Fikk plakat. :)

[homepage.git] / blog / index.rss

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        <channel>
                <title>Petter Reinholdtsen</title>
                <description></description>
                <link>https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/</link>
                <atom:link href="https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/index.rss" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />
        
        <item>
                <title>What did I learn from OpenSnitch this summer?</title>
                <link>https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_did_I_learn_from_OpenSnitch_this_summer_.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_did_I_learn_from_OpenSnitch_this_summer_.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 11 Jun 2023 08:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;With yesterdays
&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.debian.org/News/2023/20230610&quot;&gt;release of Debian
12 Bookworm&lt;/a&gt;, I am happy to know the
&lt;a href=&quot;https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/opensnitch&quot;&gt;the interactive
application firewall OpenSnitch&lt;/a&gt; is available for a wider audience.
I have been running it for a few weeks now, and have been surprised
about some of the programs connecting to the Internet.  Some programs
are obviously calling out from my machine, like the NTP network based
clock adjusting system and Tor to reach other Tor clients, but others
were more dubious.  For example, the KDE Window manager try to look up
the host name in DNS, for no apparent reason, but if this lookup is
blocked the KDE desktop get periodically stuck when I use it.  Another
surprise was how much Firefox call home directly to mozilla.com,
mozilla.net and googleapis.com, to mention a few, when I visit other
web pages.  This direct connection happen even if I told Firefox to
always use a proxy, and the proxy setting is ignored for this traffic.
Other surprising connections come from audacity and dirmngr (I do not
use Gnome).  It took some trial and error to get a good default set of
permissions.  Without it, I would get popups asking for permissions at
any time, also the most inconvenient ones where I am in the middle of
a time sensitive gaming session.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I suspect some application developers should rethink when then need
to use network connections or DNS lookups, and recommend testing
OpenSnitch (only &lt;tt&gt;apt install opensnitch&lt;/tt&gt; away in Debian
Bookworm) to locate and report any surprising Internet connections on
your desktop machine.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;At the moment the upstream developer and Debian package maintainer
is working on making the system more reliable in Debian, by enabling
the eBPF kernel module to track processes and connections instead of
depending in content in /proc/.  This should enter unstable fairly
soon.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
&lt;b&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&quot;&gt;15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/b&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>wmbusmeters, parse data from your utility meter - nice free software</title>
                <link>https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/wmbusmeters__parse_data_from_your_utility_meter___nice_free_software.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/wmbusmeters__parse_data_from_your_utility_meter___nice_free_software.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Fri, 19 May 2023 21:50:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;There is a European standard for reading utility meters like water,
gas, electricity or heat distribution meters.  The
&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meter-Bus&quot;&gt;Meter-Bus standard
(EN 13757-2, EN 13757-3 and EN 13757–4)&lt;/a&gt; provide a cross vendor way
to talk to and collect meter data.  I ran into this standard when I
wanted to monitor some heat distribution meters, and managed to find
free software that could do the job.  The meters in question broadcast
encrypted messages with meter information via radio, and the hardest
part was to track down the encryption keys from the vendor.  With this
in place I could set up a MQTT gateway to submit the meter data for
graphing.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The free software systems in question,
&lt;a href=&quot;https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/rtl-wmbus&quot;&gt;rtl-wmbus&lt;/a&gt; to
read the messages from a software defined radio, and
&lt;a href=&quot;https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/wmbusmeters&quot;&gt;wmbusmeters&lt;/a&gt; to
decrypt and decode the content of the messages, is working very well
and allowe me to get frequent updates from my meters.  I got in touch
with upstream last year to see if there was any interest in publishing
the packages via Debian.  I was very happy to learn that Fredrik
Öhrström volunteered to maintain the packages, and I have since
assisted him in getting Debian package build rules in place as well as
sponsoring the packages into the Debian archive.  Sadly we completed
it too late for them to become part of the next stable Debian release
(Bookworm).  The wmbusmeters package just cleared the NEW queue.  It
will need some work to fix a built problem, but I expect Fredrik will
find a solution soon.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If you got a infrastructure meter supporting the Meter Bus
standard, I strongly recommend having a look at these nice
packages.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
&lt;b&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&quot;&gt;15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/b&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>The 2023 LinuxCNC Norwegian developer gathering</title>
                <link>https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_2023_LinuxCNC_Norwegian_developer_gathering.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_2023_LinuxCNC_Norwegian_developer_gathering.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 14 May 2023 20:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;The LinuxCNC project is making headway these days.  A lot of
patches and issues have seen activity on
&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/LinuxCNC/linuxcnc/&quot;&gt;the project github
pages&lt;/a&gt; recently.  A few weeks ago there was a developer gathering
over at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://tormach.com/&quot;&gt;Tormach&lt;/a&gt; headquarter in
Wisconsin, and now we are planning a new gathering in Norway.  If you
wonder what LinuxCNC is, lets quote Wikipedia:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;
&quot;LinuxCNC is a software system for numerical control of
machines such as milling machines, lathes, plasma cutters, routers,
cutting machines, robots and hexapods. It can control up to 9 axes or
joints of a CNC machine using G-code (RS-274NGC) as input. It has
several GUIs suited to specific kinds of usage (touch screen,
interactive development).&quot;
&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The Norwegian developer gathering take place the weekend June 16th
to 18th this year, and is open for everyone interested in contributing
to LinuxCNC.  Up to date information about the gathering can be found
in
&lt;a href=&quot;https://sourceforge.net/p/emc/mailman/emc-developers/thread/sa64jp06nob.fsf%40hjemme.reinholdtsen.name/#msg37837251&quot;&gt;the
developer mailing list thread&lt;/a&gt; where the gathering was announced.
Thanks to the good people at
&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.debian.org/&quot;&gt;Debian&lt;/a&gt;,
&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.redpill-linpro.com/&quot;&gt;Redpill-Linpro&lt;/a&gt; and
&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nuugfoundation.no/no/&quot;&gt;NUUG Foundation&lt;/a&gt;, we
have enough sponsor funds to pay for food, and shelter for the people
traveling from afar to join us.  If you would like to join the
gathering, get in touch.&lt;/p&gt;
 
&lt;p&gt;As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
&lt;b&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&quot;&gt;15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/b&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>OpenSnitch in Debian ready for prime time</title>
                <link>https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/OpenSnitch_in_Debian_ready_for_prime_time.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/OpenSnitch_in_Debian_ready_for_prime_time.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 13 May 2023 12:10:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;A bit delayed,
&lt;a href=&quot;https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/opensnitch&quot;&gt;the interactive
application firewall OpenSnitch&lt;/a&gt; package in Debian now got the
latest fixes ready for Debian Bookworm.  Because it depend on a
package missing on some architectures, the autopkgtest check of the
testing migration script did not understand that the tests were
actually working, so the migration was delayed.  A bug in the package
dependencies is also fixed, so those installing the firewall package
(opensnitch) now also get the GUI admin tool (python3-opensnitch-ui)
installed by default.  I am very grateful to Gustavo Iñiguez Goya for
his work on getting the package ready for Debian Bookworm.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Armed with this package I have discovered some surprising
connections from programs I believed were able to work completly
offline, and it has already proven its worth, at least to me.  If you
too want to get more familiar with the kind of programs using
Internett connections on your machine, I recommend testing &lt;tt&gt;apt
install opensnitch&lt;/tt&gt; in Bookworm and see what you think.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The package is still not able to build its eBPF module within
Debian.  Not sure how much work it would be to get it working, but
suspect some kernel related packages need to be extended with more
header files to get it working.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
&lt;b&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&quot;&gt;15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/b&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Speech to text, she APTly whispered, how hard can it be?</title>
                <link>https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Speech_to_text__she_APTly_whispered__how_hard_can_it_be_.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Speech_to_text__she_APTly_whispered__how_hard_can_it_be_.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 23 Apr 2023 09:40:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;While visiting a convention during Easter, it occurred to me that
it would be great if I could have a digital Dictaphone with
transcribing capabilities, providing me with texts to cut-n-paste into
stuff I need to write.  The background is that long drives often bring
up the urge to write on texts I am working on, which of course is out
of the question while driving.  With the release of
&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/openai/whisper/&quot;&gt;OpenAI Whisper&lt;/a&gt;, this
seem to be within reach with Free Software, so I decided to give it a
go.  OpenAI Whisper is a Linux based neural network system to read in
audio files and provide text representation of the speech in that
audio recording.  It handle multiple languages and according to its
creators even can translate into a different language than the spoken
one.  I have not tested the latter feature.  It can either use the CPU
or a GPU with CUDA support.  As far as I can tell, CUDA in practice
limit that feature to NVidia graphics cards.  I have few of those, as
they do not work great with free software drivers, and have not tested
the GPU option.  While looking into the matter, I did discover some
work to provide CUDA support on non-NVidia GPUs, and some work with
the library used by Whisper to port it to other GPUs, but have not
spent much time looking into GPU support yet.  I&#39;ve so far used an old
X220 laptop as my test machine, and only transcribed using its
CPU.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;As it from a privacy standpoint is unthinkable to use computers
under control of someone else (aka a &quot;cloud&quot; service) to transcribe
ones thoughts and personal notes, I want to run the transcribing
system locally on my own computers.  The only sensible approach to me
is to make the effort I put into this available for any Linux user and
to upload the needed packages into Debian.  Looking at Debian Bookworm, I
discovered that only three packages were missing,
&lt;a href=&quot;https://bugs.debian.org/1034307&quot;&gt;tiktoken&lt;/a&gt;,
&lt;a href=&quot;https://bugs.debian.org/1034144&quot;&gt;triton&lt;/a&gt;, and
&lt;a href=&quot;https://bugs.debian.org/1034091&quot;&gt;openai-whisper&lt;/a&gt;.  For a while
I also believed
&lt;a href=&quot;https://bugs.debian.org/1034286&quot;&gt;ffmpeg-python&lt;/a&gt; was
needed, but as its
&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/kkroening/ffmpeg-python/issues/760&quot;&gt;upstream
seem to have vanished&lt;/a&gt; I found it safer
&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/openai/whisper/pull/1242&quot;&gt;to rewrite
whisper&lt;/a&gt; to stop depending on in than to introduce ffmpeg-python
into Debian.  I decided to place these packages under the umbrella of
&lt;a href=&quot;https://salsa.debian.org/deeplearning-team&quot;&gt;the Debian Deep
Learning Team&lt;/a&gt;, which seem like the best team to look after such
packages.  Discussing the topic within the group also made me aware
that the triton package was already a future dependency of newer
versions of the torch package being planned, and would be needed after
Bookworm is released.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;All required code packages have been now waiting in
&lt;a href=&quot;https://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html&quot;&gt;the Debian NEW
queue&lt;/a&gt; since Wednesday, heading for Debian Experimental until
Bookworm is released.  An unsolved issue is how to handle the neural
network models used by Whisper.  The default behaviour of Whisper is
to require Internet connectivity and download the model requested to
&lt;tt&gt;~/.cache/whisper/&lt;/tt&gt; on first invocation.  This obviously would
fail &lt;a href=&quot;https://people.debian.org/~bap/dfsg-faq.html&quot;&gt;the
deserted island test of free software&lt;/a&gt; as the Debian packages would
be unusable for someone stranded with only the Debian archive and solar
powered computer on a deserted island.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Because of this, I would love to include the models in the Debian
mirror system.  This is problematic, as the models are very large
files, which would put a heavy strain on the Debian mirror
infrastructure around the globe.  The strain would be even higher if
the models change often, which luckily as far as I can tell they do
not.  The small model, which according to its creator is most useful
for English and in my experience is not doing a great job there
either, is 462 MiB (deb is 414 MiB).  The medium model, which to me
seem to handle English speech fairly well is 1.5 GiB (deb is 1.3 GiB)
and the large model is 2.9 GiB (deb is 2.6 GiB).  I would assume
everyone with enough resources would prefer to use the large model for
highest quality.  I believe the models themselves would have to go
into the non-free part of the Debian archive, as they are not really
including any useful source code for updating the models.  The
&quot;source&quot;, aka the model training set, according to the creators
consist of &quot;680,000 hours of multilingual and multitask supervised
data collected from the web&quot;, which to me reads material with both
unknown copyright terms, unavailable to the general public.  In other
words, the source is not available according to the Debian Free
Software Guidelines and the model should be considered non-free.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I asked the Debian FTP masters for advice regarding uploading a
model package on their IRC channel, and based on the feedback there it
is still unclear to me if such package would be accepted into the
archive.  In any case I wrote build rules for a
&lt;a href=&quot;https://salsa.debian.org/deeplearning-team/openai-whisper-model&quot;&gt;OpenAI
Whisper model package&lt;/a&gt; and
&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/openai/whisper/pull/1257&quot;&gt;modified the
Whisper code base&lt;/a&gt; to prefer shared files under &lt;tt&gt;/usr/&lt;/tt&gt; and
&lt;tt&gt;/var/&lt;/tt&gt; over user specific files in &lt;tt&gt;~/.cache/whisper/&lt;/tt&gt;
to be able to use these model packages, to prepare for such
possibility.  One solution might be to include only one of the models
(small or medium, I guess) in the Debian archive, and ask people to
download the others from the Internet.  Not quite sure what to do
here, and advice is most welcome (use the debian-ai mailing list).&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;To make it easier to test the new packages while I wait for them to
clear the NEW queue, I created an APT source targeting bookworm.  I
selected Bookworm instead of Bullseye, even though I know the latter
would reach more users, is that some of the required dependencies are
missing from Bullseye and I during this phase of testing did not want
to backport a lot of packages just to get up and running.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Here is a recipe to run as user root if you want to test OpenAI
Whisper using Debian packages on your Debian Bookworm installation,
first adding the APT repository GPG key to the list of trusted keys,
then setting up the APT repository and finally installing the packages
and one of the models:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
curl https://geekbay.nuug.no/~pere/openai-whisper/D78F5C4796F353D211B119E28200D9B589641240.asc \
  -o /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/pere-whisper.asc
mkdir -p /etc/apt/sources.list.d
cat &gt; /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pere-whisper.list &amp;lt;&amp;lt;EOF
deb https://geekbay.nuug.no/~pere/openai-whisper/ bookworm main
deb-src https://geekbay.nuug.no/~pere/openai-whisper/ bookworm main
EOF
apt update
apt install openai-whisper
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The package work for me, but have not yet been tested on any other
computer than my own.  With it, I have been able to (badly) transcribe
a 2 minute 40 second Norwegian audio clip to test using the small
model.  This took 11 minutes and around 2.2 GiB of RAM.  Transcribing
the same file with the medium model gave a accurate text in 77 minutes
using around 5.2 GiB of RAM.  My test machine had too little memory to
test the large model, which I believe require 11 GiB of RAM.  In
short, this now work for me using Debian packages, and I hope it will
for you and everyone else once the packages enter Debian.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Now I can start on the audio recording part of this project.&lt;/p&gt;
 
&lt;p&gt;As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
&lt;b&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&quot;&gt;15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/b&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>rtlsdr-scanner, software defined radio frequency scanner for Linux  - nice free software</title>
                <link>https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/rtlsdr_scanner__software_defined_radio_frequency_scanner_for_Linux____nice_free_software.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/rtlsdr_scanner__software_defined_radio_frequency_scanner_for_Linux____nice_free_software.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Fri, 7 Apr 2023 23:10:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Today I finally found time to track down a useful radio frequency
scanner for my software defined radio.  Just for fun I tried to locate
the radios used in the areas, and a good start would be to scan all
the frequencies to see what is in use.  I&#39;ve tried to find a useful
program earlier, but ran out of time before I managed to find a useful
tool.  This time I was more successful, and after a few false leads I
found a description of
&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.kali.org/tools/rtlsdr-scanner/&quot;&gt;rtlsdr-scanner
over at the Kali site&lt;/a&gt;, and was able to track down
&lt;a href=&quot;https://gitlab.com/kalilinux/packages/rtlsdr-scanner.git&quot;&gt;the
Kali package git repository&lt;/a&gt; to build a deb package for the
scanner.  Sadly the package is missing from the Debian project itself,
at least in Debian Bullseye.  Two runtime dependencies,
&lt;a href=&quot;https://gitlab.com/kalilinux/packages/python-visvis.git&quot;&gt;python-visvis&lt;/a&gt;
and
&lt;a href=&quot;https://gitlab.com/kalilinux/packages/python-rtlsdr.git&quot;&gt;python-rtlsdr&lt;/a&gt;
had to be built and installed separately.  Luckily &#39;&lt;tt&gt;gbp
buildpackage&lt;/tt&gt;&#39; handled them just fine and no further packages had
to be manually built.  The end result worked out of the box after
installation.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;My initial scans for FM channels worked just fine, so I knew the
scanner was functioning.  But when I tried to scan every frequency
from 100 to 1000 MHz, the program stopped unexpectedly near the
completion.  After some debugging I discovered USB software radio I
used rejected frequencies above 948 MHz, triggering a unreported
exception breaking the scan.  Changing the scan to end at 957 worked
better.  I similarly found the lower limit to be around 15, and ended
up with the following full scan:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2023-04-07-radio-freq-scanning.png&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2023-04-07-radio-freq-scanning.png&quot; width=&quot;100%&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Saving the scan did not work, but exporting it as a CSV file worked
just fine.  I ended up with around 477k CVS lines with dB level for
the given frequency.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The save failure seem to be a missing UTF-8 encoding issue in the
python code.  Will see if I can find time to send a patch
&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/CdeMills/RTLSDR-Scanner/&quot;&gt;upstream&lt;/a&gt;
later to fix this exception:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;pre&gt;
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File &quot;/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/rtlsdr_scanner/main_window.py&quot;, line 485, in __on_save
    save_plot(fullName, self.scanInfo, self.spectrum, self.locations)
  File &quot;/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/rtlsdr_scanner/file.py&quot;, line 408, in save_plot
    handle.write(json.dumps(data, indent=4))
TypeError: a bytes-like object is required, not &#39;str&#39;
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File &quot;/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/rtlsdr_scanner/main_window.py&quot;, line 485, in __on_save
    save_plot(fullName, self.scanInfo, self.spectrum, self.locations)
  File &quot;/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/rtlsdr_scanner/file.py&quot;, line 408, in save_plot
    handle.write(json.dumps(data, indent=4))
TypeError: a bytes-like object is required, not &#39;str&#39;
&lt;/pre&gt;
 
&lt;p&gt;As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
&lt;b&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&quot;&gt;15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/b&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>OpenSnitch available in Debian Sid and Bookworm</title>
                <link>https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/OpenSnitch_available_in_Debian_Sid_and_Bookworm.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/OpenSnitch_available_in_Debian_Sid_and_Bookworm.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 25 Feb 2023 20:30:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Thanks to the efforts of the OpenSnitch lead developer Gustavo
Iñiguez Goya allowing me to sponsor the upload,
&lt;a href=&quot;https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/opensnitch&quot;&gt;the interactive
application firewall OpenSnitch&lt;/a&gt; is now available in Debian
Testing, soon to become the next stable release of Debian.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;This is a package which set up a network firewall on one or more
machines, which is controlled by a graphical user interface that will
ask the user if a program should be allowed to connect to the local
network or the Internet.  If some background daemon is trying to dial
home, it can be blocked from doing so with a simple mouse click, or by
default simply by not doing anything when the GUI question dialog pop
up.  A list of all programs discovered using the network is provided
in the GUI, giving the user an overview of how the machine(s) programs
use the network.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;OpenSnitch was uploaded for NEW processing about a month ago, and I
had little hope of it getting accepted and shaping up in time for the
package freeze, but the Debian ftpmasters proved to be amazingly quick
at checking out the package and it was accepted into the archive about
week after the first upload.  It is now team maintained under the Go
language team umbrella.  A few fixes to the default setup is only in
Sid, and should migrate to Testing/Bookworm in a week.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;During testing I ran into an
&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/evilsocket/opensnitch/issues/813&quot;&gt;issue
with Minecraft server broadcasts disappearing&lt;/a&gt;, which was quickly
resolved by the developer with a patch and a proposed configuration
change.  I&#39;ve been told this was caused by the Debian packages default
use if /proc/ information to track down kernel status, instead of the
newer eBPF module that can be used.  The reason is simply that
upstream and I have failed to find a way to build the eBPF modules for
OpenSnitch without a complete configured Linux kernel source tree,
which as far as we can tell is unavailable as a build dependency in
Debian.  We tried unsuccessfully so far to use the kernel-headers
package.  It would be great if someone could provide some clues how to
build eBPF modules on build daemons in Debian, possibly without the full
kernel source.&lt;/p&gt;
 
&lt;p&gt;As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
&lt;b&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&quot;&gt;15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/b&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Is the desktop recommending your program for opening its files?</title>
                <link>https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_the_desktop_recommending_your_program_for_opening_its_files_.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_the_desktop_recommending_your_program_for_opening_its_files_.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 29 Jan 2023 11:00:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Linux desktop systems
&lt;a href=&quot;https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html&quot;&gt;have
standardized&lt;/a&gt; how programs present themselves to the desktop
system.  If a package include a .desktop file in
/usr/share/applications/, Gnome, KDE, LXDE, Xfce and the other desktop
environments will pick up the file and use its content to generate the
menu of available programs in the system.  A lesser known fact is that
a package can also explain to the desktop system how to recognize the
files created by the program in question, and use it to open these
files on request, for example via a GUI file browser.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;A while back I ran into a package that did not tell the desktop
system how to recognize its files and was not used to open its files
in the file browser and fixed it.  In the process I wrote a simple
debian/tests/ script to ensure the setup keep working.  It might be
useful for other packages too, to ensure any future version of the
package keep handling its own files.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;For this to work the file format need a useful MIME type that can
be used to identify the format.  If the file format do not yet have a
MIME type, it should define one and preferably also
&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/media-types.xhtml&quot;&gt;register
it with IANA&lt;/a&gt; to ensure the MIME type string is reserved.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The script uses the &lt;tt&gt;xdg-mime&lt;/tt&gt; program from xdg-utils to
query the database of standardized package information and ensure it
return sensible values.  It also need the location of an example file
for xdg-mime to guess the format of.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;pre&gt;
#!/bin/sh
#
# Author: Petter Reinholdtsen
# License: GPL v2 or later at your choice.
#
# Validate the MIME setup, making sure motor types have
# application/vnd.openmotor+yaml associated with them and is connected
# to the openmotor desktop file.

retval=0

mimetype=&quot;application/vnd.openmotor+yaml&quot;
testfile=&quot;test/data/real/o3100/motor.ric&quot;
mydesktopfile=&quot;openmotor.desktop&quot;

filemime=&quot;$(xdg-mime query filetype &quot;$testfile&quot;)&quot;

if [ &quot;$mimetype&quot; != &quot;$filemime&quot; ] ; then
    retval=1
    echo &quot;error: xdg-mime claim motor file MIME type is $filemine, not $mimetype&quot;
else
    echo &quot;success: xdg-mime report correct mime type $mimetype for motor file&quot;
fi

desktop=$(xdg-mime query default &quot;$mimetype&quot;)

if [ &quot;$mydesktopfile&quot; != &quot;$desktop&quot; ]; then
    retval=1
    echo &quot;error: xdg-mime claim motor file should be handled by $desktop, not $mydesktopfile&quot;
else
    echo &quot;success: xdg-mime agree motor file should be handled by $mydesktopfile&quot;
fi

exit $retval
&lt;/pre&gt;

&lt;p&gt;It is a simple way to ensure your users are not very surprised when
they try to open one of your file formats in their file browser.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
&lt;b&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&quot;&gt;15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/b&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Opensnitch, the application level interactive firewall, heading into the Debian archive</title>
                <link>https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Opensnitch__the_application_level_interactive_firewall__heading_into_the_Debian_archive.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Opensnitch__the_application_level_interactive_firewall__heading_into_the_Debian_archive.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 22 Jan 2023 23:55:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;While reading a
&lt;a href=&quot;https://sneak.berlin/20230115/macos-scans-your-local-files-now/&quot;&gt;blog
post claiming MacOS X recently started scanning local files and
reporting information about them to Apple&lt;/a&gt;, even on a machine where
all such callback features had been disabled, I came across a
description of the Little Snitch application for MacOS X.  It seemed
like a very nice tool to have in the tool box, and I decided to see if
something similar was available for Linux.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;It did not take long to find
&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/evilsocket/opensnitch&quot;&gt;the OpenSnitch
package&lt;/a&gt;, which has been in development since 2017, and now is in
version 1.5.0.  It has had a
&lt;a href=&quot;https://bugs.debian.org/909567&quot;&gt;request for Debian
packaging&lt;/a&gt; since 2018, but no-one completed the job so far.  Just
for fun, I decided to see if I could help, and I was very happy to
discover that
&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/evilsocket/opensnitch/issues/304&quot;&gt;upstream
want a Debian package too&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;After struggling a bit with getting the program to run, figuring
out building Go programs (and a little failed detour to look at eBPF
builds too - help needed), I am very happy to report that I am
sponsoring upstream to maintain the package in Debian, and it has
since this morning been waiting in NEW for the ftpmasters to have a
look.  Perhaps it can get into the archive in time for the Bookworm
release?&lt;/p&gt;
 
&lt;p&gt;As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
&lt;b&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&quot;&gt;15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/b&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>LinuxCNC MQTT publisher component</title>
                <link>https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LinuxCNC_MQTT_publisher_component.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LinuxCNC_MQTT_publisher_component.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 8 Jan 2023 19:30:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;I watched &lt;a href=&quot;https://yewtu.be/watch?v=jmKUV3aNLjk&quot;&gt;a 2015
video from Andreas Schiffler&lt;/a&gt; the other day, where he set up
&lt;a href=&quot;https://linuxcnc.org/&quot;&gt;LinuxCNC&lt;/a&gt; to send status
information to the MQTT broker IBM Bluemix.  As I also use MQTT for
graphing, it occured to me that a generic MQTT LinuxCNC component
would be useful and I set out to implement it.  Today I got the first
draft limping along and submitted as
&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/LinuxCNC/linuxcnc/pull/2253&quot;&gt;a patch to the
LinuxCNC project&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The simple part was setting up the MQTT publishing code in Python.
I already have set up other parts submitting data to my Mosquito MQTT
broker, so I could reuse that code.  Writing a LinuxCNC component in
Python as new to me, but using existing examples in the code
repository and the extensive documentation, this was fairly straight
forward.  The hardest part was creating a automated test for the
component to ensure it was working.  Testing it in a simulated
LinuxCNC machine proved very useful, as I discovered features I needed
that I had not thought of yet, and adjusted the code quite a bit to
make it easier to test without a operational MQTT broker
available.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The draft is ready and working, but I am unsure which LinuxCNC HAL
pins I should collect and publish by default (in other words, the
default set of information pieces published), and how to get the
machine name from the LinuxCNC INI file.  The latter is a minor
detail, but I expect it would be useful in a setup with several
machines available.  I am hoping for feedback from the experienced
LinuxCNC developers and users, to make the component even better
before it can go into the mainland LinuxCNC code base.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Since I started on the MQTT component, I came across
&lt;a href=&quot;https://yewtu.be/watch?v=Bqa2grG0XtA&quot;&gt;another video from Kent
VanderVelden&lt;/a&gt; where he combine LinuxCNC with a set of screen glasses
controlled by a Raspberry Pi, and it occured to me that it would
be useful for such use cases if LinuxCNC also provided a REST API for
querying its status.  I hope to start on such component once the MQTT
component is working well.&lt;/p&gt;
 
&lt;p&gt;As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
&lt;b&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&quot;&gt;15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/b&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        </channel>
</rss>