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  13  <h1>
  14      <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/">Petter Reinholdtsen</a>
  15
  16  </h1>
  17
  18 </div>
  19
  20
  21     <h3>Entries tagged "debian".</h3>
  22
  23     <div class="entry">
  24       <div class="title">
  25         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_program_should_be_able_to_open_its_own_files_on_Linux.html">A program should be able to open its own files on Linux</a>
  26       </div>
  27       <div class="date">
  28          5th June 2016
  29       </div>
  30       <div class="body">
  31         <p>Many years ago, when koffice was fresh and with few users, I
  32 decided to test its presentation tool when making the slides for a
  33 talk I was giving for NUUG on Japhar, a free Java virtual machine.  I
  34 wrote the first draft of the slides, saved the result and went to bed
  35 the day before I would give the talk.  The next day I took a plane to
  36 the location where the meeting should take place, and on the plane I
  37 started up koffice again to polish the talk a bit, only to discover
  38 that kpresenter refused to load its own data file.  I cursed a bit and
  39 started making the slides again from memory, to have something to
  40 present when I arrived.  I tested that the saved files could be
  41 loaded, and the day seemed to be rescued.  I continued to polish the
  42 slides until I suddenly discovered that the saved file could no longer
  43 be loaded into kpresenter.  In the end I had to rewrite the slides
  44 three times, condensing the content until the talk became shorter and
  45 shorter.  After the talk I was able to pinpoint the problem &ndash;
  46 kpresenter wrote inline images in a way itself could not understand.
  47 Eventually that bug was fixed and kpresenter ended up being a great
  48 program to make slides.  The point I'm trying to make is that we
  49 expect a program to be able to load its own data files, and it is
  50 embarrassing to its developers if it can't.</p>
  51
  52 <p>Did you ever experience a program failing to load its own data
  53 files from the desktop file browser?  It is not a uncommon problem.  A
  54 while back I discovered that the screencast recorder
  55 gtk-recordmydesktop would save an Ogg Theora video file the KDE file
  56 browser would refuse to open.  No video player claimed to understand
  57 such file.  I tracked down the cause being <tt>file --mime-type</tt>
  58 returning the application/ogg mime type, which no video player I had
  59 installed listed as a MIME type they would understand.  I asked for
  60 <a href="http://bugs.gw.com/view.php?id=382">file to change its
  61 behavour</a> and use the MIME type video/ogg instead.  I also asked
  62 several video players to add video/ogg to their desktop files, to give
  63 the file browser an idea what to do about Ogg Theora files.  After a
  64 while, the desktop file browsers in Debian started to handle the
  65 output from gtk-recordmydesktop properly.</p>
  66
  67 <p>But history repeats itself.  A few days ago I tested the music
  68 system Rosegarden again, and I discovered that the KDE and xfce file
  69 browsers did not know what to do with the Rosegarden project files
  70 (*.rg).  I've reported <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/825993">the
  71 rosegarden problem to BTS</a> and a fix is commited to git and will be
  72 included in the next upload.  To increase the chance of me remembering
  73 how to fix the problem next time some program fail to load its files
  74 from the file browser, here are some notes on how to fix it.</p>
  75
  76 <p>The file browsers in Debian in general operates on MIME types.
  77 There are two sources for a given files MIME type.  The output from
  78 <tt>file --mime-type</tt> mentioned above, and the content of the
  79 shared MIME type registry (under /usr/share/mime/).  The file mime
  80 type is mapped to programs supporting the mime type, and this
  81 information is collected from
  82 <a href="https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/desktop-entry-spec/">the
  83 desktop files</a> available in /usr/share/applications/.  If there is
  84 one desktop file claiming support for the MIME type of the file, it is
  85 activated when asking to open a given file.  If there are more, one
  86 can normally select which one to use by right-clicking on the file and
  87 selecting the wanted one using 'Open with' or similar.  In general
  88 this work well.  But it depend on each program picking a good mime
  89 type (preferably
  90 <a href="http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/media-types.xhtml">a
  91 MIME type registered with IANA</a>), file and/or the shared mime
  92 registry recognizing the file and the desktop file to list the MIME
  93 type in its list of supported MIME types.</p>
  94
  95 <p>The <tt>/usr/share/mime/packages/rosegarden.xml</tt> entry for
  96 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/shared-mime-info-spec">the
  97 Shared MIME database</a> look like this:</p>
  98
  99 <p><blockquote><pre>
 100 &lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?&gt;
 101 &lt;mime-info xmlns="http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/shared-mime-info"&gt;
 102   &lt;mime-type type="audio/x-rosegarden"&gt;
 103     &lt;sub-class-of type="application/x-gzip"/&gt;
 104     &lt;comment&gt;Rosegarden project file&lt;/comment&gt;
 105     &lt;glob pattern="*.rg"/&gt;
 106   &lt;/mime-type&gt;
 107 &lt;/mime-info&gt;
 108 </pre></blockquote></p>
 109
 110 <p>This states that audio/x-rosegarden is a kind of application/x-gzip
 111 (it is a gzipped XML file).  Note, it is much better to use an
 112 official MIME type registered with IANA than it is to make up ones own
 113 unofficial ones like the x-rosegarden type used by rosegarden.</p>
 114
 115 <p>The desktop file of the rosegarden program failed to list
 116 audio/x-rosegarden in its list of supported MIME types, causing the
 117 file browsers to have no idea what to do with *.rg files:</p>
 118
 119 <p><blockquote><pre>
 120 % grep Mime /usr/share/applications/rosegarden.desktop
 121 MimeType=audio/x-rosegarden-composition;audio/x-rosegarden-device;audio/x-rosegarden-project;audio/x-rosegarden-template;audio/midi;
 122 X-KDE-NativeMimeType=audio/x-rosegarden-composition
 123 %
 124 </pre></blockquote></p>
 125
 126 <p>The fix was to add "audio/x-rosegarden;" at the end of the
 127 MimeType= line.</p>
 128
 129 <p>If you run into a file which fail to open the correct program when
 130 selected from the file browser, please check out the output from
 131 <tt>file --mime-type</tt> for the file, ensure the file ending and
 132 MIME type is registered somewhere under /usr/share/mime/ and check
 133 that some desktop file under /usr/share/applications/ is claiming
 134 support for this MIME type.  If not, please report a bug to have it
 135 fixed. :)</p>
 136
 137       </div>
 138       <div class="tags">
 139
 140
 141         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 142
 143
 144       </div>
 145     </div>
 146     <div class="padding"></div>
 147
 148     <div class="entry">
 149       <div class="title">
 150         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Isenkram_with_PackageKit_support___new_version_0_23_available_in_Debian_unstable.html">Isenkram with PackageKit support - new version 0.23 available in Debian unstable</a>
 151       </div>
 152       <div class="date">
 153         25th May 2016
 154       </div>
 155       <div class="body">
 156         <p><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/isenkram">The isenkram
 157 system</a> is a user-focused solution in Debian for handling hardware
 158 related packages.  The idea is to have a database of mappings between
 159 hardware and packages, and pop up a dialog suggesting for the user to
 160 install the packages to use a given hardware dongle.  Some use cases
 161 are when you insert a Yubikey, it proposes to install the software
 162 needed to control it; when you insert a braille reader list it
 163 proposes to install the packages needed to send text to the reader;
 164 and when you insert a ColorHug screen calibrator it suggests to
 165 install the driver for it.  The system work well, and even have a few
 166 command line tools to install firmware packages and packages for the
 167 hardware already in the machine (as opposed to hotpluggable hardware).</p>
 168
 169 <p>The system was initially written using aptdaemon, because I found
 170 good documentation and example code on how to use it.  But aptdaemon
 171 is going away and is generally being replaced by
 172 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/software/PackageKit/">PackageKit</a>,
 173 so Isenkram needed a rewrite.  And today, thanks to the great patch
 174 from my college Sunil Mohan Adapa in the FreedomBox project, the
 175 rewrite finally took place.  I've just uploaded a new version of
 176 Isenkram into Debian Unstable with the patch included, and the default
 177 for the background daemon is now to use PackageKit.  To check it out,
 178 install the <tt>isenkram</tt> package and insert some hardware dongle
 179 and see if it is recognised.</p>
 180
 181 <p>If you want to know what kind of packages isenkram would propose for
 182 the machine it is running on, you can check out the isenkram-lookup
 183 program.  This is what it look like on a Thinkpad X230:</p>
 184
 185 <p><blockquote><pre>
 186 % isenkram-lookup
 187 bluez
 188 cheese
 189 fprintd
 190 fprintd-demo
 191 gkrellm-thinkbat
 192 hdapsd
 193 libpam-fprintd
 194 pidgin-blinklight
 195 thinkfan
 196 tleds
 197 tp-smapi-dkms
 198 tp-smapi-source
 199 tpb
 200 %p
 201 </pre></blockquote></p>
 202
 203 <p>The hardware mappings come from several places.  The preferred way
 204 is for packages to announce their hardware support using
 205 <a href="https://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/">the
 206 cross distribution appstream system</a>.
 207 See
 208 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">previous
 209 blog posts about isenkram</a> to learn how to do that.</p>
 210
 211       </div>
 212       <div class="tags">
 213
 214
 215         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
 216
 217
 218       </div>
 219     </div>
 220     <div class="padding"></div>
 221
 222     <div class="entry">
 223       <div class="title">
 224         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Discharge_rate_estimate_in_new_battery_statistics_collector_for_Debian.html">Discharge rate estimate in new battery statistics collector for Debian</a>
 225       </div>
 226       <div class="date">
 227         23rd May 2016
 228       </div>
 229       <div class="body">
 230         <p>Yesterday I updated the
 231 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats
 232 package in Debian</a> with a few patches sent to me by skilled and
 233 enterprising users.  There were some nice user and visible changes.
 234 First of all, both desktop menu entries now work.  A design flaw in
 235 one of the script made the history graph fail to show up (its PNG was
 236 dumped in ~/.xsession-errors) if no controlling TTY was available.
 237 The script worked when called from the command line, but not when
 238 called from the desktop menu.  I changed this to look for a DISPLAY
 239 variable or a TTY before deciding where to draw the graph, and now the
 240 graph window pop up as expected.</p>
 241
 242 <p>The next new feature is a discharge rate estimator in one of the
 243 graphs (the one showing the last few hours).  New is also the user of
 244 colours showing charging in blue and discharge in red.  The percentages
 245 of this graph is relative to last full charge, not battery design
 246 capacity.</p>
 247
 248 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-05-23-battery-stats-rate.png"/></p>
 249
 250 <p>The other graph show the entire history of the collected battery
 251 statistics, comparing it to the design capacity of the battery to
 252 visualise how the battery life time get shorter over time.  The red
 253 line in this graph is what the previous graph considers 100 percent:
 254
 255 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-05-23-battery-stats-history.png"/></p>
 256
 257 <p>In this graph you can see that I only charge the battery to 80
 258 percent of last full capacity, and how the capacity of the battery is
 259 shrinking. :(</p>
 260
 261 <p>The last new feature is in the collector, which now will handle
 262 more hardware models.  On some hardware, Linux power supply
 263 information is stored in /sys/class/power_supply/ACAD/, while the
 264 collector previously only looked in /sys/class/power_supply/AC/.  Now
 265 both are checked to figure if there is power connected to the
 266 machine.</p>
 267
 268 <p>If you are interested in how your laptop battery is doing, please
 269 check out the
 270 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats</a>
 271 in Debian unstable, or rebuild it on Jessie to get it working on
 272 Debian stable. :) The upstream source is available from <a
 273 href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">github</a>.
 274 Patches are very welcome.</p>
 275
 276 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 277 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 278 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 279
 280       </div>
 281       <div class="tags">
 282
 283
 284         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 285
 286
 287       </div>
 288     </div>
 289     <div class="padding"></div>
 290
 291     <div class="entry">
 292       <div class="title">
 293         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_now_with_ZFS_on_Linux_included.html">Debian now with ZFS on Linux included</a>
 294       </div>
 295       <div class="date">
 296         12th May 2016
 297       </div>
 298       <div class="body">
 299         <p>Today, after many years of hard work from many people,
 300 <a href="http://zfsonlinux.org/">ZFS for Linux</a> finally entered
 301 Debian.  The package status can be seen on
 302 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/zfs-linux">the package tracker
 303 for zfs-linux</a>.  and
 304 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=pkg-zfsonlinux-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
 305 team status page</a>. If you want to help out, please join us.
 306 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-zfsonlinux/zfs.git">The
 307 source code</a> is available via git on Alioth.  It would also be
 308 great if you could help out with
 309 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/dkms">the dkms package</a>, as
 310 it is an important piece of the puzzle to get ZFS working.</p>
 311
 312       </div>
 313       <div class="tags">
 314
 315
 316         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 317
 318
 319       </div>
 320     </div>
 321     <div class="padding"></div>
 322
 323     <div class="entry">
 324       <div class="title">
 325         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_best_multimedia_player_in_Debian_.html">What is the best multimedia player in Debian?</a>
 326       </div>
 327       <div class="date">
 328          8th May 2016
 329       </div>
 330       <div class="body">
 331         <p><strong>Where I set out to figure out which multimedia player in
 332 Debian claim support for most file formats.</strong></p>
 333
 334 <p>A few years ago, I had a look at the media support for Browser
 335 plugins in Debian, to get an idea which plugins to include in Debian
 336 Edu.  I created a script to extract the set of supported MIME types
 337 for each plugin, and used this to find out which multimedia browser
 338 plugin supported most file formats / media types.
 339 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">The
 340 result</a> can still be seen on the Debian wiki, even though it have
 341 not been updated for a while.  But browser plugins are less relevant
 342 these days, so I thought it was time to look at standalone
 343 players.</p>
 344
 345 <p>A few days ago I was tired of VLC not being listed as a viable
 346 player when I wanted to play videos from the Norwegian National
 347 Broadcasting Company, and decided to investigate why.  The cause is a
 348 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/822245">missing MIME type in the VLC
 349 desktop file</a>.  In the process I wrote a script to compare the set
 350 of MIME types announced in the desktop file and the browser plugin,
 351 only to discover that there is quite a large difference between the
 352 two for VLC.  This discovery made me dig up the script I used to
 353 compare browser plugins, and adjust it to compare desktop files
 354 instead, to try to figure out which multimedia player in Debian
 355 support most file formats.</p>
 356
 357 <p>The result can be seen on the Debian Wiki, as
 358 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMultimedia/PlayerSupport">a
 359 table listing all MIME types supported by one of the packages included
 360 in the table</a>, with the package supporting most MIME types being
 361 listed first in the table.</p>
 362
 363 </p>The best multimedia player in Debian?  It is totem, followed by
 364 parole, kplayer, mpv, vlc, smplayer mplayer-gui gnome-mpv and
 365 kmplayer.  Time for the other players to update their announced MIME
 366 support?</p>
 367
 368       </div>
 369       <div class="tags">
 370
 371
 372         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
 373
 374
 375       </div>
 376     </div>
 377     <div class="padding"></div>
 378
 379     <div class="entry">
 380       <div class="title">
 381         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Pyra___handheld_computer_with_Debian_preinstalled.html">The Pyra - handheld computer with Debian preinstalled</a>
 382       </div>
 383       <div class="date">
 384          4th May 2016
 385       </div>
 386       <div class="body">
 387         A friend of mine made me aware of
 388 <a href="https://pyra-handheld.com/boards/pages/pyra/">The Pyra</a>, a
 389 handheld computer which will be delivered with Debian preinstalled.  I
 390 would love to get one of those for my birthday. :)</p>
 391
 392 <p>The machine is a complete ARM-based PC with micro HDMI, SATA, USB
 393 plugs and many others connectors, and include a full keyboard and a 5"
 394 LCD touch screen.  The 6000mAh battery is claimed to provide a whole
 395 day of battery life time, but I have not seen any independent tests
 396 confirming this.  The vendor is still collecting preorders, and the
 397 last I heard last night was that 22 more orders were needed before
 398 production started.</p>
 399
 400 <p>As far as I know, this is the first handheld preinstalled with
 401 Debian.  Please let me know if you know of any others.  Is it the
 402 first computer being sold with Debian preinstalled?</p>
 403
 404       </div>
 405       <div class="tags">
 406
 407
 408         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 409
 410
 411       </div>
 412     </div>
 413     <div class="padding"></div>
 414
 415     <div class="entry">
 416       <div class="title">
 417         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_a_Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_The_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook.html">Lets make a Norwegian Bokmål edition of The Debian Administrator's Handbook</a>
 418       </div>
 419       <div class="date">
 420         10th April 2016
 421       </div>
 422       <div class="body">
 423         <p>During this weekends
 424 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Oslo__Takk_for_feilfiksingsfesten.shtml">bug
 425 squashing party and developer gathering</a>, we decided to do our part
 426 to make sure there are good books about Debian available in Norwegian
 427 Bokmål, and got in touch with the people behind the
 428 <a href="http://debian-handbook.info/">Debian Administrator's Handbook
 429 project</a> to get started.  If you want to help out, please start
 430 contributing using
 431 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-handbook/">the
 432 hosted weblate project page</a>, and get in touch using
 433 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/debian-handbook-translators">the
 434 translators mailing list</a>.  Please also check out
 435 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/contribute/">the instructions for
 436 contributors</a>.</p>
 437
 438 <p>The book is already available on paper in English, French and
 439 Japanese, and our goal is to get it available on paper in Norwegian
 440 Bokmål too.  In addition to the paper edition, there are also EPUB and
 441 Mobi versions available.  And there are incomplete translations
 442 available for many more languages.</p>
 443
 444       </div>
 445       <div class="tags">
 446
 447
 448         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 449
 450
 451       </div>
 452     </div>
 453     <div class="padding"></div>
 454
 455     <div class="entry">
 456       <div class="title">
 457         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/One_in_two_hundred_Debian_users_using_ZFS_on_Linux_.html">One in two hundred Debian users using ZFS on Linux?</a>
 458       </div>
 459       <div class="date">
 460          7th April 2016
 461       </div>
 462       <div class="body">
 463         <p>Just for fun I had a look at the popcon number of ZFS related
 464 packages in Debian, and was quite surprised with what I found.  I use
 465 ZFS myself at home, but did not really expect many others to do so.
 466 But I might be wrong.</p>
 467
 468 <p>According to
 469 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=spl-linux">the popcon
 470 results for spl-linux</a>, there are 1019 Debian installations, or
 471 0.53% of the population, with the package installed.  As far as I know
 472 the only use of the spl-linux package is as a support library for ZFS
 473 on Linux, so I use it here as proxy for measuring the number of ZFS
 474 installation on Linux in Debian.  In the kFreeBSD variant of Debian
 475 the ZFS feature is already available, and there
 476 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=zfsutils">the popcon
 477 results for zfsutils</a> show 1625 Debian installations or 0.84% of
 478 the population.  So I guess I am not alone in using ZFS on Debian.</p>
 479
 480 <p>But even though the Debian project leader Lucas Nussbaum
 481 <a href="https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2015/04/msg00006.html">announced
 482 in April 2015</a> that the legal obstacles blocking ZFS on Debian were
 483 cleared, the package is still not in Debian.  The package is again in
 484 the NEW queue.  Several uploads have been rejected so far because the
 485 debian/copyright file was incomplete or wrong, but there is no reason
 486 to give up.  The current status can be seen on
 487 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=pkg-zfsonlinux-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
 488 team status page</a>, and
 489 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-zfsonlinux/zfs.git">the
 490 source code</a> is available on Alioth.</p>
 491
 492 <p>As I want ZFS to be included in next version of Debian to make sure
 493 my home server can function in the future using only official Debian
 494 packages, and the current blocker is to get the debian/copyright file
 495 accepted by the FTP masters in Debian, I decided a while back to try
 496 to help out the team.  This was the background for my blog post about
 497 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Creating__updating_and_checking_debian_copyright_semi_automatically.html">creating,
 498 updating and checking debian/copyright semi-automatically</a>, and I
 499 used the techniques I explored there to try to find any errors in the
 500 copyright file.  It is not very easy to check every one of the around
 501 2000 files in the source package, but I hope we this time got it
 502 right.  If you want to help out, check out the git source and try to
 503 find missing entries in the debian/copyright file.</p>
 504
 505       </div>
 506       <div class="tags">
 507
 508
 509         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 510
 511
 512       </div>
 513     </div>
 514     <div class="padding"></div>
 515
 516     <div class="entry">
 517       <div class="title">
 518         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Full_battery_stats_collector_is_now_available_in_Debian.html">Full battery stats collector is now available in Debian</a>
 519       </div>
 520       <div class="date">
 521         23rd March 2016
 522       </div>
 523       <div class="body">
 524         <p>Since this morning, the battery-stats package in Debian include an
 525 extended collector that will collect the complete battery history for
 526 later processing and graphing.  The original collector store the
 527 battery level as percentage of last full level, while the new
 528 collector also record battery vendor, model, serial number, design
 529 full level, last full level and current battery level.  This make it
 530 possible to predict the lifetime of the battery as well as visualise
 531 the energy flow when the battery is charging or discharging.</p>
 532
 533 <p>The new tools are available in <tt>/usr/share/battery-stats/</tt>
 534 in the version 0.5.1 package in unstable.  Get the new battery level graph
 535 and lifetime prediction by running:
 536
 537 <p><pre>
 538 /usr/share/battery-stats/battery-stats-graph /var/log/battery-stats.csv
 539 </pre></p>
 540
 541 <p>Or select the 'Battery Level Graph' from your application menu.</p>
 542
 543 <p>The flow in/out of the battery can be seen by running (no menu
 544 entry yet):</p>
 545
 546 <p><pre>
 547 /usr/share/battery-stats/battery-stats-graph-flow
 548 </pre></p>
 549
 550 <p>I'm not quite happy with the way the data is visualised, at least
 551 when there are few data points.  The graphs look a bit better with a
 552 few years of data.</p>
 553
 554 <p>A while back one important feature I use in the battery stats
 555 collector broke in Debian.  The scripts in
 556 <tt>/usr/lib/pm-utils/power.d/</tt> were no longer executed.  I
 557 suspect it happened when Jessie started using systemd, but I do not
 558 know.  The issue is reported as
 559 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/818649">bug #818649</a> against
 560 pm-utils.  I managed to work around it by adding an udev rule to call
 561 the collector script every time the power connector is connected and
 562 disconnected.  With this fix in place it was finally time to make a
 563 new release of the package, and get it into Debian.</p>
 564
 565 <p>If you are interested in how your laptop battery is doing, please
 566 check out the
 567 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats</a>
 568 in Debian unstable, or rebuild it on Jessie to get it working on
 569 Debian stable. :) The upstream source is available from
 570 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">github</a>.
 571 As always, patches are very welcome.</p>
 572
 573       </div>
 574       <div class="tags">
 575
 576
 577         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 578
 579
 580       </div>
 581     </div>
 582     <div class="padding"></div>
 583
 584     <div class="entry">
 585       <div class="title">
 586         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Making_battery_measurements_a_little_easier_in_Debian.html">Making battery measurements a little easier in Debian</a>
 587       </div>
 588       <div class="date">
 589         15th March 2016
 590       </div>
 591       <div class="body">
 592         <p>Back in September, I blogged about
 593 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_life_and_death_of_a_laptop_battery.html">the
 594 system I wrote to collect statistics about my laptop battery</a>, and
 595 how it showed the decay and death of this battery (now replaced).  I
 596 created a simple deb package to handle the collection and graphing,
 597 but did not want to upload it to Debian as there were already
 598 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">a battery-stats
 599 package in Debian</a> that should do the same thing, and I did not see
 600 a point of uploading a competing package when battery-stats could be
 601 fixed instead.  I reported a few bugs about its non-function, and
 602 hoped someone would step in and fix it.  But no-one did.</p>
 603
 604 <p>I got tired of waiting a few days ago, and took matters in my own
 605 hands.  The end result is that I am now the new upstream developer of
 606 battery stats (<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">available from github</a>) and part of the team maintaining
 607 battery-stats in Debian, and the package in Debian unstable is finally
 608 able to collect battery status using the <tt>/sys/class/power_supply/</tt>
 609 information provided by the Linux kernel.  If you install the
 610 battery-stats package from unstable now, you will be able to get a
 611 graph of the current battery fill level, to get some idea about the
 612 status of the battery.  The source package build and work just fine in
 613 Debian testing and stable (and probably oldstable too, but I have not
 614 tested).  The default graph you get for that system look like this:</p>
 615
 616 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-03-15-battery-stats-graph-example.png" width="70%" align="center"></p>
 617
 618 <p>My plans for the future is to merge my old scripts into the
 619 battery-stats package, as my old scripts collected a lot more details
 620 about the battery.  The scripts are merged into the upstream
 621 battery-stats git repository already, but I am not convinced they work
 622 yet, as I changed a lot of paths along the way.  Will have to test a
 623 bit more before I make a new release.</p>
 624
 625 <p>I will also consider changing the file format slightly, as I
 626 suspect the way I combine several values into one field might make it
 627 impossible to know the type of the value when using it for processing
 628 and graphing.</p>
 629
 630 <p>If you would like I would like to keep an close eye on your laptop
 631 battery, check out the battery-stats package in
 632 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">Debian</a> and
 633 on
 634 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">github</a>.
 635 I would love some help to improve the system further.</p>
 636
 637       </div>
 638       <div class="tags">
 639
 640
 641         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 642
 643
 644       </div>
 645     </div>
 646     <div class="padding"></div>
 647
 648     <div class="entry">
 649       <div class="title">
 650         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Creating__updating_and_checking_debian_copyright_semi_automatically.html">Creating, updating and checking debian/copyright semi-automatically</a>
 651       </div>
 652       <div class="date">
 653         19th February 2016
 654       </div>
 655       <div class="body">
 656         <p>Making packages for Debian requires quite a lot of attention to
 657 details.  And one of the details is the content of the
 658 debian/copyright file, which should list all relevant licenses used by
 659 the code in the package in question, preferably in
 660 <a href="https://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/">machine
 661 readable DEP5 format</a>.</p>
 662
 663 <p>For large packages with lots of contributors it is hard to write
 664 and update this file manually, and if you get some detail wrong, the
 665 package is normally rejected by the ftpmasters.  So getting it right
 666 the first time around get the package into Debian faster, and save
 667 both you and the ftpmasters some work..  Today, while trying to figure
 668 out what was wrong with
 669 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=686447">the
 670 zfsonlinux copyright file</a>, I decided to spend some time on
 671 figuring out the options for doing this job automatically, or at least
 672 semi-automatically.</p>
 673
 674 <p>Lucikly, there are at least two tools available for generating the
 675 file based on the code in the source package,
 676 <tt><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/debmake">debmake</a></tt>
 677 and <tt><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cme">cme</a></tt>.  I'm
 678 not sure which one of them came first, but both seem to be able to
 679 create a sensible draft file.  As far as I can tell, none of them can
 680 be trusted to get the result just right, so the content need to be
 681 polished a bit before the file is OK to upload.  I found the debmake
 682 option in
 683 <a href="http://goofying-with-debian.blogspot.com/2014/07/debmake-checking-source-against-dep-5.html">a
 684 blog posts from 2014</a>.
 685
 686 <p>To generate using debmake, use the -cc option:
 687
 688 <p><pre>
 689 debmake -cc > debian/copyright
 690 </pre></p>
 691
 692 <p>Note there are some problems with python and non-ASCII names, so
 693 this might not be the best option.</p>
 694
 695 <p>The cme option is based on a config parsing library, and I found
 696 this approach in
 697 <a href="https://ddumont.wordpress.com/2015/04/05/improving-creation-of-debian-copyright-file/">a
 698 blog post from 2015</a>.  To generate using cme, use the 'update
 699 dpkg-copyright' option:
 700
 701 <p><pre>
 702 cme update dpkg-copyright
 703 </pre></p>
 704
 705 <p>This will create or update debian/copyright.  The cme tool seem to
 706 handle UTF-8 names better than debmake.</p>
 707
 708 <p>When the copyright file is created, I would also like some help to
 709 check if the file is correct.  For this I found two good options,
 710 <tt>debmake -k</tt> and <tt>license-reconcile</tt>.  The former seem
 711 to focus on license types and file matching, and is able to detect
 712 ineffective blocks in the copyright file.  The latter reports missing
 713 copyright holders and years, but was confused by inconsistent license
 714 names (like CDDL vs. CDDL-1.0).  I suspect it is good to use both and
 715 fix all issues reported by them before uploading.  But I do not know
 716 if the tools and the ftpmasters agree on what is important to fix in a
 717 copyright file, so the package might still be rejected.</p>
 718
 719 <p>The devscripts tool <tt>licensecheck</tt> deserve mentioning.  It
 720 will read through the source and try to find all copyright statements.
 721 It is not comparing the result to the content of debian/copyright, but
 722 can be useful when verifying the content of the copyright file.</p>
 723
 724 <p>Are you aware of better tools in Debian to create and update
 725 debian/copyright file.  Please let me know, or blog about it on
 726 planet.debian.org.</p>
 727
 728 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 729 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 730 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 731
 732 <p><strong>Update 2016-02-20</strong>: I got a tip from Mike Gabriel
 733 on how to use licensecheck and cdbs to create a draft copyright file
 734
 735 <p><pre>
 736 licensecheck --copyright -r `find * -type f` | \
 737   /usr/lib/cdbs/licensecheck2dep5 > debian/copyright.auto
 738 </pre></p>
 739
 740 <p>He mentioned that he normally check the generated file into the
 741 version control system to make it easier to discover license and
 742 copyright changes in the upstream source.  I will try to do the same
 743 with my packages in the future.</p>
 744
 745 <p><strong>Update 2016-02-21</strong>: The cme author recommended
 746 against using -quiet for new users, so I removed it from the proposed
 747 command line.</p>
 748
 749       </div>
 750       <div class="tags">
 751
 752
 753         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 754
 755
 756       </div>
 757     </div>
 758     <div class="padding"></div>
 759
 760     <div class="entry">
 761       <div class="title">
 762         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_appstream_in_Debian_to_locate_packages_with_firmware_and_mime_type_support.html">Using appstream in Debian to locate packages with firmware and mime type support</a>
 763       </div>
 764       <div class="date">
 765          4th February 2016
 766       </div>
 767       <div class="body">
 768         <p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-11">appstream system</a>
 769 is taking shape in Debian, and one provided feature is a very
 770 convenient way to tell you which package to install to make a given
 771 firmware file available when the kernel is looking for it.  This can
 772 be done using apt-file too, but that is for someone else to blog
 773 about. :)</p>
 774
 775 <p>Here is a small recipe to find the package with a given firmware
 776 file, in this example I am looking for ctfw-3.2.3.0.bin, randomly
 777 picked from the set of firmware announced using appstream in Debian
 778 unstable.  In general you would be looking for the firmware requested
 779 by the kernel during kernel module loading.  To find the package
 780 providing the example file, do like this:</p>
 781
 782 <blockquote><pre>
 783 % apt install appstream
 784 [...]
 785 % apt update
 786 [...]
 787 % appstreamcli what-provides firmware:runtime ctfw-3.2.3.0.bin | \
 788   awk '/Package:/ {print $2}'
 789 firmware-qlogic
 790 %
 791 </pre></blockquote>
 792
 793 <p>See <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/AppStream/Guidelines">the
 794 appstream wiki</a> page to learn how to embed the package metadata in
 795 a way appstream can use.</p>
 796
 797 <p>This same approach can be used to find any package supporting a
 798 given MIME type.  This is very useful when you get a file you do not
 799 know how to handle.  First find the mime type using <tt>file
 800 --mime-type</tt>, and next look up the package providing support for
 801 it.  Lets say you got an SVG file.  Its MIME type is image/svg+xml,
 802 and you can find all packages handling this type like this:</p>
 803
 804 <blockquote><pre>
 805 % apt install appstream
 806 [...]
 807 % apt update
 808 [...]
 809 % appstreamcli what-provides mimetype image/svg+xml | \
 810   awk '/Package:/ {print $2}'
 811 bkchem
 812 phototonic
 813 inkscape
 814 shutter
 815 tetzle
 816 geeqie
 817 xia
 818 pinta
 819 gthumb
 820 karbon
 821 comix
 822 mirage
 823 viewnior
 824 postr
 825 ristretto
 826 kolourpaint4
 827 eog
 828 eom
 829 gimagereader
 830 midori
 831 %
 832 </pre></blockquote>
 833
 834 <p>I believe the MIME types are fetched from the desktop file for
 835 packages providing appstream metadata.</p>
 836
 837       </div>
 838       <div class="tags">
 839
 840
 841         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 842
 843
 844       </div>
 845     </div>
 846     <div class="padding"></div>
 847
 848     <div class="entry">
 849       <div class="title">
 850         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Creepy__visualise_geotagged_social_media_information___nice_free_software.html">Creepy, visualise geotagged social media information - nice free software</a>
 851       </div>
 852       <div class="date">
 853         24th January 2016
 854       </div>
 855       <div class="body">
 856         <p>Most people seem not to realise that every time they walk around
 857 with the computerised radio beacon known as a mobile phone their
 858 position is tracked by the phone company and often stored for a long
 859 time (like every time a SMS is received or sent).  And if their
 860 computerised radio beacon is capable of running programs (often called
 861 mobile apps) downloaded from the Internet, these programs are often
 862 also capable of tracking their location (if the app requested access
 863 during installation).  And when these programs send out information to
 864 central collection points, the location is often included, unless
 865 extra care is taken to not send the location.  The provided
 866 information is used by several entities, for good and bad (what is
 867 good and bad, depend on your point of view).  What is certain, is that
 868 the private sphere and the right to free movement is challenged and
 869 perhaps even eradicated for those announcing their location this way,
 870 when they share their whereabouts with private and public
 871 entities.</p>
 872
 873 <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-01-24-nice-creepy-desktop-window.png"></p>
 874
 875 <p>The phone company logs provide a register of locations to check out
 876 when one want to figure out what the tracked person was doing.  It is
 877 unavailable for most of us, but provided to selected government
 878 officials, company staff, those illegally buying information from
 879 unfaithful servants and crackers stealing the information.  But the
 880 public information can be collected and analysed, and a free software
 881 tool to do so is called
 882 <a href="http://www.geocreepy.com/">Creepy or Cree.py</a>.  I
 883 discovered it when I read
 884 <a href="http://www.aftenposten.no/kultur/Slik-kan-du-bli-overvaket-pa-Twitter-og-Instagram-uten-a-ane-det-7787884.html">an
 885 article about Creepy</a> in the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten i
 886 November 2014, and decided to check if it was available in Debian.
 887 The python program was in Debian, but
 888 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/creepy">the version in
 889 Debian</a> was completely broken and practically unmaintained.  I
 890 uploaded a new version which did not work quite right, but did not
 891 have time to fix it then.  This Christmas I decided to finally try to
 892 get Creepy operational in Debian.  Now a fixed version is available in
 893 Debian unstable and testing, and almost all Debian specific patches
 894 are now included
 895 <a href="https://github.com/jkakavas/creepy">upstream</a>.</p>
 896
 897 <p>The Creepy program visualises geolocation information fetched from
 898 Twitter, Instagram, Flickr and Google+, and allow one to get a
 899 complete picture of every social media message posted recently in a
 900 given area, or track the movement of a given individual across all
 901 these services.  Earlier it was possible to use the search API of at
 902 least some of these services without identifying oneself, but these
 903 days it is impossible.  This mean that to use Creepy, you need to
 904 configure it to log in as yourself on these services, and provide
 905 information to them about your search interests.  This should be taken
 906 into account when using Creepy, as it will also share information
 907 about yourself with the services.</p>
 908
 909 <p>The picture above show the twitter messages sent from (or at least
 910 geotagged with a position from) the city centre of Oslo, the capital
 911 of Norway.  One useful way to use Creepy is to first look at
 912 information tagged with an area of interest, and next look at all the
 913 information provided by one or more individuals who was in the area.
 914 I tested it by checking out which celebrity provide their location in
 915 twitter messages by checkout out who sent twitter messages near a
 916 Norwegian TV station, and next could track their position over time,
 917 making it possible to locate their home and work place, among other
 918 things.  A similar technique have been
 919 <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/maxseddon/does-this-soldiers-instagram-account-prove-russia-is-covertl">used
 920 to locate Russian soldiers in Ukraine</a>, and it is both a powerful
 921 tool to discover lying governments, and a useful tool to help people
 922 understand the value of the private information they provide to the
 923 public.</p>
 924
 925 <p>The package is not trivial to backport to Debian Stable/Jessie, as
 926 it depend on several python modules currently missing in Jessie (at
 927 least python-instagram, python-flickrapi and
 928 python-requests-toolbelt).</p>
 929
 930 <p>(I have uploaded
 931 <a href="https://screenshots.debian.net/package/creepy">the image to
 932 screenshots.debian.net</a> and licensed it under the same terms as the
 933 Creepy program in Debian.)</p>
 934
 935       </div>
 936       <div class="tags">
 937
 938
 939         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
 940
 941
 942       </div>
 943     </div>
 944     <div class="padding"></div>
 945
 946     <div class="entry">
 947       <div class="title">
 948         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Always_download_Debian_packages_using_Tor___the_simple_recipe.html">Always download Debian packages using Tor - the simple recipe</a>
 949       </div>
 950       <div class="date">
 951         15th January 2016
 952       </div>
 953       <div class="body">
 954         <p>During his DebConf15 keynote, Jacob Appelbaum
 955 <a href="https://summit.debconf.org/debconf15/meeting/331/what-is-to-be-done/">observed
 956 that those listening on the Internet lines would have good reason to
 957 believe a computer have a given security hole</a> if it download a
 958 security fix from a Debian mirror.  This is a good reason to always
 959 use encrypted connections to the Debian mirror, to make sure those
 960 listening do not know which IP address to attack.  In August, Richard
 961 Hartmann observed that encryption was not enough, when it was possible
 962 to interfere download size to security patches or the fact that
 963 download took place shortly after a security fix was released, and
 964 <a href="http://richardhartmann.de/blog/posts/2015/08/24-Tor-enabled_Debian_mirror/">proposed
 965 to always use Tor to download packages from the Debian mirror</a>.  He
 966 was not the first to propose this, as the
 967 <tt><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/apt-transport-tor">apt-transport-tor</a></tt>
 968 package by Tim Retout already existed to make it easy to convince apt
 969 to use <a href="https://www.torproject.org/">Tor</a>, but I was not
 970 aware of that package when I read the blog post from Richard.</p>
 971
 972 <p>Richard discussed the idea with Peter Palfrader, one of the Debian
 973 sysadmins, and he set up a Tor hidden service on one of the central
 974 Debian mirrors using the address vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion, thus making
 975 it possible to download packages directly between two tor nodes,
 976 making sure the network traffic always were encrypted.</p>
 977
 978 <p>Here is a short recipe for enabling this on your machine, by
 979 installing <tt>apt-transport-tor</tt> and replacing http and https
 980 urls with tor+http and tor+https, and using the hidden service instead
 981 of the official Debian mirror site.  I recommend installing
 982 <tt>etckeeper</tt> before you start to have a history of the changes
 983 done in /etc/.</p>
 984
 985 <blockquote><pre>
 986 apt install apt-transport-tor
 987 sed -i 's% http://ftp.debian.org/% tor+http://vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion/%' /etc/apt/sources.list
 988 sed -i 's% http% tor+http%' /etc/apt/sources.list
 989 </pre></blockquote>
 990
 991 <p>If you have more sources listed in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/, run
 992 the sed commands for these too.  The sed command is assuming your are
 993 using the ftp.debian.org Debian mirror.  Adjust the command (or just
 994 edit the file manually) to match your mirror.</p>
 995
 996 <p>This work in Debian Jessie and later.  Note that tools like
 997 <tt>apt-file</tt> only recently started using the apt transport
 998 system, and do not work with these tor+http URLs.  For
 999 <tt>apt-file</tt> you need the version currently in experimental,
1000 which need a recent apt version currently only in unstable.  So if you
1001 need a working <tt>apt-file</tt>, this is not for you.</p>
1002
1003 <p>Another advantage from this change is that your machine will start
1004 using Tor regularly and at fairly random intervals (every time you
1005 update the package lists or upgrade or install a new package), thus
1006 masking other Tor traffic done from the same machine.  Using Tor will
1007 become normal for the machine in question.</p>
1008
1009 <p>On <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox</a>, APT
1010 is set up by default to use <tt>apt-transport-tor</tt> when Tor is
1011 enabled.  It would be great if it was the default on any Debian
1012 system.</p>
1013
1014       </div>
1015       <div class="tags">
1016
1017
1018         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
1019
1020
1021       </div>
1022     </div>
1023     <div class="padding"></div>
1024
1025     <div class="entry">
1026       <div class="title">
1027         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/OpenALPR__find_car_license_plates_in_video_streams___nice_free_software.html">OpenALPR, find car license plates in video streams - nice free software</a>
1028       </div>
1029       <div class="date">
1030         23rd December 2015
1031       </div>
1032       <div class="body">
1033         <p>When I was a kid, we used to collect "car numbers", as we used to
1034 call the car license plate numbers in those days.  I would write the
1035 numbers down in my little book and compare notes with the other kids
1036 to see how many region codes we had seen and if we had seen some
1037 exotic or special region codes and numbers.  It was a fun game to pass
1038 time, as we kids have plenty of it.</p>
1039
1040 <p>A few days I came across
1041 <a href="https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr">the OpenALPR
1042 project</a>, a free software project to automatically discover and
1043 report license plates in images and video streams, and provide the
1044 "car numbers" in a machine readable format.  I've been looking for
1045 such system for a while now, because I believe it is a bad idea that the
1046 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number_plate_recognition">automatic
1047 number plate recognition</a> tool only is available in the hands of
1048 the powerful, and want it to be available also for the powerless to
1049 even the score when it comes to surveillance and sousveillance.  I
1050 discovered the developer
1051 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/747509">wanted to get the tool into
1052 Debian</a>, and as I too wanted it to be in Debian, I volunteered to
1053 help him get it into shape to get the package uploaded into the Debian
1054 archive.</p>
1055
1056 <p>Today we finally managed to get the package into shape and uploaded
1057 it into Debian, where it currently
1058 <a href="https://ftp-master.debian.org//new/openalpr_2.2.1-1.html">waits
1059 in the NEW queue</a> for review by the Debian ftpmasters.</p>
1060
1061 <p>I guess you are wondering why on earth such tool would be useful
1062 for the common folks, ie those not running a large government
1063 surveillance system?  Well, I plan to put it in a computer on my bike
1064 and in my car, tracking the cars nearby and allowing me to be notified
1065 when number plates on my watch list are discovered.  Another use case
1066 was suggested by a friend of mine, who wanted to set it up at his home
1067 to open the car port automatically when it discovered the plate on his
1068 car.  When I mentioned it perhaps was a bit foolhardy to allow anyone
1069 capable of placing his license plate number of a piece of cardboard to
1070 open his car port, men replied that it was always unlocked anyway.  I
1071 guess for such use case it make sense.  I am sure there are other use
1072 cases too, for those with imagination and a vision.</p>
1073
1074 <p>If you want to build your own version of the Debian package, check
1075 out the upstream git source and symlink ./distros/debian to ./debian/
1076 before running "debuild" to build the source.  Or wait a bit until the
1077 package show up in unstable.</p>
1078
1079       </div>
1080       <div class="tags">
1081
1082
1083         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
1084
1085
1086       </div>
1087     </div>
1088     <div class="padding"></div>
1089
1090     <div class="entry">
1091       <div class="title">
1092         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_appstream_with_isenkram_to_install_hardware_related_packages_in_Debian.html">Using appstream with isenkram to install hardware related packages in Debian</a>
1093       </div>
1094       <div class="date">
1095         20th December 2015
1096       </div>
1097       <div class="body">
1098         <p>Around three years ago, I created
1099 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">the isenkram
1100 system</a> to get a more practical solution in Debian for handing
1101 hardware related packages.  A GUI system in the isenkram package will
1102 present a pop-up dialog when some hardware dongle supported by
1103 relevant packages in Debian is inserted into the machine.  The same
1104 lookup mechanism to detect packages is available as command line
1105 tools in the isenkram-cli package.  In addition to mapping hardware,
1106 it will also map kernel firmware files to packages and make it easy to
1107 install needed firmware packages automatically.  The key for this
1108 system to work is a good way to map hardware to packages, in other
1109 words, allow packages to announce what hardware they will work
1110 with.</p>
1111
1112 <p>I started by providing data files in the isenkram source, and
1113 adding code to download the latest version of these data files at run
1114 time, to ensure every user had the most up to date mapping available.
1115 I also added support for storing the mapping in the Packages file in
1116 the apt repositories, but did not push this approach because while I
1117 was trying to figure out how to best store hardware/package mappings,
1118 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/">the
1119 appstream system</a> was announced.  I got in touch and suggested to
1120 add the hardware mapping into that data set to be able to use
1121 appstream as a data source, and this was accepted at least for the
1122 Debian version of appstream.</p>
1123
1124 <p>A few days ago using appstream in Debian for this became possible,
1125 and today I uploaded a new version 0.20 of isenkram adding support for
1126 appstream as a data source for mapping hardware to packages.  The only
1127 package so far using appstream to announce its hardware support is my
1128 pymissile package.  I got help from Matthias Klumpp with figuring out
1129 how do add the required
1130 <a href="https://appstream.debian.org/html/sid/main/metainfo/pymissile.html">metadata
1131 in pymissile</a>.  I added a file debian/pymissile.metainfo.xml with
1132 this content:</p>
1133
1134 <blockquote><pre>
1135 &lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?&gt;
1136 &lt;component&gt;
1137   &lt;id&gt;pymissile&lt;/id&gt;
1138   &lt;metadata_license&gt;MIT&lt;/metadata_license&gt;
1139   &lt;name&gt;pymissile&lt;/name&gt;
1140   &lt;summary&gt;Control original Striker USB Missile Launcher&lt;/summary&gt;
1141   &lt;description&gt;
1142     &lt;p&gt;
1143       Pymissile provides a curses interface to control an original
1144       Marks and Spencer / Striker USB Missile Launcher, as well as a
1145       motion control script to allow a webcamera to control the
1146       launcher.
1147     &lt;/p&gt;
1148   &lt;/description&gt;
1149   &lt;provides&gt;
1150     &lt;modalias&gt;usb:v1130p0202d*&lt;/modalias&gt;
1151   &lt;/provides&gt;
1152 &lt;/component&gt;
1153 </pre></blockquote>
1154
1155 <p>The key for isenkram is the component/provides/modalias value,
1156 which is a glob style match rule for hardware specific strings
1157 (modalias strings) provided by the Linux kernel.  In this case, it
1158 will map to all USB devices with vendor code 1130 and product code
1159 0202.</p>
1160
1161 <p>Note, it is important that the license of all the metadata files
1162 are compatible to have permissions to aggregate them into archive wide
1163 appstream files.  Matthias suggested to use MIT or BSD licenses for
1164 these files.  A challenge is figuring out a good id for the data, as
1165 it is supposed to be globally unique and shared across distributions
1166 (in other words, best to coordinate with upstream what to use).  But
1167 it can be changed later or, so we went with the package name as
1168 upstream for this project is dormant.</p>
1169
1170 <p>To get the metadata file installed in the correct location for the
1171 mirror update scripts to pick it up and include its content the
1172 appstream data source, the file must be installed in the binary
1173 package under /usr/share/appdata/.  I did this by adding the following
1174 line to debian/pymissile.install:</p>
1175
1176 <blockquote><pre>
1177 debian/pymissile.metainfo.xml usr/share/appdata
1178 </pre></blockquote>
1179
1180 <p>With that in place, the command line tool isenkram-lookup will list
1181 all packages useful on the current computer automatically, and the GUI
1182 pop-up handler will propose to install the package not already
1183 installed if a hardware dongle is inserted into the machine in
1184 question.</p>
1185
1186 <p>Details of the modalias field in appstream is available from the
1187 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-11">DEP-11</a> proposal.</p>
1188
1189 <p>To locate the modalias values of all hardware present in a machine,
1190 try running this command on the command line:</p>
1191
1192 <blockquote><pre>
1193 cat $(find /sys/devices/|grep modalias)
1194 </pre></blockquote>
1195
1196 <p>To learn more about the isenkram system, please check out
1197 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">my
1198 blog posts tagged isenkram</a>.</p>
1199
1200       </div>
1201       <div class="tags">
1202
1203
1204         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
1205
1206
1207       </div>
1208     </div>
1209     <div class="padding"></div>
1210
1211     <div class="entry">
1212       <div class="title">
1213         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_GNU_General_Public_License_is_not_magic_pixie_dust.html">The GNU General Public License is not magic pixie dust</a>
1214       </div>
1215       <div class="date">
1216         30th November 2015
1217       </div>
1218       <div class="body">
1219         <p>A blog post from my fellow Debian developer Paul Wise titled
1220 "<a href="http://bonedaddy.net/pabs3/log/2015/11/27/sfc-supporter/">The
1221 GPL is not magic pixie dust</a>" explain the importance of making sure
1222 the <a href="http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html">GPL</a> is enforced.
1223 I quote the blog post from Paul in full here with his permission:<p>
1224
1225 <blockquote>
1226
1227 <p><a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/"><img src="https://sfconservancy.org/img/supporter-badge.png" width="194" height="90" alt="Become a Software Freedom Conservancy Supporter!" align="right" border="0" /></a></p>
1228
1229 <blockquote>
1230 The GPL is not magic pixie dust. It does not work by itself.<br/>
1231
1232 The first step is to choose a
1233 <a href="https://copyleft.org/">copyleft</a> license for your
1234 code.<br/>
1235
1236 The next step is, when someone fails to follow that copyleft license,
1237 <b>it must be enforced</b><br/>
1238
1239 and its a simple fact of our modern society that such type of
1240 work<br/>
1241
1242 is incredibly expensive to do and incredibly difficult to do.
1243 </blockquote>
1244
1245 <p><small>-- <a href="http://ebb.org/bkuhn/">Bradley Kuhn</a>, in
1246 <a href="http://faif.us/" title="Free as in Freedom">FaiF</a>
1247 <a href="http://faif.us/cast/2015/nov/24/0x57/">episode
1248 0x57</a></small></p>
1249
1250 <p>As the Debian Website
1251 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/794116">used</a>
1252 <a href="https://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/webwml/webwml/english/intro/free.wml?r1=1.24&amp;r2=1.25">to</a>
1253 imply, public domain and permissively licensed software can lead to
1254 the production of more proprietary software as people discover useful
1255 software, extend it and or incorporate it into their hardware or
1256 software products.  Copyleft licenses such as the GNU GPL were created
1257 to close off this avenue to the production of proprietary software but
1258 such licenses are not enough.  With the ongoing adoption of Free
1259 Software by individuals and groups, inevitably the community's
1260 expectations of license compliance are violated, usually out of
1261 ignorance of the way Free Software works, but not always.  As Karen
1262 and Bradley explained in <a href="http://faif.us/" title="Free as in
1263 Freedom">FaiF</a>
1264 <a href="http://faif.us/cast/2015/nov/24/0x57/">episode 0x57</a>,
1265 copyleft is nothing if no-one is willing and able to stand up in court
1266 to protect it.  The reality of today's world is that legal
1267 representation is expensive, difficult and time consuming.  With
1268 <a href="http://gpl-violations.org/">gpl-violations.org</a> in hiatus
1269 <a href="http://gpl-violations.org/news/20151027-homepage-recovers/">until</a>
1270 some time in 2016, the <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/">Software
1271 Freedom Conservancy</a> (a tax-exempt charity) is the major defender
1272 of the Linux project, Debian and other groups against GPL violations.
1273 In March the SFC supported a
1274 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/mar/05/vmware-lawsuit/">lawsuit
1275 by Christoph Hellwig</a> against VMware for refusing to
1276 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/linux-compliance/vmware-lawsuit-faq.html">comply
1277 with the GPL</a> in relation to their use of parts of the Linux
1278 kernel.  Since then two of their sponsors pulled corporate funding and
1279 conferences
1280 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/nov/24/faif-carols-fundraiser/">blocked
1281 or cancelled their talks</a>.  As a result they have decided to rely
1282 less on corporate funding and more on the broad community of
1283 individuals who support Free Software and copyleft.  So the SFC has
1284 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/nov/23/2015fundraiser/">launched</a>
1285 a <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/">campaign</a> to create
1286 a community of folks who stand up for copyleft and the GPL by
1287 supporting their work on promoting and supporting copyleft and Free
1288 Software.</p>
1289
1290 <p>If you support Free Software,
1291 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/nov/26/like-what-I-do/">like</a>
1292 what the SFC do, agree with their
1293 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/linux-compliance/principles.html">compliance
1294 principles</a>, are happy about their
1295 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/">successes</a> in 2015,
1296 work on a project that is an SFC
1297 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/members/current/">member</a> and or
1298 just want to stand up for copyleft, please join
1299 <a href="https://identi.ca/cwebber/image/JQGPA4qbTyyp3-MY8QpvuA">Christopher
1300 Allan Webber</a>,
1301 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/nov/24/faif-carols-fundraiser/">Carol
1302 Smith</a>,
1303 <a href="http://www.jonobacon.org/2015/11/25/supporting-software-freedom-conservancy/">Jono
1304 Bacon</a>, myself and
1305 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/sponsors/#supporters">others</a> in
1306 becoming a
1307 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/">supporter</a>.  For the
1308 next week your donation will be
1309 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/nov/27/black-friday/">matched</a>
1310 by an anonymous donor.  Please also consider asking your employer to
1311 match your donation or become a sponsor of SFC.  Don't forget to
1312 spread the word about your support for SFC via email, your blog and or
1313 social media accounts.</p>
1314
1315 </blockquote>
1316
1317 <p>I agree with Paul on this topic and just signed up as a Supporter
1318 of Software Freedom Conservancy myself.  Perhaps you should be a
1319 supporter too?</p>
1320
1321       </div>
1322       <div class="tags">
1323
1324
1325         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>.
1326
1327
1328       </div>
1329     </div>
1330     <div class="padding"></div>
1331
1332     <div class="entry">
1333       <div class="title">
1334         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/PGP_key_transition_statement_for_key_EE4E02F9.html">PGP key transition statement for key EE4E02F9</a>
1335       </div>
1336       <div class="date">
1337         17th November 2015
1338       </div>
1339       <div class="body">
1340         <p>I've needed a new OpenPGP key for a while, but have not had time to
1341 set it up properly.  I wanted to generate it offline and have it
1342 available on <a href="http://shop.kernelconcepts.de/#openpgp">a OpenPGP
1343 smart card</a> for daily use, and learning how to do it and finding
1344 time to sit down with an offline machine almost took forever.  But
1345 finally I've been able to complete the process, and have now moved
1346 from my old GPG key to a new GPG key.  See
1347 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-11-17-new-gpg-key-transition.txt">the
1348 full transition statement, signed with both my old and new key</a> for
1349 the details.  This is my new key:</p>
1350
1351 <pre>
1352 pub   3936R/<a href="http://pgp.cs.uu.nl/stats/111D6B29EE4E02F9.html">111D6B29EE4E02F9</a> 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-14]
1353       Key fingerprint = 3AC7 B2E3 ACA5 DF87 78F1  D827 111D 6B29 EE4E 02F9
1354 uid                  Petter Reinholdtsen &lt;pere@hungry.com&gt;
1355 uid                  Petter Reinholdtsen &lt;pere@debian.org&gt;
1356 sub   4096R/87BAFB0E 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-02]
1357 sub   4096R/F91E6DE9 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-02]
1358 sub   4096R/A0439BAB 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-02]
1359 </pre>
1360
1361 <p>The key can be downloaded from the OpenPGP key servers, signed by
1362 my old key.</p>
1363
1364 <p>If you signed my old key
1365 (<a href="http://pgp.cs.uu.nl/stats/DB4CCC4B2A30D729.html">DB4CCC4B2A30D729</a>),
1366 I'd very much appreciate a signature on my new key, details and
1367 instructions in the transition statement. I m happy to reciprocate if
1368 you have a similarly signed transition statement to present.</p>
1369
1370       </div>
1371       <div class="tags">
1372
1373
1374         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
1375
1376
1377       </div>
1378     </div>
1379     <div class="padding"></div>
1380
1381     <div class="entry">
1382       <div class="title">
1383         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_life_and_death_of_a_laptop_battery.html">The life and death of a laptop battery</a>
1384       </div>
1385       <div class="date">
1386         24th September 2015
1387       </div>
1388       <div class="body">
1389         <p>When I get a new laptop, the battery life time at the start is OK.
1390 But this do not last.  The last few laptops gave me a feeling that
1391 within a year, the life time is just a fraction of what it used to be,
1392 and it slowly become painful to use the laptop without power connected
1393 all the time.  Because of this, when I got a new Thinkpad X230 laptop
1394 about two years ago, I decided to monitor its battery state to have
1395 more hard facts when the battery started to fail.</p>
1396
1397 <img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-09-24-laptop-battery-graph.png"/>
1398
1399 <p>First I tried to find a sensible Debian package to record the
1400 battery status, assuming that this must be a problem already handled
1401 by someone else.  I found
1402 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats</a>,
1403 which collects statistics from the battery, but it was completely
1404 broken.  I sent a few suggestions to the maintainer, but decided to
1405 write my own collector as a shell script while I waited for feedback
1406 from him.  Via
1407 <a href="http://www.ifweassume.com/2013/08/the-de-evolution-of-my-laptop-battery.html">a
1408 blog post about the battery development on a MacBook Air</a> I also
1409 discovered
1410 <a href="https://github.com/jradavenport/batlog.git">batlog</a>, not
1411 available in Debian.</p>
1412
1413 <p>I started my collector 2013-07-15, and it has been collecting
1414 battery stats ever since. Now my
1415 /var/log/hjemmenett-battery-status.log file contain around 115,000
1416 measurements, from the time the battery was working great until now,
1417 when it is unable to charge above 7% of original capacity.  My
1418 collector shell script is quite simple and look like this:</p>
1419
1420 <pre>
1421 #!/bin/sh
1422 # Inspired by
1423 # http://www.ifweassume.com/2013/08/the-de-evolution-of-my-laptop-battery.html
1424 # See also
1425 # http://blog.sleeplessbeastie.eu/2013/01/02/debian-how-to-monitor-battery-capacity/
1426 logfile=/var/log/hjemmenett-battery-status.log
1427
1428 files="manufacturer model_name technology serial_number \
1429     energy_full energy_full_design energy_now cycle_count status"
1430
1431 if [ ! -e "$logfile" ] ; then
1432     (
1433         printf "timestamp,"
1434         for f in $files; do
1435             printf "%s," $f
1436         done
1437         echo
1438     ) > "$logfile"
1439 fi
1440
1441 log_battery() {
1442     # Print complete message in one echo call, to avoid race condition
1443     # when several log processes run in parallel.
1444     msg=$(printf "%s," $(date +%s); \
1445         for f in $files; do \
1446             printf "%s," $(cat $f); \
1447         done)
1448     echo "$msg"
1449 }
1450
1451 cd /sys/class/power_supply
1452
1453 for bat in BAT*; do
1454     (cd $bat && log_battery >> "$logfile")
1455 done
1456 </pre>
1457
1458 <p>The script is called when the power management system detect a
1459 change in the power status (power plug in or out), and when going into
1460 and out of hibernation and suspend.  In addition, it collect a value
1461 every 10 minutes.  This make it possible for me know when the battery
1462 is discharging, charging and how the maximum charge change over time.
1463 The code for the Debian package
1464 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-status">is now
1465 available on github</a>.</p>
1466
1467 <p>The collected log file look like this:</p>
1468
1469 <pre>
1470 timestamp,manufacturer,model_name,technology,serial_number,energy_full,energy_full_design,energy_now,cycle_count,status,
1471 1376591133,LGC,45N1025,Li-ion,974,62800000,62160000,39050000,0,Discharging,
1472 [...]
1473 1443090528,LGC,45N1025,Li-ion,974,4900000,62160000,4900000,0,Full,
1474 1443090601,LGC,45N1025,Li-ion,974,4900000,62160000,4900000,0,Full,
1475 </pre>
1476
1477 <p>I wrote a small script to create a graph of the charge development
1478 over time.  This graph depicted above show the slow death of my laptop
1479 battery.</p>
1480
1481 <p>But why is this happening?  Why are my laptop batteries always
1482 dying in a year or two, while the batteries of space probes and
1483 satellites keep working year after year.  If we are to believe
1484 <a href="http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_prolong_lithium_based_batteries">Battery
1485 University</a>, the cause is me charging the battery whenever I have a
1486 chance, and the fix is to not charge the Lithium-ion batteries to 100%
1487 all the time, but to stay below 90% of full charge most of the time.
1488 I've been told that the Tesla electric cars
1489 <a href="http://my.teslamotors.com/de_CH/forum/forums/battery-charge-limit">limit
1490 the charge of their batteries to 80%</a>, with the option to charge to
1491 100% when preparing for a longer trip (not that I would want a car
1492 like Tesla where rights to privacy is abandoned, but that is another
1493 story), which I guess is the option we should have for laptops on
1494 Linux too.</p>
1495
1496 <p>Is there a good and generic way with Linux to tell the battery to
1497 stop charging at 80%, unless requested to charge to 100% once in
1498 preparation for a longer trip?  I found
1499 <a href="http://askubuntu.com/questions/34452/how-can-i-limit-battery-charging-to-80-capacity">one
1500 recipe on askubuntu for Ubuntu to limit charging on Thinkpad to
1501 80%</a>, but could not get it to work (kernel module refused to
1502 load).</p>
1503
1504 <p>I wonder why the battery capacity was reported to be more than 100%
1505 at the start.  I also wonder why the "full capacity" increases some
1506 times, and if it is possible to repeat the process to get the battery
1507 back to design capacity.  And I wonder if the discharge and charge
1508 speed change over time, or if this stay the same.  I did not yet try
1509 to write a tool to calculate the derivative values of the battery
1510 level, but suspect some interesting insights might be learned from
1511 those.</p>
1512
1513 <p>Update 2015-09-24: I got a tip to install the packages
1514 acpi-call-dkms and tlp (unfortunately missing in Debian stable)
1515 packages instead of the tp-smapi-dkms package I had tried to use
1516 initially, and use 'tlp setcharge 40 80' to change when charging start
1517 and stop.  I've done so now, but expect my existing battery is toast
1518 and need to be replaced.  The proposal is unfortunately Thinkpad
1519 specific.</p>
1520
1521       </div>
1522       <div class="tags">
1523
1524
1525         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1526
1527
1528       </div>
1529     </div>
1530     <div class="padding"></div>
1531
1532     <div class="entry">
1533       <div class="title">
1534         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_laptop___some_more_clues_and_ideas_based_on_feedback.html">New laptop - some more clues and ideas based on feedback</a>
1535       </div>
1536       <div class="date">
1537          5th July 2015
1538       </div>
1539       <div class="body">
1540         <p>Several people contacted me after my previous blog post about my
1541 need for a new laptop, and provided very useful feedback.  I wish to
1542 thank every one of these.  Several pointed me to the possibility of
1543 fixing my X230, and I am already in the process of getting Lenovo to
1544 do so thanks to the on site, next day support contract covering the
1545 machine.  But the battery is almost useless (I expect to replace it
1546 with a non-official battery) and I do not expect the machine to live
1547 for many more years, so it is time to plan its replacement.  If I did
1548 not have a support contract, it was suggested to find replacement parts
1549 using <a href="http://www.francecrans.com/">FrancEcrans</a>, but it
1550 might present a language barrier as I do not understand French.</p>
1551
1552 <p>One tip I got was to use the
1553 <a href="https://skinflint.co.uk/?cat=nb">Skinflint</a> web service to
1554 compare laptop models.  It seem to have more models available than
1555 prisjakt.no.  Another tip I got from someone I know have similar
1556 keyboard preferences was that the HP EliteBook 840 keyboard is not
1557 very good, and this matches my experience with earlier EliteBook
1558 keyboards I tested.  Because of this, I will not consider it any further.
1559
1560 <p>When I wrote my blog post, I was not aware of Thinkpad X250, the
1561 newest Thinkpad X model.  The keyboard reintroduces mouse buttons
1562 (which is missing from the X240), and is working fairly well with
1563 Debian Sid/Unstable according to
1564 <a href="http://www.corsac.net/X250/">Corsac.net</a>.  The reports I
1565 got on the keyboard quality are not consistent.  Some say the keyboard
1566 is good, others say it is ok, while others say it is not very good.
1567 Those with experience from X41 and and X60 agree that the X250
1568 keyboard is not as good as those trusty old laptops, and suggest I
1569 keep and fix my X230 instead of upgrading, or get a used X230 to
1570 replace it.  I'm also told that the X250 lack leds for caps lock, disk
1571 activity and battery status, which is very convenient on my X230.  I'm
1572 also told that the CPU fan is running very often, making it a bit
1573 noisy.  In any case, the X250 do not work out of the box with Debian
1574 Stable/Jessie, one of my requirements.</p>
1575
1576 <p>I have also gotten a few vendor proposals, one was
1577 <a href="http://pro-star.com">Pro-Star</a>, another was
1578 <a href="http://shop.gluglug.org.uk/product/libreboot-x200/">Libreboot</a>.
1579 The latter look very attractive to me.</p>
1580
1581 <p>Again, thank you all for the very useful feedback.  It help a lot
1582 as I keep looking for a replacement.</p>
1583
1584 <p>Update 2015-07-06: I was recommended to check out the
1585 <a href="">lapstore.de</a> web shop for used laptops.  They got several
1586 different
1587 <a href="http://www.lapstore.de/f.php/shop/lapstore/f/411/lang/x/kw/Lenovo_ThinkPad_X_Serie/">old
1588 thinkpad X models</a>, and provide one year warranty.</p>
1589
1590       </div>
1591       <div class="tags">
1592
1593
1594         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1595
1596
1597       </div>
1598     </div>
1599     <div class="padding"></div>
1600
1601     <div class="entry">
1602       <div class="title">
1603         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_to_find_a_new_laptop__as_the_old_one_is_broken_after_only_two_years.html">Time to find a new laptop, as the old one is broken after only two years</a>
1604       </div>
1605       <div class="date">
1606          3rd July 2015
1607       </div>
1608       <div class="body">
1609         <p>My primary work horse laptop is failing, and will need a
1610 replacement soon.  The left 5 cm of the screen on my Thinkpad X230
1611 started flickering yesterday, and I suspect the cause is a broken
1612 cable, as changing the angle of the screen some times get rid of the
1613 flickering.</p>
1614
1615 <p>My requirements have not really changed since I bought it, and is
1616 still as
1617 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html">I
1618 described them in 2013</a>.  The last time I bought a laptop, I had
1619 good help from
1620 <a href="http://www.prisjakt.no/category.php?k=353">prisjakt.no</a>
1621 where I could select at least a few of the requirements (mouse pin,
1622 wifi, weight) and go through the rest manually.  Three button mouse
1623 and a good keyboard is not available as an option, and all the three
1624 laptop models proposed today (Thinkpad X240, HP EliteBook 820 G1 and
1625 G2) lack three mouse buttons).  It is also unclear to me how good the
1626 keyboard on the HP EliteBooks are.  I hope Lenovo have not messed up
1627 the keyboard, even if the quality and robustness in the X series have
1628 deteriorated since X41.</p>
1629
1630 <p>I wonder how I can find a sensible laptop when none of the options
1631 seem sensible to me?  Are there better services around to search the
1632 set of available laptops for features?  Please send me an email if you
1633 have suggestions.</p>
1634
1635 <p>Update 2015-07-23: I got a suggestion to check out the FSF
1636 <a href="http://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/endorsement/respects-your-freedom">list
1637 of endorsed hardware</a>, which is useful background information.</p>
1638
1639       </div>
1640       <div class="tags">
1641
1642
1643         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1644
1645
1646       </div>
1647     </div>
1648     <div class="padding"></div>
1649
1650     <div class="entry">
1651       <div class="title">
1652         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_stay_with_sysvinit_in_Debian_Jessie.html">How to stay with sysvinit in Debian Jessie</a>
1653       </div>
1654       <div class="date">
1655         22nd November 2014
1656       </div>
1657       <div class="body">
1658         <p>By now, it is well known that Debian Jessie will not be using
1659 sysvinit as its boot system by default.  But how can one keep using
1660 sysvinit in Jessie?  It is fairly easy, and here are a few recipes,
1661 courtesy of
1662 <a href="http://www.vitavonni.de/blog/201410/2014102101-avoiding-systemd.html">Erich
1663 Schubert</a> and
1664 <a href="http://smcv.pseudorandom.co.uk/2014/still_universal/">Simon
1665 McVittie</a>.
1666
1667 <p>If you already are using Wheezy and want to upgrade to Jessie and
1668 keep sysvinit as your boot system, create a file
1669 <tt>/etc/apt/preferences.d/use-sysvinit</tt> with this content before
1670 you upgrade:</p>
1671
1672 <p><blockquote><pre>
1673 Package: systemd-sysv
1674 Pin: release o=Debian
1675 Pin-Priority: -1
1676 </pre></blockquote><p>
1677
1678 <p>This file content will tell apt and aptitude to not consider
1679 installing systemd-sysv as part of any installation and upgrade
1680 solution when resolving dependencies, and thus tell it to avoid
1681 systemd as a default boot system.  The end result should be that the
1682 upgraded system keep using sysvinit.</p>
1683
1684 <p>If you are installing Jessie for the first time, there is no way to
1685 get sysvinit installed by default (debootstrap used by
1686 debian-installer have no option for this), but one can tell the
1687 installer to switch to sysvinit before the first boot.  Either by
1688 using a kernel argument to the installer, or by adding a line to the
1689 preseed file used.  First, the kernel command line argument:
1690
1691 <p><blockquote><pre>
1692 preseed/late_command="in-target apt-get install --purge -y sysvinit-core"
1693 </pre></blockquote><p>
1694
1695 <p>Next, the line to use in a preseed file:</p>
1696
1697 <p><blockquote><pre>
1698 d-i preseed/late_command string in-target apt-get install -y sysvinit-core
1699 </pre></blockquote><p>
1700
1701 <p>One can of course also do this after the first boot by installing
1702 the sysvinit-core package.</p>
1703
1704 <p>I recommend only using sysvinit if you really need it, as the
1705 sysvinit boot sequence in Debian have several hardware specific bugs
1706 on Linux caused by the fact that it is unpredictable when hardware
1707 devices show up during boot.  But on the other hand, the new default
1708 boot system still have a few rough edges I hope will be fixed before
1709 Jessie is released.</p>
1710
1711 <p>Update 2014-11-26: Inspired by
1712 <ahref="https://www.mirbsd.org/permalinks/wlog-10-tg_e20141125-tg.htm#e20141125-tg_wlog-10-tg">a
1713 blog post by Torsten Glaser</a>, added --purge to the preseed
1714 line.</p>
1715
1716       </div>
1717       <div class="tags">
1718
1719
1720         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1721
1722
1723       </div>
1724     </div>
1725     <div class="padding"></div>
1726
1727     <div class="entry">
1728       <div class="title">
1729         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Debian_package_for_SMTP_via_Tor__aka_SMTorP__using_exim4.html">A Debian package for SMTP via Tor (aka SMTorP) using exim4</a>
1730       </div>
1731       <div class="date">
1732         10th November 2014
1733       </div>
1734       <div class="body">
1735         <p>The right to communicate with your friends and family in private,
1736 without anyone snooping, is a right every citicen have in a liberal
1737 democracy.  But this right is under serious attack these days.</p>
1738
1739 <p>A while back it occurred to me that one way to make the dragnet
1740 surveillance conducted by NSA, GCHQ, FRA and others (and confirmed by
1741 the whisleblower Snowden) more expensive for Internet email,
1742 is to deliver all email using SMTP via Tor.  Such SMTP option would be
1743 a nice addition to the FreedomBox project if we could send email
1744 between FreedomBox machines without leaking metadata about the emails
1745 to the people peeking on the wire.  I
1746 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/2014-October/006493.html">proposed
1747 this on the FreedomBox project mailing list in October</a> and got a
1748 lot of useful feedback and suggestions.  It also became obvious to me
1749 that this was not a novel idea, as the same idea was tested and
1750 documented by Johannes Berg as early as 2006, and both
1751 <a href="https://github.com/pagekite/Mailpile/wiki/SMTorP">the
1752 Mailpile</a> and <a href="http://dee.su/cables">the Cables</a> systems
1753 propose a similar method / protocol to pass emails between users.</p>
1754
1755 <p>To implement such system one need to set up a Tor hidden service
1756 providing the SMTP protocol on port 25, and use email addresses
1757 looking like username@hidden-service-name.onion.  With such addresses
1758 the connections to port 25 on hidden-service-name.onion using Tor will
1759 go to the correct SMTP server.  To do this, one need to configure the
1760 Tor daemon to provide the hidden service and the mail server to accept
1761 emails for this .onion domain.  To learn more about Exim configuration
1762 in Debian and test the design provided by Johannes Berg in his FAQ, I
1763 set out yesterday to create a Debian package for making it trivial to
1764 set up such SMTP over Tor service based on Debian.  Getting it to work
1765 were fairly easy, and
1766 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/exim4-smtorp">the
1767 source code for the Debian package</a> is available from github.  I
1768 plan to move it into Debian if further testing prove this to be a
1769 useful approach.</p>
1770
1771 <p>If you want to test this, set up a blank Debian machine without any
1772 mail system installed (or run <tt>apt-get purge exim4-config</tt> to
1773 get rid of exim4).  Install tor, clone the git repository mentioned
1774 above, build the deb and install it on the machine.  Next, run
1775 <tt>/usr/lib/exim4-smtorp/setup-exim-hidden-service</tt> and follow
1776 the instructions to get the service up and running.  Restart tor and
1777 exim when it is done, and test mail delivery using swaks like
1778 this:</p>
1779
1780 <p><blockquote><pre>
1781 torsocks swaks --server dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion \
1782   --to fbx@dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion
1783 </pre></blockquote></p>
1784
1785 <p>This will test the SMTP delivery using tor.  Replace the email
1786 address with your own address to test your server. :)</p>
1787
1788 <p>The setup procedure is still to complex, and I hope it can be made
1789 easier and more automatic.  Especially the tor setup need more work.
1790 Also, the package include a tor-smtp tool written in C, but its task
1791 should probably be rewritten in some script language to make the deb
1792 architecture independent.  It would probably also make the code easier
1793 to review.  The tor-smtp tool currently need to listen on a socket for
1794 exim to talk to it and is started using xinetd.  It would be better if
1795 no daemon and no socket is needed.  I suspect it is possible to get
1796 exim to run a command line tool for delivery instead of talking to a
1797 socket, and hope to figure out how in a future version of this
1798 system.</p>
1799
1800 <p>Until I wipe my test machine, I can be reached using the
1801 <tt>fbx@dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion</tt> mail address, deliverable over
1802 SMTorP. :)</p>
1803
1804       </div>
1805       <div class="tags">
1806
1807
1808         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
1809
1810
1811       </div>
1812     </div>
1813     <div class="padding"></div>
1814
1815     <div class="entry">
1816       <div class="title">
1817         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/listadmin__the_quick_way_to_moderate_mailman_lists___nice_free_software.html">listadmin, the quick way to moderate mailman lists - nice free software</a>
1818       </div>
1819       <div class="date">
1820         22nd October 2014
1821       </div>
1822       <div class="body">
1823         <p>If you ever had to moderate a mailman list, like the ones on
1824 alioth.debian.org, you know the web interface is fairly slow to
1825 operate.  First you visit one web page, enter the moderation password
1826 and get a new page shown with a list of all the messages to moderate
1827 and various options for each email address.  This take a while for
1828 every list you moderate, and you need to do it regularly to do a good
1829 job as a list moderator.  But there is a quick alternative,
1830 <a href="http://heim.ifi.uio.no/kjetilho/hacks/#listadmin">the
1831 listadmin program</a>.  It allow you to check lists for new messages
1832 to moderate in a fraction of a second.  Here is a test run on two
1833 lists I recently took over:</p>
1834
1835 <p><blockquote><pre>
1836 % time listadmin xiph
1837 fetching data for pkg-xiph-commits@lists.alioth.debian.org ... nothing in queue
1838 fetching data for pkg-xiph-maint@lists.alioth.debian.org ... nothing in queue
1839
1840 real    0m1.709s
1841 user    0m0.232s
1842 sys     0m0.012s
1843 %
1844 </pre></blockquote></p>
1845
1846 <p>In 1.7 seconds I had checked two mailing lists and confirmed that
1847 there are no message in the moderation queue.  Every morning I
1848 currently moderate 68 mailman lists, and it normally take around two
1849 minutes.  When I took over the two pkg-xiph lists above a few days
1850 ago, there were 400 emails waiting in the moderator queue.  It took me
1851 less than 15 minutes to process them all using the listadmin
1852 program.</p>
1853
1854 <p>If you install
1855 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/listadmin">the listadmin
1856 package</a> from Debian and create a file <tt>~/.listadmin.ini</tt>
1857 with content like this, the moderation task is a breeze:</p>
1858
1859 <p><blockquote><pre>
1860 username username@example.org
1861 spamlevel 23
1862 default discard
1863 discard_if_reason "Posting restricted to members only. Remove us from your mail list."
1864
1865 password secret
1866 adminurl https://{domain}/mailman/admindb/{list}
1867 mailman-list@lists.example.com
1868
1869 password hidden
1870 other-list@otherserver.example.org
1871 </pre></blockquote></p>
1872
1873 <p>There are other options to set as well.  Check the manual page to
1874 learn the details.</p>
1875
1876 <p>If you are forced to moderate lists on a mailman installation where
1877 the SSL certificate is self signed or not properly signed by a
1878 generally accepted signing authority, you can set a environment
1879 variable when calling listadmin to disable SSL verification:</p>
1880
1881 <p><blockquote><pre>
1882 PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=0 listadmin
1883 </pre></blockquote></p>
1884
1885 <p>If you want to moderate a subset of the lists you take care of, you
1886 can provide an argument to the listadmin script like I do in the
1887 initial screen dump (the xiph argument).  Using an argument, only
1888 lists matching the argument string will be processed.  This make it
1889 quick to accept messages if you notice the moderation request in your
1890 email.</p>
1891
1892 <p>Without the listadmin program, I would never be the moderator of 68
1893 mailing lists, as I simply do not have time to spend on that if the
1894 process was any slower. The listadmin program have saved me hours of
1895 time I could spend elsewhere over the years.  It truly is nice free
1896 software.</p>
1897
1898 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1899 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1900 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1901
1902 <p>Update 2014-10-27: Added missing 'username' statement in
1903 configuration example.  Also, I've been told that the
1904 PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=0 setting do not work for everyone.  Not
1905 sure why.</p>
1906
1907       </div>
1908       <div class="tags">
1909
1910
1911         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
1912
1913
1914       </div>
1915     </div>
1916     <div class="padding"></div>
1917
1918     <div class="entry">
1919       <div class="title">
1920         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Jessie__PXE_and_automatic_firmware_installation.html">Debian Jessie, PXE and automatic firmware installation</a>
1921       </div>
1922       <div class="date">
1923         17th October 2014
1924       </div>
1925       <div class="body">
1926         <p>When PXE installing laptops with Debian, I often run into the
1927 problem that the WiFi card require some firmware to work properly.
1928 And it has been a pain to fix this using preseeding in Debian.
1929 Normally something more is needed.  But thanks to
1930 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/i/isenkram.html">my isenkram
1931 package</a> and its recent tasksel extension, it has now become easy
1932 to do this using simple preseeding.</p>
1933
1934 <p>The isenkram-cli package provide tasksel tasks which will install
1935 firmware for the hardware found in the machine (actually, requested by
1936 the kernel modules for the hardware).  (It can also install user space
1937 programs supporting the hardware detected, but that is not the focus
1938 of this story.)</p>
1939
1940 <p>To get this working in the default installation, two preeseding
1941 values are needed.  First, the isenkram-cli package must be installed
1942 into the target chroot (aka the hard drive) before tasksel is executed
1943 in the pkgsel step of the debian-installer system.  This is done by
1944 preseeding the base-installer/includes debconf value to include the
1945 isenkram-cli package.  The package name is next passed to debootstrap
1946 for installation.  With the isenkram-cli package in place, tasksel
1947 will automatically use the isenkram tasks to detect hardware specific
1948 packages for the machine being installed and install them, because
1949 isenkram-cli contain tasksel tasks.</p>
1950
1951 <p>Second, one need to enable the non-free APT repository, because
1952 most firmware unfortunately is non-free.  This is done by preseeding
1953 the apt-mirror-setup step.  This is unfortunate, but for a lot of
1954 hardware it is the only option in Debian.</p>
1955
1956 <p>The end result is two lines needed in your preseeding file to get
1957 firmware installed automatically by the installer:</p>
1958
1959 <p><blockquote><pre>
1960 base-installer base-installer/includes string isenkram-cli
1961 apt-mirror-setup apt-setup/non-free boolean true
1962 </pre></blockquote></p>
1963
1964 <p>The current version of isenkram-cli in testing/jessie will install
1965 both firmware and user space packages when using this method.  It also
1966 do not work well, so use version 0.15 or later.  Installing both
1967 firmware and user space packages might give you a bit more than you
1968 want, so I decided to split the tasksel task in two, one for firmware
1969 and one for user space programs.  The firmware task is enabled by
1970 default, while the one for user space programs is not.  This split is
1971 implemented in the package currently in unstable.</p>
1972
1973 <p>If you decide to give this a go, please let me know (via email) how
1974 this recipe work for you. :)</p>
1975
1976 <p>So, I bet you are wondering, how can this work.  First and
1977 foremost, it work because tasksel is modular, and driven by whatever
1978 files it find in /usr/lib/tasksel/ and /usr/share/tasksel/.  So the
1979 isenkram-cli package place two files for tasksel to find.  First there
1980 is the task description file (/usr/share/tasksel/descs/isenkram.desc):</p>
1981
1982 <p><blockquote><pre>
1983 Task: isenkram-packages
1984 Section: hardware
1985 Description: Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)
1986  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific packages are
1987  proposed.
1988 Test-new-install: show show
1989 Relevance: 8
1990 Packages: for-current-hardware
1991
1992 Task: isenkram-firmware
1993 Section: hardware
1994 Description: Hardware specific firmware packages (autodetected by isenkram)
1995  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific firmware
1996  packages are proposed.
1997 Test-new-install: mark show
1998 Relevance: 8
1999 Packages: for-current-hardware-firmware
2000 </pre></blockquote></p>
2001
2002 <p>The key parts are Test-new-install which indicate how the task
2003 should be handled and the Packages line referencing to a script in
2004 /usr/lib/tasksel/packages/.  The scripts use other scripts to get a
2005 list of packages to install.  The for-current-hardware-firmware script
2006 look like this to list relevant firmware for the machine:
2007
2008 <p><blockquote><pre>
2009 #!/bin/sh
2010 #
2011 PATH=/usr/sbin:$PATH
2012 export PATH
2013 isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
2014 </pre></blockquote></p>
2015
2016 <p>With those two pieces in place, the firmware is installed by
2017 tasksel during the normal d-i run. :)</p>
2018
2019 <p>If you want to test what tasksel will install when isenkram-cli is
2020 installed, run <tt>DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical tasksel --test
2021 --new-install</tt> to get the list of packages that tasksel would
2022 install.</p>
2023
2024 <p><a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/">Debian Edu</a> will be
2025 pilots in testing this feature, as isenkram is used there now to
2026 install firmware, replacing the earlier scripts.</p>
2027
2028       </div>
2029       <div class="tags">
2030
2031
2032         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sysadmin">sysadmin</a>.
2033
2034
2035       </div>
2036     </div>
2037     <div class="padding"></div>
2038
2039     <div class="entry">
2040       <div class="title">
2041         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ubuntu_used_to_show_the_bread_prizes_at_ICA_Storo.html">Ubuntu used to show the bread prizes at ICA Storo</a>
2042       </div>
2043       <div class="date">
2044          4th October 2014
2045       </div>
2046       <div class="body">
2047         <p>Today I came across an unexpected Ubuntu boot screen.  Above the
2048 bread shelf on the ICA shop at Storo in Oslo, the grub menu of Ubuntu
2049 with Linux kernel 3.2.0-23 (ie probably version 12.04 LTS) was stuck
2050 on a screen normally showing the bread types and prizes:</p>
2051
2052 <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2014-10-04-ubuntu-ica-storo-crop.jpeg"></p>
2053
2054 <p>If it had booted as it was supposed to, I would never had known
2055 about this hidden Linux installation.  It is interesting what
2056 <a href="http://revealingerrors.com/">errors can reveal</a>.</p>
2057
2058       </div>
2059       <div class="tags">
2060
2061
2062         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2063
2064
2065       </div>
2066     </div>
2067     <div class="padding"></div>
2068
2069     <div class="entry">
2070       <div class="title">
2071         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_lsdvd_release_version_0_17_is_ready.html">New lsdvd release version 0.17 is ready</a>
2072       </div>
2073       <div class="date">
2074          4th October 2014
2075       </div>
2076       <div class="body">
2077         <p>The <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/">lsdvd project</a>
2078 got a new set of developers a few weeks ago, after the original
2079 developer decided to step down and pass the project to fresh blood.
2080 This project is now maintained by Petter Reinholdtsen and Steve
2081 Dibb.</p>
2082
2083 <p>I just wrapped up
2084 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/mailman/message/32896061/">a
2085 new lsdvd release</a>, available in git or from
2086 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/projects/lsdvd/files/lsdvd/">the
2087 download page</a>.  This is the changelog dated 2014-10-03 for version
2088 0.17.</p>
2089
2090 <ul>
2091
2092  <li>Ignore 'phantom' audio, subtitle tracks</li>
2093  <li>Check for garbage in the program chains, which indicate that a track is
2094    non-existant, to work around additional copy protection</li>
2095  <li>Fix displaying content type for audio tracks, subtitles</li>
2096  <li>Fix pallete display of first entry</li>
2097  <li>Fix include orders</li>
2098  <li>Ignore read errors in titles that would not be displayed anyway</li>
2099  <li>Fix the chapter count</li>
2100  <li>Make sure the array size and the array limit used when initialising
2101    the palette size is the same.</li>
2102  <li>Fix array printing.</li>
2103  <li>Correct subsecond calculations.</li>
2104  <li>Add sector information to the output format.</li>
2105  <li>Clean up code to be closer to ANSI C and compile without warnings
2106    with more GCC compiler warnings.</li>
2107
2108 </ul>
2109
2110 <p>This change bring together patches for lsdvd in use in various
2111 Linux and Unix distributions, as well as patches submitted to the
2112 project the last nine years.  Please check it out. :)</p>
2113
2114       </div>
2115       <div class="tags">
2116
2117
2118         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lsdvd">lsdvd</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>.
2119
2120
2121       </div>
2122     </div>
2123     <div class="padding"></div>
2124
2125     <div class="entry">
2126       <div class="title">
2127         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_test_Debian_Edu_Jessie_despite_some_fatal_problems_with_the_installer.html">How to test Debian Edu Jessie despite some fatal problems with the installer</a>
2128       </div>
2129       <div class="date">
2130         26th September 2014
2131       </div>
2132       <div class="body">
2133         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
2134 project</a> provide a Linux solution for schools, including a
2135 powerful desktop with education software, a central server providing
2136 web pages, user database, user home directories, central login and PXE
2137 boot of both  clients without disk and the installation to install Debian
2138 Edu on machines with disk (and a few other services perhaps to small
2139 to mention here).  We in the Debian Edu team are currently working on
2140 the Jessie based version, trying to get everything in shape before the
2141 freeze, to avoid having to maintain our own package repository in the
2142 future.  The
2143 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie">current
2144 status</a> can be seen on the Debian wiki, and there is still heaps of
2145 work left.  Some fatal problems block testing, breaking the installer,
2146 but it is possible to work around these to get anyway.  Here is a
2147 recipe on how to get the installation limping along.</p>
2148
2149 <p>First, download the test ISO via
2150 <a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.no/cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso">ftp</a>,
2151 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.no/cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso">http</a>
2152 or rsync (use
2153 ftp.skolelinux.org::cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso).
2154 The ISO build was broken on Tuesday, so we do not get a new ISO every
2155 12 hours or so, but thankfully the ISO we already got we are able to
2156 install with some tweaking.</p>
2157
2158 <p>When you get to the Debian Edu profile question, go to tty2
2159 (use Alt-Ctrl-F2), run</p>
2160
2161 <p><blockquote><pre>
2162 nano /usr/bin/edu-eatmydata-install
2163 </pre></blockquote></p>
2164
2165 <p>and add 'exit 0' as the second line, disabling the eatmydata
2166 optimization.  Return to the installation, select the profile you want
2167 and continue.  Without this change, exim4-config will fail to install
2168 due to a known bug in eatmydata.</p>
2169
2170 <p>When you get the grub question at the end, answer /dev/sda (or if
2171 this do not work, figure out what your correct value would be.  All my
2172 test machines need /dev/sda, so I have no advice if it do not fit
2173 your need.</p>
2174
2175 <p>If you installed a profile including a graphical desktop, log in as
2176 root after the initial boot from hard drive, and install the
2177 education-desktop-XXX metapackage.  XXX can be kde, gnome, lxde, xfce
2178 or mate.  If you want several desktop options, install more than one
2179 metapackage.  Once this is done, reboot and you should have a working
2180 graphical login screen.  This workaround should no longer be needed
2181 once the education-tasks package version 1.801 enter testing in two
2182 days.</p>
2183
2184 <p>I believe the ISO build will start working on two days when the new
2185 tasksel package enter testing and Steve McIntyre get a chance to
2186 update the debian-cd git repository.  The eatmydata, grub and desktop
2187 issues are already fixed in unstable and testing, and should show up
2188 on the ISO as soon as the ISO build start working again.  Well the
2189 eatmydata optimization is really just disabled.  The proper fix
2190 require an upload by the eatmydata maintainer applying the patch
2191 provided in bug <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/702711">#702711</a>.
2192 The rest have proper fixes in unstable.</p>
2193
2194 <p>I hope this get you going with the installation testing, as we are
2195 quickly running out of time trying to get our Jessie based
2196 installation ready before the distribution freeze in a month.</p>
2197
2198       </div>
2199       <div class="tags">
2200
2201
2202         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2203
2204
2205       </div>
2206     </div>
2207     <div class="padding"></div>
2208
2209     <div class="entry">
2210       <div class="title">
2211         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Suddenly_I_am_the_new_upstream_of_the_lsdvd_command_line_tool.html">Suddenly I am the new upstream of the lsdvd command line tool</a>
2212       </div>
2213       <div class="date">
2214         25th September 2014
2215       </div>
2216       <div class="body">
2217         <p>I use the <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/">lsdvd tool</a>
2218 to handle my fairly large DVD collection.  It is a nice command line
2219 tool to get details about a DVD, like title, tracks, track length,
2220 etc, in XML, Perl or human readable format.  But lsdvd have not seen
2221 any new development since 2006 and had a few irritating bugs affecting
2222 its use with some DVDs.  Upstream seemed to be dead, and in January I
2223 sent a small probe asking for a version control repository for the
2224 project, without any reply.  But I use it regularly and would like to
2225 get <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/lsdvd">an updated version
2226 into Debian</a>.  So two weeks ago I tried harder to get in touch with
2227 the project admin, and after getting a reply from him explaining that
2228 he was no longer interested in the project, I asked if I could take
2229 over.  And yesterday, I became project admin.</p>
2230
2231 <p>I've been in touch with a Gentoo developer and the Debian
2232 maintainer interested in joining forces to maintain the upstream
2233 project, and I hope we can get a new release out fairly quickly,
2234 collecting the patches spread around on the internet into on place.
2235 I've added the relevant Debian patches to the freshly created git
2236 repository, and expect the Gentoo patches to make it too.  If you got
2237 a DVD collection and care about command line tools, check out
2238 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/git/ci/master/tree/">the git source</a> and join
2239 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/mailman/">the project mailing
2240 list</a>. :)</p>
2241
2242       </div>
2243       <div class="tags">
2244
2245
2246         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lsdvd">lsdvd</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>.
2247
2248
2249       </div>
2250     </div>
2251     <div class="padding"></div>
2252
2253     <div class="entry">
2254       <div class="title">
2255         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Speeding_up_the_Debian_installer_using_eatmydata_and_dpkg_divert.html">Speeding up the Debian installer using eatmydata and dpkg-divert</a>
2256       </div>
2257       <div class="date">
2258         16th September 2014
2259       </div>
2260       <div class="body">
2261         <p>The <a href="https://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> installer could be
2262 a lot quicker.  When we install more than 2000 packages in
2263 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a> using
2264 tasksel in the installer, unpacking the binary packages take forever.
2265 A part of the slow I/O issue was discussed in
2266 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/613428">bug #613428</a> about too
2267 much file system sync-ing done by dpkg, which is the package
2268 responsible for unpacking the binary packages.  Other parts (like code
2269 executed by postinst scripts) might also sync to disk during
2270 installation.  All this sync-ing to disk do not really make sense to
2271 me.  If the machine crash half-way through, I start over, I do not try
2272 to salvage the half installed system.  So the failure sync-ing is
2273 supposed to protect against, hardware or system crash, is not really
2274 relevant while the installer is running.</p>
2275
2276 <p>A few days ago, I thought of a way to get rid of all the file
2277 system sync()-ing in a fairly non-intrusive way, without the need to
2278 change the code in several packages.  The idea is not new, but I have
2279 not heard anyone propose the approach using dpkg-divert before.  It
2280 depend on the small and clever package
2281 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/eatmydata">eatmydata</a>, which
2282 uses LD_PRELOAD to replace the system functions for syncing data to
2283 disk with functions doing nothing, thus allowing programs to live
2284 dangerous while speeding up disk I/O significantly.  Instead of
2285 modifying the implementation of dpkg, apt and tasksel (which are the
2286 packages responsible for selecting, fetching and installing packages),
2287 it occurred to me that we could just divert the programs away, replace
2288 them with a simple shell wrapper calling
2289 "eatmydata&nbsp;$program&nbsp;$@", to get the same effect.
2290 Two days ago I decided to test the idea, and wrapped up a simple
2291 implementation for the Debian Edu udeb.</p>
2292
2293 <p>The effect was stunning.  In my first test it reduced the running
2294 time of the pkgsel step (installing tasks) from 64 to less than 44
2295 minutes (20 minutes shaved off the installation) on an old Dell
2296 Latitude D505 machine.  I am not quite sure what the optimised time
2297 would have been, as I messed up the testing a bit, causing the debconf
2298 priority to get low enough for two questions to pop up during
2299 installation.  As soon as I saw the questions I moved the installation
2300 along, but do not know how long the question were holding up the
2301 installation.  I did some more measurements using Debian Edu Jessie,
2302 and got these results.  The time measured is the time stamp in
2303 /var/log/syslog between the "pkgsel: starting tasksel" and the
2304 "pkgsel: finishing up" lines, if you want to do the same measurement
2305 yourself.  In Debian Edu, the tasksel dialog do not show up, and the
2306 timing thus do not depend on how quickly the user handle the tasksel
2307 dialog.</p>
2308
2309 <p><table>
2310
2311 <tr>
2312 <th>Machine/setup</th>
2313 <th>Original tasksel</th>
2314 <th>Optimised tasksel</th>
2315 <th>Reduction</th>
2316 </tr>
2317
2318 <tr>
2319 <td>Latitude D505 Main+LTSP LXDE</td>
2320 <td>64 min (07:46-08:50)</td>
2321 <td><44 min (11:27-12:11)</td>
2322 <td>>20 min 18%</td>
2323 </tr>
2324
2325 <tr>
2326 <td>Latitude D505 Roaming LXDE</td>
2327 <td>57 min (08:48-09:45)</td>
2328 <td>34 min (07:43-08:17)</td>
2329 <td>23 min 40%</td>
2330 </tr>
2331
2332 <tr>
2333 <td>Latitude D505 Minimal</td>
2334 <td>22 min (10:37-10:59)</td>
2335 <td>11 min (11:16-11:27)</td>
2336 <td>11 min 50%</td>
2337 </tr>
2338
2339 <tr>
2340 <td>Thinkpad X200 Minimal</td>
2341 <td>6 min (08:19-08:25)</td>
2342 <td>4 min (08:04-08:08)</td>
2343 <td>2 min 33%</td>
2344 </tr>
2345
2346 <tr>
2347 <td>Thinkpad X200 Roaming KDE</td>
2348 <td>19 min (09:21-09:40)</td>
2349 <td>15 min (10:25-10:40)</td>
2350 <td>4 min 21%</td>
2351 </tr>
2352
2353 </table></p>
2354
2355 <p>The test is done using a netinst ISO on a USB stick, so some of the
2356 time is spent downloading packages.  The connection to the Internet
2357 was 100Mbit/s during testing, so downloading should not be a
2358 significant factor in the measurement.  Download typically took a few
2359 seconds to a few minutes, depending on the amount of packages being
2360 installed.</p>
2361
2362 <p>The speedup is implemented by using two hooks in
2363 <a href="https://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/">Debian
2364 Installer</a>, the pre-pkgsel.d hook to set up the diverts, and the
2365 finish-install.d hook to remove the divert at the end of the
2366 installation.  I picked the pre-pkgsel.d hook instead of the
2367 post-base-installer.d hook because I test using an ISO without the
2368 eatmydata package included, and the post-base-installer.d hook in
2369 Debian Edu can only operate on packages included in the ISO.  The
2370 negative effect of this is that I am unable to activate this
2371 optimization for the kernel installation step in d-i.  If the code is
2372 moved to the post-base-installer.d hook, the speedup would be larger
2373 for the entire installation.</p>
2374
2375 <p>I've implemented this in the
2376 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/debian-edu-install">debian-edu-install</a>
2377 git repository, and plan to provide the optimization as part of the
2378 Debian Edu installation.  If you want to test this yourself, you can
2379 create two files in the installer (or in an udeb).  One shell script
2380 need do go into /usr/lib/pre-pkgsel.d/, with content like this:</p>
2381
2382 <p><blockquote><pre>
2383 #!/bin/sh
2384 set -e
2385 . /usr/share/debconf/confmodule
2386 info() {
2387     logger -t my-pkgsel "info: $*"
2388 }
2389 error() {
2390     logger -t my-pkgsel "error: $*"
2391 }
2392 override_install() {
2393     apt-install eatmydata || true
2394     if [ -x /target/usr/bin/eatmydata ] ; then
2395         for bin in dpkg apt-get aptitude tasksel ; do
2396             file=/usr/bin/$bin
2397             # Test that the file exist and have not been diverted already.
2398             if [ -f /target$file ] ; then
2399                 info "diverting $file using eatmydata"
2400                 printf "#!/bin/sh\neatmydata $bin.distrib \"\$@\"\n" \
2401                     > /target$file.edu
2402                 chmod 755 /target$file.edu
2403                 in-target dpkg-divert --package debian-edu-config \
2404                     --rename --quiet --add $file
2405                 ln -sf ./$bin.edu /target$file
2406             else
2407                 error "unable to divert $file, as it is missing."
2408             fi
2409         done
2410     else
2411         error "unable to find /usr/bin/eatmydata after installing the eatmydata pacage"
2412     fi
2413 }
2414
2415 override_install
2416 </pre></blockquote></p>
2417
2418 <p>To clean up, another shell script should go into
2419 /usr/lib/finish-install.d/ with code like this:
2420
2421 <p><blockquote><pre>
2422 #! /bin/sh -e
2423 . /usr/share/debconf/confmodule
2424 error() {
2425     logger -t my-finish-install "error: $@"
2426 }
2427 remove_install_override() {
2428     for bin in dpkg apt-get aptitude tasksel ; do
2429         file=/usr/bin/$bin
2430         if [ -x /target$file.edu ] ; then
2431             rm /target$file
2432             in-target dpkg-divert --package debian-edu-config \
2433                 --rename --quiet --remove $file
2434             rm /target$file.edu
2435         else
2436             error "Missing divert for $file."
2437         fi
2438     done
2439     sync # Flush file buffers before continuing
2440 }
2441
2442 remove_install_override
2443 </pre></blockquote></p>
2444
2445 <p>In Debian Edu, I placed both code fragments in a separate script
2446 edu-eatmydata-install and call it from the pre-pkgsel.d and
2447 finish-install.d scripts.</p>
2448
2449 <p>By now you might ask if this change should get into the normal
2450 Debian installer too?  I suspect it should, but am not sure the
2451 current debian-installer coordinators find it useful enough.  It also
2452 depend on the side effects of the change.  I'm not aware of any, but I
2453 guess we will see if the change is safe after some more testing.
2454 Perhaps there is some package in Debian depending on sync() and
2455 fsync() having effect?  Perhaps it should go into its own udeb, to
2456 allow those of us wanting to enable it to do so without affecting
2457 everyone.</p>
2458
2459 <p>Update 2014-09-24: Since a few days ago, enabling this optimization
2460 will break installation of all programs using gnutls because of
2461 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/702711">bug #702711</a>.  An updated
2462 eatmydata package in Debian will solve it.</p>
2463
2464 <p>Update 2014-10-17: The bug mentioned above is fixed in testing and
2465 the optimization work again.  And I have discovered that the
2466 dpkg-divert trick is not really needed and implemented a slightly
2467 simpler approach as part of the debian-edu-install package.  See
2468 tools/edu-eatmydata-install in the source package.</p>
2469
2470 <p>Update 2014-11-11: Unfortunately, a new
2471 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/765738">bug #765738</a> in eatmydata only
2472 triggering on i386 made it into testing, and broke this installation
2473 optimization again.  If <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/768893">unblock
2474 request 768893</a> is accepted, it should be working again.</p>
2475
2476       </div>
2477       <div class="tags">
2478
2479
2480         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2481
2482
2483       </div>
2484     </div>
2485     <div class="padding"></div>
2486
2487     <div class="entry">
2488       <div class="title">
2489         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Good_bye_subkeys_pgp_net__welcome_pool_sks_keyservers_net.html">Good bye subkeys.pgp.net, welcome pool.sks-keyservers.net</a>
2490       </div>
2491       <div class="date">
2492         10th September 2014
2493       </div>
2494       <div class="body">
2495         <p>Yesterday, I had the pleasure of attending a talk with the
2496 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a> about
2497 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20140909-sks-keyservers/">the
2498 OpenPGP keyserver pool sks-keyservers.net</a>, and was very happy to
2499 learn that there is a large set of publicly available key servers to
2500 use when looking for peoples public key.  So far I have used
2501 subkeys.pgp.net, and some times wwwkeys.nl.pgp.net when the former
2502 were misbehaving, but those days are ended.  The servers I have used
2503 up until yesterday have been slow and some times unavailable.  I hope
2504 those problems are gone now.</p>
2505
2506 <p>Behind the round robin DNS entry of the
2507 <a href="https://sks-keyservers.net/">sks-keyservers.net</a> service
2508 there is a pool of more than 100 keyservers which are checked every
2509 day to ensure they are well connected and up to date.  It must be
2510 better than what I have used so far. :)</p>
2511
2512 <p>Yesterdays speaker told me that the service is the default
2513 keyserver provided by the default configuration in GnuPG, but this do
2514 not seem to be used in Debian.  Perhaps it should?</p>
2515
2516 <p>Anyway, I've updated my ~/.gnupg/options file to now include this
2517 line:</p>
2518
2519 <p><blockquote><pre>
2520 keyserver pool.sks-keyservers.net
2521 </pre></blockquote></p>
2522
2523 <p>With GnuPG version 2 one can also locate the keyserver using SRV
2524 entries in DNS.  Just for fun, I did just that at work, so now every
2525 user of GnuPG at the University of Oslo should find a OpenGPG
2526 keyserver automatically should their need it:</p>
2527
2528 <p><blockquote><pre>
2529 % host -t srv _pgpkey-http._tcp.uio.no
2530 _pgpkey-http._tcp.uio.no has SRV record 0 100 11371 pool.sks-keyservers.net.
2531 %
2532 </pre></blockquote></p>
2533
2534 <p>Now if only
2535 <a href="http://ietfreport.isoc.org/idref/draft-shaw-openpgp-hkp/">the
2536 HKP lookup protocol</a> supported finding signature paths, I would be
2537 very happy.  It can look up a given key or search for a user ID, but I
2538 normally do not want that, but to find a trust path from my key to
2539 another key.  Given a user ID or key ID, I would like to find (and
2540 download) the keys representing a signature path from my key to the
2541 key in question, to be able to get a trust path between the two keys.
2542 This is as far as I can tell not possible today.  Perhaps something
2543 for a future version of the protocol?</p>
2544
2545       </div>
2546       <div class="tags">
2547
2548
2549         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
2550
2551
2552       </div>
2553     </div>
2554     <div class="padding"></div>
2555
2556     <div class="entry">
2557       <div class="title">
2558         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/From_English_wiki_to_translated_PDF_and_epub_via_Docbook.html">From English wiki to translated PDF and epub via Docbook</a>
2559       </div>
2560       <div class="date">
2561         17th June 2014
2562       </div>
2563       <div class="body">
2564         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
2565 project</a> provide an instruction manual for teachers, system
2566 administrators and other users that contain useful tips for setting up
2567 and maintaining a Debian Edu installation.  This text is about how the
2568 text processing of this manual is handled in the project.</p>
2569
2570 <p>One goal of the project is to provide information in the native
2571 language of its users, and for this we need to handle translations.
2572 But we also want to make sure each language contain the same
2573 information, so for this we need a good way to keep the translations
2574 in sync.  And we want it to be easy for our users to improve the
2575 documentation, avoiding the need to learn special formats or tools to
2576 contribute, and the obvious way to do this is to make it possible to
2577 edit the documentation using a web browser.  We also want it to be
2578 easy for translators to keep the translation up to date, and give them
2579 help in figuring out what need to be translated. Here is the list of
2580 tools and the process we have found trying to reach all these
2581 goals.</p>
2582
2583 <p>We maintain the authoritative source of our manual in the
2584 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/">Debian
2585 wiki</a>, as several wiki pages written in English.  It consist of one
2586 front page with references to the different chapters, several pages
2587 for each chapter, and finally one "collection page" gluing all the
2588 chapters together into one large web page (aka
2589 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/AllInOne">the
2590 AllInOne page</a>).  The AllInOne page is the one used for further
2591 processing and translations.  Thanks to the fact that the
2592 <a href="http://moinmo.in/">MoinMoin</a> installation on
2593 wiki.debian.org support exporting pages in
2594 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">the Docbook format</a>, we can fetch
2595 the list of pages to export using the raw version of the AllInOne
2596 page, loop over each of them to generate a Docbook XML version of the
2597 manual.  This process also download images and transform image
2598 references to use the locally downloaded images.  The generated
2599 Docbook XML files are slightly broken, so some post-processing is done
2600 using the <tt>documentation/scripts/get_manual</tt> program, and the
2601 result is a nice Docbook XML file (debian-edu-wheezy-manual.xml) and
2602 a handfull of images.  The XML file can now be used to generate PDF, HTML
2603 and epub versions of the English manual.  This is the basic step of
2604 our process, making PDF (using dblatex), HTML (using xsltproc) and
2605 epub (using dbtoepub) version from Docbook XML, and the resulting files
2606 are placed in the debian-edu-doc-en binary package.</p>
2607
2608 <p>But English documentation is not enough for us.  We want translated
2609 documentation too, and we want to make it easy for translators to
2610 track the English original.  For this we use the
2611 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/poxml.html">poxml</a> package,
2612 which allow us to transform the English Docbook XML file into a
2613 translation file (a .pot file), usable with the normal gettext based
2614 translation tools used by those translating free software.  The pot
2615 file is used to create and maintain translation files (several .po
2616 files), which the translations update with the native language
2617 translations of all titles, paragraphs and blocks of text in the
2618 original.  The next step is combining the original English Docbook XML
2619 and the translation file (say debian-edu-wheezy-manual.nb.po), to
2620 create a translated Docbook XML file (in this case
2621 debian-edu-wheezy-manual.nb.xml).  This translated (or partly
2622 translated, if the translation is not complete) Docbook XML file can
2623 then be used like the original to create a PDF, HTML and epub version
2624 of the documentation.</p>
2625
2626 <p>The translators use different tools to edit the .po files.  We
2627 recommend using
2628 <a href="http://www.kde.org/applications/development/lokalize/">lokalize</a>,
2629 while some use emacs and vi, others can use web based editors like
2630 <a href="http://pootle.translatehouse.org/">Poodle</a> or
2631 <a href="https://www.transifex.com/">Transifex</a>.  All we care about
2632 is where the .po file end up, in our git repository.  Updated
2633 translations can either be committed directly to git, or submitted as
2634 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/src:debian-edu-doc">bug reports
2635 against the debian-edu-doc package</a>.</p>
2636
2637 <p>One challenge is images, which both might need to be translated (if
2638 they show translated user applications), and are needed in different
2639 formats when creating PDF and HTML versions (epub is a HTML version in
2640 this regard).  For this we transform the original PNG images to the
2641 needed density and format during build, and have a way to provide
2642 translated images by storing translated versions in
2643 images/$LANGUAGECODE/.  I am a bit unsure about the details here.  The
2644 package maintainers know more.</p>
2645
2646 <p>If you wonder what the result look like, we provide
2647 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/">the content
2648 of the documentation packages on the web</a>.  See for example the
2649 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/it/debian-edu-wheezy-manual.pdf">Italian
2650 PDF version</a> or the
2651 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/de/debian-edu-wheezy-manual.html">German
2652 HTML version</a>.  We do not yet build the epub version by default,
2653 but perhaps it will be done in the future.</p>
2654
2655 <p>To learn more, check out
2656 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/debian-edu-doc.html">the
2657 debian-edu-doc package</a>,
2658 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/">the
2659 manual on the wiki</a> and
2660 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/Translations">the
2661 translation instructions</a> in the manual.</p>
2662
2663       </div>
2664       <div class="tags">
2665
2666
2667         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2668
2669
2670       </div>
2671     </div>
2672     <div class="padding"></div>
2673
2674     <div class="entry">
2675       <div class="title">
2676         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Install_hardware_dependent_packages_using_tasksel__Isenkram_0_7_.html">Install hardware dependent packages using tasksel (Isenkram 0.7)</a>
2677       </div>
2678       <div class="date">
2679         23rd April 2014
2680       </div>
2681       <div class="body">
2682         <p>It would be nice if it was easier in Debian to get all the hardware
2683 related packages relevant for the computer installed automatically.
2684 So I implemented one, using
2685 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">my Isenkram
2686 package</a>.  To use it, install the tasksel and isenkram packages and
2687 run tasksel as user root.  You should be presented with a new option,
2688 "Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)".  When you
2689 select it, tasksel will install the packages isenkram claim is fit for
2690 the current hardware, hot pluggable or not.<p>
2691
2692 <p>The implementation is in two files, one is the tasksel menu entry
2693 description, and the other is the script used to extract the list of
2694 packages to install.  The first part is in
2695 <tt>/usr/share/tasksel/descs/isenkram.desc</tt> and look like
2696 this:</p>
2697
2698 <p><blockquote><pre>
2699 Task: isenkram
2700 Section: hardware
2701 Description: Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)
2702  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific packages are
2703  proposed.
2704 Test-new-install: mark show
2705 Relevance: 8
2706 Packages: for-current-hardware
2707 </pre></blockquote></p>
2708
2709 <p>The second part is in
2710 <tt>/usr/lib/tasksel/packages/for-current-hardware</tt> and look like
2711 this:</p>
2712
2713 <p><blockquote><pre>
2714 #!/bin/sh
2715 #
2716 (
2717     isenkram-lookup
2718     isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
2719 ) | sort -u
2720 </pre></blockquote></p>
2721
2722 <p>All in all, a very short and simple implementation making it
2723 trivial to install the hardware dependent package we all may want to
2724 have installed on our machines.  I've not been able to find a way to
2725 get tasksel to tell you exactly which packages it plan to install
2726 before doing the installation.  So if you are curious or careful,
2727 check the output from the isenkram-* command line tools first.</p>
2728
2729 <p>The information about which packages are handling which hardware is
2730 fetched either from the isenkram package itself in
2731 /usr/share/isenkram/, from git.debian.org or from the APT package
2732 database (using the Modaliases header).  The APT package database
2733 parsing have caused a nasty resource leak in the isenkram daemon (bugs
2734 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/719837">#719837</a> and
2735 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/730704">#730704</a>).  The cause is in
2736 the python-apt code (bug
2737 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/745487">#745487</a>), but using a
2738 workaround I was able to get rid of the file descriptor leak and
2739 reduce the memory leak from ~30 MiB per hardware detection down to
2740 around 2 MiB per hardware detection.  It should make the desktop
2741 daemon a lot more useful.  The fix is in version 0.7 uploaded to
2742 unstable today.</p>
2743
2744 <p>I believe the current way of mapping hardware to packages in
2745 Isenkram is is a good draft, but in the future I expect isenkram to
2746 use the AppStream data source for this.  A proposal for getting proper
2747 AppStream support into Debian is floating around as
2748 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-11">DEP-11</a>, and
2749 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2014/Projects#SummerOfCode2014.2FProjects.2FAppStreamDEP11Implementation.AppStream.2FDEP-11_for_the_Debian_Archive">GSoC
2750 project</a> will take place this summer to improve the situation.  I
2751 look forward to seeing the result, and welcome patches for isenkram to
2752 start using the information when it is ready.</p>
2753
2754 <p>If you want your package to map to some specific hardware, either
2755 add a "Xb-Modaliases" header to your control file like I did in
2756 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pymissile">the pymissile
2757 package</a> or submit a bug report with the details to the isenkram
2758 package.  See also
2759 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">all my
2760 blog posts tagged isenkram</a> for details on the notation.  I expect
2761 the information will be migrated to AppStream eventually, but for the
2762 moment I got no better place to store it.</p>
2763
2764       </div>
2765       <div class="tags">
2766
2767
2768         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
2769
2770
2771       </div>
2772     </div>
2773     <div class="padding"></div>
2774
2775     <div class="entry">
2776       <div class="title">
2777         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/FreedomBox_milestone___all_packages_now_in_Debian_Sid.html">FreedomBox milestone - all packages now in Debian Sid</a>
2778       </div>
2779       <div class="date">
2780         15th April 2014
2781       </div>
2782       <div class="body">
2783         <p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox
2784 project</a> is working on providing the software and hardware to make
2785 it easy for non-technical people to host their data and communication
2786 at home, and being able to communicate with their friends and family
2787 encrypted and away from prying eyes.  It is still going strong, and
2788 today a major mile stone was reached.</p>
2789
2790 <p>Today, the last of the packages currently used by the project to
2791 created the system images were accepted into Debian Unstable.  It was
2792 the freedombox-setup package, which is used to configure the images
2793 during build and on the first boot.  Now all one need to get going is
2794 the build code from the freedom-maker git repository and packages from
2795 Debian.  And once the freedombox-setup package enter testing, we can
2796 build everything directly from Debian. :)</p>
2797
2798 <p>Some key packages used by Freedombox are
2799 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/freedombox-setup">freedombox-setup</a>,
2800 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/plinth">plinth</a>,
2801 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pagekite">pagekite</a>,
2802 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/tor">tor</a>,
2803 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/privoxy">privoxy</a>,
2804 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/owncloud">owncloud</a> and
2805 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/dnsmasq">dnsmasq</a>.  There
2806 are plans to integrate more packages into the setup.  User
2807 documentation is maintained on the Debian wiki.  Please
2808 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/Manual/Jessie">check out
2809 the manual</a> and help us improve it.</p>
2810
2811 <p>To test for yourself and create boot images with the FreedomBox
2812 setup, run this on a Debian machine using a user with sudo rights to
2813 become root:</p>
2814
2815 <p><pre>
2816 sudo apt-get install git vmdebootstrap mercurial python-docutils \
2817   mktorrent extlinux virtualbox qemu-user-static binfmt-support \
2818   u-boot-tools
2819 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/freedombox/freedom-maker.git \
2820   freedom-maker
2821 make -C freedom-maker dreamplug-image raspberry-image virtualbox-image
2822 </pre></p>
2823
2824 <p>Root access is needed to run debootstrap and mount loopback
2825 devices.  See the README in the freedom-maker git repo for more
2826 details on the build.  If you do not want all three images, trim the
2827 make line.  Note that the virtualbox-image target is not really
2828 virtualbox specific.  It create a x86 image usable in kvm, qemu,
2829 vmware and any other x86 virtual machine environment.  You might need
2830 the version of vmdebootstrap in Jessie to get the build working, as it
2831 include fixes for a race condition with kpartx.</p>
2832
2833 <p>If you instead want to install using a Debian CD and the preseed
2834 method, boot a Debian Wheezy ISO and use this boot argument to load
2835 the preseed values:</p>
2836
2837 <p><pre>
2838 url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat</a>
2839 </pre></p>
2840
2841 <p>I have not tested it myself the last few weeks, so I do not know if
2842 it still work.</p>
2843
2844 <p>If you wonder how to help, one task you could look at is using
2845 systemd as the boot system.  It will become the default for Linux in
2846 Jessie, so we need to make sure it is usable on the Freedombox.  I did
2847 a simple test a few weeks ago, and noticed dnsmasq failed to start
2848 during boot when using systemd.  I suspect there are other problems
2849 too. :) To detect problems, there is a test suite included, which can
2850 be run from the plinth web interface.</p>
2851
2852 <p>Give it a go and let us know how it goes on the mailing list, and help
2853 us get the new release published. :) Please join us on
2854 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC (#freedombox on
2855 irc.debian.org)</a> and
2856 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
2857 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
2858
2859       </div>
2860       <div class="tags">
2861
2862
2863         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
2864
2865
2866       </div>
2867     </div>
2868     <div class="padding"></div>
2869
2870     <div class="entry">
2871       <div class="title">
2872         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/S3QL__a_locally_mounted_cloud_file_system___nice_free_software.html">S3QL, a locally mounted cloud file system - nice free software</a>
2873       </div>
2874       <div class="date">
2875          9th April 2014
2876       </div>
2877       <div class="body">
2878         <p>For a while now, I have been looking for a sensible offsite backup
2879 solution for use at home.  My requirements are simple, it must be
2880 cheap and locally encrypted (in other words, I keep the encryption
2881 keys, the storage provider do not have access to my private files).
2882 One idea me and my friends had many years ago, before the cloud
2883 storage providers showed up, was to use Google mail as storage,
2884 writing a Linux block device storing blocks as emails in the mail
2885 service provided by Google, and thus get heaps of free space.  On top
2886 of this one can add encryption, RAID and volume management to have
2887 lots of (fairly slow, I admit that) cheap and encrypted storage.  But
2888 I never found time to implement such system.  But the last few weeks I
2889 have looked at a system called
2890 <a href="https://bitbucket.org/nikratio/s3ql/">S3QL</a>, a locally
2891 mounted network backed file system with the features I need.</p>
2892
2893 <p>S3QL is a fuse file system with a local cache and cloud storage,
2894 handling several different storage providers, any with Amazon S3,
2895 Google Drive or OpenStack API.  There are heaps of such storage
2896 providers.  S3QL can also use a local directory as storage, which
2897 combined with sshfs allow for file storage on any ssh server.  S3QL
2898 include support for encryption, compression, de-duplication, snapshots
2899 and immutable file systems, allowing me to mount the remote storage as
2900 a local mount point, look at and use the files as if they were local,
2901 while the content is stored in the cloud as well.  This allow me to
2902 have a backup that should survive fire.  The file system can not be
2903 shared between several machines at the same time, as only one can
2904 mount it at the time, but any machine with the encryption key and
2905 access to the storage service can mount it if it is unmounted.</p>
2906
2907 <p>It is simple to use.  I'm using it on Debian Wheezy, where the
2908 package is included already.  So to get started, run <tt>apt-get
2909 install s3ql</tt>.  Next, pick a storage provider.  I ended up picking
2910 Greenqloud, after reading their nice recipe on
2911 <a href="https://greenqloud.zendesk.com/entries/44611757-How-To-Use-S3QL-to-mount-a-StorageQloud-bucket-on-Debian-Wheezy">how
2912 to use S3QL with their Amazon S3 service</a>, because I trust the laws
2913 in Iceland more than those in USA when it come to keeping my personal
2914 data safe and private, and thus would rather spend money on a company
2915 in Iceland.  Another nice recipe is available from the article
2916 <a href="http://www.admin-magazine.com/HPC/Articles/HPC-Cloud-Storage">S3QL
2917 Filesystem for HPC Storage</a> by Jeff Layton in the HPC section of
2918 Admin magazine.  When the provider is picked, figure out how to get
2919 the API key needed to connect to the storage API.  With Greencloud,
2920 the key did not show up until I had added payment details to my
2921 account.</p>
2922
2923 <p>Armed with the API access details, it is time to create the file
2924 system.  First, create a new bucket in the cloud.  This bucket is the
2925 file system storage area.  I picked a bucket name reflecting the
2926 machine that was going to store data there, but any name will do.
2927 I'll refer to it as <tt>bucket-name</tt> below.  In addition, one need
2928 the API login and password, and a locally created password.  Store it
2929 all in ~root/.s3ql/authinfo2 like this:
2930
2931 <p><blockquote><pre>
2932 [s3c]
2933 storage-url: s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
2934 backend-login: API-login
2935 backend-password: API-password
2936 fs-passphrase: local-password
2937 </pre></blockquote></p>
2938
2939 <p>I create my local passphrase using <tt>pwget 50</tt> or similar,
2940 but any sensible way to create a fairly random password should do it.
2941 Armed with these details, it is now time to run mkfs, entering the API
2942 details and password to create it:</p>
2943
2944 <p><blockquote><pre>
2945 # mkdir -m 700 /var/lib/s3ql-cache
2946 # mkfs.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
2947   --ssl s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
2948 Enter backend login:
2949 Enter backend password:
2950 Before using S3QL, make sure to read the user's guide, especially
2951 the 'Important Rules to Avoid Loosing Data' section.
2952 Enter encryption password:
2953 Confirm encryption password:
2954 Generating random encryption key...
2955 Creating metadata tables...
2956 Dumping metadata...
2957 ..objects..
2958 ..blocks..
2959 ..inodes..
2960 ..inode_blocks..
2961 ..symlink_targets..
2962 ..names..
2963 ..contents..
2964 ..ext_attributes..
2965 Compressing and uploading metadata...
2966 Wrote 0.00 MB of compressed metadata.
2967 # </pre></blockquote></p>
2968
2969 <p>The next step is mounting the file system to make the storage available.
2970
2971 <p><blockquote><pre>
2972 # mount.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
2973   --ssl --allow-root s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name /s3ql
2974 Using 4 upload threads.
2975 Downloading and decompressing metadata...
2976 Reading metadata...
2977 ..objects..
2978 ..blocks..
2979 ..inodes..
2980 ..inode_blocks..
2981 ..symlink_targets..
2982 ..names..
2983 ..contents..
2984 ..ext_attributes..
2985 Mounting filesystem...
2986 # df -h /s3ql
2987 Filesystem                              Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
2988 s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name  1.0T     0  1.0T   0% /s3ql
2989 #
2990 </pre></blockquote></p>
2991
2992 <p>The file system is now ready for use.  I use rsync to store my
2993 backups in it, and as the metadata used by rsync is downloaded at
2994 mount time, no network traffic (and storage cost) is triggered by
2995 running rsync.  To unmount, one should not use the normal umount
2996 command, as this will not flush the cache to the cloud storage, but
2997 instead running the umount.s3ql command like this:
2998
2999 <p><blockquote><pre>
3000 # umount.s3ql /s3ql
3001 #
3002 </pre></blockquote></p>
3003
3004 <p>There is a fsck command available to check the file system and
3005 correct any problems detected.  This can be used if the local server
3006 crashes while the file system is mounted, to reset the "already
3007 mounted" flag.  This is what it look like when processing a working
3008 file system:</p>
3009
3010 <p><blockquote><pre>
3011 # fsck.s3ql --force --ssl s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
3012 Using cached metadata.
3013 File system seems clean, checking anyway.
3014 Checking DB integrity...
3015 Creating temporary extra indices...
3016 Checking lost+found...
3017 Checking cached objects...
3018 Checking names (refcounts)...
3019 Checking contents (names)...
3020 Checking contents (inodes)...
3021 Checking contents (parent inodes)...
3022 Checking objects (reference counts)...
3023 Checking objects (backend)...
3024 ..processed 5000 objects so far..
3025 ..processed 10000 objects so far..
3026 ..processed 15000 objects so far..
3027 Checking objects (sizes)...
3028 Checking blocks (referenced objects)...
3029 Checking blocks (refcounts)...
3030 Checking inode-block mapping (blocks)...
3031 Checking inode-block mapping (inodes)...
3032 Checking inodes (refcounts)...
3033 Checking inodes (sizes)...
3034 Checking extended attributes (names)...
3035 Checking extended attributes (inodes)...
3036 Checking symlinks (inodes)...
3037 Checking directory reachability...
3038 Checking unix conventions...
3039 Checking referential integrity...
3040 Dropping temporary indices...
3041 Backing up old metadata...
3042 Dumping metadata...
3043 ..objects..
3044 ..blocks..
3045 ..inodes..
3046 ..inode_blocks..
3047 ..symlink_targets..
3048 ..names..
3049 ..contents..
3050 ..ext_attributes..
3051 Compressing and uploading metadata...
3052 Wrote 0.89 MB of compressed metadata.
3053 #
3054 </pre></blockquote></p>
3055
3056 <p>Thanks to the cache, working on files that fit in the cache is very
3057 quick, about the same speed as local file access.  Uploading large
3058 amount of data is to me limited by the bandwidth out of and into my
3059 house.  Uploading 685 MiB with a 100 MiB cache gave me 305 kiB/s,
3060 which is very close to my upload speed, and downloading the same
3061 Debian installation ISO gave me 610 kiB/s, close to my download speed.
3062 Both were measured using <tt>dd</tt>.  So for me, the bottleneck is my
3063 network, not the file system code.  I do not know what a good cache
3064 size would be, but suspect that the cache should e larger than your
3065 working set.</p>
3066
3067 <p>I mentioned that only one machine can mount the file system at the
3068 time.  If another machine try, it is told that the file system is
3069 busy:</p>
3070
3071 <p><blockquote><pre>
3072 # mount.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
3073   --ssl --allow-root s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name /s3ql
3074 Using 8 upload threads.
3075 Backend reports that fs is still mounted elsewhere, aborting.
3076 #
3077 </pre></blockquote></p>
3078
3079 <p>The file content is uploaded when the cache is full, while the
3080 metadata is uploaded once every 24 hour by default.  To ensure the
3081 file system content is flushed to the cloud, one can either umount the
3082 file system, or ask S3QL to flush the cache and metadata using
3083 s3qlctrl:
3084
3085 <p><blockquote><pre>
3086 # s3qlctrl upload-meta /s3ql
3087 # s3qlctrl flushcache /s3ql
3088 #
3089 </pre></blockquote></p>
3090
3091 <p>If you are curious about how much space your data uses in the
3092 cloud, and how much compression and deduplication cut down on the
3093 storage usage, you can use s3qlstat on the mounted file system to get
3094 a report:</p>
3095
3096 <p><blockquote><pre>
3097 # s3qlstat /s3ql
3098 Directory entries:    9141
3099 Inodes:               9143
3100 Data blocks:          8851
3101 Total data size:      22049.38 MB
3102 After de-duplication: 21955.46 MB (99.57% of total)
3103 After compression:    21877.28 MB (99.22% of total, 99.64% of de-duplicated)
3104 Database size:        2.39 MB (uncompressed)
3105 (some values do not take into account not-yet-uploaded dirty blocks in cache)
3106 #
3107 </pre></blockquote></p>
3108
3109 <p>I mentioned earlier that there are several possible suppliers of
3110 storage.  I did not try to locate them all, but am aware of at least
3111 <a href="https://www.greenqloud.com/">Greenqloud</a>,
3112 <a href="http://drive.google.com/">Google Drive</a>,
3113 <a href="http://aws.amazon.com/s3/">Amazon S3 web serivces</a>,
3114 <a href="http://www.rackspace.com/">Rackspace</a> and
3115 <a href="http://crowncloud.net/">Crowncloud</A>.  The latter even
3116 accept payment in Bitcoin.  Pick one that suit your need.  Some of
3117 them provide several GiB of free storage, but the prize models are
3118 quite different and you will have to figure out what suits you
3119 best.</p>
3120
3121 <p>While researching this blog post, I had a look at research papers
3122 and posters discussing the S3QL file system.  There are several, which
3123 told me that the file system is getting a critical check by the
3124 science community and increased my confidence in using it.  One nice
3125 poster is titled
3126 "<a href="http://www.lanl.gov/orgs/adtsc/publications/science_highlights_2013/docs/pg68_69.pdf">An
3127 Innovative Parallel Cloud Storage System using OpenStack’s SwiftObject
3128 Store and Transformative Parallel I/O Approach</a>" by Hsing-Bung
3129 Chen, Benjamin McClelland, David Sherrill, Alfred Torrez, Parks Fields
3130 and Pamela Smith.  Please  have a look.</p>
3131
3132 <p>Given my problems with different file systems earlier, I decided to
3133 check out the mounted S3QL file system to see if it would be usable as
3134 a home directory (in other word, that it provided POSIX semantics when
3135 it come to locking and umask handling etc).  Running
3136 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_if_a_file_system_can_be_used_for_home_directories___.html">my
3137 test code to check file system semantics</a>, I was happy to discover that
3138 no error was found.  So the file system can be used for home
3139 directories, if one chooses to do so.</p>
3140
3141 <p>If you do not want a locally file system, and want something that
3142 work without the Linux fuse file system, I would like to mention the
3143 <a href="http://www.tarsnap.com/">Tarsnap service</a>, which also
3144 provide locally encrypted backup using a command line client.  It have
3145 a nicer access control system, where one can split out read and write
3146 access, allowing some systems to write to the backup and others to
3147 only read from it.</p>
3148
3149 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3150 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3151 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3152
3153       </div>
3154       <div class="tags">
3155
3156
3157         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
3158
3159
3160       </div>
3161     </div>
3162     <div class="padding"></div>
3163
3164     <div class="entry">
3165       <div class="title">
3166         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Freedombox_on_Dreamplug__Raspberry_Pi_and_virtual_x86_machine.html">Freedombox on Dreamplug, Raspberry Pi and virtual x86 machine</a>
3167       </div>
3168       <div class="date">
3169         14th March 2014
3170       </div>
3171       <div class="body">
3172         <p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox
3173 project</a> is working on providing the software and hardware for
3174 making it easy for non-technical people to host their data and
3175 communication at home, and being able to communicate with their
3176 friends and family encrypted and away from prying eyes.  It has been
3177 going on for a while, and is slowly progressing towards a new test
3178 release (0.2).</p>
3179
3180 <p>And what day could be better than the Pi day to announce that the
3181 new version will provide "hard drive" / SD card / USB stick images for
3182 Dreamplug, Raspberry Pi and VirtualBox (or any other virtualization
3183 system), and can also be installed using a Debian installer preseed
3184 file.  The Debian based Freedombox is now based on Debian Jessie,
3185 where most of the needed packages used are already present.  Only one,
3186 the freedombox-setup package, is missing.  To try to build your own
3187 boot image to test the current status, fetch the freedom-maker scripts
3188 and build using
3189 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/vmdebootstrap">vmdebootstrap</a>
3190 with a user with sudo access to become root:
3191
3192 <pre>
3193 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/freedombox/freedom-maker.git \
3194   freedom-maker
3195 sudo apt-get install git vmdebootstrap mercurial python-docutils \
3196   mktorrent extlinux virtualbox qemu-user-static binfmt-support \
3197   u-boot-tools
3198 make -C freedom-maker dreamplug-image raspberry-image virtualbox-image
3199 </pre>
3200
3201 <p>Root access is needed to run debootstrap and mount loopback
3202 devices.  See the README for more details on the build. If you do not
3203 want all three images, trim the make line.  But note that thanks to <a
3204 href="https://bugs.debian.org/741407">a race condition in
3205 vmdebootstrap</a>, the build might fail without the patch to the
3206 kpartx call.</p>
3207
3208 <p>If you instead want to install using a Debian CD and the preseed
3209 method, boot a Debian Wheezy ISO and use this boot argument to load
3210 the preseed values:</p>
3211
3212 <pre>
3213 url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat</a>
3214 </pre>
3215
3216 <p>But note that due to <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/740673">a
3217 recently introduced bug in apt in Jessie</a>, the installer will
3218 currently hang while setting up APT sources.  Killing the
3219 '<tt>apt-cdrom ident</tt>' process when it hang a few times during the
3220 installation will get the installation going.  This affect all
3221 installations in Jessie, and I expect it will be fixed soon.</p>
3222
3223 <p>Give it a go and let us know how it goes on the mailing list, and help
3224 us get the new release published. :) Please join us on
3225 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC (#freedombox on
3226 irc.debian.org)</a> and
3227 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
3228 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
3229
3230       </div>
3231       <div class="tags">
3232
3233
3234         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
3235
3236
3237       </div>
3238     </div>
3239     <div class="padding"></div>
3240
3241     <div class="entry">
3242       <div class="title">
3243         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_home_and_release_1_0_for_netgroup_and_innetgr__aka_ng_utils_.html">New home and release 1.0 for netgroup and innetgr (aka ng-utils)</a>
3244       </div>
3245       <div class="date">
3246         22nd February 2014
3247       </div>
3248       <div class="body">
3249         <p>Many years ago, I wrote a GPL licensed version of the netgroup and
3250 innetgr tools, because I needed them in
3251 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a>.  I called the project
3252 ng-utils, and it has served me well.  I placed the project under the
3253 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/">Hungry Programmer</a> umbrella, and it was maintained in our CVS
3254 repository.  But many years ago, the CVS repository was dropped (lost,
3255 not migrated to new hardware, not sure), and the project have lacked a
3256 proper home since then.</p>
3257
3258 <p>Last summer, I had a look at the package and made a new release
3259 fixing a irritating crash bug, but was unable to store the changes in
3260 a proper source control system.  I applied for a project on
3261 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/">Alioth</a>, but did not have time
3262 to follow up on it.  Until today. :)</p>
3263
3264 <p>After many hours of cleaning and migration, the ng-utils project
3265 now have a new home, and a git repository with the highlight of the
3266 history of the project.  I published all release tarballs and imported
3267 them into the git repository.  As the project is really stable and not
3268 expected to gain new features any time soon, I decided to make a new
3269 release and call it 1.0.  Visit the new project home on
3270 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/ng-utils/">https://alioth.debian.org/projects/ng-utils/</a>
3271 if you want to check it out.  The new version is also uploaded into
3272 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/ng-utils.html">Debian Unstable</a>.</p>
3273
3274       </div>
3275       <div class="tags">
3276
3277
3278         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3279
3280
3281       </div>
3282     </div>
3283     <div class="padding"></div>
3284
3285     <div class="entry">
3286       <div class="title">
3287         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_sysvinit_from_experimental_in_Debian_Hurd.html">Testing sysvinit from experimental in Debian Hurd</a>
3288       </div>
3289       <div class="date">
3290          3rd February 2014
3291       </div>
3292       <div class="body">
3293         <p>A few days ago I decided to try to help the Hurd people to get
3294 their changes into sysvinit, to allow them to use the normal sysvinit
3295 boot system instead of their old one.  This follow up on the
3296 <a href="https://teythoon.cryptobitch.de//categories/gsoc.html">great
3297 Google Summer of Code work</a> done last summer by Justus Winter to
3298 get Debian on Hurd working more like Debian on Linux.  To get started,
3299 I downloaded a prebuilt hard disk image from
3300 <a href="http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian-cd/hurd-i386/current/debian-hurd.img.tar.gz">http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian-cd/hurd-i386/current/debian-hurd.img.tar.gz</a>,
3301 and started it using virt-manager.</p>
3302
3303 <p>The first think I had to do after logging in (root without any
3304 password) was to get the network operational.  I followed
3305 <a href="https://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/hurd-install">the
3306 instructions on the Debian GNU/Hurd ports page</a> and ran these
3307 commands as root to get the machine to accept a IP address from the
3308 kvm internal DHCP server:</p>
3309
3310 <p><blockquote><pre>
3311 settrans -fgap /dev/netdde /hurd/netdde
3312 kill $(ps -ef|awk '/[p]finet/ { print $2}')
3313 kill $(ps -ef|awk '/[d]evnode/ { print $2}')
3314 dhclient /dev/eth0
3315 </pre></blockquote></p>
3316
3317 <p>After this, the machine had internet connectivity, and I could
3318 upgrade it and install the sysvinit packages from experimental and
3319 enable it as the default boot system in Hurd.</p>
3320
3321 <p>But before I did that, I set a password on the root user, as ssh is
3322 running on the machine it for ssh login to work a password need to be
3323 set.  Also, note that a bug somewhere in openssh on Hurd block
3324 compression from working.  Remember to turn that off on the client
3325 side.</p>
3326
3327 <p>Run these commands as root to upgrade and test the new sysvinit
3328 stuff:</p>
3329
3330 <p><blockquote><pre>
3331 cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/experimental.list &lt;&lt;EOF
3332 deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ experimental main
3333 EOF
3334 apt-get update
3335 apt-get dist-upgrade
3336 apt-get install -t experimental initscripts sysv-rc sysvinit \
3337     sysvinit-core sysvinit-utils
3338 update-alternatives --config runsystem
3339 </pre></blockquote></p>
3340
3341 <p>To reboot after switching boot system, you have to use
3342 <tt>reboot-hurd</tt> instead of just <tt>reboot</tt>, as there is not
3343 yet a sysvinit process able to receive the signals from the normal
3344 'reboot' command.  After switching to sysvinit as the boot system,
3345 upgrading every package and rebooting, the network come up with DHCP
3346 after boot as it should, and the settrans/pkill hack mentioned at the
3347 start is no longer needed.  But for some strange reason, there are no
3348 longer any login prompt in the virtual console, so I logged in using
3349 ssh instead.
3350
3351 <p>Note that there are some race conditions in Hurd making the boot
3352 fail some times.  No idea what the cause is, but hope the Hurd porters
3353 figure it out.  At least Justus said on IRC (#debian-hurd on
3354 irc.debian.org) that they are aware of the problem.  A way to reduce
3355 the impact is to upgrade to the Hurd packages built by Justus by
3356 adding this repository to the machine:</p>
3357
3358 <p><blockquote><pre>
3359 cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hurd-ci.list &lt;&lt;EOF
3360 deb http://darnassus.sceen.net/~teythoon/hurd-ci/ sid main
3361 EOF
3362 </pre></blockquote></p>
3363
3364 <p>At the moment the prebuilt virtual machine get some packages from
3365 http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian, because some of the packages in
3366 unstable do not yet include the required patches that are lingering in
3367 BTS.  This is the completely list of "unofficial" packages installed:</p>
3368
3369 <p><blockquote><pre>
3370 # aptitude search '?narrow(?version(CURRENT),?origin(Debian Ports))'
3371 i   emacs                   - GNU Emacs editor (metapackage)
3372 i   gdb                     - GNU Debugger
3373 i   hurd-recommended        - Miscellaneous translators
3374 i   isc-dhcp-client         - ISC DHCP client
3375 i   isc-dhcp-common         - common files used by all the isc-dhcp* packages
3376 i   libc-bin                - Embedded GNU C Library: Binaries
3377 i   libc-dev-bin            - Embedded GNU C Library: Development binaries
3378 i   libc0.3                 - Embedded GNU C Library: Shared libraries
3379 i A libc0.3-dbg             - Embedded GNU C Library: detached debugging symbols
3380 i   libc0.3-dev             - Embedded GNU C Library: Development Libraries and Hea
3381 i   multiarch-support       - Transitional package to ensure multiarch compatibilit
3382 i A x11-common              - X Window System (X.Org) infrastructure
3383 i   xorg                    - X.Org X Window System
3384 i A xserver-xorg            - X.Org X server
3385 i A xserver-xorg-input-all  - X.Org X server -- input driver metapackage
3386 #
3387 </pre></blockquote></p>
3388
3389 <p>All in all, testing hurd has been an interesting experience. :)
3390 X.org did not work out of the box and I never took the time to follow
3391 the porters instructions to fix it.  This time I was interested in the
3392 command line stuff.<p>
3393
3394       </div>
3395       <div class="tags">
3396
3397
3398         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3399
3400
3401       </div>
3402     </div>
3403     <div class="padding"></div>
3404
3405     <div class="entry">
3406       <div class="title">
3407         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_chrpath_release_0_16.html">New chrpath release 0.16</a>
3408       </div>
3409       <div class="date">
3410         14th January 2014
3411       </div>
3412       <div class="body">
3413         <p><a href="http://www.coverity.com/">Coverity</a> is a nice tool to
3414 find problems in C, C++ and Java code using static source code
3415 analysis.  It can detect a lot of different problems, and is very
3416 useful to find memory and locking bugs in the error handling part of
3417 the source.  The company behind it provide
3418 <a href="https://scan.coverity.com/">check of free software projects as
3419 a community service</a>, and many hundred free software projects are
3420 already checked.  A few days ago I decided to have a closer look at
3421 the Coverity system, and discovered that the
3422 <a href="http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/">gnash</a> and
3423 <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/ipmitool/">ipmitool</a>
3424 projects I am involved with was already registered.  But these are
3425 fairly big, and I would also like to have a small and easy project to
3426 check, and decided to <a href="http://scan.coverity.com/projects/1179">request
3427 checking of the chrpath project</a>.  It was
3428 added to the checker and discovered seven potential defects.  Six of
3429 these were real, mostly resource "leak" when the program detected an
3430 error.  Nothing serious, as the resources would be released a fraction
3431 of a second later when the program exited because of the error, but it
3432 is nice to do it right in case the source of the program some time in
3433 the future end up in a library.  Having fixed all defects and added
3434 <a href="https://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/chrpath-devel">a
3435 mailing list for the chrpath developers</a>, I decided it was time to
3436 publish a new release.  These are the release notes:</p>
3437
3438 <p>New in 0.16 released 2014-01-14:</p>
3439
3440 <ul>
3441
3442   <li>Fixed all minor bugs discovered by Coverity.</li>
3443   <li>Updated config.sub and config.guess from the GNU project.</li>
3444   <li>Mention new project mailing list in the documentation.</li>
3445
3446 </ul>
3447
3448 <p>You can
3449 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/frs/?group_id=31052">download the
3450 new version 0.16 from alioth</a>.  Please let us know via the Alioth
3451 project if something is wrong with the new release.  The test suite
3452 did not discover any old errors, so if you find a new one, please also
3453 include a test suite check.</p>
3454
3455       </div>
3456       <div class="tags">
3457
3458
3459         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/chrpath">chrpath</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3460
3461
3462       </div>
3463     </div>
3464     <div class="padding"></div>
3465
3466     <div class="entry">
3467       <div class="title">
3468         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_chrpath_release_0_15.html">New chrpath release 0.15</a>
3469       </div>
3470       <div class="date">
3471         24th November 2013
3472       </div>
3473       <div class="body">
3474         <p>After many years break from the package and a vain hope that
3475 development would be continued by someone else, I finally pulled my
3476 acts together this morning and wrapped up a new release of chrpath,
3477 the command line tool to modify the rpath and runpath of already
3478 compiled ELF programs.  The update was triggered by the persistence of
3479 Isha Vishnoi at IBM, which needed a new config.guess file to get
3480 support for the ppc64le architecture (powerpc 64-bit Little Endian) he
3481 is working on.  I checked the
3482 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/chrpath">Debian</a>,
3483 <a href="https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/chrpath">Ubuntu</a> and
3484 <a href="https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/acls/name/chrpath">Fedora</a>
3485 packages for interesting patches (failed to find the source from
3486 OpenSUSE and Mandriva packages), and found quite a few nice fixes.
3487 These are the release notes:</p>
3488
3489 <p>New in 0.15 released 2013-11-24:</p>
3490
3491 <ul>
3492
3493   <li>Updated config.sub and config.guess from the GNU project to work
3494    with newer architectures.  Thanks to isha vishnoi for the heads
3495    up.</li>
3496
3497   <li>Updated README with current URLs.</li>
3498
3499   <li>Added byteswap fix found in Ubuntu, credited Jeremy Kerr and
3500    Matthias Klose.</li>
3501
3502   <li>Added missing help for -k|--keepgoing option, using patch by
3503    Petr Machata found in Fedora.</li>
3504
3505   <li>Rewrite removal of RPATH/RUNPATH to make sure the entry in
3506    .dynamic is a NULL terminated string.  Based on patch found in
3507    Fedora credited Axel Thimm and Christian Krause.</li>
3508
3509 </ul>
3510
3511 <p>You can
3512 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/frs/?group_id=31052">download the
3513 new version 0.15 from alioth</a>.  Please let us know via the Alioth
3514 project if something is wrong with the new release.  The test suite
3515 did not discover any old errors, so if you find a new one, please also
3516 include a testsuite check.</p>
3517
3518       </div>
3519       <div class="tags">
3520
3521
3522         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/chrpath">chrpath</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3523
3524
3525       </div>
3526     </div>
3527     <div class="padding"></div>
3528
3529     <div class="entry">
3530       <div class="title">
3531         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_init_d_boot_script_example_for_rsyslog.html">Debian init.d boot script example for rsyslog</a>
3532       </div>
3533       <div class="date">
3534          2nd November 2013
3535       </div>
3536       <div class="body">
3537         <p>If one of the points of switching to a new init system in Debian is
3538 <a href="http://thomas.goirand.fr/blog/?p=147">to get rid of huge
3539 init.d scripts</a>, I doubt we need to switch away from sysvinit and
3540 init.d scripts at all.  Here is an example init.d script, ie a rewrite
3541 of /etc/init.d/rsyslog:</p>
3542
3543 <p><pre>
3544 #!/lib/init/init-d-script
3545 ### BEGIN INIT INFO
3546 # Provides:          rsyslog
3547 # Required-Start:    $remote_fs $time
3548 # Required-Stop:     umountnfs $time
3549 # X-Stop-After:      sendsigs
3550 # Default-Start:     2 3 4 5
3551 # Default-Stop:      0 1 6
3552 # Short-Description: enhanced syslogd
3553 # Description:       Rsyslog is an enhanced multi-threaded syslogd.
3554 #                    It is quite compatible to stock sysklogd and can be
3555 #                    used as a drop-in replacement.
3556 ### END INIT INFO
3557 DESC="enhanced syslogd"
3558 DAEMON=/usr/sbin/rsyslogd
3559 </pre></p>
3560
3561 <p>Pretty minimalistic to me... For the record, the original sysv-rc
3562 script was 137 lines, and the above is just 15 lines, most of it meta
3563 info/comments.</p>
3564
3565 <p>How to do this, you ask?  Well, one create a new script
3566 /lib/init/init-d-script looking something like this:
3567
3568 <p><pre>
3569 #!/bin/sh
3570
3571 # Define LSB log_* functions.
3572 # Depend on lsb-base (>= 3.2-14) to ensure that this file is present
3573 # and status_of_proc is working.
3574 . /lib/lsb/init-functions
3575
3576 #
3577 # Function that starts the daemon/service
3578
3579 #
3580 do_start()
3581 {
3582         # Return
3583         #   0 if daemon has been started
3584         #   1 if daemon was already running
3585         #   2 if daemon could not be started
3586         start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --exec $DAEMON --test > /dev/null \
3587                 || return 1
3588         start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --exec $DAEMON -- \
3589                 $DAEMON_ARGS \
3590                 || return 2
3591         # Add code here, if necessary, that waits for the process to be ready
3592         # to handle requests from services started subsequently which depend
3593         # on this one.  As a last resort, sleep for some time.
3594 }
3595
3596 #
3597 # Function that stops the daemon/service
3598 #
3599 do_stop()
3600 {
3601         # Return
3602         #   0 if daemon has been stopped
3603         #   1 if daemon was already stopped
3604         #   2 if daemon could not be stopped
3605         #   other if a failure occurred
3606         start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --retry=TERM/30/KILL/5 --pidfile $PIDFILE --name $NAME
3607         RETVAL="$?"
3608         [ "$RETVAL" = 2 ] && return 2
3609         # Wait for children to finish too if this is a daemon that forks
3610         # and if the daemon is only ever run from this initscript.
3611         # If the above conditions are not satisfied then add some other code
3612         # that waits for the process to drop all resources that could be
3613         # needed by services started subsequently.  A last resort is to
3614         # sleep for some time.
3615         start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --oknodo --retry=0/30/KILL/5 --exec $DAEMON
3616         [ "$?" = 2 ] && return 2
3617         # Many daemons don't delete their pidfiles when they exit.
3618         rm -f $PIDFILE
3619         return "$RETVAL"
3620 }
3621
3622 #
3623 # Function that sends a SIGHUP to the daemon/service
3624 #
3625 do_reload() {
3626         #
3627         # If the daemon can reload its configuration without
3628         # restarting (for example, when it is sent a SIGHUP),
3629         # then implement that here.
3630         #
3631         start-stop-daemon --stop --signal 1 --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --name $NAME
3632         return 0
3633 }
3634
3635 SCRIPTNAME=$1
3636 scriptbasename="$(basename $1)"
3637 echo "SN: $scriptbasename"
3638 if [ "$scriptbasename" != "init-d-library" ] ; then
3639     script="$1"
3640     shift
3641     . $script
3642 else
3643     exit 0
3644 fi
3645
3646 NAME=$(basename $DAEMON)
3647 PIDFILE=/var/run/$NAME.pid
3648
3649 # Exit if the package is not installed
3650 #[ -x "$DAEMON" ] || exit 0
3651
3652 # Read configuration variable file if it is present
3653 [ -r /etc/default/$NAME ] && . /etc/default/$NAME
3654
3655 # Load the VERBOSE setting and other rcS variables
3656 . /lib/init/vars.sh
3657
3658 case "$1" in
3659   start)
3660         [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_daemon_msg "Starting $DESC" "$NAME"
3661         do_start
3662         case "$?" in
3663                 0|1) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 0 ;;
3664                 2) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 1 ;;
3665         esac
3666         ;;
3667   stop)
3668         [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_daemon_msg "Stopping $DESC" "$NAME"
3669         do_stop
3670         case "$?" in
3671                 0|1) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 0 ;;
3672                 2) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 1 ;;
3673         esac
3674         ;;
3675   status)
3676         status_of_proc "$DAEMON" "$NAME" && exit 0 || exit $?
3677         ;;
3678   #reload|force-reload)
3679         #
3680         # If do_reload() is not implemented then leave this commented out
3681         # and leave 'force-reload' as an alias for 'restart'.
3682         #
3683         #log_daemon_msg "Reloading $DESC" "$NAME"
3684         #do_reload
3685         #log_end_msg $?
3686         #;;
3687   restart|force-reload)
3688         #
3689         # If the "reload" option is implemented then remove the
3690         # 'force-reload' alias
3691         #
3692         log_daemon_msg "Restarting $DESC" "$NAME"
3693         do_stop
3694         case "$?" in
3695           0|1)
3696                 do_start
3697                 case "$?" in
3698                         0) log_end_msg 0 ;;
3699                         1) log_end_msg 1 ;; # Old process is still running
3700                         *) log_end_msg 1 ;; # Failed to start
3701                 esac
3702                 ;;
3703           *)
3704                 # Failed to stop
3705                 log_end_msg 1
3706                 ;;
3707         esac
3708         ;;
3709   *)
3710         echo "Usage: $SCRIPTNAME {start|stop|status|restart|force-reload}" >&2
3711         exit 3
3712         ;;
3713 esac
3714
3715 :
3716 </pre></p>
3717
3718 <p>It is based on /etc/init.d/skeleton, and could be improved quite a
3719 lot.  I did not really polish the approach, so it might not always
3720 work out of the box, but you get the idea.  I did not try very hard to
3721 optimize it nor make it more robust either.</p>
3722
3723 <p>A better argument for switching init system in Debian than reducing
3724 the size of init scripts (which is a good thing to do anyway), is to
3725 get boot system that is able to handle the kernel events sensibly and
3726 robustly, and do not depend on the boot to run sequentially.  The boot
3727 and the kernel have not behaved sequentially in years.</p>
3728
3729       </div>
3730       <div class="tags">
3731
3732
3733         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3734
3735
3736       </div>
3737     </div>
3738     <div class="padding"></div>
3739
3740     <div class="entry">
3741       <div class="title">
3742         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Browser_plugin_for_SPICE__spice_xpi__uploaded_to_Debian.html">Browser plugin for SPICE (spice-xpi) uploaded to Debian</a>
3743       </div>
3744       <div class="date">
3745          1st November 2013
3746       </div>
3747       <div class="body">
3748         <p><a href="http://www.spice-space.org/">The SPICE protocol</a> for
3749 remote display access is the preferred solution with oVirt and RedHat
3750 Enterprise Virtualization, and I was sad to discover the other day
3751 that the browser plugin needed to use these systems seamlessly was
3752 missing in Debian.  The <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/668284">request
3753 for a package</a> was from 2012-04-10 with no progress since
3754 2013-04-01, so I decided to wrap up a package based on the great work
3755 from Cajus Pollmeier and put it in a collab-maint maintained git
3756 repository to get a package I could use.  I would very much like
3757 others to help me maintain the package (or just take over, I do not
3758 mind), but as no-one had volunteered so far, I just uploaded it to
3759 NEW.  I hope it will be available in Debian in a few days.</p>
3760
3761 <p>The source is now available from
3762 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/spice-xpi.git;a=summary">http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/spice-xpi.git;a=summary</a>.</p>
3763
3764       </div>
3765       <div class="tags">
3766
3767
3768         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3769
3770
3771       </div>
3772     </div>
3773     <div class="padding"></div>
3774
3775     <div class="entry">
3776       <div class="title">
3777         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Teaching_vmdebootstrap_to_create_Raspberry_Pi_SD_card_images.html">Teaching vmdebootstrap to create Raspberry Pi SD card images</a>
3778       </div>
3779       <div class="date">
3780         27th October 2013
3781       </div>
3782       <div class="body">
3783         <p>The
3784 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/v/vmdebootstrap.html">vmdebootstrap</a>
3785 program is a a very nice system to create virtual machine images.  It
3786 create a image file, add a partition table, mount it and run
3787 debootstrap in the mounted directory to create a Debian system on a
3788 stick.  Yesterday, I decided to try to teach it how to make images for
3789 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi">Raspberry Pi</a>, as part
3790 of a plan to simplify the build system for
3791 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the FreedomBox
3792 project</a>.  The FreedomBox project already uses vmdebootstrap for
3793 the virtualbox images, but its current build system made multistrap
3794 based system for Dreamplug images, and it is lacking support for
3795 Raspberry Pi.</p>
3796
3797 <p>Armed with the knowledge on how to build "foreign" (aka non-native
3798 architecture) chroots for Raspberry Pi, I dived into the vmdebootstrap
3799 code and adjusted it to be able to build armel images on my amd64
3800 Debian laptop.  I ended up giving vmdebootstrap five new options,
3801 allowing me to replicate the image creation process I use to make
3802 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Raspberry_Pi_based_batman_adv_Mesh_network_node.html">Debian
3803 Jessie based mesh node images for the Raspberry Pi</a>.  First, the
3804 <tt>--foreign /path/to/binfm_handler</tt> option tell vmdebootstrap to
3805 call debootstrap with --foreign and to copy the handler into the
3806 generated chroot before running the second stage.  This allow
3807 vmdebootstrap to create armel images on an amd64 host.  Next I added
3808 two new options <tt>--bootsize size</tt> and <tt>--boottype
3809 fstype</tt> to teach it to create a separate /boot/ partition with the
3810 given file system type, allowing me to create an image with a vfat
3811 partition for the /boot/ stuff.  I also added a <tt>--variant
3812 variant</tt> option to allow me to create smaller images without the
3813 Debian base system packages installed.  Finally, I added an option
3814 <tt>--no-extlinux</tt> to tell vmdebootstrap to not install extlinux
3815 as a boot loader.  It is not needed on the Raspberry Pi and probably
3816 most other non-x86 architectures.  The changes were accepted by the
3817 upstream author of vmdebootstrap yesterday and today, and is now
3818 available from
3819 <a href="http://git.liw.fi/cgi-bin/cgit/cgit.cgi/vmdebootstrap/">the
3820 upstream project page</a>.</p>
3821
3822 <p>To use it to build a Raspberry Pi image using Debian Jessie, first
3823 create a small script (the customize script) to add the non-free
3824 binary blob needed to boot the Raspberry Pi and the APT source
3825 list:</p>
3826
3827 <p><pre>
3828 #!/bin/sh
3829 set -e # Exit on first error
3830 rootdir="$1"
3831 cd "$rootdir"
3832 cat &lt;&lt;EOF > etc/apt/sources.list
3833 deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ jessie main contrib non-free
3834 EOF
3835 # Install non-free binary blob needed to boot Raspberry Pi.  This
3836 # install a kernel somewhere too.
3837 wget https://raw.github.com/Hexxeh/rpi-update/master/rpi-update \
3838     -O $rootdir/usr/bin/rpi-update
3839 chmod a+x $rootdir/usr/bin/rpi-update
3840 mkdir -p $rootdir/lib/modules
3841 touch $rootdir/boot/start.elf
3842 chroot $rootdir rpi-update
3843 </pre></p>
3844
3845 <p>Next, fetch the latest vmdebootstrap script and call it like this
3846 to build the image:</p>
3847
3848 <pre>
3849 sudo ./vmdebootstrap \
3850     --variant minbase \
3851     --arch armel \
3852     --distribution jessie \
3853     --mirror http://http.debian.net/debian \
3854     --image test.img \
3855     --size 600M \
3856     --bootsize 64M \
3857     --boottype vfat \
3858     --log-level debug \
3859     --verbose \
3860     --no-kernel \
3861     --no-extlinux \
3862     --root-password raspberry \
3863     --hostname raspberrypi \
3864     --foreign /usr/bin/qemu-arm-static \
3865     --customize `pwd`/customize \
3866     --package netbase \
3867     --package git-core \
3868     --package binutils \
3869     --package ca-certificates \
3870     --package wget \
3871     --package kmod
3872 </pre></p>
3873
3874 <p>The list of packages being installed are the ones needed by
3875 rpi-update to make the image bootable on the Raspberry Pi, with the
3876 exception of netbase, which is needed by debootstrap to find
3877 /etc/hosts with the minbase variant.  I really wish there was a way to
3878 set up an Raspberry Pi using only packages in the Debian archive, but
3879 that is not possible as far as I know, because it boots from the GPU
3880 using a non-free binary blob.</p>
3881
3882 <p>The build host need debootstrap, kpartx and qemu-user-static and
3883 probably a few others installed.  I have not checked the complete
3884 build dependency list.</p>
3885
3886 <p>The resulting image will not use the hardware floating point unit
3887 on the Raspberry PI, because the armel architecture in Debian is not
3888 optimized for that use.  So the images created will be a bit slower
3889 than <a href="http://www.raspbian.org/">Raspbian</a> based images.</p>
3890
3891       </div>
3892       <div class="tags">
3893
3894
3895         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/mesh network">mesh network</a>.
3896
3897
3898       </div>
3899     </div>
3900     <div class="padding"></div>
3901
3902     <div class="entry">
3903       <div class="title">
3904         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Good_causes__Debian_Outreach_Program_for_Women__EFF_documenting_the_spying_and_Open_access_in_Norway.html">Good causes: Debian Outreach Program for Women, EFF documenting the spying and Open access in Norway</a>
3905       </div>
3906       <div class="date">
3907         15th October 2013
3908       </div>
3909       <div class="body">
3910         <p>The last few days I came across a few good causes that should get
3911 wider attention.  I recommend signing and donating to each one of
3912 these. :)</p>
3913
3914 <p>Via <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2013/18/">Debian
3915 Project News for 2013-10-14</a> I came across the Outreach Program for
3916 Women program which is a Google Summer of Code like initiative to get
3917 more women involved in free software.  One debian sponsor has offered
3918 to match <a href="http://debian.ch/opw2013">any donation done to Debian
3919 earmarked</a> for this initiative.  I donated a few minutes ago, and
3920 hope you will to. :)</p>
3921
3922 <p>And the Electronic Frontier Foundation just announced plans to
3923 create <a href="https://supporters.eff.org/donate/nsa-videos">video
3924 documentaries about the excessive spying</a> on every Internet user that
3925 take place these days, and their need to fund the work.  I've already
3926 donated.  Are you next?</p>
3927
3928 <p>For my Norwegian audience, the organisation Studentenes og
3929 Akademikernes Internasjonale Hjelpefond is collecting signatures for a
3930 statement under the heading
3931 <a href="http://saih.no/Bloggers_United/">Bloggers United for Open
3932 Access</a> for those of us asking for more focus on open access in the
3933 Norwegian government.  So far 499 signatures.  I hope you will sign it
3934 too.</p>
3935
3936       </div>
3937       <div class="tags">
3938
3939
3940         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
3941
3942
3943       </div>
3944     </div>
3945     <div class="padding"></div>
3946
3947     <div class="entry">
3948       <div class="title">
3949         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Videos_about_the_Freedombox_project___for_inspiration_and_learning.html">Videos about the Freedombox project - for inspiration and learning</a>
3950       </div>
3951       <div class="date">
3952         27th September 2013
3953       </div>
3954       <div class="body">
3955         <p>The <a href="http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/">Freedombox
3956 project</a> have been going on for a while, and have presented the
3957 vision, ideas and solution several places.  Here is a little
3958 collection of videos of talks and presentation of the project.</p>
3959
3960 <ul>
3961
3962 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukvUz5taxvA">FreedomBox -
3963 2,5 minute marketing film</a> (Youtube)</li>
3964
3965 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzW25QTVWsE">Eben Moglen
3966 discusses the Freedombox on CBS news 2011</a> (Youtube)</li>
3967
3968 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ae8SZbxfE0g">Eben Moglen -
3969 Freedom in the Cloud - Software Freedom, Privacy and and Security for
3970 Web 2.0 and Cloud computing at ISOC-NY Public Meeting 2010</a>
3971 (Youtube)</li>
3972
3973 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNaIji_3xBE">Fosdem 2011
3974 Keynote by Eben Moglen presenting the Freedombox</a> (Youtube)</li>
3975
3976 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bDDUyJSQ9s">Presentation of
3977 the Freedombox by James Vasile at Elevate in Gratz 2011</a> (Youtube)</li>
3978
3979 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQTmnk27g9s"> Freedombox -
3980 Discovery, Identity, and Trust by Nick Daly at Freedombox Hackfest New
3981 York City in 2012</a> (Youtube)</li>
3982
3983 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkbSB4Ba7Ck">Introduction
3984 to the Freedombox at Freedombox Hackfest New York City in 2012</a>
3985 (Youtube)</li>
3986
3987 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-P2Jaeg0aQ">Freedom, Out
3988 of the Box! by Bdale Garbee at linux.conf.au Ballarat, 2012</a> (Youtube) </li>
3989
3990 <li><a href="https://archive.fosdem.org/2013/schedule/event/freedombox/">Freedombox
3991 1.0 by Eben Moglen and Bdale Garbee at Fosdem 2013</a> (FOSDEM) </li>
3992
3993 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1LpYX2zVYg">What is the
3994 FreedomBox today by Bdale Garbee at Debconf13 in Vaumarcus
3995 2013</a> (Youtube)</li>
3996
3997 </ul>
3998
3999 <p>A larger list is available from
4000 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/TalksAndPresentations">the
4001 Freedombox Wiki</a>.</p>
4002
4003 <p>On other news, I am happy to report that Freedombox based on Debian
4004 Jessie is coming along quite well, and soon both Owncloud and using
4005 Tor should be available for testers of the Freedombox solution. :) In
4006 a few weeks I hope everything needed to test it is included in Debian.
4007 The withsqlite package is already in Debian, and the plinth package is
4008 pending in NEW.  The third and vital part of that puzzle is the
4009 metapackage/setup framework, which is still pending an upload.  Join
4010 us on <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC
4011 (#freedombox on irc.debian.org)</a> and
4012 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
4013 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
4014
4015       </div>
4016       <div class="tags">
4017
4018
4019         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
4020
4021
4022       </div>
4023     </div>
4024     <div class="padding"></div>
4025
4026     <div class="entry">
4027       <div class="title">
4028         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Recipe_to_test_the_Freedombox_project_on_amd64_or_Raspberry_Pi.html">Recipe to test the Freedombox project on amd64 or Raspberry Pi</a>
4029       </div>
4030       <div class="date">
4031         10th September 2013
4032       </div>
4033       <div class="body">
4034         <p>I was introduced to the
4035 <a href="http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/">Freedombox project</a>
4036 in 2010, when Eben Moglen presented his vision about serving the need
4037 of non-technical people to keep their personal information private and
4038 within the legal protection of their own homes.  The idea is to give
4039 people back the power over their network and machines, and return
4040 Internet back to its intended peer-to-peer architecture.  Instead of
4041 depending on a central service, the Freedombox will give everyone
4042 control over their own basic infrastructure.</p>
4043
4044 <p>I've intended to join the effort since then, but other tasks have
4045 taken priority.  But this summers nasty news about the misuse of trust
4046 and privilege exercised by the "western" intelligence gathering
4047 communities increased my eagerness to contribute to a point where I
4048 actually started working on the project a while back.</p>
4049
4050 <p>The <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/freedombox/">initial
4051 Debian initiative</a> based on the vision from Eben Moglen, is to
4052 create a simple and cheap Debian based appliance that anyone can hook
4053 up in their home and get access to secure and private services and
4054 communication.  The initial deployment platform have been the
4055 <a href="http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/t-dreamplugdetails.aspx">Dreamplug</a>,
4056 which is a piece of hardware I do not own.  So to be able to test what
4057 the current Freedombox setup look like, I had to come up with a way to install
4058 it on some hardware I do have access to.  I have rewritten the
4059 <a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/freedom-maker">freedom-maker</a>
4060 image build framework to use .deb packages instead of only copying
4061 setup into the boot images, and thanks to this rewrite I am able to
4062 set up any machine supported by Debian Wheezy as a Freedombox, using
4063 the previously mentioned deb (and a few support debs for packages
4064 missing in Debian).</p>
4065
4066 <p>The current Freedombox setup consist of a set of bootstrapping
4067 scripts
4068 (<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/freedombox-setup">freedombox-setup</a>),
4069 and a administrative web interface
4070 (<a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/Plinth">plinth</a> + exmachina +
4071 withsqlite), as well as a privacy enhancing proxy based on
4072 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/privoxy">privoxy</a>
4073 (freedombox-privoxy).  There is also a web/javascript based XMPP
4074 client (<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/jwchat">jwchat</a>)
4075 trying (unsuccessfully so far) to talk to the XMPP server
4076 (<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/ejabberd">ejabberd</a>).  The
4077 web interface is pluggable, and the goal is to use it to enable OpenID
4078 services, mesh network connectivity, use of TOR, etc, etc.  Not much of
4079 this is really working yet, see
4080 <a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/freedombox-todos/blob/master/TODO">the
4081 project TODO</a> for links to GIT repositories.  Most of the code is
4082 on github at the moment.  The HTTP proxy is operational out of the
4083 box, and the admin web interface can be used to add/remove plinth
4084 users.  I've not been able to do anything else with it so far, but
4085 know there are several branches spread around github and other places
4086 with lots of half baked features.</p>
4087
4088 <p>Anyway, if you want to have a look at the current state, the
4089 following recipes should work to give you a test machine to poke
4090 at.</p>
4091
4092 <p><strong>Debian Wheezy amd64</strong></p>
4093
4094 <ol>
4095
4096 <li>Fetch normal Debian Wheezy installation ISO.</li>
4097 <li>Boot from it, either as CD or USB stick.</li>
4098 <li><p>Press [tab] on the boot prompt and add this as a boot argument
4099 to the Debian installer:<p>
4100 <pre>url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-wheezy.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-wheezy.dat</a></pre></li>
4101
4102 <li>Answer the few language/region/password questions and pick disk to
4103 install on.</li>
4104
4105 <li>When the installation is finished and the machine have rebooted a
4106 few times, your Freedombox is ready for testing.</li>
4107
4108 </ol>
4109
4110 <p><strong>Raspberry Pi Raspbian</strong></p>
4111
4112 <ol>
4113
4114 <li>Fetch a Raspbian SD card image, create SD card.</li>
4115 <li>Boot from SD card, extend file system to fill the card completely.</li>
4116 <li><p>Log in and add this to /etc/sources.list:</p>
4117 <pre>
4118 deb <a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox</a> wheezy main
4119 </pre></li>
4120 <li><p>Run this as root:</p>
4121 <pre>
4122 wget -O - http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/BE1A583D.asc | \
4123    apt-key add -
4124 apt-get update
4125 apt-get install freedombox-setup
4126 /usr/lib/freedombox/setup
4127 </pre></li>
4128 <li>Reboot into your freshly created Freedombox.</li>
4129
4130 </ol>
4131
4132 <p>You can test it on other architectures too, but because the
4133 freedombox-privoxy package is binary, it will only work as intended on
4134 the architectures where I have had time to build the binary and put it
4135 in my APT repository.  But do not let this stop you.  It is only a
4136 short "<tt>apt-get source -b freedombox-privoxy</tt>" away. :)</p>
4137
4138 <p>Note that by default Freedombox is a DHCP server on the
4139 192.168.1.0/24 subnet, so if this is your subnet be careful and turn
4140 off the DHCP server by running "<tt>update-rc.d isc-dhcp-server
4141 disable</tt>" as root.</p>
4142
4143 <p>Please let me know if this works for you, or if you have any
4144 problems.  We gather on the IRC channel
4145 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">#freedombox</a> on
4146 irc.debian.org and the
4147 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">project
4148 mailing list</a>.</p>
4149
4150 <p>Once you get your freedombox operational, you can visit
4151 <tt>http://your-host-name:8001/</tt> to see the state of the plint
4152 welcome screen (dead end - do not be surprised if you are unable to
4153 get past it), and next visit <tt>http://your-host-name:8001/help/</tt>
4154 to look at the rest of plinth.  The default user is 'admin' and the
4155 default password is 'secret'.</p>
4156
4157       </div>
4158       <div class="tags">
4159
4160
4161         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
4162
4163
4164       </div>
4165     </div>
4166     <div class="padding"></div>
4167
4168     <div class="entry">
4169       <div class="title">
4170         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Intel_180_SSD_disk_with_Lenovo_firmware_can_not_use_Intel_firmware.html">Intel 180 SSD disk with Lenovo firmware can not use Intel firmware</a>
4171       </div>
4172       <div class="date">
4173         18th August 2013
4174       </div>
4175       <div class="body">
4176         <p>Earlier, I reported about
4177 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_fix_a_Thinkpad_X230_with_a_broken_180_GB_SSD_disk.html">my
4178 problems using an Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB disk</a>.  Friday I was
4179 told by IBM that the original disk should be thrown away.  And as
4180 there no longer was a problem if I bricked the firmware, I decided
4181 today to try to install Intel firmware to replace the Lenovo firmware
4182 currently on the disk.</p>
4183
4184 <p>I searched the Intel site for firmware, and found
4185 <a href="https://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&ProdId=3472&DwnldID=18363&ProductFamily=Solid-State+Drives+and+Caching&ProductLine=Intel%c2%ae+High+Performance+Solid-State+Drive&ProductProduct=Intel%c2%ae+SSD+520+Series+(180GB%2c+2.5in+SATA+6Gb%2fs%2c+25nm%2c+MLC)&lang=eng">issdfut_2.0.4.iso</a>
4186 (aka Intel SATA Solid-State Drive Firmware Update Tool) which
4187 according to the site should contain the latest firmware for SSD
4188 disks.  I inserted the broken disk in one of my spare laptops and
4189 booted the ISO from a USB stick.  The disk was recognized, but the
4190 program claimed the newest firmware already were installed and refused
4191 to insert any Intel firmware.  So no change, and the disk is still
4192 unable to handle write load. :( I guess the only way to get them
4193 working would be if Lenovo releases new firmware.  No idea how likely
4194 that is.  Anyway, just blogging about this test for completeness.  I
4195 got a working Samsung disk, and see no point in spending more time on
4196 the broken disks.</p>
4197
4198       </div>
4199       <div class="tags">
4200
4201
4202         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4203
4204
4205       </div>
4206     </div>
4207     <div class="padding"></div>
4208
4209     <div class="entry">
4210       <div class="title">
4211         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_fix_a_Thinkpad_X230_with_a_broken_180_GB_SSD_disk.html">How to fix a Thinkpad X230 with a broken 180 GB SSD disk</a>
4212       </div>
4213       <div class="date">
4214         17th July 2013
4215       </div>
4216       <div class="body">
4217         <p>Today I switched to
4218 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html">my
4219 new laptop</a>.  I've previously written about the problems I had with
4220 my new Thinkpad X230, which was delivered with an
4221 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Intel_SSD_520_Series_180_GB_with_Lenovo_firmware_still_lock_up_from_sustained_writes.html">180
4222 GB Intel SSD disk with Lenovo firmware</a> that did not handle
4223 sustained writes.  My hardware supplier have been very forthcoming in
4224 trying to find a solution, and after first trying with another
4225 identical 180 GB disks they decided to send me a 256 GB Samsung SSD
4226 disk instead to fix it once and for all.  The Samsung disk survived
4227 the installation of Debian with encrypted disks (filling the disk with
4228 random data during installation killed the first two), and I thus
4229 decided to trust it with my data.  I have installed it as a Debian Edu
4230 Wheezy roaming workstation hooked up with my Debian Edu Squeeze main
4231 server at home using Kerberos and LDAP, and will use it as my work
4232 station from now on.</p>
4233
4234 <p>As this is a solid state disk with no moving parts, I believe the
4235 Debian Wheezy default installation need to be tuned a bit to increase
4236 performance and increase life time of the disk.  The Linux kernel and
4237 user space applications do not yet adjust automatically to such
4238 environment.  To make it easier for my self, I created a draft Debian
4239 package <tt>ssd-setup</tt> to handle this tuning.  The
4240 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/ssd-setup.git">source
4241 for the ssd-setup package</a> is available from collab-maint, and it
4242 is set up to adjust the setup of the machine by just installing the
4243 package.  If there is any non-SSD disk in the machine, the package
4244 will refuse to install, as I did not try to write any logic to sort
4245 file systems in SSD and non-SSD file systems.</p>
4246
4247 <p>I consider the package a draft, as I am a bit unsure how to best
4248 set up Debian Wheezy with an SSD.  It is adjusted to my use case,
4249 where I set up the machine with one large encrypted partition (in
4250 addition to /boot), put LVM on top of this and set up partitions on
4251 top of this again.  See the README file in the package source for the
4252 references I used to pick the settings.  At the moment these
4253 parameters are tuned:</p>
4254
4255 <ul>
4256
4257 <li>Set up cryptsetup to pass TRIM commands to the physical disk
4258     (adding discard to /etc/crypttab)</li>
4259
4260 <li>Set up LVM to pass on TRIM commands to the underlying device (in
4261     this case a cryptsetup partition) by changing issue_discards from
4262     0 to 1 in /etc/lvm/lvm.conf.</li>
4263
4264 <li>Set relatime as a file system option for ext3 and ext4 file
4265     systems.</li>
4266
4267 <li>Tell swap to use TRIM commands by adding 'discard' to
4268     /etc/fstab.</li>
4269
4270 <li>Change I/O scheduler from cfq to deadline using a udev rule.</li>
4271
4272 <li>Run fstrim on every ext3 and ext4 file system every night (from
4273     cron.daily).</li>
4274
4275 <li>Adjust sysctl values vm.swappiness to 1 and vm.vfs_cache_pressure
4276     to 50 to reduce the kernel eagerness to swap out processes.</li>
4277
4278 </ul>
4279
4280 <p>During installation, I cancelled the part where the installer fill
4281 the disk with random data, as this would kill the SSD performance for
4282 little gain.  My goal with the encrypted file system is to ensure
4283 those stealing my laptop end up with a brick and not a working
4284 computer.  I have no hope in keeping the really resourceful people
4285 from getting the data on the disk (see
4286 <a href="http://xkcd.com/538/">XKCD #538</a> for an explanation why).
4287 Thus I concluded that adding the discard option to crypttab is the
4288 right thing to do.</p>
4289
4290 <p>I considered using the noop I/O scheduler, as several recommended
4291 it for SSD, but others recommended deadline and a benchmark I found
4292 indicated that deadline might be better for interactive use.</p>
4293
4294 <p>I also considered using the 'discard' file system option for ext3
4295 and ext4, but read that it would give a performance hit ever time a
4296 file is removed, and thought it best to that that slowdown once a day
4297 instead of during my work.</p>
4298
4299 <p>My package do not set up tmpfs on /var/run, /var/lock and /tmp, as
4300 this is already done by Debian Edu.</p>
4301
4302 <p>I have not yet started on the user space tuning.  I expect
4303 iceweasel need some tuning, and perhaps other applications too, but
4304 have not yet had time to investigate those parts.</p>
4305
4306 <p>The package should work on Ubuntu too, but I have not yet tested it
4307 there.</p>
4308
4309 <p>As for the answer to the question in the title of this blog post,
4310 as far as I know, the only solution I know about is to replace the
4311 disk.  It might be possible to flash it with Intel firmware instead of
4312 the Lenovo firmware.  But I have not tried and did not want to do so
4313 without approval from Lenovo as I wanted to keep the warranty on the
4314 disk until a solution was found and they wanted the broken disks
4315 back.</p>
4316
4317       </div>
4318       <div class="tags">
4319
4320
4321         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4322
4323
4324       </div>
4325     </div>
4326     <div class="padding"></div>
4327
4328     <div class="entry">
4329       <div class="title">
4330         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Intel_SSD_520_Series_180_GB_with_Lenovo_firmware_still_lock_up_from_sustained_writes.html">Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB with Lenovo firmware still lock up from sustained writes</a>
4331       </div>
4332       <div class="date">
4333         10th July 2013
4334       </div>
4335       <div class="body">
4336         <p>A few days ago, I wrote about
4337 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html">the
4338 problems I experienced with my new X230 and its SSD disk</a>, which
4339 was dying during installation because it is unable to cope with
4340 sustained write.  My supplier is in contact with
4341 <a href="http://www.lenovo.com/">Lenovo</a>, and they wanted to send a
4342 replacement disk to try to fix the problem.  They decided to send an
4343 identical model, so my hopes for a permanent fix was slim.</p>
4344
4345 <p>Anyway, today I got the replacement disk and tried to install
4346 Debian Edu Wheezy with encrypted disk on it.  The new disk have the
4347 same firmware version as the original.  This time my hope raised
4348 slightly as the installation progressed, as the original disk used to
4349 die after 4-7% of the disk was written to, while this time it kept
4350 going past 10%, 20%, 40% and even past 50%.  But around 60%, the disk
4351 died again and I was back on square one.  I still do not have a new
4352 laptop with a disk I can trust.  I can not live with a disk that might
4353 lock up when I download a new
4354 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> ISO or
4355 other large files.  I look forward to hearing from my supplier with
4356 the next proposal from Lenovo.</p>
4357
4358 <p>The original disk is marked Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB,
4359 11S0C38722Z1ZNME35X1TR, ISN: CVCV321407HB180EGN, SA: G57560302, FW:
4360 LF1i, 29MAY2013, PBA: G39779-300, LBA 351,651,888, LI P/N: 0C38722,
4361 Pb-free 2LI, LC P/N: 16-200366, WWN: 55CD2E40002756C4, Model:
4362 SSDSC2BW180A3L 2.5" 6Gb/s SATA SSD 180G 5V 1A, ASM P/N 0C38732, FRU
4363 P/N 45N8295, P0C38732.</p>
4364
4365 <p>The replacement disk is marked Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB,
4366 11S0C38722Z1ZNDE34N0L0, ISN: CVCV315306RK180EGN, SA: G57560-302, FW:
4367 LF1i, 22APR2013, PBA: G39779-300, LBA 351,651,888, LI P/N: 0C38722,
4368 Pb-free 2LI, LC P/N: 16-200366, WWN: 55CD2E40000AB69E, Model:
4369 SSDSC2BW180A3L 2.5" 6Gb/s SATA SSD 180G 5V 1A, ASM P/N 0C38732, FRU
4370 P/N 45N8295, P0C38732.</p>
4371
4372 <p>The only difference is in the first number (serial number?), ISN,
4373 SA, date and WNPP values.  Mentioning all the details here in case
4374 someone is able to use the information to find a way to identify the
4375 failing disk among working ones (if any such working disk actually
4376 exist).</p>
4377
4378       </div>
4379       <div class="tags">
4380
4381
4382         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4383
4384
4385       </div>
4386     </div>
4387     <div class="padding"></div>
4388
4389     <div class="entry">
4390       <div class="title">
4391         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/July_13th__Debian_Ubuntu_BSP_and_Skolelinux_Debian_Edu_developer_gathering_in_Oslo.html">July 13th: Debian/Ubuntu BSP and Skolelinux/Debian Edu developer gathering in Oslo</a>
4392       </div>
4393       <div class="date">
4394          9th July 2013
4395       </div>
4396       <div class="body">
4397         <p>The upcoming Saturday, 2013-07-13, we are organising a combined
4398 Debian Edu developer gathering and Debian and Ubuntu bug squashing
4399 party in Oslo.  It is organised by <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the
4400 member assosiation NUUG</a> and
4401 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">the Debian Edu / Skolelinux
4402 project</a> together with <a href="http://bitraf.no/">the hack space
4403 Bitraf</a>.</p>
4404
4405 <p>It starts 10:00 and continue until late evening.  Everyone is
4406 welcome, and there is no fee to participate.  There is on the other
4407 hand limited space, and only room for 30 people.  Please put your name
4408 on <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/BSP/2013/07/13/no/Oslo">the event
4409 wiki page</a> if you plan to join us.</p>
4410
4411       </div>
4412       <div class="tags">
4413
4414
4415         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
4416
4417
4418       </div>
4419     </div>
4420     <div class="padding"></div>
4421
4422     <div class="entry">
4423       <div class="title">
4424         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html">The Thinkpad is dead, long live the Thinkpad X230?</a>
4425       </div>
4426       <div class="date">
4427          5th July 2013
4428       </div>
4429       <div class="body">
4430         <p>Half a year ago, I reported that I had to find a
4431 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html">replacement
4432 for my trusty old Thinkpad X41</a>.  Unfortunately I did not have much
4433 time to spend on it, and it took a while to find a model I believe
4434 will do the job, but two days ago the replacement finally arrived.  I
4435 ended up picking a
4436 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/lenovo_thinkpad_x230">Thinkpad X230</a>
4437 with SSD disk (NZDAJMN).  I first test installed Debian Edu Wheezy as
4438 a roaming workstation, and it seemed to work flawlessly.  But my
4439 second installation with encrypted disk was not as successful.  More
4440 on that below.</p>
4441
4442 <p>I had a hard time trying to track down a good laptop, as my most
4443 important requirements (robust and with a good keyboard) are never
4444 listed in the feature list.  But I did get good help from the search
4445 feature at <a href="http://www.prisjakt.no/">Prisjakt</a>, which
4446 allowed me to limit the list of interesting laptops based on my other
4447 requirements.  A bit surprising that SSD disk are not disks according
4448 to that search interface, so I had to drop specifying the number of
4449 disks from my search parameters.  I also asked around among friends to
4450 get their impression on keyboards and robustness.</p>
4451
4452 <p>So the new laptop arrived, and it is quite a lot wider than the
4453 X41.  I am not quite convinced about the keyboard, as it is
4454 significantly wider than my old keyboard, and I have to stretch my
4455 hand a lot more to reach the edges.  But the key response is fairly
4456 good and the individual key shape is fairly easy to handle, so I hope
4457 I will get used to it.  My old X40 was starting to fail, and I really
4458 needed a new laptop now. :)</p>
4459
4460 <p>Turning off the touch pad was simple.  All it took was a quick
4461 visit to the BIOS during boot it disable it.</p>
4462
4463 <p>But there is a fatal problem with the laptop.  The 180 GB SSD disk
4464 lock up during load.  And this happen when installing Debian Wheezy
4465 with encrypted disk, while the disk is being filled with random data.
4466 I also tested to install Ubuntu Raring, and it happen there too if I
4467 reenable the code to fill the disk with random data (it is disabled by
4468 default in Ubuntu).  And the bug with is already known.  It was
4469 reported to Debian as <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/691427">BTS
4470 report #691427 2012-10-25</a> (journal commit I/O error on brand-new
4471 Thinkpad T430s ext4 on lvm on SSD).  It is also reported to the Linux
4472 kernel developers as
4473 <a href="https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=51861">Kernel bugzilla
4474 report #51861 2012-12-20</a> (Intel SSD 520 stops working under load
4475 (SSDSC2BW180A3L in Lenovo ThinkPad T430s)). It is also reported on the
4476 Lenovo forums, both for
4477 <a href="http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T400-T500-and-newer-T-series/T430s-Intel-SSD-520-180GB-issue/m-p/1070549">T430
4478 2012-11-10</a> and for
4479 <a href="http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/X-Series-ThinkPad-Laptops/x230-SATA-errors-with-180GB-Intel-520-SSD-under-heavy-write-load/m-p/1068147">X230
4480 03-20-2013</a>.  The problem do not only affect installation.  The
4481 reports state that the disk lock up during use if many writes are done
4482 on the disk, so it is much no use to work around the installation
4483 problem and end up with a computer that can lock up at any moment.
4484 There is even a
4485 <a href="https://git.efficios.com/?p=test-ssd.git">small C program
4486 available</a> that will lock up the hard drive after running a few
4487 minutes by writing to a file.</p>
4488
4489 <p>I've contacted my supplier and asked how to handle this, and after
4490 contacting PCHELP Norway (request 01D1FDP) which handle support
4491 requests for Lenovo, his first suggestion was to upgrade the disk
4492 firmware.  Unfortunately there is no newer firmware available from
4493 Lenovo, as my disk already have the most recent one (version LF1i).  I
4494 hope to hear more from him today and hope the problem can be
4495 fixed. :)</p>
4496
4497       </div>
4498       <div class="tags">
4499
4500
4501         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4502
4503
4504       </div>
4505     </div>
4506     <div class="padding"></div>
4507
4508     <div class="entry">
4509       <div class="title">
4510         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230.html">The Thinkpad is dead, long live the Thinkpad X230</a>
4511       </div>
4512       <div class="date">
4513          4th July 2013
4514       </div>
4515       <div class="body">
4516         <p>Half a year ago, I reported that I had to find a replacement for my
4517 trusty old Thinkpad X41.  Unfortunately I did not have much time to
4518 spend on it, but today the replacement finally arrived.  I ended up
4519 picking a <a href="http://www.linlap.com/lenovo_thinkpad_x230">Thinkpad
4520 X230</a> with SSD disk (NZDAJMN).  I first test installed Debian Edu
4521 Wheezy as a roaming workstation, and it worked flawlessly.  As I write
4522 this, it is installing what I hope will be a more final installation,
4523 with a encrypted hard drive to ensure any dope head stealing it end up
4524 with an expencive door stop.</p>
4525
4526 <p>I had a hard time trying to track down a good laptop, as my most
4527 important requirements (robust and with a good keyboard) are never
4528 listed in the feature list.  But I did get good help from the search
4529 feature at <ahref="http://www.prisjakt.no/">Prisjakt</a>, which
4530 allowed me to limit the list of interesting laptops based on my other
4531 requirements.  A bit surprising that SSD disk are not disks, so I had
4532 to drop number of disks from my search parameters.</p>
4533
4534 <p>I am not quite convinced about the keyboard, as it is significantly
4535 wider than my old keyboard, and I have to stretch my hand a lot more
4536 to reach the edges.  But the key response is fairly good and the
4537 individual key shape is fairly easy to handle, so I hope I will get
4538 used to it.  My old X40 was starting to fail, and I really needed a
4539 new laptop now. :)</p>
4540
4541 <p>I look forward to figuring out how to turn off the touch pad.</p>
4542
4543       </div>
4544       <div class="tags">
4545
4546
4547         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4548
4549
4550       </div>
4551     </div>
4552     <div class="padding"></div>
4553
4554     <div class="entry">
4555       <div class="title">
4556         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatically_locate_and_install_required_firmware_packages_on_Debian__Isenkram_0_4_.html">Automatically locate and install required firmware packages on Debian (Isenkram 0.4)</a>
4557       </div>
4558       <div class="date">
4559         25th June 2013
4560       </div>
4561       <div class="body">
4562         <p>It annoys me when the computer fail to do automatically what it is
4563 perfectly capable of, and I have to do it manually to get things
4564 working.  One such task is to find out what firmware packages are
4565 needed to get the hardware on my computer working.  Most often this
4566 affect the wifi card, but some times it even affect the RAID
4567 controller or the ethernet card.  Today I pushed version 0.4 of the
4568 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">Isenkram package</a>
4569 including a new script isenkram-autoinstall-firmware handling the
4570 process of asking all the loaded kernel modules what firmware files
4571 they want, find debian packages providing these files and install the
4572 debian packages.  Here is a test run on my laptop:</p>
4573
4574 <p><pre>
4575 # isenkram-autoinstall-firmware
4576 info: kernel drivers requested extra firmware: ipw2200-bss.fw ipw2200-ibss.fw ipw2200-sniffer.fw
4577 info: fetching http://http.debian.net/debian/dists/squeeze/Contents-i386.gz
4578 info: locating packages with the requested firmware files
4579 info: Updating APT sources after adding non-free APT source
4580 info: trying to install firmware-ipw2x00
4581 firmware-ipw2x00
4582 firmware-ipw2x00
4583 Preconfiguring packages ...
4584 Selecting previously deselected package firmware-ipw2x00.
4585 (Reading database ... 259727 files and directories currently installed.)
4586 Unpacking firmware-ipw2x00 (from .../firmware-ipw2x00_0.28+squeeze1_all.deb) ...
4587 Setting up firmware-ipw2x00 (0.28+squeeze1) ...
4588 #
4589 </pre></p>
4590
4591 <p>When all the requested firmware is present, a simple message is
4592 printed instead:</p>
4593
4594 <p><pre>
4595 # isenkram-autoinstall-firmware
4596 info: did not find any firmware files requested by loaded kernel modules.  exiting
4597 #
4598 </pre></p>
4599
4600 <p>It could use some polish, but it is already working well and saving
4601 me some time when setting up new machines. :)</p>
4602
4603 <p>So, how does it work?  It look at the set of currently loaded
4604 kernel modules, and look up each one of them using modinfo, to find
4605 the firmware files listed in the module meta-information.  Next, it
4606 download the Contents file from a nearby APT mirror, and search for
4607 the firmware files in this file to locate the package with the
4608 requested firmware file.  If the package is in the non-free section, a
4609 non-free APT source is added and the package is installed using
4610 <tt>apt-get install</tt>.  The end result is a slightly better working
4611 machine.</p>
4612
4613 <p>I hope someone find time to implement a more polished version of
4614 this script as part of the hw-detect debian-installer module, to
4615 finally fix <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/655507">BTS report
4616 #655507</a>.  There really is no need to insert USB sticks with
4617 firmware during a PXE install when the packages already are available
4618 from the nearby Debian mirror.</p>
4619
4620       </div>
4621       <div class="tags">
4622
4623
4624         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
4625
4626
4627       </div>
4628     </div>
4629     <div class="padding"></div>
4630
4631     <div class="entry">
4632       <div class="title">
4633         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Fixing_the_Linux_black_screen_of_death_on_machines_with_Intel_HD_video.html">Fixing the Linux black screen of death on machines with Intel HD video</a>
4634       </div>
4635       <div class="date">
4636         11th June 2013
4637       </div>
4638       <div class="body">
4639         <p>When installing RedHat, Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu on some machines,
4640 the screen just turn black when Linux boot, either during installation
4641 or on first boot from the hard disk.  I've seen it once in a while the
4642 last few years, but only recently understood the cause.  I've seen it
4643 on HP laptops, and on my latest acquaintance the Packard Bell laptop.
4644 The reason seem to be in the wiring of some laptops.  The system to
4645 control the screen background light is inverted, so when Linux try to
4646 turn the brightness fully on, it end up turning it off instead.  I do
4647 not know which Linux drivers are affected, but this post is about the
4648 i915 driver used by the
4649 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Packard Bell
4650 EasyNote LV</a>, Thinkpad X40 and many other laptops.</p>
4651
4652 <p>The problem can be worked around two ways.  Either by adding
4653 i915.invert_brightness=1 as a kernel option, or by adding a file in
4654 /etc/modprobe.d/ to tell modprobe to add the invert_brightness=1
4655 option when it load the i915 kernel module.  On Debian and Ubuntu, it
4656 can be done by running these commands as root:</p>
4657
4658 <pre>
4659 echo options i915 invert_brightness=1 | tee /etc/modprobe.d/i915.conf
4660 update-initramfs -u -k all
4661 </pre>
4662
4663 <p>Since March 2012 there is
4664 <a href="http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=4dca20efb1a9c2efefc28ad2867e5d6c3f5e1955">a
4665 mechanism in the Linux kernel</a> to tell the i915 driver which
4666 hardware have this problem, and get the driver to invert the
4667 brightness setting automatically.  To use it, one need to add a row in
4668 <a href="http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_display.c">the
4669 intel_quirks array</a> in the driver source
4670 <tt>drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_display.c</tt> (look for "<tt>static
4671 struct intel_quirk intel_quirks</tt>"), specifying the PCI device
4672 number (vendor number 8086 is assumed) and subdevice vendor and device
4673 number.</p>
4674
4675 <p>My Packard Bell EasyNote LV got this output from <tt>lspci
4676 -vvnn</tt> for the video card in question:</p>
4677
4678 <p><pre>
4679 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation \
4680     3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller [8086:0156] \
4681     (rev 09) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
4682  Subsystem: Acer Incorporated [ALI] Device [1025:0688]
4683  Control: I/O+ Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- \
4684     ParErr- Stepping- SE RR- FastB2B- DisINTx+
4685  Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort- \
4686     <TAbort- <MAbort->SERR- <PERR- INTx-
4687  Latency: 0
4688  Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 42
4689  Region 0: Memory at c2000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4M]
4690  Region 2: Memory at b0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
4691  Region 4: I/O ports at 4000 [size=64]
4692  Expansion ROM at <unassigned> [disabled]
4693  Capabilities: <access denied>
4694  Kernel driver in use: i915
4695 </pre></p>
4696
4697 <p>The resulting intel_quirks entry would then look like this:</p>
4698
4699 <p><pre>
4700 struct intel_quirk intel_quirks[] = {
4701        ...
4702         /* Packard Bell EasyNote LV11HC needs invert brightness quirk */
4703         { 0x0156, 0x1025, 0x0688, quirk_invert_brightness },
4704        ...
4705 }
4706 </pre></p>
4707
4708 <p>According to the kernel module instructions (as seen using
4709 <tt>modinfo i915</tt>), information about hardware needing the
4710 invert_brightness flag should be sent to the
4711 <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/dri-devel">dri-devel
4712 (at) lists.freedesktop.org</a> mailing list to reach the kernel
4713 developers.  But my email about the laptop sent 2013-06-03 have not
4714 yet shown up in
4715 <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2013-June/thread.html">the
4716 web archive for the mailing list</a>, so I suspect they do not accept
4717 emails from non-subscribers.  Because of this, I sent my patch also to
4718 the Debian bug tracking system instead as
4719 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/710938">BTS report #710938</a>, to make
4720 sure the patch is not lost.</p>
4721
4722 <p>Unfortunately, it is not enough to fix the kernel to get Laptops
4723 with this problem working properly with Linux.  If you use Gnome, your
4724 worries should be over at this point.  But if you use KDE, there is
4725 something in KDE ignoring the invert_brightness setting and turning on
4726 the screen during login.  I've reported it to Debian as
4727 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/711237">BTS report #711237</a>, and
4728 have no idea yet how to figure out exactly what subsystem is doing
4729 this.  Perhaps you can help?  Perhaps you know what the Gnome
4730 developers did to handle this, and this can give a clue to the KDE
4731 developers?  Or you know where in KDE the screen brightness is changed
4732 during login?  If so, please update the BTS report (or get in touch if
4733 you do not know how to update BTS).</p>
4734
4735 <p>Update 2013-07-19: The correct fix for this machine seem to be
4736 acpi_backlight=vendor, to disable ACPI backlight support completely,
4737 as the ACPI information on the machine is trash and it is better to
4738 leave it to the intel video driver to control the screen
4739 backlight.</p>
4740
4741       </div>
4742       <div class="tags">
4743
4744
4745         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4746
4747
4748       </div>
4749     </div>
4750     <div class="padding"></div>
4751
4752     <div class="entry">
4753       <div class="title">
4754         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_install_Linux_on_a_Packard_Bell_Easynote_LV_preinstalled_with_Windows_8.html">How to install Linux on a Packard Bell Easynote LV preinstalled with Windows 8</a>
4755       </div>
4756       <div class="date">
4757         27th May 2013
4758       </div>
4759       <div class="body">
4760         <p>Two days ago, I asked
4761 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_can_I_install_Linux_on_a_Packard_Bell_Easynote_LV_preinstalled_with_Windows_8_.html">how
4762 I could install Linux on a Packard Bell EasyNote LV computer
4763 preinstalled with Windows 8</a>.  I found a solution, but am horrified
4764 with the obstacles put in the way of Linux users on a laptop with UEFI
4765 and Windows 8.</p>
4766
4767 <p>I never found out if the cause of my problems were the use of UEFI
4768 secure booting or fast boot.  I suspect fast boot was the problem,
4769 causing the firmware to boot directly from HD without considering any
4770 key presses and alternative devices, but do not know UEFI settings
4771 enough to tell.</p>
4772
4773 <p>There is no way to install Linux on the machine in question without
4774 opening the box and disconnecting the hard drive!  This is as far as I
4775 can tell, the only way to get access to the firmware setup menu
4776 without accepting the Windows 8 license agreement.  I am told (and
4777 found description on how to) that it is possible to configure the
4778 firmware setup once booted into Windows 8.  But as I believe the terms
4779 of that agreement are completely unacceptable, accepting the license
4780 was never an alternative.  I do not enter agreements I do not intend
4781 to follow.</p>
4782
4783 <p>I feared I had to return the laptops and ask for a refund, and
4784 waste many hours on this, but luckily there was a way to get it to
4785 work.  But I would not recommend it to anyone planning to run Linux on
4786 it, and I have become sceptical to Windows 8 certified laptops.  Is
4787 this the way Linux will be forced out of the market place, by making
4788 it close to impossible for "normal" users to install Linux without
4789 accepting the Microsoft Windows license terms?  Or at least not
4790 without risking to loose the warranty?</p>
4791
4792 <p>I've updated the
4793 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Linux Laptop
4794 wiki page for Packard Bell EasyNote LV</a>, to ensure the next person
4795 do not have to struggle as much as I did to get Linux into the
4796 machine.</p>
4797
4798 <p>Thanks to Bob Rosbag, Florian Weimer, Philipp Kern, Ben Hutching,
4799 Michael Tokarev and others for feedback and ideas.</p>
4800
4801       </div>
4802       <div class="tags">
4803
4804
4805         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4806
4807
4808       </div>
4809     </div>
4810     <div class="padding"></div>
4811
4812     <div class="entry">
4813       <div class="title">
4814         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_can_I_install_Linux_on_a_Packard_Bell_Easynote_LV_preinstalled_with_Windows_8_.html">How can I install Linux on a Packard Bell Easynote LV preinstalled with Windows 8?</a>
4815       </div>
4816       <div class="date">
4817         25th May 2013
4818       </div>
4819       <div class="body">
4820         <p>I've run into quite a problem the last few days.  I bought three
4821 new laptops for my parents and a few others.  I bought Packard Bell
4822 Easynote LV to run Kubuntu on and use as their home computer.  But I
4823 am completely unable to figure out how to install Linux on it.  The
4824 computer is preinstalled with Windows 8, and I suspect it uses UEFI
4825 instead of a BIOS to boot.</p>
4826
4827 <p>The problem is that I am unable to get it to PXE boot, and unable
4828 to get it to boot the Linux installer from my USB stick.  I have yet
4829 to try the DVD install, and still hope it will work.  when I turn on
4830 the computer, there is no information on what buttons to press to get
4831 the normal boot menu.  I expect to get some boot menu to select PXE or
4832 USB stick booting.  When booting, it first ask for the language to
4833 use, then for some regional settings, and finally if I will accept the
4834 Windows 8 terms of use.  As these terms are completely unacceptable to
4835 me, I have no other choice but to turn off the computer and try again
4836 to get it to boot the Linux installer.</p>
4837
4838 <p>I have gathered my findings so far on a Linlap page about the
4839 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Packard Bell
4840 EasyNote LV</a> model.  If you have any idea how to get Linux
4841 installed on this machine, please get in touch or update that wiki
4842 page.  If I can't find a way to install Linux, I will have to return
4843 the laptop to the seller and find another machine for my parents.</p>
4844
4845 <p>I wonder, is this the way Linux will be forced out of the market
4846 using UEFI and "secure boot" by making it impossible to install Linux
4847 on new Laptops?</p>
4848
4849       </div>
4850       <div class="tags">
4851
4852
4853         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4854
4855
4856       </div>
4857     </div>
4858     <div class="padding"></div>
4859
4860     <div class="entry">
4861       <div class="title">
4862         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_transform_a_Debian_based_system_to_a_Debian_Edu_installation.html">How to transform a Debian based system to a Debian Edu installation</a>
4863       </div>
4864       <div class="date">
4865         17th May 2013
4866       </div>
4867       <div class="body">
4868         <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> is
4869 an operating system based on Debian intended for use in schools.  It
4870 contain a turn-key solution for the computer network provided to
4871 pupils in the primary schools.  It provide both the central server,
4872 network boot servers and desktop environments with heaps of
4873 educational software.  The project was founded almost 12 years ago,
4874 2001-07-02.  If you want to support the project, which is in need for
4875 cash to fund developer gatherings and other project related activity,
4876 <a href="http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">please
4877 donate some money</a>.
4878
4879 <p>A topic that come up again and again on the Debian Edu mailing
4880 lists and elsewhere, is the question on how to transform a Debian or
4881 Ubuntu installation into a Debian Edu installation.  It isn't very
4882 hard, and last week I wrote a script to replicate the steps done by
4883 the Debian Edu installer.</p>
4884
4885 <p>The script,
4886 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/branches/wheezy/debian-edu-config/share/debian-edu-config/tools/debian-edu-bless?view=markup">debian-edu-bless<a/>
4887 in the debian-edu-config package, will go through these six steps and
4888 transform an existing Debian Wheezy or Ubuntu (untested) installation
4889 into a Debian Edu Workstation:</p>
4890
4891 <ol>
4892
4893 <li>Add skolelinux related APT sources.</li>
4894 <li>Create /etc/debian-edu/config with the wanted configuration.</li>
4895 <li>Install debian-edu-install to load preseeding values and pull in
4896     our configuration.</li>
4897 <li>Preseed debconf database with profile setup in
4898     /etc/debian-edu/config, and run tasksel to install packages
4899     according to the profile specified in the config above,
4900     overriding some of the Debian automation machinery.</li>
4901 <li>Run debian-edu-cfengine-D installation to configure everything
4902     that could not be done using preseeding.</li>
4903 <li>Ask for a reboot to enable all the configuration changes.</li>
4904
4905 </ol>
4906
4907 <p>There are some steps in the Debian Edu installation that can not be
4908 replicated like this.  Disk partitioning and LVM setup, for example.
4909 So this script just assume there is enough disk space to install all
4910 the needed packages.</p>
4911
4912 <p>The script was created to help a Debian Edu student working on
4913 setting up <a href="http://www.raspberrypi.org">Raspberry Pi</a> as a
4914 Debian Edu client, and using it he can take the existing
4915 <a href="http://www.raspbian.org/FrontPage‎">Raspbian</a> installation and
4916 transform it into a fully functioning Debian Edu Workstation (or
4917 Roaming Workstation, or whatever :).</p>
4918
4919 <p>The default setting in the script is to create a KDE Workstation.
4920 If a LXDE based Roaming workstation is wanted instead, modify the
4921 PROFILE and DESKTOP values at the top to look like this instead:</p>
4922
4923 <p><pre>
4924 PROFILE="Roaming-Workstation"
4925 DESKTOP="lxde"
4926 </pre></p>
4927
4928 <p>The script could even become useful to set up Debian Edu servers in
4929 the cloud, by starting with a virtual Debian installation at some
4930 virtual hosting service and setting up all the services on first
4931 boot.</p>
4932
4933       </div>
4934       <div class="tags">
4935
4936
4937         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4938
4939
4940       </div>
4941     </div>
4942     <div class="padding"></div>
4943
4944     <div class="entry">
4945       <div class="title">
4946         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian__the_Linux_distribution_of_choice_for_LEGO_designers_.html">Debian, the Linux distribution of choice for LEGO designers?</a>
4947       </div>
4948       <div class="date">
4949         11th May 2013
4950       </div>
4951       <div class="body">
4952         <P>In January,
4953 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_IRC_channel_for_LEGO_designers_using_Debian.html">I
4954 announced a</a> new <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">IRC
4955 channel #debian-lego</a>, for those of us in the Debian and Linux
4956 community interested in <a href="http://www.lego.com/">LEGO</a>, the
4957 marvellous construction system from Denmark.  We also created
4958 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">a wiki page</a> to have
4959 a place to take notes and write down our plans and hopes.  And several
4960 people showed up to help.  I was very happy to see the effect of my
4961 call.  Since the small start, we have a debtags tag
4962 <a href="http://debtags.debian.net/search/bytag?wl=hardware::hobby:lego">hardware::hobby:lego</a>
4963 tag for LEGO related packages, and now count 10 packages related to
4964 LEGO and <a href="http://mindstorms.lego.com/">Mindstorms</a>:</p>
4965
4966 <p><table>
4967 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/brickos">brickos</a></td><td>alternative OS for LEGO Mindstorms RCX. Supports development in C/C++</td></tr>
4968 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/leocad">leocad</a></td><td>virtual brick CAD software</td></tr>
4969 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/libnxt">libnxt</a></td><td>utility library for talking to the LEGO Mindstorms NX</td></tr>
4970 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/lnpd">lnpd</a></td><td>daemon for LNP communication with BrickOS</td></tr>
4971 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/nbc">nbc</a></td><td>compiler for LEGO Mindstorms NXT bricks</td></tr>
4972 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/nqc">nqc</a></td><td>Not Quite C compiler for LEGO Mindstorms RCX</td></tr>
4973 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/python-nxt">python-nxt</a></td><td>python driver/interface/wrapper for the Lego Mindstorms NXT robot</td></tr>
4974 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/python-nxt-filer">python-nxt-filer</a></td><td>simple GUI to manage files on a LEGO Mindstorms NXT</td></tr>
4975 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/scratch">scratch</a></td><td>easy to use programming environment for ages 8 and up</td></tr>
4976 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/t2n">t2n</a></td><td>simple command-line tool for Lego NXT</td></tr>
4977 </table></p>
4978
4979 <p>Some of these are available in Wheezy, and all but one are
4980 currently available in Jessie/testing.  leocad is so far only
4981 available in experimental.</p>
4982
4983 <p>If you care about LEGO in Debian, please join us on IRC and help
4984 adding the rest of the great free software tools available on Linux
4985 for LEGO designers.</p>
4986
4987       </div>
4988       <div class="tags">
4989
4990
4991         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
4992
4993
4994       </div>
4995     </div>
4996     <div class="padding"></div>
4997
4998     <div class="entry">
4999       <div class="title">
5000         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Wheezy_is_out___and_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_should_soon_follow___newinwheezy.html">Debian Wheezy is out - and Debian Edu / Skolelinux should soon follow! #newinwheezy</a>
5001       </div>
5002       <div class="date">
5003          5th May 2013
5004       </div>
5005       <div class="body">
5006         <p>When I woke up this morning, I was very happy to see that the
5007 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2013/20130504">release announcement
5008 for Debian Wheezy</a> was waiting in my mail box.  This is a great
5009 Debian release, and I expect to move my machines at home over to it fairly
5010 soon.</p>
5011
5012 <p>The new debian release contain heaps of new stuff, and one program
5013 in particular make me very happy to see included.  The
5014 <a href="http://scratch.mit.edu/">Scratch</a> program, made famous by
5015 the <a href="http://www.code.org/">Teach kids code</a> movement, is
5016 included for the first time.  Alongside similar programs like
5017 <a href="http://edu.kde.org/kturtle/">kturtle</a> and
5018 <a href="http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Turtle_Art">turtleart</a>,
5019 it allow for visual programming where syntax errors can not happen,
5020 and a friendly programming environment for learning to control the
5021 computer.  Scratch will also be included in the next release of Debian
5022 Edu.</a>
5023
5024 <p>And now that Wheezy is wrapped up, we can wrap up the next Debian
5025 Edu/Skolelinux release too.  The
5026 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/2013/04/msg00132.html">first
5027 alpha release</a> went out last week, and the next should soon
5028 follow.<p>
5029
5030       </div>
5031       <div class="tags">
5032
5033
5034         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5035
5036
5037       </div>
5038     </div>
5039     <div class="padding"></div>
5040
5041     <div class="entry">
5042       <div class="title">
5043         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Isenkram_0_2_finally_in_the_Debian_archive.html">Isenkram 0.2 finally in the Debian archive</a>
5044       </div>
5045       <div class="date">
5046          3rd April 2013
5047       </div>
5048       <div class="body">
5049         <p>Today the <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">Isenkram
5050 package</a> finally made it into the archive, after lingering in NEW
5051 for many months.  I uploaded it to the Debian experimental suite
5052 2013-01-27, and today it was accepted into the archive.</p>
5053
5054 <p>Isenkram is a system for suggesting to users what packages to
5055 install to work with a pluggable hardware device.  The suggestion pop
5056 up when the device is plugged in.  For example if a Lego Mindstorm NXT
5057 is inserted, it will suggest to install the program needed to program
5058 the NXT controller.  Give it a go, and report bugs and suggestions to
5059 BTS. :)</p>
5060
5061       </div>
5062       <div class="tags">
5063
5064
5065         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
5066
5067
5068       </div>
5069     </div>
5070     <div class="padding"></div>
5071
5072     <div class="entry">
5073       <div class="title">
5074         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Bitcoin_GUI_now_available_from_Debian_unstable__and_Ubuntu_raring_.html">Bitcoin GUI now available from Debian/unstable (and Ubuntu/raring)</a>
5075       </div>
5076       <div class="date">
5077          2nd February 2013
5078       </div>
5079       <div class="body">
5080         <p>My
5081 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_backport_bitcoin_qt_version_0_7_2_2_to_Debian_Squeeze.html">last
5082 bitcoin related blog post</a> mentioned that the new
5083 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">bitcoin package</a> for
5084 Debian was waiting in NEW.  It was accepted by the Debian ftp-masters
5085 2013-01-19, and have been available in unstable since then.  It was
5086 automatically copied to Ubuntu, and is available in their Raring
5087 version too.</p>
5088
5089 <p>But there is a strange problem with the build that block this new
5090 version from being available on the i386 and kfreebsd-i386
5091 architectures.  For some strange reason, the autobuilders in Debian
5092 for these architectures fail to run the test suite on these
5093 architectures (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/672524">BTS #672524</a>).
5094 We are so far unable to reproduce it when building it manually, and
5095 no-one have been able to propose a fix.  If you got an idea what is
5096 failing, please let us know via the BTS.</p>
5097
5098 <p>One feature that is annoying me with of the bitcoin client, because
5099 I often run low on disk space, is the fact that the client will exit
5100 if it run short on space (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/696715">BTS
5101 #696715</a>).  So make sure you have enough disk space when you run
5102 it. :)</p>
5103
5104 <p>As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
5105 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
5106 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
5107
5108       </div>
5109       <div class="tags">
5110
5111
5112         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5113
5114
5115       </div>
5116     </div>
5117     <div class="padding"></div>
5118
5119     <div class="entry">
5120       <div class="title">
5121         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html">Welcome to the world, Isenkram!</a>
5122       </div>
5123       <div class="date">
5124         22nd January 2013
5125       </div>
5126       <div class="body">
5127         <p>Yesterday, I
5128 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_prototype_ready_making_hardware_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">asked
5129 for testers</a> for my prototype for making Debian better at handling
5130 pluggable hardware devices, which I
5131 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">set
5132 out to create</a> earlier this month.  Several valuable testers showed
5133 up, and caused me to really want to to open up the development to more
5134 people.  But before I did this, I want to come up with a sensible name
5135 for this project.  Today I finally decided on a new name, and I have
5136 renamed the project from hw-support-handler to this new name.  In the
5137 process, I moved the source to git and made it available as a
5138 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/isenkram.git">collab-maint</a>
5139 repository in Debian.  The new name?  It is <strong>Isenkram</strong>.
5140 To fetch and build the latest version of the source, use</p>
5141
5142 <pre>
5143 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/collab-maint/isenkram.git
5144 cd isenkram && git-buildpackage -us -uc
5145 </pre>
5146
5147 <p>I have not yet adjusted all files to use the new name yet.  If you
5148 want to hack on the source or improve the package, please go ahead.
5149 But please talk to me first on IRC or via email before you do major
5150 changes, to make sure we do not step on each others toes. :)</p>
5151
5152 <p>If you wonder what 'isenkram' is, it is a Norwegian word for iron
5153 stuff, typically meaning tools, nails, screws, etc.  Typical hardware
5154 stuff, in other words.  I've been told it is the Norwegian variant of
5155 the German word eisenkram, for those that are familiar with that
5156 word.</p>
5157
5158 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-26</strong>: Added -us -us to build
5159 instructions, to avoid confusing people with an error from the signing
5160 process.</p>
5161
5162 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-27</strong>: Switch to HTTP URL for the git
5163 clone argument to avoid the need for authentication.</p>
5164
5165       </div>
5166       <div class="tags">
5167
5168
5169         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
5170
5171
5172       </div>
5173     </div>
5174     <div class="padding"></div>
5175
5176     <div class="entry">
5177       <div class="title">
5178         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_prototype_ready_making_hardware_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">First prototype ready making hardware easier to use in Debian</a>
5179       </div>
5180       <div class="date">
5181         21st January 2013
5182       </div>
5183       <div class="body">
5184         <p>Early this month I set out to try to
5185 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">improve
5186 the Debian support for pluggable hardware devices</a>.  Now my
5187 prototype is working, and it is ready for a larger audience.  To test
5188 it, fetch the
5189 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">source
5190 from the Debian Edu subversion repository</a>, build and install the
5191 package.  You might have to log out and in again activate the
5192 autostart script.</p>
5193
5194 <p>The design is simple:</p>
5195
5196 <ul>
5197
5198 <li>Add desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ causing a program
5199 hw-support-handlerd to start when the user log in.</li>
5200
5201 <li>This program listen for kernel events about new hardware (directly
5202 from the kernel like udev does), not using HAL dbus events as I
5203 initially did.</li>
5204
5205 <li>When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware modalias in
5206 the APT database, a database
5207 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=markup">available
5208 via HTTP</a> and a database available as part of the package.</li>
5209
5210 <li>If a package is mapped to the hardware in question, the package
5211 isn't installed yet and this is the first time the hardware was
5212 plugged in, show a desktop notification suggesting to install the
5213 package or packages.</li>
5214
5215 <li>If the user click on the 'install package now' button, ask
5216 aptdaemon via the PackageKit API to install the requrired package.</li>
5217
5218 <li>aptdaemon ask for root password or sudo password, and install the
5219 package while showing progress information in a window.</li>
5220
5221 </ul>
5222
5223 <p>I still need to come up with a better name for the system.  Here
5224 are some screen shots showing the prototype in action.  First the
5225 notification, then the password request, and finally the request to
5226 approve all the dependencies.  Sorry for the Norwegian Bokmål GUI.</p>
5227
5228 <p><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-1-notification.png">
5229 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-2-password.png">
5230 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-3-dependencies.png">
5231 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-4-installing.png">
5232 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-5-installing-details.png" width="70%"></p>
5233
5234 <p>The prototype still need to be improved with longer timeouts, but
5235 is already useful.  The database of hardware to package mappings also
5236 need more work.  It is currently compatible with the Ubuntu way of
5237 storing such information in the package control file, but could be
5238 changed to use other formats instead or in addition to the current
5239 method.  I've dropped the use of discover for this mapping, as the
5240 modalias approach is more flexible and easier to use on Linux as long
5241 as the Linux kernel expose its modalias strings directly.</p>
5242
5243 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-21 16:50</strong>: Due to popular demand,
5244 here is the command required to check out and build the source: Use
5245 '<tt>svn checkout
5246 svn://svn.debian.org/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/; cd
5247 hw-support-handler; debuild</tt>'.  If you lack debuild, install the
5248 devscripts package.</p>
5249
5250 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-23 12:00</strong>: The project is now
5251 renamed to Isenkram and the source moved from the Debian Edu
5252 subversion repository to a Debian collab-maint git repository.  See
5253 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html">build
5254 instructions</a> for details.</p>
5255
5256       </div>
5257       <div class="tags">
5258
5259
5260         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
5261
5262
5263       </div>
5264     </div>
5265     <div class="padding"></div>
5266
5267     <div class="entry">
5268       <div class="title">
5269         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html">Thank you Thinkpad X41, for your long and trustworthy service</a>
5270       </div>
5271       <div class="date">
5272         19th January 2013
5273       </div>
5274       <div class="body">
5275         <p>This Christmas my trusty old laptop died.  It died quietly and
5276 suddenly in bed.  With a quiet whimper, it went completely quiet and
5277 black.  The power button was no longer able to turn it on.  It was a
5278 IBM Thinkpad X41, and the best laptop I ever had.  Better than both
5279 Thinkpads X30, X31, X40, X60, X61 and X61S.  Far better than the
5280 Compaq I had before that.  Now I need to find a replacement.  To keep
5281 going during Christmas, I moved the one year old SSD disk to my old
5282 X40 where it fitted (only one I had left that could use it), but it is
5283 not a durable solution.
5284
5285 <p>My laptop needs are fairly modest.  This is my wishlist from when I
5286 got a new one more than 10 years ago.  It still holds true.:)</p>
5287
5288 <ul>
5289
5290 <li>Lightweight (around 1 kg) and small volume (preferably smaller
5291   than A4).</li>
5292 <li>Robust, it will be in my backpack every day.</li>
5293 <li>Three button mouse and a mouse pin instead of touch pad.</li>
5294 <li>Long battery life time.  Preferable a week.</li>
5295 <li>Internal WIFI network card.</li>
5296 <li>Internal Twisted Pair network card.</li>
5297 <li>Some USB slots (2-3 is plenty)</li>
5298 <li>Good keyboard - similar to the Thinkpad.</li>
5299 <li>Video resolution at least 1024x768, with size around 12" (A4 paper
5300 size).</li>
5301 <li>Hardware supported by Debian Stable, ie the default kernel and
5302   X.org packages.</li>
5303 <li>Quiet, preferably fan free (or at least not using the fan most of
5304   the time).
5305
5306 </ul>
5307
5308 <p>You will notice that there are no RAM and CPU requirements in the
5309 list.  The reason is simply that the specifications on laptops the
5310 last 10-15 years have been sufficient for my needs, and I have to look
5311 at other features to choose my laptop.  But are there still made as
5312 robust laptops as my X41?  The Thinkpad X60/X61 proved to be less
5313 robust, and Thinkpads seem to be heading in the wrong direction since
5314 Lenovo took over.  But I've been told that X220 and X1 Carbon might
5315 still be useful.</p>
5316
5317 <p>Perhaps I should rethink my needs, and look for a pad with an
5318 external keyboard?  I'll have to check the
5319 <a href="http://www.linux-laptop.net/">Linux Laptops site</a> for
5320 well-supported laptops, or perhaps just buy one preinstalled from one
5321 of the vendors listed on the <a href="http://linuxpreloaded.com/">Linux
5322 Pre-loaded site</a>.</p>
5323
5324       </div>
5325       <div class="tags">
5326
5327
5328         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5329
5330
5331       </div>
5332     </div>
5333     <div class="padding"></div>
5334
5335     <div class="entry">
5336       <div class="title">
5337         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_find_a_browser_plugin_supporting_a_given_MIME_type.html">How to find a browser plugin supporting a given MIME type</a>
5338       </div>
5339       <div class="date">
5340         18th January 2013
5341       </div>
5342       <div class="body">
5343         <p>Some times I try to figure out which Iceweasel browser plugin to
5344 install to get support for a given MIME type.  Thanks to
5345 <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MozillaTeam/Plugins">specifications
5346 done by Ubuntu</a> and Mozilla, it is possible to do this in Debian.
5347 Unfortunately, not very many packages provide the needed meta
5348 information, Anyway, here is a small script to look up all browser
5349 plugin packages announcing ther MIME support using this specification:</p>
5350
5351 <pre>
5352 #!/usr/bin/python
5353 import sys
5354 import apt
5355 def pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
5356     cache = apt.Cache()
5357     cache.open(None)
5358     thepkgs = []
5359     for pkg in cache:
5360         version = pkg.candidate
5361         if version is None:
5362             version = pkg.installed
5363         if version is None:
5364             continue
5365         record = version.record
5366         if not record.has_key('Npp-MimeType'):
5367             continue
5368         mime_types = record['Npp-MimeType'].split(',')
5369         for t in mime_types:
5370             t = t.rstrip().strip()
5371             if t == mimetype:
5372                 thepkgs.append(pkg.name)
5373     return thepkgs
5374 mimetype = "audio/ogg"
5375 if 1 < len(sys.argv):
5376     mimetype = sys.argv[1]
5377 print "Browser plugin packages supporting %s:" % mimetype
5378 for pkg in pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
5379     print "  %s" %pkg
5380 </pre>
5381
5382 <p>It can be used like this to look up a given MIME type:</p>
5383
5384 <pre>
5385 % ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype
5386 Browser plugin packages supporting audio/ogg:
5387   gecko-mediaplayer
5388 % ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype application/x-shockwave-flash
5389 Browser plugin packages supporting application/x-shockwave-flash:
5390   browser-plugin-gnash
5391 %
5392 </pre>
5393
5394 <p>In Ubuntu this mechanism is combined with support in the browser
5395 itself to query for plugins and propose to install the needed
5396 packages.  It would be great if Debian supported such feature too.  Is
5397 anyone working on adding it?</p>
5398
5399 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-18 14:20</strong>: The Debian BTS
5400 request for icweasel support for this feature is
5401 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/484010">#484010</a> from 2008 (and
5402 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/698426">#698426</a> from today).  Lack
5403 of manpower and wish for a different design is the reason thus feature
5404 is not yet in iceweasel from Debian.</p>
5405
5406       </div>
5407       <div class="tags">
5408
5409
5410         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5411
5412
5413       </div>
5414     </div>
5415     <div class="padding"></div>
5416
5417     <div class="entry">
5418       <div class="title">
5419         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_most_supported_MIME_type_in_Debian_.html">What is the most supported MIME type in Debian?</a>
5420       </div>
5421       <div class="date">
5422         16th January 2013
5423       </div>
5424       <div class="body">
5425         <p>The <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/AppStreamDebianProposal">DEP-11
5426 proposal to add AppStream information to the Debian archive</a>, is a
5427 proposal to make it possible for a Desktop application to propose to
5428 the user some package to install to gain support for a given MIME
5429 type, font, library etc. that is currently missing.  With such
5430 mechanism in place, it would be possible for the desktop to
5431 automatically propose and install leocad if some LDraw file is
5432 downloaded by the browser.</p>
5433
5434 <p>To get some idea about the current content of the archive, I decided
5435 to write a simple program to extract all .desktop files from the
5436 Debian archive and look up the claimed MIME support there.  The result
5437 can be found on the
5438 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/pub/AppStreamTest">Skolelinux FTP
5439 site</a>.  Using the collected information, it become possible to
5440 answer the question in the title.  Here are the 20 most supported MIME
5441 types in Debian stable (Squeeze), testing (Wheezy) and unstable (Sid).
5442 The complete list is available from the link above.</p>
5443
5444 <p><strong>Debian Stable:</strong></p>
5445
5446 <pre>
5447   count MIME type
5448   ----- -----------------------
5449      32 text/plain
5450      30 audio/mpeg
5451      29 image/png
5452      28 image/jpeg
5453      27 application/ogg
5454      26 audio/x-mp3
5455      25 image/tiff
5456      25 image/gif
5457      22 image/bmp
5458      22 audio/x-wav
5459      20 audio/x-flac
5460      19 audio/x-mpegurl
5461      18 video/x-ms-asf
5462      18 audio/x-musepack
5463      18 audio/x-mpeg
5464      18 application/x-ogg
5465      17 video/mpeg
5466      17 audio/x-scpls
5467      17 audio/ogg
5468      16 video/x-ms-wmv
5469 </pre>
5470
5471 <p><strong>Debian Testing:</strong></p>
5472
5473 <pre>
5474   count MIME type
5475   ----- -----------------------
5476      33 text/plain
5477      32 image/png
5478      32 image/jpeg
5479      29 audio/mpeg
5480      27 image/gif
5481      26 image/tiff
5482      26 application/ogg
5483      25 audio/x-mp3
5484      22 image/bmp
5485      21 audio/x-wav
5486      19 audio/x-mpegurl
5487      19 audio/x-mpeg
5488      18 video/mpeg
5489      18 audio/x-scpls
5490      18 audio/x-flac
5491      18 application/x-ogg
5492      17 video/x-ms-asf
5493      17 text/html
5494      17 audio/x-musepack
5495      16 image/x-xbitmap
5496 </pre>
5497
5498 <p><strong>Debian Unstable:</strong></p>
5499
5500 <pre>
5501   count MIME type
5502   ----- -----------------------
5503      31 text/plain
5504      31 image/png
5505      31 image/jpeg
5506      29 audio/mpeg
5507      28 application/ogg
5508      27 image/gif
5509      26 image/tiff
5510      26 audio/x-mp3
5511      23 audio/x-wav
5512      22 image/bmp
5513      21 audio/x-flac
5514      20 audio/x-mpegurl
5515      19 audio/x-mpeg
5516      18 video/x-ms-asf
5517      18 video/mpeg
5518      18 audio/x-scpls
5519      18 application/x-ogg
5520      17 audio/x-musepack
5521      16 video/x-ms-wmv
5522      16 video/x-msvideo
5523 </pre>
5524
5525 <p>I am told that PackageKit can provide an API to access the kind of
5526 information mentioned in DEP-11.  I have not yet had time to look at
5527 it, but hope the PackageKit people in Debian are on top of these
5528 issues.</p>
5529
5530 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-16 13:35</strong>: Updated numbers after
5531 discovering a typo in my script.</p>
5532
5533       </div>
5534       <div class="tags">
5535
5536
5537         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5538
5539
5540       </div>
5541     </div>
5542     <div class="padding"></div>
5543
5544     <div class="entry">
5545       <div class="title">
5546         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_modalias_info_to_find_packages_handling_my_hardware.html">Using modalias info to find packages handling my hardware</a>
5547       </div>
5548       <div class="date">
5549         15th January 2013
5550       </div>
5551       <div class="body">
5552         <p>Yesterday, I wrote about the
5553 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Modalias_strings___a_practical_way_to_map__stuff__to_hardware.html">modalias
5554 values provided by the Linux kernel</a> following my hope for
5555 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">better
5556 dongle support in Debian</a>.  Using this knowledge, I have tested how
5557 modalias values attached to package names can be used to map packages
5558 to hardware.  This allow the system to look up and suggest relevant
5559 packages when I plug in some new hardware into my machine, and replace
5560 discover and discover-data as the database used to map hardware to
5561 packages.</p>
5562
5563 <p>I create a modaliases file with entries like the following,
5564 containing package name, kernel module name (if relevant, otherwise
5565 the package name) and globs matching the relevant hardware
5566 modalias.</p>
5567
5568 <p><blockquote>
5569 Package: package-name
5570 <br>Modaliases: module(modaliasglob, modaliasglob, modaliasglob)</p>
5571 </blockquote></p>
5572
5573 <p>It is fairly trivial to write code to find the relevant packages
5574 for a given modalias value using this file.</p>
5575
5576 <p>An entry like this would suggest the video and picture application
5577 cheese for many USB web cameras (interface bus class 0E01):</p>
5578
5579 <p><blockquote>
5580 Package: cheese
5581 <br>Modaliases: cheese(usb:v*p*d*dc*dsc*dp*ic0Eisc01ip*)</p>
5582 </blockquote></p>
5583
5584 <p>An entry like this would suggest the pcmciautils package when a
5585 CardBus bridge (bus class 0607) PCI device is present:</p>
5586
5587 <p><blockquote>
5588 Package: pcmciautils
5589 <br>Modaliases: pcmciautils(pci:v*d*sv*sd*bc06sc07i*)
5590 </blockquote></p>
5591
5592 <p>An entry like this would suggest the package colorhug-client when
5593 plugging in a ColorHug with USB IDs 04D8:F8DA:</p>
5594
5595 <p><blockquote>
5596 Package: colorhug-client
5597 <br>Modaliases: colorhug-client(usb:v04D8pF8DAd*)</p>
5598 </blockquote></p>
5599
5600 <p>I believe the format is compatible with the format of the Packages
5601 file in the Debian archive.  Ubuntu already uses their Packages file
5602 to store their mappings from packages to hardware.</p>
5603
5604 <p>By adding a XB-Modaliases: header in debian/control, any .deb can
5605 announce the hardware it support in a way my prototype understand.
5606 This allow those publishing packages in an APT source outside the
5607 Debian archive as well as those backporting packages to make sure the
5608 hardware mapping are included in the package meta information.  I've
5609 tested such header in the pymissile package, and its modalias mapping
5610 is working as it should with my prototype.  It even made it to Ubuntu
5611 Raring.</p>
5612
5613 <p>To test if it was possible to look up supported hardware using only
5614 the shell tools available in the Debian installer, I wrote a shell
5615 implementation of the lookup code.  The idea is to create files for
5616 each modalias and let the shell do the matching.  Please check out and
5617 try the
5618 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/hw-support-lookup?view=co">hw-support-lookup</a>
5619 shell script.  It run without any extra dependencies and fetch the
5620 hardware mappings from the Debian archive and the subversion
5621 repository where I currently work on my prototype.</p>
5622
5623 <p>When I use it on a machine with a yubikey inserted, it suggest to
5624 install yubikey-personalization:</p>
5625
5626 <p><blockquote>
5627 % ./hw-support-lookup
5628 <br>yubikey-personalization
5629 <br>%
5630 </blockquote></p>
5631
5632 <p>When I run it on my Thinkpad X40 with a PCMCIA/CardBus slot, it
5633 propose to install the pcmciautils package:</p>
5634
5635 <p><blockquote>
5636 % ./hw-support-lookup
5637 <br>pcmciautils
5638 <br>%
5639 </blockquote></p>
5640
5641 <p>If you know of any hardware-package mapping that should be added to
5642 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=co">my
5643 database</a>, please tell me about it.</p>
5644
5645 <p>It could be possible to generate several of the mappings between
5646 packages and hardware.  One source would be to look at packages with
5647 kernel modules, ie packages with *.ko files in /lib/modules/, and
5648 extract their modalias information.  Another would be to look at
5649 packages with udev rules, ie packages with files in
5650 /lib/udev/rules.d/, and extract their vendor/model information to
5651 generate a modalias matching rule.  I have not tested any of these to
5652 see if it work.</p>
5653
5654 <p>If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
5655 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
5656 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
5657 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-devel">#debian-devel</a>.</p>
5658
5659       </div>
5660       <div class="tags">
5661
5662
5663         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
5664
5665
5666       </div>
5667     </div>
5668     <div class="padding"></div>
5669
5670     <div class="entry">
5671       <div class="title">
5672         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Modalias_strings___a_practical_way_to_map__stuff__to_hardware.html">Modalias strings - a practical way to map "stuff" to hardware</a>
5673       </div>
5674       <div class="date">
5675         14th January 2013
5676       </div>
5677       <div class="body">
5678         <p>While looking into how to look up Debian packages based on hardware
5679 information, to find the packages that support a given piece of
5680 hardware, I refreshed my memory regarding modalias values, and decided
5681 to document the details.  Here are my findings so far, also available
5682 in
5683 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">the
5684 Debian Edu subversion repository</a>:
5685
5686 <p><strong>Modalias decoded</strong></p>
5687
5688 <p>This document try to explain what the different types of modalias
5689 values stands for.  It is in part based on information from
5690 &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias">https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias</a> &gt;,
5691 &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;,
5692 &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
5693 &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;.
5694
5695 <p>The modalias entries for a given Linux machine can be found using
5696 this shell script:</p>
5697
5698 <pre>
5699 find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -0 cat | sort -u
5700 </pre>
5701
5702 <p>The supported modalias globs for a given kernel module can be found
5703 using modinfo:</p>
5704
5705 <pre>
5706 % /sbin/modinfo psmouse | grep alias:
5707 alias:          serio:ty05pr*id*ex*
5708 alias:          serio:ty01pr*id*ex*
5709 %
5710 </pre>
5711
5712 <p><strong>PCI subtype</strong></p>
5713
5714 <p>A typical PCI entry can look like this.  This is an Intel Host
5715 Bridge memory controller:</p>
5716
5717 <p><blockquote>
5718 pci:v00008086d00002770sv00001028sd000001ADbc06sc00i00
5719 </blockquote></p>
5720
5721 <p>This represent these values:</p>
5722
5723 <pre>
5724  v   00008086  (vendor)
5725  d   00002770  (device)
5726  sv  00001028  (subvendor)
5727  sd  000001AD  (subdevice)
5728  bc  06        (bus class)
5729  sc  00        (bus subclass)
5730  i   00        (interface)
5731 </pre>
5732
5733 <p>The vendor/device values are the same values outputted from 'lspci
5734 -n' as 8086:2770.  The bus class/subclass is also shown by lspci as
5735 0600.  The 0600 class is a host bridge.  Other useful bus values are
5736 0300 (VGA compatible card) and 0200 (Ethernet controller).</p>
5737
5738 <p>Not sure how to figure out the interface value, nor what it
5739 means.</p>
5740
5741 <p><strong>USB subtype</strong></p>
5742
5743 <p>Some typical USB entries can look like this.  This is an internal
5744 USB hub in a laptop:</p>
5745
5746 <p><blockquote>
5747 usb:v1D6Bp0001d0206dc09dsc00dp00ic09isc00ip00
5748 </blockquote></p>
5749
5750 <p>Here is the values included in this alias:</p>
5751
5752 <pre>
5753  v    1D6B  (device vendor)
5754  p    0001  (device product)
5755  d    0206  (bcddevice)
5756  dc     09  (device class)
5757  dsc    00  (device subclass)
5758  dp     00  (device protocol)
5759  ic     09  (interface class)
5760  isc    00  (interface subclass)
5761  ip     00  (interface protocol)
5762 </pre>
5763
5764 <p>The 0900 device class/subclass means hub.  Some times the relevant
5765 class is in the interface class section.  For a simple USB web camera,
5766 these alias entries show up:</p>
5767
5768 <p><blockquote>
5769 usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc01ip00
5770 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc02ip00
5771 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc01ip00
5772 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc02ip00
5773 </blockquote></p>
5774
5775 <p>Interface class 0E01 is video control, 0E02 is video streaming (aka
5776 camera), 0101 is audio control device and 0102 is audio streaming (aka
5777 microphone).  Thus this is a camera with microphone included.</p>
5778
5779 <p><strong>ACPI subtype</strong></p>
5780
5781 <p>The ACPI type is used for several non-PCI/USB stuff.  This is an IR
5782 receiver in a Thinkpad X40:</p>
5783
5784 <p><blockquote>
5785 acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
5786 </blockquote></p>
5787
5788 <p>The values between the colons are IDs.</p>
5789
5790 <p><strong>DMI subtype</strong></p>
5791
5792 <p>The DMI table contain lots of information about the computer case
5793 and model.  This is an entry for a IBM Thinkpad X40, fetched from
5794 /sys/devices/virtual/dmi/id/modalias:</p>
5795
5796 <p><blockquote>
5797 dmi:bvnIBM:bvr1UETB6WW(1.66):bd06/15/2005:svnIBM:pn2371H4G:pvrThinkPadX40:rvnIBM:rn2371H4G:rvrNotAvailable:cvnIBM:ct10:cvrNotAvailable:
5798 </blockquote></p>
5799
5800 <p>The values present are</p>
5801
5802 <pre>
5803  bvn  IBM            (BIOS vendor)
5804  bvr  1UETB6WW(1.66) (BIOS version)
5805  bd   06/15/2005     (BIOS date)
5806  svn  IBM            (system vendor)
5807  pn   2371H4G        (product name)
5808  pvr  ThinkPadX40    (product version)
5809  rvn  IBM            (board vendor)
5810  rn   2371H4G        (board name)
5811  rvr  NotAvailable   (board version)
5812  cvn  IBM            (chassis vendor)
5813  ct   10             (chassis type)
5814  cvr  NotAvailable   (chassis version)
5815 </pre>
5816
5817 <p>The chassis type 10 is Notebook.  Other interesting values can be
5818 found in the dmidecode source:</p>
5819
5820 <pre>
5821   3 Desktop
5822   4 Low Profile Desktop
5823   5 Pizza Box
5824   6 Mini Tower
5825   7 Tower
5826   8 Portable
5827   9 Laptop
5828  10 Notebook
5829  11 Hand Held
5830  12 Docking Station
5831  13 All In One
5832  14 Sub Notebook
5833  15 Space-saving
5834  16 Lunch Box
5835  17 Main Server Chassis
5836  18 Expansion Chassis
5837  19 Sub Chassis
5838  20 Bus Expansion Chassis
5839  21 Peripheral Chassis
5840  22 RAID Chassis
5841  23 Rack Mount Chassis
5842  24 Sealed-case PC
5843  25 Multi-system
5844  26 CompactPCI
5845  27 AdvancedTCA
5846  28 Blade
5847  29 Blade Enclosing
5848 </pre>
5849
5850 <p>The chassis type values are not always accurately set in the DMI
5851 table.  For example my home server is a tower, but the DMI modalias
5852 claim it is a desktop.</p>
5853
5854 <p><strong>SerIO subtype</strong></p>
5855
5856 <p>This type is used for PS/2 mouse plugs.  One example is from my
5857 test machine:</p>
5858
5859 <p><blockquote>
5860 serio:ty01pr00id00ex00
5861 </blockquote></p>
5862
5863 <p>The values present are</p>
5864
5865 <pre>
5866   ty  01  (type)
5867   pr  00  (prototype)
5868   id  00  (id)
5869   ex  00  (extra)
5870 </pre>
5871
5872 <p>This type is supported by the psmouse driver.  I am not sure what
5873 the valid values are.</p>
5874
5875 <p><strong>Other subtypes</strong></p>
5876
5877 <p>There are heaps of other modalias subtypes according to
5878 file2alias.c.  There is the rest of the list from that source: amba,
5879 ap, bcma, ccw, css, eisa, hid, i2c, ieee1394, input, ipack, isapnp,
5880 mdio, of, parisc, pcmcia, platform, scsi, sdio, spi, ssb, vio, virtio,
5881 vmbus, x86cpu and zorro.  I did not spend time documenting all of
5882 these, as they do not seem relevant for my intended use with mapping
5883 hardware to packages when new stuff is inserted during run time.</p>
5884
5885 <p><strong>Looking up kernel modules using modalias values</strong></p>
5886
5887 <p>To check which kernel modules provide support for a given modalias,
5888 one can use the following shell script:</p>
5889
5890 <pre>
5891   for id in $(find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -0 cat | sort -u); do \
5892     echo "$id" ; \
5893     /sbin/modprobe --show-depends "$id"|sed 's/^/  /' ; \
5894   done
5895 </pre>
5896
5897 <p>The output can look like this (only the first few entries as the
5898 list is very long on my test machine):</p>
5899
5900 <pre>
5901   acpi:ACPI0003:
5902     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/acpi/ac.ko
5903   acpi:device:
5904   FATAL: Module acpi:device: not found.
5905   acpi:IBM0068:
5906     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/char/nvram.ko
5907     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/leds/led-class.ko
5908     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/net/rfkill/rfkill.ko
5909     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/platform/x86/thinkpad_acpi.ko
5910   acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
5911     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/lib/crc-ccitt.ko
5912     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/net/irda/irda.ko
5913     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/net/irda/nsc-ircc.ko
5914   [...]
5915 </pre>
5916
5917 <p>If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
5918 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
5919 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
5920 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-devel">#debian-devel</a>.</p>
5921
5922 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-15:</strong> Rewrite "cat $(find ...)" to
5923 "find ... -print0 | xargs -0 cat" to make sure it handle directories
5924 in /sys/ with space in them.</p>
5925
5926       </div>
5927       <div class="tags">
5928
5929
5930         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
5931
5932
5933       </div>
5934     </div>
5935     <div class="padding"></div>
5936
5937     <div class="entry">
5938       <div class="title">
5939         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Moved_the_pymissile_Debian_packaging_to_collab_maint.html">Moved the pymissile Debian packaging to collab-maint</a>
5940       </div>
5941       <div class="date">
5942         10th January 2013
5943       </div>
5944       <div class="body">
5945         <p>As part of my investigation on how to improve the support in Debian
5946 for hardware dongles, I dug up my old Mark and Spencer USB Rocket
5947 Launcher and updated the Debian package
5948 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pymissile">pymissile</a> to make
5949 sure udev will fix the device permissions when it is plugged in.  I
5950 also added a "Modaliases" header to test it in the Debian archive and
5951 hopefully make the package be proposed by jockey in Ubuntu when a user
5952 plug in his rocket launcher.  In the process I moved the source to a
5953 git repository under collab-maint, to make it easier for any DD to
5954 contribute.  <a href="http://code.google.com/p/pymissile/">Upstream</a>
5955 is not very active, but the software still work for me even after five
5956 years of relative silence.  The new git repository is not listed in
5957 the uploaded package yet, because I want to test the other changes a
5958 bit more before I upload the new version.  If you want to check out
5959 the new version with a .desktop file included, visit the
5960 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/pymissile.git">gitweb
5961 view</a> or use "<tt>git clone
5962 git://anonscm.debian.org/collab-maint/pymissile.git</tt>".</p>
5963
5964       </div>
5965       <div class="tags">
5966
5967
5968         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
5969
5970
5971       </div>
5972     </div>
5973     <div class="padding"></div>
5974
5975     <div class="entry">
5976       <div class="title">
5977         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">Lets make hardware dongles easier to use in Debian</a>
5978       </div>
5979       <div class="date">
5980          9th January 2013
5981       </div>
5982       <div class="body">
5983         <p>One thing that annoys me with Debian and Linux distributions in
5984 general, is that there is a great package management system with the
5985 ability to automatically install software packages by downloading them
5986 from the distribution mirrors, but no way to get it to automatically
5987 install the packages I need to use the hardware I plug into my
5988 machine.  Even if the package to use it is easily available from the
5989 Linux distribution.  When I plug in a LEGO Mindstorms NXT, it could
5990 suggest to automatically install the python-nxt, nbc and t2n packages
5991 I need to talk to it.  When I plug in a Yubikey, it could propose the
5992 yubikey-personalization package.  The information required to do this
5993 is available, but no-one have pulled all the pieces together.</p>
5994
5995 <p>Some years ago, I proposed to
5996 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg01206.html">use
5997 the discover subsystem to implement this</a>.  The idea is fairly
5998 simple:
5999
6000 <ul>
6001
6002 <li>Add a desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ pointing to a program
6003   starting when a user log in.</li>
6004
6005 <li>Set this program up to listen for kernel events emitted when new
6006   hardware is inserted into the computer.</li>
6007
6008 <li>When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware ID in a
6009   database mapping to packages, and take note of any non-installed
6010   packages.</li>
6011
6012 <li>Show a message to the user proposing to install the discovered
6013   package, and make it easy to install it.</li>
6014
6015 </ul>
6016
6017 <p>I am not sure what the best way to implement this is, but my
6018 initial idea was to use dbus events to discover new hardware, the
6019 discover database to find packages and
6020 <a href="http://www.packagekit.org/">PackageKit</a> to install
6021 packages.</p>
6022
6023 <p>Yesterday, I found time to try to implement this idea, and the
6024 draft package is now checked into
6025 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">the
6026 Debian Edu subversion repository</a>.  In the process, I updated the
6027 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover-data.html">discover-data</a>
6028 package to map the USB ids of LEGO Mindstorms and Yubikey devices to
6029 the relevant packages in Debian, and uploaded a new version
6030 2.2013.01.09 to unstable.  I also discovered that the current
6031 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover.html">discover</a>
6032 package in Debian no longer discovered any USB devices, because
6033 /proc/bus/usb/devices is no longer present.  I ported it to use
6034 libusb as a fall back option to get it working.  The fixed package
6035 version 2.1.2-6 is now in experimental (didn't upload it to unstable
6036 because of the freeze).</p>
6037
6038 <p>With this prototype in place, I can insert my Yubikey, and get this
6039 desktop notification to show up (only once, the first time it is
6040 inserted):</p>
6041
6042 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-09-hw-autoinstall.png"></p>
6043
6044 <p>For this prototype to be really useful, some way to automatically
6045 install the proposed packages by pressing the "Please install
6046 program(s)" button should to be implemented.</p>
6047
6048 <p>If this idea seem useful to you, and you want to help make it
6049 happen, please help me update the discover-data database with mappings
6050 from hardware to Debian packages.  Check if 'discover-pkginstall -l'
6051 list the package you would like to have installed when a given
6052 hardware device is inserted into your computer, and report bugs using
6053 reportbug if it isn't.  Or, if you know of a better way to provide
6054 such mapping, please let me know.</p>
6055
6056 <p>This prototype need more work, and there are several questions that
6057 should be considered before it is ready for production use.  Is dbus
6058 the correct way to detect new hardware?  At the moment I look for HAL
6059 dbus events on the system bus, because that is the events I could see
6060 on my Debian Squeeze KDE desktop.  Are there better events to use?
6061 How should the user be notified?  Is the desktop notification
6062 mechanism the best option, or should the background daemon raise a
6063 popup instead?  How should packages be installed?  When should they
6064 not be installed?</p>
6065
6066 <p>If you want to help getting such feature implemented in Debian,
6067 please send me an email. :)</p>
6068
6069       </div>
6070       <div class="tags">
6071
6072
6073         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
6074
6075
6076       </div>
6077     </div>
6078     <div class="padding"></div>
6079
6080     <div class="entry">
6081       <div class="title">
6082         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_IRC_channel_for_LEGO_designers_using_Debian.html">New IRC channel for LEGO designers using Debian</a>
6083       </div>
6084       <div class="date">
6085          2nd January 2013
6086       </div>
6087       <div class="body">
6088         <p>During Christmas, I have worked a bit on the Debian support for
6089 <a href="http://mindstorms.lego.com/en-us/Default.aspx">LEGO Mindstorm
6090 NXT</a>.  My son and I have played a bit with my NXT set, and I
6091 discovered I had to build all the tools myself because none were
6092 already in Debian Squeeze.  If Debian support for LEGO is something
6093 you care about, please join me on the IRC channel
6094 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">#debian-lego</a> (server
6095 irc.debian.org).  There is a lot that could be done to improve the
6096 Debian support for LEGO designers.  For example both CAD software
6097 and Mindstorm compilers are missing. :)</p>
6098
6099 <p>Update 2012-01-03: A
6100 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">project page</a>
6101 including links to Lego related packages is now available.</p>
6102
6103       </div>
6104       <div class="tags">
6105
6106
6107         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
6108
6109
6110       </div>
6111     </div>
6112     <div class="padding"></div>
6113
6114     <div class="entry">
6115       <div class="title">
6116         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_backport_bitcoin_qt_version_0_7_2_2_to_Debian_Squeeze.html">How to backport bitcoin-qt version 0.7.2-2 to Debian Squeeze</a>
6117       </div>
6118       <div class="date">
6119         25th December 2012
6120       </div>
6121       <div class="body">
6122         <p>Let me start by wishing you all marry Christmas and a happy new
6123 year!  I hope next year will prove to be a good year.</p>
6124
6125 <p><a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">Bitcoin</a>, the digital
6126 decentralised "currency" that allow people to transfer bitcoins
6127 between each other with minimal overhead, is a very interesting
6128 experiment.  And as I wrote a few days ago, the bitcoin situation in
6129 <a href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> is about to improve a bit.
6130 The <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">new debian source
6131 package</a> (version 0.7.2-2) was uploaded yesterday, and is waiting
6132 in <a href="http://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html">the NEW queue</A>
6133 for one of the ftpmasters to approve the new bitcoin-qt package
6134 name.</p>
6135
6136 <p>And thanks to the great work of Jonas and the rest of the bitcoin
6137 team in Debian, you can easily test the package in Debian Squeeze
6138 using the following steps to get a set of working packages:</p>
6139
6140 <blockquote><pre>
6141 git clone git://git.debian.org/git/collab-maint/bitcoin
6142 cd bitcoin
6143 DEB_MAINTAINER_MODE=1 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp fakeroot debian/rules clean
6144 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp git-buildpackage --git-ignore-new
6145 </pre></blockquote>
6146
6147 <p>You might have to install some build dependencies as well.  The
6148 list of commands should give you two packages, bitcoind and
6149 bitcoin-qt, ready for use in a Squeeze environment.  Note that the
6150 client will download the complete set of bitcoin "blocks", which need
6151 around 5.6 GiB of data on my machine at the moment.  Make sure your
6152 ~/.bitcoin/ directory have lots of spare room if you want to download
6153 all the blocks.  The client will warn if the disk is getting full, so
6154 there is not really a problem if you got too little room, but you will
6155 not be able to get all the features out of the client.</p>
6156
6157 <p>As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
6158 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
6159 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
6160
6161       </div>
6162       <div class="tags">
6163
6164
6165         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6166
6167
6168       </div>
6169     </div>
6170     <div class="padding"></div>
6171
6172     <div class="entry">
6173       <div class="title">
6174         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_word_on_bitcoin_support_in_Debian.html">A word on bitcoin support in Debian</a>
6175       </div>
6176       <div class="date">
6177         21st December 2012
6178       </div>
6179       <div class="body">
6180         <p>It has been a while since I wrote about
6181 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">bitcoin</a>, the decentralised
6182 peer-to-peer based crypto-currency, and the reason is simply that I
6183 have been busy elsewhere.  But two days ago, I started looking at the
6184 state of <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">bitcoin in
6185 Debian</a> again to try to recover my old bitcoin wallet.  The package
6186 is now maintained by a
6187 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-bitcoin/">team of
6188 people</a>, and the grunt work had already been done by this team.  We
6189 owe a huge thank you to all these team members. :)
6190 But I was sad to discover that the bitcoin client is missing in
6191 Wheezy.  It is only available in Sid (and an outdated client from
6192 backports).  The client had several RC bugs registered in BTS blocking
6193 it from entering testing.  To try to help the team and improve the
6194 situation, I spent some time providing patches and triaging the bug
6195 reports.  I also had a look at the bitcoin package available from Matt
6196 Corallo in a
6197 <a href="https://launchpad.net/~bitcoin/+archive/bitcoin">PPA for
6198 Ubuntu</a>, and moved the useful pieces from that version into the
6199 Debian package.</p>
6200
6201 <p>After checking with the main package maintainer Jonas Smedegaard on
6202 IRC, I pushed several patches into the collab-maint git repository to
6203 improve the package.  It now contains fixes for the RC issues (not from
6204 me, but fixed by Scott Howard), build rules for a Qt GUI client
6205 package, konqueror support for the bitcoin: URI and bash completion
6206 setup.  As I work on Debian Squeeze, I also created
6207 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-bitcoin-devel/Week-of-Mon-20121217/000041.html">a
6208 patch to backport</a> the latest version.  Jonas is going to look at
6209 it and try to integrate it into the git repository before uploading a
6210 new version to unstable.
6211
6212 <p>I would very much like bitcoin to succeed, to get rid of the
6213 centralized control currently exercised in the monetary system.  I
6214 find it completely unacceptable that the USA government is collecting
6215 transaction data for almost all international money transfers (most are done in USD and transaction logs shipped to the spooks), and
6216 that the major credit card companies can block legal money
6217 transactions to Wikileaks.  But for bitcoin to succeed, more people
6218 need to use bitcoins, and more people need to accept bitcoins when
6219 they sell products and services.  Improving the bitcoin support in
6220 Debian is a small step in the right direction, but not enough.
6221 Unfortunately the user experience when browsing the web and wanting to
6222 pay with bitcoin is still not very good.  The bitcoin: URI is a step
6223 in the right direction, but need to work in most or every browser in
6224 use.  Also the bitcoin-qt client is too heavy to fire up to do a
6225 quick transaction.  I believe there are other clients available, but
6226 have not tested them.</p>
6227
6228 <p>My
6229 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html">experiment
6230 with bitcoins</a> showed that at least some of my readers use bitcoin.
6231 I received 20.15 BTC so far on the address I provided in my blog two
6232 years ago, as can be
6233 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">seen
6234 on the blockexplorer service</a>.  Thank you everyone for your
6235 donation.  The blockexplorer service demonstrates quite well that
6236 bitcoin is not quite anonymous and untracked. :) I wonder if the
6237 number of users have gone up since then.  If you use bitcoin and want
6238 to show your support of my activity, please send Bitcoin donations to
6239 the same address as last time,
6240 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
6241
6242       </div>
6243       <div class="tags">
6244
6245
6246         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6247
6248
6249       </div>
6250     </div>
6251     <div class="padding"></div>
6252
6253     <div class="entry">
6254       <div class="title">
6255         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Git_repository_for_song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">Git repository for song book for Computer Scientists</a>
6256       </div>
6257       <div class="date">
6258          7th September 2012
6259       </div>
6260       <div class="body">
6261         <p>As I
6262 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">mentioned
6263 this summer</a>, I have created a Computer Science song book a few
6264 years ago, and today I finally found time to create a public
6265 <a href="https://gitorious.org/pere-cs-songbook/pere-cs-songbook">Gitorious
6266 repository for the project</a>.</p>
6267
6268 <p>If you want to help out, please clone the source and submit patches
6269 to the HTML version.  To generate the PDF and PostScript version,
6270 please use prince XML, or let me know about a useful free software
6271 processor capable of creating a good looking PDF from the HTML.</p>
6272
6273 <p>Want to sing?  You can still find the song book in HTML, PDF and
6274 PostScript formats at
6275 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/">Petter's Computer
6276 Science Songbook</a>.</p>
6277
6278       </div>
6279       <div class="tags">
6280
6281
6282         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>.
6283
6284
6285       </div>
6286     </div>
6287     <div class="padding"></div>
6288
6289     <div class="entry">
6290       <div class="title">
6291         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gratulerer_med_19__rsdagen__Debian_.html">Gratulerer med 19-årsdagen, Debian!</a>
6292       </div>
6293       <div class="date">
6294         16th August 2012
6295       </div>
6296       <div class="body">
6297         <p>I dag fyller
6298 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120813">Debian-prosjektet 19
6299 år</a>.  Jeg har fulgt det de siste 12 årene, og er veldig glad for å kunne
6300 si gratulerer med dagen, Debian!</p>
6301
6302       </div>
6303       <div class="tags">
6304
6305
6306         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>.
6307
6308
6309       </div>
6310     </div>
6311     <div class="padding"></div>
6312
6313     <div class="entry">
6314       <div class="title">
6315         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">Song book for Computer Scientists</a>
6316       </div>
6317       <div class="date">
6318         24th June 2012
6319       </div>
6320       <div class="body">
6321         <p>Many years ago, while studying Computer Science at the
6322 <a href="http://www.uit.no/">University of Tromsø</a>, I started
6323 collecting computer related songs for use at parties.  The original
6324 version was written in LaTeX, but a few years ago I got help from
6325 Håkon W. Lie, one of the inventors of W3C CSS, to convert it to HTML
6326 while keeping the ability to create a nice book in PDF format.  I have
6327 not had time to maintain the book for a while now, and guess I should
6328 put it up on some public version control repository where others can
6329 help me extend and update the book.  If anyone is volunteering to help
6330 me with this, send me an email.  Also let me know if there are songs
6331 missing in my book.</p>
6332
6333 <p>I have not mentioned the book on my blog so far, and it occured to
6334 me today that I really should let all my readers share the joys of
6335 singing out load about programming, computers and computer networks.
6336 Especially now that <a href="http://debconf12.debconf.org/">Debconf
6337 12</a> is about to start (and I am not going).  Want to sing?  Check
6338 out <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/">Petter's
6339 Computer Science Songbook</a>.
6340
6341       </div>
6342       <div class="tags">
6343
6344
6345         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>.
6346
6347
6348       </div>
6349     </div>
6350     <div class="padding"></div>
6351
6352     <div class="entry">
6353       <div class="title">
6354         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatically_upgrading_server_firmware_on_Dell_PowerEdge.html">Automatically upgrading server firmware on Dell PowerEdge</a>
6355       </div>
6356       <div class="date">
6357         21st November 2011
6358       </div>
6359       <div class="body">
6360         <p>At work we have heaps of servers.  I believe the total count is
6361 around 1000 at the moment.  To be able to get help from the vendors
6362 when something go wrong, we want to keep the firmware on the servers
6363 up to date.  If the firmware isn't the latest and greatest, the
6364 vendors typically refuse to start debugging any problems until the
6365 firmware is upgraded.  So before every reboot, we want to upgrade the
6366 firmware, and we would really like everyone handling servers at the
6367 university to do this themselves when they plan to reboot a machine.
6368 For that to happen we at the unix server admin group need to provide
6369 the tools to do so.</p>
6370
6371 <p>To make firmware upgrading easier, I am working on a script to
6372 fetch and install the latest firmware for the servers we got.  Most of
6373 our hardware are from Dell and HP, so I have focused on these servers
6374 so far.  This blog post is about the Dell part.</P>
6375
6376 <p>On the Dell FTP site I was lucky enough to find
6377 <a href="ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz">an XML file</a>
6378 with firmware information for all 11th generation servers, listing
6379 which firmware should be used on a given model and where on the FTP
6380 site I can find it.  Using a simple perl XML parser I can then
6381 download the shell scripts Dell provides to do firmware upgrades from
6382 within Linux and reboot when all the firmware is primed and ready to
6383 be activated on the first reboot.</p>
6384
6385 <p>This is the Dell related fragment of the perl code I am working on.
6386 Are there anyone working on similar tools for firmware upgrading all
6387 servers at a site?  Please get in touch and lets share resources.</p>
6388
6389 <p><pre>
6390 #!/usr/bin/perl
6391 use strict;
6392 use warnings;
6393 use File::Temp qw(tempdir);
6394 BEGIN {
6395     # Install needed RHEL packages if missing
6396     my %rhelmodules = (
6397         'XML::Simple' => 'perl-XML-Simple',
6398         );
6399     for my $module (keys %rhelmodules) {
6400         eval "use $module;";
6401         if ($@) {
6402             my $pkg = $rhelmodules{$module};
6403             system("yum install -y $pkg");
6404             eval "use $module;";
6405         }
6406     }
6407 }
6408 my $errorsto = 'pere@hungry.com';
6409
6410 upgrade_dell();
6411
6412 exit 0;
6413
6414 sub run_firmware_script {
6415     my ($opts, $script) = @_;
6416     unless ($script) {
6417         print STDERR "fail: missing script name\n";
6418         exit 1
6419     }
6420     print STDERR "Running $script\n\n";
6421
6422     if (0 == system("sh $script $opts")) { # FIXME correct exit code handling
6423         print STDERR "success: firmware script ran succcessfully\n";
6424     } else {
6425         print STDERR "fail: firmware script returned error\n";
6426     }
6427 }
6428
6429 sub run_firmware_scripts {
6430     my ($opts, @dirs) = @_;
6431     # Run firmware packages
6432     for my $dir (@dirs) {
6433         print STDERR "info: Running scripts in $dir\n";
6434         opendir(my $dh, $dir) or die "Unable to open directory $dir: $!";
6435         while (my $s = readdir $dh) {
6436             next if $s =~ m/^\.\.?/;
6437             run_firmware_script($opts, "$dir/$s");
6438         }
6439         closedir $dh;
6440     }
6441 }
6442
6443 sub download {
6444     my $url = shift;
6445     print STDERR "info: Downloading $url\n";
6446     system("wget --quiet \"$url\"");
6447 }
6448
6449 sub upgrade_dell {
6450     my @dirs;
6451     my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
6452     chomp $product;
6453
6454     if ($product =~ m/PowerEdge/) {
6455
6456         # on RHEL, these pacakges are needed by the firwmare upgrade scripts
6457         system('yum install -y compat-libstdc++-33.i686 libstdc++.i686 libxml2.i686 procmail');
6458
6459         my $tmpdir = tempdir(
6460             CLEANUP => 1
6461             );
6462         chdir($tmpdir);
6463         fetch_dell_fw('catalog/Catalog.xml.gz');
6464         system('gunzip Catalog.xml.gz');
6465         my @paths = fetch_dell_fw_list('Catalog.xml');
6466         # -q is quiet, disabling interactivity and reducing console output
6467         my $fwopts = "-q";
6468         if (@paths) {
6469             for my $url (@paths) {
6470                 fetch_dell_fw($url);
6471             }
6472             run_firmware_scripts($fwopts, $tmpdir);
6473         } else {
6474             print STDERR "error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
6475             print STDERR "error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
6476         }
6477         chdir('/');
6478     } else {
6479         print STDERR "error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
6480         print STDERR "error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
6481     }
6482 }
6483
6484 sub fetch_dell_fw {
6485     my $path = shift;
6486     my $url = "ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/$path";
6487     download($url);
6488 }
6489
6490 # Using ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz, figure out which
6491 # firmware packages to download from Dell.  Only work for Linux
6492 # machines and 11th generation Dell servers.
6493 sub fetch_dell_fw_list {
6494     my $filename = shift;
6495
6496     my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
6497     chomp $product;
6498     my ($mybrand, $mymodel) = split(/\s+/, $product);
6499
6500     print STDERR "Finding firmware bundles for $mybrand $mymodel\n";
6501
6502     my $xml = XMLin($filename);
6503     my @paths;
6504     for my $bundle (@{$xml->{SoftwareBundle}}) {
6505         my $brand = $bundle->{TargetSystems}->{Brand}->{Display}->{content};
6506         my $model = $bundle->{TargetSystems}->{Brand}->{Model}->{Display}->{content};
6507         my $oscode;
6508         if ("ARRAY" eq ref $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}) {
6509             $oscode = $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}[0]->{osCode};
6510         } else {
6511             $oscode = $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}->{osCode};
6512         }
6513         if ($mybrand eq $brand && $mymodel eq $model && "LIN" eq $oscode)
6514         {
6515             @paths = map { $_->{path} } @{$bundle->{Contents}->{Package}};
6516         }
6517     }
6518     for my $component (@{$xml->{SoftwareComponent}}) {
6519         my $componenttype = $component->{ComponentType}->{value};
6520
6521         # Drop application packages, only firmware and BIOS
6522         next if 'APAC' eq $componenttype;
6523
6524         my $cpath = $component->{path};
6525         for my $path (@paths) {
6526             if ($cpath =~ m%/$path$%) {
6527                 push(@paths, $cpath);
6528             }
6529         }
6530     }
6531     return @paths;
6532 }
6533 </pre>
6534
6535 <p>The code is only tested on RedHat Enterprise Linux, but I suspect
6536 it could work on other platforms with some tweaking.  Anyone know a
6537 index like Catalog.xml is available from HP for HP servers?  At the
6538 moment I maintain a similar list manually and it is quickly getting
6539 outdated.</p>
6540
6541       </div>
6542       <div class="tags">
6543
6544
6545         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6546
6547
6548       </div>
6549     </div>
6550     <div class="padding"></div>
6551
6552     <div class="entry">
6553       <div class="title">
6554         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_is_booting_into_runlevel_1_different_from_single_user_boots_.html">How is booting into runlevel 1 different from single user boots?</a>
6555       </div>
6556       <div class="date">
6557          4th August 2011
6558       </div>
6559       <div class="body">
6560         <p>Wouter Verhelst have some
6561 <a href="http://grep.be/blog/en/retorts/pere_kubuntu_boot">interesting
6562 comments and opinions</a> on my blog post on
6563 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_should_start_from__etc_rcS_d__in_Debian____almost_nothing.html">the
6564 need to clean up /etc/rcS.d/ in Debian</a> and my blog post about
6565 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_missing_in_the_Debian_desktop__or_why_my_parents_use_Kubuntu.html">the
6566 default KDE desktop in Debian</a>.  I only have time to address one
6567 small piece of his comment now, and though it best to address the
6568 misunderstanding he bring forward:</p>
6569
6570 <p><blockquote>
6571 Currently, a system admin has four options: [...] boot to a
6572 single-user system (by adding 'single' to the kernel command line;
6573 this runs rcS and rc1 scripts)
6574 </blockquote></p>
6575
6576 <p>This make me believe Wouter believe booting into single user mode
6577 and booting into runlevel 1 is the same.  I am not surprised he
6578 believe this, because it would make sense and is a quite sensible
6579 thing to believe.  But because the boot in Debian is slightly broken,
6580 runlevel 1 do not work properly and it isn't the same as single user
6581 mode.  I'll try to explain what is actually happing, but it is a bit
6582 hard to explain.</p>
6583
6584 <p>Single user mode is defined like this in /etc/inittab:
6585 "<tt>~~:S:wait:/sbin/sulogin</tt>".  This means the only thing that is
6586 executed in single user mode is sulogin.  Single user mode is a boot
6587 state "between" the runlevels, and when booting into single user mode,
6588 only the scripts in /etc/rcS.d/ are executed before the init process
6589 enters the single user state.  When switching to runlevel 1, the state
6590 is in fact not ending in runlevel 1, but it passes through runlevel 1
6591 and end up in the single user mode (see /etc/rc1.d/S03single, which
6592 runs "init -t1 S" to switch to single user mode at the end of runlevel
6593 1.  It is confusing that the 'S' (single user) init mode is not the
6594 mode enabled by /etc/rcS.d/ (which is more like the initial boot
6595 mode).</p>
6596
6597 <p>This summary might make it clearer.  When booting for the first
6598 time into single user mode, the following commands are executed:
6599 "<tt>/etc/init.d/rc S; /sbin/sulogin</tt>".  When booting into
6600 runlevel 1, the following commands are executed: "<tt>/etc/init.d/rc
6601 S; /etc/init.d/rc 1; /sbin/sulogin</tt>".  A problem show up when
6602 trying to continue after visiting single user mode.  Not all services
6603 are started again as they should, causing the machine to end up in an
6604 unpredicatble state.  This is why Debian admins recommend rebooting
6605 after visiting single user mode.</p>
6606
6607 <p>A similar problem with runlevel 1 is caused by the amount of
6608 scripts executed from /etc/rcS.d/.  When switching from say runlevel 2
6609 to runlevel 1, the services started from /etc/rcS.d/ are not properly
6610 stopped when passing through the scripts in /etc/rc1.d/, and not
6611 started again when switching away from runlevel 1 to the runlevels
6612 2-5.  I believe the problem is best fixed by moving all the scripts
6613 out of /etc/rcS.d/ that are not <strong>required</strong> to get a
6614 functioning single user mode during boot.</p>
6615
6616 <p>I have spent several years investigating the Debian boot system,
6617 and discovered this problem a few years ago.  I suspect it originates
6618 from when sysvinit was introduced into Debian, a long time ago.</p>
6619
6620       </div>
6621       <div class="tags">
6622
6623
6624         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6625
6626
6627       </div>
6628     </div>
6629     <div class="padding"></div>
6630
6631     <div class="entry">
6632       <div class="title">
6633         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_should_start_from__etc_rcS_d__in_Debian____almost_nothing.html">What should start from /etc/rcS.d/ in Debian? - almost nothing</a>
6634       </div>
6635       <div class="date">
6636         30th July 2011
6637       </div>
6638       <div class="body">
6639         <p>In the Debian boot system, several packages include scripts that
6640 are started from /etc/rcS.d/.  In fact, there is a bite more of them
6641 than make sense, and this causes a few problems.  What kind of
6642 problems, you might ask.  There are at least two problems.  The first
6643 is that it is not possible to recover a machine after switching to
6644 runlevel 1.  One need to actually reboot to get the machine back to
6645 the expected state.  The other is that single user boot will sometimes
6646 run into problems because some of the subsystems are activated before
6647 the root login is presented, causing problems when trying to recover a
6648 machine from a problem in that subsystem.  A minor additional point is
6649 that moving more scripts out of rcS.d/ and into the other rc#.d/
6650 directories will increase the amount of scripts that can run in
6651 parallel during boot, and thus decrease the boot time.</p>
6652
6653 <p>So, which scripts should start from rcS.d/.  In short, only the
6654 scripts that _have_ to execute before the root login prompt is
6655 presented during a single user boot should go there.  Everything else
6656 should go into the numeric runlevels.  This means things like
6657 lm-sensors, fuse and x11-common should not run from rcS.d, but from
6658 the numeric runlevels.  Today in Debian, there are around 115 init.d
6659 scripts that are started from rcS.d/, and most of them should be moved
6660 out.  Do your package have one of them?  Please help us make single
6661 user and runlevel 1 better by moving it.</p>
6662
6663 <p>Scripts setting up the screen, keyboard, system partitions
6664 etc. should still be started from rcS.d/, but there is for example no
6665 need to have the network enabled before the single user login prompt
6666 is presented.</p>
6667
6668 <p>As always, things are not so easy to fix as they sound.  To keep
6669 Debian systems working while scripts migrate and during upgrades, the
6670 scripts need to be moved from rcS.d/ to rc2.d/ in reverse dependency
6671 order, ie the scripts that nothing in rcS.d/ depend on can be moved,
6672 and the next ones can only be moved when their dependencies have been
6673 moved first.  This migration must be done sequentially while we ensure
6674 that the package system upgrade packages in the right order to keep
6675 the system state correct.  This will require some coordination when it
6676 comes to network related packages, but most of the packages with
6677 scripts that should migrate do not have anything in rcS.d/ depending
6678 on them.  Some packages have already been updated, like the sudo
6679 package, while others are still left to do.  I wish I had time to work
6680 on this myself, but real live constrains make it unlikely that I will
6681 find time to push this forward.</p>
6682
6683       </div>
6684       <div class="tags">
6685
6686
6687         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6688
6689
6690       </div>
6691     </div>
6692     <div class="padding"></div>
6693
6694     <div class="entry">
6695       <div class="title">
6696         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_missing_in_the_Debian_desktop__or_why_my_parents_use_Kubuntu.html">What is missing in the Debian desktop, or why my parents use Kubuntu</a>
6697       </div>
6698       <div class="date">
6699         29th July 2011
6700       </div>
6701       <div class="body">
6702         <p>While at Debconf11, I have several times during discussions
6703 mentioned the issues I believe should be improved in Debian for its
6704 desktop to be useful for more people.  The use case for this is my
6705 parents, which are currently running Kubuntu which solve the
6706 issues.</p>
6707
6708 <p>I suspect these four missing features are not very hard to
6709 implement.  After all, they are present in Ubuntu, so if we wanted to
6710 do this in Debian we would have a source.</p>
6711
6712 <ol>
6713
6714 <li><strong>Simple GUI based upgrade of packages.</strong> When there
6715 are new packages available for upgrades, a icon in the KDE status bar
6716 indicate this, and clicking on it will activate the simple upgrade
6717 tool to handle it.  I have no problem guiding both of my parents
6718 through the process over the phone.  If a kernel reboot is required,
6719 this too is indicated by the status bars and the upgrade tool.  Last
6720 time I checked, nothing with the same features was working in KDE in
6721 Debian.</li>
6722
6723 <li><strong>Simple handling of missing Firefox browser
6724 plugins.</strong> When the browser encounter a MIME type it do not
6725 currently have a handler for, it will ask the user if the system
6726 should search for a package that would add support for this MIME type,
6727 and if the user say yes, the APT sources will be searched for packages
6728 advertising the MIME type in their control file (visible in the
6729 Packages file in the APT archive).  If one or more packages are found,
6730 it is a simple click of the mouse to add support for the missing mime
6731 type.  If the package require the user to accept some non-free
6732 license, this is explained to the user.  The entire process make it
6733 more clear to the user why something do not work in the browser, and
6734 make the chances higher for the user to blame the web page authors and
6735 not the browser for any missing features.</li>
6736
6737 <li><strong>Simple handling of missing multimedia codec/format
6738 handlers.</strong> When the media players encounter a format or codec
6739 it is not supporting, a dialog pop up asking the user if the system
6740 should search for a package that would add support for it.  This
6741 happen with things like MP3, Windows Media or H.264.  The selection
6742 and installation procedure is very similar to the Firefox browser
6743 plugin handling.  This is as far as I know implemented using a
6744 gstreamer hook.  The end result is that the user easily get access to
6745 the codecs that are present from the APT archives available, while
6746 explaining more on why a given format is unsupported by Ubuntu.</li>
6747
6748 <li><strong>Better browser handling of some MIME types.</strong> When
6749 displaying a text/plain file in my Debian browser, it will propose to
6750 start emacs to show it.  If I remember correctly, when doing the same
6751 in Kunbutu it show the file as a text file in the browser.  At least I
6752 know Opera will show text files within the browser.  I much prefer the
6753 latter behaviour.</li>
6754
6755 </ol>
6756
6757 <p>There are other nice features as well, like the simplified suite
6758 upgrader, but given that I am the one mostly doing the dist-upgrade,
6759 it do not matter much.</p>
6760
6761 <p>I really hope we could get these features in place for the next
6762 Debian release.  It would require the coordinated effort of several
6763 maintainers, but would make the end user experience a lot better.</p>
6764
6765       </div>
6766       <div class="tags">
6767
6768
6769         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
6770
6771
6772       </div>
6773     </div>
6774     <div class="padding"></div>
6775
6776     <div class="entry">
6777       <div class="title">
6778         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Perl_modules_used_by_FixMyStreet_which_are_missing_in_Debian_Squeeze.html">Perl modules used by FixMyStreet which are missing in Debian/Squeeze</a>
6779       </div>
6780       <div class="date">
6781         26th July 2011
6782       </div>
6783       <div class="body">
6784         <p>The Norwegian <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</A>
6785 site is build on Debian/Squeeze, and this platform was chosen because
6786 I am most familiar with Debian (being a Debian Developer for around 10
6787 years) because it is the latest stable Debian release which should get
6788 security support for a few years.</p>
6789
6790 <p>The web service is written in Perl, and depend on some perl modules
6791 that are missing in Debian at the moment.  It would be great if these
6792 modules were added to the Debian archive, allowing anyone to set up
6793 their own <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com">FixMyStreet</a> clone
6794 in their own country using only Debian packages.  The list of modules
6795 missing in Debian/Squeeze isn't very long, and I hope the perl group
6796 will find time to package the 12 modules Catalyst::Plugin::SmartURI,
6797 Catalyst::Plugin::Unicode::Encoding, Catalyst::View::TT, Devel::Hide,
6798 Sort::Key, Statistics::Distributions, Template::Plugin::Comma,
6799 Template::Plugin::DateTime::Format, Term::Size::Any, Term::Size::Perl,
6800 URI::SmartURI and Web::Scraper to make the maintenance of FixMyStreet
6801 easier in the future.</p>
6802
6803 <p>Thanks to the great tools in Debian, getting the missing modules
6804 installed on my server was a simple call to 'cpan2deb Module::Name'
6805 and 'dpkg -i' to install the resulting package.  But this leave me
6806 with the responsibility of tracking security problems, which I really
6807 do not have time for.</p>
6808
6809       </div>
6810       <div class="tags">
6811
6812
6813         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami</a>.
6814
6815
6816       </div>
6817     </div>
6818     <div class="padding"></div>
6819
6820     <div class="entry">
6821       <div class="title">
6822         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Norwegian_FixMyStreet_have_kept_me_busy_the_last_few_weeks.html">A Norwegian FixMyStreet have kept me busy the last few weeks</a>
6823       </div>
6824       <div class="date">
6825          3rd April 2011
6826       </div>
6827       <div class="body">
6828         <p>Here is a small update for my English readers.  Most of my blog
6829 posts have been in Norwegian the last few weeks, so here is a short
6830 update in English.</p>
6831
6832 <p>The kids still keep me too busy to get much free software work
6833 done, but I did manage to organise a project to get a Norwegian port
6834 of the British service
6835 <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com/">FixMyStreet</a> up and running,
6836 and it has been running for a month now.  The entire project has been
6837 organised by me and two others.  Around Christmas we gathered sponsors
6838 to fund the development work.  In January I drafted a contract with
6839 <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a> on what to develop,
6840 and in February the development took place.  Most of it involved
6841 converting the source to use GPS coordinates instead of British
6842 easting/northing, and the resulting code should be a lot easier to get
6843 running in any country by now.  The Norwegian
6844 <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a> is using
6845 <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/">OpenStreetmap</a> as the map
6846 source and the source for administrative borders in Norway, and
6847 support for this had to be added/fixed.</p>
6848
6849 <p>The Norwegian version went live March 3th, and we spent the weekend
6850 polishing the system before we announced it March 7th.  The system is
6851 running on a KVM instance of Debian/Squeeze, and has seen almost 3000
6852 problem reports in a few weeks.  Soon we hope to announce the Android
6853 and iPhone versions making it even easier to report problems with the
6854 public infrastructure.</p>
6855
6856 <p>Perhaps something to consider for those of you in countries without
6857 such service?</p>
6858
6859       </div>
6860       <div class="tags">
6861
6862
6863         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kart">kart</a>.
6864
6865
6866       </div>
6867     </div>
6868     <div class="padding"></div>
6869
6870     <div class="entry">
6871       <div class="title">
6872         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_NVD_and_CPE_to_track_CVEs_in_locally_maintained_software.html">Using NVD and CPE to track CVEs in locally maintained software</a>
6873       </div>
6874       <div class="date">
6875         28th January 2011
6876       </div>
6877       <div class="body">
6878         <p>The last few days I have looked at ways to track open security
6879 issues here at my work with the University of Oslo.  My idea is that
6880 it should be possible to use the information about security issues
6881 available on the Internet, and check our locally
6882 maintained/distributed software against this information.  It should
6883 allow us to verify that no known security issues are forgotten.  The
6884 CVE database listing vulnerabilities seem like a great central point,
6885 and by using the package lists from Debian mapped to CVEs provided by
6886 the testing security team, I believed it should be possible to figure
6887 out which security holes were present in our free software
6888 collection.</p>
6889
6890 <p>After reading up on the topic, it became obvious that the first
6891 building block is to be able to name software packages in a unique and
6892 consistent way across data sources.  I considered several ways to do
6893 this, for example coming up with my own naming scheme like using URLs
6894 to project home pages or URLs to the Freshmeat entries, or using some
6895 existing naming scheme.  And it seem like I am not the first one to
6896 come across this problem, as MITRE already proposed and implemented a
6897 solution.  Enter the <a href="http://cpe.mitre.org/index.html">Common
6898 Platform Enumeration</a> dictionary, a vocabulary for referring to
6899 software, hardware and other platform components.  The CPE ids are
6900 mapped to CVEs in the <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/">National
6901 Vulnerability Database</a>, allowing me to look up know security
6902 issues for any CPE name.  With this in place, all I need to do is to
6903 locate the CPE id for the software packages we use at the university.
6904 This is fairly trivial (I google for 'cve cpe $package' and check the
6905 NVD entry if a CVE for the package exist).</p>
6906
6907 <p>To give you an example.  The GNU gzip source package have the CPE
6908 name cpe:/a:gnu:gzip.  If the old version 1.3.3 was the package to
6909 check out, one could look up
6910 <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
6911 in NVD</a> and get a list of 6 security holes with public CVE entries.
6912 The most recent one is
6913 <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2010-0001">CVE-2010-0001</a>,
6914 and at the bottom of the NVD page for this vulnerability the complete
6915 list of affected versions is provided.</p>
6916
6917 <p>The NVD database of CVEs is also available as a XML dump, allowing
6918 for offline processing of issues.  Using this dump, I've written a
6919 small script taking a list of CPEs as input and list all CVEs
6920 affecting the packages represented by these CPEs.  One give it CPEs
6921 with version numbers as specified above and get a list of open
6922 security issues out.</p>
6923
6924 <p>Of course for this approach to be useful, the quality of the NVD
6925 information need to be high.  For that to happen, I believe as many as
6926 possible need to use and contribute to the NVD database.  I notice
6927 RHEL is providing
6928 <a href="https://www.redhat.com/security/data/metrics/rhsamapcpe.txt">a
6929 map from CVE to CPE</a>, indicating that they are using the CPE
6930 information.  I'm not aware of Debian and Ubuntu doing the same.</p>
6931
6932 <p>To get an idea about the quality for free software, I spent some
6933 time making it possible to compare the CVE database from Debian with
6934 the CVE database in NVD.  The result look fairly good, but there are
6935 some inconsistencies in NVD (same software package having several
6936 CPEs), and some inaccuracies (NVD not mentioning buggy packages that
6937 Debian believe are affected by a CVE).  Hope to find time to improve
6938 the quality of NVD, but that require being able to get in touch with
6939 someone maintaining it.  So far my three emails with questions and
6940 corrections have not seen any reply, but I hope contact can be
6941 established soon.</p>
6942
6943 <p>An interesting application for CPEs is cross platform package
6944 mapping.  It would be useful to know which packages in for example
6945 RHEL, OpenSuSe and Mandriva are missing from Debian and Ubuntu, and
6946 this would be trivial if all linux distributions provided CPE entries
6947 for their packages.</p>
6948
6949       </div>
6950       <div class="tags">
6951
6952
6953         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
6954
6955
6956       </div>
6957     </div>
6958     <div class="padding"></div>
6959
6960     <div class="entry">
6961       <div class="title">
6962         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Which_module_is_loaded_for_a_given_PCI_and_USB_device_.html">Which module is loaded for a given PCI and USB device?</a>
6963       </div>
6964       <div class="date">
6965         23rd January 2011
6966       </div>
6967       <div class="body">
6968         <p>In the
6969 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/discover-data">discover-data</a>
6970 package in Debian, there is a script to report useful information
6971 about the running hardware for use when people report missing
6972 information.  One part of this script that I find very useful when
6973 debugging hardware problems, is the part mapping loaded kernel module
6974 to the PCI device it claims.  It allow me to quickly see if the kernel
6975 module I expect is driving the hardware I am struggling with.  To see
6976 the output, make sure discover-data is installed and run
6977 <tt>/usr/share/bug/discover-data 3>&1</tt>.  The relevant output on
6978 one of my machines like this:</p>
6979
6980 <pre>
6981 loaded modules:
6982 10de:03eb i2c_nforce2
6983 10de:03f1 ohci_hcd
6984 10de:03f2 ehci_hcd
6985 10de:03f0 snd_hda_intel
6986 10de:03ec pata_amd
6987 10de:03f6 sata_nv
6988 1022:1103 k8temp
6989 109e:036e bttv
6990 109e:0878 snd_bt87x
6991 11ab:4364 sky2
6992 </pre>
6993
6994 <p>The code in question look like this, slightly modified for
6995 readability and to drop the output to file descriptor 3:</p>
6996
6997 <pre>
6998 if [ -d /sys/bus/pci/devices/ ] ; then
6999     echo loaded pci modules:
7000     (
7001         cd /sys/bus/pci/devices/
7002         for address in * ; do
7003             if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
7004                 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
7005                 if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
7006                     address=$(echo $address |sed s/0000://)
7007                     id=`lspci -n -s $address | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $3}'`
7008                     echo "$id $module"
7009                 fi
7010             fi
7011         done
7012     )
7013     echo
7014 fi
7015 </pre>
7016
7017 <p>Similar code could be used to extract USB device module
7018 mappings:</p>
7019
7020 <pre>
7021 if [ -d /sys/bus/usb/devices/ ] ; then
7022     echo loaded usb modules:
7023     (
7024         cd /sys/bus/usb/devices/
7025         for address in * ; do
7026             if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
7027                 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
7028                 if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
7029                     address=$(echo $address |sed s/0000://)
7030                     id=$(lsusb -s $address | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $6}')
7031                     if [ "$id" ] ; then
7032                         echo "$id $module"
7033                     fi
7034                 fi
7035             fi
7036         done
7037     )
7038     echo
7039 fi
7040 </pre>
7041
7042 <p>This might perhaps be something to include in other tools as
7043 well.</p>
7044
7045       </div>
7046       <div class="tags">
7047
7048
7049         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7050
7051
7052       </div>
7053     </div>
7054     <div class="padding"></div>
7055
7056     <div class="entry">
7057       <div class="title">
7058         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_test_if_a_laptop_is_working_with_Linux.html">How to test if a laptop is working with Linux</a>
7059       </div>
7060       <div class="date">
7061         22nd December 2010
7062       </div>
7063       <div class="body">
7064         <p>The last few days I have spent at work here at the <a
7065 href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a> testing if the new
7066 batch of computers will work with Linux.  Every year for the last few
7067 years the university have organised shared bid of a few thousand
7068 computers, and this year HP won the bid.  Two different desktops and
7069 five different laptops are on the list this year.  We in the UNIX
7070 group want to know which one of these computers work well with RHEL
7071 and Ubuntu, the two Linux distributions we currently handle at the
7072 university.</p>
7073
7074 <p>My test method is simple, and I share it here to get feedback and
7075 perhaps inspire others to test hardware as well.  To test, I PXE
7076 install the OS version of choice, and log in as my normal user and run
7077 a few applications and plug in selected pieces of hardware.  When
7078 something fail, I make a note about this in the test matrix and move
7079 on.  If I have some spare time I try to report the bug to the OS
7080 vendor, but as I only have the machines for a short time, I rarely
7081 have the time to do this for all the problems I find.</p>
7082
7083 <p>Anyway, to get to the point of this post.  Here is the simple tests
7084 I perform on a new model.</p>
7085
7086 <ul>
7087
7088 <li>Is PXE installation working?  I'm testing with RHEL6, Ubuntu Lucid
7089 and Ubuntu Maverik at the moment.  If I feel like it, I also test with
7090 RHEL5 and Debian Edu/Squeeze.</li>
7091
7092 <li>Is X.org working?  If the graphical login screen show up after
7093 installation, X.org is working.</li>
7094
7095 <li>Is hardware accelerated OpenGL working?  Running glxgears (in
7096 package mesa-utils on Ubuntu) and writing down the frames per second
7097 reported by the program.</li>
7098
7099 <li>Is sound working?  With Gnome and KDE, a sound is played when
7100 logging in, and if I can hear this the test is successful.  If there
7101 are several audio exits on the machine, I try them all and check if
7102 the Gnome/KDE audio mixer can control where to send the sound.  I
7103 normally test this by playing
7104 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20101012-chef/ ">a HTML5
7105 video</a> in Firefox/Iceweasel.</li>
7106
7107 <li>Is the USB subsystem working?  I test this by plugging in a USB
7108 memory stick and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.</li>
7109
7110 <li>Is the CD/DVD player working?  I test this by inserting any CD/DVD
7111 I have lying around, and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.</li>
7112
7113 <li>Is any built in camera working?  Test using cheese, and see if a
7114 picture from the v4l device show up.</li>
7115
7116 <li>Is bluetooth working?  Use the Gnome/KDE browsing tool to see if
7117 any bluetooth devices are discovered.  In my office, I normally see a
7118 few.</li>
7119
7120 <li>For laptops, is the SD or Compaq Flash reader working.  I have
7121 memory modules lying around, and stick them in and see if Gnome/KDE
7122 notice this.</li>
7123
7124 <li>For laptops, is suspend/hibernate working?  I'm testing if the
7125 special button work, and if the laptop continue to work after
7126 resume.</li>
7127
7128 <li>For laptops, is the extra buttons working, like audio level,
7129 adjusting background light, switching on/off external video output,
7130 switching on/off wifi, bluetooth, etc?  The set of buttons differ from
7131 laptop to laptop, so I just write down which are working and which are
7132 not.</li>
7133
7134 <li>Some laptops have smart card readers, finger print readers,
7135 acceleration sensors etc.  I rarely test these, as I do not know how
7136 to quickly test if they are working or not, so I only document their
7137 existence.</li>
7138
7139 </ul>
7140
7141 <p>By now I suspect you are really curious what the test results are
7142 for the HP machines I am testing.  I'm not done yet, so I will report
7143 the test results later.  For now I can report that HP 8100 Elite work
7144 fine, and hibernation fail with HP EliteBook 8440p on Ubuntu Lucid,
7145 and audio fail on RHEL6.  Ubuntu Maverik worked with 8440p.  As you
7146 can see, I have most machines left to test.  One interesting
7147 observation is that Ubuntu Lucid has almost twice the frame rate than
7148 RHEL6 with glxgears.  No idea why.</p>
7149
7150       </div>
7151       <div class="tags">
7152
7153
7154         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7155
7156
7157       </div>
7158     </div>
7159     <div class="padding"></div>
7160
7161     <div class="entry">
7162       <div class="title">
7163         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_thoughts_on_BitCoins.html">Some thoughts on BitCoins</a>
7164       </div>
7165       <div class="date">
7166         11th December 2010
7167       </div>
7168       <div class="body">
7169         <p>As I continue to explore
7170 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin</a>, I've starting to wonder
7171 what properties the system have, and how it will be affected by laws
7172 and regulations here in Norway.  Here are some random notes.</p>
7173
7174 <p>One interesting thing to note is that since the transactions are
7175 verified using a peer to peer network, all details about a transaction
7176 is known to everyone.  This means that if a BitCoin address has been
7177 published like I did with mine in my initial post about BitCoin, it is
7178 possible for everyone to see how many BitCoins have been transfered to
7179 that address.  There is even a web service to look at the details for
7180 all transactions.  There I can see that my address
7181 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a>
7182 have received 16.06 Bitcoin, the
7183 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3">1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3</a>
7184 address of Simon Phipps have received 181.97 BitCoin and the address
7185 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt">1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt</A>
7186 of EFF have received 2447.38 BitCoins so far.  Thank you to each and
7187 every one of you that donated bitcoins to support my activity. The
7188 fact that anyone can see how much money was transfered to a given
7189 address make it more obvious why the BitCoin community recommend to
7190 generate and hand out a new address for each transaction.  I'm told
7191 there is no way to track which addresses belong to a given person or
7192 organisation without the person or organisation revealing it
7193 themselves, as Simon, EFF and I have done.</p>
7194
7195 <p>In Norway, and in most other countries, there are laws and
7196 regulations limiting how much money one can transfer across the border
7197 without declaring it.  There are money laundering, tax and accounting
7198 laws and regulations I would expect to apply to the use of BitCoin.
7199 If the Skolelinux foundation
7200 (<a href="http://linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">SLX
7201 Debian Labs</a>) were to accept donations in BitCoin in addition to
7202 normal bank transfers like EFF is doing, how should this be accounted?
7203 Given that it is impossible to know if money can cross the border or
7204 not, should everything or nothing be declared?  What exchange rate
7205 should be used when calculating taxes?  Would receivers have to pay
7206 income tax if the foundation were to pay Skolelinux contributors in
7207 BitCoin?  I have no idea, but it would be interesting to know.</p>
7208
7209 <p>For a currency to be useful and successful, it must be trusted and
7210 accepted by a lot of users.  It must be possible to get easy access to
7211 the currency (as a wage or using currency exchanges), and it must be
7212 easy to spend it.  At the moment BitCoin seem fairly easy to get
7213 access to, but there are very few places to spend it.  I am not really
7214 a regular user of any of the vendor types currently accepting BitCoin,
7215 so I wonder when my kind of shop would start accepting BitCoins.  I
7216 would like to buy electronics, travels and subway tickets, not herbs
7217 and books. :) The currency is young, and this will improve over time
7218 if it become popular, but I suspect regular banks will start to lobby
7219 to get BitCoin declared illegal if it become popular.  I'm sure they
7220 will claim it is helping fund terrorism and money laundering (which
7221 probably would be true, as is any currency in existence), but I
7222 believe the problems should be solved elsewhere and not by blaming
7223 currencies.</p>
7224
7225 <p>The process of creating new BitCoins is called mining, and it is
7226 CPU intensive process that depend on a bit of luck as well (as one is
7227 competing against all the other miners currently spending CPU cycles
7228 to see which one get the next lump of cash).  The "winner" get 50
7229 BitCoin when this happen.  Yesterday I came across the obvious way to
7230 join forces to increase ones changes of getting at least some coins,
7231 by coordinating the work on mining BitCoins across several machines
7232 and people, and sharing the result if one is lucky and get the 50
7233 BitCoins.  Check out
7234 <a href="http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/bitcoin-pool/">BitCoin Pool</a>
7235 if this sounds interesting.  I have not had time to try to set up a
7236 machine to participate there yet, but have seen that running on ones
7237 own for a few days have not yield any BitCoins througth mining
7238 yet.</p>
7239
7240 <p>Update 2010-12-15: Found an <a
7241 href="http://inertia.posterous.com/reply-to-the-underground-economist-why-bitcoi">interesting
7242 criticism</a> of bitcoin.  Not quite sure how valid it is, but thought
7243 it was interesting to read.  The arguments presented seem to be
7244 equally valid for gold, which was used as a currency for many years.</p>
7245
7246       </div>
7247       <div class="tags">
7248
7249
7250         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
7251
7252
7253       </div>
7254     </div>
7255     <div class="padding"></div>
7256
7257     <div class="entry">
7258       <div class="title">
7259         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html">Now accepting bitcoins - anonymous and distributed p2p crypto-money</a>
7260       </div>
7261       <div class="date">
7262         10th December 2010
7263       </div>
7264       <div class="body">
7265         <p>With this weeks lawless
7266 <a href="http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/06/wikileaks/index.html">governmental
7267 attacks</a> on Wikileak and
7268 <a href="http://www.salon.com/technology/dan_gillmor/2010/12/06/war_on_speech">free
7269 speech</a>, it has become obvious that PayPal, visa and mastercard can
7270 not be trusted to handle money transactions.
7271 A blog post from
7272 <a href="http://webmink.com/2010/12/06/now-accepting-bitcoin/">Simon
7273 Phipps on bitcoin</a> reminded me about a project that a friend of
7274 mine mentioned earlier.  I decided to follow Simon's example, and get
7275 involved with <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin</a>.  I got
7276 some help from my friend to get it all running, and he even handed me
7277 some bitcoins to get started.  I even donated a few bitcoins to Simon
7278 for helping me remember BitCoin.</p>
7279
7280 <p>So, what is bitcoins, you probably wonder?  It is a digital
7281 crypto-currency, decentralised and handled using peer-to-peer
7282 networks.  It allows anonymous transactions and prohibits central
7283 control over the transactions, making it impossible for governments
7284 and companies alike to block donations and other transactions.  The
7285 source is free software, and while the key dependency wxWidgets 2.9
7286 for the graphical user interface is missing in Debian, the command
7287 line client builds just fine.  Hopefully Jonas
7288 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/578157">will get the package into
7289 Debian</a> soon.</p>
7290
7291 <p>Bitcoins can be converted to other currencies, like USD and EUR.
7292 There are <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/trade">companies accepting
7293 bitcoins</a> when selling services and goods, and there are even
7294 currency "stock" markets where the exchange rate is decided.  There
7295 are not many users so far, but the concept seems promising.  If you
7296 want to get started and lack a friend with any bitcoins to spare,
7297 you can even get
7298 <a href="https://freebitcoins.appspot.com/">some for free</a> (0.05
7299 bitcoin at the time of writing).  Use
7300 <a href="http://www.bitcoinwatch.com/">BitcoinWatch</a> to keep an eye
7301 on the current exchange rates.</p>
7302
7303 <p>As an experiment, I have decided to set up bitcoind on one of my
7304 machines.  If you want to support my activity, please send Bitcoin
7305 donations to the address
7306 <b>15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</b>.  Thank you!</p>
7307
7308       </div>
7309       <div class="tags">
7310
7311
7312         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
7313
7314
7315       </div>
7316     </div>
7317     <div class="padding"></div>
7318
7319     <div class="entry">
7320       <div class="title">
7321         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_isn_t_Debian_Edu_using_VLC_.html">Why isn't Debian Edu using VLC?</a>
7322       </div>
7323       <div class="date">
7324         27th November 2010
7325       </div>
7326       <div class="body">
7327         <p>In the latest issue of Linux Journal, the readers choices were
7328 presented, and the winner among the multimedia player were VLC.
7329 Personally, I like VLC, and it is my player of choice when I first try
7330 to play a video file or stream.  Only if VLC fail will I drag out
7331 gmplayer to see if it can do better.  The reason is mostly the failure
7332 model and trust.  When VLC fail, it normally pop up a error message
7333 reporting the problem.  When mplayer fail, it normally segfault or
7334 just hangs.  The latter failure mode drain my trust in the program.<p>
7335
7336 <p>But even if VLC is my player of choice, we have choosen to use
7337 mplayer in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
7338 Edu/Skolelinux</a>.  The reason is simple.  We need a good browser
7339 plugin to play web videos seamlessly, and the VLC browser plugin is
7340 not very good.  For example, it lack in-line control buttons, so there
7341 is no way for the user to pause the video.  Also, when I
7342 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">last
7343 tested the browser plugins</a> available in Debian, the VLC plugin
7344 failed on several video pages where mplayer based plugins worked.  If
7345 the browser plugin for VLC was as good as the gecko-mediaplayer
7346 package (which uses mplayer), we would switch.</P>
7347
7348 <p>While VLC is a good player, its user interface is slightly
7349 annoying.  The most annoying feature is its inconsistent use of
7350 keyboard shortcuts.  When the player is in full screen mode, its
7351 shortcuts are different from when it is playing the video in a window.
7352 For example, space only work as pause when in full screen mode.  I
7353 wish it had consisten shortcuts and that space also would work when in
7354 window mode.  Another nice shortcut in gmplayer is [enter] to restart
7355 the current video.  It is very nice when playing short videos from the
7356 web and want to restart it when new people arrive to have a look at
7357 what is going on.</p>
7358
7359       </div>
7360       <div class="tags">
7361
7362
7363         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
7364
7365
7366       </div>
7367     </div>
7368     <div class="padding"></div>
7369
7370     <div class="entry">
7371       <div class="title">
7372         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades_of_the_Gnome_and_KDE_desktop__now_with_apt_get_autoremove.html">Lenny->Squeeze upgrades of the Gnome and KDE desktop, now with apt-get autoremove</a>
7373       </div>
7374       <div class="date">
7375         22nd November 2010
7376       </div>
7377       <div class="body">
7378         <p>Michael Biebl suggested to me on IRC, that I changed my automated
7379 upgrade testing of the
7380 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
7381 Gnome and KDE Desktop</a> to do <tt>apt-get autoremove</tt> when using apt-get.
7382 This seem like a very good idea, so I adjusted by test scripts and
7383 can now present the updated result from today:</p>
7384
7385 <p>This is for Gnome:</p>
7386
7387 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
7388
7389 <blockquote><p>
7390   apache2.2-bin
7391   aptdaemon
7392   baobab
7393   binfmt-support
7394   browser-plugin-gnash
7395   cheese-common
7396   cli-common
7397   cups-pk-helper
7398   dmz-cursor-theme
7399   empathy
7400   empathy-common
7401   freedesktop-sound-theme
7402   freeglut3
7403   gconf-defaults-service
7404   gdm-themes
7405   gedit-plugins
7406   geoclue
7407   geoclue-hostip
7408   geoclue-localnet
7409   geoclue-manual
7410   geoclue-yahoo
7411   gnash
7412   gnash-common
7413   gnome
7414   gnome-backgrounds
7415   gnome-cards-data
7416   gnome-codec-install
7417   gnome-core
7418   gnome-desktop-environment
7419   gnome-disk-utility
7420   gnome-screenshot
7421   gnome-search-tool
7422   gnome-session-canberra
7423   gnome-system-log
7424   gnome-themes-extras
7425   gnome-themes-more
7426   gnome-user-share
7427   gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
7428   gstreamer0.10-tools
7429   gtk2-engines
7430   gtk2-engines-pixbuf
7431   gtk2-engines-smooth
7432   hamster-applet
7433   libapache2-mod-dnssd
7434   libapr1
7435   libaprutil1
7436   libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3
7437   libaprutil1-ldap
7438   libart2.0-cil
7439   libboost-date-time1.42.0
7440   libboost-python1.42.0
7441   libboost-thread1.42.0
7442   libchamplain-0.4-0
7443   libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0
7444   libcheese-gtk18
7445   libclutter-gtk-0.10-0
7446   libcryptui0
7447   libdiscid0
7448   libelf1
7449   libepc-1.0-2
7450   libepc-common
7451   libepc-ui-1.0-2
7452   libfreerdp-plugins-standard
7453   libfreerdp0
7454   libgconf2.0-cil
7455   libgdata-common
7456   libgdata7
7457   libgdu-gtk0
7458   libgee2
7459   libgeoclue0
7460   libgexiv2-0
7461   libgif4
7462   libglade2.0-cil
7463   libglib2.0-cil
7464   libgmime2.4-cil
7465   libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
7466   libgnome2.24-cil
7467   libgnomepanel2.24-cil
7468   libgpod-common
7469   libgpod4
7470   libgtk2.0-cil
7471   libgtkglext1
7472   libgtksourceview2.0-common
7473   libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
7474   libmono-addins0.2-cil
7475   libmono-cairo2.0-cil
7476   libmono-corlib2.0-cil
7477   libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil
7478   libmono-posix2.0-cil
7479   libmono-security2.0-cil
7480   libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
7481   libmono-system2.0-cil
7482   libmtp8
7483   libmusicbrainz3-6
7484   libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil
7485   libndesk-dbus1.0-cil
7486   libopal3.6.8
7487   libpolkit-gtk-1-0
7488   libpt2.6.7
7489   libpython2.6
7490   librpm1
7491   librpmio1
7492   libsdl1.2debian
7493   libsrtp0
7494   libssh-4
7495   libtelepathy-farsight0
7496   libtelepathy-glib0
7497   libtidy-0.99-0
7498   media-player-info
7499   mesa-utils
7500   mono-2.0-gac
7501   mono-gac
7502   mono-runtime
7503   nautilus-sendto
7504   nautilus-sendto-empathy
7505   p7zip-full
7506   pkg-config
7507   python-aptdaemon
7508   python-aptdaemon-gtk
7509   python-axiom
7510   python-beautifulsoup
7511   python-bugbuddy
7512   python-clientform
7513   python-coherence
7514   python-configobj
7515   python-crypto
7516   python-cupshelpers
7517   python-elementtree
7518   python-epsilon
7519   python-evolution
7520   python-feedparser
7521   python-gdata
7522   python-gdbm
7523   python-gst0.10
7524   python-gtkglext1
7525   python-gtksourceview2
7526   python-httplib2
7527   python-louie
7528   python-mako
7529   python-markupsafe
7530   python-mechanize
7531   python-nevow
7532   python-notify
7533   python-opengl
7534   python-openssl
7535   python-pam
7536   python-pkg-resources
7537   python-pyasn1
7538   python-pysqlite2
7539   python-rdflib
7540   python-serial
7541   python-tagpy
7542   python-twisted-bin
7543   python-twisted-conch
7544   python-twisted-core
7545   python-twisted-web
7546   python-utidylib
7547   python-webkit
7548   python-xdg
7549   python-zope.interface
7550   remmina
7551   remmina-plugin-data
7552   remmina-plugin-rdp
7553   remmina-plugin-vnc
7554   rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
7555   rhythmbox-plugins
7556   rpm-common
7557   rpm2cpio
7558   seahorse-plugins
7559   shotwell
7560   software-center
7561   system-config-printer-udev
7562   telepathy-gabble
7563   telepathy-mission-control-5
7564   telepathy-salut
7565   tomboy
7566   totem
7567   totem-coherence
7568   totem-mozilla
7569   totem-plugins
7570   transmission-common
7571   xdg-user-dirs
7572   xdg-user-dirs-gtk
7573   xserver-xephyr
7574 </p></blockquote>
7575
7576 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
7577
7578 <blockquote><p>
7579   cheese
7580   ekiga
7581   eog
7582   epiphany-extensions
7583   evolution-exchange
7584   fast-user-switch-applet
7585   file-roller
7586   gcalctool
7587   gconf-editor
7588   gdm
7589   gedit
7590   gedit-common
7591   gnome-games
7592   gnome-games-data
7593   gnome-nettool
7594   gnome-system-tools
7595   gnome-themes
7596   gnuchess
7597   gucharmap
7598   guile-1.8-libs
7599   libavahi-ui0
7600   libdmx1
7601   libgalago3
7602   libgtk-vnc-1.0-0
7603   libgtksourceview2.0-0
7604   liblircclient0
7605   libsdl1.2debian-alsa
7606   libspeexdsp1
7607   libsvga1
7608   rhythmbox
7609   seahorse
7610   sound-juicer
7611   system-config-printer
7612   totem-common
7613   transmission-gtk
7614   vinagre
7615   vino
7616 </p></blockquote>
7617
7618 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
7619
7620 <blockquote><p>
7621   gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
7622 </p></blockquote>
7623
7624 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
7625
7626 <blockquote><p>
7627 [nothing]
7628 </p></blockquote>
7629
7630 <p>This is for KDE:</p>
7631
7632 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
7633
7634 <blockquote><p>
7635   ksmserver
7636 </p></blockquote>
7637
7638 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
7639
7640 <blockquote><p>
7641   kwin
7642   network-manager-kde
7643 </p></blockquote>
7644
7645 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
7646
7647 <blockquote><p>
7648   arts
7649   dolphin
7650   freespacenotifier
7651   google-gadgets-gst
7652   google-gadgets-xul
7653   kappfinder
7654   kcalc
7655   kcharselect
7656   kde-core
7657   kde-plasma-desktop
7658   kde-standard
7659   kde-window-manager
7660   kdeartwork
7661   kdeartwork-emoticons
7662   kdeartwork-style
7663   kdeartwork-theme-icon
7664   kdebase
7665   kdebase-apps
7666   kdebase-workspace
7667   kdebase-workspace-bin
7668   kdebase-workspace-data
7669   kdeeject
7670   kdelibs
7671   kdeplasma-addons
7672   kdeutils
7673   kdewallpapers
7674   kdf
7675   kfloppy
7676   kgpg
7677   khelpcenter4
7678   kinfocenter
7679   konq-plugins-l10n
7680   konqueror-nsplugins
7681   kscreensaver
7682   kscreensaver-xsavers
7683   ktimer
7684   kwrite
7685   libgle3
7686   libkde4-ruby1.8
7687   libkonq5
7688   libkonq5-templates
7689   libnetpbm10
7690   libplasma-ruby
7691   libplasma-ruby1.8
7692   libqt4-ruby1.8
7693   marble-data
7694   marble-plugins
7695   netpbm
7696   nuvola-icon-theme
7697   plasma-dataengines-workspace
7698   plasma-desktop
7699   plasma-desktopthemes-artwork
7700   plasma-runners-addons
7701   plasma-scriptengine-googlegadgets
7702   plasma-scriptengine-python
7703   plasma-scriptengine-qedje
7704   plasma-scriptengine-ruby
7705   plasma-scriptengine-webkit
7706   plasma-scriptengines
7707   plasma-wallpapers-addons
7708   plasma-widget-folderview
7709   plasma-widget-networkmanagement
7710   ruby
7711   sweeper
7712   update-notifier-kde
7713   xscreensaver-data-extra
7714   xscreensaver-gl
7715   xscreensaver-gl-extra
7716   xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
7717 </p></blockquote>
7718
7719 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
7720
7721 <blockquote><p>
7722   ark
7723   google-gadgets-common
7724   google-gadgets-qt
7725   htdig
7726   kate
7727   kdebase-bin
7728   kdebase-data
7729   kdepasswd
7730   kfind
7731   klipper
7732   konq-plugins
7733   konqueror
7734   ksysguard
7735   ksysguardd
7736   libarchive1
7737   libcln6
7738   libeet1
7739   libeina-svn-06
7740   libggadget-1.0-0b
7741   libggadget-qt-1.0-0b
7742   libgps19
7743   libkdecorations4
7744   libkephal4
7745   libkonq4
7746   libkonqsidebarplugin4a
7747   libkscreensaver5
7748   libksgrd4
7749   libksignalplotter4
7750   libkunitconversion4
7751   libkwineffects1a
7752   libmarblewidget4
7753   libntrack-qt4-1
7754   libntrack0
7755   libplasma-geolocation-interface4
7756   libplasmaclock4a
7757   libplasmagenericshell4
7758   libprocesscore4a
7759   libprocessui4a
7760   libqalculate5
7761   libqedje0a
7762   libqtruby4shared2
7763   libqzion0a
7764   libruby1.8
7765   libscim8c2a
7766   libsmokekdecore4-3
7767   libsmokekdeui4-3
7768   libsmokekfile3
7769   libsmokekhtml3
7770   libsmokekio3
7771   libsmokeknewstuff2-3
7772   libsmokeknewstuff3-3
7773   libsmokekparts3
7774   libsmokektexteditor3
7775   libsmokekutils3
7776   libsmokenepomuk3
7777   libsmokephonon3
7778   libsmokeplasma3
7779   libsmokeqtcore4-3
7780   libsmokeqtdbus4-3
7781   libsmokeqtgui4-3
7782   libsmokeqtnetwork4-3
7783   libsmokeqtopengl4-3
7784   libsmokeqtscript4-3
7785   libsmokeqtsql4-3
7786   libsmokeqtsvg4-3
7787   libsmokeqttest4-3
7788   libsmokeqtuitools4-3
7789   libsmokeqtwebkit4-3
7790   libsmokeqtxml4-3
7791   libsmokesolid3
7792   libsmokesoprano3
7793   libtaskmanager4a
7794   libtidy-0.99-0
7795   libweather-ion4a
7796   libxklavier16
7797   libxxf86misc1
7798   okteta
7799   oxygencursors
7800   plasma-dataengines-addons
7801   plasma-scriptengine-superkaramba
7802   plasma-widget-lancelot
7803   plasma-widgets-addons
7804   plasma-widgets-workspace
7805   polkit-kde-1
7806   ruby1.8
7807   systemsettings
7808   update-notifier-common
7809 </p></blockquote>
7810
7811 <p>Running apt-get autoremove made the results using apt-get and
7812 aptitude a bit more similar, but there are still quite a lott of
7813 differences.  I have no idea what packages should be installed after
7814 the upgrade, but hope those that do can have a look.</p>
7815
7816       </div>
7817       <div class="tags">
7818
7819
7820         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7821
7822
7823       </div>
7824     </div>
7825     <div class="padding"></div>
7826
7827     <div class="entry">
7828       <div class="title">
7829         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Migrating_Xen_virtual_machines_using_LVM_to_KVM_using_disk_images.html">Migrating Xen virtual machines using LVM to KVM using disk images</a>
7830       </div>
7831       <div class="date">
7832         22nd November 2010
7833       </div>
7834       <div class="body">
7835         <p>Most of the computers in use by the
7836 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux project</a>
7837 are virtual machines.  And they have been Xen machines running on a
7838 fairly old IBM eserver xseries 345 machine, and we wanted to migrate
7839 them to KVM on a newer Dell PowerEdge 2950 host machine.  This was a
7840 bit harder that it could have been, because we set up the Xen virtual
7841 machines to get the virtual partitions from LVM, which as far as I
7842 know is not supported by KVM.  So to migrate, we had to convert
7843 several LVM logical volumes to partitions on a virtual disk file.</p>
7844
7845 <p>I found
7846 <a href="http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM">a
7847 nice recipe</a> to do this, and wrote the following script to do the
7848 migration.  It uses qemu-img from the qemu package to make the disk
7849 image, parted to partition it, losetup and kpartx to present the disk
7850 image partions as devices, and dd to copy the data.  I NFS mounted the
7851 new servers storage area on the old server to do the migration.</p>
7852
7853 <pre>
7854 #!/bin/sh
7855
7856 # Based on
7857 # http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM
7858
7859 set -e
7860 set -x
7861
7862 if [ -z "$1" ] ; then
7863     echo "Usage: $0 &lt;hostname&gt;"
7864     exit 1
7865 else
7866     host="$1"
7867 fi
7868
7869 if [ ! -e /dev/vg_data/$host-disk ] ; then
7870     echo "error: unable to find LVM volume for $host"
7871     exit 1
7872 fi
7873
7874 # Partitions need to be a bit bigger than the LVM LVs.  not sure why.
7875 disksize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-disk | awk '{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }')
7876 swapsize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-swap | awk '{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }')
7877 totalsize=$(( ( $disksize + $swapsize ) ))
7878
7879 img=$host.img
7880 #dd if=/dev/zero of=$img bs=1M count=$(( $disksize + $swapsize ))
7881 qemu-img create $img ${totalsize}MMaking room on the Debian Edu/Sqeeze DVD
7882
7883 parted $img mklabel msdos
7884 parted $img mkpart primary linux-swap 0 $disksize
7885 parted $img mkpart primary ext2 $disksize $totalsize
7886 parted $img set 1 boot on
7887
7888 modprobe dm-mod
7889 losetup /dev/loop0 $img
7890 kpartx -a /dev/loop0
7891
7892 dd if=/dev/vg_data/$host-disk of=/dev/mapper/loop0p1 bs=1M
7893 fsck.ext3 -f /dev/mapper/loop0p1 || true
7894 mkswap /dev/mapper/loop0p2
7895
7896 kpartx -d /dev/loop0
7897 losetup -d /dev/loop0
7898 </pre>
7899
7900 <p>The script is perhaps so simple that it is not copyrightable, but
7901 if it is, it is licenced using GPL v2 or later at your discretion.</p>
7902
7903 <p>After doing this, I booted a Debian CD in rescue mode in KVM with
7904 the new disk image attached, installed grub-pc and linux-image-686 and
7905 set up grub to boot from the disk image.  After this, the KVM machines
7906 seem to work just fine.</p>
7907
7908       </div>
7909       <div class="tags">
7910
7911
7912         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7913
7914
7915       </div>
7916     </div>
7917     <div class="padding"></div>
7918
7919     <div class="entry">
7920       <div class="title">
7921         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__apt_vs_aptitude_with_the_Gnome_and_KDE_desktop.html">Lenny->Squeeze upgrades, apt vs aptitude with the Gnome and KDE desktop</a>
7922       </div>
7923       <div class="date">
7924         20th November 2010
7925       </div>
7926       <div class="body">
7927         <p>I'm still running upgrade testing of the
7928 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
7929 Gnome and KDE Desktop</a>, but have not had time to spend on reporting the
7930 status.  Here is a short update based on a test I ran 20101118.</p>
7931
7932 <p>I still do not know what a correct migration should look like, so I
7933 report any differences between apt and aptitude and hope someone else
7934 can see if anything should be changed.</p>
7935
7936 <p>This is for Gnome:</p>
7937
7938 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
7939
7940 <blockquote><p>
7941   apache2.2-bin aptdaemon at-spi baobab binfmt-support
7942   browser-plugin-gnash cheese-common cli-common cpp-4.3 cups-pk-helper
7943   dmz-cursor-theme empathy empathy-common finger
7944   freedesktop-sound-theme freeglut3 gconf-defaults-service gdm-themes
7945   gedit-plugins geoclue geoclue-hostip geoclue-localnet geoclue-manual
7946   geoclue-yahoo gnash gnash-common gnome gnome-backgrounds
7947   gnome-cards-data gnome-codec-install gnome-core
7948   gnome-desktop-environment gnome-disk-utility gnome-screenshot
7949   gnome-search-tool gnome-session-canberra gnome-spell
7950   gnome-system-log gnome-themes-extras gnome-themes-more
7951   gnome-user-share gs-common gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
7952   gstreamer0.10-tools gtk2-engines gtk2-engines-pixbuf
7953   gtk2-engines-smooth hal-info hamster-applet libapache2-mod-dnssd
7954   libapr1 libaprutil1 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3 libaprutil1-ldap
7955   libart2.0-cil libatspi1.0-0 libboost-date-time1.42.0
7956   libboost-python1.42.0 libboost-thread1.42.0 libchamplain-0.4-0
7957   libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0 libcheese-gtk18 libclutter-gtk-0.10-0
7958   libcryptui0 libcupsys2 libdiscid0 libeel2-data libelf1 libepc-1.0-2
7959   libepc-common libepc-ui-1.0-2 libfreerdp-plugins-standard
7960   libfreerdp0 libgail-common libgconf2.0-cil libgdata-common libgdata7
7961   libgdl-1-common libgdu-gtk0 libgee2 libgeoclue0 libgexiv2-0 libgif4
7962   libglade2.0-cil libglib2.0-cil libgmime2.4-cil libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
7963   libgnome2.24-cil libgnomepanel2.24-cil libgnomeprint2.2-data
7964   libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod-common libgpod4
7965   libgtk2.0-cil libgtkglext1 libgtksourceview-common
7966   libgtksourceview2.0-common libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
7967   libmono-addins0.2-cil libmono-cairo2.0-cil libmono-corlib2.0-cil
7968   libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil libmono-posix2.0-cil
7969   libmono-security2.0-cil libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
7970   libmono-system2.0-cil libmtp8 libmusicbrainz3-6
7971   libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil libndesk-dbus1.0-cil libopal3.6.8
7972   libpolkit-gtk-1-0 libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
7973   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libpt2.6.7 libpython2.6 librpm1 librpmio1
7974   libsdl1.2debian libservlet2.4-java libsrtp0 libssh-4
7975   libtelepathy-farsight0 libtelepathy-glib0 libtidy-0.99-0
7976   libxalan2-java libxerces2-java media-player-info mesa-utils
7977   mono-2.0-gac mono-gac mono-runtime nautilus-sendto
7978   nautilus-sendto-empathy openoffice.org-writer2latex
7979   openssl-blacklist p7zip p7zip-full pkg-config python-4suite-xml
7980   python-aptdaemon python-aptdaemon-gtk python-axiom
7981   python-beautifulsoup python-bugbuddy python-clientform
7982   python-coherence python-configobj python-crypto python-cupshelpers
7983   python-cupsutils python-eggtrayicon python-elementtree
7984   python-epsilon python-evolution python-feedparser python-gdata
7985   python-gdbm python-gst0.10 python-gtkglext1 python-gtkmozembed
7986   python-gtksourceview2 python-httplib2 python-louie python-mako
7987   python-markupsafe python-mechanize python-nevow python-notify
7988   python-opengl python-openssl python-pam python-pkg-resources
7989   python-pyasn1 python-pysqlite2 python-rdflib python-serial
7990   python-tagpy python-twisted-bin python-twisted-conch
7991   python-twisted-core python-twisted-web python-utidylib python-webkit
7992   python-xdg python-zope.interface remmina remmina-plugin-data
7993   remmina-plugin-rdp remmina-plugin-vnc rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
7994   rhythmbox-plugins rpm-common rpm2cpio seahorse-plugins shotwell
7995   software-center svgalibg1 system-config-printer-udev
7996   telepathy-gabble telepathy-mission-control-5 telepathy-salut tomboy
7997   totem totem-coherence totem-mozilla totem-plugins
7998   transmission-common xdg-user-dirs xdg-user-dirs-gtk xserver-xephyr
7999   zip
8000 </p></blockquote>
8001
8002 Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude
8003
8004 <blockquote><p>
8005   arj bluez-utils cheese dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop ekiga eog
8006   epiphany-extensions epiphany-gecko evolution-exchange
8007   fast-user-switch-applet file-roller gcalctool gconf-editor gdm gedit
8008   gedit-common gnome-app-install gnome-games gnome-games-data
8009   gnome-nettool gnome-system-tools gnome-themes gnome-utils
8010   gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager gnuchess gucharmap
8011   guile-1.8-libs hal libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5
8012   libavahi-ui0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7
8013   libcucul0 libcurl3 libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdmx1 libdvdread3
8014   libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1
8015   libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3 libfaad0 libgadu3
8016   libgalago3 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
8017   libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
8018   libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
8019   libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtk-vnc-1.0-0
8020   libgtkhtml2-0 libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgtksourceview2.0-0
8021   libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
8022   libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libkpathsea4 liblircclient0 libltdl3 liblwres50
8023   libmagick++10 libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmozjs1d libmpfr1ldbl libmtp7
8024   libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0
8025   libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpisock9
8026   libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8
8027   libsdl1.2debian-alsa libsensors3 libsexy2 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
8028   libspeexdsp1 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libsvga1
8029   libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0
8030   libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12
8031   libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common rhythmbox seahorse
8032   sound-juicer swfdec-gnome system-config-printer totem-common
8033   totem-gstreamer transmission-gtk vinagre vino w3c-dtd-xhtml wodim
8034 </p></blockquote>
8035
8036 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
8037
8038 <blockquote><p>
8039   gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
8040 </p></blockquote>
8041
8042 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
8043
8044 <blockquote><p>
8045 [nothing]
8046 </p></blockquote>
8047
8048 <p>This is for KDE:</p>
8049
8050 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
8051
8052 <blockquote><p>
8053   autopoint bomber bovo cantor cantor-backend-kalgebra cpp-4.3 dcoprss
8054   edict espeak espeak-data eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
8055   ghostscript-x git gnome-audio gnugo granatier gs-common
8056   gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio indi kaddressbook-plugins kalgebra
8057   kalzium-data kanjidic kapman kate-plugins kblocks kbreakout kbstate
8058   kde-icons-mono kdeaccessibility kdeaddons-kfile-plugins
8059   kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
8060   kdeedu kdeedu-data kdeedu-kvtml-data kdegames kdegames-card-data
8061   kdegames-mahjongg-data kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc
8062   kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
8063   kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdessh kdetoys kdewebdev
8064   kdiamond kdnssd kfilereplace kfourinline kgeography-data kigo
8065   killbots kiriki klettres-data kmoon kmrml knewsticker-scripts
8066   kollision kpf krosspython ksirk ksmserver ksquares kstars-data
8067   ksudoku kubrick kweather libasound2-plugins libboost-python1.42.0
8068   libcfitsio3 libconvert-binhex-perl libcrypt-ssleay-perl libdb4.6++
8069   libdjvulibre-text libdotconf1.0 liberror-perl libespeak1
8070   libfinance-quote-perl libgail-common libgsl0ldbl libhtml-parser-perl
8071   libhtml-tableextract-perl libhtml-tagset-perl libhtml-tree-perl
8072   libio-stringy-perl libkdeedu4 libkdegames5 libkiten4 libkpathsea5
8073   libkrossui4 libmailtools-perl libmime-tools-perl
8074   libnews-nntpclient-perl libopenbabel3 libportaudio2 libpulse-browse0
8075   libservlet2.4-java libspeechd2 libtiff-tools libtimedate-perl
8076   libunistring0 liburi-perl libwww-perl libxalan2-java libxerces2-java
8077   lirc luatex marble networkstatus noatun-plugins
8078   openoffice.org-writer2latex palapeli palapeli-data parley
8079   parley-data poster psutils pulseaudio pulseaudio-esound-compat
8080   pulseaudio-module-x11 pulseaudio-utils quanta-data rocs rsync
8081   speech-dispatcher step svgalibg1 texlive-binaries texlive-luatex
8082   ttf-sazanami-gothic
8083 </p></blockquote>
8084
8085 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
8086
8087 <blockquote><p>
8088   amor artsbuilder atlantik atlantikdesigner blinken bluez-utils cvs
8089   dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop imlib-base imlib11 kalzium kanagram kandy
8090   kasteroids katomic kbackgammon kbattleship kblackbox kbounce kbruch
8091   kcron kdat kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data kdeprint kdict kdvi kedit
8092   keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs kgeography kghostview
8093   kgoldrunner khangman khexedit kiconedit kig kimagemapeditor
8094   kitchensync kiten kjumpingcube klatin klettres klickety klines
8095   klinkstatus kmag kmahjongg kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmines
8096   kmousetool kmouth kmplot knetwalk kodo kolf kommander konquest kooka
8097   kpager kpat kpdf kpercentage kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler krec
8098   kregexpeditor kreversi ksame ksayit kshisen ksig ksim ksirc ksirtet
8099   ksmiletris ksnake ksokoban kspaceduel kstars ksvg ksysv kteatime
8100   ktip ktnef ktouch ktron kttsd ktuberling kturtle ktux kuickshow
8101   kverbos kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kwordquiz
8102   kworldclock kxsldbg libakode2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
8103   libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
8104   libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2
8105   libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0
8106   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
8107   libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0 libicu38
8108   libiec61883-0 libindex0 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
8109   libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1 libkdeedu3
8110   libkdegames1 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
8111   libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
8112   libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick10
8113   libmimelib1c2a libmodplug0c2 libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libmpfr1ldbl
8114   libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9 libpoppler-glib3
8115   libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 librss1 libsensors3
8116   libsmbios2 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90
8117   libtalloc1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 lskat
8118   mpeglib network-manager-kde noatun pmount tex-common texlive-base
8119   texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended tidy
8120   ttf-dustin ttf-kochi-gothic ttf-sjfonts
8121 </p></blockquote>
8122
8123 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
8124
8125 <blockquote><p>
8126   dolphin kde-core kde-plasma-desktop kde-standard kde-window-manager
8127   kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-apps kdebase-workspace
8128   kdebase-workspace-bin kdebase-workspace-data kdeutils kscreensaver
8129   kscreensaver-xsavers libgle3 libkonq5 libkonq5-templates libnetpbm10
8130   netpbm plasma-widget-folderview plasma-widget-networkmanagement
8131   xscreensaver-data-extra xscreensaver-gl xscreensaver-gl-extra
8132   xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
8133 </p></blockquote>
8134
8135 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
8136
8137 <blockquote><p>
8138   kdebase-bin konq-plugins konqueror
8139 </p></blockquote>
8140
8141       </div>
8142       <div class="tags">
8143
8144
8145         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8146
8147
8148       </div>
8149     </div>
8150     <div class="padding"></div>
8151
8152     <div class="entry">
8153       <div class="title">
8154         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_buildbot_slave_and_Debian_kfreebsd.html">Gnash buildbot slave and Debian kfreebsd</a>
8155       </div>
8156       <div class="date">
8157         20th November 2010
8158       </div>
8159       <div class="body">
8160         <p>Answering
8161 <a href="http://www.listware.net/201011/gnash-dev/67431-gnash-dev-buildbot-looking-for-slaves.html">the
8162 call from the Gnash project</a> for
8163 <a href="http://www.gnashdev.org:8010">buildbot</a> slaves to test the
8164 current source, I have set up a virtual KVM machine on the Debian
8165 Edu/Skolelinux virtualization host to test the git source on
8166 Debian/Squeeze.  I hope this can help the developers in getting new
8167 releases out more often.</p>
8168
8169 <p>As the developers want less main-stream build platforms tested to,
8170 I have considered setting up a <a
8171 href="http://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/">Debian/kfreebsd</a>
8172 machine as well.  I have also considered using the kfreebsd
8173 architecture in Debian as a file server in NUUG to get access to the 5
8174 TB zfs volume we currently use to store DV video.  Because of this, I
8175 finally got around to do a test installation of Debian/Squeeze with
8176 kfreebsd.  Installation went fairly smooth, thought I noticed some
8177 visual glitches in the cdebconf dialogs (black cursor left on the
8178 screen at random locations).  Have not gotten very far with the
8179 testing.  Noticed cfdisk did not work, but fdisk did so it was not a
8180 fatal problem.  Have to spend some more time on it to see if it is
8181 useful as a file server for NUUG.  Will try to find time to set up a
8182 gnash buildbot slave on the Debian Edu/Skolelinux this weekend.</p>
8183
8184       </div>
8185       <div class="tags">
8186
8187
8188         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
8189
8190
8191       </div>
8192     </div>
8193     <div class="padding"></div>
8194
8195     <div class="entry">
8196       <div class="title">
8197         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_in_3D.html">Debian in 3D</a>
8198       </div>
8199       <div class="date">
8200          9th November 2010
8201       </div>
8202       <div class="body">
8203         <p><img src="http://thingiverse-production.s3.amazonaws.com/renders/23/e0/c4/f9/2b/debswagtdose_preview_medium.jpg"></p>
8204
8205 <p>3D printing is just great.  I just came across this Debian logo in
8206 3D linked in from
8207 <a href="http://blog.thingiverse.com/2010/11/09/participatory-branding/">the
8208 thingiverse blog</a>.</p>
8209
8210       </div>
8211       <div class="tags">
8212
8213
8214         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8215
8216
8217       </div>
8218     </div>
8219     <div class="padding"></div>
8220
8221     <div class="entry">
8222       <div class="title">
8223         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_updates_2010_10_24.html">Software updates 2010-10-24</a>
8224       </div>
8225       <div class="date">
8226         24th October 2010
8227       </div>
8228       <div class="body">
8229         <p>Some updates.</p>
8230
8231 <p>My <a href="http://pledgebank.com/gnash-avm2">gnash pledge</a> to
8232 raise money for the project is going well.  The lower limit of 10
8233 signers was reached in 24 hours, and so far 13 people have signed it.
8234 More signers and more funding is most welcome, and I am really curious
8235 how far we can get before the time limit of December 24 is reached.
8236 :)</p>
8237
8238 <p>On the #gnash IRC channel on irc.freenode.net, I was just tipped
8239 about what appear to be a great code coverage tool capable of
8240 generating code coverage stats without any changes to the source code.
8241 It is called
8242 <a href="http://simonkagstrom.github.com/kcov/index.html">kcov</a>,
8243 and can be used using <tt>kcov &lt;directory&gt; &lt;binary&gt;</tt>.
8244 It is missing in Debian, but the git source built just fine in Squeeze
8245 after I installed libelf-dev, libdwarf-dev, pkg-config and
8246 libglib2.0-dev.  Failed to build in Lenny, but suspect that is
8247 solvable.  I hope kcov make it into Debian soon.</p>
8248
8249 <p>Finally found time to wrap up the release notes for <a
8250 href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2010/10/msg00002.html">a
8251 new alpha release of Debian Edu</a>, and just published the second
8252 alpha test release of the Squeeze based Debian Edu /
8253 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a>
8254 release.  Give it a try if you need a complete linux solution for your
8255 school, including central infrastructure server, workstations, thin
8256 client servers and diskless workstations.  A nice touch added
8257 yesterday is RDP support on the thin client servers, for windows
8258 clients to get a Linux desktop on request.</p>
8259
8260       </div>
8261       <div class="tags">
8262
8263
8264         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>.
8265
8266
8267       </div>
8268     </div>
8269     <div class="padding"></div>
8270
8271     <div class="entry">
8272       <div class="title">
8273         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_notes_on_Flash_in_Debian_and_Debian_Edu.html">Some notes on Flash in Debian and Debian Edu</a>
8274       </div>
8275       <div class="date">
8276          4th September 2010
8277       </div>
8278       <div class="body">
8279         <p>In the <a href="http://popcon.debian.org/unknown/by_vote">Debian
8280 popularity-contest numbers</a>, the adobe-flashplugin package the
8281 second most popular used package that is missing in Debian.  The sixth
8282 most popular is flashplayer-mozilla.  This is a clear indication that
8283 working flash is important for Debian users.  Around 10 percent of the
8284 users submitting data to popcon.debian.org have this package
8285 installed.</p>
8286
8287 <p>In the report written by Lars Risan in August 2008
8288 («<a href="http://wiki.skolelinux.no/Dokumentasjon/Rapporter?action=AttachFile&do=view&target=Skolelinux_i_bruk_rapport_1.0.pdf">Skolelinux
8289 i bruk – Rapport for Hurum kommune, Universitetet i Agder og
8290 stiftelsen SLX Debian Labs</a>»), one of the most important problems
8291 schools experienced with <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
8292 Edu/Skolelinux</a> was the lack of working Flash.  A lot of educational
8293 web sites require Flash to work, and lacking working Flash support in
8294 the web browser and the problems with installing it was perceived as a
8295 good reason to stay with Windows.</p>
8296
8297 <p>I once saw a funny and sad comment in a web forum, where Linux was
8298 said to be the retarded cousin that did not really understand
8299 everything you told him but could work fairly well.  This was a
8300 comment regarding the problems Linux have with proprietary formats and
8301 non-standard web pages, and is sad because it exposes a fairly common
8302 understanding of whose fault it is if web pages that only work in for
8303 example Internet Explorer 6 fail to work on Firefox, and funny because
8304 it explain very well how annoying it is for users when Linux
8305 distributions do not work with the documents they receive or the web
8306 pages they want to visit.</p>
8307
8308 <p>This is part of the reason why I believe it is important for Debian
8309 and Debian Edu to have a well working Flash implementation in the
8310 distribution, to get at least popular sites as Youtube and Google
8311 Video to working out of the box.  For Squeeze, Debian have the chance
8312 to include the latest version of Gnash that will make this happen, as
8313 the new release 0.8.8 was published a few weeks ago and is resting in
8314 unstable.  The new version work with more sites that version 0.8.7.
8315 The Gnash maintainers have asked for a freeze exception, but the
8316 release team have not had time to reply to it yet.  I hope they agree
8317 with me that Flash is important for the Debian desktop users, and thus
8318 accept the new package into Squeeze.</p>
8319
8320       </div>
8321       <div class="tags">
8322
8323
8324         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
8325
8326
8327       </div>
8328     </div>
8329     <div class="padding"></div>
8330
8331     <div class="entry">
8332       <div class="title">
8333         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Circular_package_dependencies_harms_apt_recovery.html">Circular package dependencies harms apt recovery</a>
8334       </div>
8335       <div class="date">
8336         27th July 2010
8337       </div>
8338       <div class="body">
8339         <p>I discovered this while doing
8340 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">automated
8341 testing of upgrades from Debian Lenny to Squeeze</a>.  A few packages
8342 in Debian still got circular dependencies, and it is often claimed
8343 that apt and aptitude should be able to handle this just fine, but
8344 some times these dependency loops causes apt to fail.</p>
8345
8346 <p>An example is from todays
8347 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing//test-20100727-lenny-squeeze-kde-aptitude.txt">upgrade
8348 of KDE using aptitude</a>.  In it, a bug in kdebase-workspace-data
8349 causes perl-modules to fail to upgrade.  The cause is simple.  If a
8350 package fail to unpack, then only part of packages with the circular
8351 dependency might end up being unpacked when unpacking aborts, and the
8352 ones already unpacked will fail to configure in the recovery phase
8353 because its dependencies are unavailable.</p>
8354
8355 <p>In this log, the problem manifest itself with this error:</p>
8356
8357 <blockquote><pre>
8358 dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of perl-modules:
8359  perl-modules depends on perl (>= 5.10.1-1); however:
8360   Version of perl on system is 5.10.0-19lenny2.
8361 dpkg: error processing perl-modules (--configure):
8362  dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
8363 </pre></blockquote>
8364
8365 <p>The perl/perl-modules circular dependency is already
8366 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/527917">reported as a bug</a>, and will
8367 hopefully be solved as soon as possible, but it is not the only one,
8368 and each one of these loops in the dependency tree can cause similar
8369 failures.  Of course, they only occur when there are bugs in other
8370 packages causing the unpacking to fail, but it is rather nasty when
8371 the failure of one package causes the problem to become worse because
8372 of dependency loops.</p>
8373
8374 <p>Thanks to
8375 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/06/msg00116.html">the
8376 tireless effort by Bill Allombert</a>, the number of circular
8377 dependencies
8378 <a href="http://debian.semistable.com/debgraph.out.html">left in Debian
8379 is dropping</a>, and perhaps it will reach zero one day. :)</p>
8380
8381 <p>Todays testing also exposed a bug in
8382 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/590605">update-notifier</a> and
8383 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/590604">different behaviour</a> between
8384 apt-get and aptitude, the latter possibly caused by some circular
8385 dependency.  Reported both to BTS to try to get someone to look at
8386 it.</p>
8387
8388       </div>
8389       <div class="tags">
8390
8391
8392         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
8393
8394
8395       </div>
8396     </div>
8397     <div class="padding"></div>
8398
8399     <div class="entry">
8400       <div class="title">
8401         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_are_they_searching_for___PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_in_LDAP.html">What are they searching for - PowerDNS and ISC DHCP in LDAP</a>
8402       </div>
8403       <div class="date">
8404         17th July 2010
8405       </div>
8406       <div class="body">
8407         <p>This is a
8408 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">followup</a>
8409 on my
8410 <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
8411 work</a> on
8412 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">merging
8413 all</a> the computer related LDAP objects in Debian Edu.</p>
8414
8415 <p>As a step to try to see if it possible to merge the DNS and DHCP
8416 LDAP objects, I have had a look at how the packages pdns-backend-ldap
8417 and dhcp3-server-ldap in Debian use the LDAP server.  The two
8418 implementations are quite different in how they use LDAP.</p>
8419
8420 To get this information, I started slapd with debugging enabled and
8421 dumped the debug output to a file to get the LDAP searches performed
8422 on a Debian Edu main-server.  Here is a summary.
8423
8424 <p><strong>powerdns</strong></p>
8425
8426 <a href="http://www.linuxnetworks.de/doc/index.php/PowerDNS_LDAP_Backend">Clues
8427 on how to</a> set up PowerDNS to use a LDAP backend is available on
8428 the web.
8429
8430 <p>PowerDNS have two modes of operation using LDAP as its backend.
8431 One "strict" mode where the forward and reverse DNS lookups are done
8432 using the same LDAP objects, and a "tree" mode where the forward and
8433 reverse entries are in two different subtrees in LDAP with a structure
8434 based on the DNS names, as in tjener.intern and
8435 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa.</p>
8436
8437 <p>In tree mode, the server is set up to use a LDAP subtree as its
8438 base, and uses a "base" scoped search for the DNS name by adding
8439 "dc=tjener,dc=intern," to the base with a filter for
8440 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" for the forward entry and
8441 "dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa," with a filter for
8442 "(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)" for the reverse entry.  For
8443 forward entries, it is looking for attributes named dnsttl, arecord,
8444 nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord,
8445 txtrecord, rprecord, afsdbrecord, keyrecord, aaaarecord, locrecord,
8446 srvrecord, naptrrecord, kxrecord, certrecord, dsrecord, sshfprecord,
8447 ipseckeyrecord, rrsigrecord, nsecrecord, dnskeyrecord, dhcidrecord,
8448 spfrecord and modifytimestamp.  For reverse entries it is looking for
8449 the attributes dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord,
8450 ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord,
8451 locrecord, srvrecord, naptrrecord and modifytimestamp.  The equivalent
8452 ldapsearch commands could look like this:</p>
8453
8454 <blockquote><pre>
8455 ldapsearch -h ldap \
8456   -b dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
8457   -s base -x '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
8458   cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
8459   rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
8460   nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
8461   rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
8462
8463 ldapsearch -h ldap \
8464   -b dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
8465   -s base -x '(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)'
8466   dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord soarecord ptrrecord \
8467   hinforecord mxrecord txtrecord rprecord aaaarecord locrecord \
8468   srvrecord naptrrecord modifytimestamp
8469 </pre></blockquote>
8470
8471 <p>In Debian Edu/Lenny, the PowerDNS tree mode is used with
8472 ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no as the base, and these are two
8473 example LDAP objects used there.  In addition to these objects, the
8474 parent objects all th way up to ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
8475 also exist.</p>
8476
8477 <blockquote><pre>
8478 dn: dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
8479 objectclass: top
8480 objectclass: dnsdomain
8481 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
8482 dc: tjener
8483 arecord: 10.0.2.2
8484 associateddomain: tjener.intern
8485
8486 dn: dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
8487 objectclass: top
8488 objectclass: dnsdomain2
8489 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
8490 dc: 2
8491 ptrrecord: tjener.intern
8492 associateddomain: 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa
8493 </pre></blockquote>
8494
8495 <p>In strict mode, the server behaves differently.  When looking for
8496 forward DNS entries, it is doing a "subtree" scoped search with the
8497 same base as in the tree mode for a object with filter
8498 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" and requests the attributes dnsttl,
8499 arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord,
8500 mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord, locrecord, srvrecord,
8501 naptrrecord and modifytimestamp.  For reverse entires it also do a
8502 subtree scoped search but this time the filter is "(arecord=10.0.2.2)"
8503 and the requested attributes are associateddomain, dnsttl and
8504 modifytimestamp.  In short, in strict mode the objects with ptrrecord
8505 go away, and the arecord attribute in the forward object is used
8506 instead.</p>
8507
8508 <p>The forward and reverse searches can be simulated using ldapsearch
8509 like this:</p>
8510
8511 <blockquote><pre>
8512 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
8513   '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
8514   cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
8515   rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
8516   nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
8517   rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
8518
8519 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
8520   '(arecord=10.0.2.2)' associateddomain dnsttl modifytimestamp
8521 </pre></blockquote>
8522
8523 <p>In addition to the forward and reverse searches , there is also a
8524 search for SOA records, which behave similar to the forward and
8525 reverse lookups.</p>
8526
8527 <p>A thing to note with the PowerDNS behaviour is that it do not
8528 specify any objectclass names, and instead look for the attributes it
8529 need to generate a DNS reply.  This make it able to work with any
8530 objectclass that provide the needed attributes.</p>
8531
8532 <p>The attributes are normally provided in the cosine (RFC 1274) and
8533 dnsdomain2 schemas.  The latter is used for reverse entries like
8534 ptrrecord and recent DNS additions like aaaarecord and srvrecord.</p>
8535
8536 <p>In Debian Edu, we have created DNS objects using the object classes
8537 dcobject (for dc), dnsdomain or dnsdomain2 (structural, for the DNS
8538 attributes) and domainrelatedobject (for associatedDomain).  The use
8539 of structural object classes make it impossible to combine these
8540 classes with the object classes used by DHCP.</p>
8541
8542 <p>There are other schemas that could be used too, for example the
8543 dnszone structural object class used by Gosa and bind-sdb for the DNS
8544 attributes combined with the domainrelatedobject object class, but in
8545 this case some unused attributes would have to be included as well
8546 (zonename and relativedomainname).</p>
8547
8548 <p>My proposal for Debian Edu would be to switch PowerDNS to strict
8549 mode and not use any of the existing objectclasses (dnsdomain,
8550 dnsdomain2 and dnszone) when one want to combine the DNS information
8551 with DHCP information, and instead create a auxiliary object class
8552 defined something like this (using the attributes defined for
8553 dnsdomain and dnsdomain2 or dnszone):</p>
8554
8555 <blockquote><pre>
8556 objectclass ( some-oid NAME 'dnsDomainAux'
8557     SUP top
8558     AUXILIARY
8559     MAY ( ARecord $ MDRecord $ MXRecord $ NSRecord $ SOARecord $ CNAMERecord $
8560           DNSTTL $ DNSClass $ PTRRecord $ HINFORecord $ MINFORecord $
8561           TXTRecord $ SIGRecord $ KEYRecord $ AAAARecord $ LOCRecord $
8562           NXTRecord $ SRVRecord $ NAPTRRecord $ KXRecord $ CERTRecord $
8563           A6Record $ DNAMERecord
8564     ))
8565 </pre></blockquote>
8566
8567 <p>This will allow any object to become a DNS entry when combined with
8568 the domainrelatedobject object class, and allow any entity to include
8569 all the attributes PowerDNS wants.  I've sent an email to the PowerDNS
8570 developers asking for their view on this schema and if they are
8571 interested in providing such schema with PowerDNS, and I hope my
8572 message will be accepted into their mailing list soon.</p>
8573
8574 <p><strong>ISC dhcp</strong></p>
8575
8576 <p>The DHCP server searches for specific objectclass and requests all
8577 the object attributes, and then uses the attributes it want.  This
8578 make it harder to figure out exactly what attributes are used, but
8579 thanks to the working example in Debian Edu I can at least get an idea
8580 what is needed without having to read the source code.</p>
8581
8582 <p>In the DHCP server configuration, the LDAP base to use and the
8583 search filter to use to locate the correct dhcpServer entity is
8584 stored.  These are the relevant entries from
8585 /etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf:</p>
8586
8587 <blockquote><pre>
8588 ldap-base-dn "dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no";
8589 ldap-dhcp-server-cn "dhcp";
8590 </pre></blockquote>
8591
8592 <p>The DHCP server uses this information to nest all the DHCP
8593 configuration it need.  The cn "dhcp" is located using the given LDAP
8594 base and the filter "(&(objectClass=dhcpServer)(cn=dhcp))".  The
8595 search result is this entry:</p>
8596
8597 <blockquote><pre>
8598 dn: cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
8599 cn: dhcp
8600 objectClass: top
8601 objectClass: dhcpServer
8602 dhcpServiceDN: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
8603 </pre></blockquote>
8604
8605 <p>The content of the dhcpServiceDN attribute is next used to locate the
8606 subtree with DHCP configuration.  The DHCP configuration subtree base
8607 is located using a base scope search with base "cn=DHCP
8608 Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" and filter
8609 "(&(objectClass=dhcpService)(|(dhcpPrimaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)(dhcpSecondaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)))".
8610 The search result is this entry:</p>
8611
8612 <blockquote><pre>
8613 dn: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
8614 cn: DHCP Config
8615 objectClass: top
8616 objectClass: dhcpService
8617 objectClass: dhcpOptions
8618 dhcpPrimaryDN: cn=dhcp, dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
8619 dhcpStatements: ddns-update-style none
8620 dhcpStatements: authoritative
8621 dhcpOption: smtp-server code 69 = array of ip-address
8622 dhcpOption: www-server code 72 = array of ip-address
8623 dhcpOption: wpad-url code 252 = text
8624 </pre></blockquote>
8625
8626 <p>Next, the entire subtree is processed, one level at the time.  When
8627 all the DHCP configuration is loaded, it is ready to receive requests.
8628 The subtree in Debian Edu contain objects with object classes
8629 top/dhcpService/dhcpOptions, top/dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions,
8630 top/dhcpSubnet, top/dhcpGroup and top/dhcpHost.  These provide options
8631 and information about netmasks, dynamic range etc.  Leaving out the
8632 details here because it is not relevant for the focus of my
8633 investigation, which is to see if it is possible to merge dns and dhcp
8634 related computer objects.</p>
8635
8636 <p>When a DHCP request come in, LDAP is searched for the MAC address
8637 of the client (00:00:00:00:00:00 in this example), using a subtree
8638 scoped search with "cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" as
8639 the base and "(&(objectClass=dhcpHost)(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet
8640 00:00:00:00:00:00))" as the filter.  This is what a host object look
8641 like:</p>
8642
8643 <blockquote><pre>
8644 dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
8645 cn: hostname
8646 objectClass: top
8647 objectClass: dhcpHost
8648 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
8649 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname
8650 </pre></blockquote>
8651
8652 <p>There is less flexiblity in the way LDAP searches are done here.
8653 The object classes need to have fixed names, and the configuration
8654 need to be stored in a fairly specific LDAP structure.  On the
8655 positive side, the invidiual dhcpHost entires can be anywhere without
8656 the DN pointed to by the dhcpServer entries.  The latter should make
8657 it possible to group all host entries in a subtree next to the
8658 configuration entries, and this subtree can also be shared with the
8659 DNS server if the schema proposed above is combined with the dhcpHost
8660 structural object class.
8661
8662 <p><strong>Conclusion</strong></p>
8663
8664 <p>The PowerDNS implementation seem to be very flexible when it come
8665 to which LDAP schemas to use.  While its "tree" mode is rigid when it
8666 come to the the LDAP structure, the "strict" mode is very flexible,
8667 allowing DNS objects to be stored anywhere under the base cn specified
8668 in the configuration.</p>
8669
8670 <p>The DHCP implementation on the other hand is very inflexible, both
8671 regarding which LDAP schemas to use and which LDAP structure to use.
8672 I guess one could implement ones own schema, as long as the
8673 objectclasses and attributes have the names used, but this do not
8674 really help when the DHCP subtree need to have a fairly fixed
8675 structure.</p>
8676
8677 <p>Based on the observed behaviour, I suspect a LDAP structure like
8678 this might work for Debian Edu:</p>
8679
8680 <blockquote><pre>
8681 ou=services
8682   cn=machine-info (dhcpService) - dhcpServiceDN points here
8683     cn=dhcp (dhcpServer)
8684     cn=dhcp-internal (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
8685       cn=10.0.2.0 (dhcpSubnet)
8686         cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
8687     cn=dhcp-thinclients (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
8688       cn=192.168.0.0 (dhcpSubnet)
8689         cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
8690     ou=machines - PowerDNS base points here
8691       cn=hostname (dhcpHost/domainrelatedobject/dnsDomainAux)
8692 </pre></blockquote>
8693
8694 <P>This is not tested yet.  If the DHCP server require the dhcpHost
8695 entries to be in the dhcpGroup subtrees, the entries can be stored
8696 there instead of a common machines subtree, and the PowerDNS base
8697 would have to be moved one level up to the machine-info subtree.</p>
8698
8699 <p>The combined object under the machines subtree would look something
8700 like this:</p>
8701
8702 <blockquote><pre>
8703 dn: dc=hostname,ou=machines,cn=machine-info,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
8704 dc: hostname
8705 objectClass: top
8706 objectClass: dhcpHost
8707 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
8708 objectclass: dnsDomainAux
8709 associateddomain: hostname.intern
8710 arecord: 10.11.12.13
8711 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
8712 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname.intern
8713 </pre></blockquote>
8714
8715 </p>One could even add the LTSP configuration associated with a given
8716 machine, as long as the required attributes are available in a
8717 auxiliary object class.</p>
8718
8719       </div>
8720       <div class="tags">
8721
8722
8723         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
8724
8725
8726       </div>
8727     </div>
8728     <div class="padding"></div>
8729
8730     <div class="entry">
8731       <div class="title">
8732         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">Combining PowerDNS and ISC DHCP LDAP objects</a>
8733       </div>
8734       <div class="date">
8735         14th July 2010
8736       </div>
8737       <div class="body">
8738         <p>For a while now, I have wanted to find a way to change the DNS and
8739 DHCP services in Debian Edu to use the same LDAP objects for a given
8740 computer, to avoid the possibility of having a inconsistent state for
8741 a computer in LDAP (as in DHCP but no DNS entry or the other way
8742 around) and make it easier to add computers to LDAP.</p>
8743
8744 <p>I've looked at how powerdns and dhcpd is using LDAP, and using this
8745 information finally found a solution that seem to work.</p>
8746
8747 <p>The old setup required three LDAP objects for a given computer.
8748 One forward DNS entry, one reverse DNS entry and one DHCP entry.  If
8749 we switch powerdns to use its strict LDAP method (ldap-method=strict
8750 in pdns-debian-edu.conf), the forward and reverse DNS entries are
8751 merged into one while making it impossible to transfer the reverse map
8752 to a slave DNS server.</p>
8753
8754 <p>If we also replace the object class used to get the DNS related
8755 attributes to one allowing these attributes to be combined with the
8756 dhcphost object class, we can merge the DNS and DHCP entries into one.
8757 I've written such object class in the dnsdomainaux.schema file (need
8758 proper OIDs, but that is a minor issue), and tested the setup.  It
8759 seem to work.</p>
8760
8761 <p>With this test setup in place, we can get away with one LDAP object
8762 for both DNS and DHCP, and even the LTSP configuration I suggested in
8763 an earlier email.  The combined LDAP object will look something like
8764 this:</p>
8765
8766 <blockquote><pre>
8767   dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
8768   cn: hostname
8769   objectClass: dhcphost
8770   objectclass: domainrelatedobject
8771   objectclass: dnsdomainaux
8772   associateddomain: hostname.intern
8773   arecord: 10.11.12.13
8774   dhcphwaddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
8775   dhcpstatements: fixed-address hostname
8776   ldapconfigsound: Y
8777 </pre></blockquote>
8778
8779 <p>The DNS server uses the associateddomain and arecord entries, while
8780 the DHCP server uses the dhcphwaddress and dhcpstatements entries
8781 before asking DNS to resolve the fixed-adddress.  LTSP will use
8782 dhcphwaddress or associateddomain and the ldapconfig* attributes.</p>
8783
8784 <p>I am not yet sure if I can get the DHCP server to look for its
8785 dhcphost in a different location, to allow us to put the objects
8786 outside the "DHCP Config" subtree, but hope to figure out a way to do
8787 that.  If I can't figure out a way to do that, we can still get rid of
8788 the hosts subtree and move all its content into the DHCP Config tree
8789 (which probably should be renamed to be more related to the new
8790 content.  I suspect cn=dnsdhcp,ou=services or something like that
8791 might be a good place to put it.</p>
8792
8793 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
8794 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
8795
8796       </div>
8797       <div class="tags">
8798
8799
8800         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
8801
8802
8803       </div>
8804     </div>
8805     <div class="padding"></div>
8806
8807     <div class="entry">
8808       <div class="title">
8809         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_storing_LTSP_configuration_in_LDAP.html">Idea for storing LTSP configuration in LDAP</a>
8810       </div>
8811       <div class="date">
8812         11th July 2010
8813       </div>
8814       <div class="body">
8815         <p>Vagrant mentioned on IRC today that ltsp_config now support
8816 sourcing files from /usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ on the thin
8817 clients, and that this can be used to fetch configuration from LDAP if
8818 Debian Edu choose to store configuration there.</p>
8819
8820 <p>Armed with this information, I got inspired and wrote a test module
8821 to get configuration from LDAP.  The idea is to look up the MAC
8822 address of the client in LDAP, and look for attributes on the form
8823 ltspconfigsetting=value, and use this to export SETTING=value to the
8824 LTSP clients.</p>
8825
8826 <p>The goal is to be able to store the LTSP configuration attributes
8827 in a "computer" LDAP object used by both DNS and DHCP, and thus
8828 allowing us to store all information about a computer in one place.</p>
8829
8830 <p>This is a untested draft implementation, and I welcome feedback on
8831 this approach.  A real LDAP schema for the ltspClientAux objectclass
8832 need to be written.  Comments, suggestions, etc?</p>
8833
8834 <blockquote><pre>
8835 # Store in /opt/ltsp/$arch/usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ldap-config
8836 #
8837 # Fetch LTSP client settings from LDAP based on MAC address
8838 #
8839 # Uses ethernet address as stored in the dhcpHost objectclass using
8840 # the dhcpHWAddress attribute or ethernet address stored in the
8841 # ieee802Device objectclass with the macAddress attribute.
8842 #
8843 # This module is written to be schema agnostic, and only depend on the
8844 # existence of attribute names.
8845 #
8846 # The LTSP configuration variables are saved directly using a
8847 # ltspConfig prefix and uppercasing the rest of the attribute name.
8848 # To set the SERVER variable, set the ltspConfigServer attribute.
8849 #
8850 # Some LDAP schema should be created with all the relevant
8851 # configuration settings.  Something like this should work:
8852 #
8853 # objectclass ( 1.1.2.2 NAME 'ltspClientAux'
8854 #     SUP top
8855 #     AUXILIARY
8856 #     MAY ( ltspConfigServer $ ltsConfigSound $ ... )
8857
8858 LDAPSERVER=$(debian-edu-ldapserver)
8859 if [ "$LDAPSERVER" ] ; then
8860     LDAPBASE=$(debian-edu-ldapserver -b)
8861     for MAC in $(LANG=C ifconfig |grep -i hwaddr| awk '{print $5}'|sort -u) ; do
8862         filter="(|(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet $MAC)(macAddress=$MAC))"
8863         ldapsearch -h "$LDAPSERVER" -b "$LDAPBASE" -v -x "$filter" | \
8864             grep '^ltspConfig' | while read attr value ; do
8865             # Remove prefix and convert to upper case
8866             attr=$(echo $attr | sed 's/^ltspConfig//i' | tr a-z A-Z)
8867             # bass value on to clients
8868             eval "$attr=$value; export $attr"
8869         done
8870     done
8871 fi
8872 </pre></blockquote>
8873
8874 <p>I'm not sure this shell construction will work, because I suspect
8875 the while block might end up in a subshell causing the variables set
8876 there to not show up in ltsp-config, but if that is the case I am sure
8877 the code can be restructured to make sure the variables are passed on.
8878 I expect that can be solved with some testing. :)</p>
8879
8880 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
8881 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
8882
8883 <p>Update 2010-07-17: I am aware of another effort to store LTSP
8884 configuration in LDAP that was created around year 2000 by
8885 <a href="http://www.pcxperience.com/thinclient/documentation/ldap.html">PC
8886 Xperience, Inc., 2000</a>.  I found its
8887 <a href="http://people.redhat.com/alikins/ltsp/ldap/">files</a> on a
8888 personal home page over at redhat.com.</p>
8889
8890       </div>
8891       <div class="tags">
8892
8893
8894         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
8895
8896
8897       </div>
8898     </div>
8899     <div class="padding"></div>
8900
8901     <div class="entry">
8902       <div class="title">
8903         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/jXplorer__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">jXplorer, a very nice LDAP GUI</a>
8904       </div>
8905       <div class="date">
8906          9th July 2010
8907       </div>
8908       <div class="body">
8909         <p>Since
8910 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">my
8911 last post</a> about available LDAP tools in Debian, I was told about a
8912 LDAP GUI that is even better than luma.  The java application
8913 <a href="http://jxplorer.org/">jXplorer</a> is claimed to be capable of
8914 moving LDAP objects and subtrees using drag-and-drop, and can
8915 authenticate using Kerberos.  I have only tested the Kerberos
8916 authentication, but do not have a LDAP setup allowing me to rewrite
8917 LDAP with my test user yet.  It is
8918 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/j/jxplorer.html">available in
8919 Debian</a> testing and unstable at the moment.  The only problem I
8920 have with it is how it handle errors.  If something go wrong, its
8921 non-intuitive behaviour require me to go through some query work list
8922 and remove the failing query.  Nothing big, but very annoying.</p>
8923
8924       </div>
8925       <div class="tags">
8926
8927
8928         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
8929
8930
8931       </div>
8932     </div>
8933     <div class="padding"></div>
8934
8935     <div class="entry">
8936       <div class="title">
8937         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__apt_vs_aptitude_with_the_Gnome_desktop.html">Lenny->Squeeze upgrades, apt vs aptitude with the Gnome desktop</a>
8938       </div>
8939       <div class="date">
8940          3rd July 2010
8941       </div>
8942       <div class="body">
8943         <p>Here is a short update on my <a
8944 href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">my
8945 Debian Lenny->Squeeze upgrade testing</a>.  Here is a summary of the
8946 difference for Gnome when it is upgraded by apt-get and aptitude.  I'm
8947 not reporting the status for KDE, because the upgrade crashes when
8948 aptitude try because of missing conflicts
8949 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#584861</a> and
8950 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/585716">#585716</a>).</p>
8951
8952 <p>At the end of the upgrade test script, dpkg -l is executed to get a
8953 complete list of the installed packages.  Based on this I see these
8954 differences when I did a test run today.  As usual, I do not really
8955 know what the correct set of packages would be, but thought it best to
8956 publish the difference.</p>
8957
8958 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
8959
8960 <blockquote><p>
8961   at-spi cpp-4.3 finger gnome-spell gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
8962   libatspi1.0-0 libcupsys2 libeel2-data libgail-common libgdl-1-common
8963   libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin
8964   libgtksourceview-common libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
8965   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libservlet2.4-java libxalan2-java
8966   libxerces2-java openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
8967   python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gtkhtml2
8968   python-gtkmozembed svgalibg1 xserver-xephyr zip
8969 </p></blockquote>
8970
8971 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
8972
8973 <blockquote><p>
8974   bluez-utils dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop epiphany-gecko
8975   gnome-app-install gnome-mount gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager
8976   libao2 libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libbind9-50
8977   libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcurl3
8978   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9
8979   libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3
8980   libfaad0 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
8981   libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
8982   libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
8983   libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
8984   libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50
8985   libisccfg50 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick++10
8986   libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4
8987   libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5
8988   libparted1.8-10 libpisock9 libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3
8989   libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8 libsensors3 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
8990   libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1
8991   libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0 libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj
8992   libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3
8993   mysql-common swfdec-gnome totem-gstreamer wodim
8994 </p></blockquote>
8995
8996 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
8997
8998 <blockquote><p>
8999   gnome gnome-desktop-environment hamster-applet python-gnomeapplet
9000   python-gnomekeyring python-wnck rhythmbox-plugins xorg
9001   xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
9002   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
9003   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-video-all
9004   xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark xserver-xorg-video-ati
9005   xserver-xorg-video-chips xserver-xorg-video-cirrus
9006   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
9007   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
9008   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-mach64
9009   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
9010   xserver-xorg-video-nouveau xserver-xorg-video-nv
9011   xserver-xorg-video-r128 xserver-xorg-video-radeon
9012   xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd xserver-xorg-video-rendition
9013   xserver-xorg-video-s3 xserver-xorg-video-s3virge
9014   xserver-xorg-video-savage xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion
9015   xserver-xorg-video-sis xserver-xorg-video-sisusb
9016   xserver-xorg-video-tdfx xserver-xorg-video-tga
9017   xserver-xorg-video-trident xserver-xorg-video-tseng
9018   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vmware
9019   xserver-xorg-video-voodoo
9020 </p></blockquote>
9021
9022 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
9023
9024 <blockquote><p>
9025   deskbar-applet xserver-xorg xserver-xorg-core
9026   xserver-xorg-input-wacom xserver-xorg-video-intel
9027   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome
9028 </p></blockquote>
9029
9030 <p>I was told on IRC that the xorg-xserver package was
9031 <a href="http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-xorg/xserver/xorg-server.git;a=commit;h=9c8080d06c457932d3bfec021c69ac000aa60120">changed
9032 in git</a> today to try to get apt-get to not remove xorg completely.
9033 No idea when it hits Squeeze, but when it does I hope it will reduce
9034 the difference somewhat.
9035
9036       </div>
9037       <div class="tags">
9038
9039
9040         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9041
9042
9043       </div>
9044     </div>
9045     <div class="padding"></div>
9046
9047     <div class="entry">
9048       <div class="title">
9049         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">LUMA, a very nice LDAP GUI</a>
9050       </div>
9051       <div class="date">
9052         28th June 2010
9053       </div>
9054       <div class="body">
9055         <p>The last few days I have been looking into the status of the LDAP
9056 directory in Debian Edu, and in the process I started to miss a GUI
9057 tool to browse the LDAP tree.  The only one I was able to find in
9058 Debian/Squeeze and Lenny is
9059 <a href="http://luma.sourceforge.net/">LUMA</a>, which has proved to
9060 be a great tool to get a overview of the current LDAP directory
9061 populated by default in Skolelinux.  Thanks to it, I have been able to
9062 find empty and obsolete subtrees, misplaced objects and duplicate
9063 objects.  It will be installed by default in Debian/Squeeze.  If you
9064 are working with LDAP, give it a go. :)</p>
9065
9066 <p>I did notice one problem with it I have not had time to report to
9067 the BTS yet.  There is no .desktop file in the package, so the tool do
9068 not show up in the Gnome and KDE menus, but only deep down in in the
9069 Debian submenu in KDE.  I hope that can be fixed before Squeeze is
9070 released.</p>
9071
9072 <p>I have not yet been able to get it to modify the tree yet.  I would
9073 like to move objects and remove subtrees directly in the GUI, but have
9074 not found a way to do that with LUMA yet.  So in the mean time, I use
9075 <a href="http://www.lichteblau.com/ldapvi/">ldapvi</a> for that.</p>
9076
9077 <p>If you have tips on other GUI tools for LDAP that might be useful
9078 in Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
9079
9080 <p>Update 2010-06-29: Ross Reedstrom tipped us about the
9081 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/g/gq.html">gq</a> package as a
9082 useful GUI alternative.  It seem like a good tool, but is unmaintained
9083 in Debian and got a RC bug keeping it out of Squeeze.  Unless that
9084 changes, it will not be an option for Debian Edu based on Squeeze.</p>
9085
9086       </div>
9087       <div class="tags">
9088
9089
9090         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
9091
9092
9093       </div>
9094     </div>
9095     <div class="padding"></div>
9096
9097     <div class="entry">
9098       <div class="title">
9099         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_a_change_to_LDAP_schemas_allowing_DNS_and_DHCP_info_to_be_combined_into_one_object.html">Idea for a change to LDAP schemas allowing DNS and DHCP info to be combined into one object</a>
9100       </div>
9101       <div class="date">
9102         24th June 2010
9103       </div>
9104       <div class="body">
9105         <p>A while back, I
9106 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">complained
9107 about the fact</a> that it is not possible with the provided schemas
9108 for storing DNS and DHCP information in LDAP to combine the two sets
9109 of information into one LDAP object representing a computer.</p>
9110
9111 <p>In the mean time, I discovered that a simple fix would be to make
9112 the dhcpHost object class auxiliary, to allow it to be combined with
9113 the dNSDomain object class, and thus forming one object for one
9114 computer when storing both DHCP and DNS information in LDAP.</p>
9115
9116 <p>If I understand this correctly, it is not safe to do this change
9117 without also changing the assigned number for the object class, and I
9118 do not know enough about LDAP schema design to do that properly for
9119 Debian Edu.</p>
9120
9121 <p>Anyway, for future reference, this is how I believe we could change
9122 the
9123 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dhc-ldap-schema-00">DHCP
9124 schema</a> to solve at least part of the problem with the LDAP schemas
9125 available today from IETF.</p>
9126
9127 <pre>
9128 --- dhcp.schema    (revision 65192)
9129 +++ dhcp.schema    (working copy)
9130 @@ -376,7 +376,7 @@
9131  objectclass ( 2.16.840.1.113719.1.203.6.6
9132         NAME 'dhcpHost'
9133         DESC 'This represents information about a particular client'
9134 -       SUP top
9135 +       SUP top AUXILIARY
9136         MUST cn
9137         MAY  (dhcpLeaseDN $ dhcpHWAddress $ dhcpOptionsDN $ dhcpStatements $ dhcpComments $ dhcpOption)
9138         X-NDS_CONTAINMENT ('dhcpService' 'dhcpSubnet' 'dhcpGroup') )
9139 </pre>
9140
9141 <p>I very much welcome clues on how to do this properly for Debian
9142 Edu/Squeeze.  We provide the DHCP schema in our debian-edu-config
9143 package, and should thus be free to rewrite it as we see fit.</p>
9144
9145 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
9146 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
9147
9148       </div>
9149       <div class="tags">
9150
9151
9152         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
9153
9154
9155       </div>
9156     </div>
9157     <div class="padding"></div>
9158
9159     <div class="entry">
9160       <div class="title">
9161         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Calling_tasksel_like_the_installer__while_still_getting_useful_output.html">Calling tasksel like the installer, while still getting useful output</a>
9162       </div>
9163       <div class="date">
9164         16th June 2010
9165       </div>
9166       <div class="body">
9167         <p>A few times I have had the need to simulate the way tasksel
9168 installs packages during the normal debian-installer run.  Until now,
9169 I have ended up letting tasksel do the work, with the annoying problem
9170 of not getting any feedback at all when something fails (like a
9171 conffile question from dpkg or a download that fails), using code like
9172 this:
9173
9174 <blockquote><pre>
9175 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
9176 tasksel --new-install
9177 </pre></blockquote>
9178
9179 This would invoke tasksel, let its automatic task selection pick the
9180 tasks to install, and continue to install the requested tasks without
9181 any output what so ever.
9182
9183 Recently I revisited this problem while working on the automatic
9184 package upgrade testing, because tasksel would some times hang without
9185 any useful feedback, and I want to see what is going on when it
9186 happen.  Then it occured to me, I can parse the output from tasksel
9187 when asked to run in test mode, and use that aptitude command line
9188 printed by tasksel then to simulate the tasksel run.  I ended up using
9189 code like this:
9190
9191 <blockquote><pre>
9192 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
9193 cmd="$(in_target tasksel -t --new-install | sed 's/debconf-apt-progress -- //')"
9194 $cmd
9195 </pre></blockquote>
9196
9197 <p>The content of $cmd is typically something like "<tt>aptitude -q
9198 --without-recommends -o APT::Install-Recommends=no -y install
9199 ~t^desktop$ ~t^gnome-desktop$ ~t^laptop$ ~pstandard ~prequired
9200 ~pimportant</tt>", which will install the gnome desktop task, the
9201 laptop task and all packages with priority standard , required and
9202 important, just like tasksel would have done it during
9203 installation.</p>
9204
9205 <p>A better approach is probably to extend tasksel to be able to
9206 install packages without using debconf-apt-progress, for use cases
9207 like this.</p>
9208
9209       </div>
9210       <div class="tags">
9211
9212
9213         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
9214
9215
9216       </div>
9217     </div>
9218     <div class="padding"></div>
9219
9220     <div class="entry">
9221       <div class="title">
9222         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__removals_by_apt_and_aptitude.html">Lenny->Squeeze upgrades, removals by apt and aptitude</a>
9223       </div>
9224       <div class="date">
9225         13th June 2010
9226       </div>
9227       <div class="body">
9228         <p>My
9229 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">testing
9230 of Debian upgrades</a> from Lenny to Squeeze continues, and I've
9231 finally made the upgrade logs available from
9232 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/</a>.
9233 I am now testing dist-upgrade of Gnome and KDE in a chroot using both
9234 apt and aptitude, and found their differences interesting.  This time
9235 I will only focus on their removal plans.</p>
9236
9237 <p>After installing a Gnome desktop and the laptop task, apt-get wants
9238 to remove 72 packages when dist-upgrading from Lenny to Squeeze.  The
9239 surprising part is that it want to remove xorg and all
9240 xserver-xorg-video* drivers.  Clearly not a good choice, but I am not
9241 sure why.  When asking aptitude to do the same, it want to remove 129
9242 packages, but most of them are library packages I suspect are no
9243 longer needed.  Both of them want to remove bluetooth packages, which
9244 I do not know.  Perhaps these bluetooth packages are obsolete?</p>
9245
9246 <p>For KDE, apt-get want to remove 82 packages, among them kdebase
9247 which seem like a bad idea and xorg the same way as with Gnome. Asking
9248 aptitude for the same, it wants to remove 192 packages, none which are
9249 too surprising.</p>
9250
9251 <p>I guess the removal of xorg during upgrades should be investigated
9252 and avoided, and perhaps others as well.  Here are the complete list
9253 of planned removals.  The complete logs is available from the URL
9254 above.  Note if you want to repeat these tests, that the upgrade test
9255 for kde+apt-get hung in the tasksel setup because of dpkg asking
9256 conffile questions.  No idea why.  I worked around it by using
9257 '<tt>echo >> /proc/<em>pidofdpkg</em>/fd/0</tt>' to tell dpkg to
9258 continue.</p>
9259
9260 <p><b>apt-get gnome 72</b>
9261 <br>bluez-gnome cupsddk-drivers deskbar-applet gnome
9262   gnome-desktop-environment gnome-network-admin gtkhtml3.14
9263   iceweasel-gnome-support libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libgdl-1-0
9264   libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libmetacity0 libslab0 libxcb-xlib0
9265   nautilus-cd-burner python-gnome2-desktop python-gnome2-extras
9266   serpentine swfdec-mozilla update-manager xorg xserver-xorg
9267   xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
9268   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
9269   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
9270   xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
9271   xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
9272   xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
9273   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
9274   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
9275   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
9276   xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
9277   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
9278   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
9279   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
9280   xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
9281   xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
9282   xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
9283   xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
9284   xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
9285   xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
9286   xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
9287   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
9288   xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9
9289   xulrunner-1.9-gnome-support</p>
9290
9291 <p><b>aptitude gnome 129</b>
9292
9293 <br>bluez-gnome bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers dhcdbd
9294   djvulibre-desktop finger gnome-app-install gnome-mount
9295   gnome-network-admin gnome-spell gnome-vfs-obexftp
9296   gnome-volume-manager gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs gtkhtml3.14 libao2
9297   libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
9298   libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcupsys2 libcurl3 libdatrie0
9299   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20
9300   libeel2-data libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libfaad0 libgail-common
9301   libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libgdl-1-0 libgdl-1-common
9302   libggz2 libggzcore9 libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0
9303   libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libgnomeprint2.2-0
9304   libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgnomeprintui2.2-common
9305   libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
9306   libgtksourceview-common libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6
9307   libhesiod0 libicu38 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 libmagick++10
9308   libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmetacity0 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off
9309   libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2
9310   libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10
9311   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libraw1394-8
9312   libsensors3 libslab0 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8 libssh2-1
9313   libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10
9314   libtrackerclient0 libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0
9315   libxerces2-java libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6
9316   libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common nautilus-cd-burner
9317   openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
9318   python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gnome2-desktop
9319   python-gnome2-extras python-gtkhtml2 python-gtkmozembed
9320   python-numeric python-sexy serpentine svgalibg1 swfdec-gnome
9321   swfdec-mozilla totem-gstreamer update-manager wodim
9322   xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
9323   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
9324   zip</p>
9325
9326 <p><b>apt-get kde 82</b>
9327
9328 <br>cupsddk-drivers karm kaudiocreator kcoloredit kcontrol kde kde-core
9329   kdeaddons kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-bin kdebase-bin-kde3
9330   kdebase-kio-plugins kdesktop kdeutils khelpcenter kicker
9331   kicker-applets knewsticker kolourpaint konq-plugins konqueror korn
9332   kpersonalizer kscreensaver ksplash libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libkiten1
9333   libxcb-xlib0 quanta superkaramba texlive-base-bin xorg xserver-xorg
9334   xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
9335   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
9336   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
9337   xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
9338   xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
9339   xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
9340   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
9341   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
9342   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
9343   xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
9344   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
9345   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
9346   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
9347   xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
9348   xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
9349   xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
9350   xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
9351   xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
9352   xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
9353   xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
9354   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
9355   xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9</p>
9356
9357 <p><b>aptitude kde 192</b>
9358 <br>bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers cvs dcoprss dhcdbd
9359   djvulibre-desktop dosfstools eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
9360   ghostscript-x imlib-base imlib11 indi kandy karm kasteroids
9361   kaudiocreator kbackgammon kbstate kcoloredit kcontrol kcron kdat
9362   kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
9363   kdebase-bin-kde3 kdebase-kio-plugins kdeedu-data
9364   kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data
9365   kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
9366   kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdeprint kdesktop kdessh
9367   kdict kdnssd kdvi kedit keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs
9368   kghostview khelpcenter khexedit kiconedit kitchensync klatin
9369   klickety kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmoon kmrml kodo kolourpaint
9370   kooka korn kpager kpdf kpercentage kpf kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler
9371   krec kregexpeditor ksayit ksim ksirc ksirtet ksmiletris ksmserver
9372   ksnake ksokoban ksplash ksvg ksysv ktip ktnef kuickshow kverbos
9373   kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kworldclock
9374   kxsldbg libakode2 libao2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
9375   libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
9376   libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
9377   libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0 libdatrie0
9378   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
9379   libgail-common libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0
9380   libicu38 libiec61883-0 libindex0 libiw29 libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1
9381   libkdeedu3 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkiten1 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
9382   libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
9383   libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 libmagick10 libmimelib1c2a
9384   libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9
9385   libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 libsmbios2
9386   libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libtalloc1 libtiff-tools
9387   libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0 libxerces2-java
9388   libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 mpeglib networkstatus
9389   openoffice.org-writer2latex pmount poster psutils quanta quanta-data
9390   superkaramba svgalibg1 tex-common texlive-base texlive-base-bin
9391   texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended
9392   xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
9393   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
9394   xulrunner-1.9</p>
9395
9396
9397       </div>
9398       <div class="tags">
9399
9400
9401         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9402
9403
9404       </div>
9405     </div>
9406     <div class="padding"></div>
9407
9408     <div class="entry">
9409       <div class="title">
9410         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">Automatic upgrade testing from Lenny to Squeeze</a>
9411       </div>
9412       <div class="date">
9413         11th June 2010
9414       </div>
9415       <div class="body">
9416         <p>The last few days I have done some upgrade testing in Debian, to
9417 see if the upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze will go smoothly.  A few bugs
9418 have been discovered and reported in the process
9419 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/585410">#585410</a> in nagios3-cgi,
9420 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584879">#584879</a> already fixed in
9421 enscript and <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#584861</a> in
9422 kdebase-workspace-data), and to get a more regular testing going on, I
9423 am working on a script to automate the test.</p>
9424
9425 <p>The idea is to create a Lenny chroot and use tasksel to install a
9426 Gnome or KDE desktop installation inside the chroot before upgrading
9427 it.  To ensure no services are started in the chroot, a policy-rc.d
9428 script is inserted.  To make sure tasksel believe it is to install a
9429 desktop on a laptop, the tasksel tests are replaced in the chroot
9430 (only acceptable because this is a throw-away chroot).</p>
9431
9432 <p>A naive upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze using aptitude dist-upgrade
9433 currently always fail because udev refuses to upgrade with the kernel
9434 in Lenny, so to avoid that problem the file /etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
9435 is created.  The bug report
9436 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/566000">#566000</a> make me suspect
9437 this problem do not trigger in a chroot, but I touch the file anyway
9438 to make sure the upgrade go well.  Testing on virtual and real
9439 hardware have failed me because of udev so far, and creating this file
9440 do the trick in such settings anyway.  This is a
9441 <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/debian-26/failed-dist-upgrade-due-to-udev-config_sysfs_deprecated-nonsense-804130/">known
9442 issue</a> and the current udev behaviour is intended by the udev
9443 maintainer because he lack the resources to rewrite udev to keep
9444 working with old kernels or something like that.  I really wish the
9445 udev upstream would keep udev backwards compatible, to avoid such
9446 upgrade problem, but given that they fail to do so, I guess
9447 documenting the way out of this mess is the best option we got for
9448 Debian Squeeze.</p>
9449
9450 <p>Anyway, back to the task at hand, testing upgrades.  This test
9451 script, which I call <tt>upgrade-test</tt> for now, is doing the
9452 trick:</p>
9453
9454 <blockquote><pre>
9455 #!/bin/sh
9456 set -ex
9457
9458 if [ "$1" ] ; then
9459     desktop=$1
9460 else
9461     desktop=gnome
9462 fi
9463
9464 from=lenny
9465 to=squeeze
9466
9467 exec &lt; /dev/null
9468 unset LANG
9469 mirror=http://ftp.skolelinux.org/debian
9470 tmpdir=chroot-$from-upgrade-$to-$desktop
9471 fuser -mv .
9472 debootstrap $from $tmpdir $mirror
9473 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
9474 cat > $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d &lt;&lt;EOF
9475 #!/bin/sh
9476 exit 101
9477 EOF
9478 chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d
9479 exit_cleanup() {
9480     umount $tmpdir/proc
9481 }
9482 mount -t proc proc $tmpdir/proc
9483 # Make sure proc is unmounted also on failure
9484 trap exit_cleanup EXIT INT
9485
9486 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y install debconf-utils
9487
9488 # Make sure tasksel autoselection trigger.  It need the test scripts
9489 # to return the correct answers.
9490 echo tasksel tasksel/desktop multiselect $desktop | \
9491     chroot $tmpdir debconf-set-selections
9492
9493 # Include the desktop and laptop task
9494 for test in desktop laptop ; do
9495     echo > $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test &lt;&lt;EOF
9496 #!/bin/sh
9497 exit 2
9498 EOF
9499     chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test
9500 done
9501
9502 DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
9503 DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical
9504 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND DEBIAN_PRIORITY
9505 chroot $tmpdir tasksel --new-install
9506
9507 echo deb $mirror $to main > $tmpdir/etc/apt/sources.list
9508 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
9509 touch $tmpdir/etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
9510 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y dist-upgrade
9511 fuser -mv
9512 </pre></blockquote>
9513
9514 <p>I suspect it would be useful to test upgrades with both apt-get and
9515 with aptitude, but I have not had time to look at how they behave
9516 differently so far.  I hope to get a cron job running to do the test
9517 regularly and post the result on the web.  The Gnome upgrade currently
9518 work, while the KDE upgrade fail because of the bug in
9519 kdebase-workspace-data</p>
9520
9521 <p>I am not quite sure what kind of extract from the huge upgrade logs
9522 (KDE 167 KiB, Gnome 516 KiB) it make sense to include in this blog
9523 post, so I will refrain from trying.  I can report that for Gnome,
9524 aptitude report 760 packages upgraded, 448 newly installed, 129 to
9525 remove and 1 not upgraded and 1024MB need to be downloaded while for
9526 KDE the same numbers are 702 packages upgraded, 507 newly installed,
9527 193 to remove and 0 not upgraded and 1117MB need to be downloaded</p>
9528
9529 <p>I am very happy to notice that the Gnome desktop + laptop upgrade
9530 is able to migrate to dependency based boot sequencing and parallel
9531 booting without a hitch.  Was unsure if there were still bugs with
9532 packages failing to clean up their obsolete init.d script during
9533 upgrades, and no such problem seem to affect the Gnome desktop+laptop
9534 packages.</p>
9535
9536       </div>
9537       <div class="tags">
9538
9539
9540         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9541
9542
9543       </div>
9544     </div>
9545     <div class="padding"></div>
9546
9547     <div class="entry">
9548       <div class="title">
9549         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Upstart_or_sysvinit___as_init_d_scripts_see_it.html">Upstart or sysvinit - as init.d scripts see it</a>
9550       </div>
9551       <div class="date">
9552          6th June 2010
9553       </div>
9554       <div class="body">
9555         <p>If Debian is to migrate to upstart on Linux, I expect some init.d
9556 scripts to migrate (some of) their operations to upstart job while
9557 keeping the init.d for hurd and kfreebsd.  The packages with such
9558 needs will need a way to get their init.d scripts to behave
9559 differently when used with sysvinit and with upstart.  Because of
9560 this, I had a look at the environment variables set when a init.d
9561 script is running under upstart, and when it is not.</p>
9562
9563 <p>With upstart, I notice these environment variables are set when a
9564 script is started from rcS.d/ (ignoring some irrelevant ones like
9565 COLUMNS):</p>
9566
9567 <blockquote><pre>
9568 DEFAULT_RUNLEVEL=2
9569 previous=N
9570 PREVLEVEL=
9571 RUNLEVEL=
9572 runlevel=S
9573 UPSTART_EVENTS=startup
9574 UPSTART_INSTANCE=
9575 UPSTART_JOB=rc-sysinit
9576 </pre></blockquote>
9577
9578 <p>With sysvinit, these environment variables are set for the same
9579 script.</p>
9580
9581 <blockquote><pre>
9582 INIT_VERSION=sysvinit-2.88
9583 previous=N
9584 PREVLEVEL=N
9585 RUNLEVEL=S
9586 runlevel=S
9587 </pre></blockquote>
9588
9589 <p>The RUNLEVEL and PREVLEVEL environment variables passed on from
9590 sysvinit are not set by upstart.  Not sure if it is intentional or not
9591 to not be compatible with sysvinit in this regard.</p>
9592
9593 <p>For scripts needing to behave differently when upstart is used,
9594 looking for the UPSTART_JOB environment variable seem to be a good
9595 choice.</p>
9596
9597       </div>
9598       <div class="tags">
9599
9600
9601         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9602
9603
9604       </div>
9605     </div>
9606     <div class="padding"></div>
9607
9608     <div class="entry">
9609       <div class="title">
9610         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_manual_for_standards_wars___.html">A manual for standards wars...</a>
9611       </div>
9612       <div class="date">
9613          6th June 2010
9614       </div>
9615       <div class="body">
9616         <p>Via the
9617 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/robweir/antic-atom/~3/QzU4RgoAGMg/weekly-links-10.html">blog
9618 of Rob Weir</a> I came across the very interesting essay named
9619 <a href="http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/shapiro/wars.pdf">The Art of
9620 Standards Wars</a> (PDF 25 pages).  I recommend it for everyone
9621 following the standards wars of today.</p>
9622
9623       </div>
9624       <div class="tags">
9625
9626
9627         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
9628
9629
9630       </div>
9631     </div>
9632     <div class="padding"></div>
9633
9634     <div class="entry">
9635       <div class="title">
9636         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sitesummary_tip__Listing_computer_hardware_models_used_at_site.html">Sitesummary tip: Listing computer hardware models used at site</a>
9637       </div>
9638       <div class="date">
9639          3rd June 2010
9640       </div>
9641       <div class="body">
9642         <p>When using sitesummary at a site to track machines, it is possible
9643 to get a list of the machine types in use thanks to the DMI
9644 information extracted from each machine.  The script to do so is
9645 included in the sitesummary package, and here is example output from
9646 the Skolelinux build servers:</p>
9647
9648 <blockquote><pre>
9649 maintainer:~# /usr/lib/sitesummary/hardware-model-summary
9650   vendor                    count
9651   Dell Computer Corporation     1
9652     PowerEdge 1750              1
9653   IBM                           1
9654     eserver xSeries 345 -[8670M1X]-     1
9655   Intel                         2
9656   [no-dmi-info]                 3
9657 maintainer:~#
9658 </pre></blockquote>
9659
9660 <p>The quality of the report depend on the quality of the DMI tables
9661 provided in each machine.  Here there are Intel machines without model
9662 information listed with Intel as vendor and no model, and virtual Xen
9663 machines listed as [no-dmi-info].  One can add -l as a command line
9664 option to list the individual machines.</p>
9665
9666 <p>A larger list is
9667 <a href="http://narvikskolen.no/sitesummary/">available from the the
9668 city of Narvik</a>, which uses Skolelinux on all their shools and also
9669 provide the basic sitesummary report publicly.  In their report there
9670 are ~1400 machines. I know they use both Ubuntu and Skolelinux on
9671 their machines, and as sitesummary is available in both distributions,
9672 it is trivial to get all of them to report to the same central
9673 collector.</p>
9674
9675       </div>
9676       <div class="tags">
9677
9678
9679         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary</a>.
9680
9681
9682       </div>
9683     </div>
9684     <div class="padding"></div>
9685
9686     <div class="entry">
9687       <div class="title">
9688         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/KDM_fail_at_boot_with_NVidia_cards___and_no_one_try_to_fix_it_.html">KDM fail at boot with NVidia cards - and no one try to fix it?</a>
9689       </div>
9690       <div class="date">
9691          1st June 2010
9692       </div>
9693       <div class="body">
9694         <p>It is strange to watch how a bug in Debian causing KDM to fail to
9695 start at boot when an NVidia video card is used is handled.  The
9696 problem seem to be that the nvidia X.org driver uses a long time to
9697 initialize, and this duration is longer than kdm is configured to
9698 wait.</p>
9699
9700 <p>I came across two bugs related to this issue,
9701 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">#583312</a> initially filed
9702 against initscripts and passed on to nvidia-glx when it became obvious
9703 that the nvidia drivers were involved, and
9704 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/524751">#524751</a> initially filed against
9705 kdm and passed on to src:nvidia-graphics-drivers for unknown reasons.</p>
9706
9707 <p>To me, it seem that no-one is interested in actually solving the
9708 problem nvidia video card owners experience and make sure the Debian
9709 distribution work out of the box for these users.  The nvidia driver
9710 maintainers expect kdm to be set up to wait longer, while kdm expect
9711 the nvidia driver maintainers to fix the driver to start faster, and
9712 while they wait for each other I guess the users end up switching to a
9713 distribution that work for them.  I have no idea what the solution is,
9714 but I am pretty sure that waiting for each other is not it.</p>
9715
9716 <p>I wonder why we end up handling bugs this way.</p>
9717
9718       </div>
9719       <div class="tags">
9720
9721
9722         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9723
9724
9725       </div>
9726     </div>
9727     <div class="padding"></div>
9728
9729     <div class="entry">
9730       <div class="title">
9731         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellized_boot_seem_to_hold_up_well_in_Debian_testing.html">Parallellized boot seem to hold up well in Debian/testing</a>
9732       </div>
9733       <div class="date">
9734         27th May 2010
9735       </div>
9736       <div class="body">
9737         <p>A few days ago, parallel booting was enabled in Debian/testing.
9738 The feature seem to hold up pretty well, but three fairly serious
9739 issues are known and should be solved:
9740
9741 <p><ul>
9742
9743 <li>The wicd package seen to
9744 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/508289">break NFS mounting</a> and
9745 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/581586">network setup</a> when
9746 parallel booting is enabled.  No idea why, but the wicd maintainer
9747 seem to be on the case.</li>
9748
9749 <li>The nvidia X driver seem to
9750 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">have a race condition</a>
9751 triggered more easily when parallel booting is in effect.  The
9752 maintainer is on the case.</li>
9753
9754 <li>The sysv-rc package fail to properly enable dependency based boot
9755 sequencing (the shutdown is broken) when old file-rc users
9756 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/575080">try to switch back</a> to
9757 sysv-rc.  One way to solve it would be for file-rc to create
9758 /etc/init.d/.legacy-bootordering, and another is to try to make
9759 sysv-rc more robust.  Will investigate some more and probably upload a
9760 workaround in sysv-rc to help those trying to move from file-rc to
9761 sysv-rc get a working shutdown.</li>
9762
9763 </ul></p>
9764
9765 <p>All in all not many surprising issues, and all of them seem
9766 solvable before Squeeze is released.  In addition to these there are
9767 some packages with bugs in their dependencies and run level settings,
9768 which I expect will be fixed in a reasonable time span.</p>
9769
9770 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
9771 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
9772 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
9773 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
9774
9775 <p>Update: Correct bug number to file-rc issue.</p>
9776
9777       </div>
9778       <div class="tags">
9779
9780
9781         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9782
9783
9784       </div>
9785     </div>
9786     <div class="padding"></div>
9787
9788     <div class="entry">
9789       <div class="title">
9790         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/More_flexible_firmware_handling_in_debian_installer.html">More flexible firmware handling in debian-installer</a>
9791       </div>
9792       <div class="date">
9793         22nd May 2010
9794       </div>
9795       <div class="body">
9796         <p>After a long break from debian-installer development, I finally
9797 found time today to return to the project.  Having to spend less time
9798 working dependency based boot in debian, as it is almost complete now,
9799 definitely helped freeing some time.</p>
9800
9801 <p>A while back, I ran into a problem while working on Debian Edu.  We
9802 include some firmware packages on the Debian Edu CDs, those needed to
9803 get disk and network controllers working.  Without having these
9804 firmware packages available during installation, it is impossible to
9805 install Debian Edu on the given machine, and because our target group
9806 are non-technical people, asking them to provide firmware packages on
9807 an external medium is a support pain.  Initially, I expected it to be
9808 enough to include the firmware packages on the CD to get
9809 debian-installer to find and use them.  This proved to be wrong.
9810 Next, I hoped it was enough to symlink the relevant firmware packages
9811 to some useful location on the CD (tried /cdrom/ and
9812 /cdrom/firmware/).  This also proved to not work, and at this point I
9813 found time to look at the debian-installer code to figure out what was
9814 going to work.</p>
9815
9816 <p>The firmware loading code is in the hw-detect package, and a closer
9817 look revealed that it would only look for firmware packages outside
9818 the installation media, so the CD was never checked for firmware
9819 packages.  It would only check USB sticks, floppies and other
9820 "external" media devices.  Today I changed it to also look in the
9821 /cdrom/firmware/ directory on the mounted CD or DVD, which should
9822 solve the problem I ran into with Debian edu.  I also changed it to
9823 look in /firmware/, to make sure the installer also find firmware
9824 provided in the initrd when booting the installer via PXE, to allow us
9825 to provide the same feature in the PXE setup included in Debian
9826 Edu.</p>
9827
9828 <p>To make sure firmware deb packages with a license questions are not
9829 activated without asking if the license is accepted, I extended
9830 hw-detect to look for preinst scripts in the firmware packages, and
9831 run these before activating the firmware during installation.  The
9832 license question is asked using debconf in the preinst, so this should
9833 solve the issue for the firmware packages I have looked at so far.</p>
9834
9835 <p>If you want to discuss the details of these features, please
9836 contact us on debian-boot@lists.debian.org.</p>
9837
9838       </div>
9839       <div class="tags">
9840
9841
9842         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9843
9844
9845       </div>
9846     </div>
9847     <div class="padding"></div>
9848
9849     <div class="entry">
9850       <div class="title">
9851         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellized_boot_is_now_the_default_in_Debian_unstable.html">Parallellized boot is now the default in Debian/unstable</a>
9852       </div>
9853       <div class="date">
9854         14th May 2010
9855       </div>
9856       <div class="body">
9857         <p>Since this evening, parallel booting is the default in
9858 Debian/unstable for machines using dependency based boot sequencing.
9859 Apparently the testing of concurrent booting has been wider than
9860 expected, if I am to believe the
9861 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
9862 on debian-devel@</a>, and I concluded a few days ago to move forward
9863 with the feature this weekend, to give us some time to detect any
9864 remaining problems before Squeeze is frozen.  If serious problems are
9865 detected, it is simple to change the default back to sequential boot.
9866 The upload of the new sysvinit package also activate a new upstream
9867 version.</p>
9868
9869 More information about
9870 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
9871 based boot sequencing</a> is available from the Debian wiki.  It is
9872 currently possible to disable parallel booting when one run into
9873 problems caused by it, by adding this line to /etc/default/rcS:</p>
9874
9875 <blockquote><pre>
9876 CONCURRENCY=none
9877 </pre></blockquote>
9878
9879 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
9880 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
9881 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
9882 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
9883
9884       </div>
9885       <div class="tags">
9886
9887
9888         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9889
9890
9891       </div>
9892     </div>
9893     <div class="padding"></div>
9894
9895     <div class="entry">
9896       <div class="title">
9897         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sitesummary_tip__Listing_MAC_address_of_all_clients.html">Sitesummary tip: Listing MAC address of all clients</a>
9898       </div>
9899       <div class="date">
9900         14th May 2010
9901       </div>
9902       <div class="body">
9903         <p>In the recent Debian Edu versions, the
9904 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary">sitesummary
9905 system</a> is used to keep track of the machines in the school
9906 network.  Each machine will automatically report its status to the
9907 central server after boot and once per night.  The network setup is
9908 also reported, and using this information it is possible to get the
9909 MAC address of all network interfaces in the machines.  This is useful
9910 to update the DHCP configuration.</p>
9911
9912 <p>To give some idea how to use sitesummary, here is a one-liner to
9913 ist all MAC addresses of all machines reporting to sitesummary.  Run
9914 this on the collector host:</p>
9915
9916 <blockquote><pre>
9917 perl -MSiteSummary -e 'for_all_hosts(sub { print join(" ", get_macaddresses(shift)), "\n"; });'
9918 </pre></blockquote>
9919
9920 <p>This will list all MAC addresses assosiated with all machine, one
9921 line per machine and with space between the MAC addresses.</p>
9922
9923 <p>To allow system administrators easier job at adding static DHCP
9924 addresses for hosts, it would be possible to extend this to fetch
9925 machine information from sitesummary and update the DHCP and DNS
9926 tables in LDAP using this information.  Such tool is unfortunately not
9927 written yet.</p>
9928
9929       </div>
9930       <div class="tags">
9931
9932
9933         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary</a>.
9934
9935
9936       </div>
9937     </div>
9938     <div class="padding"></div>
9939
9940     <div class="entry">
9941       <div class="title">
9942         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/systemd__an_interesting_alternative_to_upstart.html">systemd, an interesting alternative to upstart</a>
9943       </div>
9944       <div class="date">
9945         13th May 2010
9946       </div>
9947       <div class="body">
9948         <p>The last few days a new boot system called
9949 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd">systemd</a>
9950 has been
9951 <a href="http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html">introduced</a>
9952
9953 to the free software world.  I have not yet had time to play around
9954 with it, but it seem to be a very interesting alternative to
9955 <a href="http://upstart.ubuntu.com/">upstart</a>, and might prove to be
9956 a good alternative for Debian when we are able to switch to an event
9957 based boot system.  Tollef is
9958 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/580814">in the process</a> of getting
9959 systemd into Debian, and I look forward to seeing how well it work.  I
9960 like the fact that systemd handles init.d scripts with dependency
9961 information natively, allowing them to run in parallel where upstart
9962 at the moment do not.</p>
9963
9964 <p>Unfortunately do systemd have the same problem as upstart regarding
9965 platform support.  It only work on recent Linux kernels, and also need
9966 some new kernel features enabled to function properly.  This means
9967 kFreeBSD and Hurd ports of Debian will need a port or a different boot
9968 system.  Not sure how that will be handled if systemd proves to be the
9969 way forward.</p>
9970
9971 <p>In the mean time, based on the
9972 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
9973 on debian-devel@</a> regarding parallel booting in Debian, I have
9974 decided to enable full parallel booting as the default in Debian as
9975 soon as possible (probably this weekend or early next week), to see if
9976 there are any remaining serious bugs in the init.d dependencies.  A
9977 new version of the sysvinit package implementing this change is
9978 already in experimental.  If all go well, Squeeze will be released
9979 with parallel booting enabled by default.</p>
9980
9981       </div>
9982       <div class="tags">
9983
9984
9985         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
9986
9987
9988       </div>
9989     </div>
9990     <div class="padding"></div>
9991
9992     <div class="entry">
9993       <div class="title">
9994         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellizing_the_boot_in_Debian_Squeeze___ready_for_wider_testing.html">Parallellizing the boot in Debian Squeeze - ready for wider testing</a>
9995       </div>
9996       <div class="date">
9997          6th May 2010
9998       </div>
9999       <div class="body">
10000         <p>These days, the init.d script dependencies in Squeeze are quite
10001 complete, so complete that it is actually possible to run all the
10002 init.d scripts in parallell based on these dependencies.  If you want
10003 to test your Squeeze system, make sure
10004 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
10005 based boot sequencing</a> is enabled, and add this line to
10006 /etc/default/rcS:</p>
10007
10008 <blockquote><pre>
10009 CONCURRENCY=makefile
10010 </pre></blockquote>
10011
10012 <p>That is it.  It will cause sysv-rc to use the startpar tool to run
10013 scripts in parallel using the dependency information stored in
10014 /etc/init.d/.depend.boot, /etc/init.d/.depend.start and
10015 /etc/init.d/.depend.stop to order the scripts.  Startpar is configured
10016 to try to start the kdm and gdm scripts as early as possible, and will
10017 start the facilities required by kdm or gdm as early as possible to
10018 make this happen.</p>
10019
10020 <p>Give it a try, and see if you like the result.  If some services
10021 fail to start properly, it is most likely because they have incomplete
10022 init.d script dependencies in their startup script (or some of their
10023 dependent scripts have incomplete dependencies).  Report bugs and get
10024 the package maintainers to fix it. :)</p>
10025
10026 <p>Running scripts in parallel could be the default in Debian when we
10027 manage to get the init.d script dependencies complete and correct.  I
10028 expect we will get there in Squeeze+1, if we get manage to test and
10029 fix the remaining issues.</p>
10030
10031 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
10032 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
10033 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
10034 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
10035
10036       </div>
10037       <div class="tags">
10038
10039
10040         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10041
10042
10043       </div>
10044     </div>
10045     <div class="padding"></div>
10046
10047     <div class="entry">
10048       <div class="title">
10049         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_has_switched_to_dependency_based_boot_sequencing.html">Debian has switched to dependency based boot sequencing</a>
10050       </div>
10051       <div class="date">
10052         27th July 2009
10053       </div>
10054       <div class="body">
10055         <p>Since this evening, with the upload of sysvinit version 2.87dsf-2,
10056 and the upload of insserv version 1.12.0-10 yesterday, Debian unstable
10057 have been migrated to using dependency based boot sequencing.  This
10058 conclude work me and others have been doing for the last three days.
10059 It feels great to see this finally part of the default Debian
10060 installation.  Now we just need to weed out the last few problems that
10061 are bound to show up, to get everything ready for Squeeze.</p>
10062
10063 <p>The next step is migrating /sbin/init from sysvinit to upstart, and
10064 fixing the more fundamental problem of handing the event based
10065 non-predictable kernel in the early boot.</p>
10066
10067       </div>
10068       <div class="tags">
10069
10070
10071         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
10072
10073
10074       </div>
10075     </div>
10076     <div class="padding"></div>
10077
10078     <div class="entry">
10079       <div class="title">
10080         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Taking_over_sysvinit_development.html">Taking over sysvinit development</a>
10081       </div>
10082       <div class="date">
10083         22nd July 2009
10084       </div>
10085       <div class="body">
10086         <p>After several years of frustration with the lack of activity from
10087 the existing sysvinit upstream developer, I decided a few weeks ago to
10088 take over the package and become the new upstream.  The number of
10089 patches to track for the Debian package was becoming a burden, and the
10090 lack of synchronization between the distribution made it hard to keep
10091 the package up to date.</p>
10092
10093 <p>On the new sysvinit team is the SuSe maintainer Dr. Werner Fink,
10094 and my Debian co-maintainer Kel Modderman.  About 10 days ago, I made
10095 a new upstream tarball with version number 2.87dsf (for Debian, SuSe
10096 and Fedora), based on the patches currently in use in these
10097 distributions.  We Debian maintainers plan to move to this tarball as
10098 the new upstream as soon as we find time to do the merge.  Since the
10099 new tarball was created, we agreed with Werner at SuSe to make a new
10100 upstream project at <a href="http://savannah.nongnu.org/">Savannah</a>, and continue
10101 development there.  The project is registered and currently waiting
10102 for approval by the Savannah administrators, and as soon as it is
10103 approved, we will import the old versions from svn and continue
10104 working on the future release.</p>
10105
10106 <p>It is a bit ironic that this is done now, when some of the involved
10107 distributions are moving to upstart as a syvinit replacement.</p>
10108
10109       </div>
10110       <div class="tags">
10111
10112
10113         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
10114
10115
10116       </div>
10117     </div>
10118     <div class="padding"></div>
10119
10120     <div class="entry">
10121       <div class="title">
10122         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_boots_quicker_and_quicker.html">Debian boots quicker and quicker</a>
10123       </div>
10124       <div class="date">
10125         24th June 2009
10126       </div>
10127       <div class="body">
10128         <p>I spent Monday and tuesday this week in London with a lot of the
10129 people involved in the boot system on Debian and Ubuntu, to see if we
10130 could find more ways to speed up the boot system.  This was an Ubuntu
10131 funded
10132 <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FoundationsTeam/BootPerformance/DebianUbuntuSprint">developer
10133 gathering</a>. It was quite productive.  We also discussed the future
10134 of boot systems, and ways to handle the increasing number of boot
10135 issues introduced by the Linux kernel becoming more and more
10136 asynchronous and event base.  The Ubuntu approach using udev and
10137 upstart might be a good way forward.  Time will show.</p>
10138
10139 <p>Anyway, there are a few ways at the moment to speed up the boot
10140 process in Debian.  All of these should be applied to get a quick
10141 boot:</p>
10142
10143 <ul>
10144
10145 <li>Use dash as /bin/sh.</li>
10146
10147 <li>Disable the init.d/hwclock*.sh scripts and make sure the hardware
10148    clock is in UTC.</li>
10149
10150 <li>Install and activate the insserv package to enable
10151    <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
10152    based boot sequencing</a>, and enable concurrent booting.</li>
10153
10154 </ul>
10155
10156 These points are based on the Google summer of code work done by
10157 <a href="http://initscripts-ng.alioth.debian.org/soc2006-bootsystem/">Carlos
10158 Villegas</a>.
10159
10160 <p>Support for makefile-style concurrency during boot was uploaded to
10161 unstable yesterday.  When we tested it, we were able to cut 6 seconds
10162 from the boot sequence.  It depend on very correct dependency
10163 declaration in all init.d scripts, so I expect us to find edge cases
10164 where the dependences in some scripts are slightly wrong when we start
10165 using this.</p>
10166
10167 <p>On our IRC channel for this effort, #pkg-sysvinit, a new idea was
10168 introduced by Raphael Geissert today, one that could affect the
10169 startup speed as well.  Instead of starting some scripts concurrently
10170 from rcS.d/ and another set of scripts from rc2.d/, it would be
10171 possible to run a of them in the same process.  A quick way to test
10172 this would be to enable insserv and run 'mv /etc/rc2.d/S* /etc/rcS.d/;
10173 insserv'.  Will need to test if that work. :)</p>
10174
10175       </div>
10176       <div class="tags">
10177
10178
10179         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10180
10181
10182       </div>
10183     </div>
10184     <div class="padding"></div>
10185
10186     <div class="entry">
10187       <div class="title">
10188         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/BSAs_p_stander_om_piratkopiering_m_ter_motstand.html">BSAs påstander om piratkopiering møter motstand</a>
10189       </div>
10190       <div class="date">
10191         17th May 2009
10192       </div>
10193       <div class="body">
10194         <p>Hvert år de siste årene har BSA, lobbyfronten til de store
10195 programvareselskapene som Microsoft og Apple, publisert en rapport der
10196 de gjetter på hvor mye piratkopiering påfører i tapte inntekter i
10197 ulike land rundt om i verden.  Resultatene er tendensiøse.  For noen
10198 dager siden kom
10199 <a href="http://global.bsa.org/globalpiracy2008/studies/globalpiracy2008.pdf">siste
10200 rapport</a>, og det er flere kritiske kommentarer publisert de siste
10201 dagene.  Et spesielt interessant kommentar fra Sverige,
10202 <a href="http://www.idg.se/2.1085/1.229795/bsa-hoftade-sverigesiffror">BSA
10203 höftade Sverigesiffror</a>, oppsummeres slik:</p>
10204
10205 <blockquote>
10206 I sin senaste rapport slår BSA fast att 25 procent av all mjukvara i
10207 Sverige är piratkopierad. Det utan att ha pratat med ett enda svenskt
10208 företag. "Man bör nog kanske inte se de här siffrorna som helt
10209 exakta", säger BSAs Sverigechef John Hugosson.
10210 </blockquote>
10211
10212 <p>Mon tro om de er like metodiske når de gjetter på andelen piratkopiering i Norge?  To andre kommentarer er <a
10213 href="http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/comment/2242134/bsa-piracy-figures-shot-reality">BSA
10214 piracy figures need a shot of reality</a> og <a
10215 href="http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/3958/125/">Does The WIPO
10216 Copyright Treaty Work?</a></p>
10217
10218 <p>Fant lenkene via <a
10219 href="http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/17/1632242">oppslag
10220 på Slashdot</a>.</p>
10221
10222       </div>
10223       <div class="tags">
10224
10225
10226         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bsa">bsa</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fildeling">fildeling</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>.
10227
10228
10229       </div>
10230     </div>
10231     <div class="padding"></div>
10232
10233     <div class="entry">
10234       <div class="title">
10235         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IDG_mener_linux_i_servermarkedet_vil_vokse_med_21__i_2009.html">IDG mener linux i servermarkedet vil vokse med 21% i 2009</a>
10236       </div>
10237       <div class="date">
10238          7th May 2009
10239       </div>
10240       <div class="body">
10241         <p>Kom over
10242 <a href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10216873-16.html">interessante
10243 tall</a> fra IDG om utviklingen av linuxservermarkedet.  Fikk meg til
10244 å tenke på antall tjenermaskiner ved Universitetet i Oslo der jeg
10245 jobber til daglig.  En rask opptelling forteller meg at vi har 490
10246 (61%) fysiske unix-tjener (mest linux men også noen solaris) og 196
10247 (25%) windowstjenere, samt 112 (14%) virtuelle unix-tjenere.  Med den
10248 bakgrunnskunnskapen kan jeg godt tro at IDG er inne på noe.</p>
10249
10250       </div>
10251       <div class="tags">
10252
10253
10254         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
10255
10256
10257       </div>
10258     </div>
10259     <div class="padding"></div>
10260
10261     <div class="entry">
10262       <div class="title">
10263         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Kryptert_harddisk___naturligvis.html">Kryptert harddisk - naturligvis</a>
10264       </div>
10265       <div class="date">
10266          2nd May 2009
10267       </div>
10268       <div class="body">
10269         <p><a href="http://www.dagensit.no/trender/article1658676.ece">Dagens
10270 IT melder</a> at Intel hevder at det er dyrt å miste en datamaskin,
10271 når en tar tap av arbeidstid, fortrolige dokumenter,
10272 personopplysninger og alt annet det innebærer.  Det er ingen tvil om
10273 at det er en kostbar affære å miste sin datamaskin, og det er årsaken
10274 til at jeg har kryptert harddisken på både kontormaskinen og min
10275 bærbare.  Begge inneholder personopplysninger jeg ikke ønsker skal
10276 komme på avveie, den første informasjon relatert til jobben min ved
10277 Universitetet i Oslo, og den andre relatert til blant annet
10278 foreningsarbeide.  Kryptering av diskene gjør at det er lite
10279 sannsynlig at dophoder som kan finne på å rappe maskinene får noe ut
10280 av dem.  Maskinene låses automatisk etter noen minutter uten bruk,
10281 og en reboot vil gjøre at de ber om passord før de vil starte opp.
10282 Jeg bruker Debian på begge maskinene, og installasjonssystemet der
10283 gjør det trivielt å sette opp krypterte disker.  Jeg har LVM på toppen
10284 av krypterte partisjoner, slik at alt av datapartisjoner er kryptert.
10285 Jeg anbefaler alle å kryptere diskene på sine bærbare.  Kostnaden når
10286 det er gjort slik jeg gjør det er minimale, og gevinstene er
10287 betydelige.  En bør dog passe på passordet.  Hvis det går tapt, må
10288 maskinen reinstalleres og alt er tapt.</p>
10289
10290 <p>Krypteringen vil ikke stoppe kompetente angripere som f.eks. kjøler
10291 ned minnebrikkene før maskinen rebootes med programvare for å hente ut
10292 krypteringsnøklene.  Kostnaden med å forsvare seg mot slike angripere
10293 er for min del høyere enn gevinsten.  Jeg tror oddsene for at
10294 f.eks. etteretningsorganisasjoner har glede av å titte på mine
10295 maskiner er minimale, og ulempene jeg ville oppnå ved å forsøke å
10296 gjøre det vanskeligere for angripere med kompetanse og ressurser er
10297 betydelige.</p>
10298
10299       </div>
10300       <div class="tags">
10301
10302
10303         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
10304
10305
10306       </div>
10307     </div>
10308     <div class="padding"></div>
10309
10310     <div class="entry">
10311       <div class="title">
10312         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Two_projects_that_have_improved_the_quality_of_free_software_a_lot.html">Two projects that have improved the quality of free software a lot</a>
10313       </div>
10314       <div class="date">
10315          2nd May 2009
10316       </div>
10317       <div class="body">
10318         <p>There are two software projects that have had huge influence on the
10319 quality of free software, and I wanted to mention both in case someone
10320 do not yet know them.</p>
10321
10322 <p>The first one is <a href="http://valgrind.org/">valgrind</a>, a
10323 tool to detect and expose errors in the memory handling of programs.
10324 It is easy to use, all one need to do is to run 'valgrind program',
10325 and it will report any problems on stdout.  It is even better if the
10326 program include debug information.  With debug information, it is able
10327 to report the source file name and line number where the problem
10328 occurs.  It can report things like 'reading past memory block in file
10329 X line N, the memory block was allocated in file Y, line M', and
10330 'using uninitialised value in control logic'.  This tool has made it
10331 trivial to investigate reproducible crash bugs in programs, and have
10332 reduced the number of this kind of bugs in free software a lot.
10333
10334 <p>The second one is
10335 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coverity">Coverity</a> which is
10336 a source code checker.  It is able to process the source of a program
10337 and find problems in the logic without running the program.  It
10338 started out as the Stanford Checker and became well known when it was
10339 used to find bugs in the Linux kernel.  It is now a commercial tool
10340 and the company behind it is running
10341 <a href="http://www.scan.coverity.com/">a community service</a> for the
10342 free software community, where a lot of free software projects get
10343 their source checked for free.  Several thousand defects have been
10344 found and fixed so far.  It can find errors like 'lock L taken in file
10345 X line N is never released if exiting in line M', or 'the code in file
10346 Y lines O to P can never be executed'.  The projects included in the
10347 community service project have managed to get rid of a lot of
10348 reliability problems thanks to Coverity.</p>
10349
10350 <p>I believe tools like this, that are able to automatically find
10351 errors in the source, are vital to improve the quality of software and
10352 make sure we can get rid of the crashing and failing software we are
10353 surrounded by today.</p>
10354
10355       </div>
10356       <div class="tags">
10357
10358
10359         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10360
10361
10362       </div>
10363     </div>
10364     <div class="padding"></div>
10365
10366     <div class="entry">
10367       <div class="title">
10368         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/No_patch_is_not_better_than_a_useless_patch.html">No patch is not better than a useless patch</a>
10369       </div>
10370       <div class="date">
10371         28th April 2009
10372       </div>
10373       <div class="body">
10374         <p>Julien Blache
10375 <a href="http://blog.technologeek.org/2009/04/12/214">claim that no
10376 patch is better than a useless patch</a>.  I completely disagree, as a
10377 patch allow one to discuss a concrete and proposed solution, and also
10378 prove that the issue at hand is important enough for someone to spent
10379 time on fixing it.  No patch do not provide any of these positive
10380 properties.</p>
10381
10382       </div>
10383       <div class="tags">
10384
10385
10386         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
10387
10388
10389       </div>
10390     </div>
10391     <div class="padding"></div>
10392
10393     <div class="entry">
10394       <div class="title">
10395         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Standardize_on_protocols_and_formats__not_vendors_and_applications.html">Standardize on protocols and formats, not vendors and applications</a>
10396       </div>
10397       <div class="date">
10398         30th March 2009
10399       </div>
10400       <div class="body">
10401         <p>Where I work at the University of Oslo, one decision stand out as a
10402 very good one to form a long lived computer infrastructure.  It is the
10403 simple one, lost by many in todays computer industry: Standardize on
10404 open network protocols and open exchange/storage formats, not applications.
10405 Applications come and go, while protocols and files tend to stay, and
10406 thus one want to make it easy to change application and vendor, while
10407 avoiding conversion costs and locking users to a specific platform or
10408 application.</p>
10409
10410 <p>This approach make it possible to replace the client applications
10411 independently of the server applications.  One can even allow users to
10412 use several different applications as long as they handle the selected
10413 protocol and format.  In the normal case, only one client application
10414 is recommended and users only get help if they choose to use this
10415 application, but those that want to deviate from the easy path are not
10416 blocked from doing so.</p>
10417
10418 <p>It also allow us to replace the server side without forcing the
10419 users to replace their applications, and thus allow us to select the
10420 best server implementation at any moment, when scale and resouce
10421 requirements change.</p>
10422
10423 <p>I strongly recommend standardizing - on open network protocols and
10424 open formats, but I would never recommend standardizing on a single
10425 application that do not use open network protocol or open formats.</p>
10426
10427       </div>
10428       <div class="tags">
10429
10430
10431         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
10432
10433
10434       </div>
10435     </div>
10436     <div class="padding"></div>
10437
10438     <div class="entry">
10439       <div class="title">
10440         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Returning_from_Skolelinux_developer_gathering.html">Returning from Skolelinux developer gathering</a>
10441       </div>
10442       <div class="date">
10443         29th March 2009
10444       </div>
10445       <div class="body">
10446         <p>I'm sitting on the train going home from this weekends Debian
10447 Edu/Skolelinux development gathering.  I got a bit done tuning the
10448 desktop, and looked into the dynamic service location protocol
10449 implementation avahi.  It look like it could be useful for us.  Almost
10450 30 people participated, and I believe it was a great environment to
10451 get to know the Skolelinux system.  Walter Bender, involved in the
10452 development of the Sugar educational platform, presented his stuff and
10453 also helped me improve my OLPC installation.  He also showed me that
10454 his Turtle Art application can be used in standalone mode, and we
10455 agreed that I would help getting it packaged for Debian.  As a
10456 standalone application it would be great for Debian Edu.  We also
10457 tried to get the video conferencing working with two OLPCs, but that
10458 proved to be too hard for us.  The application seem to need more work
10459 before it is ready for me.  I look forward to getting home and relax
10460 now. :)</p>
10461
10462       </div>
10463       <div class="tags">
10464
10465
10466         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
10467
10468
10469       </div>
10470     </div>
10471     <div class="padding"></div>
10472
10473     <div class="entry">
10474       <div class="title">
10475         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">Time for new  LDAP schemas replacing RFC 2307?</a>
10476       </div>
10477       <div class="date">
10478         29th March 2009
10479       </div>
10480       <div class="body">
10481         <p>The state of standardized LDAP schemas on Linux is far from
10482 optimal.  There is RFC 2307 documenting one way to store NIS maps in
10483 LDAP, and a modified version of this normally called RFC 2307bis, with
10484 some modifications to be compatible with Active Directory.  The RFC
10485 specification handle the content of a lot of system databases, but do
10486 not handle DNS zones and DHCP configuration.</p>
10487
10488 <p>In <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux</a>,
10489 we would like to store information about users, SMB clients/hosts,
10490 filegroups, netgroups (users and hosts), DHCP and DNS configuration,
10491 and LTSP configuration in LDAP.  These objects have a lot in common,
10492 but with the current LDAP schemas it is not possible to have one
10493 object per entity.  For example, one need to have at least three LDAP
10494 objects for a given computer, one with the SMB related stuff, one with
10495 DNS information and another with DHCP information.  The schemas
10496 provided for DNS and DHCP are impossible to combine into one LDAP
10497 object.  In addition, it is impossible to implement quick queries for
10498 netgroup membership, because of the way NIS triples are implemented.
10499 It just do not scale.  I believe it is time for a few RFC
10500 specifications to cleam up this mess.</p>
10501
10502 <p>I would like to have one LDAP object representing each computer in
10503 the network, and this object can then keep the SMB (ie host key), DHCP
10504 (mac address/name) and DNS (name/IP address) settings in one place.
10505 It need to be efficently stored to make sure it scale well.</p>
10506
10507 <p>I would also like to have a quick way to map from a user or
10508 computer and to the net group this user or computer is a member.</p>
10509
10510 <p>Active Directory have done a better job than unix heads like myself
10511 in this regard, and the unix side need to catch up.  Time to start a
10512 new IETF work group?</p>
10513
10514       </div>
10515       <div class="tags">
10516
10517
10518         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
10519
10520
10521       </div>
10522     </div>
10523     <div class="padding"></div>
10524
10525     <div class="entry">
10526       <div class="title">
10527         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Endelig_er_Debian_Lenny_gitt_ut.html">Endelig er Debian Lenny gitt ut</a>
10528       </div>
10529       <div class="date">
10530         15th February 2009
10531       </div>
10532       <div class="body">
10533         <p>Endelig er <a href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian</a>
10534 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2009/20090214">Lenny</a> gitt ut.
10535 Et langt steg videre for Debian-prosjektet, og en rekke nye
10536 programpakker blir nå tilgjengelig for de av oss som bruker den
10537 stabile utgaven av Debian.  Neste steg er nå å få
10538 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a> /
10539 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/">Debian Edu</a> ferdig
10540 oppdatert for den nye utgaven, slik at en oppdatert versjon kan
10541 slippes løs på skolene.  Takk til alle debian-utviklerne som har
10542 gjort dette mulig.  Endelig er f.eks. fungerende avhengighetsstyrt
10543 bootsekvens tilgjengelig i stabil utgave, vha pakken
10544 <tt>insserv</tt>.</p>
10545
10546       </div>
10547       <div class="tags">
10548
10549
10550         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>.
10551
10552
10553       </div>
10554     </div>
10555     <div class="padding"></div>
10556
10557     <div class="entry">
10558       <div class="title">
10559         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Devcamp_brought_us_closer_to_the_Lenny_based_Debian_Edu_release.html">Devcamp brought us closer to the Lenny based Debian Edu release</a>
10560       </div>
10561       <div class="date">
10562          7th December 2008
10563       </div>
10564       <div class="body">
10565         <p>This weekend we had a small developer gathering for Debian Edu in
10566 Oslo.  Most of Saturday was used for the general assemly for the
10567 member organization, but the rest of the weekend I used to tune the
10568 LTSP installation.  LTSP now work out of the box on the 10-network.
10569 Acer Aspire One proved to be a very nice thin client, with both
10570 screen, mouse and keybard in a small box.  Was working on getting the
10571 diskless workstation setup configured out of the box, but did not
10572 finish it before the weekend was up.</p>
10573
10574 <p>Did not find time to look at the 4 VGA cards in one box we got from
10575 the Brazilian group, so that will have to wait for the next
10576 development gathering.  Would love to have the Debian Edu installer
10577 automatically detect and configure a multiseat setup when it find one
10578 of these cards.</p>
10579
10580       </div>
10581       <div class="tags">
10582
10583
10584         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ltsp">ltsp</a>.
10585
10586
10587       </div>
10588     </div>
10589     <div class="padding"></div>
10590
10591     <div class="entry">
10592       <div class="title">
10593         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_sorry_state_of_multimedia_browser_plugins_in_Debian.html">The sorry state of multimedia browser plugins in Debian</a>
10594       </div>
10595       <div class="date">
10596         25th November 2008
10597       </div>
10598       <div class="body">
10599         <p>Recently I have spent some time evaluating the multimedia browser
10600 plugins available in Debian Lenny, to see which one we should use by
10601 default in Debian Edu.  We need an embedded video playing plugin with
10602 control buttons to pause or stop the video, and capable of streaming
10603 all the multimedia content available on the web.  The test results and
10604 notes are available on
10605 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">the
10606 Debian wiki</a>.  I was surprised how few of the plugins are able to
10607 fill this need.  My personal video player favorite, VLC, has a really
10608 bad plugin which fail on a lot of the test pages.  A lot of the MIME
10609 types I would expect to work with any free software player (like
10610 video/ogg), just do not work.  And simple formats like the
10611 audio/x-mplegurl format (m3u playlists), just isn't supported by the
10612 totem and vlc plugins.  I hope the situation will improve soon.  No
10613 wonder sites use the proprietary Adobe flash to play video.</p>
10614
10615 <p>For Lenny, we seem to end up with the mplayer plugin.  It seem to
10616 be the only one fitting our needs. :/</p>
10617
10618       </div>
10619       <div class="tags">
10620
10621
10622         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
10623
10624
10625       </div>
10626     </div>
10627     <div class="padding"></div>
10628
10629     <p style="text-align: right;"><a href="debian.rss"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/xml.gif" alt="RSS Feed" width="36" height="14" /></a></p>
10630     <div id="sidebar">
10631
10632
10633
10634 <h2>Archive</h2>
10635 <ul>
10636
10637 <li>2016
10638 <ul>
10639
10640 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/01/">January (3)</a></li>
10641
10642 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/02/">February (2)</a></li>
10643
10644 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/03/">March (3)</a></li>
10645
10646 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/04/">April (8)</a></li>
10647
10648 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/05/">May (8)</a></li>
10649
10650 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/06/">June (1)</a></li>
10651
10652 </ul></li>
10653
10654 <li>2015
10655 <ul>
10656
10657 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/01/">January (7)</a></li>
10658
10659 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/02/">February (6)</a></li>
10660
10661 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/03/">March (1)</a></li>
10662
10663 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/04/">April (4)</a></li>
10664
10665 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/05/">May (3)</a></li>
10666
10667 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/06/">June (4)</a></li>
10668
10669 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/07/">July (6)</a></li>
10670
10671 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/08/">August (2)</a></li>
10672
10673 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/09/">September (2)</a></li>
10674
10675 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/10/">October (9)</a></li>
10676
10677 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/11/">November (6)</a></li>
10678
10679 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/12/">December (3)</a></li>
10680
10681 </ul></li>
10682
10683 <li>2014
10684 <ul>
10685
10686 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/01/">January (2)</a></li>
10687
10688 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/02/">February (3)</a></li>
10689
10690 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/03/">March (8)</a></li>
10691
10692 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/04/">April (7)</a></li>
10693
10694 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/05/">May (1)</a></li>
10695
10696 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/06/">June (2)</a></li>
10697
10698 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/07/">July (2)</a></li>
10699
10700 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/08/">August (2)</a></li>
10701
10702 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/09/">September (5)</a></li>
10703
10704 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/10/">October (6)</a></li>
10705
10706 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/11/">November (3)</a></li>
10707
10708 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/12/">December (5)</a></li>
10709
10710 </ul></li>
10711
10712 <li>2013
10713 <ul>
10714
10715 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/01/">January (11)</a></li>
10716
10717 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/02/">February (9)</a></li>
10718
10719 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/03/">March (9)</a></li>
10720
10721 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/04/">April (6)</a></li>
10722
10723 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/05/">May (9)</a></li>
10724
10725 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/06/">June (10)</a></li>
10726
10727 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/07/">July (7)</a></li>
10728
10729 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/08/">August (3)</a></li>
10730
10731 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/09/">September (5)</a></li>
10732
10733 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/10/">October (7)</a></li>
10734
10735 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/11/">November (9)</a></li>
10736
10737 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/12/">December (3)</a></li>
10738
10739 </ul></li>
10740
10741 <li>2012
10742 <ul>
10743
10744 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/01/">January (7)</a></li>
10745
10746 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/02/">February (10)</a></li>
10747
10748 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/03/">March (17)</a></li>
10749
10750 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/04/">April (12)</a></li>
10751
10752 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/05/">May (12)</a></li>
10753
10754 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/06/">June (20)</a></li>
10755
10756 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/07/">July (17)</a></li>
10757
10758 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/08/">August (6)</a></li>
10759
10760 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/09/">September (9)</a></li>
10761
10762 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/10/">October (17)</a></li>
10763
10764 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/11/">November (10)</a></li>
10765
10766 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/12/">December (7)</a></li>
10767
10768 </ul></li>
10769
10770 <li>2011
10771 <ul>
10772
10773 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/01/">January (16)</a></li>
10774
10775 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/02/">February (6)</a></li>
10776
10777 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/03/">March (6)</a></li>
10778
10779 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/04/">April (7)</a></li>
10780
10781 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/05/">May (3)</a></li>
10782
10783 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/06/">June (2)</a></li>
10784
10785 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/07/">July (7)</a></li>
10786
10787 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/08/">August (6)</a></li>
10788
10789 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/09/">September (4)</a></li>
10790
10791 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/10/">October (2)</a></li>
10792
10793 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/11/">November (3)</a></li>
10794
10795 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/12/">December (1)</a></li>
10796
10797 </ul></li>
10798
10799 <li>2010
10800 <ul>
10801
10802 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/01/">January (2)</a></li>
10803
10804 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/02/">February (1)</a></li>
10805
10806 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/03/">March (3)</a></li>
10807
10808 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/04/">April (3)</a></li>
10809
10810 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/05/">May (9)</a></li>
10811
10812 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/06/">June (14)</a></li>
10813
10814 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/07/">July (12)</a></li>
10815
10816 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/08/">August (13)</a></li>
10817
10818 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/09/">September (7)</a></li>
10819
10820 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/10/">October (9)</a></li>
10821
10822 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/11/">November (13)</a></li>
10823
10824 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/12/">December (12)</a></li>
10825
10826 </ul></li>
10827
10828 <li>2009
10829 <ul>
10830
10831 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/01/">January (8)</a></li>
10832
10833 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/02/">February (8)</a></li>
10834
10835 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/03/">March (12)</a></li>
10836
10837 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/04/">April (10)</a></li>
10838
10839 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/05/">May (9)</a></li>
10840
10841 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/06/">June (3)</a></li>
10842
10843 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/07/">July (4)</a></li>
10844
10845 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/08/">August (3)</a></li>
10846
10847 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/09/">September (1)</a></li>
10848
10849 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/10/">October (2)</a></li>
10850
10851 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/11/">November (3)</a></li>
10852
10853 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/12/">December (3)</a></li>
10854
10855 </ul></li>
10856
10857 <li>2008
10858 <ul>
10859
10860 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/11/">November (5)</a></li>
10861
10862 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/12/">December (7)</a></li>
10863
10864 </ul></li>
10865
10866 </ul>
10867
10868
10869
10870 <h2>Tags</h2>
10871 <ul>
10872
10873  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer (13)</a></li>
10874
10875  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/amiga">amiga (1)</a></li>
10876
10877  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/aros">aros (1)</a></li>
10878
10879  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bankid">bankid (4)</a></li>
10880
10881  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin (9)</a></li>
10882
10883  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem (15)</a></li>
10884
10885  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bsa">bsa (2)</a></li>
10886
10887  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/chrpath">chrpath (2)</a></li>
10888
10889  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian (130)</a></li>
10890
10891  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu (156)</a></li>
10892
10893  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan (10)</a></li>
10894
10895  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/dld">dld (15)</a></li>
10896
10897  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook (22)</a></li>
10898
10899  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/drivstoffpriser">drivstoffpriser (4)</a></li>
10900
10901  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english (320)</a></li>
10902
10903  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami (23)</a></li>
10904
10905  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fildeling">fildeling (12)</a></li>
10906
10907  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture (27)</a></li>
10908
10909  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox (9)</a></li>
10910
10911  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen (17)</a></li>
10912
10913  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264 (20)</a></li>
10914
10915  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju (42)</a></li>
10916
10917  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram (12)</a></li>
10918
10919  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kart">kart (19)</a></li>
10920
10921  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap (9)</a></li>
10922
10923  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lenker">lenker (8)</a></li>
10924
10925  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lsdvd">lsdvd (2)</a></li>
10926
10927  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ltsp">ltsp (1)</a></li>
10928
10929  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/mesh network">mesh network (8)</a></li>
10930
10931  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia (38)</a></li>
10932
10933  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software (7)</a></li>
10934
10935  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk (275)</a></li>
10936
10937  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug (181)</a></li>
10938
10939  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn (26)</a></li>
10940
10941  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/open311">open311 (2)</a></li>
10942
10943  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett (60)</a></li>
10944
10945  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern (92)</a></li>
10946
10947  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/raid">raid (1)</a></li>
10948
10949  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reactos">reactos (1)</a></li>
10950
10951  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reprap">reprap (11)</a></li>
10952
10953  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rfid">rfid (3)</a></li>
10954
10955  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot (9)</a></li>
10956
10957  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rss">rss (1)</a></li>
10958
10959  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ruter">ruter (4)</a></li>
10960
10961  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/scraperwiki">scraperwiki (2)</a></li>
10962
10963  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet (46)</a></li>
10964
10965  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary (4)</a></li>
10966
10967  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/skepsis">skepsis (4)</a></li>
10968
10969  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard (49)</a></li>
10970
10971  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stavekontroll">stavekontroll (4)</a></li>
10972
10973  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stortinget">stortinget (10)</a></li>
10974
10975  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance (36)</a></li>
10976
10977  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sysadmin">sysadmin (2)</a></li>
10978
10979  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/usenix">usenix (2)</a></li>
10980
10981  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/valg">valg (8)</a></li>
10982
10983  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video (57)</a></li>
10984
10985  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/vitenskap">vitenskap (4)</a></li>
10986
10987  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web (38)</a></li>
10988
10989 </ul>
10990
10991
10992     </div>
10993     <p style="text-align: right">
10994  Created by <a href="http://steve.org.uk/Software/chronicle">Chronicle v4.6</a>
10995 </p>
10996
10997   </body>
10998 </html>