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>First Skolelinux / Debian Edu Squeeze update released
</title>
11 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Skolelinux___Debian_Edu_Squeeze_update_released.html
</link>
12 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Skolelinux___Debian_Edu_Squeeze_update_released.html
</guid>
13 <pubDate>Fri,
8 Mar
2013 09:
30:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
14 <description><p
>Last Sunday,
2013-
03-
03,, Holger Levsen announced the first update
15 of
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Skolelinux / Debian Edu
</a
>
16 based on Debian Squeeze. This is the first update since
17 <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/
2012/
03/msg00001.html
">the
18 initial release
2012-
03-
11</a
>. This is the
19 <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/
2013/
03/msg00000.html
">release
20 announcement email from Holger
</a
>:
</p
>
22 <blockquote
><p
>Hi,
</p
>
24 <p
>it
's my pleasure to announce the immediate availability of Debian
25 Edu
6.0.7+r1 (
"Debian Edu Squeeze
").
</p
>
27 <p
>Debian Edu
6.0.7+r1 is an incremental update to Debian Edu
28 6.0.4+r0, containing all the changes between Debian
6.0.4 and
6.0.7 as
29 well Debian Edu specific bugfixes and enhancements. See below (in this
30 mail) for the full list of (edu) changes. Please see
31 <a href=
"http://www.debian.org/News/
2012/
20120311">http://www.debian.org/News/
2012/
20120311</a
>
32 for more information on
"Debian Edu Squeeze
".
</p
>
34 <p
>Images are available for download at
35 <a href=
"http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/
">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/
</a
></p
>
38 <br
>1fe79eb4f0f9ae1c58fc318e26cc1e2e debian-edu-
6.0.7+r1-CD.iso
39 <br
>a6ddd924a8bd9a1b5ca122e8fe1c34ec debian-edu-
6.0.7+r1-DVD.iso
40 <br
>ac6c72cd7925ccec51bfbf58e2a7c69c debian-edu-
6.0.7+r1-source-DVD.iso
</p
>
43 <br
>a4b58233b672a99c7df8dc24fb6de3327654a5c3 debian-edu-
6.0.7+r1-CD.iso
44 <br
>9b524915e0ff2aa793f13d93123e5bd2bab2dbaa debian-edu-
6.0.7+r1-DVD.iso
45 <br
>43997614893fc5e9e59ad6ce066b05d07fd836fa debian-edu-
6.0.7+r1-source-DVD.iso
</p
>
47 <p
>These images are suitable for amd64+i386.
</p
>
49 <p
>Changes for Debian Edu
6.0.7+r1 Codename
"Squeeze
", released
53 <li
>sitesummary was updated from
0.1.3 to
0.1.8
55 <li
>Make Nagios configuration more robust and efficient
</li
>
56 <li
>Comply with
3.X kernel
</li
>
57 </ul
></li
>
58 <li
>debian-edu-doc from
1.4~
20120310~
6.0.4+r0 to
1.4~
20130228~
6.0.7+r1
60 <li
>Minor updates from the wiki
</li
>
61 <li
>Danish translation now complete
</li
>
62 </ul
></li
>
63 <li
>debian-edu-config from
1.453 to
1.455
65 <li
>Fix /etc/hosts for LTSP diskless workstations. Closes: #
699880</li
>
66 <li
>Make ltsp_local_mount script work for multiple devices.
</li
>
67 <li
>Correct Kerberos user policy: don
't expire password after
2 days.
68 Closes: #
664596</li
>
69 <li
>Handle
'#
' characters in the root or first users password.
70 Closes: #
664976</li
>
71 <li
>Fixes for gosa-sync:
73 <li
>Don
't fail if password contains
"</li
>
74 <li
>Don
't disclose new password string in syslog
</li
>
75 </ul
></li
>
76 <li
>Fixes for gosa-create:
78 <li
>Invalidate libnss cache before applying changes
</li
>
79 <li
>Multiple failures during mass user import into GOsa²
</li
>
80 <li
>gosa-netgroups plugin: don
't erase entries of attribute type
81 "memberNisNetgroup
". Closes: #
687256</li
>
82 <li
>First user now uses the same Kerberos policy as all other users
</li
>
83 </ul
></li
>
84 <li
>Add Danish web page
</li
>
86 <li
>debian-edu-install from
1.528 to
1.530
88 <li
>Improve preseeding support and documentation
</li
>
89 </ul
></li
>
92 <p
>End-user documentation in English is available at
93 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze/
">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze/
</a
>
94 - translations to French, Italian, Danish and German are available in
95 the debian-edu-doc package. (Other languages could use your help!)
</p
>
97 <p
>If you want to contribute to Debian Edu, please join our
99 <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/
">debian-edu@lists.debian.org
</a
>!
100 </p
></blockquote
>
102 <p
>I am very happy to see the fruits of a year of hard work. :)
</p
>
107 <title>Frikanalen - Complete TV station organised using the web
</title>
108 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Frikanalen___Complete_TV_station_organised_using_the_web.html
</link>
109 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Frikanalen___Complete_TV_station_organised_using_the_web.html
</guid>
110 <pubDate>Sun,
3 Mar
2013 07:
15:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
111 <description><p
>Do you want to set up your own TV station, schedule videos and
112 broadcast them on the air? Using free software? With video on demand
114 <a href=
"http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition
">free and
115 open standards
</a
>? Included a web based video stream as well? And
116 administrate it all in your web browser from anywhere in the world? A
117 few years now the Norwegian public access TV-channel
118 <a href=
"http://www.frikanalen.no/
">Frikanalen
</a
> have been building a
119 system to do just this. The source code for the solution is licensed
120 using the GNU LGPL, and
121 <a href=
"http://github.com/Frikanalen
">available from github
</a
>.
</p
>
123 <p
>The idea is simple. You upload a video file over the web, and
124 attach meta information to the file. You select a time slot in the
125 program schedule, and when the time come it is played on the air and
126 in the web stream. It is also made available in a video on demand
127 solution for anyone to see it also outside its scheduled time. All
128 you need to run a TV station - using your web browser.
</p
>
130 <p
>There are several parts to this web based solution. I
'll mention
131 the three most important ones. The first part is the database of
132 videos and the schedule. This is written in Django and include a REST
133 API. The current database is SQLite, but the plan is to migrate it to
134 PostgreSQL. At the moment this system can be tested on
135 <a href=
"http://beta.frikanalen.tv/
">beta.frikanalen.tv
</a
>. The
136 second part is the video playout, taking the schedule information from
137 the database and providing a video stream to broadcast. This is done
138 using
<a href=
"http://www.casparcg.com/
">CasparCG from SVT
</a
> and
139 <a href=
"http://www.mltframework.org/
">Media Lovin
' Toolkit
</a
>. Video
140 signal distribution is handled using
141 <a href=
"http://www.ob-encoder.com/
">Open Broadcast Encoder
</a
>. The
142 third part is the converter, handling the transformation of uploaded
143 video files to a format useful for broadcasting, streaming and video
144 on demand. It is still very much work in progress, so it is not yet
145 decided what it will end up using. Note that the source of the latter
146 two parts are not yet pushed to github. The lead author want to clean
147 them up a bit more first.
</p
>
149 <p
>The development is coordinated on the
150 <a href=
"irc://irc.freenode.net/%
23frikanalen
">#frikanalen IRC
151 channel
</a
> (irc.freenode.net), and discussed on
152 <a href=
"http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/frikanalen
">the
153 frikanalen mailing list
</a
>. The lead developer is Benjamin Bruheim
154 (phed on IRC). Anyone is welcome to participate in the
155 development.
</p
>
160 <title>Dr. Richard Stallman, founder of Free Software Foundation, give a talk in Oslo March
1st
2013</title>
161 <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>
162 <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>
163 <pubDate>Wed,
27 Feb
2013 20:
20:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
164 <description><p
>Dr.
<a href=
"http://www.stallman.org/
">Richard Stallman
</a
>,
165 founder of
<a href=
"http://www.fsf.org/
">Free Software Foundation
</a
>,
166 is giving
<a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/
20130301-rms/
">a
167 talk in Oslo March
1st
2013 17:
00 to
19:
00</a
>. The event is public
168 and organised by
<a href=
"">Norwegian Unix Users Group (NUUG)
</a
>
169 (where I am the chair of the board) and
170 <a href=
"http://www.friprog.no/
">The Norwegian Open Source Competence
171 Center
</a
>. The title of the talk is «The Free Software Movement and
172 GNU», with this description:
174 <p
><blockquote
>
175 The Free Software Movement campaigns for computer users
' freedom to
176 cooperate and control their own computing. The Free Software Movement
177 developed the GNU operating system, typically used together with the
178 kernel Linux, specifically to make these freedoms possible.
179 </blockquote
></p
>
181 <p
>The meeting is open for everyone. Due to space limitations, the
182 doors opens for NUUG members at
16:
15, and everyone else at
16:
45. I
183 am really curious how many will show up. See
184 <a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/
20130301-rms/
">the event
185 page
</a
> for the location details.
</p
>
190 <title>Frikart - Free Garmin maps for European countries based on OpenStreetmap
</title>
191 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Frikart___Free_Garmin_maps_for_European_countries_based_on_OpenStreetmap.html
</link>
192 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Frikart___Free_Garmin_maps_for_European_countries_based_on_OpenStreetmap.html
</guid>
193 <pubDate>Fri,
15 Feb
2013 09:
30:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
194 <description><p
>If you, like me, want an updated a map for your Garmin GPS, there is
195 now a great source of free maps available from
196 <a href=
"http://www.frikart.no/garmin/index.html
">Frikart
</a
>. To
197 download a map, just click on the country you are interested in, and
198 download the map type you want. There are
8 different maps available,
199 using different colours and data selection. Pick one of Roadmap, Topo
200 Summer, Topo Winter, Roadmap II, Topo Summer II, Topo Winter II,
201 "Trails - overlay map
" and
"Cross country - overlay map
" (see the web
202 page for descriptions).
</p
>
204 <p
>The maps are updated weekly, so if you find something wrong in the
205 map you can just edit the
206 <a href=
"http://www.openstreetmap.org/
">OpenStreetmap
</a
> map source
207 (anyone can contribute) and fetch a fixed map a week later. :)
</p
>
212 <title>"Electronic
" paper invoices - using vCard in a QR code
</title>
213 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/_Electronic__paper_invoices___using_vCard_in_a_QR_code.html
</link>
214 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/_Electronic__paper_invoices___using_vCard_in_a_QR_code.html
</guid>
215 <pubDate>Tue,
12 Feb
2013 10:
30:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
216 <description><p
>Here in Norway, electronic invoices are spreading, and the
217 <a href=
"http://www.anskaffelser.no/e-handel/faktura
">solution promoted
218 by the Norwegian government
</a
> require that invoices are sent through
219 one of the approved facilitators, and it is not possible to send
220 electronic invoices without an agreement with one of these
221 facilitators. This seem like a needless limitation to be able to
222 transfer invoice information between buyers and sellers. My preferred
223 solution would be to just transfer the invoice information directly
224 between seller and buyer, for example using SMTP, or some HTTP based
225 protocol like REST or SOAP. But this might also be overkill, as the
226 "electronic
" information can be transferred using paper invoices too,
227 using a simple bar code. My bar code encoding of choice would be QR
228 codes, as this encoding can be read by any smart phone out there. The
229 content of the code could be anything, but I would go with
230 <a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VCard
">the vCard format
</a
>, as
231 it too is supported by a lot of computer equipment these days.
</p
>
233 <p
>The vCard format support extentions, and the invoice specific
234 information can be included using such extentions. For example an
235 invoice from SLX Debian Labs (picked because we
236 <a href=
"http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html
">ask
237 for donations to the Debian Edu project
</a
> and thus have bank account
238 information publicly available) for NOK
1000.00 could have these extra
243 X-INVOICE-AMOUNT:NOK1000.00
244 X-INVOICE-KID:
123412341234
245 X-INVOICE-MSG:Donation to Debian Edu
246 X-BANK-ACCOUNT-NUMBER:
16040884339
247 X-BANK-IBAN-NUMBER:NO8516040884339
248 X-BANK-SWIFT-NUMBER:DNBANOKKXXX
249 </pre
></p
>
251 <p
>The X-BANK-ACCOUNT-NUMBER field was proposed in a stackoverflow
253 <a href=
"http://stackoverflow.com/questions/
10045664/storing-bank-account-in-vcard-file
">how
254 to put bank account information into a vCard
</a
>. For payments in
255 Norway, either X-INVOICE-KID (payment ID) or X-INVOICE-MSG could be
256 used to pass on information to the seller when paying the invoice.
</p
>
258 <p
>The complete vCard could look like this:
</p
>
263 ORG:SLX Debian Labs Foundation
264 ADR;WORK:;;Gunnar Schjelderups vei
29D;OSLO;;
0485;Norway
265 URL;WORK:http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/
266 EMAIL;PREF;INTERNET:sdl-styret@rt.nuug.no
269 X-INVOICE-AMOUNT:NOK1000.00
270 X-INVOICE-MSG:Donation to Debian Edu
271 X-BANK-ACCOUNT-NUMBER:
16040884339
272 X-BANK-IBAN-NUMBER:NO8516040884339
273 X-BANK-SWIFT-NUMBER:DNBANOKKXXX
275 </pre
></p
>
277 <p
>The resulting QR code created using
278 <a href=
"http://fukuchi.org/works/qrencode/
">qrencode
</a
> would look
279 like this, and should be readable (and thus checkable) by any smart
280 phone, or for example the
<a href=
"http://zbar.sourceforge.net/
">zbar
281 bar code reader
</a
> and feed right into the approval and accounting
284 <p
><img src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
02-
12-qr-invoice.png
"></p
>
286 <p
>The extension fields will most likely not show up in any normal
287 vCard reader, so those parts would have to go directly into a system
288 handling invoices. I am a bit unsure how vCards without name parts
289 are handled, but a simple test indicate that this work just fine.
</p
>
291 <p
><strong
>Update
2013-
02-
12 11:
30</strong
>: Added KID to the proposal
292 based on feedback from Sturle Sunde.
</p
>
297 <title>Sleep until morning - home automation for the kids
</title>
298 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sleep_until_morning___home_automation_for_the_kids.html
</link>
299 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sleep_until_morning___home_automation_for_the_kids.html
</guid>
300 <pubDate>Sun,
10 Feb
2013 12:
50:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
301 <description><p
><img align=
"left
" style=
"margin-right:
25px;
" src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
02-
10-morning-light.jpeg
"></p
>
303 <p
>With kids in the house, one challenge is getting them to sleep
304 during the night and wake up when it is morning. I mean, when I
305 believe it is morning, and not two hours earlier. In our household we
306 have decided that
07:
00 is the turning point, but getting the kids to
307 sleep until
07:
00 is a small challenge every day. They have adapted
308 quite well, and rarely wake up at
05:
00 any more, but some times wake
309 up at times like
05:
50,
06:
15,
06:
30 or
06:
45, and it is hard to put
310 the awake one to bed again without disturbing and waking the rest.
311 And I understand perfectly well that they fail to sleep until
07:
00
312 some times, as there is no way for them to know if it is before or
313 after the magic moment without coming and asking us parents.
</p
>
315 <p
>But yesterday I came up with a method to solve this problem. It
316 involve home automation. A few years ago I bought a
317 <a href=
"http://www.telldus.se/products/tellstick
">Tellstick
</a
> and RF
318 switches at the local
<a href=
"http://www.clasohlson.com/
">Clas
319 Ohlson
</a
> shop, allowing me to control lights and other electrical
320 gadgets using my Linux server. When I moved from the old flat to a
321 small house, I put away all this equipment as most of the lighting in
322 the house was not using wall sockets and thus not easy to connect to
323 the gadgets I had. But recently I bought a
324 <a href=
"http://www.telldus.se/products/tellstick_net
">Tellstick
325 Net
</a
> to be able to read sensor input as well as control power
326 sockets. I want to control ovens in the basement to avoid the pipes
327 to freeze, and monitor the humidity to detect flooding. The default
328 setup for Tellstick Net is to be controlled by the vendor web service,
329 which to me is a security problem, but it is also possible to build
331 <a href=
"http://developer.telldus.com/blog/
2012/
03/
02/help-us-develop-local-access-using-tellstick-net-build-your-own-firmware
">firmware
332 with local access
</A
> instead of being controlled by a Swedish
333 company, thanks to the release of the GPL licensed firmware source
334 code. I plan to get that running before I let it control anything
335 important. But while working on this, one idea to make it easier for
336 the kids came to me yesterday. We can set up a night light controlled
337 by the computer, and turn it automatically on at
07:
00. The kids can
338 then check the light in the morning to know if they are supposed to
339 get up or not. They joined me in setting everything up, and I
340 repeated the concept several times before bed times to make sure they
341 remembered to check the light before getting up in the morning.
</p
>
343 <p
>We tested it this morning, and all the kids stayed in bed until
344 after
07:
00, and every one of them commented on the fact that the
345 "morning light
" was turned on and signalled that the morning had
346 arrived. So this look like a success, and I am excited to see how
347 this develops the next few days. :) I really hope this can allow us
348 all to sleep a bit longer in the morning.
</p
>
350 <p
>A nice advantage of this setup is that we can remote control when
351 to tell the kids to get up. We do not have to wait until
07:
00, and
352 can also delay it if we want to.
</p
>
357 <title>Bitcoin GUI now available from Debian/unstable (and Ubuntu/raring)
</title>
358 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Bitcoin_GUI_now_available_from_Debian_unstable__and_Ubuntu_raring_.html
</link>
359 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Bitcoin_GUI_now_available_from_Debian_unstable__and_Ubuntu_raring_.html
</guid>
360 <pubDate>Sat,
2 Feb
2013 09:
00:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
361 <description><p
>My
362 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_backport_bitcoin_qt_version_0_7_2_2_to_Debian_Squeeze.html
">last
363 bitcoin related blog post
</a
> mentioned that the new
364 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin
">bitcoin package
</a
> for
365 Debian was waiting in NEW. It was accepted by the Debian ftp-masters
366 2013-
01-
19, and have been available in unstable since then. It was
367 automatically copied to Ubuntu, and is available in their Raring
368 version too.
</p
>
370 <p
>But there is a strange problem with the build that block this new
371 version from being available on the i386 and kfreebsd-i386
372 architectures. For some strange reason, the autobuilders in Debian
373 for these architectures fail to run the test suite on these
374 architectures (
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
672524">BTS #
672524</a
>).
375 We are so far unable to reproduce it when building it manually, and
376 no-one have been able to propose a fix. If you got an idea what is
377 failing, please let us know via the BTS.
</p
>
379 <p
>One feature that is annoying me with of the bitcoin client, because
380 I often run low on disk space, is the fact that the client will exit
381 if it run short on space (
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
696715">BTS
382 #
696715</a
>). So make sure you have enough disk space when you run
385 <p
>As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
386 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
387 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
392 <title>Welcome to the world, Isenkram!
</title>
393 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html
</link>
394 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html
</guid>
395 <pubDate>Tue,
22 Jan
2013 22:
00:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
396 <description><p
>Yesterday, I
397 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_prototype_ready_making_hardware_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html
">asked
398 for testers
</a
> for my prototype for making Debian better at handling
399 pluggable hardware devices, which I
400 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html
">set
401 out to create
</a
> earlier this month. Several valuable testers showed
402 up, and caused me to really want to to open up the development to more
403 people. But before I did this, I want to come up with a sensible name
404 for this project. Today I finally decided on a new name, and I have
405 renamed the project from hw-support-handler to this new name. In the
406 process, I moved the source to git and made it available as a
407 <a href=
"http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/isenkram.git
">collab-maint
</a
>
408 repository in Debian. The new name? It is
<strong
>Isenkram
</strong
>.
409 To fetch and build the latest version of the source, use
</p
>
412 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/collab-maint/isenkram.git
413 cd isenkram
&& git-buildpackage -us -uc
416 <p
>I have not yet adjusted all files to use the new name yet. If you
417 want to hack on the source or improve the package, please go ahead.
418 But please talk to me first on IRC or via email before you do major
419 changes, to make sure we do not step on each others toes. :)
</p
>
421 <p
>If you wonder what
'isenkram
' is, it is a Norwegian word for iron
422 stuff, typically meaning tools, nails, screws, etc. Typical hardware
423 stuff, in other words. I
've been told it is the Norwegian variant of
424 the German word eisenkram, for those that are familiar with that
427 <p
><strong
>Update
2013-
01-
26</strong
>: Added -us -us to build
428 instructions, to avoid confusing people with an error from the signing
431 <p
><strong
>Update
2013-
01-
27</strong
>: Switch to HTTP URL for the git
432 clone argument to avoid the need for authentication.
</p
>
437 <title>First prototype ready making hardware easier to use in Debian
</title>
438 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_prototype_ready_making_hardware_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html
</link>
439 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_prototype_ready_making_hardware_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html
</guid>
440 <pubDate>Mon,
21 Jan
2013 12:
00:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
441 <description><p
>Early this month I set out to try to
442 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html
">improve
443 the Debian support for pluggable hardware devices
</a
>. Now my
444 prototype is working, and it is ready for a larger audience. To test
446 <a href=
"http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/
">source
447 from the Debian Edu subversion repository
</a
>, build and install the
448 package. You might have to log out and in again activate the
449 autostart script.
</p
>
451 <p
>The design is simple:
</p
>
455 <li
>Add desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ causing a program
456 hw-support-handlerd to start when the user log in.
</li
>
458 <li
>This program listen for kernel events about new hardware (directly
459 from the kernel like udev does), not using HAL dbus events as I
460 initially did.
</li
>
462 <li
>When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware modalias in
463 the APT database, a database
464 <a href=
"http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=markup
">available
465 via HTTP
</a
> and a database available as part of the package.
</li
>
467 <li
>If a package is mapped to the hardware in question, the package
468 isn
't installed yet and this is the first time the hardware was
469 plugged in, show a desktop notification suggesting to install the
470 package or packages.
</li
>
472 <li
>If the user click on the
'install package now
' button, ask
473 aptdaemon via the PackageKit API to install the requrired package.
</li
>
475 <li
>aptdaemon ask for root password or sudo password, and install the
476 package while showing progress information in a window.
</li
>
480 <p
>I still need to come up with a better name for the system. Here
481 are some screen shots showing the prototype in action. First the
482 notification, then the password request, and finally the request to
483 approve all the dependencies. Sorry for the Norwegian Bokmål GUI.
</p
>
485 <p
><img src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
01-
21-hw-support-
1-notification.png
">
486 <br
><img src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
01-
21-hw-support-
2-password.png
">
487 <br
><img src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
01-
21-hw-support-
3-dependencies.png
">
488 <br
><img src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
01-
21-hw-support-
4-installing.png
">
489 <br
><img src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
01-
21-hw-support-
5-installing-details.png
" width=
"70%
"></p
>
491 <p
>The prototype still need to be improved with longer timeouts, but
492 is already useful. The database of hardware to package mappings also
493 need more work. It is currently compatible with the Ubuntu way of
494 storing such information in the package control file, but could be
495 changed to use other formats instead or in addition to the current
496 method. I
've dropped the use of discover for this mapping, as the
497 modalias approach is more flexible and easier to use on Linux as long
498 as the Linux kernel expose its modalias strings directly.
</p
>
500 <p
><strong
>Update
2013-
01-
21 16:
50</strong
>: Due to popular demand,
501 here is the command required to check out and build the source: Use
502 '<tt
>svn checkout
503 svn://svn.debian.org/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/; cd
504 hw-support-handler; debuild
</tt
>'. If you lack debuild, install the
505 devscripts package.
</p
>
507 <p
><strong
>Update
2013-
01-
23 12:
00</strong
>: The project is now
508 renamed to Isenkram and the source moved from the Debian Edu
509 subversion repository to a Debian collab-maint git repository. See
510 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html
">build
511 instructions
</a
> for details.
</p
>
516 <title>Thank you Thinkpad X41, for your long and trustworthy service
</title>
517 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html
</link>
518 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html
</guid>
519 <pubDate>Sat,
19 Jan
2013 09:
20:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
520 <description><p
>This Christmas my trusty old laptop died. It died quietly and
521 suddenly in bed. With a quiet whimper, it went completely quiet and
522 black. The power button was no longer able to turn it on. It was a
523 IBM Thinkpad X41, and the best laptop I ever had. Better than both
524 Thinkpads X30, X31, X40, X60, X61 and X61S. Far better than the
525 Compaq I had before that. Now I need to find a replacement. To keep
526 going during Christmas, I moved the one year old SSD disk to my old
527 X40 where it fitted (only one I had left that could use it), but it is
528 not a durable solution.
530 <p
>My laptop needs are fairly modest. This is my wishlist from when I
531 got a new one more than
10 years ago. It still holds true.:)
</p
>
535 <li
>Lightweight (around
1 kg) and small volume (preferably smaller
537 <li
>Robust, it will be in my backpack every day.
</li
>
538 <li
>Three button mouse and a mouse pin instead of touch pad.
</li
>
539 <li
>Long battery life time. Preferable a week.
</li
>
540 <li
>Internal WIFI network card.
</li
>
541 <li
>Internal Twisted Pair network card.
</li
>
542 <li
>Some USB slots (
2-
3 is plenty)
</li
>
543 <li
>Good keyboard - similar to the Thinkpad.
</li
>
544 <li
>Video resolution at least
1024x768, with size around
12" (A4 paper
546 <li
>Hardware supported by Debian Stable, ie the default kernel and
547 X.org packages.
</li
>
548 <li
>Quiet, preferably fan free (or at least not using the fan most of
553 <p
>You will notice that there are no RAM and CPU requirements in the
554 list. The reason is simply that the specifications on laptops the
555 last
10-
15 years have been sufficient for my needs, and I have to look
556 at other features to choose my laptop. But are there still made as
557 robust laptops as my X41? The Thinkpad X60/X61 proved to be less
558 robust, and Thinkpads seem to be heading in the wrong direction since
559 Lenovo took over. But I
've been told that X220 and X1 Carbon might
560 still be useful.
</p
>
562 <p
>Perhaps I should rethink my needs, and look for a pad with an
563 external keyboard? I
'll have to check the
564 <a href=
"http://www.linux-laptop.net/
">Linux Laptops site
</a
> for
565 well-supported laptops, or perhaps just buy one preinstalled from one
566 of the vendors listed on the
<a href=
"http://linuxpreloaded.com/
">Linux
567 Pre-loaded site
</a
>.
</p
>
572 <title>How to find a browser plugin supporting a given MIME type
</title>
573 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_find_a_browser_plugin_supporting_a_given_MIME_type.html
</link>
574 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_find_a_browser_plugin_supporting_a_given_MIME_type.html
</guid>
575 <pubDate>Fri,
18 Jan
2013 10:
40:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
576 <description><p
>Some times I try to figure out which Iceweasel browser plugin to
577 install to get support for a given MIME type. Thanks to
578 <a href=
"https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MozillaTeam/Plugins
">specifications
579 done by Ubuntu
</a
> and Mozilla, it is possible to do this in Debian.
580 Unfortunately, not very many packages provide the needed meta
581 information, Anyway, here is a small script to look up all browser
582 plugin packages announcing ther MIME support using this specification:
</p
>
588 def pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
593 version = pkg.candidate
595 version = pkg.installed
598 record = version.record
599 if not record.has_key(
'Npp-MimeType
'):
601 mime_types = record[
'Npp-MimeType
'].split(
',
')
603 t = t.rstrip().strip()
605 thepkgs.append(pkg.name)
607 mimetype =
"audio/ogg
"
608 if
1 < len(sys.argv):
609 mimetype = sys.argv[
1]
610 print
"Browser plugin packages supporting %s:
" % mimetype
611 for pkg in pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
612 print
" %s
" %pkg
615 <p
>It can be used like this to look up a given MIME type:
</p
>
618 % ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype
619 Browser plugin packages supporting audio/ogg:
621 % ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype application/x-shockwave-flash
622 Browser plugin packages supporting application/x-shockwave-flash:
627 <p
>In Ubuntu this mechanism is combined with support in the browser
628 itself to query for plugins and propose to install the needed
629 packages. It would be great if Debian supported such feature too. Is
630 anyone working on adding it?
</p
>
632 <p
><strong
>Update
2013-
01-
18 14:
20</strong
>: The Debian BTS
633 request for icweasel support for this feature is
634 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
484010">#
484010</a
> from
2008 (and
635 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
698426">#
698426</a
> from today). Lack
636 of manpower and wish for a different design is the reason thus feature
637 is not yet in iceweasel from Debian.
</p
>
642 <title>What is the most supported MIME type in Debian?
</title>
643 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_most_supported_MIME_type_in_Debian_.html
</link>
644 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_most_supported_MIME_type_in_Debian_.html
</guid>
645 <pubDate>Wed,
16 Jan
2013 10:
10:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
646 <description><p
>The
<a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/AppStreamDebianProposal
">DEP-
11
647 proposal to add AppStream information to the Debian archive
</a
>, is a
648 proposal to make it possible for a Desktop application to propose to
649 the user some package to install to gain support for a given MIME
650 type, font, library etc. that is currently missing. With such
651 mechanism in place, it would be possible for the desktop to
652 automatically propose and install leocad if some LDraw file is
653 downloaded by the browser.
</p
>
655 <p
>To get some idea about the current content of the archive, I decided
656 to write a simple program to extract all .desktop files from the
657 Debian archive and look up the claimed MIME support there. The result
659 <a href=
"http://ftp.skolelinux.org/pub/AppStreamTest
">Skolelinux FTP
660 site
</a
>. Using the collected information, it become possible to
661 answer the question in the title. Here are the
20 most supported MIME
662 types in Debian stable (Squeeze), testing (Wheezy) and unstable (Sid).
663 The complete list is available from the link above.
</p
>
665 <p
><strong
>Debian Stable:
</strong
></p
>
669 ----- -----------------------
692 <p
><strong
>Debian Testing:
</strong
></p
>
696 ----- -----------------------
719 <p
><strong
>Debian Unstable:
</strong
></p
>
723 ----- -----------------------
746 <p
>I am told that PackageKit can provide an API to access the kind of
747 information mentioned in DEP-
11. I have not yet had time to look at
748 it, but hope the PackageKit people in Debian are on top of these
751 <p
><strong
>Update
2013-
01-
16 13:
35</strong
>: Updated numbers after
752 discovering a typo in my script.
</p
>
757 <title>Using modalias info to find packages handling my hardware
</title>
758 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_modalias_info_to_find_packages_handling_my_hardware.html
</link>
759 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_modalias_info_to_find_packages_handling_my_hardware.html
</guid>
760 <pubDate>Tue,
15 Jan
2013 08:
00:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
761 <description><p
>Yesterday, I wrote about the
762 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Modalias_strings___a_practical_way_to_map__stuff__to_hardware.html
">modalias
763 values provided by the Linux kernel
</a
> following my hope for
764 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html
">better
765 dongle support in Debian
</a
>. Using this knowledge, I have tested how
766 modalias values attached to package names can be used to map packages
767 to hardware. This allow the system to look up and suggest relevant
768 packages when I plug in some new hardware into my machine, and replace
769 discover and discover-data as the database used to map hardware to
772 <p
>I create a modaliases file with entries like the following,
773 containing package name, kernel module name (if relevant, otherwise
774 the package name) and globs matching the relevant hardware
777 <p
><blockquote
>
778 Package: package-name
779 <br
>Modaliases: module(modaliasglob, modaliasglob, modaliasglob)
</p
>
780 </blockquote
></p
>
782 <p
>It is fairly trivial to write code to find the relevant packages
783 for a given modalias value using this file.
</p
>
785 <p
>An entry like this would suggest the video and picture application
786 cheese for many USB web cameras (interface bus class
0E01):
</p
>
788 <p
><blockquote
>
790 <br
>Modaliases: cheese(usb:v*p*d*dc*dsc*dp*ic0Eisc01ip*)
</p
>
791 </blockquote
></p
>
793 <p
>An entry like this would suggest the pcmciautils package when a
794 CardBus bridge (bus class
0607) PCI device is present:
</p
>
796 <p
><blockquote
>
798 <br
>Modaliases: pcmciautils(pci:v*d*sv*sd*bc06sc07i*)
799 </blockquote
></p
>
801 <p
>An entry like this would suggest the package colorhug-client when
802 plugging in a ColorHug with USB IDs
04D8:F8DA:
</p
>
804 <p
><blockquote
>
805 Package: colorhug-client
806 <br
>Modaliases: colorhug-client(usb:v04D8pF8DAd*)
</p
>
807 </blockquote
></p
>
809 <p
>I believe the format is compatible with the format of the Packages
810 file in the Debian archive. Ubuntu already uses their Packages file
811 to store their mappings from packages to hardware.
</p
>
813 <p
>By adding a XB-Modaliases: header in debian/control, any .deb can
814 announce the hardware it support in a way my prototype understand.
815 This allow those publishing packages in an APT source outside the
816 Debian archive as well as those backporting packages to make sure the
817 hardware mapping are included in the package meta information. I
've
818 tested such header in the pymissile package, and its modalias mapping
819 is working as it should with my prototype. It even made it to Ubuntu
822 <p
>To test if it was possible to look up supported hardware using only
823 the shell tools available in the Debian installer, I wrote a shell
824 implementation of the lookup code. The idea is to create files for
825 each modalias and let the shell do the matching. Please check out and
827 <a href=
"http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/hw-support-lookup?view=co
">hw-support-lookup
</a
>
828 shell script. It run without any extra dependencies and fetch the
829 hardware mappings from the Debian archive and the subversion
830 repository where I currently work on my prototype.
</p
>
832 <p
>When I use it on a machine with a yubikey inserted, it suggest to
833 install yubikey-personalization:
</p
>
835 <p
><blockquote
>
836 % ./hw-support-lookup
837 <br
>yubikey-personalization
839 </blockquote
></p
>
841 <p
>When I run it on my Thinkpad X40 with a PCMCIA/CardBus slot, it
842 propose to install the pcmciautils package:
</p
>
844 <p
><blockquote
>
845 % ./hw-support-lookup
846 <br
>pcmciautils
848 </blockquote
></p
>
850 <p
>If you know of any hardware-package mapping that should be added to
851 <a href=
"http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=co
">my
852 database
</a
>, please tell me about it.
</p
>
854 <p
>It could be possible to generate several of the mappings between
855 packages and hardware. One source would be to look at packages with
856 kernel modules, ie packages with *.ko files in /lib/modules/, and
857 extract their modalias information. Another would be to look at
858 packages with udev rules, ie packages with files in
859 /lib/udev/rules.d/, and extract their vendor/model information to
860 generate a modalias matching rule. I have not tested any of these to
861 see if it work.
</p
>
863 <p
>If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
864 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
865 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
866 <a href=
"irc://irc.debian.org/%
23debian-devel
">#debian-devel
</a
>.
</p
>
871 <title>Modalias strings - a practical way to map
"stuff
" to hardware
</title>
872 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Modalias_strings___a_practical_way_to_map__stuff__to_hardware.html
</link>
873 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Modalias_strings___a_practical_way_to_map__stuff__to_hardware.html
</guid>
874 <pubDate>Mon,
14 Jan
2013 11:
20:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
875 <description><p
>While looking into how to look up Debian packages based on hardware
876 information, to find the packages that support a given piece of
877 hardware, I refreshed my memory regarding modalias values, and decided
878 to document the details. Here are my findings so far, also available
880 <a href=
"http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/
">the
881 Debian Edu subversion repository
</a
>:
883 <p
><strong
>Modalias decoded
</strong
></p
>
885 <p
>This document try to explain what the different types of modalias
886 values stands for. It is in part based on information from
887 &lt;URL:
<a href=
"https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias
">https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias
</a
> &gt;,
888 &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;,
889 &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
890 &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;.
892 <p
>The modalias entries for a given Linux machine can be found using
893 this shell script:
</p
>
896 find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -
0 cat | sort -u
899 <p
>The supported modalias globs for a given kernel module can be found
900 using modinfo:
</p
>
903 % /sbin/modinfo psmouse | grep alias:
904 alias: serio:ty05pr*id*ex*
905 alias: serio:ty01pr*id*ex*
909 <p
><strong
>PCI subtype
</strong
></p
>
911 <p
>A typical PCI entry can look like this. This is an Intel Host
912 Bridge memory controller:
</p
>
914 <p
><blockquote
>
915 pci:v00008086d00002770sv00001028sd000001ADbc06sc00i00
916 </blockquote
></p
>
918 <p
>This represent these values:
</p
>
923 sv
00001028 (subvendor)
924 sd
000001AD (subdevice)
930 <p
>The vendor/device values are the same values outputted from
'lspci
931 -n
' as
8086:
2770. The bus class/subclass is also shown by lspci as
932 0600. The
0600 class is a host bridge. Other useful bus values are
933 0300 (VGA compatible card) and
0200 (Ethernet controller).
</p
>
935 <p
>Not sure how to figure out the interface value, nor what it
938 <p
><strong
>USB subtype
</strong
></p
>
940 <p
>Some typical USB entries can look like this. This is an internal
941 USB hub in a laptop:
</p
>
943 <p
><blockquote
>
944 usb:v1D6Bp0001d0206dc09dsc00dp00ic09isc00ip00
945 </blockquote
></p
>
947 <p
>Here is the values included in this alias:
</p
>
950 v
1D6B (device vendor)
951 p
0001 (device product)
954 dsc
00 (device subclass)
955 dp
00 (device protocol)
956 ic
09 (interface class)
957 isc
00 (interface subclass)
958 ip
00 (interface protocol)
961 <p
>The
0900 device class/subclass means hub. Some times the relevant
962 class is in the interface class section. For a simple USB web camera,
963 these alias entries show up:
</p
>
965 <p
><blockquote
>
966 usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc01ip00
967 <br
>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc02ip00
968 <br
>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc01ip00
969 <br
>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc02ip00
970 </blockquote
></p
>
972 <p
>Interface class
0E01 is video control,
0E02 is video streaming (aka
973 camera),
0101 is audio control device and
0102 is audio streaming (aka
974 microphone). Thus this is a camera with microphone included.
</p
>
976 <p
><strong
>ACPI subtype
</strong
></p
>
978 <p
>The ACPI type is used for several non-PCI/USB stuff. This is an IR
979 receiver in a Thinkpad X40:
</p
>
981 <p
><blockquote
>
982 acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
983 </blockquote
></p
>
985 <p
>The values between the colons are IDs.
</p
>
987 <p
><strong
>DMI subtype
</strong
></p
>
989 <p
>The DMI table contain lots of information about the computer case
990 and model. This is an entry for a IBM Thinkpad X40, fetched from
991 /sys/devices/virtual/dmi/id/modalias:
</p
>
993 <p
><blockquote
>
994 dmi:bvnIBM:bvr1UETB6WW(
1.66):bd06/
15/
2005:svnIBM:pn2371H4G:pvrThinkPadX40:rvnIBM:rn2371H4G:rvrNotAvailable:cvnIBM:ct10:cvrNotAvailable:
995 </blockquote
></p
>
997 <p
>The values present are
</p
>
1000 bvn IBM (BIOS vendor)
1001 bvr
1UETB
6WW(
1.66) (BIOS version)
1002 bd
06/
15/
2005 (BIOS date)
1003 svn IBM (system vendor)
1004 pn
2371H4G (product name)
1005 pvr ThinkPadX40 (product version)
1006 rvn IBM (board vendor)
1007 rn
2371H4G (board name)
1008 rvr NotAvailable (board version)
1009 cvn IBM (chassis vendor)
1010 ct
10 (chassis type)
1011 cvr NotAvailable (chassis version)
1014 <p
>The chassis type
10 is Notebook. Other interesting values can be
1015 found in the dmidecode source:
</p
>
1019 4 Low Profile Desktop
1032 17 Main Server Chassis
1033 18 Expansion Chassis
1035 20 Bus Expansion Chassis
1036 21 Peripheral Chassis
1038 23 Rack Mount Chassis
1047 <p
>The chassis type values are not always accurately set in the DMI
1048 table. For example my home server is a tower, but the DMI modalias
1049 claim it is a desktop.
</p
>
1051 <p
><strong
>SerIO subtype
</strong
></p
>
1053 <p
>This type is used for PS/
2 mouse plugs. One example is from my
1054 test machine:
</p
>
1056 <p
><blockquote
>
1057 serio:ty01pr00id00ex00
1058 </blockquote
></p
>
1060 <p
>The values present are
</p
>
1069 <p
>This type is supported by the psmouse driver. I am not sure what
1070 the valid values are.
</p
>
1072 <p
><strong
>Other subtypes
</strong
></p
>
1074 <p
>There are heaps of other modalias subtypes according to
1075 file2alias.c. There is the rest of the list from that source: amba,
1076 ap, bcma, ccw, css, eisa, hid, i2c, ieee1394, input, ipack, isapnp,
1077 mdio, of, parisc, pcmcia, platform, scsi, sdio, spi, ssb, vio, virtio,
1078 vmbus, x86cpu and zorro. I did not spend time documenting all of
1079 these, as they do not seem relevant for my intended use with mapping
1080 hardware to packages when new stuff is inserted during run time.
</p
>
1082 <p
><strong
>Looking up kernel modules using modalias values
</strong
></p
>
1084 <p
>To check which kernel modules provide support for a given modalias,
1085 one can use the following shell script:
</p
>
1088 for id in $(find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -
0 cat | sort -u); do \
1089 echo
"$id
" ; \
1090 /sbin/modprobe --show-depends
"$id
"|sed
's/^/ /
' ; \
1094 <p
>The output can look like this (only the first few entries as the
1095 list is very long on my test machine):
</p
>
1099 insmod /lib/modules/
2.6.32-
5-
686/kernel/drivers/acpi/ac.ko
1101 FATAL: Module acpi:device: not found.
1103 insmod /lib/modules/
2.6.32-
5-
686/kernel/drivers/char/nvram.ko
1104 insmod /lib/modules/
2.6.32-
5-
686/kernel/drivers/leds/led-class.ko
1105 insmod /lib/modules/
2.6.32-
5-
686/kernel/net/rfkill/rfkill.ko
1106 insmod /lib/modules/
2.6.32-
5-
686/kernel/drivers/platform/x86/thinkpad_acpi.ko
1107 acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
1108 insmod /lib/modules/
2.6.32-
5-
686/kernel/lib/crc-ccitt.ko
1109 insmod /lib/modules/
2.6.32-
5-
686/kernel/net/irda/irda.ko
1110 insmod /lib/modules/
2.6.32-
5-
686/kernel/drivers/net/irda/nsc-ircc.ko
1114 <p
>If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
1115 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
1116 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
1117 <a href=
"irc://irc.debian.org/%
23debian-devel
">#debian-devel
</a
>.
</p
>
1119 <p
><strong
>Update
2013-
01-
15:
</strong
> Rewrite
"cat $(find ...)
" to
1120 "find ... -print0 | xargs -
0 cat
" to make sure it handle directories
1121 in /sys/ with space in them.
</p
>
1126 <title>Moved the pymissile Debian packaging to collab-maint
</title>
1127 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Moved_the_pymissile_Debian_packaging_to_collab_maint.html
</link>
1128 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Moved_the_pymissile_Debian_packaging_to_collab_maint.html
</guid>
1129 <pubDate>Thu,
10 Jan
2013 20:
40:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
1130 <description><p
>As part of my investigation on how to improve the support in Debian
1131 for hardware dongles, I dug up my old Mark and Spencer USB Rocket
1132 Launcher and updated the Debian package
1133 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/pymissile
">pymissile
</a
> to make
1134 sure udev will fix the device permissions when it is plugged in. I
1135 also added a
"Modaliases
" header to test it in the Debian archive and
1136 hopefully make the package be proposed by jockey in Ubuntu when a user
1137 plug in his rocket launcher. In the process I moved the source to a
1138 git repository under collab-maint, to make it easier for any DD to
1139 contribute.
<a href=
"http://code.google.com/p/pymissile/
">Upstream
</a
>
1140 is not very active, but the software still work for me even after five
1141 years of relative silence. The new git repository is not listed in
1142 the uploaded package yet, because I want to test the other changes a
1143 bit more before I upload the new version. If you want to check out
1144 the new version with a .desktop file included, visit the
1145 <a href=
"http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/pymissile.git
">gitweb
1146 view
</a
> or use
"<tt
>git clone
1147 git://anonscm.debian.org/collab-maint/pymissile.git
</tt
>".
</p
>
1152 <title>Lets make hardware dongles easier to use in Debian
</title>
1153 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html
</link>
1154 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html
</guid>
1155 <pubDate>Wed,
9 Jan
2013 15:
40:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
1156 <description><p
>One thing that annoys me with Debian and Linux distributions in
1157 general, is that there is a great package management system with the
1158 ability to automatically install software packages by downloading them
1159 from the distribution mirrors, but no way to get it to automatically
1160 install the packages I need to use the hardware I plug into my
1161 machine. Even if the package to use it is easily available from the
1162 Linux distribution. When I plug in a LEGO Mindstorms NXT, it could
1163 suggest to automatically install the python-nxt, nbc and t2n packages
1164 I need to talk to it. When I plug in a Yubikey, it could propose the
1165 yubikey-personalization package. The information required to do this
1166 is available, but no-one have pulled all the pieces together.
</p
>
1168 <p
>Some years ago, I proposed to
1169 <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/
2010/
05/msg01206.html
">use
1170 the discover subsystem to implement this
</a
>. The idea is fairly
1175 <li
>Add a desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ pointing to a program
1176 starting when a user log in.
</li
>
1178 <li
>Set this program up to listen for kernel events emitted when new
1179 hardware is inserted into the computer.
</li
>
1181 <li
>When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware ID in a
1182 database mapping to packages, and take note of any non-installed
1183 packages.
</li
>
1185 <li
>Show a message to the user proposing to install the discovered
1186 package, and make it easy to install it.
</li
>
1190 <p
>I am not sure what the best way to implement this is, but my
1191 initial idea was to use dbus events to discover new hardware, the
1192 discover database to find packages and
1193 <a href=
"http://www.packagekit.org/
">PackageKit
</a
> to install
1196 <p
>Yesterday, I found time to try to implement this idea, and the
1197 draft package is now checked into
1198 <a href=
"http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/
">the
1199 Debian Edu subversion repository
</a
>. In the process, I updated the
1200 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover-data.html
">discover-data
</a
>
1201 package to map the USB ids of LEGO Mindstorms and Yubikey devices to
1202 the relevant packages in Debian, and uploaded a new version
1203 2.2013.01.09 to unstable. I also discovered that the current
1204 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover.html
">discover
</a
>
1205 package in Debian no longer discovered any USB devices, because
1206 /proc/bus/usb/devices is no longer present. I ported it to use
1207 libusb as a fall back option to get it working. The fixed package
1208 version
2.1.2-
6 is now in experimental (didn
't upload it to unstable
1209 because of the freeze).
</p
>
1211 <p
>With this prototype in place, I can insert my Yubikey, and get this
1212 desktop notification to show up (only once, the first time it is
1213 inserted):
</p
>
1215 <p align=
"center
"><img src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
01-
09-hw-autoinstall.png
"></p
>
1217 <p
>For this prototype to be really useful, some way to automatically
1218 install the proposed packages by pressing the
"Please install
1219 program(s)
" button should to be implemented.
</p
>
1221 <p
>If this idea seem useful to you, and you want to help make it
1222 happen, please help me update the discover-data database with mappings
1223 from hardware to Debian packages. Check if
'discover-pkginstall -l
'
1224 list the package you would like to have installed when a given
1225 hardware device is inserted into your computer, and report bugs using
1226 reportbug if it isn
't. Or, if you know of a better way to provide
1227 such mapping, please let me know.
</p
>
1229 <p
>This prototype need more work, and there are several questions that
1230 should be considered before it is ready for production use. Is dbus
1231 the correct way to detect new hardware? At the moment I look for HAL
1232 dbus events on the system bus, because that is the events I could see
1233 on my Debian Squeeze KDE desktop. Are there better events to use?
1234 How should the user be notified? Is the desktop notification
1235 mechanism the best option, or should the background daemon raise a
1236 popup instead? How should packages be installed? When should they
1237 not be installed?
</p
>
1239 <p
>If you want to help getting such feature implemented in Debian,
1240 please send me an email. :)
</p
>
1245 <title>New IRC channel for LEGO designers using Debian
</title>
1246 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_IRC_channel_for_LEGO_designers_using_Debian.html
</link>
1247 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_IRC_channel_for_LEGO_designers_using_Debian.html
</guid>
1248 <pubDate>Wed,
2 Jan
2013 15:
40:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
1249 <description><p
>During Christmas, I have worked a bit on the Debian support for
1250 <a href=
"http://mindstorms.lego.com/en-us/Default.aspx
">LEGO Mindstorm
1251 NXT
</a
>. My son and I have played a bit with my NXT set, and I
1252 discovered I had to build all the tools myself because none were
1253 already in Debian Squeeze. If Debian support for LEGO is something
1254 you care about, please join me on the IRC channel
1255 <a href=
"irc://irc.debian.org/%
23debian-lego
">#debian-lego
</a
> (server
1256 irc.debian.org). There is a lot that could be done to improve the
1257 Debian support for LEGO designers. For example both CAD software
1258 and Mindstorm compilers are missing. :)
</p
>
1260 <p
>Update
2012-
01-
03: A
1261 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners
">project page
</a
>
1262 including links to Lego related packages is now available.
</p
>
1267 <title>A Christmas present for Skolelinux / Debian Edu
</title>
1268 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Christmas_present_for_Skolelinux___Debian_Edu.html
</link>
1269 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Christmas_present_for_Skolelinux___Debian_Edu.html
</guid>
1270 <pubDate>Fri,
28 Dec
2012 09:
20:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
1271 <description><p
>I was happy to discover a few days ago that the
1272 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Skolelinux / Debian Edu
</a
>
1273 project also this year received a Christmas present from Another
1274 Agency in Trondheim. NOK
1000,- showed up on our donation account
1275 December
24th. I want to express our thanks for this very welcome
1276 present. As the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project is very short on
1277 funding these days, and thus lack the money to do regular developer
1278 gatherings, this donation was most welcome. One developer gathering
1279 cost around NOK
15&nbsp;
000,-, so we need quite a lot more to keep the
1280 development pace we want. Thus, I hope their example this year is
1281 followed by many others. :)
</p
>
1283 <p
>The public list of donors can be found on
1284 <a href=
"http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html
">the
1285 donation page
</a
> for the project, which also contain instructions if
1286 you want to donate to the project.
</p
>
1291 <title>How to backport bitcoin-qt version
0.7.2-
2 to Debian Squeeze
</title>
1292 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_backport_bitcoin_qt_version_0_7_2_2_to_Debian_Squeeze.html
</link>
1293 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_backport_bitcoin_qt_version_0_7_2_2_to_Debian_Squeeze.html
</guid>
1294 <pubDate>Tue,
25 Dec
2012 20:
50:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
1295 <description><p
>Let me start by wishing you all marry Christmas and a happy new
1296 year! I hope next year will prove to be a good year.
</p
>
1298 <p
><a href=
"http://www.bitcoin.org/
">Bitcoin
</a
>, the digital
1299 decentralised
"currency
" that allow people to transfer bitcoins
1300 between each other with minimal overhead, is a very interesting
1301 experiment. And as I wrote a few days ago, the bitcoin situation in
1302 <a href=
"http://www.debian.org/
">Debian
</a
> is about to improve a bit.
1303 The
<a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin
">new debian source
1304 package
</a
> (version
0.7.2-
2) was uploaded yesterday, and is waiting
1305 in
<a href=
"http://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html
">the NEW queue
</A
>
1306 for one of the ftpmasters to approve the new bitcoin-qt package
1309 <p
>And thanks to the great work of Jonas and the rest of the bitcoin
1310 team in Debian, you can easily test the package in Debian Squeeze
1311 using the following steps to get a set of working packages:
</p
>
1313 <blockquote
><pre
>
1314 git clone git://git.debian.org/git/collab-maint/bitcoin
1316 DEB_MAINTAINER_MODE=
1 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp fakeroot debian/rules clean
1317 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp git-buildpackage --git-ignore-new
1318 </pre
></blockquote
>
1320 <p
>You might have to install some build dependencies as well. The
1321 list of commands should give you two packages, bitcoind and
1322 bitcoin-qt, ready for use in a Squeeze environment. Note that the
1323 client will download the complete set of bitcoin
"blocks
", which need
1324 around
5.6 GiB of data on my machine at the moment. Make sure your
1325 ~/.bitcoin/ directory have lots of spare room if you want to download
1326 all the blocks. The client will warn if the disk is getting full, so
1327 there is not really a problem if you got too little room, but you will
1328 not be able to get all the features out of the client.
</p
>
1330 <p
>As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1331 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1332 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
1337 <title>A word on bitcoin support in Debian
</title>
1338 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_word_on_bitcoin_support_in_Debian.html
</link>
1339 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_word_on_bitcoin_support_in_Debian.html
</guid>
1340 <pubDate>Fri,
21 Dec
2012 23:
59:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
1341 <description><p
>It has been a while since I wrote about
1342 <a href=
"http://www.bitcoin.org/
">bitcoin
</a
>, the decentralised
1343 peer-to-peer based crypto-currency, and the reason is simply that I
1344 have been busy elsewhere. But two days ago, I started looking at the
1345 state of
<a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin
">bitcoin in
1346 Debian
</a
> again to try to recover my old bitcoin wallet. The package
1347 is now maintained by a
1348 <a href=
"https://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-bitcoin/
">team of
1349 people
</a
>, and the grunt work had already been done by this team. We
1350 owe a huge thank you to all these team members. :)
1351 But I was sad to discover that the bitcoin client is missing in
1352 Wheezy. It is only available in Sid (and an outdated client from
1353 backports). The client had several RC bugs registered in BTS blocking
1354 it from entering testing. To try to help the team and improve the
1355 situation, I spent some time providing patches and triaging the bug
1356 reports. I also had a look at the bitcoin package available from Matt
1358 <a href=
"https://launchpad.net/~bitcoin/+archive/bitcoin
">PPA for
1359 Ubuntu
</a
>, and moved the useful pieces from that version into the
1360 Debian package.
</p
>
1362 <p
>After checking with the main package maintainer Jonas Smedegaard on
1363 IRC, I pushed several patches into the collab-maint git repository to
1364 improve the package. It now contains fixes for the RC issues (not from
1365 me, but fixed by Scott Howard), build rules for a Qt GUI client
1366 package, konqueror support for the bitcoin: URI and bash completion
1367 setup. As I work on Debian Squeeze, I also created
1368 <a href=
"http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-bitcoin-devel/Week-of-Mon-
20121217/
000041.html
">a
1369 patch to backport
</a
> the latest version. Jonas is going to look at
1370 it and try to integrate it into the git repository before uploading a
1371 new version to unstable.
1373 <p
>I would very much like bitcoin to succeed, to get rid of the
1374 centralized control currently exercised in the monetary system. I
1375 find it completely unacceptable that the USA government is collecting
1376 transaction data for almost all international money transfers (most are done in USD and transaction logs shipped to the spooks), and
1377 that the major credit card companies can block legal money
1378 transactions to Wikileaks. But for bitcoin to succeed, more people
1379 need to use bitcoins, and more people need to accept bitcoins when
1380 they sell products and services. Improving the bitcoin support in
1381 Debian is a small step in the right direction, but not enough.
1382 Unfortunately the user experience when browsing the web and wanting to
1383 pay with bitcoin is still not very good. The bitcoin: URI is a step
1384 in the right direction, but need to work in most or every browser in
1385 use. Also the bitcoin-qt client is too heavy to fire up to do a
1386 quick transaction. I believe there are other clients available, but
1387 have not tested them.
</p
>
1390 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html
">experiment
1391 with bitcoins
</a
> showed that at least some of my readers use bitcoin.
1392 I received
20.15 BTC so far on the address I provided in my blog two
1393 years ago, as can be
1394 <a href=
"http://blockexplorer.com/address/
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">seen
1395 on the blockexplorer service
</a
>. Thank you everyone for your
1396 donation. The blockexplorer service demonstrates quite well that
1397 bitcoin is not quite anonymous and untracked. :) I wonder if the
1398 number of users have gone up since then. If you use bitcoin and want
1399 to show your support of my activity, please send Bitcoin donations to
1400 the same address as last time,
1401 <b
><a href=
"bitcoin:
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
></b
>.
</p
>
1406 <title>Ledger - double-entry accounting using text based storage format
</title>
1407 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ledger___double_entry_accounting_using_text_based_storage_format.html
</link>
1408 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ledger___double_entry_accounting_using_text_based_storage_format.html
</guid>
1409 <pubDate>Tue,
18 Dec
2012 23:
30:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
1410 <description><p
>A few days ago I came across
1411 <a href=
"http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/hledger/
">a blog post from Joey
1412 Hess
</a
> describing
<a href=
"http://ledger-cli.org/
">ledger
</a
> and
1413 hledger, a text based system for double-entry accounting. I found it
1414 interesting, as I am involved with several organizations where
1415 accounting is an issue, and I have not really become too friendly with
1416 the different web based systems we use. I find it hard to find what I
1417 look for in the menus and even harder try to get sensible data out of
1418 the systems. Ledger seem different. The accounting data is kept in
1419 text files that can be stored in a version control system, and there
1421 are at least
<a href=
"https://github.com/ledger/ledger/wiki/Ports
">five
1422 different implementations
</a
> able to read the format. An example
1423 entry look like this, and is simple enough that it will be trivial to
1424 generate entries based on CVS files fetched from the bank:
</p
>
1426 <blockquote
><pre
>
1427 2004-
05-
27 Book Store
1428 Expenses:Books $
20.00
1430 </pre
></blockquote
>
1432 <p
>The concept seemed interesting enough for me to check it out and
1433 look for others using it. I found blog posts from
1434 <a href=
"http://blog.spang.cc/posts/hledger_rocks_my_world/
">Christine
1436 <a href=
"http://bugsplat.info/
2010-
05-
23-keeping-finances-with-ledger.html
">Pete
1438 <a href=
"http://blog.andrewcantino.com/blog/
2010/
11/
06/command-line-accounting-with-ledger-and-reckon/
">Andrew
1439 Cantino
</a
> and
1440 <a href=
"http://blog.iphoting.com/blog/
2012/
11/
29/command-line-double-entry-accounting/
">Ronald
1441 Ip
</a
> describing how they use it, as well as a post from
1442 <a href=
"https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/ledger-cli/r0oWjwbQ9Bo
">Bradley
1443 M. Kuhn
</a
> at the Software Freedom Conservancy. All seemed like good
1444 recommendations fitting my need.
</p
>
1446 <p
>The
<a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/l/ledger.html
">ledger
</a
>
1447 package is available in Debian Squeeze, while the
1448 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/h/haskell-hledger.html
">hledger
</a
>
1449 package only is available in Debian Sid. As I use Squeeze, ledger
1450 seemed the best choice to get started.
</p
>
1452 <p
>To get some real data to test on, I wrote a
1453 <a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/tools/lodo2ledger
">web scraper
</a
> for
1454 <a href=
"http://www.lodo.no/
">LODO
</a
>, the accounting system used by
1455 the
<a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/
">NUUG
</a
> association, and started to
1456 play with the data set. I
'm not really deeply into accounting, but I
1457 am able to get a simple balance and accounting status for example
1458 using the
"<tt
>ledger balance
</tt
>" command. But I will have to
1459 gather more experience before I know if the ledger way is a good fit
1460 for the organisations I am involved in.
</p
>
1465 <title>Scripting the Cerebrum/bofhd user administration system using XML-RPC
</title>
1466 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Scripting_the_Cerebrum_bofhd_user_administration_system_using_XML_RPC.html
</link>
1467 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Scripting_the_Cerebrum_bofhd_user_administration_system_using_XML_RPC.html
</guid>
1468 <pubDate>Thu,
6 Dec
2012 10:
30:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
1469 <description><p
>Where I work at the
<a href=
"http://www.uio.no/
">University of
1470 Oslo
</a
>, we use the
1471 <a href=
"http://sourceforge.net/projects/cerebrum/
">Cerebrum user
1472 administration system
</a
> to maintain users, groups, DNS, DHCP, etc.
1473 I
've known since the system was written that the server is providing
1474 an
<a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML-RPC
">XML-RPC
</a
> API, but
1475 I have never spent time to try to figure out how to use it, as we
1476 always use the bofh command line client at work. Until today. I want
1477 to script the updating of DNS and DHCP to make it easier to set up
1478 virtual machines. Here are a few notes on how to use it with
1481 <p
>I started by looking at the source of the Java
1482 <a href=
"http://cerebrum.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/cerebrum/trunk/cerebrum/clients/jbofh/
">bofh
1483 client
</a
>, to figure out how it connected to the API server. I also
1484 googled for python examples on how to use XML-RPC, and found
1485 <a href=
"http://tldp.org/HOWTO/XML-RPC-HOWTO/xmlrpc-howto-python.html
">a
1486 simple example in
</a
> the XML-RPC howto.
</p
>
1488 <p
>This simple example code show how to connect, get the list of
1489 commands (as a JSON dump), and how to get the information about the
1490 user currently logged in:
</p
>
1492 <blockquote
><pre
>
1493 #!/usr/bin/env python
1496 server_url =
'https://cerebrum-uio.uio.no:
8000';
1497 username = getpass.getuser()
1498 password = getpass.getpass()
1499 server = xmlrpclib.Server(server_url);
1500 #print server.get_commands(sessionid)
1501 sessionid = server.login(username, password)
1502 print server.run_command(sessionid,
"user_info
", username)
1503 result = server.logout(sessionid)
1505 </pre
></blockquote
>
1507 <p
>Armed with this knowledge I can now move forward and script the DNS
1508 and DHCP updates I wanted to do.
</p
>
1513 <title>Why isn
't the value of copyright taxed?
</title>
1514 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_isn_t_the_value_of_copyright_taxed_.html
</link>
1515 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_isn_t_the_value_of_copyright_taxed_.html
</guid>
1516 <pubDate>Sat,
17 Nov
2012 11:
30:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
1517 <description><p
>While working on a
1518 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig
">Norwegian
1519 translation of the Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig
</a
> (
76% done),
1520 which cover the problems with todays copyright law and how it stifles
1521 creativity, one idea occurred to me. The idea is to get the tax
1522 office to help make more works enter the public domain and also help
1523 make it easier to clear rights for using copyrighted works.
</p
>
1525 <p
>I mentioned this idea briefly during Yesterdays
1526 <a href=
"http://www.farmann.no/
2012/
11/
14/john-perry-barlow-in-oslo-friday-nov-
16
1527 -
15-
30-
19-
00/
">presentation
1528 by John Perry Barlow
</a
>, and concluded that it was best to put it
1529 in writing for a wider audience. The idea is not really based on the
1530 argument that copyrighted works are
"intellectual property
", as the
1531 core requirement is that copyrighted work have value for the copyright
1532 holder and the tax office like to collect their share from any value
1533 controlled by the citizens in a country. I
'm sharing the idea here to
1534 let others consider it and perhaps shoot it down with a fresh set of
1535 arguments.
</p
>
1537 <p
>Most valuables are taxed by the government. At least here in
1538 Norway, the amount of money you have, the value of our land property,
1539 the value of your house, the value of your car, the value of our
1540 stocks and other valuables are all added together. If the tax value
1541 of these values exceed your debt, you have to pay the tax office some
1542 taxes for these values. And copyrighted work have value. It have
1543 value for the rights holder, who can earn money selling access to the
1544 work. But it is not included in the tax calculations? Why not?
</p
>
1546 <p
>If the government want to tax copyrighted works, it would want to
1547 maintain a database of all the copyrighted works and who are the
1548 rights holders for a given works, to be able to associate the works
1549 value to the right citizen or company for tax purposes. If such
1550 database exist, it will become a lot easier to find out who to talk to
1551 for clearing permissions to use a copyrighted work, which is a very
1552 hard operation with todays copyright law. To ensure that copyright
1553 holders keep the database up-to-date, it would have to become a
1554 requirement to be able to collect money for granting access to
1555 copyrighted works that the work is listed in the database with the
1556 correct right holder.
</p
>
1558 <p
>If copyright causes copyright holders to have to pay more taxes,
1559 they will have a small incentive to
"disown
" their copyright, and let
1560 the work enter the public domain. For works with several right holders
1561 one of the right holders could state (and get it registered in the
1562 database) that she do not need to be consulted when clearing rights to
1563 use the work in question and thus will not get any income from that
1564 work. Stating this would have to be impossible to revert and stop the
1565 tax office from adding the value of that work to the given citizens
1566 tax calculation. I assume the copyright law would stay the same,
1567 allowing creators to pick a license of their choosing, and also
1568 allowing them to put their work directly in the public domain. The
1569 existence of such database will make it even easier to clear rights,
1570 and if the right holders listed in the database is taxed, this system
1571 would increase the amount of works that enter the public domain.
</p
>
1573 <p
>The effect would be that the tax office help to make it easier to
1574 get rights to use the works that have not yet entered the public
1575 domain and help to get more work into the public domain and .
</p
>
1577 <p
>Why have such taxing not happened yet? I am sure the tax office
1578 would like to tax copyrighted work values if they could.
</p
>
1583 <title>Debian Edu interview: Angela Fuß
</title>
1584 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Angela_Fu_.html
</link>
1585 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Angela_Fu_.html
</guid>
1586 <pubDate>Wed,
14 Nov
2012 21:
30:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
1587 <description><p
>Here is another interview with one of the people in the
<a
1588 href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu and Skolelinux
</a
>
1589 community. I am running short on people willing to be interviewed, so
1590 if you know about someone I should interview, Please send me an email.
1591 After asking for many months, I finally managed to lure another one of
1592 the people behind the German
1593 "<a href=
"http://wiki.it-zukunft-schule.de/
">IT-Zukunft Schule
</a
>"
1594 project out from maternity leave to conduct an interview. Give a warm
1595 welcome to Angela Fuß. :)
</p
>
1597 <p
><strong
>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
</strong
></p
>
1599 <p
>I am a
39-year-old woman living in the very north of Germany near
1600 Denmark. I live in a patchwork family with
"my man
" Mike Gabriel, my
1601 two daughters, Mikes daughter and Mikes and my rather newborn son.
1603 <p
>At the moment - because of our little baby - I am spending most of
1604 the day by being a caring and organising mom for all the kids.
1605 Besides that I am really involved into and occupied with several inner
1606 growth processes: New born souls always bring the whole familiar
1607 system into movement and that needs time and focus ;-). We are also
1608 in the middle of buying a house and moving to it.
</p
>
1610 <p
>In
2013 I will work again in my job in a German foundation for
1611 nature conservation. I am doing public relation work there. Besides
1612 that - and that is the connection to Skolelinux / Debian Edu - I am
1613 working in our own school project
"IT-Zukunft Schule
" in North
1614 Germany. I am responsible for the quality assurance, the customer
1615 relationship management and the communication processes in the
1618 <p
>Since
2001 I constantly have been training myself in communication
1619 and leadership. Besides that I am a forester, a landscaping gardener
1620 and a yoga teacher.
</p
>
1622 <p
><strong
>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
1623 project?
</strong
></p
>
1625 <p
>I fell in love with Mike ;-).
</p
>
1627 <p
>Very soon after getting to know him I was completely enrolled into
1628 Free Software. At this time Mike did IT-services for one newly
1629 founded school in Kiel. Other schools in Kiel needed concepts for
1630 their IT environment. Often when Mike came home from working at the
1631 newly founded school I found myself listening to his complaints about
1632 several points where the communication with the schools head or the
1633 teachers did not work. So we were clear that he would not work for
1634 one more school if we did not set up a structure for communication
1635 between him, the schools head, the teachers, the students and the
1638 <p
>Together with our friend and hardware supplier Andreas Buchholz we
1639 started to get an overview of free software solutions suitable for
1640 schools. One day before Christmas
2010 Mike and I had a date with Kurt
1641 Gramlich in Gütersloh. As Kurt and I are really interested in building
1642 networks of people and in being in communication we dived into
1643 Skolelinux and brought it to the first grammar schools in Northern
1646 <p
>For information about our school project you can read
1647 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Mike_Gabriel.html
">the
1648 interview with Mike Gabriel
</a
>.
</p
>
1650 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
1651 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
1653 <p
>First I have to say: I cannot answer this question technically. My
1654 answer comes rather from a social point of view.
</p
>
1656 <p
>The biggest advantage of Skolelinux / Debian Edu I see is the large
1657 and strong international community of Debian Developers in the
1658 background which is very alive and connected over mailinglists, blogs
1659 and meetings. My constant feeling for the Debian Community is: If
1660 something does not work they will somehow fix it. All is well
1661 ;-). This is of course a user experience. What I also get as a big
1662 advantage of Skolelinux / Debian Edu is that everybody who uses it and
1663 works with it can also contribute to it - that includes students,
1664 teachers, parents...
</p
>
1666 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
1667 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
1669 <p
>I will answer this question relating to the internal structure of
1670 Skolelinux / Debian Edu.
</p
>
1672 <p
>What I see as a major disadvantage is that there is a gap between
1673 the group of developers for Debian Edu and the people who make the
1674 marketing, that means the people that bring Skolelinux to the
1675 schools. There is a lack of communication between these two groups and
1676 I think that does not really work for Skolelinux / Debian Edu.
</p
>
1678 <p
>Further I appreciate that Skolelinux / Debian Edu is known as a
1679 do-ocracy. Nevertheless I keep asking myself if at some points a
1680 democracy or some kind of hierarchical project structure would be good
1681 and helpful. I am also missing some kind of contact between the
1682 Skolelinux / Debian Edu communities in Europe or on an international
1683 level. I think it would be good if there was more sharing between the
1684 different countries using Skolelinux / Debian Edu.
</p
>
1686 <p
><strong
>Which free software do you use daily?
</strong
></p
>
1688 <p
>On my laptop I am still using an Ubuntu
10.04 with a Gnome Desktop
1689 on. As applications I use Openoffice.org, Gedit, Firefox, Pidgin,
1690 LaTeX and GnuCash. For mails I am using Horde. And I am really fond of
1691 my N900 running with Maemo.
</p
>
1693 <p
><strong
>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
1694 get schools to use free software?
</strong
></p
>
1696 <p
>I am really convinced that in our school project
"IT-Zukunft
1697 Schule
" we have developed (and keep developing) a great way to get
1698 schools to use Free Software. We have written a detailed concept for
1699 that so I cannot explain the whole thing here. But in a nutshell the
1700 strategy has three crucial pillars:
</p
>
1704 <li
>We really take time to get what sort of stories, questions and
1705 concerns the schools head and the teachers have about using different
1706 kinds of IT and we take time to enrol them into Free Software.
</li
>
1708 <li
>Our solution for schools is never just technical. In the centre
1709 are always the people who are going to use the software. From the very
1710 beginning of the planning for a school, we tell the schools head that
1711 they are paying us not only for a technical solution for their school,
1712 they also pay us for leading all the communication processes
1713 needed. If they do not want that, we are not working with them because
1714 we cannot give a guarantee for the quality of our work then.
</li
>
1716 <li
>Another focus lies in the training of teachers and students in
1717 co-administrating the IT-System at their school. They start getting in
1718 contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu community and they get the
1719 offer to become more and more independent from us.
</li
>
1726 <title>The European Central Bank (ECB) take a look at bitcoin
</title>
1727 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_European_Central_Bank__ECB__take_a_look_at_bitcoin.html
</link>
1728 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_European_Central_Bank__ECB__take_a_look_at_bitcoin.html
</guid>
1729 <pubDate>Sun,
4 Nov
2012 08:
30:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
1730 <description><p
>Slashdot just ran a story about the European Central Bank (ECB)
1731 <a href=
"http://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/other/virtualcurrencyschemes201210en.pdf
">releasing
1732 a report (PDF)
</a
> about virtual currencies and
1733 <a href=
"http://www.bitcoin.org/
">bitcoin
</a
>. It is interesting to
1734 see how a member of the bitcoin community
1735 <a href=
"http://blog.bitinstant.com/blog/
2012/
10/
30/the-ecb-report-on-bitcoin-and-virtual-currencies.html
">receive
1736 the report
</a
>. As for the future, I suspect the central banks and
1737 the governments will outlaw bitcoin if it gain any popularity, to avoid
1738 competition. My thoughts go to the
1739 <a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wörgl
">Wörgl experiment
</a
> with
1740 negative inflation on cash which was such a success that it was
1741 terminated by the Austrian National Bank in
1933. A successful
1742 alternative would be a threat to the current money system and gain
1743 powerful forces to work against it.
</p
>
1745 <p
>While checking out the current status of bitcoin, I also discovered
1746 that the community already seem to have
1747 <a href=
"http://www.theverge.com/
2012/
8/
27/
3271637/bitcoin-savings-trust-pyramid-scheme-shuts-down
">experienced
1748 its first pyramid game / Ponzi scheme
</a
>. Not very surprising, given
1749 how members of
"small
" communities tend to trust each other. I guess
1750 enterprising crocks will try again and again, as they do anywhere
1751 wealth is available.
</p
>
1756 <title>12 years of outages - summarised by Stuart Kendrick
</title>
1757 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/
12_years_of_outages___summarised_by_Stuart_Kendrick.html
</link>
1758 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/
12_years_of_outages___summarised_by_Stuart_Kendrick.html
</guid>
1759 <pubDate>Fri,
26 Oct
2012 14:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
1760 <description><p
>I work at the
<a href=
"http://www.uio.no/
">University of Oslo
</a
>
1761 looking after the computers, mostly on the unix side, but in general
1762 all over the place. I am also a member (and currently leader) of
1763 <a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/
">the NUUG association
</a
>, which in turn
1764 make me a member of
<a href=
"http://www.usenix.org/
">USENIX
</a
>. NUUG
1765 is an member organisation for us in Norway interested in free
1766 software, open standards and unix like operating systems, and USENIX
1767 is a US based member organisation with similar targets. And thanks to
1768 these memberships, I get all issues of the great USENIX magazine
1769 <a href=
"https://www.usenix.org/publications/login
">;login:
</a
> in the
1770 mail several times a year. The magazine is great, and I read most of
1771 it every time.
</p
>
1773 <p
>In the last issue of the USENIX magazine ;login:, there is an
1774 article by
<a href=
"http://www.skendric.com/
">Stuart Kendrick
</a
> from
1775 Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center titled
1776 "<a href=
"https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/october-
2012-volume-
37-number-
5/what-takes-us-down
">What
1777 Takes Us Down
</a
>" (longer version also
1778 <a href=
"http://www.skendric.com/problem/incident-analysis/
2012-
06-
30/What-Takes-Us-Down.pdf
">available
1779 from his own site
</a
>), where he report what he found when he
1780 processed the outage reports (both planned and unplanned) from the
1781 last twelve years and classified them according to cause, time of day,
1782 etc etc. The article is a good read to get some empirical data on
1783 what kind of problems affect a data centre, but what really inspired
1784 me was the kind of reporting they had put in place since
2000.
<p
>
1786 <p
>The centre set up a mailing list, and started to send fairly
1787 standardised messages to this list when a outage was planned or when
1788 it already occurred, to announce the plan and get feedback on the
1789 assumtions on scope and user impact. Here is the two example from the
1790 article: First the unplanned outage:
1792 <blockquote
><pre
>
1793 Subject: Exchange
2003 Cluster Issues
1794 Severity: Critical (Unplanned)
1795 Start: Monday, May
7,
2012,
11:
58
1796 End: Monday, May
7,
2012,
12:
38
1797 Duration:
40 minutes
1798 Scope: Exchange
2003
1799 Description: The HTTPS service on the Exchange cluster crashed, triggering
1802 User Impact: During this period, all Exchange users were unable to
1803 access e-mail. Zimbra users were unaffected.
1805 </pre
></blockquote
>
1807 Next the planned outage:
1809 <blockquote
><pre
>
1810 Subject: H Building Switch Upgrades
1811 Severity: Major (Planned)
1812 Start: Saturday, June
16,
2012,
06:
00
1813 End: Saturday, June
16,
2012,
16:
00
1816 Description: Currently, Catalyst
4006s provide
10/
100 Ethernet to end-
1817 stations. We will replace these with newer Catalyst
1819 User Impact: All users on H2 will be isolated from the network during
1820 this work. Afterward, they will have gigabit
1823 </pre
></blockquote
>
1825 <p
>He notes in his article that the date formats and other fields have
1826 been a bit too free form to make it easy to automatically process them
1827 into a database for further analysis, and I would have used ISO
8601
1828 dates myself to make it easier to process (in other words I would ask
1829 people to write
'2012-
06-
16 06:
00 +
0000' instead of the start time
1830 format listed above). There are also other issues with the format
1831 that could be improved, read the article for the details.
</p
>
1833 <p
>I find the idea of standardising outage messages seem to be such a
1834 good idea that I would like to get it implemented here at the
1835 university too. We do register
1836 <a href=
"http://www.uio.no/tjenester/it/aktuelt/planlagte-tjenesteavbrudd/
">planned
1837 changes and outages in a calendar
</a
>, and report the to a mailing
1838 list, but we do not do so in a structured format and there is not a
1839 report to the same location for unplanned outages. Perhaps something
1840 for other sites to consider too?
</p
>
1845 <title>Amazon steal books from customer and throw out her out without any explanation
</title>
1846 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Amazon_steal_books_from_customer_and_throw_out_her_out_without_any_explanation.html
</link>
1847 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Amazon_steal_books_from_customer_and_throw_out_her_out_without_any_explanation.html
</guid>
1848 <pubDate>Mon,
22 Oct
2012 20:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
1849 <description><p
>A blog post from Martin Bekkelund today tell the story of
1850 <a href=
"http://www.bekkelund.net/
2012/
10/
22/outlawed-by-amazon-drm/
">how
1851 Amazon erased the books from a customer
's kindle, locked the account
1852 and refuse to tell the customer why
</a
>. If a real book store did
1853 this to a customer, it would be called breaking into private property
1854 and theft. The story has spread around the net today. A bit more
1855 background information is available in Norwegian from
1856 <a href=
"http://www.digi.no/
904658/hun-ble-kastet-ut-av-amazon
">digi.no
</a
>.
1857 It is no surprise that digital restriction mechanisms (DRM) are used
1858 this way, as it has been warned about such abuse since DRM was
1859 introduced many years back. And Amazon proved in
2009 that it was
1861 <a href=
"http://boingboing.net/
2009/
07/
20/amazons-orwellian-de.html
">
1862 break into customers equipment and remove the books
</a
> people had
1863 bought, when it removed the book
1984 by George Orwell from all the
1864 customers who had bought it. From the official comments, it even
1866 <a href=
"http://www.nytimes.com/
2009/
07/
18/technology/companies/
18amazon.html
">Amazon
1867 would never do that again
</a
>. And here we are, three years
1870 <p
>And thought this action is
1871 <a href=
"http://www.itavisen.no/
904648/forbrukerraadet-helt-haarreisende
">against
1872 Norwegian regulations and law
</a
>, it is according to the terms of use
1873 as written by Amazon, and it is hard to hold Amazon accountable to
1874 Norwegian laws. It is just yet another example of unacceptable terms
1875 of use on the web, and how they are used to remove customer
1878 <p
>Luckily for electronic books, there are alternatives without
1879 unacceptable terms. For example
1880 <a href=
"http://www.gutenberg.org/
">Project Gutenberg
</a
> (about
40,
000
1881 books),
<a href=
"http://runeberg.org/
">Project Runenberg
</a
> (
1,
652
1882 books) and
<a href=
"http://www.archive.org/details/texts
">The Internet
1883 Archive
</a
> (
3,
641,
797 books) have heaps of books without DRM, which
1884 can read by anyone and shared with anyone.
</p
>
1886 <p
>Update
2012-
10-
23: This story broke in the morning on Monday. In
1887 the evening after the story had spread all across the Internet, Amazon
1888 restored the account of the user, as reported by
1889 <a href=
"http://www.digi.no/
904675/helomvending-fra-amazon
">digi.no
</a
>
1890 and
<a href=
"http://nrk.no/kultur-og-underholdning/
1.8368487">NRK
</a
>.
1891 Apparently public pressure work. The story from Martin have seen
1892 several twitter messages per minute the last
24 hours, which is quite
1893 a lot, and is still drawing a lot of attention. But even when the
1894 account is restored, the fundamental problem still exist. I recommend
1895 reading two opinions from
1896 <a href=
"http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/
2012/
10/rights-you-have-no-right-to-your-ebooks/index.htm
">Simon
1897 Phipps
</a
> and
1898 <a href=
"http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/
2012/
10/is-amazon-playing-fair/index.htm
">Glen
1899 Moody
</a
> if you want to learn more about the fundamentals and more
1900 details about the original story.
</p
>
1905 <title>The fight for freedom and privacy
</title>
1906 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_fight_for_freedom_and_privacy.html
</link>
1907 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_fight_for_freedom_and_privacy.html
</guid>
1908 <pubDate>Thu,
18 Oct
2012 10:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
1909 <description><p
>Civil liberties and privacy in the western world are going down the
1910 drain, and it is hard to fight against it. I try to do my best, but
1911 time is limited. I hope you do your best too. A few years ago I came
1912 across a marvellous drawing by
1913 <a href=
"http://www.claybennett.com/about.html
">Clay Bennett
</a
>
1914 visualising some of what is going on.
1916 <p
><a href=
"http://www.claybennett.com/pages/security_fence.html
">
1917 <img src=
"http://www.claybennett.com/images/archivetoons/security_fence.jpg
"></a
></p
>
1920 «They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
1921 safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.» - Benjamin Franklin
1924 <p
>Do you feel safe at the airport? I do not. Do you feel safe when
1925 you see a surveillance camera? I do not. Do you feel safe when you
1926 leave electronic traces of your behaviour and opinions? I do not. I
1927 just remember
<a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon
">the
1928 Panopticon
</a
>, and can not help to think that we are slowly
1929 transforming our society to a huge Panopticon on our own.
</p
>
1934 <title>ColonHelp produser sue WordPress to silence critic
</title>
1935 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ColonHelp_produser_sue_WordPress_to_silence_critic.html
</link>
1936 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ColonHelp_produser_sue_WordPress_to_silence_critic.html
</guid>
1937 <pubDate>Fri,
12 Oct
2012 23:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
1938 <description><p
>Thanks to a blog post by
1939 <a href=
"http://ramblingfoo.blogspot.no/
2012/
10/a-shitstorm-is-comming.html
">Eddy
1940 Petrișor
</a
>, I became aware of yet another
"alternative medicine
"
1941 company using legal intimidation tactics to scare off critics.
1942 According to the originating blog post about the detox
"cure
"
1943 <a href=
"http://insulaindoielii.wordpress.com/
2012/
10/
11/colon-help-sues-wordpress/
">ColonHelp
1944 and its producers Zenyth Pharmaceuticals actions
</a
>, the producer
1945 sues Wordpress to get rid of the critical information. To check if
1946 the story was for real, I contacted Automattic, the company behind
1947 wordpress.com, and they reply was
"We can confirm that Zenyth is
1948 seeking a court order against WordPress / Automattic. However, we
1949 don
't believe the Terms of Service have been violated in this
1950 matter
".
</p
>
1952 <p
>The story seem to be simply that a blogger checked the scientific
1953 foundation for a popular health product in Rumania, ColonHelp, and
1954 reported that there was no reason at all to believe it improved the
1955 health of its users. This caused the company behind the product,
1956 Zenyth Pharmaceuticals, to use legal intimidation to try to silence
1957 the critic, instead of presenting its views and scientific foundation
1958 to argue its side.
</p
>
1960 <p
>This is the usual story, and the Zenyth Pharmaceuticals company
1961 deserve everyone to know how it failed to act properly. Lets hope the
1962 <a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
">Streisand
1963 effect
</a
> can make it rethink its strategy.
</p
>
1965 <p
>What is the harm, you might think. I suggest you take a look at
1966 <a href=
"http://www.whatstheharm.net/detoxification.html
">a list of
1967 victims of detoxification
</a
>.
</p
>
1972 <title>Why is your local library collecting the
"wrong
" computer books?
</title>
1973 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_is_your_local_library_collecting_the__wrong__computer_books_.html
</link>
1974 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_is_your_local_library_collecting_the__wrong__computer_books_.html
</guid>
1975 <pubDate>Wed,
3 Oct
2012 10:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
1976 <description><p
>I just read the blog post from Tim Retout
1977 <a href=
"http://retout.co.uk/blog/
2012/
10/
02/the-library-challenge
">about
1978 the computer science book collection available in his local
1979 library
</a
>, and just wanted to share my comment on his theory about
1980 computer books becoming obsolete so soon. That is part of the reason
1981 why the selection is so sad in almost any local library (it is in mine
1982 too), but I believe the major contributing factor is that the people
1983 buying books to the library have no way to know a good and future
1984 computer classic from trash. And they need to know which one will
1985 become a classic in the future, as they would normally buy one of the
1986 recently published books.
</p
>
1988 <p
>During my university years, I worked for a while at the university
1989 library, and even there the person in charge of buying computer
1990 related books (and in fact any natural science related book), did not
1991 know enough about computers to make a good educated guess. Once, just
1992 before Christmas, they had some leftover money on the book budget and
1993 I was asked if I could pick out a lot of computer books in the
1994 university book store, for the library to buy for their collection. I
1995 had a great time picking all the books I dreamt of buying and reading,
1996 and the books I knew were classics (like most of the
1997 <a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Richard_Stevens
">Stevens
1998 collection
</a
>). I picked several of the generic O
'Reilly books (ie
1999 documenting protocols, formats and systems, not specific versions of
2000 products) and stayed away from the
'teach yourself X in N days
' class.
2001 I had a great time, and probably picked out more than a hundred books
2002 for the library that evening.
</p
>
2004 <p
>The sad fact is that there is no way a overworked librarian is
2005 going to know that for example
2006 <a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Practice_of_Programming
">The
2007 Practice of Programming
</a
> is a must-have in any computer library,
2008 and they will most of the time end up picking the wrong books to buy.
2009 Perhaps you can help your local library make better choices by giving
2010 the suggestions for books to get? I know they would love to hear from
2011 you, even if their budget might block them from getting your favourite
2012 book right away.
</p
>
2017 <title>Seventy percent done with Norwegian docbook version of Free Culture
</title>
2018 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Seventy_percent_done_with_Norwegian_docbook_version_of_Free_Culture.html
</link>
2019 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Seventy_percent_done_with_Norwegian_docbook_version_of_Free_Culture.html
</guid>
2020 <pubDate>Sun,
23 Sep
2012 09:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
2021 <description><p
>Since this summer, I have worked in my spare time on a Norwegian
<a
2022 href=
"http://www.docbook.org/
">docbook
</a
> version of the
2004 book
<a
2023 href=
"http://free-culture.cc/
">Free Culture
</a
> by Lawrence Lessig.
2024 The reason is that this book is a great primer on what problems exist
2025 in the current copyright laws, and I want it to be available also for
2026 those that are reluctant do read an English book.
2029 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html
">called
2030 for volunteers
</a
> to help me, but too few have volunteered so far,
2031 and progress is a bit slow. Anyway, today I broken the
70 percent
2032 mark for the first rough translation. At the moment, less than
700
2033 strings (paragraphs, index terms, titles) are left to translate. With
2034 my current progress of
10-
20 strings per day, it will take a while to
2035 complete the translation. This graph show the updated progress:
</p
>
2037 <img width=
"80%
" align=
"center
" src=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png
">
2039 <p
>Progress have slowed down lately due to family and work
2040 commitments. If you want to help, please get in touch, and check out
2041 the project files currently available from
2042 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig
">github
</a
>.
</p
>
2044 <p
>If you are curious what the translated book currently look like,
2046 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true
">PDF
</a
>
2048 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true
">EPUB
</a
>
2049 are published on github. The HTML version is published as well, but
2050 github hand it out with MIME type text/plain, confusing browsers, so I
2051 saw no point in linking to that version.
</p
>
2056 <title>Debian Edu interview: Giorgio Pioda
</title>
2057 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Giorgio_Pioda.html
</link>
2058 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Giorgio_Pioda.html
</guid>
2059 <pubDate>Mon,
17 Sep
2012 14:
10:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
2060 <description><p
>After a long break in my row of interviews with people in the
2061 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu and Skolelinux
</a
>
2062 community, I finally found time to wrap up another. This time it is
2063 Giorgio Pioda, which showed up on the mailing list at the start of
2064 this year, asking questions and inspiring us to improve the first time
2065 administrators experience with Skolelinux. :) The interview was
2066 conduced in May, but I only found time to publish it now.
</p
>
2068 <p
><strong
>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
</strong
></p
>
2070 <p
>I have a PhD in chemistry but since several years I work as teacher
2071 in secondary (
15-
18 year old students) and tertiary (a kind of
"light
"
2072 university) schools. Five years ago I started to manage a Learning
2073 Management Service server and slowly I got more and more involved with
2074 IT.
3 years ago the graduating schools moved completely to Linux and I
2075 got the head of the IT for this. The experience collected in chemistry
2076 labs computers (for example NMR analysis of protein folding) and in
2077 the IT-courses during university where sufficient to start. Self
2078 training is anyway very important
</p
>
2080 <p
>I live in the Italian speaking part of Switzerland, and the
2081 <a href=
"http://www.spse.ch/
">SPSE school
</a
> (secondary) is a very
2082 special sport school for young people who try to became sport pro (for
2083 all sports, we have dozens of disciplines represented) and we are
2084 recognised by the Olympic Swiss Organisation.
2086 <p
><strong
>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
2087 project?
</strong
></p
>
2089 <p
>Looking for Linux / Primary Domain Controller (PDC) I found it
2090 already several years ago. But since the system was still not
2091 Kerberized and since our schools relies strongly on laptops I didn
't
2092 use it. I plan to introduce it in the next future, probably for the
2093 next school year, since the squeeze release solved this security
2096 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
2097 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
2099 <p
>Many. First of all there is a strong and living community that is
2100 very generous for help and hints. Chat help is crucial, together with
2101 the mailing list. Second. With Skolelinux you get an already well
2102 engineered platform and you don
't have to start to build up your PDC
2103 and your clients from GNU/scratch; I
've already done this once and I
2104 can tell it, it is hard. Third, since Skolelinux is a standard
2105 platform, it is way easier to educate other IT people and even if the
2106 head IT is sick another one could pick up the task without too much
2109 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
2110 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
2112 <p
>The only real problem I see is that it is a little too less
2113 flexible at client level. Debian stable is rocky and desirable, but
2114 there are many reasons that force for another choice. For example the
2115 need of new drivers for new PC, or the need for a specific OS for some
2116 devices that have specific software packages for another specific
2117 distribution (I have such a case for whiteboards that have only
2118 Ubuntu packages). Thus, I prepared compatibility packages educlient
2119 and eduroaming, hoping not to use them ;-)
</p
>
2121 <p
><strong
>Which free software do you use daily?
</strong
></p
>
2123 <p
>I have a Debian Stable PDC at school (Kerberos, NIS, NFS) with
2124 mixed Debian and Ubuntu clients. If you think that this triad
2125 combination is exotic... well I discovered right yesterday that
2126 <a href=
"http://moo.nac.uci.edu/~hjm/Perceus-Report.html
">Perceus
</a
>
2127 has the same...
</p
>
2129 <p
>For myself I run Debian wheezy/sid, but this combination is good
2130 only I you have enough competence to fix stuff for yourself, if
2131 something breaks. Daily I use texmacs, gnumeric, a little bit of R
2132 statistics, kmplot, and less frequently OpenOffice.org.
</p
>
2134 <p
><strong
>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
2135 get schools to use free software?
</strong
></p
>
2137 <P
>I think that the only real argument that school managers
"hear
" is
2138 cost reduction. They don
't give too much weight on quality, stability,
2139 just because they are normally not open to change.
</p
>
2141 <p
>Students adapts very quickly to GNU/Linux (and for them being able
2142 to switch between different OS is a plus value); teachers and managers
2143 don
't.
</p
>
2145 <p
>We decided to move to Linux because students at our school have own
2146 laptop and we have the responsibility to keep the laptop ready to use;
2147 we were really unsatisfied with Microsoft since every Monday we had
20
2148 machine to fix for viral infections... With Linux this has been
2149 reduced to zero, since people installs almost only from official
2150 repositories. I think that our special needs brought us to Linux.
2151 Those who don
't have such needs will hardly move to Linux.
</p
>
2156 <title>IETF activity to standardise video codec
</title>
2157 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IETF_activity_to_standardise_video_codec.html
</link>
2158 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IETF_activity_to_standardise_video_codec.html
</guid>
2159 <pubDate>Sat,
15 Sep
2012 20:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
2160 <description><p
>After the
2161 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IETF_standardize_its_first_multimedia_codec__Opus.html
">Opus
2162 codec made
</a
> it into
<a href=
"http://www.ietf.org/
">IETF
</a
> as
2163 <a href=
"http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6716
">RFC
6716</a
>, I had a look
2164 to see if there is any activity in IETF to standardise a video codec
2165 too, and I was happy to discover that there is some activity in this
2166 area. A non-
"working group
" mailing list
2167 <a href=
"https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/video-codec
">video-codec
</a
>
2169 <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
2170 formal working group should be formed.
</p
>
2172 <p
>I look forward to see how this plays out. There is already
2173 <a href=
"http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/video-codec/current/msg00003.html
">an
2174 email from someone
</a
> in the MPEG group at ISO asking people to
2175 participate in the ISO group. Given how ISO failed with OOXML and given
2176 that it so far (as far as I can remember) only have produced
2177 multimedia formats requiring royalty payments, I suspect
2178 joining the ISO group would be a complete waste of time, but I am not
2179 involved in any codec work and my opinion will not matter much.
</p
>
2181 <p
>If one of my readers is involved with codec work, I hope she will
2182 join this work to standardise a royalty free video codec within
2188 <title>IETF standardize its first multimedia codec: Opus
</title>
2189 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IETF_standardize_its_first_multimedia_codec__Opus.html
</link>
2190 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IETF_standardize_its_first_multimedia_codec__Opus.html
</guid>
2191 <pubDate>Wed,
12 Sep
2012 13:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
2192 <description><p
>Yesterday,
<a href=
"http://www.ietf.org/
">IETF
</a
> announced the
2194 <a href=
"http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6716
">RFC
6716, the Definition
2195 of the Opus Audio Codec
</a
>, a low latency, variable bandwidth, codec
2196 intended for both VoIP, film and music. This is the first time, as
2197 far as I know, that IETF have standardized a multimedia codec. In
2198 <a href=
"http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3533
">RFC
3533</a
>, IETF
2199 standardized the OGG container format, and it has proven to be a great
2200 royalty free container for audio, video and movies. I hope IETF will
2201 continue to standardize more royalty free codeces, after ISO and MPEG
2202 have proven incapable of securing everyone equal rights to publish
2203 multimedia content on the Internet.
</p
>
2205 <p
>IETF require two interoperating independent implementations to
2206 ratify a standard, and have so far ensured to only standardize royalty
2207 free specifications. Both are key factors to allow everyone (rich and
2208 poor), to compete on equal terms on the Internet.
</p
>
2210 <p
>Visit the
<a href=
"http://opus-codec.org/
">Opus project page
</a
> if
2211 you want to learn more about the solution.
</p
>
2216 <title>Git repository for song book for Computer Scientists
</title>
2217 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Git_repository_for_song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html
</link>
2218 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Git_repository_for_song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html
</guid>
2219 <pubDate>Fri,
7 Sep
2012 13:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
2220 <description><p
>As I
2221 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html
">mentioned
2222 this summer
</a
>, I have created a Computer Science song book a few
2223 years ago, and today I finally found time to create a public
2224 <a href=
"https://gitorious.org/pere-cs-songbook/pere-cs-songbook
">Gitorious
2225 repository for the project
</a
>.
</p
>
2227 <p
>If you want to help out, please clone the source and submit patches
2228 to the HTML version. To generate the PDF and PostScript version,
2229 please use prince XML, or let me know about a useful free software
2230 processor capable of creating a good looking PDF from the HTML.
</p
>
2232 <p
>Want to sing? You can still find the song book in HTML, PDF and
2233 PostScript formats at
2234 <a href=
"http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/
">Petter
's Computer
2235 Science Songbook
</a
>.
</p
>
2240 <title>Free software forced Microsoft to open Office (and don
't forget Officeshots)
</title>
2241 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_software_forced_Microsoft_to_open_Office__and_don_t_forget_Officeshots_.html
</link>
2242 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_software_forced_Microsoft_to_open_Office__and_don_t_forget_Officeshots_.html
</guid>
2243 <pubDate>Thu,
23 Aug
2012 14:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
2244 <description><p
>I came across a great comment from Simon Phipps today, about how
2245 <a href=
"http://www.infoworld.com/d/open-source-software/how-microsoft-was-forced-open-office-
200233">Microsoft
2246 have been forced to open Office
</a
>, and it made me remember and
2247 revisit the great site
2248 <a href=
"http://www.officeshots.org/
">officeshots
</a
> which allow you
2249 to check out how different programs present the ODF file format. I
2250 recommend both to those of my readers interested in ODF. :)
</p
>
2255 <title>Half way there with translated docbook version of Free Culture
</title>
2256 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Half_way_there_with_translated_docbook_version_of_Free_Culture.html
</link>
2257 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Half_way_there_with_translated_docbook_version_of_Free_Culture.html
</guid>
2258 <pubDate>Fri,
17 Aug
2012 21:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
2259 <description><p
>In my spare time, I currently work on a Norwegian
2260 <a href=
"http://www.docbook.org/
">docbook
</a
> version of the
2004 book
2261 <a href=
"http://free-culture.cc/
">Free Culture
</a
> by Lawrence Lessig,
2262 to get a Norwegian text explaining the problems with the copyright law
2263 I can give to my parents and others that are reluctant to read an
2264 English book. It is a marvellous set of examples on how the ever
2265 expanding copyright regulations hurt culture and society. When the
2266 translation is done, I hope to find funding to print and ship a copy
2267 to all the members of the Norwegian parliament, before they sit down
2268 to debate the latest revisions to the Norwegian copyright law. This
2270 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html
">called
2271 for volunteers
</a
> to help me, and I have been able to secure the
2272 valuable contribution from at least one other Norwegian.
</p
>
2274 <p
>Two days ago, we finally broke the
50% mark. Then more than
50% of
2275 the number of strings to translate (normally paragraphs, but also
2276 titles and index entries are also counted). All parts from the
2277 beginning up to and including chapter four is translated. So is
2278 chapters six, seven and the conclusion. I created a graph to show the
2281 <img width=
"80%
" align=
"center
" src=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png
">
2283 <p
>The number of strings to translate increase as I insert the index
2284 entries into the docbook. They were missing with the docbook version
2285 I initially started with. There are still quite a few index entries
2286 missing, but everyone starting with A, B, O, Z and Y are done. I
2287 currently focus on completing the index entries, to get a complete
2288 english version of the docbook source.
</p
>
2290 <p
>There is still need for translators and people with docbook
2291 knowledge, to be able to get a good looking book (I still struggle
2292 with dblatex, xmlto and docbook-xsl) as well as to do the draft
2293 translation and proof reading. And I would like the figures to be
2294 redrawn as SVGs to make it easy to translate them. Any SVG master
2295 around? I am sure there are some legal terms that are unfamiliar to
2296 me. If you want to help, please get in touch, and check out the
2297 project files currently available from
<a
2298 href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig
">github
</a
>.
</p
>
2300 <p
>If you are curious what the translated book currently look like,
2302 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true
">PDF
</a
>
2304 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true
">EPUB
</a
>
2305 are published on github. The HTML version is published as well, but
2306 github hand it out with MIME type text/plain, confusing browsers, so I
2307 saw no point in linking to that version.
</p
>
2312 <title>Notes on language codes for Norwegian docbook processing...
</title>
2313 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Notes_on_language_codes_for_Norwegian_docbook_processing___.html
</link>
2314 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Notes_on_language_codes_for_Norwegian_docbook_processing___.html
</guid>
2315 <pubDate>Fri,
10 Aug
2012 21:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
2316 <description><p
>In
<a href=
"http://www.docbook.org/
">docbook
</a
> one can specify
2317 the language used at the top, and the processing pipeline will use
2318 this information to pick the correct translations for
'chapter
',
'see
2319 also
',
'index
' etc. And for most languages used with docbook, I guess
2320 this work just fine. For example a German user can start the document
2321 with
&lt;book lang=
"de
"&gt;, and the document will show up with the
2322 correct content with any of the docbook processors. This is not the
2323 case for the language
2324 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Culture_in_Norwegian___5_chapters_done__74_percent_left_to_do.html
">I
2325 am working with at the moment
</a
>, Norwegian Bokmål.
</p
>
2327 <p
>For a while, I was confused about which language code to use,
2328 because I was unable to find any language code that would work across
2329 all tools. I am currently testing dblatex, xmlto, docbook-xsl, and
2330 dbtoepub, and they do not handle Norwegian Bokmål the same way. Some
2331 of them do not handle it at all.
</p
>
2333 <p
>A bit of background information is probably needed to understand
2334 this mess. Norwegian is not one, but two written variants. The
2335 variants are Norwegian Nynorsk and Norwegian Bokmål. There are three
2336 two letter language codes associated with these languages, Norwegian
2337 is
'no
', Norwegian Nynorsk is
'nn
' and Norwegian Bokmål is
'nb
'.
2338 Historically the
'no
' language code was used for Norwegian Bokmål, but
2339 many years ago this was found to be å bad idea, and the recommendation
2340 is to use the most specific language code instead, to avoid confusion.
2341 In the transition period it is a good idea to make sure
'no
' was an
2342 alias for
'nb
'.
</p
>
2344 <p
>Back to docbook processing tools in Debian. The dblatex tool only
2345 understand
'nn
'. There are translations for
'no
', but not
'nb
' (BTS
2346 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
684391">#
684391</a
>), but due to a bug
2347 (BTS
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
682936">#
682936</a
>) the
'no
'
2348 language code is not recognised. The docbook-xsl tool chain only
2349 recognise
'nn
' and
'nb
', but not
'no
'. The xmlto tool only recognise
2350 'nn
' and
'nb
', but not
'no
'. The end result that there is no language
2351 code I can use to get the docbook file working with all of these tools
2352 at the same time. :(
</p
>
2354 <p
>The correct solution is to use
&lt;book lang=
"nb
"&gt;, but it will
2355 take time before that will work with all the free software docbook
2356 processors. :(
</p
>
2358 <p
>Oh, the joy of well integrated tools. :/
</p
>
2363 <title>Best way to create a docbook book?
</title>
2364 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Best_way_to_create_a_docbook_book_.html
</link>
2365 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Best_way_to_create_a_docbook_book_.html
</guid>
2366 <pubDate>Tue,
31 Jul
2012 22:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
2367 <description><p
>I tried to send this text to the
2368 <a href=
"https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-apps/
">docbook-apps
2369 mailing list at lists.oasis-open.org
</a
>, but it only accept messages
2370 from subscribers and rejected my post, and I completely lack the
2371 bandwidth required to subscribe to another mailing list, so instead I
2372 try to post my message here and hope my blog readers can help me
2375 <p
>I am quite new to docbook processing, and am climbing a steep
2376 learning curve at the moment.
</p
>
2378 <p
>To give you some background, I am working on a Norwegian
2379 translation of the book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig, and I use
2380 docbook to handle the process. The files to build the book are
2382 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig
">github
</a
>.
2383 The book got around
400 pages with parts, images, footnotes, tables,
2384 index entries etc, which has proven to be a challenge for the free
2385 software docbook processors. My build platform is Debian GNU/Linux
2388 <p
>I want to build PDF, EPUB and HTML version of the book, and have
2389 tried different tool chains to do the conversion from docbook to these
2390 formats. I am currently focusing on the PDF version, and have a few
2395 <li
>Using dblatex, the
&lt;part
&gt; handling is not the way I want to,
2396 as
&lt;/part
&gt; do not really end the
&lt;part
&gt;. (See
2397 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
683166">BTS report #
683166</a
>), the
2398 xetex backend (needed to process UTF-
8) give incorrect hyphens in
2399 index references spanning several pages (See
2400 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
682901">BTS report #
682901</a
>), and
2401 I am unable to get the norwegian template texts (See
2402 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
682936">BTS report #
682936</a
>).
</li
>
2404 <li
>Using straight xmlto fail with some latex error (See
2405 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
683163">BTS report
2406 #
683163</a
>).
</li
>
2408 <li
>Using xmlto with the fop backend fail to handle images (do not
2409 show up in the PDF), fail to handle a long footnote (overlap
2410 footnote and text body, see
2411 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
683197">BTS report #
683197</a
>), and
2412 fail to create a correct index (some lack page ref, and the page
2413 refs listed are not right).
</li
>
2415 <li
>Using xmlto with the dblatex backend behave like dblatex.
</li
>
2417 <li
>Using docbook-xls with xsltproc + fop have the same footnote and
2418 index problems the xmlto + fop processing.
</li
>
2422 <p
>So I wonder, what would be the best way to create the PDF version
2423 of this book? Are some of the bugs found above solved in new or
2424 experimental versions of some docbook tool chain?
</p
>
2426 <p
>What about HTML and EPUB versions?
</p
>
2431 <title>Free Culture in Norwegian -
5 chapters done,
74 percent left to do
</title>
2432 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Culture_in_Norwegian___5_chapters_done__74_percent_left_to_do.html
</link>
2433 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Culture_in_Norwegian___5_chapters_done__74_percent_left_to_do.html
</guid>
2434 <pubDate>Sat,
21 Jul
2012 20:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
2435 <description><p
>I reported earlier that I am working on
2436 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html
">a
2437 norwegian version
</a
> of the book
2438 <a href=
"http://free-culture.cc/
">Free Culture
</a
> by Lawrence Lessig.
2439 Progress is good, and yesterday I got a major contribution from Anders
2440 Hagen Jarmund completing chapter six. The source files as well as a
2441 PDF and EPUB version of this book are available from
2442 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig
">github
</a
>.
</p
>
2444 <p
>I am happy to report that the draft for the first two chapters
2445 (preface, introduction) is complete, and three other chapters are also
2446 completely translated. This completes
26 percent of the number of
2447 strings (equivalent to paragraphs) in the book, and there is thus
74
2448 percent left to translate. A graph of the progress is present at the
2449 bottom of the github project page. There is still room for more
2450 contributors. Get in touch or send github pull requests with fixes if
2451 you got time and are willing to help make this book make it to
2454 <p
>The book translation framework could also be a good basis for other
2455 translations, if you want the book to be available in your
2461 <title>Call for help from docbook expert to tag Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig
</title>
2462 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Call_for_help_from_docbook_expert_to_tag_Free_Culture_by_Lawrence_Lessig.html
</link>
2463 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Call_for_help_from_docbook_expert_to_tag_Free_Culture_by_Lawrence_Lessig.html
</guid>
2464 <pubDate>Mon,
16 Jul
2012 22:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
2465 <description><p
>I am currently working on a
2466 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html
">project
2467 to translate
</a
> the book
2468 <a href=
"http://free-culture.cc/
">Free Culture
</a
> by Lawrence Lessig
2469 to Norwegian. And the source we base our translation on is the
2470 <a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DocBook
">docbook
</a
> version, to
2471 allow us to use po4a and .po files to handle the translation, and for
2472 this to work well the docbook source document need to be properly
2473 tagged. The source files of this project is available from
2474 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig
">github
</a
>.
</p
>
2476 <p
>The problem is that the docbook source have flaws, and we have
2477 no-one involved in the project that is a docbook expert. Is there a
2478 docbook expert somewhere that is interested in helping us create a
2479 well tagged docbook version of the book, and adjust our build process
2480 for the PDF, EPUB and HTML version of the book? This will provide a
2481 well tagged English version (our source document), and make it a lot
2482 easier for us to create a good Norwegian version. If you can and want
2483 to help, please get in touch with me or fork the github project and
2484 send pull requests with fixes. :)
</p
>
2489 <title>Debian Edu interview: George Bredberg
</title>
2490 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__George_Bredberg.html
</link>
2491 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__George_Bredberg.html
</guid>
2492 <pubDate>Mon,
9 Jul
2012 00:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
2493 <description><p
>The
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu /
2494 Skolelinux
</a
> project have users all over the globe, but until
2495 recently we have not known about any users in Norway
's neighbour
2496 country Sweden. This changed when George Bredberg showed up in March
2497 this year on the mailing list, asking interesting questions about how
2498 to adjust and scale the just released
2499 <a href=
"http://www.debian.org/News/
2012/
20120311.html
">Debian Edu
2500 Wheezy
</a
> setup to his liking. He granted me an interview, and I am
2501 happy to share his answers with you here.
</p
>
2503 <p
><strong
>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
</strong
></p
>
2505 <p
>I
'm a
44 year old country guy that have been working
12 years at
2506 the same school as
50% IT-manager and
50% Teacher. My educational
2507 background is fil.kand in history and religious beliefs, an exam as a
2508 "folkhighschool
" teacher, that is, for teaching grownups. In
2509 Norwegian I believe it
's called
"Vuxenupplaring
". I also have a master
2510 in
"Technology and social change
". So I
'm not really a tech guy, I
2511 just like to study how humans and technology interact and that is my
2512 perspective when working with IT.
</p
>
2514 <p
><strong
>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
2515 project?
</strong
></p
>
2517 I have followed the Skolelinux project for quite some time by
2518 now. Earlier I tested out the K12-LTSP project, which we used for some
2519 time, but I really like the idea of having a distribution aimed to be
2520 a complete solution for schools with necessary tools integrated. When
2521 K12-LTSP abandoned that idea some years ago, I started to look more
2522 seriously into Skolelinux instead.
2524 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
2525 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
2527 The big point of Skolelinux to me is that it is a complete
2528 distribution, ready to install. It has LDAP-support, MS Windows
2529 integration tools and so forth already configured, saving an
2530 administrator a lot of time and headache. We were using another Linux
2531 based thin-client system called Thinlinc, that has served us very
2532 well. But that Skolelinux is based on VNC and LTSP, to me, is better
2533 when it comes to the kind of multimedia used in schools. That is
2534 showing videos from Youtube or educational TV. It is also easier to
2535 mix thin clients with workstations, since the user settings will be the
2536 same. In our VNC-based solution you had to
"beat around the bush
" by
2537 setting up a second, hidden, home-directory for user settings for the
2538 workstations, because they will be different from the ones used on the
2539 thin clients. Skolelinux support for diskless workstations are very
2540 convenient since a school today often need to use a class room
2541 projector showing videos in full screen. That is easily done with a
2542 small integrated media computer running as a diskless workstation. You
2543 have only two installs to update and configure. One for the thin
2544 clients and one for the workstations. Also saving a lot of time. Our
2545 old system was also based on Redhat and CentOS. They are both very
2546 nice distributions, but they are sometimes painfully slow when it
2547 comes to updating multimedia support and multimedia programs (even
2548 such as Gimp), leaving us with a bit
"oldish
" applications. Debian is
2551 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
2552 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
2554 <p
>Debian is a bit too quick when it comes to updating. As an example
2555 we use old HP terminals as thinclients, and two times already this
2556 year (
2012) the updates you get from the repositories has stopped
2557 sound from working with them. It
's a kernel/ALSA issue. So you have
2558 to be more careful properly testing the updates before you run them in
2559 a production environment. This has never happened with CentOS.
</p
>
2561 <p
>I also would like to be able to set my own domain-settings at
2562 install time. In Skolelinux they are kind of hard coded into the
2563 distribution, when it comes to LDAP and at least samba integration.
2564 That is more a cosmetic/translation issue, and not a real problem.
2565 Running MS Windows applications within the Skolelinux environment needs
2566 to be better supported. That is, running them seamlessly via RDP, and
2567 support for single-sign on. That will make the transition to free
2568 software easier, because you can keep the applications you really
2569 need. No support will make it impossible if you work in a school where
2570 some applications can
't be open source. As for us we really need to
2571 run Adobe InDesign in our journalist classes. We run a journalist
2572 education, and is one of the very few non university ones that is ok:d
2573 by Svenska journalistförbundet (Swedish journalist association). Our
2574 education gives the pupils the right of membership there, once they
2575 are done. This is important if you want to get a job.
</p
>
2577 <p
>Adobe InDesign is the program most commonly used in newspapers and
2578 magazines. We used Quark Express before, but they seem to loose there
2579 market to Adobe. The only
"equivalent
" to InDesign in the opensource
2580 world is Scribus, and its not advanced enough. At least not according
2581 to the teacher. I think it would be possible to use it, because they
2582 are not supposed to learn a program, they are supposed to learn how to
2583 edit and compile a newspaper. But politically at our school we are not
2584 there yet. And Scribus lacks a lot of things you find i InDesign.
</p
>
2586 <p
>We used even a windows program for sound editing when it comes to
2587 the radio-journalist part. The year to come we are going to try
2588 Audacity. That software has the same kind of limitations compared to
2589 Adobe Audition, but that teacher is a bit more open minded. We have
2590 tried Ardour also, but that instead is more like a music studio
2591 program, not intended for the kind of editing taking place in a radio
2592 studio. Its way to complex and the GUI is to scattered when you only
2593 want to cut, make pass-overs, add extra channels and normalise. Those
2594 things you can do in Audacity, but its not as easy as in Audition. You
2595 have to do more things manually with envelopes, and that is a bit old
2596 fashion and timewasting. Its also harder to cut and move sound from
2597 one channel to another, which is a thing that you do frequently
2598 because you often find yourself needing to rearrange parts of the
2599 sound file.
</p
>
2601 <p
>So, I am not sure we will succeed in replacing even Audition, but we
2602 will try. The problem is the students have certain expectations when
2603 they start an education towards a profession. So the programs has to
2604 look and feel professional. Good thing with radio, there are many
2605 programs out there, that radio studios use, so its not as standardised
2606 as Newspaper editing. That means, it does not really matter what
2607 program they learn, because once they start working they still have to
2608 learn the program the studio uses, so instead focus has to be to learn
2609 the editing part without to much focus on a specific software.
</p
>
2611 <p
><strong
>Which free software do you use daily?
</strong
></p
>
2613 <p
>Myself I
'm running Linux Mint, or Ubuntu these days. I use almost
2614 only open source software, and preferably Linux based. When it comes
2615 to most used applications its OpenOffice, and Firefox (of course ;)
2618 <p
><strong
>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
2619 get schools to use free software?
</strong
></p
>
2621 <p
>To get schools to use free software there has to be good open
2622 source software that are windows based, to ease the transition. But
2623 it
's also very important that the multimedia support is working
2624 flawlessly. The problems with Youtube, Twitter, Facebook and whatever
2625 will create problems when it comes to both teachers and
2626 students. Economy are also important for schools, so using thin
2627 clients, as long as they have good multimedia support, is a very good
2628 idea. It
's also important that the open source software works even for
2629 the administration. It
's hard to convince the teachers to stick with
2630 open source, if the principal has to run Windows. It also creates a
2631 problem if some classes has to use Windows for there tasks, since that
2632 will create a difference in
"status
" between classes, so a good
2633 support for running windows applications via the thin client (Linux)
2634 desktop is essential. At least at our school, where we have mixed
2635 level of educations, from high-school to journalist-school.
</p
>
2637 <p
>Update
2012-
07-
09 08:
30: Paul Wise tipped me on IRC about three
2638 useful sources related to Free Software for radio stations: the LWN
2639 article
<a href=
"https://lwn.net/Articles/
481607/
">Radio station
2640 management with Airtime
</a
>,
2641 <a href=
"http://www.sourcefabric.org/en/airtime/
">Airtime
</a
> which
2642 claim to be a Free open source radio automation software and
2643 <a href=
"http://www.rivendellaudio.org/
">Rivendell
</a
> which claim to
2644 be complete radio broadcast automation solution. All of them seem
2645 useful to the aspiring radio producer.
</p
>
2650 <title>Why do schools waste money on IT?
</title>
2651 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_do_schools_waste_money_on_IT_.html
</link>
2652 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_do_schools_waste_money_on_IT_.html
</guid>
2653 <pubDate>Sun,
8 Jul
2012 09:
40:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
2654 <description><p
>In the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project, we have realised that one
2655 of the major blockers for the project success is the purchasing skills
2656 in schools and municipalities. We provide what the happy users of
2657 Debian Edu / Skolelinux say they need and to a lower cost than the
2658 alternatives, and yet so few schools decide to use our solution. I
2659 was pleased to discover the same observation done by mySociety and Tom
2660 Steinberg in his blog post
2661 "<a href=
"http://www.mysociety.org/
2012/
06/
19/can-you-recognize-the-million-pound-chair/
">Can
2662 you recognize the million pound chair?
</a
>". Read it and weep for the
2663 spending of your tax money.
</p
>
2665 <p
>Of course there are other factors involved as well, like our
2666 projects bad marketing skills and the Linux community fragmentation
2667 causing worry with the people on the outside, so we as a project need
2668 to keep working hard to gain users, but it is a up-hill battle when
2669 public decision makers are unable to understand computer system
2670 purchases.
</p
>
2675 <title>Free Timetabling Software - nice free software
</title>
2676 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Timetabling_Software___nice_free_software.html
</link>
2677 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Timetabling_Software___nice_free_software.html
</guid>
2678 <pubDate>Sat,
7 Jul
2012 09:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
2679 <description><p
>Included in
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu /
2680 Skolelinux
</a
> is a large collection of end user and school specific
2681 software. It is one of the packages not installed by default but
2682 provided in the Debian archive for schools to install if they want to,
2683 is a system to automatically plan the school time table using
2684 information about available teachers, classes and rooms, combined with
2685 the list of required courses and how many hours each topic should
2686 receive. The software is
2688 <a href=
"http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/
">named FET
</a
>, and it provide a
2689 graphical user interface to input the required information, save the
2690 result in a fairly simple XML format, and generate time tables for
2691 both teachers and students. It is available both for
2692 <a href=
"http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/download.html
">Linux, MacOSX and
2693 Windows
</a
>.
</p
>
2695 <p
>This is
<a href=
"http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/features.html
">the
2696 feature list
</a
>, liftet from the project web site:
</p
>
2700 <li
>FET is free software, licensed under the GNU GPL v2 or later.
2701 You can freely use, copy, modify and redistribute it
</li
>
2703 <li
>Localized to en_US (US English, default), ar (Arabic), ca
2704 (Catalan), da (Danish), de (German), el (Greek), es (Spanish), fa
2705 (Persian), fr (French), gl (Galician), he (Hebrew), hu
2706 (Hungarian), id (Indonesian), it (Italian), lt (Lithuanian), mk
2707 (Macedonian), ms (Malay), nl (Dutch), pl (Polish), pt_BR
2708 (Brazilian Portuguese), ro (Romanian), ru (Russian), si (Sinhala),
2709 sk (Slovak), sr (Serbian), tr (Turkish), uk (Ukrainian), uz
2710 (Uzbek) and vi (Vietnamese) (incompletely for some languages)
2713 <li
>Fully automatic generation algorithm, allowing also
2714 semi-automatic or manual allocation
</li
>
2716 <li
>Platform independent implementation, allowing running on
2717 GNU/Linux, Windows, Mac and any system that Qt supports
</li
>
2719 <li
>Flexible modular XML format for the input file, allowing editing
2720 with an XML editor or by hand (besides FET interface)
</li
>
2722 <li
>Import/export from CSV format
</li
>
2724 <li
>The resulted timetables are exported into HTML, XML and CSV
2727 <li
>Flexible students structure, organized into sets: years, groups
2728 and subgroups. FET allows overlapping years and groups and
2729 non-overlapping subgroups. You can even define individual students
2730 (as separate sets)
</li
>
2732 <li
>Each constraint has a weight percentage, from
0.0% to
100.0%
2733 (but some special constraints are allowed to have only
100% weight
2734 percentage)
</li
>
2736 <li
>Limits for the algorithm (all these limits can be increased on
2737 demand, as a custom version, because this would require a bit more
2740 <li
>Maximum total number of hours (periods) per day:
60</li
>
2741 <li
>Maximum number of working days per week:
35</li
>
2742 <li
>Maximum total number of teachers:
6000</li
>
2743 <li
>Maximum total number of sets of students:
30000</li
>
2744 <li
>Maximum total number of subjects:
6000</li
>
2745 <li
>Virtually unlimited number of activity tags
</li
>
2746 <li
>Maximum number of activities:
30000</li
>
2747 <li
>Maximum number of rooms:
6000</li
>
2748 <li
>Maximum number of buildings:
6000</li
>
2749 <li
>Possibility of adding multiple teachers and
2750 students sets for each activity. (it is possible
2751 also to have no teachers or no students sets for an
2752 activity)
</li
>
2753 <li
>Virtually unlimited number of time constraints
</li
>
2754 <li
>Virtually unlimited number of space constraints
</li
>
2755 </ul
></li
>
2757 <li
>A large and flexible palette of time constraints:
2759 <li
>Break periods
</li
>
2760 <li
>For teacher(s):
2762 <li
>Not available periods
</li
>
2763 <li
>Max/min days per week
</li
>
2764 <li
>Max gaps per day/week
</li
>
2765 <li
>Max hours daily/continuously
</li
>
2766 <li
>Min hours daily
</li
>
2767 <li
>Max hours daily/continuously with an activity tag
</li
>
2769 <li
>Respect working in an hourly interval a max number of
2770 days per week
</li
>
2771 </ul
></li
>
2772 <li
>For students (sets):
2774 <li
>Not available periods
</li
>
2775 <li
>Begins early (specify max allowed beginnings at second hour)
</li
>
2776 <li
>Max gaps per day/week
</li
>
2777 <li
>Max hours daily/continuously
</li
>
2778 <li
>Min hours daily
</li
>
2779 <li
>Max hours daily/continuously with an activity tag
</li
>
2781 <li
>Respect working in an hourly interval a max number of
2782 days per week
</li
>
2783 </ul
></li
>
2784 <li
>For an activity or a set of activities/subactivities:
2786 <li
>A single preferred starting time
</li
>
2787 <li
>A set of preferred starting times
</li
>
2788 <li
>A set of preferred time slots
</li
>
2789 <li
>Min/max days between them
</li
>
2790 <li
>End(s) students day
</li
>
2791 <li
>Same starting time/day/hour
</li
>
2792 <li
>Occupy max time slots from selection (a complex and
2793 flexible constraint, useful in many situations)
</li
>
2794 <li
>Consecutive, ordered, grouped (for
2 or
3 (sub)activities)
</li
>
2795 <li
>Not overlapping
</li
>
2796 <li
>Max simultaneous in selected time slots
</li
>
2797 <li
>Min gaps between a set of (sub)activities
</li
>
2798 </ul
></li
>
2799 </ul
></li
>
2801 <li
>A large and flexible palette of space constraints:
2803 <li
>Room not available periods
</li
>
2804 <li
>For teacher(s):
2806 <li
>Home room(s)
</li
>
2807 <li
>Max building changes per day/week
</li
>
2808 <li
>Min gaps between building changes
</li
>
2812 <li
>For students (sets):
2814 <li
>Home room(s)
</li
>
2815 <li
>Max building changes per day/week
</li
>
2816 <li
>Min gaps between building changes
</li
>
2819 <li
>Preferred room(s):
2821 <li
>For a subject
</li
>
2822 <li
>For an activity tag
</li
>
2823 <li
>For a subject and an activity tag
</li
>
2824 <li
>Individually for a (sub)activity
</li
>
2828 <li
>For a set of activities:
2830 <li
>Occupy a maximum number of different rooms
</li
>
2835 </ul
></p
>
2837 <p
>I have not used it myself, as I am not involved in time table
2838 planning at a school, but it seem to work fine when I test it. If you
2839 need to set up your schools time table, and is tired of doing it
2840 manually, check it out.
2842 A quick summary on how to use it can be found in
2843 <a href=
"http://marvelsoft.co.in/wp/
2012/
03/generate-timetable-for-state-cbse-icse-igcse-schools-free/
">a
2844 blog post from MarvelSoft
</a
>. If you find FET useful, please provide
2845 a recipe for the Debian Edu project in the
2846 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu#Howtos
">Debian Edu HowTo
2847 section
</a
>.
</p
>
2852 <title>Can Zimbra be told to send autoreplies to the From: address?
</title>
2853 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Can_Zimbra_be_told_to_send_autoreplies_to_the_From__address_.html
</link>
2854 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Can_Zimbra_be_told_to_send_autoreplies_to_the_From__address_.html
</guid>
2855 <pubDate>Tue,
3 Jul
2012 23:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
2856 <description><p
>In the NUUG
<a href=
"http://www.fiksgatami.no/
">FiksGataMi
</a
>
2857 project (Norwegian version of
2858 <a href=
"http://www.fixmystreet.com/
">FixMyStreet
</a
> from
2859 <a href=
"http://www.mysociety.org/
">mySociety
</a
>), we have discovered
2860 a problem with the municipalities using
2861 <a href=
"http://www.zimbra.com/
">Zimbra
</a
>. When FiksGataMi send a
2862 problem report to the government, the email From: address is set to
2863 the address of the person reporting the problem, while envelope sender
2864 is set to the FiksGataMi contact address. The intention is to make
2865 sure the municipality send any replies to the person reporting the
2866 problem, while any email delivery problems are sent to us in NUUG.
2867 This work well in most cases, but not for Karmøy municipality using
2868 Zimbra. Karmøy is using the vacation message function in Zimbra to
2869 send an automatic reply to report that the message has been received,
2870 and this message is sent to the envelope sender and not the address in
2871 the From: header.
</p
>
2873 <p
>This causes the automatic message from Karmøy to go to NUUGs
2874 request-tracker instance instead of to the person reporting the
2875 problem. We can not really change the envelope sender address, as
2876 this would make it impossible for us to discover when there are
2877 problems with the MTAs receiving problem reports. We have been in
2878 contact with the people at Karmøy municipality, and they are willing
2879 to adjust Zimbra if something can be changed there to get a better
2880 behaviour.
</p
>
2882 <p
>The default behaviour of Zimbra is as far as I can tell according
2883 to the specification in RFC
3834, which recommend that vacation
2884 messages are sent to the envelope sender and not to the From: address.
2885 But I wonder if it is possible to adjust or configure Zimbra to behave
2886 differently. Anyone know? Please let us know at
2887 <a href=
"http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/fiksgatami
">fiksgatami
2888 (at) nuug.no
</a
>.
</p
>
2893 <title>Debian Edu interview: José Luis Redrejo Rodríguez
</title>
2894 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Jos__Luis_Redrejo_Rodr_guez.html
</link>
2895 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Jos__Luis_Redrejo_Rodr_guez.html
</guid>
2896 <pubDate>Tue,
26 Jun
2012 08:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
2897 <description><p
>I
've been too busy at home, but finally I found time to wrap up
2898 another interview with the people behind
2899 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu and Skolelinux
</a
>.
2900 This time we get to know José Luis Redrejo Rodríguez, one of our great
2901 helpers from Spain. His effort was the reason we added support for
2902 several desktop types (KDE, Gnome and most recently LXDE) in Debian
2903 Edu, and have all of these available in the recently published
2904 <a href=
"http://www.debian.org/News/
2012/
20120311.html
">Debian Edu
2905 Squeeze
</a
> version.
</p
>
2907 <p
><strong
>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
</strong
></p
>
2909 <p
>I
'm a father, teacher and engineer who is working for the Education
2910 ministry of the Region of Extremadura (Spain) in the implementation of
2911 ICT in schools
</p
>
2913 <p
><strong
>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
2914 project?
</strong
></p
>
2916 <p
>At
2006, I verified that both, we in Extremadura and Skolelinux
2917 project, had been working in parallel for some years, doing very
2918 similar things, using very similar tools and with similar targets, so
2919 I decided it was time to join forces as much as possible.
</p
>
2921 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
2922 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
2924 <p
>A community of highly skilled experts working together, with a
2925 really open schema of collaboration and work. I really love the
2926 concepts of Do-ocracy and Merit-ocracy and the way these concepts are
2927 been used everyday inside Debian Edu.
</p
>
2929 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
2930 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
2932 <p
>Sometimes the differences in the implementations, laws or
2933 economical and technical resources in the different countries don
't
2934 allow us to agree in the same solution for all of us, and several
2935 approaches are needed, what is a waste of effort. Also, there is a
2936 lack of more man power to be able to follow the fast evolution of the
2937 technologies in school.
</p
>
2939 <p
><strong
>Which free software do you use daily?
</strong
></p
>
2941 <p
>Debian, of course, and due to my kind of job I am most of my time
2942 between Iceweasel,
<a href=
"http://www.geany.org/
">Geany
</a
> and
2943 <a href=
"http://www.ohloh.net/p/gnome-terminator
">Terminator
</a
>.
</p
>
2945 <p
><strong
>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
2946 get schools to use free software?
</strong
></p
>
2948 <p
>I think there is not a single strategy because there are very
2949 different scenarios: schools with mixed proprietary and free
2950 environments, schools using only workstations, other schools using
2951 laptops, netbooks, tablets, interactive white-boards, etc.
</p
>
2953 <p
>Also the range of ages of the students is very broad and you can
2954 not use the same solutions for primary schools and secondary or even
2955 universities. So different strategies are needed.
</p
>
2957 <p
>But, looking at these differences, and looking back to the things
2958 we
've done and implemented, and the places were we have spent most of
2959 our forces, I think we should focus as much as possible in free
2960 multi-platform environments, using only standards tools, and moving
2961 more and more to Internet or network solutions that could be deployed
2962 using wireless. I think we
'll see more and more personal devices in
2963 the schools, devices the students and teachers will take home with
2964 them, so the solutions must be able to be taken at home and continue
2965 working there.
</p
>
2970 <title>Song book for Computer Scientists
</title>
2971 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html
</link>
2972 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html
</guid>
2973 <pubDate>Sun,
24 Jun
2012 13:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
2974 <description><p
>Many years ago, while studying Computer Science at the
2975 <a href=
"http://www.uit.no/
">University of Tromsø
</a
>, I started
2976 collecting computer related songs for use at parties. The original
2977 version was written in LaTeX, but a few years ago I got help from
2978 Håkon W. Lie, one of the inventors of W3C CSS, to convert it to HTML
2979 while keeping the ability to create a nice book in PDF format. I have
2980 not had time to maintain the book for a while now, and guess I should
2981 put it up on some public version control repository where others can
2982 help me extend and update the book. If anyone is volunteering to help
2983 me with this, send me an email. Also let me know if there are songs
2984 missing in my book.
</p
>
2986 <p
>I have not mentioned the book on my blog so far, and it occured to
2987 me today that I really should let all my readers share the joys of
2988 singing out load about programming, computers and computer networks.
2989 Especially now that
<a href=
"http://debconf12.debconf.org/
">Debconf
2990 12</a
> is about to start (and I am not going). Want to sing? Check
2991 out
<a href=
"http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/
">Petter
's
2992 Computer Science Songbook
</a
>.
2997 <title>Debian Edu - some ideas for the future versions
</title>
2998 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu___some_ideas_for_the_future_versions.html
</link>
2999 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu___some_ideas_for_the_future_versions.html
</guid>
3000 <pubDate>Mon,
11 Jun
2012 14:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
3001 <description><p
>During my work on
3002 <a href=
"http://www.debian.org/News/
2012/
20120311.nb.html
">Debian Edu
3003 based on Squeeze
</a
>, I came across some issues that should be
3004 addressed in the Wheezy release. I finally found time to wrap up my
3005 notes and provide quick summary of what I found, with a bit
3006 explanation.
</p
>
3010 <li
>We need to rewrite our package installation framework, as tasksel
3011 changed from using tasksel tasks to using meta packages (aka packages
3012 with dependencies like our education-* packages), and our installation
3013 system depend on tasksel tasks in
3014 /usr/share/tasksel/debian-edu-tasks.desc for package
3015 installation.
</li
>
3017 <li
>Enable Kerberos login for more services. Now with the Kerberos
3018 foundation in place, we should use it to get single sign on with more
3019 services, and avoiding unneeded password / login questions. We should
3020 at least try to enable it for these services:
3023 <li
>CUPS for admins to add/configure printers and users when using
3025 <li
>Nagios for admins checking the system status.
</li
>
3026 <li
>GOsa for admins updating LDAP and users changing their passwords.
</li
>
3027 <li
>LDAP for admins updating LDAP.
</li
>
3028 <li
>Squid for users when exam mode / filtering is active.
</li
>
3029 <li
>ssh for admins and users to save a password prompt.
</li
>
3031 </ul
></li
>
3033 <li
>When we move GOsa to use Kerberos instead of LDAP bind to
3034 authenticate users, we should try to block or at least limit access to
3035 use LDAP bind for authentication, to ensure Kerberos is used when it
3036 is intended, and nothing fall back to using the less safe LDAP bind
</li
>
3038 <li
>Merge debian-edu-config and debian-edu-install. The split made
3039 sense when d-e-install did a lot more, but these days it is just an
3040 inconvenience when we update the debconf preseeding values.
</li
>
3042 <li
>Fix partman-auto to allow us to abort the installation before
3043 touching the disk if the disk is too small. This is
3044 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
653305">BTS report #
653305</a
> and the
3045 d-i developers are fine with the patch and someone just need to apply
3046 it and upload. After this is done we need to adjust
3047 debian-edu-install to use this new hook.
</li
>
3049 <li
>Adjust to new LTSP framework (boot time config instead of install
3050 time config). LTSP changed its design, and our hooks to install
3051 packages and update the configuration is most likely not going to work
3054 <li
>Consider switching to NBD instead of NFS for LTSP root, to allow
3055 the Kernel to cache files in its normal file cache, possibly speeding
3056 up KDE login on slow networks.
</li
>
3058 <li
>Make it possible to create expired user passwords that need to
3059 change on first login. This is useful when handing out password on
3060 paper, to make sure only the user know the password. This require
3061 fixes to the PAM handling of kdm and gdm.
</li
>
3063 <li
>Make GUI for adding new machines automatically from sitesummary.
3064 The current command line script is not very friendly to people most
3065 familiar with GUIs. This should probably be integrated into GOsa to
3066 have it available where the admin will be looking for it..
</li
>
3068 <li
>We should find way for Nagios to check that the DHCP service
3069 actually is working (as in handling out IP addresses). None of the
3070 Nagios checks I have found so far have been working for me.
</li
>
3072 <li
>We should switch from libpam-nss-ldapd to sssd for all profiles
3073 using LDAP, and not only on for roaming workstations, to have less
3074 packages to configure and consistent setup across all profiles.
</li
>
3076 <li
>We should configure Kerberos to update LDAP and Samba password
3077 when changing password using the Kerberos protocol. The hook was
3078 requested in
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
588968">BTS report
3079 #
588968</a
> and is now available in Wheezy. We might need to write a
3080 MIT Kerberos plugin in C to get this.
</li
>
3082 <li
>We should clean up the set of applications installed by default.
3085 <li
>reduce the number of chemistry visualisers
</li
>
3086 <li
>consider dropping xpaint
</li
>
3087 <li
>and probably more?
</li
>
3088 </ul
></li
>
3090 <li
>Some hardware need external firmware to work properly. This is
3091 mostly the case for WiFi network cards, but there are some other
3092 examples too. For popular laptops to work out of the box, such
3093 firmware need to be installed from non-free, and we should provide
3094 some GUI to do this. Ubuntu already have this implemented, and we
3095 could consider using their packages. At the moment we have some
3096 command line script to do this (one for the running system, another
3097 for the LTSP chroot).
</li
>
3100 <li
>In Squeeze, we provide KDE, Gnome and LXDE as desktop options. We
3101 should extend the list to Xfce and Sugar, and preferably find a way to
3102 install several and allow the admin or the user to select which one to
3105 <li
>The golearn tool from the goplay package make it easy to check out
3106 interesting educational packages. We should work on the package
3107 tagging in Debian to ensure it represent all the useful educational
3108 packages, and extend the tool to allow it to use packagekit to install
3109 new applications with a simple mouse click.
</li
>
3111 <li
>The Squeeze version got half a exam solution already in place,
3112 with the introduction of iptable based network blocking, but for it to
3113 be a complete exam solution the Squid proxy need to enable
3114 filtering/blocking as well when the exam mode is enabled. We should
3115 implement a way to easily enable this for the schools that want it,
3116 instead of the
"it is documented
" method of today.
</li
>
3118 <li
>A feature used in several schools is the ability for a teacher to
3119 "take over
" the desktop of individual or all computers in the room.
3120 There are at least three implementations,
3121 <a href=
"italc.sourceforge.net/
">italc
</a
>,
3122 <a href=
"http://www.itais.net/help/en/
">controlaula
</a
> og
3123 <a href=
"http://www.epoptes.org/
">epoptes
</a
> and we should pick one of
3124 them and make it trivial to set it up in a school. The challenges is
3125 how to distribute crypto keys and how to group computers in one room
3126 and how to set up which machine/user can control the machines in a
3127 given room.
</li
>
3129 <li
>Tablets and surf boards are getting more and more popular, and we
3130 should look into providing a good solution for integrating these into
3131 the Debian Edu network. Not quite sure how. Perhaps we should
3132 provide a installation profile with better touch screen support for
3133 them, or add some sync services to allow them to exchange
3134 configuration and data with the central server. This should be
3135 investigated.
</li
>
3137 </ul
></p
>
3139 <p
>I guess we will discover more as we continue to work on the Wheezy
3145 <title>TV with face recognition, for improved viewer experience
</title>
3146 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/TV_with_face_recognition__for_improved_viewer_experience.html
</link>
3147 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/TV_with_face_recognition__for_improved_viewer_experience.html
</guid>
3148 <pubDate>Sat,
9 Jun
2012 22:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
3149 <description><p
>Slashdot got a story about Intel planning a
3150 <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
3151 with face recognition
</a
> to recognise the viewer, and it occurred to
3152 me that it would be more interesting to turn it around, and do face
3153 recognition on the TV image itself. It could let the viewer know who
3154 is present on the screen, and perhaps look up their credibility,
3155 company affiliation, previous appearances etc for the viewer to better
3156 evaluate what is being said and done. That would be a feature I would
3157 be willing to pay for.
</p
>
3159 <p
>I would not be willing to pay for a TV that point a camera on my
3160 household, like the big brother feature apparently proposed by Intel.
3161 It is the telescreen idea fetched straight out of the book
3162 <a href=
"http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/
0100021.txt
">1984 by George
3163 Orwell
</a
>.
</p
>
3168 <title>Web service to look up HP and Dell computer hardware support status
</title>
3169 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Web_service_to_look_up_HP_and_Dell_computer_hardware_support_status.html
</link>
3170 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Web_service_to_look_up_HP_and_Dell_computer_hardware_support_status.html
</guid>
3171 <pubDate>Wed,
6 Jun
2012 23:
15:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
3172 <description><p
>A few days ago
3173 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/SOAP_based_webservice_from_Dell_to_check_server_support_status.html
">I
3174 reported how to get
</a
> the support status out of Dell using an
3175 unofficial and undocumented SOAP API, which I since have found out was
3176 <a href=
"http://lists.us.dell.com/pipermail/linux-poweredge/
2012-February/
045959.html
">discovered
3177 by Daniel De Marco in february
</a
>. Combined with my web scraping
3178 code for HP, Dell and IBM
3179 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Checking_server_hardware_support_status_for_Dell__HP_and_IBM_servers.html
">from
3180 2009</a
>, I got inspired and wrote
3181 <a href=
"https://views.scraperwiki.com/run/computer-hardware-support-status/
">a
3182 web service
</a
> based on Scraperwiki to make it easy to look up the
3183 support status and get a machine readable result back.
</p
>
3185 <p
>This is what it look like at the moment when asking for the JSON
3188 <blockquote
><pre
>
3189 % 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
>
3190 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
":
""})
3192 </pre
></blockquote
>
3194 <p
>It currently support Dell and HP, and I am hoping for help to add
3195 support for other vendors. The python source is available on
3196 Scraperwiki and I welcome help with adding more features.
</p
>
3201 <title>Debian Edu interview: Mike Gabriel
</title>
3202 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Mike_Gabriel.html
</link>
3203 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Mike_Gabriel.html
</guid>
3204 <pubDate>Sat,
2 Jun
2012 15:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
3205 <description><p
>Back in
2010, Mike Gabriel showed up on the
3206 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu and Skolelinux
</a
>
3207 mailing list. He quickly proved to be a valuable developer, and
3208 thanks to his tireless effort we now have Kerberos integrated into the
3209 <a href=
"http://www.debian.org/News/
2012/
20120311.html
">Debian Edu
3210 Squeeze
</a
> version.
</p
>
3212 <p
><strong
>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
</strong
></p
>
3214 <p
>My name is Mike Gabriel, I am
38 years old and live near Kiel,
3215 Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. I live together with a wonderful partner
3216 (Angela Fuß) and two own children and two bonus children (contributed
3217 by Angela).
</p
>
3219 <p
>During the day I am part-time employed as a system administrator
3220 and part-time working as an IT consultant. The consultancy work
3221 touches free software topics wherever and whenever possible. During
3222 the nights I am a free software developer. In the gaps I also train in
3223 becoming an osteopath.
</p
>
3225 <p
>Starting in
2010 we (Andreas Buchholz, Angela Fuß, Mike Gabriel)
3226 have set up a free software project in the area of Kiel that aims at
3227 introducing free software into schools. The project
's name is
3228 "IT-Zukunft Schule
" (IT future for schools). The project links IT
3229 skills with communication skills.
</p
>
3231 <p
><strong
>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
3232 project?
</strong
></p
>
3234 <p
>While preparing our own customised Linux distribution for
3235 "IT-Zukunft Schule
" we were repeatedly asked if we really wanted to
3236 reinvent the wheel. What schools really need is already available,
3237 people said. From this impulse we started evaluating other Linux
3238 distributions that target being used for school networks.
</p
>
3240 <p
>At the end we short-listed two approaches and compared them: a
3241 commercial Linux distribution developed by a company in Bremen,
3242 Germany, and Skolelinux / Debian Edu. Between
12/
2010 and
03/
2011 we
3243 went to several events and met people being responsible for marketing
3244 and development of either of the distributions. Skolelinux / Debian
3245 Edu was by far much more convincing compared to the other product that
3246 got short-listed beforehand--across the full spectrum. What was most
3247 attractive for me personally: the perspective of collaboration within
3248 the developmental branch of the Debian Edu project itself.
</p
>
3250 <p
>In parallel with this, we talked to many local and not-so-local
3251 people. People teaching at schools, headmasters, politicians, data
3252 protection experts, other IT professionals.
</p
>
3254 <p
>We came to two conclusions:
</p
>
3256 <p
>First, a technical conclusion: What schools need is available in
3257 bits and pieces here and there, and none of the solutions really fit
3258 by
100%. Any school we have seen has a very individual IT setup
3259 whereas most of each school
's requirements could mapped by a standard
3260 IT solution. The requirement to this IT solution is flexibility and
3261 customisability, so that individual adaptations here and there are
3262 possible. In terms of re-distributing and rolling out such a
3263 standardised IT system for schools (a system that is still to some
3264 degree customisable) there is still a lot of work to do here
3265 locally. Debian Edu / Skolelinux has been our choice as the starting
3268 <p
>Second, a holistic conclusion: What schools need does not exist at
3269 all (or we missed it so far). There are several technical solutions
3270 for handling IT at schools that tend to make a good impression. What
3271 has been missing completely here in Germany, though, is the enrolment
3272 of people into using IT and teaching with IT.
"IT-Zukunft Schule
"
3273 tries to provide an approach for this.
</p
>
3275 <p
>Only some schools have some sort of a media concept which explains,
3276 defines and gives guidance on how to use IT in class. Most schools in
3277 Northern Germany do not have an IT service provider, the school
's IT
3278 equipment is managed by one or (if the school is lucky) two (admin)
3279 teachers, most of the workload these admin teachers get done in there
3280 spare time.
</p
>
3282 <p
>We were surprised that only a very few admin teachers were
3283 networked with colleagues from other schools. Basically, every school
3284 here around has its individual approach of providing IT equipment to
3285 teachers and students and the exchange of ideas has been quasi
3286 non-existent until
2010/
2011.
</p
>
3288 <p
>Quite some (non-admin) teachers try to avoid using IT technology in
3289 class as a learning medium completely. Several reasons for this
3290 avoidance do exist.
</p
>
3292 <p
>We discovered that no-one has ever taken a closer look at this
3293 social part of IT management in schools, so far. On our quest journey
3294 for a technical IT solution for schools, we discussed this issue with
3295 several teachers, headmasters, politicians, other IT professionals and
3296 they all confirmed: a holistic approach of considering IT management
3297 at schools, an approach that includes the people in place, will be new
3298 and probably a gain for all.
</p
>
3300 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
3301 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
3303 <p
>There is a list of advantages: international context, openness to
3304 any kind of contributions, do-ocracy policy, the closeness to Debian,
3305 the different installation scenarios possible (from stand-alone
3306 workstation to complex multi-server sites), the transparency within
3307 project communication, honest communication within the group of
3308 developers, etc.
</p
>
3310 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
3311 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
3313 <p
>Every coin has two sides:
</p
>
3315 <p
>Technically:
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
311188">BTS issue
3316 #
311188</a
>, tricky upgradability of a Debian Edu main server, network
3317 client installations on top of a plain vanilla Debian installation
3318 should become possible sometime in the near future, one could think
3319 about splitting the very complex package debian-edu-config into
3320 several portions (to make it easier for new developers to
3321 contribute).
</p
>
3323 <p
>Another issue I see is that we (as Debian Edu developers) should
3324 find out more about the network of people who do the marketing for
3325 Debian Edu / Skolelinux. There is a very active group in Germany
3326 promoting Skolelinux on the bigger Linux Days within Germany. Are
3327 there other groups like that in other countries? How can we bring
3328 these marketing people together (marketing group A with group B and
3329 all of them with the group of Debian Edu developers)? During the last
3330 meeting of the German Skolelinux group, I got the impression of people
3331 there being rather disconnected from the development department of
3332 Debian Edu / Skolelinux.
</p
>
3334 <p
><strong
>Which free software do you use daily?
</strong
></p
>
3336 <p
>For my daily business, I do not use commercial software at all.
</p
>
3338 <p
>For normal stuff I use Iceweasel/Firefox, Libreoffice.org. For
3339 serious text writing I prefer LaTeX. I use gimp, inkscape, scribus for
3340 more artistic tasks. I run virtual machines in KVM and Virtualbox.
</p
>
3342 <p
>I am one of the upstream developers of X2Go. In
2010 I started the
3343 development of a Python based X2Go Client, called PyHoca-GUI.
3344 PyHoca-GUI has brought forth a Python X2Go Client API that currently
3345 is being integrated in Ubuntu
's software center.
</p
>
3347 <p
>For communications I have my own Kolab server running using Horde
3348 as web-based groupware client. For IRC I love to use irssi, for Jabber
3349 I have several clients that I use, mostly pidgin, though. I am also
3350 the Debian maintainer of Coccinella, a Jabber-based interactive
3351 whiteboard.
</p
>
3353 <p
>My favourite terminal emulator is KDE
's Yakuake.
</p
>
3355 <p
><strong
>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
3356 get schools to use free software?
</strong
></p
>
3358 <p
>Communicate, communicate, communicate. Enrol people, enrol people,
3359 enrol people.
</p
>
3364 <title>SOAP based webservice from Dell to check server support status
</title>
3365 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/SOAP_based_webservice_from_Dell_to_check_server_support_status.html
</link>
3366 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/SOAP_based_webservice_from_Dell_to_check_server_support_status.html
</guid>
3367 <pubDate>Fri,
1 Jun
2012 15:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
3368 <description><p
>A few years ago I wrote
3369 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Checking_server_hardware_support_status_for_Dell__HP_and_IBM_servers.html
">how
3370 to extract support status
</a
> for your Dell and HP servers. Recently
3371 I have learned from colleges here at the
3372 <a href=
"http://www.uio.no/
">University of Oslo
</a
> that Dell have
3373 made this even easier, by providing a SOAP based web service. Given
3374 the service tag, one can now query the Dell servers and get machine
3375 readable information about the support status. This perl code
3376 demonstrate how to do it:
</p
>
3378 <p
><pre
>
3383 my $GUID =
'11111111-
1111-
1111-
1111-
111111111111';
3384 my $App =
'test
';
3385 my $servicetag = $ARGV[
0] or die
"Please supply a servicetag. $!\n
";
3386 my ($deal, $latest, @dates);
3388 -
> uri(
'http://support.dell.com/WebServices/
')
3389 -
> on_action( sub { join
'', @_ } )
3390 -
> proxy(
'http://xserv.dell.com/services/assetservice.asmx
')
3392 my $a = $s-
>GetAssetInformation(
3393 SOAP::Data-
>name(
'guid
')-
>value($GUID)-
>type(
''),
3394 SOAP::Data-
>name(
'applicationName
')-
>value($App)-
>type(
''),
3395 SOAP::Data-
>name(
'serviceTags
')-
>value($servicetag)-
>type(
''),
3397 print Dumper($a -
> result) ;
3398 </pre
></p
>
3400 <p
>The output can look like this:
</p
>
3402 <p
><pre
>
3404 'Asset
' =
> {
3405 'Entitlements
' =
> {
3406 'EntitlementData
' =
> [
3408 'EntitlementType
' =
> 'Expired
',
3409 'EndDate
' =
> '2009-
07-
29T00:
00:
00',
3410 'Provider
' =
> '',
3411 'StartDate
' =
> '2006-
07-
29T00:
00:
00',
3412 'DaysLeft
' =
> '0'
3415 'EntitlementType
' =
> 'Expired
',
3416 'EndDate
' =
> '2009-
07-
29T00:
00:
00',
3417 'Provider
' =
> '',
3418 'StartDate
' =
> '2006-
07-
29T00:
00:
00',
3419 'DaysLeft
' =
> '0'
3422 'EntitlementType
' =
> 'Expired
',
3423 'EndDate
' =
> '2007-
07-
29T00:
00:
00',
3424 'Provider
' =
> '',
3425 'StartDate
' =
> '2006-
07-
29T00:
00:
00',
3426 'DaysLeft
' =
> '0'
3430 'AssetHeaderData
' =
> {
3431 'SystemModel
' =
> 'GX620
',
3432 'ServiceTag
' =
> '8DSGD2J
',
3433 'SystemShipDate
' =
> '2006-
07-
29T19:
00:
00-
05:
00',
3434 'Buid
' =
> '2323',
3435 'Region
' =
> 'Europe
',
3436 'SystemID
' =
> 'PLX_GX620
',
3437 'SystemType
' =
> 'OptiPlex
'
3441 </pre
></p
>
3443 <p
>I have not been able to find any documentation from Dell about this
3445 <a href=
"http://xserv.dell.com/services/assetservice.asmx?op=GetAssetInformation
">inline
3446 documentation
</a
>, and according to
3447 <a href=
"http://iboyd.net/index.php/
2012/
02/
14/updated-dell-warranty-information-script/
">one
3448 comment
</a
> it can have stability issues, but it is a lot better than
3449 scraping HTML pages. :)
</p
>
3451 <p
>Wonder if HP and other server vendors have a similar service. If
3452 you know of one, drop me an email. :)
</p
>
3457 <title>First monitor calibration using ColorHug
</title>
3458 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_monitor_calibration_using_ColorHug.html
</link>
3459 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_monitor_calibration_using_ColorHug.html
</guid>
3460 <pubDate>Thu,
31 May
2012 22:
10:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
3461 <description><p
>A few days ago my color calibration gadget
3462 <a href=
"http://www.hughski.com/index.html
">ColorHug
</a
> arrived in the
3463 mail, and I
've had a few days to test it. As all my machines are
3464 running Debian Squeeze, where
3465 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/c/colorhug-client.html
">the
3466 calibration software
</a
> is missing (it is present in Wheezy and Sid),
3467 I ran the calibration using the Fedora based live CD. This worked
3468 just fine. So far I have only done the quick calibration. It was
3469 slow enough for me, so I will leave the more extensive calibration for
3470 another day.
</p
>
3472 <p
>After calibration, I get a
3473 <a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICC_profile
">ICC color
3474 profile
</a
> file that can be passed to programs understanding such
3475 tools. KDE do not seem to understand it out of the box, so I searched
3476 for command line tools to use to load the color profile into X.
3477 xcalib was the first one I found, and it seem to work fine for single
3478 monitor setups. But for my video player, a laptop with a flat screen
3479 attached, it was unable to load the color profile for the correct
3480 monitor. After searching a bit, I
3481 <a href=
"http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=
1347896">discovered
</a
>
3482 that the dispwin tool from the argyll package would do what I wanted,
3483 and a simple
</p
>
3485 <p
><pre
>
3486 dispwin -d
1 profile.icc
3487 </pre
></p
>
3489 <p
>later I had the color profile loaded for the correct monitor. The
3490 result was a bit more pink than I expected. I guess I picked the
3491 wrong monitor type for the
"led
" monitor I got, but the result is good
3492 enough for now.
</p
>
3497 <title>Debian Edu interview: Ralf Gesellensetter
</title>
3498 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Ralf_Gesellensetter.html
</link>
3499 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Ralf_Gesellensetter.html
</guid>
3500 <pubDate>Sun,
27 May
2012 17:
15:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
3501 <description><p
>In
2003, a German teacher showed up on the
3502 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu and Skolelinux
</a
>
3503 mailing list with interesting problems and reports proving he setting
3504 up Linux for a (for us at the time) lot of pupils. His name was Ralf
3505 Gesellensetter, and he has been an important tester and contributor
3506 since then, helping to make sure the
3507 <a href=
"http://www.debian.org/News/
2012/
20120311.html
">Debian Edu
3508 Squeeze
</a
> release became as good as it is..
</p
>
3510 <p
><strong
>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
</strong
></p
>
3512 <p
>I am a teacher from Germany, and my subjects are Geography,
3513 Mathematics, and Computer Science (
"Informatik
"). During the past
12
3514 years (since
2000), I have been working for a comprehensive (and soon,
3515 also inclusive) school leading to all kind of general levels, such as
3516 O- or A-level (
"Abitur
"). For quite as long, I
've been taking care of
3517 our computer network.
</p
>
3519 <p
>Now, in my early
40s, I enjoy the privilege of spending a lot of my
3520 spare time together with my wife, our son (
3 years) and our daughter
3521 (
4 months).
</p
>
3523 <p
><strong
>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
3524 project?
</strong
></p
>
3526 <p
>We had tried different Linux based school servers, when members of
3527 my local Linux User Group (LUG OWL) detected Skolelinux. I remember
3528 very well, being part of a party celebrating the Linux New Media Award
3529 (
"Best Newcomer Distribution
", also nominated: Ubuntu) that was given
3530 to Skolelinux at Linux World Exposition in Frankfurt,
2005 (IIRC). Few
3531 months later, I had the chance to join a developer meeting in Ulsrud
3532 (Oslo) and to hand out the award to Knut Yrvin and others. For more
3533 than
7 years, Skolelinux is part of our schools infrastructure, namely
3534 our main server (tjener), one LTSP (today without thin clients), and
3535 approximately
50 work stations. Most of these have the option to boot a
3536 locally installed Skolelinux image. As a consequence, I joined quite
3537 a few events dealing with free software or Linux, and met many Debian
3538 (Edu) developers. All of them seemed quite nice and competent to me,
3539 one more reason to stick to Skolelinux.
</p
>
3541 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
3542 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
3544 <p
>Debian driven, you are given all the advantages of a community
3545 project including well maintained updates. Once, you are familiar with
3546 the network layout, you can easily roll out an entire educational
3547 computer infrastructure, from just one installation media. As only
3548 free software (FOSS) is used, that supports even elderly hardware,
3549 up-sizing your IT equipment is only limited by space (i.e. available
3550 labs). Especially if you run a LTSP thin client server, your
3551 administration costs tend towards zero.
</p
>
3553 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
3554 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
3556 <p
>While Debian
's stability has loads of advantages for servers, this
3557 might be different in some cases for clients: Schools with unlimited
3558 budget might buy new hardware with components that are not yet
3559 supported by Debian stable, or wish to use more recent versions of
3560 office packages or desktop environments. These schools have the
3561 option to run Debian testing or other distributions - if they have the
3562 capacity to do so. Another issue is that Debian release cycles
3563 include a wide range of changes; therefor a high percentage of human
3564 power seems to be absorbed by just keeping the features of Skolelinux
3565 within the new setting of the version to come. During this process,
3566 the cogs of Debian Edu are getting more and more professional,
3567 i.e. harder to understand for novices.
</p
>
3569 <p
><strong
>Which free software do you use daily?
</strong
></p
>
3571 <p
>LibreOffice, Wikipedia, Openstreetmap, Iceweasel (Mozilla Firefox),
3572 KMail, Gimp, Inkscape - and of course the Linux Kernel (not only on
3573 PC, Laptop, Mobile, but also our SAT receiver)
</p
>
3575 <p
><strong
>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
3576 get schools to use free software?
</strong
></p
>
3580 <li
>Support computer science as regular subject in schools to make
3581 people really
"own
" their hardware, to make them understand the
3582 difference between proprietary software products, and free software
3583 developing.
</li
>
3585 <li
>Make budget baskets corresponding: In Germany
's public schools
3586 there are more or less fixed budgets for IT equipment (including
3587 licenses), so schools won
't benefit from any savings here. This
3588 privilege is left to private schools which have consequently a large
3589 share among German Skolelinux schools.
</li
>
3591 <li
>Get free software in the seminars where would-be teachers are
3592 trained. In many cases, teachers
' software customs are respected by
3593 decision makers rather than the expertise of any IT experts.
</li
>
3595 <li
>Don
't limit ourself to free software run natively. Everybody uses
3596 free software or free licenses (for instance Wikipedia), and this
3597 general concept should get expanded to free educational content to be
3598 shared world wide (school books e.g.).
</li
>
3600 <li
>Make clear where ever you can that the market share of free (libre)
3601 office suites is much above
20 p.c. today, and that you pupils don
't
3602 need to know the
"ribbon menu
" in order to get employed.
</li
>
3604 <li
>Talk about the difference between freeware and free software.
</li
>
3606 <li
>Spread free software, or even collections of portable free apps
3607 for USB pen drives. Endorse students to get a legal copy of
3608 Libreoffice rather than accepting them to use illegal serials. And
3609 keep sending documents in ODF formats.
</li
>
3611 </ol
></p
>
3616 <title>The cost of ODF and OOXML
</title>
3617 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_cost_of_ODF_and_OOXML.html
</link>
3618 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_cost_of_ODF_and_OOXML.html
</guid>
3619 <pubDate>Sat,
26 May
2012 18:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
3620 <description><p
>I just come across a blog post from Glyn Moody reporting the
3621 claimed cost from Microsoft on requiring ODF to be used by the UK
3622 government. I just sent him an email to let him know that his
3623 assumption are most likely wrong. Sharing it here in case some of my
3624 blog readers have seem the same numbers float around in the UK.
</p
>
3626 <p
><blockquote
> <p
>Hi. I just noted your
3627 <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
>
3630 <p
><blockquote
>"They
're all in Danish, not unreasonably, but even
3631 with the help of Google Translate I can
't find any figures about the
3632 savings of
"moving to a flexible two standard
" as claimed by the
3633 Microsoft email. But I assume it is backed up somewhere, so let
's take
3634 it, and the £
500 million figure for the UK, on trust.
"
3635 </blockquote
></p
>
3637 <p
>I can tell you that the Danish reports are inflated. I believe it is
3638 the same reports that were used in the Norwegian debate around
2007,
3639 and Gisle Hannemyr (a well known IT commentator in Norway) had a look
3640 at the content. In short, the reason it is claimed that using ODF
3641 will be so costly, is based on the assumption that this mean every
3642 existing document need to be converted from one of the MS Office
3643 formats to ODF, transferred to the receiver, and converted back from
3644 ODF to one of the MS Office formats, and that the conversion will cost
3645 10 minutes of work time for both the sender and the receiver. In
3646 reality the sender would have a tool capable of saving to ODF, and the
3647 receiver would have a tool capable of reading it, and the time spent
3648 would at most be a few seconds for saving and loading, not
20 minutes
3649 of wasted effort.
</p
>
3651 <p
>Microsoft claimed all these costs were saved by allowing people to
3652 transfer the original files from MS Office instead of spending
10
3653 minutes converting to ODF. :)
</p
>
3656 <a href=
"http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12_vl02.php
">http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12_vl02.php
</a
>
3658 <a href=
"http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12.php
">http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12.php
</a
>
3659 for background information. Norwegian only, sorry. :)
</p
>
3660 </blockquote
></p
>
3665 <title>ColorHug - USB and free software based screen color calibration
</title>
3666 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ColorHug___USB_and_free_software_based_screen_color_calibration.html
</link>
3667 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ColorHug___USB_and_free_software_based_screen_color_calibration.html
</guid>
3668 <pubDate>Fri,
18 May
2012 10:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
3669 <description><p
>In january, I
3670 <a href=
"http://blog.cihar.com/archives/
2012/
01/
17/colorhug-has-arrived/
">discovered
3671 the ColorHug
</a
>, a USB dongle from
3672 <a href=
"http://www.hughski.com/index.html
">Hughski
</a
> to calibrate
3673 the color on a computer screen. The software required is
3674 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/c/colorhug-client.html
">included
3675 in Debian
</a
>, and I decided back then to preorder from the next
3676 batch. Yesterday I finally heard back from them, and got the
3677 opportunity to order. Today I ordered mine, and eagerly await the
3678 delivery. I hope it arrive next week, as I got a confirmation that it
3679 should go in the mail on monday. :)
</p
>
3681 <p
>If you want to ensure the colors on the screen match the intended
3682 colors, I suggest you check out this cheap tool with free software
3683 drivers. :)
</p
>
3688 <title>Debian Edu interview: Jürgen Leibner
</title>
3689 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__J_rgen_Leibner.html
</link>
3690 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__J_rgen_Leibner.html
</guid>
3691 <pubDate>Sun,
13 May
2012 20:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
3692 <description><p
>It has been a few busy weeks for me, but I am finally back to
3693 publish another interview with the people behind
3694 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu and Skolelinux
</a
>.
3695 This time it is one of our German developers, who have helped out over the
3696 years to make sure both a lot of major but also a lot of the minor
3697 details get right before release.
3699 <p
><strong
>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
</strong
></p
>
3701 <p
>My name is Jürgen Leibner, I
'm
49 years old and living in
3702 Bielefeld, a town in northern Germany. I worked nearly
20 years as
3703 certified engineer in the department for plant design and layout of an
3704 international company for machinery and equipment. Since
2011 I
'm a
3705 certified technical writer (tekom e.V.) and doing technical
3706 documentations for a steam turbine manufacturer. From April this year
3707 I will manage the department of technical documentation at a
3708 manufacturer of automation and assembly line engineering.
</p
>
3710 <p
>My first contact with linux was around
1993. Since that time I used
3711 it at work and at home repeatedly but not exclusively as I do now at
3712 home since
2006.
</p
>
3714 <p
><strong
>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
3715 project?
</strong
></p
>
3717 <p
>Once a day in the early year of
2001 when I wanted to fetch my
3718 daughter from primary school, there was a teacher sitting in the
3719 middle of
20 old computers trying to boot them and he failed. I helped
3720 him to get them booting. That was seen by the school director and she
3721 asked me if I would like to manage that the school gets all that old
3722 computers in use. I answered:
"Yes
".
</p
>
3724 <p
>Some weeks later every of the
10 classrooms had one computer
3725 running Windows98. I began to collect old computers and equipment as
3726 gifts and installed the first computer room with a peer-to-peer
3727 network. I did my work at school without being payed in my spare time
3728 and with a lot of fun. About one year later the school was connected
3729 to Internet and a local area network was installed in the school
3730 building. That was the time to have a server and I knew it must be a
3731 Linux server to be able to fulfil all the wishes of the teachers and
3732 being able to do this in a transparent and economic way, without extra
3733 costs for things like licence and software. So I searched for a
3734 school server system running under Linux and I found a couple of
3735 people nearby who founded
'skolelinux.de
'. It was the Skolelinux
3736 prerelease
32 I first tried out for being used at the school. I
3737 managed the IT of that school until the municipal authority took over
3738 the IT management and centralised the services for all schools in
3739 Bielefeld in December of
2006.
</p
>
3741 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
3742 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
3744 <p
>When I
'm looking back to the beginning, there were other advantages
3745 for me as today.
</p
>
3747 <p
>In the past there were advantages like:
</p
>
3751 <li
>I don
't need to buy it so it generates no costs to the school as
3752 they had little money to spent for computers and software.
</li
>
3754 <li
>It has a licence which grands all rights to use it without
3757 <li
>It was more able to fit all requirements of a server system for
3758 schools than a Microsoft server system, even if there are only Windows
3759 clients because of it
's preconfigured overall concept of being a
3760 infrastructure solution and community for schools, not only a
3763 <li
>I was able to configure the server to the needs of the
3766 </ul
></p
>
3768 <p
>Today some of the advantages has been lost, changed or new ones
3769 came up in this way:
</p
>
3773 <li
>Most schools here do have money to buy hardware and software
3776 <li
>They are today mostly managed from central IT departments which
3777 have own concepts which often do not fit to Debian Edu concepts
3778 because they are to close to Microsoft ideology.
</li
>
3780 <li
>With the Squeeze version of Debian Edu which now uses GOsa² for
3781 management I feel more able to manage the daily tasks than with the
3782 interfaces used in the past.
</li
>
3784 <li
>It is more modular than in the past and fits even better to the
3785 different needs.
</li
>
3787 <li
>The documentation is usable and gets better every day.
</li
>
3789 <li
>More people than ever before are using Debian Edu all over the
3790 world and so the community, which is an very important part I think,
3791 is sharing knowledge and minds.
</li
>
3793 <li
>Most, maybe all, of the technical requirements for schools are
3794 solved today by Debian Edu.
</li
>
3796 </ul
></p
>
3798 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
3799 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
3803 <li
>There are too few IT companies able to integrate Debian Edu into
3804 their product portfolio for serving schools with concepts or even
3805 whole municipality areas.
</li
>
3807 <li
>Debian Edu has beside other free and open software projects not
3808 enough lobbyists which promote free and open software to
3809 politicians.
</li
>
3811 <li
>Technically there are no disadvantages I
'm aware of.
</li
>
3813 </ul
></p
>
3815 <p
><strong
>Which free software do you use daily?
</strong
></p
>
3817 <p
>I use Debian stable on my home server and on my little desktop
3818 computer. On my laptop I use Debian testing/sid. The applications I
3819 use on my laptop and my desktop are Open/Libre-office, Iceweasel,
3820 KMail, DigiKam, Amarok, Dolphin, okular and all the other programs I
3821 need from the KDE environment. On console I use newsbeuter, mutt,
3822 screen, irssi and all the other famous and useful tools.
</p
>
3824 <p
>My home server provides mail services with exim, dovecot, roundcube
3825 and mutt over ssh on the console, file services with samba, NFS,
3826 rsync, web services with apache, moinmoin-wiki, multimedia services
3827 with gallery2 and mediatomb and database services with MySQL for me
3828 and the whole family. I probably forgot something.
</p
>
3830 <p
><strong
>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
3831 get schools to use free software?
</strong
></p
>
3833 <p
>I believe, we should provide concepts for IT companies to integrate
3834 Debian Edu into their product portfolio with use cases for different
3835 countries and areas all over the world.
</p
>
3840 <title>Cutting it short - and picking the right tool for the job
</title>
3841 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Cutting_it_short___and_picking_the_right_tool_for_the_job.html
</link>
3842 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Cutting_it_short___and_picking_the_right_tool_for_the_job.html
</guid>
3843 <pubDate>Mon,
30 Apr
2012 23:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
3844 <description><p
><!-- IMG_5869.JPG --
>
3845 <img src=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/panasonic-er-
1611.jpeg
"></p
>
3847 <p
>I normally cut my hair short, and my tool of choice has been a
3848 common hair/beard cutter, bought in a electrical shop here in Norway.
3849 But the last ones have not really been up to the task. My last
3850 cutter, some model from Braun, could only cut a few of my hairs at the
3851 time, and cutting my head took forever. And the one before that did
3852 not work very well either. We have looked for something better for a
3853 while, but it was not until I ended up visiting a hairdresser that we
3854 discovered that there are indeed better tools available. But these
3855 are not marketed and sold to
"regular consumers
". The hair saloons
3856 can get them through their suppliers, but their suppliers only sell
3857 companies. The models they sell, are very different from the ones
3858 available from Elkjøp and Lefdal. The main difference is their
3859 efficiency. It would cut my hair in
5 minutes, instead of the
30-
40
3860 minutes required by my impotent Braun. The hairdresser I visited had
3861 a Panasonic ER160, which unfortunately is no longer available from the
3862 producer. But I found it had a successor, the Panasonic ER1611.
</p
>
3864 <p
>The next step was to find somewhere to buy it. This was not
3865 straight forward. The list of suppliers I got from the hairdresser
3866 did not want to sell anything to me. But searching for the model on
3867 the web we found a supplier in Norway willing to sell it to us for
3868 around NOK
4000,-. This was a bit much. We kept searching and
3869 finally found a Danish supplier
3870 <a href=
"http://nicehair.dk/panasonic-er-
1611-professionel-hartrimmer.html
">selling
3871 it for around NOK
1800,-
</a
>. We ordered one, and it arrived a few
3874 <p
>The instructions said it had to charge for
8 hours when we started
3875 to use it, so we left it charging over night. Normally it will only
3876 need one hour to charge. The following evening we successfully tested
3877 it, and I can warmly recommend it to anyone looking for a real hair
3878 cutter. The ones we have used until now have been hair cutter
3884 <title>HTC One X - Your video? What do you mean?
</title>
3885 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/HTC_One_X___Your_video___What_do_you_mean_.html
</link>
3886 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/HTC_One_X___Your_video___What_do_you_mean_.html
</guid>
3887 <pubDate>Thu,
26 Apr
2012 13:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
3888 <description><p
>In
<a href=
"http://www.idg.no/computerworld/article243690.ece
">an
3889 article today
</a
> published by Computerworld Norway, the photographer
3890 <a href=
"http://www.urke.com/eirik/
">Eirik Helland Urke
</a
> reports
3891 that the video editor application included with
3892 <a href=
"http://www.htc.com/www/smartphones/htc-one-x/#specs
">HTC One
3893 X
</a
> have some quite surprising terms of use. The article is mostly
3894 based on the twitter message from mister Urke, stating:
3896 <p
><blockquote
>
3897 "<a href=
"http://twitter.com/urke/status/
194062269724897280">Drøy
3898 brukeravtale: HTC kan bruke MINE redigerte videoer kommersielt. Selv
3899 kan jeg KUN bruke dem privat.
</a
>"
3900 </blockquote
></p
>
3902 <p
>I quickly translated it to this English message:
</p
>
3904 <p
><blockquote
>
3905 "Arrogant user agreement: HTC can use MY edited videos
3906 commercially. Although I can ONLY use them privately.
"
3907 </blockquote
></p
>
3909 <p
>I
've been unable to find the text of the license term myself, but
3910 suspect it is a variation of the MPEG-LA terms I
3911 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Terms_of_use_for_video_produced_by_a_Canon_IXUS_130_digital_camera.html
">discovered
3912 with my Canon IXUS
130</a
>. The HTC One X specification specifies that
3913 the recording format of the phone is .amr for audio and .mp3 for
3915 <a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_Multi-Rate_audio_codec#Licensing_and_patent_issues
">Adaptive
3916 Multi-Rate audio codec
</a
> with patents which according to the
3917 Wikipedia article require an license agreement with
3918 <a href=
"http://www.voiceage.com/
">VoiceAge
</a
>. MP4 is
3919 <a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H
.264/MPEG-
4_AVC#Patent_licensing
">MPEG4 with
3920 H
.264</a
>, which according to Wikipedia require a licence agreement
3921 with
<a href=
"http://www.mpegla.com/
">MPEG-LA
</a
>.
</p
>
3923 <p
>I know why I prefer
3924 <a href=
"http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition
">free and open
3925 standards
</a
> also for video.
</p
>
3930 <title>RAND terms - non-reasonable and discriminatory
</title>
3931 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/RAND_terms___non_reasonable_and_discriminatory.html
</link>
3932 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/RAND_terms___non_reasonable_and_discriminatory.html
</guid>
3933 <pubDate>Thu,
19 Apr
2012 22:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
3934 <description><p
>Here in Norway, the
3935 <a href=
"http://www.regjeringen.no/nb/dep/fad.html?id=
339"> Ministry of
3936 Government Administration, Reform and Church Affairs
</a
> is behind
3937 a
<a href=
"http://standard.difi.no/forvaltningsstandarder
">directory of
3938 standards
</a
> that are recommended or mandatory for use by the
3939 government. When the directory was created, the people behind it made
3940 an effort to ensure that everyone would be able to implement the
3941 standards and compete on equal terms to supply software and solutions
3942 to the government. Free software and non-free software could compete
3943 on the same level.
</p
>
3945 <p
>But recently, some standards with RAND
3946 (
<a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_and_non-discriminatory_licensing
">Reasonable
3947 And Non-Discriminatory
</a
>) terms have made their way into the
3948 directory. And while this might not sound too bad, the fact is that
3949 standard specifications with RAND terms often block free software from
3950 implementing them. The reasonable part of RAND mean that the cost per
3951 user/unit is low,and the non-discriminatory part mean that everyone
3952 willing to pay will get a license. Both sound great in theory. In
3953 practice, to get such license one need to be able to count users, and
3954 be able to pay a small amount of money per unit or user. By
3955 definition, users of free software do not need to register their use.
3956 So counting users or units is not possible for free software projects.
3957 And given that people will use the software without handing any money
3958 to the author, it is not really economically possible for a free
3959 software author to pay a small amount of money to license the rights
3960 to implement a standard when the income available is zero. The result
3961 in these situations is that free software are locked out from
3962 implementing standards with RAND terms.
</p
>
3964 <p
>Because of this, when I see someone claiming the terms of a
3965 standard is reasonable and non-discriminatory, all I can think of is
3966 how this really is non-reasonable and discriminatory. Because free
3967 software developers are working in a global market, it does not really
3968 help to know that software patents are not supposed to be enforceable
3969 in Norway. The patent regimes in other countries affect us even here.
3970 I really hope the people behind the standard directory will pay more
3971 attention to these issues in the future.
</p
>
3973 <p
>You can find more on the issues with RAND, FRAND and RAND-Z terms
3975 (
<a href=
"http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/
2010/
11/rand-not-so-reasonable/
">RAND:
3976 Not So Reasonable?
</a
>).
</p
>
3978 <p
>Update
2012-
04-
21: Just came across a
3979 <a href=
"http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/
2012/
04/of-microsoft-netscape-patents-and-open-standards/index.htm
">blog
3980 post from Glyn Moody
</a
> over at Computer World UK warning about the
3981 same issue, and urging people to speak out to the UK government. I
3982 can only urge Norwegian users to do the same for
3983 <a href=
"http://www.standard.difi.no/hoyring/hoyring-om-nye-anbefalte-it-standarder
">the
3984 hearing taking place at the moment
</a
> (respond before
2012-
04-
27).
3985 It proposes to require video conferencing standards including
3986 specifications with RAND terms.
</p
>
3991 <title>Debian Edu interview: Andreas Mundt
</title>
3992 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Andreas_Mundt.html
</link>
3993 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Andreas_Mundt.html
</guid>
3994 <pubDate>Sun,
15 Apr
2012 12:
10:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
3995 <description><p
>Behind
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu and
3996 Skolelinux
</a
> there are a lot of people doing the hard work of
3997 setting together all the pieces. This time I present to you Andreas
3998 Mundt, who have been part of the technical development team several
3999 years. He was also a key contributor in getting GOsa and Kerberos set
4000 up in the recently released
4001 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze
">Debian
4002 Edu Squeeze
</a
> version.
</p
>
4004 <p
><strong
>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
</strong
></p
>
4006 <p
>My name is Andreas Mundt, I grew up in south Germany. After
4007 studying Physics I spent several years at university doing research in
4008 Quantum Optics. After that I worked some years in an optics company.
4009 Finally I decided to turn over a new leaf in my life and started
4010 teaching
10 to
19 years old kids at school. I teach math, physics,
4011 information technology and science/technology.
</p
>
4013 <p
><strong
>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
4014 project?
</strong
></p
>
4016 <p
>Already before I switched to teaching, I followed the Debian Edu
4017 project because of my interest in education and Debian. Within the
4018 qualification/training period for the teaching, I started
4019 contributing.
</p
>
4021 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
4022 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
4024 <p
>The advantages of Debian Edu are the well known name, the
4025 out-of-the-box philosophy and of course the great free software of the
4026 Debian Project!
</p
>
4028 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
4029 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
4031 <p
>As every coin has two sides, the out-of-the-box philosophy has its
4032 downside, too. In my opinion, it is hard to modify and tweak the
4033 setup, if you need or want that. Further more, it is not easily
4034 possible to upgrade the system to a new release. It takes much too
4035 long after a Debian release to prepare the -Edu release, perhaps
4036 because the number of developers working on the core of the code is
4037 rather small and often busy elsewhere.
</p
>
4039 <p
>The
<a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianLAN
">Debian LAN
</a
>
4040 project might fill the use case of a more flexible system.
</p
>
4042 <p
><strong
>Which free software do you use daily?
</strong
></p
>
4044 <p
>I am only using non-free software if I am forced to and run Debian
4045 on all my machines. For documents I prefer LaTeX and PGF/TikZ, then
4046 mutt and iceweasel for email respectively web browsing. At school I
4047 have Arduino and Fritzing in use for a micro controller project.
</p
>
4049 <p
><strong
>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
4050 get schools to use free software?
</strong
></p
>
4052 <p
>One of the major problems is the vendor lock-in from top to bottom:
4053 Especially in combination with ignorant government employees and
4054 politicians, this works out great for the
"market-leader
". The school
4055 administration here in Baden-Wuerttemberg is occupied by that vendor.
4056 Documents have to be prepared in non-free, proprietary formats. Even
4057 free browsers do not work for the school administration. Publishers
4058 of school books provide software only for proprietary platforms.
</p
>
4060 <p
>To change this, political work is very important. Parts of the
4061 political spectrum have become aware of the problem in the last years.
4062 However it takes quite some time and courageous politicians to
'free
'
4063 the system. There is currently some discussion about
"Open Data
" and
4064 "Free/Open Standards
". I am not sure if all the involved parties have
4065 a clue about the potential of these ideas, and probably only a
4066 fraction takes them seriously. However it might slowly make free
4067 software and the philosophy behind it more known and popular.
</p
>
4072 <title>Debian Edu interview: Justin B. Rye
</title>
4073 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Justin_B__Rye.html
</link>
4074 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Justin_B__Rye.html
</guid>
4075 <pubDate>Sun,
8 Apr
2012 10:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
4076 <description><p
>It take all kind of contributions to create a Linux distribution
4077 like
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
</a
>,
4078 and this time I lend the ear to Justin B. Rye, who is listed as a big
4080 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze
">Debian
4081 Edu Squeeze release manual
</a
>.
4083 <p
><strong
>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
</strong
></p
>
4085 <p
>I
'm a
44-year-old linguistics graduate living in Edinburgh who has
4086 occasionally been employed as a sysadmin.
</p
>
4088 <p
><strong
>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
4089 project?
</strong
></p
>
4091 <p
>I
'm neither a developer nor a Skolelinux/Debian Edu user! The only
4092 reason my name
's in the credits for the documentation is that I hang
4093 around on debian-l10n-english waiting for people to mention things
4094 they
'd like a native English speaker to proofread... So I did a sweep
4095 through the wiki for typos and Norglish and inconsistent spellings of
4096 "localisation
".
</p
>
4098 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
4099 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
4101 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
4102 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
4104 <p
>These questions are too hard for me - I don
't use it! In fact I
4105 had hardly any contact with I.T. until long after I
'd got out of the
4106 education system.
</p
>
4108 <p
>I can tell you the advantages of Debian for me though: it soaks up
4109 as much of my free time as I want and no more, and lets me do
4110 everything I want a computer for without ever forcing me to spend
4111 money on the latest hardware.
</p
>
4113 <p
><strong
>Which free software do you use daily?
</strong
></p
>
4115 <p
>I
've been using Debian since Rex; popularity-contest says the
4116 software that I use most is xinit, xterm, and xulrunner (in other
4117 words, I use a distinctly retro sort of desktop).
</p
>
4119 <p
><strong
>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
4120 get schools to use free software?
</strong
></p
>
4122 <p
>Well, I don
't know. I suppose I
'd be inclined to try reasoning
4123 with the people who make the decisions, but obviously if that worked
4124 you would hardly need a strategy.
</p
>
4129 <title>Why the KDE menu is slow when /usr/ is NFS mounted - and a workaround
</title>
4130 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_the_KDE_menu_is_slow_when__usr__is_NFS_mounted___and_a_workaround.html
</link>
4131 <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>
4132 <pubDate>Fri,
6 Apr
2012 22:
40:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
4133 <description><p
>Recently I have spent time with
4134 <a href=
"http://www.slxdrift.no/
">Skolelinux Drift AS
</a
> on speeding
4135 up a
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
</a
>
4136 Lenny installation using LTSP diskless workstations, and in the
4137 process I discovered something very surprising. The reason the KDE
4138 menu was responding slow when using it for the first time, was mostly
4139 due to the way KDE find application icons. I discovered that showing
4140 the Multimedia menu would cause more than
20 000 IP packages to be
4141 passed between the LTSP client and the NFS server. Most of these were
4143 NFS LOOKUP calls, resulting in a NFS3ERR_NOENT response. Because the
4144 ping times between the client and the server were in the range
2-
20
4145 ms, the menus would be very slow. Looking at the strace of kicker in
4146 Lenny (or plasma-desktop i Squeeze - same problem there), I see that
4147 the source of these NFS calls are access(
2) system calls for
4148 non-existing files. KDE can do hundreds of access(
2) calls to find
4149 one icon file. In my example, just finding the mplayer icon required
4150 around
230 access(
2) calls.
</p
>
4152 <p
>The KDE code seem to search for icons using a list of icon
4153 directories, and the list of possible directories is large. In
4154 (almost) each directory, it look for files ending in .png, .svgz, .svg
4155 and .xpm. The result is a very slow KDE menu when /usr/ is NFS
4156 mounted. Showing a single sub menu may result in thousands of NFS
4157 requests. I am not the first one to discover this. I found a
4158 <a href=
"https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=
211416">KDE bug report
4159 from
2009</a
> about this problem, and it is still unsolved.
</p
>
4161 <p
>My solution to speed up the KDE menu was to create a package
4162 kde-icon-cache that upon installation will look at all .desktop files
4163 used to generate the KDE menu, find their icons, search the icon paths
4164 for the file that KDE will end up finding at run time, and copying the
4165 icon file to /var/lib/kde-icon-cache/. Finally, I add symlinks to
4166 these icon files in one of the first directories where KDE will look
4167 for them. This cut down the number of file accesses required to find
4168 one icon from several hundred to less than
5, and make the KDE menu
4169 almost instantaneous. I
'm not quite sure where to make the package
4170 publicly available, so for now it is only available on request.
</p
>
4172 <p
>The bug report mention that this do not only affect the KDE menu
4173 and icon handling, but also the login process. Not quite sure how to
4174 speed up that part without replacing NFS with for example NBD, and
4175 that is not really an option at the moment.
</p
>
4177 <p
>If you got feedback on this issue, please let us know on debian-edu
4178 (at) lists.debian.org.
</p
>
4183 <title>Debian Edu in the Linux Weekly News
</title>
4184 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_in_the_Linux_Weekly_News.html
</link>
4185 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_in_the_Linux_Weekly_News.html
</guid>
4186 <pubDate>Thu,
5 Apr
2012 08:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
4187 <description><p
>About two weeks ago, I was interviewed via email about
4188 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu and Skolelinux
</a
> by
4189 Bruce Byfield in Linux Weekly News. The result was made public for
4190 non-subscribers today. I am pleased to see liked our Linux solution
4191 for schools. Check out his article
4192 <a href=
"https://lwn.net/Articles/
488805/
">Debian Edu/Skolelinux: A
4193 distribution for education
</a
> if you want to learn more.
</p
>
4198 <title>Debian Edu interview: Wolfgang Schweer
</title>
4199 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Wolfgang_Schweer.html
</link>
4200 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Wolfgang_Schweer.html
</guid>
4201 <pubDate>Sun,
1 Apr
2012 23:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
4202 <description><p
>Germany is a core area for the
4203 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu and Skolelinux
</a
>
4204 user community, and this time I managed to get hold of Wolfgang
4205 Schweer, a valuable contributor to the project from Germany.
4207 <p
><strong
>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
</strong
></p
>
4209 <p
>I
've studied Mathematics at the university
'Ruhr-Universität
' in
4210 Bochum, Germany. Since
1981 I
'm working as a teacher at the school
4211 "<a href=
"http://www.westfalenkolleg-dortmund.de/
">Westfalen-Kolleg
4212 Dortmund
</a
>", a second chance school. Here, young adults is given
4213 the opportunity to get further education in order to do the school
4214 examination
'Abitur
', which will allow to study at a university. This
4215 second chance is of value for those who want a better job perspective
4216 or failed to get a higher school examination being teens.
</p
>
4218 <p
>Besides teaching I was involved in developing online courses for a
4219 blended learning project called
'abitur-online.nrw
' and in some other
4220 information technology related projects. For about ten years I
've been
4221 teacher and coordinator for the
'abitur-online
' project at my
4222 school. Being now in my early sixties, I
've decided to leave school at
4223 the end of April this year.
</p
>
4225 <p
><strong
>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
4226 project?
</strong
></p
>
4228 <p
>The first information about Skolelinux must have come to my
4229 attention years ago and somehow related to LTSP (Linux Terminal Server
4230 Project). At school, we had set up a network at the beginning of
1997
4231 using Suse Linux on the desktop, replacing a Novell network. Since
4232 2002, we used old machines from the city council of Dortmund as thin
4233 clients (LTSP, later Ubuntu/Lessdisks) cause new hardware was out of
4234 reach. At home I
'm using Debian since years and - subscribed to the
4235 Debian news letter - heard from time to time about Skolelinux. About
4236 two years ago I proposed to replace the (somehow undocumented and only
4237 known to me) system at school by a well known Debian based system:
4238 Skolelinux.
</p
>
4240 <p
>Students and teachers appreciated the new system because of a
4241 better look and feel and an enhanced access to local media on thin
4242 clients. The possibility to alter and/or reset passwords using a GUI
4243 was welcomed, too. Being able to do administrative tasks using a GUI
4244 and to easily set up workstations using PXE was of very high value for
4245 the admin teachers.
</p
>
4247 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
4248 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
4250 <p
>It
's open source, easy to set up, stable and flexible due to it
's
4251 Debian base. It integrates LTSP out-of-the-box. And it is documented!
4252 So it was a perfect choice.
</p
>
4254 <p
>Being open source, there are no license problems and so it
's
4255 possible to point teachers and students to programs like
4256 OpenOffice.org, ViewYourMind (mind mapping) and The Gimp. It
's of
4257 high value to be able to adapt parts of the system to special needs of
4258 a school and to choose where to get support for this.
</p
>
4260 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
4261 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
4263 <p
>Nothing yet.
</p
>
4265 <p
><strong
>Which free software do you use daily?
</strong
></p
>
4267 <p
>At home (Debian Sid with Gnome Desktop): Iceweasel, LibreOffice,
4268 Mutt, Gedit, Document Viewer, Midnight Commander, flpsed (PDF
4269 Annotator). At school (Skolelinux Lenny): Iceweasel, Gedit,
4270 LibreOffice.
</p
>
4272 <p
><strong
>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
4273 get schools to use free software?
</strong
></p
>
4275 <p
>Some time ago I thought it was enough to tell people about it. But
4276 that doesn
't seem to work quite well. Now I concentrate on those more
4277 interested and hope to get multiplicators that way.
</p
>
4282 <title>Debian Edu screencast: Checking email with kmail using Kerberos authentication
</title>
4283 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_screencast__Checking_email_with_kmail_using_Kerberos_authentication.html
</link>
4284 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_screencast__Checking_email_with_kmail_using_Kerberos_authentication.html
</guid>
4285 <pubDate>Sun,
25 Mar
2012 10:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
4286 <description><!-- Video HTML based on http://www.diveintohtml5.net/video.html --
>
4288 <p
>The same Debian Edu developer that did the last screen cast I
4289 published, Wolfgang Schweer, has created a new screen cast showing how
4290 to set up Kmail in Debian Edu Squeze to authenticate using Kerberos,
4291 allowing users to check their local email account without providing
4292 any password. The video is embedded here in quarter size,
4293 and also available from
<a href=
"https://vimeo.com/
38601767">vimeo
</a
>
4295 <a href=
"http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/
2012-
03-
14-Debian-Edu_Configure_Kmail_for_internal_usage.ogv
">Ogg
4296 Theora
</a
> file. Check it out below.
</p
>
4298 <p
><video id=
"kmail-kerberos-movie
" width=
"256" height=
"184" preload controls
>
4299 <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
"' /
>
4300 <p
>Download video as
4301 <a href=
"http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/
2012-
03-
14-Debian-Edu_Configure_Kmail_for_internal_usage.ogv
">Ogg
</a
>.
</p
>
4302 </video
></p
>
4307 <title>Debian Edu interview: John Ingleby
</title>
4308 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__John_Ingleby.html
</link>
4309 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__John_Ingleby.html
</guid>
4310 <pubDate>Mon,
19 Mar
2012 21:
15:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
4311 <description><p
><a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
</a
>
4312 users are spread all across the globe. The second inteview after
4313 <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/
2012/
03/msg00001.html
">the
4314 Squeeze release
</a
> was publised is with John Ingleby, a teacher and
4315 long time Linux user in United Kingdom.
</p
>
4317 <p
><strong
>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
</strong
></p
>
4319 <p
>I teach ICT part time at the Rudolf Steiner School in Kings
4320 Langley, near London, UK. Previously I worked as a technical
4321 author/trainer while my children attended the school, and I also
4322 contributed to the Schoolforge UK community with the aim of
4323 encouraging UK schools to adopt free/open source software. Five or six
4324 years ago we had about
50 schools interested in some way, but we
4325 weren
't able to convert many of them into sustainable
4326 installations.
</p
>
4328 <p
><strong
>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
4329 project?
</strong
></p
>
4331 <p
>Skolelinux had two representatives at an early Edubuntu meeting in
4332 London which I attended. However at that time our school network had
4333 just been installed using CentOS, LTSP
4 and GNOME. When LTSP
5 came
4334 along we switched to Edubuntu thin client servers so now we have a
4335 mixed environment which includes Windows PCs and student laptops, as
4336 well as their MacBooks and iPads. However, the proprietary systems
4337 have always been rather problematic, and we never built a GUI for the
4338 LDAP server, so when I discovered Skolelinux is configured for all
4339 these things we decided to try it.
</p
>
4341 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
4342 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
4344 <p
>By far the biggest advantage is the Debian Edu community. Apart
4345 from that I have always believed in the same
"sustainable computing
"
4346 goals that Skolelinux is built on: installing Linux on computers which
4347 would otherwise be thrown away, to provide a reliable, secure and
4348 low-cost IT environment for schools. From my own experience I know
4349 that a part-time person can teach and manage a network of about
25
4350 Linux computers, but it would take much more of my time if we had
4351 proprietary software everywhere.
</p
>
4353 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
4354 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
4356 <p
>As a newcomer I
'm just finding out who
's who in the community and
4357 how you
're organised, and what your procedures are for dealing with
4358 various things such as editing manual pages and so-on. The only
4359 English language mailing list seems to be for developers as well as
4360 users, so my inbox needs heavy pruning each day!
</p
>
4362 <p
><strong
>Which free software do you use daily?
</strong
></p
>
4364 <p
>Besides the software already mentioned at school we use Samba,
4365 OpenLDAP, CUPS, Nagios and Dansguardian for the network, and on the
4366 desktops we have LibreOffice, Firefox, GIMP and Inkscape. At home I
4367 use Ubuntu and an Android
4 eePad Transformer (but I
'm not sure if
4368 that counts...)
</p
>
4370 <p
><strong
>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
4371 get schools to use free software?
</strong
></p
>
4373 <p
>That
's a tough question! For very many years UK schools installed
4374 and taught only proprietary software, so that at the highest levels
4375 the notion of
"computer
" means simply
"proprietary office
4376 applications
". However, schools today are experiencing budget
4377 constraints, and many are having to think hard about upgrading Windows
4378 XP. At the same time, we have students showing teachers how to use
4379 iPads, MacBooks and Android, so the choice of operating system is no
4380 longer quite so automatic. What is more, our government at last
4381 realised that we need people with programming skills, so they
're
4382 putting coding back in the curriculum! And it
's encouraging that the
4383 first
10,
000 Raspberry Pi units sold out in
2 hours.
</p
>
4385 <p
>I don
't really know what strategy is going to get UK schools to use
4386 free software, but building an active community of Skolelinux/Debian
4387 Edu users in this country has to be part of it.
</p
>
4392 <title>Writing and translating documentation in Debian Edu
</title>
4393 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Writing_and_translating_documentation_in_Debian_Edu.html
</link>
4394 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Writing_and_translating_documentation_in_Debian_Edu.html
</guid>
4395 <pubDate>Fri,
16 Mar
2012 09:
55:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
4396 <description><p
>Documentation in Debian Edu is provided in several languages, and
4397 it is important to make it both easy to contribute and to keep the
4398 translated versions in sync. To do this we have come up with what we
4399 believe is a very efficient work flow.
</p
>
4403 <li
>The documentation is written in a
4404 <a href=
"http://moinmo.in
">moinmoin wiki
</a
> (see for example
4405 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze
">the
4406 Squeeze release manual
</a
>) with support for exporting the content as
4407 docbook XML.
</li
>
4409 <li
>This docbook document is given to po4a to extract a gettext style
4410 .pot file with the content, which in turn is used to create .po files
4411 with the translated text.
</li
>
4413 <li
>The .po files are given to translators, and they can always tell
4414 which part of the original wiki document is new or changed. They can
4415 use their normal translation tools like lokalize or poedit to write
4416 the translation. There is even a system in place to handle translated
4419 <li
>The translated .po files are combined with the original docbook
4420 XML document using po4a to create a translated docbook document.
</li
>
4422 <li
>The final step is to use all the generated docbook files and
4423 create PDF and HTML version of the original and translated documents.
</li
>
4427 <p
>This setup work very well, but have a few issues. The biggest
4428 issue is that
<a href=
"http://moinmo.in/DocBook
">the docbook support
4429 we use in moinmoin
</a
> is not actively maintained. The docbook
4430 support is also buggy, and our build system contain workarounds to
4431 make sure the generated docbook is usable despite these bugs.
</p
>
4433 <p
>If you want to have a look at our setup, it is all there in the
4434 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/debian-edu-doc
">debian-edu-doc
4435 package
</a
>.
</p
>
4440 <title>Skolelinux / Debian Edu Squeeze is out!
</title>
4441 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Skolelinux___Debian_Edu_Squeeze_is_out_.html
</link>
4442 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Skolelinux___Debian_Edu_Squeeze_is_out_.html
</guid>
4443 <pubDate>Sun,
11 Mar
2012 23:
00:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
4444 <description><p
>This weekend we finally published the first stable release of
4445 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Skolelinux / Debian Edu
</a
> based
4446 on Debian/Squeeze. The full announcement is
4447 <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/
2012/
03/msg00001.html
">available
</a
>
4448 from the project announcement list. Now is a good time to test if it
4449 you have not done so already.
</p
>
4451 <p
>I plan to present the new version at
4452 <a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/
20120313-skolelinux/
">a NUUG
4453 meeting
</a
> on tuesday. I look forward to seeing you there if you are
4454 in Oslo, Norway.
</p
>
4459 <title>Debian Edu interview: Nigel Barker
</title>
4460 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Nigel_Barker.html
</link>
4461 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Nigel_Barker.html
</guid>
4462 <pubDate>Fri,
9 Mar
2012 11:
30:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
4463 <description><p
>Inspired by
<a href=
"http://raphaelhertzog.com/tag/interview/
">the
4464 interview series
</a
> conducted by Raphael, I started a Norwegian
4465 interview series with people involved in the Debian Edu / Skolelinux
4466 community. This was so popular that I believe it is time to move to a
4467 more international audience.
</p
>
4469 <p
>While
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu and
4470 Skolelinux
</a
> originated in France and Norway, and have most users in
4471 Europe, there are users all around the globe. One of those far away
4472 from me is Nigel Barker, a long time Debian Edu system administrator
4473 and contributor. It is thanks to him that Debian Edu is adjusted to
4474 work out of the box in Japan. I got him to answer a few questions,
4475 and am happy to share the response with you. :)
4478 <p
><strong
>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
</strong
></p
>
4480 <p
>My name is Nigel Barker, and I am British. I am married to Yumiko,
4481 and we have three lovely children, aged
15,
14 and
4(!) I am the IT
4482 Coordinator at Hiroshima International School, Japan. I am also a
4483 teacher, and in fact I spend most of my day teaching Mathematics,
4484 Science, IT, and Chemistry. I was originally a Chemistry teacher, but
4485 I have always had an interest in computers. Another teacher teaches
4486 primary school IT, but apart from that I am the only computer person,
4487 so that means I am the network manager, technician and webmaster,
4488 also, and I help people with their computer problems. I teach python
4489 to beginners in an after-school club. I am way too busy, so I really
4490 appreciate the simplicity of Skolelinux.
</p
>
4492 <p
><strong
>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
4493 project?
</strong
></p
>
4495 <p
>In around
2004 or
5 I discovered the ltsp project, and set up a
4496 server in the IT lab. I wanted some way to connect it to our central
4497 samba server, which I was also quite poor at configuring. I discovered
4498 Edubuntu when it came out, but it didn
't really improve my setup. I
4499 did various desperate searches for things like
"school Linux server
"
4500 and ended up in a document called
"Drift
" something or other. Reading
4501 there it became clear that Skolelinux was going to solve all my
4502 problems in one go. I was very excited, but apprehensive, because my
4503 previous attempts to install Debian had ended in failure (I used
4504 Mandrake for everything - ltsp, samba, apache, mail, ns...). I
4505 downloaded a beta version, had some problems, so subscribed to the
4506 Debian Edu list for help. I have remained subscribed ever since, and
4507 my school has run a Skolelinux network since Sarge.
</p
>
4509 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
4510 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
4512 <p
>For me the integrated setup. This is not just the server, or the
4513 workstation, or the ltsp. Its all of them, and its all configured
4514 ready to go. I read somewhere in the early documentation that it is
4515 designed to be setup and managed by the Maths or Science teacher, who
4516 doesn
't necessarily know much about computers, in a small Norwegian
4517 school. That describes me perfectly if you replace Norway with
4520 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
4521 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
4523 <p
>The desktop is fairly plain. If you compare it with Edubuntu, who
4524 have fun themes for children, or with distributions such as Mint, who
4525 make the desktop beautiful. They create a good impression on people
4526 who don
't need to understand how to use any of it, but who might be
4527 important to the school. School administrators or directors, for
4528 instance, or parents. Even kids. Debian itself usually has ugly
4529 default theme settings. It was my dream a few years back that some
4530 kind of integration would allow Edubuntu to do the desktop stuff and
4531 Debian Edu the servers, but now I realise how impossible that is. A
4532 second disadvantage is that if something goes wrong, or you need to
4533 customise something, then suddenly the level of expertise required
4534 multiplies. For example, backup wasn
't working properly in Lenny. It
4535 took me ages to learn how to set up my own server to do rsync backups.
4536 I am afraid of anything to do with ldap, but perhaps Gosa will
4539 <p
><strong
>Which free software do you use daily?
</strong
></p
>
4541 <p
>Nowadays I only use Debian on my personal computers. I have one for
4542 studio work (I play guitar and write songs), running AV Linux
4543 (customised Debian) a netbook running Squeeze, and a bigger laptop
4544 still running Skolelinux Lenny workstation. I have a Tjener in my
4545 house, that
's very useful for the family photos and music. At school
4546 the students only use Skolelinux. (Some teachers and the office still
4547 have windows). So that means we only use free software all day every
4548 day. Open office, The GIMP, Firefox/Iceweasel, VLC and Audacity are
4549 installed on every computer in school, irrespective of OS. We also
4550 have Koha on Debian for the library, and Apache, Moodle, b2evolution
4551 and Etomite on Debian for the www. The firewall is Untangle.
</p
>
4553 <p
><strong
>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
4554 get schools to use free software?
</strong
></p
>
4556 <p
>Current trends are in our favour. Open source is big in industry,
4557 and ordinary people have heard of it. The spread of Android and the
4558 popularity of Apple have helped to weaken the impression that you have
4559 to have Microsoft on everything. People complain to me much less about
4560 file formats and Word than they did
5 years ago. The Edu aspect is
4561 also a selling point. This is all customised for schools. Where is the
4562 Windows-edu, or the Mac-edu? But of course the main attraction is
4563 budget.The trick is to convince people that the quality is not
4564 compromised when you stop paying and use free software instead. That
4565 is one reason why I say the desktop experience is a weakness. People
4566 are not impressed when their USB drive doesn
't work, or their browser
4567 doesn
't play flash, for example.
</p
>
4572 <title>Debian Edu screencast: Mass creation of user accounts in Squeeze
</title>
4573 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_screencast__Mass_creation_of_user_accounts_in_Squeeze.html
</link>
4574 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_screencast__Mass_creation_of_user_accounts_in_Squeeze.html
</guid>
4575 <pubDate>Wed,
7 Mar
2012 13:
40:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
4576 <description><!-- Video HTML based on http://www.diveintohtml5.net/video.html --
>
4578 <p
>One of the Debian Edu developers, Wolfgang Schweer, just created a
4579 screen cast documenting how to create a lot of new users in LDAP on
4580 Debian Edu Squeeze. The video is embedded here in quarter size, and
4581 also available from
<a href=
"http://vimeo.com/
37675399">vimeo
</a
> and
4583 <a href=
"http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/
2012-
02-
29-debian_edu_mass_create_user_accounts.ogv
">Ogg
4584 Theora
</a
> file. Check it out below.
</p
>
4586 <p
><video id=
"gosa-mass-user-create-movie
" width=
"256" height=
"184" preload controls
>
4587 <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
"' /
>
4588 <p
>Download video as
4589 <a href=
"http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/
2012-
02-
29-debian_edu_mass_create_user_accounts.ogv
">Ogg
</a
>.
</p
>
4590 </video
></p
>
4595 <title>Third release candidate of Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Squeeze
</title>
4596 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Third_release_candidate_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Squeeze.html
</link>
4597 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Third_release_candidate_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Squeeze.html
</guid>
4598 <pubDate>Sun,
4 Mar
2012 18:
20:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
4599 <description><p
>This weekend we wrapped up and published the third release
4600 candidate for
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu /
4601 Skolelinux
</a
> based on Squeeze. The full announcement is
4602 <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/
2012/
03/msg00000.html
">available
</a
>
4603 from the project announcement list. Check it out if you
4604 need a software solution for your school.
</p
>
4609 <title>Stopmotion for making stop motion animations on Linux - reloaded
</title>
4610 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Stopmotion_for_making_stop_motion_animations_on_Linux___reloaded.html
</link>
4611 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Stopmotion_for_making_stop_motion_animations_on_Linux___reloaded.html
</guid>
4612 <pubDate>Sat,
3 Mar
2012 12:
50:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
4613 <description><p
>Many years ago, the
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Skolelinux
4614 / Debian Edu project
</a
> initiated a student project to create a tool
4615 for making stop motion movies. The proposal came from a teacher
4616 needing such tool on Skolelinux. The project, called
"stopmotion
",
4617 was manned by two extraordinary students and won a school award and a
4618 national aware with this great project. The project was initiated and
4619 mentored by Herman Robak, and manned by the students Bjørn Erik Nilsen
4620 and Fredrik Berg Kjølstad. They got in touch with people at Aardman
4621 Animation studio and received feedback on how professionals would like
4622 such stopmotion tool to work, and the end result was and is used by
4623 animators around the globe. But as is usual after studying, both got
4624 jobs and went elsewhere, and did not have time to properly tend to the
4625 project, and it has been lingering for a few years now. Until last
4628 <p
>Last year some of the users got together with Herman, and moved the
4629 project to Sourceforge and in effect restarted the project under a new
4631 <a href=
"http://sourceforge.net/projects/linuxstopmotion/
">linuxstopmotion
</a
>.
4632 The name change was done to make it possible to find the project using
4633 Internet search engines (try to search for
'stopmotion
' to see what I
4634 mean). I
've been following
4635 <a href=
"https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/linuxstopmotion-community
">the
4636 mailing list
</a
> and the improvement already in place and planned for
4637 the future is encouraging. If you want to make stop motion movies.
4638 Check it out. :)
</p
>
4643 <title>Second release candidate of Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Squeeze
</title>
4644 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Second_release_candidate_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Squeeze.html
</link>
4645 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Second_release_candidate_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Squeeze.html
</guid>
4646 <pubDate>Mon,
27 Feb
2012 14:
00:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
4647 <description><p
>This weekend we wrapped up and published the second release
4648 candidate for
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu /
4649 Skolelinux
</a
> based on Squeeze. The full announcement did for some
4650 reason not make it the project announcement list, but is
4651 <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/
2012/
02/msg00015.html
">available
</a
>
4652 from the Debian development announcement list. Check it out if you
4653 need a software solution for your school.
</p
>
4658 <title>First release candidate of Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Squeeze
</title>
4659 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_release_candidate_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Squeeze.html
</link>
4660 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_release_candidate_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Squeeze.html
</guid>
4661 <pubDate>Sun,
19 Feb
2012 23:
10:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
4662 <description><p
>One week delayed due to DVD build problems, we managed today to
4663 wrap up and publish the first release candidate for
4664 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
</a
> based
4665 on Squeeze. The full announcement is
4666 <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/
2012/
02/msg00001.html
">available
</a
>
4667 on the project announcement list. Check it out if you need a software
4668 solution for your school.
</p
>
4673 <title>How to figure out which RAID disk to replace when it fail
</title>
4674 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_figure_out_which_RAID_disk_to_replace_when_it_fail.html
</link>
4675 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_figure_out_which_RAID_disk_to_replace_when_it_fail.html
</guid>
4676 <pubDate>Tue,
14 Feb
2012 21:
25:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
4677 <description><p
>Once in a while my home server have disk problems. Thanks to Linux
4678 Software RAID, I have not lost data yet (but
4679 <a href=
"http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.raid/
34532">I was
4680 close
</a
> this summer :). But once a disk is starting to behave
4681 funny, a practical problem present itself. How to get from the Linux
4682 device name (like /dev/sdd) to something that can be used to identify
4683 the disk when the computer is turned off? In my case I have SATA
4684 disks with a unique ID printed on the label. All I need is a way to
4685 figure out how to query the disk to get the ID out.
</p
>
4687 <p
>After fumbling a bit, I
4688 <a href=
"http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-getting-scsi-ide-harddisk-information/
">found
4689 that hdparm -I
</a
> will report the disk serial number, which is
4690 printed on the disk label. The following (almost) one-liner can be
4691 used to look up the ID of all the failed disks:
</p
>
4693 <blockquote
><pre
>
4694 for d in $(cat /proc/mdstat |grep
'(F)
'|tr
' ' "\n
"|grep
'(F)
'|cut -d\[ -f1|sort -u);
4696 printf
"Failed disk $d:
"
4697 hdparm -I /dev/$d |grep
'Serial Num
'
4699 </blockquote
></pre
>
4701 <p
>Putting it here to make sure I do not have to search for it the
4702 next time, and in case other find it useful.
</p
>
4704 <p
>At the moment I have two failing disk. :(
</p
>
4706 <blockquote
><pre
>
4707 Failed disk sdd1: Serial Number: WD-WCASJ1860823
4708 Failed disk sdd2: Serial Number: WD-WCASJ1860823
4709 Failed disk sde2: Serial Number: WD-WCASJ1840589
4710 </blockquote
></pre
>
4712 <p
>The last time I had failing disks, I added the serial number on
4713 labels I printed and stuck on the short sides of each disk, to be able
4714 to figure out which disk to take out of the box without having to
4715 remove each disk to look at the physical vendor label. The vendor
4716 label is at the top of the disk, which is hidden when the disks are
4717 mounted inside my box.
</p
>
4719 <p
>I really wish the check_linux_raid Nagios plugin for checking Linux
4720 Software RAID in the
4721 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/nagios-plugins.html
">nagios-plugins-standard
</a
>
4722 debian package would look up this value automatically, as it would
4723 make the plugin a lot more useful when my disks fail. At the moment
4724 it only report a failure when there are no more spares left (it really
4725 should warn as soon as a disk is failing), and it do not tell me which
4726 disk(s) is failing when the RAID is running short on disks.
</p
>
4731 <title>Automatic proxy configuration with Debian Edu / Skolelinux
</title>
4732 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_proxy_configuration_with_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux.html
</link>
4733 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_proxy_configuration_with_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux.html
</guid>
4734 <pubDate>Mon,
13 Feb
2012 23:
40:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
4735 <description><p
>New in the Squeeze version of
4736 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
</a
> is the
4737 ability for clients to automatically configure their proxy settings
4738 based on their environment. We want all systems on the client to use
4739 the WPAD based proxy definition fetched from
<tt
>http://wpad/wpad.dat
</tt
>, to
4740 allow sites to control the proxy setting from a central place and make
4741 sure clients do not have hard coded proxy settings. The schools can
4742 change the global proxy setting by editing
4743 <tt
>tjener:/etc/debian-edu/www/wpad.dat
</tt
> and the change propagate
4744 to all Debian Edu clients in the network.
</p
>
4746 <p
>The problem is that some systems do not understand the WPAD system.
4747 In other words, how do one get from a WPAD file like this (this is a
4748 simple one, they can run arbitrary code):
</p
>
4750 <blockquote
><pre
>
4751 function FindProxyForURL(url, host)
4753 if (!isResolvable(host) ||
4754 isPlainHostName(host) ||
4755 dnsDomainIs(host,
".intern
"))
4756 return
"DIRECT
";
4758 return
"PROXY webcache:
3128; DIRECT
";
4760 </pre
></blockquote
>
4762 <p
>to a proxy setting in the process environment looking like this:
</p
>
4764 <blockquote
><pre
>
4765 http_proxy=http://webcache:
3128/
4766 ftp_proxy=http://webcache:
3128/
4767 </pre
></blockquote
>
4769 <p
>To do this conversion I developed a perl script that will execute
4770 the javascript fragment in the WPAD file and return the proxy that
4772 <tt
><a href=
"http://www.debian.org/
">http://www.debian.org/
</a
></tt
>,
4773 and insert this extracted proxy URL in
<tt
>/etc/environment
</tt
> and
4774 <tt
>/etc/apt/apt.conf
</tt
>. The perl script wpad-extract work just
4775 fine in Squeeze, but in Wheezy the library it need to run the
4776 javascript code is
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
631045">no longer
4777 able to build
</a
> because the C library it depended on is now a C++
4778 library. I hope someone find a solution to that problem before Wheezy
4779 is frozen. An alternative would be for us to rewrite wpad-extract to
4780 use some other javascript library currently working in Wheezy, but no
4781 known alternative is known at the moment.
</p
>
4783 <p
>This automatic proxy system allow the roaming workstation (aka
4784 laptop) setup in Debian Edu/Squeeze to use the proxy when the laptop
4785 is connected to the backbone network in a Debian Edu setup, and to
4786 automatically use any proxy present and announced using the WPAD
4787 feature when it is connected to other networks. And if no proxy is
4788 announced, direct connections will be used instead.
</p
>
4790 <p
>Silently using a proxy announced on the network might be a privacy
4791 or security problem. But those controlling DHCP and DNS on a network
4792 could just as easily set up a transparent proxy, and force all HTTP
4793 and FTP connections to use a proxy anyway, so I consider that
4794 distinction to be academic. If you are afraid of using the wrong
4795 proxy, you should avoid connecting to the network in question in the
4796 first place. In Debian Edu, the proxy setup is updated using dhcp and
4797 ifupdown hooks, to make sure the configuration is updated every time
4798 the network setup changes.
</p
>
4800 <p
>The WPAD system is documented in a
4801 <a href=
"http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-wrec-wpad-
01">IETF
4802 draft
</a
> and a
4803 <a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Proxy_Autodiscovery_Protocol
">Wikipedia
4804 page
</a
> for those that want to learn more.
</p
>
4809 <title>Saving power with Debian Edu / Skolelinux using shutdown-at-night
</title>
4810 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Saving_power_with_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_using_shutdown_at_night.html
</link>
4811 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Saving_power_with_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_using_shutdown_at_night.html
</guid>
4812 <pubDate>Sun,
5 Feb
2012 09:
45:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
4813 <description><p
>Since the Lenny version of
4814 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
</a
>, a
4815 feature to save power have been included. It is as simple as it is
4816 practical: Shut down unused clients at night, and turn them on again
4817 in the morning. This is done using the
4818 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/shutdown-at-night.html
">shutdown-at-night
</a
> Debian package.
</p
>
4820 <p
>To enable this feature on a client, the machine need to be added to
4821 the netgroup shutdown-at-night-hosts. For Debian Edu, this is done in
4822 LDAP, and once this is in place, the machine in question will check
4823 every hour from
16:
00 until
06:
00 to see if the machine is unused, and
4824 shut it down if it is. If the hardware in question is supported by
4826 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/nvram-wakeup.html
">nvram-wakeup
</a
>
4827 package, the BIOS is told to turn the machine back on around
07:
00 +-
4828 10 minutes. If this isn
't working, one can configure wake-on-lan to
4829 try to turn on the client. The wake-on-lan option is only documented
4830 and not enabled by default in Debian Edu.
</p
>
4832 <p
>It is important to not turn all machines on at once, as this can
4833 blow a fuse if several computers are connected to the same fuse like
4834 the common setup for a classroom. The nvram-wakeup method only work
4835 for machines with a functioning hardware/BIOS clock. I
've seen old
4836 machines where the BIOS battery were dead and the hardware clock were
4837 starting from
0 (or was it
1990?) every boot. If you have one of
4838 those, you have to turn on the computer manually.
</p
>
4840 <p
>The shutdown-at-night package is completely self contained, and can
4841 also be used outside the Debian Edu environment. For those without a
4842 central LDAP server with netgroups, one can instead touch the file
4843 <tt
>/etc/shutdown-at-night/shutdown-at-night
</tt
> to enable it.
4844 Perhaps you too can use it to save some power?
</p
>
4849 <title>Third beta version of Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Squeeze
</title>
4850 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Third_beta_version_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Squeeze.html
</link>
4851 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Third_beta_version_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Squeeze.html
</guid>
4852 <pubDate>Sat,
4 Feb
2012 13:
25:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
4853 <description><p
>I am happy to announce that finally we managed today to wrap up and
4854 publish the third beta version of
4855 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
</a
> based
4856 on Squeeze. If you want to test a LDAP backed Kerberos server with
4857 out of the box PXE configuration for running diskless machines and
4858 installing new machines, check it out. If you need a software
4859 solution for your school, check it out too. The full announcement is
4860 <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/
2012/
02/msg00000.html
">available
</a
>
4861 on the project announcement list.
</p
>
4863 <p
>I am very happy to report these changes and improvements since
4864 beta2 (there are more, see announcement for full list):
</p
>
4868 <li
>It is now possible to change the pre-configured IP subnet from
4869 10.0.0.0/
8 to something else by using the subnet-change tool after
4870 the installation.
</li
>
4872 <li
>Too full partitions are now automatically extended on the Main
4873 Server, based on the rules specified in /etc/fsautoresizetab.
</li
>
4875 <li
>The CUPS queues are now automatically flushed every night, and all
4876 disabled queues are restarted every hour. This should cut down on
4877 the amount of manual administration needed for printers.
</li
>
4879 <li
>The set of initial users have been changed. Now a personal user
4880 for the local system administrator is created during installation
4881 instead of the previously created localadmin and super-admin users,
4882 and this user is granted administrative privileges using group
4883 membership. This reduces the number of passwords one need to keep
4884 up to date on the system.
</li
>
4888 <p
>The new main server seem to work so well that I am testing it as my
4889 private DNS/LDAP/Kerberos/PXE/LTSP server at home. I will use it look
4890 for issues we could fix to polish Debian Edu even further before the
4891 final Squeeze release is published.
</p
>
4893 <p
>Next weekend the project organise a
4894 <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/
2012/
01/msg00001.html
">developer
4895 gathering
</a
> in Oslo. We will continue the work on the Squeeze
4896 version, and start initial planning for the Wheezy version. Perhaps I
4897 will see you there?
</p
>
4902 <title>Handling non-free firmware in Debian Edu/Squeeze
</title>
4903 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Handling_non_free_firmware_in_Debian_Edu_Squeeze.html
</link>
4904 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Handling_non_free_firmware_in_Debian_Edu_Squeeze.html
</guid>
4905 <pubDate>Fri,
27 Jan
2012 23:
30:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
4906 <description><p
>With some computer hardware, one need non-free firmware blobs.
4907 This is the sad fact of todays computers. In the next version of
4908 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
</a
> based
4909 on Squeeze, we provide several scripts and modifications to make
4910 firmware blobs easier to handle. The common use case I run into is a
4911 laptop with a wireless network card requiring non-free firmware to
4912 work, but there are other use cases as well.
</p
>
4914 <p
>First and foremost, Debian Edu provide ISO images for DVD and CD
4915 with all firmware packages in the Debian sections main and non-free
4916 included, to ensure debian-installer find and can install all of them
4917 during installation. This take care firmware for network devices used
4918 by the installer when installing from from local media. But for
4919 example multimedia devices are not activated in the installer and are
4920 not taken care of by this.
</p
>
4922 <p
>For non-network devices, we provide the script
4923 <tt
>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/auto-addfirmware
</tt
> which
4924 search through the
<tt
>dmesg
</tt
> output for drivers requesting extra
4925 firmware. The firmware file name is looked up in the Contents-ARCH.gz
4926 file available in the package repository, and the packages providing
4927 the requested firmware file(s) is installed. I have proposed to do
4928 something similar in debian-installer (BTS report
4929 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
655507">#
655507</a
>), to allow PXE
4930 installs of Debian to handle firmware installation better. Run the
4931 script as root from the command line to fetch and install the needed
4932 firmware packages.
</p
>
4934 <p
>Debian Edu provide PXE installation of Debian out of the box, and
4935 because some machines need firmware to get their network cards
4936 working, the installation initrd some times need extra firmware
4937 included to be able to install at all. To fill the PXE installation
4938 initrd with extra firmware, the
4939 <tt
>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/pxe-addfirmware
</tt
> script is
4940 provided. Again, just run it as root on the command line to fill the
4941 PXE initrd with firmware packages.
</p
>
4943 <p
>Last, some LTSP clients might also need firmware to get their
4944 network cards working. For this,
4945 <tt
>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/ltsp-addfirmware
</tt
> is
4946 provided to update the LTSP initrd with firmware blobs. It is used
4947 the same way as the other firmware related tools.
</p
>
4949 <p
>At the moment, we do not run any of these during installation. We
4950 do not know if this is acceptable for the local administrator to use
4951 non-free software, and it is their choice.
</p
>
4953 <p
>We plan to release beta3 this weekend. You might want to give it a
4959 <title>Setting up a new school with Debian Edu/Squeeze
</title>
4960 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Setting_up_a_new_school_with_Debian_Edu_Squeeze.html
</link>
4961 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Setting_up_a_new_school_with_Debian_Edu_Squeeze.html
</guid>
4962 <pubDate>Wed,
25 Jan
2012 21:
00:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
4963 <description><p
>The next version of
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu
4964 / Skolelinux
</a
> will include a new tool
4965 <tt
>sitesummary2ldapdhcp
</tt
>, which can be used to quickly set up all
4966 the computers in a school without much manual labour. Here is a short
4967 summary on how to use it to set up a new school.
</p
>
4969 <p
>First, install a combined Main Server and Thin Client Server as the
4970 central server in the network. Next, PXE boot all the client machines
4971 as thin clients and wait
5 minutes after the last client booted to
4972 allow the clients to report their existence to the central server. When
4973 this is done, log on to the central server and run
4974 <tt
>sitesummary2ldapdhcp -a
</tt
> in the
<tt
>konsole
</tt
> to use the
4975 collected information to generate system objects in LDAP. The output
4976 will look similar to this:
</p
>
4978 <p
><blockquote
><pre
>
4979 % sitesummary2ldapdhcp -a
4980 info: Updating machine tjener.intern [
10.0.2.2] id ether-
00:
01:
02:
03:
04:
05.
4981 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.
4983 Enter password if you want to activate these changes, and ^c to abort.
4985 Connecting to LDAP as cn=admin,ou=ldap-access,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
4986 enter password: *******
4988 </pre
></blockquote
></p
>
4990 <p
>After providing the LDAP administrative password (the same as the
4991 root password set during installation), the LDAP database will be
4992 populated with system objects for each PXE booted machine with
4993 automatically generated names. The final step to set up the school is
4994 then to log into
<a href=
"https://oss.gonicus.de/labs/gosa/
">GOsa
</a
>,
4995 the web based user, group and system administration system to change
4996 system names, add systems to the correct host groups and finally
4997 enable DHCP and DNS for the systems. All clients that should be used
4998 as diskless workstations should be added to the workstation-hosts
4999 group. After this is done, all computers can be booted again via PXE
5000 and get their assigned names and group based configuration
5001 automatically.
</p
>
5003 <p
>We plan to release beta3 with the updated version of this feature
5004 enabled this weekend. You might want to give it a try.
</p
>
5006 <p
>Update
2012-
01-
28: When calling sitesummary2ldapdhcp to add new
5007 hosts, one need to add the option -a. I forgot to mention this in my
5008 original text, and have added it to the text now.
</p
>
5013 <title>Changing the default Iceweasel start page in Debian Edu/Squeeze
</title>
5014 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Changing_the_default_Iceweasel_start_page_in_Debian_Edu_Squeeze.html
</link>
5015 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Changing_the_default_Iceweasel_start_page_in_Debian_Edu_Squeeze.html
</guid>
5016 <pubDate>Tue,
10 Jan
2012 15:
30:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
5017 <description><p
>In the Squeeze version of
5018 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
</a
> soon
5019 to be released, users of the system will get their default browser
5020 start page set from LDAP, allowing the system administrator to point
5021 all users to the school web page by updating one setting in LDAP. In
5022 addition to setting the default start page when a machine boots, users
5023 are shown the same page as a welcome page when they log in for the
5024 first time.
</p
>
5026 <p
>The LDAP object dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no have an attribute
5027 labeledURI with
"http://www/ LDAP for Debian Edu/Skolelinux
" as the
5028 default content. By changing this value to another URL, all users get
5029 to see the page behind this new URL.
</p
>
5031 <p
>An easy way to update it is by using the ldapvi tool. It can be
5032 called as
"<tt
>ldapvi -ZD
'(cn=admin)
'</tt
>' to update LDAP with the
5033 new setting.
</p
>
5035 <p
>We have written the code to adjust the default start page and show
5036 the welcome page, and I wonder if there is an easier way to do this
5037 from within Iceweasel instead.
</p
>
5042 <title>Second beta version of Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Squeeze
</title>
5043 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Second_beta_version_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Squeeze.html
</link>
5044 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Second_beta_version_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Squeeze.html
</guid>
5045 <pubDate>Sat,
7 Jan
2012 22:
50:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
5046 <description><p
>I am happy to announce that today we managed to wrap up and publish
5047 the second beta version of
5048 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
</a
>. If
5049 you want to test a LDAP backed Kerberos server with out of the box PXE
5050 configuration for running diskless machines and installing new
5051 machines, check it out. If you need a software solution for your
5052 school, check it out too. The full announcement is
5053 <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/
2012/
01/msg00000.html
">available
</a
>
5054 on the project announcement list.
</p
>
5059 <title>Fixing an hanging debian installer for Debian Edu
</title>
5060 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Fixing_an_hanging_debian_installer_for_Debian_Edu.html
</link>
5061 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Fixing_an_hanging_debian_installer_for_Debian_Edu.html
</guid>
5062 <pubDate>Tue,
3 Jan
2012 11:
25:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
5063 <description><p
>During christmas, I have been working getting the next version of
5064 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
</a
> ready
5065 for release. The initial problem I looked at was particularly
5066 interesting.
</p
>
5068 <P
>The installer would hang at the end when it was doing it
5069 post-installation configuration, and whatevery I did to try to find
5070 the cause and fix it always worked while I tested it, but never when I
5071 integrated it into the installer and ran the installation from
5072 scratch. I would try to restart processes, close file descriptors,
5073 remove or create files, and the installer would always unblock and
5074 wrap up its tasks.
</p
>
5076 <p
>Eventually the cause was found. The kernel was simply running out
5077 of entropy, causing the Kerberos setup to hang waiting for more.
5078 Pressing keys was adding entropy to the kernel, and thus all my tries
5079 to fix the problem worked not because what I was typing to fix it, but
5080 because I was typing.
</P
>
5082 <p
>The fix I implemented was to add a background process looking at
5083 the level of entropy in the kernel (by checking
5084 /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail), and if it was too small, the
5085 installer will flush the kernel file buffers and do
'find /
' to
5086 generate some disk IO. Disk IO generate entropy in the kernel, and is
5087 one of the few things that can be initated from within the system to
5088 generate entropy.
</p
>
5090 <p
>The fix is in
5091 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze/Installation
">beta1
5092 of the Debian Edu/Squeeze
</a
> version, and we
5093 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu
">welcome more testers and
5094 developers
</a
>. We plan to release beta2 this weekend.
</p
>
5099 <title>Automatically upgrading server firmware on Dell PowerEdge
</title>
5100 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatically_upgrading_server_firmware_on_Dell_PowerEdge.html
</link>
5101 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatically_upgrading_server_firmware_on_Dell_PowerEdge.html
</guid>
5102 <pubDate>Mon,
21 Nov
2011 12:
00:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
5103 <description><p
>At work we have heaps of servers. I believe the total count is
5104 around
1000 at the moment. To be able to get help from the vendors
5105 when something go wrong, we want to keep the firmware on the servers
5106 up to date. If the firmware isn
't the latest and greatest, the
5107 vendors typically refuse to start debugging any problems until the
5108 firmware is upgraded. So before every reboot, we want to upgrade the
5109 firmware, and we would really like everyone handling servers at the
5110 university to do this themselves when they plan to reboot a machine.
5111 For that to happen we at the unix server admin group need to provide
5112 the tools to do so.
</p
>
5114 <p
>To make firmware upgrading easier, I am working on a script to
5115 fetch and install the latest firmware for the servers we got. Most of
5116 our hardware are from Dell and HP, so I have focused on these servers
5117 so far. This blog post is about the Dell part.
</P
>
5119 <p
>On the Dell FTP site I was lucky enough to find
5120 <a href=
"ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz
">an XML file
</a
>
5121 with firmware information for all
11th generation servers, listing
5122 which firmware should be used on a given model and where on the FTP
5123 site I can find it. Using a simple perl XML parser I can then
5124 download the shell scripts Dell provides to do firmware upgrades from
5125 within Linux and reboot when all the firmware is primed and ready to
5126 be activated on the first reboot.
</p
>
5128 <p
>This is the Dell related fragment of the perl code I am working on.
5129 Are there anyone working on similar tools for firmware upgrading all
5130 servers at a site? Please get in touch and lets share resources.
</p
>
5132 <p
><pre
>
5136 use File::Temp qw(tempdir);
5138 # Install needed RHEL packages if missing
5140 'XML::Simple
' =
> 'perl-XML-Simple
',
5142 for my $module (keys %rhelmodules) {
5143 eval
"use $module;
";
5145 my $pkg = $rhelmodules{$module};
5146 system(
"yum install -y $pkg
");
5147 eval
"use $module;
";
5151 my $errorsto =
'pere@hungry.com
';
5157 sub run_firmware_script {
5158 my ($opts, $script) = @_;
5160 print STDERR
"fail: missing script name\n
";
5163 print STDERR
"Running $script\n\n
";
5165 if (
0 == system(
"sh $script $opts
")) { # FIXME correct exit code handling
5166 print STDERR
"success: firmware script ran succcessfully\n
";
5168 print STDERR
"fail: firmware script returned error\n
";
5172 sub run_firmware_scripts {
5173 my ($opts, @dirs) = @_;
5174 # Run firmware packages
5175 for my $dir (@dirs) {
5176 print STDERR
"info: Running scripts in $dir\n
";
5177 opendir(my $dh, $dir) or die
"Unable to open directory $dir: $!
";
5178 while (my $s = readdir $dh) {
5179 next if $s =~ m/^\.\.?/;
5180 run_firmware_script($opts,
"$dir/$s
");
5188 print STDERR
"info: Downloading $url\n
";
5189 system(
"wget --quiet \
"$url\
"");
5194 my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
5197 if ($product =~ m/PowerEdge/) {
5199 # on RHEL, these pacakges are needed by the firwmare upgrade scripts
5200 system(
'yum install -y compat-libstdc++-
33.i686 libstdc++.i686 libxml2.i686 procmail
');
5202 my $tmpdir = tempdir(
5206 fetch_dell_fw(
'catalog/Catalog.xml.gz
');
5207 system(
'gunzip Catalog.xml.gz
');
5208 my @paths = fetch_dell_fw_list(
'Catalog.xml
');
5209 # -q is quiet, disabling interactivity and reducing console output
5210 my $fwopts =
"-q
";
5212 for my $url (@paths) {
5213 fetch_dell_fw($url);
5215 run_firmware_scripts($fwopts, $tmpdir);
5217 print STDERR
"error: Unsupported Dell model
'$product
'.\n
";
5218 print STDERR
"error: Please report to $errorsto.\n
";
5222 print STDERR
"error: Unsupported Dell model
'$product
'.\n
";
5223 print STDERR
"error: Please report to $errorsto.\n
";
5229 my $url =
"ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/$path
";
5233 # Using ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz, figure out which
5234 # firmware packages to download from Dell. Only work for Linux
5235 # machines and
11th generation Dell servers.
5236 sub fetch_dell_fw_list {
5237 my $filename = shift;
5239 my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
5241 my ($mybrand, $mymodel) = split(/\s+/, $product);
5243 print STDERR
"Finding firmware bundles for $mybrand $mymodel\n
";
5245 my $xml = XMLin($filename);
5247 for my $bundle (@{$xml-
>{SoftwareBundle}}) {
5248 my $brand = $bundle-
>{TargetSystems}-
>{Brand}-
>{Display}-
>{content};
5249 my $model = $bundle-
>{TargetSystems}-
>{Brand}-
>{Model}-
>{Display}-
>{content};
5251 if (
"ARRAY
" eq ref $bundle-
>{TargetOSes}-
>{OperatingSystem}) {
5252 $oscode = $bundle-
>{TargetOSes}-
>{OperatingSystem}[
0]-
>{osCode};
5254 $oscode = $bundle-
>{TargetOSes}-
>{OperatingSystem}-
>{osCode};
5256 if ($mybrand eq $brand
&& $mymodel eq $model
&& "LIN
" eq $oscode)
5258 @paths = map { $_-
>{path} } @{$bundle-
>{Contents}-
>{Package}};
5261 for my $component (@{$xml-
>{SoftwareComponent}}) {
5262 my $componenttype = $component-
>{ComponentType}-
>{value};
5264 # Drop application packages, only firmware and BIOS
5265 next if
'APAC
' eq $componenttype;
5267 my $cpath = $component-
>{path};
5268 for my $path (@paths) {
5269 if ($cpath =~ m%/$path$%) {
5270 push(@paths, $cpath);
5278 <p
>The code is only tested on RedHat Enterprise Linux, but I suspect
5279 it could work on other platforms with some tweaking. Anyone know a
5280 index like Catalog.xml is available from HP for HP servers? At the
5281 moment I maintain a similar list manually and it is quickly getting
5287 <title>Free e-book kiosk for the public libraries?
</title>
5288 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_e_book_kiosk_for_the_public_libraries_.html
</link>
5289 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_e_book_kiosk_for_the_public_libraries_.html
</guid>
5290 <pubDate>Fri,
7 Oct
2011 19:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
5291 <description><p
>Here in Norway the public libraries are debating with the
5292 publishing houses how to handle electronic books. Surprisingly, the
5293 libraries seem to be willing to accept digital restriction mechanisms
5294 (DRM) on books and renting e-books with artificial scarcity from the
5295 publishing houses. Time limited renting (
2-
3 years) is one proposed
5296 model, and only allowing X borrowers for each book is another.
5297 Personally I find it amazing that libraries are even considering such
5300 <p
>Anyway, while reading
<a href=
"http://boklaben.no/?p=
220">part of
5301 this debate
</a
>, it occurred to me that someone should present a more
5302 sensible approach to the libraries, to allow its borrowers to get used
5303 to a better model. The idea is simple:
</p
>
5305 <p
>Create a computer system for the libraries, either in the form of a
5306 Live DVD or a installable distribution, that provide a simple kiosk
5307 solution to hand out free e-books. As a start, the books distributed
5308 by
<a href=
"http://www.gutenberg.org/
">Project Gutenberg
</a
> (about
5309 36,
000 books),
<a href=
"http://runeberg.org/
">Project Runenberg
</a
>
5310 (
1149 books) and
<a href=
"http://www.archive.org/details/texts
">The
5311 Internet Archive
</a
> (
3,
033,
748 books) could be included, but any book
5312 where the copyright has expired or with a free licence could be
5313 distributed.
</p
>
5315 <p
>The computer system would make it easy to:
</p
>
5319 <li
>Copy e-books into a USB stick, reading tablets, cell phones and
5320 other relevant equipment.
</li
>
5322 <li
>Show the books for reading on the the screen in the library.
</li
>
5326 <p
>In addition to such kiosk solution, there should probably be a web
5327 site as well to allow people easy access to these books without
5328 visiting the library. The site would be the distribution point for
5329 the kiosk systems, which would connect regularly to fetch any new
5330 books available.
</p
>
5332 <p
>Are there anyone working on a system like this? I guess it would
5333 fit any library in the world, and not just the Norwegian public
5334 libraries. :)
</p
>
5339 <title>Ripping problematic DVDs using dvdbackup and genisoimage
</title>
5340 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ripping_problematic_DVDs_using_dvdbackup_and_genisoimage.html
</link>
5341 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ripping_problematic_DVDs_using_dvdbackup_and_genisoimage.html
</guid>
5342 <pubDate>Sat,
17 Sep
2011 20:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
5343 <description><p
>For convenience, I want to store copies of all my DVDs on my file
5344 server. It allow me to save shelf space flat while still having my
5345 movie collection easily available. It also make it possible to let
5346 the kids see their favourite DVDs without wearing the physical copies
5347 down. I prefer to store the DVDs as ISOs to keep the DVD menu and
5348 subtitle options intact. It also ensure that the entire film is one
5349 file on the disk. As this is for personal use, the ripping is
5350 perfectly legal here in Norway.
</p
>
5352 <p
>Normally I rip the DVDs using dd like this:
</p
>
5354 <blockquote
><pre
>
5356 # apt-get install lsdvd
5357 title=$(lsdvd
2>/dev/null|awk
'/Disc Title: / {print $
3}
')
5358 dd if=/dev/dvd of=/storage/dvds/$title.iso bs=
1M
5359 </pre
></blockquote
>
5361 <p
>But some DVDs give a input/output error when I read it, and I have
5362 been looking for a better alternative. I have no idea why this I/O
5363 error occur, but suspect my DVD drive, the Linux kernel driver or
5364 something fishy with the DVDs in question. Or perhaps all three.
</p
>
5366 <p
>Anyway, I believe I found a solution today using dvdbackup and
5367 genisoimage. This script gave me a working ISO for a problematic
5368 movie by first extracting the DVD file system and then re-packing it
5371 <blockquote
><pre
>
5373 # apt-get install lsdvd dvdbackup genisoimage
5375 tmpdir=/storage/dvds/
5376 title=$(lsdvd
2>/dev/null|awk
'/Disc Title: / {print $
3}
')
5377 dvdbackup -i /dev/dvd -M -o $tmpdir -n$title
5378 genisoimage -dvd-video -o $tmpdir/$title.iso $tmpdir/$title
5379 rm -rf $tmpdir/$title
5380 </pre
></blockquote
>
5382 <p
>Anyone know of a better way available in Debian/Squeeze?
</p
>
5384 <p
>Update
2011-
09-
18: I got a tip from Konstantin Khomoutov about the
5385 readom program from the wodim package. It is specially written to
5386 read optical media, and is called like this:
<tt
>readom dev=/dev/dvd
5387 f=image.iso
</tt
>. It got
6 GB along with the problematic Cars DVD
5388 before it failed, and failed right away with a Timmy Time DVD.
</p
>
5390 <p
>Next, I got a tip from Bastian Blank about
5391 <a href=
"http://bblank.thinkmo.de/blog/new-software-python-dvdvideo
">his
5392 program python-dvdvideo
</a
>, which seem to be just what I am looking
5393 for. Tested it with my problematic Timmy Time DVD, and it succeeded
5394 creating a ISO image. The git source built and installed just fine in
5395 Squeeze, so I guess this will be my tool of choice in the future.
</p
>
5400 <title>How is booting into runlevel
1 different from single user boots?
</title>
5401 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_is_booting_into_runlevel_1_different_from_single_user_boots_.html
</link>
5402 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_is_booting_into_runlevel_1_different_from_single_user_boots_.html
</guid>
5403 <pubDate>Thu,
4 Aug
2011 12:
40:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
5404 <description><p
>Wouter Verhelst have some
5405 <a href=
"http://grep.be/blog/en/retorts/pere_kubuntu_boot
">interesting
5406 comments and opinions
</a
> on my blog post on
5407 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_should_start_from__etc_rcS_d__in_Debian____almost_nothing.html
">the
5408 need to clean up /etc/rcS.d/ in Debian
</a
> and my blog post about
5409 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_missing_in_the_Debian_desktop__or_why_my_parents_use_Kubuntu.html
">the
5410 default KDE desktop in Debian
</a
>. I only have time to address one
5411 small piece of his comment now, and though it best to address the
5412 misunderstanding he bring forward:
</p
>
5414 <p
><blockquote
>
5415 Currently, a system admin has four options: [...] boot to a
5416 single-user system (by adding
'single
' to the kernel command line;
5417 this runs rcS and rc1 scripts)
5418 </blockquote
></p
>
5420 <p
>This make me believe Wouter believe booting into single user mode
5421 and booting into runlevel
1 is the same. I am not surprised he
5422 believe this, because it would make sense and is a quite sensible
5423 thing to believe. But because the boot in Debian is slightly broken,
5424 runlevel
1 do not work properly and it isn
't the same as single user
5425 mode. I
'll try to explain what is actually happing, but it is a bit
5426 hard to explain.
</p
>
5428 <p
>Single user mode is defined like this in /etc/inittab:
5429 "<tt
>~~:S:wait:/sbin/sulogin
</tt
>". This means the only thing that is
5430 executed in single user mode is sulogin. Single user mode is a boot
5431 state
"between
" the runlevels, and when booting into single user mode,
5432 only the scripts in /etc/rcS.d/ are executed before the init process
5433 enters the single user state. When switching to runlevel
1, the state
5434 is in fact not ending in runlevel
1, but it passes through runlevel
1
5435 and end up in the single user mode (see /etc/rc1.d/S03single, which
5436 runs
"init -t1 S
" to switch to single user mode at the end of runlevel
5437 1. It is confusing that the
'S
' (single user) init mode is not the
5438 mode enabled by /etc/rcS.d/ (which is more like the initial boot
5441 <p
>This summary might make it clearer. When booting for the first
5442 time into single user mode, the following commands are executed:
5443 "<tt
>/etc/init.d/rc S; /sbin/sulogin
</tt
>". When booting into
5444 runlevel
1, the following commands are executed:
"<tt
>/etc/init.d/rc
5445 S; /etc/init.d/rc
1; /sbin/sulogin
</tt
>". A problem show up when
5446 trying to continue after visiting single user mode. Not all services
5447 are started again as they should, causing the machine to end up in an
5448 unpredicatble state. This is why Debian admins recommend rebooting
5449 after visiting single user mode.
</p
>
5451 <p
>A similar problem with runlevel
1 is caused by the amount of
5452 scripts executed from /etc/rcS.d/. When switching from say runlevel
2
5453 to runlevel
1, the services started from /etc/rcS.d/ are not properly
5454 stopped when passing through the scripts in /etc/rc1.d/, and not
5455 started again when switching away from runlevel
1 to the runlevels
5456 2-
5. I believe the problem is best fixed by moving all the scripts
5457 out of /etc/rcS.d/ that are not
<strong
>required
</strong
> to get a
5458 functioning single user mode during boot.
</p
>
5460 <p
>I have spent several years investigating the Debian boot system,
5461 and discovered this problem a few years ago. I suspect it originates
5462 from when sysvinit was introduced into Debian, a long time ago.
</p
>
5467 <title>What should start from /etc/rcS.d/ in Debian? - almost nothing
</title>
5468 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_should_start_from__etc_rcS_d__in_Debian____almost_nothing.html
</link>
5469 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_should_start_from__etc_rcS_d__in_Debian____almost_nothing.html
</guid>
5470 <pubDate>Sat,
30 Jul
2011 14:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
5471 <description><p
>In the Debian boot system, several packages include scripts that
5472 are started from /etc/rcS.d/. In fact, there is a bite more of them
5473 than make sense, and this causes a few problems. What kind of
5474 problems, you might ask. There are at least two problems. The first
5475 is that it is not possible to recover a machine after switching to
5476 runlevel
1. One need to actually reboot to get the machine back to
5477 the expected state. The other is that single user boot will sometimes
5478 run into problems because some of the subsystems are activated before
5479 the root login is presented, causing problems when trying to recover a
5480 machine from a problem in that subsystem. A minor additional point is
5481 that moving more scripts out of rcS.d/ and into the other rc#.d/
5482 directories will increase the amount of scripts that can run in
5483 parallel during boot, and thus decrease the boot time.
</p
>
5485 <p
>So, which scripts should start from rcS.d/. In short, only the
5486 scripts that _have_ to execute before the root login prompt is
5487 presented during a single user boot should go there. Everything else
5488 should go into the numeric runlevels. This means things like
5489 lm-sensors, fuse and x11-common should not run from rcS.d, but from
5490 the numeric runlevels. Today in Debian, there are around
115 init.d
5491 scripts that are started from rcS.d/, and most of them should be moved
5492 out. Do your package have one of them? Please help us make single
5493 user and runlevel
1 better by moving it.
</p
>
5495 <p
>Scripts setting up the screen, keyboard, system partitions
5496 etc. should still be started from rcS.d/, but there is for example no
5497 need to have the network enabled before the single user login prompt
5498 is presented.
</p
>
5500 <p
>As always, things are not so easy to fix as they sound. To keep
5501 Debian systems working while scripts migrate and during upgrades, the
5502 scripts need to be moved from rcS.d/ to rc2.d/ in reverse dependency
5503 order, ie the scripts that nothing in rcS.d/ depend on can be moved,
5504 and the next ones can only be moved when their dependencies have been
5505 moved first. This migration must be done sequentially while we ensure
5506 that the package system upgrade packages in the right order to keep
5507 the system state correct. This will require some coordination when it
5508 comes to network related packages, but most of the packages with
5509 scripts that should migrate do not have anything in rcS.d/ depending
5510 on them. Some packages have already been updated, like the sudo
5511 package, while others are still left to do. I wish I had time to work
5512 on this myself, but real live constrains make it unlikely that I will
5513 find time to push this forward.
</p
>
5518 <title>What is missing in the Debian desktop, or why my parents use Kubuntu
</title>
5519 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_missing_in_the_Debian_desktop__or_why_my_parents_use_Kubuntu.html
</link>
5520 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_missing_in_the_Debian_desktop__or_why_my_parents_use_Kubuntu.html
</guid>
5521 <pubDate>Fri,
29 Jul
2011 08:
10:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
5522 <description><p
>While at Debconf11, I have several times during discussions
5523 mentioned the issues I believe should be improved in Debian for its
5524 desktop to be useful for more people. The use case for this is my
5525 parents, which are currently running Kubuntu which solve the
5528 <p
>I suspect these four missing features are not very hard to
5529 implement. After all, they are present in Ubuntu, so if we wanted to
5530 do this in Debian we would have a source.
</p
>
5534 <li
><strong
>Simple GUI based upgrade of packages.
</strong
> When there
5535 are new packages available for upgrades, a icon in the KDE status bar
5536 indicate this, and clicking on it will activate the simple upgrade
5537 tool to handle it. I have no problem guiding both of my parents
5538 through the process over the phone. If a kernel reboot is required,
5539 this too is indicated by the status bars and the upgrade tool. Last
5540 time I checked, nothing with the same features was working in KDE in
5543 <li
><strong
>Simple handling of missing Firefox browser
5544 plugins.
</strong
> When the browser encounter a MIME type it do not
5545 currently have a handler for, it will ask the user if the system
5546 should search for a package that would add support for this MIME type,
5547 and if the user say yes, the APT sources will be searched for packages
5548 advertising the MIME type in their control file (visible in the
5549 Packages file in the APT archive). If one or more packages are found,
5550 it is a simple click of the mouse to add support for the missing mime
5551 type. If the package require the user to accept some non-free
5552 license, this is explained to the user. The entire process make it
5553 more clear to the user why something do not work in the browser, and
5554 make the chances higher for the user to blame the web page authors and
5555 not the browser for any missing features.
</li
>
5557 <li
><strong
>Simple handling of missing multimedia codec/format
5558 handlers.
</strong
> When the media players encounter a format or codec
5559 it is not supporting, a dialog pop up asking the user if the system
5560 should search for a package that would add support for it. This
5561 happen with things like MP3, Windows Media or H
.264. The selection
5562 and installation procedure is very similar to the Firefox browser
5563 plugin handling. This is as far as I know implemented using a
5564 gstreamer hook. The end result is that the user easily get access to
5565 the codecs that are present from the APT archives available, while
5566 explaining more on why a given format is unsupported by Ubuntu.
</li
>
5568 <li
><strong
>Better browser handling of some MIME types.
</strong
> When
5569 displaying a text/plain file in my Debian browser, it will propose to
5570 start emacs to show it. If I remember correctly, when doing the same
5571 in Kunbutu it show the file as a text file in the browser. At least I
5572 know Opera will show text files within the browser. I much prefer the
5573 latter behaviour.
</li
>
5577 <p
>There are other nice features as well, like the simplified suite
5578 upgrader, but given that I am the one mostly doing the dist-upgrade,
5579 it do not matter much.
</p
>
5581 <p
>I really hope we could get these features in place for the next
5582 Debian release. It would require the coordinated effort of several
5583 maintainers, but would make the end user experience a lot better.
</p
>
5588 <title>Perl modules used by FixMyStreet which are missing in Debian/Squeeze
</title>
5589 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Perl_modules_used_by_FixMyStreet_which_are_missing_in_Debian_Squeeze.html
</link>
5590 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Perl_modules_used_by_FixMyStreet_which_are_missing_in_Debian_Squeeze.html
</guid>
5591 <pubDate>Tue,
26 Jul
2011 12:
25:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
5592 <description><p
>The Norwegian
<a href=
"http://www.fiksgatami.no/
">FiksGataMi
</A
>
5593 site is build on Debian/Squeeze, and this platform was chosen because
5594 I am most familiar with Debian (being a Debian Developer for around
10
5595 years) because it is the latest stable Debian release which should get
5596 security support for a few years.
</p
>
5598 <p
>The web service is written in Perl, and depend on some perl modules
5599 that are missing in Debian at the moment. It would be great if these
5600 modules were added to the Debian archive, allowing anyone to set up
5601 their own
<a href=
"http://www.fixmystreet.com
">FixMyStreet
</a
> clone
5602 in their own country using only Debian packages. The list of modules
5603 missing in Debian/Squeeze isn
't very long, and I hope the perl group
5604 will find time to package the
12 modules Catalyst::Plugin::SmartURI,
5605 Catalyst::Plugin::Unicode::Encoding, Catalyst::View::TT, Devel::Hide,
5606 Sort::Key, Statistics::Distributions, Template::Plugin::Comma,
5607 Template::Plugin::DateTime::Format, Term::Size::Any, Term::Size::Perl,
5608 URI::SmartURI and Web::Scraper to make the maintenance of FixMyStreet
5609 easier in the future.
</p
>
5611 <p
>Thanks to the great tools in Debian, getting the missing modules
5612 installed on my server was a simple call to
'cpan2deb Module::Name
'
5613 and
'dpkg -i
' to install the resulting package. But this leave me
5614 with the responsibility of tracking security problems, which I really
5615 do not have time for.
</p
>
5620 <title>Free Software vs. proprietary softare...
</title>
5621 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Software_vs__proprietary_softare___.html
</link>
5622 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Software_vs__proprietary_softare___.html
</guid>
5623 <pubDate>Mon,
20 Jun
2011 12:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
5624 <description><p
>Reading
5625 <a href=
"http://blog.thingiverse.com/
2011/
06/
20/open-source-vs-closed-source-eulas/
">the
5626 thingiverse blog
</a
>, I came across two highlights of interesting
5628 <a href=
"http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Autodesk_EULA
">Autodesk
</a
>
5630 <a href=
"http://blog.makezine.com/archive/
2011/
06/things-you-cant-do-with-the-microsoft-kinect-sdk.html
">Microsoft
5631 Kinect
</a
> End User License Agreements (EULAs), which illustrates
5632 quite well why I stay away from software with EULAs. Whenever I take
5633 the time to read their content, the terms are simply unacceptable.
</p
>
5638 <title>Experimental Open311 API for the mySociety fixmystreet system
</title>
5639 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Experimental_Open311_API_for_the_mySociety_fixmystreet_system.html
</link>
5640 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Experimental_Open311_API_for_the_mySociety_fixmystreet_system.html
</guid>
5641 <pubDate>Sat,
30 Apr
2011 17:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
5642 <description><p
>Today, the first draft implementation of an
5643 <a href=
"http://www.open311.org/
">Open311 API
</a
> for the Norwegian
5644 service
<a href=
"http://www.fiksgatami.no/
">FiksGataMi
</a
> started to
5645 work. It is only available on the developer server for now, and I
5646 have not tested it using any existing Open311 client (I lack the
5647 platforms needed to run the clients I have found so far), but it is
5648 able to query the database and extract a list of open and closed
5649 requests within a given category and reported to a given municipality.
5650 I believe that is a good start to create a useful service for those
5651 that want to do data mining on the requests submitted so far.
</p
>
5653 <p
>Where is it? Visit
5654 <a href=
"http://fiksgatami-dev.nuug.no/open311.cgi/v2/
">http://fiksgatami-dev.nuug.no/open311.cgi/v2/
</a
>
5655 to have a look. Please send feedback to the
5656 <a href=
"http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/fiksgatami
">fiksgatami
5657 (at) nuug.no
</a
> mailing list.
</p
>
5662 <title>Initial notes on adding Open311 server API on FixMyStreet
</title>
5663 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Initial_notes_on_adding_Open311_server_API_on_FixMyStreet.html
</link>
5664 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Initial_notes_on_adding_Open311_server_API_on_FixMyStreet.html
</guid>
5665 <pubDate>Fri,
29 Apr
2011 10:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
5666 <description><p
>The last few days I have spent some time trying to add support for
5667 the
<a href=
"http://www.open311.org/
">Open311 API
</a
> in the
5668 <a href=
"http://www.fiksgatami.no/
">Norwegian FixMyStreet service
</a
>.
5669 Earlier I believed Open311 would be a useful API to use to submit
5670 reports to the municipalities, but when I noticed that the
5671 <a href=
"http://fixmystreet.org.nz/
">New Zealand version
</a
> of
5672 FixMyStreet had implemented Open311 on the server side, it occurred to
5673 me that this was a nice way to allow the public, press and
5674 municipalities to do data mining directly in the FixMyStreet service.
5675 Thus I went to work implementing the Open311 specification for
5676 FixMyStreet. The implementation is not yet ready, but I am starting
5677 to get a draft limping along. In the process, I have discovered a few
5678 issues with the Open311 specification.
</p
>
5680 <p
>One obvious missing feature is the lack of natural language
5681 handling in the specification. The specification seem to assume all
5682 reports will be written in English, and do not provide a way for the
5683 receiving end to specify which languages are understood there. To be
5684 able to use the same client and submit to several Open311 receivers,
5685 it would be useful to know which language to use when writing reports.
5686 I believe the specification should be extended to allow the receivers
5687 of problem reports to specify which language they accept, and the
5688 submitter to specify which language the report is written in.
5689 Language of a text can also be automatically guessed using statistical
5690 methods, but for multi-lingual persons like myself, it is useful to
5691 know which language to use when writing a problem report. I suspect
5692 some lang=nb,nn kind of attribute would solve it.
</p
>
5694 <p
>A key part of the Open311 API is the list of services provided,
5695 which is similar to the categories used by FixMyStreet. One issue I
5696 run into is the need to specify both name and unique identifier for
5697 each category. The specification do not state that the identifier
5698 should be numeric, but all example implementations have used numbers
5699 here. In FixMyStreet, there is no number associated with each
5700 category. As the specification do not forbid it, I will use the name
5701 as the unique identifier for now and see how open311 clients handle
5704 <p
>The report format in open311 and the report format in FixMyStreet
5705 differ in a key part. FixMyStreet have a title and a description,
5706 while Open311 only have a description and lack the title. I
'm not
5707 quite sure how to best handle this yet. When asking for a FixMyStreet
5708 report in Open311 format, I just merge title an description into the
5709 open311 description, but this is not going to work if the open311 API
5710 should be used for submitting new reports to FixMyStreet.
</p
>
5712 <p
>The search feature in Open311 is missing a way to ask for problems
5713 near a geographic location. I believe this is important if one is to
5714 use Open311 as the query language for mobile units. The specification
5715 should be extended to handle this, probably using some new lat=, lon=
5716 and range= options.
</p
>
5718 <p
>The final challenge I see is that the FixMyStreet code handle
5719 several administrations in one interface, while the Open311 API seem
5720 to assume only one administration. For FixMyStreet, this mean a
5721 report can be sent to several administrations, and the categories
5722 available depend on the location of the problem. Not quite sure how
5723 to best handle this. I
've noticed
5724 <a href=
"http://seeclickfix.com/open311/
">SeeClickFix
</a
> added
5725 latitude and longitude options to the services request, but it do not
5726 solve the problem of what to return when no location is specified.
5727 Will have to investigate this a bit more.
</p
>
5729 <p
>My distaste for web forums have kept me from bringing these issues
5730 up with the open311 developer group. I really wish they had a email
5731 list available via
<a href=
"http://www.gmane.org/
">Gmane
</a
> to use for
5732 discussions instead of only
5733 <a href=
"http://lists.open311.org/groups/discuss
">a forum
<a/
>. Oh,
5734 well. That will probably resolve itself, one way or another. I
've
5735 also tried visiting the IRC channel #open311 on FreeNode, but no-one
5736 seem to reply to my questions there. This make me wonder if I just
5737 fail to understand how the open311 community work. It sure do not
5738 work like the free software project communities I am used to.
</p
>
5743 <title>Gnash enteres Google Summer of Code
2011</title>
5744 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_enteres_Google_Summer_of_Code_2011.html
</link>
5745 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_enteres_Google_Summer_of_Code_2011.html
</guid>
5746 <pubDate>Wed,
6 Apr
2011 09:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
5747 <description><p
><a href=
"http://www.getgnash.org/
">The Gnash project
</a
> is still
5748 the most promising solution for a Free Software Flash implementation.
5749 A few days ago the project
5750 <a href=
"http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnash-dev/
2011-
04/msg00011.html
">announced
</a
>
5751 that it will participate in Google Summer of Code. I hope many
5752 students apply, and that some of them succeed in getting AVM2 support
5753 into Gnash.
</p
>
5758 <title>A Norwegian FixMyStreet have kept me busy the last few weeks
</title>
5759 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Norwegian_FixMyStreet_have_kept_me_busy_the_last_few_weeks.html
</link>
5760 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Norwegian_FixMyStreet_have_kept_me_busy_the_last_few_weeks.html
</guid>
5761 <pubDate>Sun,
3 Apr
2011 22:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
5762 <description><p
>Here is a small update for my English readers. Most of my blog
5763 posts have been in Norwegian the last few weeks, so here is a short
5764 update in English.
</p
>
5766 <p
>The kids still keep me too busy to get much free software work
5767 done, but I did manage to organise a project to get a Norwegian port
5768 of the British service
5769 <a href=
"http://www.fixmystreet.com/
">FixMyStreet
</a
> up and running,
5770 and it has been running for a month now. The entire project has been
5771 organised by me and two others. Around Christmas we gathered sponsors
5772 to fund the development work. In January I drafted a contract with
5773 <a href=
"http://www.mysociety.org/
">mySociety
</a
> on what to develop,
5774 and in February the development took place. Most of it involved
5775 converting the source to use GPS coordinates instead of British
5776 easting/northing, and the resulting code should be a lot easier to get
5777 running in any country by now. The Norwegian
5778 <a href=
"http://www.fiksgatami.no/
">FiksGataMi
</a
> is using
5779 <a href=
"http://www.openstreetmap.org/
">OpenStreetmap
</a
> as the map
5780 source and the source for administrative borders in Norway, and
5781 support for this had to be added/fixed.
</p
>
5783 <p
>The Norwegian version went live March
3th, and we spent the weekend
5784 polishing the system before we announced it March
7th. The system is
5785 running on a KVM instance of Debian/Squeeze, and has seen almost
3000
5786 problem reports in a few weeks. Soon we hope to announce the Android
5787 and iPhone versions making it even easier to report problems with the
5788 public infrastructure.
</p
>
5790 <p
>Perhaps something to consider for those of you in countries without
5791 such service?
</p
>
5796 <title>Using NVD and CPE to track CVEs in locally maintained software
</title>
5797 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_NVD_and_CPE_to_track_CVEs_in_locally_maintained_software.html
</link>
5798 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_NVD_and_CPE_to_track_CVEs_in_locally_maintained_software.html
</guid>
5799 <pubDate>Fri,
28 Jan
2011 15:
40:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
5800 <description><p
>The last few days I have looked at ways to track open security
5801 issues here at my work with the University of Oslo. My idea is that
5802 it should be possible to use the information about security issues
5803 available on the Internet, and check our locally
5804 maintained/distributed software against this information. It should
5805 allow us to verify that no known security issues are forgotten. The
5806 CVE database listing vulnerabilities seem like a great central point,
5807 and by using the package lists from Debian mapped to CVEs provided by
5808 the testing security team, I believed it should be possible to figure
5809 out which security holes were present in our free software
5810 collection.
</p
>
5812 <p
>After reading up on the topic, it became obvious that the first
5813 building block is to be able to name software packages in a unique and
5814 consistent way across data sources. I considered several ways to do
5815 this, for example coming up with my own naming scheme like using URLs
5816 to project home pages or URLs to the Freshmeat entries, or using some
5817 existing naming scheme. And it seem like I am not the first one to
5818 come across this problem, as MITRE already proposed and implemented a
5819 solution. Enter the
<a href=
"http://cpe.mitre.org/index.html
">Common
5820 Platform Enumeration
</a
> dictionary, a vocabulary for referring to
5821 software, hardware and other platform components. The CPE ids are
5822 mapped to CVEs in the
<a href=
"http://web.nvd.nist.gov/
">National
5823 Vulnerability Database
</a
>, allowing me to look up know security
5824 issues for any CPE name. With this in place, all I need to do is to
5825 locate the CPE id for the software packages we use at the university.
5826 This is fairly trivial (I google for
'cve cpe $package
' and check the
5827 NVD entry if a CVE for the package exist).
</p
>
5829 <p
>To give you an example. The GNU gzip source package have the CPE
5830 name cpe:/a:gnu:gzip. If the old version
1.3.3 was the package to
5831 check out, one could look up
5832 <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
5833 in NVD
</a
> and get a list of
6 security holes with public CVE entries.
5834 The most recent one is
5835 <a href=
"http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-
2010-
0001">CVE-
2010-
0001</a
>,
5836 and at the bottom of the NVD page for this vulnerability the complete
5837 list of affected versions is provided.
</p
>
5839 <p
>The NVD database of CVEs is also available as a XML dump, allowing
5840 for offline processing of issues. Using this dump, I
've written a
5841 small script taking a list of CPEs as input and list all CVEs
5842 affecting the packages represented by these CPEs. One give it CPEs
5843 with version numbers as specified above and get a list of open
5844 security issues out.
</p
>
5846 <p
>Of course for this approach to be useful, the quality of the NVD
5847 information need to be high. For that to happen, I believe as many as
5848 possible need to use and contribute to the NVD database. I notice
5850 <a href=
"https://www.redhat.com/security/data/metrics/rhsamapcpe.txt
">a
5851 map from CVE to CPE
</a
>, indicating that they are using the CPE
5852 information. I
'm not aware of Debian and Ubuntu doing the same.
</p
>
5854 <p
>To get an idea about the quality for free software, I spent some
5855 time making it possible to compare the CVE database from Debian with
5856 the CVE database in NVD. The result look fairly good, but there are
5857 some inconsistencies in NVD (same software package having several
5858 CPEs), and some inaccuracies (NVD not mentioning buggy packages that
5859 Debian believe are affected by a CVE). Hope to find time to improve
5860 the quality of NVD, but that require being able to get in touch with
5861 someone maintaining it. So far my three emails with questions and
5862 corrections have not seen any reply, but I hope contact can be
5863 established soon.
</p
>
5865 <p
>An interesting application for CPEs is cross platform package
5866 mapping. It would be useful to know which packages in for example
5867 RHEL, OpenSuSe and Mandriva are missing from Debian and Ubuntu, and
5868 this would be trivial if all linux distributions provided CPE entries
5869 for their packages.
</p
>
5874 <title>Which module is loaded for a given PCI and USB device?
</title>
5875 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Which_module_is_loaded_for_a_given_PCI_and_USB_device_.html
</link>
5876 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Which_module_is_loaded_for_a_given_PCI_and_USB_device_.html
</guid>
5877 <pubDate>Sun,
23 Jan
2011 00:
20:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
5878 <description><p
>In the
5879 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/discover-data
">discover-data
</a
>
5880 package in Debian, there is a script to report useful information
5881 about the running hardware for use when people report missing
5882 information. One part of this script that I find very useful when
5883 debugging hardware problems, is the part mapping loaded kernel module
5884 to the PCI device it claims. It allow me to quickly see if the kernel
5885 module I expect is driving the hardware I am struggling with. To see
5886 the output, make sure discover-data is installed and run
5887 <tt
>/usr/share/bug/discover-data
3>&1</tt
>. The relevant output on
5888 one of my machines like this:
</p
>
5892 10de:
03eb i2c_nforce2
5895 10de:
03f0 snd_hda_intel
5904 <p
>The code in question look like this, slightly modified for
5905 readability and to drop the output to file descriptor
3:
</p
>
5908 if [ -d /sys/bus/pci/devices/ ] ; then
5909 echo loaded pci modules:
5911 cd /sys/bus/pci/devices/
5912 for address in * ; do
5913 if [ -d
"$address/driver/module
" ] ; then
5914 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
5915 if grep -q
"^$module
" /proc/modules ; then
5916 address=$(echo $address |sed s/
0000://)
5917 id=`lspci -n -s $address | tail -n
1 | awk
'{print $
3}
'`
5918 echo
"$id $module
"
5927 <p
>Similar code could be used to extract USB device module
5931 if [ -d /sys/bus/usb/devices/ ] ; then
5932 echo loaded usb modules:
5934 cd /sys/bus/usb/devices/
5935 for address in * ; do
5936 if [ -d
"$address/driver/module
" ] ; then
5937 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
5938 if grep -q
"^$module
" /proc/modules ; then
5939 address=$(echo $address |sed s/
0000://)
5940 id=$(lsusb -s $address | tail -n
1 | awk
'{print $
6}
')
5941 if [
"$id
" ] ; then
5942 echo
"$id $module
"
5952 <p
>This might perhaps be something to include in other tools as
5958 <title>The video format most supported in web browsers?
</title>
5959 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_video_format_most_supported_in_web_browsers_.html
</link>
5960 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_video_format_most_supported_in_web_browsers_.html
</guid>
5961 <pubDate>Sun,
16 Jan
2011 00:
20:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
5962 <description><p
>The video format struggle on the web continues, and the three
5963 contenders seem to be Ogg Theora, H
.264 and WebM. Most video sites
5964 seem to use H
.264, while others use Ogg Theora. Interestingly enough,
5965 the comments I see give me the feeling that a lot of people believe
5966 H
.264 is the most supported video format in browsers, but according to
5967 the Wikipedia article on
5968 <a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video
">HTML5 video
</a
>,
5969 this is not true. Check out the nice table of supprted formats in
5970 different browsers there. The format supported by most browsers is
5971 Ogg Theora, supported by released versions of Mozilla Firefox, Google
5972 Chrome, Chromium, Opera, Konqueror, Epiphany, Origyn Web Browser and
5973 BOLT browser, while not supported by Internet Explorer nor Safari.
5974 The runner up is WebM supported by released versions of Google Chrome
5975 Chromium Opera and Origyn Web Browser, and test versions of Mozilla
5976 Firefox. H
.264 is supported by released versions of Safari, Origyn
5977 Web Browser and BOLT browser, and the test version of Internet
5978 Explorer. Those wanting Ogg Theora support in Internet Explorer and
5979 Safari can install plugins to get it.
</p
>
5981 <p
>To me, the simple conclusion from this is that to reach most users
5982 without any extra software installed, one uses Ogg Theora with the
5983 HTML5 video tag. Of course to reach all those without a browser
5984 handling HTML5, one need fallback mechanisms. In
5985 <a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/
">NUUG
</a
>, we provide first fallback to a
5986 plugin capable of playing MPEG1 video, and those without such support
5987 we have a second fallback to the Cortado java applet playing Ogg
5988 Theora. This seem to work quite well, as can be seen in an
<a
5989 href=
"http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/
20110111-semantic-web/
">example
5990 from last week
</a
>.
</p
>
5992 <p
>The reason Ogg Theora is the most supported format, and H
.264 is
5993 the least supported is simple. Implementing and using H
.264
5994 require royalty payment to MPEG-LA, and the terms of use from MPEG-LA
5995 are incompatible with free software licensing. If you believed H
.264
5996 was without royalties and license terms, check out
5997 "<a href=
"http://webmink.com/essays/h-
264/
">H
.264 – Not The Kind Of
5998 Free That Matters
</a
>" by Simon Phipps.
</p
>
6000 <p
>A incomplete list of sites providing video in Ogg Theora is
6002 <a href=
"http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/List_of_Theora_videos
">the
6003 Xiph.org wiki
</a
>, if you want to have a look. I
'm not aware of a
6004 similar list for WebM nor H
.264.
</p
>
6006 <p
>Update
2011-
01-
16 09:
40: A question from Tollef on IRC made me
6007 realise that I failed to make it clear enough this text is about the
6008 &lt;video
&gt; tag support in browsers and not the video support
6009 provided by external plugins like the Flash plugins.
</p
>
6014 <title>Chrome plan to drop H
.264 support for HTML5
&lt;video
&gt;
</title>
6015 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Chrome_plan_to_drop_H_264_support_for_HTML5__lt_video_gt_.html
</link>
6016 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Chrome_plan_to_drop_H_264_support_for_HTML5__lt_video_gt_.html
</guid>
6017 <pubDate>Wed,
12 Jan
2011 22:
10:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
6018 <description><p
>Today I discovered
6019 <a href=
"http://www.digi.no/
860070/google-dropper-h264-stotten-i-chrome
">via
6020 digi.no
</a
> that the Chrome developers, in a surprising announcement,
6021 <a href=
"http://blog.chromium.org/
2011/
01/html-video-codec-support-in-chrome.html
">yesterday
6022 announced
</a
> plans to drop H
.264 support for HTML5
&lt;video
&gt; in
6023 the browser. The argument used is that H
.264 is not a
"completely
6024 open
" codec technology. If you believe H
.264 was free for everyone
6025 to use, I recommend having a look at the essay
6026 "<a href=
"http://webmink.com/essays/h-
264/
">H
.264 – Not The Kind Of
6027 Free That Matters
</a
>". It is not free of cost for creators of video
6028 tools, nor those of us that want to publish on the Internet, and the
6029 terms provided by MPEG-LA excludes free software projects from
6030 licensing the patents needed for H
.264. Some background information
6031 on the Google announcement is available from
6032 <a href=
"http://www.osnews.com/story/
24243/Google_To_Drop_H264_Support_from_Chrome
">OSnews
</a
>.
6033 A good read. :)
</p
>
6035 <p
>Personally, I believe it is great that Google is taking a stand to
6036 promote equal terms for everyone when it comes to video publishing on
6037 the Internet. This can only be done by publishing using free and open
6038 standards, which is only possible if the web browsers provide support
6039 for these free and open standards. At the moment there seem to be two
6040 camps in the web browser world when it come to video support. Some
6041 browsers support H
.264, and others support
6042 <a href=
"http://www.theora.org/
">Ogg Theora
</a
> and
6043 <a href=
"http://www.webmproject.org/
">WebM
</a
>
6044 (
<a href=
"http://www.diracvideo.org/
">Dirac
</a
> is not really an option
6045 yet), forcing those of us that want to publish video on the Internet
6046 and which can not accept the terms of use presented by MPEG-LA for
6047 H
.264 to not reach all potential viewers.
6048 Wikipedia keep
<a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video
">an
6049 updated summary
</a
> of the current browser support.
</p
>
6051 <p
>Not surprising, several people would prefer Google to keep
6052 promoting H
.264, and John Gruber
6053 <a href=
"http://daringfireball.net/
2011/
01/simple_questions
">presents
6054 the mind set
</a
> of these people quite well. His rhetorical questions
6055 provoked a reply from Thom Holwerda with another set of questions
6056 <a href=
"http://www.osnews.com/story/
24245/
10_Questions_for_John_Gruber_Regarding_H_264_WebM
">presenting
6057 the issues with H
.264</a
>. Both are worth a read.
</p
>
6059 <p
>Some argue that if Google is dropping H
.264 because it isn
't free,
6060 they should also drop support for the Adobe Flash plugin. This
6061 argument was covered by Simon Phipps in
6062 <a href=
"http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/
2011/
01/google-and-h264---far-from-hypocritical/index.htm
">todays
6063 blog post
</a
>, which I find to put the issue in context. To me it
6064 make perfect sense to drop native H
.264 support for HTML5 in the
6065 browser while still allowing plugins.
</p
>
6067 <p
>I suspect the reason this announcement make so many people protest,
6068 is that all the users and promoters of H
.264 suddenly get an uneasy
6069 feeling that they might be backing the wrong horse. A lot of TV
6070 broadcasters have been moving to H
.264 the last few years, and a lot
6071 of money has been invested in hardware based on the belief that they
6072 could use the same video format for both broadcasting and web
6073 publishing. Suddenly this belief is shaken.
</p
>
6075 <p
>An interesting question is why Google is doing this. While the
6076 presented argument might be true enough, I believe Google would only
6077 present the argument if the change make sense from a business
6078 perspective. One reason might be that they are currently negotiating
6079 with MPEG-LA over royalties or usage terms, and giving MPEG-LA the
6080 feeling that dropping H
.264 completely from Chroome, Youtube and
6081 Google Video would improve the negotiation position of Google.
6082 Another reason might be that Google want to save money by not having
6083 to pay the video tax to MPEG-LA at all, and thus want to move to a
6084 video format not requiring royalties at all. A third reason might be
6085 that the Chrome development team simply want to avoid the
6086 Chrome/Chromium split to get more help with the development of Chrome.
6087 I guess time will tell.
</p
>
6089 <p
>Update
2011-
01-
15: The Google Chrome team provided
6090 <a href=
"http://blog.chromium.org/
2011/
01/more-about-chrome-html-video-codec.html
">more
6091 background and information on the move
</a
> it a blog post yesterday.
</p
>
6096 <title>What standards are Free and Open as defined by Digistan?
</title>
6097 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_standards_are_Free_and_Open_as_defined_by_Digistan_.html
</link>
6098 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_standards_are_Free_and_Open_as_defined_by_Digistan_.html
</guid>
6099 <pubDate>Thu,
30 Dec
2010 23:
15:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
6100 <description><p
>After trying to
6101 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_Ogg_Theora_a_free_and_open_standard_.html
">compare
6102 Ogg Theora
</a
> to
6103 <a href=
"http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition
">the Digistan
6104 definition
</a
> of a free and open standard, I concluded that this need
6105 to be done for more standards and started on a framework for doing
6106 this. As a start, I want to get the status for all the standards in
6107 the Norwegian reference directory, which include UTF-
8, HTML, PDF, ODF,
6108 JPEG, PNG, SVG and others. But to be able to complete this in a
6109 reasonable time frame, I will need help.
</p
>
6111 <p
>If you want to help out with this work, please visit
6112 <a href=
"http://wiki.nuug.no/grupper/standard/digistan-analyse
">the
6113 wiki pages I have set up for this
</a
>, and let me know that you want
6114 to help out. The IRC channel #nuug on irc.freenode.net is a good
6115 place to coordinate this for now, as it is the IRC channel for the
6116 NUUG association where I have created the framework (I am the leader
6117 of the Norwegian Unix User Group).
</p
>
6119 <p
>The framework is still forming, and a lot is left to do. Do not be
6120 scared by the sketchy form of the current pages. :)
</p
>
6125 <title>The many definitions of a open standard
</title>
6126 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_many_definitions_of_a_open_standard.html
</link>
6127 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_many_definitions_of_a_open_standard.html
</guid>
6128 <pubDate>Mon,
27 Dec
2010 14:
45:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
6129 <description><p
>One of the reasons I like the Digistan definition of
6130 "<a href=
"http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition
">Free and
6131 Open Standard
</a
>" is that this is a new term, and thus the meaning of
6132 the term has been decided by Digistan. The term
"Open Standard
" has
6133 become so misunderstood that it is no longer very useful when talking
6134 about standards. One end up discussing which definition is the best
6135 one and with such frame the only one gaining are the proponents of
6136 de-facto standards and proprietary solutions.
</p
>
6138 <p
>But to give us an idea about the diversity of definitions of open
6139 standards, here are a few that I know about. This list is not
6140 complete, but can be a starting point for those that want to do a
6141 complete survey. More definitions are available on the
6142 <a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard
">wikipedia
6143 page
</a
>.
</p
>
6145 <p
>First off is my favourite, the definition from the European
6146 Interoperability Framework version
1.0. Really sad to notice that BSA
6147 and others has succeeded in getting it removed from version
2.0 of the
6148 framework by stacking the committee drafting the new version with
6149 their own people. Anyway, the definition is still available and it
6150 include the key properties needed to make sure everyone can use a
6151 specification on equal terms.
</p
>
6155 <p
>The following are the minimal characteristics that a specification
6156 and its attendant documents must have in order to be considered an
6157 open standard:
</p
>
6161 <li
>The standard is adopted and will be maintained by a not-for-profit
6162 organisation, and its ongoing development occurs on the basis of an
6163 open decision-making procedure available to all interested parties
6164 (consensus or majority decision etc.).
</li
>
6166 <li
>The standard has been published and the standard specification
6167 document is available either freely or at a nominal charge. It must be
6168 permissible to all to copy, distribute and use it for no fee or at a
6169 nominal fee.
</li
>
6171 <li
>The intellectual property - i.e. patents possibly present - of
6172 (parts of) the standard is made irrevocably available on a royalty-
6173 free basis.
</li
>
6175 <li
>There are no constraints on the re-use of the standard.
</li
>
6180 <p
>Another one originates from my friends over at
6181 <a href=
"http://www.dkuug.dk/
">DKUUG
</a
>, who coined and gathered
6182 support for
<a href=
"http://www.aaben-standard.dk/
">this
6183 definition
</a
> in
2004. It even made it into the Danish parlament as
6184 <a href=
"http://www.ft.dk/dokumenter/tingdok.aspx?/samling/
20051/beslutningsforslag/B103/som_fremsat.htm
">their
6185 definition of a open standard
</a
>. Another from a different part of
6186 the Danish government is available from the wikipedia page.
</p
>
6190 <p
>En åben standard opfylder følgende krav:
</p
>
6194 <li
>Veldokumenteret med den fuldstændige specifikation offentligt
6195 tilgængelig.
</li
>
6197 <li
>Frit implementerbar uden økonomiske, politiske eller juridiske
6198 begrænsninger på implementation og anvendelse.
</li
>
6200 <li
>Standardiseret og vedligeholdt i et åbent forum (en såkaldt
6201 "standardiseringsorganisation
") via en åben proces.
</li
>
6207 <p
>Then there is
<a href=
"http://www.fsfe.org/projects/os/def.html
">the
6208 definition
</a
> from Free Software Foundation Europe.
</p
>
6212 <p
>An Open Standard refers to a format or protocol that is
</p
>
6216 <li
>subject to full public assessment and use without constraints in a
6217 manner equally available to all parties;
</li
>
6219 <li
>without any components or extensions that have dependencies on
6220 formats or protocols that do not meet the definition of an Open
6221 Standard themselves;
</li
>
6223 <li
>free from legal or technical clauses that limit its utilisation by
6224 any party or in any business model;
</li
>
6226 <li
>managed and further developed independently of any single vendor
6227 in a process open to the equal participation of competitors and third
6230 <li
>available in multiple complete implementations by competing
6231 vendors, or as a complete implementation equally available to all
6238 <p
>A long time ago, SUN Microsystems, now bought by Oracle, created
6240 <a href=
"http://blogs.sun.com/dennisding/resource/Open%
20Standard%
20Definition.pdf
">Open
6241 Standards Checklist
</a
> with a fairly detailed description.
</p
>
6244 <p
>Creation and Management of an Open Standard
6248 <li
>Its development and management process must be collaborative and
6253 <li
>Participation must be accessible to all those who wish to
6254 participate and can meet fair and reasonable criteria
6255 imposed by the organization under which it is developed
6256 and managed.
</li
>
6258 <li
>The processes must be documented and, through a known
6259 method, can be changed through input from all
6260 participants.
</li
>
6262 <li
>The process must be based on formal and binding commitments for
6263 the disclosure and licensing of intellectual property rights.
</li
>
6265 <li
>Development and management should strive for consensus,
6266 and an appeals process must be clearly outlined.
</li
>
6268 <li
>The standard specification must be open to extensive
6269 public review at least once in its life-cycle, with
6270 comments duly discussed and acted upon, if required.
</li
>
6278 <p
>Use and Licensing of an Open Standard
</p
>
6281 <li
>The standard must describe an interface, not an implementation,
6282 and the industry must be capable of creating multiple, competing
6283 implementations to the interface described in the standard without
6284 undue or restrictive constraints. Interfaces include APIs,
6285 protocols, schemas, data formats and their encoding.
</li
>
6287 <li
> The standard must not contain any proprietary
"hooks
" that create
6288 a technical or economic barriers
</li
>
6290 <li
>Faithful implementations of the standard must
6291 interoperate. Interoperability means the ability of a computer
6292 program to communicate and exchange information with other computer
6293 programs and mutually to use the information which has been
6294 exchanged. This includes the ability to use, convert, or exchange
6295 file formats, protocols, schemas, interface information or
6296 conventions, so as to permit the computer program to work with other
6297 computer programs and users in all the ways in which they are
6298 intended to function.
</li
>
6300 <li
>It must be permissible for anyone to copy, distribute and read the
6301 standard for a nominal fee, or even no fee. If there is a fee, it
6302 must be low enough to not preclude widespread use.
</li
>
6304 <li
>It must be possible for anyone to obtain free (no royalties or
6305 fees; also known as
"royalty free
"), worldwide, non-exclusive and
6306 perpetual licenses to all essential patent claims to make, use and
6307 sell products based on the standard. The only exceptions are
6308 terminations per the reciprocity and defensive suspension terms
6309 outlined below. Essential patent claims include pending, unpublished
6310 patents, published patents, and patent applications. The license is
6311 only for the exact scope of the standard in question.
6315 <li
> May be conditioned only on reciprocal licenses to any of
6316 licensees
' patent claims essential to practice that standard
6317 (also known as a reciprocity clause)
</li
>
6319 <li
> May be terminated as to any licensee who sues the licensor
6320 or any other licensee for infringement of patent claims
6321 essential to practice that standard (also known as a
6322 "defensive suspension
" clause)
</li
>
6324 <li
> The same licensing terms are available to every potential
6330 <li
>The licensing terms of an open standards must not preclude
6331 implementations of that standard under open source licensing terms
6332 or restricted licensing terms
</li
>
6338 <p
>It is said that one of the nice things about standards is that
6339 there are so many of them. As you can see, the same holds true for
6340 open standard definitions. Most of the definitions have a lot in
6341 common, and it is not really controversial what properties a open
6342 standard should have, but the diversity of definitions have made it
6343 possible for those that want to avoid a level marked field and real
6344 competition to downplay the significance of open standards. I hope we
6345 can turn this tide by focusing on the advantages of Free and Open
6346 Standards.
</p
>
6351 <title>Is Ogg Theora a free and open standard?
</title>
6352 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_Ogg_Theora_a_free_and_open_standard_.html
</link>
6353 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_Ogg_Theora_a_free_and_open_standard_.html
</guid>
6354 <pubDate>Sat,
25 Dec
2010 20:
25:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
6355 <description><p
><a href=
"http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition
">The
6356 Digistan definition
</a
> of a free and open standard reads like this:
</p
>
6360 <p
>The Digital Standards Organization defines free and open standard
6361 as follows:
</p
>
6365 <li
>A free and open standard is immune to vendor capture at all stages
6366 in its life-cycle. Immunity from vendor capture makes it possible to
6367 freely use, improve upon, trust, and extend a standard over time.
</li
>
6369 <li
>The standard is adopted and will be maintained by a not-for-profit
6370 organisation, and its ongoing development occurs on the basis of an
6371 open decision-making procedure available to all interested
6374 <li
>The standard has been published and the standard specification
6375 document is available freely. It must be permissible to all to copy,
6376 distribute, and use it freely.
</li
>
6378 <li
>The patents possibly present on (parts of) the standard are made
6379 irrevocably available on a royalty-free basis.
</li
>
6381 <li
>There are no constraints on the re-use of the standard.
</li
>
6385 <p
>The economic outcome of a free and open standard, which can be
6386 measured, is that it enables perfect competition between suppliers of
6387 products based on the standard.
</p
>
6390 <p
>For a while now I have tried to figure out of Ogg Theora is a free
6391 and open standard according to this definition. Here is a short
6392 writeup of what I have been able to gather so far. I brought up the
6393 topic on the Xiph advocacy mailing list
6394 <a href=
"http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/advocacy/
2009-July/
001632.html
">in
6395 July
2009</a
>, for those that want to see some background information.
6396 According to Ivo Emanuel Gonçalves and Monty Montgomery on that list
6397 the Ogg Theora specification fulfils the Digistan definition.
</p
>
6399 <p
><strong
>Free from vendor capture?
</strong
></p
>
6401 <p
>As far as I can see, there is no single vendor that can control the
6402 Ogg Theora specification. It can be argued that the
6403 <a href=
"http://www.xiph.org/
">Xiph foundation
</A
> is such vendor, but
6404 given that it is a non-profit foundation with the expressed goal
6405 making free and open protocols and standards available, it is not
6406 obvious that this is a real risk. One issue with the Xiph
6407 foundation is that its inner working (as in board member list, or who
6408 control the foundation) are not easily available on the web. I
've
6409 been unable to find out who is in the foundation board, and have not
6410 seen any accounting information documenting how money is handled nor
6411 where is is spent in the foundation. It is thus not obvious for an
6412 external observer who control The Xiph foundation, and for all I know
6413 it is possible for a single vendor to take control over the
6414 specification. But it seem unlikely.
</p
>
6416 <p
><strong
>Maintained by open not-for-profit organisation?
</strong
></p
>
6418 <p
>Assuming that the Xiph foundation is the organisation its web pages
6419 claim it to be, this point is fulfilled. If Xiph foundation is
6420 controlled by a single vendor, it isn
't, but I have not found any
6421 documentation indicating this.
</p
>
6423 <p
>According to
6424 <a href=
"http://media.hiof.no/diverse/fad/rapport_4.pdf
">a report
</a
>
6425 prepared by Audun Vaaler og Børre Ludvigsen for the Norwegian
6426 government, the Xiph foundation is a non-commercial organisation and
6427 the development process is open, transparent and non-Discrimatory.
6428 Until proven otherwise, I believe it make most sense to believe the
6429 report is correct.
</p
>
6431 <p
><strong
>Specification freely available?
</strong
></p
>
6433 <p
>The specification for the
<a href=
"http://www.xiph.org/ogg/doc/
">Ogg
6434 container format
</a
> and both the
6435 <a href=
"http://www.xiph.org/vorbis/doc/
">Vorbis
</a
> and
6436 <a href=
"http://theora.org/doc/
">Theora
</a
> codeces are available on
6437 the web. This are the terms in the Vorbis and Theora specification:
6441 Anyone may freely use and distribute the Ogg and [Vorbis/Theora]
6442 specifications, whether in private, public, or corporate
6443 capacity. However, the Xiph.Org Foundation and the Ogg project reserve
6444 the right to set the Ogg [Vorbis/Theora] specification and certify
6445 specification compliance.
6449 <p
>The Ogg container format is specified in IETF
6450 <a href=
"http://www.xiph.org/ogg/doc/rfc3533.txt
">RFC
3533</a
>, and
6451 this is the term:
<p
>
6455 <p
>This document and translations of it may be copied and furnished to
6456 others, and derivative works that comment on or otherwise explain it
6457 or assist in its implementation may be prepared, copied, published and
6458 distributed, in whole or in part, without restriction of any kind,
6459 provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph are
6460 included on all such copies and derivative works. However, this
6461 document itself may not be modified in any way, such as by removing
6462 the copyright notice or references to the Internet Society or other
6463 Internet organizations, except as needed for the purpose of developing
6464 Internet standards in which case the procedures for copyrights defined
6465 in the Internet Standards process must be followed, or as required to
6466 translate it into languages other than English.
</p
>
6468 <p
>The limited permissions granted above are perpetual and will not be
6469 revoked by the Internet Society or its successors or assigns.
</p
>
6472 <p
>All these terms seem to allow unlimited distribution and use, an
6473 this term seem to be fulfilled. There might be a problem with the
6474 missing permission to distribute modified versions of the text, and
6475 thus reuse it in other specifications. Not quite sure if that is a
6476 requirement for the Digistan definition.
</p
>
6478 <p
><strong
>Royalty-free?
</strong
></p
>
6480 <p
>There are no known patent claims requiring royalties for the Ogg
6482 <a href=
"http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=
65782">MPEG-LA
</a
>
6484 <a href=
"http://yro.slashdot.org/story/
10/
04/
30/
237238/Steve-Jobs-Hints-At-Theora-Lawsuit
">Steve
6485 Jobs
</a
> in Apple claim to know about some patent claims (submarine
6486 patents) against the Theora format, but no-one else seem to believe
6487 them. Both Opera Software and the Mozilla Foundation have looked into
6488 this and decided to implement Ogg Theora support in their browsers
6489 without paying any royalties. For now the claims from MPEG-LA and
6490 Steve Jobs seem more like FUD to scare people to use the H
.264 codec
6491 than any real problem with Ogg Theora.
</p
>
6493 <p
><strong
>No constraints on re-use?
</strong
></p
>
6495 <p
>I am not aware of any constraints on re-use.
</p
>
6497 <p
><strong
>Conclusion
</strong
></p
>
6499 <p
>3 of
5 requirements seem obviously fulfilled, and the remaining
2
6500 depend on the governing structure of the Xiph foundation. Given the
6501 background report used by the Norwegian government, I believe it is
6502 safe to assume the last two requirements are fulfilled too, but it
6503 would be nice if the Xiph foundation web site made it easier to verify
6506 <p
>It would be nice to see other analysis of other specifications to
6507 see if they are free and open standards.
</p
>
6512 <title>The reply from Edgar Villanueva to Microsoft in Peru
</title>
6513 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_reply_from_Edgar_Villanueva_to_Microsoft_in_Peru.html
</link>
6514 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_reply_from_Edgar_Villanueva_to_Microsoft_in_Peru.html
</guid>
6515 <pubDate>Sat,
25 Dec
2010 10:
50:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
6516 <description><p
>A few days ago
6517 <a href=
"http://www.idg.no/computerworld/article189879.ece
">an
6518 article
</a
> in the Norwegian Computerworld magazine about how version
6520 <a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Interoperability_Framework
">European
6521 Interoperability Framework
</a
> has been successfully lobbied by the
6522 proprietary software industry to remove the focus on free software.
6523 Nothing very surprising there, given
6524 <a href=
"http://news.slashdot.org/story/
10/
03/
29/
2115235/Open-Source-Open-Standards-Under-Attack-In-Europe
">earlier
6525 reports
</a
> on how Microsoft and others have stacked the committees in
6526 this work. But I find this very sad. The definition of
6527 <a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/dokumenter/standard-presse-def-
200506.txt
">an
6528 open standard from version
1</a
> was very good, and something I
6529 believe should be used also in the future, alongside
6530 <a href=
"http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition
">the
6531 definition from Digistan
</A
>. Version
2 have removed the open
6532 standard definition from its content.
</p
>
6534 <p
>Anyway, the news reminded me of the great reply sent by Dr. Edgar
6535 Villanueva, congressman in Peru at the time, to Microsoft as a reply
6536 to Microsofts attack on his proposal regarding the use of free software
6537 in the public sector in Peru. As the text was not available from a
6538 few of the URLs where it used to be available, I copy it here from
6539 <a href=
"http://gnuwin.epfl.ch/articles/en/reponseperou/villanueva_to_ms.html
">my
6540 source
</a
> to ensure it is available also in the future. Some
6541 background information about that story is available in
6542 <a href=
"http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/
6099">an article
</a
> from
6543 Linux Journal in
2002.
</p
>
6546 <p
>Lima,
8th of April,
2002<br
>
6547 To: Señor JUAN ALBERTO GONZÁLEZ
<br
>
6548 General Manager of Microsoft Perú
</p
>
6550 <p
>Dear Sir:
</p
>
6552 <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
>
6554 <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
>
6556 <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
>
6558 <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
>
6562 <li
>Free access to public information by the citizen.
</li
>
6563 <li
>Permanence of public data.
</li
>
6564 <li
>Security of the State and citizens.
</li
>
6568 <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
>
6570 <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
>
6572 <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
>
6574 <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
>
6576 <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
>
6579 <p
>From reading the Bill it will be clear that once passed:
<br
>
6580 <li
>the law does not forbid the production of proprietary software
</li
>
6581 <li
>the law does not forbid the sale of proprietary software
</li
>
6582 <li
>the law does not specify which concrete software to use
</li
>
6583 <li
>the law does not dictate the supplier from whom software will be bought
</li
>
6584 <li
>the law does not limit the terms under which a software product can be licensed.
</li
>
6588 <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
>
6590 <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
>
6592 <p
>As for the observations you have made, we will now go on to analyze them in detail:
</p
>
6594 <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
>
6596 <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
>
6598 <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
>
6600 <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
>
6602 <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
>
6604 <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
>
6606 <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
>
6608 <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
>
6610 <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
>
6612 <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
>
6614 <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
>
6616 <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
>
6618 <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
>
6620 <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
>
6622 <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
>
6624 <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
>
6626 <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
>
6628 <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
>
6630 <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
>
6632 <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
>
6634 <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
>
6636 <p
>On security:
</p
>
6638 <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
>
6640 <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
>
6642 <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
>
6644 <p
>In respect of the guarantee:
</p
>
6646 <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
>
6648 <p
>On Intellectual Property:
</p
>
6650 <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
>
6652 <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
>
6654 <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
>
6656 <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
>
6658 <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
>
6660 <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
>
6662 <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
>
6664 <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
>
6666 <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
>
6668 <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
>
6670 <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
>
6672 <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
>
6674 <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
>
6676 <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
>
6678 <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
>
6680 <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
>
6682 <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
>
6684 <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
>
6686 <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
>
6688 <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
>
6690 <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
>
6692 <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
>
6694 <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
>
6696 <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
>
6698 <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
>
6700 <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
>
6702 <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
>
6704 <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
>
6706 <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
>
6708 <p
>Cordially,
<br
>
6709 DR. EDGAR DAVID VILLANUEVA NUÑEZ
<br
>
6710 Congressman of the Republic of Perú.
</p
>
6716 <title>Officeshots still going strong
</title>
6717 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_still_going_strong.html
</link>
6718 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_still_going_strong.html
</guid>
6719 <pubDate>Sat,
25 Dec
2010 09:
40:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
6720 <description><p
>Half a year ago I
6721 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_taking_shape.html
">wrote
6722 a bit
</a
> about
<a href=
"http://www.officeshots.org/
">OfficeShots
</a
>,
6723 a web service to allow anyone to test how ODF documents are handled by
6724 the different programs reading and writing the ODF format.
</p
>
6726 <p
>I just had a look at the service, and it seem to be going strong.
6727 Very interesting to see the results reported in the gallery, how
6728 different Office implementations handle different ODF features. Sad
6729 to see that KOffice was not doing it very well, and happy to see that
6730 LibreOffice has been tested already (but sadly not listed as a option
6731 for OfficeShots users yet). I am glad to see that the ODF community
6732 got such a great test tool available.
</p
>
6737 <title>How to test if a laptop is working with Linux
</title>
6738 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_test_if_a_laptop_is_working_with_Linux.html
</link>
6739 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_test_if_a_laptop_is_working_with_Linux.html
</guid>
6740 <pubDate>Wed,
22 Dec
2010 14:
55:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
6741 <description><p
>The last few days I have spent at work here at the
<a
6742 href=
"http://www.uio.no/
">University of Oslo
</a
> testing if the new
6743 batch of computers will work with Linux. Every year for the last few
6744 years the university have organised shared bid of a few thousand
6745 computers, and this year HP won the bid. Two different desktops and
6746 five different laptops are on the list this year. We in the UNIX
6747 group want to know which one of these computers work well with RHEL
6748 and Ubuntu, the two Linux distributions we currently handle at the
6749 university.
</p
>
6751 <p
>My test method is simple, and I share it here to get feedback and
6752 perhaps inspire others to test hardware as well. To test, I PXE
6753 install the OS version of choice, and log in as my normal user and run
6754 a few applications and plug in selected pieces of hardware. When
6755 something fail, I make a note about this in the test matrix and move
6756 on. If I have some spare time I try to report the bug to the OS
6757 vendor, but as I only have the machines for a short time, I rarely
6758 have the time to do this for all the problems I find.
</p
>
6760 <p
>Anyway, to get to the point of this post. Here is the simple tests
6761 I perform on a new model.
</p
>
6765 <li
>Is PXE installation working? I
'm testing with RHEL6, Ubuntu Lucid
6766 and Ubuntu Maverik at the moment. If I feel like it, I also test with
6767 RHEL5 and Debian Edu/Squeeze.
</li
>
6769 <li
>Is X.org working? If the graphical login screen show up after
6770 installation, X.org is working.
</li
>
6772 <li
>Is hardware accelerated OpenGL working? Running glxgears (in
6773 package mesa-utils on Ubuntu) and writing down the frames per second
6774 reported by the program.
</li
>
6776 <li
>Is sound working? With Gnome and KDE, a sound is played when
6777 logging in, and if I can hear this the test is successful. If there
6778 are several audio exits on the machine, I try them all and check if
6779 the Gnome/KDE audio mixer can control where to send the sound. I
6780 normally test this by playing
6781 <a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/
20101012-chef/
">a HTML5
6782 video
</a
> in Firefox/Iceweasel.
</li
>
6784 <li
>Is the USB subsystem working? I test this by plugging in a USB
6785 memory stick and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.
</li
>
6787 <li
>Is the CD/DVD player working? I test this by inserting any CD/DVD
6788 I have lying around, and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.
</li
>
6790 <li
>Is any built in camera working? Test using cheese, and see if a
6791 picture from the v4l device show up.
</li
>
6793 <li
>Is bluetooth working? Use the Gnome/KDE browsing tool to see if
6794 any bluetooth devices are discovered. In my office, I normally see a
6797 <li
>For laptops, is the SD or Compaq Flash reader working. I have
6798 memory modules lying around, and stick them in and see if Gnome/KDE
6799 notice this.
</li
>
6801 <li
>For laptops, is suspend/hibernate working? I
'm testing if the
6802 special button work, and if the laptop continue to work after
6805 <li
>For laptops, is the extra buttons working, like audio level,
6806 adjusting background light, switching on/off external video output,
6807 switching on/off wifi, bluetooth, etc? The set of buttons differ from
6808 laptop to laptop, so I just write down which are working and which are
6811 <li
>Some laptops have smart card readers, finger print readers,
6812 acceleration sensors etc. I rarely test these, as I do not know how
6813 to quickly test if they are working or not, so I only document their
6814 existence.
</li
>
6818 <p
>By now I suspect you are really curious what the test results are
6819 for the HP machines I am testing. I
'm not done yet, so I will report
6820 the test results later. For now I can report that HP
8100 Elite work
6821 fine, and hibernation fail with HP EliteBook
8440p on Ubuntu Lucid,
6822 and audio fail on RHEL6. Ubuntu Maverik worked with
8440p. As you
6823 can see, I have most machines left to test. One interesting
6824 observation is that Ubuntu Lucid has almost twice the frame rate than
6825 RHEL6 with glxgears. No idea why.
</p
>
6830 <title>Some thoughts on BitCoins
</title>
6831 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_thoughts_on_BitCoins.html
</link>
6832 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_thoughts_on_BitCoins.html
</guid>
6833 <pubDate>Sat,
11 Dec
2010 15:
10:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
6834 <description><p
>As I continue to explore
6835 <a href=
"http://www.bitcoin.org/
">BitCoin
</a
>, I
've starting to wonder
6836 what properties the system have, and how it will be affected by laws
6837 and regulations here in Norway. Here are some random notes.
</p
>
6839 <p
>One interesting thing to note is that since the transactions are
6840 verified using a peer to peer network, all details about a transaction
6841 is known to everyone. This means that if a BitCoin address has been
6842 published like I did with mine in my initial post about BitCoin, it is
6843 possible for everyone to see how many BitCoins have been transfered to
6844 that address. There is even a web service to look at the details for
6845 all transactions. There I can see that my address
6846 <a href=
"http://blockexplorer.com/address/
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a
>
6847 have received
16.06 Bitcoin, the
6848 <a href=
"http://blockexplorer.com/address/
1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv
8MHqvwst
3">1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv
8MHqvwst
3</a
>
6849 address of Simon Phipps have received
181.97 BitCoin and the address
6850 <a href=
"http://blockexplorer.com/address/
1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt
">1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt
</A
>
6851 of EFF have received
2447.38 BitCoins so far. Thank you to each and
6852 every one of you that donated bitcoins to support my activity. The
6853 fact that anyone can see how much money was transfered to a given
6854 address make it more obvious why the BitCoin community recommend to
6855 generate and hand out a new address for each transaction. I
'm told
6856 there is no way to track which addresses belong to a given person or
6857 organisation without the person or organisation revealing it
6858 themselves, as Simon, EFF and I have done.
</p
>
6860 <p
>In Norway, and in most other countries, there are laws and
6861 regulations limiting how much money one can transfer across the border
6862 without declaring it. There are money laundering, tax and accounting
6863 laws and regulations I would expect to apply to the use of BitCoin.
6864 If the Skolelinux foundation
6865 (
<a href=
"http://linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html
">SLX
6866 Debian Labs
</a
>) were to accept donations in BitCoin in addition to
6867 normal bank transfers like EFF is doing, how should this be accounted?
6868 Given that it is impossible to know if money can cross the border or
6869 not, should everything or nothing be declared? What exchange rate
6870 should be used when calculating taxes? Would receivers have to pay
6871 income tax if the foundation were to pay Skolelinux contributors in
6872 BitCoin? I have no idea, but it would be interesting to know.
</p
>
6874 <p
>For a currency to be useful and successful, it must be trusted and
6875 accepted by a lot of users. It must be possible to get easy access to
6876 the currency (as a wage or using currency exchanges), and it must be
6877 easy to spend it. At the moment BitCoin seem fairly easy to get
6878 access to, but there are very few places to spend it. I am not really
6879 a regular user of any of the vendor types currently accepting BitCoin,
6880 so I wonder when my kind of shop would start accepting BitCoins. I
6881 would like to buy electronics, travels and subway tickets, not herbs
6882 and books. :) The currency is young, and this will improve over time
6883 if it become popular, but I suspect regular banks will start to lobby
6884 to get BitCoin declared illegal if it become popular. I
'm sure they
6885 will claim it is helping fund terrorism and money laundering (which
6886 probably would be true, as is any currency in existence), but I
6887 believe the problems should be solved elsewhere and not by blaming
6888 currencies.
</p
>
6890 <p
>The process of creating new BitCoins is called mining, and it is
6891 CPU intensive process that depend on a bit of luck as well (as one is
6892 competing against all the other miners currently spending CPU cycles
6893 to see which one get the next lump of cash). The
"winner
" get
50
6894 BitCoin when this happen. Yesterday I came across the obvious way to
6895 join forces to increase ones changes of getting at least some coins,
6896 by coordinating the work on mining BitCoins across several machines
6897 and people, and sharing the result if one is lucky and get the
50
6899 <a href=
"http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/bitcoin-pool/
">BitCoin Pool
</a
>
6900 if this sounds interesting. I have not had time to try to set up a
6901 machine to participate there yet, but have seen that running on ones
6902 own for a few days have not yield any BitCoins througth mining
6905 <p
>Update
2010-
12-
15: Found an
<a
6906 href=
"http://inertia.posterous.com/reply-to-the-underground-economist-why-bitcoi
">interesting
6907 criticism
</a
> of bitcoin. Not quite sure how valid it is, but thought
6908 it was interesting to read. The arguments presented seem to be
6909 equally valid for gold, which was used as a currency for many years.
</p
>
6914 <title>Now accepting bitcoins - anonymous and distributed p2p crypto-money
</title>
6915 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html
</link>
6916 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html
</guid>
6917 <pubDate>Fri,
10 Dec
2010 08:
20:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
6918 <description><p
>With this weeks lawless
6919 <a href=
"http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/
2010/
12/
06/wikileaks/index.html
">governmental
6920 attacks
</a
> on Wikileak and
6921 <a href=
"http://www.salon.com/technology/dan_gillmor/
2010/
12/
06/war_on_speech
">free
6922 speech
</a
>, it has become obvious that PayPal, visa and mastercard can
6923 not be trusted to handle money transactions.
6925 <a href=
"http://webmink.com/
2010/
12/
06/now-accepting-bitcoin/
">Simon
6926 Phipps on bitcoin
</a
> reminded me about a project that a friend of
6927 mine mentioned earlier. I decided to follow Simon
's example, and get
6928 involved with
<a href=
"http://www.bitcoin.org/
">BitCoin
</a
>. I got
6929 some help from my friend to get it all running, and he even handed me
6930 some bitcoins to get started. I even donated a few bitcoins to Simon
6931 for helping me remember BitCoin.
</p
>
6933 <p
>So, what is bitcoins, you probably wonder? It is a digital
6934 crypto-currency, decentralised and handled using peer-to-peer
6935 networks. It allows anonymous transactions and prohibits central
6936 control over the transactions, making it impossible for governments
6937 and companies alike to block donations and other transactions. The
6938 source is free software, and while the key dependency wxWidgets
2.9
6939 for the graphical user interface is missing in Debian, the command
6940 line client builds just fine. Hopefully Jonas
6941 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
578157">will get the package into
6942 Debian
</a
> soon.
</p
>
6944 <p
>Bitcoins can be converted to other currencies, like USD and EUR.
6945 There are
<a href=
"http://www.bitcoin.org/trade
">companies accepting
6946 bitcoins
</a
> when selling services and goods, and there are even
6947 currency
"stock
" markets where the exchange rate is decided. There
6948 are not many users so far, but the concept seems promising. If you
6949 want to get started and lack a friend with any bitcoins to spare,
6951 <a href=
"https://freebitcoins.appspot.com/
">some for free
</a
> (
0.05
6952 bitcoin at the time of writing). Use
6953 <a href=
"http://www.bitcoinwatch.com/
">BitcoinWatch
</a
> to keep an eye
6954 on the current exchange rates.
</p
>
6956 <p
>As an experiment, I have decided to set up bitcoind on one of my
6957 machines. If you want to support my activity, please send Bitcoin
6958 donations to the address
6959 <b
>15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</b
>. Thank you!
</p
>
6964 <title>Student group continue the work on my Reprap
3D printer
</title>
6965 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Student_group_continue_the_work_on_my_Reprap_3D_printer.html
</link>
6966 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Student_group_continue_the_work_on_my_Reprap_3D_printer.html
</guid>
6967 <pubDate>Thu,
9 Dec
2010 19:
30:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
6968 <description><p
>A few days ago, I was introduces to some students in the robot
6969 student assosiation
<a href=
"http://www.robotica.no/
">Robotica
6970 Osloensis
</a
> at the University of Oslo where I work, who planned to
6971 get their own
3D printer. They wanted to learn from me based on my
6972 work in the area. After having a short lunch meeting with them, I
6973 offered them to borrow my reprap kit, as I never had time to complete
6974 the build and this seem unlike to change any time soon. I look
6975 forward to see how this goes. This monday their volunteer driver
6976 picked up my kit and drove it to their lab, and tomorrow I am told the
6977 last exam is over so they can start work on getting the
3D printer
6978 operational.
</p
>
6980 <p
>The robotic group have already build several robots on their own,
6981 and seem capable of getting the reprap operational. I really look
6982 forward to being able to print all the cool
3D designs published on
6983 <a href=
"http://www.thingiverse.com/
">Thingiverse
</a
>. I even got
6984 some
3D scans I got made during Dagen@IFI when one of the groups at
6985 the computer science department at the university demonstrated their
6986 very cool
3D scanner.
</p
>
6991 <title>Debian Edu development gathering and General Assembly for FRiSK
</title>
6992 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_development_gathering_and_General_Assembly_for_FRiSK.html
</link>
6993 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_development_gathering_and_General_Assembly_for_FRiSK.html
</guid>
6994 <pubDate>Mon,
29 Nov
2010 18:
40:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
6995 <description><p
>On friday, the first Debian Edu / Skolelinux
6996 <a href=
"http://www.friprogramvareiskolen.no/Gathering/
2010-
12-
03-
05-Oslo
">development
6997 gathering
</a
> in a long time take place here in Oslo, Norway. I
6998 really look forward to seeing all the good people working on the
6999 Squeeze release. The gathering is open for everyone interested in
7000 learning more about Debian Edu / Skolelinux.
</p
>
7002 <p
>On Saturday, the Norwegian member organization taking care of
7003 organizing these development gatherings, Fri Programvare i Skolen,
7005 <a href=
"http://friprogramvareiskolen.no/Genfors/
2010">General Assembly
7006 for
2010</a
>. Membership is open for all, and currently there are
388
7007 people registered as members. Last year
32 members cast their vote in
7008 the memberdb based election system. I hope more people find time to
7009 vote this year.
</p
>
7014 <title>Why isn
't Debian Edu using VLC?
</title>
7015 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_isn_t_Debian_Edu_using_VLC_.html
</link>
7016 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_isn_t_Debian_Edu_using_VLC_.html
</guid>
7017 <pubDate>Sat,
27 Nov
2010 11:
30:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
7018 <description><p
>In the latest issue of Linux Journal, the readers choices were
7019 presented, and the winner among the multimedia player were VLC.
7020 Personally, I like VLC, and it is my player of choice when I first try
7021 to play a video file or stream. Only if VLC fail will I drag out
7022 gmplayer to see if it can do better. The reason is mostly the failure
7023 model and trust. When VLC fail, it normally pop up a error message
7024 reporting the problem. When mplayer fail, it normally segfault or
7025 just hangs. The latter failure mode drain my trust in the program.
<p
>
7027 <p
>But even if VLC is my player of choice, we have choosen to use
7028 mplayer in
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian
7029 Edu/Skolelinux
</a
>. The reason is simple. We need a good browser
7030 plugin to play web videos seamlessly, and the VLC browser plugin is
7031 not very good. For example, it lack in-line control buttons, so there
7032 is no way for the user to pause the video. Also, when I
7033 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia
">last
7034 tested the browser plugins
</a
> available in Debian, the VLC plugin
7035 failed on several video pages where mplayer based plugins worked. If
7036 the browser plugin for VLC was as good as the gecko-mediaplayer
7037 package (which uses mplayer), we would switch.
</P
>
7039 <p
>While VLC is a good player, its user interface is slightly
7040 annoying. The most annoying feature is its inconsistent use of
7041 keyboard shortcuts. When the player is in full screen mode, its
7042 shortcuts are different from when it is playing the video in a window.
7043 For example, space only work as pause when in full screen mode. I
7044 wish it had consisten shortcuts and that space also would work when in
7045 window mode. Another nice shortcut in gmplayer is [enter] to restart
7046 the current video. It is very nice when playing short videos from the
7047 web and want to restart it when new people arrive to have a look at
7048 what is going on.
</p
>
7053 <title>Lenny-
>Squeeze upgrades of the Gnome and KDE desktop, now with apt-get autoremove
</title>
7054 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades_of_the_Gnome_and_KDE_desktop__now_with_apt_get_autoremove.html
</link>
7055 <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>
7056 <pubDate>Mon,
22 Nov
2010 14:
15:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
7057 <description><p
>Michael Biebl suggested to me on IRC, that I changed my automated
7058 upgrade testing of the
7059 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/
">Lenny
7060 Gnome and KDE Desktop
</a
> to do
<tt
>apt-get autoremove
</tt
> when using apt-get.
7061 This seem like a very good idea, so I adjusted by test scripts and
7062 can now present the updated result from today:
</p
>
7064 <p
>This is for Gnome:
</p
>
7066 <p
>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude
</p
>
7068 <blockquote
><p
>
7073 browser-plugin-gnash
7080 freedesktop-sound-theme
7082 gconf-defaults-service
7097 gnome-desktop-environment
7101 gnome-session-canberra
7106 gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
7112 libapache2-mod-dnssd
7115 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3
7118 libboost-date-time1.42
.0
7119 libboost-python1.42
.0
7120 libboost-thread1.42
.0
7122 libchamplain-gtk-
0.4-
0
7124 libclutter-gtk-
0.10-
0
7131 libfreerdp-plugins-standard
7146 libgnomepanel2.24-cil
7151 libgtksourceview2.0-common
7152 libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
7153 libmono-addins0.2-cil
7154 libmono-cairo2.0-cil
7155 libmono-corlib2.0-cil
7156 libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil
7157 libmono-posix2.0-cil
7158 libmono-security2.0-cil
7159 libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
7160 libmono-system2.0-cil
7163 libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil
7164 libndesk-dbus1.0-cil
7174 libtelepathy-farsight0
7183 nautilus-sendto-empathy
7187 python-aptdaemon-gtk
7189 python-beautifulsoup
7204 python-gtksourceview2
7215 python-pkg-resources
7222 python-twisted-conch
7228 python-zope.interface
7233 rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
7240 system-config-printer-udev
7242 telepathy-mission-control-
5
7253 </p
></blockquote
>
7255 <p
>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude
</p
>
7257 <blockquote
><p
>
7263 fast-user-switch-applet
7282 libgtksourceview2.0-
0
7284 libsdl1.2debian-alsa
7290 system-config-printer
7295 </p
></blockquote
>
7297 <p
>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get
</p
>
7299 <blockquote
><p
>
7300 gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
7301 </p
></blockquote
>
7303 <p
>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get
</p
>
7305 <blockquote
><p
>
7307 </p
></blockquote
>
7309 <p
>This is for KDE:
</p
>
7311 <p
>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude
</p
>
7313 <blockquote
><p
>
7315 </p
></blockquote
>
7317 <p
>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude
</p
>
7319 <blockquote
><p
>
7322 </p
></blockquote
>
7324 <p
>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get
</p
>
7326 <blockquote
><p
>
7340 kdeartwork-emoticons
7342 kdeartwork-theme-icon
7346 kdebase-workspace-bin
7347 kdebase-workspace-data
7361 kscreensaver-xsavers
7376 plasma-dataengines-workspace
7378 plasma-desktopthemes-artwork
7379 plasma-runners-addons
7380 plasma-scriptengine-googlegadgets
7381 plasma-scriptengine-python
7382 plasma-scriptengine-qedje
7383 plasma-scriptengine-ruby
7384 plasma-scriptengine-webkit
7385 plasma-scriptengines
7386 plasma-wallpapers-addons
7387 plasma-widget-folderview
7388 plasma-widget-networkmanagement
7392 xscreensaver-data-extra
7394 xscreensaver-gl-extra
7395 xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
7396 </p
></blockquote
>
7398 <p
>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get
</p
>
7400 <blockquote
><p
>
7402 google-gadgets-common
7420 libggadget-qt-
1.0-
0b
7425 libkonqsidebarplugin4a
7434 libplasma-geolocation-interface4
7436 libplasmagenericshell4
7450 libsmokeknewstuff2-
3
7451 libsmokeknewstuff3-
3
7453 libsmokektexteditor3
7461 libsmokeqtnetwork4-
3
7467 libsmokeqtuitools4-
3
7479 plasma-dataengines-addons
7480 plasma-scriptengine-superkaramba
7481 plasma-widget-lancelot
7482 plasma-widgets-addons
7483 plasma-widgets-workspace
7487 update-notifier-common
7488 </p
></blockquote
>
7490 <p
>Running apt-get autoremove made the results using apt-get and
7491 aptitude a bit more similar, but there are still quite a lott of
7492 differences. I have no idea what packages should be installed after
7493 the upgrade, but hope those that do can have a look.
</p
>
7498 <title>Migrating Xen virtual machines using LVM to KVM using disk images
</title>
7499 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Migrating_Xen_virtual_machines_using_LVM_to_KVM_using_disk_images.html
</link>
7500 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Migrating_Xen_virtual_machines_using_LVM_to_KVM_using_disk_images.html
</guid>
7501 <pubDate>Mon,
22 Nov
2010 11:
20:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
7502 <description><p
>Most of the computers in use by the
7503 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu/Skolelinux project
</a
>
7504 are virtual machines. And they have been Xen machines running on a
7505 fairly old IBM eserver xseries
345 machine, and we wanted to migrate
7506 them to KVM on a newer Dell PowerEdge
2950 host machine. This was a
7507 bit harder that it could have been, because we set up the Xen virtual
7508 machines to get the virtual partitions from LVM, which as far as I
7509 know is not supported by KVM. So to migrate, we had to convert
7510 several LVM logical volumes to partitions on a virtual disk file.
</p
>
7513 <a href=
"http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/
35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM
">a
7514 nice recipe
</a
> to do this, and wrote the following script to do the
7515 migration. It uses qemu-img from the qemu package to make the disk
7516 image, parted to partition it, losetup and kpartx to present the disk
7517 image partions as devices, and dd to copy the data. I NFS mounted the
7518 new servers storage area on the old server to do the migration.
</p
>
7524 # http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/
35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM
7529 if [ -z
"$
1" ] ; then
7530 echo
"Usage: $
0 &lt;hostname
&gt;
"
7536 if [ ! -e /dev/vg_data/$host-disk ] ; then
7537 echo
"error: unable to find LVM volume for $host
"
7541 # Partitions need to be a bit bigger than the LVM LVs. not sure why.
7542 disksize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-disk | awk
'{sum = sum + $
4} END { print int(sum *
1.05) }
')
7543 swapsize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-swap | awk
'{sum = sum + $
4} END { print int(sum *
1.05) }
')
7544 totalsize=$(( ( $disksize + $swapsize ) ))
7547 #dd if=/dev/zero of=$img bs=
1M count=$(( $disksize + $swapsize ))
7548 qemu-img create $img ${totalsize}MMaking room on the Debian Edu/Sqeeze DVD
7550 parted $img mklabel msdos
7551 parted $img mkpart primary linux-swap
0 $disksize
7552 parted $img mkpart primary ext2 $disksize $totalsize
7553 parted $img set
1 boot on
7556 losetup /dev/loop0 $img
7557 kpartx -a /dev/loop0
7559 dd if=/dev/vg_data/$host-disk of=/dev/mapper/loop0p1 bs=
1M
7560 fsck.ext3 -f /dev/mapper/loop0p1 || true
7561 mkswap /dev/mapper/loop0p2
7563 kpartx -d /dev/loop0
7564 losetup -d /dev/loop0
7567 <p
>The script is perhaps so simple that it is not copyrightable, but
7568 if it is, it is licenced using GPL v2 or later at your discretion.
</p
>
7570 <p
>After doing this, I booted a Debian CD in rescue mode in KVM with
7571 the new disk image attached, installed grub-pc and linux-image-
686 and
7572 set up grub to boot from the disk image. After this, the KVM machines
7573 seem to work just fine.
</p
>
7578 <title>Lenny-
>Squeeze upgrades, apt vs aptitude with the Gnome and KDE desktop
</title>
7579 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__apt_vs_aptitude_with_the_Gnome_and_KDE_desktop.html
</link>
7580 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__apt_vs_aptitude_with_the_Gnome_and_KDE_desktop.html
</guid>
7581 <pubDate>Sat,
20 Nov
2010 22:
50:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
7582 <description><p
>I
'm still running upgrade testing of the
7583 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/
">Lenny
7584 Gnome and KDE Desktop
</a
>, but have not had time to spend on reporting the
7585 status. Here is a short update based on a test I ran
20101118.
</p
>
7587 <p
>I still do not know what a correct migration should look like, so I
7588 report any differences between apt and aptitude and hope someone else
7589 can see if anything should be changed.
</p
>
7591 <p
>This is for Gnome:
</p
>
7593 <p
>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude
</p
>
7595 <blockquote
><p
>
7596 apache2.2-bin aptdaemon at-spi baobab binfmt-support
7597 browser-plugin-gnash cheese-common cli-common cpp-
4.3 cups-pk-helper
7598 dmz-cursor-theme empathy empathy-common finger
7599 freedesktop-sound-theme freeglut3 gconf-defaults-service gdm-themes
7600 gedit-plugins geoclue geoclue-hostip geoclue-localnet geoclue-manual
7601 geoclue-yahoo gnash gnash-common gnome gnome-backgrounds
7602 gnome-cards-data gnome-codec-install gnome-core
7603 gnome-desktop-environment gnome-disk-utility gnome-screenshot
7604 gnome-search-tool gnome-session-canberra gnome-spell
7605 gnome-system-log gnome-themes-extras gnome-themes-more
7606 gnome-user-share gs-common gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
7607 gstreamer0.10-tools gtk2-engines gtk2-engines-pixbuf
7608 gtk2-engines-smooth hal-info hamster-applet libapache2-mod-dnssd
7609 libapr1 libaprutil1 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3 libaprutil1-ldap
7610 libart2.0-cil libatspi1.0-
0 libboost-date-time1.42
.0
7611 libboost-python1.42
.0 libboost-thread1.42
.0 libchamplain-
0.4-
0
7612 libchamplain-gtk-
0.4-
0 libcheese-gtk18 libclutter-gtk-
0.10-
0
7613 libcryptui0 libcupsys2 libdiscid0 libeel2-data libelf1 libepc-
1.0-
2
7614 libepc-common libepc-ui-
1.0-
2 libfreerdp-plugins-standard
7615 libfreerdp0 libgail-common libgconf2.0-cil libgdata-common libgdata7
7616 libgdl-
1-common libgdu-gtk0 libgee2 libgeoclue0 libgexiv2-
0 libgif4
7617 libglade2.0-cil libglib2.0-cil libgmime2.4-cil libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
7618 libgnome2.24-cil libgnomepanel2.24-cil libgnomeprint2.2-data
7619 libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod-common libgpod4
7620 libgtk2.0-cil libgtkglext1 libgtksourceview-common
7621 libgtksourceview2.0-common libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
7622 libmono-addins0.2-cil libmono-cairo2.0-cil libmono-corlib2.0-cil
7623 libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil libmono-posix2.0-cil
7624 libmono-security2.0-cil libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
7625 libmono-system2.0-cil libmtp8 libmusicbrainz3-
6
7626 libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil libndesk-dbus1.0-cil libopal3.6
.8
7627 libpolkit-gtk-
1-
0 libpt-
1.10.10-plugins-alsa
7628 libpt-
1.10.10-plugins-v4l libpt2.6
.7 libpython2.6 librpm1 librpmio1
7629 libsdl1.2debian libservlet2.4-java libsrtp0 libssh-
4
7630 libtelepathy-farsight0 libtelepathy-glib0 libtidy-
0.99-
0
7631 libxalan2-java libxerces2-java media-player-info mesa-utils
7632 mono-
2.0-gac mono-gac mono-runtime nautilus-sendto
7633 nautilus-sendto-empathy openoffice.org-writer2latex
7634 openssl-blacklist p7zip p7zip-full pkg-config python-
4suite-xml
7635 python-aptdaemon python-aptdaemon-gtk python-axiom
7636 python-beautifulsoup python-bugbuddy python-clientform
7637 python-coherence python-configobj python-crypto python-cupshelpers
7638 python-cupsutils python-eggtrayicon python-elementtree
7639 python-epsilon python-evolution python-feedparser python-gdata
7640 python-gdbm python-gst0.10 python-gtkglext1 python-gtkmozembed
7641 python-gtksourceview2 python-httplib2 python-louie python-mako
7642 python-markupsafe python-mechanize python-nevow python-notify
7643 python-opengl python-openssl python-pam python-pkg-resources
7644 python-pyasn1 python-pysqlite2 python-rdflib python-serial
7645 python-tagpy python-twisted-bin python-twisted-conch
7646 python-twisted-core python-twisted-web python-utidylib python-webkit
7647 python-xdg python-zope.interface remmina remmina-plugin-data
7648 remmina-plugin-rdp remmina-plugin-vnc rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
7649 rhythmbox-plugins rpm-common rpm2cpio seahorse-plugins shotwell
7650 software-center svgalibg1 system-config-printer-udev
7651 telepathy-gabble telepathy-mission-control-
5 telepathy-salut tomboy
7652 totem totem-coherence totem-mozilla totem-plugins
7653 transmission-common xdg-user-dirs xdg-user-dirs-gtk xserver-xephyr
7655 </p
></blockquote
>
7657 Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude
7659 <blockquote
><p
>
7660 arj bluez-utils cheese dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop ekiga eog
7661 epiphany-extensions epiphany-gecko evolution-exchange
7662 fast-user-switch-applet file-roller gcalctool gconf-editor gdm gedit
7663 gedit-common gnome-app-install gnome-games gnome-games-data
7664 gnome-nettool gnome-system-tools gnome-themes gnome-utils
7665 gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager gnuchess gucharmap
7666 guile-
1.8-libs hal libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5
7667 libavahi-ui0 libbind9-
50 libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-
11 libcdio7
7668 libcucul0 libcurl3 libdirectfb-
1.0-
0 libdmx1 libdvdread3
7669 libedata-cal1.2-
6 libedataserver1.2-
9 libeel2-
2.20 libepc-
1.0-
1
7670 libepc-ui-
1.0-
1 libexchange-storage1.2-
3 libfaad0 libgadu3
7671 libgalago3 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-
3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
7672 libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-
0 libgksuui1.0-
1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-
2
7673 libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-
1 libgnomeprint2.2-
0
7674 libgnomeprintui2.2-
0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtk-vnc-
1.0-
0
7675 libgtkhtml2-
0 libgtksourceview1.0-
0 libgtksourceview2.0-
0
7676 libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
7677 libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libkpathsea4 liblircclient0 libltdl3 liblwres50
7678 libmagick++
10 libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmozjs1d libmpfr1ldbl libmtp7
7679 libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0
7680 libnm-util0 libopal-
2.2 libosp5 libparted1.8-
10 libpisock9
7681 libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-
1.10.10 libraw1394-
8
7682 libsdl1.2debian-alsa libsensors3 libsexy2 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-
8
7683 libspeexdsp1 libssh2-
1 libsuitesparse-
3.1.0 libsvga1
7684 libswfdec-
0.6-
90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0
7685 libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12
7686 libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common rhythmbox seahorse
7687 sound-juicer swfdec-gnome system-config-printer totem-common
7688 totem-gstreamer transmission-gtk vinagre vino w3c-dtd-xhtml wodim
7689 </p
></blockquote
>
7691 <p
>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get
</p
>
7693 <blockquote
><p
>
7694 gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
7695 </p
></blockquote
>
7697 <p
>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get
</p
>
7699 <blockquote
><p
>
7701 </p
></blockquote
>
7703 <p
>This is for KDE:
</p
>
7705 <p
>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude
</p
>
7707 <blockquote
><p
>
7708 autopoint bomber bovo cantor cantor-backend-kalgebra cpp-
4.3 dcoprss
7709 edict espeak espeak-data eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
7710 ghostscript-x git gnome-audio gnugo granatier gs-common
7711 gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio indi kaddressbook-plugins kalgebra
7712 kalzium-data kanjidic kapman kate-plugins kblocks kbreakout kbstate
7713 kde-icons-mono kdeaccessibility kdeaddons-kfile-plugins
7714 kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
7715 kdeedu kdeedu-data kdeedu-kvtml-data kdegames kdegames-card-data
7716 kdegames-mahjongg-data kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc
7717 kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
7718 kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdessh kdetoys kdewebdev
7719 kdiamond kdnssd kfilereplace kfourinline kgeography-data kigo
7720 killbots kiriki klettres-data kmoon kmrml knewsticker-scripts
7721 kollision kpf krosspython ksirk ksmserver ksquares kstars-data
7722 ksudoku kubrick kweather libasound2-plugins libboost-python1.42
.0
7723 libcfitsio3 libconvert-binhex-perl libcrypt-ssleay-perl libdb4.6++
7724 libdjvulibre-text libdotconf1.0 liberror-perl libespeak1
7725 libfinance-quote-perl libgail-common libgsl0ldbl libhtml-parser-perl
7726 libhtml-tableextract-perl libhtml-tagset-perl libhtml-tree-perl
7727 libio-stringy-perl libkdeedu4 libkdegames5 libkiten4 libkpathsea5
7728 libkrossui4 libmailtools-perl libmime-tools-perl
7729 libnews-nntpclient-perl libopenbabel3 libportaudio2 libpulse-browse0
7730 libservlet2.4-java libspeechd2 libtiff-tools libtimedate-perl
7731 libunistring0 liburi-perl libwww-perl libxalan2-java libxerces2-java
7732 lirc luatex marble networkstatus noatun-plugins
7733 openoffice.org-writer2latex palapeli palapeli-data parley
7734 parley-data poster psutils pulseaudio pulseaudio-esound-compat
7735 pulseaudio-module-x11 pulseaudio-utils quanta-data rocs rsync
7736 speech-dispatcher step svgalibg1 texlive-binaries texlive-luatex
7738 </p
></blockquote
>
7740 <p
>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude
</p
>
7742 <blockquote
><p
>
7743 amor artsbuilder atlantik atlantikdesigner blinken bluez-utils cvs
7744 dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop imlib-base imlib11 kalzium kanagram kandy
7745 kasteroids katomic kbackgammon kbattleship kblackbox kbounce kbruch
7746 kcron kdat kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data kdeprint kdict kdvi kedit
7747 keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs kgeography kghostview
7748 kgoldrunner khangman khexedit kiconedit kig kimagemapeditor
7749 kitchensync kiten kjumpingcube klatin klettres klickety klines
7750 klinkstatus kmag kmahjongg kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmines
7751 kmousetool kmouth kmplot knetwalk kodo kolf kommander konquest kooka
7752 kpager kpat kpdf kpercentage kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler krec
7753 kregexpeditor kreversi ksame ksayit kshisen ksig ksim ksirc ksirtet
7754 ksmiletris ksnake ksokoban kspaceduel kstars ksvg ksysv kteatime
7755 ktip ktnef ktouch ktron kttsd ktuberling kturtle ktux kuickshow
7756 kverbos kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kwordquiz
7757 kworldclock kxsldbg libakode2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
7758 libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
7759 libavahi-core5 libavc1394-
0 libbind9-
50 libbluetooth2
7760 libboost-python1.34
.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0
7761 libdirectfb-
1.0-
0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
7762 libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-
0 libicu38
7763 libiec61883-
0 libindex0 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
7764 libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1 libkdeedu3
7765 libkdegames1 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
7766 libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
7767 libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick10
7768 libmimelib1c2a libmodplug0c2 libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libmpfr1ldbl
7769 libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9 libpoppler-glib3
7770 libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-
8 librss1 libsensors3
7771 libsmbios2 libssh2-
1 libsuitesparse-
3.1.0 libswfdec-
0.6-
90
7772 libtalloc1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 lskat
7773 mpeglib network-manager-kde noatun pmount tex-common texlive-base
7774 texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended tidy
7775 ttf-dustin ttf-kochi-gothic ttf-sjfonts
7776 </p
></blockquote
>
7778 <p
>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get
</p
>
7780 <blockquote
><p
>
7781 dolphin kde-core kde-plasma-desktop kde-standard kde-window-manager
7782 kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-apps kdebase-workspace
7783 kdebase-workspace-bin kdebase-workspace-data kdeutils kscreensaver
7784 kscreensaver-xsavers libgle3 libkonq5 libkonq5-templates libnetpbm10
7785 netpbm plasma-widget-folderview plasma-widget-networkmanagement
7786 xscreensaver-data-extra xscreensaver-gl xscreensaver-gl-extra
7787 xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
7788 </p
></blockquote
>
7790 <p
>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get
</p
>
7792 <blockquote
><p
>
7793 kdebase-bin konq-plugins konqueror
7794 </p
></blockquote
>
7799 <title>Gnash buildbot slave and Debian kfreebsd
</title>
7800 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_buildbot_slave_and_Debian_kfreebsd.html
</link>
7801 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_buildbot_slave_and_Debian_kfreebsd.html
</guid>
7802 <pubDate>Sat,
20 Nov
2010 07:
20:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
7803 <description><p
>Answering
7804 <a href=
"http://www.listware.net/
201011/gnash-dev/
67431-gnash-dev-buildbot-looking-for-slaves.html
">the
7805 call from the Gnash project
</a
> for
7806 <a href=
"http://www.gnashdev.org:
8010">buildbot
</a
> slaves to test the
7807 current source, I have set up a virtual KVM machine on the Debian
7808 Edu/Skolelinux virtualization host to test the git source on
7809 Debian/Squeeze. I hope this can help the developers in getting new
7810 releases out more often.
</p
>
7812 <p
>As the developers want less main-stream build platforms tested to,
7813 I have considered setting up a
<a
7814 href=
"http://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/
">Debian/kfreebsd
</a
>
7815 machine as well. I have also considered using the kfreebsd
7816 architecture in Debian as a file server in NUUG to get access to the
5
7817 TB zfs volume we currently use to store DV video. Because of this, I
7818 finally got around to do a test installation of Debian/Squeeze with
7819 kfreebsd. Installation went fairly smooth, thought I noticed some
7820 visual glitches in the cdebconf dialogs (black cursor left on the
7821 screen at random locations). Have not gotten very far with the
7822 testing. Noticed cfdisk did not work, but fdisk did so it was not a
7823 fatal problem. Have to spend some more time on it to see if it is
7824 useful as a file server for NUUG. Will try to find time to set up a
7825 gnash buildbot slave on the Debian Edu/Skolelinux this weekend.
</p
>
7830 <title>Debian in
3D
</title>
7831 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_in_3D.html
</link>
7832 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_in_3D.html
</guid>
7833 <pubDate>Tue,
9 Nov
2010 16:
10:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
7834 <description><p
><img src=
"http://thingiverse-production.s3.amazonaws.com/renders/
23/e0/c4/f9/
2b/debswagtdose_preview_medium.jpg
"></p
>
7836 <p
>3D printing is just great. I just came across this Debian logo in
7838 <a href=
"http://blog.thingiverse.com/
2010/
11/
09/participatory-branding/
">the
7839 thingiverse blog
</a
>.
</p
>
7844 <title>Making room on the Debian Edu/Sqeeze DVD
</title>
7845 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Making_room_on_the_Debian_Edu_Sqeeze_DVD.html
</link>
7846 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Making_room_on_the_Debian_Edu_Sqeeze_DVD.html
</guid>
7847 <pubDate>Sun,
7 Nov
2010 11:
45:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
7848 <description><p
>Prioritising packages for the Debian Edu /
7849 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Skolelinux
</a
> DVD, which is
7850 supposed provide a school with all the services and user applications
7851 needed on the pupils computer network has always been hard. Even
7852 schools without Internet connections should be able to get Debian Edu
7853 working using this DVD.
</p
>
7855 <p
>The job became a lot harder when apt and aptitude started
7856 installing recommended packages by default. We want the same set of
7857 packages to be installed when using the DVD and the netinst CD, and
7858 that means all recommended packages need to be on the DVD. I created
7859 a patch for debian-cd in
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
601203">BTS
7860 report #
601203</a
> to do this, and since this change was applied to
7861 the Debian Edu DVD build, we have been seriously short on space.
</p
>
7863 <p
>A few days ago we decided to drop blender, wxmaxima and kicad from
7864 the default installation to save space on the DVD, believing that
7865 those needing these applications are few and can get them from the
7866 Debian archive.
</p
>
7868 <p
>Yesterday, I had a look what source packages to see which packages
7869 were using most space. A few large packages are well know;
7870 openoffice.org, openclipart and fluid-soundfont. But I also
7871 discovered that lilypond used
106 MiB and fglrx-driver used
53 MiB.
7872 The lilypond package is pulled in as a dependency for rosegarden, and
7873 when looking a bit closer I discovered that
99 MiB of the
106 MiB were
7874 the documentation package, which is recommended by the binary package.
7875 I decided to drop this documentation package from our DVD, as most of
7876 our users will use the GUI front-ends and do not need the lilypond
7877 documentation. Similarly, I dropped the non-free fglrx-driver package
7878 which might be installed by d-i when its hardware is detected, as the
7879 free X driver should work.
</p
>
7881 <p
>With this change, we finally got space for the LXDE and Gnome
7882 desktop packages as well as the language specific packages making the
7883 DVD more useful again.
</p
>
7888 <title>Software updates
2010-
10-
24</title>
7889 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_updates_2010_10_24.html
</link>
7890 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_updates_2010_10_24.html
</guid>
7891 <pubDate>Sun,
24 Oct
2010 22:
45:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
7892 <description><p
>Some updates.
</p
>
7894 <p
>My
<a href=
"http://pledgebank.com/gnash-avm2
">gnash pledge
</a
> to
7895 raise money for the project is going well. The lower limit of
10
7896 signers was reached in
24 hours, and so far
13 people have signed it.
7897 More signers and more funding is most welcome, and I am really curious
7898 how far we can get before the time limit of December
24 is reached.
7901 <p
>On the #gnash IRC channel on irc.freenode.net, I was just tipped
7902 about what appear to be a great code coverage tool capable of
7903 generating code coverage stats without any changes to the source code.
7905 <a href=
"http://simonkagstrom.github.com/kcov/index.html
">kcov
</a
>,
7906 and can be used using
<tt
>kcov
&lt;directory
&gt;
&lt;binary
&gt;
</tt
>.
7907 It is missing in Debian, but the git source built just fine in Squeeze
7908 after I installed libelf-dev, libdwarf-dev, pkg-config and
7909 libglib2.0-dev. Failed to build in Lenny, but suspect that is
7910 solvable. I hope kcov make it into Debian soon.
</p
>
7912 <p
>Finally found time to wrap up the release notes for
<a
7913 href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/
2010/
10/msg00002.html
">a
7914 new alpha release of Debian Edu
</a
>, and just published the second
7915 alpha test release of the Squeeze based Debian Edu /
7916 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Skolelinux
</a
>
7917 release. Give it a try if you need a complete linux solution for your
7918 school, including central infrastructure server, workstations, thin
7919 client servers and diskless workstations. A nice touch added
7920 yesterday is RDP support on the thin client servers, for windows
7921 clients to get a Linux desktop on request.
</p
>
7926 <title>Pledge for funding to the Gnash project to get AVM2 support
</title>
7927 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Pledge_for_funding_to_the_Gnash_project_to_get_AVM2_support.html
</link>
7928 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Pledge_for_funding_to_the_Gnash_project_to_get_AVM2_support.html
</guid>
7929 <pubDate>Tue,
19 Oct
2010 14:
45:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
7930 <description><p
><a href=
"http://www.getgnash.org/
">The Gnash project
</a
> is the
7931 most promising solution for a Free Software Flash implementation. It
7932 has done great so far, but there is still far to go, and recently its
7933 funding has dried up. I believe AVM2 support in Gnash is vital to the
7934 continued progress of the project, as more and more sites show up with
7935 AVM2 flash files.
</p
>
7937 <p
>To try to get funding for developing such support, I have started
7938 <a href=
"http://www.pledgebank.com/gnash-avm2
">a pledge
</a
> with the
7939 following text:
</P
>
7941 <p
><blockquote
>
7943 <p
>"I will pay
100$ to the Gnash project to develop AVM2 support but
7944 only if
10 other people will do the same.
"</p
>
7946 <p
>- Petter Reinholdtsen, free software developer
</p
>
7948 <p
>Deadline to sign up by:
24th December
2010</p
>
7950 <p
>The Gnash project need to get support for the new Flash file
7951 format AVM2 to work with a lot of sites using Flash on the
7952 web. Gnash already work with a lot of Flash sites using the old AVM1
7953 format, but more and more sites are using the AVM2 format these
7954 days. The project web page is available from
7955 http://www.getgnash.org/ . Gnash is a free software implementation
7956 of Adobe Flash, allowing those of us that do not accept the terms of
7957 the Adobe Flash license to get access to Flash sites.
</p
>
7959 <p
>The project need funding to get developers to put aside enough
7960 time to develop the AVM2 support, and this pledge is my way to try
7961 to get this to happen.
</p
>
7963 <p
>The project accept donations via the OpenMediaNow foundation,
7964 <a href=
"http://www.openmedianow.org/?q=node/
32">http://www.openmedianow.org/?q=node/
32</a
> .
</p
>
7966 </blockquote
></p
>
7968 <p
>I hope you will support this effort too. I hope more than
10
7969 people will participate to make this happen. The more money the
7970 project gets, the more features it can develop using these funds.
7976 <title>First version of a Perl library to control the Spykee robot
</title>
7977 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_version_of_a_Perl_library_to_control_the_Spykee_robot.html
</link>
7978 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_version_of_a_Perl_library_to_control_the_Spykee_robot.html
</guid>
7979 <pubDate>Sat,
9 Oct
2010 14:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
7980 <description><p
>This summer I got the chance to buy cheap Spykee robots, and since
7981 then I have worked on getting Linux software in place to control them.
7982 The firmware for the robot is available from the producer, and using
7983 that source it was trivial to figure out the protocol specification.
7984 I
've started on a perl library to control it, and made some demo
7985 programs using this perl library to allow one to control the
7988 <p
>The library is quite functional already, and capable of controlling
7989 the driving, fetching video, uploading MP3s and play them. There are
7990 a few less important features too.
</p
>
7992 <p
>Since a few weeks ago, I ran out of time to spend on this project,
7993 but I never got around to releasing the current source. I decided
7994 today that it was time to do something about it, and uploaded the
7995 source to my Debian package store at people.skolelinux.org.
</p
>
7997 <p
>Because it was simpler for me, I made a Debian package and
7998 published the source and deb. If you got a spykee robot, grab the
7999 source or binary package:
</p
>
8002 <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
>
8003 <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
>
8004 <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
>
8005 </ul
></p
>
8007 <p
>If you are interested in helping out with developing this library,
8008 please let me know.
</p
>
8013 <title>Links for
2010-
10-
03</title>
8014 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Links_for_2010_10_03.html
</link>
8015 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Links_for_2010_10_03.html
</guid>
8016 <pubDate>Sun,
3 Oct
2010 22:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
8017 <description><p
><ul
>
8019 <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
8020 is no Plan B: why the IPv4-to-IPv6 transition will be ugly
</a
></li
>
8022 <li
>Scanner looking under clothes
8023 <a href=
"http://www.dagbladet.no/
2010/
10/
03/nyheter/utenriks/reise/overvakingskamera/flyplasser/
13667192/
">has
8024 already been misused at Heathrow
</a
>.
</li
>
8026 <li
><a href=
"http://wiki.softwarelivre.org/Landell
">Landell
8027 Webcasting
</a
> - interesting alternative for
8028 <ahref=
"http://dvswitch.alioth.debian.org/wiki/
">DVSwitch
</a
> with
8031 </ul
></p
>
8036 <title>Terms of use for video produced by a Canon IXUS
130 digital camera
</title>
8037 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Terms_of_use_for_video_produced_by_a_Canon_IXUS_130_digital_camera.html
</link>
8038 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Terms_of_use_for_video_produced_by_a_Canon_IXUS_130_digital_camera.html
</guid>
8039 <pubDate>Thu,
9 Sep
2010 23:
55:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
8040 <description><p
>A few days ago I had the mixed pleasure of bying a new digital
8041 camera, a Canon IXUS
130. It was instructive and very disturbing to
8042 be able to verify that also this camera producer have the nerve to
8043 specify how I can or can not use the videos produced with the camera.
8044 Even thought I was aware of the issue, the options with new cameras
8045 are limited and I ended up bying the camera anyway. What is the
8046 problem, you might ask? It is software patents, MPEG-
4, H
.264 and the
8047 MPEG-LA that is the problem, and our right to record our experiences
8048 without asking for permissions that is at risk.
8050 <p
>On page
27 of the Danish instruction manual, this section is
8054 <p
>This product is licensed under AT
&T patents for the MPEG-
4 standard
8055 and may be used for encoding MPEG-
4 compliant video and/or decoding
8056 MPEG-
4 compliant video that was encoded only (
1) for a personal and
8057 non-commercial purpose or (
2) by a video provider licensed under the
8058 AT
&T patents to provide MPEG-
4 compliant video.
</p
>
8060 <p
>No license is granted or implied for any other use for MPEG-
4
8064 <p
>In short, the camera producer have chosen to use technology
8065 (MPEG-
4/H
.264) that is only provided if I used it for personal and
8066 non-commercial purposes, or ask for permission from the organisations
8067 holding the knowledge monopoly (patent) for technology used.
</p
>
8069 <p
>This issue has been brewing for a while, and I recommend you to
8071 "<a href=
"http://www.osnews.com/story/
23236/Why_Our_Civilization_s_Video_Art_and_Culture_is_Threatened_by_the_MPEG-LA
">Why
8072 Our Civilization
's Video Art and Culture is Threatened by the
8073 MPEG-LA
</a
>" by Eugenia Loli-Queru and
8074 "<a href=
"http://webmink.com/
2010/
09/
03/h-
264-and-foss/
">H
.264 Is Not
8075 The Sort Of Free That Matters
</a
>" by Simon Phipps to learn more about
8076 the issue. The solution is to support the
8077 <a href=
"http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition
">free and
8078 open standards
</a
> for video, like
<a href=
"http://www.theora.org/
">Ogg
8079 Theora
</a
>, and avoid MPEG-
4 and H
.264 if you can.
</p
>
8084 <title>Some notes on Flash in Debian and Debian Edu
</title>
8085 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_notes_on_Flash_in_Debian_and_Debian_Edu.html
</link>
8086 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_notes_on_Flash_in_Debian_and_Debian_Edu.html
</guid>
8087 <pubDate>Sat,
4 Sep
2010 10:
10:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
8088 <description><p
>In the
<a href=
"http://popcon.debian.org/unknown/by_vote
">Debian
8089 popularity-contest numbers
</a
>, the adobe-flashplugin package the
8090 second most popular used package that is missing in Debian. The sixth
8091 most popular is flashplayer-mozilla. This is a clear indication that
8092 working flash is important for Debian users. Around
10 percent of the
8093 users submitting data to popcon.debian.org have this package
8094 installed.
</p
>
8096 <p
>In the report written by Lars Risan in August
2008
8097 («
<a href=
"http://wiki.skolelinux.no/Dokumentasjon/Rapporter?action=AttachFile
&do=view
&target=Skolelinux_i_bruk_rapport_1.0.pdf
">Skolelinux
8098 i bruk – Rapport for Hurum kommune, Universitetet i Agder og
8099 stiftelsen SLX Debian Labs
</a
>»), one of the most important problems
8100 schools experienced with
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian
8101 Edu/Skolelinux
</a
> was the lack of working Flash. A lot of educational
8102 web sites require Flash to work, and lacking working Flash support in
8103 the web browser and the problems with installing it was perceived as a
8104 good reason to stay with Windows.
</p
>
8106 <p
>I once saw a funny and sad comment in a web forum, where Linux was
8107 said to be the retarded cousin that did not really understand
8108 everything you told him but could work fairly well. This was a
8109 comment regarding the problems Linux have with proprietary formats and
8110 non-standard web pages, and is sad because it exposes a fairly common
8111 understanding of whose fault it is if web pages that only work in for
8112 example Internet Explorer
6 fail to work on Firefox, and funny because
8113 it explain very well how annoying it is for users when Linux
8114 distributions do not work with the documents they receive or the web
8115 pages they want to visit.
</p
>
8117 <p
>This is part of the reason why I believe it is important for Debian
8118 and Debian Edu to have a well working Flash implementation in the
8119 distribution, to get at least popular sites as Youtube and Google
8120 Video to working out of the box. For Squeeze, Debian have the chance
8121 to include the latest version of Gnash that will make this happen, as
8122 the new release
0.8.8 was published a few weeks ago and is resting in
8123 unstable. The new version work with more sites that version
0.8.7.
8124 The Gnash maintainers have asked for a freeze exception, but the
8125 release team have not had time to reply to it yet. I hope they agree
8126 with me that Flash is important for the Debian desktop users, and thus
8127 accept the new package into Squeeze.
</p
>
8132 <title>My first perl GUI application - controlling a Spykee robot
</title>
8133 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/My_first_perl_GUI_application___controlling_a_Spykee_robot.html
</link>
8134 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/My_first_perl_GUI_application___controlling_a_Spykee_robot.html
</guid>
8135 <pubDate>Wed,
1 Sep
2010 21:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
8136 <description><p
>This evening I made my first Perl GUI application. The last few
8137 days I have worked on a Perl module for controlling my recently
8138 aquired Spykee robots, and the module is now getting complete enought
8139 that it is possible to use it to control the robot driving at least.
8140 It was now time to figure out how to use it to create some GUI to
8141 allow me to drive the robot around. I picked PerlQt as I have had
8142 positive experiences with the Qt API before, and spent a few minutes
8143 browsing the web for examples. Using Qt Designer seemed like a short
8144 cut, so I ended up writing the perl GUI using Qt Designer and
8145 compiling it into a perl program using the puic program from
8146 libqt-perl. Nothing fancy yet, but it got buttons to connect and
8147 drive around.
</p
>
8149 <p
>The perl module I have written provide a object oriented API for
8150 controlling the robot. Here is an small example on how to use it:
</p
>
8152 <p
><pre
>
8154 Spykee::discover(sub {$robot{$_[
0]} = $_[
1]});
8155 my $host = (keys %robot)[
0];
8156 my $spykee = Spykee-
>new();
8157 $spykee-
>contact($host,
"admin
",
"admin
");
8160 $spykee-
>right();
8162 $spykee-
>forward();
8167 </pre
></p
>
8169 <p
>Thanks to the release of the source of the robot firmware, I could
8170 peek into the implementation at the other end to figure out how to
8171 implement the protocol used by the robot. I
've implemented several of
8172 the commands the robot understand, but is still missing the camera
8173 support to make it possible to control the robot from remote. First I
8174 want to implement support for uploading new firmware and configuring
8175 the wireless network, to make it possible to bootstrap a Spykee robot
8176 without the producers Windows and MacOSX software (I only have Linux,
8177 so I had to ask a friend to come over to get the robot testing
8178 going. :).
</p
>
8180 <p
>Will release the source to the public soon, but need to figure out
8181 where to make it available first. I will add a link to
8182 <a href=
"http://wiki.nuug.no/grupper/robot/
">the NUUG wiki
</a
> for
8183 those that want to check back later to find it.
</p
>
8188 <title>Broken hard link handling with sshfs
</title>
8189 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_hard_link_handling_with_sshfs.html
</link>
8190 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_hard_link_handling_with_sshfs.html
</guid>
8191 <pubDate>Mon,
30 Aug
2010 19:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
8192 <description><p
>Just got an email from Tobias Gruetzmacher as a followup on my
8193 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_umask_handling_with_sshfs.html
">previous
8194 post about sshfs
</a
>. He reported another problem with sshfs. It
8195 fail to handle hard links properly. A simple way to spot this is to
8196 look at the . and .. entries in the directory tree. These should have
8197 a link count
>1, but on sshfs the count is
1. I just tested to see
8198 what happen when trying to hardlink, and this fail as well:
</p
>
8202 ln: creating hard link `bar
' =
> `foo
': Function not implemented
8206 <p
>I have not yet found time to implement a test for this in my file
8207 system test code, but believe having working hard links is useful to
8208 avoid surprised unix programs. Not as useful as working file locking
8209 and symlinks, which are required to get a working desktop, but useful
8210 nevertheless. :)
</p
>
8212 <p
>The latest version of the file system test code is available via
8214 <a href=
"http://github.com/gebi/fs-test
">http://github.com/gebi/fs-test
</a
></p
>
8219 <title>Broken umask handling with sshfs
</title>
8220 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_umask_handling_with_sshfs.html
</link>
8221 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_umask_handling_with_sshfs.html
</guid>
8222 <pubDate>Thu,
26 Aug
2010 13:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
8223 <description><p
>My file system sematics program
8224 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_if_a_file_system_can_be_used_for_home_directories___.html
">presented
8225 a few days ago
</a
> is very useful to verify that a file system can
8226 work as a unix home directory,and today I had to extend it a bit. I
'm
8227 looking into alternatives for home directory access here at the
8228 University of Oslo, and one of the options is sshfs. My friend
8229 Finn-Arne mentioned a while back that they had used sshfs with Debian
8230 Edu, but stopped because of problems. I asked today what the problems
8231 where, and he mentioned that sshfs failed to handle umask properly.
8232 Trying to detect the problem I wrote this addition to my fs testing
8236 mode_t touch_get_mode(const char *name, mode_t mode) {
8238 int fd = open(name, O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_LARGEFILE, mode);
8241 struct stat statbuf;
8242 if (-
1 != fstat(fd,
&statbuf)) {
8243 retval = statbuf.st_mode
& 0x1ff;
8250 /* Try to detect problem discovered using sshfs */
8251 int test_umask(void) {
8252 printf(
"info: testing umask effect on file creation\n
");
8254 mode_t orig_umask = umask(
000);
8256 if (
0666 != (newmode = touch_get_mode(
"foobar
",
0666))) {
8257 printf(
" error: Wrong file mode %o when creating using mode
666 and umask
000\n
",
8261 if (
0660 != (newmode = touch_get_mode(
"foobar
",
0666))) {
8262 printf(
" error: Wrong file mode %o when creating using mode
666 and umask
007\n
",
8270 int main(int argc, char **argv) {
8277 <p
>Sure enough. On NFS to a netapp, I get this result:
</p
>
8280 Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
8281 info: testing symlink creation
8282 info: testing subdirectory creation
8283 info: testing fcntl locking
8284 Read-locking
1 byte from
1073741824
8285 Read-locking
510 byte from
1073741826
8286 Unlocking
1 byte from
1073741824
8287 Write-locking
1 byte from
1073741824
8288 Write-locking
510 byte from
1073741826
8289 Unlocking
2 byte from
1073741824
8290 info: testing umask effect on file creation
8293 <p
>When mounting the same directory using sshfs, I get this
8297 Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
8298 info: testing symlink creation
8299 info: testing subdirectory creation
8300 info: testing fcntl locking
8301 Read-locking
1 byte from
1073741824
8302 Read-locking
510 byte from
1073741826
8303 Unlocking
1 byte from
1073741824
8304 Write-locking
1 byte from
1073741824
8305 Write-locking
510 byte from
1073741826
8306 Unlocking
2 byte from
1073741824
8307 info: testing umask effect on file creation
8308 error: Wrong file mode
644 when creating using mode
666 and umask
000
8309 error: Wrong file mode
640 when creating using mode
666 and umask
007
8312 <p
>So, I can conclude that sshfs is better than smb to a Netapp or a
8313 Windows server, but not good enough to be used as a home
8314 directory.
</p
>
8316 <p
>Update
2010-
08-
26: Reported the issue in
8317 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
594498">BTS report #
594498</a
></p
>
8319 <p
>Update
2010-
08-
27: Michael Gebetsroither report that he found the
8320 script so useful that he created a GIT repository and stored it in
8321 <a href=
"http://github.com/gebi/fs-test
">http://github.com/gebi/fs-test
</a
>.
</p
>
8326 <title>Rob Weir: How to Crush Dissent
</title>
8327 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Rob_Weir__How_to_Crush_Dissent.html
</link>
8328 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Rob_Weir__How_to_Crush_Dissent.html
</guid>
8329 <pubDate>Sun,
15 Aug
2010 22:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
8330 <description><p
>I found the notes from Rob Weir on
8331 <a href=
"http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/robweir/antic-atom/~
3/VGb23-kta8c/how-to-crush-dissent.html
">how
8332 to crush dissent
</a
> matching my own thoughts on the matter quite
8333 well. Highly recommended for those wondering which road our society
8334 should go down. In my view we have been heading the wrong way for a
8335 long time.
</p
>
8340 <title>No hardcoded config on Debian Edu clients
</title>
8341 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/No_hardcoded_config_on_Debian_Edu_clients.html
</link>
8342 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/No_hardcoded_config_on_Debian_Edu_clients.html
</guid>
8343 <pubDate>Mon,
9 Aug
2010 20:
15:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
8344 <description><p
>As reported earlier, the last few days I have looked at how Debian
8345 Edu clients are configured, and tried to get rid of all hardcoded
8346 configuration settings on the clients. I believe the work to be
8347 mostly done, and the clients seem to work just fine with dynamically
8348 generated configuration.
</p
>
8350 <p
>What is the point, you might ask? The point is to allow a Debian
8351 Edu desktop to integrate into an existing network infrastructure
8352 without any manual configuration.
</p
>
8354 <p
>This is what happens when installing a Debian Edu client here at
8355 the University of Oslo using PXE. With the PXE installation, I am
8356 asked for language (Norwegian Bokmål), locality (Norway) and keyboard
8357 layout (no-latin1), Debian Edu profile (Roaming Workstation), if I
8358 accept to reformat the hard drive (yes), if I want to submit info to
8359 popcon.debian.org (no) and root password (secret). After answering
8360 these questions, the installer goes ahead and does its thing, and
8361 after around
50 minutes it is done. I press enter to finish the
8362 installation, and the machine reboots into KDE. When the machine is
8363 ready and kdm asks for login information, I enter my university
8364 username and password, am told by kdm that a local home directory has
8365 been created and that I must log in again, and finally log in with the
8366 same username and password to the KDE
4.4 desktop. At no point during
8367 this process did it ask for university specific settings, and all the
8368 required configuration was dynamically detected using information
8369 fetched via DHCP and DNS. The roaming workstation is now ready for
8372 <p
>How was this done, you might wonder? First of all, here is the
8373 list of things that need to be configured on the client to get it
8374 working properly out of the box:
</p
>
8377 <li
>IP address/netmask and DNS server.
</li
>
8378 <li
>Web proxy URL.
</li
>
8379 <li
>LDAP server for NSS directory information (user, group, etc).
</li
>
8380 <li
>Kerberos server for PAM password checking.
</li
>
8381 <li
>SMB mount point to access the network home directory. (*)
</li
>
8382 <li
>Central syslog server to send syslog messages to. (*)
</li
>
8383 <li
>Sitesummary collector URL to submit info to central server. (*)
</li
>
8386 <p
>(Hm, did I forget anything? Let me knew if I did.)
</p
>
8388 <p
>The points marked (*) are not required to be able to use the
8389 machine, but needed to provide central storage and allowing system
8390 administrators to track their machines. Since yesterday, everything
8391 but the sitesummary collector URL is dynamically discovered at boot
8392 and installation time in the svn version of Debian Edu.
</p
>
8394 <p
>The IP and DNS setup is fetched during boot using DHCP as usual.
8395 When a DHCP update arrives, the proxy setup is updated by looking for
8396 http://wpat/wpad.dat and using the content of this WPAD file to
8397 configure the http and ftp proxy in /etc/environment and
8398 /etc/apt/apt.conf. I decided to update the proxy setup using a DHCP
8399 hook to ensure that the client stops using the Debian Edu proxy when
8400 it is moved outside the Debian Edu network, and instead uses any local
8401 proxy present on the new network when it moves around.
</p
>
8403 <p
>The DNS names of the LDAP, Kerberos and syslog server and related
8404 configuration are generated using DNS information at boot. First the
8405 installer looks for a host named ldap in the current DNS domain. If
8406 not found, it looks for _ldap._tcp SRV records in DNS instead. If an
8407 LDAP server is found, its root DSE entry is requested and the
8408 attributes namingContexts and defaultNamingContext are used to
8409 determine which LDAP base to use for NSS. If there are several
8410 namingContexts attibutes and the defaultNamingContext is present, that
8411 LDAP subtree is used as the base. If defaultNamingContext is missing,
8412 the subtrees listed as namingContexts are searched in sequence for any
8413 object with class posixAccount or posixGroup, and the first one with
8414 such an object is used as the LDAP base. For Kerberos, a similar
8415 search is done by first looking for a host named kerberos, and then
8416 for the _kerberos._tcp SRV record. I
've been unable to find a way to
8417 look up the Kerberos realm, so for this the upper case string of the
8418 current DNS domain is used.
</p
>
8420 <p
>For the syslog server, the hosts syslog and loghost are searched
8421 for, and the _syslog._udp SRV record is consulted if no such host is
8422 found. This algorithm works for both Debian Edu and the University of
8423 Oslo. A similar strategy would work for locating the sitesummary
8424 server, but have not been implemented yet. I decided to fetch and
8425 save these settings during installation, to make sure moving to a
8426 different network does not change the set of users being allowed to
8427 log in nor the passwords required to log in. Usernames and passwords
8428 will be cached by sssd when the user logs in on the Debian Edu
8429 network, and will not change as the laptop move around. For a
8430 non-roaming machine, there is no caching, but given that it is
8431 supposed to stay in place it should not matter much. Perhaps we
8432 should switch those to use sssd too?
</p
>
8434 <p
>The user
's SMB mount point for the network home directory is
8435 located when the user logs in for the first time. The LDAP server is
8436 consulted to look for the user
's LDAP object and the sambaHomePath
8437 attribute is used if found. If it isn
't found, the home directory
8438 path fetched from NSS is used instead. Assuming the path is of the
8439 form /site/server/directory/username, the second part is looked up in
8440 DNS and used to generate a SMB URL of the form
8441 smb://server.domain/username. This algorithm works for both Debian
8442 edu and the University of Oslo. Perhaps there are better attributes
8443 to use or a better algorithm that works for more sites, but this will
8444 do for now. :)
</p
>
8446 <p
>This work should make it easier to integrate the Debian Edu clients
8447 into any LDAP/Kerberos infrastructure, and make the current setup even
8448 more flexible than before. I suspect it will also work for thin
8449 client servers, allowing one to easily set up LTSP and hook it into a
8450 existing network infrastructure, but I have not had time to test this
8453 <p
>If you want to help out with implementing these things for Debian
8454 Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.
</p
>
8456 <p
>Update
2010-
08-
09: Simon Farnsworth gave me a heads-up on how to
8457 detect Kerberos realm from DNS, by looking for _kerberos TXT entries
8458 before falling back to the upper case DNS domain name. Will have to
8459 implement it for Debian Edu. :)
</p
>
8464 <title>Testing if a file system can be used for home directories...
</title>
8465 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_if_a_file_system_can_be_used_for_home_directories___.html
</link>
8466 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_if_a_file_system_can_be_used_for_home_directories___.html
</guid>
8467 <pubDate>Sun,
8 Aug
2010 21:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
8468 <description><p
>A few years ago, I was involved in a project planning to use
8469 Windows file servers as home directory servers for Debian
8470 Edu/Skolelinux machines. This was thought to be no problem, as the
8471 access would be through the SMB network file system protocol, and we
8472 knew other sites used SMB with unix and samba as the file server to
8473 mount home directories without any problems. But, after months of
8474 struggling, we had to conclude that our goal was impossible.
</p
>
8476 <p
>The reason is simply that while SMB can be used for home
8477 directories when the file server is Samba running on Unix, this only
8478 work because of Samba have some extensions and the fact that the
8479 underlying file system is a unix file system. When using a Windows
8480 file server, the underlying file system do not have POSIX semantics,
8481 and several programs will fail if the users home directory where they
8482 want to store their configuration lack POSIX semantics.
</p
>
8484 <p
>As part of this work, I wrote a small C program I want to share
8485 with you all, to replicate a few of the problematic applications (like
8486 OpenOffice.org and GCompris) and see if the file system was working as
8487 it should. If you find yourself in spooky file system land, it might
8488 help you find your way out again. This is the fs-test.c source:
</p
>
8492 * Some tests to check the file system sematics. Used to verify that
8493 * CIFS from a windows server do not work properly as a linux home
8495 * License: GPL v2 or later
8497 * needs libsqlite3-dev and build-essential installed
8498 * compile with: gcc -Wall -lsqlite3 -DTEST_SQLITE fs-test.c -o fs-test
8501 #define _FILE_OFFSET_BITS
64
8502 #define _LARGEFILE_SOURCE
1
8503 #define _LARGEFILE64_SOURCE
1
8505 #define _GNU_SOURCE /* for asprintf() */
8507 #include
&lt;errno.h
>
8508 #include
&lt;fcntl.h
>
8509 #include
&lt;stdio.h
>
8510 #include
&lt;string.h
>
8511 #include
&lt;stdlib.h
>
8512 #include
&lt;sys/file.h
>
8513 #include
&lt;sys/stat.h
>
8514 #include
&lt;sys/types.h
>
8515 #include
&lt;unistd.h
>
8519 * Test sqlite open, as done by gcompris require the libsqlite3-dev
8520 * package and linking with -lsqlite3. A more low level test is
8522 * See also
&lt;URL: http://www.sqlite.org./faq.html#q5
>.
8524 #include
&lt;sqlite3.h
>
8525 #define CREATE_TABLE_USERS \
8526 "CREATE TABLE users (user_id INT UNIQUE, login TEXT, lastname TEXT, firstname TEXT, birthdate TEXT, class_id INT );
"
8527 int test_sqlite_open(void) {
8529 char *name =
"testsqlite.db
";
8532 int rc = sqlite3_open(name,
&db);
8534 printf(
"error: sqlite open of %s failed: %s\n
", name, sqlite3_errmsg(db));
8540 rc = sqlite3_exec(db,CREATE_TABLE_USERS, NULL,
0,
&zErrMsg);
8541 if( rc != SQLITE_OK ){
8542 printf(
"error: sqlite table create failed: %s\n
", zErrMsg);
8546 printf(
"info: sqlite worked\n
");
8550 #endif /* TEST_SQLITE */
8553 * Demonstrate locking issue found in gcompris using sqlite3. This
8554 * work with ext3, but not with cifs server on Windows
2003. This is
8555 * done in the sqlite3 library.
8557 *
&lt;URL:http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/
2001-
08/msg00854.html
> and the
8558 * POSIX specification
8559 *
&lt;URL:http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/
009695399/functions/fcntl.html
>.
8561 int test_gcompris_locking(void) {
8563 char *name =
"testsqlite.db
";
8565 int fd = open(name, O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_LARGEFILE,
0644);
8566 printf(
"info: testing fcntl locking\n
");
8568 fl.l_whence = SEEK_SET;
8569 fl.l_pid = getpid();
8570 printf(
" Read-locking
1 byte from
1073741824");
8571 fl.l_start =
1073741824;
8573 fl.l_type = F_RDLCK;
8574 if (
0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK,
&fl) ) printf(
" - error!\n
"); else printf(
"\n
");
8576 printf(
" Read-locking
510 byte from
1073741826");
8577 fl.l_start =
1073741826;
8579 fl.l_type = F_RDLCK;
8580 if (
0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK,
&fl) ) printf(
" - error!\n
"); else printf(
"\n
");
8582 printf(
" Unlocking
1 byte from
1073741824");
8583 fl.l_start =
1073741824;
8585 fl.l_type = F_UNLCK;
8586 if (
0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK,
&fl) ) printf(
" - error!\n
"); else printf(
"\n
");
8588 printf(
" Write-locking
1 byte from
1073741824");
8589 fl.l_start =
1073741824;
8591 fl.l_type = F_WRLCK;
8592 if (
0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK,
&fl) ) printf(
" - error!\n
"); else printf(
"\n
");
8594 printf(
" Write-locking
510 byte from
1073741826");
8595 fl.l_start =
1073741826;
8597 if (
0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK,
&fl) ) printf(
" - error!\n
"); else printf(
"\n
");
8599 printf(
" Unlocking
2 byte from
1073741824");
8600 fl.l_start =
1073741824;
8602 fl.l_type = F_UNLCK;
8603 if (
0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK,
&fl) ) printf(
" - error!\n
"); else printf(
"\n
");
8610 * Test if permissions of freshly created directories allow entries
8611 * below them. This was a problem with OpenOffice.org and gcompris.
8612 * Mounting with option
'sync
' seem to solve this problem while
8613 * slowing down file operations.
8615 int test_subdirectory_creation(void) {
8617 char *path = strdup(
"test
");
8620 printf(
"info: testing subdirectory creation\n
");
8621 for (level =
0; level
&lt; LEVELS; level++) {
8622 char *newpath = NULL;
8623 if (-
1 == mkdir(path,
0777)) {
8624 printf(
" error: Unable to create directory
'%s
': %s\n
",
8625 path, strerror(errno));
8628 asprintf(
&newpath,
"%s/%s
", path,
"test
");
8636 * Test if symlinks can be created. This was a problem detected with
8639 int test_symlinks(void) {
8640 printf(
"info: testing symlink creation\n
");
8641 unlink(
"symlink
");
8642 if (-
1 == symlink(
"file
",
"symlink
"))
8643 printf(
" error: Unable to create symlink\n
");
8647 int main(int argc, char **argv) {
8648 printf(
"Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system\n
");
8650 test_subdirectory_creation();
8653 #endif /* TEST_SQLITE */
8654 test_gcompris_locking();
8659 <p
>When everything is working, it should print something like
8663 Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
8664 info: testing symlink creation
8665 info: testing subdirectory creation
8667 info: testing fcntl locking
8668 Read-locking
1 byte from
1073741824
8669 Read-locking
510 byte from
1073741826
8670 Unlocking
1 byte from
1073741824
8671 Write-locking
1 byte from
1073741824
8672 Write-locking
510 byte from
1073741826
8673 Unlocking
2 byte from
1073741824
8676 <p
>I do not remember the exact details of the problems we saw, but one
8677 of them was with locking, where if I remember correctly, POSIX allow a
8678 read-only lock to be upgraded to a read-write lock without unlocking
8679 the read-only lock (while Windows do not). Another was a bug in the
8680 CIFS/SMB client implementation in the Linux kernel where directory
8681 meta information would be wrong for a fraction of a second, making
8682 OpenOffice.org fail to create its deep directory tree because it was
8683 not allowed to create files in its freshly created directory.
</p
>
8685 <p
>Anyway, here is a nice tool for your tool box, might you never need
8688 <p
>Update
2010-
08-
27: Michael Gebetsroither report that he found the
8689 script so useful that he created a GIT repository and stored it in
8690 <a href=
"http://github.com/gebi/fs-test
">http://github.com/gebi/fs-test
</a
>.
</p
>
8695 <title>Autodetecting Client setup for roaming workstations in Debian Edu
</title>
8696 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Autodetecting_Client_setup_for_roaming_workstations_in_Debian_Edu.html
</link>
8697 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Autodetecting_Client_setup_for_roaming_workstations_in_Debian_Edu.html
</guid>
8698 <pubDate>Sat,
7 Aug
2010 14:
45:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
8699 <description><p
>A few days ago, I
8700 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_roaming_workstation___at_the_university_of_Oslo.html
">tried
8701 to install
</a
> a Roaming workation profile from Debian Edu/Squeeze
8702 while on the university network here at the University of Oslo, and
8703 noticed how much had to change to get it operational using the
8704 university infrastructure. It was fairly easy, but it occured to me
8705 that Debian Edu would improve a lot if I could get the client to
8706 connect without any changes at all, and thus let the client configure
8707 itself during installation and first boot to use the infrastructure
8708 around it. Now I am a huge step further along that road.
</p
>
8710 <p
>With our current squeeze-test packages, I can select the roaming
8711 workstation profile and get a working laptop connecting to the
8712 university LDAP server for user and group and our active directory
8713 servers for Kerberos authentication. All this without any
8714 configuration at all during installation. My users home directory got
8715 a bookmark in the KDE menu to mount it via SMB, with the correct URL.
8716 In short, openldap and sssd is correctly configured. In addition to
8717 this, the client look for http://wpad/wpad.dat to configure a web
8718 proxy, and when it fail to find it no proxy settings are stored in
8719 /etc/environment and /etc/apt/apt.conf. Iceweasel and KDE is
8720 configured to look for the same wpad configuration and also do not use
8721 a proxy when at the university network. If the machine is moved to a
8722 network with such wpad setup, it would automatically use it when DHCP
8723 gave it a IP address.
</p
>
8725 <p
>The LDAP server is located using DNS, by first looking for the DNS
8726 entry ldap.$domain. If this do not exist, it look for the
8727 _ldap._tcp.$domain SRV records and use the first one as the LDAP
8728 server. Next, it connects to the LDAP server and search all
8729 namingContexts entries for posixAccount or posixGroup objects, and
8730 pick the first one as the LDAP base. For Kerberos, a similar
8731 algorithm is used to locate the LDAP server, and the realm is the
8732 uppercase version of $domain.
</p
>
8734 <p
>So, what is not working, you might ask. SMB mounting my home
8735 directory do not work. No idea why, but suspected the incorrect
8736 Kerberos settings in /etc/krb5.conf and /etc/samba/smb.conf might be
8737 the cause. These are not properly configured during installation, and
8738 had to be hand-edited to get the correct Kerberos realm and server,
8739 but SMB mounting still do not work. :(
</p
>
8741 <p
>With this automatic configuration in place, I expect a Debian Edu
8742 roaming profile installation would be able to automatically detect and
8743 connect to any site using LDAP and Kerberos for NSS directory and PAM
8744 authentication. It should also work out of the box in a Active
8745 Directory environment providing posixAccount and posixGroup objects
8746 with UID and GID values.
</p
>
8748 <p
>If you want to help out with implementing these things for Debian
8749 Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.
</p
>
8754 <title>Debian Edu roaming workstation - at the university of Oslo
</title>
8755 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_roaming_workstation___at_the_university_of_Oslo.html
</link>
8756 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_roaming_workstation___at_the_university_of_Oslo.html
</guid>
8757 <pubDate>Tue,
3 Aug
2010 23:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
8758 <description><p
>The new roaming workstation profile in Debian Edu/Squeeze is fairly
8759 similar to the laptop setup am I working on using Ubuntu for the
8760 University of Oslo, and just for the heck of it, I tested today how
8761 hard it would be to integrate that profile into the university
8762 infrastructure. In this case, it is the university LDAP server,
8763 Active Directory Kerberos server and SMB mounting from the Netapp file
8766 <p
>I was pleasantly surprised that the only three files needed to be
8767 changed (/etc/sssd/sssd.conf, /etc/ldap.conf and
8768 /etc/mklocaluser.d/
20-debian-edu-config) and one file had to be added
8769 (/usr/share/perl5/Debian/Edu_Local.pm), to get the client working.
8770 Most of the changes were to get the client to use the university LDAP
8771 for NSS and Kerberos server for PAM, but one was to change a hard
8772 coded DNS domain name in the mklocaluser hook from .intern to
8775 <p
>This testing was so encouraging, that I went ahead and adjusted the
8776 Debian Edu scripts and setup in subversion to centralise the roaming
8777 workstation setup a bit more and avoid the hardcoded DNS domain name,
8778 so that when I test this tomorrow, I expect to get away with modifying
8779 only /etc/sssd/sssd.conf and /etc/ldap.conf to get it to use the
8780 university servers.
</p
>
8782 <p
>My goal is to get the clients to have no hardcoded settings and
8783 fetch all their initial setup during installation and first boot, to
8784 allow them to be inserted also into environments where the default
8785 setup in Debian Edu has been changed or as with the university, where
8786 the environment is different but provides the protocols Debian Edu
8792 <title>Circular package dependencies harms apt recovery
</title>
8793 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Circular_package_dependencies_harms_apt_recovery.html
</link>
8794 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Circular_package_dependencies_harms_apt_recovery.html
</guid>
8795 <pubDate>Tue,
27 Jul
2010 23:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
8796 <description><p
>I discovered this while doing
8797 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html
">automated
8798 testing of upgrades from Debian Lenny to Squeeze
</a
>. A few packages
8799 in Debian still got circular dependencies, and it is often claimed
8800 that apt and aptitude should be able to handle this just fine, but
8801 some times these dependency loops causes apt to fail.
</p
>
8803 <p
>An example is from todays
8804 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing//test-
20100727-lenny-squeeze-kde-aptitude.txt
">upgrade
8805 of KDE using aptitude
</a
>. In it, a bug in kdebase-workspace-data
8806 causes perl-modules to fail to upgrade. The cause is simple. If a
8807 package fail to unpack, then only part of packages with the circular
8808 dependency might end up being unpacked when unpacking aborts, and the
8809 ones already unpacked will fail to configure in the recovery phase
8810 because its dependencies are unavailable.
</p
>
8812 <p
>In this log, the problem manifest itself with this error:
</p
>
8814 <blockquote
><pre
>
8815 dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of perl-modules:
8816 perl-modules depends on perl (
>=
5.10.1-
1); however:
8817 Version of perl on system is
5.10.0-
19lenny
2.
8818 dpkg: error processing perl-modules (--configure):
8819 dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
8820 </pre
></blockquote
>
8822 <p
>The perl/perl-modules circular dependency is already
8823 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
527917">reported as a bug
</a
>, and will
8824 hopefully be solved as soon as possible, but it is not the only one,
8825 and each one of these loops in the dependency tree can cause similar
8826 failures. Of course, they only occur when there are bugs in other
8827 packages causing the unpacking to fail, but it is rather nasty when
8828 the failure of one package causes the problem to become worse because
8829 of dependency loops.
</p
>
8832 <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/
2010/
06/msg00116.html
">the
8833 tireless effort by Bill Allombert
</a
>, the number of circular
8835 <a href=
"http://debian.semistable.com/debgraph.out.html
">left in Debian
8836 is dropping
</a
>, and perhaps it will reach zero one day. :)
</p
>
8838 <p
>Todays testing also exposed a bug in
8839 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
590605">update-notifier
</a
> and
8840 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
590604">different behaviour
</a
> between
8841 apt-get and aptitude, the latter possibly caused by some circular
8842 dependency. Reported both to BTS to try to get someone to look at
8848 <title>First Debian Edu test release (alpha0) based on Squeeze is released
</title>
8849 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Debian_Edu_test_release__alpha0__based_on_Squeeze_is_released.html
</link>
8850 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Debian_Edu_test_release__alpha0__based_on_Squeeze_is_released.html
</guid>
8851 <pubDate>Tue,
27 Jul
2010 17:
45:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
8852 <description><p
>I just posted this announcement culminating several months of work
8853 with the next Debian Edu release. Not nearly done, but one major step
8854 completed.
</p
>
8857 <p
>This is the first test release based on Squeeze. The focus of this
8858 release is to test the user application selection. To have a look,
8859 install the standalone profile and let the developers know if the set
8860 of installed packages i.e. applications should be modified. If some
8861 user application is missing, or if there are some applications that no
8862 longer make sense to be included in Debian Edu, please let us know.
8863 Also, if a useful application is missing the translation for your
8864 language of choice, please let us know too.
</p
>
8866 <p
>In addition, feedback and help to polish the desktop (menus,
8867 artwork, starters, etc.) is appreciated. We would like to ship a nice
8868 and handy KDE4 desktop targeted for schools out of the box.
</p
>
8870 <p
>The other profiles should be installable, but there is a lot more
8871 work left to be done before they are ready, so do not expect to
8874 <p
>Changes compared to the lenny based version
</p
>
8877 <li
>Everything from Debian Squeeze
8879 <li
>Desktop environment KDE
4.4 =
> the new KDE desktop in
8880 combination with some new artwork
8881 <li
>Web browser Iceweasel
3.5
8882 <li
>OpenOffice.org
3.2
8883 <li
>Educational toolbox GCompris
9.3
8884 <li
>Music creator Rosegarden
10.04.2
8885 <li
>Image editor Gimp
2.6.10
8886 <li
>Virtual universe Celestia
1.6.0
8887 <li
>Virtual stargazer Stellarium
0.10.4
8888 <li
>3D modeler Blender
2.49.2 (new application)
8889 <li
>Video editor Kdenlive
0.7.7 (new application)
8890 </ul
></li
>
8891 <li
>Now using Kerberos for password checking (migration not finished).
8897 <li
>SMTP (sender verification)
8900 <li
>New experimental roaming workstation profile for laptops.
</li
>
8901 <li
>Show welcome page to users when they first log in. The URL is
8902 fetched from LDAP.
</li
>
8903 <li
>New LXDE desktop option, in addition to KDE (default) and Gnome.
</li
>
8904 <li
>General cleanup (not finished)
</li
>
8906 <p
>The following features are not working as they should
</p
>
8909 <li
>No web based administration tool for creating users and groups. The
8910 scripts ldap-createuser-krb and ldap-add-user-to-group can be used
8911 for testing.
</li
>
8912 <li
>DVD installs are missing debian-installer images for the PXE boot,
8913 and do not set up the PXE menu on eth0 because of this. LTSP
8914 clients should still boot from eth1 on thin client servers.
</li
>
8915 <li
>The restructured KDE menu is not implemented.
</li
>
8916 <li
>The LDAP server setup need to be reviewed for security.
</li
>
8917 <li
>The LDAP directory structure need to be reworked.
</li
>
8918 <li
>Different sets of packages are installed when using the DVD and the
8919 netinst CD. More packages are installed using the netinst CD.
</li
>
8920 <li
>The jackd package fail to install. This is believed to be caused by
8921 some ongoing transition, and hopefully should be solved soon. The
8922 jackd1 package can be installed manually for those that need it.
</li
>
8923 <li
>Some packages lack translations. See
8924 http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Squeeze for updated status,
8925 and help out with translations.
</li
>
8928 <p
>To download this multiarch netinstall release you can use
</p
>
8931 <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
>
8932 <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
>
8933 <li
>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-
6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso
</li
>
8935 <p
>To download this multiarch dvd release you can use
</p
>
8938 <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
>
8939 <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
>
8940 <li
>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-
6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso
</li
>
8943 <p
>There is no source DVD available yet. It will be prepared when we
8944 get closer to the final release.
</p
>
8946 <p
>The MD5SUM of these images are
</p
>
8949 <li
>3dbf45d59f42a53518b6e3c9ec3b5eb6 debian-edu-
6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso
</li
>
8950 <li
>22f2cbfce281d1c6e478be452638675d debian-edu-
6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso
</li
>
8953 <p
>The SHA1SUM of these images are
</p
>
8955 <li
>c53d1b69b40cf37cd27aefaf33f6f6a3821bedf0 debian-edu-
6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso
</li
>
8956 <li
>2ec29d7db676d59d32197b05c277ffe16348376c debian-edu-
6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso
</li
>
8958 <p
>How to report bugs:
8959 http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugsInBugzilla
</p
>
8961 <p
>Please direct replies to debian-edu@lists.debian.org
</p
>
8967 <title>One step closer to single signon in Debian Edu
</title>
8968 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/One_step_closer_to_single_signon_in_Debian_Edu.html
</link>
8969 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/One_step_closer_to_single_signon_in_Debian_Edu.html
</guid>
8970 <pubDate>Sun,
25 Jul
2010 10:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
8971 <description><p
>The last few months me and the other Debian Edu developers have
8972 been working hard to get the Debian/Squeeze based version of Debian
8973 Edu/Skolelinux into shape. This future version will use Kerberos for
8974 authentication, and services are slowly migrated to single signon,
8975 getting rid of password questions one at the time.
</p
>
8977 <p
>It will also feature a roaming workstation profile with local home
8978 directory, for laptops that are only some times on the Skolelinux
8979 network, and for this profile a shortcut is created in Gnome and KDE
8980 to gain access to the users home directory on the file server. This
8981 shortcut uses SMB at the moment, and yesterday I had time to test if
8982 SMB mounting had started working in KDE after we added the cifs-utils
8983 package. I was pleasantly surprised how well it worked.
</p
>
8985 <p
>Thanks to the recent changes to our samba configuration to get it
8986 to use Kerberos for authentication, there were no question about user
8987 password when mounting the SMB volume. A simple click on the shortcut
8988 in the KDE menu, and a window with the home directory popped
8991 <p
>One step closer to a single signon solution out of the box in
8992 Debian Edu. We already had PAM, LDAP, IMAP and SMTP in place, and now
8993 also Samba. Next step is Cups and hopefully also NFS.
</p
>
8995 <p
>We had planned a alpha0 release of Debian Edu for today, but thanks
8996 to the autobuilder administrators for some architectures being slow to
8997 sign packages, we are still missing the fixed LTSP package we need for
8998 the release. It was uploaded three days ago with urgency=high, and if
8999 it had entered testing yesterday we would have been able to test it in
9000 time for a alpha0 release today. As the binaries for ia64 and powerpc
9001 still not uploaded to the Debian archive, we need to delay the alpha
9002 release another day.
</p
>
9004 <p
>If you want to help out with implementing Kerberos for Debian Edu,
9005 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.
</p
>
9010 <title>OpenStreetmap one step closer to having routing on its front page
</title>
9011 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/OpenStreetmap_one_step_closer_to_having_routing_on_its_front_page.html
</link>
9012 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/OpenStreetmap_one_step_closer_to_having_routing_on_its_front_page.html
</guid>
9013 <pubDate>Sun,
18 Jul
2010 16:
45:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
9014 <description><p
>Thanks to
9015 <a href=
"http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Opengeodata/~
3/wUTCzDZk3lc/project-of-the-week-which-way-home
">todays
9016 opengeodata blog entry
</a
>, I just discovered that the
9017 OpenStreetmap.org site have gotten
9018 <a href=
"http://nroets.dev.openstreetmap.org/demo/index.html?layers=B000FTFTT
">support
9019 for calculating routes
</a
>. The support is still experimental and
9020 only available from the development server, until more experience is
9021 gathered on the user interface and any scalability issues.
</p
>
9023 <p
>Earlier, the routing I knew about using the OpenStreetmap.org data
9024 was provided by
<a href=
"http://maps.cloudmade.com/
">Cloudmade
</a
>,
9025 but having it on the main page is required to make everyone aware of
9026 the issue. I
've had people reject Openstreetmap.org as a viable
9027 alternative for them because the front page lacked routing support,
9028 and I hope their needs will be catered for when routing show up on the
9029 www.openstreetmap.org front page.
</p
>
9034 <title>What are they searching for - PowerDNS and ISC DHCP in LDAP
</title>
9035 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_are_they_searching_for___PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_in_LDAP.html
</link>
9036 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_are_they_searching_for___PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_in_LDAP.html
</guid>
9037 <pubDate>Sat,
17 Jul
2010 21:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
9038 <description><p
>This is a
9039 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html
">followup
</a
>
9041 <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
9043 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html
">merging
9044 all
</a
> the computer related LDAP objects in Debian Edu.
</p
>
9046 <p
>As a step to try to see if it possible to merge the DNS and DHCP
9047 LDAP objects, I have had a look at how the packages pdns-backend-ldap
9048 and dhcp3-server-ldap in Debian use the LDAP server. The two
9049 implementations are quite different in how they use LDAP.
</p
>
9051 To get this information, I started slapd with debugging enabled and
9052 dumped the debug output to a file to get the LDAP searches performed
9053 on a Debian Edu main-server. Here is a summary.
9055 <p
><strong
>powerdns
</strong
></p
>
9057 <a href=
"http://www.linuxnetworks.de/doc/index.php/PowerDNS_LDAP_Backend
">Clues
9058 on how to
</a
> set up PowerDNS to use a LDAP backend is available on
9061 <p
>PowerDNS have two modes of operation using LDAP as its backend.
9062 One
"strict
" mode where the forward and reverse DNS lookups are done
9063 using the same LDAP objects, and a
"tree
" mode where the forward and
9064 reverse entries are in two different subtrees in LDAP with a structure
9065 based on the DNS names, as in tjener.intern and
9066 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa.
</p
>
9068 <p
>In tree mode, the server is set up to use a LDAP subtree as its
9069 base, and uses a
"base
" scoped search for the DNS name by adding
9070 "dc=tjener,dc=intern,
" to the base with a filter for
9071 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)
" for the forward entry and
9072 "dc=
2,dc=
2,dc=
0,dc=
10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,
" with a filter for
9073 "(associateddomain=
2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)
" for the reverse entry. For
9074 forward entries, it is looking for attributes named dnsttl, arecord,
9075 nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord,
9076 txtrecord, rprecord, afsdbrecord, keyrecord, aaaarecord, locrecord,
9077 srvrecord, naptrrecord, kxrecord, certrecord, dsrecord, sshfprecord,
9078 ipseckeyrecord, rrsigrecord, nsecrecord, dnskeyrecord, dhcidrecord,
9079 spfrecord and modifytimestamp. For reverse entries it is looking for
9080 the attributes dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord,
9081 ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord,
9082 locrecord, srvrecord, naptrrecord and modifytimestamp. The equivalent
9083 ldapsearch commands could look like this:
</p
>
9085 <blockquote
><pre
>
9086 ldapsearch -h ldap \
9087 -b dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
9088 -s base -x
'(associateddomain=tjener.intern)
' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
9089 cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
9090 rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
9091 nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
9092 rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
9094 ldapsearch -h ldap \
9095 -b dc=
2,dc=
2,dc=
0,dc=
10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
9096 -s base -x
'(associateddomain=
2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)
'
9097 dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord soarecord ptrrecord \
9098 hinforecord mxrecord txtrecord rprecord aaaarecord locrecord \
9099 srvrecord naptrrecord modifytimestamp
9100 </pre
></blockquote
>
9102 <p
>In Debian Edu/Lenny, the PowerDNS tree mode is used with
9103 ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no as the base, and these are two
9104 example LDAP objects used there. In addition to these objects, the
9105 parent objects all th way up to ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
9106 also exist.
</p
>
9108 <blockquote
><pre
>
9109 dn: dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
9111 objectclass: dnsdomain
9112 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
9115 associateddomain: tjener.intern
9117 dn: dc=
2,dc=
2,dc=
0,dc=
10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
9119 objectclass: dnsdomain2
9120 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
9122 ptrrecord: tjener.intern
9123 associateddomain:
2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa
9124 </pre
></blockquote
>
9126 <p
>In strict mode, the server behaves differently. When looking for
9127 forward DNS entries, it is doing a
"subtree
" scoped search with the
9128 same base as in the tree mode for a object with filter
9129 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)
" and requests the attributes dnsttl,
9130 arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord,
9131 mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord, locrecord, srvrecord,
9132 naptrrecord and modifytimestamp. For reverse entires it also do a
9133 subtree scoped search but this time the filter is
"(arecord=
10.0.2.2)
"
9134 and the requested attributes are associateddomain, dnsttl and
9135 modifytimestamp. In short, in strict mode the objects with ptrrecord
9136 go away, and the arecord attribute in the forward object is used
9139 <p
>The forward and reverse searches can be simulated using ldapsearch
9140 like this:
</p
>
9142 <blockquote
><pre
>
9143 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
9144 '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)
' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
9145 cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
9146 rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
9147 nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
9148 rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
9150 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
9151 '(arecord=
10.0.2.2)
' associateddomain dnsttl modifytimestamp
9152 </pre
></blockquote
>
9154 <p
>In addition to the forward and reverse searches , there is also a
9155 search for SOA records, which behave similar to the forward and
9156 reverse lookups.
</p
>
9158 <p
>A thing to note with the PowerDNS behaviour is that it do not
9159 specify any objectclass names, and instead look for the attributes it
9160 need to generate a DNS reply. This make it able to work with any
9161 objectclass that provide the needed attributes.
</p
>
9163 <p
>The attributes are normally provided in the cosine (RFC
1274) and
9164 dnsdomain2 schemas. The latter is used for reverse entries like
9165 ptrrecord and recent DNS additions like aaaarecord and srvrecord.
</p
>
9167 <p
>In Debian Edu, we have created DNS objects using the object classes
9168 dcobject (for dc), dnsdomain or dnsdomain2 (structural, for the DNS
9169 attributes) and domainrelatedobject (for associatedDomain). The use
9170 of structural object classes make it impossible to combine these
9171 classes with the object classes used by DHCP.
</p
>
9173 <p
>There are other schemas that could be used too, for example the
9174 dnszone structural object class used by Gosa and bind-sdb for the DNS
9175 attributes combined with the domainrelatedobject object class, but in
9176 this case some unused attributes would have to be included as well
9177 (zonename and relativedomainname).
</p
>
9179 <p
>My proposal for Debian Edu would be to switch PowerDNS to strict
9180 mode and not use any of the existing objectclasses (dnsdomain,
9181 dnsdomain2 and dnszone) when one want to combine the DNS information
9182 with DHCP information, and instead create a auxiliary object class
9183 defined something like this (using the attributes defined for
9184 dnsdomain and dnsdomain2 or dnszone):
</p
>
9186 <blockquote
><pre
>
9187 objectclass ( some-oid NAME
'dnsDomainAux
'
9190 MAY ( ARecord $ MDRecord $ MXRecord $ NSRecord $ SOARecord $ CNAMERecord $
9191 DNSTTL $ DNSClass $ PTRRecord $ HINFORecord $ MINFORecord $
9192 TXTRecord $ SIGRecord $ KEYRecord $ AAAARecord $ LOCRecord $
9193 NXTRecord $ SRVRecord $ NAPTRRecord $ KXRecord $ CERTRecord $
9194 A6Record $ DNAMERecord
9196 </pre
></blockquote
>
9198 <p
>This will allow any object to become a DNS entry when combined with
9199 the domainrelatedobject object class, and allow any entity to include
9200 all the attributes PowerDNS wants. I
've sent an email to the PowerDNS
9201 developers asking for their view on this schema and if they are
9202 interested in providing such schema with PowerDNS, and I hope my
9203 message will be accepted into their mailing list soon.
</p
>
9205 <p
><strong
>ISC dhcp
</strong
></p
>
9207 <p
>The DHCP server searches for specific objectclass and requests all
9208 the object attributes, and then uses the attributes it want. This
9209 make it harder to figure out exactly what attributes are used, but
9210 thanks to the working example in Debian Edu I can at least get an idea
9211 what is needed without having to read the source code.
</p
>
9213 <p
>In the DHCP server configuration, the LDAP base to use and the
9214 search filter to use to locate the correct dhcpServer entity is
9215 stored. These are the relevant entries from
9216 /etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf:
</p
>
9218 <blockquote
><pre
>
9219 ldap-base-dn
"dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
";
9220 ldap-dhcp-server-cn
"dhcp
";
9221 </pre
></blockquote
>
9223 <p
>The DHCP server uses this information to nest all the DHCP
9224 configuration it need. The cn
"dhcp
" is located using the given LDAP
9225 base and the filter
"(
&(objectClass=dhcpServer)(cn=dhcp))
". The
9226 search result is this entry:
</p
>
9228 <blockquote
><pre
>
9229 dn: cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
9232 objectClass: dhcpServer
9233 dhcpServiceDN: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
9234 </pre
></blockquote
>
9236 <p
>The content of the dhcpServiceDN attribute is next used to locate the
9237 subtree with DHCP configuration. The DHCP configuration subtree base
9238 is located using a base scope search with base
"cn=DHCP
9239 Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
" and filter
9240 "(
&(objectClass=dhcpService)(|(dhcpPrimaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)(dhcpSecondaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)))
".
9241 The search result is this entry:
</p
>
9243 <blockquote
><pre
>
9244 dn: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
9247 objectClass: dhcpService
9248 objectClass: dhcpOptions
9249 dhcpPrimaryDN: cn=dhcp, dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
9250 dhcpStatements: ddns-update-style none
9251 dhcpStatements: authoritative
9252 dhcpOption: smtp-server code
69 = array of ip-address
9253 dhcpOption: www-server code
72 = array of ip-address
9254 dhcpOption: wpad-url code
252 = text
9255 </pre
></blockquote
>
9257 <p
>Next, the entire subtree is processed, one level at the time. When
9258 all the DHCP configuration is loaded, it is ready to receive requests.
9259 The subtree in Debian Edu contain objects with object classes
9260 top/dhcpService/dhcpOptions, top/dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions,
9261 top/dhcpSubnet, top/dhcpGroup and top/dhcpHost. These provide options
9262 and information about netmasks, dynamic range etc. Leaving out the
9263 details here because it is not relevant for the focus of my
9264 investigation, which is to see if it is possible to merge dns and dhcp
9265 related computer objects.
</p
>
9267 <p
>When a DHCP request come in, LDAP is searched for the MAC address
9268 of the client (
00:
00:
00:
00:
00:
00 in this example), using a subtree
9269 scoped search with
"cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
" as
9270 the base and
"(
&(objectClass=dhcpHost)(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet
9271 00:
00:
00:
00:
00:
00))
" as the filter. This is what a host object look
9274 <blockquote
><pre
>
9275 dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
9278 objectClass: dhcpHost
9279 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet
00:
00:
00:
00:
00:
00
9280 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname
9281 </pre
></blockquote
>
9283 <p
>There is less flexiblity in the way LDAP searches are done here.
9284 The object classes need to have fixed names, and the configuration
9285 need to be stored in a fairly specific LDAP structure. On the
9286 positive side, the invidiual dhcpHost entires can be anywhere without
9287 the DN pointed to by the dhcpServer entries. The latter should make
9288 it possible to group all host entries in a subtree next to the
9289 configuration entries, and this subtree can also be shared with the
9290 DNS server if the schema proposed above is combined with the dhcpHost
9291 structural object class.
9293 <p
><strong
>Conclusion
</strong
></p
>
9295 <p
>The PowerDNS implementation seem to be very flexible when it come
9296 to which LDAP schemas to use. While its
"tree
" mode is rigid when it
9297 come to the the LDAP structure, the
"strict
" mode is very flexible,
9298 allowing DNS objects to be stored anywhere under the base cn specified
9299 in the configuration.
</p
>
9301 <p
>The DHCP implementation on the other hand is very inflexible, both
9302 regarding which LDAP schemas to use and which LDAP structure to use.
9303 I guess one could implement ones own schema, as long as the
9304 objectclasses and attributes have the names used, but this do not
9305 really help when the DHCP subtree need to have a fairly fixed
9306 structure.
</p
>
9308 <p
>Based on the observed behaviour, I suspect a LDAP structure like
9309 this might work for Debian Edu:
</p
>
9311 <blockquote
><pre
>
9313 cn=machine-info (dhcpService) - dhcpServiceDN points here
9314 cn=dhcp (dhcpServer)
9315 cn=dhcp-internal (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
9316 cn=
10.0.2.0 (dhcpSubnet)
9317 cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
9318 cn=dhcp-thinclients (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
9319 cn=
192.168.0.0 (dhcpSubnet)
9320 cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
9321 ou=machines - PowerDNS base points here
9322 cn=hostname (dhcpHost/domainrelatedobject/dnsDomainAux)
9323 </pre
></blockquote
>
9325 <P
>This is not tested yet. If the DHCP server require the dhcpHost
9326 entries to be in the dhcpGroup subtrees, the entries can be stored
9327 there instead of a common machines subtree, and the PowerDNS base
9328 would have to be moved one level up to the machine-info subtree.
</p
>
9330 <p
>The combined object under the machines subtree would look something
9331 like this:
</p
>
9333 <blockquote
><pre
>
9334 dn: dc=hostname,ou=machines,cn=machine-info,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
9337 objectClass: dhcpHost
9338 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
9339 objectclass: dnsDomainAux
9340 associateddomain: hostname.intern
9341 arecord:
10.11.12.13
9342 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet
00:
00:
00:
00:
00:
00
9343 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname.intern
9344 </pre
></blockquote
>
9346 </p
>One could even add the LTSP configuration associated with a given
9347 machine, as long as the required attributes are available in a
9348 auxiliary object class.
</p
>
9353 <title>Combining PowerDNS and ISC DHCP LDAP objects
</title>
9354 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html
</link>
9355 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html
</guid>
9356 <pubDate>Wed,
14 Jul
2010 23:
45:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
9357 <description><p
>For a while now, I have wanted to find a way to change the DNS and
9358 DHCP services in Debian Edu to use the same LDAP objects for a given
9359 computer, to avoid the possibility of having a inconsistent state for
9360 a computer in LDAP (as in DHCP but no DNS entry or the other way
9361 around) and make it easier to add computers to LDAP.
</p
>
9363 <p
>I
've looked at how powerdns and dhcpd is using LDAP, and using this
9364 information finally found a solution that seem to work.
</p
>
9366 <p
>The old setup required three LDAP objects for a given computer.
9367 One forward DNS entry, one reverse DNS entry and one DHCP entry. If
9368 we switch powerdns to use its strict LDAP method (ldap-method=strict
9369 in pdns-debian-edu.conf), the forward and reverse DNS entries are
9370 merged into one while making it impossible to transfer the reverse map
9371 to a slave DNS server.
</p
>
9373 <p
>If we also replace the object class used to get the DNS related
9374 attributes to one allowing these attributes to be combined with the
9375 dhcphost object class, we can merge the DNS and DHCP entries into one.
9376 I
've written such object class in the dnsdomainaux.schema file (need
9377 proper OIDs, but that is a minor issue), and tested the setup. It
9378 seem to work.
</p
>
9380 <p
>With this test setup in place, we can get away with one LDAP object
9381 for both DNS and DHCP, and even the LTSP configuration I suggested in
9382 an earlier email. The combined LDAP object will look something like
9385 <blockquote
><pre
>
9386 dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
9388 objectClass: dhcphost
9389 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
9390 objectclass: dnsdomainaux
9391 associateddomain: hostname.intern
9392 arecord:
10.11.12.13
9393 dhcphwaddress: ethernet
00:
00:
00:
00:
00:
00
9394 dhcpstatements: fixed-address hostname
9396 </pre
></blockquote
>
9398 <p
>The DNS server uses the associateddomain and arecord entries, while
9399 the DHCP server uses the dhcphwaddress and dhcpstatements entries
9400 before asking DNS to resolve the fixed-adddress. LTSP will use
9401 dhcphwaddress or associateddomain and the ldapconfig* attributes.
</p
>
9403 <p
>I am not yet sure if I can get the DHCP server to look for its
9404 dhcphost in a different location, to allow us to put the objects
9405 outside the
"DHCP Config
" subtree, but hope to figure out a way to do
9406 that. If I can
't figure out a way to do that, we can still get rid of
9407 the hosts subtree and move all its content into the DHCP Config tree
9408 (which probably should be renamed to be more related to the new
9409 content. I suspect cn=dnsdhcp,ou=services or something like that
9410 might be a good place to put it.
</p
>
9412 <p
>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
9413 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.
</p
>
9418 <title>Idea for storing LTSP configuration in LDAP
</title>
9419 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_storing_LTSP_configuration_in_LDAP.html
</link>
9420 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_storing_LTSP_configuration_in_LDAP.html
</guid>
9421 <pubDate>Sun,
11 Jul
2010 22:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
9422 <description><p
>Vagrant mentioned on IRC today that ltsp_config now support
9423 sourcing files from /usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ on the thin
9424 clients, and that this can be used to fetch configuration from LDAP if
9425 Debian Edu choose to store configuration there.
</p
>
9427 <p
>Armed with this information, I got inspired and wrote a test module
9428 to get configuration from LDAP. The idea is to look up the MAC
9429 address of the client in LDAP, and look for attributes on the form
9430 ltspconfigsetting=value, and use this to export SETTING=value to the
9431 LTSP clients.
</p
>
9433 <p
>The goal is to be able to store the LTSP configuration attributes
9434 in a
"computer
" LDAP object used by both DNS and DHCP, and thus
9435 allowing us to store all information about a computer in one place.
</p
>
9437 <p
>This is a untested draft implementation, and I welcome feedback on
9438 this approach. A real LDAP schema for the ltspClientAux objectclass
9439 need to be written. Comments, suggestions, etc?
</p
>
9441 <blockquote
><pre
>
9442 # Store in /opt/ltsp/$arch/usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ldap-config
9444 # Fetch LTSP client settings from LDAP based on MAC address
9446 # Uses ethernet address as stored in the dhcpHost objectclass using
9447 # the dhcpHWAddress attribute or ethernet address stored in the
9448 # ieee802Device objectclass with the macAddress attribute.
9450 # This module is written to be schema agnostic, and only depend on the
9451 # existence of attribute names.
9453 # The LTSP configuration variables are saved directly using a
9454 # ltspConfig prefix and uppercasing the rest of the attribute name.
9455 # To set the SERVER variable, set the ltspConfigServer attribute.
9457 # Some LDAP schema should be created with all the relevant
9458 # configuration settings. Something like this should work:
9460 # objectclass (
1.1.2.2 NAME
'ltspClientAux
'
9463 # MAY ( ltspConfigServer $ ltsConfigSound $ ... )
9465 LDAPSERVER=$(debian-edu-ldapserver)
9466 if [
"$LDAPSERVER
" ] ; then
9467 LDAPBASE=$(debian-edu-ldapserver -b)
9468 for MAC in $(LANG=C ifconfig |grep -i hwaddr| awk
'{print $
5}
'|sort -u) ; do
9469 filter=
"(|(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet $MAC)(macAddress=$MAC))
"
9470 ldapsearch -h
"$LDAPSERVER
" -b
"$LDAPBASE
" -v -x
"$filter
" | \
9471 grep
'^ltspConfig
' | while read attr value ; do
9472 # Remove prefix and convert to upper case
9473 attr=$(echo $attr | sed
's/^ltspConfig//i
' | tr a-z A-Z)
9474 # bass value on to clients
9475 eval
"$attr=$value; export $attr
"
9479 </pre
></blockquote
>
9481 <p
>I
'm not sure this shell construction will work, because I suspect
9482 the while block might end up in a subshell causing the variables set
9483 there to not show up in ltsp-config, but if that is the case I am sure
9484 the code can be restructured to make sure the variables are passed on.
9485 I expect that can be solved with some testing. :)
</p
>
9487 <p
>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
9488 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.
</p
>
9490 <p
>Update
2010-
07-
17: I am aware of another effort to store LTSP
9491 configuration in LDAP that was created around year
2000 by
9492 <a href=
"http://www.pcxperience.com/thinclient/documentation/ldap.html
">PC
9493 Xperience, Inc.,
2000</a
>. I found its
9494 <a href=
"http://people.redhat.com/alikins/ltsp/ldap/
">files
</a
> on a
9495 personal home page over at redhat.com.
</p
>
9500 <title>jXplorer, a very nice LDAP GUI
</title>
9501 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/jXplorer__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html
</link>
9502 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/jXplorer__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html
</guid>
9503 <pubDate>Fri,
9 Jul
2010 12:
55:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
9504 <description><p
>Since
9505 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html
">my
9506 last post
</a
> about available LDAP tools in Debian, I was told about a
9507 LDAP GUI that is even better than luma. The java application
9508 <a href=
"http://jxplorer.org/
">jXplorer
</a
> is claimed to be capable of
9509 moving LDAP objects and subtrees using drag-and-drop, and can
9510 authenticate using Kerberos. I have only tested the Kerberos
9511 authentication, but do not have a LDAP setup allowing me to rewrite
9512 LDAP with my test user yet. It is
9513 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/j/jxplorer.html
">available in
9514 Debian
</a
> testing and unstable at the moment. The only problem I
9515 have with it is how it handle errors. If something go wrong, its
9516 non-intuitive behaviour require me to go through some query work list
9517 and remove the failing query. Nothing big, but very annoying.
</p
>
9522 <title>Lenny-
>Squeeze upgrades, apt vs aptitude with the Gnome desktop
</title>
9523 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__apt_vs_aptitude_with_the_Gnome_desktop.html
</link>
9524 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__apt_vs_aptitude_with_the_Gnome_desktop.html
</guid>
9525 <pubDate>Sat,
3 Jul
2010 23:
55:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
9526 <description><p
>Here is a short update on my
<a
9527 href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/
">my
9528 Debian Lenny-
>Squeeze upgrade testing
</a
>. Here is a summary of the
9529 difference for Gnome when it is upgraded by apt-get and aptitude. I
'm
9530 not reporting the status for KDE, because the upgrade crashes when
9531 aptitude try because of missing conflicts
9532 (
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
584861">#
584861</a
> and
9533 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
585716">#
585716</a
>).
</p
>
9535 <p
>At the end of the upgrade test script, dpkg -l is executed to get a
9536 complete list of the installed packages. Based on this I see these
9537 differences when I did a test run today. As usual, I do not really
9538 know what the correct set of packages would be, but thought it best to
9539 publish the difference.
</p
>
9541 <p
>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude
</p
>
9543 <blockquote
><p
>
9544 at-spi cpp-
4.3 finger gnome-spell gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
9545 libatspi1.0-
0 libcupsys2 libeel2-data libgail-common libgdl-
1-common
9546 libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin
9547 libgtksourceview-common libpt-
1.10.10-plugins-alsa
9548 libpt-
1.10.10-plugins-v4l libservlet2.4-java libxalan2-java
9549 libxerces2-java openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
9550 python-
4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gtkhtml2
9551 python-gtkmozembed svgalibg1 xserver-xephyr zip
9552 </p
></blockquote
>
9554 <p
>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude
</p
>
9556 <blockquote
><p
>
9557 bluez-utils dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop epiphany-gecko
9558 gnome-app-install gnome-mount gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager
9559 libao2 libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libbind9-
50
9560 libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-
11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcurl3
9561 libdirectfb-
1.0-
0 libdvdread3 libedata-cal1.2-
6 libedataserver1.2-
9
9562 libeel2-
2.20 libepc-
1.0-
1 libepc-ui-
1.0-
1 libexchange-storage1.2-
3
9563 libfaad0 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-
3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
9564 libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-
0 libgksuui1.0-
1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-
2
9565 libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-
1 libgnomeprint2.2-
0
9566 libgnomeprintui2.2-
0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-
0
9567 libgtksourceview1.0-
0 libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50
9568 libisccfg50 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick++
10
9569 libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4
9570 libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-
2.2 libosp5
9571 libparted1.8-
10 libpisock9 libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3
9572 libpt-
1.10.10 libraw1394-
8 libsensors3 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-
8
9573 libssh2-
1 libsuitesparse-
3.1.0 libswfdec-
0.6-
90 libtalloc1
9574 libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0 libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj
9575 libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3
9576 mysql-common swfdec-gnome totem-gstreamer wodim
9577 </p
></blockquote
>
9579 <p
>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get
</p
>
9581 <blockquote
><p
>
9582 gnome gnome-desktop-environment hamster-applet python-gnomeapplet
9583 python-gnomekeyring python-wnck rhythmbox-plugins xorg
9584 xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
9585 xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
9586 xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-video-all
9587 xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark xserver-xorg-video-ati
9588 xserver-xorg-video-chips xserver-xorg-video-cirrus
9589 xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
9590 xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
9591 xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-mach64
9592 xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
9593 xserver-xorg-video-nouveau xserver-xorg-video-nv
9594 xserver-xorg-video-r128 xserver-xorg-video-radeon
9595 xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd xserver-xorg-video-rendition
9596 xserver-xorg-video-s3 xserver-xorg-video-s3virge
9597 xserver-xorg-video-savage xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion
9598 xserver-xorg-video-sis xserver-xorg-video-sisusb
9599 xserver-xorg-video-tdfx xserver-xorg-video-tga
9600 xserver-xorg-video-trident xserver-xorg-video-tseng
9601 xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vmware
9602 xserver-xorg-video-voodoo
9603 </p
></blockquote
>
9605 <p
>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get
</p
>
9607 <blockquote
><p
>
9608 deskbar-applet xserver-xorg xserver-xorg-core
9609 xserver-xorg-input-wacom xserver-xorg-video-intel
9610 xserver-xorg-video-openchrome
9611 </p
></blockquote
>
9613 <p
>I was told on IRC that the xorg-xserver package was
9614 <a href=
"http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-xorg/xserver/xorg-server.git;a=commit;h=
9c8080d06c457932d3bfec021c69ac000aa60120
">changed
9615 in git
</a
> today to try to get apt-get to not remove xorg completely.
9616 No idea when it hits Squeeze, but when it does I hope it will reduce
9617 the difference somewhat.
9622 <title>Caching password, user and group on a roaming Debian laptop
</title>
9623 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Caching_password__user_and_group_on_a_roaming_Debian_laptop.html
</link>
9624 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Caching_password__user_and_group_on_a_roaming_Debian_laptop.html
</guid>
9625 <pubDate>Thu,
1 Jul
2010 11:
40:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
9626 <description><p
>For a laptop, centralized user directories and password checking is
9627 a bit troubling. Laptops are typically used also when not connected
9628 to the network, and it is vital for a user to be able to log in or
9629 unlock the screen saver also when a central server is unavailable.
9630 This is possible by caching passwords and directory information (user
9631 and group attributes) locally, and the packages to do so are available
9632 in Debian. Here follow two recipes to set this up in Debian/Squeeze.
9633 It is also possible to set up in Debian/Lenny, but require more manual
9634 setup there because pam-auth-update is missing in Lenny.
</p
>
9636 <h2
>LDAP/Kerberos + nscd + libpam-ccreds + libpam-mklocaluser/pam_mkhomedir
</h2
>
9638 This is the traditional method with a twist. The password caching is
9639 provided by libpam-ccreds (version
10-
4 or later is needed on
9640 Squeeze), and the directory caching is done by nscd. The directory
9641 lookup and password checking is done using LDAP. If one want to use
9642 Kerberos for password checking the libpam-ldapd package can be
9643 replaced with libpam-krb5 or libpam-heimdal. If one is happy having a
9644 local home directory with the path listed in LDAP, one can use the
9645 pam_mkhomedir module from pam-modules to make this happen instead of
9646 using libpam-mklocaluser. A setup for pam-auth-update to enable
9647 pam_mkhomedir will have to be written until a fix for
9648 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
568577">bug #
568577</a
> is in the
9649 archive. Because I believe it is a bad idea to have local home
9650 directories using misleading paths like /site/server/partition/, I
9651 prefer to create a local user with the home directory in /home/. This
9652 is done using the libpam-mklocaluser package.
</p
>
9654 <p
>These packages need to be installed and configured
</p
>
9656 <blockquote
><pre
>
9657 libnss-ldapd libpam-ldapd nscd libpam-ccreds libpam-mklocaluser
9658 </pre
></blockquote
>
9660 <p
>The ldapd packages will ask for LDAP connection information, and
9661 one have to fill in the values that fits ones own site. Make sure the
9662 PAM part uses encrypted connections, to make sure the password is not
9663 sent in clear text to the LDAP server. I
've been unable to get TLS
9664 certificate checking for a self signed certificate working, which make
9665 LDAP authentication unsafe for Debian Edu (nslcd is not checking if it
9666 is talking to the correct LDAP server), and very much welcome feedback
9667 on how to get this working.
</p
>
9669 <p
>Because nscd do not have a default configuration fit for offline
9670 caching until
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
485282">bug #
485282</a
>
9671 is fixed, this configuration should be used instead of the one
9672 currently in /etc/nscd.conf. The changes are in the fields
9673 reload-count and positive-time-to-live, and is based on the
9674 instructions I found in the
9675 <a href=
"http://www.flyn.org/laptopldap/
">LDAP for Mobile Laptops
</a
>
9676 instructions by Flyn Computing.
</p
>
9678 <blockquote
><pre
>
9680 reload-count unlimited
9683 enable-cache passwd yes
9684 positive-time-to-live passwd
2592000
9685 negative-time-to-live passwd
20
9686 suggested-size passwd
211
9687 check-files passwd yes
9688 persistent passwd yes
9690 max-db-size passwd
33554432
9691 auto-propagate passwd yes
9693 enable-cache group yes
9694 positive-time-to-live group
2592000
9695 negative-time-to-live group
20
9696 suggested-size group
211
9697 check-files group yes
9698 persistent group yes
9700 max-db-size group
33554432
9701 auto-propagate group yes
9703 enable-cache hosts no
9704 positive-time-to-live hosts
2592000
9705 negative-time-to-live hosts
20
9706 suggested-size hosts
211
9707 check-files hosts yes
9708 persistent hosts yes
9710 max-db-size hosts
33554432
9712 enable-cache services yes
9713 positive-time-to-live services
2592000
9714 negative-time-to-live services
20
9715 suggested-size services
211
9716 check-files services yes
9717 persistent services yes
9719 max-db-size services
33554432
9720 </pre
></blockquote
>
9722 <p
>While we wait for a mechanism to update /etc/nsswitch.conf
9723 automatically like the one provided in
9724 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
496915">bug #
496915</a
>, the file
9725 content need to be manually replaced to ensure LDAP is used as the
9726 directory service on the machine. /etc/nsswitch.conf should normally
9727 look like this:
</p
>
9729 <blockquote
><pre
>
9733 hosts: files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns mdns4
9739 netgroup: files ldap
9740 </pre
></blockquote
>
9742 <p
>The important parts are that ldap is listed last for passwd, group,
9743 shadow and netgroup.
</p
>
9745 <p
>With these changes in place, any user in LDAP will be able to log
9746 in locally on the machine using for example kdm, get a local home
9747 directory created and have the password as well as user and group
9750 <h2
>LDAP/Kerberos + nss-updatedb + libpam-ccreds +
9751 libpam-mklocaluser/pam_mkhomedir
</h2
>
9753 <p
>Because nscd have had its share of problems, and seem to have
9754 problems doing proper caching, I
've seen suggestions and recipes to
9755 use nss-updatedb to copy parts of the LDAP database locally when the
9756 LDAP database is available. I have not tested such setup, because I
9757 discovered sssd.
</p
>
9759 <h2
>LDAP/Kerberos + sssd + libpam-mklocaluser
</h2
>
9761 <p
>A more flexible and robust setup than the nscd combination
9762 mentioned earlier that has shown up recently, is the
9763 <a href=
"https://fedorahosted.org/sssd/
">sssd
</a
> package from Redhat.
9764 It is part of the
<a href=
"http://www.freeipa.org/
">FreeIPA
</A
> project
9765 to provide a Active Directory like directory service for Linux
9766 machines. The sssd system combines the caching of passwords and user
9767 information into one package, and remove the need for nscd and
9768 libpam-ccreds. It support LDAP and Kerberos, but not NIS. Version
9769 1.2 do not support netgroups, but it is said that it will support this
9770 in version
1.5 expected to show up later in
2010. Because the
9771 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/sssd.html
">sssd package
</a
>
9772 was missing in Debian, I ended up co-maintaining it with Werner, and
9773 version
1.2 is now in testing.
9775 <p
>These packages need to be installed and configured to get the
9776 roaming setup I want
</p
>
9778 <blockquote
><pre
>
9779 libpam-sss libnss-sss libpam-mklocaluser
9780 </pre
></blockquote
>
9782 The complete setup of sssd is done by editing/creating
9783 <tt
>/etc/sssd/sssd.conf
</tt
>.
9785 <blockquote
><pre
>
9787 config_file_version =
2
9788 reconnection_retries =
3
9794 filter_groups = root
9796 reconnection_retries =
3
9799 reconnection_retries =
3
9803 cache_credentials = true
9806 auth_provider = ldap
9807 chpass_provider = ldap
9809 ldap_uri = ldap://ldap
9810 ldap_search_base = dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
9811 ldap_tls_reqcert = never
9812 ldap_tls_cacert = /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt
9813 </pre
></blockquote
>
9815 <p
>I got the same problem here with certificate checking. Had to set
9816 "ldap_tls_reqcert = never
" to get it working.
</p
>
9818 <p
>With the libnss-sss package in testing at the moment, the
9819 nsswitch.conf file is update automatically, so there is no need to
9820 modify it manually.
</p
>
9822 <p
>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
9823 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.
</p
>
9828 <title>LUMA, a very nice LDAP GUI
</title>
9829 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html
</link>
9830 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html
</guid>
9831 <pubDate>Mon,
28 Jun
2010 00:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
9832 <description><p
>The last few days I have been looking into the status of the LDAP
9833 directory in Debian Edu, and in the process I started to miss a GUI
9834 tool to browse the LDAP tree. The only one I was able to find in
9835 Debian/Squeeze and Lenny is
9836 <a href=
"http://luma.sourceforge.net/
">LUMA
</a
>, which has proved to
9837 be a great tool to get a overview of the current LDAP directory
9838 populated by default in Skolelinux. Thanks to it, I have been able to
9839 find empty and obsolete subtrees, misplaced objects and duplicate
9840 objects. It will be installed by default in Debian/Squeeze. If you
9841 are working with LDAP, give it a go. :)
</p
>
9843 <p
>I did notice one problem with it I have not had time to report to
9844 the BTS yet. There is no .desktop file in the package, so the tool do
9845 not show up in the Gnome and KDE menus, but only deep down in in the
9846 Debian submenu in KDE. I hope that can be fixed before Squeeze is
9849 <p
>I have not yet been able to get it to modify the tree yet. I would
9850 like to move objects and remove subtrees directly in the GUI, but have
9851 not found a way to do that with LUMA yet. So in the mean time, I use
9852 <a href=
"http://www.lichteblau.com/ldapvi/
">ldapvi
</a
> for that.
</p
>
9854 <p
>If you have tips on other GUI tools for LDAP that might be useful
9855 in Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.
</p
>
9857 <p
>Update
2010-
06-
29: Ross Reedstrom tipped us about the
9858 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/g/gq.html
">gq
</a
> package as a
9859 useful GUI alternative. It seem like a good tool, but is unmaintained
9860 in Debian and got a RC bug keeping it out of Squeeze. Unless that
9861 changes, it will not be an option for Debian Edu based on Squeeze.
</p
>
9866 <title>Idea for a change to LDAP schemas allowing DNS and DHCP info to be combined into one object
</title>
9867 <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>
9868 <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>
9869 <pubDate>Thu,
24 Jun
2010 00:
35:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
9870 <description><p
>A while back, I
9871 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html
">complained
9872 about the fact
</a
> that it is not possible with the provided schemas
9873 for storing DNS and DHCP information in LDAP to combine the two sets
9874 of information into one LDAP object representing a computer.
</p
>
9876 <p
>In the mean time, I discovered that a simple fix would be to make
9877 the dhcpHost object class auxiliary, to allow it to be combined with
9878 the dNSDomain object class, and thus forming one object for one
9879 computer when storing both DHCP and DNS information in LDAP.
</p
>
9881 <p
>If I understand this correctly, it is not safe to do this change
9882 without also changing the assigned number for the object class, and I
9883 do not know enough about LDAP schema design to do that properly for
9884 Debian Edu.
</p
>
9886 <p
>Anyway, for future reference, this is how I believe we could change
9888 <a href=
"http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dhc-ldap-schema-
00">DHCP
9889 schema
</a
> to solve at least part of the problem with the LDAP schemas
9890 available today from IETF.
</p
>
9893 --- dhcp.schema (revision
65192)
9894 +++ dhcp.schema (working copy)
9896 objectclass (
2.16.840.1.113719.1.203.6.6
9897 NAME
'dhcpHost
'
9898 DESC
'This represents information about a particular client
'
9902 MAY (dhcpLeaseDN $ dhcpHWAddress $ dhcpOptionsDN $ dhcpStatements $ dhcpComments $ dhcpOption)
9903 X-NDS_CONTAINMENT (
'dhcpService
' 'dhcpSubnet
' 'dhcpGroup
') )
9906 <p
>I very much welcome clues on how to do this properly for Debian
9907 Edu/Squeeze. We provide the DHCP schema in our debian-edu-config
9908 package, and should thus be free to rewrite it as we see fit.
</p
>
9910 <p
>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
9911 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.
</p
>
9916 <title>Calling tasksel like the installer, while still getting useful output
</title>
9917 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Calling_tasksel_like_the_installer__while_still_getting_useful_output.html
</link>
9918 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Calling_tasksel_like_the_installer__while_still_getting_useful_output.html
</guid>
9919 <pubDate>Wed,
16 Jun
2010 14:
55:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
9920 <description><p
>A few times I have had the need to simulate the way tasksel
9921 installs packages during the normal debian-installer run. Until now,
9922 I have ended up letting tasksel do the work, with the annoying problem
9923 of not getting any feedback at all when something fails (like a
9924 conffile question from dpkg or a download that fails), using code like
9927 <blockquote
><pre
>
9928 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
9929 tasksel --new-install
9930 </pre
></blockquote
>
9932 This would invoke tasksel, let its automatic task selection pick the
9933 tasks to install, and continue to install the requested tasks without
9934 any output what so ever.
9936 Recently I revisited this problem while working on the automatic
9937 package upgrade testing, because tasksel would some times hang without
9938 any useful feedback, and I want to see what is going on when it
9939 happen. Then it occured to me, I can parse the output from tasksel
9940 when asked to run in test mode, and use that aptitude command line
9941 printed by tasksel then to simulate the tasksel run. I ended up using
9944 <blockquote
><pre
>
9945 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
9946 cmd=
"$(in_target tasksel -t --new-install | sed
's/debconf-apt-progress -- //
')
"
9948 </pre
></blockquote
>
9950 <p
>The content of $cmd is typically something like
"<tt
>aptitude -q
9951 --without-recommends -o APT::Install-Recommends=no -y install
9952 ~t^desktop$ ~t^gnome-desktop$ ~t^laptop$ ~pstandard ~prequired
9953 ~pimportant
</tt
>", which will install the gnome desktop task, the
9954 laptop task and all packages with priority standard , required and
9955 important, just like tasksel would have done it during
9956 installation.
</p
>
9958 <p
>A better approach is probably to extend tasksel to be able to
9959 install packages without using debconf-apt-progress, for use cases
9960 like this.
</p
>
9965 <title>Officeshots taking shape
</title>
9966 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_taking_shape.html
</link>
9967 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_taking_shape.html
</guid>
9968 <pubDate>Sun,
13 Jun
2010 11:
40:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
9969 <description><p
>For those of us caring about document exchange and
9970 interoperability,
<a href=
"http://www.officeshots.org/
">OfficeShots
</a
>
9971 is a great service. It is to ODF documents what
9972 <a href=
"http://browsershots.org/
">BrowserShots
</a
> is for web
9975 <p
>A while back, I was contacted by Knut Yrvin at the part of Nokia
9976 that used to be Trolltech, who wanted to help the OfficeShots project
9977 and wondered if the University of Oslo where I work would be
9978 interested in supporting the project. I helped him to navigate his
9979 request to the right people at work, and his request was answered with
9980 a spot in the machine room with power and network connected, and Knut
9981 arranged funding for a machine to fill the spot. The machine is
9982 administrated by the OfficeShots people, so I do not have daily
9983 contact with its progress, and thus from time to time check back to
9984 see how the project is doing.
</p
>
9986 <p
>Today I had a look, and was happy to see that the Dell box in our
9987 machine room now is the host for several virtual machines running as
9988 OfficeShots factories, and the project is able to render ODF documents
9989 in
17 different document processing implementation on Linux and
9990 Windows. This is great.
</p
>
9995 <title>Lenny-
>Squeeze upgrades, removals by apt and aptitude
</title>
9996 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__removals_by_apt_and_aptitude.html
</link>
9997 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__removals_by_apt_and_aptitude.html
</guid>
9998 <pubDate>Sun,
13 Jun
2010 09:
05:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
9999 <description><p
>My
10000 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html
">testing
10001 of Debian upgrades
</a
> from Lenny to Squeeze continues, and I
've
10002 finally made the upgrade logs available from
10003 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/
">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/
</a
>.
10004 I am now testing dist-upgrade of Gnome and KDE in a chroot using both
10005 apt and aptitude, and found their differences interesting. This time
10006 I will only focus on their removal plans.
</p
>
10008 <p
>After installing a Gnome desktop and the laptop task, apt-get wants
10009 to remove
72 packages when dist-upgrading from Lenny to Squeeze. The
10010 surprising part is that it want to remove xorg and all
10011 xserver-xorg-video* drivers. Clearly not a good choice, but I am not
10012 sure why. When asking aptitude to do the same, it want to remove
129
10013 packages, but most of them are library packages I suspect are no
10014 longer needed. Both of them want to remove bluetooth packages, which
10015 I do not know. Perhaps these bluetooth packages are obsolete?
</p
>
10017 <p
>For KDE, apt-get want to remove
82 packages, among them kdebase
10018 which seem like a bad idea and xorg the same way as with Gnome. Asking
10019 aptitude for the same, it wants to remove
192 packages, none which are
10020 too surprising.
</p
>
10022 <p
>I guess the removal of xorg during upgrades should be investigated
10023 and avoided, and perhaps others as well. Here are the complete list
10024 of planned removals. The complete logs is available from the URL
10025 above. Note if you want to repeat these tests, that the upgrade test
10026 for kde+apt-get hung in the tasksel setup because of dpkg asking
10027 conffile questions. No idea why. I worked around it by using
10028 '<tt
>echo
>> /proc/
<em
>pidofdpkg
</em
>/fd/
0</tt
>' to tell dpkg to
10029 continue.
</p
>
10031 <p
><b
>apt-get gnome
72</b
>
10032 <br
>bluez-gnome cupsddk-drivers deskbar-applet gnome
10033 gnome-desktop-environment gnome-network-admin gtkhtml3.14
10034 iceweasel-gnome-support libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libgdl-
1-
0
10035 libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libmetacity0 libslab0 libxcb-xlib0
10036 nautilus-cd-burner python-gnome2-desktop python-gnome2-extras
10037 serpentine swfdec-mozilla update-manager xorg xserver-xorg
10038 xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
10039 xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
10040 xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
10041 xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
10042 xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
10043 xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
10044 xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
10045 xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
10046 xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
10047 xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
10048 xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
10049 xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
10050 xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
10051 xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
10052 xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
10053 xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
10054 xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
10055 xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
10056 xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
10057 xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
10058 xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
10059 xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-
1.9
10060 xulrunner-
1.9-gnome-support
</p
>
10062 <p
><b
>aptitude gnome
129</b
>
10064 <br
>bluez-gnome bluez-utils cpp-
4.3 cupsddk-drivers dhcdbd
10065 djvulibre-desktop finger gnome-app-install gnome-mount
10066 gnome-network-admin gnome-spell gnome-vfs-obexftp
10067 gnome-volume-manager gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs gtkhtml3.14 libao2
10068 libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
10069 libcamel1.2-
11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcupsys2 libcurl3 libdatrie0
10070 libdirectfb-
1.0-
0 libdvdread3 libedataserver1.2-
9 libeel2-
2.20
10071 libeel2-data libepc-
1.0-
1 libepc-ui-
1.0-
1 libfaad0 libgail-common
10072 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-
3 libgda3-common libgdl-
1-
0 libgdl-
1-common
10073 libggz2 libggzcore9 libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-
0 libgksuui1.0-
1 libgmyth0
10074 libgnomecups1.0-
1 libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libgnomeprint2.2-
0
10075 libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-
0 libgnomeprintui2.2-common
10076 libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-
0
10077 libgtksourceview-common libgtksourceview1.0-
0 libgucharmap6
10078 libhesiod0 libicu38 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 libmagick++
10
10079 libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmetacity0 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off
10080 libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-
2.2
10081 libosp5 libparted1.8-
10 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-
1.10.10
10082 libpt-
1.10.10-plugins-alsa libpt-
1.10.10-plugins-v4l libraw1394-
8
10083 libsensors3 libslab0 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-
8 libssh2-
1
10084 libsuitesparse-
3.1.0 libswfdec-
0.6-
90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10
10085 libtrackerclient0 libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0
10086 libxerces2-java libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6
10087 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common nautilus-cd-burner
10088 openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
10089 python-
4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gnome2-desktop
10090 python-gnome2-extras python-gtkhtml2 python-gtkmozembed
10091 python-numeric python-sexy serpentine svgalibg1 swfdec-gnome
10092 swfdec-mozilla totem-gstreamer update-manager wodim
10093 xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
10094 xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
10097 <p
><b
>apt-get kde
82</b
>
10099 <br
>cupsddk-drivers karm kaudiocreator kcoloredit kcontrol kde kde-core
10100 kdeaddons kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-bin kdebase-bin-kde3
10101 kdebase-kio-plugins kdesktop kdeutils khelpcenter kicker
10102 kicker-applets knewsticker kolourpaint konq-plugins konqueror korn
10103 kpersonalizer kscreensaver ksplash libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libkiten1
10104 libxcb-xlib0 quanta superkaramba texlive-base-bin xorg xserver-xorg
10105 xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
10106 xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
10107 xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
10108 xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
10109 xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
10110 xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
10111 xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
10112 xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
10113 xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
10114 xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
10115 xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
10116 xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
10117 xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
10118 xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
10119 xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
10120 xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
10121 xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
10122 xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
10123 xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
10124 xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
10125 xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
10126 xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-
1.9</p
>
10128 <p
><b
>aptitude kde
192</b
>
10129 <br
>bluez-utils cpp-
4.3 cupsddk-drivers cvs dcoprss dhcdbd
10130 djvulibre-desktop dosfstools eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
10131 ghostscript-x imlib-base imlib11 indi kandy karm kasteroids
10132 kaudiocreator kbackgammon kbstate kcoloredit kcontrol kcron kdat
10133 kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
10134 kdebase-bin-kde3 kdebase-kio-plugins kdeedu-data
10135 kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data
10136 kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
10137 kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdeprint kdesktop kdessh
10138 kdict kdnssd kdvi kedit keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs
10139 kghostview khelpcenter khexedit kiconedit kitchensync klatin
10140 klickety kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmoon kmrml kodo kolourpaint
10141 kooka korn kpager kpdf kpercentage kpf kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler
10142 krec kregexpeditor ksayit ksim ksirc ksirtet ksmiletris ksmserver
10143 ksnake ksokoban ksplash ksvg ksysv ktip ktnef kuickshow kverbos
10144 kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kworldclock
10145 kxsldbg libakode2 libao2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
10146 libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
10147 libavahi-core5 libavc1394-
0 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
10148 libboost-python1.34
.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0 libdatrie0
10149 libdirectfb-
1.0-
0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
10150 libgail-common libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-
0
10151 libicu38 libiec61883-
0 libindex0 libiw29 libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1
10152 libkdeedu3 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkiten1 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
10153 libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
10154 libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 libmagick10 libmimelib1c2a
10155 libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9
10156 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-
8 libsmbios2
10157 libssh2-
1 libsuitesparse-
3.1.0 libtalloc1 libtiff-tools
10158 libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0 libxerces2-java
10159 libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 mpeglib networkstatus
10160 openoffice.org-writer2latex pmount poster psutils quanta quanta-data
10161 superkaramba svgalibg1 tex-common texlive-base texlive-base-bin
10162 texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended
10163 xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
10164 xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
10165 xulrunner-
1.9</p
>
10171 <title>Automatic upgrade testing from Lenny to Squeeze
</title>
10172 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html
</link>
10173 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html
</guid>
10174 <pubDate>Fri,
11 Jun
2010 22:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
10175 <description><p
>The last few days I have done some upgrade testing in Debian, to
10176 see if the upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze will go smoothly. A few bugs
10177 have been discovered and reported in the process
10178 (
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
585410">#
585410</a
> in nagios3-cgi,
10179 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
584879">#
584879</a
> already fixed in
10180 enscript and
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
584861">#
584861</a
> in
10181 kdebase-workspace-data), and to get a more regular testing going on, I
10182 am working on a script to automate the test.
</p
>
10184 <p
>The idea is to create a Lenny chroot and use tasksel to install a
10185 Gnome or KDE desktop installation inside the chroot before upgrading
10186 it. To ensure no services are started in the chroot, a policy-rc.d
10187 script is inserted. To make sure tasksel believe it is to install a
10188 desktop on a laptop, the tasksel tests are replaced in the chroot
10189 (only acceptable because this is a throw-away chroot).
</p
>
10191 <p
>A naive upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze using aptitude dist-upgrade
10192 currently always fail because udev refuses to upgrade with the kernel
10193 in Lenny, so to avoid that problem the file /etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
10194 is created. The bug report
10195 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
566000">#
566000</a
> make me suspect
10196 this problem do not trigger in a chroot, but I touch the file anyway
10197 to make sure the upgrade go well. Testing on virtual and real
10198 hardware have failed me because of udev so far, and creating this file
10199 do the trick in such settings anyway. This is a
10200 <a href=
"http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/debian-
26/failed-dist-upgrade-due-to-udev-config_sysfs_deprecated-nonsense-
804130/
">known
10201 issue
</a
> and the current udev behaviour is intended by the udev
10202 maintainer because he lack the resources to rewrite udev to keep
10203 working with old kernels or something like that. I really wish the
10204 udev upstream would keep udev backwards compatible, to avoid such
10205 upgrade problem, but given that they fail to do so, I guess
10206 documenting the way out of this mess is the best option we got for
10207 Debian Squeeze.
</p
>
10209 <p
>Anyway, back to the task at hand, testing upgrades. This test
10210 script, which I call
<tt
>upgrade-test
</tt
> for now, is doing the
10213 <blockquote
><pre
>
10217 if [
"$
1" ] ; then
10226 exec
&lt; /dev/null
10228 mirror=http://ftp.skolelinux.org/debian
10229 tmpdir=chroot-$from-upgrade-$to-$desktop
10231 debootstrap $from $tmpdir $mirror
10232 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
10233 cat
> $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d
&lt;
&lt;EOF
10237 chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d
10239 umount $tmpdir/proc
10241 mount -t proc proc $tmpdir/proc
10242 # Make sure proc is unmounted also on failure
10243 trap exit_cleanup EXIT INT
10245 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y install debconf-utils
10247 # Make sure tasksel autoselection trigger. It need the test scripts
10248 # to return the correct answers.
10249 echo tasksel tasksel/desktop multiselect $desktop | \
10250 chroot $tmpdir debconf-set-selections
10252 # Include the desktop and laptop task
10253 for test in desktop laptop ; do
10254 echo
> $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test
&lt;
&lt;EOF
10258 chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test
10261 DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
10262 DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical
10263 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND DEBIAN_PRIORITY
10264 chroot $tmpdir tasksel --new-install
10266 echo deb $mirror $to main
> $tmpdir/etc/apt/sources.list
10267 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
10268 touch $tmpdir/etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
10269 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y dist-upgrade
10271 </pre
></blockquote
>
10273 <p
>I suspect it would be useful to test upgrades with both apt-get and
10274 with aptitude, but I have not had time to look at how they behave
10275 differently so far. I hope to get a cron job running to do the test
10276 regularly and post the result on the web. The Gnome upgrade currently
10277 work, while the KDE upgrade fail because of the bug in
10278 kdebase-workspace-data
</p
>
10280 <p
>I am not quite sure what kind of extract from the huge upgrade logs
10281 (KDE
167 KiB, Gnome
516 KiB) it make sense to include in this blog
10282 post, so I will refrain from trying. I can report that for Gnome,
10283 aptitude report
760 packages upgraded,
448 newly installed,
129 to
10284 remove and
1 not upgraded and
1024MB need to be downloaded while for
10285 KDE the same numbers are
702 packages upgraded,
507 newly installed,
10286 193 to remove and
0 not upgraded and
1117MB need to be downloaded
</p
>
10288 <p
>I am very happy to notice that the Gnome desktop + laptop upgrade
10289 is able to migrate to dependency based boot sequencing and parallel
10290 booting without a hitch. Was unsure if there were still bugs with
10291 packages failing to clean up their obsolete init.d script during
10292 upgrades, and no such problem seem to affect the Gnome desktop+laptop
10293 packages.
</p
>
10298 <title>Upstart or sysvinit - as init.d scripts see it
</title>
10299 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Upstart_or_sysvinit___as_init_d_scripts_see_it.html
</link>
10300 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Upstart_or_sysvinit___as_init_d_scripts_see_it.html
</guid>
10301 <pubDate>Sun,
6 Jun
2010 23:
55:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
10302 <description><p
>If Debian is to migrate to upstart on Linux, I expect some init.d
10303 scripts to migrate (some of) their operations to upstart job while
10304 keeping the init.d for hurd and kfreebsd. The packages with such
10305 needs will need a way to get their init.d scripts to behave
10306 differently when used with sysvinit and with upstart. Because of
10307 this, I had a look at the environment variables set when a init.d
10308 script is running under upstart, and when it is not.
</p
>
10310 <p
>With upstart, I notice these environment variables are set when a
10311 script is started from rcS.d/ (ignoring some irrelevant ones like
10312 COLUMNS):
</p
>
10314 <blockquote
><pre
>
10320 UPSTART_EVENTS=startup
10322 UPSTART_JOB=rc-sysinit
10323 </pre
></blockquote
>
10325 <p
>With sysvinit, these environment variables are set for the same
10328 <blockquote
><pre
>
10329 INIT_VERSION=sysvinit-
2.88
10334 </pre
></blockquote
>
10336 <p
>The RUNLEVEL and PREVLEVEL environment variables passed on from
10337 sysvinit are not set by upstart. Not sure if it is intentional or not
10338 to not be compatible with sysvinit in this regard.
</p
>
10340 <p
>For scripts needing to behave differently when upstart is used,
10341 looking for the UPSTART_JOB environment variable seem to be a good
10347 <title>A manual for standards wars...
</title>
10348 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_manual_for_standards_wars___.html
</link>
10349 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_manual_for_standards_wars___.html
</guid>
10350 <pubDate>Sun,
6 Jun
2010 14:
15:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
10351 <description><p
>Via the
10352 <a href=
"http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/robweir/antic-atom/~
3/QzU4RgoAGMg/weekly-links-
10.html
">blog
10353 of Rob Weir
</a
> I came across the very interesting essay named
10354 <a href=
"http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/shapiro/wars.pdf
">The Art of
10355 Standards Wars
</a
> (PDF
25 pages). I recommend it for everyone
10356 following the standards wars of today.
</p
>
10361 <title>Sitesummary tip: Listing computer hardware models used at site
</title>
10362 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sitesummary_tip__Listing_computer_hardware_models_used_at_site.html
</link>
10363 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sitesummary_tip__Listing_computer_hardware_models_used_at_site.html
</guid>
10364 <pubDate>Thu,
3 Jun
2010 12:
05:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
10365 <description><p
>When using sitesummary at a site to track machines, it is possible
10366 to get a list of the machine types in use thanks to the DMI
10367 information extracted from each machine. The script to do so is
10368 included in the sitesummary package, and here is example output from
10369 the Skolelinux build servers:
</p
>
10371 <blockquote
><pre
>
10372 maintainer:~# /usr/lib/sitesummary/hardware-model-summary
10374 Dell Computer Corporation
1
10377 eserver xSeries
345 -[
8670M1X]-
1
10381 </pre
></blockquote
>
10383 <p
>The quality of the report depend on the quality of the DMI tables
10384 provided in each machine. Here there are Intel machines without model
10385 information listed with Intel as vendor and no model, and virtual Xen
10386 machines listed as [no-dmi-info]. One can add -l as a command line
10387 option to list the individual machines.
</p
>
10389 <p
>A larger list is
10390 <a href=
"http://narvikskolen.no/sitesummary/
">available from the the
10391 city of Narvik
</a
>, which uses Skolelinux on all their shools and also
10392 provide the basic sitesummary report publicly. In their report there
10393 are ~
1400 machines. I know they use both Ubuntu and Skolelinux on
10394 their machines, and as sitesummary is available in both distributions,
10395 it is trivial to get all of them to report to the same central
10396 collector.
</p
>
10401 <title>KDM fail at boot with NVidia cards - and no one try to fix it?
</title>
10402 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/KDM_fail_at_boot_with_NVidia_cards___and_no_one_try_to_fix_it_.html
</link>
10403 <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>
10404 <pubDate>Tue,
1 Jun
2010 17:
05:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
10405 <description><p
>It is strange to watch how a bug in Debian causing KDM to fail to
10406 start at boot when an NVidia video card is used is handled. The
10407 problem seem to be that the nvidia X.org driver uses a long time to
10408 initialize, and this duration is longer than kdm is configured to
10411 <p
>I came across two bugs related to this issue,
10412 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
583312">#
583312</a
> initially filed
10413 against initscripts and passed on to nvidia-glx when it became obvious
10414 that the nvidia drivers were involved, and
10415 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
524751">#
524751</a
> initially filed against
10416 kdm and passed on to src:nvidia-graphics-drivers for unknown reasons.
</p
>
10418 <p
>To me, it seem that no-one is interested in actually solving the
10419 problem nvidia video card owners experience and make sure the Debian
10420 distribution work out of the box for these users. The nvidia driver
10421 maintainers expect kdm to be set up to wait longer, while kdm expect
10422 the nvidia driver maintainers to fix the driver to start faster, and
10423 while they wait for each other I guess the users end up switching to a
10424 distribution that work for them. I have no idea what the solution is,
10425 but I am pretty sure that waiting for each other is not it.
</p
>
10427 <p
>I wonder why we end up handling bugs this way.
</p
>
10432 <title>Parallellized boot seem to hold up well in Debian/testing
</title>
10433 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellized_boot_seem_to_hold_up_well_in_Debian_testing.html
</link>
10434 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellized_boot_seem_to_hold_up_well_in_Debian_testing.html
</guid>
10435 <pubDate>Thu,
27 May
2010 23:
55:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
10436 <description><p
>A few days ago, parallel booting was enabled in Debian/testing.
10437 The feature seem to hold up pretty well, but three fairly serious
10438 issues are known and should be solved:
10440 <p
><ul
>
10442 <li
>The wicd package seen to
10443 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
508289">break NFS mounting
</a
> and
10444 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
581586">network setup
</a
> when
10445 parallel booting is enabled. No idea why, but the wicd maintainer
10446 seem to be on the case.
</li
>
10448 <li
>The nvidia X driver seem to
10449 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
583312">have a race condition
</a
>
10450 triggered more easily when parallel booting is in effect. The
10451 maintainer is on the case.
</li
>
10453 <li
>The sysv-rc package fail to properly enable dependency based boot
10454 sequencing (the shutdown is broken) when old file-rc users
10455 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
575080">try to switch back
</a
> to
10456 sysv-rc. One way to solve it would be for file-rc to create
10457 /etc/init.d/.legacy-bootordering, and another is to try to make
10458 sysv-rc more robust. Will investigate some more and probably upload a
10459 workaround in sysv-rc to help those trying to move from file-rc to
10460 sysv-rc get a working shutdown.
</li
>
10462 </ul
></p
>
10464 <p
>All in all not many surprising issues, and all of them seem
10465 solvable before Squeeze is released. In addition to these there are
10466 some packages with bugs in their dependencies and run level settings,
10467 which I expect will be fixed in a reasonable time span.
</p
>
10469 <p
>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
10470 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
10471 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org
">the
10472 list of usertagged bugs related to this
</a
>.
</p
>
10474 <p
>Update: Correct bug number to file-rc issue.
</p
>
10479 <title>More flexible firmware handling in debian-installer
</title>
10480 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/More_flexible_firmware_handling_in_debian_installer.html
</link>
10481 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/More_flexible_firmware_handling_in_debian_installer.html
</guid>
10482 <pubDate>Sat,
22 May
2010 21:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
10483 <description><p
>After a long break from debian-installer development, I finally
10484 found time today to return to the project. Having to spend less time
10485 working dependency based boot in debian, as it is almost complete now,
10486 definitely helped freeing some time.
</p
>
10488 <p
>A while back, I ran into a problem while working on Debian Edu. We
10489 include some firmware packages on the Debian Edu CDs, those needed to
10490 get disk and network controllers working. Without having these
10491 firmware packages available during installation, it is impossible to
10492 install Debian Edu on the given machine, and because our target group
10493 are non-technical people, asking them to provide firmware packages on
10494 an external medium is a support pain. Initially, I expected it to be
10495 enough to include the firmware packages on the CD to get
10496 debian-installer to find and use them. This proved to be wrong.
10497 Next, I hoped it was enough to symlink the relevant firmware packages
10498 to some useful location on the CD (tried /cdrom/ and
10499 /cdrom/firmware/). This also proved to not work, and at this point I
10500 found time to look at the debian-installer code to figure out what was
10501 going to work.
</p
>
10503 <p
>The firmware loading code is in the hw-detect package, and a closer
10504 look revealed that it would only look for firmware packages outside
10505 the installation media, so the CD was never checked for firmware
10506 packages. It would only check USB sticks, floppies and other
10507 "external
" media devices. Today I changed it to also look in the
10508 /cdrom/firmware/ directory on the mounted CD or DVD, which should
10509 solve the problem I ran into with Debian edu. I also changed it to
10510 look in /firmware/, to make sure the installer also find firmware
10511 provided in the initrd when booting the installer via PXE, to allow us
10512 to provide the same feature in the PXE setup included in Debian
10515 <p
>To make sure firmware deb packages with a license questions are not
10516 activated without asking if the license is accepted, I extended
10517 hw-detect to look for preinst scripts in the firmware packages, and
10518 run these before activating the firmware during installation. The
10519 license question is asked using debconf in the preinst, so this should
10520 solve the issue for the firmware packages I have looked at so far.
</p
>
10522 <p
>If you want to discuss the details of these features, please
10523 contact us on debian-boot@lists.debian.org.
</p
>
10528 <title>Pieces of the roaming laptop puzzle in Debian
</title>
10529 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Pieces_of_the_roaming_laptop_puzzle_in_Debian.html
</link>
10530 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Pieces_of_the_roaming_laptop_puzzle_in_Debian.html
</guid>
10531 <pubDate>Wed,
19 May
2010 19:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
10532 <description><p
>Today, the last piece of the puzzle for roaming laptops in Debian
10533 Edu finally entered the Debian archive. Today, the new
10534 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/libp/libpam-mklocaluser.html
">libpam-mklocaluser
</a
>
10535 package was accepted. Two days ago, two other pieces was accepted
10537 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/pam-python.html
">pam-python
</a
>
10538 package needed by libpam-mklocaluser, and the
10539 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/sssd.html
">sssd
</a
> package
10540 passed NEW on Monday. In addition, the
10541 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/libp/libpam-ccreds.html
">libpam-ccreds
</a
>
10542 package we need is in experimental (version
10-
4) since Saturday, and
10543 hopefully will be moved to unstable soon.
</p
>
10545 <p
>This collection of packages allow for two different setups for
10546 roaming laptops. The traditional setup would be using libpam-ccreds,
10547 nscd and libpam-mklocaluser with LDAP or Kerberos authentication,
10548 which should work out of the box if the configuration changes proposed
10549 for nscd in
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
485282">BTS report
10550 #
485282</a
> is implemented. The alternative setup is to use sssd with
10551 libpam-mklocaluser to connect to LDAP or Kerberos and let sssd take
10552 care of the caching of passwords and group information.
</p
>
10554 <p
>I have so far been unable to get sssd to work with the LDAP server
10555 at the University, but suspect the issue is some SSL/GnuTLS related
10556 problem with the server certificate. I plan to update the Debian
10557 package to version
1.2, which is scheduled for next week, and hope to
10558 find time to make sure the next release will include both the
10559 Debian/Ubuntu specific patches. Upstream is friendly and responsive,
10560 and I am sure we will find a good solution.
</p
>
10562 <p
>The idea is to set up the roaming laptops to authenticate using
10563 LDAP or Kerberos and create a local user with home directory in /home/
10564 when a usre in LDAP logs in via KDM or GDM for the first time, and
10565 cache the password for offline checking, as well as caching group
10566 memberhips and other relevant LDAP information. The
10567 libpam-mklocaluser package was created to make sure the local home
10568 directory is in /home/, instead of /site/server/directory/ which would
10569 be the home directory if pam_mkhomedir was used. To avoid confusion
10570 with support requests and configuration, we do not want local laptops
10571 to have users in a path that is used for the same users home directory
10572 on the home directory servers.
</p
>
10574 <p
>One annoying problem with gdm is that it do not show the PAM
10575 message passed to the user from libpam-mklocaluser when the local user
10576 is created. Instead gdm simply reject the login with some generic
10577 message. The message is shown in kdm, ssh and login, so I guess it is
10578 a bug in gdm. Have not investigated if there is some other message
10579 type that can be used instead to get gdm to also show the message.
</p
>
10581 <p
>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
10582 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.
</p
>
10587 <title>Parallellized boot is now the default in Debian/unstable
</title>
10588 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellized_boot_is_now_the_default_in_Debian_unstable.html
</link>
10589 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellized_boot_is_now_the_default_in_Debian_unstable.html
</guid>
10590 <pubDate>Fri,
14 May
2010 22:
40:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
10591 <description><p
>Since this evening, parallel booting is the default in
10592 Debian/unstable for machines using dependency based boot sequencing.
10593 Apparently the testing of concurrent booting has been wider than
10594 expected, if I am to believe the
10595 <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/
2010/
05/msg00122.html
">input
10596 on debian-devel@
</a
>, and I concluded a few days ago to move forward
10597 with the feature this weekend, to give us some time to detect any
10598 remaining problems before Squeeze is frozen. If serious problems are
10599 detected, it is simple to change the default back to sequential boot.
10600 The upload of the new sysvinit package also activate a new upstream
10603 More information about
10604 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot
">dependency
10605 based boot sequencing
</a
> is available from the Debian wiki. It is
10606 currently possible to disable parallel booting when one run into
10607 problems caused by it, by adding this line to /etc/default/rcS:
</p
>
10609 <blockquote
><pre
>
10611 </pre
></blockquote
>
10613 <p
>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
10614 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
10615 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org
">the
10616 list of usertagged bugs related to this
</a
>.
</p
>
10621 <title>Sitesummary tip: Listing MAC address of all clients
</title>
10622 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sitesummary_tip__Listing_MAC_address_of_all_clients.html
</link>
10623 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sitesummary_tip__Listing_MAC_address_of_all_clients.html
</guid>
10624 <pubDate>Fri,
14 May
2010 21:
10:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
10625 <description><p
>In the recent Debian Edu versions, the
10626 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary
">sitesummary
10627 system
</a
> is used to keep track of the machines in the school
10628 network. Each machine will automatically report its status to the
10629 central server after boot and once per night. The network setup is
10630 also reported, and using this information it is possible to get the
10631 MAC address of all network interfaces in the machines. This is useful
10632 to update the DHCP configuration.
</p
>
10634 <p
>To give some idea how to use sitesummary, here is a one-liner to
10635 ist all MAC addresses of all machines reporting to sitesummary. Run
10636 this on the collector host:
</p
>
10638 <blockquote
><pre
>
10639 perl -MSiteSummary -e
'for_all_hosts(sub { print join(
" ", get_macaddresses(shift)),
"\n
"; });
'
10640 </pre
></blockquote
>
10642 <p
>This will list all MAC addresses assosiated with all machine, one
10643 line per machine and with space between the MAC addresses.
</p
>
10645 <p
>To allow system administrators easier job at adding static DHCP
10646 addresses for hosts, it would be possible to extend this to fetch
10647 machine information from sitesummary and update the DHCP and DNS
10648 tables in LDAP using this information. Such tool is unfortunately not
10649 written yet.
</p
>
10654 <title>systemd, an interesting alternative to upstart
</title>
10655 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/systemd__an_interesting_alternative_to_upstart.html
</link>
10656 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/systemd__an_interesting_alternative_to_upstart.html
</guid>
10657 <pubDate>Thu,
13 May
2010 22:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
10658 <description><p
>The last few days a new boot system called
10659 <a href=
"http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd
">systemd
</a
>
10661 <a href=
"http://
0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html
">introduced
</a
>
10663 to the free software world. I have not yet had time to play around
10664 with it, but it seem to be a very interesting alternative to
10665 <a href=
"http://upstart.ubuntu.com/
">upstart
</a
>, and might prove to be
10666 a good alternative for Debian when we are able to switch to an event
10667 based boot system. Tollef is
10668 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
580814">in the process
</a
> of getting
10669 systemd into Debian, and I look forward to seeing how well it work. I
10670 like the fact that systemd handles init.d scripts with dependency
10671 information natively, allowing them to run in parallel where upstart
10672 at the moment do not.
</p
>
10674 <p
>Unfortunately do systemd have the same problem as upstart regarding
10675 platform support. It only work on recent Linux kernels, and also need
10676 some new kernel features enabled to function properly. This means
10677 kFreeBSD and Hurd ports of Debian will need a port or a different boot
10678 system. Not sure how that will be handled if systemd proves to be the
10679 way forward.
</p
>
10681 <p
>In the mean time, based on the
10682 <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/
2010/
05/msg00122.html
">input
10683 on debian-devel@
</a
> regarding parallel booting in Debian, I have
10684 decided to enable full parallel booting as the default in Debian as
10685 soon as possible (probably this weekend or early next week), to see if
10686 there are any remaining serious bugs in the init.d dependencies. A
10687 new version of the sysvinit package implementing this change is
10688 already in experimental. If all go well, Squeeze will be released
10689 with parallel booting enabled by default.
</p
>
10694 <title>Parallellizing the boot in Debian Squeeze - ready for wider testing
</title>
10695 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellizing_the_boot_in_Debian_Squeeze___ready_for_wider_testing.html
</link>
10696 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellizing_the_boot_in_Debian_Squeeze___ready_for_wider_testing.html
</guid>
10697 <pubDate>Thu,
6 May
2010 23:
25:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
10698 <description><p
>These days, the init.d script dependencies in Squeeze are quite
10699 complete, so complete that it is actually possible to run all the
10700 init.d scripts in parallell based on these dependencies. If you want
10701 to test your Squeeze system, make sure
10702 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot
">dependency
10703 based boot sequencing
</a
> is enabled, and add this line to
10704 /etc/default/rcS:
</p
>
10706 <blockquote
><pre
>
10707 CONCURRENCY=makefile
10708 </pre
></blockquote
>
10710 <p
>That is it. It will cause sysv-rc to use the startpar tool to run
10711 scripts in parallel using the dependency information stored in
10712 /etc/init.d/.depend.boot, /etc/init.d/.depend.start and
10713 /etc/init.d/.depend.stop to order the scripts. Startpar is configured
10714 to try to start the kdm and gdm scripts as early as possible, and will
10715 start the facilities required by kdm or gdm as early as possible to
10716 make this happen.
</p
>
10718 <p
>Give it a try, and see if you like the result. If some services
10719 fail to start properly, it is most likely because they have incomplete
10720 init.d script dependencies in their startup script (or some of their
10721 dependent scripts have incomplete dependencies). Report bugs and get
10722 the package maintainers to fix it. :)
</p
>
10724 <p
>Running scripts in parallel could be the default in Debian when we
10725 manage to get the init.d script dependencies complete and correct. I
10726 expect we will get there in Squeeze+
1, if we get manage to test and
10727 fix the remaining issues.
</p
>
10729 <p
>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
10730 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
10731 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org
">the
10732 list of usertagged bugs related to this
</a
>.
</p
>
10737 <title>Forcing new users to change their password on first login
</title>
10738 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Forcing_new_users_to_change_their_password_on_first_login.html
</link>
10739 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Forcing_new_users_to_change_their_password_on_first_login.html
</guid>
10740 <pubDate>Sun,
2 May
2010 13:
47:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
10741 <description><p
>One interesting feature in Active Directory, is the ability to
10742 create a new user with an expired password, and thus force the user to
10743 change the password on the first login attempt.
</p
>
10745 <p
>I
'm not quite sure how to do that with the LDAP setup in Debian
10746 Edu, but did some initial testing with a local account. The account
10747 and password aging information is available in /etc/shadow, but
10748 unfortunately, it is not possible to specify an expiration time for
10749 passwords, only a maximum age for passwords.
</p
>
10751 <p
>A freshly created account (using adduser test) will have these
10752 settings in /etc/shadow:
</p
>
10754 <blockquote
><pre
>
10755 root@tjener:~# chage -l test
10756 Last password change : May
02,
2010
10757 Password expires : never
10758 Password inactive : never
10759 Account expires : never
10760 Minimum number of days between password change :
0
10761 Maximum number of days between password change :
99999
10762 Number of days of warning before password expires :
7
10764 </pre
></blockquote
>
10766 <p
>The only way I could come up with to create a user with an expired
10767 account, is to change the date of the last password change to the
10768 lowest value possible (January
1th
1970), and the maximum password age
10769 to the difference in days between that date and today. To make it
10770 simple, I went for
30 years (
30 *
365 =
10950) and January
2th (to
10771 avoid testing if
0 is a valid value).
</p
>
10773 <p
>After using these commands to set it up, it seem to work as
10774 intended:
</p
>
10776 <blockquote
><pre
>
10777 root@tjener:~# chage -d
1 test; chage -M
10950 test
10778 root@tjener:~# chage -l test
10779 Last password change : Jan
02,
1970
10780 Password expires : never
10781 Password inactive : never
10782 Account expires : never
10783 Minimum number of days between password change :
0
10784 Maximum number of days between password change :
10950
10785 Number of days of warning before password expires :
7
10787 </pre
></blockquote
>
10789 <p
>So far I have tested this with ssh and console, and kdm (in
10790 Squeeze) login, and all ask for a new password before login in the
10791 user (with ssh, I was thrown out and had to log in again).
</p
>
10793 <p
>Perhaps we should set up something similar for Debian Edu, to make
10794 sure only the user itself have the account password?
</p
>
10796 <p
>If you want to comment on or help out with implementing this for
10797 Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.
</p
>
10799 <p
>Update
2010-
05-
02 17:
20: Paul Tötterman tells me on IRC that the
10800 shadow(
8) page in Debian/testing now state that setting the date of
10801 last password change to zero (
0) will force the password to be changed
10802 on the first login. This was not mentioned in the manual in Lenny, so
10803 I did not notice this in my initial testing. I have tested it on
10804 Squeeze, and
'<tt
>chage -d
0 username
</tt
>' do work there. I have not
10805 tested it on Lenny yet.
</p
>
10807 <p
>Update
2010-
05-
02-
19:
05: Jim Paris tells me via email that an
10808 equivalent command to expire a password is
'<tt
>passwd -e
10809 username
</tt
>', which insert zero into the date of the last password
10815 <title>Thoughts on roaming laptop setup for Debian Edu
</title>
10816 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thoughts_on_roaming_laptop_setup_for_Debian_Edu.html
</link>
10817 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thoughts_on_roaming_laptop_setup_for_Debian_Edu.html
</guid>
10818 <pubDate>Wed,
28 Apr
2010 20:
40:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
10819 <description><p
>For some years now, I have wondered how we should handle laptops in
10820 Debian Edu. The Debian Edu infrastructure is mostly designed to
10821 handle stationary computers, and less suited for computers that come
10824 <p
>Now I finally believe I have an sensible idea on how to adjust
10825 Debian Edu for laptops, by introducing a new profile for them, for
10826 example called Roaming Workstations. Here are my thought on this.
10827 The setup would consist of the following:
</p
>
10831 <li
>During installation, the user name of the owner / primary user of
10832 the laptop is requested and a local home directory is set up for
10833 the user, with uid and gid information fetched from the LDAP
10834 server. This allow the user to work also when offline. The
10835 central home directory can be available in a subdirectory on
10836 request, for example mounted via CIFS. It could be mounted
10837 automatically when a user log in while on the Debian Edu network,
10838 and unmounted when the machine is taken away (network down,
10839 hibernate, etc), it can be set up to do automatic mounting on
10840 request (using autofs), or perhaps some GUI button on the desktop
10841 can be used to access it when needed. Perhaps it is enough to use
10842 the fish protocol in KDE?
</li
>
10844 <li
>Password checking is set up to use LDAP or Kerberos
10845 authentication when the machine is on the Debian Edu network, and
10846 to cache the password for offline checking when the machine unable
10847 to reach the LDAP or Kerberos server. This can be done using
10848 <a href=
"http://www.padl.com/OSS/pam_ccreds.html
">libpam-ccreds
</a
>
10849 or the Fedora developed
10850 <a href=
"https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/SSSD
">System
10851 Security Services Daemon
</a
> packages.
</li
>
10853 <li
>File synchronisation with the central home directory is set up
10854 using a shared directory in both the local and the central home
10855 directory, using unison.
</li
>
10857 <li
>Printing should be set up to print to all printers broadcasting
10858 their existence on the local network, and should then work out of
10859 the box with CUPS. For sites needing accurate printer quotas, some
10860 system with Kerberos authentication or printing via ssh could be
10861 implemented.
</li
>
10863 <li
>For users that should have local root access to their laptop,
10864 sudo should be used to allow this to the local user.
</li
>
10866 <li
>It would be nice if user and group information from LDAP is
10867 cached on the client, but given that there are entries for the
10868 local user and primary group in /etc/, it should not be needed.
</li
>
10872 <p
>I believe all the pieces to implement this are in Debian/testing at
10873 the moment. If we work quickly, we should be able to get this ready
10874 in time for the Squeeze release to freeze. Some of the pieces need
10875 tweaking, like libpam-ccreds should get support for pam-auth-update
10876 (
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
566718">#
566718</a
>) and nslcd (or
10877 perhaps debian-edu-config) should get some integration code to stop
10878 its daemon when the LDAP server is unavailable to avoid long timeouts
10879 when disconnected from the net. If we get Kerberos enabled, we need
10880 to make sure we avoid long timeouts there too.
</p
>
10882 <p
>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
10883 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.
</p
>
10888 <title>Great book:
"Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future
"</title>
10889 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Great_book___Content__Selected_Essays_on_Technology__Creativity__Copyright__and_the_Future_of_the_Future_.html
</link>
10890 <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>
10891 <pubDate>Mon,
19 Apr
2010 17:
10:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
10892 <description><p
>The last few weeks i have had the pleasure of reading a
10893 thought-provoking collection of essays by Cory Doctorow, on topics
10894 touching copyright, virtual worlds, the future of man when the
10895 conscience mind can be duplicated into a computer and many more. The
10896 book titled
"Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity,
10897 Copyright, and the Future of the Future
" is available with few
10898 restrictions on the web, for example from
10899 <a href=
"http://craphound.com/content/
">his own site
</a
>. I read the
10901 <a href=
"http://www.feedbooks.com/book/
2883">feedbooks
</a
> using
10902 <a href=
"http://www.fbreader.org/
">fbreader
</a
> and my N810. I
10903 strongly recommend this book.
</p
>
10908 <title>Kerberos for Debian Edu/Squeeze?
</title>
10909 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Kerberos_for_Debian_Edu_Squeeze_.html
</link>
10910 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Kerberos_for_Debian_Edu_Squeeze_.html
</guid>
10911 <pubDate>Wed,
14 Apr
2010 17:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
10912 <description><p
><a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/
20100413-kerberos/
">Yesterdays
10913 NUUG presentation
</a
> about Kerberos was inspiring, and reminded me
10914 about the need to start using Kerberos in Skolelinux. Setting up a
10915 Kerberos server seem to be straight forward, and if we get this in
10916 place a long time before the Squeeze version of Debian freezes, we
10917 have a chance to migrate Skolelinux away from NFSv3 for the home
10918 directories, and over to an architecture where the infrastructure do
10919 not have to trust IP addresses and machines, and instead can trust
10920 users and cryptographic keys instead.
</p
>
10922 <p
>A challenge will be integration and administration. Is there a
10923 Kerberos implementation for Debian where one can control the
10924 administration access in Kerberos using LDAP groups? With it, the
10925 school administration will have to maintain access control using flat
10926 files on the main server, which give a huge potential for errors.
</p
>
10928 <p
>A related question I would like to know is how well Kerberos and
10929 pam-ccreds (offline password check) work together. Anyone know?
</p
>
10931 <p
>Next step will be to use Kerberos for access control in Lwat and
10932 Nagios. I have no idea how much work that will be to implement. We
10933 would also need to document how to integrate with Windows AD, as such
10934 shared network will require two Kerberos realms that need to cooperate
10935 to work properly.
</p
>
10937 <p
>I believe a good start would be to start using Kerberos on the
10938 skolelinux.no machines, and this way get ourselves experience with
10939 configuration and integration. A natural starting point would be
10940 setting up ldap.skolelinux.no as the Kerberos server, and migrate the
10941 rest of the machines from PAM via LDAP to PAM via Kerberos one at the
10944 <p
>If you would like to contribute to get this working in Skolelinux,
10945 I recommend you to see the video recording from yesterdays NUUG
10946 presentation, and start using Kerberos at home. The video show show
10947 up in a few days.
</p
>
10952 <title>After
6 years of waiting, the Xreset.d feature is implemented
</title>
10953 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/After_6_years_of_waiting__the_Xreset_d_feature_is_implemented.html
</link>
10954 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/After_6_years_of_waiting__the_Xreset_d_feature_is_implemented.html
</guid>
10955 <pubDate>Sat,
6 Mar
2010 18:
15:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
10956 <description><p
>6 years ago, as part of the Debian Edu development I am involved
10957 in, I asked for a hook in the kdm and gdm setup to run scripts as root
10958 when the user log out. A bug was submitted against the xfree86-common
10959 package in
2004 (
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/
230422">#
230422</a
>),
10960 and revisited every time Debian Edu was working on a new release.
10961 Today, this finally paid off.
</p
>
10963 <p
>The framework for this feature was today commited to the git
10964 repositry for the xorg package, and the git repository for xdm has
10965 been updated to use this framework. Next on my agenda is to make sure
10966 kdm and gdm also add code to use this framework.
</p
>
10968 <p
>In Debian Edu, we want to ability to run commands as root when the
10969 user log out, to get rid of runaway processes and do general cleanup
10970 after a user. With this framework in place, we finally can do that in
10971 a generic way that work with all display managers using this
10972 framework. My goal is to get all display managers in Debian use it,
10973 similar to how they use the Xsession.d framework today.
<p
>
10978 <title>Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Lenny released, work continues
</title>
10979 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Lenny_released__work_continues.html
</link>
10980 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Lenny_released__work_continues.html
</guid>
10981 <pubDate>Thu,
11 Feb
2010 17:
15:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
10982 <description><p
>On Tuesday, the Debian/Lenny based version of
10983 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Skolelinux
</a
> was finally
10984 shipped. This was a major leap forward for the project, and I am very
10985 pleased that we finally got the release wrapped up. Work on the first
10986 point release starts imediately, as we plan to get that one out a
10987 month after the major release, to include all fixes for bugs we found
10988 and fixed too late in the release process to include last Tuesday.
</p
>
10990 <p
>Perhaps it even is time for some partying?
</p
>
10992 <p
>After this first point release, my plan is to focus again on the
10993 next major release, based on Squeeze. We will try to get as many of
10994 the fixes we need into the official Debian packages before the freeze,
10995 and have just a few weeks or months to make it happen.
</p
>
11000 <title>Automatic Munin and Nagios configuration
</title>
11001 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_Munin_and_Nagios_configuration.html
</link>
11002 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_Munin_and_Nagios_configuration.html
</guid>
11003 <pubDate>Wed,
27 Jan
2010 15:
15:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
11004 <description><p
>One of the new features in the next Debian/Lenny based release of
11005 Debian Edu/Skolelinux, which is scheduled for release in the next few
11006 days, is automatic configuration of the service monitoring system
11007 Nagios. The previous release had automatic configuration of trend
11008 analysis using Munin, and this Lenny based release take that a step
11011 <p
>When installing a Debian Edu Main-server, it is automatically
11012 configured as a Munin and Nagios server. In addition, it is
11013 configured to be a server for the
11014 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary
">SiteSummary
11015 system
</a
> I have written for use in Debian Edu. The SiteSummary
11016 system is inspired by a system used by the University of Oslo where I
11017 work. In short, the system provide a centralised collector of
11018 information about the computers on the network, and a client on each
11019 computer submitting information to this collector. This allow for
11020 automatic information on which packages are installed on each machine,
11021 which kernel the machines are using, what kind of configuration the
11022 packages got etc. This also allow us to automatically generate Munin
11023 and Nagios configuration.
</p
>
11025 <p
>All computers reporting to the sitesummary collector with the
11026 munin-node package installed is automatically enabled as a Munin
11027 client and graphs from the statistics collected from that machine show
11028 up automatically on http://www/munin/ on the Main-server.
</p
>
11030 <p
>All non-laptop computers reporting to the sitesummary collector are
11031 automatically monitored for network presence (ping and any network
11032 services detected). In addition, all computers (also laptops) with
11033 the nagios-nrpe-server package installed and configured the way
11034 sitesummary would configure it, are monitored for full disks, software
11035 raid status, swap free and other checks that need to run locally on
11036 the machine.
</p
>
11038 <p
>The result is that the administrator on a school using Debian Edu
11039 based on Lenny will be able to check the health of his installation
11040 with one look at the Nagios settings, without having to spend any time
11041 keeping the Nagios configuration up-to-date.
</p
>
11043 <p
>The only configuration one need to do to get Nagios up and running
11044 is to set the password used to get access via HTTP. The system
11045 administrator need to run
"<tt
>htpasswd /etc/nagios3/htpasswd.users
11046 nagiosadmin
</tt
>" to create a nagiosadmin user and set a password for
11047 it to be able to log into the Nagios web pages. After that,
11048 everything is taken care of.
</p
>
11053 <title>Relative popularity of document formats (MS Office vs. ODF)
</title>
11054 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Relative_popularity_of_document_formats__MS_Office_vs__ODF_.html
</link>
11055 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Relative_popularity_of_document_formats__MS_Office_vs__ODF_.html
</guid>
11056 <pubDate>Wed,
12 Aug
2009 15:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
11057 <description><p
>Just for fun, I did a search right now on Google for a few file ODF
11058 and MS Office based formats (not to be mistaken for ISO or ECMA
11059 OOXML), to get an idea of their relative usage. I searched using
11060 'filetype:odt
' and equvalent terms, and got these results:
</P
>
11063 <tr
><th
>Type
</th
><th
>ODF
</th
><th
>MS Office
</th
></tr
>
11064 <tr
><td
>Tekst
</td
> <td
>odt:
282000</td
> <td
>docx:
308000</td
></tr
>
11065 <tr
><td
>Presentasjon
</td
> <td
>odp:
75600</td
> <td
>pptx:
183000</td
></tr
>
11066 <tr
><td
>Regneark
</td
> <td
>ods:
26500 </td
> <td
>xlsx:
145000</td
></tr
>
11069 <p
>Next, I added a
'site:no
' limit to get the numbers for Norway, and
11070 got these numbers:
</p
>
11073 <tr
><th
>Type
</th
><th
>ODF
</th
><th
>MS Office
</th
></tr
>
11074 <tr
><td
>Tekst
</td
> <td
>odt:
2480 </td
> <td
>docx:
4460</td
></tr
>
11075 <tr
><td
>Presentasjon
</td
> <td
>odp:
299 </td
> <td
>pptx:
741</td
></tr
>
11076 <tr
><td
>Regneark
</td
> <td
>ods:
187 </td
> <td
>xlsx:
372</td
></tr
>
11079 <p
>I wonder how these numbers change over time.
</p
>
11081 <p
>I am aware of Google returning different results and numbers based
11082 on where the search is done, so I guess these numbers will differ if
11083 they are conduced in another country. Because of this, I did the same
11084 search from a machine in California, USA, a few minutes after the
11085 search done from a machine here in Norway.
</p
>
11089 <tr
><th
>Type
</th
><th
>ODF
</th
><th
>MS Office
</th
></tr
>
11090 <tr
><td
>Tekst
</td
> <td
>odt:
129000</td
> <td
>docx:
308000</td
></tr
>
11091 <tr
><td
>Presentasjon
</td
> <td
>odp:
44200</td
> <td
>pptx:
93900</td
></tr
>
11092 <tr
><td
>Regneark
</td
> <td
>ods:
26500 </td
> <td
>xlsx:
82400</td
></tr
>
11095 <p
>And with
'site:no
':
11098 <tr
><th
>Type
</th
><th
>ODF
</th
><th
>MS Office
</th
></tr
>
11099 <tr
><td
>Tekst
</td
> <td
>odt:
2480</td
> <td
>docx:
3410</td
></tr
>
11100 <tr
><td
>Presentasjon
</td
> <td
>odp:
175</td
> <td
>pptx:
604</td
></tr
>
11101 <tr
><td
>Regneark
</td
> <td
>ods:
186 </td
> <td
>xlsx:
296</td
></tr
>
11104 <p
>Interesting difference, not sure what to conclude from these
11110 <title>ISO still hope to fix OOXML
</title>
11111 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ISO_still_hope_to_fix_OOXML.html
</link>
11112 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ISO_still_hope_to_fix_OOXML.html
</guid>
11113 <pubDate>Sat,
8 Aug
2009 14:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
11114 <description><p
>According to
<a
11115 href=
"http://twerner.blogspot.com/
2009/
08/defects-of-office-open-xml.html
">a
11116 blog post from Torsten Werner
</a
>, the current defect report for ISO
11117 29500 (ISO OOXML) is
809 pages. His interesting point is that the
11118 defect report is
71 pages more than the full ODF
1.1 specification.
11119 Personally I find it more interesting that ISO still believe ISO OOXML
11120 can be fixed in ISO. Personally, I believe it is broken beyon repair,
11121 and I completely lack any trust in ISO for being able to get anywhere
11122 close to solving the problems. I was part of the Norwegian committee
11123 involved in the OOXML fast track process, and was not impressed with
11124 Standard Norway and ISO in how they handled it.
</p
>
11126 <p
>These days I focus on ODF instead, which seem like a specification
11127 with the future ahead of it. We are working in NUUG to organise a ODF
11128 seminar this autumn.
</p
>
11133 <title>Debian has switched to dependency based boot sequencing
</title>
11134 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_has_switched_to_dependency_based_boot_sequencing.html
</link>
11135 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_has_switched_to_dependency_based_boot_sequencing.html
</guid>
11136 <pubDate>Mon,
27 Jul
2009 23:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
11137 <description><p
>Since this evening, with the upload of sysvinit version
2.87dsf-
2,
11138 and the upload of insserv version
1.12.0-
10 yesterday, Debian unstable
11139 have been migrated to using dependency based boot sequencing. This
11140 conclude work me and others have been doing for the last three days.
11141 It feels great to see this finally part of the default Debian
11142 installation. Now we just need to weed out the last few problems that
11143 are bound to show up, to get everything ready for Squeeze.
</p
>
11145 <p
>The next step is migrating /sbin/init from sysvinit to upstart, and
11146 fixing the more fundamental problem of handing the event based
11147 non-predictable kernel in the early boot.
</p
>
11152 <title>Taking over sysvinit development
</title>
11153 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Taking_over_sysvinit_development.html
</link>
11154 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Taking_over_sysvinit_development.html
</guid>
11155 <pubDate>Wed,
22 Jul
2009 23:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
11156 <description><p
>After several years of frustration with the lack of activity from
11157 the existing sysvinit upstream developer, I decided a few weeks ago to
11158 take over the package and become the new upstream. The number of
11159 patches to track for the Debian package was becoming a burden, and the
11160 lack of synchronization between the distribution made it hard to keep
11161 the package up to date.
</p
>
11163 <p
>On the new sysvinit team is the SuSe maintainer Dr. Werner Fink,
11164 and my Debian co-maintainer Kel Modderman. About
10 days ago, I made
11165 a new upstream tarball with version number
2.87dsf (for Debian, SuSe
11166 and Fedora), based on the patches currently in use in these
11167 distributions. We Debian maintainers plan to move to this tarball as
11168 the new upstream as soon as we find time to do the merge. Since the
11169 new tarball was created, we agreed with Werner at SuSe to make a new
11170 upstream project at
<a href=
"http://savannah.nongnu.org/
">Savannah
</a
>, and continue
11171 development there. The project is registered and currently waiting
11172 for approval by the Savannah administrators, and as soon as it is
11173 approved, we will import the old versions from svn and continue
11174 working on the future release.
</p
>
11176 <p
>It is a bit ironic that this is done now, when some of the involved
11177 distributions are moving to upstart as a syvinit replacement.
</p
>
11182 <title>Debian boots quicker and quicker
</title>
11183 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_boots_quicker_and_quicker.html
</link>
11184 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_boots_quicker_and_quicker.html
</guid>
11185 <pubDate>Wed,
24 Jun
2009 21:
40:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
11186 <description><p
>I spent Monday and tuesday this week in London with a lot of the
11187 people involved in the boot system on Debian and Ubuntu, to see if we
11188 could find more ways to speed up the boot system. This was an Ubuntu
11190 <a href=
"https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FoundationsTeam/BootPerformance/DebianUbuntuSprint
">developer
11191 gathering
</a
>. It was quite productive. We also discussed the future
11192 of boot systems, and ways to handle the increasing number of boot
11193 issues introduced by the Linux kernel becoming more and more
11194 asynchronous and event base. The Ubuntu approach using udev and
11195 upstart might be a good way forward. Time will show.
</p
>
11197 <p
>Anyway, there are a few ways at the moment to speed up the boot
11198 process in Debian. All of these should be applied to get a quick
11203 <li
>Use dash as /bin/sh.
</li
>
11205 <li
>Disable the init.d/hwclock*.sh scripts and make sure the hardware
11206 clock is in UTC.
</li
>
11208 <li
>Install and activate the insserv package to enable
11209 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot
">dependency
11210 based boot sequencing
</a
>, and enable concurrent booting.
</li
>
11214 These points are based on the Google summer of code work done by
11215 <a href=
"http://initscripts-ng.alioth.debian.org/soc2006-bootsystem/
">Carlos
11216 Villegas
</a
>.
11218 <p
>Support for makefile-style concurrency during boot was uploaded to
11219 unstable yesterday. When we tested it, we were able to cut
6 seconds
11220 from the boot sequence. It depend on very correct dependency
11221 declaration in all init.d scripts, so I expect us to find edge cases
11222 where the dependences in some scripts are slightly wrong when we start
11223 using this.
</p
>
11225 <p
>On our IRC channel for this effort, #pkg-sysvinit, a new idea was
11226 introduced by Raphael Geissert today, one that could affect the
11227 startup speed as well. Instead of starting some scripts concurrently
11228 from rcS.d/ and another set of scripts from rc2.d/, it would be
11229 possible to run a of them in the same process. A quick way to test
11230 this would be to enable insserv and run
'mv /etc/rc2.d/S* /etc/rcS.d/;
11231 insserv
'. Will need to test if that work. :)
</p
>
11236 <title>Two projects that have improved the quality of free software a lot
</title>
11237 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Two_projects_that_have_improved_the_quality_of_free_software_a_lot.html
</link>
11238 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Two_projects_that_have_improved_the_quality_of_free_software_a_lot.html
</guid>
11239 <pubDate>Sat,
2 May
2009 15:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
11240 <description><p
>There are two software projects that have had huge influence on the
11241 quality of free software, and I wanted to mention both in case someone
11242 do not yet know them.
</p
>
11244 <p
>The first one is
<a href=
"http://valgrind.org/
">valgrind
</a
>, a
11245 tool to detect and expose errors in the memory handling of programs.
11246 It is easy to use, all one need to do is to run
'valgrind program
',
11247 and it will report any problems on stdout. It is even better if the
11248 program include debug information. With debug information, it is able
11249 to report the source file name and line number where the problem
11250 occurs. It can report things like
'reading past memory block in file
11251 X line N, the memory block was allocated in file Y, line M
', and
11252 'using uninitialised value in control logic
'. This tool has made it
11253 trivial to investigate reproducible crash bugs in programs, and have
11254 reduced the number of this kind of bugs in free software a lot.
11256 <p
>The second one is
11257 <a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coverity
">Coverity
</a
> which is
11258 a source code checker. It is able to process the source of a program
11259 and find problems in the logic without running the program. It
11260 started out as the Stanford Checker and became well known when it was
11261 used to find bugs in the Linux kernel. It is now a commercial tool
11262 and the company behind it is running
11263 <a href=
"http://www.scan.coverity.com/
">a community service
</a
> for the
11264 free software community, where a lot of free software projects get
11265 their source checked for free. Several thousand defects have been
11266 found and fixed so far. It can find errors like
'lock L taken in file
11267 X line N is never released if exiting in line M
', or
'the code in file
11268 Y lines O to P can never be executed
'. The projects included in the
11269 community service project have managed to get rid of a lot of
11270 reliability problems thanks to Coverity.
</p
>
11272 <p
>I believe tools like this, that are able to automatically find
11273 errors in the source, are vital to improve the quality of software and
11274 make sure we can get rid of the crashing and failing software we are
11275 surrounded by today.
</p
>
11280 <title>No patch is not better than a useless patch
</title>
11281 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/No_patch_is_not_better_than_a_useless_patch.html
</link>
11282 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/No_patch_is_not_better_than_a_useless_patch.html
</guid>
11283 <pubDate>Tue,
28 Apr
2009 09:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
11284 <description><p
>Julien Blache
11285 <a href=
"http://blog.technologeek.org/
2009/
04/
12/
214">claim that no
11286 patch is better than a useless patch
</a
>. I completely disagree, as a
11287 patch allow one to discuss a concrete and proposed solution, and also
11288 prove that the issue at hand is important enough for someone to spent
11289 time on fixing it. No patch do not provide any of these positive
11290 properties.
</p
>
11295 <title>Recording video from cron using VLC
</title>
11296 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Recording_video_from_cron_using_VLC.html
</link>
11297 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Recording_video_from_cron_using_VLC.html
</guid>
11298 <pubDate>Sun,
5 Apr
2009 10:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
11299 <description><p
>One think I have wanted to figure out for a along time is how to
11300 run vlc from cron to do recording of video streams on the net. The
11301 task is trivial with mplayer, but I do not really trust the security
11302 of mplayer (it crashes too often on strange input), and thus prefer
11303 vlc. I finally found a way to do it today. I spent an hour or so
11304 searching the web for recipes and reading the documentation. The
11305 hardest part was to get rid of the GUI window, but after finding the
11306 dummy interface, the command line finally presented itself:
</p
>
11308 <blockquote
><pre
>URL=http://www.ping.uio.no/video/rms-oslo_2009.ogg
11310 DISPLAY= vlc -q $URL \
11311 --sout=
"#duplicate{dst=std{access=file,url=
'$SAVEFILE
'},dst=nodisplay}
" \
11312 --intf=dummy
</pre
></blockquote
>
11314 <p
>The command stream the URL and store it in the SAVEFILE by
11315 duplicating the output stream to
"nodisplay
" and the file, using the
11316 dummy interface. The dummy interface and the nodisplay output make
11317 sure no X interface is needed.
</p
>
11319 <p
>The cron job then need to start this job with the appropriate URL
11320 and file name to save, sleep for the duration wanted, and then kill
11321 the vlc process with SIGTERM. Here is a complete script
11322 <tt
>vlc-record
</tt
> to use from
<tt
>at
</tt
> or
<tt
>cron
</tt
>:
</p
>
11324 <blockquote
><pre
>#!/bin/sh
11327 SAVEFILE=
"$
2"
11328 DURATION=
"$
3"
11329 DISPLAY= vlc -q
"$URL
" \
11330 --sout=
"#duplicate{dst=std{access=file,url=
'$SAVEFILE
'},dst=nodisplay}
" \
11331 --intf=dummy
< /dev/null
> /dev/null
2>&1 &
11335 wait $pid
</pre
></blockquote
>
11340 <title>Standardize on protocols and formats, not vendors and applications
</title>
11341 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Standardize_on_protocols_and_formats__not_vendors_and_applications.html
</link>
11342 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Standardize_on_protocols_and_formats__not_vendors_and_applications.html
</guid>
11343 <pubDate>Mon,
30 Mar
2009 11:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
11344 <description><p
>Where I work at the University of Oslo, one decision stand out as a
11345 very good one to form a long lived computer infrastructure. It is the
11346 simple one, lost by many in todays computer industry: Standardize on
11347 open network protocols and open exchange/storage formats, not applications.
11348 Applications come and go, while protocols and files tend to stay, and
11349 thus one want to make it easy to change application and vendor, while
11350 avoiding conversion costs and locking users to a specific platform or
11351 application.
</p
>
11353 <p
>This approach make it possible to replace the client applications
11354 independently of the server applications. One can even allow users to
11355 use several different applications as long as they handle the selected
11356 protocol and format. In the normal case, only one client application
11357 is recommended and users only get help if they choose to use this
11358 application, but those that want to deviate from the easy path are not
11359 blocked from doing so.
</p
>
11361 <p
>It also allow us to replace the server side without forcing the
11362 users to replace their applications, and thus allow us to select the
11363 best server implementation at any moment, when scale and resouce
11364 requirements change.
</p
>
11366 <p
>I strongly recommend standardizing - on open network protocols and
11367 open formats, but I would never recommend standardizing on a single
11368 application that do not use open network protocol or open formats.
</p
>
11373 <title>Returning from Skolelinux developer gathering
</title>
11374 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Returning_from_Skolelinux_developer_gathering.html
</link>
11375 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Returning_from_Skolelinux_developer_gathering.html
</guid>
11376 <pubDate>Sun,
29 Mar
2009 21:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
11377 <description><p
>I
'm sitting on the train going home from this weekends Debian
11378 Edu/Skolelinux development gathering. I got a bit done tuning the
11379 desktop, and looked into the dynamic service location protocol
11380 implementation avahi. It look like it could be useful for us. Almost
11381 30 people participated, and I believe it was a great environment to
11382 get to know the Skolelinux system. Walter Bender, involved in the
11383 development of the Sugar educational platform, presented his stuff and
11384 also helped me improve my OLPC installation. He also showed me that
11385 his Turtle Art application can be used in standalone mode, and we
11386 agreed that I would help getting it packaged for Debian. As a
11387 standalone application it would be great for Debian Edu. We also
11388 tried to get the video conferencing working with two OLPCs, but that
11389 proved to be too hard for us. The application seem to need more work
11390 before it is ready for me. I look forward to getting home and relax
11396 <title>Time for new LDAP schemas replacing RFC
2307?
</title>
11397 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html
</link>
11398 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html
</guid>
11399 <pubDate>Sun,
29 Mar
2009 20:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
11400 <description><p
>The state of standardized LDAP schemas on Linux is far from
11401 optimal. There is RFC
2307 documenting one way to store NIS maps in
11402 LDAP, and a modified version of this normally called RFC
2307bis, with
11403 some modifications to be compatible with Active Directory. The RFC
11404 specification handle the content of a lot of system databases, but do
11405 not handle DNS zones and DHCP configuration.
</p
>
11407 <p
>In
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu/Skolelinux
</a
>,
11408 we would like to store information about users, SMB clients/hosts,
11409 filegroups, netgroups (users and hosts), DHCP and DNS configuration,
11410 and LTSP configuration in LDAP. These objects have a lot in common,
11411 but with the current LDAP schemas it is not possible to have one
11412 object per entity. For example, one need to have at least three LDAP
11413 objects for a given computer, one with the SMB related stuff, one with
11414 DNS information and another with DHCP information. The schemas
11415 provided for DNS and DHCP are impossible to combine into one LDAP
11416 object. In addition, it is impossible to implement quick queries for
11417 netgroup membership, because of the way NIS triples are implemented.
11418 It just do not scale. I believe it is time for a few RFC
11419 specifications to cleam up this mess.
</p
>
11421 <p
>I would like to have one LDAP object representing each computer in
11422 the network, and this object can then keep the SMB (ie host key), DHCP
11423 (mac address/name) and DNS (name/IP address) settings in one place.
11424 It need to be efficently stored to make sure it scale well.
</p
>
11426 <p
>I would also like to have a quick way to map from a user or
11427 computer and to the net group this user or computer is a member.
</p
>
11429 <p
>Active Directory have done a better job than unix heads like myself
11430 in this regard, and the unix side need to catch up. Time to start a
11431 new IETF work group?
</p
>
11436 <title>Checking server hardware support status for Dell, HP and IBM servers
</title>
11437 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Checking_server_hardware_support_status_for_Dell__HP_and_IBM_servers.html
</link>
11438 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Checking_server_hardware_support_status_for_Dell__HP_and_IBM_servers.html
</guid>
11439 <pubDate>Sat,
28 Feb
2009 23:
50:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
11440 <description><p
>At work, we have a few hundred Linux servers, and with that amount
11441 of hardware it is important to keep track of when the hardware support
11442 contract expire for each server. We have a machine (and service)
11443 register, which until recently did not contain much useful besides the
11444 machine room location and contact information for the system owner for
11445 each machine. To make it easier for us to track support contract
11446 status, I
've recently spent time on extending the machine register to
11447 include information about when the support contract expire, and to tag
11448 machines with expired contracts to make it easy to get a list of such
11449 machines. I extended a perl script already being used to import
11450 information about machines into the register, to also do some screen
11451 scraping off the sites of Dell, HP and IBM (our majority of machines
11452 are from these vendors), and automatically check the support status
11453 for the relevant machines. This make the support status information
11454 easily available and I hope it will make it easier for the computer
11455 owner to know when to get new hardware or renew the support contract.
11456 The result of this work documented that
27% of the machines in the
11457 registry is without a support contract, and made it very easy to find
11458 them.
27% might seem like a lot, but I see it more as the case of us
11459 using machines a bit longer than the
3 years a normal support contract
11460 last, to have test machines and a platform for less important
11461 services. After all, the machines without a contract are working fine
11462 at the moment and the lack of contract is only a problem if any of
11463 them break down. When that happen, we can either fix it using spare
11464 parts from other machines or move the service to another old
11467 <p
>I believe the code for screen scraping the Dell site was originally
11468 written by Trond Hasle Amundsen, and later adjusted by me and Morten
11469 Werner Forsbring. The HP scraping was written by me after reading a
11470 nice article in ;login: about how to use WWW::Mechanize, and the IBM
11471 scraping was written by me based on the Dell code. I know the HTML
11472 parsing could be done using nice libraries, but did not want to
11473 introduce more dependencies. This is the current incarnation:
</p
>
11478 use WWW::Mechanize;
11481 sub get_support_info {
11482 my ($machine, $model, $serial, $productnumber) = @_;
11485 if ( $model =~ m/^Dell / ) {
11486 # fetch website from Dell support
11487 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
";
11488 my $webpage = get($url);
11489 return undef unless ($webpage);
11492 my @lines = split(/\n/, $webpage);
11493 foreach my $line (@lines) {
11494 next unless ($line =~ m/Beskrivelse/);
11495 $line =~ s/
&lt;[^
>]+?
>/;/gm;
11496 $line =~ s/^.+?;(Beskrivelse;)/$
1/;
11498 my @f = split(/\;/, $line);
11499 @f = @f[
13 .. $#f];
11500 my $lastend =
"";
11501 while ($f[
3] eq
"DELL
") {
11502 my ($type, $startstr, $endstr, $days) = @f[
0,
5,
7,
10];
11504 my $start = POSIX::strftime(
"%Y-%m-%d
",
11505 localtime(str2time($startstr)));
11506 my $end = POSIX::strftime(
"%Y-%m-%d
",
11507 localtime(str2time($endstr)));
11508 $str .=
"$type $start -
> $end
";
11509 @f = @f[
14 .. $#f];
11510 $lastend = $end if ($end gt $lastend);
11512 my $today = POSIX::strftime(
"%Y-%m-%d
", localtime(time));
11513 tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
11514 if ($lastend lt $today);
11516 } elsif ( $model =~ m/^HP / ) {
11517 my $mech = WWW::Mechanize-
>new();
11519 'http://www1.itrc.hp.com/service/ewarranty/warrantyInput.do
';
11520 $mech-
>get($url);
11522 'BODServiceID
' =
> 'NA
',
11523 'RegisteredPurchaseDate
' =
> '',
11524 'country
' =
> 'NO
',
11525 'productNumber
' =
> $productnumber,
11526 'serialNumber1
' =
> $serial,
11528 $mech-
>submit_form( form_number =
> 2,
11529 fields =
> $fields );
11530 # Next step is screen scraping
11531 my $content = $mech-
>content();
11533 $content =~ s/
&lt;[^
>]+?
>/;/gm;
11534 $content =~ s/\s+/ /gm;
11535 $content =~ s/;\s*;/;;/gm;
11536 $content =~ s/;[\s;]+/;/gm;
11538 my $today = POSIX::strftime(
"%Y-%m-%d
", localtime(time));
11540 while ($content =~ m/;Warranty Type;/) {
11541 my ($type, $status, $startstr, $stopstr) = $content =~
11542 m/;Warranty Type;([^;]+);.+?;Status;(\w+);Start Date;([^;]+);End Date;([^;]+);/;
11543 $content =~ s/^.+?;Warranty Type;//;
11544 my $start = POSIX::strftime(
"%Y-%m-%d
",
11545 localtime(str2time($startstr)));
11546 my $end = POSIX::strftime(
"%Y-%m-%d
",
11547 localtime(str2time($stopstr)));
11549 $str .=
"$type ($status) $start -
> $end
";
11551 tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
11552 if ($end lt $today);
11554 } elsif ( $model =~ m/^IBM / ) {
11555 # This code ignore extended support contracts.
11556 my ($producttype) = $model =~ m/.*-\[(.{
4}).+\]-/;
11557 if ($producttype
&amp;
&amp; $serial) {
11559 get(
"http://www-
947.ibm.com/systems/support/supportsite.wss/warranty?action=warranty
&amp;brandind=
5000008&amp;Submit=Submit
&amp;type=$producttype
&amp;serial=$serial
");
11561 $content =~ s/
&lt;[^
>]+?
>/;/gm;
11562 $content =~ s/\s+/ /gm;
11563 $content =~ s/;\s*;/;;/gm;
11564 $content =~ s/;[\s;]+/;/gm;
11566 $content =~ s/^.+?;Warranty status;//;
11567 my ($status, $end) = $content =~ m/;Warranty status;([^;]+)\s*;Expiration date;(\S+) ;/;
11569 $str .=
"($status) -
> $end
";
11571 my $today = POSIX::strftime(
"%Y-%m-%d
", localtime(time));
11572 tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
11573 if ($end lt $today);
11581 <p
>Here are some examples on how to use the function, using fake
11582 serial numbers. The information passed in as arguments are fetched
11583 from dmidecode.
</p
>
11586 print get_support_info(
"hp.host
",
"HP ProLiant BL460c G1
",
"1234567890"
11587 "447707-B21
");
11588 print get_support_info(
"dell.host
",
"Dell Inc. PowerEdge
2950",
"1234567");
11589 print get_support_info(
"ibm.host
",
"IBM eserver xSeries
345 -[
867061X]-
",
11590 "1234567");
11593 <p
>I would recommend this approach for tracking support contracts for
11594 everyone with more than a few computers to administer. :)
</p
>
11596 <p
>Update
2009-
03-
06: The IBM page do not include extended support
11597 contracts, so it is useless in that case. The original Dell code do
11598 not handle extended support contracts either, but has been updated to
11604 <title>Using bar codes at a computing center
</title>
11605 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_bar_codes_at_a_computing_center.html
</link>
11606 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_bar_codes_at_a_computing_center.html
</guid>
11607 <pubDate>Fri,
20 Feb
2009 08:
50:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
11608 <description><p
>At work with the University of Oslo, we have several hundred computers
11609 in our computing center. This give us a challenge in tracking the
11610 location and cabling of the computers, when they are added, moved and
11611 removed. Some times the location register is not updated when a
11612 computer is inserted or moved and we then have to search the room for
11613 the
"missing
" computer.
</p
>
11615 <p
>In the last issue of Linux Journal, I came across a project
11616 <a href=
"http://www.libdmtx.org/
">libdmtx
</a
> to write and read bar
11617 code blocks as defined in the
11618 <a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Matrix
">The Data Matrix
11619 Standard
</a
>. This is bar codes that can be read with a normal
11620 digital camera, for example that on a cell phone, and several such bar
11621 codes can be read by libdmtx from one picture. The bar code standard
11622 allow up to
2 KiB to be written in the tag. There is another project
11623 with
<a href=
"http://www.terryburton.co.uk/barcodewriter/
">a bar code
11624 writer written in postscript
</a
> capable of creating such bar codes,
11625 but this was the first time I found a tool to read these bar
11628 <p
>It occurred to me that this could be used to tag and track the
11629 machines in our computing center. If both racks and computers are
11630 tagged this way, we can use a picture of the rack and all its
11631 computers to detect the rack location of any computer in that rack.
11632 If we do this regularly for the entire room, we will find all
11633 locations, and can detect movements and removals.
</p
>
11635 <p
>I decided to test if this would work in practice, and picked a
11636 random rack and tagged all the machines with their names. Next, I
11637 took pictures with my digital camera, and gave the dmtxread program
11638 these JPEG pictures to see how many tags it could read. This worked
11639 fairly well. If the pictures was well focused and not taken from the
11640 side, all tags in the image could be read. Because of limited space
11641 between the racks, I was unable to get a good picture of the entire
11642 rack, but could without problem read all tags from a picture covering
11643 about half the rack. I had to limit the search time used by dmtxread
11644 to
60000 ms to make sure it terminated in a reasonable time frame.
</p
>
11646 <p
>My conclusion is that this could work, and we should probably look
11647 at adjusting our computer tagging procedures to use bar codes for
11648 easier automatic tracking of computers.
</p
>
11653 <title>When web browser developers make a video player...
</title>
11654 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/When_web_browser_developers_make_a_video_player___.html
</link>
11655 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/When_web_browser_developers_make_a_video_player___.html
</guid>
11656 <pubDate>Sat,
17 Jan
2009 18:
50:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
11657 <description><p
>As part of the work we do in
<a href=
"http://www.nuug.no
">NUUG
</a
>
11658 to publish video recordings of our monthly presentations, we provide a
11659 page with embedded video for easy access to the recording. Putting a
11660 good set of HTML tags together to get working embedded video in all
11661 browsers and across all operating systems is not easy. I hope this
11662 will become easier when the
&lt;video
&gt; tag is implemented in all
11663 browsers, but I am not sure. We provide the recordings in several
11664 formats, MPEG1, Ogg Theora, H
.264 and Quicktime, and want the
11665 browser/media plugin to pick one it support and use it to play the
11666 recording, using whatever embed mechanism the browser understand.
11667 There is at least four different tags to use for this, the new HTML5
11668 &lt;video
&gt; tag, the
&lt;object
&gt; tag, the
&lt;embed
&gt; tag and
11669 the
&lt;applet
&gt; tag. All of these take a lot of options, and
11670 finding the best options is a major challenge.
</p
>
11672 <p
>I just tested the experimental Opera browser available from
<a
11673 href=
"http://labs.opera.com
">labs.opera.com
</a
>, to see how it handled
11674 a
&lt;video
&gt; tag with a few video sources and no extra attributes.
11675 I was not very impressed. The browser start by fetching a picture
11676 from the video stream. Not sure if it is the first frame, but it is
11677 definitely very early in the recording. So far, so good. Next,
11678 instead of streaming the
76 MiB video file, it start to download all
11679 of it, but do not start to play the video. This mean I have to wait
11680 for several minutes for the downloading to finish. When the download
11681 is done, the playing of the video do not start! Waiting for the
11682 download, but I do not get to see the video? Some testing later, I
11683 discover that I have to add the controls=
"true
" attribute to be able
11684 to get a play button to pres to start the video. Adding
11685 autoplay=
"true
" did not help. I sure hope this is a misfeature of the
11686 test version of Opera, and that future implementations of the
11687 &lt;video
&gt; tag will stream recordings by default, or at least start
11688 playing when the download is done.
</p
>
11690 <p
>The test page I used (since changed to add more attributes) is
11691 <a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/
20090113-foredrag-om-foredrag/
">available
11692 from the nuug site
</a
>. Will have to test it with the new Firefox
11695 <p
>In the test process, I discovered a missing feature. I was unable
11696 to find a way to get the URL of the playing video out of Opera, so I
11697 am not quite sure it picked the Ogg Theora version of the video. I
11698 sure hope it was using the announced Ogg Theora support. :)
</p
>
11703 <title>Software video mixer on a USB stick
</title>
11704 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_video_mixer_on_a_USB_stick.html
</link>
11705 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_video_mixer_on_a_USB_stick.html
</guid>
11706 <pubDate>Sun,
28 Dec
2008 15:
40:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
11707 <description><p
>The
<a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/
">Norwegian Unix User Group
</a
> is
11708 recording our montly presentation on video, and recently we have
11709 worked on improving the quality of the recordings by mixing the slides
11710 directly with the video stream. For this, we use the
11711 <a href=
"http://dvswitch.alioth.debian.org/
">dvswitch
</a
> package from
11712 the Debian video team. As this require quite one computer per video
11713 source, and NUUG do not have enough laptops available, we need to
11714 borrow laptops. And to avoid having to install extra software on
11715 these borrwed laptops, I have wrapped up all the programs needed on a
11716 bootable USB stick. The software required is dvswitch with assosiated
11717 source, sink and mixer applications and
11718 <a href=
"http://www.kinodv.org/
">dvgrab
</a
>. To allow this setup to
11719 work without any configuration, I
've patched dvswitch to use
11720 <a href=
"http://www.avahi.org/
">avahi
</a
> to connect the various parts
11721 together. And to allow us to use laptops without firewire plugs, I
11722 upgraded dvgrab to the one from Debian/unstable to get one that work
11723 with USB sources. We have not yet tested this setup in a production
11724 setup, but I hope it will work properly, and allow us to set up a
11725 video mixer in a very short time frame. We will need it for
11726 <a href=
"http://www.goopen.no/
">Go Open
2009</a
>.
</p
>
11728 <p
><a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/pub/video/bin/usbstick-dvswitch.img.gz
">The
11729 USB image
</a
> is for a
1 GB memory stick, but can be used on any
11730 larger stick as well.
</p
>
11735 <title>Devcamp brought us closer to the Lenny based Debian Edu release
</title>
11736 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Devcamp_brought_us_closer_to_the_Lenny_based_Debian_Edu_release.html
</link>
11737 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Devcamp_brought_us_closer_to_the_Lenny_based_Debian_Edu_release.html
</guid>
11738 <pubDate>Sun,
7 Dec
2008 12:
00:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
11739 <description><p
>This weekend we had a small developer gathering for Debian Edu in
11740 Oslo. Most of Saturday was used for the general assemly for the
11741 member organization, but the rest of the weekend I used to tune the
11742 LTSP installation. LTSP now work out of the box on the
10-network.
11743 Acer Aspire One proved to be a very nice thin client, with both
11744 screen, mouse and keybard in a small box. Was working on getting the
11745 diskless workstation setup configured out of the box, but did not
11746 finish it before the weekend was up.
</p
>
11748 <p
>Did not find time to look at the
4 VGA cards in one box we got from
11749 the Brazilian group, so that will have to wait for the next
11750 development gathering. Would love to have the Debian Edu installer
11751 automatically detect and configure a multiseat setup when it find one
11752 of these cards.
</p
>
11757 <title>The sorry state of multimedia browser plugins in Debian
</title>
11758 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_sorry_state_of_multimedia_browser_plugins_in_Debian.html
</link>
11759 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_sorry_state_of_multimedia_browser_plugins_in_Debian.html
</guid>
11760 <pubDate>Tue,
25 Nov
2008 00:
10:
00 +
0100</pubDate>
11761 <description><p
>Recently I have spent some time evaluating the multimedia browser
11762 plugins available in Debian Lenny, to see which one we should use by
11763 default in Debian Edu. We need an embedded video playing plugin with
11764 control buttons to pause or stop the video, and capable of streaming
11765 all the multimedia content available on the web. The test results and
11766 notes are available on
11767 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia
">the
11768 Debian wiki
</a
>. I was surprised how few of the plugins are able to
11769 fill this need. My personal video player favorite, VLC, has a really
11770 bad plugin which fail on a lot of the test pages. A lot of the MIME
11771 types I would expect to work with any free software player (like
11772 video/ogg), just do not work. And simple formats like the
11773 audio/x-mplegurl format (m3u playlists), just isn
't supported by the
11774 totem and vlc plugins. I hope the situation will improve soon. No
11775 wonder sites use the proprietary Adobe flash to play video.
</p
>
11777 <p
>For Lenny, we seem to end up with the mplayer plugin. It seem to
11778 be the only one fitting our needs. :/
</p
>
projects / homepage.git / blob