, and not changed after it
9221 was received? The problem in these settings is to remove the need to
9222 trust yourself and your computers, while still being able to prove
9223 that a file is the same as it was at some given time in the past.
</p
>
9225 <p
>A solution to these problems is to have a trusted third party
9226 "stamp
" the document and verify that at some given time the document
9227 looked a given way. Such
9228 <a href=
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notarius
">notarius
</a
> service
9229 have been around for thousands of years, and its digital equivalent is
9231 <a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_timestamping
">trusted
9232 timestamping service
</a
>.
<a href=
"http://www.ietf.org/
">The Internet
9233 Engineering Task Force
</a
> standardised how such service could work a
9234 few years ago as
<a href=
"http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3161
">RFC
9235 3161</a
>. The mechanism is simple. Create a hash of the file in
9236 question, send it to a trusted third party which add a time stamp to
9237 the hash and sign the result with its private key, and send back the
9238 signed hash + timestamp. Both email, FTP and HTTP can be used to
9239 request such signature, depending on what is provided by the service
9240 used. Anyone with the document and the signature can then verify that
9241 the document matches the signature by creating their own hash and
9242 checking the signature using the trusted third party public key.
9243 There are several commercial services around providing such
9244 timestamping. A quick search for
9245 "<a href=
"https://duckduckgo.com/?q=rfc+
3161+service
">rfc
3161
9246 service
</a
>" pointed me to at least
9247 <a href=
"https://www.digistamp.com/technical/how-a-digital-time-stamp-works/
">DigiStamp
</a
>,
9248 <a href=
"http://www.quovadisglobal.co.uk/CertificateServices/SigningServices/TimeStamp.aspx
">Quo
9250 <a href=
"https://www.globalsign.com/timestamp-service/
">Global Sign
</a
>
9251 and
<a href=
"http://www.globaltrustfinder.com/TSADefault.aspx
">Global
9252 Trust Finder
</a
>. The system work as long as the private key of the
9253 trusted third party is not compromised.
</p
>
9255 <p
>But as far as I can tell, there are very few public trusted
9256 timestamp services available for everyone. I
've been looking for one
9257 for a while now. But yesterday I found one over at
9258 <a href=
"https://www.pki.dfn.de/zeitstempeldienst/
">Deutches
9259 Forschungsnetz
</a
> mentioned in
9260 <a href=
"http://www.d-mueller.de/blog/dealing-with-trusted-timestamps-in-php-rfc-
3161/
">a
9261 blog by David Müller
</a
>. I then found
9262 <a href=
"http://www.rz.uni-greifswald.de/support/dfn-pki-zertifikate/zeitstempeldienst.html
">a
9263 good recipe on how to use the service
</a
> over at the University of
9264 Greifswald.
</p
>
9266 <p
><a href=
"http://www.openssl.org/
">The OpenSSL library
</a
> contain
9267 both server and tools to use and set up your own signing service. See
9268 the ts(
1SSL), tsget(
1SSL) manual pages for more details. The
9269 following shell script demonstrate how to extract a signed timestamp
9270 for any file on the disk in a Debian environment:
</p
>
9272 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
9275 url=
"http://zeitstempel.dfn.de
"
9276 caurl=
"https://pki.pca.dfn.de/global-services-ca/pub/cacert/chain.txt
"
9277 reqfile=$(mktemp -t tmp.XXXXXXXXXX.tsq)
9278 resfile=$(mktemp -t tmp.XXXXXXXXXX.tsr)
9280 if [ ! -f $cafile ] ; then
9281 wget -O $cafile
"$caurl
"
9283 openssl ts -query -data
"$
1" -cert | tee
"$reqfile
" \
9284 | /usr/lib/ssl/misc/tsget -h
"$url
" -o
"$resfile
"
9285 openssl ts -reply -in
"$resfile
" -text
1>&2
9286 openssl ts -verify -data
"$
1" -in
"$resfile
" -CAfile
"$cafile
" 1>&2
9287 base64
< "$resfile
"
9288 rm
"$reqfile
" "$resfile
"
9289 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
9291 <p
>The argument to the script is the file to timestamp, and the output
9292 is a base64 encoded version of the signature to STDOUT and details
9293 about the signature to STDERR. Note that due to
9294 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=
742553">a bug
9295 in the tsget script
</a
>, you might need to modify the included script
9296 and remove the last line. Or just write your own HTTP uploader using
9297 curl. :) Now you too can prove and verify that files have not been
9300 <p
>But the Internet need more public trusted timestamp services.
9301 Perhaps something for
<a href=
"http://www.uninett.no/
">Uninett
</a
> or
9302 my work place the
<a href=
"http://www.uio.no/
">University of Oslo
</a
>
9303 to set up?
</p
>
9308 <title>Video DVD reader library / python-dvdvideo - nice free software
</title>
9309 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Video_DVD_reader_library___python_dvdvideo___nice_free_software.html
</link>
9310 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Video_DVD_reader_library___python_dvdvideo___nice_free_software.html
</guid>
9311 <pubDate>Fri,
21 Mar
2014 15:
25:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
9312 <description><p
>Keeping your DVD collection safe from scratches and curious
9313 children fingers while still having it available when you want to see a
9314 movie is not straight forward. My preferred method at the moment is
9315 to store a full copy of the ISO on a hard drive, and use VLC, Popcorn
9316 Hour or other useful players to view the resulting file. This way the
9317 subtitles and bonus material are still available and using the ISO is
9318 just like inserting the original DVD record in the DVD player.
</p
>
9320 <p
>Earlier I used dd for taking security copies, but it do not handle
9321 DVDs giving read errors (which are quite a few of them). I
've also
9323 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ripping_problematic_DVDs_using_dvdbackup_and_genisoimage.html
">dvdbackup
9324 and genisoimage
</a
>, but these days I use the marvellous python library
9326 <a href=
"http://bblank.thinkmo.de/blog/new-software-python-dvdvideo
">python-dvdvideo
</a
>
9327 written by Bastian Blank. It is
9328 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/python-dvdvideo.html
">in Debian
9329 already
</a
> and the binary package name is python3-dvdvideo. Instead
9330 of trying to read every block from the DVD, it parses the file
9331 structure and figure out which block on the DVD is actually in used,
9332 and only read those blocks from the DVD. This work surprisingly well,
9333 and I have been able to almost backup my entire DVD collection using
9334 this method.
</p
>
9336 <p
>So far, python-dvdvideo have failed on between
10 and
9337 20 DVDs, which is a small fraction of my collection. The most common
9339 <a href=
"https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=
720831">DVDs
9340 using UTF-
16 instead of UTF-
8 characters
</a
>, which according to
9341 Bastian is against the DVD specification (and seem to cause some
9342 players to fail too). A rarer problem is what seem to be inconsistent
9343 DVD structures, as the python library
9344 <a href=
"https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=
723079">claim
9345 there is a overlap between objects
</a
>. An equally rare problem claim
9346 <a href=
"https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=
741878">some
9347 value is out of range
</a
>. No idea what is going on there. I wish I
9348 knew enough about the DVD format to fix these, to ensure my movie
9349 collection will stay with me in the future.
</p
>
9351 <p
>So, if you need to keep your DVDs safe, back them up using
9352 python-dvdvideo. :)
</p
>
9357 <title>Freedombox on Dreamplug, Raspberry Pi and virtual x86 machine
</title>
9358 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Freedombox_on_Dreamplug__Raspberry_Pi_and_virtual_x86_machine.html
</link>
9359 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Freedombox_on_Dreamplug__Raspberry_Pi_and_virtual_x86_machine.html
</guid>
9360 <pubDate>Fri,
14 Mar
2014 11:
00:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
9361 <description><p
>The
<a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox
">Freedombox
9362 project
</a
> is working on providing the software and hardware for
9363 making it easy for non-technical people to host their data and
9364 communication at home, and being able to communicate with their
9365 friends and family encrypted and away from prying eyes. It has been
9366 going on for a while, and is slowly progressing towards a new test
9367 release (
0.2).
</p
>
9369 <p
>And what day could be better than the Pi day to announce that the
9370 new version will provide
"hard drive
" / SD card / USB stick images for
9371 Dreamplug, Raspberry Pi and VirtualBox (or any other virtualization
9372 system), and can also be installed using a Debian installer preseed
9373 file. The Debian based Freedombox is now based on Debian Jessie,
9374 where most of the needed packages used are already present. Only one,
9375 the freedombox-setup package, is missing. To try to build your own
9376 boot image to test the current status, fetch the freedom-maker scripts
9378 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/vmdebootstrap
">vmdebootstrap
</a
>
9379 with a user with sudo access to become root:
9382 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/freedombox/freedom-maker.git \
9384 sudo apt-get install git vmdebootstrap mercurial python-docutils \
9385 mktorrent extlinux virtualbox qemu-user-static binfmt-support \
9387 make -C freedom-maker dreamplug-image raspberry-image virtualbox-image
9390 <p
>Root access is needed to run debootstrap and mount loopback
9391 devices. See the README for more details on the build. If you do not
9392 want all three images, trim the make line. But note that thanks to
<a
9393 href=
"https://bugs.debian.org/
741407">a race condition in
9394 vmdebootstrap
</a
>, the build might fail without the patch to the
9395 kpartx call.
</p
>
9397 <p
>If you instead want to install using a Debian CD and the preseed
9398 method, boot a Debian Wheezy ISO and use this boot argument to load
9399 the preseed values:
</p
>
9402 url=
<a href=
"http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat
">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat
</a
>
9405 <p
>But note that due to
<a href=
"https://bugs.debian.org/
740673">a
9406 recently introduced bug in apt in Jessie
</a
>, the installer will
9407 currently hang while setting up APT sources. Killing the
9408 '<tt
>apt-cdrom ident
</tt
>' process when it hang a few times during the
9409 installation will get the installation going. This affect all
9410 installations in Jessie, and I expect it will be fixed soon.
</p
>
9412 <p
>Give it a go and let us know how it goes on the mailing list, and help
9413 us get the new release published. :) Please join us on
9414 <a href=
"irc://irc.debian.org:
6667/%
23freedombox
">IRC (#freedombox on
9415 irc.debian.org)
</a
> and
9416 <a href=
"http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss
">the
9417 mailing list
</a
> if you want to help make this vision come true.
</p
>
9422 <title>How to add extra storage servers in Debian Edu / Skolelinux
</title>
9423 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_add_extra_storage_servers_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux.html
</link>
9424 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_add_extra_storage_servers_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux.html
</guid>
9425 <pubDate>Wed,
12 Mar
2014 12:
50:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
9426 <description><p
>On larger sites, it is useful to use a dedicated storage server for
9427 storing user home directories and data. The design for handling this
9428 in
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
</a
>, is
9429 to update the automount rules in LDAP and let the automount daemon on
9430 the clients take care of the rest. I was reminded about the need to
9431 document this better when one of the customers of
9432 <a href=
"http://www.slxdrift.no/
">Skolelinux Drift AS
</a
>, where I am
9433 on the board of directors, asked about how to do this. The steps to
9434 get this working are the following:
</p
>
9438 <li
>Add new storage server in DNS. I use nas-server.intern as the
9439 example host here.
</li
>
9441 <li
>Add automoun LDAP information about this server in LDAP, to allow
9442 all clients to automatically mount it on reqeust.
</li
>
9444 <li
>Add the relevant entries in tjener.intern:/etc/fstab, because
9445 tjener.intern do not use automount to avoid mounting loops.
</li
>
9447 </ol
></p
>
9449 <p
>DNS entries are added in GOsa², and not described here. Follow the
9450 <a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/GettingStarted
">instructions
9451 in the manual
</a
> (Machine Management with GOsa² in section Getting
9454 <p
>Ensure that the NFS export points on the server are exported to the
9455 relevant subnets or machines:
</p
>
9457 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
9458 root@tjener:~# showmount -e nas-server
9459 Export list for nas-server:
9462 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
9464 <p
>Here everything on the backbone network is granted access to the
9465 /storage export. With NFSv3 it is slightly better to limit it to
9466 netgroup membership or single IP addresses to have some limits on the
9467 NFS access.
</p
>
9469 <p
>The next step is to update LDAP. This can not be done using GOsa²,
9470 because it lack a module for automount. Instead, use ldapvi and add
9471 the required LDAP objects using an editor.
</p
>
9473 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
9474 ldapvi --ldap-conf -ZD
'(cn=admin)
' -b ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
9475 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
9477 <p
>When the editor show up, add the following LDAP objects at the
9478 bottom of the document. The
"/
&" part in the last LDAP object is a
9479 wild card matching everything the nas-server exports, removing the
9480 need to list individual mount points in LDAP.
</p
>
9482 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
9483 add cn=nas-server,ou=auto.skole,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
9484 objectClass: automount
9486 automountInformation: -fstype=autofs --timeout=
60 ldap:ou=auto.nas-server,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
9488 add ou=auto.nas-server,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
9490 objectClass: automountMap
9493 add cn=/,ou=auto.nas-server,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
9494 objectClass: automount
9496 automountInformation: -fstype=nfs,tcp,rsize=
32768,wsize=
32768,rw,intr,hard,nodev,nosuid,noatime nas-server.intern:/
&
9497 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
9499 <p
>The last step to remember is to mount the relevant mount points in
9500 tjener.intern by adding them to /etc/fstab, creating the mount
9501 directories using mkdir and running
"mount -a
" to mount them.
</p
>
9503 <p
>When this is done, your users should be able to access the files on
9504 the storage server directly by just visiting the
9505 /tjener/nas-server/storage/ directory using any application on any
9506 workstation, LTSP client or LTSP server.
</p
>
9511 <title>New home and release
1.0 for netgroup and innetgr (aka ng-utils)
</title>
9512 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_home_and_release_1_0_for_netgroup_and_innetgr__aka_ng_utils_.html
</link>
9513 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_home_and_release_1_0_for_netgroup_and_innetgr__aka_ng_utils_.html
</guid>
9514 <pubDate>Sat,
22 Feb
2014 21:
45:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
9515 <description><p
>Many years ago, I wrote a GPL licensed version of the netgroup and
9516 innetgr tools, because I needed them in
9517 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Skolelinux
</a
>. I called the project
9518 ng-utils, and it has served me well. I placed the project under the
9519 <a href=
"http://www.hungry.com/
">Hungry Programmer
</a
> umbrella, and it was maintained in our CVS
9520 repository. But many years ago, the CVS repository was dropped (lost,
9521 not migrated to new hardware, not sure), and the project have lacked a
9522 proper home since then.
</p
>
9524 <p
>Last summer, I had a look at the package and made a new release
9525 fixing a irritating crash bug, but was unable to store the changes in
9526 a proper source control system. I applied for a project on
9527 <a href=
"https://alioth.debian.org/
">Alioth
</a
>, but did not have time
9528 to follow up on it. Until today. :)
</p
>
9530 <p
>After many hours of cleaning and migration, the ng-utils project
9531 now have a new home, and a git repository with the highlight of the
9532 history of the project. I published all release tarballs and imported
9533 them into the git repository. As the project is really stable and not
9534 expected to gain new features any time soon, I decided to make a new
9535 release and call it
1.0. Visit the new project home on
9536 <a href=
"https://alioth.debian.org/projects/ng-utils/
">https://alioth.debian.org/projects/ng-utils/
</a
>
9537 if you want to check it out. The new version is also uploaded into
9538 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/ng-utils.html
">Debian Unstable
</a
>.
</p
>
9543 <title>Testing sysvinit from experimental in Debian Hurd
</title>
9544 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_sysvinit_from_experimental_in_Debian_Hurd.html
</link>
9545 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_sysvinit_from_experimental_in_Debian_Hurd.html
</guid>
9546 <pubDate>Mon,
3 Feb
2014 13:
40:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
9547 <description><p
>A few days ago I decided to try to help the Hurd people to get
9548 their changes into sysvinit, to allow them to use the normal sysvinit
9549 boot system instead of their old one. This follow up on the
9550 <a href=
"https://teythoon.cryptobitch.de//categories/gsoc.html
">great
9551 Google Summer of Code work
</a
> done last summer by Justus Winter to
9552 get Debian on Hurd working more like Debian on Linux. To get started,
9553 I downloaded a prebuilt hard disk image from
9554 <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
>,
9555 and started it using virt-manager.
</p
>
9557 <p
>The first think I had to do after logging in (root without any
9558 password) was to get the network operational. I followed
9559 <a href=
"https://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/hurd-install
">the
9560 instructions on the Debian GNU/Hurd ports page
</a
> and ran these
9561 commands as root to get the machine to accept a IP address from the
9562 kvm internal DHCP server:
</p
>
9564 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
9565 settrans -fgap /dev/netdde /hurd/netdde
9566 kill $(ps -ef|awk
'/[p]finet/ { print $
2}
')
9567 kill $(ps -ef|awk
'/[d]evnode/ { print $
2}
')
9569 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
9571 <p
>After this, the machine had internet connectivity, and I could
9572 upgrade it and install the sysvinit packages from experimental and
9573 enable it as the default boot system in Hurd.
</p
>
9575 <p
>But before I did that, I set a password on the root user, as ssh is
9576 running on the machine it for ssh login to work a password need to be
9577 set. Also, note that a bug somewhere in openssh on Hurd block
9578 compression from working. Remember to turn that off on the client
9581 <p
>Run these commands as root to upgrade and test the new sysvinit
9584 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
9585 cat
> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/experimental.list
&lt;
&lt;EOF
9586 deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ experimental main
9589 apt-get dist-upgrade
9590 apt-get install -t experimental initscripts sysv-rc sysvinit \
9591 sysvinit-core sysvinit-utils
9592 update-alternatives --config runsystem
9593 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
9595 <p
>To reboot after switching boot system, you have to use
9596 <tt
>reboot-hurd
</tt
> instead of just
<tt
>reboot
</tt
>, as there is not
9597 yet a sysvinit process able to receive the signals from the normal
9598 'reboot
' command. After switching to sysvinit as the boot system,
9599 upgrading every package and rebooting, the network come up with DHCP
9600 after boot as it should, and the settrans/pkill hack mentioned at the
9601 start is no longer needed. But for some strange reason, there are no
9602 longer any login prompt in the virtual console, so I logged in using
9605 <p
>Note that there are some race conditions in Hurd making the boot
9606 fail some times. No idea what the cause is, but hope the Hurd porters
9607 figure it out. At least Justus said on IRC (#debian-hurd on
9608 irc.debian.org) that they are aware of the problem. A way to reduce
9609 the impact is to upgrade to the Hurd packages built by Justus by
9610 adding this repository to the machine:
</p
>
9612 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
9613 cat
> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hurd-ci.list
&lt;
&lt;EOF
9614 deb http://darnassus.sceen.net/~teythoon/hurd-ci/ sid main
9616 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
9618 <p
>At the moment the prebuilt virtual machine get some packages from
9619 http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian, because some of the packages in
9620 unstable do not yet include the required patches that are lingering in
9621 BTS. This is the completely list of
"unofficial
" packages installed:
</p
>
9623 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
9624 # aptitude search
'?narrow(?version(CURRENT),?origin(Debian Ports))
'
9625 i emacs - GNU Emacs editor (metapackage)
9626 i gdb - GNU Debugger
9627 i hurd-recommended - Miscellaneous translators
9628 i isc-dhcp-client - ISC DHCP client
9629 i isc-dhcp-common - common files used by all the isc-dhcp* packages
9630 i libc-bin - Embedded GNU C Library: Binaries
9631 i libc-dev-bin - Embedded GNU C Library: Development binaries
9632 i libc0.3 - Embedded GNU C Library: Shared libraries
9633 i A libc0.3-dbg - Embedded GNU C Library: detached debugging symbols
9634 i libc0.3-dev - Embedded GNU C Library: Development Libraries and Hea
9635 i multiarch-support - Transitional package to ensure multiarch compatibilit
9636 i A x11-common - X Window System (X.Org) infrastructure
9637 i xorg - X.Org X Window System
9638 i A xserver-xorg - X.Org X server
9639 i A xserver-xorg-input-all - X.Org X server -- input driver metapackage
9641 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
9643 <p
>All in all, testing hurd has been an interesting experience. :)
9644 X.org did not work out of the box and I never took the time to follow
9645 the porters instructions to fix it. This time I was interested in the
9646 command line stuff.
<p
>
9651 <title>A fist full of non-anonymous Bitcoins
</title>
9652 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_fist_full_of_non_anonymous_Bitcoins.html
</link>
9653 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_fist_full_of_non_anonymous_Bitcoins.html
</guid>
9654 <pubDate>Wed,
29 Jan
2014 14:
10:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
9655 <description><p
>Bitcoin is a incredible use of peer to peer communication and
9656 encryption, allowing direct and immediate money transfer without any
9657 central control. It is sometimes claimed to be ideal for illegal
9658 activity, which I believe is quite a long way from the truth. At least
9659 I would not conduct illegal money transfers using a system where the
9660 details of every transaction are kept forever. This point is
9662 <a href=
"https://www.usenix.org/publications/login
">USENIX ;login:
</a
>
9663 from December
2013, in the article
9664 "<a href=
"https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/articles/
03_meiklejohn-online.pdf
">A
9665 Fistful of Bitcoins - Characterizing Payments Among Men with No
9666 Names
</a
>" by Sarah Meiklejohn, Marjori Pomarole,Grant Jordan, Kirill
9667 Levchenko, Damon McCoy, Geoffrey M. Voelker, and Stefan Savage. They
9668 analyse the transaction log in the Bitcoin system, using it to find
9669 addresses belong to individuals and organisations and follow the flow
9670 of money from both Bitcoin theft and trades on Silk Road to where the
9671 money end up. This is how they wrap up their article:
</p
>
9673 <p
><blockquote
>
9674 <p
>"To demonstrate the usefulness of this type of analysis, we turned
9675 our attention to criminal activity. In the Bitcoin economy, criminal
9676 activity can appear in a number of forms, such as dealing drugs on
9677 Silk Road or simply stealing someone else’s bitcoins. We followed the
9678 flow of bitcoins out of Silk Road (in particular, from one notorious
9679 address) and from a number of highly publicized thefts to see whether
9680 we could track the bitcoins to known services. Although some of the
9681 thieves attempted to use sophisticated mixing techniques (or possibly
9682 mix services) to obscure the flow of bitcoins, for the most part
9683 tracking the bitcoins was quite straightforward, and we ultimately saw
9684 large quantities of bitcoins flow to a variety of exchanges directly
9685 from the point of theft (or the withdrawal from Silk Road).
</p
>
9687 <p
>As acknowledged above, following stolen bitcoins to the point at
9688 which they are deposited into an exchange does not in itself identify
9689 the thief; however, it does enable further de-anonymization in the
9690 case in which certain agencies can determine (through, for example,
9691 subpoena power) the real-world owner of the account into which the
9692 stolen bitcoins were deposited. Because such exchanges seem to serve
9693 as chokepoints into and out of the Bitcoin economy (i.e., there are
9694 few alternative ways to cash out), we conclude that using Bitcoin for
9695 money laundering or other illicit purposes does not (at least at
9696 present) seem to be particularly attractive.
"</p
>
9697 </blockquote
><p
>
9699 <p
>These researches are not the first to analyse the Bitcoin
9700 transaction log. The
2011 paper
9701 "<a href=
"http://arxiv.org/abs/
1107.4524">An Analysis of Anonymity in
9702 the Bitcoin System
</A
>" by Fergal Reid and Martin Harrigan is
9703 summarized like this:
</p
>
9705 <p
><blockquote
>
9706 "Anonymity in Bitcoin, a peer-to-peer electronic currency system, is a
9707 complicated issue. Within the system, users are identified by
9708 public-keys only. An attacker wishing to de-anonymize its users will
9709 attempt to construct the one-to-many mapping between users and
9710 public-keys and associate information external to the system with the
9711 users. Bitcoin tries to prevent this attack by storing the mapping of
9712 a user to his or her public-keys on that user
's node only and by
9713 allowing each user to generate as many public-keys as required. In
9714 this chapter we consider the topological structure of two networks
9715 derived from Bitcoin
's public transaction history. We show that the
9716 two networks have a non-trivial topological structure, provide
9717 complementary views of the Bitcoin system and have implications for
9718 anonymity. We combine these structures with external information and
9719 techniques such as context discovery and flow analysis to investigate
9720 an alleged theft of Bitcoins, which, at the time of the theft, had a
9721 market value of approximately half a million U.S. dollars.
"
9722 </blockquote
></p
>
9724 <p
>I hope these references can help kill the urban myth that Bitcoin
9725 is anonymous. It isn
't really a good fit for illegal activites. Use
9726 cash if you need to stay anonymous, at least until regular DNA
9727 sampling of notes and coins become the norm. :)
</p
>
9729 <p
>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
9730 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
9731 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
9736 <title>New chrpath release
0.16</title>
9737 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_chrpath_release_0_16.html
</link>
9738 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_chrpath_release_0_16.html
</guid>
9739 <pubDate>Tue,
14 Jan
2014 11:
00:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
9740 <description><p
><a href=
"http://www.coverity.com/
">Coverity
</a
> is a nice tool to
9741 find problems in C, C++ and Java code using static source code
9742 analysis. It can detect a lot of different problems, and is very
9743 useful to find memory and locking bugs in the error handling part of
9744 the source. The company behind it provide
9745 <a href=
"https://scan.coverity.com/
">check of free software projects as
9746 a community service
</a
>, and many hundred free software projects are
9747 already checked. A few days ago I decided to have a closer look at
9748 the Coverity system, and discovered that the
9749 <a href=
"http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/
">gnash
</a
> and
9750 <a href=
"http://sourceforge.net/projects/ipmitool/
">ipmitool
</a
>
9751 projects I am involved with was already registered. But these are
9752 fairly big, and I would also like to have a small and easy project to
9753 check, and decided to
<a href=
"http://scan.coverity.com/projects/
1179">request
9754 checking of the chrpath project
</a
>. It was
9755 added to the checker and discovered seven potential defects. Six of
9756 these were real, mostly resource
"leak
" when the program detected an
9757 error. Nothing serious, as the resources would be released a fraction
9758 of a second later when the program exited because of the error, but it
9759 is nice to do it right in case the source of the program some time in
9760 the future end up in a library. Having fixed all defects and added
9761 <a href=
"https://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/chrpath-devel
">a
9762 mailing list for the chrpath developers
</a
>, I decided it was time to
9763 publish a new release. These are the release notes:
</p
>
9765 <p
>New in
0.16 released
2014-
01-
14:
</p
>
9769 <li
>Fixed all minor bugs discovered by Coverity.
</li
>
9770 <li
>Updated config.sub and config.guess from the GNU project.
</li
>
9771 <li
>Mention new project mailing list in the documentation.
</li
>
9776 <a href=
"https://alioth.debian.org/frs/?group_id=
31052">download the
9777 new version
0.16 from alioth
</a
>. Please let us know via the Alioth
9778 project if something is wrong with the new release. The test suite
9779 did not discover any old errors, so if you find a new one, please also
9780 include a test suite check.
</p
>
9785 <title>Debian Edu interview: Dominik George
</title>
9786 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Dominik_George.html
</link>
9787 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Dominik_George.html
</guid>
9788 <pubDate>Wed,
25 Dec
2013 13:
40:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
9789 <description><p
>The
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
9790 project
</a
> consist of both newcomers and old timers, and this time I
9791 was able to get an interview with a newcomer in the project who showed
9792 up on the IRC channel a few weeks ago to let us know about his
9793 successful installation of Debian Edu Wheezy in his School. Say hello
9794 to
<a href=
"https://www.ohloh.net/accounts/Natureshadow
">Dominik
9795 George
</a
>.
</p
>
9797 <!-- http://www.dominik-george.de/images/foto.jpg --
>
9799 <p
><strong
>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
</strong
></p
>
9801 <p
>I am a
23 year-old student from Germany who has spent half of his
9802 life with open source. In
"real life
", I am, as already mentioned, a
9803 student in the fields of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering,
9804 Information Technologies and Anglistics. Due to my (only partially
9805 voluntary) huge engagement in the open source world, these things are
9806 a bit vacant right now however.
</p
>
9808 <p
>I also have been working as a project teacher at a Gymasnium
9809 (public school) for various years now. I took up that work some time
9810 around
2005 when still attending that school myself and have continued
9811 it until today. I also had been running the (kind of very advanced)
9812 network of that school together with a team of very interested and
9813 talented students in the age of
11 to
15 years, who took the chance to
9814 learn a lot about open source and networking before I left the school
9815 to help building another school
's informational education concept from
9818 <p
>That said, one might see me as a kind of
"glue
" between school kids
9819 and the elderly of teachers as well as between the open source
9820 ecosystem and the (even more complex) educational ecosystem.
</p
>
9822 <p
>When I am not busy with open source or education, I like Geocaching
9823 and cycling.
</p
>
9825 <p
><strong
>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
9826 project?
</strong
></p
>
9828 <p
>I think that happened some time around
2009 when I first attended
9829 <a href=
"http://www.froscon.org
">FrOSCon
</a
> and visited the project
9830 booth. I think I wasn
't too interested back then because I used to
9831 have an attitude of disliking software that does too much stuff on its
9832 own. Maybe I was too inexperienced to realise the upsides of an
9833 "out-of-the-box
" solution ;).
</p
>
9835 <p
>The first time I actively talked to Skolelinux people was at
9836 <a href=
"http://www.openrheinruhr.de
">OpenRheinRuhr
</a
> 2011 when the
9837 BiscuIT project, a home-grewn software used by my school for various
9838 really cool things from timetables and class contact lists to lunch
9839 ordering, student ID card printing and project elections first got to
9840 a stage where it could have been published. I asked the Skolelinux
9841 guys running the booth if the project were interested in it and gave a
9842 small demonstration, but there wasn
't any real feedback and the guys
9843 seemed rather uninterested.
</p
>
9845 <p
>After I left the school where I developed the software, it got
9846 mostly lost, but I am now reimplementing it for my new school. I have
9847 reusability and compatibility in mind, and I hop there will be a new
9848 basis for contributing it to the Skolelinux project ;)!
</p
>
9850 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
9851 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
9853 <p
>The most important advantage seems to be that it
"just
9854 works
". After overcoming some minor (but still very annoying) glitches
9855 in the installer, I got a fully functional, working school network,
9856 without the month-long hassle I experienced when setting all that up
9857 from scratch in earlier years. And above that, it rocked - I didn
't
9858 have any real hardware at hand, because the school was just founded
9859 and has no money whatsoever, so I installed a combined server (main
9860 server, terminal services and workstation) in a VM on my personal
9861 notebook, bridging the LTSP network interface to the ethernet port,
9862 and then PXE-booted the Windows notebooks that were lying around from
9863 it. I could use
8 clients without any performance issues, by using a
9864 tiny little VM on a tiny little notebook. I think that
's enough to say
9865 that it rocks!
</p
>
9867 <p
>Secondly, there are marketing reasons. Life
's bad, and so no
9868 politician will ever permit a setup described as
"Debian, an universal
9869 operating system, with some really cool educational tools
" while they
9870 will be jsut fine with
"Skolelinux, a single-purpose solution for your
9871 school network
", even if both turn out to be the very same thing (yes,
9872 this is unfair towards the Skolelinux project, and must not be taken
9873 too seriously - you get the idea, anyway).
</p
>
9875 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
9876 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
9878 <p
>I have not been involved with Skolelinux long enough to really
9879 answer this question in a fair way. Thus, please allow me to put it in
9880 other words:
"What do you expect from Skolelinux to keep liking it?
" I
9881 can list a few points about that:
</p
>
9885 <li
>always strive to get all things integrated into Debian upstream
9886 <li
>be open to discussion about changes and the like, even with newcomers
9887 <li
>be helpful at being helpful ;)
9891 <p
>I
'm really sorry I cannot say much more about that :(!
</p
>
9893 <p
><strong
>Which free software do you use daily?
</strong
></p
>
9895 <p
>First of all, all software I use is free and open. I have abandoned
9896 all non-free software (except for firmware on my darned phone) this
9899 <p
>I run Debian GNU/Linux on all PC systems I use. On that, I mostly
9900 run text tools. I use
9901 <a href=
"https://www.mirbsd.org/mksh.htm
">mksh
</a
> as shell,
9902 <a href=
"https://www.mirbsd.org/jupp.htm
">jupp
</a
> as very advanced
9903 text editor (I even got the developer to help me write a script/macro
9904 based full-featured student management software with the two),
9905 <a href=
"http://mcabber.com/
">mcabber
</a
> for XMPP and
9906 <a href=
"http://www.irssi.org/
">irssi
</a
> for IRC. For that overly
9907 coloured world called the WWW, I use
9908 <a href=
"https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/
">Iceweasel
9909 (Firefox)
</a
>. Oh, and
<a href=
"http://www.mutt.org/
">mutt
</a
> for
9912 <p
>However, while I am personally aware of the fact that text tools
9913 are more efficient and powerful than anything else, I also use (or at
9914 least operate) some tools that are suitable to bring open source to
9915 kids. One of these things is
<a href=
"http://jappix.org/
">Jappix
</a
>,
9916 which I already introduced to some kids even before they got aware of
9917 Facebook, making them see for themselves that they do not need
9918 Facebook now ;).
</p
>
9920 <p
><strong
>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
9921 get schools to use free software?
</strong
></p
>
9923 <p
>Well, that
's a two-sided thing. One side is what I believe, and one
9924 side is what I have experienced.
</p
>
9926 <p
>I believe that the right strategy is showing them the benefits. But
9927 that won
't work out as long as the acceptance of free alternatives
9928 grows globally. What I mean is that if all the kids are almost forced
9929 to use Windows, Facebook, Skype, you name it at home, they will not
9930 see why they would want to use alternatives at school. I have seen
9931 students take seat in front of a fully-functional, modern Debian
9932 desktop that could do anything their Windows at home could do, and
9933 they jsut refused to use it because
"Linux sucks
". It is something
9934 that makes the council of our city spend around
600000 € to buy
9935 software - not including hardware, mind you - for operating school
9936 networks, and for installing a system that, as has been proved, does
9937 not work. For those of you readers who are good at maths, have you
9938 already found out how many lives could have been saved with that money
9939 if we had instead used it to bring education to parts of the world
9940 that need it? I have, and found it to be nothing less dramatic than
9941 plain criminal.
</p
>
9943 <p
>That said, the only feasible way appears to be the bottom up
9944 method. We have to bring free software to kids and parents. I have
9945 founded an association named
9946 <a href=
"https://www.teckids.org
">Teckids
</a
> here in Germany that does
9947 just that. We organise several events for kids and adolescents in the
9948 area of free and open source software, for example the
9949 <a href=
"http://kids.froscon.org
">FrogLabs
</a
>, which share staff with
9950 Teckids and are the youth programme of
9951 <a href=
"http://www.froscon.org
">the Free and Open Source Software
9952 Conference (FrOSCon)
</a
>. We do a lot more than most other conferences
9953 - this year, we first offered the FrogLabs as a holiday camp for kids
9954 aged
10 to
16. It was a huge success, with approx.
30 kids taking part
9955 and learning with and about free software through a whole weekend. All
9956 of us had a lot of fun, and the results were really exciting.
</p
>
9958 <p
>Apart from that, we are preparing a campaign that is supposed to bring
9959 the message of free alternatives to stuff kids use every day to them and
9960 their parents, e.g. the use of Jabber / Jappix instead of Facebook and
9961 Skype. To make that possible, we are planning to get together a team of
9962 clever kids who understand very well what their peers need and can bring
9963 it across to them. So we will have a peer-driven network of adolescents
9964 who teach each other and collect feedback from the community of minors.
9965 We then take that feedback and our own experience to work closely with
9966 open source projects, such as Skolelinux or Jappix, at improving their
9967 software in a way that makes it more and more attractive for the target
9968 group. At least I hope that we will have good cooperation with
9969 Skolelinux in the future ;)!
</p
>
9971 <p
>So in conclusion, what I believe is that, if it weren
't for the world
9972 being so bad, it should be very clear to the political decision makers
9973 that the only way to go nowadays is free software for various reasons,
9974 but I have learnt that the only way that seems to work is bottom up.
</p
>
9978 > * Who should be interviewed with this questions in the future?
9980 That
's probably the hardest question of them all, as I do not know the
9981 community. However, I would be willing to do the following:
9983 <li
>Run an interview with a German headteacher who is very open to
9984 free software, and also prefers it, but cannot really use it because
9985 of the decision makers above;
9986 <li
>Run interviews with some kids, both with and without previous
9987 knowledge about free software
9989 If that is wanted, just let me know ;).
9996 <title>Debian Edu interview: Klaus Knopper
</title>
9997 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Klaus_Knopper.html
</link>
9998 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Klaus_Knopper.html
</guid>
9999 <pubDate>Fri,
6 Dec
2013 09:
50:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
10000 <description><p
>It has been a while since I managed to publish the last interview,
10001 but the
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu /
10002 Skolelinux
</a
> community is still going strong, and yesterday we even
10003 had a new school administrator show up on
10004 <a href=
"irc://irc.debian.org/#debian-edu
">#debian-edu
</a
> to share
10005 his success story with installing Debian Edu at their school. This
10006 time I have been able to get some helpful comments from the creator of
10007 Knoppix, Klaus Knopper, who was involved in a Skolelinux project in
10008 Germany a few years ago.
</p
>
10010 <p
><strong
>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
</strong
></p
>
10012 <p
>I am Klaus Knopper. I have a master degree in electrical
10013 engineering, and is currently professor in information management at
10014 the university of applied sciences Kaiserslautern / Germany and
10015 freelance Open Source software developer and consultant.
</p
>
10017 <p
>All of this is pretty much of the work I spend my days with. Apart
10018 from teaching, I
'm also conducting some more or less experimental
10019 projects like the
<a href=
"http://www.knoppix.org
">Knoppix GNU/Linux live
10020 system
</a
> (Debian-based like Skolelinux),
10021 <a href=
"http://www.knopper.net/knoppix-adriane/index-en.html
">ADRIANE
</a
>
10022 (a blind-friendly talking desktop system) and
10023 <a href=
"http://www.knopper.net/linbo/index-en.html
">LINBO
</a
>
10024 (Linux-based network boot console, a fast remote install and repair
10025 system supporting various operating systems).
</p
>
10027 <p
><strong
>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
10028 project?
</strong
></p
>
10030 <p
>The credit for this have to go to Kurt Gramlich, who is the German
10031 coordinator for Skolelinux. We were looking for an all-in-one open
10032 source community-supported distribution for schools, and Kurt
10033 introduced us to Skolelinux for this purpose.
</p
>
10035 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
10036 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
10039 <li
>Quick installation,
</li
>
10040 <li
>works (almost) out of the box,
</li
>
10041 <li
>contains many useful software packages for teaching and learning,
</li
>
10042 <li
>is a purely community-based distro and not controlled by a
10043 single company,
</li
>
10044 <li
>has a large number of supporters and teachers who share their
10045 experience and problem solutions.
</li
>
10048 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
10049 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
10052 <li
>Skolelinux is - as we had to learn - not easily upgradable to
10053 the next version. Opposed to its genuine Debian base, upgrading to
10054 a new version means a full new installation from scratch to get it
10055 working again reliably.
10057 <li
>Skolelinux is based on Debian/stable, and therefore always a
10058 little outdated in terms of program versions compared to Edubuntu or
10059 similar educational Linux distros, which rather use Debian/testing
10062 <li
>Skolelinux has some very self-opinionated and stubborn default
10063 configuration which in my opinion adds unnecessary complexity and is
10064 not always suitable for a schools needs, the preset network
10065 configuration is actually a core definition feature of Skolelinux
10066 and not easy to change, so schools sometimes have to change their
10067 network configuration to make it
"Skolelinux-compatible
".
10069 <li
>Some proposed extensions, which were made available as
10070 contribution, like secure examination mode and lecture material
10071 distribution and collection, were not accepted into the mainline
10072 Skolelinux development and are now not easy to maintain in the
10073 future because of Skolelinux somewhat undeterministic update
10074 schemes.
</li
>
10076 <li
>Skolelinux has only a very tiny number of base developers
10077 compared to Debian.
</li
>
10081 <p
>For these reasons and experience from our project, I would now
10082 rather consider using plain Debian for schools next time, until
10083 Skolelinux is more closely integrated into Debian and becomes
10084 upgradeable without reinstallation.
</p
>
10086 <p
><strong
>Which free software do you use daily?
</strong
></p
>
10088 <p
>GNU/Linux with LXDE desktop, bash for interactive dialog and
10089 programming, texlive for documentation and correspondence,
10090 occasionally LibreOffice for document format conversion. Various
10091 programming languages for teaching.
</p
>
10093 <p
><strong
>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
10094 get schools to use free software?
</strong
></p
>
10096 <p
>Strong arguments are
</p
>
10100 <li
>Knowledge is free, and so should be methods and tools for
10101 teaching and learning.
</li
>
10103 <li
>Students can learn with and use the same software at school, at
10104 home, and at their working place without running into license or
10105 conversion problems.
</li
>
10107 <li
>Closed source or proprietary software hides knowledge rather
10108 than exposing it, and proprietary software vendors try to bind
10109 customers to certain products. But teachers need to teach
10110 science, not products.
</li
>
10112 <li
>If you have everything you for daily work as open source, what
10113 would you need proprietary software for?
</li
>
10120 <title>Dugnadsnett for alle, a wireless community network in Oslo, take shape
</title>
10121 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnadsnett_for_alle__a_wireless_community_network_in_Oslo__take_shape.html
</link>
10122 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnadsnett_for_alle__a_wireless_community_network_in_Oslo__take_shape.html
</guid>
10123 <pubDate>Sat,
30 Nov
2013 10:
10:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
10124 <description><p
>If you want the ability to electronically communicate directly with
10125 your neighbors and friends using a network controlled by your peers in
10126 stead of centrally controlled by a few corporations, or would like to
10127 experiment with interesting network technology, the
10128 <a href=
"http://www.dugnadsnett.no/
">Dugnasnett for alle i Oslo
</a
>
10129 might be project for you.
39 mesh nodes are currently being planned,
10130 in the freshly started initiative from NUUG and Hackeriet to create a
10131 wireless community network. The work is inspired by
10132 <a href=
"http://freifunk.net/
">Freifunk
</a
>,
10133 <a href=
"http://www.awmn.net/
">Athens Wireless Metropolitan
10134 Network
</a
>,
<a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roofnet
">Roofnet
</a
>
10135 and other successful mesh networks around the globe. Two days ago we
10136 held a workshop to try to get people started on setting up their own
10137 mesh node, and there we decided to create a new mailing list
10138 <a href=
"http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/dugnadsnett
">dugnadsnett
10139 (at) nuug.no
</a
> and IRC channel
10140 <a href=
"irc://irc.freenode.net/#dugnadsnett.no
">#dugnadsnett.no
</a
> to
10141 coordinate the work. See also the NUUG blog post
10142 <a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/news/E_postliste_og_IRC_kanal_for_Dugnadsnett_for_alle_i_Oslo.shtml
">announcing
10143 the mailing list and IRC channel
</a
>.
</p
>
10148 <title>New chrpath release
0.15</title>
10149 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_chrpath_release_0_15.html
</link>
10150 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_chrpath_release_0_15.html
</guid>
10151 <pubDate>Sun,
24 Nov
2013 09:
30:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
10152 <description><p
>After many years break from the package and a vain hope that
10153 development would be continued by someone else, I finally pulled my
10154 acts together this morning and wrapped up a new release of chrpath,
10155 the command line tool to modify the rpath and runpath of already
10156 compiled ELF programs. The update was triggered by the persistence of
10157 Isha Vishnoi at IBM, which needed a new config.guess file to get
10158 support for the ppc64le architecture (powerpc
64-bit Little Endian) he
10159 is working on. I checked the
10160 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/chrpath
">Debian
</a
>,
10161 <a href=
"https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/chrpath
">Ubuntu
</a
> and
10162 <a href=
"https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/acls/name/chrpath
">Fedora
</a
>
10163 packages for interesting patches (failed to find the source from
10164 OpenSUSE and Mandriva packages), and found quite a few nice fixes.
10165 These are the release notes:
</p
>
10167 <p
>New in
0.15 released
2013-
11-
24:
</p
>
10171 <li
>Updated config.sub and config.guess from the GNU project to work
10172 with newer architectures. Thanks to isha vishnoi for the heads
10175 <li
>Updated README with current URLs.
</li
>
10177 <li
>Added byteswap fix found in Ubuntu, credited Jeremy Kerr and
10178 Matthias Klose.
</li
>
10180 <li
>Added missing help for -k|--keepgoing option, using patch by
10181 Petr Machata found in Fedora.
</li
>
10183 <li
>Rewrite removal of RPATH/RUNPATH to make sure the entry in
10184 .dynamic is a NULL terminated string. Based on patch found in
10185 Fedora credited Axel Thimm and Christian Krause.
</li
>
10190 <a href=
"https://alioth.debian.org/frs/?group_id=
31052">download the
10191 new version
0.15 from alioth
</a
>. Please let us know via the Alioth
10192 project if something is wrong with the new release. The test suite
10193 did not discover any old errors, so if you find a new one, please also
10194 include a testsuite check.
</p
>
10199 <title>All drones should be radio marked with what they do and who they belong to
</title>
10200 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/All_drones_should_be_radio_marked_with_what_they_do_and_who_they_belong_to.html
</link>
10201 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/All_drones_should_be_radio_marked_with_what_they_do_and_who_they_belong_to.html
</guid>
10202 <pubDate>Thu,
21 Nov
2013 15:
40:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
10203 <description><p
>Drones, flying robots, are getting more and more popular. The most
10204 know ones are the killer drones used by some government to murder
10205 people they do not like without giving them the chance of a fair
10206 trial, but the technology have many good uses too, from mapping and
10207 forest maintenance to photography and search and rescue. I am sure it
10208 is just a question of time before
"bad drones
" are in the hands of
10209 private enterprises and not only state criminals but petty criminals
10210 too. The drone technology is very useful and very dangerous. To have
10211 some control over the use of drones, I agree with Daniel Suarez in his
10213 "<a href=
"https://archive.org/details/DanielSuarez_2013G
">The kill
10214 decision shouldn
't belong to a robot
</a
>", where he suggested this
10215 little gem to keep the good while limiting the bad use of drones:
</p
>
10219 <p
>Each robot and drone should have a cryptographically signed
10220 I.D. burned in at the factory that can be used to track its movement
10221 through public spaces. We have license plates on cars, tail numbers on
10222 aircraft. This is no different. And every citizen should be able to
10223 download an app that shows the population of drones and autonomous
10224 vehicles moving through public spaces around them, both right now and
10225 historically. And civic leaders should deploy sensors and civic drones
10226 to detect rogue drones, and instead of sending killer drones of their
10227 own up to shoot them down, they should notify humans to their
10228 presence. And in certain very high-security areas, perhaps civic
10229 drones would snare them and drag them off to a bomb disposal facility.
</p
>
10231 <p
>But notice, this is more an immune system than a weapons system. It
10232 would allow us to avail ourselves of the use of autonomous vehicles
10233 and drones while still preserving our open, civil society.
</p
>
10235 </blockquote
>
10237 <p
>The key is that
<em
>every citizen
</em
> should be able to read the
10238 radio beacons sent from the drones in the area, to be able to check
10239 both the government and others use of drones. For such control to be
10240 effective, everyone must be able to do it. What should such beacon
10241 contain? At least formal owner, purpose, contact information and GPS
10242 location. Probably also the origin and target position of the current
10243 flight. And perhaps some registration number to be able to look up
10244 the drone in a central database tracking their movement. Robots
10245 should not have privacy. It is people who need privacy.
</p
>
10250 <title>Lets make a wireless community network in Oslo!
</title>
10251 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_a_wireless_community_network_in_Oslo_.html
</link>
10252 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_a_wireless_community_network_in_Oslo_.html
</guid>
10253 <pubDate>Wed,
13 Nov
2013 21:
00:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
10254 <description><p
>Today NUUG and Hackeriet announced
10255 <a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/news/Bli_med___bygge_dugnadsnett_for_alle_i_Oslo.shtml
">our
10256 plans to join forces and create a wireless community network in
10257 Oslo
</a
>. The workshop to help people get started will take place
10258 Thursday
2013-
11-
28, but we already are collecting the geolocation of
10259 people joining forces to make this happen. We have
10260 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node/blob/master/oslo-nodes.geojson
">9
10261 locations plotted on the map
</a
>, but we will need more before we have
10262 a connected mesh spread across Oslo. If this sound interesting to
10263 you, please join us at the workshop. If you are too impatient to wait
10264 15 days, please join us on the IRC channel
10265 <a href=
"irc://irc.freenode.net/%
23nuug
">#nuug on irc.freenode.net
</a
>
10266 right away. :)
</p
>
10271 <title>Running TP-Link MR3040 as a batman-adv mesh node using openwrt
</title>
10272 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Running_TP_Link_MR3040_as_a_batman_adv_mesh_node_using_openwrt.html
</link>
10273 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Running_TP_Link_MR3040_as_a_batman_adv_mesh_node_using_openwrt.html
</guid>
10274 <pubDate>Sun,
10 Nov
2013 23:
00:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
10275 <description><p
>Continuing my research into mesh networking, I was recommended to
10276 use TP-Link
3040 and
3600 access points as mesh nodes, and the pair I
10277 bought arrived on Friday. Here are my notes on how to set up the
10278 MR3040 as a mesh node using
10279 <a href=
"http://www.openwrt.org/
">OpenWrt
</a
>.
</p
>
10281 <p
>I started by following the instructions on the OpenWRT wiki for
10282 <a href=
"http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/tl-mr3040
">TL-MR3040
</a
>,
10284 <a href=
"http://downloads.openwrt.org/snapshots/trunk/ar71xx/openwrt-ar71xx-generic-tl-mr3040-v2-squashfs-factory.bin
">the
10285 recommended firmware image
</a
>
10286 (openwrt-ar71xx-generic-tl-mr3040-v2-squashfs-factory.bin) and
10287 uploaded it into the original web interface. The flashing went fine,
10288 and the machine was available via telnet on the ethernet port. After
10289 logging in and setting the root password, ssh was available and I
10290 could start to set it up as a batman-adv mesh node.
</p
>
10292 <p
>I started off by reading the instructions from
10293 <a href=
"http://wirelessafrica.meraka.org.za/wiki/index.php?title=Antoine
's_Research
">Wireless
10294 Africa
</a
>, which had quite a lot of useful information, but
10295 eventually I followed the recipe from the Open Mesh wiki for
10296 <a href=
"http://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki/Batman-adv-openwrt-config
">using
10297 batman-adv on OpenWrt
</a
>. A small snag was the fact that the
10298 <tt
>opkg install kmod-batman-adv
</tt
> command did not work as it
10299 should. The batman-adv kernel module would fail to load because its
10300 dependency crc16 was not already loaded. I
10301 <a href=
"https://dev.openwrt.org/ticket/
14452">reported the bug
</a
> to
10302 the openwrt project and hope it will be fixed soon. But the problem
10303 only seem to affect initial testing of batman-adv, as configuration
10304 seem to work when booting from scratch.
</p
>
10306 <p
>The setup is done using files in /etc/config/. I did not bridge
10307 the Ethernet and mesh interfaces this time, to be able to hook up the
10308 box on my local network and log into it for configuration updates.
10309 The following files were changed and look like this after modifying
10312 <p
><tt
>/etc/config/network
</tt
></p
>
10316 config interface
'loopback
'
10317 option ifname
'lo
'
10318 option proto
'static
'
10319 option ipaddr
'127.0.0.1'
10320 option netmask
'255.0.0.0'
10322 config globals
'globals
'
10323 option ula_prefix
'fdbf:
4c12:
3fed::/
48'
10325 config interface
'lan
'
10326 option ifname
'eth0
'
10327 option type
'bridge
'
10328 option proto
'dhcp
'
10329 option ipaddr
'192.168.1.1'
10330 option netmask
'255.255.255.0'
10331 option hostname
'tl-mr3040
'
10332 option ip6assign
'60'
10334 config interface
'mesh
'
10335 option ifname
'adhoc0
'
10336 option mtu
'1528'
10337 option proto
'batadv
'
10338 option mesh
'bat0
'
10341 <p
><tt
>/etc/config/wireless
</tt
></p
>
10344 config wifi-device
'radio0
'
10345 option type
'mac80211
'
10346 option channel
'11'
10347 option hwmode
'11ng
'
10348 option path
'platform/ar933x_wmac
'
10349 option htmode
'HT20
'
10350 list ht_capab
'SHORT-GI-
20'
10351 list ht_capab
'SHORT-GI-
40'
10352 list ht_capab
'RX-STBC1
'
10353 list ht_capab
'DSSS_CCK-
40'
10354 option disabled
'0'
10356 config wifi-iface
'wmesh
'
10357 option device
'radio0
'
10358 option ifname
'adhoc0
'
10359 option network
'mesh
'
10360 option encryption
'none
'
10361 option mode
'adhoc
'
10362 option bssid
'02:BA:
00:
00:
00:
01'
10363 option ssid
'meshfx@hackeriet
'
10365 <p
><tt
>/etc/config/batman-adv
</tt
></p
>
10368 config
'mesh
' 'bat0
'
10369 option interfaces
'adhoc0
'
10370 option
'aggregated_ogms
'
10371 option
'ap_isolation
'
10372 option
'bonding
'
10373 option
'fragmentation
'
10374 option
'gw_bandwidth
'
10375 option
'gw_mode
'
10376 option
'gw_sel_class
'
10377 option
'log_level
'
10378 option
'orig_interval
'
10379 option
'vis_mode
'
10380 option
'bridge_loop_avoidance
'
10381 option
'distributed_arp_table
'
10382 option
'network_coding
'
10383 option
'hop_penalty
'
10385 # yet another batX instance
10386 # config
'mesh
' 'bat5
'
10387 # option
'interfaces
' 'second_mesh
'
10390 <p
>The mesh node is now operational. I have yet to test its range,
10391 but I hope it is good. I have not yet tested the TP-Link
3600 box
10392 still wrapped up in plastic.
</p
>
10397 <title>Debian init.d boot script example for rsyslog
</title>
10398 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_init_d_boot_script_example_for_rsyslog.html
</link>
10399 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_init_d_boot_script_example_for_rsyslog.html
</guid>
10400 <pubDate>Sat,
2 Nov
2013 22:
40:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
10401 <description><p
>If one of the points of switching to a new init system in Debian is
10402 <a href=
"http://thomas.goirand.fr/blog/?p=
147">to get rid of huge
10403 init.d scripts
</a
>, I doubt we need to switch away from sysvinit and
10404 init.d scripts at all. Here is an example init.d script, ie a rewrite
10405 of /etc/init.d/rsyslog:
</p
>
10407 <p
><pre
>
10408 #!/lib/init/init-d-script
10409 ### BEGIN INIT INFO
10410 # Provides: rsyslog
10411 # Required-Start: $remote_fs $time
10412 # Required-Stop: umountnfs $time
10413 # X-Stop-After: sendsigs
10414 # Default-Start:
2 3 4 5
10415 # Default-Stop:
0 1 6
10416 # Short-Description: enhanced syslogd
10417 # Description: Rsyslog is an enhanced multi-threaded syslogd.
10418 # It is quite compatible to stock sysklogd and can be
10419 # used as a drop-in replacement.
10421 DESC=
"enhanced syslogd
"
10422 DAEMON=/usr/sbin/rsyslogd
10423 </pre
></p
>
10425 <p
>Pretty minimalistic to me... For the record, the original sysv-rc
10426 script was
137 lines, and the above is just
15 lines, most of it meta
10427 info/comments.
</p
>
10429 <p
>How to do this, you ask? Well, one create a new script
10430 /lib/init/init-d-script looking something like this:
10432 <p
><pre
>
10435 # Define LSB log_* functions.
10436 # Depend on lsb-base (
>=
3.2-
14) to ensure that this file is present
10437 # and status_of_proc is working.
10438 . /lib/lsb/init-functions
10441 # Function that starts the daemon/service
10447 #
0 if daemon has been started
10448 #
1 if daemon was already running
10449 #
2 if daemon could not be started
10450 start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --exec $DAEMON --test
> /dev/null \
10452 start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --exec $DAEMON -- \
10455 # Add code here, if necessary, that waits for the process to be ready
10456 # to handle requests from services started subsequently which depend
10457 # on this one. As a last resort, sleep for some time.
10461 # Function that stops the daemon/service
10466 #
0 if daemon has been stopped
10467 #
1 if daemon was already stopped
10468 #
2 if daemon could not be stopped
10469 # other if a failure occurred
10470 start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --retry=TERM/
30/KILL/
5 --pidfile $PIDFILE --name $NAME
10471 RETVAL=
"$?
"
10472 [
"$RETVAL
" =
2 ]
&& return
2
10473 # Wait for children to finish too if this is a daemon that forks
10474 # and if the daemon is only ever run from this initscript.
10475 # If the above conditions are not satisfied then add some other code
10476 # that waits for the process to drop all resources that could be
10477 # needed by services started subsequently. A last resort is to
10478 # sleep for some time.
10479 start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --oknodo --retry=
0/
30/KILL/
5 --exec $DAEMON
10480 [
"$?
" =
2 ]
&& return
2
10481 # Many daemons don
't delete their pidfiles when they exit.
10483 return
"$RETVAL
"
10487 # Function that sends a SIGHUP to the daemon/service
10491 # If the daemon can reload its configuration without
10492 # restarting (for example, when it is sent a SIGHUP),
10493 # then implement that here.
10495 start-stop-daemon --stop --signal
1 --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --name $NAME
10500 scriptbasename=
"$(basename $
1)
"
10501 echo
"SN: $scriptbasename
"
10502 if [
"$scriptbasename
" !=
"init-d-library
" ] ; then
10503 script=
"$
1"
10510 NAME=$(basename $DAEMON)
10511 PIDFILE=/var/run/$NAME.pid
10513 # Exit if the package is not installed
10514 #[ -x
"$DAEMON
" ] || exit
0
10516 # Read configuration variable file if it is present
10517 [ -r /etc/default/$NAME ]
&& . /etc/default/$NAME
10519 # Load the VERBOSE setting and other rcS variables
10520 . /lib/init/vars.sh
10522 case
"$
1" in
10524 [
"$VERBOSE
" != no ]
&& log_daemon_msg
"Starting $DESC
" "$NAME
"
10526 case
"$?
" in
10527 0|
1) [
"$VERBOSE
" != no ]
&& log_end_msg
0 ;;
10528 2) [
"$VERBOSE
" != no ]
&& log_end_msg
1 ;;
10532 [
"$VERBOSE
" != no ]
&& log_daemon_msg
"Stopping $DESC
" "$NAME
"
10534 case
"$?
" in
10535 0|
1) [
"$VERBOSE
" != no ]
&& log_end_msg
0 ;;
10536 2) [
"$VERBOSE
" != no ]
&& log_end_msg
1 ;;
10540 status_of_proc
"$DAEMON
" "$NAME
" && exit
0 || exit $?
10542 #reload|force-reload)
10544 # If do_reload() is not implemented then leave this commented out
10545 # and leave
'force-reload
' as an alias for
'restart
'.
10547 #log_daemon_msg
"Reloading $DESC
" "$NAME
"
10551 restart|force-reload)
10553 # If the
"reload
" option is implemented then remove the
10554 #
'force-reload
' alias
10556 log_daemon_msg
"Restarting $DESC
" "$NAME
"
10558 case
"$?
" in
10561 case
"$?
" in
10562 0) log_end_msg
0 ;;
10563 1) log_end_msg
1 ;; # Old process is still running
10564 *) log_end_msg
1 ;; # Failed to start
10574 echo
"Usage: $SCRIPTNAME {start|stop|status|restart|force-reload}
" >&2
10580 </pre
></p
>
10582 <p
>It is based on /etc/init.d/skeleton, and could be improved quite a
10583 lot. I did not really polish the approach, so it might not always
10584 work out of the box, but you get the idea. I did not try very hard to
10585 optimize it nor make it more robust either.
</p
>
10587 <p
>A better argument for switching init system in Debian than reducing
10588 the size of init scripts (which is a good thing to do anyway), is to
10589 get boot system that is able to handle the kernel events sensibly and
10590 robustly, and do not depend on the boot to run sequentially. The boot
10591 and the kernel have not behaved sequentially in years.
</p
>
10596 <title>Browser plugin for SPICE (spice-xpi) uploaded to Debian
</title>
10597 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Browser_plugin_for_SPICE__spice_xpi__uploaded_to_Debian.html
</link>
10598 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Browser_plugin_for_SPICE__spice_xpi__uploaded_to_Debian.html
</guid>
10599 <pubDate>Fri,
1 Nov
2013 11:
00:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
10600 <description><p
><a href=
"http://www.spice-space.org/
">The SPICE protocol
</a
> for
10601 remote display access is the preferred solution with oVirt and RedHat
10602 Enterprise Virtualization, and I was sad to discover the other day
10603 that the browser plugin needed to use these systems seamlessly was
10604 missing in Debian. The
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
668284">request
10605 for a package
</a
> was from
2012-
04-
10 with no progress since
10606 2013-
04-
01, so I decided to wrap up a package based on the great work
10607 from Cajus Pollmeier and put it in a collab-maint maintained git
10608 repository to get a package I could use. I would very much like
10609 others to help me maintain the package (or just take over, I do not
10610 mind), but as no-one had volunteered so far, I just uploaded it to
10611 NEW. I hope it will be available in Debian in a few days.
</p
>
10613 <p
>The source is now available from
10614 <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
>
10619 <title>Teaching vmdebootstrap to create Raspberry Pi SD card images
</title>
10620 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Teaching_vmdebootstrap_to_create_Raspberry_Pi_SD_card_images.html
</link>
10621 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Teaching_vmdebootstrap_to_create_Raspberry_Pi_SD_card_images.html
</guid>
10622 <pubDate>Sun,
27 Oct
2013 17:
00:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
10623 <description><p
>The
10624 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/v/vmdebootstrap.html
">vmdebootstrap
</a
>
10625 program is a a very nice system to create virtual machine images. It
10626 create a image file, add a partition table, mount it and run
10627 debootstrap in the mounted directory to create a Debian system on a
10628 stick. Yesterday, I decided to try to teach it how to make images for
10629 <a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi
">Raspberry Pi
</a
>, as part
10630 of a plan to simplify the build system for
10631 <a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox
">the FreedomBox
10632 project
</a
>. The FreedomBox project already uses vmdebootstrap for
10633 the virtualbox images, but its current build system made multistrap
10634 based system for Dreamplug images, and it is lacking support for
10635 Raspberry Pi.
</p
>
10637 <p
>Armed with the knowledge on how to build
"foreign
" (aka non-native
10638 architecture) chroots for Raspberry Pi, I dived into the vmdebootstrap
10639 code and adjusted it to be able to build armel images on my amd64
10640 Debian laptop. I ended up giving vmdebootstrap five new options,
10641 allowing me to replicate the image creation process I use to make
10642 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Raspberry_Pi_based_batman_adv_Mesh_network_node.html
">Debian
10643 Jessie based mesh node images for the Raspberry Pi
</a
>. First, the
10644 <tt
>--foreign /path/to/binfm_handler
</tt
> option tell vmdebootstrap to
10645 call debootstrap with --foreign and to copy the handler into the
10646 generated chroot before running the second stage. This allow
10647 vmdebootstrap to create armel images on an amd64 host. Next I added
10648 two new options
<tt
>--bootsize size
</tt
> and
<tt
>--boottype
10649 fstype
</tt
> to teach it to create a separate /boot/ partition with the
10650 given file system type, allowing me to create an image with a vfat
10651 partition for the /boot/ stuff. I also added a
<tt
>--variant
10652 variant
</tt
> option to allow me to create smaller images without the
10653 Debian base system packages installed. Finally, I added an option
10654 <tt
>--no-extlinux
</tt
> to tell vmdebootstrap to not install extlinux
10655 as a boot loader. It is not needed on the Raspberry Pi and probably
10656 most other non-x86 architectures. The changes were accepted by the
10657 upstream author of vmdebootstrap yesterday and today, and is now
10659 <a href=
"http://git.liw.fi/cgi-bin/cgit/cgit.cgi/vmdebootstrap/
">the
10660 upstream project page
</a
>.
</p
>
10662 <p
>To use it to build a Raspberry Pi image using Debian Jessie, first
10663 create a small script (the customize script) to add the non-free
10664 binary blob needed to boot the Raspberry Pi and the APT source
10667 <p
><pre
>
10669 set -e # Exit on first error
10670 rootdir=
"$
1"
10671 cd
"$rootdir
"
10672 cat
&lt;
&lt;EOF
> etc/apt/sources.list
10673 deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ jessie main contrib non-free
10675 # Install non-free binary blob needed to boot Raspberry Pi. This
10676 # install a kernel somewhere too.
10677 wget https://raw.github.com/Hexxeh/rpi-update/master/rpi-update \
10678 -O $rootdir/usr/bin/rpi-update
10679 chmod a+x $rootdir/usr/bin/rpi-update
10680 mkdir -p $rootdir/lib/modules
10681 touch $rootdir/boot/start.elf
10682 chroot $rootdir rpi-update
10683 </pre
></p
>
10685 <p
>Next, fetch the latest vmdebootstrap script and call it like this
10686 to build the image:
</p
>
10689 sudo ./vmdebootstrap \
10690 --variant minbase \
10692 --distribution jessie \
10693 --mirror http://http.debian.net/debian \
10698 --log-level debug \
10702 --root-password raspberry \
10703 --hostname raspberrypi \
10704 --foreign /usr/bin/qemu-arm-static \
10705 --customize `pwd`/customize \
10706 --package netbase \
10707 --package git-core \
10708 --package binutils \
10709 --package ca-certificates \
10712 </pre
></p
>
10714 <p
>The list of packages being installed are the ones needed by
10715 rpi-update to make the image bootable on the Raspberry Pi, with the
10716 exception of netbase, which is needed by debootstrap to find
10717 /etc/hosts with the minbase variant. I really wish there was a way to
10718 set up an Raspberry Pi using only packages in the Debian archive, but
10719 that is not possible as far as I know, because it boots from the GPU
10720 using a non-free binary blob.
</p
>
10722 <p
>The build host need debootstrap, kpartx and qemu-user-static and
10723 probably a few others installed. I have not checked the complete
10724 build dependency list.
</p
>
10726 <p
>The resulting image will not use the hardware floating point unit
10727 on the Raspberry PI, because the armel architecture in Debian is not
10728 optimized for that use. So the images created will be a bit slower
10729 than
<a href=
"http://www.raspbian.org/
">Raspbian
</a
> based images.
</p
>
10734 <title>A Raspberry Pi based batman-adv Mesh network node
</title>
10735 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Raspberry_Pi_based_batman_adv_Mesh_network_node.html
</link>
10736 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Raspberry_Pi_based_batman_adv_Mesh_network_node.html
</guid>
10737 <pubDate>Mon,
21 Oct
2013 11:
40:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
10738 <description><p
>The last few days I have been experimenting with
10739 <a href=
"http://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki
">the
10740 batman-adv mesh technology
</a
>. I want to gain some experience to see
10741 if it will fit
<a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox
">the
10742 Freedombox project
</a
>, and together with my neighbors try to build a
10743 mesh network around the park where I live. Batman-adv is a layer
2
10744 mesh system (
"ethernet
" in other words), where the mesh network appear
10745 as if all the mesh clients are connected to the same switch.
</p
>
10747 <p
>My hardware of choice was the Linksys WRT54GL routers I had lying
10748 around, but I
've been unable to get them working with batman-adv. So
10749 instead, I started playing with a
10750 <a href=
"http://www.raspberrypi.org/
">Raspberry Pi
</a
>, and tried to
10751 get it working as a mesh node. My idea is to use it to create a mesh
10752 node which function as a switch port, where everything connected to
10753 the Raspberry Pi ethernet plug is connected (bridged) to the mesh
10754 network. This allow me to hook a wifi base station like the Linksys
10755 WRT54GL to the mesh by plugging it into a Raspberry Pi, and allow
10756 non-mesh clients to hook up to the mesh. This in turn is useful for
10757 Android phones using
<a href=
"http://servalproject.org/
">the Serval
10758 Project
</a
> voip client, allowing every one around the playground to
10759 phone and message each other for free. The reason is that Android
10760 phones do not see ad-hoc wifi networks (they are filtered away from
10761 the GUI view), and can not join the mesh without being rooted. But if
10762 they are connected using a normal wifi base station, they can talk to
10763 every client on the local network.
</p
>
10765 <p
>To get this working, I
've created a debian package
10766 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node
">meshfx-node
</a
>
10768 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node/blob/master/build-rpi-mesh-node
">build-rpi-mesh-node
</a
>
10769 to create the Raspberry Pi boot image. I
'm using Debian Jessie (and
10770 not Raspbian), to get more control over the packages available.
10771 Unfortunately a huge binary blob need to be inserted into the boot
10772 image to get it booting, but I
'll ignore that for now. Also, as
10773 Debian lack support for the CPU features available in the Raspberry
10774 Pi, the system do not use the hardware floating point unit. I hope
10775 the routing performance isn
't affected by the lack of hardware FPU
10778 <p
>To create an image, run the following with a sudo enabled user
10779 after inserting the target SD card into the build machine:
</p
>
10781 <p
><pre
>
10782 % wget -O build-rpi-mesh-node \
10783 https://raw.github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node/master/build-rpi-mesh-node
10784 % sudo bash -x ./build-rpi-mesh-node
> build.log
2>&1
10785 % dd if=/root/rpi/rpi_basic_jessie_$(date +%Y%m%d).img of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=
1M
10787 </pre
></p
>
10789 <p
>Booting with the resulting SD card on a Raspberry PI with a USB
10790 wifi card inserted should give you a mesh node. At least it does for
10791 me with a the wifi card I am using. The default mesh settings are the
10792 ones used by the Oslo mesh project at Hackeriet, as I mentioned in
10793 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Oslo_community_mesh_network___with_NUUG_and_Hackeriet_at_Hausmania.html
">an
10794 earlier blog post about this mesh testing
</a
>.
</p
>
10796 <p
>The mesh node was not horribly expensive either. I bought
10797 everything over the counter in shops nearby. If I had ordered online
10798 from the lowest bidder, the price should be significantly lower:
</p
>
10800 <p
><table
>
10802 <tr
><th
>Supplier
</th
><th
>Model
</th
><th
>NOK
</th
></tr
>
10803 <tr
><td
>Teknikkmagasinet
</td
><td
>Raspberry Pi model B
</td
><td
>349.90</td
></tr
>
10804 <tr
><td
>Teknikkmagasinet
</td
><td
>Raspberry Pi type B case
</td
><td
>99.90</td
></tr
>
10805 <tr
><td
>Lefdal
</td
><td
>Jensen Air:Link
25150</td
><td
>295.-
</td
></tr
>
10806 <tr
><td
>Clas Ohlson
</td
><td
>Kingston
16 GB SD card
</td
><td
>199.-
</td
></tr
>
10807 <tr
><td
>Total cost
</td
><td
></td
><td
>943.80</td
></tr
>
10809 </table
></p
>
10811 <p
>Now my mesh network at home consist of one laptop in the basement
10812 connected to my production network, one Raspberry Pi node on the
1th
10813 floor that can be seen by my neighbor across the park, and one
10814 play-node I use to develop the image building script. And some times
10815 I hook up my work horse laptop to the mesh to test it. I look forward
10816 to figuring out what kind of latency the batman-adv setup will give,
10817 and how much packet loss we will experience around the park. :)
</p
>
10822 <title>Perl library to control the Spykee robot moved to github
</title>
10823 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Perl_library_to_control_the_Spykee_robot_moved_to_github.html
</link>
10824 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Perl_library_to_control_the_Spykee_robot_moved_to_github.html
</guid>
10825 <pubDate>Sat,
19 Oct
2013 10:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
10826 <description><p
>Back in
2010, I created a Perl library to talk to
10827 <a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spykee
">the Spykee robot
</a
>
10828 (with two belts, wifi, USB and Linux) and made it available from my
10829 web page. Today I concluded that it should move to a site that is
10830 easier to use to cooperate with others, and moved it to github. If
10831 you got a Spykee robot, you might want to check out
10832 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/libspykee-perl
">the
10833 libspykee-perl github repository
</a
>.
</p
>
10838 <title>Good causes: Debian Outreach Program for Women, EFF documenting the spying and Open access in Norway
</title>
10839 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Good_causes__Debian_Outreach_Program_for_Women__EFF_documenting_the_spying_and_Open_access_in_Norway.html
</link>
10840 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Good_causes__Debian_Outreach_Program_for_Women__EFF_documenting_the_spying_and_Open_access_in_Norway.html
</guid>
10841 <pubDate>Tue,
15 Oct
2013 21:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
10842 <description><p
>The last few days I came across a few good causes that should get
10843 wider attention. I recommend signing and donating to each one of
10844 these. :)
</p
>
10846 <p
>Via
<a href=
"http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/
2013/
18/
">Debian
10847 Project News for
2013-
10-
14</a
> I came across the Outreach Program for
10848 Women program which is a Google Summer of Code like initiative to get
10849 more women involved in free software. One debian sponsor has offered
10850 to match
<a href=
"http://debian.ch/opw2013
">any donation done to Debian
10851 earmarked
</a
> for this initiative. I donated a few minutes ago, and
10852 hope you will to. :)
</p
>
10854 <p
>And the Electronic Frontier Foundation just announced plans to
10855 create
<a href=
"https://supporters.eff.org/donate/nsa-videos
">video
10856 documentaries about the excessive spying
</a
> on every Internet user that
10857 take place these days, and their need to fund the work. I
've already
10858 donated. Are you next?
</p
>
10860 <p
>For my Norwegian audience, the organisation Studentenes og
10861 Akademikernes Internasjonale Hjelpefond is collecting signatures for a
10862 statement under the heading
10863 <a href=
"http://saih.no/Bloggers_United/
">Bloggers United for Open
10864 Access
</a
> for those of us asking for more focus on open access in the
10865 Norwegian government. So far
499 signatures. I hope you will sign it
10871 <title>Oslo community mesh network - with NUUG and Hackeriet at Hausmania
</title>
10872 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Oslo_community_mesh_network___with_NUUG_and_Hackeriet_at_Hausmania.html
</link>
10873 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Oslo_community_mesh_network___with_NUUG_and_Hackeriet_at_Hausmania.html
</guid>
10874 <pubDate>Fri,
11 Oct
2013 14:
10:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
10875 <description><p
>Wireless mesh networks are self organising and self healing
10876 networks that can be used to connect computers across small and large
10877 areas, depending on the radio technology used. Normal wifi equipment
10878 can be used to create home made radio networks, and there are several
10879 successful examples like
10880 <a href=
"http://www.freifunk.net/
">Freifunk
</a
> and
10881 <a href=
"http://www.awmn.net/
">Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network
</a
>
10883 <a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wireless_community_networks_by_region#Greece
">wikipedia
10884 for a large list
</a
>) around the globe. To give you an idea how it
10885 work, check out the nice overview of the Kiel Freifunk community which
10886 can be seen from their
10887 <a href=
"http://freifunk.in-kiel.de/ffmap/nodes.html
">dynamically
10888 updated node graph and map
</a
>, where one can see how the mesh nodes
10889 automatically handle routing and recover from nodes disappearing.
10890 There is also a small community mesh network group in Oslo, Norway,
10891 and that is the main topic of this blog post.
</p
>
10893 <p
>I
've wanted to check out mesh networks for a while now, and hoped
10894 to do it as part of my involvement with the
<a
10895 href=
"http://www.nuug.no/
">NUUG member organisation
</a
> community, and
10896 my recent involvement in
10897 <a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox
">the Freedombox project
</a
>
10898 finally lead me to give mesh networks some priority, as I suspect a
10899 Freedombox should use mesh networks to connect neighbours and family
10900 when possible, given that most communication between people are
10901 between those nearby (as shown for example by research on Facebook
10902 communication patterns). It also allow people to communicate without
10903 any central hub to tap into for those that want to listen in on the
10904 private communication of citizens, which have become more and more
10905 important over the years.
</p
>
10907 <p
>So far I have only been able to find one group of people in Oslo
10908 working on community mesh networks, over at the hack space
10909 <a href=
"http://hackeriet.no/
">Hackeriet
</a
> at Husmania. They seem to
10910 have started with some Freifunk based effort using OLSR, called
10911 <a href=
"http://oslo.freifunk.net/index.php?title=Main_Page
">the Oslo
10912 Freifunk project
</a
>, but that effort is now dead and the people
10913 behind it have moved on to a batman-adv based system called
10914 <a href=
"http://meshfx.org/trac
">meshfx
</a
>. Unfortunately the wiki
10915 site for the Oslo Freifunk project is no longer possible to update to
10916 reflect this fact, so the old project page can
't be updated to point to
10917 the new project. A while back, the people at Hackeriet invited people
10918 from the Freifunk community to Oslo to talk about mesh networks. I
10919 came across this video where Hans Jørgen Lysglimt interview the
10920 speakers about this talk (from
10921 <a href=
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2Kd7CLkhSY
">youtube
</a
>):
</p
>
10923 <p
><iframe width=
"420" height=
"315" src=
"https://www.youtube.com/embed/N2Kd7CLkhSY
" frameborder=
"0" allowfullscreen
></iframe
></p
>
10925 <p
>I mentioned OLSR and batman-adv, which are mesh routing protocols.
10926 There are heaps of different protocols, and I am still struggling to
10927 figure out which one would be
"best
" for some definitions of best, but
10928 given that the community mesh group in Oslo is so small, I believe it
10929 is best to hook up with the existing one instead of trying to create a
10930 completely different setup, and thus I have decided to focus on
10931 batman-adv for now. It sure help me to know that the very cool
10932 <a href=
"http://www.servalproject.org/
">Serval project in Australia
</a
>
10933 is using batman-adv as their meshing technology when it create a self
10934 organizing and self healing telephony system for disaster areas and
10935 less industrialized communities. Check out this cool video presenting
10937 <a href=
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
30qNfzJCQOA
">youtube
</a
>):
</p
>
10939 <p
><iframe width=
"560" height=
"315" src=
"https://www.youtube.com/embed/
30qNfzJCQOA
" frameborder=
"0" allowfullscreen
></iframe
></p
>
10941 <p
>According to the wikipedia page on
10942 <a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_mesh_network
">Wireless
10943 mesh network
</a
> there are around
70 competing schemes for routing
10944 packets across mesh networks, and OLSR, B.A.T.M.A.N. and
10945 B.A.T.M.A.N. advanced are protocols used by several free software
10946 based community mesh networks.
</p
>
10948 <p
>The batman-adv protocol is a bit special, as it provide layer
2
10949 (as in ethernet ) routing, allowing ipv4 and ipv6 to work on the same
10950 network. One way to think about it is that it provide a mesh based
10951 vlan you can bridge to or handle like any other vlan connected to your
10952 computer. The required drivers are already in the Linux kernel at
10953 least since Debian Wheezy, and it is fairly easy to set up. A
10954 <a href=
"http://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki/Quick-start-guide
">good
10955 introduction
</a
> is available from the Open Mesh project. These are
10956 the key settings needed to join the Oslo meshfx network:
</p
>
10958 <p
><table
>
10959 <tr
><th
>Setting
</th
><th
>Value
</th
></tr
>
10960 <tr
><td
>Protocol / kernel module
</td
><td
>batman-adv
</td
></tr
>
10961 <tr
><td
>ESSID
</td
><td
>meshfx@hackeriet
</td
></tr
>
10962 <td
>Channel / Frequency
</td
><td
>11 /
2462</td
></tr
>
10963 <td
>Cell ID
</td
><td
>02:BA:
00:
00:
00:
01</td
>
10964 </table
></p
>
10966 <p
>The reason for setting ad-hoc wifi Cell ID is to work around bugs
10967 in firmware used in wifi card and wifi drivers. (See a nice post from
10969 "<a href=
"http://tiebing.blogspot.no/
2009/
12/ad-hoc-cell-splitting-re-post-original.html
">Information
10970 about cell-id splitting, stuck beacons, and failed IBSS merges!
</a
>
10971 for details.) When these settings are activated and you have some
10972 other mesh node nearby, your computer will be connected to the mesh
10973 network and can communicate with any mesh node that is connected to
10974 any of the nodes in your network of nodes. :)
</p
>
10976 <p
>My initial plan was to reuse my old Linksys WRT54GL as a mesh node,
10977 but that seem to be very hard, as I have not been able to locate a
10978 firmware supporting batman-adv. If anyone know how to use that old
10979 wifi access point with batman-adv these days, please let me know.
</p
>
10981 <p
>If you find this project interesting and want to join, please join
10982 us on IRC, either channel
10983 <a href=
"irc://irc.freenode.net/#oslohackerspace
">#oslohackerspace
</a
>
10984 or
<a href=
"irc://irc.freenode.net/#nuug
">#nuug
</a
> on
10985 irc.freenode.net.
</p
>
10987 <p
>While investigating mesh networks in Oslo, I came across an old
10988 research paper from the university of Stavanger and Telenor Research
10989 and Innovation called
10990 <a href=
"http://folk.uio.no/paalee/publications/netrel-egeland-iswcs-
2008.pdf
">The
10991 reliability of wireless backhaul mesh networks
</a
> and elsewhere
10992 learned that Telenor have been experimenting with mesh networks at
10993 Grünerløkka in Oslo. So mesh networks are also interesting for
10994 commercial companies, even though Telenor discovered that it was hard
10995 to figure out a good business plan for mesh networking and as far as I
10996 know have closed down the experiment. Perhaps Telenor or others would
10997 be interested in a cooperation?
</p
>
10999 <p
><strong
>Update
2013-
10-
12</strong
>: I was just
11000 <a href=
"http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/
2013-October/
005900.html
">told
11001 by the Serval project developers
</a
> that they no longer use
11002 batman-adv (but are compatible with it), but their own crypto based
11003 mesh system.
</p
>
11008 <title>Skolelinux / Debian Edu
7.1 install and overview video from Marcelo Salvador
</title>
11009 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Skolelinux___Debian_Edu_7_1_install_and_overview_video_from_Marcelo_Salvador.html
</link>
11010 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Skolelinux___Debian_Edu_7_1_install_and_overview_video_from_Marcelo_Salvador.html
</guid>
11011 <pubDate>Tue,
8 Oct
2013 17:
10:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
11012 <description><p
>The other day I was pleased and surprised to discover that Marcelo
11013 Salvador had published a
11014 <a href=
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-GgpdqgLFc
">video on
11015 Youtube
</a
> showing how to install the standalone Debian Edu /
11016 Skolelinux profile. This is the profile intended for use at home or
11017 on laptops that should not be integrated into the provided network
11018 services (no central home directory, no Kerberos / LDAP directory etc,
11019 in other word a single user machine). The result is
11 minutes long,
11020 and show some user applications (seem to be rather randomly picked).
11021 Missed a few of my favorites like celestia, planets and chromium
11022 showing the
<a href=
"http://www.zygotebody.com/
">Zygote Body
3D model
11023 of the human body
</a
>, but I guess he did not know about those or find
11024 other programs more interesting. :) And the video do not show the
11025 advantages I believe is one of the most valuable featuers in Debian
11026 Edu, its central school server making it possible to run hundreds of
11027 computers without hard drives by installing one central
11028 <a href=
"http://www.ltsp.org/
">LTSP server
</a
>.
</p
>
11030 <p
>Anyway, check out the video, embedded below and linked to above:
</p
>
11032 <iframe width=
"420" height=
"315" src=
"http://www.youtube.com/embed/w-GgpdqgLFc
" frameborder=
"0" allowfullscreen
></iframe
>
11034 <p
>Are there other nice videos demonstrating Skolelinux? Please let
11035 me know. :)
</p
>
11040 <title>Finally, Debian Edu Wheezy is released today!
</title>
11041 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Finally__Debian_Edu_Wheezy_is_released_today_.html
</link>
11042 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Finally__Debian_Edu_Wheezy_is_released_today_.html
</guid>
11043 <pubDate>Sun,
29 Sep
2013 10:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
11044 <description><p
>A few hours ago, the announcement for the first stable release of
11045 Debian Edu Wheezy went out from the Debian publicity team. The
11046 complete announcement text can be found at
11047 <a href=
"http://www.debian.org/News/
2013/
20130928">the Debian News
11048 section
</a
>, translated to several languages. Please check it out.
</p
>
11050 <p
>There is one minor known problem that we will fix very soon. One
11051 can not install a amd64 Thin Client Server using PXE, as the /var/
11052 partition is too small. A workaround is to extend the partition (use
11053 lvresize + resize2fs in tty
2 while installing).
</p
>
11058 <title>Videos about the Freedombox project - for inspiration and learning
</title>
11059 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Videos_about_the_Freedombox_project___for_inspiration_and_learning.html
</link>
11060 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Videos_about_the_Freedombox_project___for_inspiration_and_learning.html
</guid>
11061 <pubDate>Fri,
27 Sep
2013 14:
10:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
11062 <description><p
>The
<a href=
"http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/
">Freedombox
11063 project
</a
> have been going on for a while, and have presented the
11064 vision, ideas and solution several places. Here is a little
11065 collection of videos of talks and presentation of the project.
</p
>
11069 <li
><a href=
"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukvUz5taxvA
">FreedomBox -
11070 2,
5 minute marketing film
</a
> (Youtube)
</li
>
11072 <li
><a href=
"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzW25QTVWsE
">Eben Moglen
11073 discusses the Freedombox on CBS news
2011</a
> (Youtube)
</li
>
11075 <li
><a href=
"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ae8SZbxfE0g
">Eben Moglen -
11076 Freedom in the Cloud - Software Freedom, Privacy and and Security for
11077 Web
2.0 and Cloud computing at ISOC-NY Public Meeting
2010</a
>
11078 (Youtube)
</li
>
11080 <li
><a href=
"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNaIji_3xBE
">Fosdem
2011
11081 Keynote by Eben Moglen presenting the Freedombox
</a
> (Youtube)
</li
>
11083 <li
><a href=
"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
9bDDUyJSQ9s
">Presentation of
11084 the Freedombox by James Vasile at Elevate in Gratz
2011</a
> (Youtube)
</li
>
11086 <li
><a href=
"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQTmnk27g9s
"> Freedombox -
11087 Discovery, Identity, and Trust by Nick Daly at Freedombox Hackfest New
11088 York City in
2012</a
> (Youtube)
</li
>
11090 <li
><a href=
"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkbSB4Ba7Ck
">Introduction
11091 to the Freedombox at Freedombox Hackfest New York City in
2012</a
>
11092 (Youtube)
</li
>
11094 <li
><a href=
"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-P2Jaeg0aQ
">Freedom, Out
11095 of the Box! by Bdale Garbee at linux.conf.au Ballarat,
2012</a
> (Youtube)
</li
>
11097 <li
><a href=
"https://archive.fosdem.org/
2013/schedule/event/freedombox/
">Freedombox
11098 1.0 by Eben Moglen and Bdale Garbee at Fosdem
2013</a
> (FOSDEM)
</li
>
11100 <li
><a href=
"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1LpYX2zVYg
">What is the
11101 FreedomBox today by Bdale Garbee at Debconf13 in Vaumarcus
11102 2013</a
> (Youtube)
</li
>
11106 <p
>A larger list is available from
11107 <a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/TalksAndPresentations
">the
11108 Freedombox Wiki
</a
>.
</p
>
11110 <p
>On other news, I am happy to report that Freedombox based on Debian
11111 Jessie is coming along quite well, and soon both Owncloud and using
11112 Tor should be available for testers of the Freedombox solution. :) In
11113 a few weeks I hope everything needed to test it is included in Debian.
11114 The withsqlite package is already in Debian, and the plinth package is
11115 pending in NEW. The third and vital part of that puzzle is the
11116 metapackage/setup framework, which is still pending an upload. Join
11117 us on
<a href=
"irc://irc.debian.org:
6667/%
23freedombox
">IRC
11118 (#freedombox on irc.debian.org)
</a
> and
11119 <a href=
"http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss
">the
11120 mailing list
</a
> if you want to help make this vision come true.
</p
>
11125 <title>Third and probably last beta release of Debian Edu Wheezy
</title>
11126 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Third_and_probably_last_beta_release_of_Debian_Edu_Wheezy.html
</link>
11127 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Third_and_probably_last_beta_release_of_Debian_Edu_Wheezy.html
</guid>
11128 <pubDate>Mon,
16 Sep
2013 21:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
11129 <description><p
>The third wheezy based beta release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
11130 today. This is the release announcement from Holger Levsen:
</p
>
11133 <p
>Hi,
</p
>
11135 <p
>it is my pleasure to announce the third beta release (beta
2 for
11136 short) of
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu /
11137 Skolelinux
</a
> based on Debian Wheezy!
</p
>
11139 <p
>Please test these images extensivly, if no new problems are found
11140 we plan to do this final Debian Edu Wheezy release this coming
11141 weekend. We are not aware of any major problems or blockers in beta2,
11142 if you find something, please notify us immediately!
</p
>
11144 <p
>(More about the remaining steps for the Edu Wheezy release in
11145 another mail to the edu list tonight or tomorrow...)
</p
>
11147 <p
>Noteworthy changes and software updates for Debian Edu
7.1+edu0~b2
11148 compared to beta1:
</p
>
11152 <li
>The KDE proxy setup has been adjusted to use the provided wpad.dat. This
11153 also gets Chromium to use this proxy.
</li
>
11154 <li
>Install kdepim-groupware with KDE desktops to make sure korganizer
11155 understand ical/dav sources.
</li
>
11156 <li
>Increased default maximum size of /var/spool/squid and /skole/backup on the
11157 main server.
</li
>
11158 <li
>A source DVD image containing all source packages is now available as well.
</li
>
11159 <li
>Updates for chromium (
29.0.1547.57-
1~deb7u1), imagemagick
11160 (
6.7.7.10-
5+deb7u2), php5 (
5.4.4-
14+deb7u4), libmodplug
11161 (
0.8.8.4-
3+deb7u1+git20130828), tiff (
4.0.2-
6+deb7u2), linux-image
11162 (
3.2.0-
4-
486_3.2
.46-
1+deb7u1).
</li
>
11166 <p
>Where to get it:
</p
>
11168 <p
>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use
</p
>
11171 <li
><a href=
"ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-
7.1+edu0~b2-CD.iso
">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-
7.1+edu0~b2-CD.iso
</a
></li
>
11172 <li
><a href=
"http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-
7.1+edu0~b2-CD.iso
">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-
7.1+edu0~b2-CD.iso
</a
></li
>
11173 <li
>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-
7.1+edu0~b2-CD.iso .
</li
>
11176 <p
>The SHA1SUM of this image is:
3a1c89f4666df80eebcd46c5bf5fedb866f9472f
</p
>
11178 <p
>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use
11180 <li
><a href=
"ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-
7.1+edu0~b2-USB.iso
">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-
7.1+edu0~b2-USB.iso
</a
></li
>
11181 <li
><a href=
"http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-
7.1+edu0~b2-USB.iso
">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-
7.1+edu0~b2-USB.iso
</a
></li
>
11182 <li
>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-
7.1+edu0~b2-USB.iso .
</li
>
11185 <p
>The SHA1SUM of this image is:
702d1718548f401c74bfa6df9f032cc3ee16597e
</p
>
11187 <p
>The Source DVD image has the filename
11188 debian-edu-
7.1+edu0~b2-source-DVD.iso and the SHA1SUM
11189 089eed8b3f962db47aae1f6a9685e9bb2fa30ca5 and is available the same way
11190 as the other isos.
</p
>
11192 <p
>How to report bugs
</p
>
11194 <p
>For information how to report bugs please see
11195 <br
><a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs
">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs
</a
></p
>
11198 <p
>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux
</p
>
11200 <p
>Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux, is a Linux distribution based
11201 on Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
11202 configured school network. Immediately after installation a school
11203 server running all services needed for a school network is set up just
11204 waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
11205 Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
11206 initial installation of the main server from CD or USB stick all other
11207 machines can be installed via the network. The provided school server
11208 provides LDAP database and Kerberos authentication service,
11209 centralized home directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other
11210 services. The desktop contains more than
60 educational software
11211 packages and more are available from the Debian archive, and schools
11212 can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE and Xfce desktop environment.
</p
>
11214 <p
>This is the seventh test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
11215 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
11216 Squeeze release.
</p
>
11218 <p
>Notes for upgrades from Alpha Prereleases
</p
>
11220 <p
>Alpha based installations should reinstall or downgrade the
11221 versions of gosa and libpam-mklocaluser to the ones used in this beta
11222 release. Both alpha and beta0 based installations should reinstall or
11223 deal with gosa.conf manually; there are two options: (
1) Keep
11224 gosa.conf and edit this file as outlined on the mailing list. (
2)
11225 Accept the new version of gosa.conf and replace both contained admin
11226 password placeholders with the password hashes found in the old one
11227 (backup copy!). In both cases all users need to change their password
11228 to make sure a password is set for CIFS access to their home
11229 directory.
</p
>
11233 <br
> Holger
</p
>
11234 </blockquote
>
11239 <title>Recipe to test the Freedombox project on amd64 or Raspberry Pi
</title>
11240 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Recipe_to_test_the_Freedombox_project_on_amd64_or_Raspberry_Pi.html
</link>
11241 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Recipe_to_test_the_Freedombox_project_on_amd64_or_Raspberry_Pi.html
</guid>
11242 <pubDate>Tue,
10 Sep
2013 14:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
11243 <description><p
>I was introduced to the
11244 <a href=
"http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/
">Freedombox project
</a
>
11245 in
2010, when Eben Moglen presented his vision about serving the need
11246 of non-technical people to keep their personal information private and
11247 within the legal protection of their own homes. The idea is to give
11248 people back the power over their network and machines, and return
11249 Internet back to its intended peer-to-peer architecture. Instead of
11250 depending on a central service, the Freedombox will give everyone
11251 control over their own basic infrastructure.
</p
>
11253 <p
>I
've intended to join the effort since then, but other tasks have
11254 taken priority. But this summers nasty news about the misuse of trust
11255 and privilege exercised by the
"western
" intelligence gathering
11256 communities increased my eagerness to contribute to a point where I
11257 actually started working on the project a while back.
</p
>
11259 <p
>The
<a href=
"https://alioth.debian.org/projects/freedombox/
">initial
11260 Debian initiative
</a
> based on the vision from Eben Moglen, is to
11261 create a simple and cheap Debian based appliance that anyone can hook
11262 up in their home and get access to secure and private services and
11263 communication. The initial deployment platform have been the
11264 <a href=
"http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/t-dreamplugdetails.aspx
">Dreamplug
</a
>,
11265 which is a piece of hardware I do not own. So to be able to test what
11266 the current Freedombox setup look like, I had to come up with a way to install
11267 it on some hardware I do have access to. I have rewritten the
11268 <a href=
"https://github.com/NickDaly/freedom-maker
">freedom-maker
</a
>
11269 image build framework to use .deb packages instead of only copying
11270 setup into the boot images, and thanks to this rewrite I am able to
11271 set up any machine supported by Debian Wheezy as a Freedombox, using
11272 the previously mentioned deb (and a few support debs for packages
11273 missing in Debian).
</p
>
11275 <p
>The current Freedombox setup consist of a set of bootstrapping
11277 (
<a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/freedombox-setup
">freedombox-setup
</a
>),
11278 and a administrative web interface
11279 (
<a href=
"https://github.com/NickDaly/Plinth
">plinth
</a
> + exmachina +
11280 withsqlite), as well as a privacy enhancing proxy based on
11281 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/privoxy
">privoxy
</a
>
11282 (freedombox-privoxy). There is also a web/javascript based XMPP
11283 client (
<a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/jwchat
">jwchat
</a
>)
11284 trying (unsuccessfully so far) to talk to the XMPP server
11285 (
<a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/ejabberd
">ejabberd
</a
>). The
11286 web interface is pluggable, and the goal is to use it to enable OpenID
11287 services, mesh network connectivity, use of TOR, etc, etc. Not much of
11288 this is really working yet, see
11289 <a href=
"https://github.com/NickDaly/freedombox-todos/blob/master/TODO
">the
11290 project TODO
</a
> for links to GIT repositories. Most of the code is
11291 on github at the moment. The HTTP proxy is operational out of the
11292 box, and the admin web interface can be used to add/remove plinth
11293 users. I
've not been able to do anything else with it so far, but
11294 know there are several branches spread around github and other places
11295 with lots of half baked features.
</p
>
11297 <p
>Anyway, if you want to have a look at the current state, the
11298 following recipes should work to give you a test machine to poke
11301 <p
><strong
>Debian Wheezy amd64
</strong
></p
>
11305 <li
>Fetch normal Debian Wheezy installation ISO.
</li
>
11306 <li
>Boot from it, either as CD or USB stick.
</li
>
11307 <li
><p
>Press [tab] on the boot prompt and add this as a boot argument
11308 to the Debian installer:
<p
>
11309 <pre
>url=
<a href=
"http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-wheezy.dat
">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-wheezy.dat
</a
></pre
></li
>
11311 <li
>Answer the few language/region/password questions and pick disk to
11312 install on.
</li
>
11314 <li
>When the installation is finished and the machine have rebooted a
11315 few times, your Freedombox is ready for testing.
</li
>
11319 <p
><strong
>Raspberry Pi Raspbian
</strong
></p
>
11323 <li
>Fetch a Raspbian SD card image, create SD card.
</li
>
11324 <li
>Boot from SD card, extend file system to fill the card completely.
</li
>
11325 <li
><p
>Log in and add this to /etc/sources.list:
</p
>
11327 deb
<a href=
"http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/
">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox
</a
> wheezy main
11328 </pre
></li
>
11329 <li
><p
>Run this as root:
</p
>
11331 wget -O - http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/BE1A583D.asc | \
11334 apt-get install freedombox-setup
11335 /usr/lib/freedombox/setup
11336 </pre
></li
>
11337 <li
>Reboot into your freshly created Freedombox.
</li
>
11341 <p
>You can test it on other architectures too, but because the
11342 freedombox-privoxy package is binary, it will only work as intended on
11343 the architectures where I have had time to build the binary and put it
11344 in my APT repository. But do not let this stop you. It is only a
11345 short
"<tt
>apt-get source -b freedombox-privoxy
</tt
>" away. :)
</p
>
11347 <p
>Note that by default Freedombox is a DHCP server on the
11348 192.168.1.0/
24 subnet, so if this is your subnet be careful and turn
11349 off the DHCP server by running
"<tt
>update-rc.d isc-dhcp-server
11350 disable
</tt
>" as root.
</p
>
11352 <p
>Please let me know if this works for you, or if you have any
11353 problems. We gather on the IRC channel
11354 <a href=
"irc://irc.debian.org:
6667/%
23freedombox
">#freedombox
</a
> on
11355 irc.debian.org and the
11356 <a href=
"http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss
">project
11357 mailing list
</a
>.
</p
>
11359 <p
>Once you get your freedombox operational, you can visit
11360 <tt
>http://your-host-name:
8001/
</tt
> to see the state of the plint
11361 welcome screen (dead end - do not be surprised if you are unable to
11362 get past it), and next visit
<tt
>http://your-host-name:
8001/help/
</tt
>
11363 to look at the rest of plinth. The default user is
'admin
' and the
11364 default password is
'secret
'.
</p
>
11369 <title>Second beta release (beta
1) of Debian Edu/Skolelinux based on Debian Wheezy
</title>
11370 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Second_beta_release__beta_1__of_Debian_Edu_Skolelinux_based_on_Debian_Wheezy.html
</link>
11371 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Second_beta_release__beta_1__of_Debian_Edu_Skolelinux_based_on_Debian_Wheezy.html
</guid>
11372 <pubDate>Thu,
22 Aug
2013 09:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
11373 <description><p
>The second wheezy based beta release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
11374 today, slightly delayed because of some bugs in the initial Windows
11375 integration fixes . This is the release announcement:
</p
>
11377 <p
><strong
>New features for Debian Edu
7.1+edu0~b1 released
2013-
08-
22</strong
></p
>
11379 <p
>These are the release notes for Debian Edu / Skolelinux
11380 7.1+edu0~b1, based on Debian with codename
"Wheezy
".
</p
>
11382 <p
><strong
>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux
</strong
></p
>
11384 <p
><a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu, also known as
11385 Skolelinux
</a
>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
11386 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
11387 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
11388 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
11389 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
11390 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
11391 the main server from CD or USB stick all other machines can be
11392 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
11393 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
11394 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
11396 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html
">more
11397 than
60 educational software packages
</a
> and more are available from
11398 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
11399 and Xfce desktop environment.
</p
>
11401 <p
>This is the sixth test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically this
11402 is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the Squeeze
11405 <p
>ALERT: Alpha based installations should reinstall or downgrade the
11406 versions of gosa and libpam-mklocaluser to the ones used in this beta
11407 release. Both alpha and beta0 based installations should reinstall or
11408 deal with gosa.conf manually; there are two options: (
1) Keep
11409 gosa.conf and edit this file as outlined
11410 <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/
2013/
08/msg00127.html
">on
11411 the mailing list
</a
>. (
2) Accept the new version of gosa.conf and
11412 replace both contained admin password placeholders with the password
11413 hashes found in the old one (backup copy!). In both cases every user
11414 need to change their their password to make sure a password is set for
11415 CIFS access to their home directory.
</p
>
11417 <p
><strong
>Software updates
</strong
></p
>
11421 <li
>Added ssh askpass packages to default installation, to ensure ssh
11422 work also without a attached tty.
</li
>
11423 <li
>Add the command-not-found package to the default installation to
11424 make it easier to figure out where to find missing command line
11425 tools. Please note, that the command
'update-command-not-found
'
11426 has to be run as root to actually make it useful (internet access
11427 required).
</li
>
11431 <p
><strong
>Other changes
</strong
></p
>
11435 <li
>Adjusted the USB stick ISO image build to include every tool
11436 needed for desktop=xfce installations.
</li
>
11437 <li
>Adjust thin-client-server task to work when installing from USB
11438 stick ISO image.
</li
>
11439 <li
>Made new grub artwork (changed png from indexed to RGB format).
</li
>
11440 <li
>Minor cleanup in the CUPS setup.
</li
>
11441 <li
>Make sure that bootstrapping of the Samba domain really happens
11442 during installation of the main server and adjust SID handling to
11443 cope with this.
</li
>
11444 <li
>Make Samba passwords changeable (again) via GOsa².
</li
>
11445 <li
>Fix generation of LM and NT password hashes via GOsa² to avoid
11446 empty password hashes.
</li
>
11447 <li
>Adapted Samba machine domain joining to latest change in the
11448 smbldap-tools Perl package, fixing bugs blocking Windows machines
11449 from joining the Samba domain.
</li
>
11453 <p
><strong
>Known issues
</strong
></p
>
11457 <li
>KDE fails to understand the wpad.dat file provided, causing it to
11458 not use the http proxy as it should.
</li
>
11459 <li
>Chromium also fails to use the proxy when using the KDE desktop
11460 (using the KDE configuration).
</li
>
11464 <p
><strong
>Where to get it
</strong
></p
>
11466 <p
>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use
</p
>
11470 <li
><a href=
"ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-
7.1+edu0~b1-CD.iso
">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-
7.1+edu0~b1-CD.iso
</a
></li
>
11472 <li
><a href=
"http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-
7.1+edu0~b1-CD.iso
">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-
7.1+edu0~b1-CD.iso
</a
></li
>
11474 <li
>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-
7.1+edu0~b1-CD.iso .
</li
>
11478 <p
>The MD5SUM of this image is:
1e357f80b55e703523f2254adde6d78b
11479 <br
>The SHA1SUM of this image is:
7157f9be5fd27c7694d713c6ecfed61c3edda3b2
</p
>
11481 <p
>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use
</p
>
11485 <li
><a href=
"ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-
7.1+edu0~b1-USB.iso
">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-
7.1+edu0~b1-USB.iso
</a
></li
>
11486 <li
><a href=
"http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-
7.1+edu0~b1-USB.iso
">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-
7.1+edu0~b1-USB.iso
</a
></li
>
11487 <li
>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-
7.1+edu0~b1-USB.iso .
</li
>
11491 <p
>The MD5SUM of this image is:
7a8408ead59cf7e3cef25afb6e91590b
11492 <br
>The SHA1SUM of this image is: f1817c031f02790d5edb3bfa0dcf8451088ad119
</p
>
11495 <p
><strong
>How to report bugs
</strong
></p
>
11497 <p
><a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs
">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs
</a
>
11502 <title>Intel
180 SSD disk with Lenovo firmware can not use Intel firmware
</title>
11503 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Intel_180_SSD_disk_with_Lenovo_firmware_can_not_use_Intel_firmware.html
</link>
11504 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Intel_180_SSD_disk_with_Lenovo_firmware_can_not_use_Intel_firmware.html
</guid>
11505 <pubDate>Sun,
18 Aug
2013 14:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
11506 <description><p
>Earlier, I reported about
11507 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_fix_a_Thinkpad_X230_with_a_broken_180_GB_SSD_disk.html
">my
11508 problems using an Intel SSD
520 Series
180 GB disk
</a
>. Friday I was
11509 told by IBM that the original disk should be thrown away. And as
11510 there no longer was a problem if I bricked the firmware, I decided
11511 today to try to install Intel firmware to replace the Lenovo firmware
11512 currently on the disk.
</p
>
11514 <p
>I searched the Intel site for firmware, and found
11515 <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
>
11516 (aka Intel SATA Solid-State Drive Firmware Update Tool) which
11517 according to the site should contain the latest firmware for SSD
11518 disks. I inserted the broken disk in one of my spare laptops and
11519 booted the ISO from a USB stick. The disk was recognized, but the
11520 program claimed the newest firmware already were installed and refused
11521 to insert any Intel firmware. So no change, and the disk is still
11522 unable to handle write load. :( I guess the only way to get them
11523 working would be if Lenovo releases new firmware. No idea how likely
11524 that is. Anyway, just blogging about this test for completeness. I
11525 got a working Samsung disk, and see no point in spending more time on
11526 the broken disks.
</p
>
11531 <title>90 percent done with the Norwegian draft translation of Free Culture
</title>
11532 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/
90_percent_done_with_the_Norwegian_draft_translation_of_Free_Culture.html
</link>
11533 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/
90_percent_done_with_the_Norwegian_draft_translation_of_Free_Culture.html
</guid>
11534 <pubDate>Fri,
2 Aug
2013 10:
40:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
11535 <description><p
>It has been a while since my last update. Since last summer, I
11536 have worked on a Norwegian
11537 <a href=
"http://www.docbook.org/
">docbook
</a
> version of the
2004 book
11538 <a href=
"http://free-culture.cc/
">Free Culture
</a
> by Lawrence Lessig,
11539 to get a Norwegian text explaining the problems with the copyright
11540 law. Yesterday, I finally broken the
90% mark, when counting the
11541 number of strings to translate. Due to real life constraints, I have
11542 not had time to work on it since March, but when the summer broke out,
11543 I found time to work on it again. Still lots of work left, but the
11544 first draft is nearing completion. I created a graph to show the
11545 progress of the translation:
</p
>
11547 <p
><img width=
"80%
" align=
"center
" src=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png
"></p
>
11549 <p
>When the first draft is done, the translated text need to be
11550 proof read, and the remaining formatting problems with images and SVG
11551 drawings need to be fixed. There are probably also some index entries
11552 missing that need to be added. This can be done by comparing the
11553 index entries listed in the SiSU version of the book, or comparing the
11554 English docbook version with the paper version. Last, the colophon
11555 page with ISBN numbers etc need to be wrapped up before the release is
11556 done. I should also figure out how to get correct Norwegian sorting
11557 of the index pages. All docbook tools I have tried so far (xmlto,
11558 docbook-xsl, dblatex) get the order of symbols and the special
11559 Norwegian letters ÆØÅ wrong.
</p
>
11561 <p
>There is still need for translators and people with docbook
11562 knowledge, to be able to get a good looking book (I still struggle
11563 with dblatex, xmlto and docbook-xsl) as well as to do the draft
11564 translation and proof reading. And I would like the figures to be
11565 redrawn as SVGs to make it easy to translate them. Any SVG master
11566 around? There are also some legal terms that are unfamiliar to me.
11567 If you want to help, please get in touch with me, and check out the
11568 project files currently available from
11569 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig
">github
</a
>.
</p
>
11571 <p
>If you are curious what the translated book currently look like,
11573 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true
">PDF
</a
>
11575 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true
">EPUB
</a
>
11576 are published on github. The HTML version is published as well, but
11577 github hand it out with MIME type text/plain, confusing browsers, so I
11578 saw no point in linking to that version.
</p
>
11583 <title>First beta release of Debian Edu/Skolelinux based on Debian Wheezy
</title>
11584 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_beta_release_of_Debian_Edu_Skolelinux_based_on_Debian_Wheezy.html
</link>
11585 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_beta_release_of_Debian_Edu_Skolelinux_based_on_Debian_Wheezy.html
</guid>
11586 <pubDate>Sat,
27 Jul
2013 20:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
11587 <description><p
>The first wheezy based beta release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
11588 today. This is the release announcement:
</p
>
11590 <p
><strong
>New features for Debian Edu
7.1+edu0~b0 released
11591 2013-
07-
27</strong
></p
>
11593 <p
>These are the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux
11594 7.1+edu0~b0, based on Debian with codename
"Wheezy
".
</p
>
11596 <p
><strong
>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux
</strong
></p
>
11598 <p
><a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu, also known as
11599 Skolelinux
</a
>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
11600 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
11601 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
11602 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
11603 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
11604 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
11605 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
11606 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
11607 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
11608 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
11610 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html
">more
11611 than
60 educational software packages
</a
> and more are available from
11612 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
11613 and Xfce desktop environment.
</p
>
11615 <p
>This is the fifth test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
11616 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
11617 Squeeze release.
</p
>
11619 <p
>ALERT: Alpha based installations should reinstall or downgrade the
11620 versions of gosa and libpam-mklocaluser to the ones used in this beta
11623 <p
><strong
>Software updates
</strong
></p
>
11627 <li
>Switched roaming workstation profiles from wicd to network-manager
11628 for network configuration, as wicd didn
't work any more.
</li
>
11629 <li
>Changed version numbers of patched gosa and libpam-mklocaluser
11630 packages to make sure our locally patched versions will be replaced
11631 by the official packages when they are released from Debian. Those
11632 installing alpha version need to reinstall or manually downgrade gosa
11633 and libpam-mklocaluser.
</li
>
11634 <li
>Added bluetooth tools to the default desktop (bluedevil, blueman).
</li
>
11635 <li
>Added tools for sharing the desktop on KDE (krdc, krfb).
</li
>
11636 <li
>Added valgrind to the default installation for easier debugging of
11637 crash bugs.
</li
>
11641 <p
><strong
>Other changes
</strong
></p
>
11645 <li
>Fixed artwork package to work with gnome, no longer break
11646 desktop=gnome installations.
</li
>
11647 <li
>Adjusted installer to now work when forced to use a proxy with the
11648 netinst CD.
</li
>
11649 <li
>Fixed code detecting and setting/loading hardware specific
11650 setup/firmware to work more robust out of the box.
</li
>
11651 <li
>Adjusted Kerberos setup to detect realm and server settings at
11652 install time instead of dynamically at run time. This avoid a crash
11653 with krb5-auth-dialog on diskless workstations without a DNS name.
</li
>
11654 <li
>Worked around misfeature in network-manager not calling the dhclient
11655 exit hooks, causing automatic proxy configuration and automatic host
11656 name setting at run time to work again.
</li
>
11657 <li
>Fixed feature setting the default Iceweasel start page from URL
11658 fetched from LDAP, to allow schools to set the global default by
11659 updating the dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no LDAP object.
</li
>
11660 <li
>Changed default host name on all networked machines to be unique
11661 (generated from MAC or reverse DNS) after boot.
</li
>
11662 <li
>Adjusted partition sizes to make sure they are big enough.
</li
>
11666 <p
><strong
>Known issues
</strong
></p
>
11670 <li
>Grub is missing the new artwork.
</li
>
11671 <li
>KDE fail to understand the wpad.dat file provided, causing it to
11672 not use the http proxy as it should.
</li
>
11673 <li
>Chromium also fail to use the proxy.
</li
>
11677 <p
><strong
>Where to get it
</strong
></p
>
11679 <p
>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use
</p
>
11683 <li
><a href=
"ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-
7.1+edu0~b0-CD.iso
">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-
7.1+edu0~b0-CD.iso
</a
></li
>
11685 <li
><a href=
"http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-
7.1+edu0~b0-CD.iso
">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-
7.1+edu0~b0-CD.iso
</a
></li
>
11687 <li
>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-
7.1+edu0~b0-CD.iso .
</li
>
11691 <p
>The MD5SUM of this image is:
55d5de9765b6dccd5d9ec33cf1a07109
11692 <br
>The SHA1SUM of this image is:
996a1d9517740e4d627d100de2d12b23dd545a3f
</p
>
11694 <p
>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use
</p
>
11698 <li
><a href=
"ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-
7.1+edu0~b0-USB.iso
">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-
7.1+edu0~b0-USB.iso
</a
></li
>
11699 <li
><a href=
"http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-
7.1+edu0~b0-USB.iso
">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-
7.1+edu0~b0-USB.iso
</a
></li
>
11700 <li
>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-
7.1+edu0~b0-USB.iso .
</li
>
11704 <p
>The MD5SUM of this image is: d8f0818c51a78d357de794066f289f69
11705 <br
>The SHA1SUM of this image is:
49185ca354e8d0543240423746924f76a6cee733
</p
>
11708 <p
><strong
>How to report bugs
</strong
></p
>
11710 <p
><a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs
">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs
</a
>
11715 <title>How to fix a Thinkpad X230 with a broken
180 GB SSD disk
</title>
11716 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_fix_a_Thinkpad_X230_with_a_broken_180_GB_SSD_disk.html
</link>
11717 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_fix_a_Thinkpad_X230_with_a_broken_180_GB_SSD_disk.html
</guid>
11718 <pubDate>Wed,
17 Jul
2013 23:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
11719 <description><p
>Today I switched to
11720 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html
">my
11721 new laptop
</a
>. I
've previously written about the problems I had with
11722 my new Thinkpad X230, which was delivered with an
11723 <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
11724 GB Intel SSD disk with Lenovo firmware
</a
> that did not handle
11725 sustained writes. My hardware supplier have been very forthcoming in
11726 trying to find a solution, and after first trying with another
11727 identical
180 GB disks they decided to send me a
256 GB Samsung SSD
11728 disk instead to fix it once and for all. The Samsung disk survived
11729 the installation of Debian with encrypted disks (filling the disk with
11730 random data during installation killed the first two), and I thus
11731 decided to trust it with my data. I have installed it as a Debian Edu
11732 Wheezy roaming workstation hooked up with my Debian Edu Squeeze main
11733 server at home using Kerberos and LDAP, and will use it as my work
11734 station from now on.
</p
>
11736 <p
>As this is a solid state disk with no moving parts, I believe the
11737 Debian Wheezy default installation need to be tuned a bit to increase
11738 performance and increase life time of the disk. The Linux kernel and
11739 user space applications do not yet adjust automatically to such
11740 environment. To make it easier for my self, I created a draft Debian
11741 package
<tt
>ssd-setup
</tt
> to handle this tuning. The
11742 <a href=
"http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/ssd-setup.git
">source
11743 for the ssd-setup package
</a
> is available from collab-maint, and it
11744 is set up to adjust the setup of the machine by just installing the
11745 package. If there is any non-SSD disk in the machine, the package
11746 will refuse to install, as I did not try to write any logic to sort
11747 file systems in SSD and non-SSD file systems.
</p
>
11749 <p
>I consider the package a draft, as I am a bit unsure how to best
11750 set up Debian Wheezy with an SSD. It is adjusted to my use case,
11751 where I set up the machine with one large encrypted partition (in
11752 addition to /boot), put LVM on top of this and set up partitions on
11753 top of this again. See the README file in the package source for the
11754 references I used to pick the settings. At the moment these
11755 parameters are tuned:
</p
>
11759 <li
>Set up cryptsetup to pass TRIM commands to the physical disk
11760 (adding discard to /etc/crypttab)
</li
>
11762 <li
>Set up LVM to pass on TRIM commands to the underlying device (in
11763 this case a cryptsetup partition) by changing issue_discards from
11764 0 to
1 in /etc/lvm/lvm.conf.
</li
>
11766 <li
>Set relatime as a file system option for ext3 and ext4 file
11767 systems.
</li
>
11769 <li
>Tell swap to use TRIM commands by adding
'discard
' to
11770 /etc/fstab.
</li
>
11772 <li
>Change I/O scheduler from cfq to deadline using a udev rule.
</li
>
11774 <li
>Run fstrim on every ext3 and ext4 file system every night (from
11775 cron.daily).
</li
>
11777 <li
>Adjust sysctl values vm.swappiness to
1 and vm.vfs_cache_pressure
11778 to
50 to reduce the kernel eagerness to swap out processes.
</li
>
11782 <p
>During installation, I cancelled the part where the installer fill
11783 the disk with random data, as this would kill the SSD performance for
11784 little gain. My goal with the encrypted file system is to ensure
11785 those stealing my laptop end up with a brick and not a working
11786 computer. I have no hope in keeping the really resourceful people
11787 from getting the data on the disk (see
11788 <a href=
"http://xkcd.com/
538/
">XKCD #
538</a
> for an explanation why).
11789 Thus I concluded that adding the discard option to crypttab is the
11790 right thing to do.
</p
>
11792 <p
>I considered using the noop I/O scheduler, as several recommended
11793 it for SSD, but others recommended deadline and a benchmark I found
11794 indicated that deadline might be better for interactive use.
</p
>
11796 <p
>I also considered using the
'discard
' file system option for ext3
11797 and ext4, but read that it would give a performance hit ever time a
11798 file is removed, and thought it best to that that slowdown once a day
11799 instead of during my work.
</p
>
11801 <p
>My package do not set up tmpfs on /var/run, /var/lock and /tmp, as
11802 this is already done by Debian Edu.
</p
>
11804 <p
>I have not yet started on the user space tuning. I expect
11805 iceweasel need some tuning, and perhaps other applications too, but
11806 have not yet had time to investigate those parts.
</p
>
11808 <p
>The package should work on Ubuntu too, but I have not yet tested it
11811 <p
>As for the answer to the question in the title of this blog post,
11812 as far as I know, the only solution I know about is to replace the
11813 disk. It might be possible to flash it with Intel firmware instead of
11814 the Lenovo firmware. But I have not tried and did not want to do so
11815 without approval from Lenovo as I wanted to keep the warranty on the
11816 disk until a solution was found and they wanted the broken disks
11822 <title>Intel SSD
520 Series
180 GB with Lenovo firmware still lock up from sustained writes
</title>
11823 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Intel_SSD_520_Series_180_GB_with_Lenovo_firmware_still_lock_up_from_sustained_writes.html
</link>
11824 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Intel_SSD_520_Series_180_GB_with_Lenovo_firmware_still_lock_up_from_sustained_writes.html
</guid>
11825 <pubDate>Wed,
10 Jul
2013 13:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
11826 <description><p
>A few days ago, I wrote about
11827 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html
">the
11828 problems I experienced with my new X230 and its SSD disk
</a
>, which
11829 was dying during installation because it is unable to cope with
11830 sustained write. My supplier is in contact with
11831 <a href=
"http://www.lenovo.com/
">Lenovo
</a
>, and they wanted to send a
11832 replacement disk to try to fix the problem. They decided to send an
11833 identical model, so my hopes for a permanent fix was slim.
</p
>
11835 <p
>Anyway, today I got the replacement disk and tried to install
11836 Debian Edu Wheezy with encrypted disk on it. The new disk have the
11837 same firmware version as the original. This time my hope raised
11838 slightly as the installation progressed, as the original disk used to
11839 die after
4-
7% of the disk was written to, while this time it kept
11840 going past
10%,
20%,
40% and even past
50%. But around
60%, the disk
11841 died again and I was back on square one. I still do not have a new
11842 laptop with a disk I can trust. I can not live with a disk that might
11843 lock up when I download a new
11844 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
</a
> ISO or
11845 other large files. I look forward to hearing from my supplier with
11846 the next proposal from Lenovo.
</p
>
11848 <p
>The original disk is marked Intel SSD
520 Series
180 GB,
11849 11S0C38722Z1ZNME35X1TR, ISN: CVCV321407HB180EGN, SA: G57560302, FW:
11850 LF1i,
29MAY2013, PBA: G39779-
300, LBA
351,
651,
888, LI P/N:
0C38722,
11851 Pb-free
2LI, LC P/N:
16-
200366, WWN:
55CD2E40002756C4, Model:
11852 SSDSC2BW180A3L
2.5" 6Gb/s SATA SSD
180G
5V
1A, ASM P/N
0C38732, FRU
11853 P/N
45N8295, P0C38732.
</p
>
11855 <p
>The replacement disk is marked Intel SSD
520 Series
180 GB,
11856 11S0C38722Z1ZNDE34N0L0, ISN: CVCV315306RK180EGN, SA: G57560-
302, FW:
11857 LF1i,
22APR2013, PBA: G39779-
300, LBA
351,
651,
888, LI P/N:
0C38722,
11858 Pb-free
2LI, LC P/N:
16-
200366, WWN:
55CD2E40000AB69E, Model:
11859 SSDSC2BW180A3L
2.5" 6Gb/s SATA SSD
180G
5V
1A, ASM P/N
0C38732, FRU
11860 P/N
45N8295, P0C38732.
</p
>
11862 <p
>The only difference is in the first number (serial number?), ISN,
11863 SA, date and WNPP values. Mentioning all the details here in case
11864 someone is able to use the information to find a way to identify the
11865 failing disk among working ones (if any such working disk actually
11871 <title>July
13th: Debian/Ubuntu BSP and Skolelinux/Debian Edu developer gathering in Oslo
</title>
11872 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/July_13th__Debian_Ubuntu_BSP_and_Skolelinux_Debian_Edu_developer_gathering_in_Oslo.html
</link>
11873 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/July_13th__Debian_Ubuntu_BSP_and_Skolelinux_Debian_Edu_developer_gathering_in_Oslo.html
</guid>
11874 <pubDate>Tue,
9 Jul
2013 10:
40:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
11875 <description><p
>The upcoming Saturday,
2013-
07-
13, we are organising a combined
11876 Debian Edu developer gathering and Debian and Ubuntu bug squashing
11877 party in Oslo. It is organised by
<a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/
">the
11878 member assosiation NUUG
</a
> and
11879 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">the Debian Edu / Skolelinux
11880 project
</a
> together with
<a href=
"http://bitraf.no/
">the hack space
11881 Bitraf
</a
>.
</p
>
11883 <p
>It starts
10:
00 and continue until late evening. Everyone is
11884 welcome, and there is no fee to participate. There is on the other
11885 hand limited space, and only room for
30 people. Please put your name
11886 on
<a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/BSP/
2013/
07/
13/no/Oslo
">the event
11887 wiki page
</a
> if you plan to join us.
</p
>
11892 <title>The Thinkpad is dead, long live the Thinkpad X230?
</title>
11893 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html
</link>
11894 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html
</guid>
11895 <pubDate>Fri,
5 Jul
2013 08:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
11896 <description><p
>Half a year ago, I reported that I had to find a
11897 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html
">replacement
11898 for my trusty old Thinkpad X41
</a
>. Unfortunately I did not have much
11899 time to spend on it, and it took a while to find a model I believe
11900 will do the job, but two days ago the replacement finally arrived. I
11902 <a href=
"http://www.linlap.com/lenovo_thinkpad_x230
">Thinkpad X230
</a
>
11903 with SSD disk (NZDAJMN). I first test installed Debian Edu Wheezy as
11904 a roaming workstation, and it seemed to work flawlessly. But my
11905 second installation with encrypted disk was not as successful. More
11906 on that below.
</p
>
11908 <p
>I had a hard time trying to track down a good laptop, as my most
11909 important requirements (robust and with a good keyboard) are never
11910 listed in the feature list. But I did get good help from the search
11911 feature at
<a href=
"http://www.prisjakt.no/
">Prisjakt
</a
>, which
11912 allowed me to limit the list of interesting laptops based on my other
11913 requirements. A bit surprising that SSD disk are not disks according
11914 to that search interface, so I had to drop specifying the number of
11915 disks from my search parameters. I also asked around among friends to
11916 get their impression on keyboards and robustness.
</p
>
11918 <p
>So the new laptop arrived, and it is quite a lot wider than the
11919 X41. I am not quite convinced about the keyboard, as it is
11920 significantly wider than my old keyboard, and I have to stretch my
11921 hand a lot more to reach the edges. But the key response is fairly
11922 good and the individual key shape is fairly easy to handle, so I hope
11923 I will get used to it. My old X40 was starting to fail, and I really
11924 needed a new laptop now. :)
</p
>
11926 <p
>Turning off the touch pad was simple. All it took was a quick
11927 visit to the BIOS during boot it disable it.
</p
>
11929 <p
>But there is a fatal problem with the laptop. The
180 GB SSD disk
11930 lock up during load. And this happen when installing Debian Wheezy
11931 with encrypted disk, while the disk is being filled with random data.
11932 I also tested to install Ubuntu Raring, and it happen there too if I
11933 reenable the code to fill the disk with random data (it is disabled by
11934 default in Ubuntu). And the bug with is already known. It was
11935 reported to Debian as
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
691427">BTS
11936 report #
691427 2012-
10-
25</a
> (journal commit I/O error on brand-new
11937 Thinkpad T430s ext4 on lvm on SSD). It is also reported to the Linux
11938 kernel developers as
11939 <a href=
"https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=
51861">Kernel bugzilla
11940 report #
51861 2012-
12-
20</a
> (Intel SSD
520 stops working under load
11941 (SSDSC2BW180A3L in Lenovo ThinkPad T430s)). It is also reported on the
11942 Lenovo forums, both for
11943 <a href=
"http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T400-T500-and-newer-T-series/T430s-Intel-SSD-
520-
180GB-issue/m-p/
1070549">T430
11944 2012-
11-
10</a
> and for
11945 <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
11946 03-
20-
2013</a
>. The problem do not only affect installation. The
11947 reports state that the disk lock up during use if many writes are done
11948 on the disk, so it is much no use to work around the installation
11949 problem and end up with a computer that can lock up at any moment.
11951 <a href=
"https://git.efficios.com/?p=test-ssd.git
">small C program
11952 available
</a
> that will lock up the hard drive after running a few
11953 minutes by writing to a file.
</p
>
11955 <p
>I
've contacted my supplier and asked how to handle this, and after
11956 contacting PCHELP Norway (request
01D1FDP) which handle support
11957 requests for Lenovo, his first suggestion was to upgrade the disk
11958 firmware. Unfortunately there is no newer firmware available from
11959 Lenovo, as my disk already have the most recent one (version LF1i). I
11960 hope to hear more from him today and hope the problem can be
11961 fixed. :)
</p
>
11966 <title>The Thinkpad is dead, long live the Thinkpad X230
</title>
11967 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230.html
</link>
11968 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230.html
</guid>
11969 <pubDate>Thu,
4 Jul
2013 09:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
11970 <description><p
>Half a year ago, I reported that I had to find a replacement for my
11971 trusty old Thinkpad X41. Unfortunately I did not have much time to
11972 spend on it, but today the replacement finally arrived. I ended up
11973 picking a
<a href=
"http://www.linlap.com/lenovo_thinkpad_x230
">Thinkpad
11974 X230
</a
> with SSD disk (NZDAJMN). I first test installed Debian Edu
11975 Wheezy as a roaming workstation, and it worked flawlessly. As I write
11976 this, it is installing what I hope will be a more final installation,
11977 with a encrypted hard drive to ensure any dope head stealing it end up
11978 with an expencive door stop.
</p
>
11980 <p
>I had a hard time trying to track down a good laptop, as my most
11981 important requirements (robust and with a good keyboard) are never
11982 listed in the feature list. But I did get good help from the search
11983 feature at
<ahref=
"http://www.prisjakt.no/
">Prisjakt
</a
>, which
11984 allowed me to limit the list of interesting laptops based on my other
11985 requirements. A bit surprising that SSD disk are not disks, so I had
11986 to drop number of disks from my search parameters.
</p
>
11988 <p
>I am not quite convinced about the keyboard, as it is significantly
11989 wider than my old keyboard, and I have to stretch my hand a lot more
11990 to reach the edges. But the key response is fairly good and the
11991 individual key shape is fairly easy to handle, so I hope I will get
11992 used to it. My old X40 was starting to fail, and I really needed a
11993 new laptop now. :)
</p
>
11995 <p
>I look forward to figuring out how to turn off the touch pad.
</p
>
12000 <title>Fourth alpha release of Debian Edu/Skolelinux based on Debian Wheezy
</title>
12001 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Fourth_alpha_release_of_Debian_Edu_Skolelinux_based_on_Debian_Wheezy.html
</link>
12002 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Fourth_alpha_release_of_Debian_Edu_Skolelinux_based_on_Debian_Wheezy.html
</guid>
12003 <pubDate>Wed,
3 Jul
2013 14:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
12004 <description><p
>The fourth wheezy based alpha release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
12005 today. This is the release announcement:
</p
>
12007 <p
><strong
>New features for Debian Edu
7.1+edu0~alpha3 released
12008 2013-
07-
03</strong
></p
>
12010 <p
>These are the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux
12011 7.1+edu0~alpha3, based on Debian with codename
"Wheezy
".
</p
>
12013 <p
><strong
>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux
</strong
></p
>
12015 <p
><a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu, also known as
12016 Skolelinux
</a
>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
12017 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
12018 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
12019 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
12020 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
12021 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
12022 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
12023 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
12024 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
12025 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
12027 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html
">more
12028 than
60 educational software packages
</a
> and more are available from
12029 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
12030 and Xfce desktop environment.
</p
>
12032 <p
>This is the fourth test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
12033 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
12034 Squeeze release.
</p
>
12036 <p
><strong
>Software updates
</strong
></p
>
12038 <li
>Dropped ispell dictionaries from our default installation.
</li
>
12039 <li
>Dropped menu-xdg from the KDE desktop option, to drop the Debian
12040 submenu. It was not included with Gnome, LXDE or Xfce, so this
12041 brings KDE in line with the others.
</li
>
12042 <li
>Dropped xdrawchem, xjig and xsok from our default installation as
12043 they don
't have a desktop menu entry and thus won
't show up in the
12044 menu now that menu-xdg was removed.
</li
>
12045 <li
>Removed the killer system to kill left behind processes on
12046 multi-user machines, as it was no longer able to understand when a
12047 X display was in use and killed the processes of the active users
12049 <li
>Dropped the golearn (from goplay) package as the debtags in wheezy
12050 are too few to make the package useful.
</li
>
12052 <p
><strong
>Other changes
</strong
></p
>
12054 <li
>Updated artwork matching http://wiki.debian.org/DebianArt/Themes/Joy
12055 <li
>Multi-arch i386/amd64 USB stick ISO available.
</li
>
12056 <li
>Got rid of ispell/wordlist related debconf questions that showed
12057 up for some language options.
</li
>
12058 <li
>Switched to using http.debian.net as APT source by default.
</li
>
12059 <li
>Fixed proxy configuration on Main Server installations.
</li
>
12060 <li
>Changed LTSP setup to ask dpkg to use force-unsafe-io the same way
12061 d-i is doing it.
</li
>
12062 <li
>Made sure root and user passwords were not left behind in the
12063 debconf database after installation on Main Server installations.
</li
>
12064 <li
>Made Roaming Workstation dynamic setup more robust and added draft
12065 script setup-ad-client to hook a Roaming Workstation up to a
12066 Active Directory server instead of a Debian Edu Main Server.
</li
>
12067 <li
>Update system to install needed firmware packages during
12068 installation, to work properly in Wheezy.
</li
>
12069 <li
>Update system to handle hardware quirks (debian-edu-hwsetup).
</li
>
12070 <li
>Corrected PXE installation setup to properly pass selected desktop
12071 and keymap settings to PXE installation clients.
</li
>
12072 <li
>LTSP diskless workstations use sshfs by default, allowing them to
12073 work without adding them to DNS and NIS netgroups for NFS access.
</li
>
12075 <p
><strong
>Known issues
</strong
></p
>
12077 <li
>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv)
12078 available yet (
698840).
</li
>
12079 <li
>Artwork not enabled for all desktops.
</li
>
12081 <p
><strong
>Where to get it
</strong
></p
>
12083 <p
>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use
</p
>
12085 <li
><a href=
"ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-
7.1+edu0~a3-CD.iso
">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-
7.1+edu0~a3-CD.iso
</a
></li
>
12086 <li
><a href=
"http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-
7.1+edu0~a3-CD.iso
">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-
7.1+edu0~a3-CD.iso
</a
></li
>
12087 <li
>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-
7.1+edu0~a3-CD.iso .
</li
>
12090 <p
>The MD5SUM of this image is:
2b161a99d2a848c376d8d04e3854e30c
12091 <br
>The SHA1SUM of this image is:
498922e9c508c0a7ee9dbe1dfe5bf830d779c3c8
</p
>
12093 <p
>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use
</p
>
12095 <li
><a href=
"ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-
7.1+edu0~a3-USB.iso
">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-
7.1+edu0~a3-USB.iso
</a
></li
>
12096 <li
><a href=
"http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-
7.1+edu0~a3-USB.iso
">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-
7.1+edu0~a3-USB.iso
</a
></li
>
12097 <li
>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-
7.1+edu0~a3-USB.iso .
</li
>
12100 <p
>The MD5SUM of this image is:
25e808e403a4c15dbef1d13c37d572ac
12101 <br
>The SHA1SUM of this image is:
15ecfc93eb6b4f453b7eb0bc04b6a279262d9721
</p
>
12103 <p
><strong
>How to report bugs
</strong
></p
>
12105 <p
><a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs
">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs
</a
></p
>
12110 <title>Automatically locate and install required firmware packages on Debian (Isenkram
0.4)
</title>
12111 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatically_locate_and_install_required_firmware_packages_on_Debian__Isenkram_0_4_.html
</link>
12112 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatically_locate_and_install_required_firmware_packages_on_Debian__Isenkram_0_4_.html
</guid>
12113 <pubDate>Tue,
25 Jun
2013 11:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
12114 <description><p
>It annoys me when the computer fail to do automatically what it is
12115 perfectly capable of, and I have to do it manually to get things
12116 working. One such task is to find out what firmware packages are
12117 needed to get the hardware on my computer working. Most often this
12118 affect the wifi card, but some times it even affect the RAID
12119 controller or the ethernet card. Today I pushed version
0.4 of the
12120 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram
">Isenkram package
</a
>
12121 including a new script isenkram-autoinstall-firmware handling the
12122 process of asking all the loaded kernel modules what firmware files
12123 they want, find debian packages providing these files and install the
12124 debian packages. Here is a test run on my laptop:
</p
>
12126 <p
><pre
>
12127 # isenkram-autoinstall-firmware
12128 info: kernel drivers requested extra firmware: ipw2200-bss.fw ipw2200-ibss.fw ipw2200-sniffer.fw
12129 info: fetching http://http.debian.net/debian/dists/squeeze/Contents-i386.gz
12130 info: locating packages with the requested firmware files
12131 info: Updating APT sources after adding non-free APT source
12132 info: trying to install firmware-ipw2x00
12135 Preconfiguring packages ...
12136 Selecting previously deselected package firmware-ipw2x00.
12137 (Reading database ...
259727 files and directories currently installed.)
12138 Unpacking firmware-ipw2x00 (from .../firmware-ipw2x00_0.28+squeeze1_all.deb) ...
12139 Setting up firmware-ipw2x00 (
0.28+squeeze1) ...
12141 </pre
></p
>
12143 <p
>When all the requested firmware is present, a simple message is
12144 printed instead:
</p
>
12146 <p
><pre
>
12147 # isenkram-autoinstall-firmware
12148 info: did not find any firmware files requested by loaded kernel modules. exiting
12150 </pre
></p
>
12152 <p
>It could use some polish, but it is already working well and saving
12153 me some time when setting up new machines. :)
</p
>
12155 <p
>So, how does it work? It look at the set of currently loaded
12156 kernel modules, and look up each one of them using modinfo, to find
12157 the firmware files listed in the module meta-information. Next, it
12158 download the Contents file from a nearby APT mirror, and search for
12159 the firmware files in this file to locate the package with the
12160 requested firmware file. If the package is in the non-free section, a
12161 non-free APT source is added and the package is installed using
12162 <tt
>apt-get install
</tt
>. The end result is a slightly better working
12165 <p
>I hope someone find time to implement a more polished version of
12166 this script as part of the hw-detect debian-installer module, to
12167 finally fix
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
655507">BTS report
12168 #
655507</a
>. There really is no need to insert USB sticks with
12169 firmware during a PXE install when the packages already are available
12170 from the nearby Debian mirror.
</p
>
12175 <title>The value of a good distro wide test suite...
</title>
12176 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_value_of_a_good_distro_wide_test_suite___.html
</link>
12177 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_value_of_a_good_distro_wide_test_suite___.html
</guid>
12178 <pubDate>Sat,
22 Jun
2013 07:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
12179 <description><p
>In the
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu /
12180 Skolelinux
</a
> project, we include a post-installation test suite,
12181 which check that services are running, working, and return the
12182 expected results. It runs automatically just after the first boot on
12183 test installations (using test ISOs), but not on production
12184 installations (using non-test ISOs). It test that the LDAP service is
12185 operating, Kerberos is responding, DNS is replying, file systems are
12186 online resizable, etc, etc. And it check that the PXE service is
12187 configured, which is the topic of this post.
</p
>
12189 <p
>The last week I
've fixed the DVD and USB stick ISOs for our Debian
12190 Edu Wheezy release. These ISOs are supposed to be able to install a
12191 complete system without any Internet connection, but for that to
12192 happen all the needed packages need to be on them. Thanks to our test
12193 suite, I discovered that we had forgotten to adjust our PXE setup to
12194 cope with the new names and paths used by the netboot d-i packages.
12195 When Internet connectivity was available, the installer fall back to
12196 using wget to fetch d-i boot images, but when offline it require
12197 working packages to get it working. And the packages changed name
12198 from debian-installer-
6.0-netboot-$arch to
12199 debian-installer-
7.0-netboot-$arch, we no longer pulled in the
12200 packages during installation. Without our test suite, I suspect we
12201 would never have discovered this before release. Now it is fixed
12202 right after we got the ISOs operational.
</p
>
12204 <p
>Another by-product of the test suite is that we can ask system
12205 administrators with problems getting Debian Edu to work, to run the
12206 test suite using
<tt
>/usr/sbin/debian-edu-test-install
</tt
> and see if
12207 any errors are detected. This usually pinpoint the subsystem causing
12208 the problem.
</p
>
12210 <p
>If you want to help us help kids learn how to share and create,
12212 <a href=
"irc://irc.debian.org/%
23debian-edu
">#debian-edu on
12213 irc.debian.org
</a
> and the
12214 <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/
">debian-edu@
</a
> mailing
12220 <title>Debian Edu interview: Victor Nițu
</title>
12221 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Victor_Ni_u.html
</link>
12222 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Victor_Ni_u.html
</guid>
12223 <pubDate>Mon,
17 Jun
2013 10:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
12224 <description><p
>The
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu and
12225 Skolelinux
</a
> distribution have users and contributors all around the
12226 globe. And a while back, an enterprising young man showed up on
12227 <a href=
"irc://irc.debian.org/%
23debian-edu
">our IRC channel
12228 #debian-edu
</a
> and started asking questions about how Debian Edu
12229 worked. We answered as good as we could, and even convinced him to
12230 help us with translations. And today I managed to get an interview
12231 with him, to learn more about him.
</p
>
12233 <p
><strong
>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
</strong
></p
>
12235 <p
>I
'm a
25 year old free software enthusiast, living in Romania,
12236 which is also my country of origin. Back in
2009, at a New Year
's Eve
12237 party, I had a very nice
<strike
>beer
</strike
> discussion with a
12238 friend, when we realized we have no organised Debian community in our
12239 country. A few days later, we put together the infrastructure for such
12240 community and even gathered a nice Debian-ish crowd. Since then, I
12241 began my quest as a free software hacker and activist and I am
12242 constantly trying to cover as much ground as possible on that
12245 <p
>A few years ago I founded a small web development company, which
12246 provided me the flexible schedule I needed so much for my
12247 activities. For the last
13 months, I have been the Technical Director
12248 of
<a href=
"http://ceata.org/
">Fundația Ceata
</a
>, which is a free
12249 software activist organisation endorsed by the FSF and the FSFE, and
12250 the only one we have in our country.
</p
>
12252 <p
><strong
>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
12253 project?
</strong
></p
>
12255 <p
>The idea of participating in the Debian Edu project was a surprise
12256 even to me, since I never used it before I began getting involved in
12257 it. This year I had a great opportunity to deliver a talk on
12258 educational software, and I knew immediately where to look. It was a
12259 love at first sight, since I was previously involved with some of the
12260 technologies the project incorporates, and I rapidly found a lot of
12261 ways to contribute.
</p
>
12263 <p
>My first contributions consisted in translating the installer and
12264 configuration dialogs, then I found some bugs to squash (I still
12265 haven
't fixed them yet though), and I even got my eyes on some other
12266 areas where I can prove myself helpful. Since the appetite for free
12267 software in my country is pretty low, I
'll be happy to be the first
12268 one around here advocating for the project
's adoption in educational
12269 environments, and maybe even get my hands dirty in creating a flavour
12270 for our own needs. I am not used to make very advanced plannings, so
12271 from now on, time will tell what I
'll be doing next, but I think I
12272 have a pretty consistent starting point.
</p
>
12274 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
12275 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
12277 <p
>Not a long time ago, I was in the position of configuring and
12278 maintaining a LDAP server on some Debian derivative, and I must say it
12279 took me a while. A long time ago, I was maintaining a bigger
12280 Samba-powered infrastructure, and I must say I spent quite a lot of
12281 time on it. I have similar stories about many of the services included
12282 with Skolelinux, and the main advantage I see about it is the
12283 out-of-the box availability of them, making it quite competitive when
12284 it comes to managing a school
's network, for example.
</p
>
12286 <p
>Of course, there is more to say about Skolelinux than the
12287 availability of the software included, its flexibility in various
12288 scenarios is something I can
't wait to experiment
"into the wild
" (I
12289 only played with virtual machines so far). And I am sure there is a
12290 lot more I haven
't discovered yet about it, being so new within the
12293 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
12294 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
12296 <p
>As usual, when it comes to Debian Blends, I see as the biggest
12297 disadvantage the lack of a numerous team dedicated to the
12298 project. Every day I see the same names in the changelogs, and I have
12299 a constantly fear of the bus factor in this story. I
'd like to see
12300 Debian Edu advertised more as an entry point into the Debian
12301 ecosystem, especially amongst newcomers and students. IMHO there are a
12302 lot low-hanging fruits in terms of bug squashing, and enough
12303 opportunities to get the feeling of the Debian Project
's dynamics. Not
12304 to mention it
's a very fun blend to work on!
</p
>
12306 <p
>Derived from the previous statement, is the delay in catching up
12307 with the main Debian release and documentation. This is common though
12308 to all blends and derivatives, but it
's an issue we can all work
12311 <p
><strong
>Which free software do you use daily?
</strong
></p
>
12313 <p
>I can hardly imagine myself spending a day without Vim, since my
12314 daily routine covers writing code and hacking configuration files. I
12315 am a fan of the Awesome window manager (but I also like the
12316 Enlightenment project a lot!),
12317 <a href=
"http://www.claws-mail.org/
">Claws Mail
</a
> due to its ease of
12318 use and very configurable behaviour. Recently I fell in love with
12319 <a href=
"https://launchpad.net/redshift
">Redshift
</a
>, which helps me
12320 get through the night without headaches. Of course, there is much more
12321 stuff in this bag, but I
'll need a blog on my own for doing this!
</p
>
12323 <p
><strong
>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
12324 get schools to use free software?
</strong
></p
>
12326 <p
>Well, on this field, I cannot do much more than experiment right
12327 now. So, being far from having a recipe for success, I can only assume
12332 <li
>schools would like to get rid of proprietary software
</li
>
12334 <li
>students will love the openness of the system, and will want to
12335 experiment with it - maybe we need to harvest the native curiosity
12336 of teenagers more?
</li
>
12338 <li
>there is no
"right one
" when it comes to strategies, but it would
12339 be useful to have some success stories published somewhere, so
12340 other can get some inspiration from them (I know I
'd promote
12343 <li
>more active promotion - talks, conferences, even small school
12344 lectures can do magical things if they encounter at least one
12345 person interested. Who knows who that person might be? ;-)
</li
>
12349 <p
>I also see some problems in getting Skolelinux into schools; for
12350 example, in our country we have a great deal of corruption issues, so
12351 it might be hard(er) to fight against proprietary solutions. Also,
12352 people who relied on commercial software for all their lives, would be
12353 very hard to convert against their will.
</p
>
12358 <title>Debian Edu interview: Jonathan Carter
</title>
12359 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Jonathan_Carter.html
</link>
12360 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Jonathan_Carter.html
</guid>
12361 <pubDate>Wed,
12 Jun
2013 09:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
12362 <description><p
>There is a certain cross-over between the
12363 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
12364 project
</a
> and
<a href=
"http://www.edubuntu.org/
">the Edubuntu
12365 project
</a
>, and for example the LTSP packages in Debian are a joint
12366 effort between the projects. One person with a foot in both camps is
12367 Jonathan Carter, which I am now happy to present to you.
</p
>
12369 <p
><strong
>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
</strong
></p
>
12371 <p
>I
'm a South-African free software geek who lives in Cape Town. My
12372 days vary quite a bit since I
'm involved in too many things. As I
'm
12373 getting older I
'm learning how to focus a bit more :)
</p
>
12375 <p
>I
'm also an Edubuntu contributor and I love when there are
12376 opportunities for the Edubuntu and Debian Edu projects to benefit from
12377 each other.
</p
>
12379 <p
><strong
>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
12380 project?
</strong
></p
>
12382 <p
>I
've been somewhat familiar with the project before, but I think my
12383 first direct exposure to the project was when I met Petter
12384 [Reinholdtsen] and Knut [Yrvin] at the Edubuntu summit in
2005 in
12385 London. They provided great feedback that helped the bootstrapping of
12386 Edubuntu. Back then Edubuntu (and even Ubuntu) was still very new and
12387 it was great getting input from people who have been around longer. I
12388 was also still very excitable and said yes to everything and to this
12389 day I have a big todo list backlog that I
'm catching up with. I think
12390 over the years the relationship between Edubuntu and Debian-Edu has
12391 been gradually improving, although I think there
's a lot that we could
12392 still improve on in terms of working together on packages. I
'm sure
12393 we
'll get there one day.
</p
>
12395 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
12396 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
12398 <p
>Debian itself already has so many advantages. I could go on about
12399 it for pages, but in essence I love that it
's a very honest project
12400 that puts its users first with no hidden agendas and also produces
12401 very high quality work.
</p
>
12403 <p
>I think the advantage of Debian Edu is that it makes many common
12404 set-up tasks simpler so that administrators can get up and running
12405 with a lot less effort and frustration. At the same time I think it
12406 helps to standardise installations in schools so that it
's easier for
12407 community members and commercial suppliers to support.
</p
>
12409 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
12410 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
12412 <p
>I had to re-type this one a few times because I
'm trying to
12413 separate
"disadvantages
" from
"areas that need improvement
" (which is
12414 what I originally rambled on about)
</p
>
12416 <p
>The biggest disadvantage I can think of is lack of manpower. The
12417 project could do so much more if there were more good contributors. I
12418 think some of the problems are external too. Free software and free
12419 content in education is a no-brainer but it takes some time to catch
12420 on. When you
've been working with the same proprietary eco-system for
12421 years and have gotten used to it, it can be hard to adjust to some
12422 concepts in the free software world. It would be nice if there were
12423 more Debian Edu consultants across the world. I
'd love to be one
12424 myself but I
'm already so over-committed that it
's just not possible
12425 currently.
</p
>
12427 <p
>I think the best short-term solution to that large-scale problem is
12428 for schools to be pro-active and share their experiences and grow
12429 their skills in-house. I
'm often saddened to see how much money
12430 educational institutions spend on
3rd party solutions that they don
't
12431 have access to after the service has ended and they could
've gotten so
12432 much more value otherwise by being more self-sustainable and
12433 autonomous.
</p
>
12435 <p
><strong
>Which free software do you use daily?
</strong
></p
>
12437 <p
>My main laptop dual-boots between Debian and Windows
7. I was
12438 Windows free for years but started dual-booting again last year for
12439 some games which help me focus and relax (Starcraft II in
12440 particular). Gaming support on Linux is improving in leaps and bounds
12441 so I suppose I
'll soon be able to regain that disk space :)
</p
>
12443 <p
>Besides that I rely on Icedove, Chromium, Terminator, Byobu, irssi,
12444 git, Tomboy, KVM, VLC and LibreOffice. Recently I
've been torn on
12445 which desktop environment I like and I
'm taking some refuge in Xfce
12446 while I figure that out. I like tools that keep things simple. I enjoy
12447 Python and shell scripting. I went to an Arduino workshop recently and
12448 it was awesome seeing how easy and simple the IDE software was to get
12449 up and running in Debian compared to the users running Windows and OS
12452 <p
>I also use mc which some people frown upon slightly. I got used to
12453 using Norton Commander in the early
90's and it stuck (I think the
12454 people who sneer at it is just jealous that they don
't know how to use
12457 <p
><strong
>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
12458 get schools to use free software?
</strong
></p
>
12460 <p
>I think trying to force it is unproductive. I also think that in
12461 many cases it
's appropriate for schools to use non-free systems and I
12462 don
't think that there
's any particular moral or ethical problem with
12465 <p
>I do think though that free software can already solve so so many
12466 problems in educational institutions and it
's just a shame not taking
12467 advantage of that.
</p
>
12469 <p
>I also think that some curricula need serious review. For example,
12470 some areas of the world rely heavily on very specific versions of MS
12471 Office, teaching students to parrot menu items instead of learning the
12472 general concepts. I think that
's very unproductive because firstly, MS
12473 Office
's interface changes drastically every few years and on top of
12474 that it also locks in a generation to a product that might not be the
12475 best solution for them.
</p
>
12477 <p
>To answer your question, I believe that the right strategy is to
12478 educate and inform, giving someone the information they require to
12479 make a decision that would work for them.
</p
>
12484 <title>Fixing the Linux black screen of death on machines with Intel HD video
</title>
12485 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Fixing_the_Linux_black_screen_of_death_on_machines_with_Intel_HD_video.html
</link>
12486 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Fixing_the_Linux_black_screen_of_death_on_machines_with_Intel_HD_video.html
</guid>
12487 <pubDate>Tue,
11 Jun
2013 11:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
12488 <description><p
>When installing RedHat, Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu on some machines,
12489 the screen just turn black when Linux boot, either during installation
12490 or on first boot from the hard disk. I
've seen it once in a while the
12491 last few years, but only recently understood the cause. I
've seen it
12492 on HP laptops, and on my latest acquaintance the Packard Bell laptop.
12493 The reason seem to be in the wiring of some laptops. The system to
12494 control the screen background light is inverted, so when Linux try to
12495 turn the brightness fully on, it end up turning it off instead. I do
12496 not know which Linux drivers are affected, but this post is about the
12497 i915 driver used by the
12498 <a href=
"http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv
">Packard Bell
12499 EasyNote LV
</a
>, Thinkpad X40 and many other laptops.
</p
>
12501 <p
>The problem can be worked around two ways. Either by adding
12502 i915.invert_brightness=
1 as a kernel option, or by adding a file in
12503 /etc/modprobe.d/ to tell modprobe to add the invert_brightness=
1
12504 option when it load the i915 kernel module. On Debian and Ubuntu, it
12505 can be done by running these commands as root:
</p
>
12508 echo options i915 invert_brightness=
1 | tee /etc/modprobe.d/i915.conf
12509 update-initramfs -u -k all
12512 <p
>Since March
2012 there is
12513 <a href=
"http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=
4dca20efb1a9c2efefc28ad2867e5d6c3f5e1955
">a
12514 mechanism in the Linux kernel
</a
> to tell the i915 driver which
12515 hardware have this problem, and get the driver to invert the
12516 brightness setting automatically. To use it, one need to add a row in
12517 <a href=
"http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_display.c
">the
12518 intel_quirks array
</a
> in the driver source
12519 <tt
>drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_display.c
</tt
> (look for
"<tt
>static
12520 struct intel_quirk intel_quirks
</tt
>"), specifying the PCI device
12521 number (vendor number
8086 is assumed) and subdevice vendor and device
12524 <p
>My Packard Bell EasyNote LV got this output from
<tt
>lspci
12525 -vvnn
</tt
> for the video card in question:
</p
>
12527 <p
><pre
>
12528 00:
02.0 VGA compatible controller [
0300]: Intel Corporation \
12529 3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller [
8086:
0156] \
12530 (rev
09) (prog-if
00 [VGA controller])
12531 Subsystem: Acer Incorporated [ALI] Device [
1025:
0688]
12532 Control: I/O+ Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- \
12533 ParErr- Stepping- SE RR- FastB2B- DisINTx+
12534 Status: Cap+
66MHz- UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=fast
>TAbort- \
12535 <TAbort-
<MAbort-
>SERR-
<PERR- INTx-
12537 Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ
42
12538 Region
0: Memory at c2000000 (
64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=
4M]
12539 Region
2: Memory at b0000000 (
64-bit, prefetchable) [size=
256M]
12540 Region
4: I/O ports at
4000 [size=
64]
12541 Expansion ROM at
<unassigned
> [disabled]
12542 Capabilities:
<access denied
>
12543 Kernel driver in use: i915
12544 </pre
></p
>
12546 <p
>The resulting intel_quirks entry would then look like this:
</p
>
12548 <p
><pre
>
12549 struct intel_quirk intel_quirks[] = {
12551 /* Packard Bell EasyNote LV11HC needs invert brightness quirk */
12552 {
0x0156,
0x1025,
0x0688, quirk_invert_brightness },
12555 </pre
></p
>
12557 <p
>According to the kernel module instructions (as seen using
12558 <tt
>modinfo i915
</tt
>), information about hardware needing the
12559 invert_brightness flag should be sent to the
12560 <a href=
"http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/dri-devel
">dri-devel
12561 (at) lists.freedesktop.org
</a
> mailing list to reach the kernel
12562 developers. But my email about the laptop sent
2013-
06-
03 have not
12564 <a href=
"http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/
2013-June/thread.html
">the
12565 web archive for the mailing list
</a
>, so I suspect they do not accept
12566 emails from non-subscribers. Because of this, I sent my patch also to
12567 the Debian bug tracking system instead as
12568 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
710938">BTS report #
710938</a
>, to make
12569 sure the patch is not lost.
</p
>
12571 <p
>Unfortunately, it is not enough to fix the kernel to get Laptops
12572 with this problem working properly with Linux. If you use Gnome, your
12573 worries should be over at this point. But if you use KDE, there is
12574 something in KDE ignoring the invert_brightness setting and turning on
12575 the screen during login. I
've reported it to Debian as
12576 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
711237">BTS report #
711237</a
>, and
12577 have no idea yet how to figure out exactly what subsystem is doing
12578 this. Perhaps you can help? Perhaps you know what the Gnome
12579 developers did to handle this, and this can give a clue to the KDE
12580 developers? Or you know where in KDE the screen brightness is changed
12581 during login? If so, please update the BTS report (or get in touch if
12582 you do not know how to update BTS).
</p
>
12584 <p
>Update
2013-
07-
19: The correct fix for this machine seem to be
12585 acpi_backlight=vendor, to disable ACPI backlight support completely,
12586 as the ACPI information on the machine is trash and it is better to
12587 leave it to the intel video driver to control the screen
12588 backlight.
</p
>
12593 <title>Third alpha release of Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Debian Wheezy
</title>
12594 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Third_alpha_release_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Debian_Wheezy.html
</link>
12595 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Third_alpha_release_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Debian_Wheezy.html
</guid>
12596 <pubDate>Mon,
10 Jun
2013 22:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
12597 <description><p
>The third wheezy based alpha release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
12598 today. This is the release announcement:
</p
>
12600 <p
><strong
>New features for Debian Edu
7.0.0 alpha2 released
12601 2013-
06-
10</strong
></p
>
12603 <p
>This is the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux
7.0.0 edu
12604 alpha2, based on Debian with codename
"Wheezy
".
</p
>
12606 <p
><strong
>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux
</strong
></p
>
12608 <p
><a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu, also known as
12609 Skolelinux
</a
>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
12610 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
12611 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
12612 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
12613 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
12614 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
12615 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
12616 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
12617 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
12618 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
12620 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html
">more
12621 than
60 educational software packages
</a
> and more are available from
12622 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
12623 and Xfce desktop environment.
</p
>
12625 <p
>This is the third test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
12626 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
12627 Squeeze release.
</p
>
12629 <p
><strong
>Software updates
</strong
></p
>
12633 <li
>Iceweasel was updated from
10 to
17. (DSA
2699-
1)
12634 <li
>Updated libxv (DSA-
2674), libxvmc (DSA-
2675), libxfixes (DSA-
2676), libxrender (DSA-
2677), mesa (DSA-
2678), xserver-xorg-video-openchrome (DSA-
2679), libxt (DSA-
2680), libxcursor (DSA-
2681), libxext (DSA-
2682), libxi (DSA-
2683), libxrandr (DSA-
2684), libxp (DSA-
2685), libxcb (DSA-
2686), libfs (DSA-
2687), libxres (DSA-
2688), libxtst (DSA-
2689), libxxf86dga (DSA-
2690), libxinerama (DSA-
2691), libxxf86vm (DSA-
2692), libx11 (DSA-
2693), chromium-browser (DSA-
2695), gnutls26 (DSA-
2697), wireshark (DSA-
2700), krb5 (DSA-
2701), telepathy-gabble (DSA-
2702) and subversion (DSA-
2703).
12635 <li
>Switched xrdp on thin client servers to use tightvncserver instead of xvnc4.
12636 <li
>Now install software oscilloscope xoscope by default.
12637 <li
>Now install music tools gtick, lingot and pianobooster by default.
12641 <p
><strong
>Other changes
</strong
></p
>
12645 <li
>The subnet-change script is now able to change all files needing a change on the main-server when changing the IP network used.
12646 <li
>Updated translation of the installation.
12647 <li
>New Romanian translation.
12648 <li
>Fix security problem causing root and first user password to no longer show up in /var/cache/debconf/templates.dat.
12649 <li
>Fix roaming workstation setup (Closed in libpam-mklocaluser/
0.8, libpam-mklocaluser/
0.8~deb7u1: #
706753: libpam-mklocaluser: Fail to create local user during first login).
12650 <li
>Made roaming workstation setup more robust in non-Debian Edu environments.
12651 <li
>New script debian-edu-bless to transform a Debian installation to a Debian Edu profile.
12652 <li
>Adjust Iceweasel setup to improve performance when $HOME is on NFS.
12653 <li
>More testsuite tests.
12654 <li
>Make automatic proxy configuration more robust.
12655 <li
>Adjust GOsa² GUI configuration.
12657 <li
>Update thin client and diskless workstation setup to work with
12658 LTSP in Wheezy.
</li
>
12660 <li
>Diskless workstations now run out of the box -- no need to set
12661 them up with GOsa².
</li
>
12663 <li
>Update IMAP server setup.
</li
>
12665 <li
>Fix login into Skolelinux Backup Tool (Closed in
12666 slbackup-php/
0.4.4-
1: #
700257: slbackup-php: Fails to submit correctly
12667 entered password).
</li
>
12671 <p
><strong
>Known issues
</strong
></p
>
12675 <li
>DVD binary and source images are not yet ready.
</li
>
12677 <li
>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv)
12678 available yet (Open in gosa/
2.7.4-
4: #
698840: gosa-plugin-ldapmanager:
12679 missing import feature).
</li
>
12681 <li
>Missing artwork for the KDE desktop (and probably a few others).
</li
>
12683 <li
>KDE Debian submenu lacks icons (Closed: #
502192: menu-xdg: invents
12684 own icon names instead of using existing). This will remain
12685 unfixed.
</li
>
12689 <p
><strong
>Where to get it
</strong
></p
>
12691 <p
>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use
</p
>
12695 <li
><a href=
"ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-
7.0+edu0~a2-CD.iso
">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-
7.0+edu0~a2-CD.iso
</a
></li
>
12697 <li
><a href=
"http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-
7.0+edu0~a2-CD.iso
">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-
7.0+edu0~a2-CD.iso
</a
></li
>
12699 <li
>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-
7.0+edu0~a2-CD.iso .
</li
>
12703 <p
>The MD5SUM of this image is:
27bbcace407743382f3c42c08dbe8178
12704 <br
>The SHA1SUM of this image is: e35f7d7908566cd3075375b3721fa10ee420d419
</p
>
12706 <p
><strong
>How to report bugs
</strong
></p
>
12708 <p
><a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs
">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs
</a
>
12713 <title>Is there a PHP expert in the building? Debian Edu need help!
</title>
12714 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_there_a_PHP_expert_in_the_building___Debian_Edu_need_help_.html
</link>
12715 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_there_a_PHP_expert_in_the_building___Debian_Edu_need_help_.html
</guid>
12716 <pubDate>Wed,
5 Jun
2013 17:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
12717 <description><p
>Here is a call for help from the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project.
12718 We have two problems blocking the release of the Wheezy version we
12719 hope to get released soon. The two problems require some with PHP
12720 skills, and we seem to lack anyone with both time and PHP skills in
12725 <li
>It is impossible to log into the slbackup web interface
12726 (slbackup-php) using the root user and password. This is
12727 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
700257">BTS report #
700257</a
>.
12728 This used to work, but stopped working some time since Squeeze.
12729 Perhaps some obsolete PHP feature was used?
</li
>
12731 <li
>It is not possible to
"mass import
" user lists in Gosa, neither
12732 using ldif nor using CSV files. The feature was disabled after a
12733 major rewrite of Gosa, and need to be ported to the new system.
12734 This is
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
698840">BTS report
12735 #
698840</a
>.
</li
>
12739 <p
>If you can help us, please join us on IRC
12740 (
<a href=
"irc://irc.debian.org/%
23debian-edu
">#debian-edu on
12741 irc.debian.org
</a
>) and provide patches via the BTS.
</p
>
12746 <title>Debian Edu interview: Cédric Boutillier
</title>
12747 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__C_dric_Boutillier.html
</link>
12748 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__C_dric_Boutillier.html
</guid>
12749 <pubDate>Tue,
4 Jun
2013 10:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
12750 <description><p
>It has been a while since my last English
12751 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu and Skolelinux
</a
>
12752 interview last November. But the developers and translators are still
12753 pulling along to get the Wheezy based release out the door, and this
12754 time I managed to get an interview from one of the French translators
12755 in the project, Cédric Boutillier.
</p
>
12757 <p
><strong
>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
</strong
></p
>
12759 <p
>I am
34 year old. I live near Paris, France. I am an assistant
12760 professor in probability theory. I spend my daytime teaching
12761 mathematics at the university and doing fundamental research in
12762 probability in connexion with combinatorics and statistical physics.
</p
>
12764 <p
>I have been involved in the Debian project for a couple of years
12765 and became Debian Developer a few months ago. I am working on Ruby
12766 packaging, publicity and translation.
</p
>
12768 <p
><strong
>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
12769 project?
</strong
></p
>
12771 <p
>I came to the Debian Edu project after a call for translation of
12772 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Manuals
">the
12773 Debian Edu manual
</a
> for the release of Debian Edu Squeeze. Since
12774 then, I have been working on updating the French translation of the
12777 <p
>I had the opportunity to make an installation of Debian Edu in a
12778 virtual machine when I was preparing localised version of some screen
12779 shots for the manual. I was amazed to see it worked out of the box and
12780 how comprehensive the list of software installed by default was.
</p
>
12782 <p
>What amazed me was the complete network infrastructure directly
12783 ready to use, which can and the nice administration interface provided
12784 by
<a href=
"https://oss.gonicus.de/labs/gosa/
">GOsa²
</a
>. What pleased
12785 me also was the fact that among the software installed by default,
12786 there were many
"traditional
" educative software to learn languages,
12787 to count, to program... but also software to develop creativity and
12788 artistic skills with music (
<a href=
"http://ardour.org/
">Ardour
</a
>,
12789 <a href=
"http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
">Audacity
</a
>) and
12790 movies/animation (I was especially thinking of
12791 <a href=
"http://linuxstopmotion.sourceforge.net/
">Stopmotion
</a
>).
</p
>
12793 <p
>I am following the development of Debian Edu and am hanging out on
12794 <a href=
"irc://irc.debian.org/%
23debian-edu
">#debian-edu
</a
>.
12795 Unfortunately, I don
't much time to get more involved in this
12796 beautiful project.
</p
>
12798 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
12799 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
12801 <p
>For me, the main advantages of Skolelinux/Debian Edu are its
12802 community of experts and its precise documentation, as well as the
12803 fact that it provides a solution ready to use.
</p
>
12805 <p
>I would add also the fact that it is based on the rock solid Debian
12806 distribution, which ensures stability and provides a huge collection
12807 of educational free software.
</p
>
12809 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
12810 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
12812 <p
>Maybe the lack of manpower to do lobbying on the
12813 project. Sometimes, people who need to take decisions concerning IT do
12814 not have all the elements to evaluate properly free software
12815 solutions. The fact that support by a company may be difficult to find
12816 is probably a problem if the school does not have IT personnel.
</p
>
12818 <p
>One can find support from a company by looking at
12819 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Help/ProfessionalHelp
">the
12820 wiki dokumentation
</a
>, where some countries already have a number of
12821 companies providing support for Debian Edu, like Germany or
12822 Norway. This list is easy to find readily from the manual. However,
12823 for other countries, like France, the list is empty. I guess that
12824 consultants proposing support for Debian would be able to provide some
12825 support for Debian Edu as well.
</p
>
12827 <p
><strong
>Which free software do you use daily?
</strong
></p
>
12829 <p
>I am using the KDE Plasma Desktop. But the pieces of software I use
12830 most runs in a terminal: Mutt and OfflineIMAP for emails, latex for
12831 scientific documents, mpd for music. VIM is my editor of choice. I am
12832 also using the mathematical software
12833 <a href=
"http://www.scilab.org/en/scilab/about
">Scilab
</a
> and
12834 <a href=
"http://www.sagemath.org/index.html
">Sage
</a
> (built from
12835 source as not completely packaged for Debian, yet).
12837 <p
><strong
>Do you have any suggestions for teachers interested in
12838 using the free software in Debian to teach mathematics and
12839 statistics?
</strong
></p
>
12841 <p
>I do not have any
"nice
" recommendations for statistics. At our
12842 university, we use both
<a href=
"http://www.r-project.org/
">R
</a
> and
12843 Scilab to teach statistics and probabilistic simulations. For
12844 geometry, there are nice programs:
</p
>
12848 <li
><a href=
"http://www.drgeo.eu/
">drgeo
</a
> and
12849 <a href=
"http://edu.kde.org/applications/all/kig
">kig
</a
> to do
12850 constructions in planar geometry
12852 <li
><a href=
"http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/software/download/kali.html
">kali
</a
>
12853 to discover symmetry groups (the so-called wallpapers and frieze
12854 groups), although the interface looks a bit old.
</li
>
12858 <p
>I like also
12859 <a href=
"http://edu.kde.org/applications/all/cantor
">cantor
</a
>, which
12860 provides a uniform interface to SciLab, Sage,
12861 <a href=
"http://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Octave
">Octave
</a
>, etc...
</p
>
12863 <p
><strong
>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
12864 get schools to use free software?
</strong
></p
>
12866 <p
>My suggestions would be to
</p
>
12870 <li
>advertise the reduction of costs when free software is used.
</li
>
12872 <li
>communicate about the quality of free software projects, using
12873 well known examples like Firefox, ThunderBird and
12874 OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice.
</li
>
12876 <li
>advertise the living and strong community around the project.
</li
>
12878 <li
>show that it is not more difficult to use than any other
12886 <title>Educational applications included in Debian Edu / Skolelinux (the screenshot collection :-)
</title>
12887 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html
</link>
12888 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html
</guid>
12889 <pubDate>Sat,
1 Jun
2013 23:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
12890 <description><p
>Included in
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu /
12891 Skolelinux
</a
>, there are quite a lot of educational software.
12892 Created to help teachers teach, and pupils learn. We have tried to
12893 tag them all using debtags use::learning and role::program, and using
12894 the debtags I was happy to be able to create a collage of the
12895 educational software packages installed by default, sorted by the
12896 debtag field. Here it is. Click on a image to learn more about the
12899 <!-- for f in $(debtags tagcat|grep field::|awk
'{print $
2}
'); do echo; echo
"<p
><strong
>$f
</strong
></p
>"; echo
"<p
>"; ( for p in $(debtags search --names
"use::learning
&& interface::x11
&& role::program
&& $f
"); do img=
"<img src=
'http://screenshots.debian.net/thumbnail/$p
' alt=
'$p
'>"; if dpkg -s $p
> /dev/null
2>&1; then echo
"<a href=
'http://packages.qa.debian.org/$p
'>$img
</a
>"; fi; done; ) | LANG=C sort; echo
"</p
>"; done --
>
12901 <p
><strong
>field::arts
</strong
></p
>
12903 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=audacity
'><img src=
'http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
06-
01-debian-edu-apps/audacity.png
' alt=
'audacity
'></a
>
12904 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=childsplay
'><img src=
'http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
06-
01-debian-edu-apps/childsplay.png
' alt=
'childsplay
'></a
>
12905 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=denemo
'><img src=
'http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
06-
01-debian-edu-apps/denemo.png
' alt=
'denemo
'></a
>
12906 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=freebirth
'><img src=
'http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
06-
01-debian-edu-apps/freebirth.png
' alt=
'freebirth
'></a
>
12907 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=gcompris
'><img src=
'http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
06-
01-debian-edu-apps/gcompris.png
' alt=
'gcompris
'></a
>
12908 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=gimp
'><img src=
'http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
06-
01-debian-edu-apps/gimp.png
' alt=
'gimp
'></a
>
12909 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=hydrogen
'><img src=
'http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
06-
01-debian-edu-apps/hydrogen.png
' alt=
'hydrogen
'></a
>
12910 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=lilypond
'><img src=
'http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
06-
01-debian-edu-apps/lilypond.png
' alt=
'lilypond
'></a
>
12911 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=lmms
'><img src=
'http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
06-
01-debian-edu-apps/lmms.png
' alt=
'lmms
'></a
>
12912 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=rosegarden
'><img src=
'http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
06-
01-debian-edu-apps/rosegarden.png
' alt=
'rosegarden
'></a
>
12913 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=scribus
'><img src=
'http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
06-
01-debian-edu-apps/scribus.png
' alt=
'scribus
'></a
>
12914 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=solfege
'><img src=
'http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
06-
01-debian-edu-apps/solfege.png
' alt=
'solfege
'></a
>
12915 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=stopmotion
'><img src=
'http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
06-
01-debian-edu-apps/stopmotion.png
' alt=
'stopmotion
'></a
>
12916 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=tuxpaint
'><img src=
'http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
06-
01-debian-edu-apps/tuxpaint.png
' alt=
'tuxpaint
'></a
>
12919 <p
><strong
>field::astronomy
</strong
></p
>
12921 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=celestia-gnome
'><img src=
'http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
06-
01-debian-edu-apps/celestia-gnome.png
' alt=
'celestia-gnome
'></a
>
12922 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=gpredict
'><img src=
'http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
06-
01-debian-edu-apps/gpredict.png
' alt=
'gpredict
'></a
>
12923 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=kstars
'><img src=
'http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
06-
01-debian-edu-apps/kstars.png
' alt=
'kstars
'></a
>
12924 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=planets
'><img src=
'http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
06-
01-debian-edu-apps/planets.png
' alt=
'planets
'></a
>
12925 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=stellarium
'><img src=
'http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
06-
01-debian-edu-apps/stellarium.png
' alt=
'stellarium
'></a
>
12926 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=xplanet
'><img src=
'http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
06-
01-debian-edu-apps/xplanet.png
' alt=
'xplanet
'></a
>
12929 <p
><strong
>field::biology:structural
</strong
></p
>
12931 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=pymol
'><img src=
'http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
06-
01-debian-edu-apps/pymol.png
' alt=
'pymol
'></a
>
12934 <p
><strong
>field::chemistry
</strong
></p
>
12936 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=atomix
'><img src=
'http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
06-
01-debian-edu-apps/atomix.png
' alt=
'atomix
'></a
>
12937 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=chemtool
'><img src=
'http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
06-
01-debian-edu-apps/chemtool.png
' alt=
'chemtool
'></a
>
12938 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=easychem
'><img src=
'http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
06-
01-debian-edu-apps/easychem.png
' alt=
'easychem
'></a
>
12939 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=gchempaint
'><img src=
'http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
06-
01-debian-edu-apps/gchempaint.png
' alt=
'gchempaint
'></a
>
12940 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=gdis
'><img src=
'http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
06-
01-debian-edu-apps/gdis.png
' alt=
'gdis
'></a
>
12941 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=ghemical
'><img src=
'http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
06-
01-debian-edu-apps/ghemical.png
' alt=
'ghemical
'></a
>
12942 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=gperiodic
'><img src=
'http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
06-
01-debian-edu-apps/gperiodic.png
' alt=
'gperiodic
'></a
>
12943 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=kalzium
'><img src=
'http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
06-
01-debian-edu-apps/kalzium.png
' alt=
'kalzium
'></a
>
12944 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=pymol
'><img src=
'http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
06-
01-debian-edu-apps/pymol.png
' alt=
'pymol
'></a
>
12945 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=viewmol
'>[viewmol]
</a
>
12946 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=xdrawchem
'><img src=
'http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
06-
01-debian-edu-apps/xdrawchem.png
' alt=
'xdrawchem
'></a
>
12949 <p
><strong
>field::electronics
</strong
></p
>
12951 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=gcompris
'><img src=
'http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
06-
01-debian-edu-apps/gcompris.png
' alt=
'gcompris
'></a
>
12952 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=gpsim
'>[gpsim]
</a
>
12955 <p
><strong
>field::geography
</strong
></p
>
12957 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=kgeography
'><img src=
'http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
06-
01-debian-edu-apps/kgeography.png
' alt=
'kgeography
'></a
>
12958 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=marble
'><img src=
'http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
06-
01-debian-edu-apps/marble.png
' alt=
'marble
'></a
>
12959 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=xplanet
'><img src=
'http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
06-
01-debian-edu-apps/xplanet.png
' alt=
'xplanet
'></a
>
12962 <p
><strong
>field::linguistics
</strong
></p
>
12964 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=gcompris
'><img src=
'http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
06-
01-debian-edu-apps/gcompris.png
' alt=
'gcompris
'></a
>
12965 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=kanagram
'><img src=
'http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
06-
01-debian-edu-apps/kanagram.png
' alt=
'kanagram
'></a
>
12966 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=khangman
'><img src=
'http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
06-
01-debian-edu-apps/khangman.png
' alt=
'khangman
'></a
>
12967 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=klettres
'><img src=
'http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
06-
01-debian-edu-apps/klettres.png
' alt=
'klettres
'></a
>
12968 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=parley
'><img src=
'http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
06-
01-debian-edu-apps/parley.png
' alt=
'parley
'></a
>
12971 <p
><strong
>field::mathematics
</strong
></p
>
12973 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=childsplay
'><img src=
'http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
06-
01-debian-edu-apps/childsplay.png
' alt=
'childsplay
'></a
>
12974 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=drgeo
'><img src=
'http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
06-
01-debian-edu-apps/drgeo.png
' alt=
'drgeo
'></a
>
12975 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=gcompris
'><img src=
'http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
06-
01-debian-edu-apps/gcompris.png
' alt=
'gcompris
'></a
>
12976 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=geogebra
'><img src=
'http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
06-
01-debian-edu-apps/geogebra.png
' alt=
'geogebra
'></a
>
12977 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=geomview
'>[geomview]
</a
>
12978 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=grace
'><img src=
'http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
06-
01-debian-edu-apps/grace.png
' alt=
'grace
'></a
>
12979 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=graphmonkey
'><img src=
'http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
06-
01-debian-edu-apps/graphmonkey.png
' alt=
'graphmonkey
'></a
>
12980 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=graphthing
'><img src=
'http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
06-
01-debian-edu-apps/graphthing.png
' alt=
'graphthing
'></a
>
12981 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=kalgebra
'><img src=
'http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
06-
01-debian-edu-apps/kalgebra.png
' alt=
'kalgebra
'></a
>
12982 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=kbruch
'><img src=
'http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
06-
01-debian-edu-apps/kbruch.png
' alt=
'kbruch
'></a
>
12983 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=kig
'><img src=
'http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
06-
01-debian-edu-apps/kig.png
' alt=
'kig
'></a
>
12984 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=kmplot
'><img src=
'http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
06-
01-debian-edu-apps/kmplot.png
' alt=
'kmplot
'></a
>
12985 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=mathwar
'><img src=
'http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
06-
01-debian-edu-apps/mathwar.png
' alt=
'mathwar
'></a
>
12986 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=rocs
'><img src=
'http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
06-
01-debian-edu-apps/rocs.png
' alt=
'rocs
'></a
>
12987 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=scratch
'><img src=
'http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
06-
01-debian-edu-apps/scratch.png
' alt=
'scratch
'></a
>
12988 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=tuxmath
'><img src=
'http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
06-
01-debian-edu-apps/tuxmath.png
' alt=
'tuxmath
'></a
>
12989 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=xabacus
'><img src=
'http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
06-
01-debian-edu-apps/xabacus.png
' alt=
'xabacus
'></a
>
12992 <p
><strong
>field::physics
</strong
></p
>
12994 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=gcompris
'><img src=
'http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
06-
01-debian-edu-apps/gcompris.png
' alt=
'gcompris
'></a
>
12995 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=step
'><img src=
'http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
06-
01-debian-edu-apps/step.png
' alt=
'step
'></a
>
12998 <p
><strong
>field::TODO
</strong
></p
>
13000 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=blinken
'><img src=
'http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
06-
01-debian-edu-apps/blinken.png
' alt=
'blinken
'></a
>
13001 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=cgoban
'><img src=
'http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
06-
01-debian-edu-apps/cgoban.png
' alt=
'cgoban
'></a
>
13002 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=childsplay
'><img src=
'http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
06-
01-debian-edu-apps/childsplay.png
' alt=
'childsplay
'></a
>
13003 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=gcompris
'><img src=
'http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
06-
01-debian-edu-apps/gcompris.png
' alt=
'gcompris
'></a
>
13004 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=gnuchess
'><img src=
'http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
06-
01-debian-edu-apps/gnuchess.png
' alt=
'gnuchess
'></a
>
13005 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=gnugo
'><img src=
'http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
06-
01-debian-edu-apps/gnugo.png
' alt=
'gnugo
'></a
>
13006 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=gtans
'><img src=
'http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
06-
01-debian-edu-apps/gtans.png
' alt=
'gtans
'></a
>
13007 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=ktouch
'><img src=
'http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
06-
01-debian-edu-apps/ktouch.png
' alt=
'ktouch
'></a
>
13008 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=librecad
'><img src=
'http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
06-
01-debian-edu-apps/librecad.png
' alt=
'librecad
'></a
>
13009 <a href=
'http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names
&exact=
1&suite=all
&section=all
&keywords=scratch
'><img src=
'http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
06-
01-debian-edu-apps/scratch.png
' alt=
'scratch
'></a
>
13012 <p
>In total,
61 applications.
3 of them lacked screen shots on
13013 <a href=
"http://screenshot.debian.net
">screenshot.debian.net
</a
>. If
13014 you know of some packages we should install by default, please let us
13015 know on
<a href=
"irc://irc.debian.org/%
23debian-edu
">IRC, #debian-edu
13016 on irc.debian.org
</a
>, or our
13017 <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/
">mailing list
13018 debian-edu@
</a
>.
</p
>
13023 <title>How to install Linux on a Packard Bell Easynote LV preinstalled with Windows
8</title>
13024 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_install_Linux_on_a_Packard_Bell_Easynote_LV_preinstalled_with_Windows_8.html
</link>
13025 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_install_Linux_on_a_Packard_Bell_Easynote_LV_preinstalled_with_Windows_8.html
</guid>
13026 <pubDate>Mon,
27 May
2013 15:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
13027 <description><p
>Two days ago, I asked
13028 <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
13029 I could install Linux on a Packard Bell EasyNote LV computer
13030 preinstalled with Windows
8</a
>. I found a solution, but am horrified
13031 with the obstacles put in the way of Linux users on a laptop with UEFI
13032 and Windows
8.
</p
>
13034 <p
>I never found out if the cause of my problems were the use of UEFI
13035 secure booting or fast boot. I suspect fast boot was the problem,
13036 causing the firmware to boot directly from HD without considering any
13037 key presses and alternative devices, but do not know UEFI settings
13038 enough to tell.
</p
>
13040 <p
>There is no way to install Linux on the machine in question without
13041 opening the box and disconnecting the hard drive! This is as far as I
13042 can tell, the only way to get access to the firmware setup menu
13043 without accepting the Windows
8 license agreement. I am told (and
13044 found description on how to) that it is possible to configure the
13045 firmware setup once booted into Windows
8. But as I believe the terms
13046 of that agreement are completely unacceptable, accepting the license
13047 was never an alternative. I do not enter agreements I do not intend
13048 to follow.
</p
>
13050 <p
>I feared I had to return the laptops and ask for a refund, and
13051 waste many hours on this, but luckily there was a way to get it to
13052 work. But I would not recommend it to anyone planning to run Linux on
13053 it, and I have become sceptical to Windows
8 certified laptops. Is
13054 this the way Linux will be forced out of the market place, by making
13055 it close to impossible for
"normal
" users to install Linux without
13056 accepting the Microsoft Windows license terms? Or at least not
13057 without risking to loose the warranty?
</p
>
13059 <p
>I
've updated the
13060 <a href=
"http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv
">Linux Laptop
13061 wiki page for Packard Bell EasyNote LV
</a
>, to ensure the next person
13062 do not have to struggle as much as I did to get Linux into the
13065 <p
>Thanks to Bob Rosbag, Florian Weimer, Philipp Kern, Ben Hutching,
13066 Michael Tokarev and others for feedback and ideas.
</p
>
13071 <title>How can I install Linux on a Packard Bell Easynote LV preinstalled with Windows
8?
</title>
13072 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_can_I_install_Linux_on_a_Packard_Bell_Easynote_LV_preinstalled_with_Windows_8_.html
</link>
13073 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_can_I_install_Linux_on_a_Packard_Bell_Easynote_LV_preinstalled_with_Windows_8_.html
</guid>
13074 <pubDate>Sat,
25 May
2013 18:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
13075 <description><p
>I
've run into quite a problem the last few days. I bought three
13076 new laptops for my parents and a few others. I bought Packard Bell
13077 Easynote LV to run Kubuntu on and use as their home computer. But I
13078 am completely unable to figure out how to install Linux on it. The
13079 computer is preinstalled with Windows
8, and I suspect it uses UEFI
13080 instead of a BIOS to boot.
</p
>
13082 <p
>The problem is that I am unable to get it to PXE boot, and unable
13083 to get it to boot the Linux installer from my USB stick. I have yet
13084 to try the DVD install, and still hope it will work. when I turn on
13085 the computer, there is no information on what buttons to press to get
13086 the normal boot menu. I expect to get some boot menu to select PXE or
13087 USB stick booting. When booting, it first ask for the language to
13088 use, then for some regional settings, and finally if I will accept the
13089 Windows
8 terms of use. As these terms are completely unacceptable to
13090 me, I have no other choice but to turn off the computer and try again
13091 to get it to boot the Linux installer.
</p
>
13093 <p
>I have gathered my findings so far on a Linlap page about the
13094 <a href=
"http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv
">Packard Bell
13095 EasyNote LV
</a
> model. If you have any idea how to get Linux
13096 installed on this machine, please get in touch or update that wiki
13097 page. If I can
't find a way to install Linux, I will have to return
13098 the laptop to the seller and find another machine for my parents.
</p
>
13100 <p
>I wonder, is this the way Linux will be forced out of the market
13101 using UEFI and
"secure boot
" by making it impossible to install Linux
13102 on new Laptops?
</p
>
13107 <title>How to transform a Debian based system to a Debian Edu installation
</title>
13108 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_transform_a_Debian_based_system_to_a_Debian_Edu_installation.html
</link>
13109 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_transform_a_Debian_based_system_to_a_Debian_Edu_installation.html
</guid>
13110 <pubDate>Fri,
17 May
2013 11:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
13111 <description><p
><a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
</a
> is
13112 an operating system based on Debian intended for use in schools. It
13113 contain a turn-key solution for the computer network provided to
13114 pupils in the primary schools. It provide both the central server,
13115 network boot servers and desktop environments with heaps of
13116 educational software. The project was founded almost
12 years ago,
13117 2001-
07-
02. If you want to support the project, which is in need for
13118 cash to fund developer gatherings and other project related activity,
13119 <a href=
"http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html
">please
13120 donate some money
</a
>.
13122 <p
>A topic that come up again and again on the Debian Edu mailing
13123 lists and elsewhere, is the question on how to transform a Debian or
13124 Ubuntu installation into a Debian Edu installation. It isn
't very
13125 hard, and last week I wrote a script to replicate the steps done by
13126 the Debian Edu installer.
</p
>
13128 <p
>The script,
13129 <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/
>
13130 in the debian-edu-config package, will go through these six steps and
13131 transform an existing Debian Wheezy or Ubuntu (untested) installation
13132 into a Debian Edu Workstation:
</p
>
13136 <li
>Add skolelinux related APT sources.
</li
>
13137 <li
>Create /etc/debian-edu/config with the wanted configuration.
</li
>
13138 <li
>Install debian-edu-install to load preseeding values and pull in
13139 our configuration.
</li
>
13140 <li
>Preseed debconf database with profile setup in
13141 /etc/debian-edu/config, and run tasksel to install packages
13142 according to the profile specified in the config above,
13143 overriding some of the Debian automation machinery.
</li
>
13144 <li
>Run debian-edu-cfengine-D installation to configure everything
13145 that could not be done using preseeding.
</li
>
13146 <li
>Ask for a reboot to enable all the configuration changes.
</li
>
13150 <p
>There are some steps in the Debian Edu installation that can not be
13151 replicated like this. Disk partitioning and LVM setup, for example.
13152 So this script just assume there is enough disk space to install all
13153 the needed packages.
</p
>
13155 <p
>The script was created to help a Debian Edu student working on
13156 setting up
<a href=
"http://www.raspberrypi.org
">Raspberry Pi
</a
> as a
13157 Debian Edu client, and using it he can take the existing
13158 <a href=
"http://www.raspbian.org/FrontPage
">Raspbian
</a
> installation and
13159 transform it into a fully functioning Debian Edu Workstation (or
13160 Roaming Workstation, or whatever :).
</p
>
13162 <p
>The default setting in the script is to create a KDE Workstation.
13163 If a LXDE based Roaming workstation is wanted instead, modify the
13164 PROFILE and DESKTOP values at the top to look like this instead:
</p
>
13166 <p
><pre
>
13167 PROFILE=
"Roaming-Workstation
"
13168 DESKTOP=
"lxde
"
13169 </pre
></p
>
13171 <p
>The script could even become useful to set up Debian Edu servers in
13172 the cloud, by starting with a virtual Debian installation at some
13173 virtual hosting service and setting up all the services on first
13179 <title>Second alpha release of Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Debian Wheezy
</title>
13180 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Second_alpha_release_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Debian_Wheezy.html
</link>
13181 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Second_alpha_release_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Debian_Wheezy.html
</guid>
13182 <pubDate>Tue,
14 May
2013 23:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
13183 <description><p
>The
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
13184 project
</a
> is making great progress and made its second Wheezy based
13185 release today. This is the release announcement:
</p
>
13187 <p
><strong
>New features for Debian Edu
7.0.0 alpha1 released
13188 2013-
05-
14</strong
></p
>
13190 <p
>This is the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux
7.0.0 edu
13191 alpha1, based on
<a href=
"http://www.debian.org
">Debian
</a
> with
13192 codename
"Wheezy
".
</p
>
13194 <p
><strong
>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux
</strong
></p
>
13196 <p
>Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux, is a Linux distribution based
13197 on Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
13198 configured school network. Immediatly after installation a school
13199 server running all services needed for a school network is set up just
13200 waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
13201 Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
13202 initial installation of the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all
13203 other machines can be installed via the network.
</p
>
13205 <p
>This is the first test release based on Wheezy (which currently is
13206 not released yet). Basically this is an updated and slightly improved
13207 version compared to the Squeeze release.
</p
>
13209 <p
><strong
>Software updates
</strong
></p
>
13211 <li
>Install freemind (
0.9.0) by default, and stop installing vym by
13212 default.
</li
>
13213 <li
>Install chromium (
26.0.1410.43) by default.
</li
>
13214 <li
>Install goplay (
0.5-
1.1) to make golearn available by default.
</li
>
13215 <li
>Updated support for Japanese input methods, now based on
13216 ibus-anthy.
</li
>
13219 <p
><strong
>Other changes
</strong
></p
>
13222 <li
>Switched default file system from ext3 to ext4 for speed and
13223 reliability improvements.
</li
>
13224 <li
>Got rid of unwanted winbind daemon and PAM setup activated because
13225 of
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
706434">706434</a
>.
</li
>
13226 <li
>Extended and improved the testsuite tests to detect more possible
13227 problems.
</li
>
13228 <li
>Corrected proxy handling to not set http_proxy to a bogus
13229 direct:// URL.
</li
>
13230 <li
>Corrected proxy setup for diskless workstations.
</li
>
13231 <li
>Corrected PXE setup to use our updated udebs during installation.
</li
>
13232 <li
>Made installation handling of low entropy level more robust.
</li
>
13233 <li
>Create larger partitions for Roaming workstations and Thin client
13234 servers, to make room for all the software installed.
</li
>
13235 <li
>Fix bug in Roaming workstation PAM setup, making it impossible to
13236 log in (
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
706753">706753</a
>).
</li
>
13239 <p
><strong
>Known issues
</strong
></p
>
13242 <li
>IP resolution for the local hostname give useless IPv6 address
13243 (
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
705900">705900</a
>). Only install
13244 libnss-myhostname on roaming workstations until it is fixed.
</li
>
13245 <li
>DVD images are not yet ready.
</li
>
13246 <li
>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv)
13247 available yet (
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
698840">698840</a
>).
</li
>
13248 <li
>Missing artwork for the KDE desktop (and probably a few others).
</li
>
13249 <li
>KDE Debian submenu lacks icons.
</li
>
13250 <li
>LXDE menu lacks entry for changing GOsa password
13251 (website). Installing gosa-desktop will be an option.
</li
>
13252 <li
>Backup configuration via web interface is impossible due to
13253 password submission problem
13254 (
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
700257">700257</a
>).
</li
>
13258 <p
><strong
>Where to get it
</strong
></p
>
13260 <p
>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use
</p
>
13263 <li
><a href=
"ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu~
7.0+edu0~a1-CD.iso
">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu~
7.0+edu0~a1-CD.iso
</a
></li
>
13264 <li
><a href=
"http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu~
7.0+edu0~a1-CD.iso
">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu~
7.0+edu0~a1-CD.iso
</a
></li
>
13265 <li
>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu~
7.0+edu0~a1-CD.iso debian-edu~
7.0+edu0~a1-CD.iso
</li
>
13269 <p
>The MD5SUM of this image is:
685ed76c1aa8e44b12d3fde21faf450b
</p
>
13271 <p
>The SHA1SUM of this image is:
6c874de157024da13e115bab29c068080a11ec4c
</p
>
13273 <p
><strong
>How to report bugs
</strong
></p
>
13275 <p
><a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs
">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs
</a
></p
>
13280 <title>Debian, the Linux distribution of choice for LEGO designers?
</title>
13281 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian__the_Linux_distribution_of_choice_for_LEGO_designers_.html
</link>
13282 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian__the_Linux_distribution_of_choice_for_LEGO_designers_.html
</guid>
13283 <pubDate>Sat,
11 May
2013 20:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
13284 <description><P
>In January,
13285 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_IRC_channel_for_LEGO_designers_using_Debian.html
">I
13286 announced a
</a
> new
<a href=
"irc://irc.debian.org/%
23debian-lego
">IRC
13287 channel #debian-lego
</a
>, for those of us in the Debian and Linux
13288 community interested in
<a href=
"http://www.lego.com/
">LEGO
</a
>, the
13289 marvellous construction system from Denmark. We also created
13290 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners
">a wiki page
</a
> to have
13291 a place to take notes and write down our plans and hopes. And several
13292 people showed up to help. I was very happy to see the effect of my
13293 call. Since the small start, we have a debtags tag
13294 <a href=
"http://debtags.debian.net/search/bytag?wl=hardware::hobby:lego
">hardware::hobby:lego
</a
>
13295 tag for LEGO related packages, and now count
10 packages related to
13296 LEGO and
<a href=
"http://mindstorms.lego.com/
">Mindstorms
</a
>:
</p
>
13298 <p
><table
>
13299 <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
>
13300 <tr
><td
><a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/leocad
">leocad
</a
></td
><td
>virtual brick CAD software
</td
></tr
>
13301 <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
>
13302 <tr
><td
><a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/lnpd
">lnpd
</a
></td
><td
>daemon for LNP communication with BrickOS
</td
></tr
>
13303 <tr
><td
><a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/nbc
">nbc
</a
></td
><td
>compiler for LEGO Mindstorms NXT bricks
</td
></tr
>
13304 <tr
><td
><a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/nqc
">nqc
</a
></td
><td
>Not Quite C compiler for LEGO Mindstorms RCX
</td
></tr
>
13305 <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
>
13306 <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
>
13307 <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
>
13308 <tr
><td
><a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/t2n
">t2n
</a
></td
><td
>simple command-line tool for Lego NXT
</td
></tr
>
13309 </table
></p
>
13311 <p
>Some of these are available in Wheezy, and all but one are
13312 currently available in Jessie/testing. leocad is so far only
13313 available in experimental.
</p
>
13315 <p
>If you care about LEGO in Debian, please join us on IRC and help
13316 adding the rest of the great free software tools available on Linux
13317 for LEGO designers.
</p
>
13322 <title>Debian Wheezy is out - and Debian Edu / Skolelinux should soon follow! #newinwheezy
</title>
13323 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Wheezy_is_out___and_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_should_soon_follow___newinwheezy.html
</link>
13324 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Wheezy_is_out___and_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_should_soon_follow___newinwheezy.html
</guid>
13325 <pubDate>Sun,
5 May
2013 07:
40:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
13326 <description><p
>When I woke up this morning, I was very happy to see that the
13327 <a href=
"http://www.debian.org/News/
2013/
20130504">release announcement
13328 for Debian Wheezy
</a
> was waiting in my mail box. This is a great
13329 Debian release, and I expect to move my machines at home over to it fairly
13332 <p
>The new debian release contain heaps of new stuff, and one program
13333 in particular make me very happy to see included. The
13334 <a href=
"http://scratch.mit.edu/
">Scratch
</a
> program, made famous by
13335 the
<a href=
"http://www.code.org/
">Teach kids code
</a
> movement, is
13336 included for the first time. Alongside similar programs like
13337 <a href=
"http://edu.kde.org/kturtle/
">kturtle
</a
> and
13338 <a href=
"http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Turtle_Art
">turtleart
</a
>,
13339 it allow for visual programming where syntax errors can not happen,
13340 and a friendly programming environment for learning to control the
13341 computer. Scratch will also be included in the next release of Debian
13344 <p
>And now that Wheezy is wrapped up, we can wrap up the next Debian
13345 Edu/Skolelinux release too. The
13346 <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/
2013/
04/msg00132.html
">first
13347 alpha release
</a
> went out last week, and the next should soon
13353 <title>First alpha release of Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Debian Wheezy
</title>
13354 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_alpha_release_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Debian_Wheezy.html
</link>
13355 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_alpha_release_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Debian_Wheezy.html
</guid>
13356 <pubDate>Fri,
26 Apr
2013 08:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
13357 <description><p
>The Debian Edu / Skolelinux project is still going strong and made
13358 its first Wheezy based release today. This is the release
13359 announcement:
</p
>
13361 <p
><strong
>New features for Debian Edu ~
7.0.0 alpha0 released
13362 2013-
04-
26</strong
></p
>
13364 <p
>This is the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux ~
7.0.0
13365 edu alpha0, based on Debian with codename
"Wheezy
".
</p
>
13367 <p
><strong
>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux
</strong
></p
>
13369 <p
><a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu, also known as
13370 Skolelinux
</a
>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
13371 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
13372 network. Immediatly after installation a school server running all
13373 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
13374 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
13375 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
13376 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
13377 installed via the network.
</p
>
13379 <p
>This is the first test release based on Wheezy (which currently is
13380 not released yet). Basically this is an updated and slightly improved
13381 version compared to the Squeeze release.
</p
>
13383 <p
><strong
>Software updates
</strong
></p
>
13386 <li
>Everything which is new in Debian Wheezy, eg:
13388 <li
>Linux kernel
3.2.x
</li
>
13389 <li
>Desktop environments KDE
"Plasma
" 4.8.4, GNOME
3.4, and LXDE
4
13390 (KDE is installed by default; to choose GNOME or LXDE: see
13391 manual.)
</li
>
13392 <li
>Web browser Iceweasel
10 ESR
</li
>
13393 <li
>LibreOffice
3.5.4</li
>
13394 <li
>LTSP
5.4.2</li
>
13395 <li
>GOsa
2.7.4</li
>
13396 <li
>CUPS print system
1.5.3</li
>
13397 <li
>Educational toolbox GCompris
12.01</li
>
13398 <li
>Music creator Rosegarden
12.04</li
>
13399 <li
>Image editor Gimp
2.8.2</li
>
13400 <li
>Virtual universe Celestia
1.6.1</li
>
13401 <li
>Virtual stargazer Stellarium
0.11.3</li
>
13402 <li
>Scratch visual programming environment
1.4.0.6</li
>
13403 <li
>New version of debian-installer from Debian Wheezy, see
13404 <a href=
"http://www.debian.org/releases/wheezy/installmanual
">installation
13405 manual
</a
> for more details.
</li
>
13406 <li
>Debian Wheezy includes about
37000 packages available for
13407 installation.
</li
>
13408 <li
>More information about Debian Wheezy
7.0 is provided in the
13409 <a href=
"http://www.debian.org/releases/wheezy/releasenotes
">release notes
</a
> and the
<a href=
"http://www.debian.org/releases/wheezy/installmanual
">installation manual
</a
>.
</li
>
13410 </ul
></li
>
13413 <p
><strong
>Documentation
</strong
></p
>
13415 <li
>The (
<a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy
">English
</a
>) Debian Edu Wheezy Manual is fully translated to
13416 German, French, Italian and Danish. Partly translated versions exist
13417 for Norwegian Bokmal and Spanish.
</li
>
13420 <p
><Strong
>LDAP related changes
</strong
></p
>
13422 <li
>Slight changes to some objects and acls to have more types to
13423 choose from when adding systems in GOsa. Now systems can be of type
13424 server, workstation, printer, terminal or netdevice.
</li
>
13427 <p
><strong
>Other changes
</strong
></p
>
13429 <li
>LTSP clients start as diskless workstation / thin client can be
13430 configured via command line argument -- or individually adding an
13431 entry in lts.conf or LDAP.
<li
>
13432 <li
>GOsa gui: Now some options that seemed to be available, but are non
13433 functional, are greyed out (or are not clickable). Some tabs are
13434 completely hidden to the end user, others even to the GOsa admin.
</li
>
13437 <p
><strong
>Regressions
</strong
></p
>
13439 <li
>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv) available
13443 <p
><strong
>No updated artwork
</strong
></p
>
13446 <li
>Updated artwork which is visible during installation, in the login
13447 screen and as desktop wallpaper is still missing or the same as we
13448 had for our Squeeze based release.
</li
>
13451 <p
><strong
>Where to get it
</strong
></p
>
13453 To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use
13455 <li
><a href=
"ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/
">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/
</a
></li
>
13456 <li
><a href=
"http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/
">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/
</a
></li
>
13457 <li
>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/
</li
>
13460 <p
>The MD5SUM of this image is: c5e773ddafdaa4f48c409c682f598b6c
</p
>
13462 <p
>The SHA1SUM of this image is:
25934fabb9b7d20235499a0a51f08ce6c54215f2
</p
>
13464 <p
><strong
>How to report bugs
</strong
></p
>
13466 <p
><a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs
">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs
</a
></p
>
13471 <title>First Debian Edu / Skolelinux developer gathering in
2013 take place in Trondheim
</title>
13472 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_developer_gathering_in_2013_take_place_in_Trondheim.html
</link>
13473 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_developer_gathering_in_2013_take_place_in_Trondheim.html
</guid>
13474 <pubDate>Tue,
16 Apr
2013 15:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
13475 <description><p
>This years first
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Skolelinux /
13476 Debian Edu
</a
> developer gathering take place the coming weekend in Trondheim.
13477 Details about the gathering can be found
13478 <a href=
"http://www.friprogramvareiskolen.no/Gathering/
2013-
04-
19-
21-Trondheim
">on
13479 the FRiSK wiki
</a
>. The dates are
19-
21th of April
2013, and online
13480 participation for those unable to make it in person is very welcome,
13481 and I plan to participate online myself as I could not leave Oslo this
13484 <p
>The focus of the gathering is to work on the web pages and project
13485 infrastructure, and to continue the work on the Wheezy based Debian
13486 Edu release.
</p
>
13488 <p
>See you on
<a href=
"irc://irc.debian.org/%
23debian-edu
">IRC, #debian-edu on irc.debian.org,
</a
> then?
</p
>
13493 <title>Isenkram
0.2 finally in the Debian archive
</title>
13494 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Isenkram_0_2_finally_in_the_Debian_archive.html
</link>
13495 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Isenkram_0_2_finally_in_the_Debian_archive.html
</guid>
13496 <pubDate>Wed,
3 Apr
2013 23:
40:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
13497 <description><p
>Today the
<a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram
">Isenkram
13498 package
</a
> finally made it into the archive, after lingering in NEW
13499 for many months. I uploaded it to the Debian experimental suite
13500 2013-
01-
27, and today it was accepted into the archive.
</p
>
13502 <p
>Isenkram is a system for suggesting to users what packages to
13503 install to work with a pluggable hardware device. The suggestion pop
13504 up when the device is plugged in. For example if a Lego Mindstorm NXT
13505 is inserted, it will suggest to install the program needed to program
13506 the NXT controller. Give it a go, and report bugs and suggestions to
13512 <title>Change the font, save the world (and save some money in the process)
</title>
13513 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Change_the_font__save_the_world__and_save_some_money_in_the_process_.html
</link>
13514 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Change_the_font__save_the_world__and_save_some_money_in_the_process_.html
</guid>
13515 <pubDate>Tue,
26 Mar
2013 15:
10:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
13516 <description><p
>Would you like to help the environment and save money at the same
13517 time, without much sacrifice? A small step could be to change the
13518 font you use when printing.
</p
>
13520 <p
>Three years ago,
13521 <a href=
"http://arstechnica.com/business/
2010/
04/last-year-printer-comparison-website/
">Ars
13522 Technica
</a
> reported how the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay
13523 changed their default front from
13524 <a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arial
">Arial
</a
> to
13525 <a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_Gothic
">Century
13526 Gothic
</a
> to save money. The Century Gothic font uses
30% less toner
13527 than Arial to print the same text. In other word, you could cut your
13528 toner costs by
30% (or actually, increase your toner supply life time
13529 by more than
30%), by simply changing the default font used in your
13532 <p
>But it is not quite obvious how much one will save by switching.
13533 The University of Wisconsin-Green Bay said it used $
100,
000 per year
13534 on ink and toner cartridges, according to
13535 <a href=
"http://www.twincities.com/ci_14833097
">a report from
13536 TwinCities.com
</a
>, and expected to save between $
5,
000 and $
10,
000
13537 per year by asking staff and students to use a different font. Not
13538 all PDFs and documents are created internally, and those from external
13539 sources will most likely still use a different font. Also, the
13540 Century Gothic font is slightly wider than Arial, and thus might use
13541 more sheets of paper to print the same text, so the total saving
13542 depend on the documents printed.
</p
>
13544 <p
>But it is definitely something to consider, if you want to reduce
13545 the amount of trash, decrease the amount of toner used in the world,
13546 and save some money in the process.
</p
>
13548 <p
>Update
2013-
04-
10: If you want to know how much ink/toner could be
13549 saved when switching between fonts, Inkfarm got a
13550 <a href=
"http://www.inkfarm.com/What-the-Font
">service to calculate the
13551 difference between font pairs
</a
>. They also
13552 <a href=
"http://www.inkfarm.com/Recommended-Ink-Saving-Fonts---
">recommend
13553 which fonts to use
</a
> to save ink. Check it out. :) While updating
13554 this blog post, I also came across a blog post from InkCloners,
13555 <a href=
"http://inkcloners.com/blog/ink-cartridges/change-fonts-to-save-ink-costs/
">listing
13556 the fonts they recommend
</a
>, with Centory Gothic at the top.
</p
>
13561 <title>Typesetting a short story using docbook for PDF, HTML and EPUB
</title>
13562 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Typesetting_a_short_story_using_docbook_for_PDF__HTML_and_EPUB.html
</link>
13563 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Typesetting_a_short_story_using_docbook_for_PDF__HTML_and_EPUB.html
</guid>
13564 <pubDate>Sun,
24 Mar
2013 17:
30:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
13565 <description><p
>A few days ago, during a discussion in
13566 <a href=
"http://www.efn.no/
">EFN
</a
> about interesting books to read
13567 about copyright and the data retention directive, a suggestion to read
13568 the
1968 short story Kodémus by
13569 <a href=
"http://web2.gyldendal.no/toraage/
">Tore Åge Bringsværd
</a
>
13570 came up. The text was only available in old paper books, and thus not
13571 easily available for current and future generations. Some of the
13572 people participating in the discussion contacted the author, and
13573 reported back
2013-
03-
19 that the author was OK with releasing the
13574 short story using a
<a href=
"http://www.creativecommons.org/
">Creative
13575 Commons
</a
> license. The text was quickly scanned and OCR-ed, and we
13576 were ready to start on the editing and typesetting.
</p
>
13578 <p
>As I already had some experience formatting text in my project to
13579 provide a Norwegian version of the Free Culture book by Lawrence
13580 Lessig, I chipped in and set up a
13581 <a href=
"http://www.docbook.org/
">DocBook
</a
> processing framework to
13582 generate PDF, HTML and EPUB version of the short story. The tools to
13583 transform DocBook to different formats are already in my Linux
13584 distribution of choice,
<a href=
"http://www.debian.org/
">Debian
</a
>, so
13585 all I had to do was to use the
13586 <a href=
"http://dblatex.sourceforge.net/
">dblatex
</a
>,
13587 <a href=
"http://docbook.sourceforge.net/release/xsl/current/epub/README
">dbtoepub
</a
>
13588 and
<a href=
"https://fedorahosted.org/xmlto/
">xmlto
</a
> tools to do the
13589 conversion. After a few days, we decided to replace dblatex with
13591 <a href=
"http://wiki.docbook.org/DocBookXslStylesheets
">docbook-xsl
</a
>),
13592 to get the copyright information to show up in the PDF and to get a
13593 nicer
&lt;variablelist
&gt; typesetting, but that is just a minor
13594 technical detail.
</p
>
13596 <p
>There were a few challenges, of course. We want to typeset the
13597 short story to look like the original, and that require fairly good
13598 control over the layout. The original short story have three
13599 parts/scenes separated by a single horizontally centred star (*), and
13600 the paragraphs do not contain only flowing text, but dialogs and text
13601 that started on a new line in the middle of the paragraph.
</p
>
13603 <p
>I initially solved the first challenge by using a paragraph with a
13604 single star in it, ie
&lt;para
&gt;*
&lt;/para
&gt;, but it made sure a
13605 placeholder indicated where the scene shifted. This did not look too
13606 good without the centring. The next approach was to create a new
13607 preprocessor directive
&lt;?newscene?
&gt;, mapping to
"&lt;hr/
&gt;
"
13608 for HTML and
"&lt;fo:block text-align=
"center
"&gt;
&lt;fo:leader
13609 leader-pattern=
"rule
" rule-thickness=
"0.5pt
"/
&gt;
&lt;/fo:block
&gt;
"
13610 for FO/PDF output (did not try to implement this in dblatex, as we had
13611 switched at this time). The HTML XSL file looked like this:
</p
>
13613 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
13614 &lt;?xml version=
'1.0'?
&gt;
13615 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl=
"http://www.w3.org/
1999/XSL/Transform
" version=
'1.0'&gt;
13616 &lt;xsl:template match=
"processing-instruction(
'newscene
')
"&gt;
13617 &lt;hr/
&gt;
13618 &lt;/xsl:template
&gt;
13619 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet
&gt;
13620 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
13622 <p
>And the FO/PDF XSL file looked like this:
</p
>
13624 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
13625 &lt;?xml version=
'1.0'?
&gt;
13626 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl=
"http://www.w3.org/
1999/XSL/Transform
" version=
'1.0'&gt;
13627 &lt;xsl:template match=
"processing-instruction(
'newscene
')
"&gt;
13628 &lt;fo:block text-align=
"center
"&gt;
13629 &lt;fo:leader leader-pattern=
"rule
" rule-thickness=
"0.5pt
"/
&gt;
13630 &lt;/fo:block
&gt;
13631 &lt;/xsl:template
&gt;
13632 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet
&gt;
13633 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
13635 <p
>Finally, I came across the
&lt;bridgehead
&gt; tag, which seem to be
13636 a good fit for the task at hand, and I replaced
&lt;?newscene?
&gt;
13637 with
&lt;bridgehead
&gt;*
&lt;/bridgehead
&gt;. It isn
't centred, but we
13638 can fix it with some XSL rule if the current visual layout isn
't
13641 <p
>I did not find a good DocBook compliant way to solve the
13642 linebreak/paragraph challenge, so I ended up creating a new processor
13643 directive
&lt;?linebreak?
&gt;, mapping to
&lt;br/
&gt; in HTML, and
13644 &lt;fo:block/
&gt; in FO/PDF. I suspect there are better ways to do
13645 this, and welcome ideas and patches on github. The HTML XSL file now
13646 look like this:
</p
>
13648 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
13649 &lt;?xml version=
'1.0'?
&gt;
13650 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl=
"http://www.w3.org/
1999/XSL/Transform
" version=
'1.0'&gt;
13651 &lt;xsl:template match=
"processing-instruction(
'linebreak)
"&gt;
13652 &lt;br/
&gt;
13653 &lt;/xsl:template
&gt;
13654 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet
&gt;
13655 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
13657 <p
>And the FO/PDF XSL file looked like this:
</p
>
13659 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
13660 &lt;?xml version=
'1.0'?
&gt;
13661 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl=
"http://www.w3.org/
1999/XSL/Transform
" version=
'1.0'
13662 xmlns:fo=
"http://www.w3.org/
1999/XSL/Format
"&gt;
13663 &lt;xsl:template match=
"processing-instruction(
'linebreak)
"&gt;
13664 &lt;fo:block/
&gt;
13665 &lt;/xsl:template
&gt;
13666 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet
&gt;
13667 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
13669 <p
>One unsolved challenge is our wish to expose different ISBN numbers
13670 per publication format, while keeping all of them in some conditional
13671 structure in the DocBook source. No idea how to do this, so we ended
13672 up listing all the ISBN numbers next to their format in the colophon
13675 <p
>If you want to check out the finished result, check out the
13676 <a href=
"https://github.com/sickel/kodemus
">source repository at
13678 (
<a href=
"https://github.com/EFN/kodemus
">future/new/official
13679 repository
</a
>). We expect it to be ready and announced in a few
13685 <title>Skolelinux
6 got a video review from Pcwizz
</title>
13686 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Skolelinux_6_got_a_video_review_from_Pcwizz.html
</link>
13687 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Skolelinux_6_got_a_video_review_from_Pcwizz.html
</guid>
13688 <pubDate>Sun,
17 Mar
2013 10:
30:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
13689 <description><p
>Via
13690 <a href=
"https://twitter.com/pcwizz/status/
313044373262716930">twitter
</a
>
13691 I just discovered that
<a href=
"http://pcwizz.net/
">Pcwizz
</a
> have
13692 done a
<a href=
"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPzTZ61Pcuc
">video
13693 review
</a
> on Youtube of
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Skolelinux
13694 / Debian Edu
</a
> version
6. He installed the standalone profile and
13695 the video show a walk-through of of the menu content, demonstration of
13696 a few programs and his view of our distribution.
</p
>
13698 <p
>There is also some really nice quotes (transcribed by me, might
13699 have heard wrong). While looking thought the Graphics menu:
</p
>
13702 "Basically everything you ever need in a school environment.
"
13703 </blockquote
>
13705 <p
>And as a general evaluation of the entire distribution:
</p
>
13708 "So, yeah, a bit bloated. It kept all the Debian stuff in there, just
13709 to keep it nice and GNU. So, I do not want to go on about it, but
13710 lets give it
7 out of
10. I am not going to use it. That is because
13711 I am not deploying a school network. There may be some mythical
13712 feature to help you deploy Skolelinux on a school network.
"
13713 </blockquote
>
13715 <p
>To bad he did not test the server profile, and discovered the PXE
13716 installation option. It make it possible to install only the main
13717 server from CD, and the rest of the machines via the net, and might be
13718 considered the mythical feature he talk about. :)
</p
>
13720 <p
>While looking through the menus, there is also this funny comment
13721 about the part of the K menu generated from the Debian menu subsystem:
13724 "[The K menu] have a special Debian section for software that no-one
13725 is going to look at, because it contain lots of junky stuff that you
13726 actually don
't need in the education distribution, but have just been
13727 included because it isn
't stripped out for some reason.
"
13728 </blockquote
>
13730 <p
>I guess it is yet another argument for merging the Debian menu and
13731 Gnome/KDE desktop menu entries into
13732 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/Proposals/DebianMenuUsingDesktopEntries
">one
13733 consistent menu system
</a
> instead of two incomplete and partly
13734 inconsistent menu systems.
</p
>
13736 <p
>The entire video is available below for those accepting iframe
13737 embedding:
</p
>
13739 <iframe width=
"560" height=
"315" src=
"http://www.youtube.com/embed/wPzTZ61Pcuc
" frameborder=
"0" allowfullscreen
></iframe
>
13744 <title>First Skolelinux / Debian Edu Squeeze update released
</title>
13745 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Skolelinux___Debian_Edu_Squeeze_update_released.html
</link>
13746 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Skolelinux___Debian_Edu_Squeeze_update_released.html
</guid>
13747 <pubDate>Fri,
8 Mar
2013 09:
30:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
13748 <description><p
>Last Sunday,
2013-
03-
03,, Holger Levsen announced the first update
13749 of
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Skolelinux / Debian Edu
</a
>
13750 based on Debian Squeeze. This is the first update since
13751 <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/
2012/
03/msg00001.html
">the
13752 initial release
2012-
03-
11</a
>. This is the
13753 <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/
2013/
03/msg00000.html
">release
13754 announcement email from Holger
</a
>:
</p
>
13756 <blockquote
><p
>Hi,
</p
>
13758 <p
>it
's my pleasure to announce the immediate availability of Debian
13759 Edu
6.0.7+r1 (
"Debian Edu Squeeze
").
</p
>
13761 <p
>Debian Edu
6.0.7+r1 is an incremental update to Debian Edu
13762 6.0.4+r0, containing all the changes between Debian
6.0.4 and
6.0.7 as
13763 well Debian Edu specific bugfixes and enhancements. See below (in this
13764 mail) for the full list of (edu) changes. Please see
13765 <a href=
"http://www.debian.org/News/
2012/
20120311">http://www.debian.org/News/
2012/
20120311</a
>
13766 for more information on
"Debian Edu Squeeze
".
</p
>
13768 <p
>Images are available for download at
13769 <a href=
"http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/
">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/
</a
></p
>
13772 <br
>1fe79eb4f0f9ae1c58fc318e26cc1e2e debian-edu-
6.0.7+r1-CD.iso
13773 <br
>a6ddd924a8bd9a1b5ca122e8fe1c34ec debian-edu-
6.0.7+r1-DVD.iso
13774 <br
>ac6c72cd7925ccec51bfbf58e2a7c69c debian-edu-
6.0.7+r1-source-DVD.iso
</p
>
13777 <br
>a4b58233b672a99c7df8dc24fb6de3327654a5c3 debian-edu-
6.0.7+r1-CD.iso
13778 <br
>9b524915e0ff2aa793f13d93123e5bd2bab2dbaa debian-edu-
6.0.7+r1-DVD.iso
13779 <br
>43997614893fc5e9e59ad6ce066b05d07fd836fa debian-edu-
6.0.7+r1-source-DVD.iso
</p
>
13781 <p
>These images are suitable for amd64+i386.
</p
>
13783 <p
>Changes for Debian Edu
6.0.7+r1 Codename
"Squeeze
", released
13784 2013-
03-
03:
</p
>
13787 <li
>sitesummary was updated from
0.1.3 to
0.1.8
13789 <li
>Make Nagios configuration more robust and efficient
</li
>
13790 <li
>Comply with
3.X kernel
</li
>
13791 </ul
></li
>
13792 <li
>debian-edu-doc from
1.4~
20120310~
6.0.4+r0 to
1.4~
20130228~
6.0.7+r1
13794 <li
>Minor updates from the wiki
</li
>
13795 <li
>Danish translation now complete
</li
>
13796 </ul
></li
>
13797 <li
>debian-edu-config from
1.453 to
1.455
13799 <li
>Fix /etc/hosts for LTSP diskless workstations. Closes: #
699880</li
>
13800 <li
>Make ltsp_local_mount script work for multiple devices.
</li
>
13801 <li
>Correct Kerberos user policy: don
't expire password after
2 days.
13802 Closes: #
664596</li
>
13803 <li
>Handle
'#
' characters in the root or first users password.
13804 Closes: #
664976</li
>
13805 <li
>Fixes for gosa-sync:
13807 <li
>Don
't fail if password contains
"</li
>
13808 <li
>Don
't disclose new password string in syslog
</li
>
13809 </ul
></li
>
13810 <li
>Fixes for gosa-create:
13812 <li
>Invalidate libnss cache before applying changes
</li
>
13813 <li
>Multiple failures during mass user import into GOsa²
</li
>
13814 <li
>gosa-netgroups plugin: don
't erase entries of attribute type
13815 "memberNisNetgroup
". Closes: #
687256</li
>
13816 <li
>First user now uses the same Kerberos policy as all other users
</li
>
13817 </ul
></li
>
13818 <li
>Add Danish web page
</li
>
13820 <li
>debian-edu-install from
1.528 to
1.530
13822 <li
>Improve preseeding support and documentation
</li
>
13823 </ul
></li
>
13826 <p
>End-user documentation in English is available at
13827 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze/
">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze/
</a
>
13828 - translations to French, Italian, Danish and German are available in
13829 the debian-edu-doc package. (Other languages could use your help!)
</p
>
13831 <p
>If you want to contribute to Debian Edu, please join our
13833 <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/
">debian-edu@lists.debian.org
</a
>!
13834 </p
></blockquote
>
13836 <p
>I am very happy to see the fruits of a year of hard work. :)
</p
>
13841 <title>Frikanalen - Complete TV station organised using the web
</title>
13842 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Frikanalen___Complete_TV_station_organised_using_the_web.html
</link>
13843 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Frikanalen___Complete_TV_station_organised_using_the_web.html
</guid>
13844 <pubDate>Sun,
3 Mar
2013 07:
15:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
13845 <description><p
>Do you want to set up your own TV station, schedule videos and
13846 broadcast them on the air? Using free software? With video on demand
13848 <a href=
"http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition
">free and
13849 open standards
</a
>? Included a web based video stream as well? And
13850 administrate it all in your web browser from anywhere in the world? A
13851 few years now the Norwegian public access TV-channel
13852 <a href=
"http://www.frikanalen.no/
">Frikanalen
</a
> have been building a
13853 system to do just this. The source code for the solution is licensed
13854 using the GNU LGPL, and
13855 <a href=
"http://github.com/Frikanalen
">available from github
</a
>.
</p
>
13857 <p
>The idea is simple. You upload a video file over the web, and
13858 attach meta information to the file. You select a time slot in the
13859 program schedule, and when the time come it is played on the air and
13860 in the web stream. It is also made available in a video on demand
13861 solution for anyone to see it also outside its scheduled time. All
13862 you need to run a TV station - using your web browser.
</p
>
13864 <p
>There are several parts to this web based solution. I
'll mention
13865 the three most important ones. The first part is the database of
13866 videos and the schedule. This is written in Django and include a REST
13867 API. The current database is SQLite, but the plan is to migrate it to
13868 PostgreSQL. At the moment this system can be tested on
13869 <a href=
"http://beta.frikanalen.tv/
">beta.frikanalen.tv
</a
>. The
13870 second part is the video playout, taking the schedule information from
13871 the database and providing a video stream to broadcast. This is done
13872 using
<a href=
"http://www.casparcg.com/
">CasparCG from SVT
</a
> and
13873 <a href=
"http://www.mltframework.org/
">Media Lovin
' Toolkit
</a
>. Video
13874 signal distribution is handled using
13875 <a href=
"http://www.ob-encoder.com/
">Open Broadcast Encoder
</a
>. The
13876 third part is the converter, handling the transformation of uploaded
13877 video files to a format useful for broadcasting, streaming and video
13878 on demand. It is still very much work in progress, so it is not yet
13879 decided what it will end up using. Note that the source of the latter
13880 two parts are not yet pushed to github. The lead author want to clean
13881 them up a bit more first.
</p
>
13883 <p
>The development is coordinated on the
13884 <a href=
"irc://irc.freenode.net/%
23frikanalen
">#frikanalen IRC
13885 channel
</a
> (irc.freenode.net), and discussed on
13886 <a href=
"http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/frikanalen
">the
13887 frikanalen mailing list
</a
>. The lead developer is Benjamin Bruheim
13888 (phed on IRC). Anyone is welcome to participate in the
13889 development.
</p
>
13894 <title>Dr. Richard Stallman, founder of Free Software Foundation, give a talk in Oslo March
1st
2013</title>
13895 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dr__Richard_Stallman__founder_of_Free_Software_Foundation__give_a_talk_in_Oslo_March_1st_2013.html
</link>
13896 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dr__Richard_Stallman__founder_of_Free_Software_Foundation__give_a_talk_in_Oslo_March_1st_2013.html
</guid>
13897 <pubDate>Wed,
27 Feb
2013 20:
20:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
13898 <description><p
>Dr.
<a href=
"http://www.stallman.org/
">Richard Stallman
</a
>,
13899 founder of
<a href=
"http://www.fsf.org/
">Free Software Foundation
</a
>,
13900 is giving
<a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/
20130301-rms/
">a
13901 talk in Oslo March
1st
2013 17:
00 to
19:
00</a
>. The event is public
13902 and organised by
<a href=
"">Norwegian Unix Users Group (NUUG)
</a
>
13903 (where I am the chair of the board) and
13904 <a href=
"http://www.friprog.no/
">The Norwegian Open Source Competence
13905 Center
</a
>. The title of the talk is «The Free Software Movement and
13906 GNU», with this description:
13908 <p
><blockquote
>
13909 The Free Software Movement campaigns for computer users
' freedom to
13910 cooperate and control their own computing. The Free Software Movement
13911 developed the GNU operating system, typically used together with the
13912 kernel Linux, specifically to make these freedoms possible.
13913 </blockquote
></p
>
13915 <p
>The meeting is open for everyone. Due to space limitations, the
13916 doors opens for NUUG members at
16:
15, and everyone else at
16:
45. I
13917 am really curious how many will show up. See
13918 <a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/
20130301-rms/
">the event
13919 page
</a
> for the location details.
</p
>
13924 <title>Frikart - Free Garmin maps for European countries based on OpenStreetmap
</title>
13925 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Frikart___Free_Garmin_maps_for_European_countries_based_on_OpenStreetmap.html
</link>
13926 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Frikart___Free_Garmin_maps_for_European_countries_based_on_OpenStreetmap.html
</guid>
13927 <pubDate>Fri,
15 Feb
2013 09:
30:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
13928 <description><p
>If you, like me, want an updated a map for your Garmin GPS, there is
13929 now a great source of free maps available from
13930 <a href=
"http://www.frikart.no/garmin/index.html
">Frikart
</a
>. To
13931 download a map, just click on the country you are interested in, and
13932 download the map type you want. There are
8 different maps available,
13933 using different colours and data selection. Pick one of Roadmap, Topo
13934 Summer, Topo Winter, Roadmap II, Topo Summer II, Topo Winter II,
13935 "Trails - overlay map
" and
"Cross country - overlay map
" (see the web
13936 page for descriptions).
</p
>
13938 <p
>The maps are updated weekly, so if you find something wrong in the
13939 map you can just edit the
13940 <a href=
"http://www.openstreetmap.org/
">OpenStreetmap
</a
> map source
13941 (anyone can contribute) and fetch a fixed map a week later. :)
</p
>
13946 <title>"Electronic
" paper invoices - using vCard in a QR code
</title>
13947 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/_Electronic__paper_invoices___using_vCard_in_a_QR_code.html
</link>
13948 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/_Electronic__paper_invoices___using_vCard_in_a_QR_code.html
</guid>
13949 <pubDate>Tue,
12 Feb
2013 10:
30:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
13950 <description><p
>Here in Norway, electronic invoices are spreading, and the
13951 <a href=
"http://www.anskaffelser.no/e-handel/faktura
">solution promoted
13952 by the Norwegian government
</a
> require that invoices are sent through
13953 one of the approved facilitators, and it is not possible to send
13954 electronic invoices without an agreement with one of these
13955 facilitators. This seem like a needless limitation to be able to
13956 transfer invoice information between buyers and sellers. My preferred
13957 solution would be to just transfer the invoice information directly
13958 between seller and buyer, for example using SMTP, or some HTTP based
13959 protocol like REST or SOAP. But this might also be overkill, as the
13960 "electronic
" information can be transferred using paper invoices too,
13961 using a simple bar code. My bar code encoding of choice would be QR
13962 codes, as this encoding can be read by any smart phone out there. The
13963 content of the code could be anything, but I would go with
13964 <a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VCard
">the vCard format
</a
>, as
13965 it too is supported by a lot of computer equipment these days.
</p
>
13967 <p
>The vCard format support extentions, and the invoice specific
13968 information can be included using such extentions. For example an
13969 invoice from SLX Debian Labs (picked because we
13970 <a href=
"http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html
">ask
13971 for donations to the Debian Edu project
</a
> and thus have bank account
13972 information publicly available) for NOK
1000.00 could have these extra
13975 <p
><pre
>
13977 X-INVOICE-AMOUNT:NOK1000.00
13978 X-INVOICE-KID:
123412341234
13979 X-INVOICE-MSG:Donation to Debian Edu
13980 X-BANK-ACCOUNT-NUMBER:
16040884339
13981 X-BANK-IBAN-NUMBER:NO8516040884339
13982 X-BANK-SWIFT-NUMBER:DNBANOKKXXX
13983 </pre
></p
>
13985 <p
>The X-BANK-ACCOUNT-NUMBER field was proposed in a stackoverflow
13987 <a href=
"http://stackoverflow.com/questions/
10045664/storing-bank-account-in-vcard-file
">how
13988 to put bank account information into a vCard
</a
>. For payments in
13989 Norway, either X-INVOICE-KID (payment ID) or X-INVOICE-MSG could be
13990 used to pass on information to the seller when paying the invoice.
</p
>
13992 <p
>The complete vCard could look like this:
</p
>
13994 <p
><pre
>
13997 ORG:SLX Debian Labs Foundation
13998 ADR;WORK:;;Gunnar Schjelderups vei
29D;OSLO;;
0485;Norway
13999 URL;WORK:http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/
14000 EMAIL;PREF;INTERNET:sdl-styret@rt.nuug.no
14001 REV:
20130212T095000Z
14003 X-INVOICE-AMOUNT:NOK1000.00
14004 X-INVOICE-MSG:Donation to Debian Edu
14005 X-BANK-ACCOUNT-NUMBER:
16040884339
14006 X-BANK-IBAN-NUMBER:NO8516040884339
14007 X-BANK-SWIFT-NUMBER:DNBANOKKXXX
14009 </pre
></p
>
14011 <p
>The resulting QR code created using
14012 <a href=
"http://fukuchi.org/works/qrencode/
">qrencode
</a
> would look
14013 like this, and should be readable (and thus checkable) by any smart
14014 phone, or for example the
<a href=
"http://zbar.sourceforge.net/
">zbar
14015 bar code reader
</a
> and feed right into the approval and accounting
14018 <p
><img src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
02-
12-qr-invoice.png
"></p
>
14020 <p
>The extension fields will most likely not show up in any normal
14021 vCard reader, so those parts would have to go directly into a system
14022 handling invoices. I am a bit unsure how vCards without name parts
14023 are handled, but a simple test indicate that this work just fine.
</p
>
14025 <p
><strong
>Update
2013-
02-
12 11:
30</strong
>: Added KID to the proposal
14026 based on feedback from Sturle Sunde.
</p
>
14031 <title>Sleep until morning - home automation for the kids
</title>
14032 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sleep_until_morning___home_automation_for_the_kids.html
</link>
14033 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sleep_until_morning___home_automation_for_the_kids.html
</guid>
14034 <pubDate>Sun,
10 Feb
2013 12:
50:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
14035 <description><p
><img align=
"left
" style=
"margin-right:
25px;
" src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
02-
10-morning-light.jpeg
"></p
>
14037 <p
>With kids in the house, one challenge is getting them to sleep
14038 during the night and wake up when it is morning. I mean, when I
14039 believe it is morning, and not two hours earlier. In our household we
14040 have decided that
07:
00 is the turning point, but getting the kids to
14041 sleep until
07:
00 is a small challenge every day. They have adapted
14042 quite well, and rarely wake up at
05:
00 any more, but some times wake
14043 up at times like
05:
50,
06:
15,
06:
30 or
06:
45, and it is hard to put
14044 the awake one to bed again without disturbing and waking the rest.
14045 And I understand perfectly well that they fail to sleep until
07:
00
14046 some times, as there is no way for them to know if it is before or
14047 after the magic moment without coming and asking us parents.
</p
>
14049 <p
>But yesterday I came up with a method to solve this problem. It
14050 involve home automation. A few years ago I bought a
14051 <a href=
"http://www.telldus.se/products/tellstick
">Tellstick
</a
> and RF
14052 switches at the local
<a href=
"http://www.clasohlson.com/
">Clas
14053 Ohlson
</a
> shop, allowing me to control lights and other electrical
14054 gadgets using my Linux server. When I moved from the old flat to a
14055 small house, I put away all this equipment as most of the lighting in
14056 the house was not using wall sockets and thus not easy to connect to
14057 the gadgets I had. But recently I bought a
14058 <a href=
"http://www.telldus.se/products/tellstick_net
">Tellstick
14059 Net
</a
> to be able to read sensor input as well as control power
14060 sockets. I want to control ovens in the basement to avoid the pipes
14061 to freeze, and monitor the humidity to detect flooding. The default
14062 setup for Tellstick Net is to be controlled by the vendor web service,
14063 which to me is a security problem, but it is also possible to build
14065 <a href=
"http://developer.telldus.com/blog/
2012/
03/
02/help-us-develop-local-access-using-tellstick-net-build-your-own-firmware
">firmware
14066 with local access
</A
> instead of being controlled by a Swedish
14067 company, thanks to the release of the GPL licensed firmware source
14068 code. I plan to get that running before I let it control anything
14069 important. But while working on this, one idea to make it easier for
14070 the kids came to me yesterday. We can set up a night light controlled
14071 by the computer, and turn it automatically on at
07:
00. The kids can
14072 then check the light in the morning to know if they are supposed to
14073 get up or not. They joined me in setting everything up, and I
14074 repeated the concept several times before bed times to make sure they
14075 remembered to check the light before getting up in the morning.
</p
>
14077 <p
>We tested it this morning, and all the kids stayed in bed until
14078 after
07:
00, and every one of them commented on the fact that the
14079 "morning light
" was turned on and signalled that the morning had
14080 arrived. So this look like a success, and I am excited to see how
14081 this develops the next few days. :) I really hope this can allow us
14082 all to sleep a bit longer in the morning.
</p
>
14084 <p
>A nice advantage of this setup is that we can remote control when
14085 to tell the kids to get up. We do not have to wait until
07:
00, and
14086 can also delay it if we want to.
</p
>
14091 <title>Bitcoin GUI now available from Debian/unstable (and Ubuntu/raring)
</title>
14092 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Bitcoin_GUI_now_available_from_Debian_unstable__and_Ubuntu_raring_.html
</link>
14093 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Bitcoin_GUI_now_available_from_Debian_unstable__and_Ubuntu_raring_.html
</guid>
14094 <pubDate>Sat,
2 Feb
2013 09:
00:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
14095 <description><p
>My
14096 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_backport_bitcoin_qt_version_0_7_2_2_to_Debian_Squeeze.html
">last
14097 bitcoin related blog post
</a
> mentioned that the new
14098 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin
">bitcoin package
</a
> for
14099 Debian was waiting in NEW. It was accepted by the Debian ftp-masters
14100 2013-
01-
19, and have been available in unstable since then. It was
14101 automatically copied to Ubuntu, and is available in their Raring
14102 version too.
</p
>
14104 <p
>But there is a strange problem with the build that block this new
14105 version from being available on the i386 and kfreebsd-i386
14106 architectures. For some strange reason, the autobuilders in Debian
14107 for these architectures fail to run the test suite on these
14108 architectures (
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
672524">BTS #
672524</a
>).
14109 We are so far unable to reproduce it when building it manually, and
14110 no-one have been able to propose a fix. If you got an idea what is
14111 failing, please let us know via the BTS.
</p
>
14113 <p
>One feature that is annoying me with of the bitcoin client, because
14114 I often run low on disk space, is the fact that the client will exit
14115 if it run short on space (
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
696715">BTS
14116 #
696715</a
>). So make sure you have enough disk space when you run
14119 <p
>As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
14120 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
14121 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
14126 <title>Welcome to the world, Isenkram!
</title>
14127 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html
</link>
14128 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html
</guid>
14129 <pubDate>Tue,
22 Jan
2013 22:
00:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
14130 <description><p
>Yesterday, I
14131 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_prototype_ready_making_hardware_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html
">asked
14132 for testers
</a
> for my prototype for making Debian better at handling
14133 pluggable hardware devices, which I
14134 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html
">set
14135 out to create
</a
> earlier this month. Several valuable testers showed
14136 up, and caused me to really want to to open up the development to more
14137 people. But before I did this, I want to come up with a sensible name
14138 for this project. Today I finally decided on a new name, and I have
14139 renamed the project from hw-support-handler to this new name. In the
14140 process, I moved the source to git and made it available as a
14141 <a href=
"http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/isenkram.git
">collab-maint
</a
>
14142 repository in Debian. The new name? It is
<strong
>Isenkram
</strong
>.
14143 To fetch and build the latest version of the source, use
</p
>
14146 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/collab-maint/isenkram.git
14147 cd isenkram
&& git-buildpackage -us -uc
14150 <p
>I have not yet adjusted all files to use the new name yet. If you
14151 want to hack on the source or improve the package, please go ahead.
14152 But please talk to me first on IRC or via email before you do major
14153 changes, to make sure we do not step on each others toes. :)
</p
>
14155 <p
>If you wonder what
'isenkram
' is, it is a Norwegian word for iron
14156 stuff, typically meaning tools, nails, screws, etc. Typical hardware
14157 stuff, in other words. I
've been told it is the Norwegian variant of
14158 the German word eisenkram, for those that are familiar with that
14161 <p
><strong
>Update
2013-
01-
26</strong
>: Added -us -us to build
14162 instructions, to avoid confusing people with an error from the signing
14165 <p
><strong
>Update
2013-
01-
27</strong
>: Switch to HTTP URL for the git
14166 clone argument to avoid the need for authentication.
</p
>
14171 <title>First prototype ready making hardware easier to use in Debian
</title>
14172 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_prototype_ready_making_hardware_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html
</link>
14173 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_prototype_ready_making_hardware_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html
</guid>
14174 <pubDate>Mon,
21 Jan
2013 12:
00:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
14175 <description><p
>Early this month I set out to try to
14176 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html
">improve
14177 the Debian support for pluggable hardware devices
</a
>. Now my
14178 prototype is working, and it is ready for a larger audience. To test
14180 <a href=
"http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/
">source
14181 from the Debian Edu subversion repository
</a
>, build and install the
14182 package. You might have to log out and in again activate the
14183 autostart script.
</p
>
14185 <p
>The design is simple:
</p
>
14189 <li
>Add desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ causing a program
14190 hw-support-handlerd to start when the user log in.
</li
>
14192 <li
>This program listen for kernel events about new hardware (directly
14193 from the kernel like udev does), not using HAL dbus events as I
14194 initially did.
</li
>
14196 <li
>When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware modalias in
14197 the APT database, a database
14198 <a href=
"http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=markup
">available
14199 via HTTP
</a
> and a database available as part of the package.
</li
>
14201 <li
>If a package is mapped to the hardware in question, the package
14202 isn
't installed yet and this is the first time the hardware was
14203 plugged in, show a desktop notification suggesting to install the
14204 package or packages.
</li
>
14206 <li
>If the user click on the
'install package now
' button, ask
14207 aptdaemon via the PackageKit API to install the requrired package.
</li
>
14209 <li
>aptdaemon ask for root password or sudo password, and install the
14210 package while showing progress information in a window.
</li
>
14214 <p
>I still need to come up with a better name for the system. Here
14215 are some screen shots showing the prototype in action. First the
14216 notification, then the password request, and finally the request to
14217 approve all the dependencies. Sorry for the Norwegian Bokmål GUI.
</p
>
14219 <p
><img src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
01-
21-hw-support-
1-notification.png
">
14220 <br
><img src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
01-
21-hw-support-
2-password.png
">
14221 <br
><img src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
01-
21-hw-support-
3-dependencies.png
">
14222 <br
><img src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
01-
21-hw-support-
4-installing.png
">
14223 <br
><img src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
01-
21-hw-support-
5-installing-details.png
" width=
"70%
"></p
>
14225 <p
>The prototype still need to be improved with longer timeouts, but
14226 is already useful. The database of hardware to package mappings also
14227 need more work. It is currently compatible with the Ubuntu way of
14228 storing such information in the package control file, but could be
14229 changed to use other formats instead or in addition to the current
14230 method. I
've dropped the use of discover for this mapping, as the
14231 modalias approach is more flexible and easier to use on Linux as long
14232 as the Linux kernel expose its modalias strings directly.
</p
>
14234 <p
><strong
>Update
2013-
01-
21 16:
50</strong
>: Due to popular demand,
14235 here is the command required to check out and build the source: Use
14236 '<tt
>svn checkout
14237 svn://svn.debian.org/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/; cd
14238 hw-support-handler; debuild
</tt
>'. If you lack debuild, install the
14239 devscripts package.
</p
>
14241 <p
><strong
>Update
2013-
01-
23 12:
00</strong
>: The project is now
14242 renamed to Isenkram and the source moved from the Debian Edu
14243 subversion repository to a Debian collab-maint git repository. See
14244 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html
">build
14245 instructions
</a
> for details.
</p
>
14250 <title>Thank you Thinkpad X41, for your long and trustworthy service
</title>
14251 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html
</link>
14252 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html
</guid>
14253 <pubDate>Sat,
19 Jan
2013 09:
20:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
14254 <description><p
>This Christmas my trusty old laptop died. It died quietly and
14255 suddenly in bed. With a quiet whimper, it went completely quiet and
14256 black. The power button was no longer able to turn it on. It was a
14257 IBM Thinkpad X41, and the best laptop I ever had. Better than both
14258 Thinkpads X30, X31, X40, X60, X61 and X61S. Far better than the
14259 Compaq I had before that. Now I need to find a replacement. To keep
14260 going during Christmas, I moved the one year old SSD disk to my old
14261 X40 where it fitted (only one I had left that could use it), but it is
14262 not a durable solution.
14264 <p
>My laptop needs are fairly modest. This is my wishlist from when I
14265 got a new one more than
10 years ago. It still holds true.:)
</p
>
14269 <li
>Lightweight (around
1 kg) and small volume (preferably smaller
14270 than A4).
</li
>
14271 <li
>Robust, it will be in my backpack every day.
</li
>
14272 <li
>Three button mouse and a mouse pin instead of touch pad.
</li
>
14273 <li
>Long battery life time. Preferable a week.
</li
>
14274 <li
>Internal WIFI network card.
</li
>
14275 <li
>Internal Twisted Pair network card.
</li
>
14276 <li
>Some USB slots (
2-
3 is plenty)
</li
>
14277 <li
>Good keyboard - similar to the Thinkpad.
</li
>
14278 <li
>Video resolution at least
1024x768, with size around
12" (A4 paper
14280 <li
>Hardware supported by Debian Stable, ie the default kernel and
14281 X.org packages.
</li
>
14282 <li
>Quiet, preferably fan free (or at least not using the fan most of
14287 <p
>You will notice that there are no RAM and CPU requirements in the
14288 list. The reason is simply that the specifications on laptops the
14289 last
10-
15 years have been sufficient for my needs, and I have to look
14290 at other features to choose my laptop. But are there still made as
14291 robust laptops as my X41? The Thinkpad X60/X61 proved to be less
14292 robust, and Thinkpads seem to be heading in the wrong direction since
14293 Lenovo took over. But I
've been told that X220 and X1 Carbon might
14294 still be useful.
</p
>
14296 <p
>Perhaps I should rethink my needs, and look for a pad with an
14297 external keyboard? I
'll have to check the
14298 <a href=
"http://www.linux-laptop.net/
">Linux Laptops site
</a
> for
14299 well-supported laptops, or perhaps just buy one preinstalled from one
14300 of the vendors listed on the
<a href=
"http://linuxpreloaded.com/
">Linux
14301 Pre-loaded site
</a
>.
</p
>
14306 <title>How to find a browser plugin supporting a given MIME type
</title>
14307 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_find_a_browser_plugin_supporting_a_given_MIME_type.html
</link>
14308 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_find_a_browser_plugin_supporting_a_given_MIME_type.html
</guid>
14309 <pubDate>Fri,
18 Jan
2013 10:
40:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
14310 <description><p
>Some times I try to figure out which Iceweasel browser plugin to
14311 install to get support for a given MIME type. Thanks to
14312 <a href=
"https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MozillaTeam/Plugins
">specifications
14313 done by Ubuntu
</a
> and Mozilla, it is possible to do this in Debian.
14314 Unfortunately, not very many packages provide the needed meta
14315 information, Anyway, here is a small script to look up all browser
14316 plugin packages announcing ther MIME support using this specification:
</p
>
14322 def pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
14323 cache = apt.Cache()
14327 version = pkg.candidate
14328 if version is None:
14329 version = pkg.installed
14330 if version is None:
14332 record = version.record
14333 if not record.has_key(
'Npp-MimeType
'):
14335 mime_types = record[
'Npp-MimeType
'].split(
',
')
14336 for t in mime_types:
14337 t = t.rstrip().strip()
14339 thepkgs.append(pkg.name)
14341 mimetype =
"audio/ogg
"
14342 if
1 < len(sys.argv):
14343 mimetype = sys.argv[
1]
14344 print
"Browser plugin packages supporting %s:
" % mimetype
14345 for pkg in pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
14346 print
" %s
" %pkg
14349 <p
>It can be used like this to look up a given MIME type:
</p
>
14352 % ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype
14353 Browser plugin packages supporting audio/ogg:
14355 % ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype application/x-shockwave-flash
14356 Browser plugin packages supporting application/x-shockwave-flash:
14357 browser-plugin-gnash
14361 <p
>In Ubuntu this mechanism is combined with support in the browser
14362 itself to query for plugins and propose to install the needed
14363 packages. It would be great if Debian supported such feature too. Is
14364 anyone working on adding it?
</p
>
14366 <p
><strong
>Update
2013-
01-
18 14:
20</strong
>: The Debian BTS
14367 request for icweasel support for this feature is
14368 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
484010">#
484010</a
> from
2008 (and
14369 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
698426">#
698426</a
> from today). Lack
14370 of manpower and wish for a different design is the reason thus feature
14371 is not yet in iceweasel from Debian.
</p
>
14376 <title>What is the most supported MIME type in Debian?
</title>
14377 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_most_supported_MIME_type_in_Debian_.html
</link>
14378 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_most_supported_MIME_type_in_Debian_.html
</guid>
14379 <pubDate>Wed,
16 Jan
2013 10:
10:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
14380 <description><p
>The
<a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/AppStreamDebianProposal
">DEP-
11
14381 proposal to add AppStream information to the Debian archive
</a
>, is a
14382 proposal to make it possible for a Desktop application to propose to
14383 the user some package to install to gain support for a given MIME
14384 type, font, library etc. that is currently missing. With such
14385 mechanism in place, it would be possible for the desktop to
14386 automatically propose and install leocad if some LDraw file is
14387 downloaded by the browser.
</p
>
14389 <p
>To get some idea about the current content of the archive, I decided
14390 to write a simple program to extract all .desktop files from the
14391 Debian archive and look up the claimed MIME support there. The result
14392 can be found on the
14393 <a href=
"http://ftp.skolelinux.org/pub/AppStreamTest
">Skolelinux FTP
14394 site
</a
>. Using the collected information, it become possible to
14395 answer the question in the title. Here are the
20 most supported MIME
14396 types in Debian stable (Squeeze), testing (Wheezy) and unstable (Sid).
14397 The complete list is available from the link above.
</p
>
14399 <p
><strong
>Debian Stable:
</strong
></p
>
14403 ----- -----------------------
14417 18 audio/x-musepack
14419 18 application/x-ogg
14426 <p
><strong
>Debian Testing:
</strong
></p
>
14430 ----- -----------------------
14446 18 application/x-ogg
14449 17 audio/x-musepack
14453 <p
><strong
>Debian Unstable:
</strong
></p
>
14457 ----- -----------------------
14474 18 application/x-ogg
14475 17 audio/x-musepack
14480 <p
>I am told that PackageKit can provide an API to access the kind of
14481 information mentioned in DEP-
11. I have not yet had time to look at
14482 it, but hope the PackageKit people in Debian are on top of these
14485 <p
><strong
>Update
2013-
01-
16 13:
35</strong
>: Updated numbers after
14486 discovering a typo in my script.
</p
>
14491 <title>Using modalias info to find packages handling my hardware
</title>
14492 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_modalias_info_to_find_packages_handling_my_hardware.html
</link>
14493 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_modalias_info_to_find_packages_handling_my_hardware.html
</guid>
14494 <pubDate>Tue,
15 Jan
2013 08:
00:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
14495 <description><p
>Yesterday, I wrote about the
14496 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Modalias_strings___a_practical_way_to_map__stuff__to_hardware.html
">modalias
14497 values provided by the Linux kernel
</a
> following my hope for
14498 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html
">better
14499 dongle support in Debian
</a
>. Using this knowledge, I have tested how
14500 modalias values attached to package names can be used to map packages
14501 to hardware. This allow the system to look up and suggest relevant
14502 packages when I plug in some new hardware into my machine, and replace
14503 discover and discover-data as the database used to map hardware to
14504 packages.
</p
>
14506 <p
>I create a modaliases file with entries like the following,
14507 containing package name, kernel module name (if relevant, otherwise
14508 the package name) and globs matching the relevant hardware
14509 modalias.
</p
>
14511 <p
><blockquote
>
14512 Package: package-name
14513 <br
>Modaliases: module(modaliasglob, modaliasglob, modaliasglob)
</p
>
14514 </blockquote
></p
>
14516 <p
>It is fairly trivial to write code to find the relevant packages
14517 for a given modalias value using this file.
</p
>
14519 <p
>An entry like this would suggest the video and picture application
14520 cheese for many USB web cameras (interface bus class
0E01):
</p
>
14522 <p
><blockquote
>
14524 <br
>Modaliases: cheese(usb:v*p*d*dc*dsc*dp*ic0Eisc01ip*)
</p
>
14525 </blockquote
></p
>
14527 <p
>An entry like this would suggest the pcmciautils package when a
14528 CardBus bridge (bus class
0607) PCI device is present:
</p
>
14530 <p
><blockquote
>
14531 Package: pcmciautils
14532 <br
>Modaliases: pcmciautils(pci:v*d*sv*sd*bc06sc07i*)
14533 </blockquote
></p
>
14535 <p
>An entry like this would suggest the package colorhug-client when
14536 plugging in a ColorHug with USB IDs
04D8:F8DA:
</p
>
14538 <p
><blockquote
>
14539 Package: colorhug-client
14540 <br
>Modaliases: colorhug-client(usb:v04D8pF8DAd*)
</p
>
14541 </blockquote
></p
>
14543 <p
>I believe the format is compatible with the format of the Packages
14544 file in the Debian archive. Ubuntu already uses their Packages file
14545 to store their mappings from packages to hardware.
</p
>
14547 <p
>By adding a XB-Modaliases: header in debian/control, any .deb can
14548 announce the hardware it support in a way my prototype understand.
14549 This allow those publishing packages in an APT source outside the
14550 Debian archive as well as those backporting packages to make sure the
14551 hardware mapping are included in the package meta information. I
've
14552 tested such header in the pymissile package, and its modalias mapping
14553 is working as it should with my prototype. It even made it to Ubuntu
14556 <p
>To test if it was possible to look up supported hardware using only
14557 the shell tools available in the Debian installer, I wrote a shell
14558 implementation of the lookup code. The idea is to create files for
14559 each modalias and let the shell do the matching. Please check out and
14561 <a href=
"http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/hw-support-lookup?view=co
">hw-support-lookup
</a
>
14562 shell script. It run without any extra dependencies and fetch the
14563 hardware mappings from the Debian archive and the subversion
14564 repository where I currently work on my prototype.
</p
>
14566 <p
>When I use it on a machine with a yubikey inserted, it suggest to
14567 install yubikey-personalization:
</p
>
14569 <p
><blockquote
>
14570 % ./hw-support-lookup
14571 <br
>yubikey-personalization
14573 </blockquote
></p
>
14575 <p
>When I run it on my Thinkpad X40 with a PCMCIA/CardBus slot, it
14576 propose to install the pcmciautils package:
</p
>
14578 <p
><blockquote
>
14579 % ./hw-support-lookup
14580 <br
>pcmciautils
14582 </blockquote
></p
>
14584 <p
>If you know of any hardware-package mapping that should be added to
14585 <a href=
"http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=co
">my
14586 database
</a
>, please tell me about it.
</p
>
14588 <p
>It could be possible to generate several of the mappings between
14589 packages and hardware. One source would be to look at packages with
14590 kernel modules, ie packages with *.ko files in /lib/modules/, and
14591 extract their modalias information. Another would be to look at
14592 packages with udev rules, ie packages with files in
14593 /lib/udev/rules.d/, and extract their vendor/model information to
14594 generate a modalias matching rule. I have not tested any of these to
14595 see if it work.
</p
>
14597 <p
>If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
14598 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
14599 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
14600 <a href=
"irc://irc.debian.org/%
23debian-devel
">#debian-devel
</a
>.
</p
>
14605 <title>Modalias strings - a practical way to map
"stuff
" to hardware
</title>
14606 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Modalias_strings___a_practical_way_to_map__stuff__to_hardware.html
</link>
14607 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Modalias_strings___a_practical_way_to_map__stuff__to_hardware.html
</guid>
14608 <pubDate>Mon,
14 Jan
2013 11:
20:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
14609 <description><p
>While looking into how to look up Debian packages based on hardware
14610 information, to find the packages that support a given piece of
14611 hardware, I refreshed my memory regarding modalias values, and decided
14612 to document the details. Here are my findings so far, also available
14614 <a href=
"http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/
">the
14615 Debian Edu subversion repository
</a
>:
14617 <p
><strong
>Modalias decoded
</strong
></p
>
14619 <p
>This document try to explain what the different types of modalias
14620 values stands for. It is in part based on information from
14621 &lt;URL:
<a href=
"https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias
">https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias
</a
> &gt;,
14622 &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;,
14623 &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
14624 &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;.
14626 <p
>The modalias entries for a given Linux machine can be found using
14627 this shell script:
</p
>
14630 find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -
0 cat | sort -u
14633 <p
>The supported modalias globs for a given kernel module can be found
14634 using modinfo:
</p
>
14637 % /sbin/modinfo psmouse | grep alias:
14638 alias: serio:ty05pr*id*ex*
14639 alias: serio:ty01pr*id*ex*
14643 <p
><strong
>PCI subtype
</strong
></p
>
14645 <p
>A typical PCI entry can look like this. This is an Intel Host
14646 Bridge memory controller:
</p
>
14648 <p
><blockquote
>
14649 pci:v00008086d00002770sv00001028sd000001ADbc06sc00i00
14650 </blockquote
></p
>
14652 <p
>This represent these values:
</p
>
14655 v
00008086 (vendor)
14656 d
00002770 (device)
14657 sv
00001028 (subvendor)
14658 sd
000001AD (subdevice)
14660 sc
00 (bus subclass)
14664 <p
>The vendor/device values are the same values outputted from
'lspci
14665 -n
' as
8086:
2770. The bus class/subclass is also shown by lspci as
14666 0600. The
0600 class is a host bridge. Other useful bus values are
14667 0300 (VGA compatible card) and
0200 (Ethernet controller).
</p
>
14669 <p
>Not sure how to figure out the interface value, nor what it
14672 <p
><strong
>USB subtype
</strong
></p
>
14674 <p
>Some typical USB entries can look like this. This is an internal
14675 USB hub in a laptop:
</p
>
14677 <p
><blockquote
>
14678 usb:v1D6Bp0001d0206dc09dsc00dp00ic09isc00ip00
14679 </blockquote
></p
>
14681 <p
>Here is the values included in this alias:
</p
>
14684 v
1D6B (device vendor)
14685 p
0001 (device product)
14687 dc
09 (device class)
14688 dsc
00 (device subclass)
14689 dp
00 (device protocol)
14690 ic
09 (interface class)
14691 isc
00 (interface subclass)
14692 ip
00 (interface protocol)
14695 <p
>The
0900 device class/subclass means hub. Some times the relevant
14696 class is in the interface class section. For a simple USB web camera,
14697 these alias entries show up:
</p
>
14699 <p
><blockquote
>
14700 usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc01ip00
14701 <br
>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc02ip00
14702 <br
>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc01ip00
14703 <br
>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc02ip00
14704 </blockquote
></p
>
14706 <p
>Interface class
0E01 is video control,
0E02 is video streaming (aka
14707 camera),
0101 is audio control device and
0102 is audio streaming (aka
14708 microphone). Thus this is a camera with microphone included.
</p
>
14710 <p
><strong
>ACPI subtype
</strong
></p
>
14712 <p
>The ACPI type is used for several non-PCI/USB stuff. This is an IR
14713 receiver in a Thinkpad X40:
</p
>
14715 <p
><blockquote
>
14716 acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
14717 </blockquote
></p
>
14719 <p
>The values between the colons are IDs.
</p
>
14721 <p
><strong
>DMI subtype
</strong
></p
>
14723 <p
>The DMI table contain lots of information about the computer case
14724 and model. This is an entry for a IBM Thinkpad X40, fetched from
14725 /sys/devices/virtual/dmi/id/modalias:
</p
>
14727 <p
><blockquote
>
14728 dmi:bvnIBM:bvr1UETB6WW(
1.66):bd06/
15/
2005:svnIBM:pn2371H4G:pvrThinkPadX40:rvnIBM:rn2371H4G:rvrNotAvailable:cvnIBM:ct10:cvrNotAvailable:
14729 </blockquote
></p
>
14731 <p
>The values present are
</p
>
14734 bvn IBM (BIOS vendor)
14735 bvr
1UETB
6WW(
1.66) (BIOS version)
14736 bd
06/
15/
2005 (BIOS date)
14737 svn IBM (system vendor)
14738 pn
2371H4G (product name)
14739 pvr ThinkPadX40 (product version)
14740 rvn IBM (board vendor)
14741 rn
2371H4G (board name)
14742 rvr NotAvailable (board version)
14743 cvn IBM (chassis vendor)
14744 ct
10 (chassis type)
14745 cvr NotAvailable (chassis version)
14748 <p
>The chassis type
10 is Notebook. Other interesting values can be
14749 found in the dmidecode source:
</p
>
14753 4 Low Profile Desktop
14766 17 Main Server Chassis
14767 18 Expansion Chassis
14769 20 Bus Expansion Chassis
14770 21 Peripheral Chassis
14772 23 Rack Mount Chassis
14781 <p
>The chassis type values are not always accurately set in the DMI
14782 table. For example my home server is a tower, but the DMI modalias
14783 claim it is a desktop.
</p
>
14785 <p
><strong
>SerIO subtype
</strong
></p
>
14787 <p
>This type is used for PS/
2 mouse plugs. One example is from my
14788 test machine:
</p
>
14790 <p
><blockquote
>
14791 serio:ty01pr00id00ex00
14792 </blockquote
></p
>
14794 <p
>The values present are
</p
>
14803 <p
>This type is supported by the psmouse driver. I am not sure what
14804 the valid values are.
</p
>
14806 <p
><strong
>Other subtypes
</strong
></p
>
14808 <p
>There are heaps of other modalias subtypes according to
14809 file2alias.c. There is the rest of the list from that source: amba,
14810 ap, bcma, ccw, css, eisa, hid, i2c, ieee1394, input, ipack, isapnp,
14811 mdio, of, parisc, pcmcia, platform, scsi, sdio, spi, ssb, vio, virtio,
14812 vmbus, x86cpu and zorro. I did not spend time documenting all of
14813 these, as they do not seem relevant for my intended use with mapping
14814 hardware to packages when new stuff is inserted during run time.
</p
>
14816 <p
><strong
>Looking up kernel modules using modalias values
</strong
></p
>
14818 <p
>To check which kernel modules provide support for a given modalias,
14819 one can use the following shell script:
</p
>
14822 for id in $(find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -
0 cat | sort -u); do \
14823 echo
"$id
" ; \
14824 /sbin/modprobe --show-depends
"$id
"|sed
's/^/ /
' ; \
14828 <p
>The output can look like this (only the first few entries as the
14829 list is very long on my test machine):
</p
>
14833 insmod /lib/modules/
2.6.32-
5-
686/kernel/drivers/acpi/ac.ko
14835 FATAL: Module acpi:device: not found.
14837 insmod /lib/modules/
2.6.32-
5-
686/kernel/drivers/char/nvram.ko
14838 insmod /lib/modules/
2.6.32-
5-
686/kernel/drivers/leds/led-class.ko
14839 insmod /lib/modules/
2.6.32-
5-
686/kernel/net/rfkill/rfkill.ko
14840 insmod /lib/modules/
2.6.32-
5-
686/kernel/drivers/platform/x86/thinkpad_acpi.ko
14841 acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
14842 insmod /lib/modules/
2.6.32-
5-
686/kernel/lib/crc-ccitt.ko
14843 insmod /lib/modules/
2.6.32-
5-
686/kernel/net/irda/irda.ko
14844 insmod /lib/modules/
2.6.32-
5-
686/kernel/drivers/net/irda/nsc-ircc.ko
14848 <p
>If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
14849 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
14850 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
14851 <a href=
"irc://irc.debian.org/%
23debian-devel
">#debian-devel
</a
>.
</p
>
14853 <p
><strong
>Update
2013-
01-
15:
</strong
> Rewrite
"cat $(find ...)
" to
14854 "find ... -print0 | xargs -
0 cat
" to make sure it handle directories
14855 in /sys/ with space in them.
</p
>
14860 <title>Moved the pymissile Debian packaging to collab-maint
</title>
14861 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Moved_the_pymissile_Debian_packaging_to_collab_maint.html
</link>
14862 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Moved_the_pymissile_Debian_packaging_to_collab_maint.html
</guid>
14863 <pubDate>Thu,
10 Jan
2013 20:
40:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
14864 <description><p
>As part of my investigation on how to improve the support in Debian
14865 for hardware dongles, I dug up my old Mark and Spencer USB Rocket
14866 Launcher and updated the Debian package
14867 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/pymissile
">pymissile
</a
> to make
14868 sure udev will fix the device permissions when it is plugged in. I
14869 also added a
"Modaliases
" header to test it in the Debian archive and
14870 hopefully make the package be proposed by jockey in Ubuntu when a user
14871 plug in his rocket launcher. In the process I moved the source to a
14872 git repository under collab-maint, to make it easier for any DD to
14873 contribute.
<a href=
"http://code.google.com/p/pymissile/
">Upstream
</a
>
14874 is not very active, but the software still work for me even after five
14875 years of relative silence. The new git repository is not listed in
14876 the uploaded package yet, because I want to test the other changes a
14877 bit more before I upload the new version. If you want to check out
14878 the new version with a .desktop file included, visit the
14879 <a href=
"http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/pymissile.git
">gitweb
14880 view
</a
> or use
"<tt
>git clone
14881 git://anonscm.debian.org/collab-maint/pymissile.git
</tt
>".
</p
>
14886 <title>Lets make hardware dongles easier to use in Debian
</title>
14887 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html
</link>
14888 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html
</guid>
14889 <pubDate>Wed,
9 Jan
2013 15:
40:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
14890 <description><p
>One thing that annoys me with Debian and Linux distributions in
14891 general, is that there is a great package management system with the
14892 ability to automatically install software packages by downloading them
14893 from the distribution mirrors, but no way to get it to automatically
14894 install the packages I need to use the hardware I plug into my
14895 machine. Even if the package to use it is easily available from the
14896 Linux distribution. When I plug in a LEGO Mindstorms NXT, it could
14897 suggest to automatically install the python-nxt, nbc and t2n packages
14898 I need to talk to it. When I plug in a Yubikey, it could propose the
14899 yubikey-personalization package. The information required to do this
14900 is available, but no-one have pulled all the pieces together.
</p
>
14902 <p
>Some years ago, I proposed to
14903 <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/
2010/
05/msg01206.html
">use
14904 the discover subsystem to implement this
</a
>. The idea is fairly
14909 <li
>Add a desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ pointing to a program
14910 starting when a user log in.
</li
>
14912 <li
>Set this program up to listen for kernel events emitted when new
14913 hardware is inserted into the computer.
</li
>
14915 <li
>When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware ID in a
14916 database mapping to packages, and take note of any non-installed
14917 packages.
</li
>
14919 <li
>Show a message to the user proposing to install the discovered
14920 package, and make it easy to install it.
</li
>
14924 <p
>I am not sure what the best way to implement this is, but my
14925 initial idea was to use dbus events to discover new hardware, the
14926 discover database to find packages and
14927 <a href=
"http://www.packagekit.org/
">PackageKit
</a
> to install
14928 packages.
</p
>
14930 <p
>Yesterday, I found time to try to implement this idea, and the
14931 draft package is now checked into
14932 <a href=
"http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/
">the
14933 Debian Edu subversion repository
</a
>. In the process, I updated the
14934 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover-data.html
">discover-data
</a
>
14935 package to map the USB ids of LEGO Mindstorms and Yubikey devices to
14936 the relevant packages in Debian, and uploaded a new version
14937 2.2013.01.09 to unstable. I also discovered that the current
14938 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover.html
">discover
</a
>
14939 package in Debian no longer discovered any USB devices, because
14940 /proc/bus/usb/devices is no longer present. I ported it to use
14941 libusb as a fall back option to get it working. The fixed package
14942 version
2.1.2-
6 is now in experimental (didn
't upload it to unstable
14943 because of the freeze).
</p
>
14945 <p
>With this prototype in place, I can insert my Yubikey, and get this
14946 desktop notification to show up (only once, the first time it is
14947 inserted):
</p
>
14949 <p align=
"center
"><img src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
01-
09-hw-autoinstall.png
"></p
>
14951 <p
>For this prototype to be really useful, some way to automatically
14952 install the proposed packages by pressing the
"Please install
14953 program(s)
" button should to be implemented.
</p
>
14955 <p
>If this idea seem useful to you, and you want to help make it
14956 happen, please help me update the discover-data database with mappings
14957 from hardware to Debian packages. Check if
'discover-pkginstall -l
'
14958 list the package you would like to have installed when a given
14959 hardware device is inserted into your computer, and report bugs using
14960 reportbug if it isn
't. Or, if you know of a better way to provide
14961 such mapping, please let me know.
</p
>
14963 <p
>This prototype need more work, and there are several questions that
14964 should be considered before it is ready for production use. Is dbus
14965 the correct way to detect new hardware? At the moment I look for HAL
14966 dbus events on the system bus, because that is the events I could see
14967 on my Debian Squeeze KDE desktop. Are there better events to use?
14968 How should the user be notified? Is the desktop notification
14969 mechanism the best option, or should the background daemon raise a
14970 popup instead? How should packages be installed? When should they
14971 not be installed?
</p
>
14973 <p
>If you want to help getting such feature implemented in Debian,
14974 please send me an email. :)
</p
>
14979 <title>New IRC channel for LEGO designers using Debian
</title>
14980 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_IRC_channel_for_LEGO_designers_using_Debian.html
</link>
14981 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_IRC_channel_for_LEGO_designers_using_Debian.html
</guid>
14982 <pubDate>Wed,
2 Jan
2013 15:
40:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
14983 <description><p
>During Christmas, I have worked a bit on the Debian support for
14984 <a href=
"http://mindstorms.lego.com/en-us/Default.aspx
">LEGO Mindstorm
14985 NXT
</a
>. My son and I have played a bit with my NXT set, and I
14986 discovered I had to build all the tools myself because none were
14987 already in Debian Squeeze. If Debian support for LEGO is something
14988 you care about, please join me on the IRC channel
14989 <a href=
"irc://irc.debian.org/%
23debian-lego
">#debian-lego
</a
> (server
14990 irc.debian.org). There is a lot that could be done to improve the
14991 Debian support for LEGO designers. For example both CAD software
14992 and Mindstorm compilers are missing. :)
</p
>
14994 <p
>Update
2012-
01-
03: A
14995 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners
">project page
</a
>
14996 including links to Lego related packages is now available.
</p
>
15001 <title>A Christmas present for Skolelinux / Debian Edu
</title>
15002 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Christmas_present_for_Skolelinux___Debian_Edu.html
</link>
15003 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Christmas_present_for_Skolelinux___Debian_Edu.html
</guid>
15004 <pubDate>Fri,
28 Dec
2012 09:
20:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
15005 <description><p
>I was happy to discover a few days ago that the
15006 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Skolelinux / Debian Edu
</a
>
15007 project also this year received a Christmas present from Another
15008 Agency in Trondheim. NOK
1000,- showed up on our donation account
15009 December
24th. I want to express our thanks for this very welcome
15010 present. As the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project is very short on
15011 funding these days, and thus lack the money to do regular developer
15012 gatherings, this donation was most welcome. One developer gathering
15013 cost around NOK
15&nbsp;
000,-, so we need quite a lot more to keep the
15014 development pace we want. Thus, I hope their example this year is
15015 followed by many others. :)
</p
>
15017 <p
>The public list of donors can be found on
15018 <a href=
"http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html
">the
15019 donation page
</a
> for the project, which also contain instructions if
15020 you want to donate to the project.
</p
>
15025 <title>How to backport bitcoin-qt version
0.7.2-
2 to Debian Squeeze
</title>
15026 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_backport_bitcoin_qt_version_0_7_2_2_to_Debian_Squeeze.html
</link>
15027 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_backport_bitcoin_qt_version_0_7_2_2_to_Debian_Squeeze.html
</guid>
15028 <pubDate>Tue,
25 Dec
2012 20:
50:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
15029 <description><p
>Let me start by wishing you all marry Christmas and a happy new
15030 year! I hope next year will prove to be a good year.
</p
>
15032 <p
><a href=
"http://www.bitcoin.org/
">Bitcoin
</a
>, the digital
15033 decentralised
"currency
" that allow people to transfer bitcoins
15034 between each other with minimal overhead, is a very interesting
15035 experiment. And as I wrote a few days ago, the bitcoin situation in
15036 <a href=
"http://www.debian.org/
">Debian
</a
> is about to improve a bit.
15037 The
<a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin
">new debian source
15038 package
</a
> (version
0.7.2-
2) was uploaded yesterday, and is waiting
15039 in
<a href=
"http://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html
">the NEW queue
</A
>
15040 for one of the ftpmasters to approve the new bitcoin-qt package
15043 <p
>And thanks to the great work of Jonas and the rest of the bitcoin
15044 team in Debian, you can easily test the package in Debian Squeeze
15045 using the following steps to get a set of working packages:
</p
>
15047 <blockquote
><pre
>
15048 git clone git://git.debian.org/git/collab-maint/bitcoin
15050 DEB_MAINTAINER_MODE=
1 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp fakeroot debian/rules clean
15051 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp git-buildpackage --git-ignore-new
15052 </pre
></blockquote
>
15054 <p
>You might have to install some build dependencies as well. The
15055 list of commands should give you two packages, bitcoind and
15056 bitcoin-qt, ready for use in a Squeeze environment. Note that the
15057 client will download the complete set of bitcoin
"blocks
", which need
15058 around
5.6 GiB of data on my machine at the moment. Make sure your
15059 ~/.bitcoin/ directory have lots of spare room if you want to download
15060 all the blocks. The client will warn if the disk is getting full, so
15061 there is not really a problem if you got too little room, but you will
15062 not be able to get all the features out of the client.
</p
>
15064 <p
>As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
15065 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
15066 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
15071 <title>A word on bitcoin support in Debian
</title>
15072 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_word_on_bitcoin_support_in_Debian.html
</link>
15073 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_word_on_bitcoin_support_in_Debian.html
</guid>
15074 <pubDate>Fri,
21 Dec
2012 23:
59:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
15075 <description><p
>It has been a while since I wrote about
15076 <a href=
"http://www.bitcoin.org/
">bitcoin
</a
>, the decentralised
15077 peer-to-peer based crypto-currency, and the reason is simply that I
15078 have been busy elsewhere. But two days ago, I started looking at the
15079 state of
<a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin
">bitcoin in
15080 Debian
</a
> again to try to recover my old bitcoin wallet. The package
15081 is now maintained by a
15082 <a href=
"https://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-bitcoin/
">team of
15083 people
</a
>, and the grunt work had already been done by this team. We
15084 owe a huge thank you to all these team members. :)
15085 But I was sad to discover that the bitcoin client is missing in
15086 Wheezy. It is only available in Sid (and an outdated client from
15087 backports). The client had several RC bugs registered in BTS blocking
15088 it from entering testing. To try to help the team and improve the
15089 situation, I spent some time providing patches and triaging the bug
15090 reports. I also had a look at the bitcoin package available from Matt
15092 <a href=
"https://launchpad.net/~bitcoin/+archive/bitcoin
">PPA for
15093 Ubuntu
</a
>, and moved the useful pieces from that version into the
15094 Debian package.
</p
>
15096 <p
>After checking with the main package maintainer Jonas Smedegaard on
15097 IRC, I pushed several patches into the collab-maint git repository to
15098 improve the package. It now contains fixes for the RC issues (not from
15099 me, but fixed by Scott Howard), build rules for a Qt GUI client
15100 package, konqueror support for the bitcoin: URI and bash completion
15101 setup. As I work on Debian Squeeze, I also created
15102 <a href=
"http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-bitcoin-devel/Week-of-Mon-
20121217/
000041.html
">a
15103 patch to backport
</a
> the latest version. Jonas is going to look at
15104 it and try to integrate it into the git repository before uploading a
15105 new version to unstable.
15107 <p
>I would very much like bitcoin to succeed, to get rid of the
15108 centralized control currently exercised in the monetary system. I
15109 find it completely unacceptable that the USA government is collecting
15110 transaction data for almost all international money transfers (most are done in USD and transaction logs shipped to the spooks), and
15111 that the major credit card companies can block legal money
15112 transactions to Wikileaks. But for bitcoin to succeed, more people
15113 need to use bitcoins, and more people need to accept bitcoins when
15114 they sell products and services. Improving the bitcoin support in
15115 Debian is a small step in the right direction, but not enough.
15116 Unfortunately the user experience when browsing the web and wanting to
15117 pay with bitcoin is still not very good. The bitcoin: URI is a step
15118 in the right direction, but need to work in most or every browser in
15119 use. Also the bitcoin-qt client is too heavy to fire up to do a
15120 quick transaction. I believe there are other clients available, but
15121 have not tested them.
</p
>
15124 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html
">experiment
15125 with bitcoins
</a
> showed that at least some of my readers use bitcoin.
15126 I received
20.15 BTC so far on the address I provided in my blog two
15127 years ago, as can be
15128 <a href=
"http://blockexplorer.com/address/
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">seen
15129 on the blockexplorer service
</a
>. Thank you everyone for your
15130 donation. The blockexplorer service demonstrates quite well that
15131 bitcoin is not quite anonymous and untracked. :) I wonder if the
15132 number of users have gone up since then. If you use bitcoin and want
15133 to show your support of my activity, please send Bitcoin donations to
15134 the same address as last time,
15135 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
15140 <title>Ledger - double-entry accounting using text based storage format
</title>
15141 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ledger___double_entry_accounting_using_text_based_storage_format.html
</link>
15142 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ledger___double_entry_accounting_using_text_based_storage_format.html
</guid>
15143 <pubDate>Tue,
18 Dec
2012 23:
30:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
15144 <description><p
>A few days ago I came across
15145 <a href=
"http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/hledger/
">a blog post from Joey
15146 Hess
</a
> describing
<a href=
"http://ledger-cli.org/
">ledger
</a
> and
15147 hledger, a text based system for double-entry accounting. I found it
15148 interesting, as I am involved with several organizations where
15149 accounting is an issue, and I have not really become too friendly with
15150 the different web based systems we use. I find it hard to find what I
15151 look for in the menus and even harder try to get sensible data out of
15152 the systems. Ledger seem different. The accounting data is kept in
15153 text files that can be stored in a version control system, and there
15155 are at least
<a href=
"https://github.com/ledger/ledger/wiki/Ports
">five
15156 different implementations
</a
> able to read the format. An example
15157 entry look like this, and is simple enough that it will be trivial to
15158 generate entries based on CVS files fetched from the bank:
</p
>
15160 <blockquote
><pre
>
15161 2004-
05-
27 Book Store
15162 Expenses:Books $
20.00
15164 </pre
></blockquote
>
15166 <p
>The concept seemed interesting enough for me to check it out and
15167 look for others using it. I found blog posts from
15168 <a href=
"http://blog.spang.cc/posts/hledger_rocks_my_world/
">Christine
15170 <a href=
"http://bugsplat.info/
2010-
05-
23-keeping-finances-with-ledger.html
">Pete
15172 <a href=
"http://blog.andrewcantino.com/blog/
2010/
11/
06/command-line-accounting-with-ledger-and-reckon/
">Andrew
15173 Cantino
</a
> and
15174 <a href=
"http://blog.iphoting.com/blog/
2012/
11/
29/command-line-double-entry-accounting/
">Ronald
15175 Ip
</a
> describing how they use it, as well as a post from
15176 <a href=
"https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/ledger-cli/r0oWjwbQ9Bo
">Bradley
15177 M. Kuhn
</a
> at the Software Freedom Conservancy. All seemed like good
15178 recommendations fitting my need.
</p
>
15180 <p
>The
<a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/l/ledger.html
">ledger
</a
>
15181 package is available in Debian Squeeze, while the
15182 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/h/haskell-hledger.html
">hledger
</a
>
15183 package only is available in Debian Sid. As I use Squeeze, ledger
15184 seemed the best choice to get started.
</p
>
15186 <p
>To get some real data to test on, I wrote a
15187 <a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/tools/lodo2ledger
">web scraper
</a
> for
15188 <a href=
"http://www.lodo.no/
">LODO
</a
>, the accounting system used by
15189 the
<a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/
">NUUG
</a
> association, and started to
15190 play with the data set. I
'm not really deeply into accounting, but I
15191 am able to get a simple balance and accounting status for example
15192 using the
"<tt
>ledger balance
</tt
>" command. But I will have to
15193 gather more experience before I know if the ledger way is a good fit
15194 for the organisations I am involved in.
</p
>
15199 <title>Scripting the Cerebrum/bofhd user administration system using XML-RPC
</title>
15200 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Scripting_the_Cerebrum_bofhd_user_administration_system_using_XML_RPC.html
</link>
15201 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Scripting_the_Cerebrum_bofhd_user_administration_system_using_XML_RPC.html
</guid>
15202 <pubDate>Thu,
6 Dec
2012 10:
30:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
15203 <description><p
>Where I work at the
<a href=
"http://www.uio.no/
">University of
15204 Oslo
</a
>, we use the
15205 <a href=
"http://sourceforge.net/projects/cerebrum/
">Cerebrum user
15206 administration system
</a
> to maintain users, groups, DNS, DHCP, etc.
15207 I
've known since the system was written that the server is providing
15208 an
<a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML-RPC
">XML-RPC
</a
> API, but
15209 I have never spent time to try to figure out how to use it, as we
15210 always use the bofh command line client at work. Until today. I want
15211 to script the updating of DNS and DHCP to make it easier to set up
15212 virtual machines. Here are a few notes on how to use it with
15215 <p
>I started by looking at the source of the Java
15216 <a href=
"http://cerebrum.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/cerebrum/trunk/cerebrum/clients/jbofh/
">bofh
15217 client
</a
>, to figure out how it connected to the API server. I also
15218 googled for python examples on how to use XML-RPC, and found
15219 <a href=
"http://tldp.org/HOWTO/XML-RPC-HOWTO/xmlrpc-howto-python.html
">a
15220 simple example in
</a
> the XML-RPC howto.
</p
>
15222 <p
>This simple example code show how to connect, get the list of
15223 commands (as a JSON dump), and how to get the information about the
15224 user currently logged in:
</p
>
15226 <blockquote
><pre
>
15227 #!/usr/bin/env python
15230 server_url =
'https://cerebrum-uio.uio.no:
8000';
15231 username = getpass.getuser()
15232 password = getpass.getpass()
15233 server = xmlrpclib.Server(server_url);
15234 #print server.get_commands(sessionid)
15235 sessionid = server.login(username, password)
15236 print server.run_command(sessionid,
"user_info
", username)
15237 result = server.logout(sessionid)
15239 </pre
></blockquote
>
15241 <p
>Armed with this knowledge I can now move forward and script the DNS
15242 and DHCP updates I wanted to do.
</p
>
15247 <title>Why isn
't the value of copyright taxed?
</title>
15248 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_isn_t_the_value_of_copyright_taxed_.html
</link>
15249 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_isn_t_the_value_of_copyright_taxed_.html
</guid>
15250 <pubDate>Sat,
17 Nov
2012 11:
30:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
15251 <description><p
>While working on a
15252 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig
">Norwegian
15253 translation of the Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig
</a
> (
76% done),
15254 which cover the problems with todays copyright law and how it stifles
15255 creativity, one idea occurred to me. The idea is to get the tax
15256 office to help make more works enter the public domain and also help
15257 make it easier to clear rights for using copyrighted works.
</p
>
15259 <p
>I mentioned this idea briefly during Yesterdays
15260 <a href=
"http://www.farmann.no/
2012/
11/
14/john-perry-barlow-in-oslo-friday-nov-
16
15261 -
15-
30-
19-
00/
">presentation
15262 by John Perry Barlow
</a
>, and concluded that it was best to put it
15263 in writing for a wider audience. The idea is not really based on the
15264 argument that copyrighted works are
"intellectual property
", as the
15265 core requirement is that copyrighted work have value for the copyright
15266 holder and the tax office like to collect their share from any value
15267 controlled by the citizens in a country. I
'm sharing the idea here to
15268 let others consider it and perhaps shoot it down with a fresh set of
15269 arguments.
</p
>
15271 <p
>Most valuables are taxed by the government. At least here in
15272 Norway, the amount of money you have, the value of our land property,
15273 the value of your house, the value of your car, the value of our
15274 stocks and other valuables are all added together. If the tax value
15275 of these values exceed your debt, you have to pay the tax office some
15276 taxes for these values. And copyrighted work have value. It have
15277 value for the rights holder, who can earn money selling access to the
15278 work. But it is not included in the tax calculations? Why not?
</p
>
15280 <p
>If the government want to tax copyrighted works, it would want to
15281 maintain a database of all the copyrighted works and who are the
15282 rights holders for a given works, to be able to associate the works
15283 value to the right citizen or company for tax purposes. If such
15284 database exist, it will become a lot easier to find out who to talk to
15285 for clearing permissions to use a copyrighted work, which is a very
15286 hard operation with todays copyright law. To ensure that copyright
15287 holders keep the database up-to-date, it would have to become a
15288 requirement to be able to collect money for granting access to
15289 copyrighted works that the work is listed in the database with the
15290 correct right holder.
</p
>
15292 <p
>If copyright causes copyright holders to have to pay more taxes,
15293 they will have a small incentive to
"disown
" their copyright, and let
15294 the work enter the public domain. For works with several right holders
15295 one of the right holders could state (and get it registered in the
15296 database) that she do not need to be consulted when clearing rights to
15297 use the work in question and thus will not get any income from that
15298 work. Stating this would have to be impossible to revert and stop the
15299 tax office from adding the value of that work to the given citizens
15300 tax calculation. I assume the copyright law would stay the same,
15301 allowing creators to pick a license of their choosing, and also
15302 allowing them to put their work directly in the public domain. The
15303 existence of such database will make it even easier to clear rights,
15304 and if the right holders listed in the database is taxed, this system
15305 would increase the amount of works that enter the public domain.
</p
>
15307 <p
>The effect would be that the tax office help to make it easier to
15308 get rights to use the works that have not yet entered the public
15309 domain and help to get more work into the public domain.
</p
>
15311 <p
>Why have such taxing not happened yet? I am sure the tax office
15312 would like to tax copyrighted work values if they could.
</p
>
15317 <title>Debian Edu interview: Angela Fuß
</title>
15318 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Angela_Fu_.html
</link>
15319 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Angela_Fu_.html
</guid>
15320 <pubDate>Wed,
14 Nov
2012 21:
30:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
15321 <description><p
>Here is another interview with one of the people in the
<a
15322 href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu and Skolelinux
</a
>
15323 community. I am running short on people willing to be interviewed, so
15324 if you know about someone I should interview, Please send me an email.
15325 After asking for many months, I finally managed to lure another one of
15326 the people behind the German
15327 "<a href=
"http://wiki.it-zukunft-schule.de/
">IT-Zukunft Schule
</a
>"
15328 project out from maternity leave to conduct an interview. Give a warm
15329 welcome to Angela Fuß. :)
</p
>
15331 <p
><strong
>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
</strong
></p
>
15333 <p
>I am a
39-year-old woman living in the very north of Germany near
15334 Denmark. I live in a patchwork family with
"my man
" Mike Gabriel, my
15335 two daughters, Mikes daughter and Mikes and my rather newborn son.
15337 <p
>At the moment - because of our little baby - I am spending most of
15338 the day by being a caring and organising mom for all the kids.
15339 Besides that I am really involved into and occupied with several inner
15340 growth processes: New born souls always bring the whole familiar
15341 system into movement and that needs time and focus ;-). We are also
15342 in the middle of buying a house and moving to it.
</p
>
15344 <p
>In
2013 I will work again in my job in a German foundation for
15345 nature conservation. I am doing public relation work there. Besides
15346 that - and that is the connection to Skolelinux / Debian Edu - I am
15347 working in our own school project
"IT-Zukunft Schule
" in North
15348 Germany. I am responsible for the quality assurance, the customer
15349 relationship management and the communication processes in the
15352 <p
>Since
2001 I constantly have been training myself in communication
15353 and leadership. Besides that I am a forester, a landscaping gardener
15354 and a yoga teacher.
</p
>
15356 <p
><strong
>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
15357 project?
</strong
></p
>
15359 <p
>I fell in love with Mike ;-).
</p
>
15361 <p
>Very soon after getting to know him I was completely enrolled into
15362 Free Software. At this time Mike did IT-services for one newly
15363 founded school in Kiel. Other schools in Kiel needed concepts for
15364 their IT environment. Often when Mike came home from working at the
15365 newly founded school I found myself listening to his complaints about
15366 several points where the communication with the schools head or the
15367 teachers did not work. So we were clear that he would not work for
15368 one more school if we did not set up a structure for communication
15369 between him, the schools head, the teachers, the students and the
15372 <p
>Together with our friend and hardware supplier Andreas Buchholz we
15373 started to get an overview of free software solutions suitable for
15374 schools. One day before Christmas
2010 Mike and I had a date with Kurt
15375 Gramlich in Gütersloh. As Kurt and I are really interested in building
15376 networks of people and in being in communication we dived into
15377 Skolelinux and brought it to the first grammar schools in Northern
15380 <p
>For information about our school project you can read
15381 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Mike_Gabriel.html
">the
15382 interview with Mike Gabriel
</a
>.
</p
>
15384 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
15385 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
15387 <p
>First I have to say: I cannot answer this question technically. My
15388 answer comes rather from a social point of view.
</p
>
15390 <p
>The biggest advantage of Skolelinux / Debian Edu I see is the large
15391 and strong international community of Debian Developers in the
15392 background which is very alive and connected over mailinglists, blogs
15393 and meetings. My constant feeling for the Debian Community is: If
15394 something does not work they will somehow fix it. All is well
15395 ;-). This is of course a user experience. What I also get as a big
15396 advantage of Skolelinux / Debian Edu is that everybody who uses it and
15397 works with it can also contribute to it - that includes students,
15398 teachers, parents...
</p
>
15400 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
15401 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
15403 <p
>I will answer this question relating to the internal structure of
15404 Skolelinux / Debian Edu.
</p
>
15406 <p
>What I see as a major disadvantage is that there is a gap between
15407 the group of developers for Debian Edu and the people who make the
15408 marketing, that means the people that bring Skolelinux to the
15409 schools. There is a lack of communication between these two groups and
15410 I think that does not really work for Skolelinux / Debian Edu.
</p
>
15412 <p
>Further I appreciate that Skolelinux / Debian Edu is known as a
15413 do-ocracy. Nevertheless I keep asking myself if at some points a
15414 democracy or some kind of hierarchical project structure would be good
15415 and helpful. I am also missing some kind of contact between the
15416 Skolelinux / Debian Edu communities in Europe or on an international
15417 level. I think it would be good if there was more sharing between the
15418 different countries using Skolelinux / Debian Edu.
</p
>
15420 <p
><strong
>Which free software do you use daily?
</strong
></p
>
15422 <p
>On my laptop I am still using an Ubuntu
10.04 with a Gnome Desktop
15423 on. As applications I use Openoffice.org, Gedit, Firefox, Pidgin,
15424 LaTeX and GnuCash. For mails I am using Horde. And I am really fond of
15425 my N900 running with Maemo.
</p
>
15427 <p
><strong
>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
15428 get schools to use free software?
</strong
></p
>
15430 <p
>I am really convinced that in our school project
"IT-Zukunft
15431 Schule
" we have developed (and keep developing) a great way to get
15432 schools to use Free Software. We have written a detailed concept for
15433 that so I cannot explain the whole thing here. But in a nutshell the
15434 strategy has three crucial pillars:
</p
>
15438 <li
>We really take time to get what sort of stories, questions and
15439 concerns the schools head and the teachers have about using different
15440 kinds of IT and we take time to enrol them into Free Software.
</li
>
15442 <li
>Our solution for schools is never just technical. In the centre
15443 are always the people who are going to use the software. From the very
15444 beginning of the planning for a school, we tell the schools head that
15445 they are paying us not only for a technical solution for their school,
15446 they also pay us for leading all the communication processes
15447 needed. If they do not want that, we are not working with them because
15448 we cannot give a guarantee for the quality of our work then.
</li
>
15450 <li
>Another focus lies in the training of teachers and students in
15451 co-administrating the IT-System at their school. They start getting in
15452 contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu community and they get the
15453 offer to become more and more independent from us.
</li
>
15460 <title>The European Central Bank (ECB) take a look at bitcoin
</title>
15461 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_European_Central_Bank__ECB__take_a_look_at_bitcoin.html
</link>
15462 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_European_Central_Bank__ECB__take_a_look_at_bitcoin.html
</guid>
15463 <pubDate>Sun,
4 Nov
2012 08:
30:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
15464 <description><p
>Slashdot just ran a story about the European Central Bank (ECB)
15465 <a href=
"http://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/other/virtualcurrencyschemes201210en.pdf
">releasing
15466 a report (PDF)
</a
> about virtual currencies and
15467 <a href=
"http://www.bitcoin.org/
">bitcoin
</a
>. It is interesting to
15468 see how a member of the bitcoin community
15469 <a href=
"http://blog.bitinstant.com/blog/
2012/
10/
30/the-ecb-report-on-bitcoin-and-virtual-currencies.html
">receive
15470 the report
</a
>. As for the future, I suspect the central banks and
15471 the governments will outlaw bitcoin if it gain any popularity, to avoid
15472 competition. My thoughts go to the
15473 <a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wörgl
">Wörgl experiment
</a
> with
15474 negative inflation on cash which was such a success that it was
15475 terminated by the Austrian National Bank in
1933. A successful
15476 alternative would be a threat to the current money system and gain
15477 powerful forces to work against it.
</p
>
15479 <p
>While checking out the current status of bitcoin, I also discovered
15480 that the community already seem to have
15481 <a href=
"http://www.theverge.com/
2012/
8/
27/
3271637/bitcoin-savings-trust-pyramid-scheme-shuts-down
">experienced
15482 its first pyramid game / Ponzi scheme
</a
>. Not very surprising, given
15483 how members of
"small
" communities tend to trust each other. I guess
15484 enterprising crocks will try again and again, as they do anywhere
15485 wealth is available.
</p
>
15490 <title>12 years of outages - summarised by Stuart Kendrick
</title>
15491 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/
12_years_of_outages___summarised_by_Stuart_Kendrick.html
</link>
15492 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/
12_years_of_outages___summarised_by_Stuart_Kendrick.html
</guid>
15493 <pubDate>Fri,
26 Oct
2012 14:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
15494 <description><p
>I work at the
<a href=
"http://www.uio.no/
">University of Oslo
</a
>
15495 looking after the computers, mostly on the unix side, but in general
15496 all over the place. I am also a member (and currently leader) of
15497 <a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/
">the NUUG association
</a
>, which in turn
15498 make me a member of
<a href=
"http://www.usenix.org/
">USENIX
</a
>. NUUG
15499 is an member organisation for us in Norway interested in free
15500 software, open standards and unix like operating systems, and USENIX
15501 is a US based member organisation with similar targets. And thanks to
15502 these memberships, I get all issues of the great USENIX magazine
15503 <a href=
"https://www.usenix.org/publications/login
">;login:
</a
> in the
15504 mail several times a year. The magazine is great, and I read most of
15505 it every time.
</p
>
15507 <p
>In the last issue of the USENIX magazine ;login:, there is an
15508 article by
<a href=
"http://www.skendric.com/
">Stuart Kendrick
</a
> from
15509 Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center titled
15510 "<a href=
"https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/october-
2012-volume-
37-number-
5/what-takes-us-down
">What
15511 Takes Us Down
</a
>" (longer version also
15512 <a href=
"http://www.skendric.com/problem/incident-analysis/
2012-
06-
30/What-Takes-Us-Down.pdf
">available
15513 from his own site
</a
>), where he report what he found when he
15514 processed the outage reports (both planned and unplanned) from the
15515 last twelve years and classified them according to cause, time of day,
15516 etc etc. The article is a good read to get some empirical data on
15517 what kind of problems affect a data centre, but what really inspired
15518 me was the kind of reporting they had put in place since
2000.
<p
>
15520 <p
>The centre set up a mailing list, and started to send fairly
15521 standardised messages to this list when a outage was planned or when
15522 it already occurred, to announce the plan and get feedback on the
15523 assumtions on scope and user impact. Here is the two example from the
15524 article: First the unplanned outage:
15526 <blockquote
><pre
>
15527 Subject: Exchange
2003 Cluster Issues
15528 Severity: Critical (Unplanned)
15529 Start: Monday, May
7,
2012,
11:
58
15530 End: Monday, May
7,
2012,
12:
38
15531 Duration:
40 minutes
15532 Scope: Exchange
2003
15533 Description: The HTTPS service on the Exchange cluster crashed, triggering
15534 a cluster failover.
15536 User Impact: During this period, all Exchange users were unable to
15537 access e-mail. Zimbra users were unaffected.
15539 </pre
></blockquote
>
15541 Next the planned outage:
15543 <blockquote
><pre
>
15544 Subject: H Building Switch Upgrades
15545 Severity: Major (Planned)
15546 Start: Saturday, June
16,
2012,
06:
00
15547 End: Saturday, June
16,
2012,
16:
00
15549 Scope: H2 Transport
15550 Description: Currently, Catalyst
4006s provide
10/
100 Ethernet to end-
15551 stations. We will replace these with newer Catalyst
15553 User Impact: All users on H2 will be isolated from the network during
15554 this work. Afterward, they will have gigabit
15557 </pre
></blockquote
>
15559 <p
>He notes in his article that the date formats and other fields have
15560 been a bit too free form to make it easy to automatically process them
15561 into a database for further analysis, and I would have used ISO
8601
15562 dates myself to make it easier to process (in other words I would ask
15563 people to write
'2012-
06-
16 06:
00 +
0000' instead of the start time
15564 format listed above). There are also other issues with the format
15565 that could be improved, read the article for the details.
</p
>
15567 <p
>I find the idea of standardising outage messages seem to be such a
15568 good idea that I would like to get it implemented here at the
15569 university too. We do register
15570 <a href=
"http://www.uio.no/tjenester/it/aktuelt/planlagte-tjenesteavbrudd/
">planned
15571 changes and outages in a calendar
</a
>, and report the to a mailing
15572 list, but we do not do so in a structured format and there is not a
15573 report to the same location for unplanned outages. Perhaps something
15574 for other sites to consider too?
</p
>
15579 <title>Amazon steal books from customer and throw out her out without any explanation
</title>
15580 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Amazon_steal_books_from_customer_and_throw_out_her_out_without_any_explanation.html
</link>
15581 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Amazon_steal_books_from_customer_and_throw_out_her_out_without_any_explanation.html
</guid>
15582 <pubDate>Mon,
22 Oct
2012 20:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
15583 <description><p
>A blog post from Martin Bekkelund today tell the story of
15584 <a href=
"http://www.bekkelund.net/
2012/
10/
22/outlawed-by-amazon-drm/
">how
15585 Amazon erased the books from a customer
's kindle, locked the account
15586 and refuse to tell the customer why
</a
>. If a real book store did
15587 this to a customer, it would be called breaking into private property
15588 and theft. The story has spread around the net today. A bit more
15589 background information is available in Norwegian from
15590 <a href=
"http://www.digi.no/
904658/hun-ble-kastet-ut-av-amazon
">digi.no
</a
>.
15591 It is no surprise that digital restriction mechanisms (DRM) are used
15592 this way, as it has been warned about such abuse since DRM was
15593 introduced many years back. And Amazon proved in
2009 that it was
15595 <a href=
"http://boingboing.net/
2009/
07/
20/amazons-orwellian-de.html
">
15596 break into customers equipment and remove the books
</a
> people had
15597 bought, when it removed the book
1984 by George Orwell from all the
15598 customers who had bought it. From the official comments, it even
15600 <a href=
"http://www.nytimes.com/
2009/
07/
18/technology/companies/
18amazon.html
">Amazon
15601 would never do that again
</a
>. And here we are, three years
15604 <p
>And thought this action is
15605 <a href=
"http://www.itavisen.no/
904648/forbrukerraadet-helt-haarreisende
">against
15606 Norwegian regulations and law
</a
>, it is according to the terms of use
15607 as written by Amazon, and it is hard to hold Amazon accountable to
15608 Norwegian laws. It is just yet another example of unacceptable terms
15609 of use on the web, and how they are used to remove customer
15612 <p
>Luckily for electronic books, there are alternatives without
15613 unacceptable terms. For example
15614 <a href=
"http://www.gutenberg.org/
">Project Gutenberg
</a
> (about
40,
000
15615 books),
<a href=
"http://runeberg.org/
">Project Runenberg
</a
> (
1,
652
15616 books) and
<a href=
"http://www.archive.org/details/texts
">The Internet
15617 Archive
</a
> (
3,
641,
797 books) have heaps of books without DRM, which
15618 can read by anyone and shared with anyone.
</p
>
15620 <p
>Update
2012-
10-
23: This story broke in the morning on Monday. In
15621 the evening after the story had spread all across the Internet, Amazon
15622 restored the account of the user, as reported by
15623 <a href=
"http://www.digi.no/
904675/helomvending-fra-amazon
">digi.no
</a
>
15624 and
<a href=
"http://nrk.no/kultur-og-underholdning/
1.8368487">NRK
</a
>.
15625 Apparently public pressure work. The story from Martin have seen
15626 several twitter messages per minute the last
24 hours, which is quite
15627 a lot, and is still drawing a lot of attention. But even when the
15628 account is restored, the fundamental problem still exist. I recommend
15629 reading two opinions from
15630 <a href=
"http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/
2012/
10/rights-you-have-no-right-to-your-ebooks/index.htm
">Simon
15631 Phipps
</a
> and
15632 <a href=
"http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/
2012/
10/is-amazon-playing-fair/index.htm
">Glen
15633 Moody
</a
> if you want to learn more about the fundamentals and more
15634 details about the original story.
</p
>
15639 <title>The fight for freedom and privacy
</title>
15640 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_fight_for_freedom_and_privacy.html
</link>
15641 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_fight_for_freedom_and_privacy.html
</guid>
15642 <pubDate>Thu,
18 Oct
2012 10:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
15643 <description><p
>Civil liberties and privacy in the western world are going down the
15644 drain, and it is hard to fight against it. I try to do my best, but
15645 time is limited. I hope you do your best too. A few years ago I came
15646 across a marvellous drawing by
15647 <a href=
"http://www.claybennett.com/about.html
">Clay Bennett
</a
>
15648 visualising some of what is going on.
15650 <p
><a href=
"http://www.claybennett.com/pages/security_fence.html
">
15651 <img src=
"http://www.claybennett.com/images/archivetoons/security_fence.jpg
"></a
></p
>
15654 «They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
15655 safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.» - Benjamin Franklin
15656 </blockquote
>
15658 <p
>Do you feel safe at the airport? I do not. Do you feel safe when
15659 you see a surveillance camera? I do not. Do you feel safe when you
15660 leave electronic traces of your behaviour and opinions? I do not. I
15661 just remember
<a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon
">the
15662 Panopticon
</a
>, and can not help to think that we are slowly
15663 transforming our society to a huge Panopticon on our own.
</p
>
15668 <title>ColonHelp produser sue WordPress to silence critic
</title>
15669 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ColonHelp_produser_sue_WordPress_to_silence_critic.html
</link>
15670 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ColonHelp_produser_sue_WordPress_to_silence_critic.html
</guid>
15671 <pubDate>Fri,
12 Oct
2012 23:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
15672 <description><p
>Thanks to a blog post by
15673 <a href=
"http://ramblingfoo.blogspot.no/
2012/
10/a-shitstorm-is-comming.html
">Eddy
15674 Petrișor
</a
>, I became aware of yet another
"alternative medicine
"
15675 company using legal intimidation tactics to scare off critics.
15676 According to the originating blog post about the detox
"cure
"
15677 <a href=
"http://insulaindoielii.wordpress.com/
2012/
10/
11/colon-help-sues-wordpress/
">ColonHelp
15678 and its producers Zenyth Pharmaceuticals actions
</a
>, the producer
15679 sues Wordpress to get rid of the critical information. To check if
15680 the story was for real, I contacted Automattic, the company behind
15681 wordpress.com, and they reply was
"We can confirm that Zenyth is
15682 seeking a court order against WordPress / Automattic. However, we
15683 don
't believe the Terms of Service have been violated in this
15684 matter
".
</p
>
15686 <p
>The story seem to be simply that a blogger checked the scientific
15687 foundation for a popular health product in Rumania, ColonHelp, and
15688 reported that there was no reason at all to believe it improved the
15689 health of its users. This caused the company behind the product,
15690 Zenyth Pharmaceuticals, to use legal intimidation to try to silence
15691 the critic, instead of presenting its views and scientific foundation
15692 to argue its side.
</p
>
15694 <p
>This is the usual story, and the Zenyth Pharmaceuticals company
15695 deserve everyone to know how it failed to act properly. Lets hope the
15696 <a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
">Streisand
15697 effect
</a
> can make it rethink its strategy.
</p
>
15699 <p
>What is the harm, you might think. I suggest you take a look at
15700 <a href=
"http://www.whatstheharm.net/detoxification.html
">a list of
15701 victims of detoxification
</a
>.
</p
>
15706 <title>Why is your local library collecting the
"wrong
" computer books?
</title>
15707 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_is_your_local_library_collecting_the__wrong__computer_books_.html
</link>
15708 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_is_your_local_library_collecting_the__wrong__computer_books_.html
</guid>
15709 <pubDate>Wed,
3 Oct
2012 10:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
15710 <description><p
>I just read the blog post from Tim Retout
15711 <a href=
"http://retout.co.uk/blog/
2012/
10/
02/the-library-challenge
">about
15712 the computer science book collection available in his local
15713 library
</a
>, and just wanted to share my comment on his theory about
15714 computer books becoming obsolete so soon. That is part of the reason
15715 why the selection is so sad in almost any local library (it is in mine
15716 too), but I believe the major contributing factor is that the people
15717 buying books to the library have no way to know a good and future
15718 computer classic from trash. And they need to know which one will
15719 become a classic in the future, as they would normally buy one of the
15720 recently published books.
</p
>
15722 <p
>During my university years, I worked for a while at the university
15723 library, and even there the person in charge of buying computer
15724 related books (and in fact any natural science related book), did not
15725 know enough about computers to make a good educated guess. Once, just
15726 before Christmas, they had some leftover money on the book budget and
15727 I was asked if I could pick out a lot of computer books in the
15728 university book store, for the library to buy for their collection. I
15729 had a great time picking all the books I dreamt of buying and reading,
15730 and the books I knew were classics (like most of the
15731 <a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Richard_Stevens
">Stevens
15732 collection
</a
>). I picked several of the generic O
'Reilly books (ie
15733 documenting protocols, formats and systems, not specific versions of
15734 products) and stayed away from the
'teach yourself X in N days
' class.
15735 I had a great time, and probably picked out more than a hundred books
15736 for the library that evening.
</p
>
15738 <p
>The sad fact is that there is no way a overworked librarian is
15739 going to know that for example
15740 <a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Practice_of_Programming
">The
15741 Practice of Programming
</a
> is a must-have in any computer library,
15742 and they will most of the time end up picking the wrong books to buy.
15743 Perhaps you can help your local library make better choices by giving
15744 the suggestions for books to get? I know they would love to hear from
15745 you, even if their budget might block them from getting your favourite
15746 book right away.
</p
>
15751 <title>Seventy percent done with Norwegian docbook version of Free Culture
</title>
15752 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Seventy_percent_done_with_Norwegian_docbook_version_of_Free_Culture.html
</link>
15753 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Seventy_percent_done_with_Norwegian_docbook_version_of_Free_Culture.html
</guid>
15754 <pubDate>Sun,
23 Sep
2012 09:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
15755 <description><p
>Since this summer, I have worked in my spare time on a Norwegian
<a
15756 href=
"http://www.docbook.org/
">docbook
</a
> version of the
2004 book
<a
15757 href=
"http://free-culture.cc/
">Free Culture
</a
> by Lawrence Lessig.
15758 The reason is that this book is a great primer on what problems exist
15759 in the current copyright laws, and I want it to be available also for
15760 those that are reluctant do read an English book.
15763 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html
">called
15764 for volunteers
</a
> to help me, but too few have volunteered so far,
15765 and progress is a bit slow. Anyway, today I broken the
70 percent
15766 mark for the first rough translation. At the moment, less than
700
15767 strings (paragraphs, index terms, titles) are left to translate. With
15768 my current progress of
10-
20 strings per day, it will take a while to
15769 complete the translation. This graph show the updated progress:
</p
>
15771 <img width=
"80%
" align=
"center
" src=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png
">
15773 <p
>Progress have slowed down lately due to family and work
15774 commitments. If you want to help, please get in touch, and check out
15775 the project files currently available from
15776 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig
">github
</a
>.
</p
>
15778 <p
>If you are curious what the translated book currently look like,
15780 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true
">PDF
</a
>
15782 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true
">EPUB
</a
>
15783 are published on github. The HTML version is published as well, but
15784 github hand it out with MIME type text/plain, confusing browsers, so I
15785 saw no point in linking to that version.
</p
>
15790 <title>Debian Edu interview: Giorgio Pioda
</title>
15791 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Giorgio_Pioda.html
</link>
15792 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Giorgio_Pioda.html
</guid>
15793 <pubDate>Mon,
17 Sep
2012 14:
10:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
15794 <description><p
>After a long break in my row of interviews with people in the
15795 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu and Skolelinux
</a
>
15796 community, I finally found time to wrap up another. This time it is
15797 Giorgio Pioda, which showed up on the mailing list at the start of
15798 this year, asking questions and inspiring us to improve the first time
15799 administrators experience with Skolelinux. :) The interview was
15800 conduced in May, but I only found time to publish it now.
</p
>
15802 <p
><strong
>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
</strong
></p
>
15804 <p
>I have a PhD in chemistry but since several years I work as teacher
15805 in secondary (
15-
18 year old students) and tertiary (a kind of
"light
"
15806 university) schools. Five years ago I started to manage a Learning
15807 Management Service server and slowly I got more and more involved with
15808 IT.
3 years ago the graduating schools moved completely to Linux and I
15809 got the head of the IT for this. The experience collected in chemistry
15810 labs computers (for example NMR analysis of protein folding) and in
15811 the IT-courses during university where sufficient to start. Self
15812 training is anyway very important
</p
>
15814 <p
>I live in the Italian speaking part of Switzerland, and the
15815 <a href=
"http://www.spse.ch/
">SPSE school
</a
> (secondary) is a very
15816 special sport school for young people who try to became sport pro (for
15817 all sports, we have dozens of disciplines represented) and we are
15818 recognised by the Olympic Swiss Organisation.
15820 <p
><strong
>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
15821 project?
</strong
></p
>
15823 <p
>Looking for Linux / Primary Domain Controller (PDC) I found it
15824 already several years ago. But since the system was still not
15825 Kerberized and since our schools relies strongly on laptops I didn
't
15826 use it. I plan to introduce it in the next future, probably for the
15827 next school year, since the squeeze release solved this security
15830 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
15831 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
15833 <p
>Many. First of all there is a strong and living community that is
15834 very generous for help and hints. Chat help is crucial, together with
15835 the mailing list. Second. With Skolelinux you get an already well
15836 engineered platform and you don
't have to start to build up your PDC
15837 and your clients from GNU/scratch; I
've already done this once and I
15838 can tell it, it is hard. Third, since Skolelinux is a standard
15839 platform, it is way easier to educate other IT people and even if the
15840 head IT is sick another one could pick up the task without too much
15843 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
15844 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
15846 <p
>The only real problem I see is that it is a little too less
15847 flexible at client level. Debian stable is rocky and desirable, but
15848 there are many reasons that force for another choice. For example the
15849 need of new drivers for new PC, or the need for a specific OS for some
15850 devices that have specific software packages for another specific
15851 distribution (I have such a case for whiteboards that have only
15852 Ubuntu packages). Thus, I prepared compatibility packages educlient
15853 and eduroaming, hoping not to use them ;-)
</p
>
15855 <p
><strong
>Which free software do you use daily?
</strong
></p
>
15857 <p
>I have a Debian Stable PDC at school (Kerberos, NIS, NFS) with
15858 mixed Debian and Ubuntu clients. If you think that this triad
15859 combination is exotic... well I discovered right yesterday that
15860 <a href=
"http://moo.nac.uci.edu/~hjm/Perceus-Report.html
">Perceus
</a
>
15861 has the same...
</p
>
15863 <p
>For myself I run Debian wheezy/sid, but this combination is good
15864 only I you have enough competence to fix stuff for yourself, if
15865 something breaks. Daily I use texmacs, gnumeric, a little bit of R
15866 statistics, kmplot, and less frequently OpenOffice.org.
</p
>
15868 <p
><strong
>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
15869 get schools to use free software?
</strong
></p
>
15871 <P
>I think that the only real argument that school managers
"hear
" is
15872 cost reduction. They don
't give too much weight on quality, stability,
15873 just because they are normally not open to change.
</p
>
15875 <p
>Students adapts very quickly to GNU/Linux (and for them being able
15876 to switch between different OS is a plus value); teachers and managers
15877 don
't.
</p
>
15879 <p
>We decided to move to Linux because students at our school have own
15880 laptop and we have the responsibility to keep the laptop ready to use;
15881 we were really unsatisfied with Microsoft since every Monday we had
20
15882 machine to fix for viral infections... With Linux this has been
15883 reduced to zero, since people installs almost only from official
15884 repositories. I think that our special needs brought us to Linux.
15885 Those who don
't have such needs will hardly move to Linux.
</p
>
15890 <title>IETF activity to standardise video codec
</title>
15891 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IETF_activity_to_standardise_video_codec.html
</link>
15892 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IETF_activity_to_standardise_video_codec.html
</guid>
15893 <pubDate>Sat,
15 Sep
2012 20:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
15894 <description><p
>After the
15895 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IETF_standardize_its_first_multimedia_codec__Opus.html
">Opus
15896 codec made
</a
> it into
<a href=
"http://www.ietf.org/
">IETF
</a
> as
15897 <a href=
"http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6716
">RFC
6716</a
>, I had a look
15898 to see if there is any activity in IETF to standardise a video codec
15899 too, and I was happy to discover that there is some activity in this
15900 area. A non-
"working group
" mailing list
15901 <a href=
"https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/video-codec
">video-codec
</a
>
15903 <a href=
"http://ietf
.10.n7.nabble.com/New-Non-WG-Mailing-List-video-codec-Video-codec-BoF-discussion-list-td119548.html
">created
2012-
08-
20</a
>. It is intended to discuss the topic and if a
15904 formal working group should be formed.
</p
>
15906 <p
>I look forward to see how this plays out. There is already
15907 <a href=
"http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/video-codec/current/msg00003.html
">an
15908 email from someone
</a
> in the MPEG group at ISO asking people to
15909 participate in the ISO group. Given how ISO failed with OOXML and given
15910 that it so far (as far as I can remember) only have produced
15911 multimedia formats requiring royalty payments, I suspect
15912 joining the ISO group would be a complete waste of time, but I am not
15913 involved in any codec work and my opinion will not matter much.
</p
>
15915 <p
>If one of my readers is involved with codec work, I hope she will
15916 join this work to standardise a royalty free video codec within
15922 <title>IETF standardize its first multimedia codec: Opus
</title>
15923 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IETF_standardize_its_first_multimedia_codec__Opus.html
</link>
15924 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IETF_standardize_its_first_multimedia_codec__Opus.html
</guid>
15925 <pubDate>Wed,
12 Sep
2012 13:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
15926 <description><p
>Yesterday,
<a href=
"http://www.ietf.org/
">IETF
</a
> announced the
15928 <a href=
"http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6716
">RFC
6716, the Definition
15929 of the Opus Audio Codec
</a
>, a low latency, variable bandwidth, codec
15930 intended for both VoIP, film and music. This is the first time, as
15931 far as I know, that IETF have standardized a multimedia codec. In
15932 <a href=
"http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3533
">RFC
3533</a
>, IETF
15933 standardized the OGG container format, and it has proven to be a great
15934 royalty free container for audio, video and movies. I hope IETF will
15935 continue to standardize more royalty free codeces, after ISO and MPEG
15936 have proven incapable of securing everyone equal rights to publish
15937 multimedia content on the Internet.
</p
>
15939 <p
>IETF require two interoperating independent implementations to
15940 ratify a standard, and have so far ensured to only standardize royalty
15941 free specifications. Both are key factors to allow everyone (rich and
15942 poor), to compete on equal terms on the Internet.
</p
>
15944 <p
>Visit the
<a href=
"http://opus-codec.org/
">Opus project page
</a
> if
15945 you want to learn more about the solution.
</p
>
15950 <title>Git repository for song book for Computer Scientists
</title>
15951 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Git_repository_for_song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html
</link>
15952 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Git_repository_for_song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html
</guid>
15953 <pubDate>Fri,
7 Sep
2012 13:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
15954 <description><p
>As I
15955 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html
">mentioned
15956 this summer
</a
>, I have created a Computer Science song book a few
15957 years ago, and today I finally found time to create a public
15958 <a href=
"https://gitorious.org/pere-cs-songbook/pere-cs-songbook
">Gitorious
15959 repository for the project
</a
>.
</p
>
15961 <p
>If you want to help out, please clone the source and submit patches
15962 to the HTML version. To generate the PDF and PostScript version,
15963 please use prince XML, or let me know about a useful free software
15964 processor capable of creating a good looking PDF from the HTML.
</p
>
15966 <p
>Want to sing? You can still find the song book in HTML, PDF and
15967 PostScript formats at
15968 <a href=
"http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/
">Petter
's Computer
15969 Science Songbook
</a
>.
</p
>
15974 <title>Free software forced Microsoft to open Office (and don
't forget Officeshots)
</title>
15975 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_software_forced_Microsoft_to_open_Office__and_don_t_forget_Officeshots_.html
</link>
15976 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_software_forced_Microsoft_to_open_Office__and_don_t_forget_Officeshots_.html
</guid>
15977 <pubDate>Thu,
23 Aug
2012 14:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
15978 <description><p
>I came across a great comment from Simon Phipps today, about how
15979 <a href=
"http://www.infoworld.com/d/open-source-software/how-microsoft-was-forced-open-office-
200233">Microsoft
15980 have been forced to open Office
</a
>, and it made me remember and
15981 revisit the great site
15982 <a href=
"http://www.officeshots.org/
">officeshots
</a
> which allow you
15983 to check out how different programs present the ODF file format. I
15984 recommend both to those of my readers interested in ODF. :)
</p
>
15989 <title>Half way there with translated docbook version of Free Culture
</title>
15990 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Half_way_there_with_translated_docbook_version_of_Free_Culture.html
</link>
15991 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Half_way_there_with_translated_docbook_version_of_Free_Culture.html
</guid>
15992 <pubDate>Fri,
17 Aug
2012 21:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
15993 <description><p
>In my spare time, I currently work on a Norwegian
15994 <a href=
"http://www.docbook.org/
">docbook
</a
> version of the
2004 book
15995 <a href=
"http://free-culture.cc/
">Free Culture
</a
> by Lawrence Lessig,
15996 to get a Norwegian text explaining the problems with the copyright law
15997 I can give to my parents and others that are reluctant to read an
15998 English book. It is a marvellous set of examples on how the ever
15999 expanding copyright regulations hurt culture and society. When the
16000 translation is done, I hope to find funding to print and ship a copy
16001 to all the members of the Norwegian parliament, before they sit down
16002 to debate the latest revisions to the Norwegian copyright law. This
16004 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html
">called
16005 for volunteers
</a
> to help me, and I have been able to secure the
16006 valuable contribution from at least one other Norwegian.
</p
>
16008 <p
>Two days ago, we finally broke the
50% mark. Then more than
50% of
16009 the number of strings to translate (normally paragraphs, but also
16010 titles and index entries are also counted). All parts from the
16011 beginning up to and including chapter four is translated. So is
16012 chapters six, seven and the conclusion. I created a graph to show the
16013 progress:
</p
>
16015 <img width=
"80%
" align=
"center
" src=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png
">
16017 <p
>The number of strings to translate increase as I insert the index
16018 entries into the docbook. They were missing with the docbook version
16019 I initially started with. There are still quite a few index entries
16020 missing, but everyone starting with A, B, O, Z and Y are done. I
16021 currently focus on completing the index entries, to get a complete
16022 english version of the docbook source.
</p
>
16024 <p
>There is still need for translators and people with docbook
16025 knowledge, to be able to get a good looking book (I still struggle
16026 with dblatex, xmlto and docbook-xsl) as well as to do the draft
16027 translation and proof reading. And I would like the figures to be
16028 redrawn as SVGs to make it easy to translate them. Any SVG master
16029 around? I am sure there are some legal terms that are unfamiliar to
16030 me. If you want to help, please get in touch, and check out the
16031 project files currently available from
<a
16032 href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig
">github
</a
>.
</p
>
16034 <p
>If you are curious what the translated book currently look like,
16036 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true
">PDF
</a
>
16038 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true
">EPUB
</a
>
16039 are published on github. The HTML version is published as well, but
16040 github hand it out with MIME type text/plain, confusing browsers, so I
16041 saw no point in linking to that version.
</p
>
16046 <title>Notes on language codes for Norwegian docbook processing...
</title>
16047 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Notes_on_language_codes_for_Norwegian_docbook_processing___.html
</link>
16048 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Notes_on_language_codes_for_Norwegian_docbook_processing___.html
</guid>
16049 <pubDate>Fri,
10 Aug
2012 21:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
16050 <description><p
>In
<a href=
"http://www.docbook.org/
">docbook
</a
> one can specify
16051 the language used at the top, and the processing pipeline will use
16052 this information to pick the correct translations for
'chapter
',
'see
16053 also
',
'index
' etc. And for most languages used with docbook, I guess
16054 this work just fine. For example a German user can start the document
16055 with
&lt;book lang=
"de
"&gt;, and the document will show up with the
16056 correct content with any of the docbook processors. This is not the
16057 case for the language
16058 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Culture_in_Norwegian___5_chapters_done__74_percent_left_to_do.html
">I
16059 am working with at the moment
</a
>, Norwegian Bokmål.
</p
>
16061 <p
>For a while, I was confused about which language code to use,
16062 because I was unable to find any language code that would work across
16063 all tools. I am currently testing dblatex, xmlto, docbook-xsl, and
16064 dbtoepub, and they do not handle Norwegian Bokmål the same way. Some
16065 of them do not handle it at all.
</p
>
16067 <p
>A bit of background information is probably needed to understand
16068 this mess. Norwegian is not one, but two written variants. The
16069 variants are Norwegian Nynorsk and Norwegian Bokmål. There are three
16070 two letter language codes associated with these languages, Norwegian
16071 is
'no
', Norwegian Nynorsk is
'nn
' and Norwegian Bokmål is
'nb
'.
16072 Historically the
'no
' language code was used for Norwegian Bokmål, but
16073 many years ago this was found to be å bad idea, and the recommendation
16074 is to use the most specific language code instead, to avoid confusion.
16075 In the transition period it is a good idea to make sure
'no
' was an
16076 alias for
'nb
'.
</p
>
16078 <p
>Back to docbook processing tools in Debian. The dblatex tool only
16079 understand
'nn
'. There are translations for
'no
', but not
'nb
' (BTS
16080 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
684391">#
684391</a
>), but due to a bug
16081 (BTS
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
682936">#
682936</a
>) the
'no
'
16082 language code is not recognised. The docbook-xsl tool chain only
16083 recognise
'nn
' and
'nb
', but not
'no
'. The xmlto tool only recognise
16084 'nn
' and
'nb
', but not
'no
'. The end result that there is no language
16085 code I can use to get the docbook file working with all of these tools
16086 at the same time. :(
</p
>
16088 <p
>The correct solution is to use
&lt;book lang=
"nb
"&gt;, but it will
16089 take time before that will work with all the free software docbook
16090 processors. :(
</p
>
16092 <p
>Oh, the joy of well integrated tools. :/
</p
>
16097 <title>Best way to create a docbook book?
</title>
16098 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Best_way_to_create_a_docbook_book_.html
</link>
16099 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Best_way_to_create_a_docbook_book_.html
</guid>
16100 <pubDate>Tue,
31 Jul
2012 22:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
16101 <description><p
>I tried to send this text to the
16102 <a href=
"https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-apps/
">docbook-apps
16103 mailing list at lists.oasis-open.org
</a
>, but it only accept messages
16104 from subscribers and rejected my post, and I completely lack the
16105 bandwidth required to subscribe to another mailing list, so instead I
16106 try to post my message here and hope my blog readers can help me
16109 <p
>I am quite new to docbook processing, and am climbing a steep
16110 learning curve at the moment.
</p
>
16112 <p
>To give you some background, I am working on a Norwegian
16113 translation of the book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig, and I use
16114 docbook to handle the process. The files to build the book are
16116 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig
">github
</a
>.
16117 The book got around
400 pages with parts, images, footnotes, tables,
16118 index entries etc, which has proven to be a challenge for the free
16119 software docbook processors. My build platform is Debian GNU/Linux
16122 <p
>I want to build PDF, EPUB and HTML version of the book, and have
16123 tried different tool chains to do the conversion from docbook to these
16124 formats. I am currently focusing on the PDF version, and have a few
16125 problems.
</p
>
16129 <li
>Using dblatex, the
&lt;part
&gt; handling is not the way I want to,
16130 as
&lt;/part
&gt; do not really end the
&lt;part
&gt;. (See
16131 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
683166">BTS report #
683166</a
>), the
16132 xetex backend (needed to process UTF-
8) give incorrect hyphens in
16133 index references spanning several pages (See
16134 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
682901">BTS report #
682901</a
>), and
16135 I am unable to get the norwegian template texts (See
16136 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
682936">BTS report #
682936</a
>).
</li
>
16138 <li
>Using straight xmlto fail with some latex error (See
16139 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
683163">BTS report
16140 #
683163</a
>).
</li
>
16142 <li
>Using xmlto with the fop backend fail to handle images (do not
16143 show up in the PDF), fail to handle a long footnote (overlap
16144 footnote and text body, see
16145 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
683197">BTS report #
683197</a
>), and
16146 fail to create a correct index (some lack page ref, and the page
16147 refs listed are not right).
</li
>
16149 <li
>Using xmlto with the dblatex backend behave like dblatex.
</li
>
16151 <li
>Using docbook-xls with xsltproc + fop have the same footnote and
16152 index problems the xmlto + fop processing.
</li
>
16156 <p
>So I wonder, what would be the best way to create the PDF version
16157 of this book? Are some of the bugs found above solved in new or
16158 experimental versions of some docbook tool chain?
</p
>
16160 <p
>What about HTML and EPUB versions?
</p
>
16165 <title>Free Culture in Norwegian -
5 chapters done,
74 percent left to do
</title>
16166 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Culture_in_Norwegian___5_chapters_done__74_percent_left_to_do.html
</link>
16167 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Culture_in_Norwegian___5_chapters_done__74_percent_left_to_do.html
</guid>
16168 <pubDate>Sat,
21 Jul
2012 20:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
16169 <description><p
>I reported earlier that I am working on
16170 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html
">a
16171 norwegian version
</a
> of the book
16172 <a href=
"http://free-culture.cc/
">Free Culture
</a
> by Lawrence Lessig.
16173 Progress is good, and yesterday I got a major contribution from Anders
16174 Hagen Jarmund completing chapter six. The source files as well as a
16175 PDF and EPUB version of this book are available from
16176 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig
">github
</a
>.
</p
>
16178 <p
>I am happy to report that the draft for the first two chapters
16179 (preface, introduction) is complete, and three other chapters are also
16180 completely translated. This completes
26 percent of the number of
16181 strings (equivalent to paragraphs) in the book, and there is thus
74
16182 percent left to translate. A graph of the progress is present at the
16183 bottom of the github project page. There is still room for more
16184 contributors. Get in touch or send github pull requests with fixes if
16185 you got time and are willing to help make this book make it to
16186 print. :)
</p
>
16188 <p
>The book translation framework could also be a good basis for other
16189 translations, if you want the book to be available in your
16190 language.
</p
>
16195 <title>Call for help from docbook expert to tag Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig
</title>
16196 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Call_for_help_from_docbook_expert_to_tag_Free_Culture_by_Lawrence_Lessig.html
</link>
16197 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Call_for_help_from_docbook_expert_to_tag_Free_Culture_by_Lawrence_Lessig.html
</guid>
16198 <pubDate>Mon,
16 Jul
2012 22:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
16199 <description><p
>I am currently working on a
16200 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html
">project
16201 to translate
</a
> the book
16202 <a href=
"http://free-culture.cc/
">Free Culture
</a
> by Lawrence Lessig
16203 to Norwegian. And the source we base our translation on is the
16204 <a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DocBook
">docbook
</a
> version, to
16205 allow us to use po4a and .po files to handle the translation, and for
16206 this to work well the docbook source document need to be properly
16207 tagged. The source files of this project is available from
16208 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig
">github
</a
>.
</p
>
16210 <p
>The problem is that the docbook source have flaws, and we have
16211 no-one involved in the project that is a docbook expert. Is there a
16212 docbook expert somewhere that is interested in helping us create a
16213 well tagged docbook version of the book, and adjust our build process
16214 for the PDF, EPUB and HTML version of the book? This will provide a
16215 well tagged English version (our source document), and make it a lot
16216 easier for us to create a good Norwegian version. If you can and want
16217 to help, please get in touch with me or fork the github project and
16218 send pull requests with fixes. :)
</p
>
16223 <title>Debian Edu interview: George Bredberg
</title>
16224 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__George_Bredberg.html
</link>
16225 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__George_Bredberg.html
</guid>
16226 <pubDate>Mon,
9 Jul
2012 00:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
16227 <description><p
>The
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu /
16228 Skolelinux
</a
> project have users all over the globe, but until
16229 recently we have not known about any users in Norway
's neighbour
16230 country Sweden. This changed when George Bredberg showed up in March
16231 this year on the mailing list, asking interesting questions about how
16232 to adjust and scale the just released
16233 <a href=
"http://www.debian.org/News/
2012/
20120311.html
">Debian Edu
16234 Wheezy
</a
> setup to his liking. He granted me an interview, and I am
16235 happy to share his answers with you here.
</p
>
16237 <p
><strong
>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
</strong
></p
>
16239 <p
>I
'm a
44 year old country guy that have been working
12 years at
16240 the same school as
50% IT-manager and
50% Teacher. My educational
16241 background is fil.kand in history and religious beliefs, an exam as a
16242 "folkhighschool
" teacher, that is, for teaching grownups. In
16243 Norwegian I believe it
's called
"Vuxenupplaring
". I also have a master
16244 in
"Technology and social change
". So I
'm not really a tech guy, I
16245 just like to study how humans and technology interact and that is my
16246 perspective when working with IT.
</p
>
16248 <p
><strong
>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
16249 project?
</strong
></p
>
16251 I have followed the Skolelinux project for quite some time by
16252 now. Earlier I tested out the K12-LTSP project, which we used for some
16253 time, but I really like the idea of having a distribution aimed to be
16254 a complete solution for schools with necessary tools integrated. When
16255 K12-LTSP abandoned that idea some years ago, I started to look more
16256 seriously into Skolelinux instead.
16258 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
16259 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
16261 The big point of Skolelinux to me is that it is a complete
16262 distribution, ready to install. It has LDAP-support, MS Windows
16263 integration tools and so forth already configured, saving an
16264 administrator a lot of time and headache. We were using another Linux
16265 based thin-client system called Thinlinc, that has served us very
16266 well. But that Skolelinux is based on VNC and LTSP, to me, is better
16267 when it comes to the kind of multimedia used in schools. That is
16268 showing videos from Youtube or educational TV. It is also easier to
16269 mix thin clients with workstations, since the user settings will be the
16270 same. In our VNC-based solution you had to
"beat around the bush
" by
16271 setting up a second, hidden, home-directory for user settings for the
16272 workstations, because they will be different from the ones used on the
16273 thin clients. Skolelinux support for diskless workstations are very
16274 convenient since a school today often need to use a class room
16275 projector showing videos in full screen. That is easily done with a
16276 small integrated media computer running as a diskless workstation. You
16277 have only two installs to update and configure. One for the thin
16278 clients and one for the workstations. Also saving a lot of time. Our
16279 old system was also based on Redhat and CentOS. They are both very
16280 nice distributions, but they are sometimes painfully slow when it
16281 comes to updating multimedia support and multimedia programs (even
16282 such as Gimp), leaving us with a bit
"oldish
" applications. Debian is
16285 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
16286 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
16288 <p
>Debian is a bit too quick when it comes to updating. As an example
16289 we use old HP terminals as thinclients, and two times already this
16290 year (
2012) the updates you get from the repositories has stopped
16291 sound from working with them. It
's a kernel/ALSA issue. So you have
16292 to be more careful properly testing the updates before you run them in
16293 a production environment. This has never happened with CentOS.
</p
>
16295 <p
>I also would like to be able to set my own domain-settings at
16296 install time. In Skolelinux they are kind of hard coded into the
16297 distribution, when it comes to LDAP and at least samba integration.
16298 That is more a cosmetic/translation issue, and not a real problem.
16299 Running MS Windows applications within the Skolelinux environment needs
16300 to be better supported. That is, running them seamlessly via RDP, and
16301 support for single-sign on. That will make the transition to free
16302 software easier, because you can keep the applications you really
16303 need. No support will make it impossible if you work in a school where
16304 some applications can
't be open source. As for us we really need to
16305 run Adobe InDesign in our journalist classes. We run a journalist
16306 education, and is one of the very few non university ones that is ok:d
16307 by Svenska journalistförbundet (Swedish journalist association). Our
16308 education gives the pupils the right of membership there, once they
16309 are done. This is important if you want to get a job.
</p
>
16311 <p
>Adobe InDesign is the program most commonly used in newspapers and
16312 magazines. We used Quark Express before, but they seem to loose there
16313 market to Adobe. The only
"equivalent
" to InDesign in the opensource
16314 world is Scribus, and its not advanced enough. At least not according
16315 to the teacher. I think it would be possible to use it, because they
16316 are not supposed to learn a program, they are supposed to learn how to
16317 edit and compile a newspaper. But politically at our school we are not
16318 there yet. And Scribus lacks a lot of things you find i InDesign.
</p
>
16320 <p
>We used even a windows program for sound editing when it comes to
16321 the radio-journalist part. The year to come we are going to try
16322 Audacity. That software has the same kind of limitations compared to
16323 Adobe Audition, but that teacher is a bit more open minded. We have
16324 tried Ardour also, but that instead is more like a music studio
16325 program, not intended for the kind of editing taking place in a radio
16326 studio. Its way to complex and the GUI is to scattered when you only
16327 want to cut, make pass-overs, add extra channels and normalise. Those
16328 things you can do in Audacity, but its not as easy as in Audition. You
16329 have to do more things manually with envelopes, and that is a bit old
16330 fashion and timewasting. Its also harder to cut and move sound from
16331 one channel to another, which is a thing that you do frequently
16332 because you often find yourself needing to rearrange parts of the
16333 sound file.
</p
>
16335 <p
>So, I am not sure we will succeed in replacing even Audition, but we
16336 will try. The problem is the students have certain expectations when
16337 they start an education towards a profession. So the programs has to
16338 look and feel professional. Good thing with radio, there are many
16339 programs out there, that radio studios use, so its not as standardised
16340 as Newspaper editing. That means, it does not really matter what
16341 program they learn, because once they start working they still have to
16342 learn the program the studio uses, so instead focus has to be to learn
16343 the editing part without to much focus on a specific software.
</p
>
16345 <p
><strong
>Which free software do you use daily?
</strong
></p
>
16347 <p
>Myself I
'm running Linux Mint, or Ubuntu these days. I use almost
16348 only open source software, and preferably Linux based. When it comes
16349 to most used applications its OpenOffice, and Firefox (of course ;)
16352 <p
><strong
>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
16353 get schools to use free software?
</strong
></p
>
16355 <p
>To get schools to use free software there has to be good open
16356 source software that are windows based, to ease the transition. But
16357 it
's also very important that the multimedia support is working
16358 flawlessly. The problems with Youtube, Twitter, Facebook and whatever
16359 will create problems when it comes to both teachers and
16360 students. Economy are also important for schools, so using thin
16361 clients, as long as they have good multimedia support, is a very good
16362 idea. It
's also important that the open source software works even for
16363 the administration. It
's hard to convince the teachers to stick with
16364 open source, if the principal has to run Windows. It also creates a
16365 problem if some classes has to use Windows for there tasks, since that
16366 will create a difference in
"status
" between classes, so a good
16367 support for running windows applications via the thin client (Linux)
16368 desktop is essential. At least at our school, where we have mixed
16369 level of educations, from high-school to journalist-school.
</p
>
16371 <p
>Update
2012-
07-
09 08:
30: Paul Wise tipped me on IRC about three
16372 useful sources related to Free Software for radio stations: the LWN
16373 article
<a href=
"https://lwn.net/Articles/
481607/
">Radio station
16374 management with Airtime
</a
>,
16375 <a href=
"http://www.sourcefabric.org/en/airtime/
">Airtime
</a
> which
16376 claim to be a Free open source radio automation software and
16377 <a href=
"http://www.rivendellaudio.org/
">Rivendell
</a
> which claim to
16378 be complete radio broadcast automation solution. All of them seem
16379 useful to the aspiring radio producer.
</p
>
16384 <title>Why do schools waste money on IT?
</title>
16385 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_do_schools_waste_money_on_IT_.html
</link>
16386 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_do_schools_waste_money_on_IT_.html
</guid>
16387 <pubDate>Sun,
8 Jul
2012 09:
40:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
16388 <description><p
>In the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project, we have realised that one
16389 of the major blockers for the project success is the purchasing skills
16390 in schools and municipalities. We provide what the happy users of
16391 Debian Edu / Skolelinux say they need and to a lower cost than the
16392 alternatives, and yet so few schools decide to use our solution. I
16393 was pleased to discover the same observation done by mySociety and Tom
16394 Steinberg in his blog post
16395 "<a href=
"http://www.mysociety.org/
2012/
06/
19/can-you-recognize-the-million-pound-chair/
">Can
16396 you recognize the million pound chair?
</a
>". Read it and weep for the
16397 spending of your tax money.
</p
>
16399 <p
>Of course there are other factors involved as well, like our
16400 projects bad marketing skills and the Linux community fragmentation
16401 causing worry with the people on the outside, so we as a project need
16402 to keep working hard to gain users, but it is a up-hill battle when
16403 public decision makers are unable to understand computer system
16404 purchases.
</p
>
16409 <title>Free Timetabling Software - nice free software
</title>
16410 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Timetabling_Software___nice_free_software.html
</link>
16411 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Timetabling_Software___nice_free_software.html
</guid>
16412 <pubDate>Sat,
7 Jul
2012 09:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
16413 <description><p
>Included in
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu /
16414 Skolelinux
</a
> is a large collection of end user and school specific
16415 software. It is one of the packages not installed by default but
16416 provided in the Debian archive for schools to install if they want to,
16417 is a system to automatically plan the school time table using
16418 information about available teachers, classes and rooms, combined with
16419 the list of required courses and how many hours each topic should
16420 receive. The software is
16422 <a href=
"http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/
">named FET
</a
>, and it provide a
16423 graphical user interface to input the required information, save the
16424 result in a fairly simple XML format, and generate time tables for
16425 both teachers and students. It is available both for
16426 <a href=
"http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/download.html
">Linux, MacOSX and
16427 Windows
</a
>.
</p
>
16429 <p
>This is
<a href=
"http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/features.html
">the
16430 feature list
</a
>, liftet from the project web site:
</p
>
16432 <p
><ul
>
16434 <li
>FET is free software, licensed under the GNU GPL v2 or later.
16435 You can freely use, copy, modify and redistribute it
</li
>
16437 <li
>Localized to en_US (US English, default), ar (Arabic), ca
16438 (Catalan), da (Danish), de (German), el (Greek), es (Spanish), fa
16439 (Persian), fr (French), gl (Galician), he (Hebrew), hu
16440 (Hungarian), id (Indonesian), it (Italian), lt (Lithuanian), mk
16441 (Macedonian), ms (Malay), nl (Dutch), pl (Polish), pt_BR
16442 (Brazilian Portuguese), ro (Romanian), ru (Russian), si (Sinhala),
16443 sk (Slovak), sr (Serbian), tr (Turkish), uk (Ukrainian), uz
16444 (Uzbek) and vi (Vietnamese) (incompletely for some languages)
16447 <li
>Fully automatic generation algorithm, allowing also
16448 semi-automatic or manual allocation
</li
>
16450 <li
>Platform independent implementation, allowing running on
16451 GNU/Linux, Windows, Mac and any system that Qt supports
</li
>
16453 <li
>Flexible modular XML format for the input file, allowing editing
16454 with an XML editor or by hand (besides FET interface)
</li
>
16456 <li
>Import/export from CSV format
</li
>
16458 <li
>The resulted timetables are exported into HTML, XML and CSV
16459 formats
</li
>
16461 <li
>Flexible students structure, organized into sets: years, groups
16462 and subgroups. FET allows overlapping years and groups and
16463 non-overlapping subgroups. You can even define individual students
16464 (as separate sets)
</li
>
16466 <li
>Each constraint has a weight percentage, from
0.0% to
100.0%
16467 (but some special constraints are allowed to have only
100% weight
16468 percentage)
</li
>
16470 <li
>Limits for the algorithm (all these limits can be increased on
16471 demand, as a custom version, because this would require a bit more
16474 <li
>Maximum total number of hours (periods) per day:
60</li
>
16475 <li
>Maximum number of working days per week:
35</li
>
16476 <li
>Maximum total number of teachers:
6000</li
>
16477 <li
>Maximum total number of sets of students:
30000</li
>
16478 <li
>Maximum total number of subjects:
6000</li
>
16479 <li
>Virtually unlimited number of activity tags
</li
>
16480 <li
>Maximum number of activities:
30000</li
>
16481 <li
>Maximum number of rooms:
6000</li
>
16482 <li
>Maximum number of buildings:
6000</li
>
16483 <li
>Possibility of adding multiple teachers and
16484 students sets for each activity. (it is possible
16485 also to have no teachers or no students sets for an
16486 activity)
</li
>
16487 <li
>Virtually unlimited number of time constraints
</li
>
16488 <li
>Virtually unlimited number of space constraints
</li
>
16489 </ul
></li
>
16491 <li
>A large and flexible palette of time constraints:
16493 <li
>Break periods
</li
>
16494 <li
>For teacher(s):
16496 <li
>Not available periods
</li
>
16497 <li
>Max/min days per week
</li
>
16498 <li
>Max gaps per day/week
</li
>
16499 <li
>Max hours daily/continuously
</li
>
16500 <li
>Min hours daily
</li
>
16501 <li
>Max hours daily/continuously with an activity tag
</li
>
16503 <li
>Respect working in an hourly interval a max number of
16504 days per week
</li
>
16505 </ul
></li
>
16506 <li
>For students (sets):
16508 <li
>Not available periods
</li
>
16509 <li
>Begins early (specify max allowed beginnings at second hour)
</li
>
16510 <li
>Max gaps per day/week
</li
>
16511 <li
>Max hours daily/continuously
</li
>
16512 <li
>Min hours daily
</li
>
16513 <li
>Max hours daily/continuously with an activity tag
</li
>
16515 <li
>Respect working in an hourly interval a max number of
16516 days per week
</li
>
16517 </ul
></li
>
16518 <li
>For an activity or a set of activities/subactivities:
16520 <li
>A single preferred starting time
</li
>
16521 <li
>A set of preferred starting times
</li
>
16522 <li
>A set of preferred time slots
</li
>
16523 <li
>Min/max days between them
</li
>
16524 <li
>End(s) students day
</li
>
16525 <li
>Same starting time/day/hour
</li
>
16526 <li
>Occupy max time slots from selection (a complex and
16527 flexible constraint, useful in many situations)
</li
>
16528 <li
>Consecutive, ordered, grouped (for
2 or
3 (sub)activities)
</li
>
16529 <li
>Not overlapping
</li
>
16530 <li
>Max simultaneous in selected time slots
</li
>
16531 <li
>Min gaps between a set of (sub)activities
</li
>
16532 </ul
></li
>
16533 </ul
></li
>
16535 <li
>A large and flexible palette of space constraints:
16537 <li
>Room not available periods
</li
>
16538 <li
>For teacher(s):
16540 <li
>Home room(s)
</li
>
16541 <li
>Max building changes per day/week
</li
>
16542 <li
>Min gaps between building changes
</li
>
16546 <li
>For students (sets):
16548 <li
>Home room(s)
</li
>
16549 <li
>Max building changes per day/week
</li
>
16550 <li
>Min gaps between building changes
</li
>
16553 <li
>Preferred room(s):
16555 <li
>For a subject
</li
>
16556 <li
>For an activity tag
</li
>
16557 <li
>For a subject and an activity tag
</li
>
16558 <li
>Individually for a (sub)activity
</li
>
16562 <li
>For a set of activities:
16564 <li
>Occupy a maximum number of different rooms
</li
>
16569 </ul
></p
>
16571 <p
>I have not used it myself, as I am not involved in time table
16572 planning at a school, but it seem to work fine when I test it. If you
16573 need to set up your schools time table, and is tired of doing it
16574 manually, check it out.
16576 A quick summary on how to use it can be found in
16577 <a href=
"http://marvelsoft.co.in/wp/
2012/
03/generate-timetable-for-state-cbse-icse-igcse-schools-free/
">a
16578 blog post from MarvelSoft
</a
>. If you find FET useful, please provide
16579 a recipe for the Debian Edu project in the
16580 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu#Howtos
">Debian Edu HowTo
16581 section
</a
>.
</p
>
16586 <title>Can Zimbra be told to send autoreplies to the From: address?
</title>
16587 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Can_Zimbra_be_told_to_send_autoreplies_to_the_From__address_.html
</link>
16588 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Can_Zimbra_be_told_to_send_autoreplies_to_the_From__address_.html
</guid>
16589 <pubDate>Tue,
3 Jul
2012 23:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
16590 <description><p
>In the NUUG
<a href=
"http://www.fiksgatami.no/
">FiksGataMi
</a
>
16591 project (Norwegian version of
16592 <a href=
"http://www.fixmystreet.com/
">FixMyStreet
</a
> from
16593 <a href=
"http://www.mysociety.org/
">mySociety
</a
>), we have discovered
16594 a problem with the municipalities using
16595 <a href=
"http://www.zimbra.com/
">Zimbra
</a
>. When FiksGataMi send a
16596 problem report to the government, the email From: address is set to
16597 the address of the person reporting the problem, while envelope sender
16598 is set to the FiksGataMi contact address. The intention is to make
16599 sure the municipality send any replies to the person reporting the
16600 problem, while any email delivery problems are sent to us in NUUG.
16601 This work well in most cases, but not for Karmøy municipality using
16602 Zimbra. Karmøy is using the vacation message function in Zimbra to
16603 send an automatic reply to report that the message has been received,
16604 and this message is sent to the envelope sender and not the address in
16605 the From: header.
</p
>
16607 <p
>This causes the automatic message from Karmøy to go to NUUGs
16608 request-tracker instance instead of to the person reporting the
16609 problem. We can not really change the envelope sender address, as
16610 this would make it impossible for us to discover when there are
16611 problems with the MTAs receiving problem reports. We have been in
16612 contact with the people at Karmøy municipality, and they are willing
16613 to adjust Zimbra if something can be changed there to get a better
16614 behaviour.
</p
>
16616 <p
>The default behaviour of Zimbra is as far as I can tell according
16617 to the specification in RFC
3834, which recommend that vacation
16618 messages are sent to the envelope sender and not to the From: address.
16619 But I wonder if it is possible to adjust or configure Zimbra to behave
16620 differently. Anyone know? Please let us know at
16621 <a href=
"http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/fiksgatami
">fiksgatami
16622 (at) nuug.no
</a
>.
</p
>
16627 <title>Debian Edu interview: José Luis Redrejo Rodríguez
</title>
16628 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Jos__Luis_Redrejo_Rodr_guez.html
</link>
16629 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Jos__Luis_Redrejo_Rodr_guez.html
</guid>
16630 <pubDate>Tue,
26 Jun
2012 08:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
16631 <description><p
>I
've been too busy at home, but finally I found time to wrap up
16632 another interview with the people behind
16633 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu and Skolelinux
</a
>.
16634 This time we get to know José Luis Redrejo Rodríguez, one of our great
16635 helpers from Spain. His effort was the reason we added support for
16636 several desktop types (KDE, Gnome and most recently LXDE) in Debian
16637 Edu, and have all of these available in the recently published
16638 <a href=
"http://www.debian.org/News/
2012/
20120311.html
">Debian Edu
16639 Squeeze
</a
> version.
</p
>
16641 <p
><strong
>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
</strong
></p
>
16643 <p
>I
'm a father, teacher and engineer who is working for the Education
16644 ministry of the Region of Extremadura (Spain) in the implementation of
16645 ICT in schools
</p
>
16647 <p
><strong
>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
16648 project?
</strong
></p
>
16650 <p
>At
2006, I verified that both, we in Extremadura and Skolelinux
16651 project, had been working in parallel for some years, doing very
16652 similar things, using very similar tools and with similar targets, so
16653 I decided it was time to join forces as much as possible.
</p
>
16655 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
16656 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
16658 <p
>A community of highly skilled experts working together, with a
16659 really open schema of collaboration and work. I really love the
16660 concepts of Do-ocracy and Merit-ocracy and the way these concepts are
16661 been used everyday inside Debian Edu.
</p
>
16663 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
16664 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
16666 <p
>Sometimes the differences in the implementations, laws or
16667 economical and technical resources in the different countries don
't
16668 allow us to agree in the same solution for all of us, and several
16669 approaches are needed, what is a waste of effort. Also, there is a
16670 lack of more man power to be able to follow the fast evolution of the
16671 technologies in school.
</p
>
16673 <p
><strong
>Which free software do you use daily?
</strong
></p
>
16675 <p
>Debian, of course, and due to my kind of job I am most of my time
16676 between Iceweasel,
<a href=
"http://www.geany.org/
">Geany
</a
> and
16677 <a href=
"http://www.ohloh.net/p/gnome-terminator
">Terminator
</a
>.
</p
>
16679 <p
><strong
>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
16680 get schools to use free software?
</strong
></p
>
16682 <p
>I think there is not a single strategy because there are very
16683 different scenarios: schools with mixed proprietary and free
16684 environments, schools using only workstations, other schools using
16685 laptops, netbooks, tablets, interactive white-boards, etc.
</p
>
16687 <p
>Also the range of ages of the students is very broad and you can
16688 not use the same solutions for primary schools and secondary or even
16689 universities. So different strategies are needed.
</p
>
16691 <p
>But, looking at these differences, and looking back to the things
16692 we
've done and implemented, and the places were we have spent most of
16693 our forces, I think we should focus as much as possible in free
16694 multi-platform environments, using only standards tools, and moving
16695 more and more to Internet or network solutions that could be deployed
16696 using wireless. I think we
'll see more and more personal devices in
16697 the schools, devices the students and teachers will take home with
16698 them, so the solutions must be able to be taken at home and continue
16699 working there.
</p
>
16704 <title>Song book for Computer Scientists
</title>
16705 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html
</link>
16706 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html
</guid>
16707 <pubDate>Sun,
24 Jun
2012 13:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
16708 <description><p
>Many years ago, while studying Computer Science at the
16709 <a href=
"http://www.uit.no/
">University of Tromsø
</a
>, I started
16710 collecting computer related songs for use at parties. The original
16711 version was written in LaTeX, but a few years ago I got help from
16712 Håkon W. Lie, one of the inventors of W3C CSS, to convert it to HTML
16713 while keeping the ability to create a nice book in PDF format. I have
16714 not had time to maintain the book for a while now, and guess I should
16715 put it up on some public version control repository where others can
16716 help me extend and update the book. If anyone is volunteering to help
16717 me with this, send me an email. Also let me know if there are songs
16718 missing in my book.
</p
>
16720 <p
>I have not mentioned the book on my blog so far, and it occured to
16721 me today that I really should let all my readers share the joys of
16722 singing out load about programming, computers and computer networks.
16723 Especially now that
<a href=
"http://debconf12.debconf.org/
">Debconf
16724 12</a
> is about to start (and I am not going). Want to sing? Check
16725 out
<a href=
"http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/
">Petter
's
16726 Computer Science Songbook
</a
>.
16731 <title>Debian Edu - some ideas for the future versions
</title>
16732 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu___some_ideas_for_the_future_versions.html
</link>
16733 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu___some_ideas_for_the_future_versions.html
</guid>
16734 <pubDate>Mon,
11 Jun
2012 14:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
16735 <description><p
>During my work on
16736 <a href=
"http://www.debian.org/News/
2012/
20120311.nb.html
">Debian Edu
16737 based on Squeeze
</a
>, I came across some issues that should be
16738 addressed in the Wheezy release. I finally found time to wrap up my
16739 notes and provide quick summary of what I found, with a bit
16740 explanation.
</p
>
16742 <p
><ul
>
16744 <li
>We need to rewrite our package installation framework, as tasksel
16745 changed from using tasksel tasks to using meta packages (aka packages
16746 with dependencies like our education-* packages), and our installation
16747 system depend on tasksel tasks in
16748 /usr/share/tasksel/debian-edu-tasks.desc for package
16749 installation.
</li
>
16751 <li
>Enable Kerberos login for more services. Now with the Kerberos
16752 foundation in place, we should use it to get single sign on with more
16753 services, and avoiding unneeded password / login questions. We should
16754 at least try to enable it for these services:
16757 <li
>CUPS for admins to add/configure printers and users when using
16759 <li
>Nagios for admins checking the system status.
</li
>
16760 <li
>GOsa for admins updating LDAP and users changing their passwords.
</li
>
16761 <li
>LDAP for admins updating LDAP.
</li
>
16762 <li
>Squid for users when exam mode / filtering is active.
</li
>
16763 <li
>ssh for admins and users to save a password prompt.
</li
>
16765 </ul
></li
>
16767 <li
>When we move GOsa to use Kerberos instead of LDAP bind to
16768 authenticate users, we should try to block or at least limit access to
16769 use LDAP bind for authentication, to ensure Kerberos is used when it
16770 is intended, and nothing fall back to using the less safe LDAP bind
</li
>
16772 <li
>Merge debian-edu-config and debian-edu-install. The split made
16773 sense when d-e-install did a lot more, but these days it is just an
16774 inconvenience when we update the debconf preseeding values.
</li
>
16776 <li
>Fix partman-auto to allow us to abort the installation before
16777 touching the disk if the disk is too small. This is
16778 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
653305">BTS report #
653305</a
> and the
16779 d-i developers are fine with the patch and someone just need to apply
16780 it and upload. After this is done we need to adjust
16781 debian-edu-install to use this new hook.
</li
>
16783 <li
>Adjust to new LTSP framework (boot time config instead of install
16784 time config). LTSP changed its design, and our hooks to install
16785 packages and update the configuration is most likely not going to work
16788 <li
>Consider switching to NBD instead of NFS for LTSP root, to allow
16789 the Kernel to cache files in its normal file cache, possibly speeding
16790 up KDE login on slow networks.
</li
>
16792 <li
>Make it possible to create expired user passwords that need to
16793 change on first login. This is useful when handing out password on
16794 paper, to make sure only the user know the password. This require
16795 fixes to the PAM handling of kdm and gdm.
</li
>
16797 <li
>Make GUI for adding new machines automatically from sitesummary.
16798 The current command line script is not very friendly to people most
16799 familiar with GUIs. This should probably be integrated into GOsa to
16800 have it available where the admin will be looking for it..
</li
>
16802 <li
>We should find way for Nagios to check that the DHCP service
16803 actually is working (as in handling out IP addresses). None of the
16804 Nagios checks I have found so far have been working for me.
</li
>
16806 <li
>We should switch from libpam-nss-ldapd to sssd for all profiles
16807 using LDAP, and not only on for roaming workstations, to have less
16808 packages to configure and consistent setup across all profiles.
</li
>
16810 <li
>We should configure Kerberos to update LDAP and Samba password
16811 when changing password using the Kerberos protocol. The hook was
16812 requested in
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
588968">BTS report
16813 #
588968</a
> and is now available in Wheezy. We might need to write a
16814 MIT Kerberos plugin in C to get this.
</li
>
16816 <li
>We should clean up the set of applications installed by default.
16819 <li
>reduce the number of chemistry visualisers
</li
>
16820 <li
>consider dropping xpaint
</li
>
16821 <li
>and probably more?
</li
>
16822 </ul
></li
>
16824 <li
>Some hardware need external firmware to work properly. This is
16825 mostly the case for WiFi network cards, but there are some other
16826 examples too. For popular laptops to work out of the box, such
16827 firmware need to be installed from non-free, and we should provide
16828 some GUI to do this. Ubuntu already have this implemented, and we
16829 could consider using their packages. At the moment we have some
16830 command line script to do this (one for the running system, another
16831 for the LTSP chroot).
</li
>
16834 <li
>In Squeeze, we provide KDE, Gnome and LXDE as desktop options. We
16835 should extend the list to Xfce and Sugar, and preferably find a way to
16836 install several and allow the admin or the user to select which one to
16839 <li
>The golearn tool from the goplay package make it easy to check out
16840 interesting educational packages. We should work on the package
16841 tagging in Debian to ensure it represent all the useful educational
16842 packages, and extend the tool to allow it to use packagekit to install
16843 new applications with a simple mouse click.
</li
>
16845 <li
>The Squeeze version got half a exam solution already in place,
16846 with the introduction of iptable based network blocking, but for it to
16847 be a complete exam solution the Squid proxy need to enable
16848 filtering/blocking as well when the exam mode is enabled. We should
16849 implement a way to easily enable this for the schools that want it,
16850 instead of the
"it is documented
" method of today.
</li
>
16852 <li
>A feature used in several schools is the ability for a teacher to
16853 "take over
" the desktop of individual or all computers in the room.
16854 There are at least three implementations,
16855 <a href=
"italc.sourceforge.net/
">italc
</a
>,
16856 <a href=
"http://www.itais.net/help/en/
">controlaula
</a
> og
16857 <a href=
"http://www.epoptes.org/
">epoptes
</a
> and we should pick one of
16858 them and make it trivial to set it up in a school. The challenges is
16859 how to distribute crypto keys and how to group computers in one room
16860 and how to set up which machine/user can control the machines in a
16861 given room.
</li
>
16863 <li
>Tablets and surf boards are getting more and more popular, and we
16864 should look into providing a good solution for integrating these into
16865 the Debian Edu network. Not quite sure how. Perhaps we should
16866 provide a installation profile with better touch screen support for
16867 them, or add some sync services to allow them to exchange
16868 configuration and data with the central server. This should be
16869 investigated.
</li
>
16871 </ul
></p
>
16873 <p
>I guess we will discover more as we continue to work on the Wheezy
16879 <title>TV with face recognition, for improved viewer experience
</title>
16880 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/TV_with_face_recognition__for_improved_viewer_experience.html
</link>
16881 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/TV_with_face_recognition__for_improved_viewer_experience.html
</guid>
16882 <pubDate>Sat,
9 Jun
2012 22:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
16883 <description><p
>Slashdot got a story about Intel planning a
16884 <a href=
"http://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/
12/
06/
09/
0012247/intel-to-launch-tv-service-with-facial-recognition-by-end-of-the-year
">TV
16885 with face recognition
</a
> to recognise the viewer, and it occurred to
16886 me that it would be more interesting to turn it around, and do face
16887 recognition on the TV image itself. It could let the viewer know who
16888 is present on the screen, and perhaps look up their credibility,
16889 company affiliation, previous appearances etc for the viewer to better
16890 evaluate what is being said and done. That would be a feature I would
16891 be willing to pay for.
</p
>
16893 <p
>I would not be willing to pay for a TV that point a camera on my
16894 household, like the big brother feature apparently proposed by Intel.
16895 It is the telescreen idea fetched straight out of the book
16896 <a href=
"http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/
0100021.txt
">1984 by George
16897 Orwell
</a
>.
</p
>
16902 <title>Web service to look up HP and Dell computer hardware support status
</title>
16903 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Web_service_to_look_up_HP_and_Dell_computer_hardware_support_status.html
</link>
16904 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Web_service_to_look_up_HP_and_Dell_computer_hardware_support_status.html
</guid>
16905 <pubDate>Wed,
6 Jun
2012 23:
15:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
16906 <description><p
>A few days ago
16907 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/SOAP_based_webservice_from_Dell_to_check_server_support_status.html
">I
16908 reported how to get
</a
> the support status out of Dell using an
16909 unofficial and undocumented SOAP API, which I since have found out was
16910 <a href=
"http://lists.us.dell.com/pipermail/linux-poweredge/
2012-February/
045959.html
">discovered
16911 by Daniel De Marco in february
</a
>. Combined with my web scraping
16912 code for HP, Dell and IBM
16913 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Checking_server_hardware_support_status_for_Dell__HP_and_IBM_servers.html
">from
16914 2009</a
>, I got inspired and wrote
16915 <a href=
"https://views.scraperwiki.com/run/computer-hardware-support-status/
">a
16916 web service
</a
> based on Scraperwiki to make it easy to look up the
16917 support status and get a machine readable result back.
</p
>
16919 <p
>This is what it look like at the moment when asking for the JSON
16922 <blockquote
><pre
>
16923 % GET
<a href=
"https://views.scraperwiki.com/run/computer-hardware-support-status/?format=json
&vendor=Dell
&servicetag=
2v1xwn1
">https://views.scraperwiki.com/run/computer-hardware-support-status/?format=json
&vendor=Dell
&servicetag=
2v1xwn1
</a
>
16924 supportstatus({
"servicetag
":
"2v1xwn1
",
"warrantyend
":
"2013-
11-
24",
"shipped
":
"2010-
11-
24",
"scrapestamputc
":
"2012-
06-
06T20:
26:
56.965847",
"scrapedurl
":
"http://
143.166.84.118/services/assetservice.asmx?WSDL
",
"vendor
":
"Dell
",
"productid
":
""})
16926 </pre
></blockquote
>
16928 <p
>It currently support Dell and HP, and I am hoping for help to add
16929 support for other vendors. The python source is available on
16930 Scraperwiki and I welcome help with adding more features.
</p
>
16935 <title>Debian Edu interview: Mike Gabriel
</title>
16936 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Mike_Gabriel.html
</link>
16937 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Mike_Gabriel.html
</guid>
16938 <pubDate>Sat,
2 Jun
2012 15:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
16939 <description><p
>Back in
2010, Mike Gabriel showed up on the
16940 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu and Skolelinux
</a
>
16941 mailing list. He quickly proved to be a valuable developer, and
16942 thanks to his tireless effort we now have Kerberos integrated into the
16943 <a href=
"http://www.debian.org/News/
2012/
20120311.html
">Debian Edu
16944 Squeeze
</a
> version.
</p
>
16946 <p
><strong
>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
</strong
></p
>
16948 <p
>My name is Mike Gabriel, I am
38 years old and live near Kiel,
16949 Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. I live together with a wonderful partner
16950 (Angela Fuß) and two own children and two bonus children (contributed
16951 by Angela).
</p
>
16953 <p
>During the day I am part-time employed as a system administrator
16954 and part-time working as an IT consultant. The consultancy work
16955 touches free software topics wherever and whenever possible. During
16956 the nights I am a free software developer. In the gaps I also train in
16957 becoming an osteopath.
</p
>
16959 <p
>Starting in
2010 we (Andreas Buchholz, Angela Fuß, Mike Gabriel)
16960 have set up a free software project in the area of Kiel that aims at
16961 introducing free software into schools. The project
's name is
16962 "IT-Zukunft Schule
" (IT future for schools). The project links IT
16963 skills with communication skills.
</p
>
16965 <p
><strong
>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
16966 project?
</strong
></p
>
16968 <p
>While preparing our own customised Linux distribution for
16969 "IT-Zukunft Schule
" we were repeatedly asked if we really wanted to
16970 reinvent the wheel. What schools really need is already available,
16971 people said. From this impulse we started evaluating other Linux
16972 distributions that target being used for school networks.
</p
>
16974 <p
>At the end we short-listed two approaches and compared them: a
16975 commercial Linux distribution developed by a company in Bremen,
16976 Germany, and Skolelinux / Debian Edu. Between
12/
2010 and
03/
2011 we
16977 went to several events and met people being responsible for marketing
16978 and development of either of the distributions. Skolelinux / Debian
16979 Edu was by far much more convincing compared to the other product that
16980 got short-listed beforehand--across the full spectrum. What was most
16981 attractive for me personally: the perspective of collaboration within
16982 the developmental branch of the Debian Edu project itself.
</p
>
16984 <p
>In parallel with this, we talked to many local and not-so-local
16985 people. People teaching at schools, headmasters, politicians, data
16986 protection experts, other IT professionals.
</p
>
16988 <p
>We came to two conclusions:
</p
>
16990 <p
>First, a technical conclusion: What schools need is available in
16991 bits and pieces here and there, and none of the solutions really fit
16992 by
100%. Any school we have seen has a very individual IT setup
16993 whereas most of each school
's requirements could mapped by a standard
16994 IT solution. The requirement to this IT solution is flexibility and
16995 customisability, so that individual adaptations here and there are
16996 possible. In terms of re-distributing and rolling out such a
16997 standardised IT system for schools (a system that is still to some
16998 degree customisable) there is still a lot of work to do here
16999 locally. Debian Edu / Skolelinux has been our choice as the starting
17002 <p
>Second, a holistic conclusion: What schools need does not exist at
17003 all (or we missed it so far). There are several technical solutions
17004 for handling IT at schools that tend to make a good impression. What
17005 has been missing completely here in Germany, though, is the enrolment
17006 of people into using IT and teaching with IT.
"IT-Zukunft Schule
"
17007 tries to provide an approach for this.
</p
>
17009 <p
>Only some schools have some sort of a media concept which explains,
17010 defines and gives guidance on how to use IT in class. Most schools in
17011 Northern Germany do not have an IT service provider, the school
's IT
17012 equipment is managed by one or (if the school is lucky) two (admin)
17013 teachers, most of the workload these admin teachers get done in there
17014 spare time.
</p
>
17016 <p
>We were surprised that only a very few admin teachers were
17017 networked with colleagues from other schools. Basically, every school
17018 here around has its individual approach of providing IT equipment to
17019 teachers and students and the exchange of ideas has been quasi
17020 non-existent until
2010/
2011.
</p
>
17022 <p
>Quite some (non-admin) teachers try to avoid using IT technology in
17023 class as a learning medium completely. Several reasons for this
17024 avoidance do exist.
</p
>
17026 <p
>We discovered that no-one has ever taken a closer look at this
17027 social part of IT management in schools, so far. On our quest journey
17028 for a technical IT solution for schools, we discussed this issue with
17029 several teachers, headmasters, politicians, other IT professionals and
17030 they all confirmed: a holistic approach of considering IT management
17031 at schools, an approach that includes the people in place, will be new
17032 and probably a gain for all.
</p
>
17034 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
17035 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
17037 <p
>There is a list of advantages: international context, openness to
17038 any kind of contributions, do-ocracy policy, the closeness to Debian,
17039 the different installation scenarios possible (from stand-alone
17040 workstation to complex multi-server sites), the transparency within
17041 project communication, honest communication within the group of
17042 developers, etc.
</p
>
17044 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
17045 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
17047 <p
>Every coin has two sides:
</p
>
17049 <p
>Technically:
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
311188">BTS issue
17050 #
311188</a
>, tricky upgradability of a Debian Edu main server, network
17051 client installations on top of a plain vanilla Debian installation
17052 should become possible sometime in the near future, one could think
17053 about splitting the very complex package debian-edu-config into
17054 several portions (to make it easier for new developers to
17055 contribute).
</p
>
17057 <p
>Another issue I see is that we (as Debian Edu developers) should
17058 find out more about the network of people who do the marketing for
17059 Debian Edu / Skolelinux. There is a very active group in Germany
17060 promoting Skolelinux on the bigger Linux Days within Germany. Are
17061 there other groups like that in other countries? How can we bring
17062 these marketing people together (marketing group A with group B and
17063 all of them with the group of Debian Edu developers)? During the last
17064 meeting of the German Skolelinux group, I got the impression of people
17065 there being rather disconnected from the development department of
17066 Debian Edu / Skolelinux.
</p
>
17068 <p
><strong
>Which free software do you use daily?
</strong
></p
>
17070 <p
>For my daily business, I do not use commercial software at all.
</p
>
17072 <p
>For normal stuff I use Iceweasel/Firefox, Libreoffice.org. For
17073 serious text writing I prefer LaTeX. I use gimp, inkscape, scribus for
17074 more artistic tasks. I run virtual machines in KVM and Virtualbox.
</p
>
17076 <p
>I am one of the upstream developers of X2Go. In
2010 I started the
17077 development of a Python based X2Go Client, called PyHoca-GUI.
17078 PyHoca-GUI has brought forth a Python X2Go Client API that currently
17079 is being integrated in Ubuntu
's software center.
</p
>
17081 <p
>For communications I have my own Kolab server running using Horde
17082 as web-based groupware client. For IRC I love to use irssi, for Jabber
17083 I have several clients that I use, mostly pidgin, though. I am also
17084 the Debian maintainer of Coccinella, a Jabber-based interactive
17085 whiteboard.
</p
>
17087 <p
>My favourite terminal emulator is KDE
's Yakuake.
</p
>
17089 <p
><strong
>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
17090 get schools to use free software?
</strong
></p
>
17092 <p
>Communicate, communicate, communicate. Enrol people, enrol people,
17093 enrol people.
</p
>
17098 <title>SOAP based webservice from Dell to check server support status
</title>
17099 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/SOAP_based_webservice_from_Dell_to_check_server_support_status.html
</link>
17100 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/SOAP_based_webservice_from_Dell_to_check_server_support_status.html
</guid>
17101 <pubDate>Fri,
1 Jun
2012 15:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
17102 <description><p
>A few years ago I wrote
17103 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Checking_server_hardware_support_status_for_Dell__HP_and_IBM_servers.html
">how
17104 to extract support status
</a
> for your Dell and HP servers. Recently
17105 I have learned from colleges here at the
17106 <a href=
"http://www.uio.no/
">University of Oslo
</a
> that Dell have
17107 made this even easier, by providing a SOAP based web service. Given
17108 the service tag, one can now query the Dell servers and get machine
17109 readable information about the support status. This perl code
17110 demonstrate how to do it:
</p
>
17112 <p
><pre
>
17117 my $GUID =
'11111111-
1111-
1111-
1111-
111111111111';
17118 my $App =
'test
';
17119 my $servicetag = $ARGV[
0] or die
"Please supply a servicetag. $!\n
";
17120 my ($deal, $latest, @dates);
17122 -
> uri(
'http://support.dell.com/WebServices/
')
17123 -
> on_action( sub { join
'', @_ } )
17124 -
> proxy(
'http://xserv.dell.com/services/assetservice.asmx
')
17126 my $a = $s-
>GetAssetInformation(
17127 SOAP::Data-
>name(
'guid
')-
>value($GUID)-
>type(
''),
17128 SOAP::Data-
>name(
'applicationName
')-
>value($App)-
>type(
''),
17129 SOAP::Data-
>name(
'serviceTags
')-
>value($servicetag)-
>type(
''),
17131 print Dumper($a -
> result) ;
17132 </pre
></p
>
17134 <p
>The output can look like this:
</p
>
17136 <p
><pre
>
17138 'Asset
' =
> {
17139 'Entitlements
' =
> {
17140 'EntitlementData
' =
> [
17142 'EntitlementType
' =
> 'Expired
',
17143 'EndDate
' =
> '2009-
07-
29T00:
00:
00',
17144 'Provider
' =
> '',
17145 'StartDate
' =
> '2006-
07-
29T00:
00:
00',
17146 'DaysLeft
' =
> '0'
17149 'EntitlementType
' =
> 'Expired
',
17150 'EndDate
' =
> '2009-
07-
29T00:
00:
00',
17151 'Provider
' =
> '',
17152 'StartDate
' =
> '2006-
07-
29T00:
00:
00',
17153 'DaysLeft
' =
> '0'
17156 'EntitlementType
' =
> 'Expired
',
17157 'EndDate
' =
> '2007-
07-
29T00:
00:
00',
17158 'Provider
' =
> '',
17159 'StartDate
' =
> '2006-
07-
29T00:
00:
00',
17160 'DaysLeft
' =
> '0'
17164 'AssetHeaderData
' =
> {
17165 'SystemModel
' =
> 'GX620
',
17166 'ServiceTag
' =
> '8DSGD2J
',
17167 'SystemShipDate
' =
> '2006-
07-
29T19:
00:
00-
05:
00',
17168 'Buid
' =
> '2323',
17169 'Region
' =
> 'Europe
',
17170 'SystemID
' =
> 'PLX_GX620
',
17171 'SystemType
' =
> 'OptiPlex
'
17175 </pre
></p
>
17177 <p
>I have not been able to find any documentation from Dell about this
17178 service outside the
17179 <a href=
"http://xserv.dell.com/services/assetservice.asmx?op=GetAssetInformation
">inline
17180 documentation
</a
>, and according to
17181 <a href=
"http://iboyd.net/index.php/
2012/
02/
14/updated-dell-warranty-information-script/
">one
17182 comment
</a
> it can have stability issues, but it is a lot better than
17183 scraping HTML pages. :)
</p
>
17185 <p
>Wonder if HP and other server vendors have a similar service. If
17186 you know of one, drop me an email. :)
</p
>
17191 <title>First monitor calibration using ColorHug
</title>
17192 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_monitor_calibration_using_ColorHug.html
</link>
17193 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_monitor_calibration_using_ColorHug.html
</guid>
17194 <pubDate>Thu,
31 May
2012 22:
10:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
17195 <description><p
>A few days ago my color calibration gadget
17196 <a href=
"http://www.hughski.com/index.html
">ColorHug
</a
> arrived in the
17197 mail, and I
've had a few days to test it. As all my machines are
17198 running Debian Squeeze, where
17199 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/c/colorhug-client.html
">the
17200 calibration software
</a
> is missing (it is present in Wheezy and Sid),
17201 I ran the calibration using the Fedora based live CD. This worked
17202 just fine. So far I have only done the quick calibration. It was
17203 slow enough for me, so I will leave the more extensive calibration for
17204 another day.
</p
>
17206 <p
>After calibration, I get a
17207 <a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICC_profile
">ICC color
17208 profile
</a
> file that can be passed to programs understanding such
17209 tools. KDE do not seem to understand it out of the box, so I searched
17210 for command line tools to use to load the color profile into X.
17211 xcalib was the first one I found, and it seem to work fine for single
17212 monitor setups. But for my video player, a laptop with a flat screen
17213 attached, it was unable to load the color profile for the correct
17214 monitor. After searching a bit, I
17215 <a href=
"http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=
1347896">discovered
</a
>
17216 that the dispwin tool from the argyll package would do what I wanted,
17217 and a simple
</p
>
17219 <p
><pre
>
17220 dispwin -d
1 profile.icc
17221 </pre
></p
>
17223 <p
>later I had the color profile loaded for the correct monitor. The
17224 result was a bit more pink than I expected. I guess I picked the
17225 wrong monitor type for the
"led
" monitor I got, but the result is good
17226 enough for now.
</p
>
17231 <title>Debian Edu interview: Ralf Gesellensetter
</title>
17232 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Ralf_Gesellensetter.html
</link>
17233 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Ralf_Gesellensetter.html
</guid>
17234 <pubDate>Sun,
27 May
2012 17:
15:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
17235 <description><p
>In
2003, a German teacher showed up on the
17236 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu and Skolelinux
</a
>
17237 mailing list with interesting problems and reports proving he setting
17238 up Linux for a (for us at the time) lot of pupils. His name was Ralf
17239 Gesellensetter, and he has been an important tester and contributor
17240 since then, helping to make sure the
17241 <a href=
"http://www.debian.org/News/
2012/
20120311.html
">Debian Edu
17242 Squeeze
</a
> release became as good as it is..
</p
>
17244 <p
><strong
>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
</strong
></p
>
17246 <p
>I am a teacher from Germany, and my subjects are Geography,
17247 Mathematics, and Computer Science (
"Informatik
"). During the past
12
17248 years (since
2000), I have been working for a comprehensive (and soon,
17249 also inclusive) school leading to all kind of general levels, such as
17250 O- or A-level (
"Abitur
"). For quite as long, I
've been taking care of
17251 our computer network.
</p
>
17253 <p
>Now, in my early
40s, I enjoy the privilege of spending a lot of my
17254 spare time together with my wife, our son (
3 years) and our daughter
17255 (
4 months).
</p
>
17257 <p
><strong
>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
17258 project?
</strong
></p
>
17260 <p
>We had tried different Linux based school servers, when members of
17261 my local Linux User Group (LUG OWL) detected Skolelinux. I remember
17262 very well, being part of a party celebrating the Linux New Media Award
17263 (
"Best Newcomer Distribution
", also nominated: Ubuntu) that was given
17264 to Skolelinux at Linux World Exposition in Frankfurt,
2005 (IIRC). Few
17265 months later, I had the chance to join a developer meeting in Ulsrud
17266 (Oslo) and to hand out the award to Knut Yrvin and others. For more
17267 than
7 years, Skolelinux is part of our schools infrastructure, namely
17268 our main server (tjener), one LTSP (today without thin clients), and
17269 approximately
50 work stations. Most of these have the option to boot a
17270 locally installed Skolelinux image. As a consequence, I joined quite
17271 a few events dealing with free software or Linux, and met many Debian
17272 (Edu) developers. All of them seemed quite nice and competent to me,
17273 one more reason to stick to Skolelinux.
</p
>
17275 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
17276 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
17278 <p
>Debian driven, you are given all the advantages of a community
17279 project including well maintained updates. Once, you are familiar with
17280 the network layout, you can easily roll out an entire educational
17281 computer infrastructure, from just one installation media. As only
17282 free software (FOSS) is used, that supports even elderly hardware,
17283 up-sizing your IT equipment is only limited by space (i.e. available
17284 labs). Especially if you run a LTSP thin client server, your
17285 administration costs tend towards zero.
</p
>
17287 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
17288 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
17290 <p
>While Debian
's stability has loads of advantages for servers, this
17291 might be different in some cases for clients: Schools with unlimited
17292 budget might buy new hardware with components that are not yet
17293 supported by Debian stable, or wish to use more recent versions of
17294 office packages or desktop environments. These schools have the
17295 option to run Debian testing or other distributions - if they have the
17296 capacity to do so. Another issue is that Debian release cycles
17297 include a wide range of changes; therefor a high percentage of human
17298 power seems to be absorbed by just keeping the features of Skolelinux
17299 within the new setting of the version to come. During this process,
17300 the cogs of Debian Edu are getting more and more professional,
17301 i.e. harder to understand for novices.
</p
>
17303 <p
><strong
>Which free software do you use daily?
</strong
></p
>
17305 <p
>LibreOffice, Wikipedia, Openstreetmap, Iceweasel (Mozilla Firefox),
17306 KMail, Gimp, Inkscape - and of course the Linux Kernel (not only on
17307 PC, Laptop, Mobile, but also our SAT receiver)
</p
>
17309 <p
><strong
>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
17310 get schools to use free software?
</strong
></p
>
17312 <p
><ol
>
17314 <li
>Support computer science as regular subject in schools to make
17315 people really
"own
" their hardware, to make them understand the
17316 difference between proprietary software products, and free software
17317 developing.
</li
>
17319 <li
>Make budget baskets corresponding: In Germany
's public schools
17320 there are more or less fixed budgets for IT equipment (including
17321 licenses), so schools won
't benefit from any savings here. This
17322 privilege is left to private schools which have consequently a large
17323 share among German Skolelinux schools.
</li
>
17325 <li
>Get free software in the seminars where would-be teachers are
17326 trained. In many cases, teachers
' software customs are respected by
17327 decision makers rather than the expertise of any IT experts.
</li
>
17329 <li
>Don
't limit ourself to free software run natively. Everybody uses
17330 free software or free licenses (for instance Wikipedia), and this
17331 general concept should get expanded to free educational content to be
17332 shared world wide (school books e.g.).
</li
>
17334 <li
>Make clear where ever you can that the market share of free (libre)
17335 office suites is much above
20 p.c. today, and that you pupils don
't
17336 need to know the
"ribbon menu
" in order to get employed.
</li
>
17338 <li
>Talk about the difference between freeware and free software.
</li
>
17340 <li
>Spread free software, or even collections of portable free apps
17341 for USB pen drives. Endorse students to get a legal copy of
17342 Libreoffice rather than accepting them to use illegal serials. And
17343 keep sending documents in ODF formats.
</li
>
17345 </ol
></p
>
17350 <title>The cost of ODF and OOXML
</title>
17351 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_cost_of_ODF_and_OOXML.html
</link>
17352 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_cost_of_ODF_and_OOXML.html
</guid>
17353 <pubDate>Sat,
26 May
2012 18:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
17354 <description><p
>I just come across a blog post from Glyn Moody reporting the
17355 claimed cost from Microsoft on requiring ODF to be used by the UK
17356 government. I just sent him an email to let him know that his
17357 assumption are most likely wrong. Sharing it here in case some of my
17358 blog readers have seem the same numbers float around in the UK.
</p
>
17360 <p
><blockquote
> <p
>Hi. I just noted your
17361 <a href=
"http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/
2012/
04/does-microsoft-office-lock-in-cost-the-uk-government-
500-million/index.htm
">http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/
2012/
04/does-microsoft-office-lock-in-cost-the-uk-government-
500-million/index.htm
</a
>
17364 <p
><blockquote
>"They
're all in Danish, not unreasonably, but even
17365 with the help of Google Translate I can
't find any figures about the
17366 savings of
"moving to a flexible two standard
" as claimed by the
17367 Microsoft email. But I assume it is backed up somewhere, so let
's take
17368 it, and the £
500 million figure for the UK, on trust.
"
17369 </blockquote
></p
>
17371 <p
>I can tell you that the Danish reports are inflated. I believe it is
17372 the same reports that were used in the Norwegian debate around
2007,
17373 and Gisle Hannemyr (a well known IT commentator in Norway) had a look
17374 at the content. In short, the reason it is claimed that using ODF
17375 will be so costly, is based on the assumption that this mean every
17376 existing document need to be converted from one of the MS Office
17377 formats to ODF, transferred to the receiver, and converted back from
17378 ODF to one of the MS Office formats, and that the conversion will cost
17379 10 minutes of work time for both the sender and the receiver. In
17380 reality the sender would have a tool capable of saving to ODF, and the
17381 receiver would have a tool capable of reading it, and the time spent
17382 would at most be a few seconds for saving and loading, not
20 minutes
17383 of wasted effort.
</p
>
17385 <p
>Microsoft claimed all these costs were saved by allowing people to
17386 transfer the original files from MS Office instead of spending
10
17387 minutes converting to ODF. :)
</p
>
17390 <a href=
"http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12_vl02.php
">http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12_vl02.php
</a
>
17392 <a href=
"http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12.php
">http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12.php
</a
>
17393 for background information. Norwegian only, sorry. :)
</p
>
17394 </blockquote
></p
>
17399 <title>ColorHug - USB and free software based screen color calibration
</title>
17400 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ColorHug___USB_and_free_software_based_screen_color_calibration.html
</link>
17401 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ColorHug___USB_and_free_software_based_screen_color_calibration.html
</guid>
17402 <pubDate>Fri,
18 May
2012 10:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
17403 <description><p
>In january, I
17404 <a href=
"http://blog.cihar.com/archives/
2012/
01/
17/colorhug-has-arrived/
">discovered
17405 the ColorHug
</a
>, a USB dongle from
17406 <a href=
"http://www.hughski.com/index.html
">Hughski
</a
> to calibrate
17407 the color on a computer screen. The software required is
17408 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/c/colorhug-client.html
">included
17409 in Debian
</a
>, and I decided back then to preorder from the next
17410 batch. Yesterday I finally heard back from them, and got the
17411 opportunity to order. Today I ordered mine, and eagerly await the
17412 delivery. I hope it arrive next week, as I got a confirmation that it
17413 should go in the mail on monday. :)
</p
>
17415 <p
>If you want to ensure the colors on the screen match the intended
17416 colors, I suggest you check out this cheap tool with free software
17417 drivers. :)
</p
>
17422 <title>Debian Edu interview: Jürgen Leibner
</title>
17423 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__J_rgen_Leibner.html
</link>
17424 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__J_rgen_Leibner.html
</guid>
17425 <pubDate>Sun,
13 May
2012 20:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
17426 <description><p
>It has been a few busy weeks for me, but I am finally back to
17427 publish another interview with the people behind
17428 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu and Skolelinux
</a
>.
17429 This time it is one of our German developers, who have helped out over the
17430 years to make sure both a lot of major but also a lot of the minor
17431 details get right before release.
17433 <p
><strong
>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
</strong
></p
>
17435 <p
>My name is Jürgen Leibner, I
'm
49 years old and living in
17436 Bielefeld, a town in northern Germany. I worked nearly
20 years as
17437 certified engineer in the department for plant design and layout of an
17438 international company for machinery and equipment. Since
2011 I
'm a
17439 certified technical writer (tekom e.V.) and doing technical
17440 documentations for a steam turbine manufacturer. From April this year
17441 I will manage the department of technical documentation at a
17442 manufacturer of automation and assembly line engineering.
</p
>
17444 <p
>My first contact with linux was around
1993. Since that time I used
17445 it at work and at home repeatedly but not exclusively as I do now at
17446 home since
2006.
</p
>
17448 <p
><strong
>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
17449 project?
</strong
></p
>
17451 <p
>Once a day in the early year of
2001 when I wanted to fetch my
17452 daughter from primary school, there was a teacher sitting in the
17453 middle of
20 old computers trying to boot them and he failed. I helped
17454 him to get them booting. That was seen by the school director and she
17455 asked me if I would like to manage that the school gets all that old
17456 computers in use. I answered:
"Yes
".
</p
>
17458 <p
>Some weeks later every of the
10 classrooms had one computer
17459 running Windows98. I began to collect old computers and equipment as
17460 gifts and installed the first computer room with a peer-to-peer
17461 network. I did my work at school without being payed in my spare time
17462 and with a lot of fun. About one year later the school was connected
17463 to Internet and a local area network was installed in the school
17464 building. That was the time to have a server and I knew it must be a
17465 Linux server to be able to fulfil all the wishes of the teachers and
17466 being able to do this in a transparent and economic way, without extra
17467 costs for things like licence and software. So I searched for a
17468 school server system running under Linux and I found a couple of
17469 people nearby who founded
'skolelinux.de
'. It was the Skolelinux
17470 prerelease
32 I first tried out for being used at the school. I
17471 managed the IT of that school until the municipal authority took over
17472 the IT management and centralised the services for all schools in
17473 Bielefeld in December of
2006.
</p
>
17475 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
17476 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
17478 <p
>When I
'm looking back to the beginning, there were other advantages
17479 for me as today.
</p
>
17481 <p
>In the past there were advantages like:
</p
>
17483 <p
><ul
>
17485 <li
>I don
't need to buy it so it generates no costs to the school as
17486 they had little money to spent for computers and software.
</li
>
17488 <li
>It has a licence which grands all rights to use it without
17491 <li
>It was more able to fit all requirements of a server system for
17492 schools than a Microsoft server system, even if there are only Windows
17493 clients because of it
's preconfigured overall concept of being a
17494 infrastructure solution and community for schools, not only a
17497 <li
>I was able to configure the server to the needs of the
17500 </ul
></p
>
17502 <p
>Today some of the advantages has been lost, changed or new ones
17503 came up in this way:
</p
>
17505 <p
><ul
>
17507 <li
>Most schools here do have money to buy hardware and software
17510 <li
>They are today mostly managed from central IT departments which
17511 have own concepts which often do not fit to Debian Edu concepts
17512 because they are to close to Microsoft ideology.
</li
>
17514 <li
>With the Squeeze version of Debian Edu which now uses GOsa² for
17515 management I feel more able to manage the daily tasks than with the
17516 interfaces used in the past.
</li
>
17518 <li
>It is more modular than in the past and fits even better to the
17519 different needs.
</li
>
17521 <li
>The documentation is usable and gets better every day.
</li
>
17523 <li
>More people than ever before are using Debian Edu all over the
17524 world and so the community, which is an very important part I think,
17525 is sharing knowledge and minds.
</li
>
17527 <li
>Most, maybe all, of the technical requirements for schools are
17528 solved today by Debian Edu.
</li
>
17530 </ul
></p
>
17532 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
17533 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
17535 <p
><ul
>
17537 <li
>There are too few IT companies able to integrate Debian Edu into
17538 their product portfolio for serving schools with concepts or even
17539 whole municipality areas.
</li
>
17541 <li
>Debian Edu has beside other free and open software projects not
17542 enough lobbyists which promote free and open software to
17543 politicians.
</li
>
17545 <li
>Technically there are no disadvantages I
'm aware of.
</li
>
17547 </ul
></p
>
17549 <p
><strong
>Which free software do you use daily?
</strong
></p
>
17551 <p
>I use Debian stable on my home server and on my little desktop
17552 computer. On my laptop I use Debian testing/sid. The applications I
17553 use on my laptop and my desktop are Open/Libre-office, Iceweasel,
17554 KMail, DigiKam, Amarok, Dolphin, okular and all the other programs I
17555 need from the KDE environment. On console I use newsbeuter, mutt,
17556 screen, irssi and all the other famous and useful tools.
</p
>
17558 <p
>My home server provides mail services with exim, dovecot, roundcube
17559 and mutt over ssh on the console, file services with samba, NFS,
17560 rsync, web services with apache, moinmoin-wiki, multimedia services
17561 with gallery2 and mediatomb and database services with MySQL for me
17562 and the whole family. I probably forgot something.
</p
>
17564 <p
><strong
>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
17565 get schools to use free software?
</strong
></p
>
17567 <p
>I believe, we should provide concepts for IT companies to integrate
17568 Debian Edu into their product portfolio with use cases for different
17569 countries and areas all over the world.
</p
>
17574 <title>Cutting it short - and picking the right tool for the job
</title>
17575 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Cutting_it_short___and_picking_the_right_tool_for_the_job.html
</link>
17576 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Cutting_it_short___and_picking_the_right_tool_for_the_job.html
</guid>
17577 <pubDate>Mon,
30 Apr
2012 23:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
17578 <description><p
><!-- IMG_5869.JPG --
>
17579 <img src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/panasonic-er-
1611.jpeg
"></p
>
17581 <p
>I normally cut my hair short, and my tool of choice has been a
17582 common hair/beard cutter, bought in a electrical shop here in Norway.
17583 But the last ones have not really been up to the task. My last
17584 cutter, some model from Braun, could only cut a few of my hairs at the
17585 time, and cutting my head took forever. And the one before that did
17586 not work very well either. We have looked for something better for a
17587 while, but it was not until I ended up visiting a hairdresser that we
17588 discovered that there are indeed better tools available. But these
17589 are not marketed and sold to
"regular consumers
". The hair saloons
17590 can get them through their suppliers, but their suppliers only sell
17591 companies. The models they sell, are very different from the ones
17592 available from Elkjøp and Lefdal. The main difference is their
17593 efficiency. It would cut my hair in
5 minutes, instead of the
30-
40
17594 minutes required by my impotent Braun. The hairdresser I visited had
17595 a Panasonic ER160, which unfortunately is no longer available from the
17596 producer. But I found it had a successor, the Panasonic ER1611.
</p
>
17598 <p
>The next step was to find somewhere to buy it. This was not
17599 straight forward. The list of suppliers I got from the hairdresser
17600 did not want to sell anything to me. But searching for the model on
17601 the web we found a supplier in Norway willing to sell it to us for
17602 around NOK
4000,-. This was a bit much. We kept searching and
17603 finally found a Danish supplier
17604 <a href=
"http://nicehair.dk/panasonic-er-
1611-professionel-hartrimmer.html
">selling
17605 it for around NOK
1800,-
</a
>. We ordered one, and it arrived a few
17606 days ago.
</p
>
17608 <p
>The instructions said it had to charge for
8 hours when we started
17609 to use it, so we left it charging over night. Normally it will only
17610 need one hour to charge. The following evening we successfully tested
17611 it, and I can warmly recommend it to anyone looking for a real hair
17612 cutter. The ones we have used until now have been hair cutter
17618 <title>HTC One X - Your video? What do you mean?
</title>
17619 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/HTC_One_X___Your_video___What_do_you_mean_.html
</link>
17620 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/HTC_One_X___Your_video___What_do_you_mean_.html
</guid>
17621 <pubDate>Thu,
26 Apr
2012 13:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
17622 <description><p
>In
<a href=
"http://www.idg.no/computerworld/article243690.ece
">an
17623 article today
</a
> published by Computerworld Norway, the photographer
17624 <a href=
"http://www.urke.com/eirik/
">Eirik Helland Urke
</a
> reports
17625 that the video editor application included with
17626 <a href=
"http://www.htc.com/www/smartphones/htc-one-x/#specs
">HTC One
17627 X
</a
> have some quite surprising terms of use. The article is mostly
17628 based on the twitter message from mister Urke, stating:
17630 <p
><blockquote
>
17631 "<a href=
"http://twitter.com/urke/status/
194062269724897280">Drøy
17632 brukeravtale: HTC kan bruke MINE redigerte videoer kommersielt. Selv
17633 kan jeg KUN bruke dem privat.
</a
>"
17634 </blockquote
></p
>
17636 <p
>I quickly translated it to this English message:
</p
>
17638 <p
><blockquote
>
17639 "Arrogant user agreement: HTC can use MY edited videos
17640 commercially. Although I can ONLY use them privately.
"
17641 </blockquote
></p
>
17643 <p
>I
've been unable to find the text of the license term myself, but
17644 suspect it is a variation of the MPEG-LA terms I
17645 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Terms_of_use_for_video_produced_by_a_Canon_IXUS_130_digital_camera.html
">discovered
17646 with my Canon IXUS
130</a
>. The HTC One X specification specifies that
17647 the recording format of the phone is .amr for audio and .mp3 for
17649 <a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_Multi-Rate_audio_codec#Licensing_and_patent_issues
">Adaptive
17650 Multi-Rate audio codec
</a
> with patents which according to the
17651 Wikipedia article require an license agreement with
17652 <a href=
"http://www.voiceage.com/
">VoiceAge
</a
>. MP4 is
17653 <a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H
.264/MPEG-
4_AVC#Patent_licensing
">MPEG4 with
17654 H
.264</a
>, which according to Wikipedia require a licence agreement
17655 with
<a href=
"http://www.mpegla.com/
">MPEG-LA
</a
>.
</p
>
17657 <p
>I know why I prefer
17658 <a href=
"http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition
">free and open
17659 standards
</a
> also for video.
</p
>
17664 <title>RAND terms - non-reasonable and discriminatory
</title>
17665 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/RAND_terms___non_reasonable_and_discriminatory.html
</link>
17666 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/RAND_terms___non_reasonable_and_discriminatory.html
</guid>
17667 <pubDate>Thu,
19 Apr
2012 22:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
17668 <description><p
>Here in Norway, the
17669 <a href=
"http://www.regjeringen.no/nb/dep/fad.html?id=
339"> Ministry of
17670 Government Administration, Reform and Church Affairs
</a
> is behind
17671 a
<a href=
"http://standard.difi.no/forvaltningsstandarder
">directory of
17672 standards
</a
> that are recommended or mandatory for use by the
17673 government. When the directory was created, the people behind it made
17674 an effort to ensure that everyone would be able to implement the
17675 standards and compete on equal terms to supply software and solutions
17676 to the government. Free software and non-free software could compete
17677 on the same level.
</p
>
17679 <p
>But recently, some standards with RAND
17680 (
<a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_and_non-discriminatory_licensing
">Reasonable
17681 And Non-Discriminatory
</a
>) terms have made their way into the
17682 directory. And while this might not sound too bad, the fact is that
17683 standard specifications with RAND terms often block free software from
17684 implementing them. The reasonable part of RAND mean that the cost per
17685 user/unit is low,and the non-discriminatory part mean that everyone
17686 willing to pay will get a license. Both sound great in theory. In
17687 practice, to get such license one need to be able to count users, and
17688 be able to pay a small amount of money per unit or user. By
17689 definition, users of free software do not need to register their use.
17690 So counting users or units is not possible for free software projects.
17691 And given that people will use the software without handing any money
17692 to the author, it is not really economically possible for a free
17693 software author to pay a small amount of money to license the rights
17694 to implement a standard when the income available is zero. The result
17695 in these situations is that free software are locked out from
17696 implementing standards with RAND terms.
</p
>
17698 <p
>Because of this, when I see someone claiming the terms of a
17699 standard is reasonable and non-discriminatory, all I can think of is
17700 how this really is non-reasonable and discriminatory. Because free
17701 software developers are working in a global market, it does not really
17702 help to know that software patents are not supposed to be enforceable
17703 in Norway. The patent regimes in other countries affect us even here.
17704 I really hope the people behind the standard directory will pay more
17705 attention to these issues in the future.
</p
>
17707 <p
>You can find more on the issues with RAND, FRAND and RAND-Z terms
17709 (
<a href=
"http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/
2010/
11/rand-not-so-reasonable/
">RAND:
17710 Not So Reasonable?
</a
>).
</p
>
17712 <p
>Update
2012-
04-
21: Just came across a
17713 <a href=
"http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/
2012/
04/of-microsoft-netscape-patents-and-open-standards/index.htm
">blog
17714 post from Glyn Moody
</a
> over at Computer World UK warning about the
17715 same issue, and urging people to speak out to the UK government. I
17716 can only urge Norwegian users to do the same for
17717 <a href=
"http://www.standard.difi.no/hoyring/hoyring-om-nye-anbefalte-it-standarder
">the
17718 hearing taking place at the moment
</a
> (respond before
2012-
04-
27).
17719 It proposes to require video conferencing standards including
17720 specifications with RAND terms.
</p
>
17725 <title>Debian Edu interview: Andreas Mundt
</title>
17726 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Andreas_Mundt.html
</link>
17727 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Andreas_Mundt.html
</guid>
17728 <pubDate>Sun,
15 Apr
2012 12:
10:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
17729 <description><p
>Behind
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu and
17730 Skolelinux
</a
> there are a lot of people doing the hard work of
17731 setting together all the pieces. This time I present to you Andreas
17732 Mundt, who have been part of the technical development team several
17733 years. He was also a key contributor in getting GOsa and Kerberos set
17734 up in the recently released
17735 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze
">Debian
17736 Edu Squeeze
</a
> version.
</p
>
17738 <p
><strong
>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
</strong
></p
>
17740 <p
>My name is Andreas Mundt, I grew up in south Germany. After
17741 studying Physics I spent several years at university doing research in
17742 Quantum Optics. After that I worked some years in an optics company.
17743 Finally I decided to turn over a new leaf in my life and started
17744 teaching
10 to
19 years old kids at school. I teach math, physics,
17745 information technology and science/technology.
</p
>
17747 <p
><strong
>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
17748 project?
</strong
></p
>
17750 <p
>Already before I switched to teaching, I followed the Debian Edu
17751 project because of my interest in education and Debian. Within the
17752 qualification/training period for the teaching, I started
17753 contributing.
</p
>
17755 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
17756 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
17758 <p
>The advantages of Debian Edu are the well known name, the
17759 out-of-the-box philosophy and of course the great free software of the
17760 Debian Project!
</p
>
17762 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
17763 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
17765 <p
>As every coin has two sides, the out-of-the-box philosophy has its
17766 downside, too. In my opinion, it is hard to modify and tweak the
17767 setup, if you need or want that. Further more, it is not easily
17768 possible to upgrade the system to a new release. It takes much too
17769 long after a Debian release to prepare the -Edu release, perhaps
17770 because the number of developers working on the core of the code is
17771 rather small and often busy elsewhere.
</p
>
17773 <p
>The
<a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianLAN
">Debian LAN
</a
>
17774 project might fill the use case of a more flexible system.
</p
>
17776 <p
><strong
>Which free software do you use daily?
</strong
></p
>
17778 <p
>I am only using non-free software if I am forced to and run Debian
17779 on all my machines. For documents I prefer LaTeX and PGF/TikZ, then
17780 mutt and iceweasel for email respectively web browsing. At school I
17781 have Arduino and Fritzing in use for a micro controller project.
</p
>
17783 <p
><strong
>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
17784 get schools to use free software?
</strong
></p
>
17786 <p
>One of the major problems is the vendor lock-in from top to bottom:
17787 Especially in combination with ignorant government employees and
17788 politicians, this works out great for the
"market-leader
". The school
17789 administration here in Baden-Wuerttemberg is occupied by that vendor.
17790 Documents have to be prepared in non-free, proprietary formats. Even
17791 free browsers do not work for the school administration. Publishers
17792 of school books provide software only for proprietary platforms.
</p
>
17794 <p
>To change this, political work is very important. Parts of the
17795 political spectrum have become aware of the problem in the last years.
17796 However it takes quite some time and courageous politicians to
'free
'
17797 the system. There is currently some discussion about
"Open Data
" and
17798 "Free/Open Standards
". I am not sure if all the involved parties have
17799 a clue about the potential of these ideas, and probably only a
17800 fraction takes them seriously. However it might slowly make free
17801 software and the philosophy behind it more known and popular.
</p
>
17806 <title>Debian Edu interview: Justin B. Rye
</title>
17807 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Justin_B__Rye.html
</link>
17808 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Justin_B__Rye.html
</guid>
17809 <pubDate>Sun,
8 Apr
2012 10:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
17810 <description><p
>It take all kind of contributions to create a Linux distribution
17811 like
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
</a
>,
17812 and this time I lend the ear to Justin B. Rye, who is listed as a big
17814 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze
">Debian
17815 Edu Squeeze release manual
</a
>.
17817 <p
><strong
>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
</strong
></p
>
17819 <p
>I
'm a
44-year-old linguistics graduate living in Edinburgh who has
17820 occasionally been employed as a sysadmin.
</p
>
17822 <p
><strong
>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
17823 project?
</strong
></p
>
17825 <p
>I
'm neither a developer nor a Skolelinux/Debian Edu user! The only
17826 reason my name
's in the credits for the documentation is that I hang
17827 around on debian-l10n-english waiting for people to mention things
17828 they
'd like a native English speaker to proofread... So I did a sweep
17829 through the wiki for typos and Norglish and inconsistent spellings of
17830 "localisation
".
</p
>
17832 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
17833 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
17835 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
17836 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
17838 <p
>These questions are too hard for me - I don
't use it! In fact I
17839 had hardly any contact with I.T. until long after I
'd got out of the
17840 education system.
</p
>
17842 <p
>I can tell you the advantages of Debian for me though: it soaks up
17843 as much of my free time as I want and no more, and lets me do
17844 everything I want a computer for without ever forcing me to spend
17845 money on the latest hardware.
</p
>
17847 <p
><strong
>Which free software do you use daily?
</strong
></p
>
17849 <p
>I
've been using Debian since Rex; popularity-contest says the
17850 software that I use most is xinit, xterm, and xulrunner (in other
17851 words, I use a distinctly retro sort of desktop).
</p
>
17853 <p
><strong
>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
17854 get schools to use free software?
</strong
></p
>
17856 <p
>Well, I don
't know. I suppose I
'd be inclined to try reasoning
17857 with the people who make the decisions, but obviously if that worked
17858 you would hardly need a strategy.
</p
>
17863 <title>Why the KDE menu is slow when /usr/ is NFS mounted - and a workaround
</title>
17864 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_the_KDE_menu_is_slow_when__usr__is_NFS_mounted___and_a_workaround.html
</link>
17865 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_the_KDE_menu_is_slow_when__usr__is_NFS_mounted___and_a_workaround.html
</guid>
17866 <pubDate>Fri,
6 Apr
2012 22:
40:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
17867 <description><p
>Recently I have spent time with
17868 <a href=
"http://www.slxdrift.no/
">Skolelinux Drift AS
</a
> on speeding
17869 up a
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
</a
>
17870 Lenny installation using LTSP diskless workstations, and in the
17871 process I discovered something very surprising. The reason the KDE
17872 menu was responding slow when using it for the first time, was mostly
17873 due to the way KDE find application icons. I discovered that showing
17874 the Multimedia menu would cause more than
20 000 IP packages to be
17875 passed between the LTSP client and the NFS server. Most of these were
17877 NFS LOOKUP calls, resulting in a NFS3ERR_NOENT response. Because the
17878 ping times between the client and the server were in the range
2-
20
17879 ms, the menus would be very slow. Looking at the strace of kicker in
17880 Lenny (or plasma-desktop i Squeeze - same problem there), I see that
17881 the source of these NFS calls are access(
2) system calls for
17882 non-existing files. KDE can do hundreds of access(
2) calls to find
17883 one icon file. In my example, just finding the mplayer icon required
17884 around
230 access(
2) calls.
</p
>
17886 <p
>The KDE code seem to search for icons using a list of icon
17887 directories, and the list of possible directories is large. In
17888 (almost) each directory, it look for files ending in .png, .svgz, .svg
17889 and .xpm. The result is a very slow KDE menu when /usr/ is NFS
17890 mounted. Showing a single sub menu may result in thousands of NFS
17891 requests. I am not the first one to discover this. I found a
17892 <a href=
"https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=
211416">KDE bug report
17893 from
2009</a
> about this problem, and it is still unsolved.
</p
>
17895 <p
>My solution to speed up the KDE menu was to create a package
17896 kde-icon-cache that upon installation will look at all .desktop files
17897 used to generate the KDE menu, find their icons, search the icon paths
17898 for the file that KDE will end up finding at run time, and copying the
17899 icon file to /var/lib/kde-icon-cache/. Finally, I add symlinks to
17900 these icon files in one of the first directories where KDE will look
17901 for them. This cut down the number of file accesses required to find
17902 one icon from several hundred to less than
5, and make the KDE menu
17903 almost instantaneous. I
'm not quite sure where to make the package
17904 publicly available, so for now it is only available on request.
</p
>
17906 <p
>The bug report mention that this do not only affect the KDE menu
17907 and icon handling, but also the login process. Not quite sure how to
17908 speed up that part without replacing NFS with for example NBD, and
17909 that is not really an option at the moment.
</p
>
17911 <p
>If you got feedback on this issue, please let us know on debian-edu
17912 (at) lists.debian.org.
</p
>
17914 <p
>Update
2015-
08-
04: The
17915 <a href=
"http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/debian-edu/upstream/kde-icon-cache.git/
">source
17916 of the scripts and associated Debian package
</a
> is available from the
17917 Debian Edu github repository.
</p
>
17922 <title>Debian Edu in the Linux Weekly News
</title>
17923 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_in_the_Linux_Weekly_News.html
</link>
17924 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_in_the_Linux_Weekly_News.html
</guid>
17925 <pubDate>Thu,
5 Apr
2012 08:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
17926 <description><p
>About two weeks ago, I was interviewed via email about
17927 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu and Skolelinux
</a
> by
17928 Bruce Byfield in Linux Weekly News. The result was made public for
17929 non-subscribers today. I am pleased to see liked our Linux solution
17930 for schools. Check out his article
17931 <a href=
"https://lwn.net/Articles/
488805/
">Debian Edu/Skolelinux: A
17932 distribution for education
</a
> if you want to learn more.
</p
>
17937 <title>Debian Edu interview: Wolfgang Schweer
</title>
17938 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Wolfgang_Schweer.html
</link>
17939 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Wolfgang_Schweer.html
</guid>
17940 <pubDate>Sun,
1 Apr
2012 23:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
17941 <description><p
>Germany is a core area for the
17942 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu and Skolelinux
</a
>
17943 user community, and this time I managed to get hold of Wolfgang
17944 Schweer, a valuable contributor to the project from Germany.
17946 <p
><strong
>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
</strong
></p
>
17948 <p
>I
've studied Mathematics at the university
'Ruhr-Universität
' in
17949 Bochum, Germany. Since
1981 I
'm working as a teacher at the school
17950 "<a href=
"http://www.westfalenkolleg-dortmund.de/
">Westfalen-Kolleg
17951 Dortmund
</a
>", a second chance school. Here, young adults is given
17952 the opportunity to get further education in order to do the school
17953 examination
'Abitur
', which will allow to study at a university. This
17954 second chance is of value for those who want a better job perspective
17955 or failed to get a higher school examination being teens.
</p
>
17957 <p
>Besides teaching I was involved in developing online courses for a
17958 blended learning project called
'abitur-online.nrw
' and in some other
17959 information technology related projects. For about ten years I
've been
17960 teacher and coordinator for the
'abitur-online
' project at my
17961 school. Being now in my early sixties, I
've decided to leave school at
17962 the end of April this year.
</p
>
17964 <p
><strong
>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
17965 project?
</strong
></p
>
17967 <p
>The first information about Skolelinux must have come to my
17968 attention years ago and somehow related to LTSP (Linux Terminal Server
17969 Project). At school, we had set up a network at the beginning of
1997
17970 using Suse Linux on the desktop, replacing a Novell network. Since
17971 2002, we used old machines from the city council of Dortmund as thin
17972 clients (LTSP, later Ubuntu/Lessdisks) cause new hardware was out of
17973 reach. At home I
'm using Debian since years and - subscribed to the
17974 Debian news letter - heard from time to time about Skolelinux. About
17975 two years ago I proposed to replace the (somehow undocumented and only
17976 known to me) system at school by a well known Debian based system:
17977 Skolelinux.
</p
>
17979 <p
>Students and teachers appreciated the new system because of a
17980 better look and feel and an enhanced access to local media on thin
17981 clients. The possibility to alter and/or reset passwords using a GUI
17982 was welcomed, too. Being able to do administrative tasks using a GUI
17983 and to easily set up workstations using PXE was of very high value for
17984 the admin teachers.
</p
>
17986 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
17987 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
17989 <p
>It
's open source, easy to set up, stable and flexible due to it
's
17990 Debian base. It integrates LTSP out-of-the-box. And it is documented!
17991 So it was a perfect choice.
</p
>
17993 <p
>Being open source, there are no license problems and so it
's
17994 possible to point teachers and students to programs like
17995 OpenOffice.org, ViewYourMind (mind mapping) and The Gimp. It
's of
17996 high value to be able to adapt parts of the system to special needs of
17997 a school and to choose where to get support for this.
</p
>
17999 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
18000 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
18002 <p
>Nothing yet.
</p
>
18004 <p
><strong
>Which free software do you use daily?
</strong
></p
>
18006 <p
>At home (Debian Sid with Gnome Desktop): Iceweasel, LibreOffice,
18007 Mutt, Gedit, Document Viewer, Midnight Commander, flpsed (PDF
18008 Annotator). At school (Skolelinux Lenny): Iceweasel, Gedit,
18009 LibreOffice.
</p
>
18011 <p
><strong
>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
18012 get schools to use free software?
</strong
></p
>
18014 <p
>Some time ago I thought it was enough to tell people about it. But
18015 that doesn
't seem to work quite well. Now I concentrate on those more
18016 interested and hope to get multiplicators that way.
</p
>
18021 <title>Debian Edu screencast: Checking email with kmail using Kerberos authentication
</title>
18022 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_screencast__Checking_email_with_kmail_using_Kerberos_authentication.html
</link>
18023 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_screencast__Checking_email_with_kmail_using_Kerberos_authentication.html
</guid>
18024 <pubDate>Sun,
25 Mar
2012 10:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
18025 <description><!-- Video HTML based on http://www.diveintohtml5.net/video.html --
>
18027 <p
>The same Debian Edu developer that did the last screen cast I
18028 published, Wolfgang Schweer, has created a new screen cast showing how
18029 to set up Kmail in Debian Edu Squeze to authenticate using Kerberos,
18030 allowing users to check their local email account without providing
18031 any password. The video is embedded here in quarter size,
18032 and also available from
<a href=
"https://vimeo.com/
38601767">vimeo
</a
>
18034 <a href=
"http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/
2012-
03-
14-Debian-Edu_Configure_Kmail_for_internal_usage.ogv
">Ogg
18035 Theora
</a
> file. Check it out below.
</p
>
18037 <p
><video id=
"kmail-kerberos-movie
" width=
"256" height=
"184" preload controls
>
18038 <source src=
"http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/
2012-
03-
14-Debian-Edu_Configure_Kmail_for_internal_usage.ogv
" type=
'video/ogg; codecs=
"theora, vorbis
"' /
>
18039 <p
>Download video as
18040 <a href=
"http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/
2012-
03-
14-Debian-Edu_Configure_Kmail_for_internal_usage.ogv
">Ogg
</a
>.
</p
>
18041 </video
></p
>
18046 <title>Debian Edu interview: John Ingleby
</title>
18047 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__John_Ingleby.html
</link>
18048 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__John_Ingleby.html
</guid>
18049 <pubDate>Mon,
19 Mar
2012 21:
15:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
18050 <description><p
><a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
</a
>
18051 users are spread all across the globe. The second inteview after
18052 <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/
2012/
03/msg00001.html
">the
18053 Squeeze release
</a
> was publised is with John Ingleby, a teacher and
18054 long time Linux user in United Kingdom.
</p
>
18056 <p
><strong
>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
</strong
></p
>
18058 <p
>I teach ICT part time at the Rudolf Steiner School in Kings
18059 Langley, near London, UK. Previously I worked as a technical
18060 author/trainer while my children attended the school, and I also
18061 contributed to the Schoolforge UK community with the aim of
18062 encouraging UK schools to adopt free/open source software. Five or six
18063 years ago we had about
50 schools interested in some way, but we
18064 weren
't able to convert many of them into sustainable
18065 installations.
</p
>
18067 <p
><strong
>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
18068 project?
</strong
></p
>
18070 <p
>Skolelinux had two representatives at an early Edubuntu meeting in
18071 London which I attended. However at that time our school network had
18072 just been installed using CentOS, LTSP
4 and GNOME. When LTSP
5 came
18073 along we switched to Edubuntu thin client servers so now we have a
18074 mixed environment which includes Windows PCs and student laptops, as
18075 well as their MacBooks and iPads. However, the proprietary systems
18076 have always been rather problematic, and we never built a GUI for the
18077 LDAP server, so when I discovered Skolelinux is configured for all
18078 these things we decided to try it.
</p
>
18080 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
18081 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
18083 <p
>By far the biggest advantage is the Debian Edu community. Apart
18084 from that I have always believed in the same
"sustainable computing
"
18085 goals that Skolelinux is built on: installing Linux on computers which
18086 would otherwise be thrown away, to provide a reliable, secure and
18087 low-cost IT environment for schools. From my own experience I know
18088 that a part-time person can teach and manage a network of about
25
18089 Linux computers, but it would take much more of my time if we had
18090 proprietary software everywhere.
</p
>
18092 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
18093 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
18095 <p
>As a newcomer I
'm just finding out who
's who in the community and
18096 how you
're organised, and what your procedures are for dealing with
18097 various things such as editing manual pages and so-on. The only
18098 English language mailing list seems to be for developers as well as
18099 users, so my inbox needs heavy pruning each day!
</p
>
18101 <p
><strong
>Which free software do you use daily?
</strong
></p
>
18103 <p
>Besides the software already mentioned at school we use Samba,
18104 OpenLDAP, CUPS, Nagios and Dansguardian for the network, and on the
18105 desktops we have LibreOffice, Firefox, GIMP and Inkscape. At home I
18106 use Ubuntu and an Android
4 eePad Transformer (but I
'm not sure if
18107 that counts...)
</p
>
18109 <p
><strong
>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
18110 get schools to use free software?
</strong
></p
>
18112 <p
>That
's a tough question! For very many years UK schools installed
18113 and taught only proprietary software, so that at the highest levels
18114 the notion of
"computer
" means simply
"proprietary office
18115 applications
". However, schools today are experiencing budget
18116 constraints, and many are having to think hard about upgrading Windows
18117 XP. At the same time, we have students showing teachers how to use
18118 iPads, MacBooks and Android, so the choice of operating system is no
18119 longer quite so automatic. What is more, our government at last
18120 realised that we need people with programming skills, so they
're
18121 putting coding back in the curriculum! And it
's encouraging that the
18122 first
10,
000 Raspberry Pi units sold out in
2 hours.
</p
>
18124 <p
>I don
't really know what strategy is going to get UK schools to use
18125 free software, but building an active community of Skolelinux/Debian
18126 Edu users in this country has to be part of it.
</p
>
18131 <title>Writing and translating documentation in Debian Edu
</title>
18132 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Writing_and_translating_documentation_in_Debian_Edu.html
</link>
18133 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Writing_and_translating_documentation_in_Debian_Edu.html
</guid>
18134 <pubDate>Fri,
16 Mar
2012 09:
55:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
18135 <description><p
>Documentation in Debian Edu is provided in several languages, and
18136 it is important to make it both easy to contribute and to keep the
18137 translated versions in sync. To do this we have come up with what we
18138 believe is a very efficient work flow.
</p
>
18142 <li
>The documentation is written in a
18143 <a href=
"http://moinmo.in
">moinmoin wiki
</a
> (see for example
18144 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze
">the
18145 Squeeze release manual
</a
>) with support for exporting the content as
18146 docbook XML.
</li
>
18148 <li
>This docbook document is given to po4a to extract a gettext style
18149 .pot file with the content, which in turn is used to create .po files
18150 with the translated text.
</li
>
18152 <li
>The .po files are given to translators, and they can always tell
18153 which part of the original wiki document is new or changed. They can
18154 use their normal translation tools like lokalize or poedit to write
18155 the translation. There is even a system in place to handle translated
18158 <li
>The translated .po files are combined with the original docbook
18159 XML document using po4a to create a translated docbook document.
</li
>
18161 <li
>The final step is to use all the generated docbook files and
18162 create PDF and HTML version of the original and translated documents.
</li
>
18166 <p
>This setup work very well, but have a few issues. The biggest
18167 issue is that
<a href=
"http://moinmo.in/DocBook
">the docbook support
18168 we use in moinmoin
</a
> is not actively maintained. The docbook
18169 support is also buggy, and our build system contain workarounds to
18170 make sure the generated docbook is usable despite these bugs.
</p
>
18172 <p
>If you want to have a look at our setup, it is all there in the
18173 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/debian-edu-doc
">debian-edu-doc
18174 package
</a
>.
</p
>
18179 <title>Skolelinux / Debian Edu Squeeze is out!
</title>
18180 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Skolelinux___Debian_Edu_Squeeze_is_out_.html
</link>
18181 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Skolelinux___Debian_Edu_Squeeze_is_out_.html
</guid>
18182 <pubDate>Sun,
11 Mar
2012 23:
00:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
18183 <description><p
>This weekend we finally published the first stable release of
18184 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Skolelinux / Debian Edu
</a
> based
18185 on Debian/Squeeze. The full announcement is
18186 <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/
2012/
03/msg00001.html
">available
</a
>
18187 from the project announcement list. Now is a good time to test if it
18188 you have not done so already.
</p
>
18190 <p
>I plan to present the new version at
18191 <a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/
20120313-skolelinux/
">a NUUG
18192 meeting
</a
> on tuesday. I look forward to seeing you there if you are
18193 in Oslo, Norway.
</p
>
18198 <title>Debian Edu interview: Nigel Barker
</title>
18199 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Nigel_Barker.html
</link>
18200 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Nigel_Barker.html
</guid>
18201 <pubDate>Fri,
9 Mar
2012 11:
30:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
18202 <description><p
>Inspired by
<a href=
"http://raphaelhertzog.com/tag/interview/
">the
18203 interview series
</a
> conducted by Raphael, I started a Norwegian
18204 interview series with people involved in the Debian Edu / Skolelinux
18205 community. This was so popular that I believe it is time to move to a
18206 more international audience.
</p
>
18208 <p
>While
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu and
18209 Skolelinux
</a
> originated in France and Norway, and have most users in
18210 Europe, there are users all around the globe. One of those far away
18211 from me is Nigel Barker, a long time Debian Edu system administrator
18212 and contributor. It is thanks to him that Debian Edu is adjusted to
18213 work out of the box in Japan. I got him to answer a few questions,
18214 and am happy to share the response with you. :)
18217 <p
><strong
>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
</strong
></p
>
18219 <p
>My name is Nigel Barker, and I am British. I am married to Yumiko,
18220 and we have three lovely children, aged
15,
14 and
4(!) I am the IT
18221 Coordinator at Hiroshima International School, Japan. I am also a
18222 teacher, and in fact I spend most of my day teaching Mathematics,
18223 Science, IT, and Chemistry. I was originally a Chemistry teacher, but
18224 I have always had an interest in computers. Another teacher teaches
18225 primary school IT, but apart from that I am the only computer person,
18226 so that means I am the network manager, technician and webmaster,
18227 also, and I help people with their computer problems. I teach python
18228 to beginners in an after-school club. I am way too busy, so I really
18229 appreciate the simplicity of Skolelinux.
</p
>
18231 <p
><strong
>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
18232 project?
</strong
></p
>
18234 <p
>In around
2004 or
5 I discovered the ltsp project, and set up a
18235 server in the IT lab. I wanted some way to connect it to our central
18236 samba server, which I was also quite poor at configuring. I discovered
18237 Edubuntu when it came out, but it didn
't really improve my setup. I
18238 did various desperate searches for things like
"school Linux server
"
18239 and ended up in a document called
"Drift
" something or other. Reading
18240 there it became clear that Skolelinux was going to solve all my
18241 problems in one go. I was very excited, but apprehensive, because my
18242 previous attempts to install Debian had ended in failure (I used
18243 Mandrake for everything - ltsp, samba, apache, mail, ns...). I
18244 downloaded a beta version, had some problems, so subscribed to the
18245 Debian Edu list for help. I have remained subscribed ever since, and
18246 my school has run a Skolelinux network since Sarge.
</p
>
18248 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
18249 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
18251 <p
>For me the integrated setup. This is not just the server, or the
18252 workstation, or the ltsp. Its all of them, and its all configured
18253 ready to go. I read somewhere in the early documentation that it is
18254 designed to be setup and managed by the Maths or Science teacher, who
18255 doesn
't necessarily know much about computers, in a small Norwegian
18256 school. That describes me perfectly if you replace Norway with
18259 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
18260 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
18262 <p
>The desktop is fairly plain. If you compare it with Edubuntu, who
18263 have fun themes for children, or with distributions such as Mint, who
18264 make the desktop beautiful. They create a good impression on people
18265 who don
't need to understand how to use any of it, but who might be
18266 important to the school. School administrators or directors, for
18267 instance, or parents. Even kids. Debian itself usually has ugly
18268 default theme settings. It was my dream a few years back that some
18269 kind of integration would allow Edubuntu to do the desktop stuff and
18270 Debian Edu the servers, but now I realise how impossible that is. A
18271 second disadvantage is that if something goes wrong, or you need to
18272 customise something, then suddenly the level of expertise required
18273 multiplies. For example, backup wasn
't working properly in Lenny. It
18274 took me ages to learn how to set up my own server to do rsync backups.
18275 I am afraid of anything to do with ldap, but perhaps Gosa will
18278 <p
><strong
>Which free software do you use daily?
</strong
></p
>
18280 <p
>Nowadays I only use Debian on my personal computers. I have one for
18281 studio work (I play guitar and write songs), running AV Linux
18282 (customised Debian) a netbook running Squeeze, and a bigger laptop
18283 still running Skolelinux Lenny workstation. I have a Tjener in my
18284 house, that
's very useful for the family photos and music. At school
18285 the students only use Skolelinux. (Some teachers and the office still
18286 have windows). So that means we only use free software all day every
18287 day. Open office, The GIMP, Firefox/Iceweasel, VLC and Audacity are
18288 installed on every computer in school, irrespective of OS. We also
18289 have Koha on Debian for the library, and Apache, Moodle, b2evolution
18290 and Etomite on Debian for the www. The firewall is Untangle.
</p
>
18292 <p
><strong
>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
18293 get schools to use free software?
</strong
></p
>
18295 <p
>Current trends are in our favour. Open source is big in industry,
18296 and ordinary people have heard of it. The spread of Android and the
18297 popularity of Apple have helped to weaken the impression that you have
18298 to have Microsoft on everything. People complain to me much less about
18299 file formats and Word than they did
5 years ago. The Edu aspect is
18300 also a selling point. This is all customised for schools. Where is the
18301 Windows-edu, or the Mac-edu? But of course the main attraction is
18302 budget.The trick is to convince people that the quality is not
18303 compromised when you stop paying and use free software instead. That
18304 is one reason why I say the desktop experience is a weakness. People
18305 are not impressed when their USB drive doesn
't work, or their browser
18306 doesn
't play flash, for example.
</p
>
18311 <title>Debian Edu screencast: Mass creation of user accounts in Squeeze
</title>
18312 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_screencast__Mass_creation_of_user_accounts_in_Squeeze.html
</link>
18313 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_screencast__Mass_creation_of_user_accounts_in_Squeeze.html
</guid>
18314 <pubDate>Wed,
7 Mar
2012 13:
40:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
18315 <description><!-- Video HTML based on http://www.diveintohtml5.net/video.html --
>
18317 <p
>One of the Debian Edu developers, Wolfgang Schweer, just created a
18318 screen cast documenting how to create a lot of new users in LDAP on
18319 Debian Edu Squeeze. The video is embedded here in quarter size, and
18320 also available from
<a href=
"http://vimeo.com/
37675399">vimeo
</a
> and
18322 <a href=
"http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/
2012-
02-
29-debian_edu_mass_create_user_accounts.ogv
">Ogg
18323 Theora
</a
> file. Check it out below.
</p
>
18325 <p
><video id=
"gosa-mass-user-create-movie
" width=
"256" height=
"184" preload controls
>
18326 <source src=
"http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/
2012-
02-
29-debian_edu_mass_create_user_accounts.ogv
" type=
'video/ogg; codecs=
"theora, vorbis
"' /
>
18327 <p
>Download video as
18328 <a href=
"http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/
2012-
02-
29-debian_edu_mass_create_user_accounts.ogv
">Ogg
</a
>.
</p
>
18329 </video
></p
>
18334 <title>Third release candidate of Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Squeeze
</title>
18335 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Third_release_candidate_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Squeeze.html
</link>
18336 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Third_release_candidate_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Squeeze.html
</guid>
18337 <pubDate>Sun,
4 Mar
2012 18:
20:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
18338 <description><p
>This weekend we wrapped up and published the third release
18339 candidate for
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu /
18340 Skolelinux
</a
> based on Squeeze. The full announcement is
18341 <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/
2012/
03/msg00000.html
">available
</a
>
18342 from the project announcement list. Check it out if you
18343 need a software solution for your school.
</p
>
18348 <title>Stopmotion for making stop motion animations on Linux - reloaded
</title>
18349 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Stopmotion_for_making_stop_motion_animations_on_Linux___reloaded.html
</link>
18350 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Stopmotion_for_making_stop_motion_animations_on_Linux___reloaded.html
</guid>
18351 <pubDate>Sat,
3 Mar
2012 12:
50:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
18352 <description><p
>Many years ago, the
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Skolelinux
18353 / Debian Edu project
</a
> initiated a student project to create a tool
18354 for making stop motion movies. The proposal came from a teacher
18355 needing such tool on Skolelinux. The project, called
"stopmotion
",
18356 was manned by two extraordinary students and won a school award and a
18357 national aware with this great project. The project was initiated and
18358 mentored by Herman Robak, and manned by the students Bjørn Erik Nilsen
18359 and Fredrik Berg Kjølstad. They got in touch with people at Aardman
18360 Animation studio and received feedback on how professionals would like
18361 such stopmotion tool to work, and the end result was and is used by
18362 animators around the globe. But as is usual after studying, both got
18363 jobs and went elsewhere, and did not have time to properly tend to the
18364 project, and it has been lingering for a few years now. Until last
18367 <p
>Last year some of the users got together with Herman, and moved the
18368 project to Sourceforge and in effect restarted the project under a new
18370 <a href=
"http://sourceforge.net/projects/linuxstopmotion/
">linuxstopmotion
</a
>.
18371 The name change was done to make it possible to find the project using
18372 Internet search engines (try to search for
'stopmotion
' to see what I
18373 mean). I
've been following
18374 <a href=
"https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/linuxstopmotion-community
">the
18375 mailing list
</a
> and the improvement already in place and planned for
18376 the future is encouraging. If you want to make stop motion movies.
18377 Check it out. :)
</p
>
18382 <title>Second release candidate of Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Squeeze
</title>
18383 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Second_release_candidate_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Squeeze.html
</link>
18384 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Second_release_candidate_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Squeeze.html
</guid>
18385 <pubDate>Mon,
27 Feb
2012 14:
00:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
18386 <description><p
>This weekend we wrapped up and published the second release
18387 candidate for
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu /
18388 Skolelinux
</a
> based on Squeeze. The full announcement did for some
18389 reason not make it the project announcement list, but is
18390 <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/
2012/
02/msg00015.html
">available
</a
>
18391 from the Debian development announcement list. Check it out if you
18392 need a software solution for your school.
</p
>
18397 <title>First release candidate of Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Squeeze
</title>
18398 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_release_candidate_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Squeeze.html
</link>
18399 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_release_candidate_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Squeeze.html
</guid>
18400 <pubDate>Sun,
19 Feb
2012 23:
10:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
18401 <description><p
>One week delayed due to DVD build problems, we managed today to
18402 wrap up and publish the first release candidate for
18403 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
</a
> based
18404 on Squeeze. The full announcement is
18405 <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/
2012/
02/msg00001.html
">available
</a
>
18406 on the project announcement list. Check it out if you need a software
18407 solution for your school.
</p
>
18412 <title>How to figure out which RAID disk to replace when it fail
</title>
18413 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_figure_out_which_RAID_disk_to_replace_when_it_fail.html
</link>
18414 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_figure_out_which_RAID_disk_to_replace_when_it_fail.html
</guid>
18415 <pubDate>Tue,
14 Feb
2012 21:
25:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
18416 <description><p
>Once in a while my home server have disk problems. Thanks to Linux
18417 Software RAID, I have not lost data yet (but
18418 <a href=
"http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.raid/
34532">I was
18419 close
</a
> this summer :). But once a disk is starting to behave
18420 funny, a practical problem present itself. How to get from the Linux
18421 device name (like /dev/sdd) to something that can be used to identify
18422 the disk when the computer is turned off? In my case I have SATA
18423 disks with a unique ID printed on the label. All I need is a way to
18424 figure out how to query the disk to get the ID out.
</p
>
18426 <p
>After fumbling a bit, I
18427 <a href=
"http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-getting-scsi-ide-harddisk-information/
">found
18428 that hdparm -I
</a
> will report the disk serial number, which is
18429 printed on the disk label. The following (almost) one-liner can be
18430 used to look up the ID of all the failed disks:
</p
>
18432 <blockquote
><pre
>
18433 for d in $(cat /proc/mdstat |grep
'(F)
'|tr
' ' "\n
"|grep
'(F)
'|cut -d\[ -f1|sort -u);
18435 printf
"Failed disk $d:
"
18436 hdparm -I /dev/$d |grep
'Serial Num
'
18438 </blockquote
></pre
>
18440 <p
>Putting it here to make sure I do not have to search for it the
18441 next time, and in case other find it useful.
</p
>
18443 <p
>At the moment I have two failing disk. :(
</p
>
18445 <blockquote
><pre
>
18446 Failed disk sdd1: Serial Number: WD-WCASJ1860823
18447 Failed disk sdd2: Serial Number: WD-WCASJ1860823
18448 Failed disk sde2: Serial Number: WD-WCASJ1840589
18449 </blockquote
></pre
>
18451 <p
>The last time I had failing disks, I added the serial number on
18452 labels I printed and stuck on the short sides of each disk, to be able
18453 to figure out which disk to take out of the box without having to
18454 remove each disk to look at the physical vendor label. The vendor
18455 label is at the top of the disk, which is hidden when the disks are
18456 mounted inside my box.
</p
>
18458 <p
>I really wish the check_linux_raid Nagios plugin for checking Linux
18459 Software RAID in the
18460 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/nagios-plugins.html
">nagios-plugins-standard
</a
>
18461 debian package would look up this value automatically, as it would
18462 make the plugin a lot more useful when my disks fail. At the moment
18463 it only report a failure when there are no more spares left (it really
18464 should warn as soon as a disk is failing), and it do not tell me which
18465 disk(s) is failing when the RAID is running short on disks.
</p
>
18470 <title>Automatic proxy configuration with Debian Edu / Skolelinux
</title>
18471 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_proxy_configuration_with_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux.html
</link>
18472 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_proxy_configuration_with_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux.html
</guid>
18473 <pubDate>Mon,
13 Feb
2012 23:
40:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
18474 <description><p
>New in the Squeeze version of
18475 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
</a
> is the
18476 ability for clients to automatically configure their proxy settings
18477 based on their environment. We want all systems on the client to use
18478 the WPAD based proxy definition fetched from
<tt
>http://wpad/wpad.dat
</tt
>, to
18479 allow sites to control the proxy setting from a central place and make
18480 sure clients do not have hard coded proxy settings. The schools can
18481 change the global proxy setting by editing
18482 <tt
>tjener:/etc/debian-edu/www/wpad.dat
</tt
> and the change propagate
18483 to all Debian Edu clients in the network.
</p
>
18485 <p
>The problem is that some systems do not understand the WPAD system.
18486 In other words, how do one get from a WPAD file like this (this is a
18487 simple one, they can run arbitrary code):
</p
>
18489 <blockquote
><pre
>
18490 function FindProxyForURL(url, host)
18492 if (!isResolvable(host) ||
18493 isPlainHostName(host) ||
18494 dnsDomainIs(host,
".intern
"))
18495 return
"DIRECT
";
18497 return
"PROXY webcache:
3128; DIRECT
";
18499 </pre
></blockquote
>
18501 <p
>to a proxy setting in the process environment looking like this:
</p
>
18503 <blockquote
><pre
>
18504 http_proxy=http://webcache:
3128/
18505 ftp_proxy=http://webcache:
3128/
18506 </pre
></blockquote
>
18508 <p
>To do this conversion I developed a perl script that will execute
18509 the javascript fragment in the WPAD file and return the proxy that
18511 <tt
><a href=
"http://www.debian.org/
">http://www.debian.org/
</a
></tt
>,
18512 and insert this extracted proxy URL in
<tt
>/etc/environment
</tt
> and
18513 <tt
>/etc/apt/apt.conf
</tt
>. The perl script wpad-extract work just
18514 fine in Squeeze, but in Wheezy the library it need to run the
18515 javascript code is
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
631045">no longer
18516 able to build
</a
> because the C library it depended on is now a C++
18517 library. I hope someone find a solution to that problem before Wheezy
18518 is frozen. An alternative would be for us to rewrite wpad-extract to
18519 use some other javascript library currently working in Wheezy, but no
18520 known alternative is known at the moment.
</p
>
18522 <p
>This automatic proxy system allow the roaming workstation (aka
18523 laptop) setup in Debian Edu/Squeeze to use the proxy when the laptop
18524 is connected to the backbone network in a Debian Edu setup, and to
18525 automatically use any proxy present and announced using the WPAD
18526 feature when it is connected to other networks. And if no proxy is
18527 announced, direct connections will be used instead.
</p
>
18529 <p
>Silently using a proxy announced on the network might be a privacy
18530 or security problem. But those controlling DHCP and DNS on a network
18531 could just as easily set up a transparent proxy, and force all HTTP
18532 and FTP connections to use a proxy anyway, so I consider that
18533 distinction to be academic. If you are afraid of using the wrong
18534 proxy, you should avoid connecting to the network in question in the
18535 first place. In Debian Edu, the proxy setup is updated using dhcp and
18536 ifupdown hooks, to make sure the configuration is updated every time
18537 the network setup changes.
</p
>
18539 <p
>The WPAD system is documented in a
18540 <a href=
"http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-wrec-wpad-
01">IETF
18541 draft
</a
> and a
18542 <a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Proxy_Autodiscovery_Protocol
">Wikipedia
18543 page
</a
> for those that want to learn more.
</p
>
18548 <title>Saving power with Debian Edu / Skolelinux using shutdown-at-night
</title>
18549 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Saving_power_with_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_using_shutdown_at_night.html
</link>
18550 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Saving_power_with_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_using_shutdown_at_night.html
</guid>
18551 <pubDate>Sun,
5 Feb
2012 09:
45:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
18552 <description><p
>Since the Lenny version of
18553 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
</a
>, a
18554 feature to save power have been included. It is as simple as it is
18555 practical: Shut down unused clients at night, and turn them on again
18556 in the morning. This is done using the
18557 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/shutdown-at-night.html
">shutdown-at-night
</a
> Debian package.
</p
>
18559 <p
>To enable this feature on a client, the machine need to be added to
18560 the netgroup shutdown-at-night-hosts. For Debian Edu, this is done in
18561 LDAP, and once this is in place, the machine in question will check
18562 every hour from
16:
00 until
06:
00 to see if the machine is unused, and
18563 shut it down if it is. If the hardware in question is supported by
18565 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/nvram-wakeup.html
">nvram-wakeup
</a
>
18566 package, the BIOS is told to turn the machine back on around
07:
00 +-
18567 10 minutes. If this isn
't working, one can configure wake-on-lan to
18568 try to turn on the client. The wake-on-lan option is only documented
18569 and not enabled by default in Debian Edu.
</p
>
18571 <p
>It is important to not turn all machines on at once, as this can
18572 blow a fuse if several computers are connected to the same fuse like
18573 the common setup for a classroom. The nvram-wakeup method only work
18574 for machines with a functioning hardware/BIOS clock. I
've seen old
18575 machines where the BIOS battery were dead and the hardware clock were
18576 starting from
0 (or was it
1990?) every boot. If you have one of
18577 those, you have to turn on the computer manually.
</p
>
18579 <p
>The shutdown-at-night package is completely self contained, and can
18580 also be used outside the Debian Edu environment. For those without a
18581 central LDAP server with netgroups, one can instead touch the file
18582 <tt
>/etc/shutdown-at-night/shutdown-at-night
</tt
> to enable it.
18583 Perhaps you too can use it to save some power?
</p
>
18588 <title>Third beta version of Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Squeeze
</title>
18589 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Third_beta_version_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Squeeze.html
</link>
18590 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Third_beta_version_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Squeeze.html
</guid>
18591 <pubDate>Sat,
4 Feb
2012 13:
25:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
18592 <description><p
>I am happy to announce that finally we managed today to wrap up and
18593 publish the third beta version of
18594 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
</a
> based
18595 on Squeeze. If you want to test a LDAP backed Kerberos server with
18596 out of the box PXE configuration for running diskless machines and
18597 installing new machines, check it out. If you need a software
18598 solution for your school, check it out too. The full announcement is
18599 <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/
2012/
02/msg00000.html
">available
</a
>
18600 on the project announcement list.
</p
>
18602 <p
>I am very happy to report these changes and improvements since
18603 beta2 (there are more, see announcement for full list):
</p
>
18607 <li
>It is now possible to change the pre-configured IP subnet from
18608 10.0.0.0/
8 to something else by using the subnet-change tool after
18609 the installation.
</li
>
18611 <li
>Too full partitions are now automatically extended on the Main
18612 Server, based on the rules specified in /etc/fsautoresizetab.
</li
>
18614 <li
>The CUPS queues are now automatically flushed every night, and all
18615 disabled queues are restarted every hour. This should cut down on
18616 the amount of manual administration needed for printers.
</li
>
18618 <li
>The set of initial users have been changed. Now a personal user
18619 for the local system administrator is created during installation
18620 instead of the previously created localadmin and super-admin users,
18621 and this user is granted administrative privileges using group
18622 membership. This reduces the number of passwords one need to keep
18623 up to date on the system.
</li
>
18627 <p
>The new main server seem to work so well that I am testing it as my
18628 private DNS/LDAP/Kerberos/PXE/LTSP server at home. I will use it look
18629 for issues we could fix to polish Debian Edu even further before the
18630 final Squeeze release is published.
</p
>
18632 <p
>Next weekend the project organise a
18633 <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/
2012/
01/msg00001.html
">developer
18634 gathering
</a
> in Oslo. We will continue the work on the Squeeze
18635 version, and start initial planning for the Wheezy version. Perhaps I
18636 will see you there?
</p
>
18641 <title>Handling non-free firmware in Debian Edu/Squeeze
</title>
18642 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Handling_non_free_firmware_in_Debian_Edu_Squeeze.html
</link>
18643 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Handling_non_free_firmware_in_Debian_Edu_Squeeze.html
</guid>
18644 <pubDate>Fri,
27 Jan
2012 23:
30:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
18645 <description><p
>With some computer hardware, one need non-free firmware blobs.
18646 This is the sad fact of todays computers. In the next version of
18647 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
</a
> based
18648 on Squeeze, we provide several scripts and modifications to make
18649 firmware blobs easier to handle. The common use case I run into is a
18650 laptop with a wireless network card requiring non-free firmware to
18651 work, but there are other use cases as well.
</p
>
18653 <p
>First and foremost, Debian Edu provide ISO images for DVD and CD
18654 with all firmware packages in the Debian sections main and non-free
18655 included, to ensure debian-installer find and can install all of them
18656 during installation. This take care firmware for network devices used
18657 by the installer when installing from from local media. But for
18658 example multimedia devices are not activated in the installer and are
18659 not taken care of by this.
</p
>
18661 <p
>For non-network devices, we provide the script
18662 <tt
>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/auto-addfirmware
</tt
> which
18663 search through the
<tt
>dmesg
</tt
> output for drivers requesting extra
18664 firmware. The firmware file name is looked up in the Contents-ARCH.gz
18665 file available in the package repository, and the packages providing
18666 the requested firmware file(s) is installed. I have proposed to do
18667 something similar in debian-installer (BTS report
18668 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
655507">#
655507</a
>), to allow PXE
18669 installs of Debian to handle firmware installation better. Run the
18670 script as root from the command line to fetch and install the needed
18671 firmware packages.
</p
>
18673 <p
>Debian Edu provide PXE installation of Debian out of the box, and
18674 because some machines need firmware to get their network cards
18675 working, the installation initrd some times need extra firmware
18676 included to be able to install at all. To fill the PXE installation
18677 initrd with extra firmware, the
18678 <tt
>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/pxe-addfirmware
</tt
> script is
18679 provided. Again, just run it as root on the command line to fill the
18680 PXE initrd with firmware packages.
</p
>
18682 <p
>Last, some LTSP clients might also need firmware to get their
18683 network cards working. For this,
18684 <tt
>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/ltsp-addfirmware
</tt
> is
18685 provided to update the LTSP initrd with firmware blobs. It is used
18686 the same way as the other firmware related tools.
</p
>
18688 <p
>At the moment, we do not run any of these during installation. We
18689 do not know if this is acceptable for the local administrator to use
18690 non-free software, and it is their choice.
</p
>
18692 <p
>We plan to release beta3 this weekend. You might want to give it a
18698 <title>Setting up a new school with Debian Edu/Squeeze
</title>
18699 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Setting_up_a_new_school_with_Debian_Edu_Squeeze.html
</link>
18700 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Setting_up_a_new_school_with_Debian_Edu_Squeeze.html
</guid>
18701 <pubDate>Wed,
25 Jan
2012 21:
00:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
18702 <description><p
>The next version of
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu
18703 / Skolelinux
</a
> will include a new tool
18704 <tt
>sitesummary2ldapdhcp
</tt
>, which can be used to quickly set up all
18705 the computers in a school without much manual labour. Here is a short
18706 summary on how to use it to set up a new school.
</p
>
18708 <p
>First, install a combined Main Server and Thin Client Server as the
18709 central server in the network. Next, PXE boot all the client machines
18710 as thin clients and wait
5 minutes after the last client booted to
18711 allow the clients to report their existence to the central server. When
18712 this is done, log on to the central server and run
18713 <tt
>sitesummary2ldapdhcp -a
</tt
> in the
<tt
>konsole
</tt
> to use the
18714 collected information to generate system objects in LDAP. The output
18715 will look similar to this:
</p
>
18717 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
18718 % sitesummary2ldapdhcp -a
18719 info: Updating machine tjener.intern [
10.0.2.2] id ether-
00:
01:
02:
03:
04:
05.
18720 info: Create GOsa machine for auto-mac-
00-
01-
02-
03-
04-
06 [
10.0.16.20] id ether-
00:
01:
02:
03:
04:
06.
18722 Enter password if you want to activate these changes, and ^c to abort.
18724 Connecting to LDAP as cn=admin,ou=ldap-access,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
18725 enter password: *******
18727 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
18729 <p
>After providing the LDAP administrative password (the same as the
18730 root password set during installation), the LDAP database will be
18731 populated with system objects for each PXE booted machine with
18732 automatically generated names. The final step to set up the school is
18733 then to log into
<a href=
"https://oss.gonicus.de/labs/gosa/
">GOsa
</a
>,
18734 the web based user, group and system administration system to change
18735 system names, add systems to the correct host groups and finally
18736 enable DHCP and DNS for the systems. All clients that should be used
18737 as diskless workstations should be added to the workstation-hosts
18738 group. After this is done, all computers can be booted again via PXE
18739 and get their assigned names and group based configuration
18740 automatically.
</p
>
18742 <p
>We plan to release beta3 with the updated version of this feature
18743 enabled this weekend. You might want to give it a try.
</p
>
18745 <p
>Update
2012-
01-
28: When calling sitesummary2ldapdhcp to add new
18746 hosts, one need to add the option -a. I forgot to mention this in my
18747 original text, and have added it to the text now.
</p
>
18752 <title>Changing the default Iceweasel start page in Debian Edu/Squeeze
</title>
18753 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Changing_the_default_Iceweasel_start_page_in_Debian_Edu_Squeeze.html
</link>
18754 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Changing_the_default_Iceweasel_start_page_in_Debian_Edu_Squeeze.html
</guid>
18755 <pubDate>Tue,
10 Jan
2012 15:
30:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
18756 <description><p
>In the Squeeze version of
18757 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
</a
> soon
18758 to be released, users of the system will get their default browser
18759 start page set from LDAP, allowing the system administrator to point
18760 all users to the school web page by updating one setting in LDAP. In
18761 addition to setting the default start page when a machine boots, users
18762 are shown the same page as a welcome page when they log in for the
18763 first time.
</p
>
18765 <p
>The LDAP object dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no have an attribute
18766 labeledURI with
"http://www/ LDAP for Debian Edu/Skolelinux
" as the
18767 default content. By changing this value to another URL, all users get
18768 to see the page behind this new URL.
</p
>
18770 <p
>An easy way to update it is by using the ldapvi tool. It can be
18771 called as
"<tt
>ldapvi -ZD
'(cn=admin)
'</tt
>' to update LDAP with the
18772 new setting.
</p
>
18774 <p
>We have written the code to adjust the default start page and show
18775 the welcome page, and I wonder if there is an easier way to do this
18776 from within Iceweasel instead.
</p
>
18781 <title>Second beta version of Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Squeeze
</title>
18782 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Second_beta_version_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Squeeze.html
</link>
18783 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Second_beta_version_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Squeeze.html
</guid>
18784 <pubDate>Sat,
7 Jan
2012 22:
50:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
18785 <description><p
>I am happy to announce that today we managed to wrap up and publish
18786 the second beta version of
18787 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
</a
>. If
18788 you want to test a LDAP backed Kerberos server with out of the box PXE
18789 configuration for running diskless machines and installing new
18790 machines, check it out. If you need a software solution for your
18791 school, check it out too. The full announcement is
18792 <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/
2012/
01/msg00000.html
">available
</a
>
18793 on the project announcement list.
</p
>
18798 <title>Fixing an hanging debian installer for Debian Edu
</title>
18799 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Fixing_an_hanging_debian_installer_for_Debian_Edu.html
</link>
18800 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Fixing_an_hanging_debian_installer_for_Debian_Edu.html
</guid>
18801 <pubDate>Tue,
3 Jan
2012 11:
25:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
18802 <description><p
>During christmas, I have been working getting the next version of
18803 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
</a
> ready
18804 for release. The initial problem I looked at was particularly
18805 interesting.
</p
>
18807 <P
>The installer would hang at the end when it was doing it
18808 post-installation configuration, and whatevery I did to try to find
18809 the cause and fix it always worked while I tested it, but never when I
18810 integrated it into the installer and ran the installation from
18811 scratch. I would try to restart processes, close file descriptors,
18812 remove or create files, and the installer would always unblock and
18813 wrap up its tasks.
</p
>
18815 <p
>Eventually the cause was found. The kernel was simply running out
18816 of entropy, causing the Kerberos setup to hang waiting for more.
18817 Pressing keys was adding entropy to the kernel, and thus all my tries
18818 to fix the problem worked not because what I was typing to fix it, but
18819 because I was typing.
</P
>
18821 <p
>The fix I implemented was to add a background process looking at
18822 the level of entropy in the kernel (by checking
18823 /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail), and if it was too small, the
18824 installer will flush the kernel file buffers and do
'find /
' to
18825 generate some disk IO. Disk IO generate entropy in the kernel, and is
18826 one of the few things that can be initated from within the system to
18827 generate entropy.
</p
>
18829 <p
>The fix is in
18830 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze/Installation
">beta1
18831 of the Debian Edu/Squeeze
</a
> version, and we
18832 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu
">welcome more testers and
18833 developers
</a
>. We plan to release beta2 this weekend.
</p
>
18838 <title>Automatically upgrading server firmware on Dell PowerEdge
</title>
18839 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatically_upgrading_server_firmware_on_Dell_PowerEdge.html
</link>
18840 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatically_upgrading_server_firmware_on_Dell_PowerEdge.html
</guid>
18841 <pubDate>Mon,
21 Nov
2011 12:
00:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
18842 <description><p
>At work we have heaps of servers. I believe the total count is
18843 around
1000 at the moment. To be able to get help from the vendors
18844 when something go wrong, we want to keep the firmware on the servers
18845 up to date. If the firmware isn
't the latest and greatest, the
18846 vendors typically refuse to start debugging any problems until the
18847 firmware is upgraded. So before every reboot, we want to upgrade the
18848 firmware, and we would really like everyone handling servers at the
18849 university to do this themselves when they plan to reboot a machine.
18850 For that to happen we at the unix server admin group need to provide
18851 the tools to do so.
</p
>
18853 <p
>To make firmware upgrading easier, I am working on a script to
18854 fetch and install the latest firmware for the servers we got. Most of
18855 our hardware are from Dell and HP, so I have focused on these servers
18856 so far. This blog post is about the Dell part.
</P
>
18858 <p
>On the Dell FTP site I was lucky enough to find
18859 <a href=
"ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz
">an XML file
</a
>
18860 with firmware information for all
11th generation servers, listing
18861 which firmware should be used on a given model and where on the FTP
18862 site I can find it. Using a simple perl XML parser I can then
18863 download the shell scripts Dell provides to do firmware upgrades from
18864 within Linux and reboot when all the firmware is primed and ready to
18865 be activated on the first reboot.
</p
>
18867 <p
>This is the Dell related fragment of the perl code I am working on.
18868 Are there anyone working on similar tools for firmware upgrading all
18869 servers at a site? Please get in touch and lets share resources.
</p
>
18871 <p
><pre
>
18875 use File::Temp qw(tempdir);
18877 # Install needed RHEL packages if missing
18878 my %rhelmodules = (
18879 'XML::Simple
' =
> 'perl-XML-Simple
',
18881 for my $module (keys %rhelmodules) {
18882 eval
"use $module;
";
18884 my $pkg = $rhelmodules{$module};
18885 system(
"yum install -y $pkg
");
18886 eval
"use $module;
";
18890 my $errorsto =
'pere@hungry.com
';
18896 sub run_firmware_script {
18897 my ($opts, $script) = @_;
18899 print STDERR
"fail: missing script name\n
";
18902 print STDERR
"Running $script\n\n
";
18904 if (
0 == system(
"sh $script $opts
")) { # FIXME correct exit code handling
18905 print STDERR
"success: firmware script ran succcessfully\n
";
18907 print STDERR
"fail: firmware script returned error\n
";
18911 sub run_firmware_scripts {
18912 my ($opts, @dirs) = @_;
18913 # Run firmware packages
18914 for my $dir (@dirs) {
18915 print STDERR
"info: Running scripts in $dir\n
";
18916 opendir(my $dh, $dir) or die
"Unable to open directory $dir: $!
";
18917 while (my $s = readdir $dh) {
18918 next if $s =~ m/^\.\.?/;
18919 run_firmware_script($opts,
"$dir/$s
");
18927 print STDERR
"info: Downloading $url\n
";
18928 system(
"wget --quiet \
"$url\
"");
18933 my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
18936 if ($product =~ m/PowerEdge/) {
18938 # on RHEL, these pacakges are needed by the firwmare upgrade scripts
18939 system(
'yum install -y compat-libstdc++-
33.i686 libstdc++.i686 libxml2.i686 procmail
');
18941 my $tmpdir = tempdir(
18945 fetch_dell_fw(
'catalog/Catalog.xml.gz
');
18946 system(
'gunzip Catalog.xml.gz
');
18947 my @paths = fetch_dell_fw_list(
'Catalog.xml
');
18948 # -q is quiet, disabling interactivity and reducing console output
18949 my $fwopts =
"-q
";
18951 for my $url (@paths) {
18952 fetch_dell_fw($url);
18954 run_firmware_scripts($fwopts, $tmpdir);
18956 print STDERR
"error: Unsupported Dell model
'$product
'.\n
";
18957 print STDERR
"error: Please report to $errorsto.\n
";
18959 chdir(
'/
');
18961 print STDERR
"error: Unsupported Dell model
'$product
'.\n
";
18962 print STDERR
"error: Please report to $errorsto.\n
";
18966 sub fetch_dell_fw {
18968 my $url =
"ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/$path
";
18972 # Using ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz, figure out which
18973 # firmware packages to download from Dell. Only work for Linux
18974 # machines and
11th generation Dell servers.
18975 sub fetch_dell_fw_list {
18976 my $filename = shift;
18978 my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
18980 my ($mybrand, $mymodel) = split(/\s+/, $product);
18982 print STDERR
"Finding firmware bundles for $mybrand $mymodel\n
";
18984 my $xml = XMLin($filename);
18986 for my $bundle (@{$xml-
>{SoftwareBundle}}) {
18987 my $brand = $bundle-
>{TargetSystems}-
>{Brand}-
>{Display}-
>{content};
18988 my $model = $bundle-
>{TargetSystems}-
>{Brand}-
>{Model}-
>{Display}-
>{content};
18990 if (
"ARRAY
" eq ref $bundle-
>{TargetOSes}-
>{OperatingSystem}) {
18991 $oscode = $bundle-
>{TargetOSes}-
>{OperatingSystem}[
0]-
>{osCode};
18993 $oscode = $bundle-
>{TargetOSes}-
>{OperatingSystem}-
>{osCode};
18995 if ($mybrand eq $brand
&& $mymodel eq $model
&& "LIN
" eq $oscode)
18997 @paths = map { $_-
>{path} } @{$bundle-
>{Contents}-
>{Package}};
19000 for my $component (@{$xml-
>{SoftwareComponent}}) {
19001 my $componenttype = $component-
>{ComponentType}-
>{value};
19003 # Drop application packages, only firmware and BIOS
19004 next if
'APAC
' eq $componenttype;
19006 my $cpath = $component-
>{path};
19007 for my $path (@paths) {
19008 if ($cpath =~ m%/$path$%) {
19009 push(@paths, $cpath);
19017 <p
>The code is only tested on RedHat Enterprise Linux, but I suspect
19018 it could work on other platforms with some tweaking. Anyone know a
19019 index like Catalog.xml is available from HP for HP servers? At the
19020 moment I maintain a similar list manually and it is quickly getting
19021 outdated.
</p
>
19026 <title>Free e-book kiosk for the public libraries?
</title>
19027 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_e_book_kiosk_for_the_public_libraries_.html
</link>
19028 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_e_book_kiosk_for_the_public_libraries_.html
</guid>
19029 <pubDate>Fri,
7 Oct
2011 19:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
19030 <description><p
>Here in Norway the public libraries are debating with the
19031 publishing houses how to handle electronic books. Surprisingly, the
19032 libraries seem to be willing to accept digital restriction mechanisms
19033 (DRM) on books and renting e-books with artificial scarcity from the
19034 publishing houses. Time limited renting (
2-
3 years) is one proposed
19035 model, and only allowing X borrowers for each book is another.
19036 Personally I find it amazing that libraries are even considering such
19039 <p
>Anyway, while reading
<a href=
"http://boklaben.no/?p=
220">part of
19040 this debate
</a
>, it occurred to me that someone should present a more
19041 sensible approach to the libraries, to allow its borrowers to get used
19042 to a better model. The idea is simple:
</p
>
19044 <p
>Create a computer system for the libraries, either in the form of a
19045 Live DVD or a installable distribution, that provide a simple kiosk
19046 solution to hand out free e-books. As a start, the books distributed
19047 by
<a href=
"http://www.gutenberg.org/
">Project Gutenberg
</a
> (about
19048 36,
000 books),
<a href=
"http://runeberg.org/
">Project Runenberg
</a
>
19049 (
1149 books) and
<a href=
"http://www.archive.org/details/texts
">The
19050 Internet Archive
</a
> (
3,
033,
748 books) could be included, but any book
19051 where the copyright has expired or with a free licence could be
19052 distributed.
</p
>
19054 <p
>The computer system would make it easy to:
</p
>
19058 <li
>Copy e-books into a USB stick, reading tablets, cell phones and
19059 other relevant equipment.
</li
>
19061 <li
>Show the books for reading on the the screen in the library.
</li
>
19065 <p
>In addition to such kiosk solution, there should probably be a web
19066 site as well to allow people easy access to these books without
19067 visiting the library. The site would be the distribution point for
19068 the kiosk systems, which would connect regularly to fetch any new
19069 books available.
</p
>
19071 <p
>Are there anyone working on a system like this? I guess it would
19072 fit any library in the world, and not just the Norwegian public
19073 libraries. :)
</p
>
19078 <title>Ripping problematic DVDs using dvdbackup and genisoimage
</title>
19079 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ripping_problematic_DVDs_using_dvdbackup_and_genisoimage.html
</link>
19080 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ripping_problematic_DVDs_using_dvdbackup_and_genisoimage.html
</guid>
19081 <pubDate>Sat,
17 Sep
2011 20:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
19082 <description><p
>For convenience, I want to store copies of all my DVDs on my file
19083 server. It allow me to save shelf space flat while still having my
19084 movie collection easily available. It also make it possible to let
19085 the kids see their favourite DVDs without wearing the physical copies
19086 down. I prefer to store the DVDs as ISOs to keep the DVD menu and
19087 subtitle options intact. It also ensure that the entire film is one
19088 file on the disk. As this is for personal use, the ripping is
19089 perfectly legal here in Norway.
</p
>
19091 <p
>Normally I rip the DVDs using dd like this:
</p
>
19093 <blockquote
><pre
>
19095 # apt-get install lsdvd
19096 title=$(lsdvd
2>/dev/null|awk
'/Disc Title: / {print $
3}
')
19097 dd if=/dev/dvd of=/storage/dvds/$title.iso bs=
1M
19098 </pre
></blockquote
>
19100 <p
>But some DVDs give a input/output error when I read it, and I have
19101 been looking for a better alternative. I have no idea why this I/O
19102 error occur, but suspect my DVD drive, the Linux kernel driver or
19103 something fishy with the DVDs in question. Or perhaps all three.
</p
>
19105 <p
>Anyway, I believe I found a solution today using dvdbackup and
19106 genisoimage. This script gave me a working ISO for a problematic
19107 movie by first extracting the DVD file system and then re-packing it
19110 <blockquote
><pre
>
19112 # apt-get install lsdvd dvdbackup genisoimage
19114 tmpdir=/storage/dvds/
19115 title=$(lsdvd
2>/dev/null|awk
'/Disc Title: / {print $
3}
')
19116 dvdbackup -i /dev/dvd -M -o $tmpdir -n$title
19117 genisoimage -dvd-video -o $tmpdir/$title.iso $tmpdir/$title
19118 rm -rf $tmpdir/$title
19119 </pre
></blockquote
>
19121 <p
>Anyone know of a better way available in Debian/Squeeze?
</p
>
19123 <p
>Update
2011-
09-
18: I got a tip from Konstantin Khomoutov about the
19124 readom program from the wodim package. It is specially written to
19125 read optical media, and is called like this:
<tt
>readom dev=/dev/dvd
19126 f=image.iso
</tt
>. It got
6 GB along with the problematic Cars DVD
19127 before it failed, and failed right away with a Timmy Time DVD.
</p
>
19129 <p
>Next, I got a tip from Bastian Blank about
19130 <a href=
"http://bblank.thinkmo.de/blog/new-software-python-dvdvideo
">his
19131 program python-dvdvideo
</a
>, which seem to be just what I am looking
19132 for. Tested it with my problematic Timmy Time DVD, and it succeeded
19133 creating a ISO image. The git source built and installed just fine in
19134 Squeeze, so I guess this will be my tool of choice in the future.
</p
>
19139 <title>How is booting into runlevel
1 different from single user boots?
</title>
19140 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_is_booting_into_runlevel_1_different_from_single_user_boots_.html
</link>
19141 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_is_booting_into_runlevel_1_different_from_single_user_boots_.html
</guid>
19142 <pubDate>Thu,
4 Aug
2011 12:
40:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
19143 <description><p
>Wouter Verhelst have some
19144 <a href=
"http://grep.be/blog/en/retorts/pere_kubuntu_boot
">interesting
19145 comments and opinions
</a
> on my blog post on
19146 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_should_start_from__etc_rcS_d__in_Debian____almost_nothing.html
">the
19147 need to clean up /etc/rcS.d/ in Debian
</a
> and my blog post about
19148 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_missing_in_the_Debian_desktop__or_why_my_parents_use_Kubuntu.html
">the
19149 default KDE desktop in Debian
</a
>. I only have time to address one
19150 small piece of his comment now, and though it best to address the
19151 misunderstanding he bring forward:
</p
>
19153 <p
><blockquote
>
19154 Currently, a system admin has four options: [...] boot to a
19155 single-user system (by adding
'single
' to the kernel command line;
19156 this runs rcS and rc1 scripts)
19157 </blockquote
></p
>
19159 <p
>This make me believe Wouter believe booting into single user mode
19160 and booting into runlevel
1 is the same. I am not surprised he
19161 believe this, because it would make sense and is a quite sensible
19162 thing to believe. But because the boot in Debian is slightly broken,
19163 runlevel
1 do not work properly and it isn
't the same as single user
19164 mode. I
'll try to explain what is actually happing, but it is a bit
19165 hard to explain.
</p
>
19167 <p
>Single user mode is defined like this in /etc/inittab:
19168 "<tt
>~~:S:wait:/sbin/sulogin
</tt
>". This means the only thing that is
19169 executed in single user mode is sulogin. Single user mode is a boot
19170 state
"between
" the runlevels, and when booting into single user mode,
19171 only the scripts in /etc/rcS.d/ are executed before the init process
19172 enters the single user state. When switching to runlevel
1, the state
19173 is in fact not ending in runlevel
1, but it passes through runlevel
1
19174 and end up in the single user mode (see /etc/rc1.d/S03single, which
19175 runs
"init -t1 S
" to switch to single user mode at the end of runlevel
19176 1. It is confusing that the
'S
' (single user) init mode is not the
19177 mode enabled by /etc/rcS.d/ (which is more like the initial boot
19180 <p
>This summary might make it clearer. When booting for the first
19181 time into single user mode, the following commands are executed:
19182 "<tt
>/etc/init.d/rc S; /sbin/sulogin
</tt
>". When booting into
19183 runlevel
1, the following commands are executed:
"<tt
>/etc/init.d/rc
19184 S; /etc/init.d/rc
1; /sbin/sulogin
</tt
>". A problem show up when
19185 trying to continue after visiting single user mode. Not all services
19186 are started again as they should, causing the machine to end up in an
19187 unpredicatble state. This is why Debian admins recommend rebooting
19188 after visiting single user mode.
</p
>
19190 <p
>A similar problem with runlevel
1 is caused by the amount of
19191 scripts executed from /etc/rcS.d/. When switching from say runlevel
2
19192 to runlevel
1, the services started from /etc/rcS.d/ are not properly
19193 stopped when passing through the scripts in /etc/rc1.d/, and not
19194 started again when switching away from runlevel
1 to the runlevels
19195 2-
5. I believe the problem is best fixed by moving all the scripts
19196 out of /etc/rcS.d/ that are not
<strong
>required
</strong
> to get a
19197 functioning single user mode during boot.
</p
>
19199 <p
>I have spent several years investigating the Debian boot system,
19200 and discovered this problem a few years ago. I suspect it originates
19201 from when sysvinit was introduced into Debian, a long time ago.
</p
>
19206 <title>What should start from /etc/rcS.d/ in Debian? - almost nothing
</title>
19207 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_should_start_from__etc_rcS_d__in_Debian____almost_nothing.html
</link>
19208 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_should_start_from__etc_rcS_d__in_Debian____almost_nothing.html
</guid>
19209 <pubDate>Sat,
30 Jul
2011 14:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
19210 <description><p
>In the Debian boot system, several packages include scripts that
19211 are started from /etc/rcS.d/. In fact, there is a bite more of them
19212 than make sense, and this causes a few problems. What kind of
19213 problems, you might ask. There are at least two problems. The first
19214 is that it is not possible to recover a machine after switching to
19215 runlevel
1. One need to actually reboot to get the machine back to
19216 the expected state. The other is that single user boot will sometimes
19217 run into problems because some of the subsystems are activated before
19218 the root login is presented, causing problems when trying to recover a
19219 machine from a problem in that subsystem. A minor additional point is
19220 that moving more scripts out of rcS.d/ and into the other rc#.d/
19221 directories will increase the amount of scripts that can run in
19222 parallel during boot, and thus decrease the boot time.
</p
>
19224 <p
>So, which scripts should start from rcS.d/. In short, only the
19225 scripts that _have_ to execute before the root login prompt is
19226 presented during a single user boot should go there. Everything else
19227 should go into the numeric runlevels. This means things like
19228 lm-sensors, fuse and x11-common should not run from rcS.d, but from
19229 the numeric runlevels. Today in Debian, there are around
115 init.d
19230 scripts that are started from rcS.d/, and most of them should be moved
19231 out. Do your package have one of them? Please help us make single
19232 user and runlevel
1 better by moving it.
</p
>
19234 <p
>Scripts setting up the screen, keyboard, system partitions
19235 etc. should still be started from rcS.d/, but there is for example no
19236 need to have the network enabled before the single user login prompt
19237 is presented.
</p
>
19239 <p
>As always, things are not so easy to fix as they sound. To keep
19240 Debian systems working while scripts migrate and during upgrades, the
19241 scripts need to be moved from rcS.d/ to rc2.d/ in reverse dependency
19242 order, ie the scripts that nothing in rcS.d/ depend on can be moved,
19243 and the next ones can only be moved when their dependencies have been
19244 moved first. This migration must be done sequentially while we ensure
19245 that the package system upgrade packages in the right order to keep
19246 the system state correct. This will require some coordination when it
19247 comes to network related packages, but most of the packages with
19248 scripts that should migrate do not have anything in rcS.d/ depending
19249 on them. Some packages have already been updated, like the sudo
19250 package, while others are still left to do. I wish I had time to work
19251 on this myself, but real live constrains make it unlikely that I will
19252 find time to push this forward.
</p
>
19257 <title>What is missing in the Debian desktop, or why my parents use Kubuntu
</title>
19258 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_missing_in_the_Debian_desktop__or_why_my_parents_use_Kubuntu.html
</link>
19259 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_missing_in_the_Debian_desktop__or_why_my_parents_use_Kubuntu.html
</guid>
19260 <pubDate>Fri,
29 Jul
2011 08:
10:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
19261 <description><p
>While at Debconf11, I have several times during discussions
19262 mentioned the issues I believe should be improved in Debian for its
19263 desktop to be useful for more people. The use case for this is my
19264 parents, which are currently running Kubuntu which solve the
19267 <p
>I suspect these four missing features are not very hard to
19268 implement. After all, they are present in Ubuntu, so if we wanted to
19269 do this in Debian we would have a source.
</p
>
19273 <li
><strong
>Simple GUI based upgrade of packages.
</strong
> When there
19274 are new packages available for upgrades, a icon in the KDE status bar
19275 indicate this, and clicking on it will activate the simple upgrade
19276 tool to handle it. I have no problem guiding both of my parents
19277 through the process over the phone. If a kernel reboot is required,
19278 this too is indicated by the status bars and the upgrade tool. Last
19279 time I checked, nothing with the same features was working in KDE in
19282 <li
><strong
>Simple handling of missing Firefox browser
19283 plugins.
</strong
> When the browser encounter a MIME type it do not
19284 currently have a handler for, it will ask the user if the system
19285 should search for a package that would add support for this MIME type,
19286 and if the user say yes, the APT sources will be searched for packages
19287 advertising the MIME type in their control file (visible in the
19288 Packages file in the APT archive). If one or more packages are found,
19289 it is a simple click of the mouse to add support for the missing mime
19290 type. If the package require the user to accept some non-free
19291 license, this is explained to the user. The entire process make it
19292 more clear to the user why something do not work in the browser, and
19293 make the chances higher for the user to blame the web page authors and
19294 not the browser for any missing features.
</li
>
19296 <li
><strong
>Simple handling of missing multimedia codec/format
19297 handlers.
</strong
> When the media players encounter a format or codec
19298 it is not supporting, a dialog pop up asking the user if the system
19299 should search for a package that would add support for it. This
19300 happen with things like MP3, Windows Media or H
.264. The selection
19301 and installation procedure is very similar to the Firefox browser
19302 plugin handling. This is as far as I know implemented using a
19303 gstreamer hook. The end result is that the user easily get access to
19304 the codecs that are present from the APT archives available, while
19305 explaining more on why a given format is unsupported by Ubuntu.
</li
>
19307 <li
><strong
>Better browser handling of some MIME types.
</strong
> When
19308 displaying a text/plain file in my Debian browser, it will propose to
19309 start emacs to show it. If I remember correctly, when doing the same
19310 in Kunbutu it show the file as a text file in the browser. At least I
19311 know Opera will show text files within the browser. I much prefer the
19312 latter behaviour.
</li
>
19316 <p
>There are other nice features as well, like the simplified suite
19317 upgrader, but given that I am the one mostly doing the dist-upgrade,
19318 it do not matter much.
</p
>
19320 <p
>I really hope we could get these features in place for the next
19321 Debian release. It would require the coordinated effort of several
19322 maintainers, but would make the end user experience a lot better.
</p
>
19327 <title>Perl modules used by FixMyStreet which are missing in Debian/Squeeze
</title>
19328 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Perl_modules_used_by_FixMyStreet_which_are_missing_in_Debian_Squeeze.html
</link>
19329 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Perl_modules_used_by_FixMyStreet_which_are_missing_in_Debian_Squeeze.html
</guid>
19330 <pubDate>Tue,
26 Jul
2011 12:
25:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
19331 <description><p
>The Norwegian
<a href=
"http://www.fiksgatami.no/
">FiksGataMi
</A
>
19332 site is build on Debian/Squeeze, and this platform was chosen because
19333 I am most familiar with Debian (being a Debian Developer for around
10
19334 years) because it is the latest stable Debian release which should get
19335 security support for a few years.
</p
>
19337 <p
>The web service is written in Perl, and depend on some perl modules
19338 that are missing in Debian at the moment. It would be great if these
19339 modules were added to the Debian archive, allowing anyone to set up
19340 their own
<a href=
"http://www.fixmystreet.com
">FixMyStreet
</a
> clone
19341 in their own country using only Debian packages. The list of modules
19342 missing in Debian/Squeeze isn
't very long, and I hope the perl group
19343 will find time to package the
12 modules Catalyst::Plugin::SmartURI,
19344 Catalyst::Plugin::Unicode::Encoding, Catalyst::View::TT, Devel::Hide,
19345 Sort::Key, Statistics::Distributions, Template::Plugin::Comma,
19346 Template::Plugin::DateTime::Format, Term::Size::Any, Term::Size::Perl,
19347 URI::SmartURI and Web::Scraper to make the maintenance of FixMyStreet
19348 easier in the future.
</p
>
19350 <p
>Thanks to the great tools in Debian, getting the missing modules
19351 installed on my server was a simple call to
'cpan2deb Module::Name
'
19352 and
'dpkg -i
' to install the resulting package. But this leave me
19353 with the responsibility of tracking security problems, which I really
19354 do not have time for.
</p
>
19359 <title>Free Software vs. proprietary softare...
</title>
19360 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Software_vs__proprietary_softare___.html
</link>
19361 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Software_vs__proprietary_softare___.html
</guid>
19362 <pubDate>Mon,
20 Jun
2011 12:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
19363 <description><p
>Reading
19364 <a href=
"http://blog.thingiverse.com/
2011/
06/
20/open-source-vs-closed-source-eulas/
">the
19365 thingiverse blog
</a
>, I came across two highlights of interesting
19367 <a href=
"http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Autodesk_EULA
">Autodesk
</a
>
19369 <a href=
"http://blog.makezine.com/archive/
2011/
06/things-you-cant-do-with-the-microsoft-kinect-sdk.html
">Microsoft
19370 Kinect
</a
> End User License Agreements (EULAs), which illustrates
19371 quite well why I stay away from software with EULAs. Whenever I take
19372 the time to read their content, the terms are simply unacceptable.
</p
>
19377 <title>Experimental Open311 API for the mySociety fixmystreet system
</title>
19378 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Experimental_Open311_API_for_the_mySociety_fixmystreet_system.html
</link>
19379 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Experimental_Open311_API_for_the_mySociety_fixmystreet_system.html
</guid>
19380 <pubDate>Sat,
30 Apr
2011 17:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
19381 <description><p
>Today, the first draft implementation of an
19382 <a href=
"http://www.open311.org/
">Open311 API
</a
> for the Norwegian
19383 service
<a href=
"http://www.fiksgatami.no/
">FiksGataMi
</a
> started to
19384 work. It is only available on the developer server for now, and I
19385 have not tested it using any existing Open311 client (I lack the
19386 platforms needed to run the clients I have found so far), but it is
19387 able to query the database and extract a list of open and closed
19388 requests within a given category and reported to a given municipality.
19389 I believe that is a good start to create a useful service for those
19390 that want to do data mining on the requests submitted so far.
</p
>
19392 <p
>Where is it? Visit
19393 <a href=
"http://fiksgatami-dev.nuug.no/open311.cgi/v2/
">http://fiksgatami-dev.nuug.no/open311.cgi/v2/
</a
>
19394 to have a look. Please send feedback to the
19395 <a href=
"http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/fiksgatami
">fiksgatami
19396 (at) nuug.no
</a
> mailing list.
</p
>
19401 <title>Initial notes on adding Open311 server API on FixMyStreet
</title>
19402 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Initial_notes_on_adding_Open311_server_API_on_FixMyStreet.html
</link>
19403 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Initial_notes_on_adding_Open311_server_API_on_FixMyStreet.html
</guid>
19404 <pubDate>Fri,
29 Apr
2011 10:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
19405 <description><p
>The last few days I have spent some time trying to add support for
19406 the
<a href=
"http://www.open311.org/
">Open311 API
</a
> in the
19407 <a href=
"http://www.fiksgatami.no/
">Norwegian FixMyStreet service
</a
>.
19408 Earlier I believed Open311 would be a useful API to use to submit
19409 reports to the municipalities, but when I noticed that the
19410 <a href=
"http://fixmystreet.org.nz/
">New Zealand version
</a
> of
19411 FixMyStreet had implemented Open311 on the server side, it occurred to
19412 me that this was a nice way to allow the public, press and
19413 municipalities to do data mining directly in the FixMyStreet service.
19414 Thus I went to work implementing the Open311 specification for
19415 FixMyStreet. The implementation is not yet ready, but I am starting
19416 to get a draft limping along. In the process, I have discovered a few
19417 issues with the Open311 specification.
</p
>
19419 <p
>One obvious missing feature is the lack of natural language
19420 handling in the specification. The specification seem to assume all
19421 reports will be written in English, and do not provide a way for the
19422 receiving end to specify which languages are understood there. To be
19423 able to use the same client and submit to several Open311 receivers,
19424 it would be useful to know which language to use when writing reports.
19425 I believe the specification should be extended to allow the receivers
19426 of problem reports to specify which language they accept, and the
19427 submitter to specify which language the report is written in.
19428 Language of a text can also be automatically guessed using statistical
19429 methods, but for multi-lingual persons like myself, it is useful to
19430 know which language to use when writing a problem report. I suspect
19431 some lang=nb,nn kind of attribute would solve it.
</p
>
19433 <p
>A key part of the Open311 API is the list of services provided,
19434 which is similar to the categories used by FixMyStreet. One issue I
19435 run into is the need to specify both name and unique identifier for
19436 each category. The specification do not state that the identifier
19437 should be numeric, but all example implementations have used numbers
19438 here. In FixMyStreet, there is no number associated with each
19439 category. As the specification do not forbid it, I will use the name
19440 as the unique identifier for now and see how open311 clients handle
19443 <p
>The report format in open311 and the report format in FixMyStreet
19444 differ in a key part. FixMyStreet have a title and a description,
19445 while Open311 only have a description and lack the title. I
'm not
19446 quite sure how to best handle this yet. When asking for a FixMyStreet
19447 report in Open311 format, I just merge title an description into the
19448 open311 description, but this is not going to work if the open311 API
19449 should be used for submitting new reports to FixMyStreet.
</p
>
19451 <p
>The search feature in Open311 is missing a way to ask for problems
19452 near a geographic location. I believe this is important if one is to
19453 use Open311 as the query language for mobile units. The specification
19454 should be extended to handle this, probably using some new lat=, lon=
19455 and range= options.
</p
>
19457 <p
>The final challenge I see is that the FixMyStreet code handle
19458 several administrations in one interface, while the Open311 API seem
19459 to assume only one administration. For FixMyStreet, this mean a
19460 report can be sent to several administrations, and the categories
19461 available depend on the location of the problem. Not quite sure how
19462 to best handle this. I
've noticed
19463 <a href=
"http://seeclickfix.com/open311/
">SeeClickFix
</a
> added
19464 latitude and longitude options to the services request, but it do not
19465 solve the problem of what to return when no location is specified.
19466 Will have to investigate this a bit more.
</p
>
19468 <p
>My distaste for web forums have kept me from bringing these issues
19469 up with the open311 developer group. I really wish they had a email
19470 list available via
<a href=
"http://www.gmane.org/
">Gmane
</a
> to use for
19471 discussions instead of only
19472 <a href=
"http://lists.open311.org/groups/discuss
">a forum
<a/
>. Oh,
19473 well. That will probably resolve itself, one way or another. I
've
19474 also tried visiting the IRC channel #open311 on FreeNode, but no-one
19475 seem to reply to my questions there. This make me wonder if I just
19476 fail to understand how the open311 community work. It sure do not
19477 work like the free software project communities I am used to.
</p
>
19482 <title>Gnash enteres Google Summer of Code
2011</title>
19483 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_enteres_Google_Summer_of_Code_2011.html
</link>
19484 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_enteres_Google_Summer_of_Code_2011.html
</guid>
19485 <pubDate>Wed,
6 Apr
2011 09:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
19486 <description><p
><a href=
"http://www.getgnash.org/
">The Gnash project
</a
> is still
19487 the most promising solution for a Free Software Flash implementation.
19488 A few days ago the project
19489 <a href=
"http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnash-dev/
2011-
04/msg00011.html
">announced
</a
>
19490 that it will participate in Google Summer of Code. I hope many
19491 students apply, and that some of them succeed in getting AVM2 support
19492 into Gnash.
</p
>
19497 <title>A Norwegian FixMyStreet have kept me busy the last few weeks
</title>
19498 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Norwegian_FixMyStreet_have_kept_me_busy_the_last_few_weeks.html
</link>
19499 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Norwegian_FixMyStreet_have_kept_me_busy_the_last_few_weeks.html
</guid>
19500 <pubDate>Sun,
3 Apr
2011 22:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
19501 <description><p
>Here is a small update for my English readers. Most of my blog
19502 posts have been in Norwegian the last few weeks, so here is a short
19503 update in English.
</p
>
19505 <p
>The kids still keep me too busy to get much free software work
19506 done, but I did manage to organise a project to get a Norwegian port
19507 of the British service
19508 <a href=
"http://www.fixmystreet.com/
">FixMyStreet
</a
> up and running,
19509 and it has been running for a month now. The entire project has been
19510 organised by me and two others. Around Christmas we gathered sponsors
19511 to fund the development work. In January I drafted a contract with
19512 <a href=
"http://www.mysociety.org/
">mySociety
</a
> on what to develop,
19513 and in February the development took place. Most of it involved
19514 converting the source to use GPS coordinates instead of British
19515 easting/northing, and the resulting code should be a lot easier to get
19516 running in any country by now. The Norwegian
19517 <a href=
"http://www.fiksgatami.no/
">FiksGataMi
</a
> is using
19518 <a href=
"http://www.openstreetmap.org/
">OpenStreetmap
</a
> as the map
19519 source and the source for administrative borders in Norway, and
19520 support for this had to be added/fixed.
</p
>
19522 <p
>The Norwegian version went live March
3th, and we spent the weekend
19523 polishing the system before we announced it March
7th. The system is
19524 running on a KVM instance of Debian/Squeeze, and has seen almost
3000
19525 problem reports in a few weeks. Soon we hope to announce the Android
19526 and iPhone versions making it even easier to report problems with the
19527 public infrastructure.
</p
>
19529 <p
>Perhaps something to consider for those of you in countries without
19530 such service?
</p
>
19535 <title>Using NVD and CPE to track CVEs in locally maintained software
</title>
19536 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_NVD_and_CPE_to_track_CVEs_in_locally_maintained_software.html
</link>
19537 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_NVD_and_CPE_to_track_CVEs_in_locally_maintained_software.html
</guid>
19538 <pubDate>Fri,
28 Jan
2011 15:
40:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
19539 <description><p
>The last few days I have looked at ways to track open security
19540 issues here at my work with the University of Oslo. My idea is that
19541 it should be possible to use the information about security issues
19542 available on the Internet, and check our locally
19543 maintained/distributed software against this information. It should
19544 allow us to verify that no known security issues are forgotten. The
19545 CVE database listing vulnerabilities seem like a great central point,
19546 and by using the package lists from Debian mapped to CVEs provided by
19547 the testing security team, I believed it should be possible to figure
19548 out which security holes were present in our free software
19549 collection.
</p
>
19551 <p
>After reading up on the topic, it became obvious that the first
19552 building block is to be able to name software packages in a unique and
19553 consistent way across data sources. I considered several ways to do
19554 this, for example coming up with my own naming scheme like using URLs
19555 to project home pages or URLs to the Freshmeat entries, or using some
19556 existing naming scheme. And it seem like I am not the first one to
19557 come across this problem, as MITRE already proposed and implemented a
19558 solution. Enter the
<a href=
"http://cpe.mitre.org/index.html
">Common
19559 Platform Enumeration
</a
> dictionary, a vocabulary for referring to
19560 software, hardware and other platform components. The CPE ids are
19561 mapped to CVEs in the
<a href=
"http://web.nvd.nist.gov/
">National
19562 Vulnerability Database
</a
>, allowing me to look up know security
19563 issues for any CPE name. With this in place, all I need to do is to
19564 locate the CPE id for the software packages we use at the university.
19565 This is fairly trivial (I google for
'cve cpe $package
' and check the
19566 NVD entry if a CVE for the package exist).
</p
>
19568 <p
>To give you an example. The GNU gzip source package have the CPE
19569 name cpe:/a:gnu:gzip. If the old version
1.3.3 was the package to
19570 check out, one could look up
19571 <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
19572 in NVD
</a
> and get a list of
6 security holes with public CVE entries.
19573 The most recent one is
19574 <a href=
"http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-
2010-
0001">CVE-
2010-
0001</a
>,
19575 and at the bottom of the NVD page for this vulnerability the complete
19576 list of affected versions is provided.
</p
>
19578 <p
>The NVD database of CVEs is also available as a XML dump, allowing
19579 for offline processing of issues. Using this dump, I
've written a
19580 small script taking a list of CPEs as input and list all CVEs
19581 affecting the packages represented by these CPEs. One give it CPEs
19582 with version numbers as specified above and get a list of open
19583 security issues out.
</p
>
19585 <p
>Of course for this approach to be useful, the quality of the NVD
19586 information need to be high. For that to happen, I believe as many as
19587 possible need to use and contribute to the NVD database. I notice
19589 <a href=
"https://www.redhat.com/security/data/metrics/rhsamapcpe.txt
">a
19590 map from CVE to CPE
</a
>, indicating that they are using the CPE
19591 information. I
'm not aware of Debian and Ubuntu doing the same.
</p
>
19593 <p
>To get an idea about the quality for free software, I spent some
19594 time making it possible to compare the CVE database from Debian with
19595 the CVE database in NVD. The result look fairly good, but there are
19596 some inconsistencies in NVD (same software package having several
19597 CPEs), and some inaccuracies (NVD not mentioning buggy packages that
19598 Debian believe are affected by a CVE). Hope to find time to improve
19599 the quality of NVD, but that require being able to get in touch with
19600 someone maintaining it. So far my three emails with questions and
19601 corrections have not seen any reply, but I hope contact can be
19602 established soon.
</p
>
19604 <p
>An interesting application for CPEs is cross platform package
19605 mapping. It would be useful to know which packages in for example
19606 RHEL, OpenSuSe and Mandriva are missing from Debian and Ubuntu, and
19607 this would be trivial if all linux distributions provided CPE entries
19608 for their packages.
</p
>
19613 <title>Which module is loaded for a given PCI and USB device?
</title>
19614 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Which_module_is_loaded_for_a_given_PCI_and_USB_device_.html
</link>
19615 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Which_module_is_loaded_for_a_given_PCI_and_USB_device_.html
</guid>
19616 <pubDate>Sun,
23 Jan
2011 00:
20:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
19617 <description><p
>In the
19618 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/discover-data
">discover-data
</a
>
19619 package in Debian, there is a script to report useful information
19620 about the running hardware for use when people report missing
19621 information. One part of this script that I find very useful when
19622 debugging hardware problems, is the part mapping loaded kernel module
19623 to the PCI device it claims. It allow me to quickly see if the kernel
19624 module I expect is driving the hardware I am struggling with. To see
19625 the output, make sure discover-data is installed and run
19626 <tt
>/usr/share/bug/discover-data
3>&1</tt
>. The relevant output on
19627 one of my machines like this:
</p
>
19631 10de:
03eb i2c_nforce2
19634 10de:
03f0 snd_hda_intel
19639 109e:
0878 snd_bt87x
19643 <p
>The code in question look like this, slightly modified for
19644 readability and to drop the output to file descriptor
3:
</p
>
19647 if [ -d /sys/bus/pci/devices/ ] ; then
19648 echo loaded pci modules:
19650 cd /sys/bus/pci/devices/
19651 for address in * ; do
19652 if [ -d
"$address/driver/module
" ] ; then
19653 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
19654 if grep -q
"^$module
" /proc/modules ; then
19655 address=$(echo $address |sed s/
0000://)
19656 id=`lspci -n -s $address | tail -n
1 | awk
'{print $
3}
'`
19657 echo
"$id $module
"
19666 <p
>Similar code could be used to extract USB device module
19667 mappings:
</p
>
19670 if [ -d /sys/bus/usb/devices/ ] ; then
19671 echo loaded usb modules:
19673 cd /sys/bus/usb/devices/
19674 for address in * ; do
19675 if [ -d
"$address/driver/module
" ] ; then
19676 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
19677 if grep -q
"^$module
" /proc/modules ; then
19678 address=$(echo $address |sed s/
0000://)
19679 id=$(lsusb -s $address | tail -n
1 | awk
'{print $
6}
')
19680 if [
"$id
" ] ; then
19681 echo
"$id $module
"
19691 <p
>This might perhaps be something to include in other tools as
19697 <title>The video format most supported in web browsers?
</title>
19698 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_video_format_most_supported_in_web_browsers_.html
</link>
19699 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_video_format_most_supported_in_web_browsers_.html
</guid>
19700 <pubDate>Sun,
16 Jan
2011 00:
20:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
19701 <description><p
>The video format struggle on the web continues, and the three
19702 contenders seem to be Ogg Theora, H
.264 and WebM. Most video sites
19703 seem to use H
.264, while others use Ogg Theora. Interestingly enough,
19704 the comments I see give me the feeling that a lot of people believe
19705 H
.264 is the most supported video format in browsers, but according to
19706 the Wikipedia article on
19707 <a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video
">HTML5 video
</a
>,
19708 this is not true. Check out the nice table of supprted formats in
19709 different browsers there. The format supported by most browsers is
19710 Ogg Theora, supported by released versions of Mozilla Firefox, Google
19711 Chrome, Chromium, Opera, Konqueror, Epiphany, Origyn Web Browser and
19712 BOLT browser, while not supported by Internet Explorer nor Safari.
19713 The runner up is WebM supported by released versions of Google Chrome
19714 Chromium Opera and Origyn Web Browser, and test versions of Mozilla
19715 Firefox. H
.264 is supported by released versions of Safari, Origyn
19716 Web Browser and BOLT browser, and the test version of Internet
19717 Explorer. Those wanting Ogg Theora support in Internet Explorer and
19718 Safari can install plugins to get it.
</p
>
19720 <p
>To me, the simple conclusion from this is that to reach most users
19721 without any extra software installed, one uses Ogg Theora with the
19722 HTML5 video tag. Of course to reach all those without a browser
19723 handling HTML5, one need fallback mechanisms. In
19724 <a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/
">NUUG
</a
>, we provide first fallback to a
19725 plugin capable of playing MPEG1 video, and those without such support
19726 we have a second fallback to the Cortado java applet playing Ogg
19727 Theora. This seem to work quite well, as can be seen in an
<a
19728 href=
"http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/
20110111-semantic-web/
">example
19729 from last week
</a
>.
</p
>
19731 <p
>The reason Ogg Theora is the most supported format, and H
.264 is
19732 the least supported is simple. Implementing and using H
.264
19733 require royalty payment to MPEG-LA, and the terms of use from MPEG-LA
19734 are incompatible with free software licensing. If you believed H
.264
19735 was without royalties and license terms, check out
19736 "<a href=
"http://webmink.com/essays/h-
264/
">H
.264 – Not The Kind Of
19737 Free That Matters
</a
>" by Simon Phipps.
</p
>
19739 <p
>A incomplete list of sites providing video in Ogg Theora is
19741 <a href=
"http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/List_of_Theora_videos
">the
19742 Xiph.org wiki
</a
>, if you want to have a look. I
'm not aware of a
19743 similar list for WebM nor H
.264.
</p
>
19745 <p
>Update
2011-
01-
16 09:
40: A question from Tollef on IRC made me
19746 realise that I failed to make it clear enough this text is about the
19747 &lt;video
&gt; tag support in browsers and not the video support
19748 provided by external plugins like the Flash plugins.
</p
>
19753 <title>Chrome plan to drop H
.264 support for HTML5
&lt;video
&gt;
</title>
19754 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Chrome_plan_to_drop_H_264_support_for_HTML5__lt_video_gt_.html
</link>
19755 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Chrome_plan_to_drop_H_264_support_for_HTML5__lt_video_gt_.html
</guid>
19756 <pubDate>Wed,
12 Jan
2011 22:
10:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
19757 <description><p
>Today I discovered
19758 <a href=
"http://www.digi.no/
860070/google-dropper-h264-stotten-i-chrome
">via
19759 digi.no
</a
> that the Chrome developers, in a surprising announcement,
19760 <a href=
"http://blog.chromium.org/
2011/
01/html-video-codec-support-in-chrome.html
">yesterday
19761 announced
</a
> plans to drop H
.264 support for HTML5
&lt;video
&gt; in
19762 the browser. The argument used is that H
.264 is not a
"completely
19763 open
" codec technology. If you believe H
.264 was free for everyone
19764 to use, I recommend having a look at the essay
19765 "<a href=
"http://webmink.com/essays/h-
264/
">H
.264 – Not The Kind Of
19766 Free That Matters
</a
>". It is not free of cost for creators of video
19767 tools, nor those of us that want to publish on the Internet, and the
19768 terms provided by MPEG-LA excludes free software projects from
19769 licensing the patents needed for H
.264. Some background information
19770 on the Google announcement is available from
19771 <a href=
"http://www.osnews.com/story/
24243/Google_To_Drop_H264_Support_from_Chrome
">OSnews
</a
>.
19772 A good read. :)
</p
>
19774 <p
>Personally, I believe it is great that Google is taking a stand to
19775 promote equal terms for everyone when it comes to video publishing on
19776 the Internet. This can only be done by publishing using free and open
19777 standards, which is only possible if the web browsers provide support
19778 for these free and open standards. At the moment there seem to be two
19779 camps in the web browser world when it come to video support. Some
19780 browsers support H
.264, and others support
19781 <a href=
"http://www.theora.org/
">Ogg Theora
</a
> and
19782 <a href=
"http://www.webmproject.org/
">WebM
</a
>
19783 (
<a href=
"http://www.diracvideo.org/
">Dirac
</a
> is not really an option
19784 yet), forcing those of us that want to publish video on the Internet
19785 and which can not accept the terms of use presented by MPEG-LA for
19786 H
.264 to not reach all potential viewers.
19787 Wikipedia keep
<a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video
">an
19788 updated summary
</a
> of the current browser support.
</p
>
19790 <p
>Not surprising, several people would prefer Google to keep
19791 promoting H
.264, and John Gruber
19792 <a href=
"http://daringfireball.net/
2011/
01/simple_questions
">presents
19793 the mind set
</a
> of these people quite well. His rhetorical questions
19794 provoked a reply from Thom Holwerda with another set of questions
19795 <a href=
"http://www.osnews.com/story/
24245/
10_Questions_for_John_Gruber_Regarding_H_264_WebM
">presenting
19796 the issues with H
.264</a
>. Both are worth a read.
</p
>
19798 <p
>Some argue that if Google is dropping H
.264 because it isn
't free,
19799 they should also drop support for the Adobe Flash plugin. This
19800 argument was covered by Simon Phipps in
19801 <a href=
"http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/
2011/
01/google-and-h264---far-from-hypocritical/index.htm
">todays
19802 blog post
</a
>, which I find to put the issue in context. To me it
19803 make perfect sense to drop native H
.264 support for HTML5 in the
19804 browser while still allowing plugins.
</p
>
19806 <p
>I suspect the reason this announcement make so many people protest,
19807 is that all the users and promoters of H
.264 suddenly get an uneasy
19808 feeling that they might be backing the wrong horse. A lot of TV
19809 broadcasters have been moving to H
.264 the last few years, and a lot
19810 of money has been invested in hardware based on the belief that they
19811 could use the same video format for both broadcasting and web
19812 publishing. Suddenly this belief is shaken.
</p
>
19814 <p
>An interesting question is why Google is doing this. While the
19815 presented argument might be true enough, I believe Google would only
19816 present the argument if the change make sense from a business
19817 perspective. One reason might be that they are currently negotiating
19818 with MPEG-LA over royalties or usage terms, and giving MPEG-LA the
19819 feeling that dropping H
.264 completely from Chroome, Youtube and
19820 Google Video would improve the negotiation position of Google.
19821 Another reason might be that Google want to save money by not having
19822 to pay the video tax to MPEG-LA at all, and thus want to move to a
19823 video format not requiring royalties at all. A third reason might be
19824 that the Chrome development team simply want to avoid the
19825 Chrome/Chromium split to get more help with the development of Chrome.
19826 I guess time will tell.
</p
>
19828 <p
>Update
2011-
01-
15: The Google Chrome team provided
19829 <a href=
"http://blog.chromium.org/
2011/
01/more-about-chrome-html-video-codec.html
">more
19830 background and information on the move
</a
> it a blog post yesterday.
</p
>
19835 <title>What standards are Free and Open as defined by Digistan?
</title>
19836 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_standards_are_Free_and_Open_as_defined_by_Digistan_.html
</link>
19837 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_standards_are_Free_and_Open_as_defined_by_Digistan_.html
</guid>
19838 <pubDate>Thu,
30 Dec
2010 23:
15:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
19839 <description><p
>After trying to
19840 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_Ogg_Theora_a_free_and_open_standard_.html
">compare
19841 Ogg Theora
</a
> to
19842 <a href=
"http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition
">the Digistan
19843 definition
</a
> of a free and open standard, I concluded that this need
19844 to be done for more standards and started on a framework for doing
19845 this. As a start, I want to get the status for all the standards in
19846 the Norwegian reference directory, which include UTF-
8, HTML, PDF, ODF,
19847 JPEG, PNG, SVG and others. But to be able to complete this in a
19848 reasonable time frame, I will need help.
</p
>
19850 <p
>If you want to help out with this work, please visit
19851 <a href=
"http://wiki.nuug.no/grupper/standard/digistan-analyse
">the
19852 wiki pages I have set up for this
</a
>, and let me know that you want
19853 to help out. The IRC channel #nuug on irc.freenode.net is a good
19854 place to coordinate this for now, as it is the IRC channel for the
19855 NUUG association where I have created the framework (I am the leader
19856 of the Norwegian Unix User Group).
</p
>
19858 <p
>The framework is still forming, and a lot is left to do. Do not be
19859 scared by the sketchy form of the current pages. :)
</p
>
19864 <title>The many definitions of a open standard
</title>
19865 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_many_definitions_of_a_open_standard.html
</link>
19866 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_many_definitions_of_a_open_standard.html
</guid>
19867 <pubDate>Mon,
27 Dec
2010 14:
45:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
19868 <description><p
>One of the reasons I like the Digistan definition of
19869 "<a href=
"http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition
">Free and
19870 Open Standard
</a
>" is that this is a new term, and thus the meaning of
19871 the term has been decided by Digistan. The term
"Open Standard
" has
19872 become so misunderstood that it is no longer very useful when talking
19873 about standards. One end up discussing which definition is the best
19874 one and with such frame the only one gaining are the proponents of
19875 de-facto standards and proprietary solutions.
</p
>
19877 <p
>But to give us an idea about the diversity of definitions of open
19878 standards, here are a few that I know about. This list is not
19879 complete, but can be a starting point for those that want to do a
19880 complete survey. More definitions are available on the
19881 <a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard
">wikipedia
19882 page
</a
>.
</p
>
19884 <p
>First off is my favourite, the definition from the European
19885 Interoperability Framework version
1.0. Really sad to notice that BSA
19886 and others has succeeded in getting it removed from version
2.0 of the
19887 framework by stacking the committee drafting the new version with
19888 their own people. Anyway, the definition is still available and it
19889 include the key properties needed to make sure everyone can use a
19890 specification on equal terms.
</p
>
19894 <p
>The following are the minimal characteristics that a specification
19895 and its attendant documents must have in order to be considered an
19896 open standard:
</p
>
19900 <li
>The standard is adopted and will be maintained by a not-for-profit
19901 organisation, and its ongoing development occurs on the basis of an
19902 open decision-making procedure available to all interested parties
19903 (consensus or majority decision etc.).
</li
>
19905 <li
>The standard has been published and the standard specification
19906 document is available either freely or at a nominal charge. It must be
19907 permissible to all to copy, distribute and use it for no fee or at a
19908 nominal fee.
</li
>
19910 <li
>The intellectual property - i.e. patents possibly present - of
19911 (parts of) the standard is made irrevocably available on a royalty-
19912 free basis.
</li
>
19914 <li
>There are no constraints on the re-use of the standard.
</li
>
19917 </blockquote
>
19919 <p
>Another one originates from my friends over at
19920 <a href=
"http://www.dkuug.dk/
">DKUUG
</a
>, who coined and gathered
19921 support for
<a href=
"http://www.aaben-standard.dk/
">this
19922 definition
</a
> in
2004. It even made it into the Danish parlament as
19923 <a href=
"http://www.ft.dk/dokumenter/tingdok.aspx?/samling/
20051/beslutningsforslag/B103/som_fremsat.htm
">their
19924 definition of a open standard
</a
>. Another from a different part of
19925 the Danish government is available from the wikipedia page.
</p
>
19929 <p
>En åben standard opfylder følgende krav:
</p
>
19933 <li
>Veldokumenteret med den fuldstændige specifikation offentligt
19934 tilgængelig.
</li
>
19936 <li
>Frit implementerbar uden økonomiske, politiske eller juridiske
19937 begrænsninger på implementation og anvendelse.
</li
>
19939 <li
>Standardiseret og vedligeholdt i et åbent forum (en såkaldt
19940 "standardiseringsorganisation
") via en åben proces.
</li
>
19944 </blockquote
>
19946 <p
>Then there is
<a href=
"http://www.fsfe.org/projects/os/def.html
">the
19947 definition
</a
> from Free Software Foundation Europe.
</p
>
19951 <p
>An Open Standard refers to a format or protocol that is
</p
>
19955 <li
>subject to full public assessment and use without constraints in a
19956 manner equally available to all parties;
</li
>
19958 <li
>without any components or extensions that have dependencies on
19959 formats or protocols that do not meet the definition of an Open
19960 Standard themselves;
</li
>
19962 <li
>free from legal or technical clauses that limit its utilisation by
19963 any party or in any business model;
</li
>
19965 <li
>managed and further developed independently of any single vendor
19966 in a process open to the equal participation of competitors and third
19967 parties;
</li
>
19969 <li
>available in multiple complete implementations by competing
19970 vendors, or as a complete implementation equally available to all
19971 parties.
</li
>
19975 </blockquote
>
19977 <p
>A long time ago, SUN Microsystems, now bought by Oracle, created
19979 <a href=
"http://blogs.sun.com/dennisding/resource/Open%
20Standard%
20Definition.pdf
">Open
19980 Standards Checklist
</a
> with a fairly detailed description.
</p
>
19983 <p
>Creation and Management of an Open Standard
19987 <li
>Its development and management process must be collaborative and
19992 <li
>Participation must be accessible to all those who wish to
19993 participate and can meet fair and reasonable criteria
19994 imposed by the organization under which it is developed
19995 and managed.
</li
>
19997 <li
>The processes must be documented and, through a known
19998 method, can be changed through input from all
19999 participants.
</li
>
20001 <li
>The process must be based on formal and binding commitments for
20002 the disclosure and licensing of intellectual property rights.
</li
>
20004 <li
>Development and management should strive for consensus,
20005 and an appeals process must be clearly outlined.
</li
>
20007 <li
>The standard specification must be open to extensive
20008 public review at least once in its life-cycle, with
20009 comments duly discussed and acted upon, if required.
</li
>
20017 <p
>Use and Licensing of an Open Standard
</p
>
20020 <li
>The standard must describe an interface, not an implementation,
20021 and the industry must be capable of creating multiple, competing
20022 implementations to the interface described in the standard without
20023 undue or restrictive constraints. Interfaces include APIs,
20024 protocols, schemas, data formats and their encoding.
</li
>
20026 <li
> The standard must not contain any proprietary
"hooks
" that create
20027 a technical or economic barriers
</li
>
20029 <li
>Faithful implementations of the standard must
20030 interoperate. Interoperability means the ability of a computer
20031 program to communicate and exchange information with other computer
20032 programs and mutually to use the information which has been
20033 exchanged. This includes the ability to use, convert, or exchange
20034 file formats, protocols, schemas, interface information or
20035 conventions, so as to permit the computer program to work with other
20036 computer programs and users in all the ways in which they are
20037 intended to function.
</li
>
20039 <li
>It must be permissible for anyone to copy, distribute and read the
20040 standard for a nominal fee, or even no fee. If there is a fee, it
20041 must be low enough to not preclude widespread use.
</li
>
20043 <li
>It must be possible for anyone to obtain free (no royalties or
20044 fees; also known as
"royalty free
"), worldwide, non-exclusive and
20045 perpetual licenses to all essential patent claims to make, use and
20046 sell products based on the standard. The only exceptions are
20047 terminations per the reciprocity and defensive suspension terms
20048 outlined below. Essential patent claims include pending, unpublished
20049 patents, published patents, and patent applications. The license is
20050 only for the exact scope of the standard in question.
20054 <li
> May be conditioned only on reciprocal licenses to any of
20055 licensees
' patent claims essential to practice that standard
20056 (also known as a reciprocity clause)
</li
>
20058 <li
> May be terminated as to any licensee who sues the licensor
20059 or any other licensee for infringement of patent claims
20060 essential to practice that standard (also known as a
20061 "defensive suspension
" clause)
</li
>
20063 <li
> The same licensing terms are available to every potential
20064 licensor
</li
>
20069 <li
>The licensing terms of an open standards must not preclude
20070 implementations of that standard under open source licensing terms
20071 or restricted licensing terms
</li
>
20075 </blockquote
>
20077 <p
>It is said that one of the nice things about standards is that
20078 there are so many of them. As you can see, the same holds true for
20079 open standard definitions. Most of the definitions have a lot in
20080 common, and it is not really controversial what properties a open
20081 standard should have, but the diversity of definitions have made it
20082 possible for those that want to avoid a level marked field and real
20083 competition to downplay the significance of open standards. I hope we
20084 can turn this tide by focusing on the advantages of Free and Open
20085 Standards.
</p
>
20090 <title>Is Ogg Theora a free and open standard?
</title>
20091 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_Ogg_Theora_a_free_and_open_standard_.html
</link>
20092 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_Ogg_Theora_a_free_and_open_standard_.html
</guid>
20093 <pubDate>Sat,
25 Dec
2010 20:
25:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
20094 <description><p
><a href=
"http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition
">The
20095 Digistan definition
</a
> of a free and open standard reads like this:
</p
>
20099 <p
>The Digital Standards Organization defines free and open standard
20100 as follows:
</p
>
20104 <li
>A free and open standard is immune to vendor capture at all stages
20105 in its life-cycle. Immunity from vendor capture makes it possible to
20106 freely use, improve upon, trust, and extend a standard over time.
</li
>
20108 <li
>The standard is adopted and will be maintained by a not-for-profit
20109 organisation, and its ongoing development occurs on the basis of an
20110 open decision-making procedure available to all interested
20111 parties.
</li
>
20113 <li
>The standard has been published and the standard specification
20114 document is available freely. It must be permissible to all to copy,
20115 distribute, and use it freely.
</li
>
20117 <li
>The patents possibly present on (parts of) the standard are made
20118 irrevocably available on a royalty-free basis.
</li
>
20120 <li
>There are no constraints on the re-use of the standard.
</li
>
20124 <p
>The economic outcome of a free and open standard, which can be
20125 measured, is that it enables perfect competition between suppliers of
20126 products based on the standard.
</p
>
20127 </blockquote
>
20129 <p
>For a while now I have tried to figure out of Ogg Theora is a free
20130 and open standard according to this definition. Here is a short
20131 writeup of what I have been able to gather so far. I brought up the
20132 topic on the Xiph advocacy mailing list
20133 <a href=
"http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/advocacy/
2009-July/
001632.html
">in
20134 July
2009</a
>, for those that want to see some background information.
20135 According to Ivo Emanuel Gonçalves and Monty Montgomery on that list
20136 the Ogg Theora specification fulfils the Digistan definition.
</p
>
20138 <p
><strong
>Free from vendor capture?
</strong
></p
>
20140 <p
>As far as I can see, there is no single vendor that can control the
20141 Ogg Theora specification. It can be argued that the
20142 <a href=
"http://www.xiph.org/
">Xiph foundation
</A
> is such vendor, but
20143 given that it is a non-profit foundation with the expressed goal
20144 making free and open protocols and standards available, it is not
20145 obvious that this is a real risk. One issue with the Xiph
20146 foundation is that its inner working (as in board member list, or who
20147 control the foundation) are not easily available on the web. I
've
20148 been unable to find out who is in the foundation board, and have not
20149 seen any accounting information documenting how money is handled nor
20150 where is is spent in the foundation. It is thus not obvious for an
20151 external observer who control The Xiph foundation, and for all I know
20152 it is possible for a single vendor to take control over the
20153 specification. But it seem unlikely.
</p
>
20155 <p
><strong
>Maintained by open not-for-profit organisation?
</strong
></p
>
20157 <p
>Assuming that the Xiph foundation is the organisation its web pages
20158 claim it to be, this point is fulfilled. If Xiph foundation is
20159 controlled by a single vendor, it isn
't, but I have not found any
20160 documentation indicating this.
</p
>
20162 <p
>According to
20163 <a href=
"http://media.hiof.no/diverse/fad/rapport_4.pdf
">a report
</a
>
20164 prepared by Audun Vaaler og Børre Ludvigsen for the Norwegian
20165 government, the Xiph foundation is a non-commercial organisation and
20166 the development process is open, transparent and non-Discrimatory.
20167 Until proven otherwise, I believe it make most sense to believe the
20168 report is correct.
</p
>
20170 <p
><strong
>Specification freely available?
</strong
></p
>
20172 <p
>The specification for the
<a href=
"http://www.xiph.org/ogg/doc/
">Ogg
20173 container format
</a
> and both the
20174 <a href=
"http://www.xiph.org/vorbis/doc/
">Vorbis
</a
> and
20175 <a href=
"http://theora.org/doc/
">Theora
</a
> codeces are available on
20176 the web. This are the terms in the Vorbis and Theora specification:
20180 Anyone may freely use and distribute the Ogg and [Vorbis/Theora]
20181 specifications, whether in private, public, or corporate
20182 capacity. However, the Xiph.Org Foundation and the Ogg project reserve
20183 the right to set the Ogg [Vorbis/Theora] specification and certify
20184 specification compliance.
20186 </blockquote
>
20188 <p
>The Ogg container format is specified in IETF
20189 <a href=
"http://www.xiph.org/ogg/doc/rfc3533.txt
">RFC
3533</a
>, and
20190 this is the term:
<p
>
20194 <p
>This document and translations of it may be copied and furnished to
20195 others, and derivative works that comment on or otherwise explain it
20196 or assist in its implementation may be prepared, copied, published and
20197 distributed, in whole or in part, without restriction of any kind,
20198 provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph are
20199 included on all such copies and derivative works. However, this
20200 document itself may not be modified in any way, such as by removing
20201 the copyright notice or references to the Internet Society or other
20202 Internet organizations, except as needed for the purpose of developing
20203 Internet standards in which case the procedures for copyrights defined
20204 in the Internet Standards process must be followed, or as required to
20205 translate it into languages other than English.
</p
>
20207 <p
>The limited permissions granted above are perpetual and will not be
20208 revoked by the Internet Society or its successors or assigns.
</p
>
20209 </blockquote
>
20211 <p
>All these terms seem to allow unlimited distribution and use, an
20212 this term seem to be fulfilled. There might be a problem with the
20213 missing permission to distribute modified versions of the text, and
20214 thus reuse it in other specifications. Not quite sure if that is a
20215 requirement for the Digistan definition.
</p
>
20217 <p
><strong
>Royalty-free?
</strong
></p
>
20219 <p
>There are no known patent claims requiring royalties for the Ogg
20221 <a href=
"http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=
65782">MPEG-LA
</a
>
20223 <a href=
"http://yro.slashdot.org/story/
10/
04/
30/
237238/Steve-Jobs-Hints-At-Theora-Lawsuit
">Steve
20224 Jobs
</a
> in Apple claim to know about some patent claims (submarine
20225 patents) against the Theora format, but no-one else seem to believe
20226 them. Both Opera Software and the Mozilla Foundation have looked into
20227 this and decided to implement Ogg Theora support in their browsers
20228 without paying any royalties. For now the claims from MPEG-LA and
20229 Steve Jobs seem more like FUD to scare people to use the H
.264 codec
20230 than any real problem with Ogg Theora.
</p
>
20232 <p
><strong
>No constraints on re-use?
</strong
></p
>
20234 <p
>I am not aware of any constraints on re-use.
</p
>
20236 <p
><strong
>Conclusion
</strong
></p
>
20238 <p
>3 of
5 requirements seem obviously fulfilled, and the remaining
2
20239 depend on the governing structure of the Xiph foundation. Given the
20240 background report used by the Norwegian government, I believe it is
20241 safe to assume the last two requirements are fulfilled too, but it
20242 would be nice if the Xiph foundation web site made it easier to verify
20245 <p
>It would be nice to see other analysis of other specifications to
20246 see if they are free and open standards.
</p
>
20251 <title>The reply from Edgar Villanueva to Microsoft in Peru
</title>
20252 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_reply_from_Edgar_Villanueva_to_Microsoft_in_Peru.html
</link>
20253 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_reply_from_Edgar_Villanueva_to_Microsoft_in_Peru.html
</guid>
20254 <pubDate>Sat,
25 Dec
2010 10:
50:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
20255 <description><p
>A few days ago
20256 <a href=
"http://www.idg.no/computerworld/article189879.ece
">an
20257 article
</a
> in the Norwegian Computerworld magazine about how version
20259 <a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Interoperability_Framework
">European
20260 Interoperability Framework
</a
> has been successfully lobbied by the
20261 proprietary software industry to remove the focus on free software.
20262 Nothing very surprising there, given
20263 <a href=
"http://news.slashdot.org/story/
10/
03/
29/
2115235/Open-Source-Open-Standards-Under-Attack-In-Europe
">earlier
20264 reports
</a
> on how Microsoft and others have stacked the committees in
20265 this work. But I find this very sad. The definition of
20266 <a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/dokumenter/standard-presse-def-
200506.txt
">an
20267 open standard from version
1</a
> was very good, and something I
20268 believe should be used also in the future, alongside
20269 <a href=
"http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition
">the
20270 definition from Digistan
</A
>. Version
2 have removed the open
20271 standard definition from its content.
</p
>
20273 <p
>Anyway, the news reminded me of the great reply sent by Dr. Edgar
20274 Villanueva, congressman in Peru at the time, to Microsoft as a reply
20275 to Microsofts attack on his proposal regarding the use of free software
20276 in the public sector in Peru. As the text was not available from a
20277 few of the URLs where it used to be available, I copy it here from
20278 <a href=
"http://gnuwin.epfl.ch/articles/en/reponseperou/villanueva_to_ms.html
">my
20279 source
</a
> to ensure it is available also in the future. Some
20280 background information about that story is available in
20281 <a href=
"http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/
6099">an article
</a
> from
20282 Linux Journal in
2002.
</p
>
20285 <p
>Lima,
8th of April,
2002<br
>
20286 To: Señor JUAN ALBERTO GONZÁLEZ
<br
>
20287 General Manager of Microsoft Perú
</p
>
20289 <p
>Dear Sir:
</p
>
20291 <p
>First of all, I thank you for your letter of March
25,
2002 in which you state the official position of Microsoft relative to Bill Number
1609, Free Software in Public Administration, which is indubitably inspired by the desire for Peru to find a suitable place in the global technological context. In the same spirit, and convinced that we will find the best solutions through an exchange of clear and open ideas, I will take this opportunity to reply to the commentaries included in your letter.
</p
>
20293 <p
>While acknowledging that opinions such as yours constitute a significant contribution, it would have been even more worthwhile for me if, rather than formulating objections of a general nature (which we will analyze in detail later) you had gathered solid arguments for the advantages that proprietary software could bring to the Peruvian State, and to its citizens in general, since this would have allowed a more enlightening exchange in respect of each of our positions.
</p
>
20295 <p
>With the aim of creating an orderly debate, we will assume that what you call
"open source software
" is what the Bill defines as
"free software
", since there exists software for which the source code is distributed together with the program, but which does not fall within the definition established by the Bill; and that what you call
"commercial software
" is what the Bill defines as
"proprietary
" or
"unfree
", given that there exists free software which is sold in the market for a price like any other good or service.
</p
>
20297 <p
>It is also necessary to make it clear that the aim of the Bill we are discussing is not directly related to the amount of direct savings that can by made by using free software in state institutions. That is in any case a marginal aggregate value, but in no way is it the chief focus of the Bill. The basic principles which inspire the Bill are linked to the basic guarantees of a state of law, such as:
</p
>
20301 <li
>Free access to public information by the citizen.
</li
>
20302 <li
>Permanence of public data.
</li
>
20303 <li
>Security of the State and citizens.
</li
>
20307 <p
>To guarantee the free access of citizens to public information, it is indispensable that the encoding of data is not tied to a single provider. The use of standard and open formats gives a guarantee of this free access, if necessary through the creation of compatible free software.
</p
>
20309 <p
>To guarantee the permanence of public data, it is necessary that the usability and maintenance of the software does not depend on the goodwill of the suppliers, or on the monopoly conditions imposed by them. For this reason the State needs systems the development of which can be guaranteed due to the availability of the source code.
</p
>
20311 <p
>To guarantee national security or the security of the State, it is indispensable to be able to rely on systems without elements which allow control from a distance or the undesired transmission of information to third parties. Systems with source code freely accessible to the public are required to allow their inspection by the State itself, by the citizens, and by a large number of independent experts throughout the world. Our proposal brings further security, since the knowledge of the source code will eliminate the growing number of programs with *spy code*.
</p
>
20313 <p
>In the same way, our proposal strengthens the security of the citizens, both in their role as legitimate owners of information managed by the state, and in their role as consumers. In this second case, by allowing the growth of a widespread availability of free software not containing *spy code* able to put at risk privacy and individual freedoms.
</p
>
20315 <p
>In this sense, the Bill is limited to establishing the conditions under which the state bodies will obtain software in the future, that is, in a way compatible with these basic principles.
</p
>
20318 <p
>From reading the Bill it will be clear that once passed:
<br
>
20319 <li
>the law does not forbid the production of proprietary software
</li
>
20320 <li
>the law does not forbid the sale of proprietary software
</li
>
20321 <li
>the law does not specify which concrete software to use
</li
>
20322 <li
>the law does not dictate the supplier from whom software will be bought
</li
>
20323 <li
>the law does not limit the terms under which a software product can be licensed.
</li
>
20327 <p
>What the Bill does express clearly, is that, for software to be acceptable for the state it is not enough that it is technically capable of fulfilling a task, but that further the contractual conditions must satisfy a series of requirements regarding the license, without which the State cannot guarantee the citizen adequate processing of his data, watching over its integrity, confidentiality, and accessibility throughout time, as these are very critical aspects for its normal functioning.
</p
>
20329 <p
>We agree, Mr. Gonzalez, that information and communication technology have a significant impact on the quality of life of the citizens (whether it be positive or negative). We surely also agree that the basic values I have pointed out above are fundamental in a democratic state like Peru. So we are very interested to know of any other way of guaranteeing these principles, other than through the use of free software in the terms defined by the Bill.
</p
>
20331 <p
>As for the observations you have made, we will now go on to analyze them in detail:
</p
>
20333 <p
>Firstly, you point out that:
"1. The bill makes it compulsory for all public bodies to use only free software, that is to say open source software, which breaches the principles of equality before the law, that of non-discrimination and the right of free private enterprise, freedom of industry and of contract, protected by the constitution.
"</p
>
20335 <p
>This understanding is in error. The Bill in no way affects the rights you list; it limits itself entirely to establishing conditions for the use of software on the part of state institutions, without in any way meddling in private sector transactions. It is a well established principle that the State does not enjoy the wide spectrum of contractual freedom of the private sector, as it is limited in its actions precisely by the requirement for transparency of public acts; and in this sense, the preservation of the greater common interest must prevail when legislating on the matter.
</p
>
20337 <p
>The Bill protects equality under the law, since no natural or legal person is excluded from the right of offering these goods to the State under the conditions defined in the Bill and without more limitations than those established by the Law of State Contracts and Purchasing (T.U.O. by Supreme Decree No.
012-
2001-PCM).
</p
>
20339 <p
>The Bill does not introduce any discrimination whatever, since it only establishes *how* the goods have to be provided (which is a state power) and not *who* has to provide them (which would effectively be discriminatory, if restrictions based on national origin, race religion, ideology, sexual preference etc. were imposed). On the contrary, the Bill is decidedly antidiscriminatory. This is so because by defining with no room for doubt the conditions for the provision of software, it prevents state bodies from using software which has a license including discriminatory conditions.
</p
>
20341 <p
>It should be obvious from the preceding two paragraphs that the Bill does not harm free private enterprise, since the latter can always choose under what conditions it will produce software; some of these will be acceptable to the State, and others will not be since they contradict the guarantee of the basic principles listed above. This free initiative is of course compatible with the freedom of industry and freedom of contract (in the limited form in which the State can exercise the latter). Any private subject can produce software under the conditions which the State requires, or can refrain from doing so. Nobody is forced to adopt a model of production, but if they wish to provide software to the State, they must provide the mechanisms which guarantee the basic principles, and which are those described in the Bill.
</p
>
20343 <p
>By way of an example: nothing in the text of the Bill would prevent your company offering the State bodies an office
"suite
", under the conditions defined in the Bill and setting the price that you consider satisfactory. If you did not, it would not be due to restrictions imposed by the law, but to business decisions relative to the method of commercializing your products, decisions with which the State is not involved.
</p
>
20345 <p
>To continue; you note that:
" 2. The bill, by making the use of open source software compulsory, would establish discriminatory and non competitive practices in the contracting and purchasing by public bodies...
"</p
>
20347 <p
>This statement is just a reiteration of the previous one, and so the response can be found above. However, let us concern ourselves for a moment with your comment regarding
"non-competitive ... practices.
"</p
>
20349 <p
>Of course, in defining any kind of purchase, the buyer sets conditions which relate to the proposed use of the good or service. From the start, this excludes certain manufacturers from the possibility of competing, but does not exclude them
"a priori
", but rather based on a series of principles determined by the autonomous will of the purchaser, and so the process takes place in conformance with the law. And in the Bill it is established that *no one* is excluded from competing as far as he guarantees the fulfillment of the basic principles.
</p
>
20351 <p
>Furthermore, the Bill *stimulates* competition, since it tends to generate a supply of software with better conditions of usability, and to better existing work, in a model of continuous improvement.
</p
>
20353 <p
>On the other hand, the central aspect of competivity is the chance to provide better choices to the consumer. Now, it is impossible to ignore the fact that marketing does not play a neutral role when the product is offered on the market (since accepting the opposite would lead one to suppose that firms
' expenses in marketing lack any sense), and that therefore a significant expense under this heading can influence the decisions of the purchaser. This influence of marketing is in large measure reduced by the bill that we are backing, since the choice within the framework proposed is based on the *technical merits* of the product and not on the effort put into commercialization by the producer; in this sense, competitiveness is increased, since the smallest software producer can compete on equal terms with the most powerful corporations.
</p
>
20355 <p
>It is necessary to stress that there is no position more anti-competitive than that of the big software producers, which frequently abuse their dominant position, since in innumerable cases they propose as a solution to problems raised by users:
"update your software to the new version
" (at the user
's expense, naturally); furthermore, it is common to find arbitrary cessation of technical help for products, which, in the provider
's judgment alone, are
"old
"; and so, to receive any kind of technical assistance, the user finds himself forced to migrate to new versions (with non-trivial costs, especially as changes in hardware platform are often involved). And as the whole infrastructure is based on proprietary data formats, the user stays
"trapped
" in the need to continue using products from the same supplier, or to make the huge effort to change to another environment (probably also proprietary).
</p
>
20357 <p
>You add:
"3. So, by compelling the State to favor a business model based entirely on open source, the bill would only discourage the local and international manufacturing companies, which are the ones which really undertake important expenditures, create a significant number of direct and indirect jobs, as well as contributing to the GNP, as opposed to a model of open source software which tends to have an ever weaker economic impact, since it mainly creates jobs in the service sector.
"</p
>
20359 <p
>I do not agree with your statement. Partly because of what you yourself point out in paragraph
6 of your letter, regarding the relative weight of services in the context of software use. This contradiction alone would invalidate your position. The service model, adopted by a large number of companies in the software industry, is much larger in economic terms, and with a tendency to increase, than the licensing of programs.
</p
>
20361 <p
>On the other hand, the private sector of the economy has the widest possible freedom to choose the economic model which best suits its interests, even if this freedom of choice is often obscured subliminally by the disproportionate expenditure on marketing by the producers of proprietary software.
</p
>
20363 <p
>In addition, a reading of your opinion would lead to the conclusion that the State market is crucial and essential for the proprietary software industry, to such a point that the choice made by the State in this bill would completely eliminate the market for these firms. If that is true, we can deduce that the State must be subsidizing the proprietary software industry. In the unlikely event that this were true, the State would have the right to apply the subsidies in the area it considered of greatest social value; it is undeniable, in this improbable hypothesis, that if the State decided to subsidize software, it would have to do so choosing the free over the proprietary, considering its social effect and the rational use of taxpayers money.
</p
>
20365 <p
>In respect of the jobs generated by proprietary software in countries like ours, these mainly concern technical tasks of little aggregate value; at the local level, the technicians who provide support for proprietary software produced by transnational companies do not have the possibility of fixing bugs, not necessarily for lack of technical capability or of talent, but because they do not have access to the source code to fix it. With free software one creates more technically qualified employment and a framework of free competence where success is only tied to the ability to offer good technical support and quality of service, one stimulates the market, and one increases the shared fund of knowledge, opening up alternatives to generate services of greater total value and a higher quality level, to the benefit of all involved: producers, service organizations, and consumers.
</p
>
20367 <p
>It is a common phenomenon in developing countries that local software industries obtain the majority of their takings in the service sector, or in the creation of
"ad hoc
" software. Therefore, any negative impact that the application of the Bill might have in this sector will be more than compensated by a growth in demand for services (as long as these are carried out to high quality standards). If the transnational software companies decide not to compete under these new rules of the game, it is likely that they will undergo some decrease in takings in terms of payment for licenses; however, considering that these firms continue to allege that much of the software used by the State has been illegally copied, one can see that the impact will not be very serious. Certainly, in any case their fortune will be determined by market laws, changes in which cannot be avoided; many firms traditionally associated with proprietary software have already set out on the road (supported by copious expense) of providing services associated with free software, which shows that the models are not mutually exclusive.
</p
>
20369 <p
>With this bill the State is deciding that it needs to preserve certain fundamental values. And it is deciding this based on its sovereign power, without affecting any of the constitutional guarantees. If these values could be guaranteed without having to choose a particular economic model, the effects of the law would be even more beneficial. In any case, it should be clear that the State does not choose an economic model; if it happens that there only exists one economic model capable of providing software which provides the basic guarantee of these principles, this is because of historical circumstances, not because of an arbitrary choice of a given model.
</p
>
20371 <p
>Your letter continues:
"4. The bill imposes the use of open source software without considering the dangers that this can bring from the point of view of security, guarantee, and possible violation of the intellectual property rights of third parties.
"</p
>
20373 <p
>Alluding in an abstract way to
"the dangers this can bring
", without specifically mentioning a single one of these supposed dangers, shows at the least some lack of knowledge of the topic. So, allow me to enlighten you on these points.
</p
>
20375 <p
>On security:
</p
>
20377 <p
>National security has already been mentioned in general terms in the initial discussion of the basic principles of the bill. In more specific terms, relative to the security of the software itself, it is well known that all software (whether proprietary or free) contains errors or
"bugs
" (in programmers
' slang). But it is also well known that the bugs in free software are fewer, and are fixed much more quickly, than in proprietary software. It is not in vain that numerous public bodies responsible for the IT security of state systems in developed countries require the use of free software for the same conditions of security and efficiency.
</p
>
20379 <p
>What is impossible to prove is that proprietary software is more secure than free, without the public and open inspection of the scientific community and users in general. This demonstration is impossible because the model of proprietary software itself prevents this analysis, so that any guarantee of security is based only on promises of good intentions (biased, by any reckoning) made by the producer itself, or its contractors.
</p
>
20381 <p
>It should be remembered that in many cases, the licensing conditions include Non-Disclosure clauses which prevent the user from publicly revealing security flaws found in the licensed proprietary product.
</p
>
20383 <p
>In respect of the guarantee:
</p
>
20385 <p
>As you know perfectly well, or could find out by reading the
"End User License Agreement
" of the products you license, in the great majority of cases the guarantees are limited to replacement of the storage medium in case of defects, but in no case is compensation given for direct or indirect damages, loss of profits, etc... If as a result of a security bug in one of your products, not fixed in time by yourselves, an attacker managed to compromise crucial State systems, what guarantees, reparations and compensation would your company make in accordance with your licensing conditions? The guarantees of proprietary software, inasmuch as programs are delivered ``AS IS
'', that is, in the state in which they are, with no additional responsibility of the provider in respect of function, in no way differ from those normal with free software.
</p
>
20387 <p
>On Intellectual Property:
</p
>
20389 <p
>Questions of intellectual property fall outside the scope of this bill, since they are covered by specific other laws. The model of free software in no way implies ignorance of these laws, and in fact the great majority of free software is covered by copyright. In reality, the inclusion of this question in your observations shows your confusion in respect of the legal framework in which free software is developed. The inclusion of the intellectual property of others in works claimed as one
's own is not a practice that has been noted in the free software community; whereas, unfortunately, it has been in the area of proprietary software. As an example, the condemnation by the Commercial Court of Nanterre, France, on
27th September
2001 of Microsoft Corp. to a penalty of
3 million francs in damages and interest, for violation of intellectual property (piracy, to use the unfortunate term that your firm commonly uses in its publicity).
</p
>
20391 <p
>You go on to say that:
"The bill uses the concept of open source software incorrectly, since it does not necessarily imply that the software is free or of zero cost, and so arrives at mistaken conclusions regarding State savings, with no cost-benefit analysis to validate its position.
"</p
>
20393 <p
>This observation is wrong; in principle, freedom and lack of cost are orthogonal concepts: there is software which is proprietary and charged for (for example, MS Office), software which is proprietary and free of charge (MS Internet Explorer), software which is free and charged for (Red Hat, SuSE etc GNU/Linux distributions), software which is free and not charged for (Apache, Open Office, Mozilla), and even software which can be licensed in a range of combinations (MySQL).
</p
>
20395 <p
>Certainly free software is not necessarily free of charge. And the text of the bill does not state that it has to be so, as you will have noted after reading it. The definitions included in the Bill state clearly *what* should be considered free software, at no point referring to freedom from charges. Although the possibility of savings in payments for proprietary software licenses are mentioned, the foundations of the bill clearly refer to the fundamental guarantees to be preserved and to the stimulus to local technological development. Given that a democratic State must support these principles, it has no other choice than to use software with publicly available source code, and to exchange information only in standard formats.
</p
>
20397 <p
>If the State does not use software with these characteristics, it will be weakening basic republican principles. Luckily, free software also implies lower total costs; however, even given the hypothesis (easily disproved) that it was more expensive than proprietary software, the simple existence of an effective free software tool for a particular IT function would oblige the State to use it; not by command of this Bill, but because of the basic principles we enumerated at the start, and which arise from the very essence of the lawful democratic State.
</p
>
20399 <p
>You continue:
"6. It is wrong to think that Open Source Software is free of charge. Research by the Gartner Group (an important investigator of the technological market recognized at world level) has shown that the cost of purchase of software (operating system and applications) is only
8% of the total cost which firms and institutions take on for a rational and truly beneficial use of the technology. The other
92% consists of: installation costs, enabling, support, maintenance, administration, and down-time.
"</p
>
20401 <p
>This argument repeats that already given in paragraph
5 and partly contradicts paragraph
3. For the sake of brevity we refer to the comments on those paragraphs. However, allow me to point out that your conclusion is logically false: even if according to Gartner Group the cost of software is on average only
8% of the total cost of use, this does not in any way deny the existence of software which is free of charge, that is, with a licensing cost of zero.
</p
>
20403 <p
>In addition, in this paragraph you correctly point out that the service components and losses due to down-time make up the largest part of the total cost of software use, which, as you will note, contradicts your statement regarding the small value of services suggested in paragraph
3. Now the use of free software contributes significantly to reduce the remaining life-cycle costs. This reduction in the costs of installation, support etc. can be noted in several areas: in the first place, the competitive service model of free software, support and maintenance for which can be freely contracted out to a range of suppliers competing on the grounds of quality and low cost. This is true for installation, enabling, and support, and in large part for maintenance. In the second place, due to the reproductive characteristics of the model, maintenance carried out for an application is easily replicable, without incurring large costs (that is, without paying more than once for the same thing) since modifications, if one wishes, can be incorporated in the common fund of knowledge. Thirdly, the huge costs caused by non-functioning software (
"blue screens of death
", malicious code such as virus, worms, and trojans, exceptions, general protection faults and other well-known problems) are reduced considerably by using more stable software; and it is well known that one of the most notable virtues of free software is its stability.
</p
>
20405 <p
>You further state that:
"7. One of the arguments behind the bill is the supposed freedom from costs of open-source software, compared with the costs of commercial software, without taking into account the fact that there exist types of volume licensing which can be highly advantageous for the State, as has happened in other countries.
"</p
>
20407 <p
>I have already pointed out that what is in question is not the cost of the software but the principles of freedom of information, accessibility, and security. These arguments have been covered extensively in the preceding paragraphs to which I would refer you.
</p
>
20409 <p
>On the other hand, there certainly exist types of volume licensing (although unfortunately proprietary software does not satisfy the basic principles). But as you correctly pointed out in the immediately preceding paragraph of your letter, they only manage to reduce the impact of a component which makes up no more than
8% of the total.
</p
>
20411 <p
>You continue:
"8. In addition, the alternative adopted by the bill (I) is clearly more expensive, due to the high costs of software migration, and (II) puts at risk compatibility and interoperability of the IT platforms within the State, and between the State and the private sector, given the hundreds of versions of open source software on the market.
"</p
>
20413 <p
>Let us analyze your statement in two parts. Your first argument, that migration implies high costs, is in reality an argument in favor of the Bill. Because the more time goes by, the more difficult migration to another technology will become; and at the same time, the security risks associated with proprietary software will continue to increase. In this way, the use of proprietary systems and formats will make the State ever more dependent on specific suppliers. Once a policy of using free software has been established (which certainly, does imply some cost) then on the contrary migration from one system to another becomes very simple, since all data is stored in open formats. On the other hand, migration to an open software context implies no more costs than migration between two different proprietary software contexts, which invalidates your argument completely.
</p
>
20415 <p
>The second argument refers to
"problems in interoperability of the IT platforms within the State, and between the State and the private sector
" This statement implies a certain lack of knowledge of the way in which free software is built, which does not maximize the dependence of the user on a particular platform, as normally happens in the realm of proprietary software. Even when there are multiple free software distributions, and numerous programs which can be used for the same function, interoperability is guaranteed as much by the use of standard formats, as required by the bill, as by the possibility of creating interoperable software given the availability of the source code.
</p
>
20417 <p
>You then say that:
"9. The majority of open source code does not offer adequate levels of service nor the guarantee from recognized manufacturers of high productivity on the part of the users, which has led various public organizations to retract their decision to go with an open source software solution and to use commercial software in its place.
"</p
>
20419 <p
>This observation is without foundation. In respect of the guarantee, your argument was rebutted in the response to paragraph
4. In respect of support services, it is possible to use free software without them (just as also happens with proprietary software), but anyone who does need them can obtain support separately, whether from local firms or from international corporations, again just as in the case of proprietary software.
</p
>
20421 <p
>On the other hand, it would contribute greatly to our analysis if you could inform us about free software projects *established* in public bodies which have already been abandoned in favor of proprietary software. We know of a good number of cases where the opposite has taken place, but not know of any where what you describe has taken place.
</p
>
20423 <p
>You continue by observing that:
"10. The bill discourages the creativity of the Peruvian software industry, which invoices
40 million US$/year, exports
4 million US$ (
10th in ranking among non-traditional exports, more than handicrafts) and is a source of highly qualified employment. With a law that encourages the use of open source, software programmers lose their intellectual property rights and their main source of payment.
"</p
>
20425 <p
>It is clear enough that nobody is forced to commercialize their code as free software. The only thing to take into account is that if it is not free software, it cannot be sold to the public sector. This is not in any case the main market for the national software industry. We covered some questions referring to the influence of the Bill on the generation of employment which would be both highly technically qualified and in better conditions for competition above, so it seems unnecessary to insist on this point.
</p
>
20427 <p
>What follows in your statement is incorrect. On the one hand, no author of free software loses his intellectual property rights, unless he expressly wishes to place his work in the public domain. The free software movement has always been very respectful of intellectual property, and has generated widespread public recognition of its authors. Names like those of Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, Guido van Rossum, Larry Wall, Miguel de Icaza, Andrew Tridgell, Theo de Raadt, Andrea Arcangeli, Bruce Perens, Darren Reed, Alan Cox, Eric Raymond, and many others, are recognized world-wide for their contributions to the development of software that is used today by millions of people throughout the world. On the other hand, to say that the rewards for authors rights make up the main source of payment of Peruvian programmers is in any case a guess, in particular since there is no proof to this effect, nor a demonstration of how the use of free software by the State would influence these payments.
</p
>
20429 <p
>You go on to say that:
"11. Open source software, since it can be distributed without charge, does not allow the generation of income for its developers through exports. In this way, the multiplier effect of the sale of software to other countries is weakened, and so in turn is the growth of the industry, while Government rules ought on the contrary to stimulate local industry.
"</p
>
20431 <p
>This statement shows once again complete ignorance of the mechanisms of and market for free software. It tries to claim that the market of sale of non- exclusive rights for use (sale of licenses) is the only possible one for the software industry, when you yourself pointed out several paragraphs above that it is not even the most important one. The incentives that the bill offers for the growth of a supply of better qualified professionals, together with the increase in experience that working on a large scale with free software within the State will bring for Peruvian technicians, will place them in a highly competitive position to offer their services abroad.
</p
>
20433 <p
>You then state that:
"12. In the Forum, the use of open source software in education was discussed, without mentioning the complete collapse of this initiative in a country like Mexico, where precisely the State employees who founded the project now state that open source software did not make it possible to offer a learning experience to pupils in the schools, did not take into account the capability at a national level to give adequate support to the platform, and that the software did not and does not allow for the levels of platform integration that now exist in schools.
"</p
>
20435 <p
>In fact Mexico has gone into reverse with the Red Escolar (Schools Network) project. This is due precisely to the fact that the driving forces behind the Mexican project used license costs as their main argument, instead of the other reasons specified in our project, which are far more essential. Because of this conceptual mistake, and as a result of the lack of effective support from the SEP (Secretary of State for Public Education), the assumption was made that to implant free software in schools it would be enough to drop their software budget and send them a CD ROM with Gnu/Linux instead. Of course this failed, and it couldn
't have been otherwise, just as school laboratories fail when they use proprietary software and have no budget for implementation and maintenance. That
's exactly why our bill is not limited to making the use of free software mandatory, but recognizes the need to create a viable migration plan, in which the State undertakes the technical transition in an orderly way in order to then enjoy the advantages of free software.
</p
>
20437 <p
>You end with a rhetorical question:
"13. If open source software satisfies all the requirements of State bodies, why do you need a law to adopt it? Shouldn
't it be the market which decides freely which products give most benefits or value?
"</p
>
20439 <p
>We agree that in the private sector of the economy, it must be the market that decides which products to use, and no state interference is permissible there. However, in the case of the public sector, the reasoning is not the same: as we have already established, the state archives, handles, and transmits information which does not belong to it, but which is entrusted to it by citizens, who have no alternative under the rule of law. As a counterpart to this legal requirement, the State must take extreme measures to safeguard the integrity, confidentiality, and accessibility of this information. The use of proprietary software raises serious doubts as to whether these requirements can be fulfilled, lacks conclusive evidence in this respect, and so is not suitable for use in the public sector.
</p
>
20441 <p
>The need for a law is based, firstly, on the realization of the fundamental principles listed above in the specific area of software; secondly, on the fact that the State is not an ideal homogeneous entity, but made up of multiple bodies with varying degrees of autonomy in decision making. Given that it is inappropriate to use proprietary software, the fact of establishing these rules in law will prevent the personal discretion of any state employee from putting at risk the information which belongs to citizens. And above all, because it constitutes an up-to-date reaffirmation in relation to the means of management and communication of information used today, it is based on the republican principle of openness to the public.
</p
>
20443 <p
>In conformance with this universally accepted principle, the citizen has the right to know all information held by the State and not covered by well- founded declarations of secrecy based on law. Now, software deals with information and is itself information. Information in a special form, capable of being interpreted by a machine in order to execute actions, but crucial information all the same because the citizen has a legitimate right to know, for example, how his vote is computed or his taxes calculated. And for that he must have free access to the source code and be able to prove to his satisfaction the programs used for electoral computations or calculation of his taxes.
</p
>
20445 <p
>I wish you the greatest respect, and would like to repeat that my office will always be open for you to expound your point of view to whatever level of detail you consider suitable.
</p
>
20447 <p
>Cordially,
<br
>
20448 DR. EDGAR DAVID VILLANUEVA NUÑEZ
<br
>
20449 Congressman of the Republic of Perú.
</p
>
20450 </blockquote
>
20455 <title>Officeshots still going strong
</title>
20456 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_still_going_strong.html
</link>
20457 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_still_going_strong.html
</guid>
20458 <pubDate>Sat,
25 Dec
2010 09:
40:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
20459 <description><p
>Half a year ago I
20460 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_taking_shape.html
">wrote
20461 a bit
</a
> about
<a href=
"http://www.officeshots.org/
">OfficeShots
</a
>,
20462 a web service to allow anyone to test how ODF documents are handled by
20463 the different programs reading and writing the ODF format.
</p
>
20465 <p
>I just had a look at the service, and it seem to be going strong.
20466 Very interesting to see the results reported in the gallery, how
20467 different Office implementations handle different ODF features. Sad
20468 to see that KOffice was not doing it very well, and happy to see that
20469 LibreOffice has been tested already (but sadly not listed as a option
20470 for OfficeShots users yet). I am glad to see that the ODF community
20471 got such a great test tool available.
</p
>
20476 <title>How to test if a laptop is working with Linux
</title>
20477 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_test_if_a_laptop_is_working_with_Linux.html
</link>
20478 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_test_if_a_laptop_is_working_with_Linux.html
</guid>
20479 <pubDate>Wed,
22 Dec
2010 14:
55:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
20480 <description><p
>The last few days I have spent at work here at the
<a
20481 href=
"http://www.uio.no/
">University of Oslo
</a
> testing if the new
20482 batch of computers will work with Linux. Every year for the last few
20483 years the university have organised shared bid of a few thousand
20484 computers, and this year HP won the bid. Two different desktops and
20485 five different laptops are on the list this year. We in the UNIX
20486 group want to know which one of these computers work well with RHEL
20487 and Ubuntu, the two Linux distributions we currently handle at the
20488 university.
</p
>
20490 <p
>My test method is simple, and I share it here to get feedback and
20491 perhaps inspire others to test hardware as well. To test, I PXE
20492 install the OS version of choice, and log in as my normal user and run
20493 a few applications and plug in selected pieces of hardware. When
20494 something fail, I make a note about this in the test matrix and move
20495 on. If I have some spare time I try to report the bug to the OS
20496 vendor, but as I only have the machines for a short time, I rarely
20497 have the time to do this for all the problems I find.
</p
>
20499 <p
>Anyway, to get to the point of this post. Here is the simple tests
20500 I perform on a new model.
</p
>
20504 <li
>Is PXE installation working? I
'm testing with RHEL6, Ubuntu Lucid
20505 and Ubuntu Maverik at the moment. If I feel like it, I also test with
20506 RHEL5 and Debian Edu/Squeeze.
</li
>
20508 <li
>Is X.org working? If the graphical login screen show up after
20509 installation, X.org is working.
</li
>
20511 <li
>Is hardware accelerated OpenGL working? Running glxgears (in
20512 package mesa-utils on Ubuntu) and writing down the frames per second
20513 reported by the program.
</li
>
20515 <li
>Is sound working? With Gnome and KDE, a sound is played when
20516 logging in, and if I can hear this the test is successful. If there
20517 are several audio exits on the machine, I try them all and check if
20518 the Gnome/KDE audio mixer can control where to send the sound. I
20519 normally test this by playing
20520 <a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/
20101012-chef/
">a HTML5
20521 video
</a
> in Firefox/Iceweasel.
</li
>
20523 <li
>Is the USB subsystem working? I test this by plugging in a USB
20524 memory stick and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.
</li
>
20526 <li
>Is the CD/DVD player working? I test this by inserting any CD/DVD
20527 I have lying around, and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.
</li
>
20529 <li
>Is any built in camera working? Test using cheese, and see if a
20530 picture from the v4l device show up.
</li
>
20532 <li
>Is bluetooth working? Use the Gnome/KDE browsing tool to see if
20533 any bluetooth devices are discovered. In my office, I normally see a
20536 <li
>For laptops, is the SD or Compaq Flash reader working. I have
20537 memory modules lying around, and stick them in and see if Gnome/KDE
20538 notice this.
</li
>
20540 <li
>For laptops, is suspend/hibernate working? I
'm testing if the
20541 special button work, and if the laptop continue to work after
20544 <li
>For laptops, is the extra buttons working, like audio level,
20545 adjusting background light, switching on/off external video output,
20546 switching on/off wifi, bluetooth, etc? The set of buttons differ from
20547 laptop to laptop, so I just write down which are working and which are
20550 <li
>Some laptops have smart card readers, finger print readers,
20551 acceleration sensors etc. I rarely test these, as I do not know how
20552 to quickly test if they are working or not, so I only document their
20553 existence.
</li
>
20557 <p
>By now I suspect you are really curious what the test results are
20558 for the HP machines I am testing. I
'm not done yet, so I will report
20559 the test results later. For now I can report that HP
8100 Elite work
20560 fine, and hibernation fail with HP EliteBook
8440p on Ubuntu Lucid,
20561 and audio fail on RHEL6. Ubuntu Maverik worked with
8440p. As you
20562 can see, I have most machines left to test. One interesting
20563 observation is that Ubuntu Lucid has almost twice the frame rate than
20564 RHEL6 with glxgears. No idea why.
</p
>
20569 <title>Some thoughts on BitCoins
</title>
20570 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_thoughts_on_BitCoins.html
</link>
20571 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_thoughts_on_BitCoins.html
</guid>
20572 <pubDate>Sat,
11 Dec
2010 15:
10:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
20573 <description><p
>As I continue to explore
20574 <a href=
"http://www.bitcoin.org/
">BitCoin
</a
>, I
've starting to wonder
20575 what properties the system have, and how it will be affected by laws
20576 and regulations here in Norway. Here are some random notes.
</p
>
20578 <p
>One interesting thing to note is that since the transactions are
20579 verified using a peer to peer network, all details about a transaction
20580 is known to everyone. This means that if a BitCoin address has been
20581 published like I did with mine in my initial post about BitCoin, it is
20582 possible for everyone to see how many BitCoins have been transfered to
20583 that address. There is even a web service to look at the details for
20584 all transactions. There I can see that my address
20585 <a href=
"http://blockexplorer.com/address/
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
>
20586 have received
16.06 Bitcoin, the
20587 <a href=
"http://blockexplorer.com/address/
1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv
8MHqvwst
3">1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv
8MHqvwst
3</a
>
20588 address of Simon Phipps have received
181.97 BitCoin and the address
20589 <a href=
"http://blockexplorer.com/address/
1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt
">1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt
</A
>
20590 of EFF have received
2447.38 BitCoins so far. Thank you to each and
20591 every one of you that donated bitcoins to support my activity. The
20592 fact that anyone can see how much money was transfered to a given
20593 address make it more obvious why the BitCoin community recommend to
20594 generate and hand out a new address for each transaction. I
'm told
20595 there is no way to track which addresses belong to a given person or
20596 organisation without the person or organisation revealing it
20597 themselves, as Simon, EFF and I have done.
</p
>
20599 <p
>In Norway, and in most other countries, there are laws and
20600 regulations limiting how much money one can transfer across the border
20601 without declaring it. There are money laundering, tax and accounting
20602 laws and regulations I would expect to apply to the use of BitCoin.
20603 If the Skolelinux foundation
20604 (
<a href=
"http://linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html
">SLX
20605 Debian Labs
</a
>) were to accept donations in BitCoin in addition to
20606 normal bank transfers like EFF is doing, how should this be accounted?
20607 Given that it is impossible to know if money can cross the border or
20608 not, should everything or nothing be declared? What exchange rate
20609 should be used when calculating taxes? Would receivers have to pay
20610 income tax if the foundation were to pay Skolelinux contributors in
20611 BitCoin? I have no idea, but it would be interesting to know.
</p
>
20613 <p
>For a currency to be useful and successful, it must be trusted and
20614 accepted by a lot of users. It must be possible to get easy access to
20615 the currency (as a wage or using currency exchanges), and it must be
20616 easy to spend it. At the moment BitCoin seem fairly easy to get
20617 access to, but there are very few places to spend it. I am not really
20618 a regular user of any of the vendor types currently accepting BitCoin,
20619 so I wonder when my kind of shop would start accepting BitCoins. I
20620 would like to buy electronics, travels and subway tickets, not herbs
20621 and books. :) The currency is young, and this will improve over time
20622 if it become popular, but I suspect regular banks will start to lobby
20623 to get BitCoin declared illegal if it become popular. I
'm sure they
20624 will claim it is helping fund terrorism and money laundering (which
20625 probably would be true, as is any currency in existence), but I
20626 believe the problems should be solved elsewhere and not by blaming
20627 currencies.
</p
>
20629 <p
>The process of creating new BitCoins is called mining, and it is
20630 CPU intensive process that depend on a bit of luck as well (as one is
20631 competing against all the other miners currently spending CPU cycles
20632 to see which one get the next lump of cash). The
"winner
" get
50
20633 BitCoin when this happen. Yesterday I came across the obvious way to
20634 join forces to increase ones changes of getting at least some coins,
20635 by coordinating the work on mining BitCoins across several machines
20636 and people, and sharing the result if one is lucky and get the
50
20637 BitCoins. Check out
20638 <a href=
"http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/bitcoin-pool/
">BitCoin Pool
</a
>
20639 if this sounds interesting. I have not had time to try to set up a
20640 machine to participate there yet, but have seen that running on ones
20641 own for a few days have not yield any BitCoins througth mining
20644 <p
>Update
2010-
12-
15: Found an
<a
20645 href=
"http://inertia.posterous.com/reply-to-the-underground-economist-why-bitcoi
">interesting
20646 criticism
</a
> of bitcoin. Not quite sure how valid it is, but thought
20647 it was interesting to read. The arguments presented seem to be
20648 equally valid for gold, which was used as a currency for many years.
</p
>
20653 <title>Now accepting bitcoins - anonymous and distributed p2p crypto-money
</title>
20654 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html
</link>
20655 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html
</guid>
20656 <pubDate>Fri,
10 Dec
2010 08:
20:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
20657 <description><p
>With this weeks lawless
20658 <a href=
"http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/
2010/
12/
06/wikileaks/index.html
">governmental
20659 attacks
</a
> on Wikileak and
20660 <a href=
"http://www.salon.com/technology/dan_gillmor/
2010/
12/
06/war_on_speech
">free
20661 speech
</a
>, it has become obvious that PayPal, visa and mastercard can
20662 not be trusted to handle money transactions.
20664 <a href=
"http://webmink.com/
2010/
12/
06/now-accepting-bitcoin/
">Simon
20665 Phipps on bitcoin
</a
> reminded me about a project that a friend of
20666 mine mentioned earlier. I decided to follow Simon
's example, and get
20667 involved with
<a href=
"http://www.bitcoin.org/
">BitCoin
</a
>. I got
20668 some help from my friend to get it all running, and he even handed me
20669 some bitcoins to get started. I even donated a few bitcoins to Simon
20670 for helping me remember BitCoin.
</p
>
20672 <p
>So, what is bitcoins, you probably wonder? It is a digital
20673 crypto-currency, decentralised and handled using peer-to-peer
20674 networks. It allows anonymous transactions and prohibits central
20675 control over the transactions, making it impossible for governments
20676 and companies alike to block donations and other transactions. The
20677 source is free software, and while the key dependency wxWidgets
2.9
20678 for the graphical user interface is missing in Debian, the command
20679 line client builds just fine. Hopefully Jonas
20680 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
578157">will get the package into
20681 Debian
</a
> soon.
</p
>
20683 <p
>Bitcoins can be converted to other currencies, like USD and EUR.
20684 There are
<a href=
"http://www.bitcoin.org/trade
">companies accepting
20685 bitcoins
</a
> when selling services and goods, and there are even
20686 currency
"stock
" markets where the exchange rate is decided. There
20687 are not many users so far, but the concept seems promising. If you
20688 want to get started and lack a friend with any bitcoins to spare,
20690 <a href=
"https://freebitcoins.appspot.com/
">some for free
</a
> (
0.05
20691 bitcoin at the time of writing). Use
20692 <a href=
"http://www.bitcoinwatch.com/
">BitcoinWatch
</a
> to keep an eye
20693 on the current exchange rates.
</p
>
20695 <p
>As an experiment, I have decided to set up bitcoind on one of my
20696 machines. If you want to support my activity, please send Bitcoin
20697 donations to the address
20698 <b
>15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</b
>. Thank you!
</p
>
20703 <title>Student group continue the work on my Reprap
3D printer
</title>
20704 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Student_group_continue_the_work_on_my_Reprap_3D_printer.html
</link>
20705 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Student_group_continue_the_work_on_my_Reprap_3D_printer.html
</guid>
20706 <pubDate>Thu,
9 Dec
2010 19:
30:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
20707 <description><p
>A few days ago, I was introduces to some students in the robot
20708 student assosiation
<a href=
"http://www.robotica.no/
">Robotica
20709 Osloensis
</a
> at the University of Oslo where I work, who planned to
20710 get their own
3D printer. They wanted to learn from me based on my
20711 work in the area. After having a short lunch meeting with them, I
20712 offered them to borrow my reprap kit, as I never had time to complete
20713 the build and this seem unlike to change any time soon. I look
20714 forward to see how this goes. This monday their volunteer driver
20715 picked up my kit and drove it to their lab, and tomorrow I am told the
20716 last exam is over so they can start work on getting the
3D printer
20717 operational.
</p
>
20719 <p
>The robotic group have already build several robots on their own,
20720 and seem capable of getting the reprap operational. I really look
20721 forward to being able to print all the cool
3D designs published on
20722 <a href=
"http://www.thingiverse.com/
">Thingiverse
</a
>. I even got
20723 some
3D scans I got made during Dagen@IFI when one of the groups at
20724 the computer science department at the university demonstrated their
20725 very cool
3D scanner.
</p
>
20730 <title>Debian Edu development gathering and General Assembly for FRiSK
</title>
20731 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_development_gathering_and_General_Assembly_for_FRiSK.html
</link>
20732 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_development_gathering_and_General_Assembly_for_FRiSK.html
</guid>
20733 <pubDate>Mon,
29 Nov
2010 18:
40:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
20734 <description><p
>On friday, the first Debian Edu / Skolelinux
20735 <a href=
"http://www.friprogramvareiskolen.no/Gathering/
2010-
12-
03-
05-Oslo
">development
20736 gathering
</a
> in a long time take place here in Oslo, Norway. I
20737 really look forward to seeing all the good people working on the
20738 Squeeze release. The gathering is open for everyone interested in
20739 learning more about Debian Edu / Skolelinux.
</p
>
20741 <p
>On Saturday, the Norwegian member organization taking care of
20742 organizing these development gatherings, Fri Programvare i Skolen,
20744 <a href=
"http://friprogramvareiskolen.no/Genfors/
2010">General Assembly
20745 for
2010</a
>. Membership is open for all, and currently there are
388
20746 people registered as members. Last year
32 members cast their vote in
20747 the memberdb based election system. I hope more people find time to
20748 vote this year.
</p
>
20753 <title>Why isn
't Debian Edu using VLC?
</title>
20754 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_isn_t_Debian_Edu_using_VLC_.html
</link>
20755 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_isn_t_Debian_Edu_using_VLC_.html
</guid>
20756 <pubDate>Sat,
27 Nov
2010 11:
30:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
20757 <description><p
>In the latest issue of Linux Journal, the readers choices were
20758 presented, and the winner among the multimedia player were VLC.
20759 Personally, I like VLC, and it is my player of choice when I first try
20760 to play a video file or stream. Only if VLC fail will I drag out
20761 gmplayer to see if it can do better. The reason is mostly the failure
20762 model and trust. When VLC fail, it normally pop up a error message
20763 reporting the problem. When mplayer fail, it normally segfault or
20764 just hangs. The latter failure mode drain my trust in the program.
<p
>
20766 <p
>But even if VLC is my player of choice, we have choosen to use
20767 mplayer in
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian
20768 Edu/Skolelinux
</a
>. The reason is simple. We need a good browser
20769 plugin to play web videos seamlessly, and the VLC browser plugin is
20770 not very good. For example, it lack in-line control buttons, so there
20771 is no way for the user to pause the video. Also, when I
20772 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia
">last
20773 tested the browser plugins
</a
> available in Debian, the VLC plugin
20774 failed on several video pages where mplayer based plugins worked. If
20775 the browser plugin for VLC was as good as the gecko-mediaplayer
20776 package (which uses mplayer), we would switch.
</P
>
20778 <p
>While VLC is a good player, its user interface is slightly
20779 annoying. The most annoying feature is its inconsistent use of
20780 keyboard shortcuts. When the player is in full screen mode, its
20781 shortcuts are different from when it is playing the video in a window.
20782 For example, space only work as pause when in full screen mode. I
20783 wish it had consisten shortcuts and that space also would work when in
20784 window mode. Another nice shortcut in gmplayer is [enter] to restart
20785 the current video. It is very nice when playing short videos from the
20786 web and want to restart it when new people arrive to have a look at
20787 what is going on.
</p
>
20792 <title>Lenny-
>Squeeze upgrades of the Gnome and KDE desktop, now with apt-get autoremove
</title>
20793 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades_of_the_Gnome_and_KDE_desktop__now_with_apt_get_autoremove.html
</link>
20794 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades_of_the_Gnome_and_KDE_desktop__now_with_apt_get_autoremove.html
</guid>
20795 <pubDate>Mon,
22 Nov
2010 14:
15:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
20796 <description><p
>Michael Biebl suggested to me on IRC, that I changed my automated
20797 upgrade testing of the
20798 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/
">Lenny
20799 Gnome and KDE Desktop
</a
> to do
<tt
>apt-get autoremove
</tt
> when using apt-get.
20800 This seem like a very good idea, so I adjusted by test scripts and
20801 can now present the updated result from today:
</p
>
20803 <p
>This is for Gnome:
</p
>
20805 <p
>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude
</p
>
20807 <blockquote
><p
>
20812 browser-plugin-gnash
20819 freedesktop-sound-theme
20821 gconf-defaults-service
20834 gnome-codec-install
20836 gnome-desktop-environment
20840 gnome-session-canberra
20842 gnome-themes-extras
20845 gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
20846 gstreamer0.10-tools
20848 gtk2-engines-pixbuf
20849 gtk2-engines-smooth
20851 libapache2-mod-dnssd
20854 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3
20857 libboost-date-time1.42
.0
20858 libboost-python1.42
.0
20859 libboost-thread1.42
.0
20861 libchamplain-gtk-
0.4-
0
20863 libclutter-gtk-
0.10-
0
20870 libfreerdp-plugins-standard
20883 libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
20885 libgnomepanel2.24-cil
20890 libgtksourceview2.0-common
20891 libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
20892 libmono-addins0.2-cil
20893 libmono-cairo2.0-cil
20894 libmono-corlib2.0-cil
20895 libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil
20896 libmono-posix2.0-cil
20897 libmono-security2.0-cil
20898 libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
20899 libmono-system2.0-cil
20902 libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil
20903 libndesk-dbus1.0-cil
20913 libtelepathy-farsight0
20922 nautilus-sendto-empathy
20926 python-aptdaemon-gtk
20928 python-beautifulsoup
20943 python-gtksourceview2
20954 python-pkg-resources
20961 python-twisted-conch
20962 python-twisted-core
20967 python-zope.interface
20969 remmina-plugin-data
20972 rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
20979 system-config-printer-udev
20981 telepathy-mission-control-
5
20988 transmission-common
20992 </p
></blockquote
>
20994 <p
>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude
</p
>
20996 <blockquote
><p
>
21000 epiphany-extensions
21002 fast-user-switch-applet
21021 libgtksourceview2.0-
0
21023 libsdl1.2debian-alsa
21029 system-config-printer
21034 </p
></blockquote
>
21036 <p
>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get
</p
>
21038 <blockquote
><p
>
21039 gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
21040 </p
></blockquote
>
21042 <p
>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get
</p
>
21044 <blockquote
><p
>
21046 </p
></blockquote
>
21048 <p
>This is for KDE:
</p
>
21050 <p
>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude
</p
>
21052 <blockquote
><p
>
21054 </p
></blockquote
>
21056 <p
>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude
</p
>
21058 <blockquote
><p
>
21060 network-manager-kde
21061 </p
></blockquote
>
21063 <p
>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get
</p
>
21065 <blockquote
><p
>
21079 kdeartwork-emoticons
21081 kdeartwork-theme-icon
21085 kdebase-workspace-bin
21086 kdebase-workspace-data
21098 konqueror-nsplugins
21100 kscreensaver-xsavers
21115 plasma-dataengines-workspace
21117 plasma-desktopthemes-artwork
21118 plasma-runners-addons
21119 plasma-scriptengine-googlegadgets
21120 plasma-scriptengine-python
21121 plasma-scriptengine-qedje
21122 plasma-scriptengine-ruby
21123 plasma-scriptengine-webkit
21124 plasma-scriptengines
21125 plasma-wallpapers-addons
21126 plasma-widget-folderview
21127 plasma-widget-networkmanagement
21130 update-notifier-kde
21131 xscreensaver-data-extra
21133 xscreensaver-gl-extra
21134 xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
21135 </p
></blockquote
>
21137 <p
>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get
</p
>
21139 <blockquote
><p
>
21141 google-gadgets-common
21159 libggadget-qt-
1.0-
0b
21164 libkonqsidebarplugin4a
21168 libkunitconversion4
21173 libplasma-geolocation-interface4
21175 libplasmagenericshell4
21189 libsmokeknewstuff2-
3
21190 libsmokeknewstuff3-
3
21192 libsmokektexteditor3
21200 libsmokeqtnetwork4-
3
21201 libsmokeqtopengl4-
3
21202 libsmokeqtscript4-
3
21206 libsmokeqtuitools4-
3
21207 libsmokeqtwebkit4-
3
21218 plasma-dataengines-addons
21219 plasma-scriptengine-superkaramba
21220 plasma-widget-lancelot
21221 plasma-widgets-addons
21222 plasma-widgets-workspace
21226 update-notifier-common
21227 </p
></blockquote
>
21229 <p
>Running apt-get autoremove made the results using apt-get and
21230 aptitude a bit more similar, but there are still quite a lott of
21231 differences. I have no idea what packages should be installed after
21232 the upgrade, but hope those that do can have a look.
</p
>
21237 <title>Migrating Xen virtual machines using LVM to KVM using disk images
</title>
21238 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Migrating_Xen_virtual_machines_using_LVM_to_KVM_using_disk_images.html
</link>
21239 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Migrating_Xen_virtual_machines_using_LVM_to_KVM_using_disk_images.html
</guid>
21240 <pubDate>Mon,
22 Nov
2010 11:
20:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
21241 <description><p
>Most of the computers in use by the
21242 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu/Skolelinux project
</a
>
21243 are virtual machines. And they have been Xen machines running on a
21244 fairly old IBM eserver xseries
345 machine, and we wanted to migrate
21245 them to KVM on a newer Dell PowerEdge
2950 host machine. This was a
21246 bit harder that it could have been, because we set up the Xen virtual
21247 machines to get the virtual partitions from LVM, which as far as I
21248 know is not supported by KVM. So to migrate, we had to convert
21249 several LVM logical volumes to partitions on a virtual disk file.
</p
>
21252 <a href=
"http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/
35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM
">a
21253 nice recipe
</a
> to do this, and wrote the following script to do the
21254 migration. It uses qemu-img from the qemu package to make the disk
21255 image, parted to partition it, losetup and kpartx to present the disk
21256 image partions as devices, and dd to copy the data. I NFS mounted the
21257 new servers storage area on the old server to do the migration.
</p
>
21263 # http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/
35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM
21268 if [ -z
"$
1" ] ; then
21269 echo
"Usage: $
0 &lt;hostname
&gt;
"
21272 host=
"$
1"
21275 if [ ! -e /dev/vg_data/$host-disk ] ; then
21276 echo
"error: unable to find LVM volume for $host
"
21280 # Partitions need to be a bit bigger than the LVM LVs. not sure why.
21281 disksize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-disk | awk
'{sum = sum + $
4} END { print int(sum *
1.05) }
')
21282 swapsize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-swap | awk
'{sum = sum + $
4} END { print int(sum *
1.05) }
')
21283 totalsize=$(( ( $disksize + $swapsize ) ))
21286 #dd if=/dev/zero of=$img bs=
1M count=$(( $disksize + $swapsize ))
21287 qemu-img create $img ${totalsize}MMaking room on the Debian Edu/Sqeeze DVD
21289 parted $img mklabel msdos
21290 parted $img mkpart primary linux-swap
0 $disksize
21291 parted $img mkpart primary ext2 $disksize $totalsize
21292 parted $img set
1 boot on
21295 losetup /dev/loop0 $img
21296 kpartx -a /dev/loop0
21298 dd if=/dev/vg_data/$host-disk of=/dev/mapper/loop0p1 bs=
1M
21299 fsck.ext3 -f /dev/mapper/loop0p1 || true
21300 mkswap /dev/mapper/loop0p2
21302 kpartx -d /dev/loop0
21303 losetup -d /dev/loop0
21306 <p
>The script is perhaps so simple that it is not copyrightable, but
21307 if it is, it is licenced using GPL v2 or later at your discretion.
</p
>
21309 <p
>After doing this, I booted a Debian CD in rescue mode in KVM with
21310 the new disk image attached, installed grub-pc and linux-image-
686 and
21311 set up grub to boot from the disk image. After this, the KVM machines
21312 seem to work just fine.
</p
>
21317 <title>Lenny-
>Squeeze upgrades, apt vs aptitude with the Gnome and KDE desktop
</title>
21318 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__apt_vs_aptitude_with_the_Gnome_and_KDE_desktop.html
</link>
21319 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__apt_vs_aptitude_with_the_Gnome_and_KDE_desktop.html
</guid>
21320 <pubDate>Sat,
20 Nov
2010 22:
50:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
21321 <description><p
>I
'm still running upgrade testing of the
21322 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/
">Lenny
21323 Gnome and KDE Desktop
</a
>, but have not had time to spend on reporting the
21324 status. Here is a short update based on a test I ran
20101118.
</p
>
21326 <p
>I still do not know what a correct migration should look like, so I
21327 report any differences between apt and aptitude and hope someone else
21328 can see if anything should be changed.
</p
>
21330 <p
>This is for Gnome:
</p
>
21332 <p
>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude
</p
>
21334 <blockquote
><p
>
21335 apache2.2-bin aptdaemon at-spi baobab binfmt-support
21336 browser-plugin-gnash cheese-common cli-common cpp-
4.3 cups-pk-helper
21337 dmz-cursor-theme empathy empathy-common finger
21338 freedesktop-sound-theme freeglut3 gconf-defaults-service gdm-themes
21339 gedit-plugins geoclue geoclue-hostip geoclue-localnet geoclue-manual
21340 geoclue-yahoo gnash gnash-common gnome gnome-backgrounds
21341 gnome-cards-data gnome-codec-install gnome-core
21342 gnome-desktop-environment gnome-disk-utility gnome-screenshot
21343 gnome-search-tool gnome-session-canberra gnome-spell
21344 gnome-system-log gnome-themes-extras gnome-themes-more
21345 gnome-user-share gs-common gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
21346 gstreamer0.10-tools gtk2-engines gtk2-engines-pixbuf
21347 gtk2-engines-smooth hal-info hamster-applet libapache2-mod-dnssd
21348 libapr1 libaprutil1 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3 libaprutil1-ldap
21349 libart2.0-cil libatspi1.0-
0 libboost-date-time1.42
.0
21350 libboost-python1.42
.0 libboost-thread1.42
.0 libchamplain-
0.4-
0
21351 libchamplain-gtk-
0.4-
0 libcheese-gtk18 libclutter-gtk-
0.10-
0
21352 libcryptui0 libcupsys2 libdiscid0 libeel2-data libelf1 libepc-
1.0-
2
21353 libepc-common libepc-ui-
1.0-
2 libfreerdp-plugins-standard
21354 libfreerdp0 libgail-common libgconf2.0-cil libgdata-common libgdata7
21355 libgdl-
1-common libgdu-gtk0 libgee2 libgeoclue0 libgexiv2-
0 libgif4
21356 libglade2.0-cil libglib2.0-cil libgmime2.4-cil libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
21357 libgnome2.24-cil libgnomepanel2.24-cil libgnomeprint2.2-data
21358 libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod-common libgpod4
21359 libgtk2.0-cil libgtkglext1 libgtksourceview-common
21360 libgtksourceview2.0-common libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
21361 libmono-addins0.2-cil libmono-cairo2.0-cil libmono-corlib2.0-cil
21362 libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil libmono-posix2.0-cil
21363 libmono-security2.0-cil libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
21364 libmono-system2.0-cil libmtp8 libmusicbrainz3-
6
21365 libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil libndesk-dbus1.0-cil libopal3.6
.8
21366 libpolkit-gtk-
1-
0 libpt-
1.10.10-plugins-alsa
21367 libpt-
1.10.10-plugins-v4l libpt2.6
.7 libpython2.6 librpm1 librpmio1
21368 libsdl1.2debian libservlet2.4-java libsrtp0 libssh-
4
21369 libtelepathy-farsight0 libtelepathy-glib0 libtidy-
0.99-
0
21370 libxalan2-java libxerces2-java media-player-info mesa-utils
21371 mono-
2.0-gac mono-gac mono-runtime nautilus-sendto
21372 nautilus-sendto-empathy openoffice.org-writer2latex
21373 openssl-blacklist p7zip p7zip-full pkg-config python-
4suite-xml
21374 python-aptdaemon python-aptdaemon-gtk python-axiom
21375 python-beautifulsoup python-bugbuddy python-clientform
21376 python-coherence python-configobj python-crypto python-cupshelpers
21377 python-cupsutils python-eggtrayicon python-elementtree
21378 python-epsilon python-evolution python-feedparser python-gdata
21379 python-gdbm python-gst0.10 python-gtkglext1 python-gtkmozembed
21380 python-gtksourceview2 python-httplib2 python-louie python-mako
21381 python-markupsafe python-mechanize python-nevow python-notify
21382 python-opengl python-openssl python-pam python-pkg-resources
21383 python-pyasn1 python-pysqlite2 python-rdflib python-serial
21384 python-tagpy python-twisted-bin python-twisted-conch
21385 python-twisted-core python-twisted-web python-utidylib python-webkit
21386 python-xdg python-zope.interface remmina remmina-plugin-data
21387 remmina-plugin-rdp remmina-plugin-vnc rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
21388 rhythmbox-plugins rpm-common rpm2cpio seahorse-plugins shotwell
21389 software-center svgalibg1 system-config-printer-udev
21390 telepathy-gabble telepathy-mission-control-
5 telepathy-salut tomboy
21391 totem totem-coherence totem-mozilla totem-plugins
21392 transmission-common xdg-user-dirs xdg-user-dirs-gtk xserver-xephyr
21394 </p
></blockquote
>
21396 Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude
21398 <blockquote
><p
>
21399 arj bluez-utils cheese dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop ekiga eog
21400 epiphany-extensions epiphany-gecko evolution-exchange
21401 fast-user-switch-applet file-roller gcalctool gconf-editor gdm gedit
21402 gedit-common gnome-app-install gnome-games gnome-games-data
21403 gnome-nettool gnome-system-tools gnome-themes gnome-utils
21404 gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager gnuchess gucharmap
21405 guile-
1.8-libs hal libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5
21406 libavahi-ui0 libbind9-
50 libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-
11 libcdio7
21407 libcucul0 libcurl3 libdirectfb-
1.0-
0 libdmx1 libdvdread3
21408 libedata-cal1.2-
6 libedataserver1.2-
9 libeel2-
2.20 libepc-
1.0-
1
21409 libepc-ui-
1.0-
1 libexchange-storage1.2-
3 libfaad0 libgadu3
21410 libgalago3 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-
3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
21411 libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-
0 libgksuui1.0-
1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-
2
21412 libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-
1 libgnomeprint2.2-
0
21413 libgnomeprintui2.2-
0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtk-vnc-
1.0-
0
21414 libgtkhtml2-
0 libgtksourceview1.0-
0 libgtksourceview2.0-
0
21415 libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
21416 libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libkpathsea4 liblircclient0 libltdl3 liblwres50
21417 libmagick++
10 libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmozjs1d libmpfr1ldbl libmtp7
21418 libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0
21419 libnm-util0 libopal-
2.2 libosp5 libparted1.8-
10 libpisock9
21420 libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-
1.10.10 libraw1394-
8
21421 libsdl1.2debian-alsa libsensors3 libsexy2 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-
8
21422 libspeexdsp1 libssh2-
1 libsuitesparse-
3.1.0 libsvga1
21423 libswfdec-
0.6-
90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0
21424 libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12
21425 libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common rhythmbox seahorse
21426 sound-juicer swfdec-gnome system-config-printer totem-common
21427 totem-gstreamer transmission-gtk vinagre vino w3c-dtd-xhtml wodim
21428 </p
></blockquote
>
21430 <p
>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get
</p
>
21432 <blockquote
><p
>
21433 gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
21434 </p
></blockquote
>
21436 <p
>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get
</p
>
21438 <blockquote
><p
>
21440 </p
></blockquote
>
21442 <p
>This is for KDE:
</p
>
21444 <p
>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude
</p
>
21446 <blockquote
><p
>
21447 autopoint bomber bovo cantor cantor-backend-kalgebra cpp-
4.3 dcoprss
21448 edict espeak espeak-data eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
21449 ghostscript-x git gnome-audio gnugo granatier gs-common
21450 gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio indi kaddressbook-plugins kalgebra
21451 kalzium-data kanjidic kapman kate-plugins kblocks kbreakout kbstate
21452 kde-icons-mono kdeaccessibility kdeaddons-kfile-plugins
21453 kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
21454 kdeedu kdeedu-data kdeedu-kvtml-data kdegames kdegames-card-data
21455 kdegames-mahjongg-data kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc
21456 kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
21457 kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdessh kdetoys kdewebdev
21458 kdiamond kdnssd kfilereplace kfourinline kgeography-data kigo
21459 killbots kiriki klettres-data kmoon kmrml knewsticker-scripts
21460 kollision kpf krosspython ksirk ksmserver ksquares kstars-data
21461 ksudoku kubrick kweather libasound2-plugins libboost-python1.42
.0
21462 libcfitsio3 libconvert-binhex-perl libcrypt-ssleay-perl libdb4.6++
21463 libdjvulibre-text libdotconf1.0 liberror-perl libespeak1
21464 libfinance-quote-perl libgail-common libgsl0ldbl libhtml-parser-perl
21465 libhtml-tableextract-perl libhtml-tagset-perl libhtml-tree-perl
21466 libio-stringy-perl libkdeedu4 libkdegames5 libkiten4 libkpathsea5
21467 libkrossui4 libmailtools-perl libmime-tools-perl
21468 libnews-nntpclient-perl libopenbabel3 libportaudio2 libpulse-browse0
21469 libservlet2.4-java libspeechd2 libtiff-tools libtimedate-perl
21470 libunistring0 liburi-perl libwww-perl libxalan2-java libxerces2-java
21471 lirc luatex marble networkstatus noatun-plugins
21472 openoffice.org-writer2latex palapeli palapeli-data parley
21473 parley-data poster psutils pulseaudio pulseaudio-esound-compat
21474 pulseaudio-module-x11 pulseaudio-utils quanta-data rocs rsync
21475 speech-dispatcher step svgalibg1 texlive-binaries texlive-luatex
21476 ttf-sazanami-gothic
21477 </p
></blockquote
>
21479 <p
>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude
</p
>
21481 <blockquote
><p
>
21482 amor artsbuilder atlantik atlantikdesigner blinken bluez-utils cvs
21483 dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop imlib-base imlib11 kalzium kanagram kandy
21484 kasteroids katomic kbackgammon kbattleship kblackbox kbounce kbruch
21485 kcron kdat kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data kdeprint kdict kdvi kedit
21486 keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs kgeography kghostview
21487 kgoldrunner khangman khexedit kiconedit kig kimagemapeditor
21488 kitchensync kiten kjumpingcube klatin klettres klickety klines
21489 klinkstatus kmag kmahjongg kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmines
21490 kmousetool kmouth kmplot knetwalk kodo kolf kommander konquest kooka
21491 kpager kpat kpdf kpercentage kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler krec
21492 kregexpeditor kreversi ksame ksayit kshisen ksig ksim ksirc ksirtet
21493 ksmiletris ksnake ksokoban kspaceduel kstars ksvg ksysv kteatime
21494 ktip ktnef ktouch ktron kttsd ktuberling kturtle ktux kuickshow
21495 kverbos kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kwordquiz
21496 kworldclock kxsldbg libakode2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
21497 libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
21498 libavahi-core5 libavc1394-
0 libbind9-
50 libbluetooth2
21499 libboost-python1.34
.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0
21500 libdirectfb-
1.0-
0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
21501 libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-
0 libicu38
21502 libiec61883-
0 libindex0 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
21503 libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1 libkdeedu3
21504 libkdegames1 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
21505 libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
21506 libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick10
21507 libmimelib1c2a libmodplug0c2 libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libmpfr1ldbl
21508 libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9 libpoppler-glib3
21509 libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-
8 librss1 libsensors3
21510 libsmbios2 libssh2-
1 libsuitesparse-
3.1.0 libswfdec-
0.6-
90
21511 libtalloc1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 lskat
21512 mpeglib network-manager-kde noatun pmount tex-common texlive-base
21513 texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended tidy
21514 ttf-dustin ttf-kochi-gothic ttf-sjfonts
21515 </p
></blockquote
>
21517 <p
>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get
</p
>
21519 <blockquote
><p
>
21520 dolphin kde-core kde-plasma-desktop kde-standard kde-window-manager
21521 kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-apps kdebase-workspace
21522 kdebase-workspace-bin kdebase-workspace-data kdeutils kscreensaver
21523 kscreensaver-xsavers libgle3 libkonq5 libkonq5-templates libnetpbm10
21524 netpbm plasma-widget-folderview plasma-widget-networkmanagement
21525 xscreensaver-data-extra xscreensaver-gl xscreensaver-gl-extra
21526 xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
21527 </p
></blockquote
>
21529 <p
>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get
</p
>
21531 <blockquote
><p
>
21532 kdebase-bin konq-plugins konqueror
21533 </p
></blockquote
>
21538 <title>Gnash buildbot slave and Debian kfreebsd
</title>
21539 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_buildbot_slave_and_Debian_kfreebsd.html
</link>
21540 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_buildbot_slave_and_Debian_kfreebsd.html
</guid>
21541 <pubDate>Sat,
20 Nov
2010 07:
20:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
21542 <description><p
>Answering
21543 <a href=
"http://www.listware.net/
201011/gnash-dev/
67431-gnash-dev-buildbot-looking-for-slaves.html
">the
21544 call from the Gnash project
</a
> for
21545 <a href=
"http://www.gnashdev.org:
8010">buildbot
</a
> slaves to test the
21546 current source, I have set up a virtual KVM machine on the Debian
21547 Edu/Skolelinux virtualization host to test the git source on
21548 Debian/Squeeze. I hope this can help the developers in getting new
21549 releases out more often.
</p
>
21551 <p
>As the developers want less main-stream build platforms tested to,
21552 I have considered setting up a
<a
21553 href=
"http://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/
">Debian/kfreebsd
</a
>
21554 machine as well. I have also considered using the kfreebsd
21555 architecture in Debian as a file server in NUUG to get access to the
5
21556 TB zfs volume we currently use to store DV video. Because of this, I
21557 finally got around to do a test installation of Debian/Squeeze with
21558 kfreebsd. Installation went fairly smooth, thought I noticed some
21559 visual glitches in the cdebconf dialogs (black cursor left on the
21560 screen at random locations). Have not gotten very far with the
21561 testing. Noticed cfdisk did not work, but fdisk did so it was not a
21562 fatal problem. Have to spend some more time on it to see if it is
21563 useful as a file server for NUUG. Will try to find time to set up a
21564 gnash buildbot slave on the Debian Edu/Skolelinux this weekend.
</p
>
21569 <title>Debian in
3D
</title>
21570 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_in_3D.html
</link>
21571 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_in_3D.html
</guid>
21572 <pubDate>Tue,
9 Nov
2010 16:
10:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
21573 <description><p
><img src=
"http://thingiverse-production.s3.amazonaws.com/renders/
23/e0/c4/f9/
2b/debswagtdose_preview_medium.jpg
"></p
>
21575 <p
>3D printing is just great. I just came across this Debian logo in
21577 <a href=
"http://blog.thingiverse.com/
2010/
11/
09/participatory-branding/
">the
21578 thingiverse blog
</a
>.
</p
>
21583 <title>Making room on the Debian Edu/Sqeeze DVD
</title>
21584 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Making_room_on_the_Debian_Edu_Sqeeze_DVD.html
</link>
21585 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Making_room_on_the_Debian_Edu_Sqeeze_DVD.html
</guid>
21586 <pubDate>Sun,
7 Nov
2010 11:
45:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
21587 <description><p
>Prioritising packages for the Debian Edu /
21588 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Skolelinux
</a
> DVD, which is
21589 supposed provide a school with all the services and user applications
21590 needed on the pupils computer network has always been hard. Even
21591 schools without Internet connections should be able to get Debian Edu
21592 working using this DVD.
</p
>
21594 <p
>The job became a lot harder when apt and aptitude started
21595 installing recommended packages by default. We want the same set of
21596 packages to be installed when using the DVD and the netinst CD, and
21597 that means all recommended packages need to be on the DVD. I created
21598 a patch for debian-cd in
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
601203">BTS
21599 report #
601203</a
> to do this, and since this change was applied to
21600 the Debian Edu DVD build, we have been seriously short on space.
</p
>
21602 <p
>A few days ago we decided to drop blender, wxmaxima and kicad from
21603 the default installation to save space on the DVD, believing that
21604 those needing these applications are few and can get them from the
21605 Debian archive.
</p
>
21607 <p
>Yesterday, I had a look what source packages to see which packages
21608 were using most space. A few large packages are well know;
21609 openoffice.org, openclipart and fluid-soundfont. But I also
21610 discovered that lilypond used
106 MiB and fglrx-driver used
53 MiB.
21611 The lilypond package is pulled in as a dependency for rosegarden, and
21612 when looking a bit closer I discovered that
99 MiB of the
106 MiB were
21613 the documentation package, which is recommended by the binary package.
21614 I decided to drop this documentation package from our DVD, as most of
21615 our users will use the GUI front-ends and do not need the lilypond
21616 documentation. Similarly, I dropped the non-free fglrx-driver package
21617 which might be installed by d-i when its hardware is detected, as the
21618 free X driver should work.
</p
>
21620 <p
>With this change, we finally got space for the LXDE and Gnome
21621 desktop packages as well as the language specific packages making the
21622 DVD more useful again.
</p
>
21627 <title>Software updates
2010-
10-
24</title>
21628 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_updates_2010_10_24.html
</link>
21629 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_updates_2010_10_24.html
</guid>
21630 <pubDate>Sun,
24 Oct
2010 22:
45:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
21631 <description><p
>Some updates.
</p
>
21633 <p
>My
<a href=
"http://pledgebank.com/gnash-avm2
">gnash pledge
</a
> to
21634 raise money for the project is going well. The lower limit of
10
21635 signers was reached in
24 hours, and so far
13 people have signed it.
21636 More signers and more funding is most welcome, and I am really curious
21637 how far we can get before the time limit of December
24 is reached.
21640 <p
>On the #gnash IRC channel on irc.freenode.net, I was just tipped
21641 about what appear to be a great code coverage tool capable of
21642 generating code coverage stats without any changes to the source code.
21644 <a href=
"http://simonkagstrom.github.com/kcov/index.html
">kcov
</a
>,
21645 and can be used using
<tt
>kcov
&lt;directory
&gt;
&lt;binary
&gt;
</tt
>.
21646 It is missing in Debian, but the git source built just fine in Squeeze
21647 after I installed libelf-dev, libdwarf-dev, pkg-config and
21648 libglib2.0-dev. Failed to build in Lenny, but suspect that is
21649 solvable. I hope kcov make it into Debian soon.
</p
>
21651 <p
>Finally found time to wrap up the release notes for
<a
21652 href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/
2010/
10/msg00002.html
">a
21653 new alpha release of Debian Edu
</a
>, and just published the second
21654 alpha test release of the Squeeze based Debian Edu /
21655 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Skolelinux
</a
>
21656 release. Give it a try if you need a complete linux solution for your
21657 school, including central infrastructure server, workstations, thin
21658 client servers and diskless workstations. A nice touch added
21659 yesterday is RDP support on the thin client servers, for windows
21660 clients to get a Linux desktop on request.
</p
>
21665 <title>Pledge for funding to the Gnash project to get AVM2 support
</title>
21666 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Pledge_for_funding_to_the_Gnash_project_to_get_AVM2_support.html
</link>
21667 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Pledge_for_funding_to_the_Gnash_project_to_get_AVM2_support.html
</guid>
21668 <pubDate>Tue,
19 Oct
2010 14:
45:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
21669 <description><p
><a href=
"http://www.getgnash.org/
">The Gnash project
</a
> is the
21670 most promising solution for a Free Software Flash implementation. It
21671 has done great so far, but there is still far to go, and recently its
21672 funding has dried up. I believe AVM2 support in Gnash is vital to the
21673 continued progress of the project, as more and more sites show up with
21674 AVM2 flash files.
</p
>
21676 <p
>To try to get funding for developing such support, I have started
21677 <a href=
"http://www.pledgebank.com/gnash-avm2
">a pledge
</a
> with the
21678 following text:
</P
>
21680 <p
><blockquote
>
21682 <p
>"I will pay
100$ to the Gnash project to develop AVM2 support but
21683 only if
10 other people will do the same.
"</p
>
21685 <p
>- Petter Reinholdtsen, free software developer
</p
>
21687 <p
>Deadline to sign up by:
24th December
2010</p
>
21689 <p
>The Gnash project need to get support for the new Flash file
21690 format AVM2 to work with a lot of sites using Flash on the
21691 web. Gnash already work with a lot of Flash sites using the old AVM1
21692 format, but more and more sites are using the AVM2 format these
21693 days. The project web page is available from
21694 http://www.getgnash.org/ . Gnash is a free software implementation
21695 of Adobe Flash, allowing those of us that do not accept the terms of
21696 the Adobe Flash license to get access to Flash sites.
</p
>
21698 <p
>The project need funding to get developers to put aside enough
21699 time to develop the AVM2 support, and this pledge is my way to try
21700 to get this to happen.
</p
>
21702 <p
>The project accept donations via the OpenMediaNow foundation,
21703 <a href=
"http://www.openmedianow.org/?q=node/
32">http://www.openmedianow.org/?q=node/
32</a
> .
</p
>
21705 </blockquote
></p
>
21707 <p
>I hope you will support this effort too. I hope more than
10
21708 people will participate to make this happen. The more money the
21709 project gets, the more features it can develop using these funds.
21715 <title>First version of a Perl library to control the Spykee robot
</title>
21716 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_version_of_a_Perl_library_to_control_the_Spykee_robot.html
</link>
21717 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_version_of_a_Perl_library_to_control_the_Spykee_robot.html
</guid>
21718 <pubDate>Sat,
9 Oct
2010 14:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
21719 <description><p
>This summer I got the chance to buy cheap Spykee robots, and since
21720 then I have worked on getting Linux software in place to control them.
21721 The firmware for the robot is available from the producer, and using
21722 that source it was trivial to figure out the protocol specification.
21723 I
've started on a perl library to control it, and made some demo
21724 programs using this perl library to allow one to control the
21727 <p
>The library is quite functional already, and capable of controlling
21728 the driving, fetching video, uploading MP3s and play them. There are
21729 a few less important features too.
</p
>
21731 <p
>Since a few weeks ago, I ran out of time to spend on this project,
21732 but I never got around to releasing the current source. I decided
21733 today that it was time to do something about it, and uploaded the
21734 source to my Debian package store at people.skolelinux.org.
</p
>
21736 <p
>Because it was simpler for me, I made a Debian package and
21737 published the source and deb. If you got a spykee robot, grab the
21738 source or binary package:
</p
>
21740 <p
><ul
>
21741 <li
><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian/packages/lenny/libspykee-perl_0.0
.20101009-
1.tar.gz
">libspykee-perl_0.0
.20101009-
1.tar.gz
</a
></li
>
21742 <li
><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian/packages/lenny/libspykee-perl_0.0
.20101009-
1.dsc
">libspykee-perl_0.0
.20101009-
1.dsc
</a
></li
>
21743 <li
><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian/packages/lenny/libspykee-perl_0.0
.20101009-
1_all.deb
">libspykee-perl_0.0
.20101009-
1_all.deb
</a
></li
>
21744 </ul
></p
>
21746 <p
>If you are interested in helping out with developing this library,
21747 please let me know.
</p
>
21752 <title>Links for
2010-
10-
03</title>
21753 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Links_for_2010_10_03.html
</link>
21754 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Links_for_2010_10_03.html
</guid>
21755 <pubDate>Sun,
3 Oct
2010 22:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
21756 <description><p
><ul
>
21758 <li
><a href=
"http://arstechnica.com/business/news/
2010/
09/there-is-no-plan-b-why-the-ipv4-to-ipv6-transition-will-be-ugly.ars
">There
21759 is no Plan B: why the IPv4-to-IPv6 transition will be ugly
</a
></li
>
21761 <li
>Scanner looking under clothes
21762 <a href=
"http://www.dagbladet.no/
2010/
10/
03/nyheter/utenriks/reise/overvakingskamera/flyplasser/
13667192/
">has
21763 already been misused at Heathrow
</a
>.
</li
>
21765 <li
><a href=
"http://wiki.softwarelivre.org/Landell
">Landell
21766 Webcasting
</a
> - interesting alternative for
21767 <ahref=
"http://dvswitch.alioth.debian.org/wiki/
">DVSwitch
</a
> with
21770 </ul
></p
>
21775 <title>Terms of use for video produced by a Canon IXUS
130 digital camera
</title>
21776 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Terms_of_use_for_video_produced_by_a_Canon_IXUS_130_digital_camera.html
</link>
21777 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Terms_of_use_for_video_produced_by_a_Canon_IXUS_130_digital_camera.html
</guid>
21778 <pubDate>Thu,
9 Sep
2010 23:
55:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
21779 <description><p
>A few days ago I had the mixed pleasure of bying a new digital
21780 camera, a Canon IXUS
130. It was instructive and very disturbing to
21781 be able to verify that also this camera producer have the nerve to
21782 specify how I can or can not use the videos produced with the camera.
21783 Even thought I was aware of the issue, the options with new cameras
21784 are limited and I ended up bying the camera anyway. What is the
21785 problem, you might ask? It is software patents, MPEG-
4, H
.264 and the
21786 MPEG-LA that is the problem, and our right to record our experiences
21787 without asking for permissions that is at risk.
21789 <p
>On page
27 of the Danish instruction manual, this section is
21793 <p
>This product is licensed under AT
&T patents for the MPEG-
4 standard
21794 and may be used for encoding MPEG-
4 compliant video and/or decoding
21795 MPEG-
4 compliant video that was encoded only (
1) for a personal and
21796 non-commercial purpose or (
2) by a video provider licensed under the
21797 AT
&T patents to provide MPEG-
4 compliant video.
</p
>
21799 <p
>No license is granted or implied for any other use for MPEG-
4
21800 standard.
</p
>
21801 </blockquote
>
21803 <p
>In short, the camera producer have chosen to use technology
21804 (MPEG-
4/H
.264) that is only provided if I used it for personal and
21805 non-commercial purposes, or ask for permission from the organisations
21806 holding the knowledge monopoly (patent) for technology used.
</p
>
21808 <p
>This issue has been brewing for a while, and I recommend you to
21810 "<a href=
"http://www.osnews.com/story/
23236/Why_Our_Civilization_s_Video_Art_and_Culture_is_Threatened_by_the_MPEG-LA
">Why
21811 Our Civilization
's Video Art and Culture is Threatened by the
21812 MPEG-LA
</a
>" by Eugenia Loli-Queru and
21813 "<a href=
"http://webmink.com/
2010/
09/
03/h-
264-and-foss/
">H
.264 Is Not
21814 The Sort Of Free That Matters
</a
>" by Simon Phipps to learn more about
21815 the issue. The solution is to support the
21816 <a href=
"http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition
">free and
21817 open standards
</a
> for video, like
<a href=
"http://www.theora.org/
">Ogg
21818 Theora
</a
>, and avoid MPEG-
4 and H
.264 if you can.
</p
>
21823 <title>Some notes on Flash in Debian and Debian Edu
</title>
21824 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_notes_on_Flash_in_Debian_and_Debian_Edu.html
</link>
21825 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_notes_on_Flash_in_Debian_and_Debian_Edu.html
</guid>
21826 <pubDate>Sat,
4 Sep
2010 10:
10:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
21827 <description><p
>In the
<a href=
"http://popcon.debian.org/unknown/by_vote
">Debian
21828 popularity-contest numbers
</a
>, the adobe-flashplugin package the
21829 second most popular used package that is missing in Debian. The sixth
21830 most popular is flashplayer-mozilla. This is a clear indication that
21831 working flash is important for Debian users. Around
10 percent of the
21832 users submitting data to popcon.debian.org have this package
21833 installed.
</p
>
21835 <p
>In the report written by Lars Risan in August
2008
21836 («
<a href=
"http://wiki.skolelinux.no/Dokumentasjon/Rapporter?action=AttachFile
&do=view
&target=Skolelinux_i_bruk_rapport_1.0.pdf
">Skolelinux
21837 i bruk – Rapport for Hurum kommune, Universitetet i Agder og
21838 stiftelsen SLX Debian Labs
</a
>»), one of the most important problems
21839 schools experienced with
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian
21840 Edu/Skolelinux
</a
> was the lack of working Flash. A lot of educational
21841 web sites require Flash to work, and lacking working Flash support in
21842 the web browser and the problems with installing it was perceived as a
21843 good reason to stay with Windows.
</p
>
21845 <p
>I once saw a funny and sad comment in a web forum, where Linux was
21846 said to be the retarded cousin that did not really understand
21847 everything you told him but could work fairly well. This was a
21848 comment regarding the problems Linux have with proprietary formats and
21849 non-standard web pages, and is sad because it exposes a fairly common
21850 understanding of whose fault it is if web pages that only work in for
21851 example Internet Explorer
6 fail to work on Firefox, and funny because
21852 it explain very well how annoying it is for users when Linux
21853 distributions do not work with the documents they receive or the web
21854 pages they want to visit.
</p
>
21856 <p
>This is part of the reason why I believe it is important for Debian
21857 and Debian Edu to have a well working Flash implementation in the
21858 distribution, to get at least popular sites as Youtube and Google
21859 Video to working out of the box. For Squeeze, Debian have the chance
21860 to include the latest version of Gnash that will make this happen, as
21861 the new release
0.8.8 was published a few weeks ago and is resting in
21862 unstable. The new version work with more sites that version
0.8.7.
21863 The Gnash maintainers have asked for a freeze exception, but the
21864 release team have not had time to reply to it yet. I hope they agree
21865 with me that Flash is important for the Debian desktop users, and thus
21866 accept the new package into Squeeze.
</p
>
21871 <title>My first perl GUI application - controlling a Spykee robot
</title>
21872 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/My_first_perl_GUI_application___controlling_a_Spykee_robot.html
</link>
21873 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/My_first_perl_GUI_application___controlling_a_Spykee_robot.html
</guid>
21874 <pubDate>Wed,
1 Sep
2010 21:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
21875 <description><p
>This evening I made my first Perl GUI application. The last few
21876 days I have worked on a Perl module for controlling my recently
21877 aquired Spykee robots, and the module is now getting complete enought
21878 that it is possible to use it to control the robot driving at least.
21879 It was now time to figure out how to use it to create some GUI to
21880 allow me to drive the robot around. I picked PerlQt as I have had
21881 positive experiences with the Qt API before, and spent a few minutes
21882 browsing the web for examples. Using Qt Designer seemed like a short
21883 cut, so I ended up writing the perl GUI using Qt Designer and
21884 compiling it into a perl program using the puic program from
21885 libqt-perl. Nothing fancy yet, but it got buttons to connect and
21886 drive around.
</p
>
21888 <p
>The perl module I have written provide a object oriented API for
21889 controlling the robot. Here is an small example on how to use it:
</p
>
21891 <p
><pre
>
21893 Spykee::discover(sub {$robot{$_[
0]} = $_[
1]});
21894 my $host = (keys %robot)[
0];
21895 my $spykee = Spykee-
>new();
21896 $spykee-
>contact($host,
"admin
",
"admin
");
21897 $spykee-
>left();
21899 $spykee-
>right();
21901 $spykee-
>forward();
21903 $spykee-
>back();
21905 $spykee-
>stop();
21906 </pre
></p
>
21908 <p
>Thanks to the release of the source of the robot firmware, I could
21909 peek into the implementation at the other end to figure out how to
21910 implement the protocol used by the robot. I
've implemented several of
21911 the commands the robot understand, but is still missing the camera
21912 support to make it possible to control the robot from remote. First I
21913 want to implement support for uploading new firmware and configuring
21914 the wireless network, to make it possible to bootstrap a Spykee robot
21915 without the producers Windows and MacOSX software (I only have Linux,
21916 so I had to ask a friend to come over to get the robot testing
21917 going. :).
</p
>
21919 <p
>Will release the source to the public soon, but need to figure out
21920 where to make it available first. I will add a link to
21921 <a href=
"http://wiki.nuug.no/grupper/robot/
">the NUUG wiki
</a
> for
21922 those that want to check back later to find it.
</p
>
21927 <title>Broken hard link handling with sshfs
</title>
21928 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_hard_link_handling_with_sshfs.html
</link>
21929 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_hard_link_handling_with_sshfs.html
</guid>
21930 <pubDate>Mon,
30 Aug
2010 19:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
21931 <description><p
>Just got an email from Tobias Gruetzmacher as a followup on my
21932 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_umask_handling_with_sshfs.html
">previous
21933 post about sshfs
</a
>. He reported another problem with sshfs. It
21934 fail to handle hard links properly. A simple way to spot this is to
21935 look at the . and .. entries in the directory tree. These should have
21936 a link count
>1, but on sshfs the count is
1. I just tested to see
21937 what happen when trying to hardlink, and this fail as well:
</p
>
21941 ln: creating hard link `bar
' =
> `foo
': Function not implemented
21945 <p
>I have not yet found time to implement a test for this in my file
21946 system test code, but believe having working hard links is useful to
21947 avoid surprised unix programs. Not as useful as working file locking
21948 and symlinks, which are required to get a working desktop, but useful
21949 nevertheless. :)
</p
>
21951 <p
>The latest version of the file system test code is available via
21953 <a href=
"http://github.com/gebi/fs-test
">http://github.com/gebi/fs-test
</a
></p
>
21958 <title>Broken umask handling with sshfs
</title>
21959 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_umask_handling_with_sshfs.html
</link>
21960 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_umask_handling_with_sshfs.html
</guid>
21961 <pubDate>Thu,
26 Aug
2010 13:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
21962 <description><p
>My file system sematics program
21963 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_if_a_file_system_can_be_used_for_home_directories___.html
">presented
21964 a few days ago
</a
> is very useful to verify that a file system can
21965 work as a unix home directory,and today I had to extend it a bit. I
'm
21966 looking into alternatives for home directory access here at the
21967 University of Oslo, and one of the options is sshfs. My friend
21968 Finn-Arne mentioned a while back that they had used sshfs with Debian
21969 Edu, but stopped because of problems. I asked today what the problems
21970 where, and he mentioned that sshfs failed to handle umask properly.
21971 Trying to detect the problem I wrote this addition to my fs testing
21975 mode_t touch_get_mode(const char *name, mode_t mode) {
21977 int fd = open(name, O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_LARGEFILE, mode);
21980 struct stat statbuf;
21981 if (-
1 != fstat(fd,
&statbuf)) {
21982 retval = statbuf.st_mode
& 0x1ff;
21989 /* Try to detect problem discovered using sshfs */
21990 int test_umask(void) {
21991 printf(
"info: testing umask effect on file creation\n
");
21993 mode_t orig_umask = umask(
000);
21995 if (
0666 != (newmode = touch_get_mode(
"foobar
",
0666))) {
21996 printf(
" error: Wrong file mode %o when creating using mode
666 and umask
000\n
",
22000 if (
0660 != (newmode = touch_get_mode(
"foobar
",
0666))) {
22001 printf(
" error: Wrong file mode %o when creating using mode
666 and umask
007\n
",
22005 umask (orig_umask);
22009 int main(int argc, char **argv) {
22016 <p
>Sure enough. On NFS to a netapp, I get this result:
</p
>
22019 Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
22020 info: testing symlink creation
22021 info: testing subdirectory creation
22022 info: testing fcntl locking
22023 Read-locking
1 byte from
1073741824
22024 Read-locking
510 byte from
1073741826
22025 Unlocking
1 byte from
1073741824
22026 Write-locking
1 byte from
1073741824
22027 Write-locking
510 byte from
1073741826
22028 Unlocking
2 byte from
1073741824
22029 info: testing umask effect on file creation
22032 <p
>When mounting the same directory using sshfs, I get this
22036 Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
22037 info: testing symlink creation
22038 info: testing subdirectory creation
22039 info: testing fcntl locking
22040 Read-locking
1 byte from
1073741824
22041 Read-locking
510 byte from
1073741826
22042 Unlocking
1 byte from
1073741824
22043 Write-locking
1 byte from
1073741824
22044 Write-locking
510 byte from
1073741826
22045 Unlocking
2 byte from
1073741824
22046 info: testing umask effect on file creation
22047 error: Wrong file mode
644 when creating using mode
666 and umask
000
22048 error: Wrong file mode
640 when creating using mode
666 and umask
007
22051 <p
>So, I can conclude that sshfs is better than smb to a Netapp or a
22052 Windows server, but not good enough to be used as a home
22053 directory.
</p
>
22055 <p
>Update
2010-
08-
26: Reported the issue in
22056 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
594498">BTS report #
594498</a
></p
>
22058 <p
>Update
2010-
08-
27: Michael Gebetsroither report that he found the
22059 script so useful that he created a GIT repository and stored it in
22060 <a href=
"http://github.com/gebi/fs-test
">http://github.com/gebi/fs-test
</a
>.
</p
>
22065 <title>Rob Weir: How to Crush Dissent
</title>
22066 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Rob_Weir__How_to_Crush_Dissent.html
</link>
22067 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Rob_Weir__How_to_Crush_Dissent.html
</guid>
22068 <pubDate>Sun,
15 Aug
2010 22:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
22069 <description><p
>I found the notes from Rob Weir on
22070 <a href=
"http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/robweir/antic-atom/~
3/VGb23-kta8c/how-to-crush-dissent.html
">how
22071 to crush dissent
</a
> matching my own thoughts on the matter quite
22072 well. Highly recommended for those wondering which road our society
22073 should go down. In my view we have been heading the wrong way for a
22074 long time.
</p
>
22079 <title>No hardcoded config on Debian Edu clients
</title>
22080 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/No_hardcoded_config_on_Debian_Edu_clients.html
</link>
22081 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/No_hardcoded_config_on_Debian_Edu_clients.html
</guid>
22082 <pubDate>Mon,
9 Aug
2010 20:
15:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
22083 <description><p
>As reported earlier, the last few days I have looked at how Debian
22084 Edu clients are configured, and tried to get rid of all hardcoded
22085 configuration settings on the clients. I believe the work to be
22086 mostly done, and the clients seem to work just fine with dynamically
22087 generated configuration.
</p
>
22089 <p
>What is the point, you might ask? The point is to allow a Debian
22090 Edu desktop to integrate into an existing network infrastructure
22091 without any manual configuration.
</p
>
22093 <p
>This is what happens when installing a Debian Edu client here at
22094 the University of Oslo using PXE. With the PXE installation, I am
22095 asked for language (Norwegian Bokmål), locality (Norway) and keyboard
22096 layout (no-latin1), Debian Edu profile (Roaming Workstation), if I
22097 accept to reformat the hard drive (yes), if I want to submit info to
22098 popcon.debian.org (no) and root password (secret). After answering
22099 these questions, the installer goes ahead and does its thing, and
22100 after around
50 minutes it is done. I press enter to finish the
22101 installation, and the machine reboots into KDE. When the machine is
22102 ready and kdm asks for login information, I enter my university
22103 username and password, am told by kdm that a local home directory has
22104 been created and that I must log in again, and finally log in with the
22105 same username and password to the KDE
4.4 desktop. At no point during
22106 this process did it ask for university specific settings, and all the
22107 required configuration was dynamically detected using information
22108 fetched via DHCP and DNS. The roaming workstation is now ready for
22111 <p
>How was this done, you might wonder? First of all, here is the
22112 list of things that need to be configured on the client to get it
22113 working properly out of the box:
</p
>
22116 <li
>IP address/netmask and DNS server.
</li
>
22117 <li
>Web proxy URL.
</li
>
22118 <li
>LDAP server for NSS directory information (user, group, etc).
</li
>
22119 <li
>Kerberos server for PAM password checking.
</li
>
22120 <li
>SMB mount point to access the network home directory. (*)
</li
>
22121 <li
>Central syslog server to send syslog messages to. (*)
</li
>
22122 <li
>Sitesummary collector URL to submit info to central server. (*)
</li
>
22125 <p
>(Hm, did I forget anything? Let me knew if I did.)
</p
>
22127 <p
>The points marked (*) are not required to be able to use the
22128 machine, but needed to provide central storage and allowing system
22129 administrators to track their machines. Since yesterday, everything
22130 but the sitesummary collector URL is dynamically discovered at boot
22131 and installation time in the svn version of Debian Edu.
</p
>
22133 <p
>The IP and DNS setup is fetched during boot using DHCP as usual.
22134 When a DHCP update arrives, the proxy setup is updated by looking for
22135 http://wpat/wpad.dat and using the content of this WPAD file to
22136 configure the http and ftp proxy in /etc/environment and
22137 /etc/apt/apt.conf. I decided to update the proxy setup using a DHCP
22138 hook to ensure that the client stops using the Debian Edu proxy when
22139 it is moved outside the Debian Edu network, and instead uses any local
22140 proxy present on the new network when it moves around.
</p
>
22142 <p
>The DNS names of the LDAP, Kerberos and syslog server and related
22143 configuration are generated using DNS information at boot. First the
22144 installer looks for a host named ldap in the current DNS domain. If
22145 not found, it looks for _ldap._tcp SRV records in DNS instead. If an
22146 LDAP server is found, its root DSE entry is requested and the
22147 attributes namingContexts and defaultNamingContext are used to
22148 determine which LDAP base to use for NSS. If there are several
22149 namingContexts attibutes and the defaultNamingContext is present, that
22150 LDAP subtree is used as the base. If defaultNamingContext is missing,
22151 the subtrees listed as namingContexts are searched in sequence for any
22152 object with class posixAccount or posixGroup, and the first one with
22153 such an object is used as the LDAP base. For Kerberos, a similar
22154 search is done by first looking for a host named kerberos, and then
22155 for the _kerberos._tcp SRV record. I
've been unable to find a way to
22156 look up the Kerberos realm, so for this the upper case string of the
22157 current DNS domain is used.
</p
>
22159 <p
>For the syslog server, the hosts syslog and loghost are searched
22160 for, and the _syslog._udp SRV record is consulted if no such host is
22161 found. This algorithm works for both Debian Edu and the University of
22162 Oslo. A similar strategy would work for locating the sitesummary
22163 server, but have not been implemented yet. I decided to fetch and
22164 save these settings during installation, to make sure moving to a
22165 different network does not change the set of users being allowed to
22166 log in nor the passwords required to log in. Usernames and passwords
22167 will be cached by sssd when the user logs in on the Debian Edu
22168 network, and will not change as the laptop move around. For a
22169 non-roaming machine, there is no caching, but given that it is
22170 supposed to stay in place it should not matter much. Perhaps we
22171 should switch those to use sssd too?
</p
>
22173 <p
>The user
's SMB mount point for the network home directory is
22174 located when the user logs in for the first time. The LDAP server is
22175 consulted to look for the user
's LDAP object and the sambaHomePath
22176 attribute is used if found. If it isn
't found, the home directory
22177 path fetched from NSS is used instead. Assuming the path is of the
22178 form /site/server/directory/username, the second part is looked up in
22179 DNS and used to generate a SMB URL of the form
22180 smb://server.domain/username. This algorithm works for both Debian
22181 edu and the University of Oslo. Perhaps there are better attributes
22182 to use or a better algorithm that works for more sites, but this will
22183 do for now. :)
</p
>
22185 <p
>This work should make it easier to integrate the Debian Edu clients
22186 into any LDAP/Kerberos infrastructure, and make the current setup even
22187 more flexible than before. I suspect it will also work for thin
22188 client servers, allowing one to easily set up LTSP and hook it into a
22189 existing network infrastructure, but I have not had time to test this
22192 <p
>If you want to help out with implementing these things for Debian
22193 Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.
</p
>
22195 <p
>Update
2010-
08-
09: Simon Farnsworth gave me a heads-up on how to
22196 detect Kerberos realm from DNS, by looking for _kerberos TXT entries
22197 before falling back to the upper case DNS domain name. Will have to
22198 implement it for Debian Edu. :)
</p
>
22203 <title>Testing if a file system can be used for home directories...
</title>
22204 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_if_a_file_system_can_be_used_for_home_directories___.html
</link>
22205 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_if_a_file_system_can_be_used_for_home_directories___.html
</guid>
22206 <pubDate>Sun,
8 Aug
2010 21:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
22207 <description><p
>A few years ago, I was involved in a project planning to use
22208 Windows file servers as home directory servers for Debian
22209 Edu/Skolelinux machines. This was thought to be no problem, as the
22210 access would be through the SMB network file system protocol, and we
22211 knew other sites used SMB with unix and samba as the file server to
22212 mount home directories without any problems. But, after months of
22213 struggling, we had to conclude that our goal was impossible.
</p
>
22215 <p
>The reason is simply that while SMB can be used for home
22216 directories when the file server is Samba running on Unix, this only
22217 work because of Samba have some extensions and the fact that the
22218 underlying file system is a unix file system. When using a Windows
22219 file server, the underlying file system do not have POSIX semantics,
22220 and several programs will fail if the users home directory where they
22221 want to store their configuration lack POSIX semantics.
</p
>
22223 <p
>As part of this work, I wrote a small C program I want to share
22224 with you all, to replicate a few of the problematic applications (like
22225 OpenOffice.org and GCompris) and see if the file system was working as
22226 it should. If you find yourself in spooky file system land, it might
22227 help you find your way out again. This is the fs-test.c source:
</p
>
22231 * Some tests to check the file system sematics. Used to verify that
22232 * CIFS from a windows server do not work properly as a linux home
22234 * License: GPL v2 or later
22236 * needs libsqlite3-dev and build-essential installed
22237 * compile with: gcc -Wall -lsqlite3 -DTEST_SQLITE fs-test.c -o fs-test
22240 #define _FILE_OFFSET_BITS
64
22241 #define _LARGEFILE_SOURCE
1
22242 #define _LARGEFILE64_SOURCE
1
22244 #define _GNU_SOURCE /* for asprintf() */
22246 #include
&lt;errno.h
>
22247 #include
&lt;fcntl.h
>
22248 #include
&lt;stdio.h
>
22249 #include
&lt;string.h
>
22250 #include
&lt;stdlib.h
>
22251 #include
&lt;sys/file.h
>
22252 #include
&lt;sys/stat.h
>
22253 #include
&lt;sys/types.h
>
22254 #include
&lt;unistd.h
>
22258 * Test sqlite open, as done by gcompris require the libsqlite3-dev
22259 * package and linking with -lsqlite3. A more low level test is
22261 * See also
&lt;URL: http://www.sqlite.org./faq.html#q5
>.
22263 #include
&lt;sqlite3.h
>
22264 #define CREATE_TABLE_USERS \
22265 "CREATE TABLE users (user_id INT UNIQUE, login TEXT, lastname TEXT, firstname TEXT, birthdate TEXT, class_id INT );
"
22266 int test_sqlite_open(void) {
22268 char *name =
"testsqlite.db
";
22271 int rc = sqlite3_open(name,
&db);
22273 printf(
"error: sqlite open of %s failed: %s\n
", name, sqlite3_errmsg(db));
22278 /* create tables */
22279 rc = sqlite3_exec(db,CREATE_TABLE_USERS, NULL,
0,
&zErrMsg);
22280 if( rc != SQLITE_OK ){
22281 printf(
"error: sqlite table create failed: %s\n
", zErrMsg);
22285 printf(
"info: sqlite worked\n
");
22289 #endif /* TEST_SQLITE */
22292 * Demonstrate locking issue found in gcompris using sqlite3. This
22293 * work with ext3, but not with cifs server on Windows
2003. This is
22294 * done in the sqlite3 library.
22296 *
&lt;URL:http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/
2001-
08/msg00854.html
> and the
22297 * POSIX specification
22298 *
&lt;URL:http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/
009695399/functions/fcntl.html
>.
22300 int test_gcompris_locking(void) {
22302 char *name =
"testsqlite.db
";
22304 int fd = open(name, O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_LARGEFILE,
0644);
22305 printf(
"info: testing fcntl locking\n
");
22307 fl.l_whence = SEEK_SET;
22308 fl.l_pid = getpid();
22309 printf(
" Read-locking
1 byte from
1073741824");
22310 fl.l_start =
1073741824;
22312 fl.l_type = F_RDLCK;
22313 if (
0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK,
&fl) ) printf(
" - error!\n
"); else printf(
"\n
");
22315 printf(
" Read-locking
510 byte from
1073741826");
22316 fl.l_start =
1073741826;
22318 fl.l_type = F_RDLCK;
22319 if (
0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK,
&fl) ) printf(
" - error!\n
"); else printf(
"\n
");
22321 printf(
" Unlocking
1 byte from
1073741824");
22322 fl.l_start =
1073741824;
22324 fl.l_type = F_UNLCK;
22325 if (
0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK,
&fl) ) printf(
" - error!\n
"); else printf(
"\n
");
22327 printf(
" Write-locking
1 byte from
1073741824");
22328 fl.l_start =
1073741824;
22330 fl.l_type = F_WRLCK;
22331 if (
0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK,
&fl) ) printf(
" - error!\n
"); else printf(
"\n
");
22333 printf(
" Write-locking
510 byte from
1073741826");
22334 fl.l_start =
1073741826;
22336 if (
0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK,
&fl) ) printf(
" - error!\n
"); else printf(
"\n
");
22338 printf(
" Unlocking
2 byte from
1073741824");
22339 fl.l_start =
1073741824;
22341 fl.l_type = F_UNLCK;
22342 if (
0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK,
&fl) ) printf(
" - error!\n
"); else printf(
"\n
");
22349 * Test if permissions of freshly created directories allow entries
22350 * below them. This was a problem with OpenOffice.org and gcompris.
22351 * Mounting with option
'sync
' seem to solve this problem while
22352 * slowing down file operations.
22354 int test_subdirectory_creation(void) {
22356 char *path = strdup(
"test
");
22357 char *dirs[LEVELS];
22359 printf(
"info: testing subdirectory creation\n
");
22360 for (level =
0; level
&lt; LEVELS; level++) {
22361 char *newpath = NULL;
22362 if (-
1 == mkdir(path,
0777)) {
22363 printf(
" error: Unable to create directory
'%s
': %s\n
",
22364 path, strerror(errno));
22367 asprintf(
&newpath,
"%s/%s
", path,
"test
");
22375 * Test if symlinks can be created. This was a problem detected with
22378 int test_symlinks(void) {
22379 printf(
"info: testing symlink creation\n
");
22380 unlink(
"symlink
");
22381 if (-
1 == symlink(
"file
",
"symlink
"))
22382 printf(
" error: Unable to create symlink\n
");
22386 int main(int argc, char **argv) {
22387 printf(
"Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system\n
");
22389 test_subdirectory_creation();
22391 test_sqlite_open();
22392 #endif /* TEST_SQLITE */
22393 test_gcompris_locking();
22398 <p
>When everything is working, it should print something like
22402 Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
22403 info: testing symlink creation
22404 info: testing subdirectory creation
22405 info: sqlite worked
22406 info: testing fcntl locking
22407 Read-locking
1 byte from
1073741824
22408 Read-locking
510 byte from
1073741826
22409 Unlocking
1 byte from
1073741824
22410 Write-locking
1 byte from
1073741824
22411 Write-locking
510 byte from
1073741826
22412 Unlocking
2 byte from
1073741824
22415 <p
>I do not remember the exact details of the problems we saw, but one
22416 of them was with locking, where if I remember correctly, POSIX allow a
22417 read-only lock to be upgraded to a read-write lock without unlocking
22418 the read-only lock (while Windows do not). Another was a bug in the
22419 CIFS/SMB client implementation in the Linux kernel where directory
22420 meta information would be wrong for a fraction of a second, making
22421 OpenOffice.org fail to create its deep directory tree because it was
22422 not allowed to create files in its freshly created directory.
</p
>
22424 <p
>Anyway, here is a nice tool for your tool box, might you never need
22427 <p
>Update
2010-
08-
27: Michael Gebetsroither report that he found the
22428 script so useful that he created a GIT repository and stored it in
22429 <a href=
"http://github.com/gebi/fs-test
">http://github.com/gebi/fs-test
</a
>.
</p
>
22434 <title>Autodetecting Client setup for roaming workstations in Debian Edu
</title>
22435 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Autodetecting_Client_setup_for_roaming_workstations_in_Debian_Edu.html
</link>
22436 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Autodetecting_Client_setup_for_roaming_workstations_in_Debian_Edu.html
</guid>
22437 <pubDate>Sat,
7 Aug
2010 14:
45:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
22438 <description><p
>A few days ago, I
22439 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_roaming_workstation___at_the_university_of_Oslo.html
">tried
22440 to install
</a
> a Roaming workation profile from Debian Edu/Squeeze
22441 while on the university network here at the University of Oslo, and
22442 noticed how much had to change to get it operational using the
22443 university infrastructure. It was fairly easy, but it occured to me
22444 that Debian Edu would improve a lot if I could get the client to
22445 connect without any changes at all, and thus let the client configure
22446 itself during installation and first boot to use the infrastructure
22447 around it. Now I am a huge step further along that road.
</p
>
22449 <p
>With our current squeeze-test packages, I can select the roaming
22450 workstation profile and get a working laptop connecting to the
22451 university LDAP server for user and group and our active directory
22452 servers for Kerberos authentication. All this without any
22453 configuration at all during installation. My users home directory got
22454 a bookmark in the KDE menu to mount it via SMB, with the correct URL.
22455 In short, openldap and sssd is correctly configured. In addition to
22456 this, the client look for http://wpad/wpad.dat to configure a web
22457 proxy, and when it fail to find it no proxy settings are stored in
22458 /etc/environment and /etc/apt/apt.conf. Iceweasel and KDE is
22459 configured to look for the same wpad configuration and also do not use
22460 a proxy when at the university network. If the machine is moved to a
22461 network with such wpad setup, it would automatically use it when DHCP
22462 gave it a IP address.
</p
>
22464 <p
>The LDAP server is located using DNS, by first looking for the DNS
22465 entry ldap.$domain. If this do not exist, it look for the
22466 _ldap._tcp.$domain SRV records and use the first one as the LDAP
22467 server. Next, it connects to the LDAP server and search all
22468 namingContexts entries for posixAccount or posixGroup objects, and
22469 pick the first one as the LDAP base. For Kerberos, a similar
22470 algorithm is used to locate the LDAP server, and the realm is the
22471 uppercase version of $domain.
</p
>
22473 <p
>So, what is not working, you might ask. SMB mounting my home
22474 directory do not work. No idea why, but suspected the incorrect
22475 Kerberos settings in /etc/krb5.conf and /etc/samba/smb.conf might be
22476 the cause. These are not properly configured during installation, and
22477 had to be hand-edited to get the correct Kerberos realm and server,
22478 but SMB mounting still do not work. :(
</p
>
22480 <p
>With this automatic configuration in place, I expect a Debian Edu
22481 roaming profile installation would be able to automatically detect and
22482 connect to any site using LDAP and Kerberos for NSS directory and PAM
22483 authentication. It should also work out of the box in a Active
22484 Directory environment providing posixAccount and posixGroup objects
22485 with UID and GID values.
</p
>
22487 <p
>If you want to help out with implementing these things for Debian
22488 Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.
</p
>
22493 <title>Debian Edu roaming workstation - at the university of Oslo
</title>
22494 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_roaming_workstation___at_the_university_of_Oslo.html
</link>
22495 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_roaming_workstation___at_the_university_of_Oslo.html
</guid>
22496 <pubDate>Tue,
3 Aug
2010 23:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
22497 <description><p
>The new roaming workstation profile in Debian Edu/Squeeze is fairly
22498 similar to the laptop setup am I working on using Ubuntu for the
22499 University of Oslo, and just for the heck of it, I tested today how
22500 hard it would be to integrate that profile into the university
22501 infrastructure. In this case, it is the university LDAP server,
22502 Active Directory Kerberos server and SMB mounting from the Netapp file
22505 <p
>I was pleasantly surprised that the only three files needed to be
22506 changed (/etc/sssd/sssd.conf, /etc/ldap.conf and
22507 /etc/mklocaluser.d/
20-debian-edu-config) and one file had to be added
22508 (/usr/share/perl5/Debian/Edu_Local.pm), to get the client working.
22509 Most of the changes were to get the client to use the university LDAP
22510 for NSS and Kerberos server for PAM, but one was to change a hard
22511 coded DNS domain name in the mklocaluser hook from .intern to
22514 <p
>This testing was so encouraging, that I went ahead and adjusted the
22515 Debian Edu scripts and setup in subversion to centralise the roaming
22516 workstation setup a bit more and avoid the hardcoded DNS domain name,
22517 so that when I test this tomorrow, I expect to get away with modifying
22518 only /etc/sssd/sssd.conf and /etc/ldap.conf to get it to use the
22519 university servers.
</p
>
22521 <p
>My goal is to get the clients to have no hardcoded settings and
22522 fetch all their initial setup during installation and first boot, to
22523 allow them to be inserted also into environments where the default
22524 setup in Debian Edu has been changed or as with the university, where
22525 the environment is different but provides the protocols Debian Edu
22531 <title>Circular package dependencies harms apt recovery
</title>
22532 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Circular_package_dependencies_harms_apt_recovery.html
</link>
22533 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Circular_package_dependencies_harms_apt_recovery.html
</guid>
22534 <pubDate>Tue,
27 Jul
2010 23:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
22535 <description><p
>I discovered this while doing
22536 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html
">automated
22537 testing of upgrades from Debian Lenny to Squeeze
</a
>. A few packages
22538 in Debian still got circular dependencies, and it is often claimed
22539 that apt and aptitude should be able to handle this just fine, but
22540 some times these dependency loops causes apt to fail.
</p
>
22542 <p
>An example is from todays
22543 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing//test-
20100727-lenny-squeeze-kde-aptitude.txt
">upgrade
22544 of KDE using aptitude
</a
>. In it, a bug in kdebase-workspace-data
22545 causes perl-modules to fail to upgrade. The cause is simple. If a
22546 package fail to unpack, then only part of packages with the circular
22547 dependency might end up being unpacked when unpacking aborts, and the
22548 ones already unpacked will fail to configure in the recovery phase
22549 because its dependencies are unavailable.
</p
>
22551 <p
>In this log, the problem manifest itself with this error:
</p
>
22553 <blockquote
><pre
>
22554 dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of perl-modules:
22555 perl-modules depends on perl (
>=
5.10.1-
1); however:
22556 Version of perl on system is
5.10.0-
19lenny
2.
22557 dpkg: error processing perl-modules (--configure):
22558 dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
22559 </pre
></blockquote
>
22561 <p
>The perl/perl-modules circular dependency is already
22562 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
527917">reported as a bug
</a
>, and will
22563 hopefully be solved as soon as possible, but it is not the only one,
22564 and each one of these loops in the dependency tree can cause similar
22565 failures. Of course, they only occur when there are bugs in other
22566 packages causing the unpacking to fail, but it is rather nasty when
22567 the failure of one package causes the problem to become worse because
22568 of dependency loops.
</p
>
22571 <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/
2010/
06/msg00116.html
">the
22572 tireless effort by Bill Allombert
</a
>, the number of circular
22574 <a href=
"http://debian.semistable.com/debgraph.out.html
">left in Debian
22575 is dropping
</a
>, and perhaps it will reach zero one day. :)
</p
>
22577 <p
>Todays testing also exposed a bug in
22578 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
590605">update-notifier
</a
> and
22579 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
590604">different behaviour
</a
> between
22580 apt-get and aptitude, the latter possibly caused by some circular
22581 dependency. Reported both to BTS to try to get someone to look at
22587 <title>First Debian Edu test release (alpha0) based on Squeeze is released
</title>
22588 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Debian_Edu_test_release__alpha0__based_on_Squeeze_is_released.html
</link>
22589 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Debian_Edu_test_release__alpha0__based_on_Squeeze_is_released.html
</guid>
22590 <pubDate>Tue,
27 Jul
2010 17:
45:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
22591 <description><p
>I just posted this announcement culminating several months of work
22592 with the next Debian Edu release. Not nearly done, but one major step
22593 completed.
</p
>
22596 <p
>This is the first test release based on Squeeze. The focus of this
22597 release is to test the user application selection. To have a look,
22598 install the standalone profile and let the developers know if the set
22599 of installed packages i.e. applications should be modified. If some
22600 user application is missing, or if there are some applications that no
22601 longer make sense to be included in Debian Edu, please let us know.
22602 Also, if a useful application is missing the translation for your
22603 language of choice, please let us know too.
</p
>
22605 <p
>In addition, feedback and help to polish the desktop (menus,
22606 artwork, starters, etc.) is appreciated. We would like to ship a nice
22607 and handy KDE4 desktop targeted for schools out of the box.
</p
>
22609 <p
>The other profiles should be installable, but there is a lot more
22610 work left to be done before they are ready, so do not expect to
22613 <p
>Changes compared to the lenny based version
</p
>
22616 <li
>Everything from Debian Squeeze
22618 <li
>Desktop environment KDE
4.4 =
> the new KDE desktop in
22619 combination with some new artwork
22620 <li
>Web browser Iceweasel
3.5
22621 <li
>OpenOffice.org
3.2
22622 <li
>Educational toolbox GCompris
9.3
22623 <li
>Music creator Rosegarden
10.04.2
22624 <li
>Image editor Gimp
2.6.10
22625 <li
>Virtual universe Celestia
1.6.0
22626 <li
>Virtual stargazer Stellarium
0.10.4
22627 <li
>3D modeler Blender
2.49.2 (new application)
22628 <li
>Video editor Kdenlive
0.7.7 (new application)
22629 </ul
></li
>
22630 <li
>Now using Kerberos for password checking (migration not finished).
22636 <li
>SMTP (sender verification)
22639 <li
>New experimental roaming workstation profile for laptops.
</li
>
22640 <li
>Show welcome page to users when they first log in. The URL is
22641 fetched from LDAP.
</li
>
22642 <li
>New LXDE desktop option, in addition to KDE (default) and Gnome.
</li
>
22643 <li
>General cleanup (not finished)
</li
>
22645 <p
>The following features are not working as they should
</p
>
22648 <li
>No web based administration tool for creating users and groups. The
22649 scripts ldap-createuser-krb and ldap-add-user-to-group can be used
22650 for testing.
</li
>
22651 <li
>DVD installs are missing debian-installer images for the PXE boot,
22652 and do not set up the PXE menu on eth0 because of this. LTSP
22653 clients should still boot from eth1 on thin client servers.
</li
>
22654 <li
>The restructured KDE menu is not implemented.
</li
>
22655 <li
>The LDAP server setup need to be reviewed for security.
</li
>
22656 <li
>The LDAP directory structure need to be reworked.
</li
>
22657 <li
>Different sets of packages are installed when using the DVD and the
22658 netinst CD. More packages are installed using the netinst CD.
</li
>
22659 <li
>The jackd package fail to install. This is believed to be caused by
22660 some ongoing transition, and hopefully should be solved soon. The
22661 jackd1 package can be installed manually for those that need it.
</li
>
22662 <li
>Some packages lack translations. See
22663 http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Squeeze for updated status,
22664 and help out with translations.
</li
>
22667 <p
>To download this multiarch netinstall release you can use
</p
>
22670 <li
><a href=
"ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-
6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso
">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-
6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso
</a
></li
>
22671 <li
><a href=
"http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-
6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso
">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-
6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso
</a
></li
>
22672 <li
>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-
6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso
</li
>
22674 <p
>To download this multiarch dvd release you can use
</p
>
22677 <li
><a href=
"ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-
6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso
">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-
6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso
</a
></li
>
22678 <li
><a href=
"http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-
6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso
">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-
6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso
</a
></li
>
22679 <li
>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-
6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso
</li
>
22682 <p
>There is no source DVD available yet. It will be prepared when we
22683 get closer to the final release.
</p
>
22685 <p
>The MD5SUM of these images are
</p
>
22688 <li
>3dbf45d59f42a53518b6e3c9ec3b5eb6 debian-edu-
6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso
</li
>
22689 <li
>22f2cbfce281d1c6e478be452638675d debian-edu-
6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso
</li
>
22692 <p
>The SHA1SUM of these images are
</p
>
22694 <li
>c53d1b69b40cf37cd27aefaf33f6f6a3821bedf0 debian-edu-
6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso
</li
>
22695 <li
>2ec29d7db676d59d32197b05c277ffe16348376c debian-edu-
6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso
</li
>
22697 <p
>How to report bugs:
22698 http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugsInBugzilla
</p
>
22700 <p
>Please direct replies to debian-edu@lists.debian.org
</p
>
22701 </blockquote
>
22706 <title>One step closer to single signon in Debian Edu
</title>
22707 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/One_step_closer_to_single_signon_in_Debian_Edu.html
</link>
22708 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/One_step_closer_to_single_signon_in_Debian_Edu.html
</guid>
22709 <pubDate>Sun,
25 Jul
2010 10:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
22710 <description><p
>The last few months me and the other Debian Edu developers have
22711 been working hard to get the Debian/Squeeze based version of Debian
22712 Edu/Skolelinux into shape. This future version will use Kerberos for
22713 authentication, and services are slowly migrated to single signon,
22714 getting rid of password questions one at the time.
</p
>
22716 <p
>It will also feature a roaming workstation profile with local home
22717 directory, for laptops that are only some times on the Skolelinux
22718 network, and for this profile a shortcut is created in Gnome and KDE
22719 to gain access to the users home directory on the file server. This
22720 shortcut uses SMB at the moment, and yesterday I had time to test if
22721 SMB mounting had started working in KDE after we added the cifs-utils
22722 package. I was pleasantly surprised how well it worked.
</p
>
22724 <p
>Thanks to the recent changes to our samba configuration to get it
22725 to use Kerberos for authentication, there were no question about user
22726 password when mounting the SMB volume. A simple click on the shortcut
22727 in the KDE menu, and a window with the home directory popped
22730 <p
>One step closer to a single signon solution out of the box in
22731 Debian Edu. We already had PAM, LDAP, IMAP and SMTP in place, and now
22732 also Samba. Next step is Cups and hopefully also NFS.
</p
>
22734 <p
>We had planned a alpha0 release of Debian Edu for today, but thanks
22735 to the autobuilder administrators for some architectures being slow to
22736 sign packages, we are still missing the fixed LTSP package we need for
22737 the release. It was uploaded three days ago with urgency=high, and if
22738 it had entered testing yesterday we would have been able to test it in
22739 time for a alpha0 release today. As the binaries for ia64 and powerpc
22740 still not uploaded to the Debian archive, we need to delay the alpha
22741 release another day.
</p
>
22743 <p
>If you want to help out with implementing Kerberos for Debian Edu,
22744 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.
</p
>
22749 <title>OpenStreetmap one step closer to having routing on its front page
</title>
22750 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/OpenStreetmap_one_step_closer_to_having_routing_on_its_front_page.html
</link>
22751 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/OpenStreetmap_one_step_closer_to_having_routing_on_its_front_page.html
</guid>
22752 <pubDate>Sun,
18 Jul
2010 16:
45:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
22753 <description><p
>Thanks to
22754 <a href=
"http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Opengeodata/~
3/wUTCzDZk3lc/project-of-the-week-which-way-home
">todays
22755 opengeodata blog entry
</a
>, I just discovered that the
22756 OpenStreetmap.org site have gotten
22757 <a href=
"http://nroets.dev.openstreetmap.org/demo/index.html?layers=B000FTFTT
">support
22758 for calculating routes
</a
>. The support is still experimental and
22759 only available from the development server, until more experience is
22760 gathered on the user interface and any scalability issues.
</p
>
22762 <p
>Earlier, the routing I knew about using the OpenStreetmap.org data
22763 was provided by
<a href=
"http://maps.cloudmade.com/
">Cloudmade
</a
>,
22764 but having it on the main page is required to make everyone aware of
22765 the issue. I
've had people reject Openstreetmap.org as a viable
22766 alternative for them because the front page lacked routing support,
22767 and I hope their needs will be catered for when routing show up on the
22768 www.openstreetmap.org front page.
</p
>
22773 <title>What are they searching for - PowerDNS and ISC DHCP in LDAP
</title>
22774 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_are_they_searching_for___PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_in_LDAP.html
</link>
22775 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_are_they_searching_for___PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_in_LDAP.html
</guid>
22776 <pubDate>Sat,
17 Jul
2010 21:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
22777 <description><p
>This is a
22778 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html
">followup
</a
>
22780 <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
22782 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html
">merging
22783 all
</a
> the computer related LDAP objects in Debian Edu.
</p
>
22785 <p
>As a step to try to see if it possible to merge the DNS and DHCP
22786 LDAP objects, I have had a look at how the packages pdns-backend-ldap
22787 and dhcp3-server-ldap in Debian use the LDAP server. The two
22788 implementations are quite different in how they use LDAP.
</p
>
22790 To get this information, I started slapd with debugging enabled and
22791 dumped the debug output to a file to get the LDAP searches performed
22792 on a Debian Edu main-server. Here is a summary.
22794 <p
><strong
>powerdns
</strong
></p
>
22796 <a href=
"http://www.linuxnetworks.de/doc/index.php/PowerDNS_LDAP_Backend
">Clues
22797 on how to
</a
> set up PowerDNS to use a LDAP backend is available on
22800 <p
>PowerDNS have two modes of operation using LDAP as its backend.
22801 One
"strict
" mode where the forward and reverse DNS lookups are done
22802 using the same LDAP objects, and a
"tree
" mode where the forward and
22803 reverse entries are in two different subtrees in LDAP with a structure
22804 based on the DNS names, as in tjener.intern and
22805 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa.
</p
>
22807 <p
>In tree mode, the server is set up to use a LDAP subtree as its
22808 base, and uses a
"base
" scoped search for the DNS name by adding
22809 "dc=tjener,dc=intern,
" to the base with a filter for
22810 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)
" for the forward entry and
22811 "dc=
2,dc=
2,dc=
0,dc=
10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,
" with a filter for
22812 "(associateddomain=
2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)
" for the reverse entry. For
22813 forward entries, it is looking for attributes named dnsttl, arecord,
22814 nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord,
22815 txtrecord, rprecord, afsdbrecord, keyrecord, aaaarecord, locrecord,
22816 srvrecord, naptrrecord, kxrecord, certrecord, dsrecord, sshfprecord,
22817 ipseckeyrecord, rrsigrecord, nsecrecord, dnskeyrecord, dhcidrecord,
22818 spfrecord and modifytimestamp. For reverse entries it is looking for
22819 the attributes dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord,
22820 ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord,
22821 locrecord, srvrecord, naptrrecord and modifytimestamp. The equivalent
22822 ldapsearch commands could look like this:
</p
>
22824 <blockquote
><pre
>
22825 ldapsearch -h ldap \
22826 -b dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
22827 -s base -x
'(associateddomain=tjener.intern)
' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
22828 cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
22829 rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
22830 nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
22831 rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
22833 ldapsearch -h ldap \
22834 -b dc=
2,dc=
2,dc=
0,dc=
10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
22835 -s base -x
'(associateddomain=
2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)
'
22836 dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord soarecord ptrrecord \
22837 hinforecord mxrecord txtrecord rprecord aaaarecord locrecord \
22838 srvrecord naptrrecord modifytimestamp
22839 </pre
></blockquote
>
22841 <p
>In Debian Edu/Lenny, the PowerDNS tree mode is used with
22842 ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no as the base, and these are two
22843 example LDAP objects used there. In addition to these objects, the
22844 parent objects all th way up to ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
22845 also exist.
</p
>
22847 <blockquote
><pre
>
22848 dn: dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
22850 objectclass: dnsdomain
22851 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
22854 associateddomain: tjener.intern
22856 dn: dc=
2,dc=
2,dc=
0,dc=
10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
22858 objectclass: dnsdomain2
22859 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
22861 ptrrecord: tjener.intern
22862 associateddomain:
2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa
22863 </pre
></blockquote
>
22865 <p
>In strict mode, the server behaves differently. When looking for
22866 forward DNS entries, it is doing a
"subtree
" scoped search with the
22867 same base as in the tree mode for a object with filter
22868 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)
" and requests the attributes dnsttl,
22869 arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord,
22870 mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord, locrecord, srvrecord,
22871 naptrrecord and modifytimestamp. For reverse entires it also do a
22872 subtree scoped search but this time the filter is
"(arecord=
10.0.2.2)
"
22873 and the requested attributes are associateddomain, dnsttl and
22874 modifytimestamp. In short, in strict mode the objects with ptrrecord
22875 go away, and the arecord attribute in the forward object is used
22878 <p
>The forward and reverse searches can be simulated using ldapsearch
22879 like this:
</p
>
22881 <blockquote
><pre
>
22882 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
22883 '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)
' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
22884 cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
22885 rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
22886 nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
22887 rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
22889 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
22890 '(arecord=
10.0.2.2)
' associateddomain dnsttl modifytimestamp
22891 </pre
></blockquote
>
22893 <p
>In addition to the forward and reverse searches , there is also a
22894 search for SOA records, which behave similar to the forward and
22895 reverse lookups.
</p
>
22897 <p
>A thing to note with the PowerDNS behaviour is that it do not
22898 specify any objectclass names, and instead look for the attributes it
22899 need to generate a DNS reply. This make it able to work with any
22900 objectclass that provide the needed attributes.
</p
>
22902 <p
>The attributes are normally provided in the cosine (RFC
1274) and
22903 dnsdomain2 schemas. The latter is used for reverse entries like
22904 ptrrecord and recent DNS additions like aaaarecord and srvrecord.
</p
>
22906 <p
>In Debian Edu, we have created DNS objects using the object classes
22907 dcobject (for dc), dnsdomain or dnsdomain2 (structural, for the DNS
22908 attributes) and domainrelatedobject (for associatedDomain). The use
22909 of structural object classes make it impossible to combine these
22910 classes with the object classes used by DHCP.
</p
>
22912 <p
>There are other schemas that could be used too, for example the
22913 dnszone structural object class used by Gosa and bind-sdb for the DNS
22914 attributes combined with the domainrelatedobject object class, but in
22915 this case some unused attributes would have to be included as well
22916 (zonename and relativedomainname).
</p
>
22918 <p
>My proposal for Debian Edu would be to switch PowerDNS to strict
22919 mode and not use any of the existing objectclasses (dnsdomain,
22920 dnsdomain2 and dnszone) when one want to combine the DNS information
22921 with DHCP information, and instead create a auxiliary object class
22922 defined something like this (using the attributes defined for
22923 dnsdomain and dnsdomain2 or dnszone):
</p
>
22925 <blockquote
><pre
>
22926 objectclass ( some-oid NAME
'dnsDomainAux
'
22929 MAY ( ARecord $ MDRecord $ MXRecord $ NSRecord $ SOARecord $ CNAMERecord $
22930 DNSTTL $ DNSClass $ PTRRecord $ HINFORecord $ MINFORecord $
22931 TXTRecord $ SIGRecord $ KEYRecord $ AAAARecord $ LOCRecord $
22932 NXTRecord $ SRVRecord $ NAPTRRecord $ KXRecord $ CERTRecord $
22933 A6Record $ DNAMERecord
22935 </pre
></blockquote
>
22937 <p
>This will allow any object to become a DNS entry when combined with
22938 the domainrelatedobject object class, and allow any entity to include
22939 all the attributes PowerDNS wants. I
've sent an email to the PowerDNS
22940 developers asking for their view on this schema and if they are
22941 interested in providing such schema with PowerDNS, and I hope my
22942 message will be accepted into their mailing list soon.
</p
>
22944 <p
><strong
>ISC dhcp
</strong
></p
>
22946 <p
>The DHCP server searches for specific objectclass and requests all
22947 the object attributes, and then uses the attributes it want. This
22948 make it harder to figure out exactly what attributes are used, but
22949 thanks to the working example in Debian Edu I can at least get an idea
22950 what is needed without having to read the source code.
</p
>
22952 <p
>In the DHCP server configuration, the LDAP base to use and the
22953 search filter to use to locate the correct dhcpServer entity is
22954 stored. These are the relevant entries from
22955 /etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf:
</p
>
22957 <blockquote
><pre
>
22958 ldap-base-dn
"dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
";
22959 ldap-dhcp-server-cn
"dhcp
";
22960 </pre
></blockquote
>
22962 <p
>The DHCP server uses this information to nest all the DHCP
22963 configuration it need. The cn
"dhcp
" is located using the given LDAP
22964 base and the filter
"(
&(objectClass=dhcpServer)(cn=dhcp))
". The
22965 search result is this entry:
</p
>
22967 <blockquote
><pre
>
22968 dn: cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
22971 objectClass: dhcpServer
22972 dhcpServiceDN: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
22973 </pre
></blockquote
>
22975 <p
>The content of the dhcpServiceDN attribute is next used to locate the
22976 subtree with DHCP configuration. The DHCP configuration subtree base
22977 is located using a base scope search with base
"cn=DHCP
22978 Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
" and filter
22979 "(
&(objectClass=dhcpService)(|(dhcpPrimaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)(dhcpSecondaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)))
".
22980 The search result is this entry:
</p
>
22982 <blockquote
><pre
>
22983 dn: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
22986 objectClass: dhcpService
22987 objectClass: dhcpOptions
22988 dhcpPrimaryDN: cn=dhcp, dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
22989 dhcpStatements: ddns-update-style none
22990 dhcpStatements: authoritative
22991 dhcpOption: smtp-server code
69 = array of ip-address
22992 dhcpOption: www-server code
72 = array of ip-address
22993 dhcpOption: wpad-url code
252 = text
22994 </pre
></blockquote
>
22996 <p
>Next, the entire subtree is processed, one level at the time. When
22997 all the DHCP configuration is loaded, it is ready to receive requests.
22998 The subtree in Debian Edu contain objects with object classes
22999 top/dhcpService/dhcpOptions, top/dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions,
23000 top/dhcpSubnet, top/dhcpGroup and top/dhcpHost. These provide options
23001 and information about netmasks, dynamic range etc. Leaving out the
23002 details here because it is not relevant for the focus of my
23003 investigation, which is to see if it is possible to merge dns and dhcp
23004 related computer objects.
</p
>
23006 <p
>When a DHCP request come in, LDAP is searched for the MAC address
23007 of the client (
00:
00:
00:
00:
00:
00 in this example), using a subtree
23008 scoped search with
"cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
" as
23009 the base and
"(
&(objectClass=dhcpHost)(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet
23010 00:
00:
00:
00:
00:
00))
" as the filter. This is what a host object look
23013 <blockquote
><pre
>
23014 dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
23017 objectClass: dhcpHost
23018 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet
00:
00:
00:
00:
00:
00
23019 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname
23020 </pre
></blockquote
>
23022 <p
>There is less flexiblity in the way LDAP searches are done here.
23023 The object classes need to have fixed names, and the configuration
23024 need to be stored in a fairly specific LDAP structure. On the
23025 positive side, the invidiual dhcpHost entires can be anywhere without
23026 the DN pointed to by the dhcpServer entries. The latter should make
23027 it possible to group all host entries in a subtree next to the
23028 configuration entries, and this subtree can also be shared with the
23029 DNS server if the schema proposed above is combined with the dhcpHost
23030 structural object class.
23032 <p
><strong
>Conclusion
</strong
></p
>
23034 <p
>The PowerDNS implementation seem to be very flexible when it come
23035 to which LDAP schemas to use. While its
"tree
" mode is rigid when it
23036 come to the the LDAP structure, the
"strict
" mode is very flexible,
23037 allowing DNS objects to be stored anywhere under the base cn specified
23038 in the configuration.
</p
>
23040 <p
>The DHCP implementation on the other hand is very inflexible, both
23041 regarding which LDAP schemas to use and which LDAP structure to use.
23042 I guess one could implement ones own schema, as long as the
23043 objectclasses and attributes have the names used, but this do not
23044 really help when the DHCP subtree need to have a fairly fixed
23045 structure.
</p
>
23047 <p
>Based on the observed behaviour, I suspect a LDAP structure like
23048 this might work for Debian Edu:
</p
>
23050 <blockquote
><pre
>
23052 cn=machine-info (dhcpService) - dhcpServiceDN points here
23053 cn=dhcp (dhcpServer)
23054 cn=dhcp-internal (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
23055 cn=
10.0.2.0 (dhcpSubnet)
23056 cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
23057 cn=dhcp-thinclients (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
23058 cn=
192.168.0.0 (dhcpSubnet)
23059 cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
23060 ou=machines - PowerDNS base points here
23061 cn=hostname (dhcpHost/domainrelatedobject/dnsDomainAux)
23062 </pre
></blockquote
>
23064 <P
>This is not tested yet. If the DHCP server require the dhcpHost
23065 entries to be in the dhcpGroup subtrees, the entries can be stored
23066 there instead of a common machines subtree, and the PowerDNS base
23067 would have to be moved one level up to the machine-info subtree.
</p
>
23069 <p
>The combined object under the machines subtree would look something
23070 like this:
</p
>
23072 <blockquote
><pre
>
23073 dn: dc=hostname,ou=machines,cn=machine-info,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
23076 objectClass: dhcpHost
23077 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
23078 objectclass: dnsDomainAux
23079 associateddomain: hostname.intern
23080 arecord:
10.11.12.13
23081 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet
00:
00:
00:
00:
00:
00
23082 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname.intern
23083 </pre
></blockquote
>
23085 </p
>One could even add the LTSP configuration associated with a given
23086 machine, as long as the required attributes are available in a
23087 auxiliary object class.
</p
>
23092 <title>Combining PowerDNS and ISC DHCP LDAP objects
</title>
23093 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html
</link>
23094 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html
</guid>
23095 <pubDate>Wed,
14 Jul
2010 23:
45:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
23096 <description><p
>For a while now, I have wanted to find a way to change the DNS and
23097 DHCP services in Debian Edu to use the same LDAP objects for a given
23098 computer, to avoid the possibility of having a inconsistent state for
23099 a computer in LDAP (as in DHCP but no DNS entry or the other way
23100 around) and make it easier to add computers to LDAP.
</p
>
23102 <p
>I
've looked at how powerdns and dhcpd is using LDAP, and using this
23103 information finally found a solution that seem to work.
</p
>
23105 <p
>The old setup required three LDAP objects for a given computer.
23106 One forward DNS entry, one reverse DNS entry and one DHCP entry. If
23107 we switch powerdns to use its strict LDAP method (ldap-method=strict
23108 in pdns-debian-edu.conf), the forward and reverse DNS entries are
23109 merged into one while making it impossible to transfer the reverse map
23110 to a slave DNS server.
</p
>
23112 <p
>If we also replace the object class used to get the DNS related
23113 attributes to one allowing these attributes to be combined with the
23114 dhcphost object class, we can merge the DNS and DHCP entries into one.
23115 I
've written such object class in the dnsdomainaux.schema file (need
23116 proper OIDs, but that is a minor issue), and tested the setup. It
23117 seem to work.
</p
>
23119 <p
>With this test setup in place, we can get away with one LDAP object
23120 for both DNS and DHCP, and even the LTSP configuration I suggested in
23121 an earlier email. The combined LDAP object will look something like
23124 <blockquote
><pre
>
23125 dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
23127 objectClass: dhcphost
23128 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
23129 objectclass: dnsdomainaux
23130 associateddomain: hostname.intern
23131 arecord:
10.11.12.13
23132 dhcphwaddress: ethernet
00:
00:
00:
00:
00:
00
23133 dhcpstatements: fixed-address hostname
23135 </pre
></blockquote
>
23137 <p
>The DNS server uses the associateddomain and arecord entries, while
23138 the DHCP server uses the dhcphwaddress and dhcpstatements entries
23139 before asking DNS to resolve the fixed-adddress. LTSP will use
23140 dhcphwaddress or associateddomain and the ldapconfig* attributes.
</p
>
23142 <p
>I am not yet sure if I can get the DHCP server to look for its
23143 dhcphost in a different location, to allow us to put the objects
23144 outside the
"DHCP Config
" subtree, but hope to figure out a way to do
23145 that. If I can
't figure out a way to do that, we can still get rid of
23146 the hosts subtree and move all its content into the DHCP Config tree
23147 (which probably should be renamed to be more related to the new
23148 content. I suspect cn=dnsdhcp,ou=services or something like that
23149 might be a good place to put it.
</p
>
23151 <p
>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
23152 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.
</p
>
23157 <title>Idea for storing LTSP configuration in LDAP
</title>
23158 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_storing_LTSP_configuration_in_LDAP.html
</link>
23159 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_storing_LTSP_configuration_in_LDAP.html
</guid>
23160 <pubDate>Sun,
11 Jul
2010 22:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
23161 <description><p
>Vagrant mentioned on IRC today that ltsp_config now support
23162 sourcing files from /usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ on the thin
23163 clients, and that this can be used to fetch configuration from LDAP if
23164 Debian Edu choose to store configuration there.
</p
>
23166 <p
>Armed with this information, I got inspired and wrote a test module
23167 to get configuration from LDAP. The idea is to look up the MAC
23168 address of the client in LDAP, and look for attributes on the form
23169 ltspconfigsetting=value, and use this to export SETTING=value to the
23170 LTSP clients.
</p
>
23172 <p
>The goal is to be able to store the LTSP configuration attributes
23173 in a
"computer
" LDAP object used by both DNS and DHCP, and thus
23174 allowing us to store all information about a computer in one place.
</p
>
23176 <p
>This is a untested draft implementation, and I welcome feedback on
23177 this approach. A real LDAP schema for the ltspClientAux objectclass
23178 need to be written. Comments, suggestions, etc?
</p
>
23180 <blockquote
><pre
>
23181 # Store in /opt/ltsp/$arch/usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ldap-config
23183 # Fetch LTSP client settings from LDAP based on MAC address
23185 # Uses ethernet address as stored in the dhcpHost objectclass using
23186 # the dhcpHWAddress attribute or ethernet address stored in the
23187 # ieee802Device objectclass with the macAddress attribute.
23189 # This module is written to be schema agnostic, and only depend on the
23190 # existence of attribute names.
23192 # The LTSP configuration variables are saved directly using a
23193 # ltspConfig prefix and uppercasing the rest of the attribute name.
23194 # To set the SERVER variable, set the ltspConfigServer attribute.
23196 # Some LDAP schema should be created with all the relevant
23197 # configuration settings. Something like this should work:
23199 # objectclass (
1.1.2.2 NAME
'ltspClientAux
'
23202 # MAY ( ltspConfigServer $ ltsConfigSound $ ... )
23204 LDAPSERVER=$(debian-edu-ldapserver)
23205 if [
"$LDAPSERVER
" ] ; then
23206 LDAPBASE=$(debian-edu-ldapserver -b)
23207 for MAC in $(LANG=C ifconfig |grep -i hwaddr| awk
'{print $
5}
'|sort -u) ; do
23208 filter=
"(|(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet $MAC)(macAddress=$MAC))
"
23209 ldapsearch -h
"$LDAPSERVER
" -b
"$LDAPBASE
" -v -x
"$filter
" | \
23210 grep
'^ltspConfig
' | while read attr value ; do
23211 # Remove prefix and convert to upper case
23212 attr=$(echo $attr | sed
's/^ltspConfig//i
' | tr a-z A-Z)
23213 # bass value on to clients
23214 eval
"$attr=$value; export $attr
"
23218 </pre
></blockquote
>
23220 <p
>I
'm not sure this shell construction will work, because I suspect
23221 the while block might end up in a subshell causing the variables set
23222 there to not show up in ltsp-config, but if that is the case I am sure
23223 the code can be restructured to make sure the variables are passed on.
23224 I expect that can be solved with some testing. :)
</p
>
23226 <p
>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
23227 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.
</p
>
23229 <p
>Update
2010-
07-
17: I am aware of another effort to store LTSP
23230 configuration in LDAP that was created around year
2000 by
23231 <a href=
"http://www.pcxperience.com/thinclient/documentation/ldap.html
">PC
23232 Xperience, Inc.,
2000</a
>. I found its
23233 <a href=
"http://people.redhat.com/alikins/ltsp/ldap/
">files
</a
> on a
23234 personal home page over at redhat.com.
</p
>
23239 <title>jXplorer, a very nice LDAP GUI
</title>
23240 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/jXplorer__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html
</link>
23241 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/jXplorer__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html
</guid>
23242 <pubDate>Fri,
9 Jul
2010 12:
55:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
23243 <description><p
>Since
23244 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html
">my
23245 last post
</a
> about available LDAP tools in Debian, I was told about a
23246 LDAP GUI that is even better than luma. The java application
23247 <a href=
"http://jxplorer.org/
">jXplorer
</a
> is claimed to be capable of
23248 moving LDAP objects and subtrees using drag-and-drop, and can
23249 authenticate using Kerberos. I have only tested the Kerberos
23250 authentication, but do not have a LDAP setup allowing me to rewrite
23251 LDAP with my test user yet. It is
23252 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/j/jxplorer.html
">available in
23253 Debian
</a
> testing and unstable at the moment. The only problem I
23254 have with it is how it handle errors. If something go wrong, its
23255 non-intuitive behaviour require me to go through some query work list
23256 and remove the failing query. Nothing big, but very annoying.
</p
>
23261 <title>Lenny-
>Squeeze upgrades, apt vs aptitude with the Gnome desktop
</title>
23262 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__apt_vs_aptitude_with_the_Gnome_desktop.html
</link>
23263 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__apt_vs_aptitude_with_the_Gnome_desktop.html
</guid>
23264 <pubDate>Sat,
3 Jul
2010 23:
55:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
23265 <description><p
>Here is a short update on my
<a
23266 href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/
">my
23267 Debian Lenny-
>Squeeze upgrade testing
</a
>. Here is a summary of the
23268 difference for Gnome when it is upgraded by apt-get and aptitude. I
'm
23269 not reporting the status for KDE, because the upgrade crashes when
23270 aptitude try because of missing conflicts
23271 (
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
584861">#
584861</a
> and
23272 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
585716">#
585716</a
>).
</p
>
23274 <p
>At the end of the upgrade test script, dpkg -l is executed to get a
23275 complete list of the installed packages. Based on this I see these
23276 differences when I did a test run today. As usual, I do not really
23277 know what the correct set of packages would be, but thought it best to
23278 publish the difference.
</p
>
23280 <p
>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude
</p
>
23282 <blockquote
><p
>
23283 at-spi cpp-
4.3 finger gnome-spell gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
23284 libatspi1.0-
0 libcupsys2 libeel2-data libgail-common libgdl-
1-common
23285 libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin
23286 libgtksourceview-common libpt-
1.10.10-plugins-alsa
23287 libpt-
1.10.10-plugins-v4l libservlet2.4-java libxalan2-java
23288 libxerces2-java openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
23289 python-
4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gtkhtml2
23290 python-gtkmozembed svgalibg1 xserver-xephyr zip
23291 </p
></blockquote
>
23293 <p
>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude
</p
>
23295 <blockquote
><p
>
23296 bluez-utils dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop epiphany-gecko
23297 gnome-app-install gnome-mount gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager
23298 libao2 libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libbind9-
50
23299 libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-
11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcurl3
23300 libdirectfb-
1.0-
0 libdvdread3 libedata-cal1.2-
6 libedataserver1.2-
9
23301 libeel2-
2.20 libepc-
1.0-
1 libepc-ui-
1.0-
1 libexchange-storage1.2-
3
23302 libfaad0 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-
3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
23303 libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-
0 libgksuui1.0-
1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-
2
23304 libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-
1 libgnomeprint2.2-
0
23305 libgnomeprintui2.2-
0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-
0
23306 libgtksourceview1.0-
0 libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50
23307 libisccfg50 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick++
10
23308 libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4
23309 libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-
2.2 libosp5
23310 libparted1.8-
10 libpisock9 libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3
23311 libpt-
1.10.10 libraw1394-
8 libsensors3 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-
8
23312 libssh2-
1 libsuitesparse-
3.1.0 libswfdec-
0.6-
90 libtalloc1
23313 libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0 libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj
23314 libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3
23315 mysql-common swfdec-gnome totem-gstreamer wodim
23316 </p
></blockquote
>
23318 <p
>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get
</p
>
23320 <blockquote
><p
>
23321 gnome gnome-desktop-environment hamster-applet python-gnomeapplet
23322 python-gnomekeyring python-wnck rhythmbox-plugins xorg
23323 xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
23324 xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
23325 xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-video-all
23326 xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark xserver-xorg-video-ati
23327 xserver-xorg-video-chips xserver-xorg-video-cirrus
23328 xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
23329 xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
23330 xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-mach64
23331 xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
23332 xserver-xorg-video-nouveau xserver-xorg-video-nv
23333 xserver-xorg-video-r128 xserver-xorg-video-radeon
23334 xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd xserver-xorg-video-rendition
23335 xserver-xorg-video-s3 xserver-xorg-video-s3virge
23336 xserver-xorg-video-savage xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion
23337 xserver-xorg-video-sis xserver-xorg-video-sisusb
23338 xserver-xorg-video-tdfx xserver-xorg-video-tga
23339 xserver-xorg-video-trident xserver-xorg-video-tseng
23340 xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vmware
23341 xserver-xorg-video-voodoo
23342 </p
></blockquote
>
23344 <p
>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get
</p
>
23346 <blockquote
><p
>
23347 deskbar-applet xserver-xorg xserver-xorg-core
23348 xserver-xorg-input-wacom xserver-xorg-video-intel
23349 xserver-xorg-video-openchrome
23350 </p
></blockquote
>
23352 <p
>I was told on IRC that the xorg-xserver package was
23353 <a href=
"http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-xorg/xserver/xorg-server.git;a=commit;h=
9c8080d06c457932d3bfec021c69ac000aa60120
">changed
23354 in git
</a
> today to try to get apt-get to not remove xorg completely.
23355 No idea when it hits Squeeze, but when it does I hope it will reduce
23356 the difference somewhat.
23361 <title>Caching password, user and group on a roaming Debian laptop
</title>
23362 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Caching_password__user_and_group_on_a_roaming_Debian_laptop.html
</link>
23363 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Caching_password__user_and_group_on_a_roaming_Debian_laptop.html
</guid>
23364 <pubDate>Thu,
1 Jul
2010 11:
40:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
23365 <description><p
>For a laptop, centralized user directories and password checking is
23366 a bit troubling. Laptops are typically used also when not connected
23367 to the network, and it is vital for a user to be able to log in or
23368 unlock the screen saver also when a central server is unavailable.
23369 This is possible by caching passwords and directory information (user
23370 and group attributes) locally, and the packages to do so are available
23371 in Debian. Here follow two recipes to set this up in Debian/Squeeze.
23372 It is also possible to set up in Debian/Lenny, but require more manual
23373 setup there because pam-auth-update is missing in Lenny.
</p
>
23375 <h2
>LDAP/Kerberos + nscd + libpam-ccreds + libpam-mklocaluser/pam_mkhomedir
</h2
>
23377 This is the traditional method with a twist. The password caching is
23378 provided by libpam-ccreds (version
10-
4 or later is needed on
23379 Squeeze), and the directory caching is done by nscd. The directory
23380 lookup and password checking is done using LDAP. If one want to use
23381 Kerberos for password checking the libpam-ldapd package can be
23382 replaced with libpam-krb5 or libpam-heimdal. If one is happy having a
23383 local home directory with the path listed in LDAP, one can use the
23384 pam_mkhomedir module from pam-modules to make this happen instead of
23385 using libpam-mklocaluser. A setup for pam-auth-update to enable
23386 pam_mkhomedir will have to be written until a fix for
23387 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
568577">bug #
568577</a
> is in the
23388 archive. Because I believe it is a bad idea to have local home
23389 directories using misleading paths like /site/server/partition/, I
23390 prefer to create a local user with the home directory in /home/. This
23391 is done using the libpam-mklocaluser package.
</p
>
23393 <p
>These packages need to be installed and configured
</p
>
23395 <blockquote
><pre
>
23396 libnss-ldapd libpam-ldapd nscd libpam-ccreds libpam-mklocaluser
23397 </pre
></blockquote
>
23399 <p
>The ldapd packages will ask for LDAP connection information, and
23400 one have to fill in the values that fits ones own site. Make sure the
23401 PAM part uses encrypted connections, to make sure the password is not
23402 sent in clear text to the LDAP server. I
've been unable to get TLS
23403 certificate checking for a self signed certificate working, which make
23404 LDAP authentication unsafe for Debian Edu (nslcd is not checking if it
23405 is talking to the correct LDAP server), and very much welcome feedback
23406 on how to get this working.
</p
>
23408 <p
>Because nscd do not have a default configuration fit for offline
23409 caching until
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
485282">bug #
485282</a
>
23410 is fixed, this configuration should be used instead of the one
23411 currently in /etc/nscd.conf. The changes are in the fields
23412 reload-count and positive-time-to-live, and is based on the
23413 instructions I found in the
23414 <a href=
"http://www.flyn.org/laptopldap/
">LDAP for Mobile Laptops
</a
>
23415 instructions by Flyn Computing.
</p
>
23417 <blockquote
><pre
>
23419 reload-count unlimited
23422 enable-cache passwd yes
23423 positive-time-to-live passwd
2592000
23424 negative-time-to-live passwd
20
23425 suggested-size passwd
211
23426 check-files passwd yes
23427 persistent passwd yes
23429 max-db-size passwd
33554432
23430 auto-propagate passwd yes
23432 enable-cache group yes
23433 positive-time-to-live group
2592000
23434 negative-time-to-live group
20
23435 suggested-size group
211
23436 check-files group yes
23437 persistent group yes
23439 max-db-size group
33554432
23440 auto-propagate group yes
23442 enable-cache hosts no
23443 positive-time-to-live hosts
2592000
23444 negative-time-to-live hosts
20
23445 suggested-size hosts
211
23446 check-files hosts yes
23447 persistent hosts yes
23449 max-db-size hosts
33554432
23451 enable-cache services yes
23452 positive-time-to-live services
2592000
23453 negative-time-to-live services
20
23454 suggested-size services
211
23455 check-files services yes
23456 persistent services yes
23457 shared services yes
23458 max-db-size services
33554432
23459 </pre
></blockquote
>
23461 <p
>While we wait for a mechanism to update /etc/nsswitch.conf
23462 automatically like the one provided in
23463 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
496915">bug #
496915</a
>, the file
23464 content need to be manually replaced to ensure LDAP is used as the
23465 directory service on the machine. /etc/nsswitch.conf should normally
23466 look like this:
</p
>
23468 <blockquote
><pre
>
23472 hosts: files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns mdns4
23478 netgroup: files ldap
23479 </pre
></blockquote
>
23481 <p
>The important parts are that ldap is listed last for passwd, group,
23482 shadow and netgroup.
</p
>
23484 <p
>With these changes in place, any user in LDAP will be able to log
23485 in locally on the machine using for example kdm, get a local home
23486 directory created and have the password as well as user and group
23489 <h2
>LDAP/Kerberos + nss-updatedb + libpam-ccreds +
23490 libpam-mklocaluser/pam_mkhomedir
</h2
>
23492 <p
>Because nscd have had its share of problems, and seem to have
23493 problems doing proper caching, I
've seen suggestions and recipes to
23494 use nss-updatedb to copy parts of the LDAP database locally when the
23495 LDAP database is available. I have not tested such setup, because I
23496 discovered sssd.
</p
>
23498 <h2
>LDAP/Kerberos + sssd + libpam-mklocaluser
</h2
>
23500 <p
>A more flexible and robust setup than the nscd combination
23501 mentioned earlier that has shown up recently, is the
23502 <a href=
"https://fedorahosted.org/sssd/
">sssd
</a
> package from Redhat.
23503 It is part of the
<a href=
"http://www.freeipa.org/
">FreeIPA
</A
> project
23504 to provide a Active Directory like directory service for Linux
23505 machines. The sssd system combines the caching of passwords and user
23506 information into one package, and remove the need for nscd and
23507 libpam-ccreds. It support LDAP and Kerberos, but not NIS. Version
23508 1.2 do not support netgroups, but it is said that it will support this
23509 in version
1.5 expected to show up later in
2010. Because the
23510 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/sssd.html
">sssd package
</a
>
23511 was missing in Debian, I ended up co-maintaining it with Werner, and
23512 version
1.2 is now in testing.
23514 <p
>These packages need to be installed and configured to get the
23515 roaming setup I want
</p
>
23517 <blockquote
><pre
>
23518 libpam-sss libnss-sss libpam-mklocaluser
23519 </pre
></blockquote
>
23521 The complete setup of sssd is done by editing/creating
23522 <tt
>/etc/sssd/sssd.conf
</tt
>.
23524 <blockquote
><pre
>
23526 config_file_version =
2
23527 reconnection_retries =
3
23529 services = nss, pam
23533 filter_groups = root
23534 filter_users = root
23535 reconnection_retries =
3
23538 reconnection_retries =
3
23542 cache_credentials = true
23545 auth_provider = ldap
23546 chpass_provider = ldap
23548 ldap_uri = ldap://ldap
23549 ldap_search_base = dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
23550 ldap_tls_reqcert = never
23551 ldap_tls_cacert = /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt
23552 </pre
></blockquote
>
23554 <p
>I got the same problem here with certificate checking. Had to set
23555 "ldap_tls_reqcert = never
" to get it working.
</p
>
23557 <p
>With the libnss-sss package in testing at the moment, the
23558 nsswitch.conf file is update automatically, so there is no need to
23559 modify it manually.
</p
>
23561 <p
>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
23562 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.
</p
>
23567 <title>LUMA, a very nice LDAP GUI
</title>
23568 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html
</link>
23569 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html
</guid>
23570 <pubDate>Mon,
28 Jun
2010 00:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
23571 <description><p
>The last few days I have been looking into the status of the LDAP
23572 directory in Debian Edu, and in the process I started to miss a GUI
23573 tool to browse the LDAP tree. The only one I was able to find in
23574 Debian/Squeeze and Lenny is
23575 <a href=
"http://luma.sourceforge.net/
">LUMA
</a
>, which has proved to
23576 be a great tool to get a overview of the current LDAP directory
23577 populated by default in Skolelinux. Thanks to it, I have been able to
23578 find empty and obsolete subtrees, misplaced objects and duplicate
23579 objects. It will be installed by default in Debian/Squeeze. If you
23580 are working with LDAP, give it a go. :)
</p
>
23582 <p
>I did notice one problem with it I have not had time to report to
23583 the BTS yet. There is no .desktop file in the package, so the tool do
23584 not show up in the Gnome and KDE menus, but only deep down in in the
23585 Debian submenu in KDE. I hope that can be fixed before Squeeze is
23586 released.
</p
>
23588 <p
>I have not yet been able to get it to modify the tree yet. I would
23589 like to move objects and remove subtrees directly in the GUI, but have
23590 not found a way to do that with LUMA yet. So in the mean time, I use
23591 <a href=
"http://www.lichteblau.com/ldapvi/
">ldapvi
</a
> for that.
</p
>
23593 <p
>If you have tips on other GUI tools for LDAP that might be useful
23594 in Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.
</p
>
23596 <p
>Update
2010-
06-
29: Ross Reedstrom tipped us about the
23597 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/g/gq.html
">gq
</a
> package as a
23598 useful GUI alternative. It seem like a good tool, but is unmaintained
23599 in Debian and got a RC bug keeping it out of Squeeze. Unless that
23600 changes, it will not be an option for Debian Edu based on Squeeze.
</p
>
23605 <title>Idea for a change to LDAP schemas allowing DNS and DHCP info to be combined into one object
</title>
23606 <link>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
</link>
23607 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">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
</guid>
23608 <pubDate>Thu,
24 Jun
2010 00:
35:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
23609 <description><p
>A while back, I
23610 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html
">complained
23611 about the fact
</a
> that it is not possible with the provided schemas
23612 for storing DNS and DHCP information in LDAP to combine the two sets
23613 of information into one LDAP object representing a computer.
</p
>
23615 <p
>In the mean time, I discovered that a simple fix would be to make
23616 the dhcpHost object class auxiliary, to allow it to be combined with
23617 the dNSDomain object class, and thus forming one object for one
23618 computer when storing both DHCP and DNS information in LDAP.
</p
>
23620 <p
>If I understand this correctly, it is not safe to do this change
23621 without also changing the assigned number for the object class, and I
23622 do not know enough about LDAP schema design to do that properly for
23623 Debian Edu.
</p
>
23625 <p
>Anyway, for future reference, this is how I believe we could change
23627 <a href=
"http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dhc-ldap-schema-
00">DHCP
23628 schema
</a
> to solve at least part of the problem with the LDAP schemas
23629 available today from IETF.
</p
>
23632 --- dhcp.schema (revision
65192)
23633 +++ dhcp.schema (working copy)
23634 @@ -
376,
7 +
376,
7 @@
23635 objectclass (
2.16.840.1.113719.1.203.6.6
23636 NAME
'dhcpHost
'
23637 DESC
'This represents information about a particular client
'
23639 + SUP top AUXILIARY
23641 MAY (dhcpLeaseDN $ dhcpHWAddress $ dhcpOptionsDN $ dhcpStatements $ dhcpComments $ dhcpOption)
23642 X-NDS_CONTAINMENT (
'dhcpService
' 'dhcpSubnet
' 'dhcpGroup
') )
23645 <p
>I very much welcome clues on how to do this properly for Debian
23646 Edu/Squeeze. We provide the DHCP schema in our debian-edu-config
23647 package, and should thus be free to rewrite it as we see fit.
</p
>
23649 <p
>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
23650 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.
</p
>
23655 <title>Calling tasksel like the installer, while still getting useful output
</title>
23656 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Calling_tasksel_like_the_installer__while_still_getting_useful_output.html
</link>
23657 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Calling_tasksel_like_the_installer__while_still_getting_useful_output.html
</guid>
23658 <pubDate>Wed,
16 Jun
2010 14:
55:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
23659 <description><p
>A few times I have had the need to simulate the way tasksel
23660 installs packages during the normal debian-installer run. Until now,
23661 I have ended up letting tasksel do the work, with the annoying problem
23662 of not getting any feedback at all when something fails (like a
23663 conffile question from dpkg or a download that fails), using code like
23666 <blockquote
><pre
>
23667 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
23668 tasksel --new-install
23669 </pre
></blockquote
>
23671 This would invoke tasksel, let its automatic task selection pick the
23672 tasks to install, and continue to install the requested tasks without
23673 any output what so ever.
23675 Recently I revisited this problem while working on the automatic
23676 package upgrade testing, because tasksel would some times hang without
23677 any useful feedback, and I want to see what is going on when it
23678 happen. Then it occured to me, I can parse the output from tasksel
23679 when asked to run in test mode, and use that aptitude command line
23680 printed by tasksel then to simulate the tasksel run. I ended up using
23683 <blockquote
><pre
>
23684 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
23685 cmd=
"$(in_target tasksel -t --new-install | sed
's/debconf-apt-progress -- //
')
"
23687 </pre
></blockquote
>
23689 <p
>The content of $cmd is typically something like
"<tt
>aptitude -q
23690 --without-recommends -o APT::Install-Recommends=no -y install
23691 ~t^desktop$ ~t^gnome-desktop$ ~t^laptop$ ~pstandard ~prequired
23692 ~pimportant
</tt
>", which will install the gnome desktop task, the
23693 laptop task and all packages with priority standard , required and
23694 important, just like tasksel would have done it during
23695 installation.
</p
>
23697 <p
>A better approach is probably to extend tasksel to be able to
23698 install packages without using debconf-apt-progress, for use cases
23699 like this.
</p
>
23704 <title>Officeshots taking shape
</title>
23705 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_taking_shape.html
</link>
23706 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_taking_shape.html
</guid>
23707 <pubDate>Sun,
13 Jun
2010 11:
40:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
23708 <description><p
>For those of us caring about document exchange and
23709 interoperability,
<a href=
"http://www.officeshots.org/
">OfficeShots
</a
>
23710 is a great service. It is to ODF documents what
23711 <a href=
"http://browsershots.org/
">BrowserShots
</a
> is for web
23714 <p
>A while back, I was contacted by Knut Yrvin at the part of Nokia
23715 that used to be Trolltech, who wanted to help the OfficeShots project
23716 and wondered if the University of Oslo where I work would be
23717 interested in supporting the project. I helped him to navigate his
23718 request to the right people at work, and his request was answered with
23719 a spot in the machine room with power and network connected, and Knut
23720 arranged funding for a machine to fill the spot. The machine is
23721 administrated by the OfficeShots people, so I do not have daily
23722 contact with its progress, and thus from time to time check back to
23723 see how the project is doing.
</p
>
23725 <p
>Today I had a look, and was happy to see that the Dell box in our
23726 machine room now is the host for several virtual machines running as
23727 OfficeShots factories, and the project is able to render ODF documents
23728 in
17 different document processing implementation on Linux and
23729 Windows. This is great.
</p
>
23734 <title>Lenny-
>Squeeze upgrades, removals by apt and aptitude
</title>
23735 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__removals_by_apt_and_aptitude.html
</link>
23736 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__removals_by_apt_and_aptitude.html
</guid>
23737 <pubDate>Sun,
13 Jun
2010 09:
05:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
23738 <description><p
>My
23739 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html
">testing
23740 of Debian upgrades
</a
> from Lenny to Squeeze continues, and I
've
23741 finally made the upgrade logs available from
23742 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/
">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/
</a
>.
23743 I am now testing dist-upgrade of Gnome and KDE in a chroot using both
23744 apt and aptitude, and found their differences interesting. This time
23745 I will only focus on their removal plans.
</p
>
23747 <p
>After installing a Gnome desktop and the laptop task, apt-get wants
23748 to remove
72 packages when dist-upgrading from Lenny to Squeeze. The
23749 surprising part is that it want to remove xorg and all
23750 xserver-xorg-video* drivers. Clearly not a good choice, but I am not
23751 sure why. When asking aptitude to do the same, it want to remove
129
23752 packages, but most of them are library packages I suspect are no
23753 longer needed. Both of them want to remove bluetooth packages, which
23754 I do not know. Perhaps these bluetooth packages are obsolete?
</p
>
23756 <p
>For KDE, apt-get want to remove
82 packages, among them kdebase
23757 which seem like a bad idea and xorg the same way as with Gnome. Asking
23758 aptitude for the same, it wants to remove
192 packages, none which are
23759 too surprising.
</p
>
23761 <p
>I guess the removal of xorg during upgrades should be investigated
23762 and avoided, and perhaps others as well. Here are the complete list
23763 of planned removals. The complete logs is available from the URL
23764 above. Note if you want to repeat these tests, that the upgrade test
23765 for kde+apt-get hung in the tasksel setup because of dpkg asking
23766 conffile questions. No idea why. I worked around it by using
23767 '<tt
>echo
>> /proc/
<em
>pidofdpkg
</em
>/fd/
0</tt
>' to tell dpkg to
23768 continue.
</p
>
23770 <p
><b
>apt-get gnome
72</b
>
23771 <br
>bluez-gnome cupsddk-drivers deskbar-applet gnome
23772 gnome-desktop-environment gnome-network-admin gtkhtml3.14
23773 iceweasel-gnome-support libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libgdl-
1-
0
23774 libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libmetacity0 libslab0 libxcb-xlib0
23775 nautilus-cd-burner python-gnome2-desktop python-gnome2-extras
23776 serpentine swfdec-mozilla update-manager xorg xserver-xorg
23777 xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
23778 xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
23779 xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
23780 xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
23781 xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
23782 xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
23783 xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
23784 xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
23785 xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
23786 xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
23787 xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
23788 xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
23789 xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
23790 xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
23791 xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
23792 xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
23793 xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
23794 xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
23795 xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
23796 xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
23797 xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
23798 xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-
1.9
23799 xulrunner-
1.9-gnome-support
</p
>
23801 <p
><b
>aptitude gnome
129</b
>
23803 <br
>bluez-gnome bluez-utils cpp-
4.3 cupsddk-drivers dhcdbd
23804 djvulibre-desktop finger gnome-app-install gnome-mount
23805 gnome-network-admin gnome-spell gnome-vfs-obexftp
23806 gnome-volume-manager gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs gtkhtml3.14 libao2
23807 libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
23808 libcamel1.2-
11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcupsys2 libcurl3 libdatrie0
23809 libdirectfb-
1.0-
0 libdvdread3 libedataserver1.2-
9 libeel2-
2.20
23810 libeel2-data libepc-
1.0-
1 libepc-ui-
1.0-
1 libfaad0 libgail-common
23811 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-
3 libgda3-common libgdl-
1-
0 libgdl-
1-common
23812 libggz2 libggzcore9 libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-
0 libgksuui1.0-
1 libgmyth0
23813 libgnomecups1.0-
1 libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libgnomeprint2.2-
0
23814 libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-
0 libgnomeprintui2.2-common
23815 libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-
0
23816 libgtksourceview-common libgtksourceview1.0-
0 libgucharmap6
23817 libhesiod0 libicu38 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 libmagick++
10
23818 libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmetacity0 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off
23819 libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-
2.2
23820 libosp5 libparted1.8-
10 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-
1.10.10
23821 libpt-
1.10.10-plugins-alsa libpt-
1.10.10-plugins-v4l libraw1394-
8
23822 libsensors3 libslab0 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-
8 libssh2-
1
23823 libsuitesparse-
3.1.0 libswfdec-
0.6-
90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10
23824 libtrackerclient0 libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0
23825 libxerces2-java libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6
23826 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common nautilus-cd-burner
23827 openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
23828 python-
4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gnome2-desktop
23829 python-gnome2-extras python-gtkhtml2 python-gtkmozembed
23830 python-numeric python-sexy serpentine svgalibg1 swfdec-gnome
23831 swfdec-mozilla totem-gstreamer update-manager wodim
23832 xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
23833 xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
23836 <p
><b
>apt-get kde
82</b
>
23838 <br
>cupsddk-drivers karm kaudiocreator kcoloredit kcontrol kde kde-core
23839 kdeaddons kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-bin kdebase-bin-kde3
23840 kdebase-kio-plugins kdesktop kdeutils khelpcenter kicker
23841 kicker-applets knewsticker kolourpaint konq-plugins konqueror korn
23842 kpersonalizer kscreensaver ksplash libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libkiten1
23843 libxcb-xlib0 quanta superkaramba texlive-base-bin xorg xserver-xorg
23844 xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
23845 xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
23846 xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
23847 xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
23848 xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
23849 xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
23850 xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
23851 xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
23852 xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
23853 xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
23854 xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
23855 xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
23856 xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
23857 xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
23858 xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
23859 xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
23860 xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
23861 xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
23862 xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
23863 xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
23864 xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
23865 xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-
1.9</p
>
23867 <p
><b
>aptitude kde
192</b
>
23868 <br
>bluez-utils cpp-
4.3 cupsddk-drivers cvs dcoprss dhcdbd
23869 djvulibre-desktop dosfstools eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
23870 ghostscript-x imlib-base imlib11 indi kandy karm kasteroids
23871 kaudiocreator kbackgammon kbstate kcoloredit kcontrol kcron kdat
23872 kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
23873 kdebase-bin-kde3 kdebase-kio-plugins kdeedu-data
23874 kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data
23875 kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
23876 kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdeprint kdesktop kdessh
23877 kdict kdnssd kdvi kedit keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs
23878 kghostview khelpcenter khexedit kiconedit kitchensync klatin
23879 klickety kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmoon kmrml kodo kolourpaint
23880 kooka korn kpager kpdf kpercentage kpf kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler
23881 krec kregexpeditor ksayit ksim ksirc ksirtet ksmiletris ksmserver
23882 ksnake ksokoban ksplash ksvg ksysv ktip ktnef kuickshow kverbos
23883 kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kworldclock
23884 kxsldbg libakode2 libao2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
23885 libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
23886 libavahi-core5 libavc1394-
0 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
23887 libboost-python1.34
.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0 libdatrie0
23888 libdirectfb-
1.0-
0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
23889 libgail-common libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-
0
23890 libicu38 libiec61883-
0 libindex0 libiw29 libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1
23891 libkdeedu3 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkiten1 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
23892 libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
23893 libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 libmagick10 libmimelib1c2a
23894 libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9
23895 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-
8 libsmbios2
23896 libssh2-
1 libsuitesparse-
3.1.0 libtalloc1 libtiff-tools
23897 libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0 libxerces2-java
23898 libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 mpeglib networkstatus
23899 openoffice.org-writer2latex pmount poster psutils quanta quanta-data
23900 superkaramba svgalibg1 tex-common texlive-base texlive-base-bin
23901 texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended
23902 xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
23903 xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
23904 xulrunner-
1.9</p
>
23910 <title>Automatic upgrade testing from Lenny to Squeeze
</title>
23911 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html
</link>
23912 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html
</guid>
23913 <pubDate>Fri,
11 Jun
2010 22:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
23914 <description><p
>The last few days I have done some upgrade testing in Debian, to
23915 see if the upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze will go smoothly. A few bugs
23916 have been discovered and reported in the process
23917 (
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
585410">#
585410</a
> in nagios3-cgi,
23918 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
584879">#
584879</a
> already fixed in
23919 enscript and
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
584861">#
584861</a
> in
23920 kdebase-workspace-data), and to get a more regular testing going on, I
23921 am working on a script to automate the test.
</p
>
23923 <p
>The idea is to create a Lenny chroot and use tasksel to install a
23924 Gnome or KDE desktop installation inside the chroot before upgrading
23925 it. To ensure no services are started in the chroot, a policy-rc.d
23926 script is inserted. To make sure tasksel believe it is to install a
23927 desktop on a laptop, the tasksel tests are replaced in the chroot
23928 (only acceptable because this is a throw-away chroot).
</p
>
23930 <p
>A naive upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze using aptitude dist-upgrade
23931 currently always fail because udev refuses to upgrade with the kernel
23932 in Lenny, so to avoid that problem the file /etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
23933 is created. The bug report
23934 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
566000">#
566000</a
> make me suspect
23935 this problem do not trigger in a chroot, but I touch the file anyway
23936 to make sure the upgrade go well. Testing on virtual and real
23937 hardware have failed me because of udev so far, and creating this file
23938 do the trick in such settings anyway. This is a
23939 <a href=
"http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/debian-
26/failed-dist-upgrade-due-to-udev-config_sysfs_deprecated-nonsense-
804130/
">known
23940 issue
</a
> and the current udev behaviour is intended by the udev
23941 maintainer because he lack the resources to rewrite udev to keep
23942 working with old kernels or something like that. I really wish the
23943 udev upstream would keep udev backwards compatible, to avoid such
23944 upgrade problem, but given that they fail to do so, I guess
23945 documenting the way out of this mess is the best option we got for
23946 Debian Squeeze.
</p
>
23948 <p
>Anyway, back to the task at hand, testing upgrades. This test
23949 script, which I call
<tt
>upgrade-test
</tt
> for now, is doing the
23952 <blockquote
><pre
>
23956 if [
"$
1" ] ; then
23965 exec
&lt; /dev/null
23967 mirror=http://ftp.skolelinux.org/debian
23968 tmpdir=chroot-$from-upgrade-$to-$desktop
23970 debootstrap $from $tmpdir $mirror
23971 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
23972 cat
> $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d
&lt;
&lt;EOF
23976 chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d
23978 umount $tmpdir/proc
23980 mount -t proc proc $tmpdir/proc
23981 # Make sure proc is unmounted also on failure
23982 trap exit_cleanup EXIT INT
23984 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y install debconf-utils
23986 # Make sure tasksel autoselection trigger. It need the test scripts
23987 # to return the correct answers.
23988 echo tasksel tasksel/desktop multiselect $desktop | \
23989 chroot $tmpdir debconf-set-selections
23991 # Include the desktop and laptop task
23992 for test in desktop laptop ; do
23993 echo
> $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test
&lt;
&lt;EOF
23997 chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test
24000 DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
24001 DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical
24002 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND DEBIAN_PRIORITY
24003 chroot $tmpdir tasksel --new-install
24005 echo deb $mirror $to main
> $tmpdir/etc/apt/sources.list
24006 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
24007 touch $tmpdir/etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
24008 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y dist-upgrade
24010 </pre
></blockquote
>
24012 <p
>I suspect it would be useful to test upgrades with both apt-get and
24013 with aptitude, but I have not had time to look at how they behave
24014 differently so far. I hope to get a cron job running to do the test
24015 regularly and post the result on the web. The Gnome upgrade currently
24016 work, while the KDE upgrade fail because of the bug in
24017 kdebase-workspace-data
</p
>
24019 <p
>I am not quite sure what kind of extract from the huge upgrade logs
24020 (KDE
167 KiB, Gnome
516 KiB) it make sense to include in this blog
24021 post, so I will refrain from trying. I can report that for Gnome,
24022 aptitude report
760 packages upgraded,
448 newly installed,
129 to
24023 remove and
1 not upgraded and
1024MB need to be downloaded while for
24024 KDE the same numbers are
702 packages upgraded,
507 newly installed,
24025 193 to remove and
0 not upgraded and
1117MB need to be downloaded
</p
>
24027 <p
>I am very happy to notice that the Gnome desktop + laptop upgrade
24028 is able to migrate to dependency based boot sequencing and parallel
24029 booting without a hitch. Was unsure if there were still bugs with
24030 packages failing to clean up their obsolete init.d script during
24031 upgrades, and no such problem seem to affect the Gnome desktop+laptop
24032 packages.
</p
>
24037 <title>Upstart or sysvinit - as init.d scripts see it
</title>
24038 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Upstart_or_sysvinit___as_init_d_scripts_see_it.html
</link>
24039 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Upstart_or_sysvinit___as_init_d_scripts_see_it.html
</guid>
24040 <pubDate>Sun,
6 Jun
2010 23:
55:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
24041 <description><p
>If Debian is to migrate to upstart on Linux, I expect some init.d
24042 scripts to migrate (some of) their operations to upstart job while
24043 keeping the init.d for hurd and kfreebsd. The packages with such
24044 needs will need a way to get their init.d scripts to behave
24045 differently when used with sysvinit and with upstart. Because of
24046 this, I had a look at the environment variables set when a init.d
24047 script is running under upstart, and when it is not.
</p
>
24049 <p
>With upstart, I notice these environment variables are set when a
24050 script is started from rcS.d/ (ignoring some irrelevant ones like
24051 COLUMNS):
</p
>
24053 <blockquote
><pre
>
24059 UPSTART_EVENTS=startup
24061 UPSTART_JOB=rc-sysinit
24062 </pre
></blockquote
>
24064 <p
>With sysvinit, these environment variables are set for the same
24067 <blockquote
><pre
>
24068 INIT_VERSION=sysvinit-
2.88
24073 </pre
></blockquote
>
24075 <p
>The RUNLEVEL and PREVLEVEL environment variables passed on from
24076 sysvinit are not set by upstart. Not sure if it is intentional or not
24077 to not be compatible with sysvinit in this regard.
</p
>
24079 <p
>For scripts needing to behave differently when upstart is used,
24080 looking for the UPSTART_JOB environment variable seem to be a good
24086 <title>A manual for standards wars...
</title>
24087 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_manual_for_standards_wars___.html
</link>
24088 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_manual_for_standards_wars___.html
</guid>
24089 <pubDate>Sun,
6 Jun
2010 14:
15:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
24090 <description><p
>Via the
24091 <a href=
"http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/robweir/antic-atom/~
3/QzU4RgoAGMg/weekly-links-
10.html
">blog
24092 of Rob Weir
</a
> I came across the very interesting essay named
24093 <a href=
"http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/shapiro/wars.pdf
">The Art of
24094 Standards Wars
</a
> (PDF
25 pages). I recommend it for everyone
24095 following the standards wars of today.
</p
>
24100 <title>Sitesummary tip: Listing computer hardware models used at site
</title>
24101 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sitesummary_tip__Listing_computer_hardware_models_used_at_site.html
</link>
24102 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sitesummary_tip__Listing_computer_hardware_models_used_at_site.html
</guid>
24103 <pubDate>Thu,
3 Jun
2010 12:
05:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
24104 <description><p
>When using sitesummary at a site to track machines, it is possible
24105 to get a list of the machine types in use thanks to the DMI
24106 information extracted from each machine. The script to do so is
24107 included in the sitesummary package, and here is example output from
24108 the Skolelinux build servers:
</p
>
24110 <blockquote
><pre
>
24111 maintainer:~# /usr/lib/sitesummary/hardware-model-summary
24113 Dell Computer Corporation
1
24116 eserver xSeries
345 -[
8670M1X]-
1
24120 </pre
></blockquote
>
24122 <p
>The quality of the report depend on the quality of the DMI tables
24123 provided in each machine. Here there are Intel machines without model
24124 information listed with Intel as vendor and no model, and virtual Xen
24125 machines listed as [no-dmi-info]. One can add -l as a command line
24126 option to list the individual machines.
</p
>
24128 <p
>A larger list is
24129 <a href=
"http://narvikskolen.no/sitesummary/
">available from the the
24130 city of Narvik
</a
>, which uses Skolelinux on all their shools and also
24131 provide the basic sitesummary report publicly. In their report there
24132 are ~
1400 machines. I know they use both Ubuntu and Skolelinux on
24133 their machines, and as sitesummary is available in both distributions,
24134 it is trivial to get all of them to report to the same central
24135 collector.
</p
>
24140 <title>KDM fail at boot with NVidia cards - and no one try to fix it?
</title>
24141 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/KDM_fail_at_boot_with_NVidia_cards___and_no_one_try_to_fix_it_.html
</link>
24142 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/KDM_fail_at_boot_with_NVidia_cards___and_no_one_try_to_fix_it_.html
</guid>
24143 <pubDate>Tue,
1 Jun
2010 17:
05:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
24144 <description><p
>It is strange to watch how a bug in Debian causing KDM to fail to
24145 start at boot when an NVidia video card is used is handled. The
24146 problem seem to be that the nvidia X.org driver uses a long time to
24147 initialize, and this duration is longer than kdm is configured to
24150 <p
>I came across two bugs related to this issue,
24151 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
583312">#
583312</a
> initially filed
24152 against initscripts and passed on to nvidia-glx when it became obvious
24153 that the nvidia drivers were involved, and
24154 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
524751">#
524751</a
> initially filed against
24155 kdm and passed on to src:nvidia-graphics-drivers for unknown reasons.
</p
>
24157 <p
>To me, it seem that no-one is interested in actually solving the
24158 problem nvidia video card owners experience and make sure the Debian
24159 distribution work out of the box for these users. The nvidia driver
24160 maintainers expect kdm to be set up to wait longer, while kdm expect
24161 the nvidia driver maintainers to fix the driver to start faster, and
24162 while they wait for each other I guess the users end up switching to a
24163 distribution that work for them. I have no idea what the solution is,
24164 but I am pretty sure that waiting for each other is not it.
</p
>
24166 <p
>I wonder why we end up handling bugs this way.
</p
>
24171 <title>Parallellized boot seem to hold up well in Debian/testing
</title>
24172 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellized_boot_seem_to_hold_up_well_in_Debian_testing.html
</link>
24173 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellized_boot_seem_to_hold_up_well_in_Debian_testing.html
</guid>
24174 <pubDate>Thu,
27 May
2010 23:
55:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
24175 <description><p
>A few days ago, parallel booting was enabled in Debian/testing.
24176 The feature seem to hold up pretty well, but three fairly serious
24177 issues are known and should be solved:
24179 <p
><ul
>
24181 <li
>The wicd package seen to
24182 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
508289">break NFS mounting
</a
> and
24183 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
581586">network setup
</a
> when
24184 parallel booting is enabled. No idea why, but the wicd maintainer
24185 seem to be on the case.
</li
>
24187 <li
>The nvidia X driver seem to
24188 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
583312">have a race condition
</a
>
24189 triggered more easily when parallel booting is in effect. The
24190 maintainer is on the case.
</li
>
24192 <li
>The sysv-rc package fail to properly enable dependency based boot
24193 sequencing (the shutdown is broken) when old file-rc users
24194 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
575080">try to switch back
</a
> to
24195 sysv-rc. One way to solve it would be for file-rc to create
24196 /etc/init.d/.legacy-bootordering, and another is to try to make
24197 sysv-rc more robust. Will investigate some more and probably upload a
24198 workaround in sysv-rc to help those trying to move from file-rc to
24199 sysv-rc get a working shutdown.
</li
>
24201 </ul
></p
>
24203 <p
>All in all not many surprising issues, and all of them seem
24204 solvable before Squeeze is released. In addition to these there are
24205 some packages with bugs in their dependencies and run level settings,
24206 which I expect will be fixed in a reasonable time span.
</p
>
24208 <p
>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
24209 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
24210 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org
">the
24211 list of usertagged bugs related to this
</a
>.
</p
>
24213 <p
>Update: Correct bug number to file-rc issue.
</p
>
24218 <title>More flexible firmware handling in debian-installer
</title>
24219 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/More_flexible_firmware_handling_in_debian_installer.html
</link>
24220 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/More_flexible_firmware_handling_in_debian_installer.html
</guid>
24221 <pubDate>Sat,
22 May
2010 21:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
24222 <description><p
>After a long break from debian-installer development, I finally
24223 found time today to return to the project. Having to spend less time
24224 working dependency based boot in debian, as it is almost complete now,
24225 definitely helped freeing some time.
</p
>
24227 <p
>A while back, I ran into a problem while working on Debian Edu. We
24228 include some firmware packages on the Debian Edu CDs, those needed to
24229 get disk and network controllers working. Without having these
24230 firmware packages available during installation, it is impossible to
24231 install Debian Edu on the given machine, and because our target group
24232 are non-technical people, asking them to provide firmware packages on
24233 an external medium is a support pain. Initially, I expected it to be
24234 enough to include the firmware packages on the CD to get
24235 debian-installer to find and use them. This proved to be wrong.
24236 Next, I hoped it was enough to symlink the relevant firmware packages
24237 to some useful location on the CD (tried /cdrom/ and
24238 /cdrom/firmware/). This also proved to not work, and at this point I
24239 found time to look at the debian-installer code to figure out what was
24240 going to work.
</p
>
24242 <p
>The firmware loading code is in the hw-detect package, and a closer
24243 look revealed that it would only look for firmware packages outside
24244 the installation media, so the CD was never checked for firmware
24245 packages. It would only check USB sticks, floppies and other
24246 "external
" media devices. Today I changed it to also look in the
24247 /cdrom/firmware/ directory on the mounted CD or DVD, which should
24248 solve the problem I ran into with Debian edu. I also changed it to
24249 look in /firmware/, to make sure the installer also find firmware
24250 provided in the initrd when booting the installer via PXE, to allow us
24251 to provide the same feature in the PXE setup included in Debian
24254 <p
>To make sure firmware deb packages with a license questions are not
24255 activated without asking if the license is accepted, I extended
24256 hw-detect to look for preinst scripts in the firmware packages, and
24257 run these before activating the firmware during installation. The
24258 license question is asked using debconf in the preinst, so this should
24259 solve the issue for the firmware packages I have looked at so far.
</p
>
24261 <p
>If you want to discuss the details of these features, please
24262 contact us on debian-boot@lists.debian.org.
</p
>
24267 <title>Pieces of the roaming laptop puzzle in Debian
</title>
24268 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Pieces_of_the_roaming_laptop_puzzle_in_Debian.html
</link>
24269 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Pieces_of_the_roaming_laptop_puzzle_in_Debian.html
</guid>
24270 <pubDate>Wed,
19 May
2010 19:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
24271 <description><p
>Today, the last piece of the puzzle for roaming laptops in Debian
24272 Edu finally entered the Debian archive. Today, the new
24273 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/libp/libpam-mklocaluser.html
">libpam-mklocaluser
</a
>
24274 package was accepted. Two days ago, two other pieces was accepted
24276 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/pam-python.html
">pam-python
</a
>
24277 package needed by libpam-mklocaluser, and the
24278 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/sssd.html
">sssd
</a
> package
24279 passed NEW on Monday. In addition, the
24280 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/libp/libpam-ccreds.html
">libpam-ccreds
</a
>
24281 package we need is in experimental (version
10-
4) since Saturday, and
24282 hopefully will be moved to unstable soon.
</p
>
24284 <p
>This collection of packages allow for two different setups for
24285 roaming laptops. The traditional setup would be using libpam-ccreds,
24286 nscd and libpam-mklocaluser with LDAP or Kerberos authentication,
24287 which should work out of the box if the configuration changes proposed
24288 for nscd in
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
485282">BTS report
24289 #
485282</a
> is implemented. The alternative setup is to use sssd with
24290 libpam-mklocaluser to connect to LDAP or Kerberos and let sssd take
24291 care of the caching of passwords and group information.
</p
>
24293 <p
>I have so far been unable to get sssd to work with the LDAP server
24294 at the University, but suspect the issue is some SSL/GnuTLS related
24295 problem with the server certificate. I plan to update the Debian
24296 package to version
1.2, which is scheduled for next week, and hope to
24297 find time to make sure the next release will include both the
24298 Debian/Ubuntu specific patches. Upstream is friendly and responsive,
24299 and I am sure we will find a good solution.
</p
>
24301 <p
>The idea is to set up the roaming laptops to authenticate using
24302 LDAP or Kerberos and create a local user with home directory in /home/
24303 when a usre in LDAP logs in via KDM or GDM for the first time, and
24304 cache the password for offline checking, as well as caching group
24305 memberhips and other relevant LDAP information. The
24306 libpam-mklocaluser package was created to make sure the local home
24307 directory is in /home/, instead of /site/server/directory/ which would
24308 be the home directory if pam_mkhomedir was used. To avoid confusion
24309 with support requests and configuration, we do not want local laptops
24310 to have users in a path that is used for the same users home directory
24311 on the home directory servers.
</p
>
24313 <p
>One annoying problem with gdm is that it do not show the PAM
24314 message passed to the user from libpam-mklocaluser when the local user
24315 is created. Instead gdm simply reject the login with some generic
24316 message. The message is shown in kdm, ssh and login, so I guess it is
24317 a bug in gdm. Have not investigated if there is some other message
24318 type that can be used instead to get gdm to also show the message.
</p
>
24320 <p
>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
24321 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.
</p
>
24326 <title>Parallellized boot is now the default in Debian/unstable
</title>
24327 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellized_boot_is_now_the_default_in_Debian_unstable.html
</link>
24328 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellized_boot_is_now_the_default_in_Debian_unstable.html
</guid>
24329 <pubDate>Fri,
14 May
2010 22:
40:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
24330 <description><p
>Since this evening, parallel booting is the default in
24331 Debian/unstable for machines using dependency based boot sequencing.
24332 Apparently the testing of concurrent booting has been wider than
24333 expected, if I am to believe the
24334 <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/
2010/
05/msg00122.html
">input
24335 on debian-devel@
</a
>, and I concluded a few days ago to move forward
24336 with the feature this weekend, to give us some time to detect any
24337 remaining problems before Squeeze is frozen. If serious problems are
24338 detected, it is simple to change the default back to sequential boot.
24339 The upload of the new sysvinit package also activate a new upstream
24342 More information about
24343 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot
">dependency
24344 based boot sequencing
</a
> is available from the Debian wiki. It is
24345 currently possible to disable parallel booting when one run into
24346 problems caused by it, by adding this line to /etc/default/rcS:
</p
>
24348 <blockquote
><pre
>
24350 </pre
></blockquote
>
24352 <p
>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
24353 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
24354 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org
">the
24355 list of usertagged bugs related to this
</a
>.
</p
>
24360 <title>Sitesummary tip: Listing MAC address of all clients
</title>
24361 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sitesummary_tip__Listing_MAC_address_of_all_clients.html
</link>
24362 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sitesummary_tip__Listing_MAC_address_of_all_clients.html
</guid>
24363 <pubDate>Fri,
14 May
2010 21:
10:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
24364 <description><p
>In the recent Debian Edu versions, the
24365 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary
">sitesummary
24366 system
</a
> is used to keep track of the machines in the school
24367 network. Each machine will automatically report its status to the
24368 central server after boot and once per night. The network setup is
24369 also reported, and using this information it is possible to get the
24370 MAC address of all network interfaces in the machines. This is useful
24371 to update the DHCP configuration.
</p
>
24373 <p
>To give some idea how to use sitesummary, here is a one-liner to
24374 ist all MAC addresses of all machines reporting to sitesummary. Run
24375 this on the collector host:
</p
>
24377 <blockquote
><pre
>
24378 perl -MSiteSummary -e
'for_all_hosts(sub { print join(
" ", get_macaddresses(shift)),
"\n
"; });
'
24379 </pre
></blockquote
>
24381 <p
>This will list all MAC addresses assosiated with all machine, one
24382 line per machine and with space between the MAC addresses.
</p
>
24384 <p
>To allow system administrators easier job at adding static DHCP
24385 addresses for hosts, it would be possible to extend this to fetch
24386 machine information from sitesummary and update the DHCP and DNS
24387 tables in LDAP using this information. Such tool is unfortunately not
24388 written yet.
</p
>
24393 <title>systemd, an interesting alternative to upstart
</title>
24394 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/systemd__an_interesting_alternative_to_upstart.html
</link>
24395 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/systemd__an_interesting_alternative_to_upstart.html
</guid>
24396 <pubDate>Thu,
13 May
2010 22:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
24397 <description><p
>The last few days a new boot system called
24398 <a href=
"http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd
">systemd
</a
>
24400 <a href=
"http://
0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html
">introduced
</a
>
24402 to the free software world. I have not yet had time to play around
24403 with it, but it seem to be a very interesting alternative to
24404 <a href=
"http://upstart.ubuntu.com/
">upstart
</a
>, and might prove to be
24405 a good alternative for Debian when we are able to switch to an event
24406 based boot system. Tollef is
24407 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
580814">in the process
</a
> of getting
24408 systemd into Debian, and I look forward to seeing how well it work. I
24409 like the fact that systemd handles init.d scripts with dependency
24410 information natively, allowing them to run in parallel where upstart
24411 at the moment do not.
</p
>
24413 <p
>Unfortunately do systemd have the same problem as upstart regarding
24414 platform support. It only work on recent Linux kernels, and also need
24415 some new kernel features enabled to function properly. This means
24416 kFreeBSD and Hurd ports of Debian will need a port or a different boot
24417 system. Not sure how that will be handled if systemd proves to be the
24418 way forward.
</p
>
24420 <p
>In the mean time, based on the
24421 <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/
2010/
05/msg00122.html
">input
24422 on debian-devel@
</a
> regarding parallel booting in Debian, I have
24423 decided to enable full parallel booting as the default in Debian as
24424 soon as possible (probably this weekend or early next week), to see if
24425 there are any remaining serious bugs in the init.d dependencies. A
24426 new version of the sysvinit package implementing this change is
24427 already in experimental. If all go well, Squeeze will be released
24428 with parallel booting enabled by default.
</p
>
24433 <title>Parallellizing the boot in Debian Squeeze - ready for wider testing
</title>
24434 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellizing_the_boot_in_Debian_Squeeze___ready_for_wider_testing.html
</link>
24435 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellizing_the_boot_in_Debian_Squeeze___ready_for_wider_testing.html
</guid>
24436 <pubDate>Thu,
6 May
2010 23:
25:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
24437 <description><p
>These days, the init.d script dependencies in Squeeze are quite
24438 complete, so complete that it is actually possible to run all the
24439 init.d scripts in parallell based on these dependencies. If you want
24440 to test your Squeeze system, make sure
24441 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot
">dependency
24442 based boot sequencing
</a
> is enabled, and add this line to
24443 /etc/default/rcS:
</p
>
24445 <blockquote
><pre
>
24446 CONCURRENCY=makefile
24447 </pre
></blockquote
>
24449 <p
>That is it. It will cause sysv-rc to use the startpar tool to run
24450 scripts in parallel using the dependency information stored in
24451 /etc/init.d/.depend.boot, /etc/init.d/.depend.start and
24452 /etc/init.d/.depend.stop to order the scripts. Startpar is configured
24453 to try to start the kdm and gdm scripts as early as possible, and will
24454 start the facilities required by kdm or gdm as early as possible to
24455 make this happen.
</p
>
24457 <p
>Give it a try, and see if you like the result. If some services
24458 fail to start properly, it is most likely because they have incomplete
24459 init.d script dependencies in their startup script (or some of their
24460 dependent scripts have incomplete dependencies). Report bugs and get
24461 the package maintainers to fix it. :)
</p
>
24463 <p
>Running scripts in parallel could be the default in Debian when we
24464 manage to get the init.d script dependencies complete and correct. I
24465 expect we will get there in Squeeze+
1, if we get manage to test and
24466 fix the remaining issues.
</p
>
24468 <p
>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
24469 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
24470 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org
">the
24471 list of usertagged bugs related to this
</a
>.
</p
>
24476 <title>Forcing new users to change their password on first login
</title>
24477 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Forcing_new_users_to_change_their_password_on_first_login.html
</link>
24478 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Forcing_new_users_to_change_their_password_on_first_login.html
</guid>
24479 <pubDate>Sun,
2 May
2010 13:
47:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
24480 <description><p
>One interesting feature in Active Directory, is the ability to
24481 create a new user with an expired password, and thus force the user to
24482 change the password on the first login attempt.
</p
>
24484 <p
>I
'm not quite sure how to do that with the LDAP setup in Debian
24485 Edu, but did some initial testing with a local account. The account
24486 and password aging information is available in /etc/shadow, but
24487 unfortunately, it is not possible to specify an expiration time for
24488 passwords, only a maximum age for passwords.
</p
>
24490 <p
>A freshly created account (using adduser test) will have these
24491 settings in /etc/shadow:
</p
>
24493 <blockquote
><pre
>
24494 root@tjener:~# chage -l test
24495 Last password change : May
02,
2010
24496 Password expires : never
24497 Password inactive : never
24498 Account expires : never
24499 Minimum number of days between password change :
0
24500 Maximum number of days between password change :
99999
24501 Number of days of warning before password expires :
7
24503 </pre
></blockquote
>
24505 <p
>The only way I could come up with to create a user with an expired
24506 account, is to change the date of the last password change to the
24507 lowest value possible (January
1th
1970), and the maximum password age
24508 to the difference in days between that date and today. To make it
24509 simple, I went for
30 years (
30 *
365 =
10950) and January
2th (to
24510 avoid testing if
0 is a valid value).
</p
>
24512 <p
>After using these commands to set it up, it seem to work as
24513 intended:
</p
>
24515 <blockquote
><pre
>
24516 root@tjener:~# chage -d
1 test; chage -M
10950 test
24517 root@tjener:~# chage -l test
24518 Last password change : Jan
02,
1970
24519 Password expires : never
24520 Password inactive : never
24521 Account expires : never
24522 Minimum number of days between password change :
0
24523 Maximum number of days between password change :
10950
24524 Number of days of warning before password expires :
7
24526 </pre
></blockquote
>
24528 <p
>So far I have tested this with ssh and console, and kdm (in
24529 Squeeze) login, and all ask for a new password before login in the
24530 user (with ssh, I was thrown out and had to log in again).
</p
>
24532 <p
>Perhaps we should set up something similar for Debian Edu, to make
24533 sure only the user itself have the account password?
</p
>
24535 <p
>If you want to comment on or help out with implementing this for
24536 Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.
</p
>
24538 <p
>Update
2010-
05-
02 17:
20: Paul Tötterman tells me on IRC that the
24539 shadow(
8) page in Debian/testing now state that setting the date of
24540 last password change to zero (
0) will force the password to be changed
24541 on the first login. This was not mentioned in the manual in Lenny, so
24542 I did not notice this in my initial testing. I have tested it on
24543 Squeeze, and
'<tt
>chage -d
0 username
</tt
>' do work there. I have not
24544 tested it on Lenny yet.
</p
>
24546 <p
>Update
2010-
05-
02-
19:
05: Jim Paris tells me via email that an
24547 equivalent command to expire a password is
'<tt
>passwd -e
24548 username
</tt
>', which insert zero into the date of the last password
24554 <title>Thoughts on roaming laptop setup for Debian Edu
</title>
24555 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thoughts_on_roaming_laptop_setup_for_Debian_Edu.html
</link>
24556 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thoughts_on_roaming_laptop_setup_for_Debian_Edu.html
</guid>
24557 <pubDate>Wed,
28 Apr
2010 20:
40:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
24558 <description><p
>For some years now, I have wondered how we should handle laptops in
24559 Debian Edu. The Debian Edu infrastructure is mostly designed to
24560 handle stationary computers, and less suited for computers that come
24563 <p
>Now I finally believe I have an sensible idea on how to adjust
24564 Debian Edu for laptops, by introducing a new profile for them, for
24565 example called Roaming Workstations. Here are my thought on this.
24566 The setup would consist of the following:
</p
>
24570 <li
>During installation, the user name of the owner / primary user of
24571 the laptop is requested and a local home directory is set up for
24572 the user, with uid and gid information fetched from the LDAP
24573 server. This allow the user to work also when offline. The
24574 central home directory can be available in a subdirectory on
24575 request, for example mounted via CIFS. It could be mounted
24576 automatically when a user log in while on the Debian Edu network,
24577 and unmounted when the machine is taken away (network down,
24578 hibernate, etc), it can be set up to do automatic mounting on
24579 request (using autofs), or perhaps some GUI button on the desktop
24580 can be used to access it when needed. Perhaps it is enough to use
24581 the fish protocol in KDE?
</li
>
24583 <li
>Password checking is set up to use LDAP or Kerberos
24584 authentication when the machine is on the Debian Edu network, and
24585 to cache the password for offline checking when the machine unable
24586 to reach the LDAP or Kerberos server. This can be done using
24587 <a href=
"http://www.padl.com/OSS/pam_ccreds.html
">libpam-ccreds
</a
>
24588 or the Fedora developed
24589 <a href=
"https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/SSSD
">System
24590 Security Services Daemon
</a
> packages.
</li
>
24592 <li
>File synchronisation with the central home directory is set up
24593 using a shared directory in both the local and the central home
24594 directory, using unison.
</li
>
24596 <li
>Printing should be set up to print to all printers broadcasting
24597 their existence on the local network, and should then work out of
24598 the box with CUPS. For sites needing accurate printer quotas, some
24599 system with Kerberos authentication or printing via ssh could be
24600 implemented.
</li
>
24602 <li
>For users that should have local root access to their laptop,
24603 sudo should be used to allow this to the local user.
</li
>
24605 <li
>It would be nice if user and group information from LDAP is
24606 cached on the client, but given that there are entries for the
24607 local user and primary group in /etc/, it should not be needed.
</li
>
24611 <p
>I believe all the pieces to implement this are in Debian/testing at
24612 the moment. If we work quickly, we should be able to get this ready
24613 in time for the Squeeze release to freeze. Some of the pieces need
24614 tweaking, like libpam-ccreds should get support for pam-auth-update
24615 (
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
566718">#
566718</a
>) and nslcd (or
24616 perhaps debian-edu-config) should get some integration code to stop
24617 its daemon when the LDAP server is unavailable to avoid long timeouts
24618 when disconnected from the net. If we get Kerberos enabled, we need
24619 to make sure we avoid long timeouts there too.
</p
>
24621 <p
>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
24622 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.
</p
>
24627 <title>Great book:
"Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future
"</title>
24628 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Great_book___Content__Selected_Essays_on_Technology__Creativity__Copyright__and_the_Future_of_the_Future_.html
</link>
24629 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Great_book___Content__Selected_Essays_on_Technology__Creativity__Copyright__and_the_Future_of_the_Future_.html
</guid>
24630 <pubDate>Mon,
19 Apr
2010 17:
10:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
24631 <description><p
>The last few weeks i have had the pleasure of reading a
24632 thought-provoking collection of essays by Cory Doctorow, on topics
24633 touching copyright, virtual worlds, the future of man when the
24634 conscience mind can be duplicated into a computer and many more. The
24635 book titled
"Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity,
24636 Copyright, and the Future of the Future
" is available with few
24637 restrictions on the web, for example from
24638 <a href=
"http://craphound.com/content/
">his own site
</a
>. I read the
24640 <a href=
"http://www.feedbooks.com/book/
2883">feedbooks
</a
> using
24641 <a href=
"http://www.fbreader.org/
">fbreader
</a
> and my N810. I
24642 strongly recommend this book.
</p
>
24647 <title>Kerberos for Debian Edu/Squeeze?
</title>
24648 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Kerberos_for_Debian_Edu_Squeeze_.html
</link>
24649 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Kerberos_for_Debian_Edu_Squeeze_.html
</guid>
24650 <pubDate>Wed,
14 Apr
2010 17:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
24651 <description><p
><a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/
20100413-kerberos/
">Yesterdays
24652 NUUG presentation
</a
> about Kerberos was inspiring, and reminded me
24653 about the need to start using Kerberos in Skolelinux. Setting up a
24654 Kerberos server seem to be straight forward, and if we get this in
24655 place a long time before the Squeeze version of Debian freezes, we
24656 have a chance to migrate Skolelinux away from NFSv3 for the home
24657 directories, and over to an architecture where the infrastructure do
24658 not have to trust IP addresses and machines, and instead can trust
24659 users and cryptographic keys instead.
</p
>
24661 <p
>A challenge will be integration and administration. Is there a
24662 Kerberos implementation for Debian where one can control the
24663 administration access in Kerberos using LDAP groups? With it, the
24664 school administration will have to maintain access control using flat
24665 files on the main server, which give a huge potential for errors.
</p
>
24667 <p
>A related question I would like to know is how well Kerberos and
24668 pam-ccreds (offline password check) work together. Anyone know?
</p
>
24670 <p
>Next step will be to use Kerberos for access control in Lwat and
24671 Nagios. I have no idea how much work that will be to implement. We
24672 would also need to document how to integrate with Windows AD, as such
24673 shared network will require two Kerberos realms that need to cooperate
24674 to work properly.
</p
>
24676 <p
>I believe a good start would be to start using Kerberos on the
24677 skolelinux.no machines, and this way get ourselves experience with
24678 configuration and integration. A natural starting point would be
24679 setting up ldap.skolelinux.no as the Kerberos server, and migrate the
24680 rest of the machines from PAM via LDAP to PAM via Kerberos one at the
24683 <p
>If you would like to contribute to get this working in Skolelinux,
24684 I recommend you to see the video recording from yesterdays NUUG
24685 presentation, and start using Kerberos at home. The video show show
24686 up in a few days.
</p
>
24691 <title>After
6 years of waiting, the Xreset.d feature is implemented
</title>
24692 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/After_6_years_of_waiting__the_Xreset_d_feature_is_implemented.html
</link>
24693 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/After_6_years_of_waiting__the_Xreset_d_feature_is_implemented.html
</guid>
24694 <pubDate>Sat,
6 Mar
2010 18:
15:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
24695 <description><p
>6 years ago, as part of the Debian Edu development I am involved
24696 in, I asked for a hook in the kdm and gdm setup to run scripts as root
24697 when the user log out. A bug was submitted against the xfree86-common
24698 package in
2004 (
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
230422">#
230422</a
>),
24699 and revisited every time Debian Edu was working on a new release.
24700 Today, this finally paid off.
</p
>
24702 <p
>The framework for this feature was today commited to the git
24703 repositry for the xorg package, and the git repository for xdm has
24704 been updated to use this framework. Next on my agenda is to make sure
24705 kdm and gdm also add code to use this framework.
</p
>
24707 <p
>In Debian Edu, we want to ability to run commands as root when the
24708 user log out, to get rid of runaway processes and do general cleanup
24709 after a user. With this framework in place, we finally can do that in
24710 a generic way that work with all display managers using this
24711 framework. My goal is to get all display managers in Debian use it,
24712 similar to how they use the Xsession.d framework today.
<p
>
24717 <title>Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Lenny released, work continues
</title>
24718 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Lenny_released__work_continues.html
</link>
24719 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Lenny_released__work_continues.html
</guid>
24720 <pubDate>Thu,
11 Feb
2010 17:
15:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
24721 <description><p
>On Tuesday, the Debian/Lenny based version of
24722 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Skolelinux
</a
> was finally
24723 shipped. This was a major leap forward for the project, and I am very
24724 pleased that we finally got the release wrapped up. Work on the first
24725 point release starts imediately, as we plan to get that one out a
24726 month after the major release, to include all fixes for bugs we found
24727 and fixed too late in the release process to include last Tuesday.
</p
>
24729 <p
>Perhaps it even is time for some partying?
</p
>
24731 <p
>After this first point release, my plan is to focus again on the
24732 next major release, based on Squeeze. We will try to get as many of
24733 the fixes we need into the official Debian packages before the freeze,
24734 and have just a few weeks or months to make it happen.
</p
>
24739 <title>Automatic Munin and Nagios configuration
</title>
24740 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_Munin_and_Nagios_configuration.html
</link>
24741 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_Munin_and_Nagios_configuration.html
</guid>
24742 <pubDate>Wed,
27 Jan
2010 15:
15:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
24743 <description><p
>One of the new features in the next Debian/Lenny based release of
24744 Debian Edu/Skolelinux, which is scheduled for release in the next few
24745 days, is automatic configuration of the service monitoring system
24746 Nagios. The previous release had automatic configuration of trend
24747 analysis using Munin, and this Lenny based release take that a step
24750 <p
>When installing a Debian Edu Main-server, it is automatically
24751 configured as a Munin and Nagios server. In addition, it is
24752 configured to be a server for the
24753 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary
">SiteSummary
24754 system
</a
> I have written for use in Debian Edu. The SiteSummary
24755 system is inspired by a system used by the University of Oslo where I
24756 work. In short, the system provide a centralised collector of
24757 information about the computers on the network, and a client on each
24758 computer submitting information to this collector. This allow for
24759 automatic information on which packages are installed on each machine,
24760 which kernel the machines are using, what kind of configuration the
24761 packages got etc. This also allow us to automatically generate Munin
24762 and Nagios configuration.
</p
>
24764 <p
>All computers reporting to the sitesummary collector with the
24765 munin-node package installed is automatically enabled as a Munin
24766 client and graphs from the statistics collected from that machine show
24767 up automatically on http://www/munin/ on the Main-server.
</p
>
24769 <p
>All non-laptop computers reporting to the sitesummary collector are
24770 automatically monitored for network presence (ping and any network
24771 services detected). In addition, all computers (also laptops) with
24772 the nagios-nrpe-server package installed and configured the way
24773 sitesummary would configure it, are monitored for full disks, software
24774 raid status, swap free and other checks that need to run locally on
24775 the machine.
</p
>
24777 <p
>The result is that the administrator on a school using Debian Edu
24778 based on Lenny will be able to check the health of his installation
24779 with one look at the Nagios settings, without having to spend any time
24780 keeping the Nagios configuration up-to-date.
</p
>
24782 <p
>The only configuration one need to do to get Nagios up and running
24783 is to set the password used to get access via HTTP. The system
24784 administrator need to run
"<tt
>htpasswd /etc/nagios3/htpasswd.users
24785 nagiosadmin
</tt
>" to create a nagiosadmin user and set a password for
24786 it to be able to log into the Nagios web pages. After that,
24787 everything is taken care of.
</p
>
24792 <title>Relative popularity of document formats (MS Office vs. ODF)
</title>
24793 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Relative_popularity_of_document_formats__MS_Office_vs__ODF_.html
</link>
24794 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Relative_popularity_of_document_formats__MS_Office_vs__ODF_.html
</guid>
24795 <pubDate>Wed,
12 Aug
2009 15:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
24796 <description><p
>Just for fun, I did a search right now on Google for a few file ODF
24797 and MS Office based formats (not to be mistaken for ISO or ECMA
24798 OOXML), to get an idea of their relative usage. I searched using
24799 'filetype:odt
' and equvalent terms, and got these results:
</P
>
24802 <tr
><th
>Type
</th
><th
>ODF
</th
><th
>MS Office
</th
></tr
>
24803 <tr
><td
>Tekst
</td
> <td
>odt:
282000</td
> <td
>docx:
308000</td
></tr
>
24804 <tr
><td
>Presentasjon
</td
> <td
>odp:
75600</td
> <td
>pptx:
183000</td
></tr
>
24805 <tr
><td
>Regneark
</td
> <td
>ods:
26500 </td
> <td
>xlsx:
145000</td
></tr
>
24808 <p
>Next, I added a
'site:no
' limit to get the numbers for Norway, and
24809 got these numbers:
</p
>
24812 <tr
><th
>Type
</th
><th
>ODF
</th
><th
>MS Office
</th
></tr
>
24813 <tr
><td
>Tekst
</td
> <td
>odt:
2480 </td
> <td
>docx:
4460</td
></tr
>
24814 <tr
><td
>Presentasjon
</td
> <td
>odp:
299 </td
> <td
>pptx:
741</td
></tr
>
24815 <tr
><td
>Regneark
</td
> <td
>ods:
187 </td
> <td
>xlsx:
372</td
></tr
>
24818 <p
>I wonder how these numbers change over time.
</p
>
24820 <p
>I am aware of Google returning different results and numbers based
24821 on where the search is done, so I guess these numbers will differ if
24822 they are conduced in another country. Because of this, I did the same
24823 search from a machine in California, USA, a few minutes after the
24824 search done from a machine here in Norway.
</p
>
24828 <tr
><th
>Type
</th
><th
>ODF
</th
><th
>MS Office
</th
></tr
>
24829 <tr
><td
>Tekst
</td
> <td
>odt:
129000</td
> <td
>docx:
308000</td
></tr
>
24830 <tr
><td
>Presentasjon
</td
> <td
>odp:
44200</td
> <td
>pptx:
93900</td
></tr
>
24831 <tr
><td
>Regneark
</td
> <td
>ods:
26500 </td
> <td
>xlsx:
82400</td
></tr
>
24834 <p
>And with
'site:no
':
24837 <tr
><th
>Type
</th
><th
>ODF
</th
><th
>MS Office
</th
></tr
>
24838 <tr
><td
>Tekst
</td
> <td
>odt:
2480</td
> <td
>docx:
3410</td
></tr
>
24839 <tr
><td
>Presentasjon
</td
> <td
>odp:
175</td
> <td
>pptx:
604</td
></tr
>
24840 <tr
><td
>Regneark
</td
> <td
>ods:
186 </td
> <td
>xlsx:
296</td
></tr
>
24843 <p
>Interesting difference, not sure what to conclude from these
24849 <title>ISO still hope to fix OOXML
</title>
24850 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ISO_still_hope_to_fix_OOXML.html
</link>
24851 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ISO_still_hope_to_fix_OOXML.html
</guid>
24852 <pubDate>Sat,
8 Aug
2009 14:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
24853 <description><p
>According to
<a
24854 href=
"http://twerner.blogspot.com/
2009/
08/defects-of-office-open-xml.html
">a
24855 blog post from Torsten Werner
</a
>, the current defect report for ISO
24856 29500 (ISO OOXML) is
809 pages. His interesting point is that the
24857 defect report is
71 pages more than the full ODF
1.1 specification.
24858 Personally I find it more interesting that ISO still believe ISO OOXML
24859 can be fixed in ISO. Personally, I believe it is broken beyon repair,
24860 and I completely lack any trust in ISO for being able to get anywhere
24861 close to solving the problems. I was part of the Norwegian committee
24862 involved in the OOXML fast track process, and was not impressed with
24863 Standard Norway and ISO in how they handled it.
</p
>
24865 <p
>These days I focus on ODF instead, which seem like a specification
24866 with the future ahead of it. We are working in NUUG to organise a ODF
24867 seminar this autumn.
</p
>
24872 <title>Debian has switched to dependency based boot sequencing
</title>
24873 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_has_switched_to_dependency_based_boot_sequencing.html
</link>
24874 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_has_switched_to_dependency_based_boot_sequencing.html
</guid>
24875 <pubDate>Mon,
27 Jul
2009 23:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
24876 <description><p
>Since this evening, with the upload of sysvinit version
2.87dsf-
2,
24877 and the upload of insserv version
1.12.0-
10 yesterday, Debian unstable
24878 have been migrated to using dependency based boot sequencing. This
24879 conclude work me and others have been doing for the last three days.
24880 It feels great to see this finally part of the default Debian
24881 installation. Now we just need to weed out the last few problems that
24882 are bound to show up, to get everything ready for Squeeze.
</p
>
24884 <p
>The next step is migrating /sbin/init from sysvinit to upstart, and
24885 fixing the more fundamental problem of handing the event based
24886 non-predictable kernel in the early boot.
</p
>
24891 <title>Taking over sysvinit development
</title>
24892 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Taking_over_sysvinit_development.html
</link>
24893 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Taking_over_sysvinit_development.html
</guid>
24894 <pubDate>Wed,
22 Jul
2009 23:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
24895 <description><p
>After several years of frustration with the lack of activity from
24896 the existing sysvinit upstream developer, I decided a few weeks ago to
24897 take over the package and become the new upstream. The number of
24898 patches to track for the Debian package was becoming a burden, and the
24899 lack of synchronization between the distribution made it hard to keep
24900 the package up to date.
</p
>
24902 <p
>On the new sysvinit team is the SuSe maintainer Dr. Werner Fink,
24903 and my Debian co-maintainer Kel Modderman. About
10 days ago, I made
24904 a new upstream tarball with version number
2.87dsf (for Debian, SuSe
24905 and Fedora), based on the patches currently in use in these
24906 distributions. We Debian maintainers plan to move to this tarball as
24907 the new upstream as soon as we find time to do the merge. Since the
24908 new tarball was created, we agreed with Werner at SuSe to make a new
24909 upstream project at
<a href=
"http://savannah.nongnu.org/
">Savannah
</a
>, and continue
24910 development there. The project is registered and currently waiting
24911 for approval by the Savannah administrators, and as soon as it is
24912 approved, we will import the old versions from svn and continue
24913 working on the future release.
</p
>
24915 <p
>It is a bit ironic that this is done now, when some of the involved
24916 distributions are moving to upstart as a syvinit replacement.
</p
>
24921 <title>Debian boots quicker and quicker
</title>
24922 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_boots_quicker_and_quicker.html
</link>
24923 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_boots_quicker_and_quicker.html
</guid>
24924 <pubDate>Wed,
24 Jun
2009 21:
40:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
24925 <description><p
>I spent Monday and tuesday this week in London with a lot of the
24926 people involved in the boot system on Debian and Ubuntu, to see if we
24927 could find more ways to speed up the boot system. This was an Ubuntu
24929 <a href=
"https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FoundationsTeam/BootPerformance/DebianUbuntuSprint
">developer
24930 gathering
</a
>. It was quite productive. We also discussed the future
24931 of boot systems, and ways to handle the increasing number of boot
24932 issues introduced by the Linux kernel becoming more and more
24933 asynchronous and event base. The Ubuntu approach using udev and
24934 upstart might be a good way forward. Time will show.
</p
>
24936 <p
>Anyway, there are a few ways at the moment to speed up the boot
24937 process in Debian. All of these should be applied to get a quick
24942 <li
>Use dash as /bin/sh.
</li
>
24944 <li
>Disable the init.d/hwclock*.sh scripts and make sure the hardware
24945 clock is in UTC.
</li
>
24947 <li
>Install and activate the insserv package to enable
24948 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot
">dependency
24949 based boot sequencing
</a
>, and enable concurrent booting.
</li
>
24953 These points are based on the Google summer of code work done by
24954 <a href=
"http://initscripts-ng.alioth.debian.org/soc2006-bootsystem/
">Carlos
24955 Villegas
</a
>.
24957 <p
>Support for makefile-style concurrency during boot was uploaded to
24958 unstable yesterday. When we tested it, we were able to cut
6 seconds
24959 from the boot sequence. It depend on very correct dependency
24960 declaration in all init.d scripts, so I expect us to find edge cases
24961 where the dependences in some scripts are slightly wrong when we start
24962 using this.
</p
>
24964 <p
>On our IRC channel for this effort, #pkg-sysvinit, a new idea was
24965 introduced by Raphael Geissert today, one that could affect the
24966 startup speed as well. Instead of starting some scripts concurrently
24967 from rcS.d/ and another set of scripts from rc2.d/, it would be
24968 possible to run a of them in the same process. A quick way to test
24969 this would be to enable insserv and run
'mv /etc/rc2.d/S* /etc/rcS.d/;
24970 insserv
'. Will need to test if that work. :)
</p
>
24975 <title>Two projects that have improved the quality of free software a lot
</title>
24976 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Two_projects_that_have_improved_the_quality_of_free_software_a_lot.html
</link>
24977 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Two_projects_that_have_improved_the_quality_of_free_software_a_lot.html
</guid>
24978 <pubDate>Sat,
2 May
2009 15:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
24979 <description><p
>There are two software projects that have had huge influence on the
24980 quality of free software, and I wanted to mention both in case someone
24981 do not yet know them.
</p
>
24983 <p
>The first one is
<a href=
"http://valgrind.org/
">valgrind
</a
>, a
24984 tool to detect and expose errors in the memory handling of programs.
24985 It is easy to use, all one need to do is to run
'valgrind program
',
24986 and it will report any problems on stdout. It is even better if the
24987 program include debug information. With debug information, it is able
24988 to report the source file name and line number where the problem
24989 occurs. It can report things like
'reading past memory block in file
24990 X line N, the memory block was allocated in file Y, line M
', and
24991 'using uninitialised value in control logic
'. This tool has made it
24992 trivial to investigate reproducible crash bugs in programs, and have
24993 reduced the number of this kind of bugs in free software a lot.
24995 <p
>The second one is
24996 <a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coverity
">Coverity
</a
> which is
24997 a source code checker. It is able to process the source of a program
24998 and find problems in the logic without running the program. It
24999 started out as the Stanford Checker and became well known when it was
25000 used to find bugs in the Linux kernel. It is now a commercial tool
25001 and the company behind it is running
25002 <a href=
"http://www.scan.coverity.com/
">a community service
</a
> for the
25003 free software community, where a lot of free software projects get
25004 their source checked for free. Several thousand defects have been
25005 found and fixed so far. It can find errors like
'lock L taken in file
25006 X line N is never released if exiting in line M
', or
'the code in file
25007 Y lines O to P can never be executed
'. The projects included in the
25008 community service project have managed to get rid of a lot of
25009 reliability problems thanks to Coverity.
</p
>
25011 <p
>I believe tools like this, that are able to automatically find
25012 errors in the source, are vital to improve the quality of software and
25013 make sure we can get rid of the crashing and failing software we are
25014 surrounded by today.
</p
>
25019 <title>No patch is not better than a useless patch
</title>
25020 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/No_patch_is_not_better_than_a_useless_patch.html
</link>
25021 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/No_patch_is_not_better_than_a_useless_patch.html
</guid>
25022 <pubDate>Tue,
28 Apr
2009 09:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
25023 <description><p
>Julien Blache
25024 <a href=
"http://blog.technologeek.org/
2009/
04/
12/
214">claim that no
25025 patch is better than a useless patch
</a
>. I completely disagree, as a
25026 patch allow one to discuss a concrete and proposed solution, and also
25027 prove that the issue at hand is important enough for someone to spent
25028 time on fixing it. No patch do not provide any of these positive
25029 properties.
</p
>
25034 <title>Recording video from cron using VLC
</title>
25035 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Recording_video_from_cron_using_VLC.html
</link>
25036 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Recording_video_from_cron_using_VLC.html
</guid>
25037 <pubDate>Sun,
5 Apr
2009 10:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
25038 <description><p
>One think I have wanted to figure out for a along time is how to
25039 run vlc from cron to do recording of video streams on the net. The
25040 task is trivial with mplayer, but I do not really trust the security
25041 of mplayer (it crashes too often on strange input), and thus prefer
25042 vlc. I finally found a way to do it today. I spent an hour or so
25043 searching the web for recipes and reading the documentation. The
25044 hardest part was to get rid of the GUI window, but after finding the
25045 dummy interface, the command line finally presented itself:
</p
>
25047 <blockquote
><pre
>URL=http://www.ping.uio.no/video/rms-oslo_2009.ogg
25049 DISPLAY= vlc -q $URL \
25050 --sout=
"#duplicate{dst=std{access=file,url=
'$SAVEFILE
'},dst=nodisplay}
" \
25051 --intf=dummy
</pre
></blockquote
>
25053 <p
>The command stream the URL and store it in the SAVEFILE by
25054 duplicating the output stream to
"nodisplay
" and the file, using the
25055 dummy interface. The dummy interface and the nodisplay output make
25056 sure no X interface is needed.
</p
>
25058 <p
>The cron job then need to start this job with the appropriate URL
25059 and file name to save, sleep for the duration wanted, and then kill
25060 the vlc process with SIGTERM. Here is a complete script
25061 <tt
>vlc-record
</tt
> to use from
<tt
>at
</tt
> or
<tt
>cron
</tt
>:
</p
>
25063 <blockquote
><pre
>#!/bin/sh
25066 SAVEFILE=
"$
2"
25067 DURATION=
"$
3"
25068 DISPLAY= vlc -q
"$URL
" \
25069 --sout=
"#duplicate{dst=std{access=file,url=
'$SAVEFILE
'},dst=nodisplay}
" \
25070 --intf=dummy
< /dev/null
> /dev/null
2>&1 &
25074 wait $pid
</pre
></blockquote
>
25079 <title>Standardize on protocols and formats, not vendors and applications
</title>
25080 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Standardize_on_protocols_and_formats__not_vendors_and_applications.html
</link>
25081 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Standardize_on_protocols_and_formats__not_vendors_and_applications.html
</guid>
25082 <pubDate>Mon,
30 Mar
2009 11:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
25083 <description><p
>Where I work at the University of Oslo, one decision stand out as a
25084 very good one to form a long lived computer infrastructure. It is the
25085 simple one, lost by many in todays computer industry: Standardize on
25086 open network protocols and open exchange/storage formats, not applications.
25087 Applications come and go, while protocols and files tend to stay, and
25088 thus one want to make it easy to change application and vendor, while
25089 avoiding conversion costs and locking users to a specific platform or
25090 application.
</p
>
25092 <p
>This approach make it possible to replace the client applications
25093 independently of the server applications. One can even allow users to
25094 use several different applications as long as they handle the selected
25095 protocol and format. In the normal case, only one client application
25096 is recommended and users only get help if they choose to use this
25097 application, but those that want to deviate from the easy path are not
25098 blocked from doing so.
</p
>
25100 <p
>It also allow us to replace the server side without forcing the
25101 users to replace their applications, and thus allow us to select the
25102 best server implementation at any moment, when scale and resouce
25103 requirements change.
</p
>
25105 <p
>I strongly recommend standardizing - on open network protocols and
25106 open formats, but I would never recommend standardizing on a single
25107 application that do not use open network protocol or open formats.
</p
>
25112 <title>Returning from Skolelinux developer gathering
</title>
25113 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Returning_from_Skolelinux_developer_gathering.html
</link>
25114 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Returning_from_Skolelinux_developer_gathering.html
</guid>
25115 <pubDate>Sun,
29 Mar
2009 21:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
25116 <description><p
>I
'm sitting on the train going home from this weekends Debian
25117 Edu/Skolelinux development gathering. I got a bit done tuning the
25118 desktop, and looked into the dynamic service location protocol
25119 implementation avahi. It look like it could be useful for us. Almost
25120 30 people participated, and I believe it was a great environment to
25121 get to know the Skolelinux system. Walter Bender, involved in the
25122 development of the Sugar educational platform, presented his stuff and
25123 also helped me improve my OLPC installation. He also showed me that
25124 his Turtle Art application can be used in standalone mode, and we
25125 agreed that I would help getting it packaged for Debian. As a
25126 standalone application it would be great for Debian Edu. We also
25127 tried to get the video conferencing working with two OLPCs, but that
25128 proved to be too hard for us. The application seem to need more work
25129 before it is ready for me. I look forward to getting home and relax
25135 <title>Time for new LDAP schemas replacing RFC
2307?
</title>
25136 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html
</link>
25137 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html
</guid>
25138 <pubDate>Sun,
29 Mar
2009 20:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
25139 <description><p
>The state of standardized LDAP schemas on Linux is far from
25140 optimal. There is RFC
2307 documenting one way to store NIS maps in
25141 LDAP, and a modified version of this normally called RFC
2307bis, with
25142 some modifications to be compatible with Active Directory. The RFC
25143 specification handle the content of a lot of system databases, but do
25144 not handle DNS zones and DHCP configuration.
</p
>
25146 <p
>In
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu/Skolelinux
</a
>,
25147 we would like to store information about users, SMB clients/hosts,
25148 filegroups, netgroups (users and hosts), DHCP and DNS configuration,
25149 and LTSP configuration in LDAP. These objects have a lot in common,
25150 but with the current LDAP schemas it is not possible to have one
25151 object per entity. For example, one need to have at least three LDAP
25152 objects for a given computer, one with the SMB related stuff, one with
25153 DNS information and another with DHCP information. The schemas
25154 provided for DNS and DHCP are impossible to combine into one LDAP
25155 object. In addition, it is impossible to implement quick queries for
25156 netgroup membership, because of the way NIS triples are implemented.
25157 It just do not scale. I believe it is time for a few RFC
25158 specifications to cleam up this mess.
</p
>
25160 <p
>I would like to have one LDAP object representing each computer in
25161 the network, and this object can then keep the SMB (ie host key), DHCP
25162 (mac address/name) and DNS (name/IP address) settings in one place.
25163 It need to be efficently stored to make sure it scale well.
</p
>
25165 <p
>I would also like to have a quick way to map from a user or
25166 computer and to the net group this user or computer is a member.
</p
>
25168 <p
>Active Directory have done a better job than unix heads like myself
25169 in this regard, and the unix side need to catch up. Time to start a
25170 new IETF work group?
</p
>
25175 <title>Checking server hardware support status for Dell, HP and IBM servers
</title>
25176 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Checking_server_hardware_support_status_for_Dell__HP_and_IBM_servers.html
</link>
25177 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Checking_server_hardware_support_status_for_Dell__HP_and_IBM_servers.html
</guid>
25178 <pubDate>Sat,
28 Feb
2009 23:
50:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
25179 <description><p
>At work, we have a few hundred Linux servers, and with that amount
25180 of hardware it is important to keep track of when the hardware support
25181 contract expire for each server. We have a machine (and service)
25182 register, which until recently did not contain much useful besides the
25183 machine room location and contact information for the system owner for
25184 each machine. To make it easier for us to track support contract
25185 status, I
've recently spent time on extending the machine register to
25186 include information about when the support contract expire, and to tag
25187 machines with expired contracts to make it easy to get a list of such
25188 machines. I extended a perl script already being used to import
25189 information about machines into the register, to also do some screen
25190 scraping off the sites of Dell, HP and IBM (our majority of machines
25191 are from these vendors), and automatically check the support status
25192 for the relevant machines. This make the support status information
25193 easily available and I hope it will make it easier for the computer
25194 owner to know when to get new hardware or renew the support contract.
25195 The result of this work documented that
27% of the machines in the
25196 registry is without a support contract, and made it very easy to find
25197 them.
27% might seem like a lot, but I see it more as the case of us
25198 using machines a bit longer than the
3 years a normal support contract
25199 last, to have test machines and a platform for less important
25200 services. After all, the machines without a contract are working fine
25201 at the moment and the lack of contract is only a problem if any of
25202 them break down. When that happen, we can either fix it using spare
25203 parts from other machines or move the service to another old
25206 <p
>I believe the code for screen scraping the Dell site was originally
25207 written by Trond Hasle Amundsen, and later adjusted by me and Morten
25208 Werner Forsbring. The HP scraping was written by me after reading a
25209 nice article in ;login: about how to use WWW::Mechanize, and the IBM
25210 scraping was written by me based on the Dell code. I know the HTML
25211 parsing could be done using nice libraries, but did not want to
25212 introduce more dependencies. This is the current incarnation:
</p
>
25217 use WWW::Mechanize;
25220 sub get_support_info {
25221 my ($machine, $model, $serial, $productnumber) = @_;
25224 if ( $model =~ m/^Dell / ) {
25225 # fetch website from Dell support
25226 my $url =
"http://support.euro.dell.com/support/topics/topic.aspx/emea/shared/support/my_systems_info/no/details?c=no
&amp;cs=nodhs1
&amp;l=no
&amp;s=dhs
&amp;ServiceTag=$serial
";
25227 my $webpage = get($url);
25228 return undef unless ($webpage);
25231 my @lines = split(/\n/, $webpage);
25232 foreach my $line (@lines) {
25233 next unless ($line =~ m/Beskrivelse/);
25234 $line =~ s/
&lt;[^
>]+?
>/;/gm;
25235 $line =~ s/^.+?;(Beskrivelse;)/$
1/;
25237 my @f = split(/\;/, $line);
25238 @f = @f[
13 .. $#f];
25239 my $lastend =
"";
25240 while ($f[
3] eq
"DELL
") {
25241 my ($type, $startstr, $endstr, $days) = @f[
0,
5,
7,
10];
25243 my $start = POSIX::strftime(
"%Y-%m-%d
",
25244 localtime(str2time($startstr)));
25245 my $end = POSIX::strftime(
"%Y-%m-%d
",
25246 localtime(str2time($endstr)));
25247 $str .=
"$type $start -
> $end
";
25248 @f = @f[
14 .. $#f];
25249 $lastend = $end if ($end gt $lastend);
25251 my $today = POSIX::strftime(
"%Y-%m-%d
", localtime(time));
25252 tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
25253 if ($lastend lt $today);
25255 } elsif ( $model =~ m/^HP / ) {
25256 my $mech = WWW::Mechanize-
>new();
25258 'http://www1.itrc.hp.com/service/ewarranty/warrantyInput.do
';
25259 $mech-
>get($url);
25261 'BODServiceID
' =
> 'NA
',
25262 'RegisteredPurchaseDate
' =
> '',
25263 'country
' =
> 'NO
',
25264 'productNumber
' =
> $productnumber,
25265 'serialNumber1
' =
> $serial,
25267 $mech-
>submit_form( form_number =
> 2,
25268 fields =
> $fields );
25269 # Next step is screen scraping
25270 my $content = $mech-
>content();
25272 $content =~ s/
&lt;[^
>]+?
>/;/gm;
25273 $content =~ s/\s+/ /gm;
25274 $content =~ s/;\s*;/;;/gm;
25275 $content =~ s/;[\s;]+/;/gm;
25277 my $today = POSIX::strftime(
"%Y-%m-%d
", localtime(time));
25279 while ($content =~ m/;Warranty Type;/) {
25280 my ($type, $status, $startstr, $stopstr) = $content =~
25281 m/;Warranty Type;([^;]+);.+?;Status;(\w+);Start Date;([^;]+);End Date;([^;]+);/;
25282 $content =~ s/^.+?;Warranty Type;//;
25283 my $start = POSIX::strftime(
"%Y-%m-%d
",
25284 localtime(str2time($startstr)));
25285 my $end = POSIX::strftime(
"%Y-%m-%d
",
25286 localtime(str2time($stopstr)));
25288 $str .=
"$type ($status) $start -
> $end
";
25290 tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
25291 if ($end lt $today);
25293 } elsif ( $model =~ m/^IBM / ) {
25294 # This code ignore extended support contracts.
25295 my ($producttype) = $model =~ m/.*-\[(.{
4}).+\]-/;
25296 if ($producttype
&amp;
&amp; $serial) {
25298 get(
"http://www-
947.ibm.com/systems/support/supportsite.wss/warranty?action=warranty
&amp;brandind=
5000008&amp;Submit=Submit
&amp;type=$producttype
&amp;serial=$serial
");
25300 $content =~ s/
&lt;[^
>]+?
>/;/gm;
25301 $content =~ s/\s+/ /gm;
25302 $content =~ s/;\s*;/;;/gm;
25303 $content =~ s/;[\s;]+/;/gm;
25305 $content =~ s/^.+?;Warranty status;//;
25306 my ($status, $end) = $content =~ m/;Warranty status;([^;]+)\s*;Expiration date;(\S+) ;/;
25308 $str .=
"($status) -
> $end
";
25310 my $today = POSIX::strftime(
"%Y-%m-%d
", localtime(time));
25311 tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
25312 if ($end lt $today);
25320 <p
>Here are some examples on how to use the function, using fake
25321 serial numbers. The information passed in as arguments are fetched
25322 from dmidecode.
</p
>
25325 print get_support_info(
"hp.host
",
"HP ProLiant BL460c G1
",
"1234567890"
25326 "447707-B21
");
25327 print get_support_info(
"dell.host
",
"Dell Inc. PowerEdge
2950",
"1234567");
25328 print get_support_info(
"ibm.host
",
"IBM eserver xSeries
345 -[
867061X]-
",
25329 "1234567");
25332 <p
>I would recommend this approach for tracking support contracts for
25333 everyone with more than a few computers to administer. :)
</p
>
25335 <p
>Update
2009-
03-
06: The IBM page do not include extended support
25336 contracts, so it is useless in that case. The original Dell code do
25337 not handle extended support contracts either, but has been updated to
25343 <title>Using bar codes at a computing center
</title>
25344 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_bar_codes_at_a_computing_center.html
</link>
25345 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_bar_codes_at_a_computing_center.html
</guid>
25346 <pubDate>Fri,
20 Feb
2009 08:
50:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
25347 <description><p
>At work with the University of Oslo, we have several hundred computers
25348 in our computing center. This give us a challenge in tracking the
25349 location and cabling of the computers, when they are added, moved and
25350 removed. Some times the location register is not updated when a
25351 computer is inserted or moved and we then have to search the room for
25352 the
"missing
" computer.
</p
>
25354 <p
>In the last issue of Linux Journal, I came across a project
25355 <a href=
"http://www.libdmtx.org/
">libdmtx
</a
> to write and read bar
25356 code blocks as defined in the
25357 <a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Matrix
">The Data Matrix
25358 Standard
</a
>. This is bar codes that can be read with a normal
25359 digital camera, for example that on a cell phone, and several such bar
25360 codes can be read by libdmtx from one picture. The bar code standard
25361 allow up to
2 KiB to be written in the tag. There is another project
25362 with
<a href=
"http://www.terryburton.co.uk/barcodewriter/
">a bar code
25363 writer written in postscript
</a
> capable of creating such bar codes,
25364 but this was the first time I found a tool to read these bar
25367 <p
>It occurred to me that this could be used to tag and track the
25368 machines in our computing center. If both racks and computers are
25369 tagged this way, we can use a picture of the rack and all its
25370 computers to detect the rack location of any computer in that rack.
25371 If we do this regularly for the entire room, we will find all
25372 locations, and can detect movements and removals.
</p
>
25374 <p
>I decided to test if this would work in practice, and picked a
25375 random rack and tagged all the machines with their names. Next, I
25376 took pictures with my digital camera, and gave the dmtxread program
25377 these JPEG pictures to see how many tags it could read. This worked
25378 fairly well. If the pictures was well focused and not taken from the
25379 side, all tags in the image could be read. Because of limited space
25380 between the racks, I was unable to get a good picture of the entire
25381 rack, but could without problem read all tags from a picture covering
25382 about half the rack. I had to limit the search time used by dmtxread
25383 to
60000 ms to make sure it terminated in a reasonable time frame.
</p
>
25385 <p
>My conclusion is that this could work, and we should probably look
25386 at adjusting our computer tagging procedures to use bar codes for
25387 easier automatic tracking of computers.
</p
>
25392 <title>When web browser developers make a video player...
</title>
25393 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/When_web_browser_developers_make_a_video_player___.html
</link>
25394 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/When_web_browser_developers_make_a_video_player___.html
</guid>
25395 <pubDate>Sat,
17 Jan
2009 18:
50:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
25396 <description><p
>As part of the work we do in
<a href=
"http://www.nuug.no
">NUUG
</a
>
25397 to publish video recordings of our monthly presentations, we provide a
25398 page with embedded video for easy access to the recording. Putting a
25399 good set of HTML tags together to get working embedded video in all
25400 browsers and across all operating systems is not easy. I hope this
25401 will become easier when the
&lt;video
&gt; tag is implemented in all
25402 browsers, but I am not sure. We provide the recordings in several
25403 formats, MPEG1, Ogg Theora, H
.264 and Quicktime, and want the
25404 browser/media plugin to pick one it support and use it to play the
25405 recording, using whatever embed mechanism the browser understand.
25406 There is at least four different tags to use for this, the new HTML5
25407 &lt;video
&gt; tag, the
&lt;object
&gt; tag, the
&lt;embed
&gt; tag and
25408 the
&lt;applet
&gt; tag. All of these take a lot of options, and
25409 finding the best options is a major challenge.
</p
>
25411 <p
>I just tested the experimental Opera browser available from
<a
25412 href=
"http://labs.opera.com
">labs.opera.com
</a
>, to see how it handled
25413 a
&lt;video
&gt; tag with a few video sources and no extra attributes.
25414 I was not very impressed. The browser start by fetching a picture
25415 from the video stream. Not sure if it is the first frame, but it is
25416 definitely very early in the recording. So far, so good. Next,
25417 instead of streaming the
76 MiB video file, it start to download all
25418 of it, but do not start to play the video. This mean I have to wait
25419 for several minutes for the downloading to finish. When the download
25420 is done, the playing of the video do not start! Waiting for the
25421 download, but I do not get to see the video? Some testing later, I
25422 discover that I have to add the controls=
"true
" attribute to be able
25423 to get a play button to pres to start the video. Adding
25424 autoplay=
"true
" did not help. I sure hope this is a misfeature of the
25425 test version of Opera, and that future implementations of the
25426 &lt;video
&gt; tag will stream recordings by default, or at least start
25427 playing when the download is done.
</p
>
25429 <p
>The test page I used (since changed to add more attributes) is
25430 <a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/
20090113-foredrag-om-foredrag/
">available
25431 from the nuug site
</a
>. Will have to test it with the new Firefox
25434 <p
>In the test process, I discovered a missing feature. I was unable
25435 to find a way to get the URL of the playing video out of Opera, so I
25436 am not quite sure it picked the Ogg Theora version of the video. I
25437 sure hope it was using the announced Ogg Theora support. :)
</p
>
25442 <title>Software video mixer on a USB stick
</title>
25443 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_video_mixer_on_a_USB_stick.html
</link>
25444 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_video_mixer_on_a_USB_stick.html
</guid>
25445 <pubDate>Sun,
28 Dec
2008 15:
40:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
25446 <description><p
>The
<a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/
">Norwegian Unix User Group
</a
> is
25447 recording our montly presentation on video, and recently we have
25448 worked on improving the quality of the recordings by mixing the slides
25449 directly with the video stream. For this, we use the
25450 <a href=
"http://dvswitch.alioth.debian.org/
">dvswitch
</a
> package from
25451 the Debian video team. As this require quite one computer per video
25452 source, and NUUG do not have enough laptops available, we need to
25453 borrow laptops. And to avoid having to install extra software on
25454 these borrwed laptops, I have wrapped up all the programs needed on a
25455 bootable USB stick. The software required is dvswitch with assosiated
25456 source, sink and mixer applications and
25457 <a href=
"http://www.kinodv.org/
">dvgrab
</a
>. To allow this setup to
25458 work without any configuration, I
've patched dvswitch to use
25459 <a href=
"http://www.avahi.org/
">avahi
</a
> to connect the various parts
25460 together. And to allow us to use laptops without firewire plugs, I
25461 upgraded dvgrab to the one from Debian/unstable to get one that work
25462 with USB sources. We have not yet tested this setup in a production
25463 setup, but I hope it will work properly, and allow us to set up a
25464 video mixer in a very short time frame. We will need it for
25465 <a href=
"http://www.goopen.no/
">Go Open
2009</a
>.
</p
>
25467 <p
><a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/pub/video/bin/usbstick-dvswitch.img.gz
">The
25468 USB image
</a
> is for a
1 GB memory stick, but can be used on any
25469 larger stick as well.
</p
>
25474 <title>Devcamp brought us closer to the Lenny based Debian Edu release
</title>
25475 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Devcamp_brought_us_closer_to_the_Lenny_based_Debian_Edu_release.html
</link>
25476 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Devcamp_brought_us_closer_to_the_Lenny_based_Debian_Edu_release.html
</guid>
25477 <pubDate>Sun,
7 Dec
2008 12:
00:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
25478 <description><p
>This weekend we had a small developer gathering for Debian Edu in
25479 Oslo. Most of Saturday was used for the general assemly for the
25480 member organization, but the rest of the weekend I used to tune the
25481 LTSP installation. LTSP now work out of the box on the
10-network.
25482 Acer Aspire One proved to be a very nice thin client, with both
25483 screen, mouse and keybard in a small box. Was working on getting the
25484 diskless workstation setup configured out of the box, but did not
25485 finish it before the weekend was up.
</p
>
25487 <p
>Did not find time to look at the
4 VGA cards in one box we got from
25488 the Brazilian group, so that will have to wait for the next
25489 development gathering. Would love to have the Debian Edu installer
25490 automatically detect and configure a multiseat setup when it find one
25491 of these cards.
</p
>
25496 <title>The sorry state of multimedia browser plugins in Debian
</title>
25497 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_sorry_state_of_multimedia_browser_plugins_in_Debian.html
</link>
25498 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_sorry_state_of_multimedia_browser_plugins_in_Debian.html
</guid>
25499 <pubDate>Tue,
25 Nov
2008 00:
10:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
25500 <description><p
>Recently I have spent some time evaluating the multimedia browser
25501 plugins available in Debian Lenny, to see which one we should use by
25502 default in Debian Edu. We need an embedded video playing plugin with
25503 control buttons to pause or stop the video, and capable of streaming
25504 all the multimedia content available on the web. The test results and
25505 notes are available on
25506 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia
">the
25507 Debian wiki
</a
>. I was surprised how few of the plugins are able to
25508 fill this need. My personal video player favorite, VLC, has a really
25509 bad plugin which fail on a lot of the test pages. A lot of the MIME
25510 types I would expect to work with any free software player (like
25511 video/ogg), just do not work. And simple formats like the
25512 audio/x-mplegurl format (m3u playlists), just isn
't supported by the
25513 totem and vlc plugins. I hope the situation will improve soon. No
25514 wonder sites use the proprietary Adobe flash to play video.
</p
>
25516 <p
>For Lenny, we seem to end up with the mplayer plugin. It seem to
25517 be the only one fitting our needs. :/
</p
>
projects / homepage.git / blob