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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/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>
  26       </div>
  27       <div class="date">
  28         25th December 2012
  29       </div>
  30       <div class="body">
  31         <p>Let me start by wishing you all marry Christmas and a happy new
  32 year!  I hope next year will prove to be a good year.</p>
  33
  34 <p><a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">Bitcoin</a>, the digital
  35 decentralised "currency" that allow people to transfer bitcoins
  36 between each other with minimal overhead, is a very interesting
  37 experiment.  And as I wrote a few days ago, the bitcoin situation in
  38 <a href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> is about to improve a bit.
  39 The <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">new debian source
  40 package</a> (version 0.7.2-2) was uploaded yesterday, and is waiting
  41 in <a href="http://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html">the NEW queue</A>
  42 for one of the ftpmasters to approve the new bitcoin-qt package
  43 name.</p>
  44
  45 <p>And thanks to the great work of Jonas and the rest of the bitcoin
  46 team in Debian, you can easily test the package in Debian Squeeze
  47 using the following steps to get a set of working packages:</p>
  48
  49 <blockquote><pre>
  50 git clone git://git.debian.org/git/collab-maint/bitcoin
  51 cd bitcoin
  52 DEB_MAINTAINER_MODE=1 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp fakeroot debian/rules clean
  53 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp git-buildpackage --git-ignore-new
  54 </pre></blockquote>
  55
  56 <p>You might have to install some build dependencies as well.  The
  57 list of commands should give you two packages, bitcoind and
  58 bitcoin-qt, ready for use in a Squeeze environment.  Note that the
  59 client will download the complete set of bitcoin "blocks", which need
  60 around 5.6 GiB of data on my machine at the moment.  Make sure your
  61 ~/.bitcoin/ directory have lots of spare room if you want to download
  62 all the blocks.  The client will warn if the disk is getting full, so
  63 there is not really a problem if you got too little room, but you will
  64 not be able to get all the features out of the client.</p>
  65
  66 <p>As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
  67 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
  68 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
  69
  70       </div>
  71       <div class="tags">
  72
  73
  74         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>.
  75
  76
  77       </div>
  78     </div>
  79     <div class="padding"></div>
  80
  81     <div class="entry">
  82       <div class="title">
  83         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_word_on_bitcoin_support_in_Debian.html">A word on bitcoin support in Debian</a>
  84       </div>
  85       <div class="date">
  86         21st December 2012
  87       </div>
  88       <div class="body">
  89         <p>It has been a while since I wrote about
  90 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">bitcoin</a>, the decentralised
  91 peer-to-peer based crypto-currency, and the reason is simply that I
  92 have been busy elsewhere.  But two days ago, I started looking at the
  93 state of <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">bitcoin in
  94 Debian</a> again to try to recover my old bitcoin wallet.  The package
  95 is now maintained by a
  96 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-bitcoin/">team of
  97 people</a>, and the grunt work had already been done by this team.  We
  98 owe a huge thank you to all these team members. :)
  99 But I was sad to discover that the bitcoin client is missing in
 100 Wheezy.  It is only available in Sid (and an outdated client from
 101 backports).  The client had several RC bugs registered in BTS blocking
 102 it from entering testing.  To try to help the team and improve the
 103 situation, I spent some time providing patches and triaging the bug
 104 reports.  I also had a look at the bitcoin package available from Matt
 105 Corallo in a
 106 <a href="https://launchpad.net/~bitcoin/+archive/bitcoin">PPA for
 107 Ubuntu</a>, and moved the useful pieces from that version into the
 108 Debian package.</p>
 109
 110 <p>After checking with the main package maintainer Jonas Smedegaard on
 111 IRC, I pushed several patches into the collab-maint git repository to
 112 improve the package.  It now contains fixes for the RC issues (not from
 113 me, but fixed by Scott Howard), build rules for a Qt GUI client
 114 package, konqueror support for the bitcoin: URI and bash completion
 115 setup.  As I work on Debian Squeeze, I also created
 116 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-bitcoin-devel/Week-of-Mon-20121217/000041.html">a
 117 patch to backport</a> the latest version.  Jonas is going to look at
 118 it and try to integrate it into the git repository before uploading a
 119 new version to unstable.
 120
 121 <p>I would very much like bitcoin to succeed, to get rid of the
 122 centralized control currently exercised in the monetary system.  I
 123 find it completely unacceptable that the USA government is collecting
 124 transaction data for almost all international money transfers (most are done in USD and transaction logs shipped to the spooks), and
 125 that the major credit card companies can block legal money
 126 transactions to Wikileaks.  But for bitcoin to succeed, more people
 127 need to use bitcoins, and more people need to accept bitcoins when
 128 they sell products and services.  Improving the bitcoin support in
 129 Debian is a small step in the right direction, but not enough.
 130 Unfortunately the user experience when browsing the web and wanting to
 131 pay with bitcoin is still not very good.  The bitcoin: URI is a step
 132 in the right direction, but need to work in most or every browser in
 133 use.  Also the bitcoin-qt client is too heavy to fire up to do a
 134 quick transaction.  I believe there are other clients available, but
 135 have not tested them.</p>
 136
 137 <p>My
 138 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html">experiment
 139 with bitcoins</a> showed that at least some of my readers use bitcoin.
 140 I received 20.15 BTC so far on the address I provided in my blog two
 141 years ago, as can be
 142 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">seen
 143 on the blockexplorer service</a>.  Thank you everyone for your
 144 donation.  The blockexplorer service demonstrates quite well that
 145 bitcoin is not quite anonymous and untracked. :) I wonder if the
 146 number of users have gone up since then.  If you use bitcoin and want
 147 to show your support of my activity, please send Bitcoin donations to
 148 the same address as last time,
 149 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 150
 151       </div>
 152       <div class="tags">
 153
 154
 155         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>.
 156
 157
 158       </div>
 159     </div>
 160     <div class="padding"></div>
 161
 162     <div class="entry">
 163       <div class="title">
 164         <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>
 165       </div>
 166       <div class="date">
 167          7th September 2012
 168       </div>
 169       <div class="body">
 170         <p>As I
 171 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">mentioned
 172 this summer</a>, I have created a Computer Science song book a few
 173 years ago, and today I finally found time to create a public
 174 <a href="https://gitorious.org/pere-cs-songbook/pere-cs-songbook">Gitorious
 175 repository for the project</a>.</p>
 176
 177 <p>If you want to help out, please clone the source and submit patches
 178 to the HTML version.  To generate the PDF and PostScript version,
 179 please use prince XML, or let me know about a useful free software
 180 processor capable of creating a good looking PDF from the HTML.</p>
 181
 182 <p>Want to sing?  You can still find the song book in HTML, PDF and
 183 PostScript formats at
 184 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/">Petter's Computer
 185 Science Songbook</a>.</p>
 186
 187       </div>
 188       <div class="tags">
 189
 190
 191         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>.
 192
 193
 194       </div>
 195     </div>
 196     <div class="padding"></div>
 197
 198     <div class="entry">
 199       <div class="title">
 200         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gratulerer_med_19__rsdagen__Debian_.html">Gratulerer med 19-årsdagen, Debian!</a>
 201       </div>
 202       <div class="date">
 203         16th August 2012
 204       </div>
 205       <div class="body">
 206         <p>I dag fyller
 207 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120813">Debian-prosjektet 19
 208 år</a>.  Jeg har fulgt det de siste 12 årene, og er veldig glad for å kunne
 209 si gratulerer med dagen, Debian!</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/norsk">norsk</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/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">Song book for Computer Scientists</a>
 225       </div>
 226       <div class="date">
 227         24th June 2012
 228       </div>
 229       <div class="body">
 230         <p>Many years ago, while studying Computer Science at the
 231 <a href="http://www.uit.no/">University of Tromsø</a>, I started
 232 collecting computer related songs for use at parties.  The original
 233 version was written in LaTeX, but a few years ago I got help from
 234 Håkon W. Lie, one of the inventors of W3C CSS, to convert it to HTML
 235 while keeping the ability to create a nice book in PDF format.  I have
 236 not had time to maintain the book for a while now, and guess I should
 237 put it up on some public version control repository where others can
 238 help me extend and update the book.  If anyone is volunteering to help
 239 me with this, send me an email.  Also let me know if there are songs
 240 missing in my book.</p>
 241
 242 <p>I have not mentioned the book on my blog so far, and it occured to
 243 me today that I really should let all my readers share the joys of
 244 singing out load about programming, computers and computer networks.
 245 Especially now that <a href="http://debconf12.debconf.org/">Debconf
 246 12</a> is about to start (and I am not going).  Want to sing?  Check
 247 out <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/">Petter's
 248 Computer Science Songbook</a>.
 249
 250       </div>
 251       <div class="tags">
 252
 253
 254         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>.
 255
 256
 257       </div>
 258     </div>
 259     <div class="padding"></div>
 260
 261     <div class="entry">
 262       <div class="title">
 263         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatically_upgrading_server_firmware_on_Dell_PowerEdge.html">Automatically upgrading server firmware on Dell PowerEdge</a>
 264       </div>
 265       <div class="date">
 266         21st November 2011
 267       </div>
 268       <div class="body">
 269         <p>At work we have heaps of servers.  I believe the total count is
 270 around 1000 at the moment.  To be able to get help from the vendors
 271 when something go wrong, we want to keep the firmware on the servers
 272 up to date.  If the firmware isn't the latest and greatest, the
 273 vendors typically refuse to start debugging any problems until the
 274 firmware is upgraded.  So before every reboot, we want to upgrade the
 275 firmware, and we would really like everyone handling servers at the
 276 university to do this themselves when they plan to reboot a machine.
 277 For that to happen we at the unix server admin group need to provide
 278 the tools to do so.</p>
 279
 280 <p>To make firmware upgrading easier, I am working on a script to
 281 fetch and install the latest firmware for the servers we got.  Most of
 282 our hardware are from Dell and HP, so I have focused on these servers
 283 so far.  This blog post is about the Dell part.</P>
 284
 285 <p>On the Dell FTP site I was lucky enough to find
 286 <a href="ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz">an XML file</a>
 287 with firmware information for all 11th generation servers, listing
 288 which firmware should be used on a given model and where on the FTP
 289 site I can find it.  Using a simple perl XML parser I can then
 290 download the shell scripts Dell provides to do firmware upgrades from
 291 within Linux and reboot when all the firmware is primed and ready to
 292 be activated on the first reboot.</p>
 293
 294 <p>This is the Dell related fragment of the perl code I am working on.
 295 Are there anyone working on similar tools for firmware upgrading all
 296 servers at a site?  Please get in touch and lets share resources.</p>
 297
 298 <p><pre>
 299 #!/usr/bin/perl
 300 use strict;
 301 use warnings;
 302 use File::Temp qw(tempdir);
 303 BEGIN {
 304     # Install needed RHEL packages if missing
 305     my %rhelmodules = (
 306         'XML::Simple' => 'perl-XML-Simple',
 307         );
 308     for my $module (keys %rhelmodules) {
 309         eval "use $module;";
 310         if ($@) {
 311             my $pkg = $rhelmodules{$module};
 312             system("yum install -y $pkg");
 313             eval "use $module;";
 314         }
 315     }
 316 }
 317 my $errorsto = 'pere@hungry.com';
 318
 319 upgrade_dell();
 320
 321 exit 0;
 322
 323 sub run_firmware_script {
 324     my ($opts, $script) = @_;
 325     unless ($script) {
 326         print STDERR "fail: missing script name\n";
 327         exit 1
 328     }
 329     print STDERR "Running $script\n\n";
 330
 331     if (0 == system("sh $script $opts")) { # FIXME correct exit code handling
 332         print STDERR "success: firmware script ran succcessfully\n";
 333     } else {
 334         print STDERR "fail: firmware script returned error\n";
 335     }
 336 }
 337
 338 sub run_firmware_scripts {
 339     my ($opts, @dirs) = @_;
 340     # Run firmware packages
 341     for my $dir (@dirs) {
 342         print STDERR "info: Running scripts in $dir\n";
 343         opendir(my $dh, $dir) or die "Unable to open directory $dir: $!";
 344         while (my $s = readdir $dh) {
 345             next if $s =~ m/^\.\.?/;
 346             run_firmware_script($opts, "$dir/$s");
 347         }
 348         closedir $dh;
 349     }
 350 }
 351
 352 sub download {
 353     my $url = shift;
 354     print STDERR "info: Downloading $url\n";
 355     system("wget --quiet \"$url\"");
 356 }
 357
 358 sub upgrade_dell {
 359     my @dirs;
 360     my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
 361     chomp $product;
 362
 363     if ($product =~ m/PowerEdge/) {
 364
 365         # on RHEL, these pacakges are needed by the firwmare upgrade scripts
 366         system('yum install -y compat-libstdc++-33.i686 libstdc++.i686 libxml2.i686 procmail');
 367
 368         my $tmpdir = tempdir(
 369             CLEANUP => 1
 370             );
 371         chdir($tmpdir);
 372         fetch_dell_fw('catalog/Catalog.xml.gz');
 373         system('gunzip Catalog.xml.gz');
 374         my @paths = fetch_dell_fw_list('Catalog.xml');
 375         # -q is quiet, disabling interactivity and reducing console output
 376         my $fwopts = "-q";
 377         if (@paths) {
 378             for my $url (@paths) {
 379                 fetch_dell_fw($url);
 380             }
 381             run_firmware_scripts($fwopts, $tmpdir);
 382         } else {
 383             print STDERR "error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
 384             print STDERR "error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
 385         }
 386         chdir('/');
 387     } else {
 388         print STDERR "error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
 389         print STDERR "error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
 390     }
 391 }
 392
 393 sub fetch_dell_fw {
 394     my $path = shift;
 395     my $url = "ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/$path";
 396     download($url);
 397 }
 398
 399 # Using ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz, figure out which
 400 # firmware packages to download from Dell.  Only work for Linux
 401 # machines and 11th generation Dell servers.
 402 sub fetch_dell_fw_list {
 403     my $filename = shift;
 404
 405     my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
 406     chomp $product;
 407     my ($mybrand, $mymodel) = split(/\s+/, $product);
 408
 409     print STDERR "Finding firmware bundles for $mybrand $mymodel\n";
 410
 411     my $xml = XMLin($filename);
 412     my @paths;
 413     for my $bundle (@{$xml->{SoftwareBundle}}) {
 414         my $brand = $bundle->{TargetSystems}->{Brand}->{Display}->{content};
 415         my $model = $bundle->{TargetSystems}->{Brand}->{Model}->{Display}->{content};
 416         my $oscode;
 417         if ("ARRAY" eq ref $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}) {
 418             $oscode = $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}[0]->{osCode};
 419         } else {
 420             $oscode = $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}->{osCode};
 421         }
 422         if ($mybrand eq $brand && $mymodel eq $model && "LIN" eq $oscode)
 423         {
 424             @paths = map { $_->{path} } @{$bundle->{Contents}->{Package}};
 425         }
 426     }
 427     for my $component (@{$xml->{SoftwareComponent}}) {
 428         my $componenttype = $component->{ComponentType}->{value};
 429
 430         # Drop application packages, only firmware and BIOS
 431         next if 'APAC' eq $componenttype;
 432
 433         my $cpath = $component->{path};
 434         for my $path (@paths) {
 435             if ($cpath =~ m%/$path$%) {
 436                 push(@paths, $cpath);
 437             }
 438         }
 439     }
 440     return @paths;
 441 }
 442 </pre>
 443
 444 <p>The code is only tested on RedHat Enterprise Linux, but I suspect
 445 it could work on other platforms with some tweaking.  Anyone know a
 446 index like Catalog.xml is available from HP for HP servers?  At the
 447 moment I maintain a similar list manually and it is quickly getting
 448 outdated.</p>
 449
 450       </div>
 451       <div class="tags">
 452
 453
 454         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>.
 455
 456
 457       </div>
 458     </div>
 459     <div class="padding"></div>
 460
 461     <div class="entry">
 462       <div class="title">
 463         <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>
 464       </div>
 465       <div class="date">
 466          4th August 2011
 467       </div>
 468       <div class="body">
 469         <p>Wouter Verhelst have some
 470 <a href="http://grep.be/blog/en/retorts/pere_kubuntu_boot">interesting
 471 comments and opinions</a> on my blog post on
 472 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_should_start_from__etc_rcS_d__in_Debian____almost_nothing.html">the
 473 need to clean up /etc/rcS.d/ in Debian</a> and my blog post about
 474 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_missing_in_the_Debian_desktop__or_why_my_parents_use_Kubuntu.html">the
 475 default KDE desktop in Debian</a>.  I only have time to address one
 476 small piece of his comment now, and though it best to address the
 477 misunderstanding he bring forward:</p>
 478
 479 <p><blockquote>
 480 Currently, a system admin has four options: [...] boot to a
 481 single-user system (by adding 'single' to the kernel command line;
 482 this runs rcS and rc1 scripts)
 483 </blockquote></p>
 484
 485 <p>This make me believe Wouter believe booting into single user mode
 486 and booting into runlevel 1 is the same.  I am not surprised he
 487 believe this, because it would make sense and is a quite sensible
 488 thing to believe.  But because the boot in Debian is slightly broken,
 489 runlevel 1 do not work properly and it isn't the same as single user
 490 mode.  I'll try to explain what is actually happing, but it is a bit
 491 hard to explain.</p>
 492
 493 <p>Single user mode is defined like this in /etc/inittab:
 494 "<tt>~~:S:wait:/sbin/sulogin</tt>".  This means the only thing that is
 495 executed in single user mode is sulogin.  Single user mode is a boot
 496 state "between" the runlevels, and when booting into single user mode,
 497 only the scripts in /etc/rcS.d/ are executed before the init process
 498 enters the single user state.  When switching to runlevel 1, the state
 499 is in fact not ending in runlevel 1, but it passes through runlevel 1
 500 and end up in the single user mode (see /etc/rc1.d/S03single, which
 501 runs "init -t1 S" to switch to single user mode at the end of runlevel
 502 1.  It is confusing that the 'S' (single user) init mode is not the
 503 mode enabled by /etc/rcS.d/ (which is more like the initial boot
 504 mode).</p>
 505
 506 <p>This summary might make it clearer.  When booting for the first
 507 time into single user mode, the following commands are executed:
 508 "<tt>/etc/init.d/rc S; /sbin/sulogin</tt>".  When booting into
 509 runlevel 1, the following commands are executed: "<tt>/etc/init.d/rc
 510 S; /etc/init.d/rc 1; /sbin/sulogin</tt>".  A problem show up when
 511 trying to continue after visiting single user mode.  Not all services
 512 are started again as they should, causing the machine to end up in an
 513 unpredicatble state.  This is why Debian admins recommend rebooting
 514 after visiting single user mode.</p>
 515
 516 <p>A similar problem with runlevel 1 is caused by the amount of
 517 scripts executed from /etc/rcS.d/.  When switching from say runlevel 2
 518 to runlevel 1, the services started from /etc/rcS.d/ are not properly
 519 stopped when passing through the scripts in /etc/rc1.d/, and not
 520 started again when switching away from runlevel 1 to the runlevels
 521 2-5.  I believe the problem is best fixed by moving all the scripts
 522 out of /etc/rcS.d/ that are not <strong>required</strong> to get a
 523 functioning single user mode during boot.</p>
 524
 525 <p>I have spent several years investigating the Debian boot system,
 526 and discovered this problem a few years ago.  I suspect it originates
 527 from when sysvinit was introduced into Debian, a long time ago.</p>
 528
 529       </div>
 530       <div class="tags">
 531
 532
 533         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>.
 534
 535
 536       </div>
 537     </div>
 538     <div class="padding"></div>
 539
 540     <div class="entry">
 541       <div class="title">
 542         <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>
 543       </div>
 544       <div class="date">
 545         30th July 2011
 546       </div>
 547       <div class="body">
 548         <p>In the Debian boot system, several packages include scripts that
 549 are started from /etc/rcS.d/.  In fact, there is a bite more of them
 550 than make sense, and this causes a few problems.  What kind of
 551 problems, you might ask.  There are at least two problems.  The first
 552 is that it is not possible to recover a machine after switching to
 553 runlevel 1.  One need to actually reboot to get the machine back to
 554 the expected state.  The other is that single user boot will sometimes
 555 run into problems because some of the subsystems are activated before
 556 the root login is presented, causing problems when trying to recover a
 557 machine from a problem in that subsystem.  A minor additional point is
 558 that moving more scripts out of rcS.d/ and into the other rc#.d/
 559 directories will increase the amount of scripts that can run in
 560 parallel during boot, and thus decrease the boot time.</p>
 561
 562 <p>So, which scripts should start from rcS.d/.  In short, only the
 563 scripts that _have_ to execute before the root login prompt is
 564 presented during a single user boot should go there.  Everything else
 565 should go into the numeric runlevels.  This means things like
 566 lm-sensors, fuse and x11-common should not run from rcS.d, but from
 567 the numeric runlevels.  Today in Debian, there are around 115 init.d
 568 scripts that are started from rcS.d/, and most of them should be moved
 569 out.  Do your package have one of them?  Please help us make single
 570 user and runlevel 1 better by moving it.</p>
 571
 572 <p>Scripts setting up the screen, keyboard, system partitions
 573 etc. should still be started from rcS.d/, but there is for example no
 574 need to have the network enabled before the single user login prompt
 575 is presented.</p>
 576
 577 <p>As always, things are not so easy to fix as they sound.  To keep
 578 Debian systems working while scripts migrate and during upgrades, the
 579 scripts need to be moved from rcS.d/ to rc2.d/ in reverse dependency
 580 order, ie the scripts that nothing in rcS.d/ depend on can be moved,
 581 and the next ones can only be moved when their dependencies have been
 582 moved first.  This migration must be done sequentially while we ensure
 583 that the package system upgrade packages in the right order to keep
 584 the system state correct.  This will require some coordination when it
 585 comes to network related packages, but most of the packages with
 586 scripts that should migrate do not have anything in rcS.d/ depending
 587 on them.  Some packages have already been updated, like the sudo
 588 package, while others are still left to do.  I wish I had time to work
 589 on this myself, but real live constrains make it unlikely that I will
 590 find time to push this forward.</p>
 591
 592       </div>
 593       <div class="tags">
 594
 595
 596         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>.
 597
 598
 599       </div>
 600     </div>
 601     <div class="padding"></div>
 602
 603     <div class="entry">
 604       <div class="title">
 605         <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>
 606       </div>
 607       <div class="date">
 608         29th July 2011
 609       </div>
 610       <div class="body">
 611         <p>While at Debconf11, I have several times during discussions
 612 mentioned the issues I believe should be improved in Debian for its
 613 desktop to be useful for more people.  The use case for this is my
 614 parents, which are currently running Kubuntu which solve the
 615 issues.</p>
 616
 617 <p>I suspect these four missing features are not very hard to
 618 implement.  After all, they are present in Ubuntu, so if we wanted to
 619 do this in Debian we would have a source.</p>
 620
 621 <ol>
 622
 623 <li><strong>Simple GUI based upgrade of packages.</strong> When there
 624 are new packages available for upgrades, a icon in the KDE status bar
 625 indicate this, and clicking on it will activate the simple upgrade
 626 tool to handle it.  I have no problem guiding both of my parents
 627 through the process over the phone.  If a kernel reboot is required,
 628 this too is indicated by the status bars and the upgrade tool.  Last
 629 time I checked, nothing with the same features was working in KDE in
 630 Debian.</li>
 631
 632 <li><strong>Simple handling of missing Firefox browser
 633 plugins.</strong> When the browser encounter a MIME type it do not
 634 currently have a handler for, it will ask the user if the system
 635 should search for a package that would add support for this MIME type,
 636 and if the user say yes, the APT sources will be searched for packages
 637 advertising the MIME type in their control file (visible in the
 638 Packages file in the APT archive).  If one or more packages are found,
 639 it is a simple click of the mouse to add support for the missing mime
 640 type.  If the package require the user to accept some non-free
 641 license, this is explained to the user.  The entire process make it
 642 more clear to the user why something do not work in the browser, and
 643 make the chances higher for the user to blame the web page authors and
 644 not the browser for any missing features.</li>
 645
 646 <li><strong>Simple handling of missing multimedia codec/format
 647 handlers.</strong> When the media players encounter a format or codec
 648 it is not supporting, a dialog pop up asking the user if the system
 649 should search for a package that would add support for it.  This
 650 happen with things like MP3, Windows Media or H.264.  The selection
 651 and installation procedure is very similar to the Firefox browser
 652 plugin handling.  This is as far as I know implemented using a
 653 gstreamer hook.  The end result is that the user easily get access to
 654 the codecs that are present from the APT archives available, while
 655 explaining more on why a given format is unsupported by Ubuntu.</li>
 656
 657 <li><strong>Better browser handling of some MIME types.</strong> When
 658 displaying a text/plain file in my Debian browser, it will propose to
 659 start emacs to show it.  If I remember correctly, when doing the same
 660 in Kunbutu it show the file as a text file in the browser.  At least I
 661 know Opera will show text files within the browser.  I much prefer the
 662 latter behaviour.</li>
 663
 664 </ol>
 665
 666 <p>There are other nice features as well, like the simplified suite
 667 upgrader, but given that I am the one mostly doing the dist-upgrade,
 668 it do not matter much.</p>
 669
 670 <p>I really hope we could get these features in place for the next
 671 Debian release.  It would require the coordinated effort of several
 672 maintainers, but would make the end user experience a lot better.</p>
 673
 674       </div>
 675       <div class="tags">
 676
 677
 678         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>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
 679
 680
 681       </div>
 682     </div>
 683     <div class="padding"></div>
 684
 685     <div class="entry">
 686       <div class="title">
 687         <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>
 688       </div>
 689       <div class="date">
 690         26th July 2011
 691       </div>
 692       <div class="body">
 693         <p>The Norwegian <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</A>
 694 site is build on Debian/Squeeze, and this platform was chosen because
 695 I am most familiar with Debian (being a Debian Developer for around 10
 696 years) because it is the latest stable Debian release which should get
 697 security support for a few years.</p>
 698
 699 <p>The web service is written in Perl, and depend on some perl modules
 700 that are missing in Debian at the moment.  It would be great if these
 701 modules were added to the Debian archive, allowing anyone to set up
 702 their own <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com">FixMyStreet</a> clone
 703 in their own country using only Debian packages.  The list of modules
 704 missing in Debian/Squeeze isn't very long, and I hope the perl group
 705 will find time to package the 12 modules Catalyst::Plugin::SmartURI,
 706 Catalyst::Plugin::Unicode::Encoding, Catalyst::View::TT, Devel::Hide,
 707 Sort::Key, Statistics::Distributions, Template::Plugin::Comma,
 708 Template::Plugin::DateTime::Format, Term::Size::Any, Term::Size::Perl,
 709 URI::SmartURI and Web::Scraper to make the maintenance of FixMyStreet
 710 easier in the future.</p>
 711
 712 <p>Thanks to the great tools in Debian, getting the missing modules
 713 installed on my server was a simple call to 'cpan2deb Module::Name'
 714 and 'dpkg -i' to install the resulting package.  But this leave me
 715 with the responsibility of tracking security problems, which I really
 716 do not have time for.</p>
 717
 718       </div>
 719       <div class="tags">
 720
 721
 722         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>.
 723
 724
 725       </div>
 726     </div>
 727     <div class="padding"></div>
 728
 729     <div class="entry">
 730       <div class="title">
 731         <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>
 732       </div>
 733       <div class="date">
 734          3rd April 2011
 735       </div>
 736       <div class="body">
 737         <p>Here is a small update for my English readers.  Most of my blog
 738 posts have been in Norwegian the last few weeks, so here is a short
 739 update in English.</p>
 740
 741 <p>The kids still keep me too busy to get much free software work
 742 done, but I did manage to organise a project to get a Norwegian port
 743 of the British service
 744 <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com/">FixMyStreet</a> up and running,
 745 and it has been running for a month now.  The entire project has been
 746 organised by me and two others.  Around Christmas we gathered sponsors
 747 to fund the development work.  In January I drafted a contract with
 748 <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a> on what to develop,
 749 and in February the development took place.  Most of it involved
 750 converting the source to use GPS coordinates instead of British
 751 easting/northing, and the resulting code should be a lot easier to get
 752 running in any country by now.  The Norwegian
 753 <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a> is using
 754 <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/">OpenStreetmap</a> as the map
 755 source and the source for administrative borders in Norway, and
 756 support for this had to be added/fixed.</p>
 757
 758 <p>The Norwegian version went live March 3th, and we spent the weekend
 759 polishing the system before we announced it March 7th.  The system is
 760 running on a KVM instance of Debian/Squeeze, and has seen almost 3000
 761 problem reports in a few weeks.  Soon we hope to announce the Android
 762 and iPhone versions making it even easier to report problems with the
 763 public infrastructure.</p>
 764
 765 <p>Perhaps something to consider for those of you in countries without
 766 such service?</p>
 767
 768       </div>
 769       <div class="tags">
 770
 771
 772         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>.
 773
 774
 775       </div>
 776     </div>
 777     <div class="padding"></div>
 778
 779     <div class="entry">
 780       <div class="title">
 781         <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>
 782       </div>
 783       <div class="date">
 784         28th January 2011
 785       </div>
 786       <div class="body">
 787         <p>The last few days I have looked at ways to track open security
 788 issues here at my work with the University of Oslo.  My idea is that
 789 it should be possible to use the information about security issues
 790 available on the Internet, and check our locally
 791 maintained/distributed software against this information.  It should
 792 allow us to verify that no known security issues are forgotten.  The
 793 CVE database listing vulnerabilities seem like a great central point,
 794 and by using the package lists from Debian mapped to CVEs provided by
 795 the testing security team, I believed it should be possible to figure
 796 out which security holes were present in our free software
 797 collection.</p>
 798
 799 <p>After reading up on the topic, it became obvious that the first
 800 building block is to be able to name software packages in a unique and
 801 consistent way across data sources.  I considered several ways to do
 802 this, for example coming up with my own naming scheme like using URLs
 803 to project home pages or URLs to the Freshmeat entries, or using some
 804 existing naming scheme.  And it seem like I am not the first one to
 805 come across this problem, as MITRE already proposed and implemented a
 806 solution.  Enter the <a href="http://cpe.mitre.org/index.html">Common
 807 Platform Enumeration</a> dictionary, a vocabulary for referring to
 808 software, hardware and other platform components.  The CPE ids are
 809 mapped to CVEs in the <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/">National
 810 Vulnerability Database</a>, allowing me to look up know security
 811 issues for any CPE name.  With this in place, all I need to do is to
 812 locate the CPE id for the software packages we use at the university.
 813 This is fairly trivial (I google for 'cve cpe $package' and check the
 814 NVD entry if a CVE for the package exist).</p>
 815
 816 <p>To give you an example.  The GNU gzip source package have the CPE
 817 name cpe:/a:gnu:gzip.  If the old version 1.3.3 was the package to
 818 check out, one could look up
 819 <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
 820 in NVD</a> and get a list of 6 security holes with public CVE entries.
 821 The most recent one is
 822 <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2010-0001">CVE-2010-0001</a>,
 823 and at the bottom of the NVD page for this vulnerability the complete
 824 list of affected versions is provided.</p>
 825
 826 <p>The NVD database of CVEs is also available as a XML dump, allowing
 827 for offline processing of issues.  Using this dump, I've written a
 828 small script taking a list of CPEs as input and list all CVEs
 829 affecting the packages represented by these CPEs.  One give it CPEs
 830 with version numbers as specified above and get a list of open
 831 security issues out.</p>
 832
 833 <p>Of course for this approach to be useful, the quality of the NVD
 834 information need to be high.  For that to happen, I believe as many as
 835 possible need to use and contribute to the NVD database.  I notice
 836 RHEL is providing
 837 <a href="https://www.redhat.com/security/data/metrics/rhsamapcpe.txt">a
 838 map from CVE to CPE</a>, indicating that they are using the CPE
 839 information.  I'm not aware of Debian and Ubuntu doing the same.</p>
 840
 841 <p>To get an idea about the quality for free software, I spent some
 842 time making it possible to compare the CVE database from Debian with
 843 the CVE database in NVD.  The result look fairly good, but there are
 844 some inconsistencies in NVD (same software package having several
 845 CPEs), and some inaccuracies (NVD not mentioning buggy packages that
 846 Debian believe are affected by a CVE).  Hope to find time to improve
 847 the quality of NVD, but that require being able to get in touch with
 848 someone maintaining it.  So far my three emails with questions and
 849 corrections have not seen any reply, but I hope contact can be
 850 established soon.</p>
 851
 852 <p>An interesting application for CPEs is cross platform package
 853 mapping.  It would be useful to know which packages in for example
 854 RHEL, OpenSuSe and Mandriva are missing from Debian and Ubuntu, and
 855 this would be trivial if all linux distributions provided CPE entries
 856 for their packages.</p>
 857
 858       </div>
 859       <div class="tags">
 860
 861
 862         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>.
 863
 864
 865       </div>
 866     </div>
 867     <div class="padding"></div>
 868
 869     <div class="entry">
 870       <div class="title">
 871         <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>
 872       </div>
 873       <div class="date">
 874         23rd January 2011
 875       </div>
 876       <div class="body">
 877         <p>In the
 878 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/discover-data">discover-data</a>
 879 package in Debian, there is a script to report useful information
 880 about the running hardware for use when people report missing
 881 information.  One part of this script that I find very useful when
 882 debugging hardware problems, is the part mapping loaded kernel module
 883 to the PCI device it claims.  It allow me to quickly see if the kernel
 884 module I expect is driving the hardware I am struggling with.  To see
 885 the output, make sure discover-data is installed and run
 886 <tt>/usr/share/bug/discover-data 3>&1</tt>.  The relevant output on
 887 one of my machines like this:</p>
 888
 889 <pre>
 890 loaded modules:
 891 10de:03eb i2c_nforce2
 892 10de:03f1 ohci_hcd
 893 10de:03f2 ehci_hcd
 894 10de:03f0 snd_hda_intel
 895 10de:03ec pata_amd
 896 10de:03f6 sata_nv
 897 1022:1103 k8temp
 898 109e:036e bttv
 899 109e:0878 snd_bt87x
 900 11ab:4364 sky2
 901 </pre>
 902
 903 <p>The code in question look like this, slightly modified for
 904 readability and to drop the output to file descriptor 3:</p>
 905
 906 <pre>
 907 if [ -d /sys/bus/pci/devices/ ] ; then
 908     echo loaded pci modules:
 909     (
 910         cd /sys/bus/pci/devices/
 911         for address in * ; do
 912             if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
 913                 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
 914                 if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
 915                     address=$(echo $address |sed s/0000://)
 916                     id=`lspci -n -s $address | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $3}'`
 917                     echo "$id $module"
 918                 fi
 919             fi
 920         done
 921     )
 922     echo
 923 fi
 924 </pre>
 925
 926 <p>Similar code could be used to extract USB device module
 927 mappings:</p>
 928
 929 <pre>
 930 if [ -d /sys/bus/usb/devices/ ] ; then
 931     echo loaded usb modules:
 932     (
 933         cd /sys/bus/usb/devices/
 934         for address in * ; do
 935             if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
 936                 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
 937                 if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
 938                     address=$(echo $address |sed s/0000://)
 939                     id=$(lsusb -s $address | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $6}')
 940                     if [ "$id" ] ; then
 941                         echo "$id $module"
 942                     fi
 943                 fi
 944             fi
 945         done
 946     )
 947     echo
 948 fi
 949 </pre>
 950
 951 <p>This might perhaps be something to include in other tools as
 952 well.</p>
 953
 954       </div>
 955       <div class="tags">
 956
 957
 958         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>.
 959
 960
 961       </div>
 962     </div>
 963     <div class="padding"></div>
 964
 965     <div class="entry">
 966       <div class="title">
 967         <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>
 968       </div>
 969       <div class="date">
 970         22nd December 2010
 971       </div>
 972       <div class="body">
 973         <p>The last few days I have spent at work here at the <a
 974 href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a> testing if the new
 975 batch of computers will work with Linux.  Every year for the last few
 976 years the university have organised shared bid of a few thousand
 977 computers, and this year HP won the bid.  Two different desktops and
 978 five different laptops are on the list this year.  We in the UNIX
 979 group want to know which one of these computers work well with RHEL
 980 and Ubuntu, the two Linux distributions we currently handle at the
 981 university.</p>
 982
 983 <p>My test method is simple, and I share it here to get feedback and
 984 perhaps inspire others to test hardware as well.  To test, I PXE
 985 install the OS version of choice, and log in as my normal user and run
 986 a few applications and plug in selected pieces of hardware.  When
 987 something fail, I make a note about this in the test matrix and move
 988 on.  If I have some spare time I try to report the bug to the OS
 989 vendor, but as I only have the machines for a short time, I rarely
 990 have the time to do this for all the problems I find.</p>
 991
 992 <p>Anyway, to get to the point of this post.  Here is the simple tests
 993 I perform on a new model.</p>
 994
 995 <ul>
 996
 997 <li>Is PXE installation working?  I'm testing with RHEL6, Ubuntu Lucid
 998 and Ubuntu Maverik at the moment.  If I feel like it, I also test with
 999 RHEL5 and Debian Edu/Squeeze.</li>
1000
1001 <li>Is X.org working?  If the graphical login screen show up after
1002 installation, X.org is working.</li>
1003
1004 <li>Is hardware accelerated OpenGL working?  Running glxgears (in
1005 package mesa-utils on Ubuntu) and writing down the frames per second
1006 reported by the program.</li>
1007
1008 <li>Is sound working?  With Gnome and KDE, a sound is played when
1009 logging in, and if I can hear this the test is successful.  If there
1010 are several audio exits on the machine, I try them all and check if
1011 the Gnome/KDE audio mixer can control where to send the sound.  I
1012 normally test this by playing
1013 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20101012-chef/ ">a HTML5
1014 video</a> in Firefox/Iceweasel.</li>
1015
1016 <li>Is the USB subsystem working?  I test this by plugging in a USB
1017 memory stick and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.</li>
1018
1019 <li>Is the CD/DVD player working?  I test this by inserting any CD/DVD
1020 I have lying around, and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.</li>
1021
1022 <li>Is any built in camera working?  Test using cheese, and see if a
1023 picture from the v4l device show up.</li>
1024
1025 <li>Is bluetooth working?  Use the Gnome/KDE browsing tool to see if
1026 any bluetooth devices are discovered.  In my office, I normally see a
1027 few.</li>
1028
1029 <li>For laptops, is the SD or Compaq Flash reader working.  I have
1030 memory modules lying around, and stick them in and see if Gnome/KDE
1031 notice this.</li>
1032
1033 <li>For laptops, is suspend/hibernate working?  I'm testing if the
1034 special button work, and if the laptop continue to work after
1035 resume.</li>
1036
1037 <li>For laptops, is the extra buttons working, like audio level,
1038 adjusting background light, switching on/off external video output,
1039 switching on/off wifi, bluetooth, etc?  The set of buttons differ from
1040 laptop to laptop, so I just write down which are working and which are
1041 not.</li>
1042
1043 <li>Some laptops have smart card readers, finger print readers,
1044 acceleration sensors etc.  I rarely test these, as I do not know how
1045 to quickly test if they are working or not, so I only document their
1046 existence.</li>
1047
1048 </ul>
1049
1050 <p>By now I suspect you are really curious what the test results are
1051 for the HP machines I am testing.  I'm not done yet, so I will report
1052 the test results later.  For now I can report that HP 8100 Elite work
1053 fine, and hibernation fail with HP EliteBook 8440p on Ubuntu Lucid,
1054 and audio fail on RHEL6.  Ubuntu Maverik worked with 8440p.  As you
1055 can see, I have most machines left to test.  One interesting
1056 observation is that Ubuntu Lucid has almost twice the frame rate than
1057 RHEL6 with glxgears.  No idea why.</p>
1058
1059       </div>
1060       <div class="tags">
1061
1062
1063         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>.
1064
1065
1066       </div>
1067     </div>
1068     <div class="padding"></div>
1069
1070     <div class="entry">
1071       <div class="title">
1072         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_thoughts_on_BitCoins.html">Some thoughts on BitCoins</a>
1073       </div>
1074       <div class="date">
1075         11th December 2010
1076       </div>
1077       <div class="body">
1078         <p>As I continue to explore
1079 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin</a>, I've starting to wonder
1080 what properties the system have, and how it will be affected by laws
1081 and regulations here in Norway.  Here are some random notes.</p>
1082
1083 <p>One interesting thing to note is that since the transactions are
1084 verified using a peer to peer network, all details about a transaction
1085 is known to everyone.  This means that if a BitCoin address has been
1086 published like I did with mine in my initial post about BitCoin, it is
1087 possible for everyone to see how many BitCoins have been transfered to
1088 that address.  There is even a web service to look at the details for
1089 all transactions.  There I can see that my address
1090 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a>
1091 have received 16.06 Bitcoin, the
1092 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3">1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3</a>
1093 address of Simon Phipps have received 181.97 BitCoin and the address
1094 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt">1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt</A>
1095 of EFF have received 2447.38 BitCoins so far.  Thank you to each and
1096 every one of you that donated bitcoins to support my activity. The
1097 fact that anyone can see how much money was transfered to a given
1098 address make it more obvious why the BitCoin community recommend to
1099 generate and hand out a new address for each transaction.  I'm told
1100 there is no way to track which addresses belong to a given person or
1101 organisation without the person or organisation revealing it
1102 themselves, as Simon, EFF and I have done.</p>
1103
1104 <p>In Norway, and in most other countries, there are laws and
1105 regulations limiting how much money one can transfer across the border
1106 without declaring it.  There are money laundering, tax and accounting
1107 laws and regulations I would expect to apply to the use of BitCoin.
1108 If the Skolelinux foundation
1109 (<a href="http://linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">SLX
1110 Debian Labs</a>) were to accept donations in BitCoin in addition to
1111 normal bank transfers like EFF is doing, how should this be accounted?
1112 Given that it is impossible to know if money can cross the border or
1113 not, should everything or nothing be declared?  What exchange rate
1114 should be used when calculating taxes?  Would receivers have to pay
1115 income tax if the foundation were to pay Skolelinux contributors in
1116 BitCoin?  I have no idea, but it would be interesting to know.</p>
1117
1118 <p>For a currency to be useful and successful, it must be trusted and
1119 accepted by a lot of users.  It must be possible to get easy access to
1120 the currency (as a wage or using currency exchanges), and it must be
1121 easy to spend it.  At the moment BitCoin seem fairly easy to get
1122 access to, but there are very few places to spend it.  I am not really
1123 a regular user of any of the vendor types currently accepting BitCoin,
1124 so I wonder when my kind of shop would start accepting BitCoins.  I
1125 would like to buy electronics, travels and subway tickets, not herbs
1126 and books. :) The currency is young, and this will improve over time
1127 if it become popular, but I suspect regular banks will start to lobby
1128 to get BitCoin declared illegal if it become popular.  I'm sure they
1129 will claim it is helping fund terrorism and money laundering (which
1130 probably would be true, as is any currency in existence), but I
1131 believe the problems should be solved elsewhere and not by blaming
1132 currencies.</p>
1133
1134 <p>The process of creating new BitCoins is called mining, and it is
1135 CPU intensive process that depend on a bit of luck as well (as one is
1136 competing against all the other miners currently spending CPU cycles
1137 to see which one get the next lump of cash).  The "winner" get 50
1138 BitCoin when this happen.  Yesterday I came across the obvious way to
1139 join forces to increase ones changes of getting at least some coins,
1140 by coordinating the work on mining BitCoins across several machines
1141 and people, and sharing the result if one is lucky and get the 50
1142 BitCoins.  Check out
1143 <a href="http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/bitcoin-pool/">BitCoin Pool</a>
1144 if this sounds interesting.  I have not had time to try to set up a
1145 machine to participate there yet, but have seen that running on ones
1146 own for a few days have not yield any BitCoins througth mining
1147 yet.</p>
1148
1149 <p>Update 2010-12-15: Found an <a
1150 href="http://inertia.posterous.com/reply-to-the-underground-economist-why-bitcoi">interesting
1151 criticism</a> of bitcoin.  Not quite sure how valid it is, but thought
1152 it was interesting to read.  The arguments presented seem to be
1153 equally valid for gold, which was used as a currency for many years.</p>
1154
1155       </div>
1156       <div class="tags">
1157
1158
1159         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>.
1160
1161
1162       </div>
1163     </div>
1164     <div class="padding"></div>
1165
1166     <div class="entry">
1167       <div class="title">
1168         <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>
1169       </div>
1170       <div class="date">
1171         10th December 2010
1172       </div>
1173       <div class="body">
1174         <p>With this weeks lawless
1175 <a href="http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/06/wikileaks/index.html">governmental
1176 attacks</a> on Wikileak and
1177 <a href="http://www.salon.com/technology/dan_gillmor/2010/12/06/war_on_speech">free
1178 speech</a>, it has become obvious that PayPal, visa and mastercard can
1179 not be trusted to handle money transactions.
1180 A blog post from
1181 <a href="http://webmink.com/2010/12/06/now-accepting-bitcoin/">Simon
1182 Phipps on bitcoin</a> reminded me about a project that a friend of
1183 mine mentioned earlier.  I decided to follow Simon's example, and get
1184 involved with <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin</a>.  I got
1185 some help from my friend to get it all running, and he even handed me
1186 some bitcoins to get started.  I even donated a few bitcoins to Simon
1187 for helping me remember BitCoin.</p>
1188
1189 <p>So, what is bitcoins, you probably wonder?  It is a digital
1190 crypto-currency, decentralised and handled using peer-to-peer
1191 networks.  It allows anonymous transactions and prohibits central
1192 control over the transactions, making it impossible for governments
1193 and companies alike to block donations and other transactions.  The
1194 source is free software, and while the key dependency wxWidgets 2.9
1195 for the graphical user interface is missing in Debian, the command
1196 line client builds just fine.  Hopefully Jonas
1197 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/578157">will get the package into
1198 Debian</a> soon.</p>
1199
1200 <p>Bitcoins can be converted to other currencies, like USD and EUR.
1201 There are <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/trade">companies accepting
1202 bitcoins</a> when selling services and goods, and there are even
1203 currency "stock" markets where the exchange rate is decided.  There
1204 are not many users so far, but the concept seems promising.  If you
1205 want to get started and lack a friend with any bitcoins to spare,
1206 you can even get
1207 <a href="https://freebitcoins.appspot.com/">some for free</a> (0.05
1208 bitcoin at the time of writing).  Use
1209 <a href="http://www.bitcoinwatch.com/">BitcoinWatch</a> to keep an eye
1210 on the current exchange rates.</p>
1211
1212 <p>As an experiment, I have decided to set up bitcoind on one of my
1213 machines.  If you want to support my activity, please send Bitcoin
1214 donations to the address
1215 <b>15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</b>.  Thank you!</p>
1216
1217       </div>
1218       <div class="tags">
1219
1220
1221         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>.
1222
1223
1224       </div>
1225     </div>
1226     <div class="padding"></div>
1227
1228     <div class="entry">
1229       <div class="title">
1230         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_isn_t_Debian_Edu_using_VLC_.html">Why isn't Debian Edu using VLC?</a>
1231       </div>
1232       <div class="date">
1233         27th November 2010
1234       </div>
1235       <div class="body">
1236         <p>In the latest issue of Linux Journal, the readers choices were
1237 presented, and the winner among the multimedia player were VLC.
1238 Personally, I like VLC, and it is my player of choice when I first try
1239 to play a video file or stream.  Only if VLC fail will I drag out
1240 gmplayer to see if it can do better.  The reason is mostly the failure
1241 model and trust.  When VLC fail, it normally pop up a error message
1242 reporting the problem.  When mplayer fail, it normally segfault or
1243 just hangs.  The latter failure mode drain my trust in the program.<p>
1244
1245 <p>But even if VLC is my player of choice, we have choosen to use
1246 mplayer in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
1247 Edu/Skolelinux</a>.  The reason is simple.  We need a good browser
1248 plugin to play web videos seamlessly, and the VLC browser plugin is
1249 not very good.  For example, it lack in-line control buttons, so there
1250 is no way for the user to pause the video.  Also, when I
1251 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">last
1252 tested the browser plugins</a> available in Debian, the VLC plugin
1253 failed on several video pages where mplayer based plugins worked.  If
1254 the browser plugin for VLC was as good as the gecko-mediaplayer
1255 package (which uses mplayer), we would switch.</P>
1256
1257 <p>While VLC is a good player, its user interface is slightly
1258 annoying.  The most annoying feature is its inconsistent use of
1259 keyboard shortcuts.  When the player is in full screen mode, its
1260 shortcuts are different from when it is playing the video in a window.
1261 For example, space only work as pause when in full screen mode.  I
1262 wish it had consisten shortcuts and that space also would work when in
1263 window mode.  Another nice shortcut in gmplayer is [enter] to restart
1264 the current video.  It is very nice when playing short videos from the
1265 web and want to restart it when new people arrive to have a look at
1266 what is going on.</p>
1267
1268       </div>
1269       <div class="tags">
1270
1271
1272         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>.
1273
1274
1275       </div>
1276     </div>
1277     <div class="padding"></div>
1278
1279     <div class="entry">
1280       <div class="title">
1281         <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>
1282       </div>
1283       <div class="date">
1284         22nd November 2010
1285       </div>
1286       <div class="body">
1287         <p>Michael Biebl suggested to me on IRC, that I changed my automated
1288 upgrade testing of the
1289 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
1290 Gnome and KDE Desktop</a> to do <tt>apt-get autoremove</tt> when using apt-get.
1291 This seem like a very good idea, so I adjusted by test scripts and
1292 can now present the updated result from today:</p>
1293
1294 <p>This is for Gnome:</p>
1295
1296 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
1297
1298 <blockquote><p>
1299   apache2.2-bin
1300   aptdaemon
1301   baobab
1302   binfmt-support
1303   browser-plugin-gnash
1304   cheese-common
1305   cli-common
1306   cups-pk-helper
1307   dmz-cursor-theme
1308   empathy
1309   empathy-common
1310   freedesktop-sound-theme
1311   freeglut3
1312   gconf-defaults-service
1313   gdm-themes
1314   gedit-plugins
1315   geoclue
1316   geoclue-hostip
1317   geoclue-localnet
1318   geoclue-manual
1319   geoclue-yahoo
1320   gnash
1321   gnash-common
1322   gnome
1323   gnome-backgrounds
1324   gnome-cards-data
1325   gnome-codec-install
1326   gnome-core
1327   gnome-desktop-environment
1328   gnome-disk-utility
1329   gnome-screenshot
1330   gnome-search-tool
1331   gnome-session-canberra
1332   gnome-system-log
1333   gnome-themes-extras
1334   gnome-themes-more
1335   gnome-user-share
1336   gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
1337   gstreamer0.10-tools
1338   gtk2-engines
1339   gtk2-engines-pixbuf
1340   gtk2-engines-smooth
1341   hamster-applet
1342   libapache2-mod-dnssd
1343   libapr1
1344   libaprutil1
1345   libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3
1346   libaprutil1-ldap
1347   libart2.0-cil
1348   libboost-date-time1.42.0
1349   libboost-python1.42.0
1350   libboost-thread1.42.0
1351   libchamplain-0.4-0
1352   libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0
1353   libcheese-gtk18
1354   libclutter-gtk-0.10-0
1355   libcryptui0
1356   libdiscid0
1357   libelf1
1358   libepc-1.0-2
1359   libepc-common
1360   libepc-ui-1.0-2
1361   libfreerdp-plugins-standard
1362   libfreerdp0
1363   libgconf2.0-cil
1364   libgdata-common
1365   libgdata7
1366   libgdu-gtk0
1367   libgee2
1368   libgeoclue0
1369   libgexiv2-0
1370   libgif4
1371   libglade2.0-cil
1372   libglib2.0-cil
1373   libgmime2.4-cil
1374   libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
1375   libgnome2.24-cil
1376   libgnomepanel2.24-cil
1377   libgpod-common
1378   libgpod4
1379   libgtk2.0-cil
1380   libgtkglext1
1381   libgtksourceview2.0-common
1382   libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
1383   libmono-addins0.2-cil
1384   libmono-cairo2.0-cil
1385   libmono-corlib2.0-cil
1386   libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil
1387   libmono-posix2.0-cil
1388   libmono-security2.0-cil
1389   libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
1390   libmono-system2.0-cil
1391   libmtp8
1392   libmusicbrainz3-6
1393   libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil
1394   libndesk-dbus1.0-cil
1395   libopal3.6.8
1396   libpolkit-gtk-1-0
1397   libpt2.6.7
1398   libpython2.6
1399   librpm1
1400   librpmio1
1401   libsdl1.2debian
1402   libsrtp0
1403   libssh-4
1404   libtelepathy-farsight0
1405   libtelepathy-glib0
1406   libtidy-0.99-0
1407   media-player-info
1408   mesa-utils
1409   mono-2.0-gac
1410   mono-gac
1411   mono-runtime
1412   nautilus-sendto
1413   nautilus-sendto-empathy
1414   p7zip-full
1415   pkg-config
1416   python-aptdaemon
1417   python-aptdaemon-gtk
1418   python-axiom
1419   python-beautifulsoup
1420   python-bugbuddy
1421   python-clientform
1422   python-coherence
1423   python-configobj
1424   python-crypto
1425   python-cupshelpers
1426   python-elementtree
1427   python-epsilon
1428   python-evolution
1429   python-feedparser
1430   python-gdata
1431   python-gdbm
1432   python-gst0.10
1433   python-gtkglext1
1434   python-gtksourceview2
1435   python-httplib2
1436   python-louie
1437   python-mako
1438   python-markupsafe
1439   python-mechanize
1440   python-nevow
1441   python-notify
1442   python-opengl
1443   python-openssl
1444   python-pam
1445   python-pkg-resources
1446   python-pyasn1
1447   python-pysqlite2
1448   python-rdflib
1449   python-serial
1450   python-tagpy
1451   python-twisted-bin
1452   python-twisted-conch
1453   python-twisted-core
1454   python-twisted-web
1455   python-utidylib
1456   python-webkit
1457   python-xdg
1458   python-zope.interface
1459   remmina
1460   remmina-plugin-data
1461   remmina-plugin-rdp
1462   remmina-plugin-vnc
1463   rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
1464   rhythmbox-plugins
1465   rpm-common
1466   rpm2cpio
1467   seahorse-plugins
1468   shotwell
1469   software-center
1470   system-config-printer-udev
1471   telepathy-gabble
1472   telepathy-mission-control-5
1473   telepathy-salut
1474   tomboy
1475   totem
1476   totem-coherence
1477   totem-mozilla
1478   totem-plugins
1479   transmission-common
1480   xdg-user-dirs
1481   xdg-user-dirs-gtk
1482   xserver-xephyr
1483 </p></blockquote>
1484
1485 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
1486
1487 <blockquote><p>
1488   cheese
1489   ekiga
1490   eog
1491   epiphany-extensions
1492   evolution-exchange
1493   fast-user-switch-applet
1494   file-roller
1495   gcalctool
1496   gconf-editor
1497   gdm
1498   gedit
1499   gedit-common
1500   gnome-games
1501   gnome-games-data
1502   gnome-nettool
1503   gnome-system-tools
1504   gnome-themes
1505   gnuchess
1506   gucharmap
1507   guile-1.8-libs
1508   libavahi-ui0
1509   libdmx1
1510   libgalago3
1511   libgtk-vnc-1.0-0
1512   libgtksourceview2.0-0
1513   liblircclient0
1514   libsdl1.2debian-alsa
1515   libspeexdsp1
1516   libsvga1
1517   rhythmbox
1518   seahorse
1519   sound-juicer
1520   system-config-printer
1521   totem-common
1522   transmission-gtk
1523   vinagre
1524   vino
1525 </p></blockquote>
1526
1527 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
1528
1529 <blockquote><p>
1530   gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
1531 </p></blockquote>
1532
1533 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
1534
1535 <blockquote><p>
1536 [nothing]
1537 </p></blockquote>
1538
1539 <p>This is for KDE:</p>
1540
1541 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
1542
1543 <blockquote><p>
1544   ksmserver
1545 </p></blockquote>
1546
1547 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
1548
1549 <blockquote><p>
1550   kwin
1551   network-manager-kde
1552 </p></blockquote>
1553
1554 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
1555
1556 <blockquote><p>
1557   arts
1558   dolphin
1559   freespacenotifier
1560   google-gadgets-gst
1561   google-gadgets-xul
1562   kappfinder
1563   kcalc
1564   kcharselect
1565   kde-core
1566   kde-plasma-desktop
1567   kde-standard
1568   kde-window-manager
1569   kdeartwork
1570   kdeartwork-emoticons
1571   kdeartwork-style
1572   kdeartwork-theme-icon
1573   kdebase
1574   kdebase-apps
1575   kdebase-workspace
1576   kdebase-workspace-bin
1577   kdebase-workspace-data
1578   kdeeject
1579   kdelibs
1580   kdeplasma-addons
1581   kdeutils
1582   kdewallpapers
1583   kdf
1584   kfloppy
1585   kgpg
1586   khelpcenter4
1587   kinfocenter
1588   konq-plugins-l10n
1589   konqueror-nsplugins
1590   kscreensaver
1591   kscreensaver-xsavers
1592   ktimer
1593   kwrite
1594   libgle3
1595   libkde4-ruby1.8
1596   libkonq5
1597   libkonq5-templates
1598   libnetpbm10
1599   libplasma-ruby
1600   libplasma-ruby1.8
1601   libqt4-ruby1.8
1602   marble-data
1603   marble-plugins
1604   netpbm
1605   nuvola-icon-theme
1606   plasma-dataengines-workspace
1607   plasma-desktop
1608   plasma-desktopthemes-artwork
1609   plasma-runners-addons
1610   plasma-scriptengine-googlegadgets
1611   plasma-scriptengine-python
1612   plasma-scriptengine-qedje
1613   plasma-scriptengine-ruby
1614   plasma-scriptengine-webkit
1615   plasma-scriptengines
1616   plasma-wallpapers-addons
1617   plasma-widget-folderview
1618   plasma-widget-networkmanagement
1619   ruby
1620   sweeper
1621   update-notifier-kde
1622   xscreensaver-data-extra
1623   xscreensaver-gl
1624   xscreensaver-gl-extra
1625   xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
1626 </p></blockquote>
1627
1628 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
1629
1630 <blockquote><p>
1631   ark
1632   google-gadgets-common
1633   google-gadgets-qt
1634   htdig
1635   kate
1636   kdebase-bin
1637   kdebase-data
1638   kdepasswd
1639   kfind
1640   klipper
1641   konq-plugins
1642   konqueror
1643   ksysguard
1644   ksysguardd
1645   libarchive1
1646   libcln6
1647   libeet1
1648   libeina-svn-06
1649   libggadget-1.0-0b
1650   libggadget-qt-1.0-0b
1651   libgps19
1652   libkdecorations4
1653   libkephal4
1654   libkonq4
1655   libkonqsidebarplugin4a
1656   libkscreensaver5
1657   libksgrd4
1658   libksignalplotter4
1659   libkunitconversion4
1660   libkwineffects1a
1661   libmarblewidget4
1662   libntrack-qt4-1
1663   libntrack0
1664   libplasma-geolocation-interface4
1665   libplasmaclock4a
1666   libplasmagenericshell4
1667   libprocesscore4a
1668   libprocessui4a
1669   libqalculate5
1670   libqedje0a
1671   libqtruby4shared2
1672   libqzion0a
1673   libruby1.8
1674   libscim8c2a
1675   libsmokekdecore4-3
1676   libsmokekdeui4-3
1677   libsmokekfile3
1678   libsmokekhtml3
1679   libsmokekio3
1680   libsmokeknewstuff2-3
1681   libsmokeknewstuff3-3
1682   libsmokekparts3
1683   libsmokektexteditor3
1684   libsmokekutils3
1685   libsmokenepomuk3
1686   libsmokephonon3
1687   libsmokeplasma3
1688   libsmokeqtcore4-3
1689   libsmokeqtdbus4-3
1690   libsmokeqtgui4-3
1691   libsmokeqtnetwork4-3
1692   libsmokeqtopengl4-3
1693   libsmokeqtscript4-3
1694   libsmokeqtsql4-3
1695   libsmokeqtsvg4-3
1696   libsmokeqttest4-3
1697   libsmokeqtuitools4-3
1698   libsmokeqtwebkit4-3
1699   libsmokeqtxml4-3
1700   libsmokesolid3
1701   libsmokesoprano3
1702   libtaskmanager4a
1703   libtidy-0.99-0
1704   libweather-ion4a
1705   libxklavier16
1706   libxxf86misc1
1707   okteta
1708   oxygencursors
1709   plasma-dataengines-addons
1710   plasma-scriptengine-superkaramba
1711   plasma-widget-lancelot
1712   plasma-widgets-addons
1713   plasma-widgets-workspace
1714   polkit-kde-1
1715   ruby1.8
1716   systemsettings
1717   update-notifier-common
1718 </p></blockquote>
1719
1720 <p>Running apt-get autoremove made the results using apt-get and
1721 aptitude a bit more similar, but there are still quite a lott of
1722 differences.  I have no idea what packages should be installed after
1723 the upgrade, but hope those that do can have a look.</p>
1724
1725       </div>
1726       <div class="tags">
1727
1728
1729         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>.
1730
1731
1732       </div>
1733     </div>
1734     <div class="padding"></div>
1735
1736     <div class="entry">
1737       <div class="title">
1738         <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>
1739       </div>
1740       <div class="date">
1741         22nd November 2010
1742       </div>
1743       <div class="body">
1744         <p>Most of the computers in use by the
1745 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux project</a>
1746 are virtual machines.  And they have been Xen machines running on a
1747 fairly old IBM eserver xseries 345 machine, and we wanted to migrate
1748 them to KVM on a newer Dell PowerEdge 2950 host machine.  This was a
1749 bit harder that it could have been, because we set up the Xen virtual
1750 machines to get the virtual partitions from LVM, which as far as I
1751 know is not supported by KVM.  So to migrate, we had to convert
1752 several LVM logical volumes to partitions on a virtual disk file.</p>
1753
1754 <p>I found
1755 <a href="http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM">a
1756 nice recipe</a> to do this, and wrote the following script to do the
1757 migration.  It uses qemu-img from the qemu package to make the disk
1758 image, parted to partition it, losetup and kpartx to present the disk
1759 image partions as devices, and dd to copy the data.  I NFS mounted the
1760 new servers storage area on the old server to do the migration.</p>
1761
1762 <pre>
1763 #!/bin/sh
1764
1765 # Based on
1766 # http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM
1767
1768 set -e
1769 set -x
1770
1771 if [ -z "$1" ] ; then
1772     echo "Usage: $0 &lt;hostname&gt;"
1773     exit 1
1774 else
1775     host="$1"
1776 fi
1777
1778 if [ ! -e /dev/vg_data/$host-disk ] ; then
1779     echo "error: unable to find LVM volume for $host"
1780     exit 1
1781 fi
1782
1783 # Partitions need to be a bit bigger than the LVM LVs.  not sure why.
1784 disksize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-disk | awk '{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }')
1785 swapsize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-swap | awk '{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }')
1786 totalsize=$(( ( $disksize + $swapsize ) ))
1787
1788 img=$host.img
1789 #dd if=/dev/zero of=$img bs=1M count=$(( $disksize + $swapsize ))
1790 qemu-img create $img ${totalsize}MMaking room on the Debian Edu/Sqeeze DVD
1791
1792 parted $img mklabel msdos
1793 parted $img mkpart primary linux-swap 0 $disksize
1794 parted $img mkpart primary ext2 $disksize $totalsize
1795 parted $img set 1 boot on
1796
1797 modprobe dm-mod
1798 losetup /dev/loop0 $img
1799 kpartx -a /dev/loop0
1800
1801 dd if=/dev/vg_data/$host-disk of=/dev/mapper/loop0p1 bs=1M
1802 fsck.ext3 -f /dev/mapper/loop0p1 || true
1803 mkswap /dev/mapper/loop0p2
1804
1805 kpartx -d /dev/loop0
1806 losetup -d /dev/loop0
1807 </pre>
1808
1809 <p>The script is perhaps so simple that it is not copyrightable, but
1810 if it is, it is licenced using GPL v2 or later at your discretion.</p>
1811
1812 <p>After doing this, I booted a Debian CD in rescue mode in KVM with
1813 the new disk image attached, installed grub-pc and linux-image-686 and
1814 set up grub to boot from the disk image.  After this, the KVM machines
1815 seem to work just fine.</p>
1816
1817       </div>
1818       <div class="tags">
1819
1820
1821         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>.
1822
1823
1824       </div>
1825     </div>
1826     <div class="padding"></div>
1827
1828     <div class="entry">
1829       <div class="title">
1830         <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>
1831       </div>
1832       <div class="date">
1833         20th November 2010
1834       </div>
1835       <div class="body">
1836         <p>I'm still running upgrade testing of the
1837 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
1838 Gnome and KDE Desktop</a>, but have not had time to spend on reporting the
1839 status.  Here is a short update based on a test I ran 20101118.</p>
1840
1841 <p>I still do not know what a correct migration should look like, so I
1842 report any differences between apt and aptitude and hope someone else
1843 can see if anything should be changed.</p>
1844
1845 <p>This is for Gnome:</p>
1846
1847 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
1848
1849 <blockquote><p>
1850   apache2.2-bin aptdaemon at-spi baobab binfmt-support
1851   browser-plugin-gnash cheese-common cli-common cpp-4.3 cups-pk-helper
1852   dmz-cursor-theme empathy empathy-common finger
1853   freedesktop-sound-theme freeglut3 gconf-defaults-service gdm-themes
1854   gedit-plugins geoclue geoclue-hostip geoclue-localnet geoclue-manual
1855   geoclue-yahoo gnash gnash-common gnome gnome-backgrounds
1856   gnome-cards-data gnome-codec-install gnome-core
1857   gnome-desktop-environment gnome-disk-utility gnome-screenshot
1858   gnome-search-tool gnome-session-canberra gnome-spell
1859   gnome-system-log gnome-themes-extras gnome-themes-more
1860   gnome-user-share gs-common gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
1861   gstreamer0.10-tools gtk2-engines gtk2-engines-pixbuf
1862   gtk2-engines-smooth hal-info hamster-applet libapache2-mod-dnssd
1863   libapr1 libaprutil1 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3 libaprutil1-ldap
1864   libart2.0-cil libatspi1.0-0 libboost-date-time1.42.0
1865   libboost-python1.42.0 libboost-thread1.42.0 libchamplain-0.4-0
1866   libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0 libcheese-gtk18 libclutter-gtk-0.10-0
1867   libcryptui0 libcupsys2 libdiscid0 libeel2-data libelf1 libepc-1.0-2
1868   libepc-common libepc-ui-1.0-2 libfreerdp-plugins-standard
1869   libfreerdp0 libgail-common libgconf2.0-cil libgdata-common libgdata7
1870   libgdl-1-common libgdu-gtk0 libgee2 libgeoclue0 libgexiv2-0 libgif4
1871   libglade2.0-cil libglib2.0-cil libgmime2.4-cil libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
1872   libgnome2.24-cil libgnomepanel2.24-cil libgnomeprint2.2-data
1873   libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod-common libgpod4
1874   libgtk2.0-cil libgtkglext1 libgtksourceview-common
1875   libgtksourceview2.0-common libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
1876   libmono-addins0.2-cil libmono-cairo2.0-cil libmono-corlib2.0-cil
1877   libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil libmono-posix2.0-cil
1878   libmono-security2.0-cil libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
1879   libmono-system2.0-cil libmtp8 libmusicbrainz3-6
1880   libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil libndesk-dbus1.0-cil libopal3.6.8
1881   libpolkit-gtk-1-0 libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
1882   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libpt2.6.7 libpython2.6 librpm1 librpmio1
1883   libsdl1.2debian libservlet2.4-java libsrtp0 libssh-4
1884   libtelepathy-farsight0 libtelepathy-glib0 libtidy-0.99-0
1885   libxalan2-java libxerces2-java media-player-info mesa-utils
1886   mono-2.0-gac mono-gac mono-runtime nautilus-sendto
1887   nautilus-sendto-empathy openoffice.org-writer2latex
1888   openssl-blacklist p7zip p7zip-full pkg-config python-4suite-xml
1889   python-aptdaemon python-aptdaemon-gtk python-axiom
1890   python-beautifulsoup python-bugbuddy python-clientform
1891   python-coherence python-configobj python-crypto python-cupshelpers
1892   python-cupsutils python-eggtrayicon python-elementtree
1893   python-epsilon python-evolution python-feedparser python-gdata
1894   python-gdbm python-gst0.10 python-gtkglext1 python-gtkmozembed
1895   python-gtksourceview2 python-httplib2 python-louie python-mako
1896   python-markupsafe python-mechanize python-nevow python-notify
1897   python-opengl python-openssl python-pam python-pkg-resources
1898   python-pyasn1 python-pysqlite2 python-rdflib python-serial
1899   python-tagpy python-twisted-bin python-twisted-conch
1900   python-twisted-core python-twisted-web python-utidylib python-webkit
1901   python-xdg python-zope.interface remmina remmina-plugin-data
1902   remmina-plugin-rdp remmina-plugin-vnc rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
1903   rhythmbox-plugins rpm-common rpm2cpio seahorse-plugins shotwell
1904   software-center svgalibg1 system-config-printer-udev
1905   telepathy-gabble telepathy-mission-control-5 telepathy-salut tomboy
1906   totem totem-coherence totem-mozilla totem-plugins
1907   transmission-common xdg-user-dirs xdg-user-dirs-gtk xserver-xephyr
1908   zip
1909 </p></blockquote>
1910
1911 Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude
1912
1913 <blockquote><p>
1914   arj bluez-utils cheese dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop ekiga eog
1915   epiphany-extensions epiphany-gecko evolution-exchange
1916   fast-user-switch-applet file-roller gcalctool gconf-editor gdm gedit
1917   gedit-common gnome-app-install gnome-games gnome-games-data
1918   gnome-nettool gnome-system-tools gnome-themes gnome-utils
1919   gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager gnuchess gucharmap
1920   guile-1.8-libs hal libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5
1921   libavahi-ui0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7
1922   libcucul0 libcurl3 libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdmx1 libdvdread3
1923   libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1
1924   libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3 libfaad0 libgadu3
1925   libgalago3 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
1926   libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
1927   libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
1928   libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtk-vnc-1.0-0
1929   libgtkhtml2-0 libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgtksourceview2.0-0
1930   libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
1931   libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libkpathsea4 liblircclient0 libltdl3 liblwres50
1932   libmagick++10 libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmozjs1d libmpfr1ldbl libmtp7
1933   libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0
1934   libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpisock9
1935   libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8
1936   libsdl1.2debian-alsa libsensors3 libsexy2 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
1937   libspeexdsp1 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libsvga1
1938   libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0
1939   libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12
1940   libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common rhythmbox seahorse
1941   sound-juicer swfdec-gnome system-config-printer totem-common
1942   totem-gstreamer transmission-gtk vinagre vino w3c-dtd-xhtml wodim
1943 </p></blockquote>
1944
1945 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
1946
1947 <blockquote><p>
1948   gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
1949 </p></blockquote>
1950
1951 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
1952
1953 <blockquote><p>
1954 [nothing]
1955 </p></blockquote>
1956
1957 <p>This is for KDE:</p>
1958
1959 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
1960
1961 <blockquote><p>
1962   autopoint bomber bovo cantor cantor-backend-kalgebra cpp-4.3 dcoprss
1963   edict espeak espeak-data eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
1964   ghostscript-x git gnome-audio gnugo granatier gs-common
1965   gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio indi kaddressbook-plugins kalgebra
1966   kalzium-data kanjidic kapman kate-plugins kblocks kbreakout kbstate
1967   kde-icons-mono kdeaccessibility kdeaddons-kfile-plugins
1968   kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
1969   kdeedu kdeedu-data kdeedu-kvtml-data kdegames kdegames-card-data
1970   kdegames-mahjongg-data kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc
1971   kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
1972   kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdessh kdetoys kdewebdev
1973   kdiamond kdnssd kfilereplace kfourinline kgeography-data kigo
1974   killbots kiriki klettres-data kmoon kmrml knewsticker-scripts
1975   kollision kpf krosspython ksirk ksmserver ksquares kstars-data
1976   ksudoku kubrick kweather libasound2-plugins libboost-python1.42.0
1977   libcfitsio3 libconvert-binhex-perl libcrypt-ssleay-perl libdb4.6++
1978   libdjvulibre-text libdotconf1.0 liberror-perl libespeak1
1979   libfinance-quote-perl libgail-common libgsl0ldbl libhtml-parser-perl
1980   libhtml-tableextract-perl libhtml-tagset-perl libhtml-tree-perl
1981   libio-stringy-perl libkdeedu4 libkdegames5 libkiten4 libkpathsea5
1982   libkrossui4 libmailtools-perl libmime-tools-perl
1983   libnews-nntpclient-perl libopenbabel3 libportaudio2 libpulse-browse0
1984   libservlet2.4-java libspeechd2 libtiff-tools libtimedate-perl
1985   libunistring0 liburi-perl libwww-perl libxalan2-java libxerces2-java
1986   lirc luatex marble networkstatus noatun-plugins
1987   openoffice.org-writer2latex palapeli palapeli-data parley
1988   parley-data poster psutils pulseaudio pulseaudio-esound-compat
1989   pulseaudio-module-x11 pulseaudio-utils quanta-data rocs rsync
1990   speech-dispatcher step svgalibg1 texlive-binaries texlive-luatex
1991   ttf-sazanami-gothic
1992 </p></blockquote>
1993
1994 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
1995
1996 <blockquote><p>
1997   amor artsbuilder atlantik atlantikdesigner blinken bluez-utils cvs
1998   dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop imlib-base imlib11 kalzium kanagram kandy
1999   kasteroids katomic kbackgammon kbattleship kblackbox kbounce kbruch
2000   kcron kdat kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data kdeprint kdict kdvi kedit
2001   keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs kgeography kghostview
2002   kgoldrunner khangman khexedit kiconedit kig kimagemapeditor
2003   kitchensync kiten kjumpingcube klatin klettres klickety klines
2004   klinkstatus kmag kmahjongg kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmines
2005   kmousetool kmouth kmplot knetwalk kodo kolf kommander konquest kooka
2006   kpager kpat kpdf kpercentage kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler krec
2007   kregexpeditor kreversi ksame ksayit kshisen ksig ksim ksirc ksirtet
2008   ksmiletris ksnake ksokoban kspaceduel kstars ksvg ksysv kteatime
2009   ktip ktnef ktouch ktron kttsd ktuberling kturtle ktux kuickshow
2010   kverbos kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kwordquiz
2011   kworldclock kxsldbg libakode2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
2012   libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
2013   libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2
2014   libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0
2015   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
2016   libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0 libicu38
2017   libiec61883-0 libindex0 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
2018   libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1 libkdeedu3
2019   libkdegames1 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
2020   libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
2021   libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick10
2022   libmimelib1c2a libmodplug0c2 libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libmpfr1ldbl
2023   libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9 libpoppler-glib3
2024   libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 librss1 libsensors3
2025   libsmbios2 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90
2026   libtalloc1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 lskat
2027   mpeglib network-manager-kde noatun pmount tex-common texlive-base
2028   texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended tidy
2029   ttf-dustin ttf-kochi-gothic ttf-sjfonts
2030 </p></blockquote>
2031
2032 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
2033
2034 <blockquote><p>
2035   dolphin kde-core kde-plasma-desktop kde-standard kde-window-manager
2036   kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-apps kdebase-workspace
2037   kdebase-workspace-bin kdebase-workspace-data kdeutils kscreensaver
2038   kscreensaver-xsavers libgle3 libkonq5 libkonq5-templates libnetpbm10
2039   netpbm plasma-widget-folderview plasma-widget-networkmanagement
2040   xscreensaver-data-extra xscreensaver-gl xscreensaver-gl-extra
2041   xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
2042 </p></blockquote>
2043
2044 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
2045
2046 <blockquote><p>
2047   kdebase-bin konq-plugins konqueror
2048 </p></blockquote>
2049
2050       </div>
2051       <div class="tags">
2052
2053
2054         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>.
2055
2056
2057       </div>
2058     </div>
2059     <div class="padding"></div>
2060
2061     <div class="entry">
2062       <div class="title">
2063         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_buildbot_slave_and_Debian_kfreebsd.html">Gnash buildbot slave and Debian kfreebsd</a>
2064       </div>
2065       <div class="date">
2066         20th November 2010
2067       </div>
2068       <div class="body">
2069         <p>Answering
2070 <a href="http://www.listware.net/201011/gnash-dev/67431-gnash-dev-buildbot-looking-for-slaves.html">the
2071 call from the Gnash project</a> for
2072 <a href="http://www.gnashdev.org:8010">buildbot</a> slaves to test the
2073 current source, I have set up a virtual KVM machine on the Debian
2074 Edu/Skolelinux virtualization host to test the git source on
2075 Debian/Squeeze.  I hope this can help the developers in getting new
2076 releases out more often.</p>
2077
2078 <p>As the developers want less main-stream build platforms tested to,
2079 I have considered setting up a <a
2080 href="http://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/">Debian/kfreebsd</a>
2081 machine as well.  I have also considered using the kfreebsd
2082 architecture in Debian as a file server in NUUG to get access to the 5
2083 TB zfs volume we currently use to store DV video.  Because of this, I
2084 finally got around to do a test installation of Debian/Squeeze with
2085 kfreebsd.  Installation went fairly smooth, thought I noticed some
2086 visual glitches in the cdebconf dialogs (black cursor left on the
2087 screen at random locations).  Have not gotten very far with the
2088 testing.  Noticed cfdisk did not work, but fdisk did so it was not a
2089 fatal problem.  Have to spend some more time on it to see if it is
2090 useful as a file server for NUUG.  Will try to find time to set up a
2091 gnash buildbot slave on the Debian Edu/Skolelinux this weekend.</p>
2092
2093       </div>
2094       <div class="tags">
2095
2096
2097         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>.
2098
2099
2100       </div>
2101     </div>
2102     <div class="padding"></div>
2103
2104     <div class="entry">
2105       <div class="title">
2106         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_in_3D.html">Debian in 3D</a>
2107       </div>
2108       <div class="date">
2109          9th November 2010
2110       </div>
2111       <div class="body">
2112         <p><img src="http://thingiverse-production.s3.amazonaws.com/renders/23/e0/c4/f9/2b/debswagtdose_preview_medium.jpg"></p>
2113
2114 <p>3D printing is just great.  I just came across this Debian logo in
2115 3D linked in from
2116 <a href="http://blog.thingiverse.com/2010/11/09/participatory-branding/">the
2117 thingiverse blog</a>.</p>
2118
2119       </div>
2120       <div class="tags">
2121
2122
2123         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>.
2124
2125
2126       </div>
2127     </div>
2128     <div class="padding"></div>
2129
2130     <div class="entry">
2131       <div class="title">
2132         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_updates_2010_10_24.html">Software updates 2010-10-24</a>
2133       </div>
2134       <div class="date">
2135         24th October 2010
2136       </div>
2137       <div class="body">
2138         <p>Some updates.</p>
2139
2140 <p>My <a href="http://pledgebank.com/gnash-avm2">gnash pledge</a> to
2141 raise money for the project is going well.  The lower limit of 10
2142 signers was reached in 24 hours, and so far 13 people have signed it.
2143 More signers and more funding is most welcome, and I am really curious
2144 how far we can get before the time limit of December 24 is reached.
2145 :)</p>
2146
2147 <p>On the #gnash IRC channel on irc.freenode.net, I was just tipped
2148 about what appear to be a great code coverage tool capable of
2149 generating code coverage stats without any changes to the source code.
2150 It is called
2151 <a href="http://simonkagstrom.github.com/kcov/index.html">kcov</a>,
2152 and can be used using <tt>kcov &lt;directory&gt; &lt;binary&gt;</tt>.
2153 It is missing in Debian, but the git source built just fine in Squeeze
2154 after I installed libelf-dev, libdwarf-dev, pkg-config and
2155 libglib2.0-dev.  Failed to build in Lenny, but suspect that is
2156 solvable.  I hope kcov make it into Debian soon.</p>
2157
2158 <p>Finally found time to wrap up the release notes for <a
2159 href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2010/10/msg00002.html">a
2160 new alpha release of Debian Edu</a>, and just published the second
2161 alpha test release of the Squeeze based Debian Edu /
2162 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a>
2163 release.  Give it a try if you need a complete linux solution for your
2164 school, including central infrastructure server, workstations, thin
2165 client servers and diskless workstations.  A nice touch added
2166 yesterday is RDP support on the thin client servers, for windows
2167 clients to get a Linux desktop on request.</p>
2168
2169       </div>
2170       <div class="tags">
2171
2172
2173         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>.
2174
2175
2176       </div>
2177     </div>
2178     <div class="padding"></div>
2179
2180     <div class="entry">
2181       <div class="title">
2182         <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>
2183       </div>
2184       <div class="date">
2185          4th September 2010
2186       </div>
2187       <div class="body">
2188         <p>In the <a href="http://popcon.debian.org/unknown/by_vote">Debian
2189 popularity-contest numbers</a>, the adobe-flashplugin package the
2190 second most popular used package that is missing in Debian.  The sixth
2191 most popular is flashplayer-mozilla.  This is a clear indication that
2192 working flash is important for Debian users.  Around 10 percent of the
2193 users submitting data to popcon.debian.org have this package
2194 installed.</p>
2195
2196 <p>In the report written by Lars Risan in August 2008
2197 («<a href="http://wiki.skolelinux.no/Dokumentasjon/Rapporter?action=AttachFile&do=view&target=Skolelinux_i_bruk_rapport_1.0.pdf">Skolelinux
2198 i bruk – Rapport for Hurum kommune, Universitetet i Agder og
2199 stiftelsen SLX Debian Labs</a>»), one of the most important problems
2200 schools experienced with <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
2201 Edu/Skolelinux</a> was the lack of working Flash.  A lot of educational
2202 web sites require Flash to work, and lacking working Flash support in
2203 the web browser and the problems with installing it was perceived as a
2204 good reason to stay with Windows.</p>
2205
2206 <p>I once saw a funny and sad comment in a web forum, where Linux was
2207 said to be the retarded cousin that did not really understand
2208 everything you told him but could work fairly well.  This was a
2209 comment regarding the problems Linux have with proprietary formats and
2210 non-standard web pages, and is sad because it exposes a fairly common
2211 understanding of whose fault it is if web pages that only work in for
2212 example Internet Explorer 6 fail to work on Firefox, and funny because
2213 it explain very well how annoying it is for users when Linux
2214 distributions do not work with the documents they receive or the web
2215 pages they want to visit.</p>
2216
2217 <p>This is part of the reason why I believe it is important for Debian
2218 and Debian Edu to have a well working Flash implementation in the
2219 distribution, to get at least popular sites as Youtube and Google
2220 Video to working out of the box.  For Squeeze, Debian have the chance
2221 to include the latest version of Gnash that will make this happen, as
2222 the new release 0.8.8 was published a few weeks ago and is resting in
2223 unstable.  The new version work with more sites that version 0.8.7.
2224 The Gnash maintainers have asked for a freeze exception, but the
2225 release team have not had time to reply to it yet.  I hope they agree
2226 with me that Flash is important for the Debian desktop users, and thus
2227 accept the new package into Squeeze.</p>
2228
2229       </div>
2230       <div class="tags">
2231
2232
2233         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>.
2234
2235
2236       </div>
2237     </div>
2238     <div class="padding"></div>
2239
2240     <div class="entry">
2241       <div class="title">
2242         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Circular_package_dependencies_harms_apt_recovery.html">Circular package dependencies harms apt recovery</a>
2243       </div>
2244       <div class="date">
2245         27th July 2010
2246       </div>
2247       <div class="body">
2248         <p>I discovered this while doing
2249 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">automated
2250 testing of upgrades from Debian Lenny to Squeeze</a>.  A few packages
2251 in Debian still got circular dependencies, and it is often claimed
2252 that apt and aptitude should be able to handle this just fine, but
2253 some times these dependency loops causes apt to fail.</p>
2254
2255 <p>An example is from todays
2256 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing//test-20100727-lenny-squeeze-kde-aptitude.txt">upgrade
2257 of KDE using aptitude</a>.  In it, a bug in kdebase-workspace-data
2258 causes perl-modules to fail to upgrade.  The cause is simple.  If a
2259 package fail to unpack, then only part of packages with the circular
2260 dependency might end up being unpacked when unpacking aborts, and the
2261 ones already unpacked will fail to configure in the recovery phase
2262 because its dependencies are unavailable.</p>
2263
2264 <p>In this log, the problem manifest itself with this error:</p>
2265
2266 <blockquote><pre>
2267 dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of perl-modules:
2268  perl-modules depends on perl (>= 5.10.1-1); however:
2269   Version of perl on system is 5.10.0-19lenny2.
2270 dpkg: error processing perl-modules (--configure):
2271  dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
2272 </pre></blockquote>
2273
2274 <p>The perl/perl-modules circular dependency is already
2275 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/527917">reported as a bug</a>, and will
2276 hopefully be solved as soon as possible, but it is not the only one,
2277 and each one of these loops in the dependency tree can cause similar
2278 failures.  Of course, they only occur when there are bugs in other
2279 packages causing the unpacking to fail, but it is rather nasty when
2280 the failure of one package causes the problem to become worse because
2281 of dependency loops.</p>
2282
2283 <p>Thanks to
2284 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/06/msg00116.html">the
2285 tireless effort by Bill Allombert</a>, the number of circular
2286 dependencies
2287 <a href="http://debian.semistable.com/debgraph.out.html">left in Debian
2288 is dropping</a>, and perhaps it will reach zero one day. :)</p>
2289
2290 <p>Todays testing also exposed a bug in
2291 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/590605">update-notifier</a> and
2292 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/590604">different behaviour</a> between
2293 apt-get and aptitude, the latter possibly caused by some circular
2294 dependency.  Reported both to BTS to try to get someone to look at
2295 it.</p>
2296
2297       </div>
2298       <div class="tags">
2299
2300
2301         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>.
2302
2303
2304       </div>
2305     </div>
2306     <div class="padding"></div>
2307
2308     <div class="entry">
2309       <div class="title">
2310         <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>
2311       </div>
2312       <div class="date">
2313         17th July 2010
2314       </div>
2315       <div class="body">
2316         <p>This is a
2317 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">followup</a>
2318 on my
2319 <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
2320 work</a> on
2321 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">merging
2322 all</a> the computer related LDAP objects in Debian Edu.</p>
2323
2324 <p>As a step to try to see if it possible to merge the DNS and DHCP
2325 LDAP objects, I have had a look at how the packages pdns-backend-ldap
2326 and dhcp3-server-ldap in Debian use the LDAP server.  The two
2327 implementations are quite different in how they use LDAP.</p>
2328
2329 To get this information, I started slapd with debugging enabled and
2330 dumped the debug output to a file to get the LDAP searches performed
2331 on a Debian Edu main-server.  Here is a summary.
2332
2333 <p><strong>powerdns</strong></p>
2334
2335 <a href="http://www.linuxnetworks.de/doc/index.php/PowerDNS_LDAP_Backend">Clues
2336 on how to</a> set up PowerDNS to use a LDAP backend is available on
2337 the web.
2338
2339 <p>PowerDNS have two modes of operation using LDAP as its backend.
2340 One "strict" mode where the forward and reverse DNS lookups are done
2341 using the same LDAP objects, and a "tree" mode where the forward and
2342 reverse entries are in two different subtrees in LDAP with a structure
2343 based on the DNS names, as in tjener.intern and
2344 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa.</p>
2345
2346 <p>In tree mode, the server is set up to use a LDAP subtree as its
2347 base, and uses a "base" scoped search for the DNS name by adding
2348 "dc=tjener,dc=intern," to the base with a filter for
2349 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" for the forward entry and
2350 "dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa," with a filter for
2351 "(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)" for the reverse entry.  For
2352 forward entries, it is looking for attributes named dnsttl, arecord,
2353 nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord,
2354 txtrecord, rprecord, afsdbrecord, keyrecord, aaaarecord, locrecord,
2355 srvrecord, naptrrecord, kxrecord, certrecord, dsrecord, sshfprecord,
2356 ipseckeyrecord, rrsigrecord, nsecrecord, dnskeyrecord, dhcidrecord,
2357 spfrecord and modifytimestamp.  For reverse entries it is looking for
2358 the attributes dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord,
2359 ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord,
2360 locrecord, srvrecord, naptrrecord and modifytimestamp.  The equivalent
2361 ldapsearch commands could look like this:</p>
2362
2363 <blockquote><pre>
2364 ldapsearch -h ldap \
2365   -b dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
2366   -s base -x '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
2367   cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
2368   rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
2369   nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
2370   rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
2371
2372 ldapsearch -h ldap \
2373   -b dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
2374   -s base -x '(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)'
2375   dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord soarecord ptrrecord \
2376   hinforecord mxrecord txtrecord rprecord aaaarecord locrecord \
2377   srvrecord naptrrecord modifytimestamp
2378 </pre></blockquote>
2379
2380 <p>In Debian Edu/Lenny, the PowerDNS tree mode is used with
2381 ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no as the base, and these are two
2382 example LDAP objects used there.  In addition to these objects, the
2383 parent objects all th way up to ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
2384 also exist.</p>
2385
2386 <blockquote><pre>
2387 dn: dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
2388 objectclass: top
2389 objectclass: dnsdomain
2390 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
2391 dc: tjener
2392 arecord: 10.0.2.2
2393 associateddomain: tjener.intern
2394
2395 dn: dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
2396 objectclass: top
2397 objectclass: dnsdomain2
2398 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
2399 dc: 2
2400 ptrrecord: tjener.intern
2401 associateddomain: 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa
2402 </pre></blockquote>
2403
2404 <p>In strict mode, the server behaves differently.  When looking for
2405 forward DNS entries, it is doing a "subtree" scoped search with the
2406 same base as in the tree mode for a object with filter
2407 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" and requests the attributes dnsttl,
2408 arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord,
2409 mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord, locrecord, srvrecord,
2410 naptrrecord and modifytimestamp.  For reverse entires it also do a
2411 subtree scoped search but this time the filter is "(arecord=10.0.2.2)"
2412 and the requested attributes are associateddomain, dnsttl and
2413 modifytimestamp.  In short, in strict mode the objects with ptrrecord
2414 go away, and the arecord attribute in the forward object is used
2415 instead.</p>
2416
2417 <p>The forward and reverse searches can be simulated using ldapsearch
2418 like this:</p>
2419
2420 <blockquote><pre>
2421 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
2422   '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
2423   cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
2424   rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
2425   nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
2426   rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
2427
2428 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
2429   '(arecord=10.0.2.2)' associateddomain dnsttl modifytimestamp
2430 </pre></blockquote>
2431
2432 <p>In addition to the forward and reverse searches , there is also a
2433 search for SOA records, which behave similar to the forward and
2434 reverse lookups.</p>
2435
2436 <p>A thing to note with the PowerDNS behaviour is that it do not
2437 specify any objectclass names, and instead look for the attributes it
2438 need to generate a DNS reply.  This make it able to work with any
2439 objectclass that provide the needed attributes.</p>
2440
2441 <p>The attributes are normally provided in the cosine (RFC 1274) and
2442 dnsdomain2 schemas.  The latter is used for reverse entries like
2443 ptrrecord and recent DNS additions like aaaarecord and srvrecord.</p>
2444
2445 <p>In Debian Edu, we have created DNS objects using the object classes
2446 dcobject (for dc), dnsdomain or dnsdomain2 (structural, for the DNS
2447 attributes) and domainrelatedobject (for associatedDomain).  The use
2448 of structural object classes make it impossible to combine these
2449 classes with the object classes used by DHCP.</p>
2450
2451 <p>There are other schemas that could be used too, for example the
2452 dnszone structural object class used by Gosa and bind-sdb for the DNS
2453 attributes combined with the domainrelatedobject object class, but in
2454 this case some unused attributes would have to be included as well
2455 (zonename and relativedomainname).</p>
2456
2457 <p>My proposal for Debian Edu would be to switch PowerDNS to strict
2458 mode and not use any of the existing objectclasses (dnsdomain,
2459 dnsdomain2 and dnszone) when one want to combine the DNS information
2460 with DHCP information, and instead create a auxiliary object class
2461 defined something like this (using the attributes defined for
2462 dnsdomain and dnsdomain2 or dnszone):</p>
2463
2464 <blockquote><pre>
2465 objectclass ( some-oid NAME 'dnsDomainAux'
2466     SUP top
2467     AUXILIARY
2468     MAY ( ARecord $ MDRecord $ MXRecord $ NSRecord $ SOARecord $ CNAMERecord $
2469           DNSTTL $ DNSClass $ PTRRecord $ HINFORecord $ MINFORecord $
2470           TXTRecord $ SIGRecord $ KEYRecord $ AAAARecord $ LOCRecord $
2471           NXTRecord $ SRVRecord $ NAPTRRecord $ KXRecord $ CERTRecord $
2472           A6Record $ DNAMERecord
2473     ))
2474 </pre></blockquote>
2475
2476 <p>This will allow any object to become a DNS entry when combined with
2477 the domainrelatedobject object class, and allow any entity to include
2478 all the attributes PowerDNS wants.  I've sent an email to the PowerDNS
2479 developers asking for their view on this schema and if they are
2480 interested in providing such schema with PowerDNS, and I hope my
2481 message will be accepted into their mailing list soon.</p>
2482
2483 <p><strong>ISC dhcp</strong></p>
2484
2485 <p>The DHCP server searches for specific objectclass and requests all
2486 the object attributes, and then uses the attributes it want.  This
2487 make it harder to figure out exactly what attributes are used, but
2488 thanks to the working example in Debian Edu I can at least get an idea
2489 what is needed without having to read the source code.</p>
2490
2491 <p>In the DHCP server configuration, the LDAP base to use and the
2492 search filter to use to locate the correct dhcpServer entity is
2493 stored.  These are the relevant entries from
2494 /etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf:</p>
2495
2496 <blockquote><pre>
2497 ldap-base-dn "dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no";
2498 ldap-dhcp-server-cn "dhcp";
2499 </pre></blockquote>
2500
2501 <p>The DHCP server uses this information to nest all the DHCP
2502 configuration it need.  The cn "dhcp" is located using the given LDAP
2503 base and the filter "(&(objectClass=dhcpServer)(cn=dhcp))".  The
2504 search result is this entry:</p>
2505
2506 <blockquote><pre>
2507 dn: cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
2508 cn: dhcp
2509 objectClass: top
2510 objectClass: dhcpServer
2511 dhcpServiceDN: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
2512 </pre></blockquote>
2513
2514 <p>The content of the dhcpServiceDN attribute is next used to locate the
2515 subtree with DHCP configuration.  The DHCP configuration subtree base
2516 is located using a base scope search with base "cn=DHCP
2517 Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" and filter
2518 "(&(objectClass=dhcpService)(|(dhcpPrimaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)(dhcpSecondaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)))".
2519 The search result is this entry:</p>
2520
2521 <blockquote><pre>
2522 dn: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
2523 cn: DHCP Config
2524 objectClass: top
2525 objectClass: dhcpService
2526 objectClass: dhcpOptions
2527 dhcpPrimaryDN: cn=dhcp, dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
2528 dhcpStatements: ddns-update-style none
2529 dhcpStatements: authoritative
2530 dhcpOption: smtp-server code 69 = array of ip-address
2531 dhcpOption: www-server code 72 = array of ip-address
2532 dhcpOption: wpad-url code 252 = text
2533 </pre></blockquote>
2534
2535 <p>Next, the entire subtree is processed, one level at the time.  When
2536 all the DHCP configuration is loaded, it is ready to receive requests.
2537 The subtree in Debian Edu contain objects with object classes
2538 top/dhcpService/dhcpOptions, top/dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions,
2539 top/dhcpSubnet, top/dhcpGroup and top/dhcpHost.  These provide options
2540 and information about netmasks, dynamic range etc.  Leaving out the
2541 details here because it is not relevant for the focus of my
2542 investigation, which is to see if it is possible to merge dns and dhcp
2543 related computer objects.</p>
2544
2545 <p>When a DHCP request come in, LDAP is searched for the MAC address
2546 of the client (00:00:00:00:00:00 in this example), using a subtree
2547 scoped search with "cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" as
2548 the base and "(&(objectClass=dhcpHost)(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet
2549 00:00:00:00:00:00))" as the filter.  This is what a host object look
2550 like:</p>
2551
2552 <blockquote><pre>
2553 dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
2554 cn: hostname
2555 objectClass: top
2556 objectClass: dhcpHost
2557 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
2558 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname
2559 </pre></blockquote>
2560
2561 <p>There is less flexiblity in the way LDAP searches are done here.
2562 The object classes need to have fixed names, and the configuration
2563 need to be stored in a fairly specific LDAP structure.  On the
2564 positive side, the invidiual dhcpHost entires can be anywhere without
2565 the DN pointed to by the dhcpServer entries.  The latter should make
2566 it possible to group all host entries in a subtree next to the
2567 configuration entries, and this subtree can also be shared with the
2568 DNS server if the schema proposed above is combined with the dhcpHost
2569 structural object class.
2570
2571 <p><strong>Conclusion</strong></p>
2572
2573 <p>The PowerDNS implementation seem to be very flexible when it come
2574 to which LDAP schemas to use.  While its "tree" mode is rigid when it
2575 come to the the LDAP structure, the "strict" mode is very flexible,
2576 allowing DNS objects to be stored anywhere under the base cn specified
2577 in the configuration.</p>
2578
2579 <p>The DHCP implementation on the other hand is very inflexible, both
2580 regarding which LDAP schemas to use and which LDAP structure to use.
2581 I guess one could implement ones own schema, as long as the
2582 objectclasses and attributes have the names used, but this do not
2583 really help when the DHCP subtree need to have a fairly fixed
2584 structure.</p>
2585
2586 <p>Based on the observed behaviour, I suspect a LDAP structure like
2587 this might work for Debian Edu:</p>
2588
2589 <blockquote><pre>
2590 ou=services
2591   cn=machine-info (dhcpService) - dhcpServiceDN points here
2592     cn=dhcp (dhcpServer)
2593     cn=dhcp-internal (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
2594       cn=10.0.2.0 (dhcpSubnet)
2595         cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
2596     cn=dhcp-thinclients (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
2597       cn=192.168.0.0 (dhcpSubnet)
2598         cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
2599     ou=machines - PowerDNS base points here
2600       cn=hostname (dhcpHost/domainrelatedobject/dnsDomainAux)
2601 </pre></blockquote>
2602
2603 <P>This is not tested yet.  If the DHCP server require the dhcpHost
2604 entries to be in the dhcpGroup subtrees, the entries can be stored
2605 there instead of a common machines subtree, and the PowerDNS base
2606 would have to be moved one level up to the machine-info subtree.</p>
2607
2608 <p>The combined object under the machines subtree would look something
2609 like this:</p>
2610
2611 <blockquote><pre>
2612 dn: dc=hostname,ou=machines,cn=machine-info,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
2613 dc: hostname
2614 objectClass: top
2615 objectClass: dhcpHost
2616 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
2617 objectclass: dnsDomainAux
2618 associateddomain: hostname.intern
2619 arecord: 10.11.12.13
2620 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
2621 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname.intern
2622 </pre></blockquote>
2623
2624 </p>One could even add the LTSP configuration associated with a given
2625 machine, as long as the required attributes are available in a
2626 auxiliary object class.</p>
2627
2628       </div>
2629       <div class="tags">
2630
2631
2632         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>.
2633
2634
2635       </div>
2636     </div>
2637     <div class="padding"></div>
2638
2639     <div class="entry">
2640       <div class="title">
2641         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">Combining PowerDNS and ISC DHCP LDAP objects</a>
2642       </div>
2643       <div class="date">
2644         14th July 2010
2645       </div>
2646       <div class="body">
2647         <p>For a while now, I have wanted to find a way to change the DNS and
2648 DHCP services in Debian Edu to use the same LDAP objects for a given
2649 computer, to avoid the possibility of having a inconsistent state for
2650 a computer in LDAP (as in DHCP but no DNS entry or the other way
2651 around) and make it easier to add computers to LDAP.</p>
2652
2653 <p>I've looked at how powerdns and dhcpd is using LDAP, and using this
2654 information finally found a solution that seem to work.</p>
2655
2656 <p>The old setup required three LDAP objects for a given computer.
2657 One forward DNS entry, one reverse DNS entry and one DHCP entry.  If
2658 we switch powerdns to use its strict LDAP method (ldap-method=strict
2659 in pdns-debian-edu.conf), the forward and reverse DNS entries are
2660 merged into one while making it impossible to transfer the reverse map
2661 to a slave DNS server.</p>
2662
2663 <p>If we also replace the object class used to get the DNS related
2664 attributes to one allowing these attributes to be combined with the
2665 dhcphost object class, we can merge the DNS and DHCP entries into one.
2666 I've written such object class in the dnsdomainaux.schema file (need
2667 proper OIDs, but that is a minor issue), and tested the setup.  It
2668 seem to work.</p>
2669
2670 <p>With this test setup in place, we can get away with one LDAP object
2671 for both DNS and DHCP, and even the LTSP configuration I suggested in
2672 an earlier email.  The combined LDAP object will look something like
2673 this:</p>
2674
2675 <blockquote><pre>
2676   dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
2677   cn: hostname
2678   objectClass: dhcphost
2679   objectclass: domainrelatedobject
2680   objectclass: dnsdomainaux
2681   associateddomain: hostname.intern
2682   arecord: 10.11.12.13
2683   dhcphwaddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
2684   dhcpstatements: fixed-address hostname
2685   ldapconfigsound: Y
2686 </pre></blockquote>
2687
2688 <p>The DNS server uses the associateddomain and arecord entries, while
2689 the DHCP server uses the dhcphwaddress and dhcpstatements entries
2690 before asking DNS to resolve the fixed-adddress.  LTSP will use
2691 dhcphwaddress or associateddomain and the ldapconfig* attributes.</p>
2692
2693 <p>I am not yet sure if I can get the DHCP server to look for its
2694 dhcphost in a different location, to allow us to put the objects
2695 outside the "DHCP Config" subtree, but hope to figure out a way to do
2696 that.  If I can't figure out a way to do that, we can still get rid of
2697 the hosts subtree and move all its content into the DHCP Config tree
2698 (which probably should be renamed to be more related to the new
2699 content.  I suspect cn=dnsdhcp,ou=services or something like that
2700 might be a good place to put it.</p>
2701
2702 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
2703 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
2704
2705       </div>
2706       <div class="tags">
2707
2708
2709         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>.
2710
2711
2712       </div>
2713     </div>
2714     <div class="padding"></div>
2715
2716     <div class="entry">
2717       <div class="title">
2718         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_storing_LTSP_configuration_in_LDAP.html">Idea for storing LTSP configuration in LDAP</a>
2719       </div>
2720       <div class="date">
2721         11th July 2010
2722       </div>
2723       <div class="body">
2724         <p>Vagrant mentioned on IRC today that ltsp_config now support
2725 sourcing files from /usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ on the thin
2726 clients, and that this can be used to fetch configuration from LDAP if
2727 Debian Edu choose to store configuration there.</p>
2728
2729 <p>Armed with this information, I got inspired and wrote a test module
2730 to get configuration from LDAP.  The idea is to look up the MAC
2731 address of the client in LDAP, and look for attributes on the form
2732 ltspconfigsetting=value, and use this to export SETTING=value to the
2733 LTSP clients.</p>
2734
2735 <p>The goal is to be able to store the LTSP configuration attributes
2736 in a "computer" LDAP object used by both DNS and DHCP, and thus
2737 allowing us to store all information about a computer in one place.</p>
2738
2739 <p>This is a untested draft implementation, and I welcome feedback on
2740 this approach.  A real LDAP schema for the ltspClientAux objectclass
2741 need to be written.  Comments, suggestions, etc?</p>
2742
2743 <blockquote><pre>
2744 # Store in /opt/ltsp/$arch/usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ldap-config
2745 #
2746 # Fetch LTSP client settings from LDAP based on MAC address
2747 #
2748 # Uses ethernet address as stored in the dhcpHost objectclass using
2749 # the dhcpHWAddress attribute or ethernet address stored in the
2750 # ieee802Device objectclass with the macAddress attribute.
2751 #
2752 # This module is written to be schema agnostic, and only depend on the
2753 # existence of attribute names.
2754 #
2755 # The LTSP configuration variables are saved directly using a
2756 # ltspConfig prefix and uppercasing the rest of the attribute name.
2757 # To set the SERVER variable, set the ltspConfigServer attribute.
2758 #
2759 # Some LDAP schema should be created with all the relevant
2760 # configuration settings.  Something like this should work:
2761 #
2762 # objectclass ( 1.1.2.2 NAME 'ltspClientAux'
2763 #     SUP top
2764 #     AUXILIARY
2765 #     MAY ( ltspConfigServer $ ltsConfigSound $ ... )
2766
2767 LDAPSERVER=$(debian-edu-ldapserver)
2768 if [ "$LDAPSERVER" ] ; then
2769     LDAPBASE=$(debian-edu-ldapserver -b)
2770     for MAC in $(LANG=C ifconfig |grep -i hwaddr| awk '{print $5}'|sort -u) ; do
2771         filter="(|(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet $MAC)(macAddress=$MAC))"
2772         ldapsearch -h "$LDAPSERVER" -b "$LDAPBASE" -v -x "$filter" | \
2773             grep '^ltspConfig' | while read attr value ; do
2774             # Remove prefix and convert to upper case
2775             attr=$(echo $attr | sed 's/^ltspConfig//i' | tr a-z A-Z)
2776             # bass value on to clients
2777             eval "$attr=$value; export $attr"
2778         done
2779     done
2780 fi
2781 </pre></blockquote>
2782
2783 <p>I'm not sure this shell construction will work, because I suspect
2784 the while block might end up in a subshell causing the variables set
2785 there to not show up in ltsp-config, but if that is the case I am sure
2786 the code can be restructured to make sure the variables are passed on.
2787 I expect that can be solved with some testing. :)</p>
2788
2789 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
2790 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
2791
2792 <p>Update 2010-07-17: I am aware of another effort to store LTSP
2793 configuration in LDAP that was created around year 2000 by
2794 <a href="http://www.pcxperience.com/thinclient/documentation/ldap.html">PC
2795 Xperience, Inc., 2000</a>.  I found its
2796 <a href="http://people.redhat.com/alikins/ltsp/ldap/">files</a> on a
2797 personal home page over at redhat.com.</p>
2798
2799       </div>
2800       <div class="tags">
2801
2802
2803         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>.
2804
2805
2806       </div>
2807     </div>
2808     <div class="padding"></div>
2809
2810     <div class="entry">
2811       <div class="title">
2812         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/jXplorer__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">jXplorer, a very nice LDAP GUI</a>
2813       </div>
2814       <div class="date">
2815          9th July 2010
2816       </div>
2817       <div class="body">
2818         <p>Since
2819 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">my
2820 last post</a> about available LDAP tools in Debian, I was told about a
2821 LDAP GUI that is even better than luma.  The java application
2822 <a href="http://jxplorer.org/">jXplorer</a> is claimed to be capable of
2823 moving LDAP objects and subtrees using drag-and-drop, and can
2824 authenticate using Kerberos.  I have only tested the Kerberos
2825 authentication, but do not have a LDAP setup allowing me to rewrite
2826 LDAP with my test user yet.  It is
2827 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/j/jxplorer.html">available in
2828 Debian</a> testing and unstable at the moment.  The only problem I
2829 have with it is how it handle errors.  If something go wrong, its
2830 non-intuitive behaviour require me to go through some query work list
2831 and remove the failing query.  Nothing big, but very annoying.</p>
2832
2833       </div>
2834       <div class="tags">
2835
2836
2837         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>.
2838
2839
2840       </div>
2841     </div>
2842     <div class="padding"></div>
2843
2844     <div class="entry">
2845       <div class="title">
2846         <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>
2847       </div>
2848       <div class="date">
2849          3rd July 2010
2850       </div>
2851       <div class="body">
2852         <p>Here is a short update on my <a
2853 href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">my
2854 Debian Lenny->Squeeze upgrade testing</a>.  Here is a summary of the
2855 difference for Gnome when it is upgraded by apt-get and aptitude.  I'm
2856 not reporting the status for KDE, because the upgrade crashes when
2857 aptitude try because of missing conflicts
2858 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#584861</a> and
2859 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/585716">#585716</a>).</p>
2860
2861 <p>At the end of the upgrade test script, dpkg -l is executed to get a
2862 complete list of the installed packages.  Based on this I see these
2863 differences when I did a test run today.  As usual, I do not really
2864 know what the correct set of packages would be, but thought it best to
2865 publish the difference.</p>
2866
2867 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
2868
2869 <blockquote><p>
2870   at-spi cpp-4.3 finger gnome-spell gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
2871   libatspi1.0-0 libcupsys2 libeel2-data libgail-common libgdl-1-common
2872   libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin
2873   libgtksourceview-common libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
2874   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libservlet2.4-java libxalan2-java
2875   libxerces2-java openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
2876   python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gtkhtml2
2877   python-gtkmozembed svgalibg1 xserver-xephyr zip
2878 </p></blockquote>
2879
2880 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
2881
2882 <blockquote><p>
2883   bluez-utils dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop epiphany-gecko
2884   gnome-app-install gnome-mount gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager
2885   libao2 libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libbind9-50
2886   libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcurl3
2887   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9
2888   libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3
2889   libfaad0 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
2890   libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
2891   libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
2892   libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
2893   libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50
2894   libisccfg50 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick++10
2895   libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4
2896   libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5
2897   libparted1.8-10 libpisock9 libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3
2898   libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8 libsensors3 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
2899   libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1
2900   libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0 libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj
2901   libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3
2902   mysql-common swfdec-gnome totem-gstreamer wodim
2903 </p></blockquote>
2904
2905 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
2906
2907 <blockquote><p>
2908   gnome gnome-desktop-environment hamster-applet python-gnomeapplet
2909   python-gnomekeyring python-wnck rhythmbox-plugins xorg
2910   xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
2911   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
2912   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-video-all
2913   xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark xserver-xorg-video-ati
2914   xserver-xorg-video-chips xserver-xorg-video-cirrus
2915   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
2916   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
2917   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-mach64
2918   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
2919   xserver-xorg-video-nouveau xserver-xorg-video-nv
2920   xserver-xorg-video-r128 xserver-xorg-video-radeon
2921   xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd xserver-xorg-video-rendition
2922   xserver-xorg-video-s3 xserver-xorg-video-s3virge
2923   xserver-xorg-video-savage xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion
2924   xserver-xorg-video-sis xserver-xorg-video-sisusb
2925   xserver-xorg-video-tdfx xserver-xorg-video-tga
2926   xserver-xorg-video-trident xserver-xorg-video-tseng
2927   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vmware
2928   xserver-xorg-video-voodoo
2929 </p></blockquote>
2930
2931 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
2932
2933 <blockquote><p>
2934   deskbar-applet xserver-xorg xserver-xorg-core
2935   xserver-xorg-input-wacom xserver-xorg-video-intel
2936   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome
2937 </p></blockquote>
2938
2939 <p>I was told on IRC that the xorg-xserver package was
2940 <a href="http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-xorg/xserver/xorg-server.git;a=commit;h=9c8080d06c457932d3bfec021c69ac000aa60120">changed
2941 in git</a> today to try to get apt-get to not remove xorg completely.
2942 No idea when it hits Squeeze, but when it does I hope it will reduce
2943 the difference somewhat.
2944
2945       </div>
2946       <div class="tags">
2947
2948
2949         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>.
2950
2951
2952       </div>
2953     </div>
2954     <div class="padding"></div>
2955
2956     <div class="entry">
2957       <div class="title">
2958         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">LUMA, a very nice LDAP GUI</a>
2959       </div>
2960       <div class="date">
2961         28th June 2010
2962       </div>
2963       <div class="body">
2964         <p>The last few days I have been looking into the status of the LDAP
2965 directory in Debian Edu, and in the process I started to miss a GUI
2966 tool to browse the LDAP tree.  The only one I was able to find in
2967 Debian/Squeeze and Lenny is
2968 <a href="http://luma.sourceforge.net/">LUMA</a>, which has proved to
2969 be a great tool to get a overview of the current LDAP directory
2970 populated by default in Skolelinux.  Thanks to it, I have been able to
2971 find empty and obsolete subtrees, misplaced objects and duplicate
2972 objects.  It will be installed by default in Debian/Squeeze.  If you
2973 are working with LDAP, give it a go. :)</p>
2974
2975 <p>I did notice one problem with it I have not had time to report to
2976 the BTS yet.  There is no .desktop file in the package, so the tool do
2977 not show up in the Gnome and KDE menus, but only deep down in in the
2978 Debian submenu in KDE.  I hope that can be fixed before Squeeze is
2979 released.</p>
2980
2981 <p>I have not yet been able to get it to modify the tree yet.  I would
2982 like to move objects and remove subtrees directly in the GUI, but have
2983 not found a way to do that with LUMA yet.  So in the mean time, I use
2984 <a href="http://www.lichteblau.com/ldapvi/">ldapvi</a> for that.</p>
2985
2986 <p>If you have tips on other GUI tools for LDAP that might be useful
2987 in Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
2988
2989 <p>Update 2010-06-29: Ross Reedstrom tipped us about the
2990 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/g/gq.html">gq</a> package as a
2991 useful GUI alternative.  It seem like a good tool, but is unmaintained
2992 in Debian and got a RC bug keeping it out of Squeeze.  Unless that
2993 changes, it will not be an option for Debian Edu based on Squeeze.</p>
2994
2995       </div>
2996       <div class="tags">
2997
2998
2999         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>.
3000
3001
3002       </div>
3003     </div>
3004     <div class="padding"></div>
3005
3006     <div class="entry">
3007       <div class="title">
3008         <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>
3009       </div>
3010       <div class="date">
3011         24th June 2010
3012       </div>
3013       <div class="body">
3014         <p>A while back, I
3015 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">complained
3016 about the fact</a> that it is not possible with the provided schemas
3017 for storing DNS and DHCP information in LDAP to combine the two sets
3018 of information into one LDAP object representing a computer.</p>
3019
3020 <p>In the mean time, I discovered that a simple fix would be to make
3021 the dhcpHost object class auxiliary, to allow it to be combined with
3022 the dNSDomain object class, and thus forming one object for one
3023 computer when storing both DHCP and DNS information in LDAP.</p>
3024
3025 <p>If I understand this correctly, it is not safe to do this change
3026 without also changing the assigned number for the object class, and I
3027 do not know enough about LDAP schema design to do that properly for
3028 Debian Edu.</p>
3029
3030 <p>Anyway, for future reference, this is how I believe we could change
3031 the
3032 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dhc-ldap-schema-00">DHCP
3033 schema</a> to solve at least part of the problem with the LDAP schemas
3034 available today from IETF.</p>
3035
3036 <pre>
3037 --- dhcp.schema    (revision 65192)
3038 +++ dhcp.schema    (working copy)
3039 @@ -376,7 +376,7 @@
3040  objectclass ( 2.16.840.1.113719.1.203.6.6
3041         NAME 'dhcpHost'
3042         DESC 'This represents information about a particular client'
3043 -       SUP top
3044 +       SUP top AUXILIARY
3045         MUST cn
3046         MAY  (dhcpLeaseDN $ dhcpHWAddress $ dhcpOptionsDN $ dhcpStatements $ dhcpComments $ dhcpOption)
3047         X-NDS_CONTAINMENT ('dhcpService' 'dhcpSubnet' 'dhcpGroup') )
3048 </pre>
3049
3050 <p>I very much welcome clues on how to do this properly for Debian
3051 Edu/Squeeze.  We provide the DHCP schema in our debian-edu-config
3052 package, and should thus be free to rewrite it as we see fit.</p>
3053
3054 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
3055 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
3056
3057       </div>
3058       <div class="tags">
3059
3060
3061         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>.
3062
3063
3064       </div>
3065     </div>
3066     <div class="padding"></div>
3067
3068     <div class="entry">
3069       <div class="title">
3070         <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>
3071       </div>
3072       <div class="date">
3073         16th June 2010
3074       </div>
3075       <div class="body">
3076         <p>A few times I have had the need to simulate the way tasksel
3077 installs packages during the normal debian-installer run.  Until now,
3078 I have ended up letting tasksel do the work, with the annoying problem
3079 of not getting any feedback at all when something fails (like a
3080 conffile question from dpkg or a download that fails), using code like
3081 this:
3082
3083 <blockquote><pre>
3084 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
3085 tasksel --new-install
3086 </pre></blockquote>
3087
3088 This would invoke tasksel, let its automatic task selection pick the
3089 tasks to install, and continue to install the requested tasks without
3090 any output what so ever.
3091
3092 Recently I revisited this problem while working on the automatic
3093 package upgrade testing, because tasksel would some times hang without
3094 any useful feedback, and I want to see what is going on when it
3095 happen.  Then it occured to me, I can parse the output from tasksel
3096 when asked to run in test mode, and use that aptitude command line
3097 printed by tasksel then to simulate the tasksel run.  I ended up using
3098 code like this:
3099
3100 <blockquote><pre>
3101 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
3102 cmd="$(in_target tasksel -t --new-install | sed 's/debconf-apt-progress -- //')"
3103 $cmd
3104 </pre></blockquote>
3105
3106 <p>The content of $cmd is typically something like "<tt>aptitude -q
3107 --without-recommends -o APT::Install-Recommends=no -y install
3108 ~t^desktop$ ~t^gnome-desktop$ ~t^laptop$ ~pstandard ~prequired
3109 ~pimportant</tt>", which will install the gnome desktop task, the
3110 laptop task and all packages with priority standard , required and
3111 important, just like tasksel would have done it during
3112 installation.</p>
3113
3114 <p>A better approach is probably to extend tasksel to be able to
3115 install packages without using debconf-apt-progress, for use cases
3116 like this.</p>
3117
3118       </div>
3119       <div class="tags">
3120
3121
3122         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>.
3123
3124
3125       </div>
3126     </div>
3127     <div class="padding"></div>
3128
3129     <div class="entry">
3130       <div class="title">
3131         <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>
3132       </div>
3133       <div class="date">
3134         13th June 2010
3135       </div>
3136       <div class="body">
3137         <p>My
3138 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">testing
3139 of Debian upgrades</a> from Lenny to Squeeze continues, and I've
3140 finally made the upgrade logs available from
3141 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/</a>.
3142 I am now testing dist-upgrade of Gnome and KDE in a chroot using both
3143 apt and aptitude, and found their differences interesting.  This time
3144 I will only focus on their removal plans.</p>
3145
3146 <p>After installing a Gnome desktop and the laptop task, apt-get wants
3147 to remove 72 packages when dist-upgrading from Lenny to Squeeze.  The
3148 surprising part is that it want to remove xorg and all
3149 xserver-xorg-video* drivers.  Clearly not a good choice, but I am not
3150 sure why.  When asking aptitude to do the same, it want to remove 129
3151 packages, but most of them are library packages I suspect are no
3152 longer needed.  Both of them want to remove bluetooth packages, which
3153 I do not know.  Perhaps these bluetooth packages are obsolete?</p>
3154
3155 <p>For KDE, apt-get want to remove 82 packages, among them kdebase
3156 which seem like a bad idea and xorg the same way as with Gnome. Asking
3157 aptitude for the same, it wants to remove 192 packages, none which are
3158 too surprising.</p>
3159
3160 <p>I guess the removal of xorg during upgrades should be investigated
3161 and avoided, and perhaps others as well.  Here are the complete list
3162 of planned removals.  The complete logs is available from the URL
3163 above.  Note if you want to repeat these tests, that the upgrade test
3164 for kde+apt-get hung in the tasksel setup because of dpkg asking
3165 conffile questions.  No idea why.  I worked around it by using
3166 '<tt>echo >> /proc/<em>pidofdpkg</em>/fd/0</tt>' to tell dpkg to
3167 continue.</p>
3168
3169 <p><b>apt-get gnome 72</b>
3170 <br>bluez-gnome cupsddk-drivers deskbar-applet gnome
3171   gnome-desktop-environment gnome-network-admin gtkhtml3.14
3172   iceweasel-gnome-support libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libgdl-1-0
3173   libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libmetacity0 libslab0 libxcb-xlib0
3174   nautilus-cd-burner python-gnome2-desktop python-gnome2-extras
3175   serpentine swfdec-mozilla update-manager xorg xserver-xorg
3176   xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
3177   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
3178   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
3179   xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
3180   xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
3181   xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
3182   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
3183   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
3184   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
3185   xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
3186   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
3187   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
3188   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
3189   xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
3190   xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
3191   xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
3192   xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
3193   xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
3194   xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
3195   xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
3196   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
3197   xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9
3198   xulrunner-1.9-gnome-support</p>
3199
3200 <p><b>aptitude gnome 129</b>
3201
3202 <br>bluez-gnome bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers dhcdbd
3203   djvulibre-desktop finger gnome-app-install gnome-mount
3204   gnome-network-admin gnome-spell gnome-vfs-obexftp
3205   gnome-volume-manager gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs gtkhtml3.14 libao2
3206   libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
3207   libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcupsys2 libcurl3 libdatrie0
3208   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20
3209   libeel2-data libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libfaad0 libgail-common
3210   libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libgdl-1-0 libgdl-1-common
3211   libggz2 libggzcore9 libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0
3212   libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libgnomeprint2.2-0
3213   libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgnomeprintui2.2-common
3214   libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
3215   libgtksourceview-common libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6
3216   libhesiod0 libicu38 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 libmagick++10
3217   libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmetacity0 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off
3218   libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2
3219   libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10
3220   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libraw1394-8
3221   libsensors3 libslab0 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8 libssh2-1
3222   libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10
3223   libtrackerclient0 libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0
3224   libxerces2-java libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6
3225   libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common nautilus-cd-burner
3226   openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
3227   python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gnome2-desktop
3228   python-gnome2-extras python-gtkhtml2 python-gtkmozembed
3229   python-numeric python-sexy serpentine svgalibg1 swfdec-gnome
3230   swfdec-mozilla totem-gstreamer update-manager wodim
3231   xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
3232   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
3233   zip</p>
3234
3235 <p><b>apt-get kde 82</b>
3236
3237 <br>cupsddk-drivers karm kaudiocreator kcoloredit kcontrol kde kde-core
3238   kdeaddons kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-bin kdebase-bin-kde3
3239   kdebase-kio-plugins kdesktop kdeutils khelpcenter kicker
3240   kicker-applets knewsticker kolourpaint konq-plugins konqueror korn
3241   kpersonalizer kscreensaver ksplash libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libkiten1
3242   libxcb-xlib0 quanta superkaramba texlive-base-bin xorg xserver-xorg
3243   xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
3244   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
3245   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
3246   xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
3247   xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
3248   xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
3249   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
3250   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
3251   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
3252   xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
3253   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
3254   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
3255   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
3256   xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
3257   xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
3258   xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
3259   xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
3260   xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
3261   xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
3262   xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
3263   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
3264   xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9</p>
3265
3266 <p><b>aptitude kde 192</b>
3267 <br>bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers cvs dcoprss dhcdbd
3268   djvulibre-desktop dosfstools eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
3269   ghostscript-x imlib-base imlib11 indi kandy karm kasteroids
3270   kaudiocreator kbackgammon kbstate kcoloredit kcontrol kcron kdat
3271   kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
3272   kdebase-bin-kde3 kdebase-kio-plugins kdeedu-data
3273   kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data
3274   kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
3275   kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdeprint kdesktop kdessh
3276   kdict kdnssd kdvi kedit keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs
3277   kghostview khelpcenter khexedit kiconedit kitchensync klatin
3278   klickety kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmoon kmrml kodo kolourpaint
3279   kooka korn kpager kpdf kpercentage kpf kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler
3280   krec kregexpeditor ksayit ksim ksirc ksirtet ksmiletris ksmserver
3281   ksnake ksokoban ksplash ksvg ksysv ktip ktnef kuickshow kverbos
3282   kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kworldclock
3283   kxsldbg libakode2 libao2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
3284   libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
3285   libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
3286   libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0 libdatrie0
3287   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
3288   libgail-common libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0
3289   libicu38 libiec61883-0 libindex0 libiw29 libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1
3290   libkdeedu3 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkiten1 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
3291   libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
3292   libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 libmagick10 libmimelib1c2a
3293   libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9
3294   libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 libsmbios2
3295   libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libtalloc1 libtiff-tools
3296   libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0 libxerces2-java
3297   libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 mpeglib networkstatus
3298   openoffice.org-writer2latex pmount poster psutils quanta quanta-data
3299   superkaramba svgalibg1 tex-common texlive-base texlive-base-bin
3300   texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended
3301   xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
3302   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
3303   xulrunner-1.9</p>
3304
3305
3306       </div>
3307       <div class="tags">
3308
3309
3310         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>.
3311
3312
3313       </div>
3314     </div>
3315     <div class="padding"></div>
3316
3317     <div class="entry">
3318       <div class="title">
3319         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">Automatic upgrade testing from Lenny to Squeeze</a>
3320       </div>
3321       <div class="date">
3322         11th June 2010
3323       </div>
3324       <div class="body">
3325         <p>The last few days I have done some upgrade testing in Debian, to
3326 see if the upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze will go smoothly.  A few bugs
3327 have been discovered and reported in the process
3328 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/585410">#585410</a> in nagios3-cgi,
3329 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584879">#584879</a> already fixed in
3330 enscript and <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#584861</a> in
3331 kdebase-workspace-data), and to get a more regular testing going on, I
3332 am working on a script to automate the test.</p>
3333
3334 <p>The idea is to create a Lenny chroot and use tasksel to install a
3335 Gnome or KDE desktop installation inside the chroot before upgrading
3336 it.  To ensure no services are started in the chroot, a policy-rc.d
3337 script is inserted.  To make sure tasksel believe it is to install a
3338 desktop on a laptop, the tasksel tests are replaced in the chroot
3339 (only acceptable because this is a throw-away chroot).</p>
3340
3341 <p>A naive upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze using aptitude dist-upgrade
3342 currently always fail because udev refuses to upgrade with the kernel
3343 in Lenny, so to avoid that problem the file /etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
3344 is created.  The bug report
3345 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/566000">#566000</a> make me suspect
3346 this problem do not trigger in a chroot, but I touch the file anyway
3347 to make sure the upgrade go well.  Testing on virtual and real
3348 hardware have failed me because of udev so far, and creating this file
3349 do the trick in such settings anyway.  This is a
3350 <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/debian-26/failed-dist-upgrade-due-to-udev-config_sysfs_deprecated-nonsense-804130/">known
3351 issue</a> and the current udev behaviour is intended by the udev
3352 maintainer because he lack the resources to rewrite udev to keep
3353 working with old kernels or something like that.  I really wish the
3354 udev upstream would keep udev backwards compatible, to avoid such
3355 upgrade problem, but given that they fail to do so, I guess
3356 documenting the way out of this mess is the best option we got for
3357 Debian Squeeze.</p>
3358
3359 <p>Anyway, back to the task at hand, testing upgrades.  This test
3360 script, which I call <tt>upgrade-test</tt> for now, is doing the
3361 trick:</p>
3362
3363 <blockquote><pre>
3364 #!/bin/sh
3365 set -ex
3366
3367 if [ "$1" ] ; then
3368     desktop=$1
3369 else
3370     desktop=gnome
3371 fi
3372
3373 from=lenny
3374 to=squeeze
3375
3376 exec &lt; /dev/null
3377 unset LANG
3378 mirror=http://ftp.skolelinux.org/debian
3379 tmpdir=chroot-$from-upgrade-$to-$desktop
3380 fuser -mv .
3381 debootstrap $from $tmpdir $mirror
3382 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
3383 cat > $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d &lt;&lt;EOF
3384 #!/bin/sh
3385 exit 101
3386 EOF
3387 chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d
3388 exit_cleanup() {
3389     umount $tmpdir/proc
3390 }
3391 mount -t proc proc $tmpdir/proc
3392 # Make sure proc is unmounted also on failure
3393 trap exit_cleanup EXIT INT
3394
3395 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y install debconf-utils
3396
3397 # Make sure tasksel autoselection trigger.  It need the test scripts
3398 # to return the correct answers.
3399 echo tasksel tasksel/desktop multiselect $desktop | \
3400     chroot $tmpdir debconf-set-selections
3401
3402 # Include the desktop and laptop task
3403 for test in desktop laptop ; do
3404     echo > $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test &lt;&lt;EOF
3405 #!/bin/sh
3406 exit 2
3407 EOF
3408     chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test
3409 done
3410
3411 DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
3412 DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical
3413 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND DEBIAN_PRIORITY
3414 chroot $tmpdir tasksel --new-install
3415
3416 echo deb $mirror $to main > $tmpdir/etc/apt/sources.list
3417 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
3418 touch $tmpdir/etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
3419 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y dist-upgrade
3420 fuser -mv
3421 </pre></blockquote>
3422
3423 <p>I suspect it would be useful to test upgrades with both apt-get and
3424 with aptitude, but I have not had time to look at how they behave
3425 differently so far.  I hope to get a cron job running to do the test
3426 regularly and post the result on the web.  The Gnome upgrade currently
3427 work, while the KDE upgrade fail because of the bug in
3428 kdebase-workspace-data</p>
3429
3430 <p>I am not quite sure what kind of extract from the huge upgrade logs
3431 (KDE 167 KiB, Gnome 516 KiB) it make sense to include in this blog
3432 post, so I will refrain from trying.  I can report that for Gnome,
3433 aptitude report 760 packages upgraded, 448 newly installed, 129 to
3434 remove and 1 not upgraded and 1024MB need to be downloaded while for
3435 KDE the same numbers are 702 packages upgraded, 507 newly installed,
3436 193 to remove and 0 not upgraded and 1117MB need to be downloaded</p>
3437
3438 <p>I am very happy to notice that the Gnome desktop + laptop upgrade
3439 is able to migrate to dependency based boot sequencing and parallel
3440 booting without a hitch.  Was unsure if there were still bugs with
3441 packages failing to clean up their obsolete init.d script during
3442 upgrades, and no such problem seem to affect the Gnome desktop+laptop
3443 packages.</p>
3444
3445       </div>
3446       <div class="tags">
3447
3448
3449         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>.
3450
3451
3452       </div>
3453     </div>
3454     <div class="padding"></div>
3455
3456     <div class="entry">
3457       <div class="title">
3458         <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>
3459       </div>
3460       <div class="date">
3461          6th June 2010
3462       </div>
3463       <div class="body">
3464         <p>If Debian is to migrate to upstart on Linux, I expect some init.d
3465 scripts to migrate (some of) their operations to upstart job while
3466 keeping the init.d for hurd and kfreebsd.  The packages with such
3467 needs will need a way to get their init.d scripts to behave
3468 differently when used with sysvinit and with upstart.  Because of
3469 this, I had a look at the environment variables set when a init.d
3470 script is running under upstart, and when it is not.</p>
3471
3472 <p>With upstart, I notice these environment variables are set when a
3473 script is started from rcS.d/ (ignoring some irrelevant ones like
3474 COLUMNS):</p>
3475
3476 <blockquote><pre>
3477 DEFAULT_RUNLEVEL=2
3478 previous=N
3479 PREVLEVEL=
3480 RUNLEVEL=
3481 runlevel=S
3482 UPSTART_EVENTS=startup
3483 UPSTART_INSTANCE=
3484 UPSTART_JOB=rc-sysinit
3485 </pre></blockquote>
3486
3487 <p>With sysvinit, these environment variables are set for the same
3488 script.</p>
3489
3490 <blockquote><pre>
3491 INIT_VERSION=sysvinit-2.88
3492 previous=N
3493 PREVLEVEL=N
3494 RUNLEVEL=S
3495 runlevel=S
3496 </pre></blockquote>
3497
3498 <p>The RUNLEVEL and PREVLEVEL environment variables passed on from
3499 sysvinit are not set by upstart.  Not sure if it is intentional or not
3500 to not be compatible with sysvinit in this regard.</p>
3501
3502 <p>For scripts needing to behave differently when upstart is used,
3503 looking for the UPSTART_JOB environment variable seem to be a good
3504 choice.</p>
3505
3506       </div>
3507       <div class="tags">
3508
3509
3510         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>.
3511
3512
3513       </div>
3514     </div>
3515     <div class="padding"></div>
3516
3517     <div class="entry">
3518       <div class="title">
3519         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_manual_for_standards_wars___.html">A manual for standards wars...</a>
3520       </div>
3521       <div class="date">
3522          6th June 2010
3523       </div>
3524       <div class="body">
3525         <p>Via the
3526 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/robweir/antic-atom/~3/QzU4RgoAGMg/weekly-links-10.html">blog
3527 of Rob Weir</a> I came across the very interesting essay named
3528 <a href="http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/shapiro/wars.pdf">The Art of
3529 Standards Wars</a> (PDF 25 pages).  I recommend it for everyone
3530 following the standards wars of today.</p>
3531
3532       </div>
3533       <div class="tags">
3534
3535
3536         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>.
3537
3538
3539       </div>
3540     </div>
3541     <div class="padding"></div>
3542
3543     <div class="entry">
3544       <div class="title">
3545         <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>
3546       </div>
3547       <div class="date">
3548          3rd June 2010
3549       </div>
3550       <div class="body">
3551         <p>When using sitesummary at a site to track machines, it is possible
3552 to get a list of the machine types in use thanks to the DMI
3553 information extracted from each machine.  The script to do so is
3554 included in the sitesummary package, and here is example output from
3555 the Skolelinux build servers:</p>
3556
3557 <blockquote><pre>
3558 maintainer:~# /usr/lib/sitesummary/hardware-model-summary
3559   vendor                    count
3560   Dell Computer Corporation     1
3561     PowerEdge 1750              1
3562   IBM                           1
3563     eserver xSeries 345 -[8670M1X]-     1
3564   Intel                         2
3565   [no-dmi-info]                 3
3566 maintainer:~#
3567 </pre></blockquote>
3568
3569 <p>The quality of the report depend on the quality of the DMI tables
3570 provided in each machine.  Here there are Intel machines without model
3571 information listed with Intel as vendor and no model, and virtual Xen
3572 machines listed as [no-dmi-info].  One can add -l as a command line
3573 option to list the individual machines.</p>
3574
3575 <p>A larger list is
3576 <a href="http://narvikskolen.no/sitesummary/">available from the the
3577 city of Narvik</a>, which uses Skolelinux on all their shools and also
3578 provide the basic sitesummary report publicly.  In their report there
3579 are ~1400 machines. I know they use both Ubuntu and Skolelinux on
3580 their machines, and as sitesummary is available in both distributions,
3581 it is trivial to get all of them to report to the same central
3582 collector.</p>
3583
3584       </div>
3585       <div class="tags">
3586
3587
3588         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>.
3589
3590
3591       </div>
3592     </div>
3593     <div class="padding"></div>
3594
3595     <div class="entry">
3596       <div class="title">
3597         <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>
3598       </div>
3599       <div class="date">
3600          1st June 2010
3601       </div>
3602       <div class="body">
3603         <p>It is strange to watch how a bug in Debian causing KDM to fail to
3604 start at boot when an NVidia video card is used is handled.  The
3605 problem seem to be that the nvidia X.org driver uses a long time to
3606 initialize, and this duration is longer than kdm is configured to
3607 wait.</p>
3608
3609 <p>I came across two bugs related to this issue,
3610 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">#583312</a> initially filed
3611 against initscripts and passed on to nvidia-glx when it became obvious
3612 that the nvidia drivers were involved, and
3613 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/524751">#524751</a> initially filed against
3614 kdm and passed on to src:nvidia-graphics-drivers for unknown reasons.</p>
3615
3616 <p>To me, it seem that no-one is interested in actually solving the
3617 problem nvidia video card owners experience and make sure the Debian
3618 distribution work out of the box for these users.  The nvidia driver
3619 maintainers expect kdm to be set up to wait longer, while kdm expect
3620 the nvidia driver maintainers to fix the driver to start faster, and
3621 while they wait for each other I guess the users end up switching to a
3622 distribution that work for them.  I have no idea what the solution is,
3623 but I am pretty sure that waiting for each other is not it.</p>
3624
3625 <p>I wonder why we end up handling bugs this way.</p>
3626
3627       </div>
3628       <div class="tags">
3629
3630
3631         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>.
3632
3633
3634       </div>
3635     </div>
3636     <div class="padding"></div>
3637
3638     <div class="entry">
3639       <div class="title">
3640         <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>
3641       </div>
3642       <div class="date">
3643         27th May 2010
3644       </div>
3645       <div class="body">
3646         <p>A few days ago, parallel booting was enabled in Debian/testing.
3647 The feature seem to hold up pretty well, but three fairly serious
3648 issues are known and should be solved:
3649
3650 <p><ul>
3651
3652 <li>The wicd package seen to
3653 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/508289">break NFS mounting</a> and
3654 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/581586">network setup</a> when
3655 parallel booting is enabled.  No idea why, but the wicd maintainer
3656 seem to be on the case.</li>
3657
3658 <li>The nvidia X driver seem to
3659 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">have a race condition</a>
3660 triggered more easily when parallel booting is in effect.  The
3661 maintainer is on the case.</li>
3662
3663 <li>The sysv-rc package fail to properly enable dependency based boot
3664 sequencing (the shutdown is broken) when old file-rc users
3665 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/575080">try to switch back</a> to
3666 sysv-rc.  One way to solve it would be for file-rc to create
3667 /etc/init.d/.legacy-bootordering, and another is to try to make
3668 sysv-rc more robust.  Will investigate some more and probably upload a
3669 workaround in sysv-rc to help those trying to move from file-rc to
3670 sysv-rc get a working shutdown.</li>
3671
3672 </ul></p>
3673
3674 <p>All in all not many surprising issues, and all of them seem
3675 solvable before Squeeze is released.  In addition to these there are
3676 some packages with bugs in their dependencies and run level settings,
3677 which I expect will be fixed in a reasonable time span.</p>
3678
3679 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
3680 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
3681 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
3682 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
3683
3684 <p>Update: Correct bug number to file-rc issue.</p>
3685
3686       </div>
3687       <div class="tags">
3688
3689
3690         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>.
3691
3692
3693       </div>
3694     </div>
3695     <div class="padding"></div>
3696
3697     <div class="entry">
3698       <div class="title">
3699         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/More_flexible_firmware_handling_in_debian_installer.html">More flexible firmware handling in debian-installer</a>
3700       </div>
3701       <div class="date">
3702         22nd May 2010
3703       </div>
3704       <div class="body">
3705         <p>After a long break from debian-installer development, I finally
3706 found time today to return to the project.  Having to spend less time
3707 working dependency based boot in debian, as it is almost complete now,
3708 definitely helped freeing some time.</p>
3709
3710 <p>A while back, I ran into a problem while working on Debian Edu.  We
3711 include some firmware packages on the Debian Edu CDs, those needed to
3712 get disk and network controllers working.  Without having these
3713 firmware packages available during installation, it is impossible to
3714 install Debian Edu on the given machine, and because our target group
3715 are non-technical people, asking them to provide firmware packages on
3716 an external medium is a support pain.  Initially, I expected it to be
3717 enough to include the firmware packages on the CD to get
3718 debian-installer to find and use them.  This proved to be wrong.
3719 Next, I hoped it was enough to symlink the relevant firmware packages
3720 to some useful location on the CD (tried /cdrom/ and
3721 /cdrom/firmware/).  This also proved to not work, and at this point I
3722 found time to look at the debian-installer code to figure out what was
3723 going to work.</p>
3724
3725 <p>The firmware loading code is in the hw-detect package, and a closer
3726 look revealed that it would only look for firmware packages outside
3727 the installation media, so the CD was never checked for firmware
3728 packages.  It would only check USB sticks, floppies and other
3729 "external" media devices.  Today I changed it to also look in the
3730 /cdrom/firmware/ directory on the mounted CD or DVD, which should
3731 solve the problem I ran into with Debian edu.  I also changed it to
3732 look in /firmware/, to make sure the installer also find firmware
3733 provided in the initrd when booting the installer via PXE, to allow us
3734 to provide the same feature in the PXE setup included in Debian
3735 Edu.</p>
3736
3737 <p>To make sure firmware deb packages with a license questions are not
3738 activated without asking if the license is accepted, I extended
3739 hw-detect to look for preinst scripts in the firmware packages, and
3740 run these before activating the firmware during installation.  The
3741 license question is asked using debconf in the preinst, so this should
3742 solve the issue for the firmware packages I have looked at so far.</p>
3743
3744 <p>If you want to discuss the details of these features, please
3745 contact us on debian-boot@lists.debian.org.</p>
3746
3747       </div>
3748       <div class="tags">
3749
3750
3751         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>.
3752
3753
3754       </div>
3755     </div>
3756     <div class="padding"></div>
3757
3758     <div class="entry">
3759       <div class="title">
3760         <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>
3761       </div>
3762       <div class="date">
3763         14th May 2010
3764       </div>
3765       <div class="body">
3766         <p>Since this evening, parallel booting is the default in
3767 Debian/unstable for machines using dependency based boot sequencing.
3768 Apparently the testing of concurrent booting has been wider than
3769 expected, if I am to believe the
3770 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
3771 on debian-devel@</a>, and I concluded a few days ago to move forward
3772 with the feature this weekend, to give us some time to detect any
3773 remaining problems before Squeeze is frozen.  If serious problems are
3774 detected, it is simple to change the default back to sequential boot.
3775 The upload of the new sysvinit package also activate a new upstream
3776 version.</p>
3777
3778 More information about
3779 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
3780 based boot sequencing</a> is available from the Debian wiki.  It is
3781 currently possible to disable parallel booting when one run into
3782 problems caused by it, by adding this line to /etc/default/rcS:</p>
3783
3784 <blockquote><pre>
3785 CONCURRENCY=none
3786 </pre></blockquote>
3787
3788 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
3789 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
3790 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
3791 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
3792
3793       </div>
3794       <div class="tags">
3795
3796
3797         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>.
3798
3799
3800       </div>
3801     </div>
3802     <div class="padding"></div>
3803
3804     <div class="entry">
3805       <div class="title">
3806         <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>
3807       </div>
3808       <div class="date">
3809         14th May 2010
3810       </div>
3811       <div class="body">
3812         <p>In the recent Debian Edu versions, the
3813 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary">sitesummary
3814 system</a> is used to keep track of the machines in the school
3815 network.  Each machine will automatically report its status to the
3816 central server after boot and once per night.  The network setup is
3817 also reported, and using this information it is possible to get the
3818 MAC address of all network interfaces in the machines.  This is useful
3819 to update the DHCP configuration.</p>
3820
3821 <p>To give some idea how to use sitesummary, here is a one-liner to
3822 ist all MAC addresses of all machines reporting to sitesummary.  Run
3823 this on the collector host:</p>
3824
3825 <blockquote><pre>
3826 perl -MSiteSummary -e 'for_all_hosts(sub { print join(" ", get_macaddresses(shift)), "\n"; });'
3827 </pre></blockquote>
3828
3829 <p>This will list all MAC addresses assosiated with all machine, one
3830 line per machine and with space between the MAC addresses.</p>
3831
3832 <p>To allow system administrators easier job at adding static DHCP
3833 addresses for hosts, it would be possible to extend this to fetch
3834 machine information from sitesummary and update the DHCP and DNS
3835 tables in LDAP using this information.  Such tool is unfortunately not
3836 written yet.</p>
3837
3838       </div>
3839       <div class="tags">
3840
3841
3842         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>.
3843
3844
3845       </div>
3846     </div>
3847     <div class="padding"></div>
3848
3849     <div class="entry">
3850       <div class="title">
3851         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/systemd__an_interesting_alternative_to_upstart.html">systemd, an interesting alternative to upstart</a>
3852       </div>
3853       <div class="date">
3854         13th May 2010
3855       </div>
3856       <div class="body">
3857         <p>The last few days a new boot system called
3858 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd">systemd</a>
3859 has been
3860 <a href="http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html">introduced</a>
3861
3862 to the free software world.  I have not yet had time to play around
3863 with it, but it seem to be a very interesting alternative to
3864 <a href="http://upstart.ubuntu.com/">upstart</a>, and might prove to be
3865 a good alternative for Debian when we are able to switch to an event
3866 based boot system.  Tollef is
3867 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/580814">in the process</a> of getting
3868 systemd into Debian, and I look forward to seeing how well it work.  I
3869 like the fact that systemd handles init.d scripts with dependency
3870 information natively, allowing them to run in parallel where upstart
3871 at the moment do not.</p>
3872
3873 <p>Unfortunately do systemd have the same problem as upstart regarding
3874 platform support.  It only work on recent Linux kernels, and also need
3875 some new kernel features enabled to function properly.  This means
3876 kFreeBSD and Hurd ports of Debian will need a port or a different boot
3877 system.  Not sure how that will be handled if systemd proves to be the
3878 way forward.</p>
3879
3880 <p>In the mean time, based on the
3881 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
3882 on debian-devel@</a> regarding parallel booting in Debian, I have
3883 decided to enable full parallel booting as the default in Debian as
3884 soon as possible (probably this weekend or early next week), to see if
3885 there are any remaining serious bugs in the init.d dependencies.  A
3886 new version of the sysvinit package implementing this change is
3887 already in experimental.  If all go well, Squeeze will be released
3888 with parallel booting enabled by default.</p>
3889
3890       </div>
3891       <div class="tags">
3892
3893
3894         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>.
3895
3896
3897       </div>
3898     </div>
3899     <div class="padding"></div>
3900
3901     <div class="entry">
3902       <div class="title">
3903         <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>
3904       </div>
3905       <div class="date">
3906          6th May 2010
3907       </div>
3908       <div class="body">
3909         <p>These days, the init.d script dependencies in Squeeze are quite
3910 complete, so complete that it is actually possible to run all the
3911 init.d scripts in parallell based on these dependencies.  If you want
3912 to test your Squeeze system, make sure
3913 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
3914 based boot sequencing</a> is enabled, and add this line to
3915 /etc/default/rcS:</p>
3916
3917 <blockquote><pre>
3918 CONCURRENCY=makefile
3919 </pre></blockquote>
3920
3921 <p>That is it.  It will cause sysv-rc to use the startpar tool to run
3922 scripts in parallel using the dependency information stored in
3923 /etc/init.d/.depend.boot, /etc/init.d/.depend.start and
3924 /etc/init.d/.depend.stop to order the scripts.  Startpar is configured
3925 to try to start the kdm and gdm scripts as early as possible, and will
3926 start the facilities required by kdm or gdm as early as possible to
3927 make this happen.</p>
3928
3929 <p>Give it a try, and see if you like the result.  If some services
3930 fail to start properly, it is most likely because they have incomplete
3931 init.d script dependencies in their startup script (or some of their
3932 dependent scripts have incomplete dependencies).  Report bugs and get
3933 the package maintainers to fix it. :)</p>
3934
3935 <p>Running scripts in parallel could be the default in Debian when we
3936 manage to get the init.d script dependencies complete and correct.  I
3937 expect we will get there in Squeeze+1, if we get manage to test and
3938 fix the remaining issues.</p>
3939
3940 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
3941 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
3942 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
3943 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
3944
3945       </div>
3946       <div class="tags">
3947
3948
3949         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>.
3950
3951
3952       </div>
3953     </div>
3954     <div class="padding"></div>
3955
3956     <div class="entry">
3957       <div class="title">
3958         <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>
3959       </div>
3960       <div class="date">
3961         27th July 2009
3962       </div>
3963       <div class="body">
3964         <p>Since this evening, with the upload of sysvinit version 2.87dsf-2,
3965 and the upload of insserv version 1.12.0-10 yesterday, Debian unstable
3966 have been migrated to using dependency based boot sequencing.  This
3967 conclude work me and others have been doing for the last three days.
3968 It feels great to see this finally part of the default Debian
3969 installation.  Now we just need to weed out the last few problems that
3970 are bound to show up, to get everything ready for Squeeze.</p>
3971
3972 <p>The next step is migrating /sbin/init from sysvinit to upstart, and
3973 fixing the more fundamental problem of handing the event based
3974 non-predictable kernel in the early boot.</p>
3975
3976       </div>
3977       <div class="tags">
3978
3979
3980         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>.
3981
3982
3983       </div>
3984     </div>
3985     <div class="padding"></div>
3986
3987     <div class="entry">
3988       <div class="title">
3989         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Taking_over_sysvinit_development.html">Taking over sysvinit development</a>
3990       </div>
3991       <div class="date">
3992         22nd July 2009
3993       </div>
3994       <div class="body">
3995         <p>After several years of frustration with the lack of activity from
3996 the existing sysvinit upstream developer, I decided a few weeks ago to
3997 take over the package and become the new upstream.  The number of
3998 patches to track for the Debian package was becoming a burden, and the
3999 lack of synchronization between the distribution made it hard to keep
4000 the package up to date.</p>
4001
4002 <p>On the new sysvinit team is the SuSe maintainer Dr. Werner Fink,
4003 and my Debian co-maintainer Kel Modderman.  About 10 days ago, I made
4004 a new upstream tarball with version number 2.87dsf (for Debian, SuSe
4005 and Fedora), based on the patches currently in use in these
4006 distributions.  We Debian maintainers plan to move to this tarball as
4007 the new upstream as soon as we find time to do the merge.  Since the
4008 new tarball was created, we agreed with Werner at SuSe to make a new
4009 upstream project at <a href="http://savannah.nongnu.org/">Savannah</a>, and continue
4010 development there.  The project is registered and currently waiting
4011 for approval by the Savannah administrators, and as soon as it is
4012 approved, we will import the old versions from svn and continue
4013 working on the future release.</p>
4014
4015 <p>It is a bit ironic that this is done now, when some of the involved
4016 distributions are moving to upstart as a syvinit replacement.</p>
4017
4018       </div>
4019       <div class="tags">
4020
4021
4022         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>.
4023
4024
4025       </div>
4026     </div>
4027     <div class="padding"></div>
4028
4029     <div class="entry">
4030       <div class="title">
4031         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_boots_quicker_and_quicker.html">Debian boots quicker and quicker</a>
4032       </div>
4033       <div class="date">
4034         24th June 2009
4035       </div>
4036       <div class="body">
4037         <p>I spent Monday and tuesday this week in London with a lot of the
4038 people involved in the boot system on Debian and Ubuntu, to see if we
4039 could find more ways to speed up the boot system.  This was an Ubuntu
4040 funded
4041 <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FoundationsTeam/BootPerformance/DebianUbuntuSprint">developer
4042 gathering</a>. It was quite productive.  We also discussed the future
4043 of boot systems, and ways to handle the increasing number of boot
4044 issues introduced by the Linux kernel becoming more and more
4045 asynchronous and event base.  The Ubuntu approach using udev and
4046 upstart might be a good way forward.  Time will show.</p>
4047
4048 <p>Anyway, there are a few ways at the moment to speed up the boot
4049 process in Debian.  All of these should be applied to get a quick
4050 boot:</p>
4051
4052 <ul>
4053
4054 <li>Use dash as /bin/sh.</li>
4055
4056 <li>Disable the init.d/hwclock*.sh scripts and make sure the hardware
4057    clock is in UTC.</li>
4058
4059 <li>Install and activate the insserv package to enable
4060    <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
4061    based boot sequencing</a>, and enable concurrent booting.</li>
4062
4063 </ul>
4064
4065 These points are based on the Google summer of code work done by
4066 <a href="http://initscripts-ng.alioth.debian.org/soc2006-bootsystem/">Carlos
4067 Villegas</a>.
4068
4069 <p>Support for makefile-style concurrency during boot was uploaded to
4070 unstable yesterday.  When we tested it, we were able to cut 6 seconds
4071 from the boot sequence.  It depend on very correct dependency
4072 declaration in all init.d scripts, so I expect us to find edge cases
4073 where the dependences in some scripts are slightly wrong when we start
4074 using this.</p>
4075
4076 <p>On our IRC channel for this effort, #pkg-sysvinit, a new idea was
4077 introduced by Raphael Geissert today, one that could affect the
4078 startup speed as well.  Instead of starting some scripts concurrently
4079 from rcS.d/ and another set of scripts from rc2.d/, it would be
4080 possible to run a of them in the same process.  A quick way to test
4081 this would be to enable insserv and run 'mv /etc/rc2.d/S* /etc/rcS.d/;
4082 insserv'.  Will need to test if that work. :)</p>
4083
4084       </div>
4085       <div class="tags">
4086
4087
4088         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>.
4089
4090
4091       </div>
4092     </div>
4093     <div class="padding"></div>
4094
4095     <div class="entry">
4096       <div class="title">
4097         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/BSAs_p_stander_om_piratkopiering_m_ter_motstand.html">BSAs påstander om piratkopiering møter motstand</a>
4098       </div>
4099       <div class="date">
4100         17th May 2009
4101       </div>
4102       <div class="body">
4103         <p>Hvert år de siste årene har BSA, lobbyfronten til de store
4104 programvareselskapene som Microsoft og Apple, publisert en rapport der
4105 de gjetter på hvor mye piratkopiering påfører i tapte inntekter i
4106 ulike land rundt om i verden.  Resultatene er tendensiøse.  For noen
4107 dager siden kom
4108 <a href="http://global.bsa.org/globalpiracy2008/studies/globalpiracy2008.pdf">siste
4109 rapport</a>, og det er flere kritiske kommentarer publisert de siste
4110 dagene.  Et spesielt interessant kommentar fra Sverige,
4111 <a href="http://www.idg.se/2.1085/1.229795/bsa-hoftade-sverigesiffror">BSA
4112 höftade Sverigesiffror</a>, oppsummeres slik:</p>
4113
4114 <blockquote>
4115 I sin senaste rapport slår BSA fast att 25 procent av all mjukvara i
4116 Sverige är piratkopierad. Det utan att ha pratat med ett enda svenskt
4117 företag. "Man bör nog kanske inte se de här siffrorna som helt
4118 exakta", säger BSAs Sverigechef John Hugosson.
4119 </blockquote>
4120
4121 <p>Mon tro om de er like metodiske når de gjetter på andelen piratkopiering i Norge?  To andre kommentarer er <a
4122 href="http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/comment/2242134/bsa-piracy-figures-shot-reality">BSA
4123 piracy figures need a shot of reality</a> og <a
4124 href="http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/3958/125/">Does The WIPO
4125 Copyright Treaty Work?</a></p>
4126
4127 <p>Fant lenkene via <a
4128 href="http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/17/1632242">oppslag
4129 på Slashdot</a>.</p>
4130
4131       </div>
4132       <div class="tags">
4133
4134
4135         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>.
4136
4137
4138       </div>
4139     </div>
4140     <div class="padding"></div>
4141
4142     <div class="entry">
4143       <div class="title">
4144         <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>
4145       </div>
4146       <div class="date">
4147          7th May 2009
4148       </div>
4149       <div class="body">
4150         <p>Kom over
4151 <a href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10216873-16.html">interessante
4152 tall</a> fra IDG om utviklingen av linuxservermarkedet.  Fikk meg til
4153 å tenke på antall tjenermaskiner ved Universitetet i Oslo der jeg
4154 jobber til daglig.  En rask opptelling forteller meg at vi har 490
4155 (61%) fysiske unix-tjener (mest linux men også noen solaris) og 196
4156 (25%) windowstjenere, samt 112 (14%) virtuelle unix-tjenere.  Med den
4157 bakgrunnskunnskapen kan jeg godt tro at IDG er inne på noe.</p>
4158
4159       </div>
4160       <div class="tags">
4161
4162
4163         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>.
4164
4165
4166       </div>
4167     </div>
4168     <div class="padding"></div>
4169
4170     <div class="entry">
4171       <div class="title">
4172         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Kryptert_harddisk___naturligvis.html">Kryptert harddisk - naturligvis</a>
4173       </div>
4174       <div class="date">
4175          2nd May 2009
4176       </div>
4177       <div class="body">
4178         <p><a href="http://www.dagensit.no/trender/article1658676.ece">Dagens
4179 IT melder</a> at Intel hevder at det er dyrt å miste en datamaskin,
4180 når en tar tap av arbeidstid, fortrolige dokumenter,
4181 personopplysninger og alt annet det innebærer.  Det er ingen tvil om
4182 at det er en kostbar affære å miste sin datamaskin, og det er årsaken
4183 til at jeg har kryptert harddisken på både kontormaskinen og min
4184 bærbare.  Begge inneholder personopplysninger jeg ikke ønsker skal
4185 komme på avveie, den første informasjon relatert til jobben min ved
4186 Universitetet i Oslo, og den andre relatert til blant annet
4187 foreningsarbeide.  Kryptering av diskene gjør at det er lite
4188 sannsynlig at dophoder som kan finne på å rappe maskinene får noe ut
4189 av dem.  Maskinene låses automatisk etter noen minutter uten bruk,
4190 og en reboot vil gjøre at de ber om passord før de vil starte opp.
4191 Jeg bruker Debian på begge maskinene, og installasjonssystemet der
4192 gjør det trivielt å sette opp krypterte disker.  Jeg har LVM på toppen
4193 av krypterte partisjoner, slik at alt av datapartisjoner er kryptert.
4194 Jeg anbefaler alle å kryptere diskene på sine bærbare.  Kostnaden når
4195 det er gjort slik jeg gjør det er minimale, og gevinstene er
4196 betydelige.  En bør dog passe på passordet.  Hvis det går tapt, må
4197 maskinen reinstalleres og alt er tapt.</p>
4198
4199 <p>Krypteringen vil ikke stoppe kompetente angripere som f.eks. kjøler
4200 ned minnebrikkene før maskinen rebootes med programvare for å hente ut
4201 krypteringsnøklene.  Kostnaden med å forsvare seg mot slike angripere
4202 er for min del høyere enn gevinsten.  Jeg tror oddsene for at
4203 f.eks. etteretningsorganisasjoner har glede av å titte på mine
4204 maskiner er minimale, og ulempene jeg ville oppnå ved å forsøke å
4205 gjøre det vanskeligere for angripere med kompetanse og ressurser er
4206 betydelige.</p>
4207
4208       </div>
4209       <div class="tags">
4210
4211
4212         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>.
4213
4214
4215       </div>
4216     </div>
4217     <div class="padding"></div>
4218
4219     <div class="entry">
4220       <div class="title">
4221         <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>
4222       </div>
4223       <div class="date">
4224          2nd May 2009
4225       </div>
4226       <div class="body">
4227         <p>There are two software projects that have had huge influence on the
4228 quality of free software, and I wanted to mention both in case someone
4229 do not yet know them.</p>
4230
4231 <p>The first one is <a href="http://valgrind.org/">valgrind</a>, a
4232 tool to detect and expose errors in the memory handling of programs.
4233 It is easy to use, all one need to do is to run 'valgrind program',
4234 and it will report any problems on stdout.  It is even better if the
4235 program include debug information.  With debug information, it is able
4236 to report the source file name and line number where the problem
4237 occurs.  It can report things like 'reading past memory block in file
4238 X line N, the memory block was allocated in file Y, line M', and
4239 'using uninitialised value in control logic'.  This tool has made it
4240 trivial to investigate reproducible crash bugs in programs, and have
4241 reduced the number of this kind of bugs in free software a lot.
4242
4243 <p>The second one is
4244 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coverity">Coverity</a> which is
4245 a source code checker.  It is able to process the source of a program
4246 and find problems in the logic without running the program.  It
4247 started out as the Stanford Checker and became well known when it was
4248 used to find bugs in the Linux kernel.  It is now a commercial tool
4249 and the company behind it is running
4250 <a href="http://www.scan.coverity.com/">a community service</a> for the
4251 free software community, where a lot of free software projects get
4252 their source checked for free.  Several thousand defects have been
4253 found and fixed so far.  It can find errors like 'lock L taken in file
4254 X line N is never released if exiting in line M', or 'the code in file
4255 Y lines O to P can never be executed'.  The projects included in the
4256 community service project have managed to get rid of a lot of
4257 reliability problems thanks to Coverity.</p>
4258
4259 <p>I believe tools like this, that are able to automatically find
4260 errors in the source, are vital to improve the quality of software and
4261 make sure we can get rid of the crashing and failing software we are
4262 surrounded by today.</p>
4263
4264       </div>
4265       <div class="tags">
4266
4267
4268         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>.
4269
4270
4271       </div>
4272     </div>
4273     <div class="padding"></div>
4274
4275     <div class="entry">
4276       <div class="title">
4277         <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>
4278       </div>
4279       <div class="date">
4280         28th April 2009
4281       </div>
4282       <div class="body">
4283         <p>Julien Blache
4284 <a href="http://blog.technologeek.org/2009/04/12/214">claim that no
4285 patch is better than a useless patch</a>.  I completely disagree, as a
4286 patch allow one to discuss a concrete and proposed solution, and also
4287 prove that the issue at hand is important enough for someone to spent
4288 time on fixing it.  No patch do not provide any of these positive
4289 properties.</p>
4290
4291       </div>
4292       <div class="tags">
4293
4294
4295         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>.
4296
4297
4298       </div>
4299     </div>
4300     <div class="padding"></div>
4301
4302     <div class="entry">
4303       <div class="title">
4304         <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>
4305       </div>
4306       <div class="date">
4307         30th March 2009
4308       </div>
4309       <div class="body">
4310         <p>Where I work at the University of Oslo, one decision stand out as a
4311 very good one to form a long lived computer infrastructure.  It is the
4312 simple one, lost by many in todays computer industry: Standardize on
4313 open network protocols and open exchange/storage formats, not applications.
4314 Applications come and go, while protocols and files tend to stay, and
4315 thus one want to make it easy to change application and vendor, while
4316 avoiding conversion costs and locking users to a specific platform or
4317 application.</p>
4318
4319 <p>This approach make it possible to replace the client applications
4320 independently of the server applications.  One can even allow users to
4321 use several different applications as long as they handle the selected
4322 protocol and format.  In the normal case, only one client application
4323 is recommended and users only get help if they choose to use this
4324 application, but those that want to deviate from the easy path are not
4325 blocked from doing so.</p>
4326
4327 <p>It also allow us to replace the server side without forcing the
4328 users to replace their applications, and thus allow us to select the
4329 best server implementation at any moment, when scale and resouce
4330 requirements change.</p>
4331
4332 <p>I strongly recommend standardizing - on open network protocols and
4333 open formats, but I would never recommend standardizing on a single
4334 application that do not use open network protocol or open formats.</p>
4335
4336       </div>
4337       <div class="tags">
4338
4339
4340         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>.
4341
4342
4343       </div>
4344     </div>
4345     <div class="padding"></div>
4346
4347     <div class="entry">
4348       <div class="title">
4349         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Returning_from_Skolelinux_developer_gathering.html">Returning from Skolelinux developer gathering</a>
4350       </div>
4351       <div class="date">
4352         29th March 2009
4353       </div>
4354       <div class="body">
4355         <p>I'm sitting on the train going home from this weekends Debian
4356 Edu/Skolelinux development gathering.  I got a bit done tuning the
4357 desktop, and looked into the dynamic service location protocol
4358 implementation avahi.  It look like it could be useful for us.  Almost
4359 30 people participated, and I believe it was a great environment to
4360 get to know the Skolelinux system.  Walter Bender, involved in the
4361 development of the Sugar educational platform, presented his stuff and
4362 also helped me improve my OLPC installation.  He also showed me that
4363 his Turtle Art application can be used in standalone mode, and we
4364 agreed that I would help getting it packaged for Debian.  As a
4365 standalone application it would be great for Debian Edu.  We also
4366 tried to get the video conferencing working with two OLPCs, but that
4367 proved to be too hard for us.  The application seem to need more work
4368 before it is ready for me.  I look forward to getting home and relax
4369 now. :)</p>
4370
4371       </div>
4372       <div class="tags">
4373
4374
4375         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>.
4376
4377
4378       </div>
4379     </div>
4380     <div class="padding"></div>
4381
4382     <div class="entry">
4383       <div class="title">
4384         <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>
4385       </div>
4386       <div class="date">
4387         29th March 2009
4388       </div>
4389       <div class="body">
4390         <p>The state of standardized LDAP schemas on Linux is far from
4391 optimal.  There is RFC 2307 documenting one way to store NIS maps in
4392 LDAP, and a modified version of this normally called RFC 2307bis, with
4393 some modifications to be compatible with Active Directory.  The RFC
4394 specification handle the content of a lot of system databases, but do
4395 not handle DNS zones and DHCP configuration.</p>
4396
4397 <p>In <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux</a>,
4398 we would like to store information about users, SMB clients/hosts,
4399 filegroups, netgroups (users and hosts), DHCP and DNS configuration,
4400 and LTSP configuration in LDAP.  These objects have a lot in common,
4401 but with the current LDAP schemas it is not possible to have one
4402 object per entity.  For example, one need to have at least three LDAP
4403 objects for a given computer, one with the SMB related stuff, one with
4404 DNS information and another with DHCP information.  The schemas
4405 provided for DNS and DHCP are impossible to combine into one LDAP
4406 object.  In addition, it is impossible to implement quick queries for
4407 netgroup membership, because of the way NIS triples are implemented.
4408 It just do not scale.  I believe it is time for a few RFC
4409 specifications to cleam up this mess.</p>
4410
4411 <p>I would like to have one LDAP object representing each computer in
4412 the network, and this object can then keep the SMB (ie host key), DHCP
4413 (mac address/name) and DNS (name/IP address) settings in one place.
4414 It need to be efficently stored to make sure it scale well.</p>
4415
4416 <p>I would also like to have a quick way to map from a user or
4417 computer and to the net group this user or computer is a member.</p>
4418
4419 <p>Active Directory have done a better job than unix heads like myself
4420 in this regard, and the unix side need to catch up.  Time to start a
4421 new IETF work group?</p>
4422
4423       </div>
4424       <div class="tags">
4425
4426
4427         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>.
4428
4429
4430       </div>
4431     </div>
4432     <div class="padding"></div>
4433
4434     <div class="entry">
4435       <div class="title">
4436         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Endelig_er_Debian_Lenny_gitt_ut.html">Endelig er Debian Lenny gitt ut</a>
4437       </div>
4438       <div class="date">
4439         15th February 2009
4440       </div>
4441       <div class="body">
4442         <p>Endelig er <a href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian</a>
4443 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2009/20090214">Lenny</a> gitt ut.
4444 Et langt steg videre for Debian-prosjektet, og en rekke nye
4445 programpakker blir nå tilgjengelig for de av oss som bruker den
4446 stabile utgaven av Debian.  Neste steg er nå å få
4447 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a> /
4448 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/">Debian Edu</a> ferdig
4449 oppdatert for den nye utgaven, slik at en oppdatert versjon kan
4450 slippes løs på skolene.  Takk til alle debian-utviklerne som har
4451 gjort dette mulig.  Endelig er f.eks. fungerende avhengighetsstyrt
4452 bootsekvens tilgjengelig i stabil utgave, vha pakken
4453 <tt>insserv</tt>.</p>
4454
4455       </div>
4456       <div class="tags">
4457
4458
4459         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>.
4460
4461
4462       </div>
4463     </div>
4464     <div class="padding"></div>
4465
4466     <div class="entry">
4467       <div class="title">
4468         <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>
4469       </div>
4470       <div class="date">
4471          7th December 2008
4472       </div>
4473       <div class="body">
4474         <p>This weekend we had a small developer gathering for Debian Edu in
4475 Oslo.  Most of Saturday was used for the general assemly for the
4476 member organization, but the rest of the weekend I used to tune the
4477 LTSP installation.  LTSP now work out of the box on the 10-network.
4478 Acer Aspire One proved to be a very nice thin client, with both
4479 screen, mouse and keybard in a small box.  Was working on getting the
4480 diskless workstation setup configured out of the box, but did not
4481 finish it before the weekend was up.</p>
4482
4483 <p>Did not find time to look at the 4 VGA cards in one box we got from
4484 the Brazilian group, so that will have to wait for the next
4485 development gathering.  Would love to have the Debian Edu installer
4486 automatically detect and configure a multiseat setup when it find one
4487 of these cards.</p>
4488
4489       </div>
4490       <div class="tags">
4491
4492
4493         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>.
4494
4495
4496       </div>
4497     </div>
4498     <div class="padding"></div>
4499
4500     <div class="entry">
4501       <div class="title">
4502         <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>
4503       </div>
4504       <div class="date">
4505         25th November 2008
4506       </div>
4507       <div class="body">
4508         <p>Recently I have spent some time evaluating the multimedia browser
4509 plugins available in Debian Lenny, to see which one we should use by
4510 default in Debian Edu.  We need an embedded video playing plugin with
4511 control buttons to pause or stop the video, and capable of streaming
4512 all the multimedia content available on the web.  The test results and
4513 notes are available on
4514 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">the
4515 Debian wiki</a>.  I was surprised how few of the plugins are able to
4516 fill this need.  My personal video player favorite, VLC, has a really
4517 bad plugin which fail on a lot of the test pages.  A lot of the MIME
4518 types I would expect to work with any free software player (like
4519 video/ogg), just do not work.  And simple formats like the
4520 audio/x-mplegurl format (m3u playlists), just isn't supported by the
4521 totem and vlc plugins.  I hope the situation will improve soon.  No
4522 wonder sites use the proprietary Adobe flash to play video.</p>
4523
4524 <p>For Lenny, we seem to end up with the mplayer plugin.  It seem to
4525 be the only one fitting our needs. :/</p>
4526
4527       </div>
4528       <div class="tags">
4529
4530
4531         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>.
4532
4533
4534       </div>
4535     </div>
4536     <div class="padding"></div>
4537
4538     <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>
4539     <div id="sidebar">
4540
4541
4542
4543 <h2>Archive</h2>
4544 <ul>
4545
4546 <li>2013
4547 <ul>
4548
4549 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/01/">January (2)</a></li>
4550
4551 </ul></li>
4552
4553 <li>2012
4554 <ul>
4555
4556 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/01/">January (7)</a></li>
4557
4558 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/02/">February (10)</a></li>
4559
4560 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/03/">March (17)</a></li>
4561
4562 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/04/">April (12)</a></li>
4563
4564 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/05/">May (12)</a></li>
4565
4566 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/06/">June (20)</a></li>
4567
4568 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/07/">July (17)</a></li>
4569
4570 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/08/">August (6)</a></li>
4571
4572 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/09/">September (9)</a></li>
4573
4574 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/10/">October (17)</a></li>
4575
4576 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/11/">November (10)</a></li>
4577
4578 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/12/">December (7)</a></li>
4579
4580 </ul></li>
4581
4582 <li>2011
4583 <ul>
4584
4585 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/01/">January (16)</a></li>
4586
4587 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/02/">February (6)</a></li>
4588
4589 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/03/">March (6)</a></li>
4590
4591 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/04/">April (7)</a></li>
4592
4593 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/05/">May (3)</a></li>
4594
4595 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/06/">June (2)</a></li>
4596
4597 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/07/">July (7)</a></li>
4598
4599 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/08/">August (6)</a></li>
4600
4601 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/09/">September (4)</a></li>
4602
4603 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/10/">October (2)</a></li>
4604
4605 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/11/">November (3)</a></li>
4606
4607 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/12/">December (1)</a></li>
4608
4609 </ul></li>
4610
4611 <li>2010
4612 <ul>
4613
4614 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/01/">January (2)</a></li>
4615
4616 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/02/">February (1)</a></li>
4617
4618 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/03/">March (3)</a></li>
4619
4620 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/04/">April (3)</a></li>
4621
4622 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/05/">May (9)</a></li>
4623
4624 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/06/">June (14)</a></li>
4625
4626 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/07/">July (12)</a></li>
4627
4628 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/08/">August (13)</a></li>
4629
4630 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/09/">September (7)</a></li>
4631
4632 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/10/">October (9)</a></li>
4633
4634 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/11/">November (13)</a></li>
4635
4636 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/12/">December (12)</a></li>
4637
4638 </ul></li>
4639
4640 <li>2009
4641 <ul>
4642
4643 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/01/">January (8)</a></li>
4644
4645 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/02/">February (8)</a></li>
4646
4647 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/03/">March (12)</a></li>
4648
4649 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/04/">April (10)</a></li>
4650
4651 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/05/">May (9)</a></li>
4652
4653 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/06/">June (3)</a></li>
4654
4655 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/07/">July (4)</a></li>
4656
4657 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/08/">August (3)</a></li>
4658
4659 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/09/">September (1)</a></li>
4660
4661 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/10/">October (2)</a></li>
4662
4663 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/11/">November (3)</a></li>
4664
4665 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/12/">December (3)</a></li>
4666
4667 </ul></li>
4668
4669 <li>2008
4670 <ul>
4671
4672 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/11/">November (5)</a></li>
4673
4674 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/12/">December (7)</a></li>
4675
4676 </ul></li>
4677
4678 </ul>
4679
4680
4681
4682 <h2>Tags</h2>
4683 <ul>
4684
4685  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer (13)</a></li>
4686
4687  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/amiga">amiga (1)</a></li>
4688
4689  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/aros">aros (1)</a></li>
4690
4691  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bankid">bankid (4)</a></li>
4692
4693  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin (5)</a></li>
4694
4695  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem (12)</a></li>
4696
4697  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bsa">bsa (2)</a></li>
4698
4699  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian (59)</a></li>
4700
4701  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu (118)</a></li>
4702
4703  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan (9)</a></li>
4704
4705  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook (7)</a></li>
4706
4707  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/drivstoffpriser">drivstoffpriser (4)</a></li>
4708
4709  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english (166)</a></li>
4710
4711  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami (21)</a></li>
4712
4713  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fildeling">fildeling (12)</a></li>
4714
4715  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture (10)</a></li>
4716
4717  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen (9)</a></li>
4718
4719  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju (32)</a></li>
4720
4721  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kart">kart (17)</a></li>
4722
4723  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap (8)</a></li>
4724
4725  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lenker">lenker (6)</a></li>
4726
4727  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ltsp">ltsp (1)</a></li>
4728
4729  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia (25)</a></li>
4730
4731  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk (219)</a></li>
4732
4733  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug (148)</a></li>
4734
4735  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn (6)</a></li>
4736
4737  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/open311">open311 (2)</a></li>
4738
4739  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett (41)</a></li>
4740
4741  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern (61)</a></li>
4742
4743  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/raid">raid (1)</a></li>
4744
4745  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reprap">reprap (11)</a></li>
4746
4747  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rfid">rfid (2)</a></li>
4748
4749  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot (4)</a></li>
4750
4751  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rss">rss (1)</a></li>
4752
4753  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ruter">ruter (4)</a></li>
4754
4755  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/scraperwiki">scraperwiki (2)</a></li>
4756
4757  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet (28)</a></li>
4758
4759  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary (4)</a></li>
4760
4761  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/skepsis">skepsis (4)</a></li>
4762
4763  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard (39)</a></li>
4764
4765  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stavekontroll">stavekontroll (3)</a></li>
4766
4767  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stortinget">stortinget (5)</a></li>
4768
4769  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance (12)</a></li>
4770
4771  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sysadmin">sysadmin (1)</a></li>
4772
4773  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/valg">valg (7)</a></li>
4774
4775  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video (35)</a></li>
4776
4777  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/vitenskap">vitenskap (4)</a></li>
4778
4779  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web (26)</a></li>
4780
4781 </ul>
4782
4783
4784     </div>
4785     <p style="text-align: right">
4786  Created by <a href="http://steve.org.uk/Software/chronicle">Chronicle v4.4</a>
4787 </p>
4788
4789   </body>
4790 </html>