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