1 <?xml version=
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>
4 <title>Petter Reinholdtsen - Entries from April
2012</title>
5 <description>Entries from April
2012</description>
6 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/
</link>
10 <title>Debian Edu interview: Wolfgang Schweer
</title>
11 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Wolfgang_Schweer.html
</link>
12 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Wolfgang_Schweer.html
</guid>
13 <pubDate>Sun,
1 Apr
2012 23:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
14 <description><p
>Germany is a core area for the
15 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu and Skolelinux
</a
>
16 user community, and this time I managed to get hold of Wolfgang
17 Schweer, a valuable contributor to the project from Germany.
19 <p
><strong
>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
</strong
></p
>
21 <p
>I
've studied Mathematics at the university
'Ruhr-Universität
' in
22 Bochum, Germany. Since
1981 I
'm working as a teacher at the school
23 "<a href=
"http://www.westfalenkolleg-dortmund.de/
">Westfalen-Kolleg
24 Dortmund
</a
>", a second chance school. Here, young adults is given
25 the opportunity to get further education in order to do the school
26 examination
'Abitur
', which will allow to study at a university. This
27 second chance is of value for those who want a better job perspective
28 or failed to get a higher school examination being teens.
</p
>
30 <p
>Besides teaching I was involved in developing online courses for a
31 blended learning project called
'abitur-online.nrw
' and in some other
32 information technology related projects. For about ten years I
've been
33 teacher and coordinator for the
'abitur-online
' project at my
34 school. Being now in my early sixties, I
've decided to leave school at
35 the end of April this year.
</p
>
37 <p
><strong
>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
38 project?
</strong
></p
>
40 <p
>The first information about Skolelinux must have come to my
41 attention years ago and somehow related to LTSP (Linux Terminal Server
42 Project). At school, we had set up a network at the beginning of
1997
43 using Suse Linux on the desktop, replacing a Novell network. Since
44 2002, we used old machines from the city council of Dortmund as thin
45 clients (LTSP, later Ubuntu/Lessdisks) cause new hardware was out of
46 reach. At home I
'm using Debian since years and - subscribed to the
47 Debian news letter - heard from time to time about Skolelinux. About
48 two years ago I proposed to replace the (somehow undocumented and only
49 known to me) system at school by a well known Debian based system:
52 <p
>Students and teachers appreciated the new system because of a
53 better look and feel and an enhanced access to local media on thin
54 clients. The possibility to alter and/or reset passwords using a GUI
55 was welcomed, too. Being able to do administrative tasks using a GUI
56 and to easily set up workstations using PXE was of very high value for
57 the admin teachers.
</p
>
59 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
60 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
62 <p
>It
's open source, easy to set up, stable and flexible due to it
's
63 Debian base. It integrates LTSP out-of-the-box. And it is documented!
64 So it was a perfect choice.
</p
>
66 <p
>Being open source, there are no license problems and so it
's
67 possible to point teachers and students to programs like
68 OpenOffice.org, ViewYourMind (mind mapping) and The Gimp. It
's of
69 high value to be able to adapt parts of the system to special needs of
70 a school and to choose where to get support for this.
</p
>
72 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
73 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
75 <p
>Nothing yet.
</p
>
77 <p
><strong
>Which free software do you use daily?
</strong
></p
>
79 <p
>At home (Debian Sid with Gnome Desktop): Iceweasel, LibreOffice,
80 Mutt, Gedit, Document Viewer, Midnight Commander, flpsed (PDF
81 Annotator). At school (Skolelinux Lenny): Iceweasel, Gedit,
82 LibreOffice.
</p
>
84 <p
><strong
>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
85 get schools to use free software?
</strong
></p
>
87 <p
>Some time ago I thought it was enough to tell people about it. But
88 that doesn
't seem to work quite well. Now I concentrate on those more
89 interested and hope to get multiplicators that way.
</p
>
94 <title>Debian Edu in the Linux Weekly News
</title>
95 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_in_the_Linux_Weekly_News.html
</link>
96 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_in_the_Linux_Weekly_News.html
</guid>
97 <pubDate>Thu,
5 Apr
2012 08:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
98 <description><p
>About two weeks ago, I was interviewed via email about
99 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu and Skolelinux
</a
> by
100 Bruce Byfield in Linux Weekly News. The result was made public for
101 non-subscribers today. I am pleased to see liked our Linux solution
102 for schools. Check out his article
103 <a href=
"https://lwn.net/Articles/
488805/
">Debian Edu/Skolelinux: A
104 distribution for education
</a
> if you want to learn more.
</p
>
109 <title>Why the KDE menu is slow when /usr/ is NFS mounted - and a workaround
</title>
110 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_the_KDE_menu_is_slow_when__usr__is_NFS_mounted___and_a_workaround.html
</link>
111 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_the_KDE_menu_is_slow_when__usr__is_NFS_mounted___and_a_workaround.html
</guid>
112 <pubDate>Fri,
6 Apr
2012 22:
40:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
113 <description><p
>Recently I have spent time with
114 <a href=
"http://www.slxdrift.no/
">Skolelinux Drift AS
</a
> on speeding
115 up a
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
</a
>
116 Lenny installation using LTSP diskless workstations, and in the
117 process I discovered something very surprising. The reason the KDE
118 menu was responding slow when using it for the first time, was mostly
119 due to the way KDE find application icons. I discovered that showing
120 the Multimedia menu would cause more than
20 000 IP packages to be
121 passed between the LTSP client and the NFS server. Most of these were
123 NFS LOOKUP calls, resulting in a NFS3ERR_NOENT response. Because the
124 ping times between the client and the server were in the range
2-
20
125 ms, the menus would be very slow. Looking at the strace of kicker in
126 Lenny (or plasma-desktop i Squeeze - same problem there), I see that
127 the source of these NFS calls are access(
2) system calls for
128 non-existing files. KDE can do hundreds of access(
2) calls to find
129 one icon file. In my example, just finding the mplayer icon required
130 around
230 access(
2) calls.
</p
>
132 <p
>The KDE code seem to search for icons using a list of icon
133 directories, and the list of possible directories is large. In
134 (almost) each directory, it look for files ending in .png, .svgz, .svg
135 and .xpm. The result is a very slow KDE menu when /usr/ is NFS
136 mounted. Showing a single sub menu may result in thousands of NFS
137 requests. I am not the first one to discover this. I found a
138 <a href=
"https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=
211416">KDE bug report
139 from
2009</a
> about this problem, and it is still unsolved.
</p
>
141 <p
>My solution to speed up the KDE menu was to create a package
142 kde-icon-cache that upon installation will look at all .desktop files
143 used to generate the KDE menu, find their icons, search the icon paths
144 for the file that KDE will end up finding at run time, and copying the
145 icon file to /var/lib/kde-icon-cache/. Finally, I add symlinks to
146 these icon files in one of the first directories where KDE will look
147 for them. This cut down the number of file accesses required to find
148 one icon from several hundred to less than
5, and make the KDE menu
149 almost instantaneous. I
'm not quite sure where to make the package
150 publicly available, so for now it is only available on request.
</p
>
152 <p
>The bug report mention that this do not only affect the KDE menu
153 and icon handling, but also the login process. Not quite sure how to
154 speed up that part without replacing NFS with for example NBD, and
155 that is not really an option at the moment.
</p
>
157 <p
>If you got feedback on this issue, please let us know on debian-edu
158 (at) lists.debian.org.
</p
>
163 <title>Debian Edu interview: Justin B. Rye
</title>
164 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Justin_B__Rye.html
</link>
165 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Justin_B__Rye.html
</guid>
166 <pubDate>Sun,
8 Apr
2012 10:
50:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
167 <description><p
>It take all kind of contributions to create a Linux distribution
168 like
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
</a
>,
169 and this time I lend the ear to Justin B. Rye, who is listed as a big
171 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze
">Debian
172 Edu Squeeze release manual
</a
>.
174 <p
><strong
>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
</strong
></p
>
176 <p
>I
'm a
44-year-old linguistics graduate living in Edinburgh who has
177 occasionally been employed as a sysadmin.
</p
>
179 <p
><strong
>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
180 project?
</strong
></p
>
182 <p
>I
'm neither a developer nor a Skolelinux/Debian Edu user! The only
183 reason my name
's in the credits for the documentation is that I hang
184 around on debian-l10n-english waiting for people to mention things
185 they
'd like a native English speaker to proofread... So I did a sweep
186 through the wiki for typos and Norglish and inconsistent spellings of
187 "localisation
".
</p
>
189 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
190 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
192 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
193 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
195 <p
>These questions are too hard for me - I don
't use it! In fact I
196 had hardly any contact with I.T. until long after I
'd got out of the
197 education system.
</p
>
199 <p
>I can tell you the advantages of Debian for me though: it soaks up
200 as much of my free time as I want and no more, and lets me do
201 everything I want a computer for without ever forcing me to spend
202 money on the latest hardware.
</p
>
204 <p
><strong
>Which free software do you use daily?
</strong
></p
>
206 <p
>I
've been using Debian since Rex; popularity-contest says the
207 software that I use most is xinit, xterm, and xulrunner (in other
208 words, I use a distinctly retro sort of desktop).
</p
>
210 <p
><strong
>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
211 get schools to use free software?
</strong
></p
>
213 <p
>Well, I don
't know. I suppose I
'd be inclined to try reasoning
214 with the people who make the decisions, but obviously if that worked
215 you would hardly need a strategy.
</p
>
220 <title>Jeg skal på konferansen Go Open
2012</title>
221 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Jeg_skal_p__konferansen_Go_Open_2012.html
</link>
222 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Jeg_skal_p__konferansen_Go_Open_2012.html
</guid>
223 <pubDate>Fri,
13 Apr
2012 11:
30:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
224 <description><p
>Jeg har tenkt meg på konferansen
<a href=
"http://www.goopen.no/
">Go
225 Open
2012</a
> i Oslo
23. april.
226 <a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/
">Medlemsforeningen NUUG
</a
> deler ut
227 <a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/prisen/
">prisen for fremme av fri
228 programvare i Norge
</a
> der i år. Kommer du?
</p
>
233 <title>Debian Edu interview: Andreas Mundt
</title>
234 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Andreas_Mundt.html
</link>
235 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Andreas_Mundt.html
</guid>
236 <pubDate>Sun,
15 Apr
2012 12:
10:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
237 <description><p
>Behind
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu and
238 Skolelinux
</a
> there are a lot of people doing the hard work of
239 setting together all the pieces. This time I present to you Andreas
240 Mundt, who have been part of the technical development team several
241 years. He was also a key contributor in getting GOsa and Kerberos set
242 up in the recently released
243 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze
">Debian
244 Edu Squeeze
</a
> version.
</p
>
246 <p
><strong
>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
</strong
></p
>
248 <p
>My name is Andreas Mundt, I grew up in south Germany. After
249 studying Physics I spent several years at university doing research in
250 Quantum Optics. After that I worked some years in an optics company.
251 Finally I decided to turn over a new leaf in my life and started
252 teaching
10 to
19 years old kids at school. I teach math, physics,
253 information technology and science/technology.
</p
>
255 <p
><strong
>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
256 project?
</strong
></p
>
258 <p
>Already before I switched to teaching, I followed the Debian Edu
259 project because of my interest in education and Debian. Within the
260 qualification/training period for the teaching, I started
261 contributing.
</p
>
263 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
264 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
266 <p
>The advantages of Debian Edu are the well known name, the
267 out-of-the-box philosophy and of course the great free software of the
268 Debian Project!
</p
>
270 <p
><strong
>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
271 Edu?
</strong
></p
>
273 <p
>As every coin has two sides, the out-of-the-box philosophy has its
274 downside, too. In my opinion, it is hard to modify and tweak the
275 setup, if you need or want that. Further more, it is not easily
276 possible to upgrade the system to a new release. It takes much too
277 long after a Debian release to prepare the -Edu release, perhaps
278 because the number of developers working on the core of the code is
279 rather small and often busy elsewhere.
</p
>
281 <p
>The
<a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianLAN
">Debian LAN
</a
>
282 project might fill the use case of a more flexible system.
</p
>
284 <p
><strong
>Which free software do you use daily?
</strong
></p
>
286 <p
>I am only using non-free software if I am forced to and run Debian
287 on all my machines. For documents I prefer LaTeX and PGF/TikZ, then
288 mutt and iceweasel for email respectively web browsing. At school I
289 have Arduino and Fritzing in use for a micro controller project.
</p
>
291 <p
><strong
>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
292 get schools to use free software?
</strong
></p
>
294 <p
>One of the major problems is the vendor lock-in from top to bottom:
295 Especially in combination with ignorant government employees and
296 politicians, this works out great for the
"market-leader
". The school
297 administration here in Baden-Wuerttemberg is occupied by that vendor.
298 Documents have to be prepared in non-free, proprietary formats. Even
299 free browsers do not work for the school administration. Publishers
300 of school books provide software only for proprietary platforms.
</p
>
302 <p
>To change this, political work is very important. Parts of the
303 political spectrum have become aware of the problem in the last years.
304 However it takes quite some time and courageous politicians to
'free
'
305 the system. There is currently some discussion about
"Open Data
" and
306 "Free/Open Standards
". I am not sure if all the involved parties have
307 a clue about the potential of these ideas, and probably only a
308 fraction takes them seriously. However it might slowly make free
309 software and the philosophy behind it more known and popular.
</p
>
314 <title>Forskning:
"GPL gir lokal frihet og kontroll gjennom omfordeling av makt fra produsent til bruker
"</title>
315 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Forskning___GPL_gir_lokal_frihet_og_kontroll_gjennom_omfordeling_av_makt_fra_produsent_til_bruker_.html
</link>
316 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Forskning___GPL_gir_lokal_frihet_og_kontroll_gjennom_omfordeling_av_makt_fra_produsent_til_bruker_.html
</guid>
317 <pubDate>Sun,
15 Apr
2012 13:
00:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
318 <description><p
>Da jeg googlet etter noe annet kom jeg tilfeldigvis over
319 <a href=
"http://www.duo.uio.no/sok/work.html?WORKID=
58309">en
320 hovedfagsoppgave
</a
> ved Universitetet i Oslo som diskuterer verdien
321 av GPLs fire friheter for brukerne av IT-systemer. Jeg ble fascinert
322 over det som presenteres der. Her er sammendraget:
</p
>
324 <p
><blockquote
>
326 <p
>Motivasjonen til å skrive denne oppgaven er en personlig undring
327 over hvorfor det primært, og ofte eksklusivt, fokuseres på det
328 økonomiske aspektet ved utredninger om fri programvare er et godt valg
329 for det offentlige. Fri og produsenteid programvare bygger på
330 fundamentalt forskjellige ideologier som kan ha implikasjoner utover
331 økonomiske kostnader. Kunnskapskulturen som er med på å definere fri
332 programvare er basert på åpenhet, og er en verdi i seg selv.
</p
>
334 <p
>Oppgavens tema er programvarelisensen GPL og frihet. GPL-lisensiert
335 programvare gir visse friheter i forhold til produsenteid
336 programvare. Mitt spørsmål er om, og eventuelt i hvilken utstrekning,
337 disse frihetene blir benyttet av ulike brukere og hvordan de
338 manifesterer seg for disse brukerne. Sentrale spørsmål i oppgaven
342 <li
>Hvordan fordeles handlekraft gjennom lisensieringen av programvaren?
</li
>
343 <li
>Hvilke konsekvenser har programvarelisensen for de ulike brukere?
</li
>
346 <p
>Fri programvare gir blant annet brukeren mulighet til å studere og
347 modifisere kildekoden. Denne formen for frihet erverves gjennom
348 kunnskap og krever at brukeren også er en ekspert. Hva skjer med
349 frihetene til GPL når sluttbrukeren er en annen? Dette diskuteres i
350 dialog med informantene.
</p
>
352 <p
>Jeg har i denne oppgaven samlet inn intervjudata fra IKT-ansvarlige
353 ved grunnskolene i Nittedal kommune, driftsansvarlig og IKT-veilederen
354 for skolene i kommunen, samt IKT-koordinator for utdanning i Akershus
355 fylkeskommune og bokmåloversettere av OpenOffice.org. Den empiriske
356 delen av oppgaven er delt inn i to seksjoner; den første omhandler
357 operativsystemet Skolelinux, den andre kontorprogrampakken
358 OpenOffice.org.
</p
>
360 <p
>Som vi vil se gir GPL lokal frihet og kontroll gjennom omfordeling
361 av makt fra produsent til bruker. Brukerens makt analyseres gjennom
362 begrepene brukermedvirkning og handlingsfrihet. Det blir også lagt
363 vekt på strukturelle forhold rundt bruken av teknologi, og spesielt de
364 økonomiske begrepene nettverkseksternaliteter, innlåsing og
365 stiavhengighet. Dette er begreper av spesiell nytte når objektet som
366 omsettes eller distribueres er et kommunikasjonsprodukt, fordi verdien
367 til et slikt gode for en potensiell bruker avhenger av antall
368 eksisterende brukere av godet. I tilknytning til denne problematikken
369 inneholder oppgaven også en diskusjon rundt åpne standarder og
372 <p
>Oppgaven konkluderer med at de «fire frihetene» som GPL-lisensen er
373 laget for å beskytte er av avgjørende betydning for bruken av
374 OpenOffice.org og Skolelinux, i Akershus fylkeskommune såvel som i
375 skolene i Nittedal. Distribusjonen av handlekraft er ikke helt
376 symmetrisk. Det er først og fremst de profesjonelle utviklerne i
377 Skolelinux som direkte kan nyttiggjøre seg friheten til å endre kode,
378 mens en sluttbruker som Nittedal kommune nyttiggjør seg den økonomiske
379 friheten til å kunne distribuere programmene. Det er imidlertid også
380 slik at ingen aktør klarer seg uten alle disse «frihetene».
</p
>
381 </blockquote
></p
>
383 <p
>Jeg fant også en masteroppgave fra
2006, men der ligger ikke
384 komplett oppgave tilgjengelig. På tide å holde et øye med
385 <a href=
"http://www.duo.uio.no/sok/search.html?q=skolelinux
">Skolelinux-søket
</a
>
392 <title>RAND terms - non-reasonable and discriminatory
</title>
393 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/RAND_terms___non_reasonable_and_discriminatory.html
</link>
394 <guid isPermaLink=
"true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/RAND_terms___non_reasonable_and_discriminatory.html
</guid>
395 <pubDate>Thu,
19 Apr
2012 22:
20:
00 +
0200</pubDate>
396 <description><p
>Here in Norway, the
397 <a href=
"http://www.regjeringen.no/nb/dep/fad.html?id=
339"> Ministry of
398 Government Administration, Reform and Church Affairs
</a
> is behind
399 a
<a href=
"http://standard.difi.no/forvaltningsstandarder
">directory of
400 standards
</a
> that are recommended or mandatory for use by the
401 government. When the directory was created, the people behind it made
402 an effort to ensure that everyone would be able to implement the
403 standards and compete on equal terms to supply software and solutions
404 to the government. Free software and non-free software could compete
405 on the same level.
</p
>
407 <p
>But recently, some standards with RAND
408 (
<a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_and_non-discriminatory_licensing
">Reasonable
409 And Non-Discriminatory
</a
>) terms have made their way into the
410 directory. And while this might not sound too bad, the fact is that
411 standard specifications with RAND terms often block free software from
412 implementing them. The reasonable part of RAND mean that the cost per
413 user/unit is low,and the non-discriminatory part mean that everyone
414 willing to pay will get a license. Both sound great in theory. In
415 practice, to get such license one need to be able to count users, and
416 be able to pay a small amount of money per unit or user. By
417 definition, users of free software do not need to register their use.
418 So counting users or units is not possible for free software projects.
419 And given that people will use the software without handing any money
420 to the author, it is not really economically possible for a free
421 software author to pay a small amount of money to license the rights
422 to implement a standard when the income available is zero. The result
423 in these situations is that free software are locked out from
424 implementing standards with RAND terms.
</p
>
426 <p
>Because of this, when I see someone claiming the terms of a
427 standard is reasonable and non-discriminatory, all I can think of is
428 how this really is non-reasonable and discriminatory. Because free
429 software developers are working in a global marked, it does not really
430 help to know that software patents are not supposed to be enforceable
431 in Norway. The patent regimes in other countries affect us even here.
432 I really hope the people behind the standard directory will pay more
433 attention to these issues in the future.
</p
>
435 <p
>You can find more on the issues with RAND, FRAND and RAND-Z terms
437 (
<a href=
"http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/
2010/
11/rand-not-so-reasonable/
">RAND:
438 Not So Reasonable?
</a
>).
</p
>