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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/Intel_SSD_520_Series_180_GB_with_Lenovo_firmware_still_lock_up_from_sustained_writes.html">Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB with Lenovo firmware still lock up from sustained writes</a>
  26       </div>
  27       <div class="date">
  28         10th July 2013
  29       </div>
  30       <div class="body">
  31         <p>A few days ago, I wrote about
  32 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html">the
  33 problems I experienced with my new X230 and its SSD disk</a>, which
  34 was dying during installation because it is unable to cope with
  35 sustained write.  My supplier is in contact with
  36 <a href="http://www.lenovo.com/">Lenovo</a>, and they wanted to send a
  37 replacement disk to try to fix the problem.  They decided to send an
  38 identical model, so my hopes for a permanent fix was slim.</p>
  39
  40 <p>Anyway, today I got the replacement disk and tried to install
  41 Debian Edu Wheezy with encrypted disk on it.  The new disk have the
  42 same firmware version as the original.  This time my hope raised
  43 slightly as the installation progressed, as the original disk used to
  44 die after 4-7% of the disk was written to, while this time it kept
  45 going past 10%, 20%, 40% and even past 50%.  But around 60%, the disk
  46 died again and I was back on square one.  I still do not have a new
  47 laptop with a disk I can trust.  I can not live with a disk that might
  48 lock up when I download a new
  49 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> ISO or
  50 other large files.  I look forward to hearing from my supplier with
  51 the next proposal from Lenovo.</p>
  52
  53 <p>The original disk is marked Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB,
  54 11S0C38722Z1ZNME35X1TR, ISN: CVCV321407HB180EGN, SA: G57560302, FW:
  55 LF1i, 29MAY2013, PBA: G39779-300, LBA 351,651,888, LI P/N: 0C38722,
  56 Pb-free 2LI, LC P/N: 16-200366, WWN: 55CD2E40002756C4, Model:
  57 SSDSC2BW180A3L 2.5" 6Gb/s SATA SSD 180G 5V 1A, ASM P/N 0C38732, FRU
  58 P/N 45N8295, P0C38732.</p>
  59
  60 <p>The replacement disk is marked Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB,
  61 11S0C38722Z1ZNDE34N0L0, ISN: CVCV315306RK180EGN, SA: G57560-302, FW:
  62 LF1i, 22APR2013, PBA: G39779-300, LBA 351,651,888, LI P/N: 0C38722,
  63 Pb-free 2LI, LC P/N: 16-200366, WWN: 55CD2E40000AB69E, Model:
  64 SSDSC2BW180A3L 2.5" 6Gb/s SATA SSD 180G 5V 1A, ASM P/N 0C38732, FRU
  65 P/N 45N8295, P0C38732.</p>
  66
  67 <p>The only difference is in the first number (serial number?), ISN,
  68 SA, date and WNPP values.  Mentioning all the details here in case
  69 someone is able to use the information to find a way to identify the
  70 failing disk among working ones (if any such working disk actually
  71 exist).</p>
  72
  73       </div>
  74       <div class="tags">
  75
  76
  77         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>.
  78
  79
  80       </div>
  81     </div>
  82     <div class="padding"></div>
  83
  84     <div class="entry">
  85       <div class="title">
  86         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/July_13th__Debian_Ubuntu_BSP_and_Skolelinux_Debian_Edu_developer_gathering_in_Oslo.html">July 13th: Debian/Ubuntu BSP and Skolelinux/Debian Edu developer gathering in Oslo</a>
  87       </div>
  88       <div class="date">
  89          9th July 2013
  90       </div>
  91       <div class="body">
  92         <p>The upcoming Saturday, 2013-07-13, we are organising a combined
  93 Debian Edu developer gathering and Debian and Ubuntu bug squashing
  94 party in Oslo.  It is organised by <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the
  95 member assosiation NUUG</a> and
  96 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">the Debian Edu / Skolelinux
  97 project</a> together with <a href="http://bitraf.no/">the hack space
  98 Bitraf</a>.</p>
  99
 100 <p>It starts 10:00 and continue until late evening.  Everyone is
 101 welcome, and there is no fee to participate.  There is on the other
 102 hand limited space, and only room for 30 people.  Please put your name
 103 on <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/BSP/2013/07/13/no/Oslo">the event
 104 wiki page</a> if you plan to join us.</p>
 105
 106       </div>
 107       <div class="tags">
 108
 109
 110         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>.
 111
 112
 113       </div>
 114     </div>
 115     <div class="padding"></div>
 116
 117     <div class="entry">
 118       <div class="title">
 119         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html">The Thinkpad is dead, long live the Thinkpad X230?</a>
 120       </div>
 121       <div class="date">
 122          5th July 2013
 123       </div>
 124       <div class="body">
 125         <p>Half a year ago, I reported that I had to find a
 126 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html">replacement
 127 for my trusty old Thinkpad X41</a>.  Unfortunately I did not have much
 128 time to spend on it, and it took a while to find a model I believe
 129 will do the job, but two days ago the replacement finally arrived.  I
 130 ended up picking a
 131 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/lenovo_thinkpad_x230">Thinkpad X230</a>
 132 with SSD disk (NZDAJMN).  I first test installed Debian Edu Wheezy as
 133 a roaming workstation, and it seemed to work flawlessly.  But my
 134 second installation with encrypted disk was not as successful.  More
 135 on that below.</p>
 136
 137 <p>I had a hard time trying to track down a good laptop, as my most
 138 important requirements (robust and with a good keyboard) are never
 139 listed in the feature list.  But I did get good help from the search
 140 feature at <a href="http://www.prisjakt.no/">Prisjakt</a>, which
 141 allowed me to limit the list of interesting laptops based on my other
 142 requirements.  A bit surprising that SSD disk are not disks according
 143 to that search interface, so I had to drop specifying the number of
 144 disks from my search parameters.  I also asked around among friends to
 145 get their impression on keyboards and robustness.</p>
 146
 147 <p>So the new laptop arrived, and it is quite a lot wider than the
 148 X41.  I am not quite convinced about the keyboard, as it is
 149 significantly wider than my old keyboard, and I have to stretch my
 150 hand a lot more to reach the edges.  But the key response is fairly
 151 good and the individual key shape is fairly easy to handle, so I hope
 152 I will get used to it.  My old X40 was starting to fail, and I really
 153 needed a new laptop now. :)</p>
 154
 155 <p>Turning off the touch pad was simple.  All it took was a quick
 156 visit to the BIOS during boot it disable it.</p>
 157
 158 <p>But there is a fatal problem with the laptop.  The 180 GB SSD disk
 159 lock up during load.  And this happen when installing Debian Wheezy
 160 with encrypted disk, while the disk is being filled with random data.
 161 I also tested to install Ubuntu Raring, and it happen there too if I
 162 reenable the code to fill the disk with random data (it is disabled by
 163 default in Ubuntu).  And the bug with is already known.  It was
 164 reported to Debian as <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/691427">BTS
 165 report #691427 2012-10-25</a> (journal commit I/O error on brand-new
 166 Thinkpad T430s ext4 on lvm on SSD).  It is also reported to the Linux
 167 kernel developers as
 168 <a href="https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=51861">Kernel bugzilla
 169 report #51861 2012-12-20</a> (Intel SSD 520 stops working under load
 170 (SSDSC2BW180A3L in Lenovo ThinkPad T430s)). It is also reported on the
 171 Lenovo forums, both for
 172 <a href="http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T400-T500-and-newer-T-series/T430s-Intel-SSD-520-180GB-issue/m-p/1070549">T430
 173 2012-11-10</a> and for
 174 <a href="http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/X-Series-ThinkPad-Laptops/x230-SATA-errors-with-180GB-Intel-520-SSD-under-heavy-write-load/m-p/1068147">X230
 175 03-20-2013</a>.  The problem do not only affect installation.  The
 176 reports state that the disk lock up during use if many writes are done
 177 on the disk, so it is much no use to work around the installation
 178 problem and end up with a computer that can lock up at any moment.
 179 There is even a
 180 <a href="https://git.efficios.com/?p=test-ssd.git">small C program
 181 available</a> that will lock up the hard drive after running a few
 182 minutes by writing to a file.</p>
 183
 184 <p>I've contacted my supplier and asked how to handle this, and after
 185 contacting PCHELP Norway (request 01D1FDP) which handle support
 186 requests for Lenovo, his first suggestion was to upgrade the disk
 187 firmware.  Unfortunately there is no newer firmware available from
 188 Lenovo, as my disk already have the most recent one (version LF1i).  I
 189 hope to hear more from him today and hope the problem can be
 190 fixed. :)</p>
 191
 192       </div>
 193       <div class="tags">
 194
 195
 196         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>.
 197
 198
 199       </div>
 200     </div>
 201     <div class="padding"></div>
 202
 203     <div class="entry">
 204       <div class="title">
 205         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230.html">The Thinkpad is dead, long live the Thinkpad X230</a>
 206       </div>
 207       <div class="date">
 208          4th July 2013
 209       </div>
 210       <div class="body">
 211         <p>Half a year ago, I reported that I had to find a replacement for my
 212 trusty old Thinkpad X41.  Unfortunately I did not have much time to
 213 spend on it, but today the replacement finally arrived.  I ended up
 214 picking a <a href="http://www.linlap.com/lenovo_thinkpad_x230">Thinkpad
 215 X230</a> with SSD disk (NZDAJMN).  I first test installed Debian Edu
 216 Wheezy as a roaming workstation, and it worked flawlessly.  As I write
 217 this, it is installing what I hope will be a more final installation,
 218 with a encrypted hard drive to ensure any dope head stealing it end up
 219 with an expencive door stop.</p>
 220
 221 <p>I had a hard time trying to track down a good laptop, as my most
 222 important requirements (robust and with a good keyboard) are never
 223 listed in the feature list.  But I did get good help from the search
 224 feature at <ahref="http://www.prisjakt.no/">Prisjakt</a>, which
 225 allowed me to limit the list of interesting laptops based on my other
 226 requirements.  A bit surprising that SSD disk are not disks, so I had
 227 to drop number of disks from my search parameters.</p>
 228
 229 <p>I am not quite convinced about the keyboard, as it is significantly
 230 wider than my old keyboard, and I have to stretch my hand a lot more
 231 to reach the edges.  But the key response is fairly good and the
 232 individual key shape is fairly easy to handle, so I hope I will get
 233 used to it.  My old X40 was starting to fail, and I really needed a
 234 new laptop now. :)</p>
 235
 236 <p>I look forward to figuring out how to turn off the touch pad.</p>
 237
 238       </div>
 239       <div class="tags">
 240
 241
 242         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>.
 243
 244
 245       </div>
 246     </div>
 247     <div class="padding"></div>
 248
 249     <div class="entry">
 250       <div class="title">
 251         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatically_locate_and_install_required_firmware_packages_on_Debian__Isenkram_0_4_.html">Automatically locate and install required firmware packages on Debian (Isenkram 0.4)</a>
 252       </div>
 253       <div class="date">
 254         25th June 2013
 255       </div>
 256       <div class="body">
 257         <p>It annoys me when the computer fail to do automatically what it is
 258 perfectly capable of, and I have to do it manually to get things
 259 working.  One such task is to find out what firmware packages are
 260 needed to get the hardware on my computer working.  Most often this
 261 affect the wifi card, but some times it even affect the RAID
 262 controller or the ethernet card.  Today I pushed version 0.4 of the
 263 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">Isenkram package</a>
 264 including a new script isenkram-autoinstall-firmware handling the
 265 process of asking all the loaded kernel modules what firmware files
 266 they want, find debian packages providing these files and install the
 267 debian packages.  Here is a test run on my laptop:</p>
 268
 269 <p><pre>
 270 # isenkram-autoinstall-firmware
 271 info: kernel drivers requested extra firmware: ipw2200-bss.fw ipw2200-ibss.fw ipw2200-sniffer.fw
 272 info: fetching http://http.debian.net/debian/dists/squeeze/Contents-i386.gz
 273 info: locating packages with the requested firmware files
 274 info: Updating APT sources after adding non-free APT source
 275 info: trying to install firmware-ipw2x00
 276 firmware-ipw2x00
 277 firmware-ipw2x00
 278 Preconfiguring packages ...
 279 Selecting previously deselected package firmware-ipw2x00.
 280 (Reading database ... 259727 files and directories currently installed.)
 281 Unpacking firmware-ipw2x00 (from .../firmware-ipw2x00_0.28+squeeze1_all.deb) ...
 282 Setting up firmware-ipw2x00 (0.28+squeeze1) ...
 283 #
 284 </pre></p>
 285
 286 <p>When all the requested firmware is present, a simple message is
 287 printed instead:</p>
 288
 289 <p><pre>
 290 # isenkram-autoinstall-firmware
 291 info: did not find any firmware files requested by loaded kernel modules.  exiting
 292 #
 293 </pre></p>
 294
 295 <p>It could use some polish, but it is already working well and saving
 296 me some time when setting up new machines. :)</p>
 297
 298 <p>So, how does it work?  It look at the set of currently loaded
 299 kernel modules, and look up each one of them using modinfo, to find
 300 the firmware files listed in the module meta-information.  Next, it
 301 download the Contents file from a nearby APT mirror, and search for
 302 the firmware files in this file to locate the package with the
 303 requested firmware file.  If the package is in the non-free section, a
 304 non-free APT source is added and the package is installed using
 305 <tt>apt-get install</tt>.  The end result is a slightly better working
 306 machine.</p>
 307
 308 <p>I hope someone find time to implement a more polished version of
 309 this script as part of the hw-detect debian-installer module, to
 310 finally fix <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/655507">BTS report
 311 #655507</a>.  There really is no need to insert USB sticks with
 312 firmware during a PXE install when the packages already are available
 313 from the nearby Debian mirror.</p>
 314
 315       </div>
 316       <div class="tags">
 317
 318
 319         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
 320
 321
 322       </div>
 323     </div>
 324     <div class="padding"></div>
 325
 326     <div class="entry">
 327       <div class="title">
 328         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Fixing_the_Linux_black_screen_of_death_on_machines_with_Intel_HD_video.html">Fixing the Linux black screen of death on machines with Intel HD video</a>
 329       </div>
 330       <div class="date">
 331         11th June 2013
 332       </div>
 333       <div class="body">
 334         <p>When installing RedHat, Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu on some machines,
 335 the screen just turn black when Linux boot, either during installation
 336 or on first boot from the hard disk.  I've seen it once in a while the
 337 last few years, but only recently understood the cause.  I've seen it
 338 on HP laptops, and on my latest acquaintance the Packard Bell laptop.
 339 The reason seem to be in the wiring of some laptops.  The system to
 340 control the screen background light is inverted, so when Linux try to
 341 turn the brightness fully on, it end up turning it off instead.  I do
 342 not know which Linux drivers are affected, but this post is about the
 343 i915 driver used by the
 344 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Packard Bell
 345 EasyNote LV</a>, Thinkpad X40 and many other laptops.</p>
 346
 347 <p>The problem can be worked around two ways.  Either by adding
 348 i915.invert_brightness=1 as a kernel option, or by adding a file in
 349 /etc/modprobe.d/ to tell modprobe to add the invert_brightness=1
 350 option when it load the i915 kernel module.  On Debian and Ubuntu, it
 351 can be done by running these commands as root:</p>
 352
 353 <pre>
 354 echo options i915 invert_brightness=1 | tee /etc/modprobe.d/i915.conf
 355 update-initramfs -u -k all
 356 </pre>
 357
 358 <p>Since March 2012 there is
 359 <a href="http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=4dca20efb1a9c2efefc28ad2867e5d6c3f5e1955">a
 360 mechanism in the Linux kernel</a> to tell the i915 driver which
 361 hardware have this problem, and get the driver to invert the
 362 brightness setting automatically.  To use it, one need to add a row in
 363 <a href="http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_display.c">the
 364 intel_quirks array</a> in the driver source
 365 <tt>drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_display.c</tt> (look for "<tt>static
 366 struct intel_quirk intel_quirks</tt>"), specifying the PCI device
 367 number (vendor number 8086 is assumed) and subdevice vendor and device
 368 number.</p>
 369
 370 <p>My Packard Bell EasyNote LV got this output from <tt>lspci
 371 -vvnn</tt> for the video card in question:</p>
 372
 373 <p><pre>
 374 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation \
 375     3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller [8086:0156] \
 376     (rev 09) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
 377  Subsystem: Acer Incorporated [ALI] Device [1025:0688]
 378  Control: I/O+ Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- \
 379     ParErr- Stepping- SE RR- FastB2B- DisINTx+
 380  Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort- \
 381     <TAbort- <MAbort->SERR- <PERR- INTx-
 382  Latency: 0
 383  Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 42
 384  Region 0: Memory at c2000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4M]
 385  Region 2: Memory at b0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
 386  Region 4: I/O ports at 4000 [size=64]
 387  Expansion ROM at <unassigned> [disabled]
 388  Capabilities: <access denied>
 389  Kernel driver in use: i915
 390 </pre></p>
 391
 392 <p>The resulting intel_quirks entry would then look like this:</p>
 393
 394 <p><pre>
 395 struct intel_quirk intel_quirks[] = {
 396        ...
 397         /* Packard Bell EasyNote LV11HC needs invert brightness quirk */
 398         { 0x0156, 0x1025, 0x0688, quirk_invert_brightness },
 399        ...
 400 }
 401 </pre></p>
 402
 403 <p>According to the kernel module instructions (as seen using
 404 <tt>modinfo i915</tt>), information about hardware needing the
 405 invert_brightness flag should be sent to the
 406 <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/dri-devel">dri-devel
 407 (at) lists.freedesktop.org</a> mailing list to reach the kernel
 408 developers.  But my email about the laptop sent 2013-06-03 have not
 409 yet shown up in
 410 <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2013-June/thread.html">the
 411 web archive for the mailing list</a>, so I suspect they do not accept
 412 emails from non-subscribers.  Because of this, I sent my patch also to
 413 the Debian bug tracking system instead as
 414 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/710938">BTS report #710938</a>, to make
 415 sure the patch is not lost.</p>
 416
 417 <p>Unfortunately, it is not enough to fix the kernel to get Laptops
 418 with this problem working properly with Linux.  If you use Gnome, your
 419 worries should be over at this point.  But if you use KDE, there is
 420 something in KDE ignoring the invert_brightness setting and turning on
 421 the screen during login.  I've reported it to Debian as
 422 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/711237">BTS report #711237</a>, and
 423 have no idea yet how to figure out exactly what subsystem is doing
 424 this.  Perhaps you can help?  Perhaps you know what the Gnome
 425 developers did to handle this, and this can give a clue to the KDE
 426 developers?  Or you know where in KDE the screen brightness is changed
 427 during login?  If so, please update the BTS report (or get in touch if
 428 you do not know how to update BTS).</p>
 429
 430       </div>
 431       <div class="tags">
 432
 433
 434         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>.
 435
 436
 437       </div>
 438     </div>
 439     <div class="padding"></div>
 440
 441     <div class="entry">
 442       <div class="title">
 443         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_install_Linux_on_a_Packard_Bell_Easynote_LV_preinstalled_with_Windows_8.html">How to install Linux on a Packard Bell Easynote LV preinstalled with Windows 8</a>
 444       </div>
 445       <div class="date">
 446         27th May 2013
 447       </div>
 448       <div class="body">
 449         <p>Two days ago, I asked
 450 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_can_I_install_Linux_on_a_Packard_Bell_Easynote_LV_preinstalled_with_Windows_8_.html">how
 451 I could install Linux on a Packard Bell EasyNote LV computer
 452 preinstalled with Windows 8</a>.  I found a solution, but am horrified
 453 with the obstacles put in the way of Linux users on a laptop with UEFI
 454 and Windows 8.</p>
 455
 456 <p>I never found out if the cause of my problems were the use of UEFI
 457 secure booting or fast boot.  I suspect fast boot was the problem,
 458 causing the firmware to boot directly from HD without considering any
 459 key presses and alternative devices, but do not know UEFI settings
 460 enough to tell.</p>
 461
 462 <p>There is no way to install Linux on the machine in question without
 463 opening the box and disconnecting the hard drive!  This is as far as I
 464 can tell, the only way to get access to the firmware setup menu
 465 without accepting the Windows 8 license agreement.  I am told (and
 466 found description on how to) that it is possible to configure the
 467 firmware setup once booted into Windows 8.  But as I believe the terms
 468 of that agreement are completely unacceptable, accepting the license
 469 was never an alternative.  I do not enter agreements I do not intend
 470 to follow.</p>
 471
 472 <p>I feared I had to return the laptops and ask for a refund, and
 473 waste many hours on this, but luckily there was a way to get it to
 474 work.  But I would not recommend it to anyone planning to run Linux on
 475 it, and I have become sceptical to Windows 8 certified laptops.  Is
 476 this the way Linux will be forced out of the market place, by making
 477 it close to impossible for "normal" users to install Linux without
 478 accepting the Microsoft Windows license terms?  Or at least not
 479 without risking to loose the warranty?</p>
 480
 481 <p>I've updated the
 482 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Linux Laptop
 483 wiki page for Packard Bell EasyNote LV</a>, to ensure the next person
 484 do not have to struggle as much as I did to get Linux into the
 485 machine.</p>
 486
 487 <p>Thanks to Bob Rosbag, Florian Weimer, Philipp Kern, Ben Hutching,
 488 Michael Tokarev and others for feedback and ideas.</p>
 489
 490       </div>
 491       <div class="tags">
 492
 493
 494         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>.
 495
 496
 497       </div>
 498     </div>
 499     <div class="padding"></div>
 500
 501     <div class="entry">
 502       <div class="title">
 503         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_can_I_install_Linux_on_a_Packard_Bell_Easynote_LV_preinstalled_with_Windows_8_.html">How can I install Linux on a Packard Bell Easynote LV preinstalled with Windows 8?</a>
 504       </div>
 505       <div class="date">
 506         25th May 2013
 507       </div>
 508       <div class="body">
 509         <p>I've run into quite a problem the last few days.  I bought three
 510 new laptops for my parents and a few others.  I bought Packard Bell
 511 Easynote LV to run Kubuntu on and use as their home computer.  But I
 512 am completely unable to figure out how to install Linux on it.  The
 513 computer is preinstalled with Windows 8, and I suspect it uses UEFI
 514 instead of a BIOS to boot.</p>
 515
 516 <p>The problem is that I am unable to get it to PXE boot, and unable
 517 to get it to boot the Linux installer from my USB stick.  I have yet
 518 to try the DVD install, and still hope it will work.  when I turn on
 519 the computer, there is no information on what buttons to press to get
 520 the normal boot menu.  I expect to get some boot menu to select PXE or
 521 USB stick booting.  When booting, it first ask for the language to
 522 use, then for some regional settings, and finally if I will accept the
 523 Windows 8 terms of use.  As these terms are completely unacceptable to
 524 me, I have no other choice but to turn off the computer and try again
 525 to get it to boot the Linux installer.</p>
 526
 527 <p>I have gathered my findings so far on a Linlap page about the
 528 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Packard Bell
 529 EasyNote LV</a> model.  If you have any idea how to get Linux
 530 installed on this machine, please get in touch or update that wiki
 531 page.  If I can't find a way to install Linux, I will have to return
 532 the laptop to the seller and find another machine for my parents.</p>
 533
 534 <p>I wonder, is this the way Linux will be forced out of the market
 535 using UEFI and "secure boot" by making it impossible to install Linux
 536 on new Laptops?</p>
 537
 538       </div>
 539       <div class="tags">
 540
 541
 542         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>.
 543
 544
 545       </div>
 546     </div>
 547     <div class="padding"></div>
 548
 549     <div class="entry">
 550       <div class="title">
 551         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_transform_a_Debian_based_system_to_a_Debian_Edu_installation.html">How to transform a Debian based system to a Debian Edu installation</a>
 552       </div>
 553       <div class="date">
 554         17th May 2013
 555       </div>
 556       <div class="body">
 557         <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> is
 558 an operating system based on Debian intended for use in schools.  It
 559 contain a turn-key solution for the computer network provided to
 560 pupils in the primary schools.  It provide both the central server,
 561 network boot servers and desktop environments with heaps of
 562 educational software.  The project was founded almost 12 years ago,
 563 2001-07-02.  If you want to support the project, which is in need for
 564 cash to fund developer gatherings and other project related activity,
 565 <a href="http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">please
 566 donate some money</a>.
 567
 568 <p>A topic that come up again and again on the Debian Edu mailing
 569 lists and elsewhere, is the question on how to transform a Debian or
 570 Ubuntu installation into a Debian Edu installation.  It isn't very
 571 hard, and last week I wrote a script to replicate the steps done by
 572 the Debian Edu installer.</p>
 573
 574 <p>The script,
 575 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/branches/wheezy/debian-edu-config/share/debian-edu-config/tools/debian-edu-bless?view=markup">debian-edu-bless<a/>
 576 in the debian-edu-config package, will go through these six steps and
 577 transform an existing Debian Wheezy or Ubuntu (untested) installation
 578 into a Debian Edu Workstation:</p>
 579
 580 <ol>
 581
 582 <li>Add skolelinux related APT sources.</li>
 583 <li>Create /etc/debian-edu/config with the wanted configuration.</li>
 584 <li>Install debian-edu-install to load preseeding values and pull in
 585     our configuration.</li>
 586 <li>Preseed debconf database with profile setup in
 587     /etc/debian-edu/config, and run tasksel to install packages
 588     according to the profile specified in the config above,
 589     overriding some of the Debian automation machinery.</li>
 590 <li>Run debian-edu-cfengine-D installation to configure everything
 591     that could not be done using preseeding.</li>
 592 <li>Ask for a reboot to enable all the configuration changes.</li>
 593
 594 </ol>
 595
 596 <p>There are some steps in the Debian Edu installation that can not be
 597 replicated like this.  Disk partitioning and LVM setup, for example.
 598 So this script just assume there is enough disk space to install all
 599 the needed packages.</p>
 600
 601 <p>The script was created to help a Debian Edu student working on
 602 setting up <a href="http://www.raspberrypi.org">Raspberry Pi</a> as a
 603 Debian Edu client, and using it he can take the existing
 604 <a href="http://www.raspbian.org/FrontPage‎">Raspbian</a> installation and
 605 transform it into a fully functioning Debian Edu Workstation (or
 606 Roaming Workstation, or whatever :).</p>
 607
 608 <p>The default setting in the script is to create a KDE Workstation.
 609 If a LXDE based Roaming workstation is wanted instead, modify the
 610 PROFILE and DESKTOP values at the top to look like this instead:</p>
 611
 612 <p><pre>
 613 PROFILE="Roaming-Workstation"
 614 DESKTOP="lxde"
 615 </pre></p>
 616
 617 <p>The script could even become useful to set up Debian Edu servers in
 618 the cloud, by starting with a virtual Debian installation at some
 619 virtual hosting service and setting up all the services on first
 620 boot.</p>
 621
 622       </div>
 623       <div class="tags">
 624
 625
 626         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>.
 627
 628
 629       </div>
 630     </div>
 631     <div class="padding"></div>
 632
 633     <div class="entry">
 634       <div class="title">
 635         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian__the_Linux_distribution_of_choice_for_LEGO_designers_.html">Debian, the Linux distribution of choice for LEGO designers?</a>
 636       </div>
 637       <div class="date">
 638         11th May 2013
 639       </div>
 640       <div class="body">
 641         <P>In January,
 642 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_IRC_channel_for_LEGO_designers_using_Debian.html">I
 643 announced a</a> new <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">IRC
 644 channel #debian-lego</a>, for those of us in the Debian and Linux
 645 community interested in <a href="http://www.lego.com/">LEGO</a>, the
 646 marvellous construction system from Denmark.  We also created
 647 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">a wiki page</a> to have
 648 a place to take notes and write down our plans and hopes.  And several
 649 people showed up to help.  I was very happy to see the effect of my
 650 call.  Since the small start, we have a debtags tag
 651 <a href="http://debtags.debian.net/search/bytag?wl=hardware::hobby:lego">hardware::hobby:lego</a>
 652 tag for LEGO related packages, and now count 10 packages related to
 653 LEGO and <a href="http://mindstorms.lego.com/">Mindstorms</a>:</p>
 654
 655 <p><table>
 656 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/brickos">brickos</a></td><td>alternative OS for LEGO Mindstorms RCX. Supports development in C/C++</td></tr>
 657 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/leocad">leocad</a></td><td>virtual brick CAD software</td></tr>
 658 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/libnxt">libnxt</a></td><td>utility library for talking to the LEGO Mindstorms NX</td></tr>
 659 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/lnpd">lnpd</a></td><td>daemon for LNP communication with BrickOS</td></tr>
 660 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/nbc">nbc</a></td><td>compiler for LEGO Mindstorms NXT bricks</td></tr>
 661 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/nqc">nqc</a></td><td>Not Quite C compiler for LEGO Mindstorms RCX</td></tr>
 662 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/python-nxt">python-nxt</a></td><td>python driver/interface/wrapper for the Lego Mindstorms NXT robot</td></tr>
 663 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/python-nxt-filer">python-nxt-filer</a></td><td>simple GUI to manage files on a LEGO Mindstorms NXT</td></tr>
 664 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/scratch">scratch</a></td><td>easy to use programming environment for ages 8 and up</td></tr>
 665 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/t2n">t2n</a></td><td>simple command-line tool for Lego NXT</td></tr>
 666 </table></p>
 667
 668 <p>Some of these are available in Wheezy, and all but one are
 669 currently available in Jessie/testing.  leocad is so far only
 670 available in experimental.</p>
 671
 672 <p>If you care about LEGO in Debian, please join us on IRC and help
 673 adding the rest of the great free software tools available on Linux
 674 for LEGO designers.</p>
 675
 676       </div>
 677       <div class="tags">
 678
 679
 680         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
 681
 682
 683       </div>
 684     </div>
 685     <div class="padding"></div>
 686
 687     <div class="entry">
 688       <div class="title">
 689         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Wheezy_is_out___and_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_should_soon_follow___newinwheezy.html">Debian Wheezy is out - and Debian Edu / Skolelinux should soon follow! #newinwheezy</a>
 690       </div>
 691       <div class="date">
 692          5th May 2013
 693       </div>
 694       <div class="body">
 695         <p>When I woke up this morning, I was very happy to see that the
 696 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2013/20130504">release announcement
 697 for Debian Wheezy</a> was waiting in my mail box.  This is a great
 698 Debian release, and I expect to move my machines at home over to it fairly
 699 soon.</p>
 700
 701 <p>The new debian release contain heaps of new stuff, and one program
 702 in particular make me very happy to see included.  The
 703 <a href="http://scratch.mit.edu/">Scratch</a> program, made famous by
 704 the <a href="http://www.code.org/">Teach kids code</a> movement, is
 705 included for the first time.  Alongside similar programs like
 706 <a href="http://edu.kde.org/kturtle/">kturtle</a> and
 707 <a href="http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Turtle_Art">turtleart</a>,
 708 it allow for visual programming where syntax errors can not happen,
 709 and a friendly programming environment for learning to control the
 710 computer.  Scratch will also be included in the next release of Debian
 711 Edu.</a>
 712
 713 <p>And now that Wheezy is wrapped up, we can wrap up the next Debian
 714 Edu/Skolelinux release too.  The
 715 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/2013/04/msg00132.html">first
 716 alpha release</a> went out last week, and the next should soon
 717 follow.<p>
 718
 719       </div>
 720       <div class="tags">
 721
 722
 723         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>.
 724
 725
 726       </div>
 727     </div>
 728     <div class="padding"></div>
 729
 730     <div class="entry">
 731       <div class="title">
 732         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Isenkram_0_2_finally_in_the_Debian_archive.html">Isenkram 0.2 finally in the Debian archive</a>
 733       </div>
 734       <div class="date">
 735          3rd April 2013
 736       </div>
 737       <div class="body">
 738         <p>Today the <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">Isenkram
 739 package</a> finally made it into the archive, after lingering in NEW
 740 for many months.  I uploaded it to the Debian experimental suite
 741 2013-01-27, and today it was accepted into the archive.</p>
 742
 743 <p>Isenkram is a system for suggesting to users what packages to
 744 install to work with a pluggable hardware device.  The suggestion pop
 745 up when the device is plugged in.  For example if a Lego Mindstorm NXT
 746 is inserted, it will suggest to install the program needed to program
 747 the NXT controller.  Give it a go, and report bugs and suggestions to
 748 BTS. :)</p>
 749
 750       </div>
 751       <div class="tags">
 752
 753
 754         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
 755
 756
 757       </div>
 758     </div>
 759     <div class="padding"></div>
 760
 761     <div class="entry">
 762       <div class="title">
 763         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Bitcoin_GUI_now_available_from_Debian_unstable__and_Ubuntu_raring_.html">Bitcoin GUI now available from Debian/unstable (and Ubuntu/raring)</a>
 764       </div>
 765       <div class="date">
 766          2nd February 2013
 767       </div>
 768       <div class="body">
 769         <p>My
 770 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_backport_bitcoin_qt_version_0_7_2_2_to_Debian_Squeeze.html">last
 771 bitcoin related blog post</a> mentioned that the new
 772 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">bitcoin package</a> for
 773 Debian was waiting in NEW.  It was accepted by the Debian ftp-masters
 774 2013-01-19, and have been available in unstable since then.  It was
 775 automatically copied to Ubuntu, and is available in their Raring
 776 version too.</p>
 777
 778 <p>But there is a strange problem with the build that block this new
 779 version from being available on the i386 and kfreebsd-i386
 780 architectures.  For some strange reason, the autobuilders in Debian
 781 for these architectures fail to run the test suite on these
 782 architectures (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/672524">BTS #672524</a>).
 783 We are so far unable to reproduce it when building it manually, and
 784 no-one have been able to propose a fix.  If you got an idea what is
 785 failing, please let us know via the BTS.</p>
 786
 787 <p>One feature that is annoying me with of the bitcoin client, because
 788 I often run low on disk space, is the fact that the client will exit
 789 if it run short on space (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/696715">BTS
 790 #696715</a>).  So make sure you have enough disk space when you run
 791 it. :)</p>
 792
 793 <p>As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 794 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 795 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 796
 797       </div>
 798       <div class="tags">
 799
 800
 801         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>.
 802
 803
 804       </div>
 805     </div>
 806     <div class="padding"></div>
 807
 808     <div class="entry">
 809       <div class="title">
 810         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html">Welcome to the world, Isenkram!</a>
 811       </div>
 812       <div class="date">
 813         22nd January 2013
 814       </div>
 815       <div class="body">
 816         <p>Yesterday, I
 817 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_prototype_ready_making_hardware_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">asked
 818 for testers</a> for my prototype for making Debian better at handling
 819 pluggable hardware devices, which I
 820 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">set
 821 out to create</a> earlier this month.  Several valuable testers showed
 822 up, and caused me to really want to to open up the development to more
 823 people.  But before I did this, I want to come up with a sensible name
 824 for this project.  Today I finally decided on a new name, and I have
 825 renamed the project from hw-support-handler to this new name.  In the
 826 process, I moved the source to git and made it available as a
 827 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/isenkram.git">collab-maint</a>
 828 repository in Debian.  The new name?  It is <strong>Isenkram</strong>.
 829 To fetch and build the latest version of the source, use</p>
 830
 831 <pre>
 832 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/collab-maint/isenkram.git
 833 cd isenkram && git-buildpackage -us -uc
 834 </pre>
 835
 836 <p>I have not yet adjusted all files to use the new name yet.  If you
 837 want to hack on the source or improve the package, please go ahead.
 838 But please talk to me first on IRC or via email before you do major
 839 changes, to make sure we do not step on each others toes. :)</p>
 840
 841 <p>If you wonder what 'isenkram' is, it is a Norwegian word for iron
 842 stuff, typically meaning tools, nails, screws, etc.  Typical hardware
 843 stuff, in other words.  I've been told it is the Norwegian variant of
 844 the German word eisenkram, for those that are familiar with that
 845 word.</p>
 846
 847 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-26</strong>: Added -us -us to build
 848 instructions, to avoid confusing people with an error from the signing
 849 process.</p>
 850
 851 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-27</strong>: Switch to HTTP URL for the git
 852 clone argument to avoid the need for authentication.</p>
 853
 854       </div>
 855       <div class="tags">
 856
 857
 858         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
 859
 860
 861       </div>
 862     </div>
 863     <div class="padding"></div>
 864
 865     <div class="entry">
 866       <div class="title">
 867         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_prototype_ready_making_hardware_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">First prototype ready making hardware easier to use in Debian</a>
 868       </div>
 869       <div class="date">
 870         21st January 2013
 871       </div>
 872       <div class="body">
 873         <p>Early this month I set out to try to
 874 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">improve
 875 the Debian support for pluggable hardware devices</a>.  Now my
 876 prototype is working, and it is ready for a larger audience.  To test
 877 it, fetch the
 878 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">source
 879 from the Debian Edu subversion repository</a>, build and install the
 880 package.  You might have to log out and in again activate the
 881 autostart script.</p>
 882
 883 <p>The design is simple:</p>
 884
 885 <ul>
 886
 887 <li>Add desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ causing a program
 888 hw-support-handlerd to start when the user log in.</li>
 889
 890 <li>This program listen for kernel events about new hardware (directly
 891 from the kernel like udev does), not using HAL dbus events as I
 892 initially did.</li>
 893
 894 <li>When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware modalias in
 895 the APT database, a database
 896 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=markup">available
 897 via HTTP</a> and a database available as part of the package.</li>
 898
 899 <li>If a package is mapped to the hardware in question, the package
 900 isn't installed yet and this is the first time the hardware was
 901 plugged in, show a desktop notification suggesting to install the
 902 package or packages.</li>
 903
 904 <li>If the user click on the 'install package now' button, ask
 905 aptdaemon via the PackageKit API to install the requrired package.</li>
 906
 907 <li>aptdaemon ask for root password or sudo password, and install the
 908 package while showing progress information in a window.</li>
 909
 910 </ul>
 911
 912 <p>I still need to come up with a better name for the system.  Here
 913 are some screen shots showing the prototype in action.  First the
 914 notification, then the password request, and finally the request to
 915 approve all the dependencies.  Sorry for the Norwegian Bokmål GUI.</p>
 916
 917 <p><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-1-notification.png">
 918 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-2-password.png">
 919 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-3-dependencies.png">
 920 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-4-installing.png">
 921 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-5-installing-details.png" width="70%"></p>
 922
 923 <p>The prototype still need to be improved with longer timeouts, but
 924 is already useful.  The database of hardware to package mappings also
 925 need more work.  It is currently compatible with the Ubuntu way of
 926 storing such information in the package control file, but could be
 927 changed to use other formats instead or in addition to the current
 928 method.  I've dropped the use of discover for this mapping, as the
 929 modalias approach is more flexible and easier to use on Linux as long
 930 as the Linux kernel expose its modalias strings directly.</p>
 931
 932 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-21 16:50</strong>: Due to popular demand,
 933 here is the command required to check out and build the source: Use
 934 '<tt>svn checkout
 935 svn://svn.debian.org/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/; cd
 936 hw-support-handler; debuild</tt>'.  If you lack debuild, install the
 937 devscripts package.</p>
 938
 939 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-23 12:00</strong>: The project is now
 940 renamed to Isenkram and the source moved from the Debian Edu
 941 subversion repository to a Debian collab-maint git repository.  See
 942 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html">build
 943 instructions</a> for details.</p>
 944
 945       </div>
 946       <div class="tags">
 947
 948
 949         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
 950
 951
 952       </div>
 953     </div>
 954     <div class="padding"></div>
 955
 956     <div class="entry">
 957       <div class="title">
 958         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html">Thank you Thinkpad X41, for your long and trustworthy service</a>
 959       </div>
 960       <div class="date">
 961         19th January 2013
 962       </div>
 963       <div class="body">
 964         <p>This Christmas my trusty old laptop died.  It died quietly and
 965 suddenly in bed.  With a quiet whimper, it went completely quiet and
 966 black.  The power button was no longer able to turn it on.  It was a
 967 IBM Thinkpad X41, and the best laptop I ever had.  Better than both
 968 Thinkpads X30, X31, X40, X60, X61 and X61S.  Far better than the
 969 Compaq I had before that.  Now I need to find a replacement.  To keep
 970 going during Christmas, I moved the one year old SSD disk to my old
 971 X40 where it fitted (only one I had left that could use it), but it is
 972 not a durable solution.
 973
 974 <p>My laptop needs are fairly modest.  This is my wishlist from when I
 975 got a new one more than 10 years ago.  It still holds true.:)</p>
 976
 977 <ul>
 978
 979 <li>Lightweight (around 1 kg) and small volume (preferably smaller
 980   than A4).</li>
 981 <li>Robust, it will be in my backpack every day.</li>
 982 <li>Three button mouse and a mouse pin instead of touch pad.</li>
 983 <li>Long battery life time.  Preferable a week.</li>
 984 <li>Internal WIFI network card.</li>
 985 <li>Internal Twisted Pair network card.</li>
 986 <li>Some USB slots (2-3 is plenty)</li>
 987 <li>Good keyboard - similar to the Thinkpad.</li>
 988 <li>Video resolution at least 1024x768, with size around 12" (A4 paper
 989 size).</li>
 990 <li>Hardware supported by Debian Stable, ie the default kernel and
 991   X.org packages.</li>
 992 <li>Quiet, preferably fan free (or at least not using the fan most of
 993   the time).
 994
 995 </ul>
 996
 997 <p>You will notice that there are no RAM and CPU requirements in the
 998 list.  The reason is simply that the specifications on laptops the
 999 last 10-15 years have been sufficient for my needs, and I have to look
1000 at other features to choose my laptop.  But are there still made as
1001 robust laptops as my X41?  The Thinkpad X60/X61 proved to be less
1002 robust, and Thinkpads seem to be heading in the wrong direction since
1003 Lenovo took over.  But I've been told that X220 and X1 Carbon might
1004 still be useful.</p>
1005
1006 <p>Perhaps I should rethink my needs, and look for a pad with an
1007 external keyboard?  I'll have to check the
1008 <a href="http://www.linux-laptop.net/">Linux Laptops site</a> for
1009 well-supported laptops, or perhaps just buy one preinstalled from one
1010 of the vendors listed on the <a href="http://linuxpreloaded.com/">Linux
1011 Pre-loaded site</a>.</p>
1012
1013       </div>
1014       <div class="tags">
1015
1016
1017         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>.
1018
1019
1020       </div>
1021     </div>
1022     <div class="padding"></div>
1023
1024     <div class="entry">
1025       <div class="title">
1026         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_find_a_browser_plugin_supporting_a_given_MIME_type.html">How to find a browser plugin supporting a given MIME type</a>
1027       </div>
1028       <div class="date">
1029         18th January 2013
1030       </div>
1031       <div class="body">
1032         <p>Some times I try to figure out which Iceweasel browser plugin to
1033 install to get support for a given MIME type.  Thanks to
1034 <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MozillaTeam/Plugins">specifications
1035 done by Ubuntu</a> and Mozilla, it is possible to do this in Debian.
1036 Unfortunately, not very many packages provide the needed meta
1037 information, Anyway, here is a small script to look up all browser
1038 plugin packages announcing ther MIME support using this specification:</p>
1039
1040 <pre>
1041 #!/usr/bin/python
1042 import sys
1043 import apt
1044 def pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
1045     cache = apt.Cache()
1046     cache.open(None)
1047     thepkgs = []
1048     for pkg in cache:
1049         version = pkg.candidate
1050         if version is None:
1051             version = pkg.installed
1052         if version is None:
1053             continue
1054         record = version.record
1055         if not record.has_key('Npp-MimeType'):
1056             continue
1057         mime_types = record['Npp-MimeType'].split(',')
1058         for t in mime_types:
1059             t = t.rstrip().strip()
1060             if t == mimetype:
1061                 thepkgs.append(pkg.name)
1062     return thepkgs
1063 mimetype = "audio/ogg"
1064 if 1 < len(sys.argv):
1065     mimetype = sys.argv[1]
1066 print "Browser plugin packages supporting %s:" % mimetype
1067 for pkg in pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
1068     print "  %s" %pkg
1069 </pre>
1070
1071 <p>It can be used like this to look up a given MIME type:</p>
1072
1073 <pre>
1074 % ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype
1075 Browser plugin packages supporting audio/ogg:
1076   gecko-mediaplayer
1077 % ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype application/x-shockwave-flash
1078 Browser plugin packages supporting application/x-shockwave-flash:
1079   browser-plugin-gnash
1080 %
1081 </pre>
1082
1083 <p>In Ubuntu this mechanism is combined with support in the browser
1084 itself to query for plugins and propose to install the needed
1085 packages.  It would be great if Debian supported such feature too.  Is
1086 anyone working on adding it?</p>
1087
1088 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-18 14:20</strong>: The Debian BTS
1089 request for icweasel support for this feature is
1090 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/484010">#484010</a> from 2008 (and
1091 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/698426">#698426</a> from today).  Lack
1092 of manpower and wish for a different design is the reason thus feature
1093 is not yet in iceweasel from Debian.</p>
1094
1095       </div>
1096       <div class="tags">
1097
1098
1099         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>.
1100
1101
1102       </div>
1103     </div>
1104     <div class="padding"></div>
1105
1106     <div class="entry">
1107       <div class="title">
1108         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_most_supported_MIME_type_in_Debian_.html">What is the most supported MIME type in Debian?</a>
1109       </div>
1110       <div class="date">
1111         16th January 2013
1112       </div>
1113       <div class="body">
1114         <p>The <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/AppStreamDebianProposal">DEP-11
1115 proposal to add AppStream information to the Debian archive</a>, is a
1116 proposal to make it possible for a Desktop application to propose to
1117 the user some package to install to gain support for a given MIME
1118 type, font, library etc. that is currently missing.  With such
1119 mechanism in place, it would be possible for the desktop to
1120 automatically propose and install leocad if some LDraw file is
1121 downloaded by the browser.</p>
1122
1123 <p>To get some idea about the current content of the archive, I decided
1124 to write a simple program to extract all .desktop files from the
1125 Debian archive and look up the claimed MIME support there.  The result
1126 can be found on the
1127 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/pub/AppStreamTest">Skolelinux FTP
1128 site</a>.  Using the collected information, it become possible to
1129 answer the question in the title.  Here are the 20 most supported MIME
1130 types in Debian stable (Squeeze), testing (Wheezy) and unstable (Sid).
1131 The complete list is available from the link above.</p>
1132
1133 <p><strong>Debian Stable:</strong></p>
1134
1135 <pre>
1136   count MIME type
1137   ----- -----------------------
1138      32 text/plain
1139      30 audio/mpeg
1140      29 image/png
1141      28 image/jpeg
1142      27 application/ogg
1143      26 audio/x-mp3
1144      25 image/tiff
1145      25 image/gif
1146      22 image/bmp
1147      22 audio/x-wav
1148      20 audio/x-flac
1149      19 audio/x-mpegurl
1150      18 video/x-ms-asf
1151      18 audio/x-musepack
1152      18 audio/x-mpeg
1153      18 application/x-ogg
1154      17 video/mpeg
1155      17 audio/x-scpls
1156      17 audio/ogg
1157      16 video/x-ms-wmv
1158 </pre>
1159
1160 <p><strong>Debian Testing:</strong></p>
1161
1162 <pre>
1163   count MIME type
1164   ----- -----------------------
1165      33 text/plain
1166      32 image/png
1167      32 image/jpeg
1168      29 audio/mpeg
1169      27 image/gif
1170      26 image/tiff
1171      26 application/ogg
1172      25 audio/x-mp3
1173      22 image/bmp
1174      21 audio/x-wav
1175      19 audio/x-mpegurl
1176      19 audio/x-mpeg
1177      18 video/mpeg
1178      18 audio/x-scpls
1179      18 audio/x-flac
1180      18 application/x-ogg
1181      17 video/x-ms-asf
1182      17 text/html
1183      17 audio/x-musepack
1184      16 image/x-xbitmap
1185 </pre>
1186
1187 <p><strong>Debian Unstable:</strong></p>
1188
1189 <pre>
1190   count MIME type
1191   ----- -----------------------
1192      31 text/plain
1193      31 image/png
1194      31 image/jpeg
1195      29 audio/mpeg
1196      28 application/ogg
1197      27 image/gif
1198      26 image/tiff
1199      26 audio/x-mp3
1200      23 audio/x-wav
1201      22 image/bmp
1202      21 audio/x-flac
1203      20 audio/x-mpegurl
1204      19 audio/x-mpeg
1205      18 video/x-ms-asf
1206      18 video/mpeg
1207      18 audio/x-scpls
1208      18 application/x-ogg
1209      17 audio/x-musepack
1210      16 video/x-ms-wmv
1211      16 video/x-msvideo
1212 </pre>
1213
1214 <p>I am told that PackageKit can provide an API to access the kind of
1215 information mentioned in DEP-11.  I have not yet had time to look at
1216 it, but hope the PackageKit people in Debian are on top of these
1217 issues.</p>
1218
1219 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-16 13:35</strong>: Updated numbers after
1220 discovering a typo in my script.</p>
1221
1222       </div>
1223       <div class="tags">
1224
1225
1226         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>.
1227
1228
1229       </div>
1230     </div>
1231     <div class="padding"></div>
1232
1233     <div class="entry">
1234       <div class="title">
1235         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_modalias_info_to_find_packages_handling_my_hardware.html">Using modalias info to find packages handling my hardware</a>
1236       </div>
1237       <div class="date">
1238         15th January 2013
1239       </div>
1240       <div class="body">
1241         <p>Yesterday, I wrote about the
1242 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Modalias_strings___a_practical_way_to_map__stuff__to_hardware.html">modalias
1243 values provided by the Linux kernel</a> following my hope for
1244 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">better
1245 dongle support in Debian</a>.  Using this knowledge, I have tested how
1246 modalias values attached to package names can be used to map packages
1247 to hardware.  This allow the system to look up and suggest relevant
1248 packages when I plug in some new hardware into my machine, and replace
1249 discover and discover-data as the database used to map hardware to
1250 packages.</p>
1251
1252 <p>I create a modaliases file with entries like the following,
1253 containing package name, kernel module name (if relevant, otherwise
1254 the package name) and globs matching the relevant hardware
1255 modalias.</p>
1256
1257 <p><blockquote>
1258 Package: package-name
1259 <br>Modaliases: module(modaliasglob, modaliasglob, modaliasglob)</p>
1260 </blockquote></p>
1261
1262 <p>It is fairly trivial to write code to find the relevant packages
1263 for a given modalias value using this file.</p>
1264
1265 <p>An entry like this would suggest the video and picture application
1266 cheese for many USB web cameras (interface bus class 0E01):</p>
1267
1268 <p><blockquote>
1269 Package: cheese
1270 <br>Modaliases: cheese(usb:v*p*d*dc*dsc*dp*ic0Eisc01ip*)</p>
1271 </blockquote></p>
1272
1273 <p>An entry like this would suggest the pcmciautils package when a
1274 CardBus bridge (bus class 0607) PCI device is present:</p>
1275
1276 <p><blockquote>
1277 Package: pcmciautils
1278 <br>Modaliases: pcmciautils(pci:v*d*sv*sd*bc06sc07i*)
1279 </blockquote></p>
1280
1281 <p>An entry like this would suggest the package colorhug-client when
1282 plugging in a ColorHug with USB IDs 04D8:F8DA:</p>
1283
1284 <p><blockquote>
1285 Package: colorhug-client
1286 <br>Modaliases: colorhug-client(usb:v04D8pF8DAd*)</p>
1287 </blockquote></p>
1288
1289 <p>I believe the format is compatible with the format of the Packages
1290 file in the Debian archive.  Ubuntu already uses their Packages file
1291 to store their mappings from packages to hardware.</p>
1292
1293 <p>By adding a XB-Modaliases: header in debian/control, any .deb can
1294 announce the hardware it support in a way my prototype understand.
1295 This allow those publishing packages in an APT source outside the
1296 Debian archive as well as those backporting packages to make sure the
1297 hardware mapping are included in the package meta information.  I've
1298 tested such header in the pymissile package, and its modalias mapping
1299 is working as it should with my prototype.  It even made it to Ubuntu
1300 Raring.</p>
1301
1302 <p>To test if it was possible to look up supported hardware using only
1303 the shell tools available in the Debian installer, I wrote a shell
1304 implementation of the lookup code.  The idea is to create files for
1305 each modalias and let the shell do the matching.  Please check out and
1306 try the
1307 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/hw-support-lookup?view=co">hw-support-lookup</a>
1308 shell script.  It run without any extra dependencies and fetch the
1309 hardware mappings from the Debian archive and the subversion
1310 repository where I currently work on my prototype.</p>
1311
1312 <p>When I use it on a machine with a yubikey inserted, it suggest to
1313 install yubikey-personalization:</p>
1314
1315 <p><blockquote>
1316 % ./hw-support-lookup
1317 <br>yubikey-personalization
1318 <br>%
1319 </blockquote></p>
1320
1321 <p>When I run it on my Thinkpad X40 with a PCMCIA/CardBus slot, it
1322 propose to install the pcmciautils package:</p>
1323
1324 <p><blockquote>
1325 % ./hw-support-lookup
1326 <br>pcmciautils
1327 <br>%
1328 </blockquote></p>
1329
1330 <p>If you know of any hardware-package mapping that should be added to
1331 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=co">my
1332 database</a>, please tell me about it.</p>
1333
1334 <p>It could be possible to generate several of the mappings between
1335 packages and hardware.  One source would be to look at packages with
1336 kernel modules, ie packages with *.ko files in /lib/modules/, and
1337 extract their modalias information.  Another would be to look at
1338 packages with udev rules, ie packages with files in
1339 /lib/udev/rules.d/, and extract their vendor/model information to
1340 generate a modalias matching rule.  I have not tested any of these to
1341 see if it work.</p>
1342
1343 <p>If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
1344 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
1345 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
1346 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-devel">#debian-devel</a>.</p>
1347
1348       </div>
1349       <div class="tags">
1350
1351
1352         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
1353
1354
1355       </div>
1356     </div>
1357     <div class="padding"></div>
1358
1359     <div class="entry">
1360       <div class="title">
1361         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Modalias_strings___a_practical_way_to_map__stuff__to_hardware.html">Modalias strings - a practical way to map "stuff" to hardware</a>
1362       </div>
1363       <div class="date">
1364         14th January 2013
1365       </div>
1366       <div class="body">
1367         <p>While looking into how to look up Debian packages based on hardware
1368 information, to find the packages that support a given piece of
1369 hardware, I refreshed my memory regarding modalias values, and decided
1370 to document the details.  Here are my findings so far, also available
1371 in
1372 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">the
1373 Debian Edu subversion repository</a>:
1374
1375 <p><strong>Modalias decoded</strong></p>
1376
1377 <p>This document try to explain what the different types of modalias
1378 values stands for.  It is in part based on information from
1379 &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias">https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias</a> &gt;,
1380 &lt;URL: <a href="http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/26132/how-to-assign-usb-driver-to-device">http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/26132/how-to-assign-usb-driver-to-device</a> &gt;,
1381 &lt;URL: <a href="http://code.metager.de/source/history/linux/stable/scripts/mod/file2alias.c">http://code.metager.de/source/history/linux/stable/scripts/mod/file2alias.c</a> &gt; and
1382 &lt;URL: <a href="http://cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/dmidecode/dmidecode.c?root=dmidecode&view=markup">http://cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/dmidecode/dmidecode.c?root=dmidecode&view=markup</a> &gt;.
1383
1384 <p>The modalias entries for a given Linux machine can be found using
1385 this shell script:</p>
1386
1387 <pre>
1388 find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -0 cat | sort -u
1389 </pre>
1390
1391 <p>The supported modalias globs for a given kernel module can be found
1392 using modinfo:</p>
1393
1394 <pre>
1395 % /sbin/modinfo psmouse | grep alias:
1396 alias:          serio:ty05pr*id*ex*
1397 alias:          serio:ty01pr*id*ex*
1398 %
1399 </pre>
1400
1401 <p><strong>PCI subtype</strong></p>
1402
1403 <p>A typical PCI entry can look like this.  This is an Intel Host
1404 Bridge memory controller:</p>
1405
1406 <p><blockquote>
1407 pci:v00008086d00002770sv00001028sd000001ADbc06sc00i00
1408 </blockquote></p>
1409
1410 <p>This represent these values:</p>
1411
1412 <pre>
1413  v   00008086  (vendor)
1414  d   00002770  (device)
1415  sv  00001028  (subvendor)
1416  sd  000001AD  (subdevice)
1417  bc  06        (bus class)
1418  sc  00        (bus subclass)
1419  i   00        (interface)
1420 </pre>
1421
1422 <p>The vendor/device values are the same values outputted from 'lspci
1423 -n' as 8086:2770.  The bus class/subclass is also shown by lspci as
1424 0600.  The 0600 class is a host bridge.  Other useful bus values are
1425 0300 (VGA compatible card) and 0200 (Ethernet controller).</p>
1426
1427 <p>Not sure how to figure out the interface value, nor what it
1428 means.</p>
1429
1430 <p><strong>USB subtype</strong></p>
1431
1432 <p>Some typical USB entries can look like this.  This is an internal
1433 USB hub in a laptop:</p>
1434
1435 <p><blockquote>
1436 usb:v1D6Bp0001d0206dc09dsc00dp00ic09isc00ip00
1437 </blockquote></p>
1438
1439 <p>Here is the values included in this alias:</p>
1440
1441 <pre>
1442  v    1D6B  (device vendor)
1443  p    0001  (device product)
1444  d    0206  (bcddevice)
1445  dc     09  (device class)
1446  dsc    00  (device subclass)
1447  dp     00  (device protocol)
1448  ic     09  (interface class)
1449  isc    00  (interface subclass)
1450  ip     00  (interface protocol)
1451 </pre>
1452
1453 <p>The 0900 device class/subclass means hub.  Some times the relevant
1454 class is in the interface class section.  For a simple USB web camera,
1455 these alias entries show up:</p>
1456
1457 <p><blockquote>
1458 usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc01ip00
1459 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc02ip00
1460 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc01ip00
1461 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc02ip00
1462 </blockquote></p>
1463
1464 <p>Interface class 0E01 is video control, 0E02 is video streaming (aka
1465 camera), 0101 is audio control device and 0102 is audio streaming (aka
1466 microphone).  Thus this is a camera with microphone included.</p>
1467
1468 <p><strong>ACPI subtype</strong></p>
1469
1470 <p>The ACPI type is used for several non-PCI/USB stuff.  This is an IR
1471 receiver in a Thinkpad X40:</p>
1472
1473 <p><blockquote>
1474 acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
1475 </blockquote></p>
1476
1477 <p>The values between the colons are IDs.</p>
1478
1479 <p><strong>DMI subtype</strong></p>
1480
1481 <p>The DMI table contain lots of information about the computer case
1482 and model.  This is an entry for a IBM Thinkpad X40, fetched from
1483 /sys/devices/virtual/dmi/id/modalias:</p>
1484
1485 <p><blockquote>
1486 dmi:bvnIBM:bvr1UETB6WW(1.66):bd06/15/2005:svnIBM:pn2371H4G:pvrThinkPadX40:rvnIBM:rn2371H4G:rvrNotAvailable:cvnIBM:ct10:cvrNotAvailable:
1487 </blockquote></p>
1488
1489 <p>The values present are</p>
1490
1491 <pre>
1492  bvn  IBM            (BIOS vendor)
1493  bvr  1UETB6WW(1.66) (BIOS version)
1494  bd   06/15/2005     (BIOS date)
1495  svn  IBM            (system vendor)
1496  pn   2371H4G        (product name)
1497  pvr  ThinkPadX40    (product version)
1498  rvn  IBM            (board vendor)
1499  rn   2371H4G        (board name)
1500  rvr  NotAvailable   (board version)
1501  cvn  IBM            (chassis vendor)
1502  ct   10             (chassis type)
1503  cvr  NotAvailable   (chassis version)
1504 </pre>
1505
1506 <p>The chassis type 10 is Notebook.  Other interesting values can be
1507 found in the dmidecode source:</p>
1508
1509 <pre>
1510   3 Desktop
1511   4 Low Profile Desktop
1512   5 Pizza Box
1513   6 Mini Tower
1514   7 Tower
1515   8 Portable
1516   9 Laptop
1517  10 Notebook
1518  11 Hand Held
1519  12 Docking Station
1520  13 All In One
1521  14 Sub Notebook
1522  15 Space-saving
1523  16 Lunch Box
1524  17 Main Server Chassis
1525  18 Expansion Chassis
1526  19 Sub Chassis
1527  20 Bus Expansion Chassis
1528  21 Peripheral Chassis
1529  22 RAID Chassis
1530  23 Rack Mount Chassis
1531  24 Sealed-case PC
1532  25 Multi-system
1533  26 CompactPCI
1534  27 AdvancedTCA
1535  28 Blade
1536  29 Blade Enclosing
1537 </pre>
1538
1539 <p>The chassis type values are not always accurately set in the DMI
1540 table.  For example my home server is a tower, but the DMI modalias
1541 claim it is a desktop.</p>
1542
1543 <p><strong>SerIO subtype</strong></p>
1544
1545 <p>This type is used for PS/2 mouse plugs.  One example is from my
1546 test machine:</p>
1547
1548 <p><blockquote>
1549 serio:ty01pr00id00ex00
1550 </blockquote></p>
1551
1552 <p>The values present are</p>
1553
1554 <pre>
1555   ty  01  (type)
1556   pr  00  (prototype)
1557   id  00  (id)
1558   ex  00  (extra)
1559 </pre>
1560
1561 <p>This type is supported by the psmouse driver.  I am not sure what
1562 the valid values are.</p>
1563
1564 <p><strong>Other subtypes</strong></p>
1565
1566 <p>There are heaps of other modalias subtypes according to
1567 file2alias.c.  There is the rest of the list from that source: amba,
1568 ap, bcma, ccw, css, eisa, hid, i2c, ieee1394, input, ipack, isapnp,
1569 mdio, of, parisc, pcmcia, platform, scsi, sdio, spi, ssb, vio, virtio,
1570 vmbus, x86cpu and zorro.  I did not spend time documenting all of
1571 these, as they do not seem relevant for my intended use with mapping
1572 hardware to packages when new stuff is inserted during run time.</p>
1573
1574 <p><strong>Looking up kernel modules using modalias values</strong></p>
1575
1576 <p>To check which kernel modules provide support for a given modalias,
1577 one can use the following shell script:</p>
1578
1579 <pre>
1580   for id in $(find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -0 cat | sort -u); do \
1581     echo "$id" ; \
1582     /sbin/modprobe --show-depends "$id"|sed 's/^/  /' ; \
1583   done
1584 </pre>
1585
1586 <p>The output can look like this (only the first few entries as the
1587 list is very long on my test machine):</p>
1588
1589 <pre>
1590   acpi:ACPI0003:
1591     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/acpi/ac.ko
1592   acpi:device:
1593   FATAL: Module acpi:device: not found.
1594   acpi:IBM0068:
1595     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/char/nvram.ko
1596     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/leds/led-class.ko
1597     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/net/rfkill/rfkill.ko
1598     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/platform/x86/thinkpad_acpi.ko
1599   acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
1600     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/lib/crc-ccitt.ko
1601     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/net/irda/irda.ko
1602     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/net/irda/nsc-ircc.ko
1603   [...]
1604 </pre>
1605
1606 <p>If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
1607 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
1608 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
1609 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-devel">#debian-devel</a>.</p>
1610
1611 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-15:</strong> Rewrite "cat $(find ...)" to
1612 "find ... -print0 | xargs -0 cat" to make sure it handle directories
1613 in /sys/ with space in them.</p>
1614
1615       </div>
1616       <div class="tags">
1617
1618
1619         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
1620
1621
1622       </div>
1623     </div>
1624     <div class="padding"></div>
1625
1626     <div class="entry">
1627       <div class="title">
1628         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Moved_the_pymissile_Debian_packaging_to_collab_maint.html">Moved the pymissile Debian packaging to collab-maint</a>
1629       </div>
1630       <div class="date">
1631         10th January 2013
1632       </div>
1633       <div class="body">
1634         <p>As part of my investigation on how to improve the support in Debian
1635 for hardware dongles, I dug up my old Mark and Spencer USB Rocket
1636 Launcher and updated the Debian package
1637 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pymissile">pymissile</a> to make
1638 sure udev will fix the device permissions when it is plugged in.  I
1639 also added a "Modaliases" header to test it in the Debian archive and
1640 hopefully make the package be proposed by jockey in Ubuntu when a user
1641 plug in his rocket launcher.  In the process I moved the source to a
1642 git repository under collab-maint, to make it easier for any DD to
1643 contribute.  <a href="http://code.google.com/p/pymissile/">Upstream</a>
1644 is not very active, but the software still work for me even after five
1645 years of relative silence.  The new git repository is not listed in
1646 the uploaded package yet, because I want to test the other changes a
1647 bit more before I upload the new version.  If you want to check out
1648 the new version with a .desktop file included, visit the
1649 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/pymissile.git">gitweb
1650 view</a> or use "<tt>git clone
1651 git://anonscm.debian.org/collab-maint/pymissile.git</tt>".</p>
1652
1653       </div>
1654       <div class="tags">
1655
1656
1657         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
1658
1659
1660       </div>
1661     </div>
1662     <div class="padding"></div>
1663
1664     <div class="entry">
1665       <div class="title">
1666         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">Lets make hardware dongles easier to use in Debian</a>
1667       </div>
1668       <div class="date">
1669          9th January 2013
1670       </div>
1671       <div class="body">
1672         <p>One thing that annoys me with Debian and Linux distributions in
1673 general, is that there is a great package management system with the
1674 ability to automatically install software packages by downloading them
1675 from the distribution mirrors, but no way to get it to automatically
1676 install the packages I need to use the hardware I plug into my
1677 machine.  Even if the package to use it is easily available from the
1678 Linux distribution.  When I plug in a LEGO Mindstorms NXT, it could
1679 suggest to automatically install the python-nxt, nbc and t2n packages
1680 I need to talk to it.  When I plug in a Yubikey, it could propose the
1681 yubikey-personalization package.  The information required to do this
1682 is available, but no-one have pulled all the pieces together.</p>
1683
1684 <p>Some years ago, I proposed to
1685 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg01206.html">use
1686 the discover subsystem to implement this</a>.  The idea is fairly
1687 simple:
1688
1689 <ul>
1690
1691 <li>Add a desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ pointing to a program
1692   starting when a user log in.</li>
1693
1694 <li>Set this program up to listen for kernel events emitted when new
1695   hardware is inserted into the computer.</li>
1696
1697 <li>When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware ID in a
1698   database mapping to packages, and take note of any non-installed
1699   packages.</li>
1700
1701 <li>Show a message to the user proposing to install the discovered
1702   package, and make it easy to install it.</li>
1703
1704 </ul>
1705
1706 <p>I am not sure what the best way to implement this is, but my
1707 initial idea was to use dbus events to discover new hardware, the
1708 discover database to find packages and
1709 <a href="http://www.packagekit.org/">PackageKit</a> to install
1710 packages.</p>
1711
1712 <p>Yesterday, I found time to try to implement this idea, and the
1713 draft package is now checked into
1714 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">the
1715 Debian Edu subversion repository</a>.  In the process, I updated the
1716 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover-data.html">discover-data</a>
1717 package to map the USB ids of LEGO Mindstorms and Yubikey devices to
1718 the relevant packages in Debian, and uploaded a new version
1719 2.2013.01.09 to unstable.  I also discovered that the current
1720 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover.html">discover</a>
1721 package in Debian no longer discovered any USB devices, because
1722 /proc/bus/usb/devices is no longer present.  I ported it to use
1723 libusb as a fall back option to get it working.  The fixed package
1724 version 2.1.2-6 is now in experimental (didn't upload it to unstable
1725 because of the freeze).</p>
1726
1727 <p>With this prototype in place, I can insert my Yubikey, and get this
1728 desktop notification to show up (only once, the first time it is
1729 inserted):</p>
1730
1731 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-09-hw-autoinstall.png"></p>
1732
1733 <p>For this prototype to be really useful, some way to automatically
1734 install the proposed packages by pressing the "Please install
1735 program(s)" button should to be implemented.</p>
1736
1737 <p>If this idea seem useful to you, and you want to help make it
1738 happen, please help me update the discover-data database with mappings
1739 from hardware to Debian packages.  Check if 'discover-pkginstall -l'
1740 list the package you would like to have installed when a given
1741 hardware device is inserted into your computer, and report bugs using
1742 reportbug if it isn't.  Or, if you know of a better way to provide
1743 such mapping, please let me know.</p>
1744
1745 <p>This prototype need more work, and there are several questions that
1746 should be considered before it is ready for production use.  Is dbus
1747 the correct way to detect new hardware?  At the moment I look for HAL
1748 dbus events on the system bus, because that is the events I could see
1749 on my Debian Squeeze KDE desktop.  Are there better events to use?
1750 How should the user be notified?  Is the desktop notification
1751 mechanism the best option, or should the background daemon raise a
1752 popup instead?  How should packages be installed?  When should they
1753 not be installed?</p>
1754
1755 <p>If you want to help getting such feature implemented in Debian,
1756 please send me an email. :)</p>
1757
1758       </div>
1759       <div class="tags">
1760
1761
1762         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
1763
1764
1765       </div>
1766     </div>
1767     <div class="padding"></div>
1768
1769     <div class="entry">
1770       <div class="title">
1771         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_IRC_channel_for_LEGO_designers_using_Debian.html">New IRC channel for LEGO designers using Debian</a>
1772       </div>
1773       <div class="date">
1774          2nd January 2013
1775       </div>
1776       <div class="body">
1777         <p>During Christmas, I have worked a bit on the Debian support for
1778 <a href="http://mindstorms.lego.com/en-us/Default.aspx">LEGO Mindstorm
1779 NXT</a>.  My son and I have played a bit with my NXT set, and I
1780 discovered I had to build all the tools myself because none were
1781 already in Debian Squeeze.  If Debian support for LEGO is something
1782 you care about, please join me on the IRC channel
1783 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">#debian-lego</a> (server
1784 irc.debian.org).  There is a lot that could be done to improve the
1785 Debian support for LEGO designers.  For example both CAD software
1786 and Mindstorm compilers are missing. :)</p>
1787
1788 <p>Update 2012-01-03: A
1789 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">project page</a>
1790 including links to Lego related packages is now available.</p>
1791
1792       </div>
1793       <div class="tags">
1794
1795
1796         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
1797
1798
1799       </div>
1800     </div>
1801     <div class="padding"></div>
1802
1803     <div class="entry">
1804       <div class="title">
1805         <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>
1806       </div>
1807       <div class="date">
1808         25th December 2012
1809       </div>
1810       <div class="body">
1811         <p>Let me start by wishing you all marry Christmas and a happy new
1812 year!  I hope next year will prove to be a good year.</p>
1813
1814 <p><a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">Bitcoin</a>, the digital
1815 decentralised "currency" that allow people to transfer bitcoins
1816 between each other with minimal overhead, is a very interesting
1817 experiment.  And as I wrote a few days ago, the bitcoin situation in
1818 <a href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> is about to improve a bit.
1819 The <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">new debian source
1820 package</a> (version 0.7.2-2) was uploaded yesterday, and is waiting
1821 in <a href="http://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html">the NEW queue</A>
1822 for one of the ftpmasters to approve the new bitcoin-qt package
1823 name.</p>
1824
1825 <p>And thanks to the great work of Jonas and the rest of the bitcoin
1826 team in Debian, you can easily test the package in Debian Squeeze
1827 using the following steps to get a set of working packages:</p>
1828
1829 <blockquote><pre>
1830 git clone git://git.debian.org/git/collab-maint/bitcoin
1831 cd bitcoin
1832 DEB_MAINTAINER_MODE=1 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp fakeroot debian/rules clean
1833 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp git-buildpackage --git-ignore-new
1834 </pre></blockquote>
1835
1836 <p>You might have to install some build dependencies as well.  The
1837 list of commands should give you two packages, bitcoind and
1838 bitcoin-qt, ready for use in a Squeeze environment.  Note that the
1839 client will download the complete set of bitcoin "blocks", which need
1840 around 5.6 GiB of data on my machine at the moment.  Make sure your
1841 ~/.bitcoin/ directory have lots of spare room if you want to download
1842 all the blocks.  The client will warn if the disk is getting full, so
1843 there is not really a problem if you got too little room, but you will
1844 not be able to get all the features out of the client.</p>
1845
1846 <p>As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1847 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1848 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1849
1850       </div>
1851       <div class="tags">
1852
1853
1854         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>.
1855
1856
1857       </div>
1858     </div>
1859     <div class="padding"></div>
1860
1861     <div class="entry">
1862       <div class="title">
1863         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_word_on_bitcoin_support_in_Debian.html">A word on bitcoin support in Debian</a>
1864       </div>
1865       <div class="date">
1866         21st December 2012
1867       </div>
1868       <div class="body">
1869         <p>It has been a while since I wrote about
1870 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">bitcoin</a>, the decentralised
1871 peer-to-peer based crypto-currency, and the reason is simply that I
1872 have been busy elsewhere.  But two days ago, I started looking at the
1873 state of <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">bitcoin in
1874 Debian</a> again to try to recover my old bitcoin wallet.  The package
1875 is now maintained by a
1876 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-bitcoin/">team of
1877 people</a>, and the grunt work had already been done by this team.  We
1878 owe a huge thank you to all these team members. :)
1879 But I was sad to discover that the bitcoin client is missing in
1880 Wheezy.  It is only available in Sid (and an outdated client from
1881 backports).  The client had several RC bugs registered in BTS blocking
1882 it from entering testing.  To try to help the team and improve the
1883 situation, I spent some time providing patches and triaging the bug
1884 reports.  I also had a look at the bitcoin package available from Matt
1885 Corallo in a
1886 <a href="https://launchpad.net/~bitcoin/+archive/bitcoin">PPA for
1887 Ubuntu</a>, and moved the useful pieces from that version into the
1888 Debian package.</p>
1889
1890 <p>After checking with the main package maintainer Jonas Smedegaard on
1891 IRC, I pushed several patches into the collab-maint git repository to
1892 improve the package.  It now contains fixes for the RC issues (not from
1893 me, but fixed by Scott Howard), build rules for a Qt GUI client
1894 package, konqueror support for the bitcoin: URI and bash completion
1895 setup.  As I work on Debian Squeeze, I also created
1896 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-bitcoin-devel/Week-of-Mon-20121217/000041.html">a
1897 patch to backport</a> the latest version.  Jonas is going to look at
1898 it and try to integrate it into the git repository before uploading a
1899 new version to unstable.
1900
1901 <p>I would very much like bitcoin to succeed, to get rid of the
1902 centralized control currently exercised in the monetary system.  I
1903 find it completely unacceptable that the USA government is collecting
1904 transaction data for almost all international money transfers (most are done in USD and transaction logs shipped to the spooks), and
1905 that the major credit card companies can block legal money
1906 transactions to Wikileaks.  But for bitcoin to succeed, more people
1907 need to use bitcoins, and more people need to accept bitcoins when
1908 they sell products and services.  Improving the bitcoin support in
1909 Debian is a small step in the right direction, but not enough.
1910 Unfortunately the user experience when browsing the web and wanting to
1911 pay with bitcoin is still not very good.  The bitcoin: URI is a step
1912 in the right direction, but need to work in most or every browser in
1913 use.  Also the bitcoin-qt client is too heavy to fire up to do a
1914 quick transaction.  I believe there are other clients available, but
1915 have not tested them.</p>
1916
1917 <p>My
1918 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html">experiment
1919 with bitcoins</a> showed that at least some of my readers use bitcoin.
1920 I received 20.15 BTC so far on the address I provided in my blog two
1921 years ago, as can be
1922 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">seen
1923 on the blockexplorer service</a>.  Thank you everyone for your
1924 donation.  The blockexplorer service demonstrates quite well that
1925 bitcoin is not quite anonymous and untracked. :) I wonder if the
1926 number of users have gone up since then.  If you use bitcoin and want
1927 to show your support of my activity, please send Bitcoin donations to
1928 the same address as last time,
1929 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1930
1931       </div>
1932       <div class="tags">
1933
1934
1935         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>.
1936
1937
1938       </div>
1939     </div>
1940     <div class="padding"></div>
1941
1942     <div class="entry">
1943       <div class="title">
1944         <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>
1945       </div>
1946       <div class="date">
1947          7th September 2012
1948       </div>
1949       <div class="body">
1950         <p>As I
1951 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">mentioned
1952 this summer</a>, I have created a Computer Science song book a few
1953 years ago, and today I finally found time to create a public
1954 <a href="https://gitorious.org/pere-cs-songbook/pere-cs-songbook">Gitorious
1955 repository for the project</a>.</p>
1956
1957 <p>If you want to help out, please clone the source and submit patches
1958 to the HTML version.  To generate the PDF and PostScript version,
1959 please use prince XML, or let me know about a useful free software
1960 processor capable of creating a good looking PDF from the HTML.</p>
1961
1962 <p>Want to sing?  You can still find the song book in HTML, PDF and
1963 PostScript formats at
1964 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/">Petter's Computer
1965 Science Songbook</a>.</p>
1966
1967       </div>
1968       <div class="tags">
1969
1970
1971         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>.
1972
1973
1974       </div>
1975     </div>
1976     <div class="padding"></div>
1977
1978     <div class="entry">
1979       <div class="title">
1980         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gratulerer_med_19__rsdagen__Debian_.html">Gratulerer med 19-årsdagen, Debian!</a>
1981       </div>
1982       <div class="date">
1983         16th August 2012
1984       </div>
1985       <div class="body">
1986         <p>I dag fyller
1987 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120813">Debian-prosjektet 19
1988 år</a>.  Jeg har fulgt det de siste 12 årene, og er veldig glad for å kunne
1989 si gratulerer med dagen, Debian!</p>
1990
1991       </div>
1992       <div class="tags">
1993
1994
1995         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>.
1996
1997
1998       </div>
1999     </div>
2000     <div class="padding"></div>
2001
2002     <div class="entry">
2003       <div class="title">
2004         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">Song book for Computer Scientists</a>
2005       </div>
2006       <div class="date">
2007         24th June 2012
2008       </div>
2009       <div class="body">
2010         <p>Many years ago, while studying Computer Science at the
2011 <a href="http://www.uit.no/">University of Tromsø</a>, I started
2012 collecting computer related songs for use at parties.  The original
2013 version was written in LaTeX, but a few years ago I got help from
2014 Håkon W. Lie, one of the inventors of W3C CSS, to convert it to HTML
2015 while keeping the ability to create a nice book in PDF format.  I have
2016 not had time to maintain the book for a while now, and guess I should
2017 put it up on some public version control repository where others can
2018 help me extend and update the book.  If anyone is volunteering to help
2019 me with this, send me an email.  Also let me know if there are songs
2020 missing in my book.</p>
2021
2022 <p>I have not mentioned the book on my blog so far, and it occured to
2023 me today that I really should let all my readers share the joys of
2024 singing out load about programming, computers and computer networks.
2025 Especially now that <a href="http://debconf12.debconf.org/">Debconf
2026 12</a> is about to start (and I am not going).  Want to sing?  Check
2027 out <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/">Petter's
2028 Computer Science Songbook</a>.
2029
2030       </div>
2031       <div class="tags">
2032
2033
2034         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>.
2035
2036
2037       </div>
2038     </div>
2039     <div class="padding"></div>
2040
2041     <div class="entry">
2042       <div class="title">
2043         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatically_upgrading_server_firmware_on_Dell_PowerEdge.html">Automatically upgrading server firmware on Dell PowerEdge</a>
2044       </div>
2045       <div class="date">
2046         21st November 2011
2047       </div>
2048       <div class="body">
2049         <p>At work we have heaps of servers.  I believe the total count is
2050 around 1000 at the moment.  To be able to get help from the vendors
2051 when something go wrong, we want to keep the firmware on the servers
2052 up to date.  If the firmware isn't the latest and greatest, the
2053 vendors typically refuse to start debugging any problems until the
2054 firmware is upgraded.  So before every reboot, we want to upgrade the
2055 firmware, and we would really like everyone handling servers at the
2056 university to do this themselves when they plan to reboot a machine.
2057 For that to happen we at the unix server admin group need to provide
2058 the tools to do so.</p>
2059
2060 <p>To make firmware upgrading easier, I am working on a script to
2061 fetch and install the latest firmware for the servers we got.  Most of
2062 our hardware are from Dell and HP, so I have focused on these servers
2063 so far.  This blog post is about the Dell part.</P>
2064
2065 <p>On the Dell FTP site I was lucky enough to find
2066 <a href="ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz">an XML file</a>
2067 with firmware information for all 11th generation servers, listing
2068 which firmware should be used on a given model and where on the FTP
2069 site I can find it.  Using a simple perl XML parser I can then
2070 download the shell scripts Dell provides to do firmware upgrades from
2071 within Linux and reboot when all the firmware is primed and ready to
2072 be activated on the first reboot.</p>
2073
2074 <p>This is the Dell related fragment of the perl code I am working on.
2075 Are there anyone working on similar tools for firmware upgrading all
2076 servers at a site?  Please get in touch and lets share resources.</p>
2077
2078 <p><pre>
2079 #!/usr/bin/perl
2080 use strict;
2081 use warnings;
2082 use File::Temp qw(tempdir);
2083 BEGIN {
2084     # Install needed RHEL packages if missing
2085     my %rhelmodules = (
2086         'XML::Simple' => 'perl-XML-Simple',
2087         );
2088     for my $module (keys %rhelmodules) {
2089         eval "use $module;";
2090         if ($@) {
2091             my $pkg = $rhelmodules{$module};
2092             system("yum install -y $pkg");
2093             eval "use $module;";
2094         }
2095     }
2096 }
2097 my $errorsto = 'pere@hungry.com';
2098
2099 upgrade_dell();
2100
2101 exit 0;
2102
2103 sub run_firmware_script {
2104     my ($opts, $script) = @_;
2105     unless ($script) {
2106         print STDERR "fail: missing script name\n";
2107         exit 1
2108     }
2109     print STDERR "Running $script\n\n";
2110
2111     if (0 == system("sh $script $opts")) { # FIXME correct exit code handling
2112         print STDERR "success: firmware script ran succcessfully\n";
2113     } else {
2114         print STDERR "fail: firmware script returned error\n";
2115     }
2116 }
2117
2118 sub run_firmware_scripts {
2119     my ($opts, @dirs) = @_;
2120     # Run firmware packages
2121     for my $dir (@dirs) {
2122         print STDERR "info: Running scripts in $dir\n";
2123         opendir(my $dh, $dir) or die "Unable to open directory $dir: $!";
2124         while (my $s = readdir $dh) {
2125             next if $s =~ m/^\.\.?/;
2126             run_firmware_script($opts, "$dir/$s");
2127         }
2128         closedir $dh;
2129     }
2130 }
2131
2132 sub download {
2133     my $url = shift;
2134     print STDERR "info: Downloading $url\n";
2135     system("wget --quiet \"$url\"");
2136 }
2137
2138 sub upgrade_dell {
2139     my @dirs;
2140     my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
2141     chomp $product;
2142
2143     if ($product =~ m/PowerEdge/) {
2144
2145         # on RHEL, these pacakges are needed by the firwmare upgrade scripts
2146         system('yum install -y compat-libstdc++-33.i686 libstdc++.i686 libxml2.i686 procmail');
2147
2148         my $tmpdir = tempdir(
2149             CLEANUP => 1
2150             );
2151         chdir($tmpdir);
2152         fetch_dell_fw('catalog/Catalog.xml.gz');
2153         system('gunzip Catalog.xml.gz');
2154         my @paths = fetch_dell_fw_list('Catalog.xml');
2155         # -q is quiet, disabling interactivity and reducing console output
2156         my $fwopts = "-q";
2157         if (@paths) {
2158             for my $url (@paths) {
2159                 fetch_dell_fw($url);
2160             }
2161             run_firmware_scripts($fwopts, $tmpdir);
2162         } else {
2163             print STDERR "error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
2164             print STDERR "error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
2165         }
2166         chdir('/');
2167     } else {
2168         print STDERR "error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
2169         print STDERR "error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
2170     }
2171 }
2172
2173 sub fetch_dell_fw {
2174     my $path = shift;
2175     my $url = "ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/$path";
2176     download($url);
2177 }
2178
2179 # Using ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz, figure out which
2180 # firmware packages to download from Dell.  Only work for Linux
2181 # machines and 11th generation Dell servers.
2182 sub fetch_dell_fw_list {
2183     my $filename = shift;
2184
2185     my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
2186     chomp $product;
2187     my ($mybrand, $mymodel) = split(/\s+/, $product);
2188
2189     print STDERR "Finding firmware bundles for $mybrand $mymodel\n";
2190
2191     my $xml = XMLin($filename);
2192     my @paths;
2193     for my $bundle (@{$xml->{SoftwareBundle}}) {
2194         my $brand = $bundle->{TargetSystems}->{Brand}->{Display}->{content};
2195         my $model = $bundle->{TargetSystems}->{Brand}->{Model}->{Display}->{content};
2196         my $oscode;
2197         if ("ARRAY" eq ref $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}) {
2198             $oscode = $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}[0]->{osCode};
2199         } else {
2200             $oscode = $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}->{osCode};
2201         }
2202         if ($mybrand eq $brand && $mymodel eq $model && "LIN" eq $oscode)
2203         {
2204             @paths = map { $_->{path} } @{$bundle->{Contents}->{Package}};
2205         }
2206     }
2207     for my $component (@{$xml->{SoftwareComponent}}) {
2208         my $componenttype = $component->{ComponentType}->{value};
2209
2210         # Drop application packages, only firmware and BIOS
2211         next if 'APAC' eq $componenttype;
2212
2213         my $cpath = $component->{path};
2214         for my $path (@paths) {
2215             if ($cpath =~ m%/$path$%) {
2216                 push(@paths, $cpath);
2217             }
2218         }
2219     }
2220     return @paths;
2221 }
2222 </pre>
2223
2224 <p>The code is only tested on RedHat Enterprise Linux, but I suspect
2225 it could work on other platforms with some tweaking.  Anyone know a
2226 index like Catalog.xml is available from HP for HP servers?  At the
2227 moment I maintain a similar list manually and it is quickly getting
2228 outdated.</p>
2229
2230       </div>
2231       <div class="tags">
2232
2233
2234         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>.
2235
2236
2237       </div>
2238     </div>
2239     <div class="padding"></div>
2240
2241     <div class="entry">
2242       <div class="title">
2243         <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>
2244       </div>
2245       <div class="date">
2246          4th August 2011
2247       </div>
2248       <div class="body">
2249         <p>Wouter Verhelst have some
2250 <a href="http://grep.be/blog/en/retorts/pere_kubuntu_boot">interesting
2251 comments and opinions</a> on my blog post on
2252 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_should_start_from__etc_rcS_d__in_Debian____almost_nothing.html">the
2253 need to clean up /etc/rcS.d/ in Debian</a> and my blog post about
2254 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_missing_in_the_Debian_desktop__or_why_my_parents_use_Kubuntu.html">the
2255 default KDE desktop in Debian</a>.  I only have time to address one
2256 small piece of his comment now, and though it best to address the
2257 misunderstanding he bring forward:</p>
2258
2259 <p><blockquote>
2260 Currently, a system admin has four options: [...] boot to a
2261 single-user system (by adding 'single' to the kernel command line;
2262 this runs rcS and rc1 scripts)
2263 </blockquote></p>
2264
2265 <p>This make me believe Wouter believe booting into single user mode
2266 and booting into runlevel 1 is the same.  I am not surprised he
2267 believe this, because it would make sense and is a quite sensible
2268 thing to believe.  But because the boot in Debian is slightly broken,
2269 runlevel 1 do not work properly and it isn't the same as single user
2270 mode.  I'll try to explain what is actually happing, but it is a bit
2271 hard to explain.</p>
2272
2273 <p>Single user mode is defined like this in /etc/inittab:
2274 "<tt>~~:S:wait:/sbin/sulogin</tt>".  This means the only thing that is
2275 executed in single user mode is sulogin.  Single user mode is a boot
2276 state "between" the runlevels, and when booting into single user mode,
2277 only the scripts in /etc/rcS.d/ are executed before the init process
2278 enters the single user state.  When switching to runlevel 1, the state
2279 is in fact not ending in runlevel 1, but it passes through runlevel 1
2280 and end up in the single user mode (see /etc/rc1.d/S03single, which
2281 runs "init -t1 S" to switch to single user mode at the end of runlevel
2282 1.  It is confusing that the 'S' (single user) init mode is not the
2283 mode enabled by /etc/rcS.d/ (which is more like the initial boot
2284 mode).</p>
2285
2286 <p>This summary might make it clearer.  When booting for the first
2287 time into single user mode, the following commands are executed:
2288 "<tt>/etc/init.d/rc S; /sbin/sulogin</tt>".  When booting into
2289 runlevel 1, the following commands are executed: "<tt>/etc/init.d/rc
2290 S; /etc/init.d/rc 1; /sbin/sulogin</tt>".  A problem show up when
2291 trying to continue after visiting single user mode.  Not all services
2292 are started again as they should, causing the machine to end up in an
2293 unpredicatble state.  This is why Debian admins recommend rebooting
2294 after visiting single user mode.</p>
2295
2296 <p>A similar problem with runlevel 1 is caused by the amount of
2297 scripts executed from /etc/rcS.d/.  When switching from say runlevel 2
2298 to runlevel 1, the services started from /etc/rcS.d/ are not properly
2299 stopped when passing through the scripts in /etc/rc1.d/, and not
2300 started again when switching away from runlevel 1 to the runlevels
2301 2-5.  I believe the problem is best fixed by moving all the scripts
2302 out of /etc/rcS.d/ that are not <strong>required</strong> to get a
2303 functioning single user mode during boot.</p>
2304
2305 <p>I have spent several years investigating the Debian boot system,
2306 and discovered this problem a few years ago.  I suspect it originates
2307 from when sysvinit was introduced into Debian, a long time ago.</p>
2308
2309       </div>
2310       <div class="tags">
2311
2312
2313         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>.
2314
2315
2316       </div>
2317     </div>
2318     <div class="padding"></div>
2319
2320     <div class="entry">
2321       <div class="title">
2322         <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>
2323       </div>
2324       <div class="date">
2325         30th July 2011
2326       </div>
2327       <div class="body">
2328         <p>In the Debian boot system, several packages include scripts that
2329 are started from /etc/rcS.d/.  In fact, there is a bite more of them
2330 than make sense, and this causes a few problems.  What kind of
2331 problems, you might ask.  There are at least two problems.  The first
2332 is that it is not possible to recover a machine after switching to
2333 runlevel 1.  One need to actually reboot to get the machine back to
2334 the expected state.  The other is that single user boot will sometimes
2335 run into problems because some of the subsystems are activated before
2336 the root login is presented, causing problems when trying to recover a
2337 machine from a problem in that subsystem.  A minor additional point is
2338 that moving more scripts out of rcS.d/ and into the other rc#.d/
2339 directories will increase the amount of scripts that can run in
2340 parallel during boot, and thus decrease the boot time.</p>
2341
2342 <p>So, which scripts should start from rcS.d/.  In short, only the
2343 scripts that _have_ to execute before the root login prompt is
2344 presented during a single user boot should go there.  Everything else
2345 should go into the numeric runlevels.  This means things like
2346 lm-sensors, fuse and x11-common should not run from rcS.d, but from
2347 the numeric runlevels.  Today in Debian, there are around 115 init.d
2348 scripts that are started from rcS.d/, and most of them should be moved
2349 out.  Do your package have one of them?  Please help us make single
2350 user and runlevel 1 better by moving it.</p>
2351
2352 <p>Scripts setting up the screen, keyboard, system partitions
2353 etc. should still be started from rcS.d/, but there is for example no
2354 need to have the network enabled before the single user login prompt
2355 is presented.</p>
2356
2357 <p>As always, things are not so easy to fix as they sound.  To keep
2358 Debian systems working while scripts migrate and during upgrades, the
2359 scripts need to be moved from rcS.d/ to rc2.d/ in reverse dependency
2360 order, ie the scripts that nothing in rcS.d/ depend on can be moved,
2361 and the next ones can only be moved when their dependencies have been
2362 moved first.  This migration must be done sequentially while we ensure
2363 that the package system upgrade packages in the right order to keep
2364 the system state correct.  This will require some coordination when it
2365 comes to network related packages, but most of the packages with
2366 scripts that should migrate do not have anything in rcS.d/ depending
2367 on them.  Some packages have already been updated, like the sudo
2368 package, while others are still left to do.  I wish I had time to work
2369 on this myself, but real live constrains make it unlikely that I will
2370 find time to push this forward.</p>
2371
2372       </div>
2373       <div class="tags">
2374
2375
2376         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>.
2377
2378
2379       </div>
2380     </div>
2381     <div class="padding"></div>
2382
2383     <div class="entry">
2384       <div class="title">
2385         <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>
2386       </div>
2387       <div class="date">
2388         29th July 2011
2389       </div>
2390       <div class="body">
2391         <p>While at Debconf11, I have several times during discussions
2392 mentioned the issues I believe should be improved in Debian for its
2393 desktop to be useful for more people.  The use case for this is my
2394 parents, which are currently running Kubuntu which solve the
2395 issues.</p>
2396
2397 <p>I suspect these four missing features are not very hard to
2398 implement.  After all, they are present in Ubuntu, so if we wanted to
2399 do this in Debian we would have a source.</p>
2400
2401 <ol>
2402
2403 <li><strong>Simple GUI based upgrade of packages.</strong> When there
2404 are new packages available for upgrades, a icon in the KDE status bar
2405 indicate this, and clicking on it will activate the simple upgrade
2406 tool to handle it.  I have no problem guiding both of my parents
2407 through the process over the phone.  If a kernel reboot is required,
2408 this too is indicated by the status bars and the upgrade tool.  Last
2409 time I checked, nothing with the same features was working in KDE in
2410 Debian.</li>
2411
2412 <li><strong>Simple handling of missing Firefox browser
2413 plugins.</strong> When the browser encounter a MIME type it do not
2414 currently have a handler for, it will ask the user if the system
2415 should search for a package that would add support for this MIME type,
2416 and if the user say yes, the APT sources will be searched for packages
2417 advertising the MIME type in their control file (visible in the
2418 Packages file in the APT archive).  If one or more packages are found,
2419 it is a simple click of the mouse to add support for the missing mime
2420 type.  If the package require the user to accept some non-free
2421 license, this is explained to the user.  The entire process make it
2422 more clear to the user why something do not work in the browser, and
2423 make the chances higher for the user to blame the web page authors and
2424 not the browser for any missing features.</li>
2425
2426 <li><strong>Simple handling of missing multimedia codec/format
2427 handlers.</strong> When the media players encounter a format or codec
2428 it is not supporting, a dialog pop up asking the user if the system
2429 should search for a package that would add support for it.  This
2430 happen with things like MP3, Windows Media or H.264.  The selection
2431 and installation procedure is very similar to the Firefox browser
2432 plugin handling.  This is as far as I know implemented using a
2433 gstreamer hook.  The end result is that the user easily get access to
2434 the codecs that are present from the APT archives available, while
2435 explaining more on why a given format is unsupported by Ubuntu.</li>
2436
2437 <li><strong>Better browser handling of some MIME types.</strong> When
2438 displaying a text/plain file in my Debian browser, it will propose to
2439 start emacs to show it.  If I remember correctly, when doing the same
2440 in Kunbutu it show the file as a text file in the browser.  At least I
2441 know Opera will show text files within the browser.  I much prefer the
2442 latter behaviour.</li>
2443
2444 </ol>
2445
2446 <p>There are other nice features as well, like the simplified suite
2447 upgrader, but given that I am the one mostly doing the dist-upgrade,
2448 it do not matter much.</p>
2449
2450 <p>I really hope we could get these features in place for the next
2451 Debian release.  It would require the coordinated effort of several
2452 maintainers, but would make the end user experience a lot better.</p>
2453
2454       </div>
2455       <div class="tags">
2456
2457
2458         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>.
2459
2460
2461       </div>
2462     </div>
2463     <div class="padding"></div>
2464
2465     <div class="entry">
2466       <div class="title">
2467         <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>
2468       </div>
2469       <div class="date">
2470         26th July 2011
2471       </div>
2472       <div class="body">
2473         <p>The Norwegian <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</A>
2474 site is build on Debian/Squeeze, and this platform was chosen because
2475 I am most familiar with Debian (being a Debian Developer for around 10
2476 years) because it is the latest stable Debian release which should get
2477 security support for a few years.</p>
2478
2479 <p>The web service is written in Perl, and depend on some perl modules
2480 that are missing in Debian at the moment.  It would be great if these
2481 modules were added to the Debian archive, allowing anyone to set up
2482 their own <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com">FixMyStreet</a> clone
2483 in their own country using only Debian packages.  The list of modules
2484 missing in Debian/Squeeze isn't very long, and I hope the perl group
2485 will find time to package the 12 modules Catalyst::Plugin::SmartURI,
2486 Catalyst::Plugin::Unicode::Encoding, Catalyst::View::TT, Devel::Hide,
2487 Sort::Key, Statistics::Distributions, Template::Plugin::Comma,
2488 Template::Plugin::DateTime::Format, Term::Size::Any, Term::Size::Perl,
2489 URI::SmartURI and Web::Scraper to make the maintenance of FixMyStreet
2490 easier in the future.</p>
2491
2492 <p>Thanks to the great tools in Debian, getting the missing modules
2493 installed on my server was a simple call to 'cpan2deb Module::Name'
2494 and 'dpkg -i' to install the resulting package.  But this leave me
2495 with the responsibility of tracking security problems, which I really
2496 do not have time for.</p>
2497
2498       </div>
2499       <div class="tags">
2500
2501
2502         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>.
2503
2504
2505       </div>
2506     </div>
2507     <div class="padding"></div>
2508
2509     <div class="entry">
2510       <div class="title">
2511         <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>
2512       </div>
2513       <div class="date">
2514          3rd April 2011
2515       </div>
2516       <div class="body">
2517         <p>Here is a small update for my English readers.  Most of my blog
2518 posts have been in Norwegian the last few weeks, so here is a short
2519 update in English.</p>
2520
2521 <p>The kids still keep me too busy to get much free software work
2522 done, but I did manage to organise a project to get a Norwegian port
2523 of the British service
2524 <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com/">FixMyStreet</a> up and running,
2525 and it has been running for a month now.  The entire project has been
2526 organised by me and two others.  Around Christmas we gathered sponsors
2527 to fund the development work.  In January I drafted a contract with
2528 <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a> on what to develop,
2529 and in February the development took place.  Most of it involved
2530 converting the source to use GPS coordinates instead of British
2531 easting/northing, and the resulting code should be a lot easier to get
2532 running in any country by now.  The Norwegian
2533 <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a> is using
2534 <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/">OpenStreetmap</a> as the map
2535 source and the source for administrative borders in Norway, and
2536 support for this had to be added/fixed.</p>
2537
2538 <p>The Norwegian version went live March 3th, and we spent the weekend
2539 polishing the system before we announced it March 7th.  The system is
2540 running on a KVM instance of Debian/Squeeze, and has seen almost 3000
2541 problem reports in a few weeks.  Soon we hope to announce the Android
2542 and iPhone versions making it even easier to report problems with the
2543 public infrastructure.</p>
2544
2545 <p>Perhaps something to consider for those of you in countries without
2546 such service?</p>
2547
2548       </div>
2549       <div class="tags">
2550
2551
2552         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>.
2553
2554
2555       </div>
2556     </div>
2557     <div class="padding"></div>
2558
2559     <div class="entry">
2560       <div class="title">
2561         <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>
2562       </div>
2563       <div class="date">
2564         28th January 2011
2565       </div>
2566       <div class="body">
2567         <p>The last few days I have looked at ways to track open security
2568 issues here at my work with the University of Oslo.  My idea is that
2569 it should be possible to use the information about security issues
2570 available on the Internet, and check our locally
2571 maintained/distributed software against this information.  It should
2572 allow us to verify that no known security issues are forgotten.  The
2573 CVE database listing vulnerabilities seem like a great central point,
2574 and by using the package lists from Debian mapped to CVEs provided by
2575 the testing security team, I believed it should be possible to figure
2576 out which security holes were present in our free software
2577 collection.</p>
2578
2579 <p>After reading up on the topic, it became obvious that the first
2580 building block is to be able to name software packages in a unique and
2581 consistent way across data sources.  I considered several ways to do
2582 this, for example coming up with my own naming scheme like using URLs
2583 to project home pages or URLs to the Freshmeat entries, or using some
2584 existing naming scheme.  And it seem like I am not the first one to
2585 come across this problem, as MITRE already proposed and implemented a
2586 solution.  Enter the <a href="http://cpe.mitre.org/index.html">Common
2587 Platform Enumeration</a> dictionary, a vocabulary for referring to
2588 software, hardware and other platform components.  The CPE ids are
2589 mapped to CVEs in the <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/">National
2590 Vulnerability Database</a>, allowing me to look up know security
2591 issues for any CPE name.  With this in place, all I need to do is to
2592 locate the CPE id for the software packages we use at the university.
2593 This is fairly trivial (I google for 'cve cpe $package' and check the
2594 NVD entry if a CVE for the package exist).</p>
2595
2596 <p>To give you an example.  The GNU gzip source package have the CPE
2597 name cpe:/a:gnu:gzip.  If the old version 1.3.3 was the package to
2598 check out, one could look up
2599 <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
2600 in NVD</a> and get a list of 6 security holes with public CVE entries.
2601 The most recent one is
2602 <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2010-0001">CVE-2010-0001</a>,
2603 and at the bottom of the NVD page for this vulnerability the complete
2604 list of affected versions is provided.</p>
2605
2606 <p>The NVD database of CVEs is also available as a XML dump, allowing
2607 for offline processing of issues.  Using this dump, I've written a
2608 small script taking a list of CPEs as input and list all CVEs
2609 affecting the packages represented by these CPEs.  One give it CPEs
2610 with version numbers as specified above and get a list of open
2611 security issues out.</p>
2612
2613 <p>Of course for this approach to be useful, the quality of the NVD
2614 information need to be high.  For that to happen, I believe as many as
2615 possible need to use and contribute to the NVD database.  I notice
2616 RHEL is providing
2617 <a href="https://www.redhat.com/security/data/metrics/rhsamapcpe.txt">a
2618 map from CVE to CPE</a>, indicating that they are using the CPE
2619 information.  I'm not aware of Debian and Ubuntu doing the same.</p>
2620
2621 <p>To get an idea about the quality for free software, I spent some
2622 time making it possible to compare the CVE database from Debian with
2623 the CVE database in NVD.  The result look fairly good, but there are
2624 some inconsistencies in NVD (same software package having several
2625 CPEs), and some inaccuracies (NVD not mentioning buggy packages that
2626 Debian believe are affected by a CVE).  Hope to find time to improve
2627 the quality of NVD, but that require being able to get in touch with
2628 someone maintaining it.  So far my three emails with questions and
2629 corrections have not seen any reply, but I hope contact can be
2630 established soon.</p>
2631
2632 <p>An interesting application for CPEs is cross platform package
2633 mapping.  It would be useful to know which packages in for example
2634 RHEL, OpenSuSe and Mandriva are missing from Debian and Ubuntu, and
2635 this would be trivial if all linux distributions provided CPE entries
2636 for their packages.</p>
2637
2638       </div>
2639       <div class="tags">
2640
2641
2642         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>.
2643
2644
2645       </div>
2646     </div>
2647     <div class="padding"></div>
2648
2649     <div class="entry">
2650       <div class="title">
2651         <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>
2652       </div>
2653       <div class="date">
2654         23rd January 2011
2655       </div>
2656       <div class="body">
2657         <p>In the
2658 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/discover-data">discover-data</a>
2659 package in Debian, there is a script to report useful information
2660 about the running hardware for use when people report missing
2661 information.  One part of this script that I find very useful when
2662 debugging hardware problems, is the part mapping loaded kernel module
2663 to the PCI device it claims.  It allow me to quickly see if the kernel
2664 module I expect is driving the hardware I am struggling with.  To see
2665 the output, make sure discover-data is installed and run
2666 <tt>/usr/share/bug/discover-data 3>&1</tt>.  The relevant output on
2667 one of my machines like this:</p>
2668
2669 <pre>
2670 loaded modules:
2671 10de:03eb i2c_nforce2
2672 10de:03f1 ohci_hcd
2673 10de:03f2 ehci_hcd
2674 10de:03f0 snd_hda_intel
2675 10de:03ec pata_amd
2676 10de:03f6 sata_nv
2677 1022:1103 k8temp
2678 109e:036e bttv
2679 109e:0878 snd_bt87x
2680 11ab:4364 sky2
2681 </pre>
2682
2683 <p>The code in question look like this, slightly modified for
2684 readability and to drop the output to file descriptor 3:</p>
2685
2686 <pre>
2687 if [ -d /sys/bus/pci/devices/ ] ; then
2688     echo loaded pci modules:
2689     (
2690         cd /sys/bus/pci/devices/
2691         for address in * ; do
2692             if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
2693                 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
2694                 if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
2695                     address=$(echo $address |sed s/0000://)
2696                     id=`lspci -n -s $address | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $3}'`
2697                     echo "$id $module"
2698                 fi
2699             fi
2700         done
2701     )
2702     echo
2703 fi
2704 </pre>
2705
2706 <p>Similar code could be used to extract USB device module
2707 mappings:</p>
2708
2709 <pre>
2710 if [ -d /sys/bus/usb/devices/ ] ; then
2711     echo loaded usb modules:
2712     (
2713         cd /sys/bus/usb/devices/
2714         for address in * ; do
2715             if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
2716                 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
2717                 if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
2718                     address=$(echo $address |sed s/0000://)
2719                     id=$(lsusb -s $address | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $6}')
2720                     if [ "$id" ] ; then
2721                         echo "$id $module"
2722                     fi
2723                 fi
2724             fi
2725         done
2726     )
2727     echo
2728 fi
2729 </pre>
2730
2731 <p>This might perhaps be something to include in other tools as
2732 well.</p>
2733
2734       </div>
2735       <div class="tags">
2736
2737
2738         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>.
2739
2740
2741       </div>
2742     </div>
2743     <div class="padding"></div>
2744
2745     <div class="entry">
2746       <div class="title">
2747         <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>
2748       </div>
2749       <div class="date">
2750         22nd December 2010
2751       </div>
2752       <div class="body">
2753         <p>The last few days I have spent at work here at the <a
2754 href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a> testing if the new
2755 batch of computers will work with Linux.  Every year for the last few
2756 years the university have organised shared bid of a few thousand
2757 computers, and this year HP won the bid.  Two different desktops and
2758 five different laptops are on the list this year.  We in the UNIX
2759 group want to know which one of these computers work well with RHEL
2760 and Ubuntu, the two Linux distributions we currently handle at the
2761 university.</p>
2762
2763 <p>My test method is simple, and I share it here to get feedback and
2764 perhaps inspire others to test hardware as well.  To test, I PXE
2765 install the OS version of choice, and log in as my normal user and run
2766 a few applications and plug in selected pieces of hardware.  When
2767 something fail, I make a note about this in the test matrix and move
2768 on.  If I have some spare time I try to report the bug to the OS
2769 vendor, but as I only have the machines for a short time, I rarely
2770 have the time to do this for all the problems I find.</p>
2771
2772 <p>Anyway, to get to the point of this post.  Here is the simple tests
2773 I perform on a new model.</p>
2774
2775 <ul>
2776
2777 <li>Is PXE installation working?  I'm testing with RHEL6, Ubuntu Lucid
2778 and Ubuntu Maverik at the moment.  If I feel like it, I also test with
2779 RHEL5 and Debian Edu/Squeeze.</li>
2780
2781 <li>Is X.org working?  If the graphical login screen show up after
2782 installation, X.org is working.</li>
2783
2784 <li>Is hardware accelerated OpenGL working?  Running glxgears (in
2785 package mesa-utils on Ubuntu) and writing down the frames per second
2786 reported by the program.</li>
2787
2788 <li>Is sound working?  With Gnome and KDE, a sound is played when
2789 logging in, and if I can hear this the test is successful.  If there
2790 are several audio exits on the machine, I try them all and check if
2791 the Gnome/KDE audio mixer can control where to send the sound.  I
2792 normally test this by playing
2793 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20101012-chef/ ">a HTML5
2794 video</a> in Firefox/Iceweasel.</li>
2795
2796 <li>Is the USB subsystem working?  I test this by plugging in a USB
2797 memory stick and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.</li>
2798
2799 <li>Is the CD/DVD player working?  I test this by inserting any CD/DVD
2800 I have lying around, and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.</li>
2801
2802 <li>Is any built in camera working?  Test using cheese, and see if a
2803 picture from the v4l device show up.</li>
2804
2805 <li>Is bluetooth working?  Use the Gnome/KDE browsing tool to see if
2806 any bluetooth devices are discovered.  In my office, I normally see a
2807 few.</li>
2808
2809 <li>For laptops, is the SD or Compaq Flash reader working.  I have
2810 memory modules lying around, and stick them in and see if Gnome/KDE
2811 notice this.</li>
2812
2813 <li>For laptops, is suspend/hibernate working?  I'm testing if the
2814 special button work, and if the laptop continue to work after
2815 resume.</li>
2816
2817 <li>For laptops, is the extra buttons working, like audio level,
2818 adjusting background light, switching on/off external video output,
2819 switching on/off wifi, bluetooth, etc?  The set of buttons differ from
2820 laptop to laptop, so I just write down which are working and which are
2821 not.</li>
2822
2823 <li>Some laptops have smart card readers, finger print readers,
2824 acceleration sensors etc.  I rarely test these, as I do not know how
2825 to quickly test if they are working or not, so I only document their
2826 existence.</li>
2827
2828 </ul>
2829
2830 <p>By now I suspect you are really curious what the test results are
2831 for the HP machines I am testing.  I'm not done yet, so I will report
2832 the test results later.  For now I can report that HP 8100 Elite work
2833 fine, and hibernation fail with HP EliteBook 8440p on Ubuntu Lucid,
2834 and audio fail on RHEL6.  Ubuntu Maverik worked with 8440p.  As you
2835 can see, I have most machines left to test.  One interesting
2836 observation is that Ubuntu Lucid has almost twice the frame rate than
2837 RHEL6 with glxgears.  No idea why.</p>
2838
2839       </div>
2840       <div class="tags">
2841
2842
2843         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>.
2844
2845
2846       </div>
2847     </div>
2848     <div class="padding"></div>
2849
2850     <div class="entry">
2851       <div class="title">
2852         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_thoughts_on_BitCoins.html">Some thoughts on BitCoins</a>
2853       </div>
2854       <div class="date">
2855         11th December 2010
2856       </div>
2857       <div class="body">
2858         <p>As I continue to explore
2859 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin</a>, I've starting to wonder
2860 what properties the system have, and how it will be affected by laws
2861 and regulations here in Norway.  Here are some random notes.</p>
2862
2863 <p>One interesting thing to note is that since the transactions are
2864 verified using a peer to peer network, all details about a transaction
2865 is known to everyone.  This means that if a BitCoin address has been
2866 published like I did with mine in my initial post about BitCoin, it is
2867 possible for everyone to see how many BitCoins have been transfered to
2868 that address.  There is even a web service to look at the details for
2869 all transactions.  There I can see that my address
2870 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a>
2871 have received 16.06 Bitcoin, the
2872 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3">1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3</a>
2873 address of Simon Phipps have received 181.97 BitCoin and the address
2874 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt">1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt</A>
2875 of EFF have received 2447.38 BitCoins so far.  Thank you to each and
2876 every one of you that donated bitcoins to support my activity. The
2877 fact that anyone can see how much money was transfered to a given
2878 address make it more obvious why the BitCoin community recommend to
2879 generate and hand out a new address for each transaction.  I'm told
2880 there is no way to track which addresses belong to a given person or
2881 organisation without the person or organisation revealing it
2882 themselves, as Simon, EFF and I have done.</p>
2883
2884 <p>In Norway, and in most other countries, there are laws and
2885 regulations limiting how much money one can transfer across the border
2886 without declaring it.  There are money laundering, tax and accounting
2887 laws and regulations I would expect to apply to the use of BitCoin.
2888 If the Skolelinux foundation
2889 (<a href="http://linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">SLX
2890 Debian Labs</a>) were to accept donations in BitCoin in addition to
2891 normal bank transfers like EFF is doing, how should this be accounted?
2892 Given that it is impossible to know if money can cross the border or
2893 not, should everything or nothing be declared?  What exchange rate
2894 should be used when calculating taxes?  Would receivers have to pay
2895 income tax if the foundation were to pay Skolelinux contributors in
2896 BitCoin?  I have no idea, but it would be interesting to know.</p>
2897
2898 <p>For a currency to be useful and successful, it must be trusted and
2899 accepted by a lot of users.  It must be possible to get easy access to
2900 the currency (as a wage or using currency exchanges), and it must be
2901 easy to spend it.  At the moment BitCoin seem fairly easy to get
2902 access to, but there are very few places to spend it.  I am not really
2903 a regular user of any of the vendor types currently accepting BitCoin,
2904 so I wonder when my kind of shop would start accepting BitCoins.  I
2905 would like to buy electronics, travels and subway tickets, not herbs
2906 and books. :) The currency is young, and this will improve over time
2907 if it become popular, but I suspect regular banks will start to lobby
2908 to get BitCoin declared illegal if it become popular.  I'm sure they
2909 will claim it is helping fund terrorism and money laundering (which
2910 probably would be true, as is any currency in existence), but I
2911 believe the problems should be solved elsewhere and not by blaming
2912 currencies.</p>
2913
2914 <p>The process of creating new BitCoins is called mining, and it is
2915 CPU intensive process that depend on a bit of luck as well (as one is
2916 competing against all the other miners currently spending CPU cycles
2917 to see which one get the next lump of cash).  The "winner" get 50
2918 BitCoin when this happen.  Yesterday I came across the obvious way to
2919 join forces to increase ones changes of getting at least some coins,
2920 by coordinating the work on mining BitCoins across several machines
2921 and people, and sharing the result if one is lucky and get the 50
2922 BitCoins.  Check out
2923 <a href="http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/bitcoin-pool/">BitCoin Pool</a>
2924 if this sounds interesting.  I have not had time to try to set up a
2925 machine to participate there yet, but have seen that running on ones
2926 own for a few days have not yield any BitCoins througth mining
2927 yet.</p>
2928
2929 <p>Update 2010-12-15: Found an <a
2930 href="http://inertia.posterous.com/reply-to-the-underground-economist-why-bitcoi">interesting
2931 criticism</a> of bitcoin.  Not quite sure how valid it is, but thought
2932 it was interesting to read.  The arguments presented seem to be
2933 equally valid for gold, which was used as a currency for many years.</p>
2934
2935       </div>
2936       <div class="tags">
2937
2938
2939         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>.
2940
2941
2942       </div>
2943     </div>
2944     <div class="padding"></div>
2945
2946     <div class="entry">
2947       <div class="title">
2948         <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>
2949       </div>
2950       <div class="date">
2951         10th December 2010
2952       </div>
2953       <div class="body">
2954         <p>With this weeks lawless
2955 <a href="http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/06/wikileaks/index.html">governmental
2956 attacks</a> on Wikileak and
2957 <a href="http://www.salon.com/technology/dan_gillmor/2010/12/06/war_on_speech">free
2958 speech</a>, it has become obvious that PayPal, visa and mastercard can
2959 not be trusted to handle money transactions.
2960 A blog post from
2961 <a href="http://webmink.com/2010/12/06/now-accepting-bitcoin/">Simon
2962 Phipps on bitcoin</a> reminded me about a project that a friend of
2963 mine mentioned earlier.  I decided to follow Simon's example, and get
2964 involved with <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin</a>.  I got
2965 some help from my friend to get it all running, and he even handed me
2966 some bitcoins to get started.  I even donated a few bitcoins to Simon
2967 for helping me remember BitCoin.</p>
2968
2969 <p>So, what is bitcoins, you probably wonder?  It is a digital
2970 crypto-currency, decentralised and handled using peer-to-peer
2971 networks.  It allows anonymous transactions and prohibits central
2972 control over the transactions, making it impossible for governments
2973 and companies alike to block donations and other transactions.  The
2974 source is free software, and while the key dependency wxWidgets 2.9
2975 for the graphical user interface is missing in Debian, the command
2976 line client builds just fine.  Hopefully Jonas
2977 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/578157">will get the package into
2978 Debian</a> soon.</p>
2979
2980 <p>Bitcoins can be converted to other currencies, like USD and EUR.
2981 There are <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/trade">companies accepting
2982 bitcoins</a> when selling services and goods, and there are even
2983 currency "stock" markets where the exchange rate is decided.  There
2984 are not many users so far, but the concept seems promising.  If you
2985 want to get started and lack a friend with any bitcoins to spare,
2986 you can even get
2987 <a href="https://freebitcoins.appspot.com/">some for free</a> (0.05
2988 bitcoin at the time of writing).  Use
2989 <a href="http://www.bitcoinwatch.com/">BitcoinWatch</a> to keep an eye
2990 on the current exchange rates.</p>
2991
2992 <p>As an experiment, I have decided to set up bitcoind on one of my
2993 machines.  If you want to support my activity, please send Bitcoin
2994 donations to the address
2995 <b>15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</b>.  Thank you!</p>
2996
2997       </div>
2998       <div class="tags">
2999
3000
3001         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>.
3002
3003
3004       </div>
3005     </div>
3006     <div class="padding"></div>
3007
3008     <div class="entry">
3009       <div class="title">
3010         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_isn_t_Debian_Edu_using_VLC_.html">Why isn't Debian Edu using VLC?</a>
3011       </div>
3012       <div class="date">
3013         27th November 2010
3014       </div>
3015       <div class="body">
3016         <p>In the latest issue of Linux Journal, the readers choices were
3017 presented, and the winner among the multimedia player were VLC.
3018 Personally, I like VLC, and it is my player of choice when I first try
3019 to play a video file or stream.  Only if VLC fail will I drag out
3020 gmplayer to see if it can do better.  The reason is mostly the failure
3021 model and trust.  When VLC fail, it normally pop up a error message
3022 reporting the problem.  When mplayer fail, it normally segfault or
3023 just hangs.  The latter failure mode drain my trust in the program.<p>
3024
3025 <p>But even if VLC is my player of choice, we have choosen to use
3026 mplayer in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
3027 Edu/Skolelinux</a>.  The reason is simple.  We need a good browser
3028 plugin to play web videos seamlessly, and the VLC browser plugin is
3029 not very good.  For example, it lack in-line control buttons, so there
3030 is no way for the user to pause the video.  Also, when I
3031 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">last
3032 tested the browser plugins</a> available in Debian, the VLC plugin
3033 failed on several video pages where mplayer based plugins worked.  If
3034 the browser plugin for VLC was as good as the gecko-mediaplayer
3035 package (which uses mplayer), we would switch.</P>
3036
3037 <p>While VLC is a good player, its user interface is slightly
3038 annoying.  The most annoying feature is its inconsistent use of
3039 keyboard shortcuts.  When the player is in full screen mode, its
3040 shortcuts are different from when it is playing the video in a window.
3041 For example, space only work as pause when in full screen mode.  I
3042 wish it had consisten shortcuts and that space also would work when in
3043 window mode.  Another nice shortcut in gmplayer is [enter] to restart
3044 the current video.  It is very nice when playing short videos from the
3045 web and want to restart it when new people arrive to have a look at
3046 what is going on.</p>
3047
3048       </div>
3049       <div class="tags">
3050
3051
3052         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>.
3053
3054
3055       </div>
3056     </div>
3057     <div class="padding"></div>
3058
3059     <div class="entry">
3060       <div class="title">
3061         <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>
3062       </div>
3063       <div class="date">
3064         22nd November 2010
3065       </div>
3066       <div class="body">
3067         <p>Michael Biebl suggested to me on IRC, that I changed my automated
3068 upgrade testing of the
3069 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
3070 Gnome and KDE Desktop</a> to do <tt>apt-get autoremove</tt> when using apt-get.
3071 This seem like a very good idea, so I adjusted by test scripts and
3072 can now present the updated result from today:</p>
3073
3074 <p>This is for Gnome:</p>
3075
3076 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
3077
3078 <blockquote><p>
3079   apache2.2-bin
3080   aptdaemon
3081   baobab
3082   binfmt-support
3083   browser-plugin-gnash
3084   cheese-common
3085   cli-common
3086   cups-pk-helper
3087   dmz-cursor-theme
3088   empathy
3089   empathy-common
3090   freedesktop-sound-theme
3091   freeglut3
3092   gconf-defaults-service
3093   gdm-themes
3094   gedit-plugins
3095   geoclue
3096   geoclue-hostip
3097   geoclue-localnet
3098   geoclue-manual
3099   geoclue-yahoo
3100   gnash
3101   gnash-common
3102   gnome
3103   gnome-backgrounds
3104   gnome-cards-data
3105   gnome-codec-install
3106   gnome-core
3107   gnome-desktop-environment
3108   gnome-disk-utility
3109   gnome-screenshot
3110   gnome-search-tool
3111   gnome-session-canberra
3112   gnome-system-log
3113   gnome-themes-extras
3114   gnome-themes-more
3115   gnome-user-share
3116   gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
3117   gstreamer0.10-tools
3118   gtk2-engines
3119   gtk2-engines-pixbuf
3120   gtk2-engines-smooth
3121   hamster-applet
3122   libapache2-mod-dnssd
3123   libapr1
3124   libaprutil1
3125   libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3
3126   libaprutil1-ldap
3127   libart2.0-cil
3128   libboost-date-time1.42.0
3129   libboost-python1.42.0
3130   libboost-thread1.42.0
3131   libchamplain-0.4-0
3132   libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0
3133   libcheese-gtk18
3134   libclutter-gtk-0.10-0
3135   libcryptui0
3136   libdiscid0
3137   libelf1
3138   libepc-1.0-2
3139   libepc-common
3140   libepc-ui-1.0-2
3141   libfreerdp-plugins-standard
3142   libfreerdp0
3143   libgconf2.0-cil
3144   libgdata-common
3145   libgdata7
3146   libgdu-gtk0
3147   libgee2
3148   libgeoclue0
3149   libgexiv2-0
3150   libgif4
3151   libglade2.0-cil
3152   libglib2.0-cil
3153   libgmime2.4-cil
3154   libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
3155   libgnome2.24-cil
3156   libgnomepanel2.24-cil
3157   libgpod-common
3158   libgpod4
3159   libgtk2.0-cil
3160   libgtkglext1
3161   libgtksourceview2.0-common
3162   libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
3163   libmono-addins0.2-cil
3164   libmono-cairo2.0-cil
3165   libmono-corlib2.0-cil
3166   libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil
3167   libmono-posix2.0-cil
3168   libmono-security2.0-cil
3169   libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
3170   libmono-system2.0-cil
3171   libmtp8
3172   libmusicbrainz3-6
3173   libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil
3174   libndesk-dbus1.0-cil
3175   libopal3.6.8
3176   libpolkit-gtk-1-0
3177   libpt2.6.7
3178   libpython2.6
3179   librpm1
3180   librpmio1
3181   libsdl1.2debian
3182   libsrtp0
3183   libssh-4
3184   libtelepathy-farsight0
3185   libtelepathy-glib0
3186   libtidy-0.99-0
3187   media-player-info
3188   mesa-utils
3189   mono-2.0-gac
3190   mono-gac
3191   mono-runtime
3192   nautilus-sendto
3193   nautilus-sendto-empathy
3194   p7zip-full
3195   pkg-config
3196   python-aptdaemon
3197   python-aptdaemon-gtk
3198   python-axiom
3199   python-beautifulsoup
3200   python-bugbuddy
3201   python-clientform
3202   python-coherence
3203   python-configobj
3204   python-crypto
3205   python-cupshelpers
3206   python-elementtree
3207   python-epsilon
3208   python-evolution
3209   python-feedparser
3210   python-gdata
3211   python-gdbm
3212   python-gst0.10
3213   python-gtkglext1
3214   python-gtksourceview2
3215   python-httplib2
3216   python-louie
3217   python-mako
3218   python-markupsafe
3219   python-mechanize
3220   python-nevow
3221   python-notify
3222   python-opengl
3223   python-openssl
3224   python-pam
3225   python-pkg-resources
3226   python-pyasn1
3227   python-pysqlite2
3228   python-rdflib
3229   python-serial
3230   python-tagpy
3231   python-twisted-bin
3232   python-twisted-conch
3233   python-twisted-core
3234   python-twisted-web
3235   python-utidylib
3236   python-webkit
3237   python-xdg
3238   python-zope.interface
3239   remmina
3240   remmina-plugin-data
3241   remmina-plugin-rdp
3242   remmina-plugin-vnc
3243   rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
3244   rhythmbox-plugins
3245   rpm-common
3246   rpm2cpio
3247   seahorse-plugins
3248   shotwell
3249   software-center
3250   system-config-printer-udev
3251   telepathy-gabble
3252   telepathy-mission-control-5
3253   telepathy-salut
3254   tomboy
3255   totem
3256   totem-coherence
3257   totem-mozilla
3258   totem-plugins
3259   transmission-common
3260   xdg-user-dirs
3261   xdg-user-dirs-gtk
3262   xserver-xephyr
3263 </p></blockquote>
3264
3265 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
3266
3267 <blockquote><p>
3268   cheese
3269   ekiga
3270   eog
3271   epiphany-extensions
3272   evolution-exchange
3273   fast-user-switch-applet
3274   file-roller
3275   gcalctool
3276   gconf-editor
3277   gdm
3278   gedit
3279   gedit-common
3280   gnome-games
3281   gnome-games-data
3282   gnome-nettool
3283   gnome-system-tools
3284   gnome-themes
3285   gnuchess
3286   gucharmap
3287   guile-1.8-libs
3288   libavahi-ui0
3289   libdmx1
3290   libgalago3
3291   libgtk-vnc-1.0-0
3292   libgtksourceview2.0-0
3293   liblircclient0
3294   libsdl1.2debian-alsa
3295   libspeexdsp1
3296   libsvga1
3297   rhythmbox
3298   seahorse
3299   sound-juicer
3300   system-config-printer
3301   totem-common
3302   transmission-gtk
3303   vinagre
3304   vino
3305 </p></blockquote>
3306
3307 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
3308
3309 <blockquote><p>
3310   gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
3311 </p></blockquote>
3312
3313 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
3314
3315 <blockquote><p>
3316 [nothing]
3317 </p></blockquote>
3318
3319 <p>This is for KDE:</p>
3320
3321 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
3322
3323 <blockquote><p>
3324   ksmserver
3325 </p></blockquote>
3326
3327 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
3328
3329 <blockquote><p>
3330   kwin
3331   network-manager-kde
3332 </p></blockquote>
3333
3334 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
3335
3336 <blockquote><p>
3337   arts
3338   dolphin
3339   freespacenotifier
3340   google-gadgets-gst
3341   google-gadgets-xul
3342   kappfinder
3343   kcalc
3344   kcharselect
3345   kde-core
3346   kde-plasma-desktop
3347   kde-standard
3348   kde-window-manager
3349   kdeartwork
3350   kdeartwork-emoticons
3351   kdeartwork-style
3352   kdeartwork-theme-icon
3353   kdebase
3354   kdebase-apps
3355   kdebase-workspace
3356   kdebase-workspace-bin
3357   kdebase-workspace-data
3358   kdeeject
3359   kdelibs
3360   kdeplasma-addons
3361   kdeutils
3362   kdewallpapers
3363   kdf
3364   kfloppy
3365   kgpg
3366   khelpcenter4
3367   kinfocenter
3368   konq-plugins-l10n
3369   konqueror-nsplugins
3370   kscreensaver
3371   kscreensaver-xsavers
3372   ktimer
3373   kwrite
3374   libgle3
3375   libkde4-ruby1.8
3376   libkonq5
3377   libkonq5-templates
3378   libnetpbm10
3379   libplasma-ruby
3380   libplasma-ruby1.8
3381   libqt4-ruby1.8
3382   marble-data
3383   marble-plugins
3384   netpbm
3385   nuvola-icon-theme
3386   plasma-dataengines-workspace
3387   plasma-desktop
3388   plasma-desktopthemes-artwork
3389   plasma-runners-addons
3390   plasma-scriptengine-googlegadgets
3391   plasma-scriptengine-python
3392   plasma-scriptengine-qedje
3393   plasma-scriptengine-ruby
3394   plasma-scriptengine-webkit
3395   plasma-scriptengines
3396   plasma-wallpapers-addons
3397   plasma-widget-folderview
3398   plasma-widget-networkmanagement
3399   ruby
3400   sweeper
3401   update-notifier-kde
3402   xscreensaver-data-extra
3403   xscreensaver-gl
3404   xscreensaver-gl-extra
3405   xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
3406 </p></blockquote>
3407
3408 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
3409
3410 <blockquote><p>
3411   ark
3412   google-gadgets-common
3413   google-gadgets-qt
3414   htdig
3415   kate
3416   kdebase-bin
3417   kdebase-data
3418   kdepasswd
3419   kfind
3420   klipper
3421   konq-plugins
3422   konqueror
3423   ksysguard
3424   ksysguardd
3425   libarchive1
3426   libcln6
3427   libeet1
3428   libeina-svn-06
3429   libggadget-1.0-0b
3430   libggadget-qt-1.0-0b
3431   libgps19
3432   libkdecorations4
3433   libkephal4
3434   libkonq4
3435   libkonqsidebarplugin4a
3436   libkscreensaver5
3437   libksgrd4
3438   libksignalplotter4
3439   libkunitconversion4
3440   libkwineffects1a
3441   libmarblewidget4
3442   libntrack-qt4-1
3443   libntrack0
3444   libplasma-geolocation-interface4
3445   libplasmaclock4a
3446   libplasmagenericshell4
3447   libprocesscore4a
3448   libprocessui4a
3449   libqalculate5
3450   libqedje0a
3451   libqtruby4shared2
3452   libqzion0a
3453   libruby1.8
3454   libscim8c2a
3455   libsmokekdecore4-3
3456   libsmokekdeui4-3
3457   libsmokekfile3
3458   libsmokekhtml3
3459   libsmokekio3
3460   libsmokeknewstuff2-3
3461   libsmokeknewstuff3-3
3462   libsmokekparts3
3463   libsmokektexteditor3
3464   libsmokekutils3
3465   libsmokenepomuk3
3466   libsmokephonon3
3467   libsmokeplasma3
3468   libsmokeqtcore4-3
3469   libsmokeqtdbus4-3
3470   libsmokeqtgui4-3
3471   libsmokeqtnetwork4-3
3472   libsmokeqtopengl4-3
3473   libsmokeqtscript4-3
3474   libsmokeqtsql4-3
3475   libsmokeqtsvg4-3
3476   libsmokeqttest4-3
3477   libsmokeqtuitools4-3
3478   libsmokeqtwebkit4-3
3479   libsmokeqtxml4-3
3480   libsmokesolid3
3481   libsmokesoprano3
3482   libtaskmanager4a
3483   libtidy-0.99-0
3484   libweather-ion4a
3485   libxklavier16
3486   libxxf86misc1
3487   okteta
3488   oxygencursors
3489   plasma-dataengines-addons
3490   plasma-scriptengine-superkaramba
3491   plasma-widget-lancelot
3492   plasma-widgets-addons
3493   plasma-widgets-workspace
3494   polkit-kde-1
3495   ruby1.8
3496   systemsettings
3497   update-notifier-common
3498 </p></blockquote>
3499
3500 <p>Running apt-get autoremove made the results using apt-get and
3501 aptitude a bit more similar, but there are still quite a lott of
3502 differences.  I have no idea what packages should be installed after
3503 the upgrade, but hope those that do can have a look.</p>
3504
3505       </div>
3506       <div class="tags">
3507
3508
3509         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>.
3510
3511
3512       </div>
3513     </div>
3514     <div class="padding"></div>
3515
3516     <div class="entry">
3517       <div class="title">
3518         <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>
3519       </div>
3520       <div class="date">
3521         22nd November 2010
3522       </div>
3523       <div class="body">
3524         <p>Most of the computers in use by the
3525 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux project</a>
3526 are virtual machines.  And they have been Xen machines running on a
3527 fairly old IBM eserver xseries 345 machine, and we wanted to migrate
3528 them to KVM on a newer Dell PowerEdge 2950 host machine.  This was a
3529 bit harder that it could have been, because we set up the Xen virtual
3530 machines to get the virtual partitions from LVM, which as far as I
3531 know is not supported by KVM.  So to migrate, we had to convert
3532 several LVM logical volumes to partitions on a virtual disk file.</p>
3533
3534 <p>I found
3535 <a href="http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM">a
3536 nice recipe</a> to do this, and wrote the following script to do the
3537 migration.  It uses qemu-img from the qemu package to make the disk
3538 image, parted to partition it, losetup and kpartx to present the disk
3539 image partions as devices, and dd to copy the data.  I NFS mounted the
3540 new servers storage area on the old server to do the migration.</p>
3541
3542 <pre>
3543 #!/bin/sh
3544
3545 # Based on
3546 # http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM
3547
3548 set -e
3549 set -x
3550
3551 if [ -z "$1" ] ; then
3552     echo "Usage: $0 &lt;hostname&gt;"
3553     exit 1
3554 else
3555     host="$1"
3556 fi
3557
3558 if [ ! -e /dev/vg_data/$host-disk ] ; then
3559     echo "error: unable to find LVM volume for $host"
3560     exit 1
3561 fi
3562
3563 # Partitions need to be a bit bigger than the LVM LVs.  not sure why.
3564 disksize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-disk | awk '{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }')
3565 swapsize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-swap | awk '{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }')
3566 totalsize=$(( ( $disksize + $swapsize ) ))
3567
3568 img=$host.img
3569 #dd if=/dev/zero of=$img bs=1M count=$(( $disksize + $swapsize ))
3570 qemu-img create $img ${totalsize}MMaking room on the Debian Edu/Sqeeze DVD
3571
3572 parted $img mklabel msdos
3573 parted $img mkpart primary linux-swap 0 $disksize
3574 parted $img mkpart primary ext2 $disksize $totalsize
3575 parted $img set 1 boot on
3576
3577 modprobe dm-mod
3578 losetup /dev/loop0 $img
3579 kpartx -a /dev/loop0
3580
3581 dd if=/dev/vg_data/$host-disk of=/dev/mapper/loop0p1 bs=1M
3582 fsck.ext3 -f /dev/mapper/loop0p1 || true
3583 mkswap /dev/mapper/loop0p2
3584
3585 kpartx -d /dev/loop0
3586 losetup -d /dev/loop0
3587 </pre>
3588
3589 <p>The script is perhaps so simple that it is not copyrightable, but
3590 if it is, it is licenced using GPL v2 or later at your discretion.</p>
3591
3592 <p>After doing this, I booted a Debian CD in rescue mode in KVM with
3593 the new disk image attached, installed grub-pc and linux-image-686 and
3594 set up grub to boot from the disk image.  After this, the KVM machines
3595 seem to work just fine.</p>
3596
3597       </div>
3598       <div class="tags">
3599
3600
3601         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>.
3602
3603
3604       </div>
3605     </div>
3606     <div class="padding"></div>
3607
3608     <div class="entry">
3609       <div class="title">
3610         <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>
3611       </div>
3612       <div class="date">
3613         20th November 2010
3614       </div>
3615       <div class="body">
3616         <p>I'm still running upgrade testing of the
3617 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
3618 Gnome and KDE Desktop</a>, but have not had time to spend on reporting the
3619 status.  Here is a short update based on a test I ran 20101118.</p>
3620
3621 <p>I still do not know what a correct migration should look like, so I
3622 report any differences between apt and aptitude and hope someone else
3623 can see if anything should be changed.</p>
3624
3625 <p>This is for Gnome:</p>
3626
3627 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
3628
3629 <blockquote><p>
3630   apache2.2-bin aptdaemon at-spi baobab binfmt-support
3631   browser-plugin-gnash cheese-common cli-common cpp-4.3 cups-pk-helper
3632   dmz-cursor-theme empathy empathy-common finger
3633   freedesktop-sound-theme freeglut3 gconf-defaults-service gdm-themes
3634   gedit-plugins geoclue geoclue-hostip geoclue-localnet geoclue-manual
3635   geoclue-yahoo gnash gnash-common gnome gnome-backgrounds
3636   gnome-cards-data gnome-codec-install gnome-core
3637   gnome-desktop-environment gnome-disk-utility gnome-screenshot
3638   gnome-search-tool gnome-session-canberra gnome-spell
3639   gnome-system-log gnome-themes-extras gnome-themes-more
3640   gnome-user-share gs-common gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
3641   gstreamer0.10-tools gtk2-engines gtk2-engines-pixbuf
3642   gtk2-engines-smooth hal-info hamster-applet libapache2-mod-dnssd
3643   libapr1 libaprutil1 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3 libaprutil1-ldap
3644   libart2.0-cil libatspi1.0-0 libboost-date-time1.42.0
3645   libboost-python1.42.0 libboost-thread1.42.0 libchamplain-0.4-0
3646   libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0 libcheese-gtk18 libclutter-gtk-0.10-0
3647   libcryptui0 libcupsys2 libdiscid0 libeel2-data libelf1 libepc-1.0-2
3648   libepc-common libepc-ui-1.0-2 libfreerdp-plugins-standard
3649   libfreerdp0 libgail-common libgconf2.0-cil libgdata-common libgdata7
3650   libgdl-1-common libgdu-gtk0 libgee2 libgeoclue0 libgexiv2-0 libgif4
3651   libglade2.0-cil libglib2.0-cil libgmime2.4-cil libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
3652   libgnome2.24-cil libgnomepanel2.24-cil libgnomeprint2.2-data
3653   libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod-common libgpod4
3654   libgtk2.0-cil libgtkglext1 libgtksourceview-common
3655   libgtksourceview2.0-common libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
3656   libmono-addins0.2-cil libmono-cairo2.0-cil libmono-corlib2.0-cil
3657   libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil libmono-posix2.0-cil
3658   libmono-security2.0-cil libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
3659   libmono-system2.0-cil libmtp8 libmusicbrainz3-6
3660   libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil libndesk-dbus1.0-cil libopal3.6.8
3661   libpolkit-gtk-1-0 libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
3662   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libpt2.6.7 libpython2.6 librpm1 librpmio1
3663   libsdl1.2debian libservlet2.4-java libsrtp0 libssh-4
3664   libtelepathy-farsight0 libtelepathy-glib0 libtidy-0.99-0
3665   libxalan2-java libxerces2-java media-player-info mesa-utils
3666   mono-2.0-gac mono-gac mono-runtime nautilus-sendto
3667   nautilus-sendto-empathy openoffice.org-writer2latex
3668   openssl-blacklist p7zip p7zip-full pkg-config python-4suite-xml
3669   python-aptdaemon python-aptdaemon-gtk python-axiom
3670   python-beautifulsoup python-bugbuddy python-clientform
3671   python-coherence python-configobj python-crypto python-cupshelpers
3672   python-cupsutils python-eggtrayicon python-elementtree
3673   python-epsilon python-evolution python-feedparser python-gdata
3674   python-gdbm python-gst0.10 python-gtkglext1 python-gtkmozembed
3675   python-gtksourceview2 python-httplib2 python-louie python-mako
3676   python-markupsafe python-mechanize python-nevow python-notify
3677   python-opengl python-openssl python-pam python-pkg-resources
3678   python-pyasn1 python-pysqlite2 python-rdflib python-serial
3679   python-tagpy python-twisted-bin python-twisted-conch
3680   python-twisted-core python-twisted-web python-utidylib python-webkit
3681   python-xdg python-zope.interface remmina remmina-plugin-data
3682   remmina-plugin-rdp remmina-plugin-vnc rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
3683   rhythmbox-plugins rpm-common rpm2cpio seahorse-plugins shotwell
3684   software-center svgalibg1 system-config-printer-udev
3685   telepathy-gabble telepathy-mission-control-5 telepathy-salut tomboy
3686   totem totem-coherence totem-mozilla totem-plugins
3687   transmission-common xdg-user-dirs xdg-user-dirs-gtk xserver-xephyr
3688   zip
3689 </p></blockquote>
3690
3691 Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude
3692
3693 <blockquote><p>
3694   arj bluez-utils cheese dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop ekiga eog
3695   epiphany-extensions epiphany-gecko evolution-exchange
3696   fast-user-switch-applet file-roller gcalctool gconf-editor gdm gedit
3697   gedit-common gnome-app-install gnome-games gnome-games-data
3698   gnome-nettool gnome-system-tools gnome-themes gnome-utils
3699   gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager gnuchess gucharmap
3700   guile-1.8-libs hal libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5
3701   libavahi-ui0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7
3702   libcucul0 libcurl3 libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdmx1 libdvdread3
3703   libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1
3704   libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3 libfaad0 libgadu3
3705   libgalago3 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
3706   libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
3707   libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
3708   libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtk-vnc-1.0-0
3709   libgtkhtml2-0 libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgtksourceview2.0-0
3710   libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
3711   libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libkpathsea4 liblircclient0 libltdl3 liblwres50
3712   libmagick++10 libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmozjs1d libmpfr1ldbl libmtp7
3713   libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0
3714   libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpisock9
3715   libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8
3716   libsdl1.2debian-alsa libsensors3 libsexy2 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
3717   libspeexdsp1 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libsvga1
3718   libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0
3719   libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12
3720   libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common rhythmbox seahorse
3721   sound-juicer swfdec-gnome system-config-printer totem-common
3722   totem-gstreamer transmission-gtk vinagre vino w3c-dtd-xhtml wodim
3723 </p></blockquote>
3724
3725 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
3726
3727 <blockquote><p>
3728   gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
3729 </p></blockquote>
3730
3731 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
3732
3733 <blockquote><p>
3734 [nothing]
3735 </p></blockquote>
3736
3737 <p>This is for KDE:</p>
3738
3739 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
3740
3741 <blockquote><p>
3742   autopoint bomber bovo cantor cantor-backend-kalgebra cpp-4.3 dcoprss
3743   edict espeak espeak-data eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
3744   ghostscript-x git gnome-audio gnugo granatier gs-common
3745   gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio indi kaddressbook-plugins kalgebra
3746   kalzium-data kanjidic kapman kate-plugins kblocks kbreakout kbstate
3747   kde-icons-mono kdeaccessibility kdeaddons-kfile-plugins
3748   kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
3749   kdeedu kdeedu-data kdeedu-kvtml-data kdegames kdegames-card-data
3750   kdegames-mahjongg-data kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc
3751   kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
3752   kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdessh kdetoys kdewebdev
3753   kdiamond kdnssd kfilereplace kfourinline kgeography-data kigo
3754   killbots kiriki klettres-data kmoon kmrml knewsticker-scripts
3755   kollision kpf krosspython ksirk ksmserver ksquares kstars-data
3756   ksudoku kubrick kweather libasound2-plugins libboost-python1.42.0
3757   libcfitsio3 libconvert-binhex-perl libcrypt-ssleay-perl libdb4.6++
3758   libdjvulibre-text libdotconf1.0 liberror-perl libespeak1
3759   libfinance-quote-perl libgail-common libgsl0ldbl libhtml-parser-perl
3760   libhtml-tableextract-perl libhtml-tagset-perl libhtml-tree-perl
3761   libio-stringy-perl libkdeedu4 libkdegames5 libkiten4 libkpathsea5
3762   libkrossui4 libmailtools-perl libmime-tools-perl
3763   libnews-nntpclient-perl libopenbabel3 libportaudio2 libpulse-browse0
3764   libservlet2.4-java libspeechd2 libtiff-tools libtimedate-perl
3765   libunistring0 liburi-perl libwww-perl libxalan2-java libxerces2-java
3766   lirc luatex marble networkstatus noatun-plugins
3767   openoffice.org-writer2latex palapeli palapeli-data parley
3768   parley-data poster psutils pulseaudio pulseaudio-esound-compat
3769   pulseaudio-module-x11 pulseaudio-utils quanta-data rocs rsync
3770   speech-dispatcher step svgalibg1 texlive-binaries texlive-luatex
3771   ttf-sazanami-gothic
3772 </p></blockquote>
3773
3774 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
3775
3776 <blockquote><p>
3777   amor artsbuilder atlantik atlantikdesigner blinken bluez-utils cvs
3778   dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop imlib-base imlib11 kalzium kanagram kandy
3779   kasteroids katomic kbackgammon kbattleship kblackbox kbounce kbruch
3780   kcron kdat kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data kdeprint kdict kdvi kedit
3781   keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs kgeography kghostview
3782   kgoldrunner khangman khexedit kiconedit kig kimagemapeditor
3783   kitchensync kiten kjumpingcube klatin klettres klickety klines
3784   klinkstatus kmag kmahjongg kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmines
3785   kmousetool kmouth kmplot knetwalk kodo kolf kommander konquest kooka
3786   kpager kpat kpdf kpercentage kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler krec
3787   kregexpeditor kreversi ksame ksayit kshisen ksig ksim ksirc ksirtet
3788   ksmiletris ksnake ksokoban kspaceduel kstars ksvg ksysv kteatime
3789   ktip ktnef ktouch ktron kttsd ktuberling kturtle ktux kuickshow
3790   kverbos kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kwordquiz
3791   kworldclock kxsldbg libakode2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
3792   libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
3793   libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2
3794   libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0
3795   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
3796   libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0 libicu38
3797   libiec61883-0 libindex0 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
3798   libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1 libkdeedu3
3799   libkdegames1 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
3800   libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
3801   libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick10
3802   libmimelib1c2a libmodplug0c2 libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libmpfr1ldbl
3803   libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9 libpoppler-glib3
3804   libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 librss1 libsensors3
3805   libsmbios2 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90
3806   libtalloc1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 lskat
3807   mpeglib network-manager-kde noatun pmount tex-common texlive-base
3808   texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended tidy
3809   ttf-dustin ttf-kochi-gothic ttf-sjfonts
3810 </p></blockquote>
3811
3812 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
3813
3814 <blockquote><p>
3815   dolphin kde-core kde-plasma-desktop kde-standard kde-window-manager
3816   kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-apps kdebase-workspace
3817   kdebase-workspace-bin kdebase-workspace-data kdeutils kscreensaver
3818   kscreensaver-xsavers libgle3 libkonq5 libkonq5-templates libnetpbm10
3819   netpbm plasma-widget-folderview plasma-widget-networkmanagement
3820   xscreensaver-data-extra xscreensaver-gl xscreensaver-gl-extra
3821   xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
3822 </p></blockquote>
3823
3824 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
3825
3826 <blockquote><p>
3827   kdebase-bin konq-plugins konqueror
3828 </p></blockquote>
3829
3830       </div>
3831       <div class="tags">
3832
3833
3834         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>.
3835
3836
3837       </div>
3838     </div>
3839     <div class="padding"></div>
3840
3841     <div class="entry">
3842       <div class="title">
3843         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_buildbot_slave_and_Debian_kfreebsd.html">Gnash buildbot slave and Debian kfreebsd</a>
3844       </div>
3845       <div class="date">
3846         20th November 2010
3847       </div>
3848       <div class="body">
3849         <p>Answering
3850 <a href="http://www.listware.net/201011/gnash-dev/67431-gnash-dev-buildbot-looking-for-slaves.html">the
3851 call from the Gnash project</a> for
3852 <a href="http://www.gnashdev.org:8010">buildbot</a> slaves to test the
3853 current source, I have set up a virtual KVM machine on the Debian
3854 Edu/Skolelinux virtualization host to test the git source on
3855 Debian/Squeeze.  I hope this can help the developers in getting new
3856 releases out more often.</p>
3857
3858 <p>As the developers want less main-stream build platforms tested to,
3859 I have considered setting up a <a
3860 href="http://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/">Debian/kfreebsd</a>
3861 machine as well.  I have also considered using the kfreebsd
3862 architecture in Debian as a file server in NUUG to get access to the 5
3863 TB zfs volume we currently use to store DV video.  Because of this, I
3864 finally got around to do a test installation of Debian/Squeeze with
3865 kfreebsd.  Installation went fairly smooth, thought I noticed some
3866 visual glitches in the cdebconf dialogs (black cursor left on the
3867 screen at random locations).  Have not gotten very far with the
3868 testing.  Noticed cfdisk did not work, but fdisk did so it was not a
3869 fatal problem.  Have to spend some more time on it to see if it is
3870 useful as a file server for NUUG.  Will try to find time to set up a
3871 gnash buildbot slave on the Debian Edu/Skolelinux this weekend.</p>
3872
3873       </div>
3874       <div class="tags">
3875
3876
3877         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>.
3878
3879
3880       </div>
3881     </div>
3882     <div class="padding"></div>
3883
3884     <div class="entry">
3885       <div class="title">
3886         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_in_3D.html">Debian in 3D</a>
3887       </div>
3888       <div class="date">
3889          9th November 2010
3890       </div>
3891       <div class="body">
3892         <p><img src="http://thingiverse-production.s3.amazonaws.com/renders/23/e0/c4/f9/2b/debswagtdose_preview_medium.jpg"></p>
3893
3894 <p>3D printing is just great.  I just came across this Debian logo in
3895 3D linked in from
3896 <a href="http://blog.thingiverse.com/2010/11/09/participatory-branding/">the
3897 thingiverse blog</a>.</p>
3898
3899       </div>
3900       <div class="tags">
3901
3902
3903         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>.
3904
3905
3906       </div>
3907     </div>
3908     <div class="padding"></div>
3909
3910     <div class="entry">
3911       <div class="title">
3912         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_updates_2010_10_24.html">Software updates 2010-10-24</a>
3913       </div>
3914       <div class="date">
3915         24th October 2010
3916       </div>
3917       <div class="body">
3918         <p>Some updates.</p>
3919
3920 <p>My <a href="http://pledgebank.com/gnash-avm2">gnash pledge</a> to
3921 raise money for the project is going well.  The lower limit of 10
3922 signers was reached in 24 hours, and so far 13 people have signed it.
3923 More signers and more funding is most welcome, and I am really curious
3924 how far we can get before the time limit of December 24 is reached.
3925 :)</p>
3926
3927 <p>On the #gnash IRC channel on irc.freenode.net, I was just tipped
3928 about what appear to be a great code coverage tool capable of
3929 generating code coverage stats without any changes to the source code.
3930 It is called
3931 <a href="http://simonkagstrom.github.com/kcov/index.html">kcov</a>,
3932 and can be used using <tt>kcov &lt;directory&gt; &lt;binary&gt;</tt>.
3933 It is missing in Debian, but the git source built just fine in Squeeze
3934 after I installed libelf-dev, libdwarf-dev, pkg-config and
3935 libglib2.0-dev.  Failed to build in Lenny, but suspect that is
3936 solvable.  I hope kcov make it into Debian soon.</p>
3937
3938 <p>Finally found time to wrap up the release notes for <a
3939 href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2010/10/msg00002.html">a
3940 new alpha release of Debian Edu</a>, and just published the second
3941 alpha test release of the Squeeze based Debian Edu /
3942 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a>
3943 release.  Give it a try if you need a complete linux solution for your
3944 school, including central infrastructure server, workstations, thin
3945 client servers and diskless workstations.  A nice touch added
3946 yesterday is RDP support on the thin client servers, for windows
3947 clients to get a Linux desktop on request.</p>
3948
3949       </div>
3950       <div class="tags">
3951
3952
3953         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>.
3954
3955
3956       </div>
3957     </div>
3958     <div class="padding"></div>
3959
3960     <div class="entry">
3961       <div class="title">
3962         <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>
3963       </div>
3964       <div class="date">
3965          4th September 2010
3966       </div>
3967       <div class="body">
3968         <p>In the <a href="http://popcon.debian.org/unknown/by_vote">Debian
3969 popularity-contest numbers</a>, the adobe-flashplugin package the
3970 second most popular used package that is missing in Debian.  The sixth
3971 most popular is flashplayer-mozilla.  This is a clear indication that
3972 working flash is important for Debian users.  Around 10 percent of the
3973 users submitting data to popcon.debian.org have this package
3974 installed.</p>
3975
3976 <p>In the report written by Lars Risan in August 2008
3977 («<a href="http://wiki.skolelinux.no/Dokumentasjon/Rapporter?action=AttachFile&do=view&target=Skolelinux_i_bruk_rapport_1.0.pdf">Skolelinux
3978 i bruk – Rapport for Hurum kommune, Universitetet i Agder og
3979 stiftelsen SLX Debian Labs</a>»), one of the most important problems
3980 schools experienced with <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
3981 Edu/Skolelinux</a> was the lack of working Flash.  A lot of educational
3982 web sites require Flash to work, and lacking working Flash support in
3983 the web browser and the problems with installing it was perceived as a
3984 good reason to stay with Windows.</p>
3985
3986 <p>I once saw a funny and sad comment in a web forum, where Linux was
3987 said to be the retarded cousin that did not really understand
3988 everything you told him but could work fairly well.  This was a
3989 comment regarding the problems Linux have with proprietary formats and
3990 non-standard web pages, and is sad because it exposes a fairly common
3991 understanding of whose fault it is if web pages that only work in for
3992 example Internet Explorer 6 fail to work on Firefox, and funny because
3993 it explain very well how annoying it is for users when Linux
3994 distributions do not work with the documents they receive or the web
3995 pages they want to visit.</p>
3996
3997 <p>This is part of the reason why I believe it is important for Debian
3998 and Debian Edu to have a well working Flash implementation in the
3999 distribution, to get at least popular sites as Youtube and Google
4000 Video to working out of the box.  For Squeeze, Debian have the chance
4001 to include the latest version of Gnash that will make this happen, as
4002 the new release 0.8.8 was published a few weeks ago and is resting in
4003 unstable.  The new version work with more sites that version 0.8.7.
4004 The Gnash maintainers have asked for a freeze exception, but the
4005 release team have not had time to reply to it yet.  I hope they agree
4006 with me that Flash is important for the Debian desktop users, and thus
4007 accept the new package into Squeeze.</p>
4008
4009       </div>
4010       <div class="tags">
4011
4012
4013         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>.
4014
4015
4016       </div>
4017     </div>
4018     <div class="padding"></div>
4019
4020     <div class="entry">
4021       <div class="title">
4022         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Circular_package_dependencies_harms_apt_recovery.html">Circular package dependencies harms apt recovery</a>
4023       </div>
4024       <div class="date">
4025         27th July 2010
4026       </div>
4027       <div class="body">
4028         <p>I discovered this while doing
4029 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">automated
4030 testing of upgrades from Debian Lenny to Squeeze</a>.  A few packages
4031 in Debian still got circular dependencies, and it is often claimed
4032 that apt and aptitude should be able to handle this just fine, but
4033 some times these dependency loops causes apt to fail.</p>
4034
4035 <p>An example is from todays
4036 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing//test-20100727-lenny-squeeze-kde-aptitude.txt">upgrade
4037 of KDE using aptitude</a>.  In it, a bug in kdebase-workspace-data
4038 causes perl-modules to fail to upgrade.  The cause is simple.  If a
4039 package fail to unpack, then only part of packages with the circular
4040 dependency might end up being unpacked when unpacking aborts, and the
4041 ones already unpacked will fail to configure in the recovery phase
4042 because its dependencies are unavailable.</p>
4043
4044 <p>In this log, the problem manifest itself with this error:</p>
4045
4046 <blockquote><pre>
4047 dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of perl-modules:
4048  perl-modules depends on perl (>= 5.10.1-1); however:
4049   Version of perl on system is 5.10.0-19lenny2.
4050 dpkg: error processing perl-modules (--configure):
4051  dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
4052 </pre></blockquote>
4053
4054 <p>The perl/perl-modules circular dependency is already
4055 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/527917">reported as a bug</a>, and will
4056 hopefully be solved as soon as possible, but it is not the only one,
4057 and each one of these loops in the dependency tree can cause similar
4058 failures.  Of course, they only occur when there are bugs in other
4059 packages causing the unpacking to fail, but it is rather nasty when
4060 the failure of one package causes the problem to become worse because
4061 of dependency loops.</p>
4062
4063 <p>Thanks to
4064 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/06/msg00116.html">the
4065 tireless effort by Bill Allombert</a>, the number of circular
4066 dependencies
4067 <a href="http://debian.semistable.com/debgraph.out.html">left in Debian
4068 is dropping</a>, and perhaps it will reach zero one day. :)</p>
4069
4070 <p>Todays testing also exposed a bug in
4071 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/590605">update-notifier</a> and
4072 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/590604">different behaviour</a> between
4073 apt-get and aptitude, the latter possibly caused by some circular
4074 dependency.  Reported both to BTS to try to get someone to look at
4075 it.</p>
4076
4077       </div>
4078       <div class="tags">
4079
4080
4081         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>.
4082
4083
4084       </div>
4085     </div>
4086     <div class="padding"></div>
4087
4088     <div class="entry">
4089       <div class="title">
4090         <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>
4091       </div>
4092       <div class="date">
4093         17th July 2010
4094       </div>
4095       <div class="body">
4096         <p>This is a
4097 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">followup</a>
4098 on my
4099 <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
4100 work</a> on
4101 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">merging
4102 all</a> the computer related LDAP objects in Debian Edu.</p>
4103
4104 <p>As a step to try to see if it possible to merge the DNS and DHCP
4105 LDAP objects, I have had a look at how the packages pdns-backend-ldap
4106 and dhcp3-server-ldap in Debian use the LDAP server.  The two
4107 implementations are quite different in how they use LDAP.</p>
4108
4109 To get this information, I started slapd with debugging enabled and
4110 dumped the debug output to a file to get the LDAP searches performed
4111 on a Debian Edu main-server.  Here is a summary.
4112
4113 <p><strong>powerdns</strong></p>
4114
4115 <a href="http://www.linuxnetworks.de/doc/index.php/PowerDNS_LDAP_Backend">Clues
4116 on how to</a> set up PowerDNS to use a LDAP backend is available on
4117 the web.
4118
4119 <p>PowerDNS have two modes of operation using LDAP as its backend.
4120 One "strict" mode where the forward and reverse DNS lookups are done
4121 using the same LDAP objects, and a "tree" mode where the forward and
4122 reverse entries are in two different subtrees in LDAP with a structure
4123 based on the DNS names, as in tjener.intern and
4124 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa.</p>
4125
4126 <p>In tree mode, the server is set up to use a LDAP subtree as its
4127 base, and uses a "base" scoped search for the DNS name by adding
4128 "dc=tjener,dc=intern," to the base with a filter for
4129 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" for the forward entry and
4130 "dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa," with a filter for
4131 "(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)" for the reverse entry.  For
4132 forward entries, it is looking for attributes named dnsttl, arecord,
4133 nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord,
4134 txtrecord, rprecord, afsdbrecord, keyrecord, aaaarecord, locrecord,
4135 srvrecord, naptrrecord, kxrecord, certrecord, dsrecord, sshfprecord,
4136 ipseckeyrecord, rrsigrecord, nsecrecord, dnskeyrecord, dhcidrecord,
4137 spfrecord and modifytimestamp.  For reverse entries it is looking for
4138 the attributes dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord,
4139 ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord,
4140 locrecord, srvrecord, naptrrecord and modifytimestamp.  The equivalent
4141 ldapsearch commands could look like this:</p>
4142
4143 <blockquote><pre>
4144 ldapsearch -h ldap \
4145   -b dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
4146   -s base -x '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
4147   cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
4148   rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
4149   nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
4150   rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
4151
4152 ldapsearch -h ldap \
4153   -b dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
4154   -s base -x '(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)'
4155   dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord soarecord ptrrecord \
4156   hinforecord mxrecord txtrecord rprecord aaaarecord locrecord \
4157   srvrecord naptrrecord modifytimestamp
4158 </pre></blockquote>
4159
4160 <p>In Debian Edu/Lenny, the PowerDNS tree mode is used with
4161 ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no as the base, and these are two
4162 example LDAP objects used there.  In addition to these objects, the
4163 parent objects all th way up to ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
4164 also exist.</p>
4165
4166 <blockquote><pre>
4167 dn: dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
4168 objectclass: top
4169 objectclass: dnsdomain
4170 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
4171 dc: tjener
4172 arecord: 10.0.2.2
4173 associateddomain: tjener.intern
4174
4175 dn: dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
4176 objectclass: top
4177 objectclass: dnsdomain2
4178 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
4179 dc: 2
4180 ptrrecord: tjener.intern
4181 associateddomain: 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa
4182 </pre></blockquote>
4183
4184 <p>In strict mode, the server behaves differently.  When looking for
4185 forward DNS entries, it is doing a "subtree" scoped search with the
4186 same base as in the tree mode for a object with filter
4187 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" and requests the attributes dnsttl,
4188 arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord,
4189 mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord, locrecord, srvrecord,
4190 naptrrecord and modifytimestamp.  For reverse entires it also do a
4191 subtree scoped search but this time the filter is "(arecord=10.0.2.2)"
4192 and the requested attributes are associateddomain, dnsttl and
4193 modifytimestamp.  In short, in strict mode the objects with ptrrecord
4194 go away, and the arecord attribute in the forward object is used
4195 instead.</p>
4196
4197 <p>The forward and reverse searches can be simulated using ldapsearch
4198 like this:</p>
4199
4200 <blockquote><pre>
4201 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
4202   '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
4203   cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
4204   rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
4205   nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
4206   rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
4207
4208 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
4209   '(arecord=10.0.2.2)' associateddomain dnsttl modifytimestamp
4210 </pre></blockquote>
4211
4212 <p>In addition to the forward and reverse searches , there is also a
4213 search for SOA records, which behave similar to the forward and
4214 reverse lookups.</p>
4215
4216 <p>A thing to note with the PowerDNS behaviour is that it do not
4217 specify any objectclass names, and instead look for the attributes it
4218 need to generate a DNS reply.  This make it able to work with any
4219 objectclass that provide the needed attributes.</p>
4220
4221 <p>The attributes are normally provided in the cosine (RFC 1274) and
4222 dnsdomain2 schemas.  The latter is used for reverse entries like
4223 ptrrecord and recent DNS additions like aaaarecord and srvrecord.</p>
4224
4225 <p>In Debian Edu, we have created DNS objects using the object classes
4226 dcobject (for dc), dnsdomain or dnsdomain2 (structural, for the DNS
4227 attributes) and domainrelatedobject (for associatedDomain).  The use
4228 of structural object classes make it impossible to combine these
4229 classes with the object classes used by DHCP.</p>
4230
4231 <p>There are other schemas that could be used too, for example the
4232 dnszone structural object class used by Gosa and bind-sdb for the DNS
4233 attributes combined with the domainrelatedobject object class, but in
4234 this case some unused attributes would have to be included as well
4235 (zonename and relativedomainname).</p>
4236
4237 <p>My proposal for Debian Edu would be to switch PowerDNS to strict
4238 mode and not use any of the existing objectclasses (dnsdomain,
4239 dnsdomain2 and dnszone) when one want to combine the DNS information
4240 with DHCP information, and instead create a auxiliary object class
4241 defined something like this (using the attributes defined for
4242 dnsdomain and dnsdomain2 or dnszone):</p>
4243
4244 <blockquote><pre>
4245 objectclass ( some-oid NAME 'dnsDomainAux'
4246     SUP top
4247     AUXILIARY
4248     MAY ( ARecord $ MDRecord $ MXRecord $ NSRecord $ SOARecord $ CNAMERecord $
4249           DNSTTL $ DNSClass $ PTRRecord $ HINFORecord $ MINFORecord $
4250           TXTRecord $ SIGRecord $ KEYRecord $ AAAARecord $ LOCRecord $
4251           NXTRecord $ SRVRecord $ NAPTRRecord $ KXRecord $ CERTRecord $
4252           A6Record $ DNAMERecord
4253     ))
4254 </pre></blockquote>
4255
4256 <p>This will allow any object to become a DNS entry when combined with
4257 the domainrelatedobject object class, and allow any entity to include
4258 all the attributes PowerDNS wants.  I've sent an email to the PowerDNS
4259 developers asking for their view on this schema and if they are
4260 interested in providing such schema with PowerDNS, and I hope my
4261 message will be accepted into their mailing list soon.</p>
4262
4263 <p><strong>ISC dhcp</strong></p>
4264
4265 <p>The DHCP server searches for specific objectclass and requests all
4266 the object attributes, and then uses the attributes it want.  This
4267 make it harder to figure out exactly what attributes are used, but
4268 thanks to the working example in Debian Edu I can at least get an idea
4269 what is needed without having to read the source code.</p>
4270
4271 <p>In the DHCP server configuration, the LDAP base to use and the
4272 search filter to use to locate the correct dhcpServer entity is
4273 stored.  These are the relevant entries from
4274 /etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf:</p>
4275
4276 <blockquote><pre>
4277 ldap-base-dn "dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no";
4278 ldap-dhcp-server-cn "dhcp";
4279 </pre></blockquote>
4280
4281 <p>The DHCP server uses this information to nest all the DHCP
4282 configuration it need.  The cn "dhcp" is located using the given LDAP
4283 base and the filter "(&(objectClass=dhcpServer)(cn=dhcp))".  The
4284 search result is this entry:</p>
4285
4286 <blockquote><pre>
4287 dn: cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
4288 cn: dhcp
4289 objectClass: top
4290 objectClass: dhcpServer
4291 dhcpServiceDN: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
4292 </pre></blockquote>
4293
4294 <p>The content of the dhcpServiceDN attribute is next used to locate the
4295 subtree with DHCP configuration.  The DHCP configuration subtree base
4296 is located using a base scope search with base "cn=DHCP
4297 Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" and filter
4298 "(&(objectClass=dhcpService)(|(dhcpPrimaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)(dhcpSecondaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)))".
4299 The search result is this entry:</p>
4300
4301 <blockquote><pre>
4302 dn: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
4303 cn: DHCP Config
4304 objectClass: top
4305 objectClass: dhcpService
4306 objectClass: dhcpOptions
4307 dhcpPrimaryDN: cn=dhcp, dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
4308 dhcpStatements: ddns-update-style none
4309 dhcpStatements: authoritative
4310 dhcpOption: smtp-server code 69 = array of ip-address
4311 dhcpOption: www-server code 72 = array of ip-address
4312 dhcpOption: wpad-url code 252 = text
4313 </pre></blockquote>
4314
4315 <p>Next, the entire subtree is processed, one level at the time.  When
4316 all the DHCP configuration is loaded, it is ready to receive requests.
4317 The subtree in Debian Edu contain objects with object classes
4318 top/dhcpService/dhcpOptions, top/dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions,
4319 top/dhcpSubnet, top/dhcpGroup and top/dhcpHost.  These provide options
4320 and information about netmasks, dynamic range etc.  Leaving out the
4321 details here because it is not relevant for the focus of my
4322 investigation, which is to see if it is possible to merge dns and dhcp
4323 related computer objects.</p>
4324
4325 <p>When a DHCP request come in, LDAP is searched for the MAC address
4326 of the client (00:00:00:00:00:00 in this example), using a subtree
4327 scoped search with "cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" as
4328 the base and "(&(objectClass=dhcpHost)(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet
4329 00:00:00:00:00:00))" as the filter.  This is what a host object look
4330 like:</p>
4331
4332 <blockquote><pre>
4333 dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
4334 cn: hostname
4335 objectClass: top
4336 objectClass: dhcpHost
4337 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
4338 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname
4339 </pre></blockquote>
4340
4341 <p>There is less flexiblity in the way LDAP searches are done here.
4342 The object classes need to have fixed names, and the configuration
4343 need to be stored in a fairly specific LDAP structure.  On the
4344 positive side, the invidiual dhcpHost entires can be anywhere without
4345 the DN pointed to by the dhcpServer entries.  The latter should make
4346 it possible to group all host entries in a subtree next to the
4347 configuration entries, and this subtree can also be shared with the
4348 DNS server if the schema proposed above is combined with the dhcpHost
4349 structural object class.
4350
4351 <p><strong>Conclusion</strong></p>
4352
4353 <p>The PowerDNS implementation seem to be very flexible when it come
4354 to which LDAP schemas to use.  While its "tree" mode is rigid when it
4355 come to the the LDAP structure, the "strict" mode is very flexible,
4356 allowing DNS objects to be stored anywhere under the base cn specified
4357 in the configuration.</p>
4358
4359 <p>The DHCP implementation on the other hand is very inflexible, both
4360 regarding which LDAP schemas to use and which LDAP structure to use.
4361 I guess one could implement ones own schema, as long as the
4362 objectclasses and attributes have the names used, but this do not
4363 really help when the DHCP subtree need to have a fairly fixed
4364 structure.</p>
4365
4366 <p>Based on the observed behaviour, I suspect a LDAP structure like
4367 this might work for Debian Edu:</p>
4368
4369 <blockquote><pre>
4370 ou=services
4371   cn=machine-info (dhcpService) - dhcpServiceDN points here
4372     cn=dhcp (dhcpServer)
4373     cn=dhcp-internal (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
4374       cn=10.0.2.0 (dhcpSubnet)
4375         cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
4376     cn=dhcp-thinclients (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
4377       cn=192.168.0.0 (dhcpSubnet)
4378         cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
4379     ou=machines - PowerDNS base points here
4380       cn=hostname (dhcpHost/domainrelatedobject/dnsDomainAux)
4381 </pre></blockquote>
4382
4383 <P>This is not tested yet.  If the DHCP server require the dhcpHost
4384 entries to be in the dhcpGroup subtrees, the entries can be stored
4385 there instead of a common machines subtree, and the PowerDNS base
4386 would have to be moved one level up to the machine-info subtree.</p>
4387
4388 <p>The combined object under the machines subtree would look something
4389 like this:</p>
4390
4391 <blockquote><pre>
4392 dn: dc=hostname,ou=machines,cn=machine-info,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
4393 dc: hostname
4394 objectClass: top
4395 objectClass: dhcpHost
4396 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
4397 objectclass: dnsDomainAux
4398 associateddomain: hostname.intern
4399 arecord: 10.11.12.13
4400 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
4401 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname.intern
4402 </pre></blockquote>
4403
4404 </p>One could even add the LTSP configuration associated with a given
4405 machine, as long as the required attributes are available in a
4406 auxiliary object class.</p>
4407
4408       </div>
4409       <div class="tags">
4410
4411
4412         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>.
4413
4414
4415       </div>
4416     </div>
4417     <div class="padding"></div>
4418
4419     <div class="entry">
4420       <div class="title">
4421         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">Combining PowerDNS and ISC DHCP LDAP objects</a>
4422       </div>
4423       <div class="date">
4424         14th July 2010
4425       </div>
4426       <div class="body">
4427         <p>For a while now, I have wanted to find a way to change the DNS and
4428 DHCP services in Debian Edu to use the same LDAP objects for a given
4429 computer, to avoid the possibility of having a inconsistent state for
4430 a computer in LDAP (as in DHCP but no DNS entry or the other way
4431 around) and make it easier to add computers to LDAP.</p>
4432
4433 <p>I've looked at how powerdns and dhcpd is using LDAP, and using this
4434 information finally found a solution that seem to work.</p>
4435
4436 <p>The old setup required three LDAP objects for a given computer.
4437 One forward DNS entry, one reverse DNS entry and one DHCP entry.  If
4438 we switch powerdns to use its strict LDAP method (ldap-method=strict
4439 in pdns-debian-edu.conf), the forward and reverse DNS entries are
4440 merged into one while making it impossible to transfer the reverse map
4441 to a slave DNS server.</p>
4442
4443 <p>If we also replace the object class used to get the DNS related
4444 attributes to one allowing these attributes to be combined with the
4445 dhcphost object class, we can merge the DNS and DHCP entries into one.
4446 I've written such object class in the dnsdomainaux.schema file (need
4447 proper OIDs, but that is a minor issue), and tested the setup.  It
4448 seem to work.</p>
4449
4450 <p>With this test setup in place, we can get away with one LDAP object
4451 for both DNS and DHCP, and even the LTSP configuration I suggested in
4452 an earlier email.  The combined LDAP object will look something like
4453 this:</p>
4454
4455 <blockquote><pre>
4456   dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
4457   cn: hostname
4458   objectClass: dhcphost
4459   objectclass: domainrelatedobject
4460   objectclass: dnsdomainaux
4461   associateddomain: hostname.intern
4462   arecord: 10.11.12.13
4463   dhcphwaddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
4464   dhcpstatements: fixed-address hostname
4465   ldapconfigsound: Y
4466 </pre></blockquote>
4467
4468 <p>The DNS server uses the associateddomain and arecord entries, while
4469 the DHCP server uses the dhcphwaddress and dhcpstatements entries
4470 before asking DNS to resolve the fixed-adddress.  LTSP will use
4471 dhcphwaddress or associateddomain and the ldapconfig* attributes.</p>
4472
4473 <p>I am not yet sure if I can get the DHCP server to look for its
4474 dhcphost in a different location, to allow us to put the objects
4475 outside the "DHCP Config" subtree, but hope to figure out a way to do
4476 that.  If I can't figure out a way to do that, we can still get rid of
4477 the hosts subtree and move all its content into the DHCP Config tree
4478 (which probably should be renamed to be more related to the new
4479 content.  I suspect cn=dnsdhcp,ou=services or something like that
4480 might be a good place to put it.</p>
4481
4482 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
4483 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
4484
4485       </div>
4486       <div class="tags">
4487
4488
4489         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>.
4490
4491
4492       </div>
4493     </div>
4494     <div class="padding"></div>
4495
4496     <div class="entry">
4497       <div class="title">
4498         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_storing_LTSP_configuration_in_LDAP.html">Idea for storing LTSP configuration in LDAP</a>
4499       </div>
4500       <div class="date">
4501         11th July 2010
4502       </div>
4503       <div class="body">
4504         <p>Vagrant mentioned on IRC today that ltsp_config now support
4505 sourcing files from /usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ on the thin
4506 clients, and that this can be used to fetch configuration from LDAP if
4507 Debian Edu choose to store configuration there.</p>
4508
4509 <p>Armed with this information, I got inspired and wrote a test module
4510 to get configuration from LDAP.  The idea is to look up the MAC
4511 address of the client in LDAP, and look for attributes on the form
4512 ltspconfigsetting=value, and use this to export SETTING=value to the
4513 LTSP clients.</p>
4514
4515 <p>The goal is to be able to store the LTSP configuration attributes
4516 in a "computer" LDAP object used by both DNS and DHCP, and thus
4517 allowing us to store all information about a computer in one place.</p>
4518
4519 <p>This is a untested draft implementation, and I welcome feedback on
4520 this approach.  A real LDAP schema for the ltspClientAux objectclass
4521 need to be written.  Comments, suggestions, etc?</p>
4522
4523 <blockquote><pre>
4524 # Store in /opt/ltsp/$arch/usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ldap-config
4525 #
4526 # Fetch LTSP client settings from LDAP based on MAC address
4527 #
4528 # Uses ethernet address as stored in the dhcpHost objectclass using
4529 # the dhcpHWAddress attribute or ethernet address stored in the
4530 # ieee802Device objectclass with the macAddress attribute.
4531 #
4532 # This module is written to be schema agnostic, and only depend on the
4533 # existence of attribute names.
4534 #
4535 # The LTSP configuration variables are saved directly using a
4536 # ltspConfig prefix and uppercasing the rest of the attribute name.
4537 # To set the SERVER variable, set the ltspConfigServer attribute.
4538 #
4539 # Some LDAP schema should be created with all the relevant
4540 # configuration settings.  Something like this should work:
4541 #
4542 # objectclass ( 1.1.2.2 NAME 'ltspClientAux'
4543 #     SUP top
4544 #     AUXILIARY
4545 #     MAY ( ltspConfigServer $ ltsConfigSound $ ... )
4546
4547 LDAPSERVER=$(debian-edu-ldapserver)
4548 if [ "$LDAPSERVER" ] ; then
4549     LDAPBASE=$(debian-edu-ldapserver -b)
4550     for MAC in $(LANG=C ifconfig |grep -i hwaddr| awk '{print $5}'|sort -u) ; do
4551         filter="(|(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet $MAC)(macAddress=$MAC))"
4552         ldapsearch -h "$LDAPSERVER" -b "$LDAPBASE" -v -x "$filter" | \
4553             grep '^ltspConfig' | while read attr value ; do
4554             # Remove prefix and convert to upper case
4555             attr=$(echo $attr | sed 's/^ltspConfig//i' | tr a-z A-Z)
4556             # bass value on to clients
4557             eval "$attr=$value; export $attr"
4558         done
4559     done
4560 fi
4561 </pre></blockquote>
4562
4563 <p>I'm not sure this shell construction will work, because I suspect
4564 the while block might end up in a subshell causing the variables set
4565 there to not show up in ltsp-config, but if that is the case I am sure
4566 the code can be restructured to make sure the variables are passed on.
4567 I expect that can be solved with some testing. :)</p>
4568
4569 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
4570 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
4571
4572 <p>Update 2010-07-17: I am aware of another effort to store LTSP
4573 configuration in LDAP that was created around year 2000 by
4574 <a href="http://www.pcxperience.com/thinclient/documentation/ldap.html">PC
4575 Xperience, Inc., 2000</a>.  I found its
4576 <a href="http://people.redhat.com/alikins/ltsp/ldap/">files</a> on a
4577 personal home page over at redhat.com.</p>
4578
4579       </div>
4580       <div class="tags">
4581
4582
4583         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>.
4584
4585
4586       </div>
4587     </div>
4588     <div class="padding"></div>
4589
4590     <div class="entry">
4591       <div class="title">
4592         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/jXplorer__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">jXplorer, a very nice LDAP GUI</a>
4593       </div>
4594       <div class="date">
4595          9th July 2010
4596       </div>
4597       <div class="body">
4598         <p>Since
4599 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">my
4600 last post</a> about available LDAP tools in Debian, I was told about a
4601 LDAP GUI that is even better than luma.  The java application
4602 <a href="http://jxplorer.org/">jXplorer</a> is claimed to be capable of
4603 moving LDAP objects and subtrees using drag-and-drop, and can
4604 authenticate using Kerberos.  I have only tested the Kerberos
4605 authentication, but do not have a LDAP setup allowing me to rewrite
4606 LDAP with my test user yet.  It is
4607 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/j/jxplorer.html">available in
4608 Debian</a> testing and unstable at the moment.  The only problem I
4609 have with it is how it handle errors.  If something go wrong, its
4610 non-intuitive behaviour require me to go through some query work list
4611 and remove the failing query.  Nothing big, but very annoying.</p>
4612
4613       </div>
4614       <div class="tags">
4615
4616
4617         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>.
4618
4619
4620       </div>
4621     </div>
4622     <div class="padding"></div>
4623
4624     <div class="entry">
4625       <div class="title">
4626         <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>
4627       </div>
4628       <div class="date">
4629          3rd July 2010
4630       </div>
4631       <div class="body">
4632         <p>Here is a short update on my <a
4633 href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">my
4634 Debian Lenny->Squeeze upgrade testing</a>.  Here is a summary of the
4635 difference for Gnome when it is upgraded by apt-get and aptitude.  I'm
4636 not reporting the status for KDE, because the upgrade crashes when
4637 aptitude try because of missing conflicts
4638 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#584861</a> and
4639 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/585716">#585716</a>).</p>
4640
4641 <p>At the end of the upgrade test script, dpkg -l is executed to get a
4642 complete list of the installed packages.  Based on this I see these
4643 differences when I did a test run today.  As usual, I do not really
4644 know what the correct set of packages would be, but thought it best to
4645 publish the difference.</p>
4646
4647 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
4648
4649 <blockquote><p>
4650   at-spi cpp-4.3 finger gnome-spell gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
4651   libatspi1.0-0 libcupsys2 libeel2-data libgail-common libgdl-1-common
4652   libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin
4653   libgtksourceview-common libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
4654   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libservlet2.4-java libxalan2-java
4655   libxerces2-java openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
4656   python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gtkhtml2
4657   python-gtkmozembed svgalibg1 xserver-xephyr zip
4658 </p></blockquote>
4659
4660 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
4661
4662 <blockquote><p>
4663   bluez-utils dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop epiphany-gecko
4664   gnome-app-install gnome-mount gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager
4665   libao2 libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libbind9-50
4666   libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcurl3
4667   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9
4668   libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3
4669   libfaad0 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
4670   libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
4671   libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
4672   libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
4673   libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50
4674   libisccfg50 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick++10
4675   libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4
4676   libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5
4677   libparted1.8-10 libpisock9 libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3
4678   libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8 libsensors3 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
4679   libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1
4680   libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0 libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj
4681   libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3
4682   mysql-common swfdec-gnome totem-gstreamer wodim
4683 </p></blockquote>
4684
4685 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
4686
4687 <blockquote><p>
4688   gnome gnome-desktop-environment hamster-applet python-gnomeapplet
4689   python-gnomekeyring python-wnck rhythmbox-plugins xorg
4690   xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
4691   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
4692   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-video-all
4693   xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark xserver-xorg-video-ati
4694   xserver-xorg-video-chips xserver-xorg-video-cirrus
4695   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
4696   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
4697   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-mach64
4698   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
4699   xserver-xorg-video-nouveau xserver-xorg-video-nv
4700   xserver-xorg-video-r128 xserver-xorg-video-radeon
4701   xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd xserver-xorg-video-rendition
4702   xserver-xorg-video-s3 xserver-xorg-video-s3virge
4703   xserver-xorg-video-savage xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion
4704   xserver-xorg-video-sis xserver-xorg-video-sisusb
4705   xserver-xorg-video-tdfx xserver-xorg-video-tga
4706   xserver-xorg-video-trident xserver-xorg-video-tseng
4707   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vmware
4708   xserver-xorg-video-voodoo
4709 </p></blockquote>
4710
4711 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
4712
4713 <blockquote><p>
4714   deskbar-applet xserver-xorg xserver-xorg-core
4715   xserver-xorg-input-wacom xserver-xorg-video-intel
4716   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome
4717 </p></blockquote>
4718
4719 <p>I was told on IRC that the xorg-xserver package was
4720 <a href="http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-xorg/xserver/xorg-server.git;a=commit;h=9c8080d06c457932d3bfec021c69ac000aa60120">changed
4721 in git</a> today to try to get apt-get to not remove xorg completely.
4722 No idea when it hits Squeeze, but when it does I hope it will reduce
4723 the difference somewhat.
4724
4725       </div>
4726       <div class="tags">
4727
4728
4729         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>.
4730
4731
4732       </div>
4733     </div>
4734     <div class="padding"></div>
4735
4736     <div class="entry">
4737       <div class="title">
4738         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">LUMA, a very nice LDAP GUI</a>
4739       </div>
4740       <div class="date">
4741         28th June 2010
4742       </div>
4743       <div class="body">
4744         <p>The last few days I have been looking into the status of the LDAP
4745 directory in Debian Edu, and in the process I started to miss a GUI
4746 tool to browse the LDAP tree.  The only one I was able to find in
4747 Debian/Squeeze and Lenny is
4748 <a href="http://luma.sourceforge.net/">LUMA</a>, which has proved to
4749 be a great tool to get a overview of the current LDAP directory
4750 populated by default in Skolelinux.  Thanks to it, I have been able to
4751 find empty and obsolete subtrees, misplaced objects and duplicate
4752 objects.  It will be installed by default in Debian/Squeeze.  If you
4753 are working with LDAP, give it a go. :)</p>
4754
4755 <p>I did notice one problem with it I have not had time to report to
4756 the BTS yet.  There is no .desktop file in the package, so the tool do
4757 not show up in the Gnome and KDE menus, but only deep down in in the
4758 Debian submenu in KDE.  I hope that can be fixed before Squeeze is
4759 released.</p>
4760
4761 <p>I have not yet been able to get it to modify the tree yet.  I would
4762 like to move objects and remove subtrees directly in the GUI, but have
4763 not found a way to do that with LUMA yet.  So in the mean time, I use
4764 <a href="http://www.lichteblau.com/ldapvi/">ldapvi</a> for that.</p>
4765
4766 <p>If you have tips on other GUI tools for LDAP that might be useful
4767 in Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
4768
4769 <p>Update 2010-06-29: Ross Reedstrom tipped us about the
4770 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/g/gq.html">gq</a> package as a
4771 useful GUI alternative.  It seem like a good tool, but is unmaintained
4772 in Debian and got a RC bug keeping it out of Squeeze.  Unless that
4773 changes, it will not be an option for Debian Edu based on Squeeze.</p>
4774
4775       </div>
4776       <div class="tags">
4777
4778
4779         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>.
4780
4781
4782       </div>
4783     </div>
4784     <div class="padding"></div>
4785
4786     <div class="entry">
4787       <div class="title">
4788         <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>
4789       </div>
4790       <div class="date">
4791         24th June 2010
4792       </div>
4793       <div class="body">
4794         <p>A while back, I
4795 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">complained
4796 about the fact</a> that it is not possible with the provided schemas
4797 for storing DNS and DHCP information in LDAP to combine the two sets
4798 of information into one LDAP object representing a computer.</p>
4799
4800 <p>In the mean time, I discovered that a simple fix would be to make
4801 the dhcpHost object class auxiliary, to allow it to be combined with
4802 the dNSDomain object class, and thus forming one object for one
4803 computer when storing both DHCP and DNS information in LDAP.</p>
4804
4805 <p>If I understand this correctly, it is not safe to do this change
4806 without also changing the assigned number for the object class, and I
4807 do not know enough about LDAP schema design to do that properly for
4808 Debian Edu.</p>
4809
4810 <p>Anyway, for future reference, this is how I believe we could change
4811 the
4812 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dhc-ldap-schema-00">DHCP
4813 schema</a> to solve at least part of the problem with the LDAP schemas
4814 available today from IETF.</p>
4815
4816 <pre>
4817 --- dhcp.schema    (revision 65192)
4818 +++ dhcp.schema    (working copy)
4819 @@ -376,7 +376,7 @@
4820  objectclass ( 2.16.840.1.113719.1.203.6.6
4821         NAME 'dhcpHost'
4822         DESC 'This represents information about a particular client'
4823 -       SUP top
4824 +       SUP top AUXILIARY
4825         MUST cn
4826         MAY  (dhcpLeaseDN $ dhcpHWAddress $ dhcpOptionsDN $ dhcpStatements $ dhcpComments $ dhcpOption)
4827         X-NDS_CONTAINMENT ('dhcpService' 'dhcpSubnet' 'dhcpGroup') )
4828 </pre>
4829
4830 <p>I very much welcome clues on how to do this properly for Debian
4831 Edu/Squeeze.  We provide the DHCP schema in our debian-edu-config
4832 package, and should thus be free to rewrite it as we see fit.</p>
4833
4834 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
4835 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
4836
4837       </div>
4838       <div class="tags">
4839
4840
4841         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>.
4842
4843
4844       </div>
4845     </div>
4846     <div class="padding"></div>
4847
4848     <div class="entry">
4849       <div class="title">
4850         <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>
4851       </div>
4852       <div class="date">
4853         16th June 2010
4854       </div>
4855       <div class="body">
4856         <p>A few times I have had the need to simulate the way tasksel
4857 installs packages during the normal debian-installer run.  Until now,
4858 I have ended up letting tasksel do the work, with the annoying problem
4859 of not getting any feedback at all when something fails (like a
4860 conffile question from dpkg or a download that fails), using code like
4861 this:
4862
4863 <blockquote><pre>
4864 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
4865 tasksel --new-install
4866 </pre></blockquote>
4867
4868 This would invoke tasksel, let its automatic task selection pick the
4869 tasks to install, and continue to install the requested tasks without
4870 any output what so ever.
4871
4872 Recently I revisited this problem while working on the automatic
4873 package upgrade testing, because tasksel would some times hang without
4874 any useful feedback, and I want to see what is going on when it
4875 happen.  Then it occured to me, I can parse the output from tasksel
4876 when asked to run in test mode, and use that aptitude command line
4877 printed by tasksel then to simulate the tasksel run.  I ended up using
4878 code like this:
4879
4880 <blockquote><pre>
4881 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
4882 cmd="$(in_target tasksel -t --new-install | sed 's/debconf-apt-progress -- //')"
4883 $cmd
4884 </pre></blockquote>
4885
4886 <p>The content of $cmd is typically something like "<tt>aptitude -q
4887 --without-recommends -o APT::Install-Recommends=no -y install
4888 ~t^desktop$ ~t^gnome-desktop$ ~t^laptop$ ~pstandard ~prequired
4889 ~pimportant</tt>", which will install the gnome desktop task, the
4890 laptop task and all packages with priority standard , required and
4891 important, just like tasksel would have done it during
4892 installation.</p>
4893
4894 <p>A better approach is probably to extend tasksel to be able to
4895 install packages without using debconf-apt-progress, for use cases
4896 like this.</p>
4897
4898       </div>
4899       <div class="tags">
4900
4901
4902         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>.
4903
4904
4905       </div>
4906     </div>
4907     <div class="padding"></div>
4908
4909     <div class="entry">
4910       <div class="title">
4911         <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>
4912       </div>
4913       <div class="date">
4914         13th June 2010
4915       </div>
4916       <div class="body">
4917         <p>My
4918 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">testing
4919 of Debian upgrades</a> from Lenny to Squeeze continues, and I've
4920 finally made the upgrade logs available from
4921 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/</a>.
4922 I am now testing dist-upgrade of Gnome and KDE in a chroot using both
4923 apt and aptitude, and found their differences interesting.  This time
4924 I will only focus on their removal plans.</p>
4925
4926 <p>After installing a Gnome desktop and the laptop task, apt-get wants
4927 to remove 72 packages when dist-upgrading from Lenny to Squeeze.  The
4928 surprising part is that it want to remove xorg and all
4929 xserver-xorg-video* drivers.  Clearly not a good choice, but I am not
4930 sure why.  When asking aptitude to do the same, it want to remove 129
4931 packages, but most of them are library packages I suspect are no
4932 longer needed.  Both of them want to remove bluetooth packages, which
4933 I do not know.  Perhaps these bluetooth packages are obsolete?</p>
4934
4935 <p>For KDE, apt-get want to remove 82 packages, among them kdebase
4936 which seem like a bad idea and xorg the same way as with Gnome. Asking
4937 aptitude for the same, it wants to remove 192 packages, none which are
4938 too surprising.</p>
4939
4940 <p>I guess the removal of xorg during upgrades should be investigated
4941 and avoided, and perhaps others as well.  Here are the complete list
4942 of planned removals.  The complete logs is available from the URL
4943 above.  Note if you want to repeat these tests, that the upgrade test
4944 for kde+apt-get hung in the tasksel setup because of dpkg asking
4945 conffile questions.  No idea why.  I worked around it by using
4946 '<tt>echo >> /proc/<em>pidofdpkg</em>/fd/0</tt>' to tell dpkg to
4947 continue.</p>
4948
4949 <p><b>apt-get gnome 72</b>
4950 <br>bluez-gnome cupsddk-drivers deskbar-applet gnome
4951   gnome-desktop-environment gnome-network-admin gtkhtml3.14
4952   iceweasel-gnome-support libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libgdl-1-0
4953   libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libmetacity0 libslab0 libxcb-xlib0
4954   nautilus-cd-burner python-gnome2-desktop python-gnome2-extras
4955   serpentine swfdec-mozilla update-manager xorg xserver-xorg
4956   xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
4957   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
4958   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
4959   xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
4960   xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
4961   xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
4962   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
4963   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
4964   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
4965   xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
4966   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
4967   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
4968   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
4969   xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
4970   xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
4971   xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
4972   xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
4973   xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
4974   xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
4975   xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
4976   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
4977   xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9
4978   xulrunner-1.9-gnome-support</p>
4979
4980 <p><b>aptitude gnome 129</b>
4981
4982 <br>bluez-gnome bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers dhcdbd
4983   djvulibre-desktop finger gnome-app-install gnome-mount
4984   gnome-network-admin gnome-spell gnome-vfs-obexftp
4985   gnome-volume-manager gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs gtkhtml3.14 libao2
4986   libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
4987   libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcupsys2 libcurl3 libdatrie0
4988   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20
4989   libeel2-data libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libfaad0 libgail-common
4990   libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libgdl-1-0 libgdl-1-common
4991   libggz2 libggzcore9 libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0
4992   libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libgnomeprint2.2-0
4993   libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgnomeprintui2.2-common
4994   libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
4995   libgtksourceview-common libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6
4996   libhesiod0 libicu38 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 libmagick++10
4997   libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmetacity0 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off
4998   libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2
4999   libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10
5000   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libraw1394-8
5001   libsensors3 libslab0 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8 libssh2-1
5002   libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10
5003   libtrackerclient0 libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0
5004   libxerces2-java libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6
5005   libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common nautilus-cd-burner
5006   openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
5007   python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gnome2-desktop
5008   python-gnome2-extras python-gtkhtml2 python-gtkmozembed
5009   python-numeric python-sexy serpentine svgalibg1 swfdec-gnome
5010   swfdec-mozilla totem-gstreamer update-manager wodim
5011   xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
5012   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
5013   zip</p>
5014
5015 <p><b>apt-get kde 82</b>
5016
5017 <br>cupsddk-drivers karm kaudiocreator kcoloredit kcontrol kde kde-core
5018   kdeaddons kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-bin kdebase-bin-kde3
5019   kdebase-kio-plugins kdesktop kdeutils khelpcenter kicker
5020   kicker-applets knewsticker kolourpaint konq-plugins konqueror korn
5021   kpersonalizer kscreensaver ksplash libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libkiten1
5022   libxcb-xlib0 quanta superkaramba texlive-base-bin xorg xserver-xorg
5023   xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
5024   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
5025   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
5026   xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
5027   xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
5028   xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
5029   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
5030   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
5031   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
5032   xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
5033   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
5034   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
5035   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
5036   xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
5037   xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
5038   xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
5039   xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
5040   xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
5041   xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
5042   xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
5043   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
5044   xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9</p>
5045
5046 <p><b>aptitude kde 192</b>
5047 <br>bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers cvs dcoprss dhcdbd
5048   djvulibre-desktop dosfstools eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
5049   ghostscript-x imlib-base imlib11 indi kandy karm kasteroids
5050   kaudiocreator kbackgammon kbstate kcoloredit kcontrol kcron kdat
5051   kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
5052   kdebase-bin-kde3 kdebase-kio-plugins kdeedu-data
5053   kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data
5054   kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
5055   kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdeprint kdesktop kdessh
5056   kdict kdnssd kdvi kedit keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs
5057   kghostview khelpcenter khexedit kiconedit kitchensync klatin
5058   klickety kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmoon kmrml kodo kolourpaint
5059   kooka korn kpager kpdf kpercentage kpf kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler
5060   krec kregexpeditor ksayit ksim ksirc ksirtet ksmiletris ksmserver
5061   ksnake ksokoban ksplash ksvg ksysv ktip ktnef kuickshow kverbos
5062   kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kworldclock
5063   kxsldbg libakode2 libao2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
5064   libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
5065   libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
5066   libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0 libdatrie0
5067   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
5068   libgail-common libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0
5069   libicu38 libiec61883-0 libindex0 libiw29 libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1
5070   libkdeedu3 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkiten1 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
5071   libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
5072   libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 libmagick10 libmimelib1c2a
5073   libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9
5074   libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 libsmbios2
5075   libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libtalloc1 libtiff-tools
5076   libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0 libxerces2-java
5077   libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 mpeglib networkstatus
5078   openoffice.org-writer2latex pmount poster psutils quanta quanta-data
5079   superkaramba svgalibg1 tex-common texlive-base texlive-base-bin
5080   texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended
5081   xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
5082   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
5083   xulrunner-1.9</p>
5084
5085
5086       </div>
5087       <div class="tags">
5088
5089
5090         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>.
5091
5092
5093       </div>
5094     </div>
5095     <div class="padding"></div>
5096
5097     <div class="entry">
5098       <div class="title">
5099         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">Automatic upgrade testing from Lenny to Squeeze</a>
5100       </div>
5101       <div class="date">
5102         11th June 2010
5103       </div>
5104       <div class="body">
5105         <p>The last few days I have done some upgrade testing in Debian, to
5106 see if the upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze will go smoothly.  A few bugs
5107 have been discovered and reported in the process
5108 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/585410">#585410</a> in nagios3-cgi,
5109 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584879">#584879</a> already fixed in
5110 enscript and <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#584861</a> in
5111 kdebase-workspace-data), and to get a more regular testing going on, I
5112 am working on a script to automate the test.</p>
5113
5114 <p>The idea is to create a Lenny chroot and use tasksel to install a
5115 Gnome or KDE desktop installation inside the chroot before upgrading
5116 it.  To ensure no services are started in the chroot, a policy-rc.d
5117 script is inserted.  To make sure tasksel believe it is to install a
5118 desktop on a laptop, the tasksel tests are replaced in the chroot
5119 (only acceptable because this is a throw-away chroot).</p>
5120
5121 <p>A naive upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze using aptitude dist-upgrade
5122 currently always fail because udev refuses to upgrade with the kernel
5123 in Lenny, so to avoid that problem the file /etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
5124 is created.  The bug report
5125 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/566000">#566000</a> make me suspect
5126 this problem do not trigger in a chroot, but I touch the file anyway
5127 to make sure the upgrade go well.  Testing on virtual and real
5128 hardware have failed me because of udev so far, and creating this file
5129 do the trick in such settings anyway.  This is a
5130 <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/debian-26/failed-dist-upgrade-due-to-udev-config_sysfs_deprecated-nonsense-804130/">known
5131 issue</a> and the current udev behaviour is intended by the udev
5132 maintainer because he lack the resources to rewrite udev to keep
5133 working with old kernels or something like that.  I really wish the
5134 udev upstream would keep udev backwards compatible, to avoid such
5135 upgrade problem, but given that they fail to do so, I guess
5136 documenting the way out of this mess is the best option we got for
5137 Debian Squeeze.</p>
5138
5139 <p>Anyway, back to the task at hand, testing upgrades.  This test
5140 script, which I call <tt>upgrade-test</tt> for now, is doing the
5141 trick:</p>
5142
5143 <blockquote><pre>
5144 #!/bin/sh
5145 set -ex
5146
5147 if [ "$1" ] ; then
5148     desktop=$1
5149 else
5150     desktop=gnome
5151 fi
5152
5153 from=lenny
5154 to=squeeze
5155
5156 exec &lt; /dev/null
5157 unset LANG
5158 mirror=http://ftp.skolelinux.org/debian
5159 tmpdir=chroot-$from-upgrade-$to-$desktop
5160 fuser -mv .
5161 debootstrap $from $tmpdir $mirror
5162 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
5163 cat > $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d &lt;&lt;EOF
5164 #!/bin/sh
5165 exit 101
5166 EOF
5167 chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d
5168 exit_cleanup() {
5169     umount $tmpdir/proc
5170 }
5171 mount -t proc proc $tmpdir/proc
5172 # Make sure proc is unmounted also on failure
5173 trap exit_cleanup EXIT INT
5174
5175 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y install debconf-utils
5176
5177 # Make sure tasksel autoselection trigger.  It need the test scripts
5178 # to return the correct answers.
5179 echo tasksel tasksel/desktop multiselect $desktop | \
5180     chroot $tmpdir debconf-set-selections
5181
5182 # Include the desktop and laptop task
5183 for test in desktop laptop ; do
5184     echo > $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test &lt;&lt;EOF
5185 #!/bin/sh
5186 exit 2
5187 EOF
5188     chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test
5189 done
5190
5191 DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
5192 DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical
5193 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND DEBIAN_PRIORITY
5194 chroot $tmpdir tasksel --new-install
5195
5196 echo deb $mirror $to main > $tmpdir/etc/apt/sources.list
5197 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
5198 touch $tmpdir/etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
5199 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y dist-upgrade
5200 fuser -mv
5201 </pre></blockquote>
5202
5203 <p>I suspect it would be useful to test upgrades with both apt-get and
5204 with aptitude, but I have not had time to look at how they behave
5205 differently so far.  I hope to get a cron job running to do the test
5206 regularly and post the result on the web.  The Gnome upgrade currently
5207 work, while the KDE upgrade fail because of the bug in
5208 kdebase-workspace-data</p>
5209
5210 <p>I am not quite sure what kind of extract from the huge upgrade logs
5211 (KDE 167 KiB, Gnome 516 KiB) it make sense to include in this blog
5212 post, so I will refrain from trying.  I can report that for Gnome,
5213 aptitude report 760 packages upgraded, 448 newly installed, 129 to
5214 remove and 1 not upgraded and 1024MB need to be downloaded while for
5215 KDE the same numbers are 702 packages upgraded, 507 newly installed,
5216 193 to remove and 0 not upgraded and 1117MB need to be downloaded</p>
5217
5218 <p>I am very happy to notice that the Gnome desktop + laptop upgrade
5219 is able to migrate to dependency based boot sequencing and parallel
5220 booting without a hitch.  Was unsure if there were still bugs with
5221 packages failing to clean up their obsolete init.d script during
5222 upgrades, and no such problem seem to affect the Gnome desktop+laptop
5223 packages.</p>
5224
5225       </div>
5226       <div class="tags">
5227
5228
5229         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>.
5230
5231
5232       </div>
5233     </div>
5234     <div class="padding"></div>
5235
5236     <div class="entry">
5237       <div class="title">
5238         <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>
5239       </div>
5240       <div class="date">
5241          6th June 2010
5242       </div>
5243       <div class="body">
5244         <p>If Debian is to migrate to upstart on Linux, I expect some init.d
5245 scripts to migrate (some of) their operations to upstart job while
5246 keeping the init.d for hurd and kfreebsd.  The packages with such
5247 needs will need a way to get their init.d scripts to behave
5248 differently when used with sysvinit and with upstart.  Because of
5249 this, I had a look at the environment variables set when a init.d
5250 script is running under upstart, and when it is not.</p>
5251
5252 <p>With upstart, I notice these environment variables are set when a
5253 script is started from rcS.d/ (ignoring some irrelevant ones like
5254 COLUMNS):</p>
5255
5256 <blockquote><pre>
5257 DEFAULT_RUNLEVEL=2
5258 previous=N
5259 PREVLEVEL=
5260 RUNLEVEL=
5261 runlevel=S
5262 UPSTART_EVENTS=startup
5263 UPSTART_INSTANCE=
5264 UPSTART_JOB=rc-sysinit
5265 </pre></blockquote>
5266
5267 <p>With sysvinit, these environment variables are set for the same
5268 script.</p>
5269
5270 <blockquote><pre>
5271 INIT_VERSION=sysvinit-2.88
5272 previous=N
5273 PREVLEVEL=N
5274 RUNLEVEL=S
5275 runlevel=S
5276 </pre></blockquote>
5277
5278 <p>The RUNLEVEL and PREVLEVEL environment variables passed on from
5279 sysvinit are not set by upstart.  Not sure if it is intentional or not
5280 to not be compatible with sysvinit in this regard.</p>
5281
5282 <p>For scripts needing to behave differently when upstart is used,
5283 looking for the UPSTART_JOB environment variable seem to be a good
5284 choice.</p>
5285
5286       </div>
5287       <div class="tags">
5288
5289
5290         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>.
5291
5292
5293       </div>
5294     </div>
5295     <div class="padding"></div>
5296
5297     <div class="entry">
5298       <div class="title">
5299         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_manual_for_standards_wars___.html">A manual for standards wars...</a>
5300       </div>
5301       <div class="date">
5302          6th June 2010
5303       </div>
5304       <div class="body">
5305         <p>Via the
5306 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/robweir/antic-atom/~3/QzU4RgoAGMg/weekly-links-10.html">blog
5307 of Rob Weir</a> I came across the very interesting essay named
5308 <a href="http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/shapiro/wars.pdf">The Art of
5309 Standards Wars</a> (PDF 25 pages).  I recommend it for everyone
5310 following the standards wars of today.</p>
5311
5312       </div>
5313       <div class="tags">
5314
5315
5316         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>.
5317
5318
5319       </div>
5320     </div>
5321     <div class="padding"></div>
5322
5323     <div class="entry">
5324       <div class="title">
5325         <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>
5326       </div>
5327       <div class="date">
5328          3rd June 2010
5329       </div>
5330       <div class="body">
5331         <p>When using sitesummary at a site to track machines, it is possible
5332 to get a list of the machine types in use thanks to the DMI
5333 information extracted from each machine.  The script to do so is
5334 included in the sitesummary package, and here is example output from
5335 the Skolelinux build servers:</p>
5336
5337 <blockquote><pre>
5338 maintainer:~# /usr/lib/sitesummary/hardware-model-summary
5339   vendor                    count
5340   Dell Computer Corporation     1
5341     PowerEdge 1750              1
5342   IBM                           1
5343     eserver xSeries 345 -[8670M1X]-     1
5344   Intel                         2
5345   [no-dmi-info]                 3
5346 maintainer:~#
5347 </pre></blockquote>
5348
5349 <p>The quality of the report depend on the quality of the DMI tables
5350 provided in each machine.  Here there are Intel machines without model
5351 information listed with Intel as vendor and no model, and virtual Xen
5352 machines listed as [no-dmi-info].  One can add -l as a command line
5353 option to list the individual machines.</p>
5354
5355 <p>A larger list is
5356 <a href="http://narvikskolen.no/sitesummary/">available from the the
5357 city of Narvik</a>, which uses Skolelinux on all their shools and also
5358 provide the basic sitesummary report publicly.  In their report there
5359 are ~1400 machines. I know they use both Ubuntu and Skolelinux on
5360 their machines, and as sitesummary is available in both distributions,
5361 it is trivial to get all of them to report to the same central
5362 collector.</p>
5363
5364       </div>
5365       <div class="tags">
5366
5367
5368         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>.
5369
5370
5371       </div>
5372     </div>
5373     <div class="padding"></div>
5374
5375     <div class="entry">
5376       <div class="title">
5377         <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>
5378       </div>
5379       <div class="date">
5380          1st June 2010
5381       </div>
5382       <div class="body">
5383         <p>It is strange to watch how a bug in Debian causing KDM to fail to
5384 start at boot when an NVidia video card is used is handled.  The
5385 problem seem to be that the nvidia X.org driver uses a long time to
5386 initialize, and this duration is longer than kdm is configured to
5387 wait.</p>
5388
5389 <p>I came across two bugs related to this issue,
5390 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">#583312</a> initially filed
5391 against initscripts and passed on to nvidia-glx when it became obvious
5392 that the nvidia drivers were involved, and
5393 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/524751">#524751</a> initially filed against
5394 kdm and passed on to src:nvidia-graphics-drivers for unknown reasons.</p>
5395
5396 <p>To me, it seem that no-one is interested in actually solving the
5397 problem nvidia video card owners experience and make sure the Debian
5398 distribution work out of the box for these users.  The nvidia driver
5399 maintainers expect kdm to be set up to wait longer, while kdm expect
5400 the nvidia driver maintainers to fix the driver to start faster, and
5401 while they wait for each other I guess the users end up switching to a
5402 distribution that work for them.  I have no idea what the solution is,
5403 but I am pretty sure that waiting for each other is not it.</p>
5404
5405 <p>I wonder why we end up handling bugs this way.</p>
5406
5407       </div>
5408       <div class="tags">
5409
5410
5411         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>.
5412
5413
5414       </div>
5415     </div>
5416     <div class="padding"></div>
5417
5418     <div class="entry">
5419       <div class="title">
5420         <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>
5421       </div>
5422       <div class="date">
5423         27th May 2010
5424       </div>
5425       <div class="body">
5426         <p>A few days ago, parallel booting was enabled in Debian/testing.
5427 The feature seem to hold up pretty well, but three fairly serious
5428 issues are known and should be solved:
5429
5430 <p><ul>
5431
5432 <li>The wicd package seen to
5433 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/508289">break NFS mounting</a> and
5434 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/581586">network setup</a> when
5435 parallel booting is enabled.  No idea why, but the wicd maintainer
5436 seem to be on the case.</li>
5437
5438 <li>The nvidia X driver seem to
5439 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">have a race condition</a>
5440 triggered more easily when parallel booting is in effect.  The
5441 maintainer is on the case.</li>
5442
5443 <li>The sysv-rc package fail to properly enable dependency based boot
5444 sequencing (the shutdown is broken) when old file-rc users
5445 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/575080">try to switch back</a> to
5446 sysv-rc.  One way to solve it would be for file-rc to create
5447 /etc/init.d/.legacy-bootordering, and another is to try to make
5448 sysv-rc more robust.  Will investigate some more and probably upload a
5449 workaround in sysv-rc to help those trying to move from file-rc to
5450 sysv-rc get a working shutdown.</li>
5451
5452 </ul></p>
5453
5454 <p>All in all not many surprising issues, and all of them seem
5455 solvable before Squeeze is released.  In addition to these there are
5456 some packages with bugs in their dependencies and run level settings,
5457 which I expect will be fixed in a reasonable time span.</p>
5458
5459 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
5460 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
5461 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
5462 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
5463
5464 <p>Update: Correct bug number to file-rc issue.</p>
5465
5466       </div>
5467       <div class="tags">
5468
5469
5470         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>.
5471
5472
5473       </div>
5474     </div>
5475     <div class="padding"></div>
5476
5477     <div class="entry">
5478       <div class="title">
5479         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/More_flexible_firmware_handling_in_debian_installer.html">More flexible firmware handling in debian-installer</a>
5480       </div>
5481       <div class="date">
5482         22nd May 2010
5483       </div>
5484       <div class="body">
5485         <p>After a long break from debian-installer development, I finally
5486 found time today to return to the project.  Having to spend less time
5487 working dependency based boot in debian, as it is almost complete now,
5488 definitely helped freeing some time.</p>
5489
5490 <p>A while back, I ran into a problem while working on Debian Edu.  We
5491 include some firmware packages on the Debian Edu CDs, those needed to
5492 get disk and network controllers working.  Without having these
5493 firmware packages available during installation, it is impossible to
5494 install Debian Edu on the given machine, and because our target group
5495 are non-technical people, asking them to provide firmware packages on
5496 an external medium is a support pain.  Initially, I expected it to be
5497 enough to include the firmware packages on the CD to get
5498 debian-installer to find and use them.  This proved to be wrong.
5499 Next, I hoped it was enough to symlink the relevant firmware packages
5500 to some useful location on the CD (tried /cdrom/ and
5501 /cdrom/firmware/).  This also proved to not work, and at this point I
5502 found time to look at the debian-installer code to figure out what was
5503 going to work.</p>
5504
5505 <p>The firmware loading code is in the hw-detect package, and a closer
5506 look revealed that it would only look for firmware packages outside
5507 the installation media, so the CD was never checked for firmware
5508 packages.  It would only check USB sticks, floppies and other
5509 "external" media devices.  Today I changed it to also look in the
5510 /cdrom/firmware/ directory on the mounted CD or DVD, which should
5511 solve the problem I ran into with Debian edu.  I also changed it to
5512 look in /firmware/, to make sure the installer also find firmware
5513 provided in the initrd when booting the installer via PXE, to allow us
5514 to provide the same feature in the PXE setup included in Debian
5515 Edu.</p>
5516
5517 <p>To make sure firmware deb packages with a license questions are not
5518 activated without asking if the license is accepted, I extended
5519 hw-detect to look for preinst scripts in the firmware packages, and
5520 run these before activating the firmware during installation.  The
5521 license question is asked using debconf in the preinst, so this should
5522 solve the issue for the firmware packages I have looked at so far.</p>
5523
5524 <p>If you want to discuss the details of these features, please
5525 contact us on debian-boot@lists.debian.org.</p>
5526
5527       </div>
5528       <div class="tags">
5529
5530
5531         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>.
5532
5533
5534       </div>
5535     </div>
5536     <div class="padding"></div>
5537
5538     <div class="entry">
5539       <div class="title">
5540         <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>
5541       </div>
5542       <div class="date">
5543         14th May 2010
5544       </div>
5545       <div class="body">
5546         <p>Since this evening, parallel booting is the default in
5547 Debian/unstable for machines using dependency based boot sequencing.
5548 Apparently the testing of concurrent booting has been wider than
5549 expected, if I am to believe the
5550 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
5551 on debian-devel@</a>, and I concluded a few days ago to move forward
5552 with the feature this weekend, to give us some time to detect any
5553 remaining problems before Squeeze is frozen.  If serious problems are
5554 detected, it is simple to change the default back to sequential boot.
5555 The upload of the new sysvinit package also activate a new upstream
5556 version.</p>
5557
5558 More information about
5559 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
5560 based boot sequencing</a> is available from the Debian wiki.  It is
5561 currently possible to disable parallel booting when one run into
5562 problems caused by it, by adding this line to /etc/default/rcS:</p>
5563
5564 <blockquote><pre>
5565 CONCURRENCY=none
5566 </pre></blockquote>
5567
5568 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
5569 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
5570 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
5571 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
5572
5573       </div>
5574       <div class="tags">
5575
5576
5577         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>.
5578
5579
5580       </div>
5581     </div>
5582     <div class="padding"></div>
5583
5584     <div class="entry">
5585       <div class="title">
5586         <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>
5587       </div>
5588       <div class="date">
5589         14th May 2010
5590       </div>
5591       <div class="body">
5592         <p>In the recent Debian Edu versions, the
5593 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary">sitesummary
5594 system</a> is used to keep track of the machines in the school
5595 network.  Each machine will automatically report its status to the
5596 central server after boot and once per night.  The network setup is
5597 also reported, and using this information it is possible to get the
5598 MAC address of all network interfaces in the machines.  This is useful
5599 to update the DHCP configuration.</p>
5600
5601 <p>To give some idea how to use sitesummary, here is a one-liner to
5602 ist all MAC addresses of all machines reporting to sitesummary.  Run
5603 this on the collector host:</p>
5604
5605 <blockquote><pre>
5606 perl -MSiteSummary -e 'for_all_hosts(sub { print join(" ", get_macaddresses(shift)), "\n"; });'
5607 </pre></blockquote>
5608
5609 <p>This will list all MAC addresses assosiated with all machine, one
5610 line per machine and with space between the MAC addresses.</p>
5611
5612 <p>To allow system administrators easier job at adding static DHCP
5613 addresses for hosts, it would be possible to extend this to fetch
5614 machine information from sitesummary and update the DHCP and DNS
5615 tables in LDAP using this information.  Such tool is unfortunately not
5616 written yet.</p>
5617
5618       </div>
5619       <div class="tags">
5620
5621
5622         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>.
5623
5624
5625       </div>
5626     </div>
5627     <div class="padding"></div>
5628
5629     <div class="entry">
5630       <div class="title">
5631         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/systemd__an_interesting_alternative_to_upstart.html">systemd, an interesting alternative to upstart</a>
5632       </div>
5633       <div class="date">
5634         13th May 2010
5635       </div>
5636       <div class="body">
5637         <p>The last few days a new boot system called
5638 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd">systemd</a>
5639 has been
5640 <a href="http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html">introduced</a>
5641
5642 to the free software world.  I have not yet had time to play around
5643 with it, but it seem to be a very interesting alternative to
5644 <a href="http://upstart.ubuntu.com/">upstart</a>, and might prove to be
5645 a good alternative for Debian when we are able to switch to an event
5646 based boot system.  Tollef is
5647 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/580814">in the process</a> of getting
5648 systemd into Debian, and I look forward to seeing how well it work.  I
5649 like the fact that systemd handles init.d scripts with dependency
5650 information natively, allowing them to run in parallel where upstart
5651 at the moment do not.</p>
5652
5653 <p>Unfortunately do systemd have the same problem as upstart regarding
5654 platform support.  It only work on recent Linux kernels, and also need
5655 some new kernel features enabled to function properly.  This means
5656 kFreeBSD and Hurd ports of Debian will need a port or a different boot
5657 system.  Not sure how that will be handled if systemd proves to be the
5658 way forward.</p>
5659
5660 <p>In the mean time, based on the
5661 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
5662 on debian-devel@</a> regarding parallel booting in Debian, I have
5663 decided to enable full parallel booting as the default in Debian as
5664 soon as possible (probably this weekend or early next week), to see if
5665 there are any remaining serious bugs in the init.d dependencies.  A
5666 new version of the sysvinit package implementing this change is
5667 already in experimental.  If all go well, Squeeze will be released
5668 with parallel booting enabled by default.</p>
5669
5670       </div>
5671       <div class="tags">
5672
5673
5674         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>.
5675
5676
5677       </div>
5678     </div>
5679     <div class="padding"></div>
5680
5681     <div class="entry">
5682       <div class="title">
5683         <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>
5684       </div>
5685       <div class="date">
5686          6th May 2010
5687       </div>
5688       <div class="body">
5689         <p>These days, the init.d script dependencies in Squeeze are quite
5690 complete, so complete that it is actually possible to run all the
5691 init.d scripts in parallell based on these dependencies.  If you want
5692 to test your Squeeze system, make sure
5693 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
5694 based boot sequencing</a> is enabled, and add this line to
5695 /etc/default/rcS:</p>
5696
5697 <blockquote><pre>
5698 CONCURRENCY=makefile
5699 </pre></blockquote>
5700
5701 <p>That is it.  It will cause sysv-rc to use the startpar tool to run
5702 scripts in parallel using the dependency information stored in
5703 /etc/init.d/.depend.boot, /etc/init.d/.depend.start and
5704 /etc/init.d/.depend.stop to order the scripts.  Startpar is configured
5705 to try to start the kdm and gdm scripts as early as possible, and will
5706 start the facilities required by kdm or gdm as early as possible to
5707 make this happen.</p>
5708
5709 <p>Give it a try, and see if you like the result.  If some services
5710 fail to start properly, it is most likely because they have incomplete
5711 init.d script dependencies in their startup script (or some of their
5712 dependent scripts have incomplete dependencies).  Report bugs and get
5713 the package maintainers to fix it. :)</p>
5714
5715 <p>Running scripts in parallel could be the default in Debian when we
5716 manage to get the init.d script dependencies complete and correct.  I
5717 expect we will get there in Squeeze+1, if we get manage to test and
5718 fix the remaining issues.</p>
5719
5720 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
5721 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
5722 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
5723 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
5724
5725       </div>
5726       <div class="tags">
5727
5728
5729         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>.
5730
5731
5732       </div>
5733     </div>
5734     <div class="padding"></div>
5735
5736     <div class="entry">
5737       <div class="title">
5738         <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>
5739       </div>
5740       <div class="date">
5741         27th July 2009
5742       </div>
5743       <div class="body">
5744         <p>Since this evening, with the upload of sysvinit version 2.87dsf-2,
5745 and the upload of insserv version 1.12.0-10 yesterday, Debian unstable
5746 have been migrated to using dependency based boot sequencing.  This
5747 conclude work me and others have been doing for the last three days.
5748 It feels great to see this finally part of the default Debian
5749 installation.  Now we just need to weed out the last few problems that
5750 are bound to show up, to get everything ready for Squeeze.</p>
5751
5752 <p>The next step is migrating /sbin/init from sysvinit to upstart, and
5753 fixing the more fundamental problem of handing the event based
5754 non-predictable kernel in the early boot.</p>
5755
5756       </div>
5757       <div class="tags">
5758
5759
5760         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>.
5761
5762
5763       </div>
5764     </div>
5765     <div class="padding"></div>
5766
5767     <div class="entry">
5768       <div class="title">
5769         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Taking_over_sysvinit_development.html">Taking over sysvinit development</a>
5770       </div>
5771       <div class="date">
5772         22nd July 2009
5773       </div>
5774       <div class="body">
5775         <p>After several years of frustration with the lack of activity from
5776 the existing sysvinit upstream developer, I decided a few weeks ago to
5777 take over the package and become the new upstream.  The number of
5778 patches to track for the Debian package was becoming a burden, and the
5779 lack of synchronization between the distribution made it hard to keep
5780 the package up to date.</p>
5781
5782 <p>On the new sysvinit team is the SuSe maintainer Dr. Werner Fink,
5783 and my Debian co-maintainer Kel Modderman.  About 10 days ago, I made
5784 a new upstream tarball with version number 2.87dsf (for Debian, SuSe
5785 and Fedora), based on the patches currently in use in these
5786 distributions.  We Debian maintainers plan to move to this tarball as
5787 the new upstream as soon as we find time to do the merge.  Since the
5788 new tarball was created, we agreed with Werner at SuSe to make a new
5789 upstream project at <a href="http://savannah.nongnu.org/">Savannah</a>, and continue
5790 development there.  The project is registered and currently waiting
5791 for approval by the Savannah administrators, and as soon as it is
5792 approved, we will import the old versions from svn and continue
5793 working on the future release.</p>
5794
5795 <p>It is a bit ironic that this is done now, when some of the involved
5796 distributions are moving to upstart as a syvinit replacement.</p>
5797
5798       </div>
5799       <div class="tags">
5800
5801
5802         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>.
5803
5804
5805       </div>
5806     </div>
5807     <div class="padding"></div>
5808
5809     <div class="entry">
5810       <div class="title">
5811         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_boots_quicker_and_quicker.html">Debian boots quicker and quicker</a>
5812       </div>
5813       <div class="date">
5814         24th June 2009
5815       </div>
5816       <div class="body">
5817         <p>I spent Monday and tuesday this week in London with a lot of the
5818 people involved in the boot system on Debian and Ubuntu, to see if we
5819 could find more ways to speed up the boot system.  This was an Ubuntu
5820 funded
5821 <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FoundationsTeam/BootPerformance/DebianUbuntuSprint">developer
5822 gathering</a>. It was quite productive.  We also discussed the future
5823 of boot systems, and ways to handle the increasing number of boot
5824 issues introduced by the Linux kernel becoming more and more
5825 asynchronous and event base.  The Ubuntu approach using udev and
5826 upstart might be a good way forward.  Time will show.</p>
5827
5828 <p>Anyway, there are a few ways at the moment to speed up the boot
5829 process in Debian.  All of these should be applied to get a quick
5830 boot:</p>
5831
5832 <ul>
5833
5834 <li>Use dash as /bin/sh.</li>
5835
5836 <li>Disable the init.d/hwclock*.sh scripts and make sure the hardware
5837    clock is in UTC.</li>
5838
5839 <li>Install and activate the insserv package to enable
5840    <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
5841    based boot sequencing</a>, and enable concurrent booting.</li>
5842
5843 </ul>
5844
5845 These points are based on the Google summer of code work done by
5846 <a href="http://initscripts-ng.alioth.debian.org/soc2006-bootsystem/">Carlos
5847 Villegas</a>.
5848
5849 <p>Support for makefile-style concurrency during boot was uploaded to
5850 unstable yesterday.  When we tested it, we were able to cut 6 seconds
5851 from the boot sequence.  It depend on very correct dependency
5852 declaration in all init.d scripts, so I expect us to find edge cases
5853 where the dependences in some scripts are slightly wrong when we start
5854 using this.</p>
5855
5856 <p>On our IRC channel for this effort, #pkg-sysvinit, a new idea was
5857 introduced by Raphael Geissert today, one that could affect the
5858 startup speed as well.  Instead of starting some scripts concurrently
5859 from rcS.d/ and another set of scripts from rc2.d/, it would be
5860 possible to run a of them in the same process.  A quick way to test
5861 this would be to enable insserv and run 'mv /etc/rc2.d/S* /etc/rcS.d/;
5862 insserv'.  Will need to test if that work. :)</p>
5863
5864       </div>
5865       <div class="tags">
5866
5867
5868         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>.
5869
5870
5871       </div>
5872     </div>
5873     <div class="padding"></div>
5874
5875     <div class="entry">
5876       <div class="title">
5877         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/BSAs_p_stander_om_piratkopiering_m_ter_motstand.html">BSAs påstander om piratkopiering møter motstand</a>
5878       </div>
5879       <div class="date">
5880         17th May 2009
5881       </div>
5882       <div class="body">
5883         <p>Hvert år de siste årene har BSA, lobbyfronten til de store
5884 programvareselskapene som Microsoft og Apple, publisert en rapport der
5885 de gjetter på hvor mye piratkopiering påfører i tapte inntekter i
5886 ulike land rundt om i verden.  Resultatene er tendensiøse.  For noen
5887 dager siden kom
5888 <a href="http://global.bsa.org/globalpiracy2008/studies/globalpiracy2008.pdf">siste
5889 rapport</a>, og det er flere kritiske kommentarer publisert de siste
5890 dagene.  Et spesielt interessant kommentar fra Sverige,
5891 <a href="http://www.idg.se/2.1085/1.229795/bsa-hoftade-sverigesiffror">BSA
5892 höftade Sverigesiffror</a>, oppsummeres slik:</p>
5893
5894 <blockquote>
5895 I sin senaste rapport slår BSA fast att 25 procent av all mjukvara i
5896 Sverige är piratkopierad. Det utan att ha pratat med ett enda svenskt
5897 företag. "Man bör nog kanske inte se de här siffrorna som helt
5898 exakta", säger BSAs Sverigechef John Hugosson.
5899 </blockquote>
5900
5901 <p>Mon tro om de er like metodiske når de gjetter på andelen piratkopiering i Norge?  To andre kommentarer er <a
5902 href="http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/comment/2242134/bsa-piracy-figures-shot-reality">BSA
5903 piracy figures need a shot of reality</a> og <a
5904 href="http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/3958/125/">Does The WIPO
5905 Copyright Treaty Work?</a></p>
5906
5907 <p>Fant lenkene via <a
5908 href="http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/17/1632242">oppslag
5909 på Slashdot</a>.</p>
5910
5911       </div>
5912       <div class="tags">
5913
5914
5915         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>.
5916
5917
5918       </div>
5919     </div>
5920     <div class="padding"></div>
5921
5922     <div class="entry">
5923       <div class="title">
5924         <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>
5925       </div>
5926       <div class="date">
5927          7th May 2009
5928       </div>
5929       <div class="body">
5930         <p>Kom over
5931 <a href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10216873-16.html">interessante
5932 tall</a> fra IDG om utviklingen av linuxservermarkedet.  Fikk meg til
5933 å tenke på antall tjenermaskiner ved Universitetet i Oslo der jeg
5934 jobber til daglig.  En rask opptelling forteller meg at vi har 490
5935 (61%) fysiske unix-tjener (mest linux men også noen solaris) og 196
5936 (25%) windowstjenere, samt 112 (14%) virtuelle unix-tjenere.  Med den
5937 bakgrunnskunnskapen kan jeg godt tro at IDG er inne på noe.</p>
5938
5939       </div>
5940       <div class="tags">
5941
5942
5943         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>.
5944
5945
5946       </div>
5947     </div>
5948     <div class="padding"></div>
5949
5950     <div class="entry">
5951       <div class="title">
5952         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Kryptert_harddisk___naturligvis.html">Kryptert harddisk - naturligvis</a>
5953       </div>
5954       <div class="date">
5955          2nd May 2009
5956       </div>
5957       <div class="body">
5958         <p><a href="http://www.dagensit.no/trender/article1658676.ece">Dagens
5959 IT melder</a> at Intel hevder at det er dyrt å miste en datamaskin,
5960 når en tar tap av arbeidstid, fortrolige dokumenter,
5961 personopplysninger og alt annet det innebærer.  Det er ingen tvil om
5962 at det er en kostbar affære å miste sin datamaskin, og det er årsaken
5963 til at jeg har kryptert harddisken på både kontormaskinen og min
5964 bærbare.  Begge inneholder personopplysninger jeg ikke ønsker skal
5965 komme på avveie, den første informasjon relatert til jobben min ved
5966 Universitetet i Oslo, og den andre relatert til blant annet
5967 foreningsarbeide.  Kryptering av diskene gjør at det er lite
5968 sannsynlig at dophoder som kan finne på å rappe maskinene får noe ut
5969 av dem.  Maskinene låses automatisk etter noen minutter uten bruk,
5970 og en reboot vil gjøre at de ber om passord før de vil starte opp.
5971 Jeg bruker Debian på begge maskinene, og installasjonssystemet der
5972 gjør det trivielt å sette opp krypterte disker.  Jeg har LVM på toppen
5973 av krypterte partisjoner, slik at alt av datapartisjoner er kryptert.
5974 Jeg anbefaler alle å kryptere diskene på sine bærbare.  Kostnaden når
5975 det er gjort slik jeg gjør det er minimale, og gevinstene er
5976 betydelige.  En bør dog passe på passordet.  Hvis det går tapt, må
5977 maskinen reinstalleres og alt er tapt.</p>
5978
5979 <p>Krypteringen vil ikke stoppe kompetente angripere som f.eks. kjøler
5980 ned minnebrikkene før maskinen rebootes med programvare for å hente ut
5981 krypteringsnøklene.  Kostnaden med å forsvare seg mot slike angripere
5982 er for min del høyere enn gevinsten.  Jeg tror oddsene for at
5983 f.eks. etteretningsorganisasjoner har glede av å titte på mine
5984 maskiner er minimale, og ulempene jeg ville oppnå ved å forsøke å
5985 gjøre det vanskeligere for angripere med kompetanse og ressurser er
5986 betydelige.</p>
5987
5988       </div>
5989       <div class="tags">
5990
5991
5992         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>.
5993
5994
5995       </div>
5996     </div>
5997     <div class="padding"></div>
5998
5999     <div class="entry">
6000       <div class="title">
6001         <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>
6002       </div>
6003       <div class="date">
6004          2nd May 2009
6005       </div>
6006       <div class="body">
6007         <p>There are two software projects that have had huge influence on the
6008 quality of free software, and I wanted to mention both in case someone
6009 do not yet know them.</p>
6010
6011 <p>The first one is <a href="http://valgrind.org/">valgrind</a>, a
6012 tool to detect and expose errors in the memory handling of programs.
6013 It is easy to use, all one need to do is to run 'valgrind program',
6014 and it will report any problems on stdout.  It is even better if the
6015 program include debug information.  With debug information, it is able
6016 to report the source file name and line number where the problem
6017 occurs.  It can report things like 'reading past memory block in file
6018 X line N, the memory block was allocated in file Y, line M', and
6019 'using uninitialised value in control logic'.  This tool has made it
6020 trivial to investigate reproducible crash bugs in programs, and have
6021 reduced the number of this kind of bugs in free software a lot.
6022
6023 <p>The second one is
6024 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coverity">Coverity</a> which is
6025 a source code checker.  It is able to process the source of a program
6026 and find problems in the logic without running the program.  It
6027 started out as the Stanford Checker and became well known when it was
6028 used to find bugs in the Linux kernel.  It is now a commercial tool
6029 and the company behind it is running
6030 <a href="http://www.scan.coverity.com/">a community service</a> for the
6031 free software community, where a lot of free software projects get
6032 their source checked for free.  Several thousand defects have been
6033 found and fixed so far.  It can find errors like 'lock L taken in file
6034 X line N is never released if exiting in line M', or 'the code in file
6035 Y lines O to P can never be executed'.  The projects included in the
6036 community service project have managed to get rid of a lot of
6037 reliability problems thanks to Coverity.</p>
6038
6039 <p>I believe tools like this, that are able to automatically find
6040 errors in the source, are vital to improve the quality of software and
6041 make sure we can get rid of the crashing and failing software we are
6042 surrounded by today.</p>
6043
6044       </div>
6045       <div class="tags">
6046
6047
6048         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>.
6049
6050
6051       </div>
6052     </div>
6053     <div class="padding"></div>
6054
6055     <div class="entry">
6056       <div class="title">
6057         <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>
6058       </div>
6059       <div class="date">
6060         28th April 2009
6061       </div>
6062       <div class="body">
6063         <p>Julien Blache
6064 <a href="http://blog.technologeek.org/2009/04/12/214">claim that no
6065 patch is better than a useless patch</a>.  I completely disagree, as a
6066 patch allow one to discuss a concrete and proposed solution, and also
6067 prove that the issue at hand is important enough for someone to spent
6068 time on fixing it.  No patch do not provide any of these positive
6069 properties.</p>
6070
6071       </div>
6072       <div class="tags">
6073
6074
6075         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>.
6076
6077
6078       </div>
6079     </div>
6080     <div class="padding"></div>
6081
6082     <div class="entry">
6083       <div class="title">
6084         <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>
6085       </div>
6086       <div class="date">
6087         30th March 2009
6088       </div>
6089       <div class="body">
6090         <p>Where I work at the University of Oslo, one decision stand out as a
6091 very good one to form a long lived computer infrastructure.  It is the
6092 simple one, lost by many in todays computer industry: Standardize on
6093 open network protocols and open exchange/storage formats, not applications.
6094 Applications come and go, while protocols and files tend to stay, and
6095 thus one want to make it easy to change application and vendor, while
6096 avoiding conversion costs and locking users to a specific platform or
6097 application.</p>
6098
6099 <p>This approach make it possible to replace the client applications
6100 independently of the server applications.  One can even allow users to
6101 use several different applications as long as they handle the selected
6102 protocol and format.  In the normal case, only one client application
6103 is recommended and users only get help if they choose to use this
6104 application, but those that want to deviate from the easy path are not
6105 blocked from doing so.</p>
6106
6107 <p>It also allow us to replace the server side without forcing the
6108 users to replace their applications, and thus allow us to select the
6109 best server implementation at any moment, when scale and resouce
6110 requirements change.</p>
6111
6112 <p>I strongly recommend standardizing - on open network protocols and
6113 open formats, but I would never recommend standardizing on a single
6114 application that do not use open network protocol or open formats.</p>
6115
6116       </div>
6117       <div class="tags">
6118
6119
6120         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>.
6121
6122
6123       </div>
6124     </div>
6125     <div class="padding"></div>
6126
6127     <div class="entry">
6128       <div class="title">
6129         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Returning_from_Skolelinux_developer_gathering.html">Returning from Skolelinux developer gathering</a>
6130       </div>
6131       <div class="date">
6132         29th March 2009
6133       </div>
6134       <div class="body">
6135         <p>I'm sitting on the train going home from this weekends Debian
6136 Edu/Skolelinux development gathering.  I got a bit done tuning the
6137 desktop, and looked into the dynamic service location protocol
6138 implementation avahi.  It look like it could be useful for us.  Almost
6139 30 people participated, and I believe it was a great environment to
6140 get to know the Skolelinux system.  Walter Bender, involved in the
6141 development of the Sugar educational platform, presented his stuff and
6142 also helped me improve my OLPC installation.  He also showed me that
6143 his Turtle Art application can be used in standalone mode, and we
6144 agreed that I would help getting it packaged for Debian.  As a
6145 standalone application it would be great for Debian Edu.  We also
6146 tried to get the video conferencing working with two OLPCs, but that
6147 proved to be too hard for us.  The application seem to need more work
6148 before it is ready for me.  I look forward to getting home and relax
6149 now. :)</p>
6150
6151       </div>
6152       <div class="tags">
6153
6154
6155         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>.
6156
6157
6158       </div>
6159     </div>
6160     <div class="padding"></div>
6161
6162     <div class="entry">
6163       <div class="title">
6164         <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>
6165       </div>
6166       <div class="date">
6167         29th March 2009
6168       </div>
6169       <div class="body">
6170         <p>The state of standardized LDAP schemas on Linux is far from
6171 optimal.  There is RFC 2307 documenting one way to store NIS maps in
6172 LDAP, and a modified version of this normally called RFC 2307bis, with
6173 some modifications to be compatible with Active Directory.  The RFC
6174 specification handle the content of a lot of system databases, but do
6175 not handle DNS zones and DHCP configuration.</p>
6176
6177 <p>In <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux</a>,
6178 we would like to store information about users, SMB clients/hosts,
6179 filegroups, netgroups (users and hosts), DHCP and DNS configuration,
6180 and LTSP configuration in LDAP.  These objects have a lot in common,
6181 but with the current LDAP schemas it is not possible to have one
6182 object per entity.  For example, one need to have at least three LDAP
6183 objects for a given computer, one with the SMB related stuff, one with
6184 DNS information and another with DHCP information.  The schemas
6185 provided for DNS and DHCP are impossible to combine into one LDAP
6186 object.  In addition, it is impossible to implement quick queries for
6187 netgroup membership, because of the way NIS triples are implemented.
6188 It just do not scale.  I believe it is time for a few RFC
6189 specifications to cleam up this mess.</p>
6190
6191 <p>I would like to have one LDAP object representing each computer in
6192 the network, and this object can then keep the SMB (ie host key), DHCP
6193 (mac address/name) and DNS (name/IP address) settings in one place.
6194 It need to be efficently stored to make sure it scale well.</p>
6195
6196 <p>I would also like to have a quick way to map from a user or
6197 computer and to the net group this user or computer is a member.</p>
6198
6199 <p>Active Directory have done a better job than unix heads like myself
6200 in this regard, and the unix side need to catch up.  Time to start a
6201 new IETF work group?</p>
6202
6203       </div>
6204       <div class="tags">
6205
6206
6207         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>.
6208
6209
6210       </div>
6211     </div>
6212     <div class="padding"></div>
6213
6214     <div class="entry">
6215       <div class="title">
6216         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Endelig_er_Debian_Lenny_gitt_ut.html">Endelig er Debian Lenny gitt ut</a>
6217       </div>
6218       <div class="date">
6219         15th February 2009
6220       </div>
6221       <div class="body">
6222         <p>Endelig er <a href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian</a>
6223 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2009/20090214">Lenny</a> gitt ut.
6224 Et langt steg videre for Debian-prosjektet, og en rekke nye
6225 programpakker blir nå tilgjengelig for de av oss som bruker den
6226 stabile utgaven av Debian.  Neste steg er nå å få
6227 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a> /
6228 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/">Debian Edu</a> ferdig
6229 oppdatert for den nye utgaven, slik at en oppdatert versjon kan
6230 slippes løs på skolene.  Takk til alle debian-utviklerne som har
6231 gjort dette mulig.  Endelig er f.eks. fungerende avhengighetsstyrt
6232 bootsekvens tilgjengelig i stabil utgave, vha pakken
6233 <tt>insserv</tt>.</p>
6234
6235       </div>
6236       <div class="tags">
6237
6238
6239         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>.
6240
6241
6242       </div>
6243     </div>
6244     <div class="padding"></div>
6245
6246     <div class="entry">
6247       <div class="title">
6248         <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>
6249       </div>
6250       <div class="date">
6251          7th December 2008
6252       </div>
6253       <div class="body">
6254         <p>This weekend we had a small developer gathering for Debian Edu in
6255 Oslo.  Most of Saturday was used for the general assemly for the
6256 member organization, but the rest of the weekend I used to tune the
6257 LTSP installation.  LTSP now work out of the box on the 10-network.
6258 Acer Aspire One proved to be a very nice thin client, with both
6259 screen, mouse and keybard in a small box.  Was working on getting the
6260 diskless workstation setup configured out of the box, but did not
6261 finish it before the weekend was up.</p>
6262
6263 <p>Did not find time to look at the 4 VGA cards in one box we got from
6264 the Brazilian group, so that will have to wait for the next
6265 development gathering.  Would love to have the Debian Edu installer
6266 automatically detect and configure a multiseat setup when it find one
6267 of these cards.</p>
6268
6269       </div>
6270       <div class="tags">
6271
6272
6273         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>.
6274
6275
6276       </div>
6277     </div>
6278     <div class="padding"></div>
6279
6280     <div class="entry">
6281       <div class="title">
6282         <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>
6283       </div>
6284       <div class="date">
6285         25th November 2008
6286       </div>
6287       <div class="body">
6288         <p>Recently I have spent some time evaluating the multimedia browser
6289 plugins available in Debian Lenny, to see which one we should use by
6290 default in Debian Edu.  We need an embedded video playing plugin with
6291 control buttons to pause or stop the video, and capable of streaming
6292 all the multimedia content available on the web.  The test results and
6293 notes are available on
6294 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">the
6295 Debian wiki</a>.  I was surprised how few of the plugins are able to
6296 fill this need.  My personal video player favorite, VLC, has a really
6297 bad plugin which fail on a lot of the test pages.  A lot of the MIME
6298 types I would expect to work with any free software player (like
6299 video/ogg), just do not work.  And simple formats like the
6300 audio/x-mplegurl format (m3u playlists), just isn't supported by the
6301 totem and vlc plugins.  I hope the situation will improve soon.  No
6302 wonder sites use the proprietary Adobe flash to play video.</p>
6303
6304 <p>For Lenny, we seem to end up with the mplayer plugin.  It seem to
6305 be the only one fitting our needs. :/</p>
6306
6307       </div>
6308       <div class="tags">
6309
6310
6311         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>.
6312
6313
6314       </div>
6315     </div>
6316     <div class="padding"></div>
6317
6318     <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>
6319     <div id="sidebar">
6320
6321
6322
6323 <h2>Archive</h2>
6324 <ul>
6325
6326 <li>2013
6327 <ul>
6328
6329 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/01/">January (11)</a></li>
6330
6331 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/02/">February (9)</a></li>
6332
6333 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/03/">March (9)</a></li>
6334
6335 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/04/">April (6)</a></li>
6336
6337 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/05/">May (9)</a></li>
6338
6339 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/06/">June (10)</a></li>
6340
6341 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/07/">July (5)</a></li>
6342
6343 </ul></li>
6344
6345 <li>2012
6346 <ul>
6347
6348 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/01/">January (7)</a></li>
6349
6350 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/02/">February (10)</a></li>
6351
6352 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/03/">March (17)</a></li>
6353
6354 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/04/">April (12)</a></li>
6355
6356 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/05/">May (12)</a></li>
6357
6358 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/06/">June (20)</a></li>
6359
6360 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/07/">July (17)</a></li>
6361
6362 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/08/">August (6)</a></li>
6363
6364 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/09/">September (9)</a></li>
6365
6366 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/10/">October (17)</a></li>
6367
6368 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/11/">November (10)</a></li>
6369
6370 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/12/">December (7)</a></li>
6371
6372 </ul></li>
6373
6374 <li>2011
6375 <ul>
6376
6377 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/01/">January (16)</a></li>
6378
6379 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/02/">February (6)</a></li>
6380
6381 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/03/">March (6)</a></li>
6382
6383 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/04/">April (7)</a></li>
6384
6385 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/05/">May (3)</a></li>
6386
6387 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/06/">June (2)</a></li>
6388
6389 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/07/">July (7)</a></li>
6390
6391 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/08/">August (6)</a></li>
6392
6393 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/09/">September (4)</a></li>
6394
6395 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/10/">October (2)</a></li>
6396
6397 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/11/">November (3)</a></li>
6398
6399 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/12/">December (1)</a></li>
6400
6401 </ul></li>
6402
6403 <li>2010
6404 <ul>
6405
6406 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/01/">January (2)</a></li>
6407
6408 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/02/">February (1)</a></li>
6409
6410 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/03/">March (3)</a></li>
6411
6412 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/04/">April (3)</a></li>
6413
6414 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/05/">May (9)</a></li>
6415
6416 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/06/">June (14)</a></li>
6417
6418 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/07/">July (12)</a></li>
6419
6420 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/08/">August (13)</a></li>
6421
6422 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/09/">September (7)</a></li>
6423
6424 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/10/">October (9)</a></li>
6425
6426 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/11/">November (13)</a></li>
6427
6428 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/12/">December (12)</a></li>
6429
6430 </ul></li>
6431
6432 <li>2009
6433 <ul>
6434
6435 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/01/">January (8)</a></li>
6436
6437 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/02/">February (8)</a></li>
6438
6439 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/03/">March (12)</a></li>
6440
6441 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/04/">April (10)</a></li>
6442
6443 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/05/">May (9)</a></li>
6444
6445 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/06/">June (3)</a></li>
6446
6447 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/07/">July (4)</a></li>
6448
6449 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/08/">August (3)</a></li>
6450
6451 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/09/">September (1)</a></li>
6452
6453 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/10/">October (2)</a></li>
6454
6455 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/11/">November (3)</a></li>
6456
6457 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/12/">December (3)</a></li>
6458
6459 </ul></li>
6460
6461 <li>2008
6462 <ul>
6463
6464 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/11/">November (5)</a></li>
6465
6466 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/12/">December (7)</a></li>
6467
6468 </ul></li>
6469
6470 </ul>
6471
6472
6473
6474 <h2>Tags</h2>
6475 <ul>
6476
6477  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer (13)</a></li>
6478
6479  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/amiga">amiga (1)</a></li>
6480
6481  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/aros">aros (1)</a></li>
6482
6483  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bankid">bankid (4)</a></li>
6484
6485  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin (7)</a></li>
6486
6487  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem (12)</a></li>
6488
6489  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bsa">bsa (2)</a></li>
6490
6491  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian (82)</a></li>
6492
6493  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu (137)</a></li>
6494
6495  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan (10)</a></li>
6496
6497  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook (9)</a></li>
6498
6499  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/drivstoffpriser">drivstoffpriser (4)</a></li>
6500
6501  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english (208)</a></li>
6502
6503  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami (21)</a></li>
6504
6505  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fildeling">fildeling (12)</a></li>
6506
6507  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture (11)</a></li>
6508
6509  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen (11)</a></li>
6510
6511  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju (37)</a></li>
6512
6513  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram (7)</a></li>
6514
6515  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kart">kart (18)</a></li>
6516
6517  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap (8)</a></li>
6518
6519  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lenker">lenker (6)</a></li>
6520
6521  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ltsp">ltsp (1)</a></li>
6522
6523  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia (25)</a></li>
6524
6525  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk (234)</a></li>
6526
6527  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug (153)</a></li>
6528
6529  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn (8)</a></li>
6530
6531  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/open311">open311 (2)</a></li>
6532
6533  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett (44)</a></li>
6534
6535  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern (65)</a></li>
6536
6537  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/raid">raid (1)</a></li>
6538
6539  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reprap">reprap (11)</a></li>
6540
6541  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rfid">rfid (2)</a></li>
6542
6543  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot (7)</a></li>
6544
6545  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rss">rss (1)</a></li>
6546
6547  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ruter">ruter (4)</a></li>
6548
6549  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/scraperwiki">scraperwiki (2)</a></li>
6550
6551  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet (29)</a></li>
6552
6553  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary (4)</a></li>
6554
6555  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/skepsis">skepsis (4)</a></li>
6556
6557  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard (43)</a></li>
6558
6559  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stavekontroll">stavekontroll (3)</a></li>
6560
6561  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stortinget">stortinget (7)</a></li>
6562
6563  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance (15)</a></li>
6564
6565  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sysadmin">sysadmin (1)</a></li>
6566
6567  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/valg">valg (7)</a></li>
6568
6569  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video (38)</a></li>
6570
6571  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/vitenskap">vitenskap (4)</a></li>
6572
6573  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web (26)</a></li>
6574
6575 </ul>
6576
6577
6578     </div>
6579     <p style="text-align: right">
6580  Created by <a href="http://steve.org.uk/Software/chronicle">Chronicle v4.6</a>
6581 </p>
6582
6583   </body>
6584 </html>