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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 "english".</h3>
  22
  23     <div class="entry">
  24       <div class="title">
  25         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Updated_sales_number_for_my_Free_Culture_paper_editions.html">Updated sales number for my Free Culture paper editions</a>
  26       </div>
  27       <div class="date">
  28         12th June 2017
  29       </div>
  30       <div class="body">
  31         <p>It is pleasing to see that the work we put down in publishing new
  32 editions of the classic <a href="http://www.free-culture.cc/">Free
  33 Culture book</a> by the founder of the Creative Commons movement,
  34 Lawrence Lessig, is still being appreciated.  I had a look at the
  35 latest sales numbers for the paper edition today.  Not too impressive,
  36 but happy to see some buyers still exist.  All the revenue from the
  37 books is sent to the <a href="https://creativecommons.org/">Creative
  38 Commons Corporation</a>, and they receive the largest cut if you buy
  39 directly from Lulu.  Most books are sold via Amazon, with Ingram
  40 second and only a small fraction directly from Lulu.  The ebook
  41 edition is available for free from
  42 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">Github</a>.</p>
  43
  44 <table border="0">
  45 <tr><th rowspan="2" valign="bottom">Title / language</th><th colspan="3">Quantity</th></tr>
  46 <tr><th>2016 jan-jun</th><th>2016 jul-dec</th><th>2017 jan-may</th></tr>
  47
  48 <tr>
  49   <td><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/culture-libre/paperback/product-22645082.html">Culture Libre / French</a></td>
  50   <td align="right">3</td>
  51   <td align="right">6</td>
  52   <td align="right">15</td>
  53 </tr>
  54
  55 <tr>
  56   <td><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/fri-kultur/paperback/product-22441576.html">Fri kultur / Norwegian</a></td>
  57   <td align="right">7</td>
  58   <td align="right">1</td>
  59   <td align="right">0</td>
  60 </tr>
  61
  62 <tr>
  63   <td><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22440520.html">Free Culture / English</a></td>
  64   <td align="right">14</td>
  65   <td align="right">27</td>
  66   <td align="right">16</td>
  67 </tr>
  68
  69 <tr>
  70   <td>Total</td>
  71   <td align="right">24</td>
  72   <td align="right">34</td>
  73   <td align="right">31</td>
  74 </tr>
  75
  76 </table>
  77
  78 <p>A bit sad to see the low sales number on the Norwegian edition, and
  79 a bit surprising the English edition still selling so well.</p>
  80
  81 <p>If you would like to translate and publish the book in your native
  82 language, I would be happy to help make it happen.  Please get in
  83 touch.</p>
  84
  85       </div>
  86       <div class="tags">
  87
  88
  89         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>.
  90
  91
  92       </div>
  93     </div>
  94     <div class="padding"></div>
  95
  96     <div class="entry">
  97       <div class="title">
  98         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Release_0_1_1_of_free_software_archive_system_Nikita_announced.html">Release 0.1.1 of free software archive system Nikita announced</a>
  99       </div>
 100       <div class="date">
 101         10th June 2017
 102       </div>
 103       <div class="body">
 104         <p>I am very happy to report that the
 105 <a href="https://github.com/hiOA-ABI/nikita-noark5-core">Nikita Noark 5
 106 core project</a> tagged its second release today.  The free software
 107 solution is an implementation of the Norwegian archive standard Noark
 108 5 used by government offices in Norway.  These were the changes in
 109 version 0.1.1 since version 0.1.0 (from NEWS.md):
 110
 111 <ul>
 112
 113  <li>Continued work on the angularjs GUI, including document upload.</li>
 114  <li>Implemented correspondencepartPerson, correspondencepartUnit and
 115    correspondencepartInternal</li>
 116  <li>Applied for coverity coverage and started submitting code on
 117    regualr basis.</li>
 118  <li>Started fixing bugs reported by coverity</li>
 119  <li>Corrected and completed HATEOAS links to make sure entire API is
 120    available via URLs in _links.</li>
 121  <li>Corrected all relation URLs to use trailing slash.</li>
 122  <li>Add initial support for storing data in ElasticSearch.</li>
 123  <li>Now able to receive and store uploaded files in the archive.</li>
 124  <li>Changed JSON output for object lists to have relations in _links.</li>
 125  <li>Improve JSON output for empty object lists.</li>
 126  <li>Now uses correct MIME type application/vnd.noark5-v4+json.</li>
 127  <li>Added support for docker container images.</li>
 128  <li>Added simple API browser implemented in JavaScript/Angular.</li>
 129  <li>Started on archive client implemented in JavaScript/Angular.</li>
 130  <li>Started on prototype to show the public mail journal.</li>
 131  <li>Improved performance by disabling Sprint FileWatcher.</li>
 132  <li>Added support for 'arkivskaper', 'saksmappe' and 'journalpost'.</li>
 133  <li>Added support for some metadata codelists.</li>
 134  <li>Added support for Cross-origin resource sharing (CORS).</li>
 135  <li>Changed login method from Basic Auth to JSON Web Token (RFC 7519)
 136    style.</li>
 137  <li>Added support for GET-ing ny-* URLs.</li>
 138  <li>Added support for modifying entities using PUT and eTag.</li>
 139  <li>Added support for returning XML output on request.</li>
 140  <li>Removed support for English field and class names, limiting ourself
 141    to the official names.</li>
 142  <li>...</li>
 143
 144 </ul>
 145
 146 <p>If this sound interesting to you, please contact us on IRC (#nikita
 147 on irc.freenode.net) or email
 148 (<a href="https://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/nikita-noark">nikita-noark
 149 mailing list).</p>
 150
 151       </div>
 152       <div class="tags">
 153
 154
 155         Tags: <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/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
 156
 157
 158       </div>
 159     </div>
 160     <div class="padding"></div>
 161
 162     <div class="entry">
 163       <div class="title">
 164         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_storing_trusted_timestamps_in_a_Noark_5_archive.html">Idea for storing trusted timestamps in a Noark 5 archive</a>
 165       </div>
 166       <div class="date">
 167          7th June 2017
 168       </div>
 169       <div class="body">
 170         <p><em>This is a copy of
 171 <a href="https://lists.nuug.no/pipermail/nikita-noark/2017-June/000297.html">an
 172 email I posted to the nikita-noark mailing list</a>.  Please follow up
 173 there if you would like to discuss this topic.  The background is that
 174 we are making a free software archive system based on the Norwegian
 175 <a href="https://www.arkivverket.no/forvaltning-og-utvikling/regelverk-og-standarder/noark-standarden">Noark
 176 5 standard</a> for government archives.</em></p>
 177
 178 <p>I've been wondering a bit lately how trusted timestamps could be
 179 stored in Noark 5.
 180 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_timestamping">Trusted
 181 timestamps</a> can be used to verify that some information
 182 (document/file/checksum/metadata) have not been changed since a
 183 specific time in the past.  This is useful to verify the integrity of
 184 the documents in the archive.</p>
 185
 186 <p>Then it occured to me, perhaps the trusted timestamps could be
 187 stored as dokument variants (ie dokumentobjekt referered to from
 188 dokumentbeskrivelse) with the filename set to the hash it is
 189 stamping?</p>
 190
 191 <p>Given a "dokumentbeskrivelse" with an associated "dokumentobjekt",
 192 a new dokumentobjekt is associated with "dokumentbeskrivelse" with the
 193 same attributes as the stamped dokumentobjekt except these
 194 attributes:</p>
 195
 196 <ul>
 197
 198 <li>format -> "RFC3161"
 199 <li>mimeType -> "application/timestamp-reply"
 200 <li>formatDetaljer -> "&lt;source URL for timestamp service&gt;"
 201 <li>filenavn -> "&lt;sjekksum&gt;.tsr"
 202
 203 </ul>
 204
 205 <p>This assume a service following
 206 <a href="https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3161">IETF RFC 3161</a> is
 207 used, which specifiy the given MIME type for replies and the .tsr file
 208 ending for the content of such trusted timestamp.  As far as I can
 209 tell from the Noark 5 specifications, it is OK to have several
 210 variants/renderings of a dokument attached to a given
 211 dokumentbeskrivelse objekt.  It might be stretching it a bit to make
 212 some of these variants represent crypto-signatures useful for
 213 verifying the document integrity instead of representing the dokument
 214 itself.</p>
 215
 216 <p>Using the source of the service in formatDetaljer allow several
 217 timestamping services to be used.  This is useful to spread the risk
 218 of key compromise over several organisations.  It would only be a
 219 problem to trust the timestamps if all of the organisations are
 220 compromised.</p>
 221
 222 <p>The following oneliner on Linux can be used to generate the tsr
 223 file.  $input is the path to the file to checksum, and $sha256 is the
 224 SHA-256 checksum of the file (ie the "<sjekksum>.tsr" value mentioned
 225 above).</p>
 226
 227 <p><blockquote><pre>
 228 openssl ts -query -data "$inputfile" -cert -sha256 -no_nonce \
 229   | curl -s -H "Content-Type: application/timestamp-query" \
 230       --data-binary "@-" http://zeitstempel.dfn.de > $sha256.tsr
 231 </pre></blockquote></p>
 232
 233 <p>To verify the timestamp, you first need to download the public key
 234 of the trusted timestamp service, for example using this command:</p>
 235
 236 <p><blockquote><pre>
 237 wget -O ca-cert.txt \
 238   https://pki.pca.dfn.de/global-services-ca/pub/cacert/chain.txt
 239 </pre></blockquote></p>
 240
 241 <p>Note, the public key should be stored alongside the timestamps in
 242 the archive to make sure it is also available 100 years from now.  It
 243 is probably a good idea to standardise how and were to store such
 244 public keys, to make it easier to find for those trying to verify
 245 documents 100 or 1000 years from now. :)</p>
 246
 247 <p>The verification itself is a simple openssl command:</p>
 248
 249 <p><blockquote><pre>
 250 openssl ts -verify -data $inputfile -in $sha256.tsr \
 251   -CAfile ca-cert.txt -text
 252 </pre></blockquote></p>
 253
 254 <p>Is there any reason this approach would not work?  Is it somehow against
 255 the Noark 5 specification?</p>
 256
 257       </div>
 258       <div class="tags">
 259
 260
 261         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
 262
 263
 264       </div>
 265     </div>
 266     <div class="padding"></div>
 267
 268     <div class="entry">
 269       <div class="title">
 270         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_software_archive_system_Nikita_now_able_to_store_documents.html">Free software archive system Nikita now able to store documents</a>
 271       </div>
 272       <div class="date">
 273         19th March 2017
 274       </div>
 275       <div class="body">
 276         <p>The <a href="https://github.com/hiOA-ABI/nikita-noark5-core">Nikita
 277 Noark 5 core project</a> is implementing the Norwegian standard for
 278 keeping an electronic archive of government documents.
 279 <a href="http://www.arkivverket.no/arkivverket/Offentlig-forvaltning/Noark/Noark-5/English-version">The
 280 Noark 5 standard</a> document the requirement for data systems used by
 281 the archives in the Norwegian government, and the Noark 5 web interface
 282 specification document a REST web service for storing, searching and
 283 retrieving documents and metadata in such archive.  I've been involved
 284 in the project since a few weeks before Christmas, when the Norwegian
 285 Unix User Group
 286 <a href="https://www.nuug.no/news/NOARK5_kjerne_som_fri_programvare_f_r_epostliste_hos_NUUG.shtml">announced
 287 it supported the project</a>.  I believe this is an important project,
 288 and hope it can make it possible for the government archives in the
 289 future to use free software to keep the archives we citizens depend
 290 on.  But as I do not hold such archive myself, personally my first use
 291 case is to store and analyse public mail journal metadata published
 292 from the government.  I find it useful to have a clear use case in
 293 mind when developing, to make sure the system scratches one of my
 294 itches.</p>
 295
 296 <p>If you would like to help make sure there is a free software
 297 alternatives for the archives, please join our IRC channel
 298 (<a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23nikita"">#nikita on
 299 irc.freenode.net</a>) and
 300 <a href="https://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/nikita-noark">the
 301 project mailing list</a>.</p>
 302
 303 <p>When I got involved, the web service could store metadata about
 304 documents.  But a few weeks ago, a new milestone was reached when it
 305 became possible to store full text documents too.  Yesterday, I
 306 completed an implementation of a command line tool
 307 <tt>archive-pdf</tt> to upload a PDF file to the archive using this
 308 API.  The tool is very simple at the moment, and find existing
 309 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fonds">fonds</a>, series and
 310 files while asking the user to select which one to use if more than
 311 one exist.  Once a file is identified, the PDF is associated with the
 312 file and uploaded, using the title extracted from the PDF itself.  The
 313 process is fairly similar to visiting the archive, opening a cabinet,
 314 locating a file and storing a piece of paper in the archive.  Here is
 315 a test run directly after populating the database with test data using
 316 our API tester:</p>
 317
 318 <p><blockquote><pre>
 319 ~/src//noark5-tester$ ./archive-pdf mangelmelding/mangler.pdf
 320 using arkiv: Title of the test fonds created 2017-03-18T23:49:32.103446
 321 using arkivdel: Title of the test series created 2017-03-18T23:49:32.103446
 322
 323  0 - Title of the test case file created 2017-03-18T23:49:32.103446
 324  1 - Title of the test file created 2017-03-18T23:49:32.103446
 325 Select which mappe you want (or search term): 0
 326 Uploading mangelmelding/mangler.pdf
 327   PDF title: Mangler i spesifikasjonsdokumentet for NOARK 5 Tjenestegrensesnitt
 328   File 2017/1: Title of the test case file created 2017-03-18T23:49:32.103446
 329 ~/src//noark5-tester$
 330 </pre></blockquote></p>
 331
 332 <p>You can see here how the fonds (arkiv) and serie (arkivdel) only had
 333 one option, while the user need to choose which file (mappe) to use
 334 among the two created by the API tester.  The <tt>archive-pdf</tt>
 335 tool can be found in the git repository for the API tester.</p>
 336
 337 <p>In the project, I have been mostly working on
 338 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/noark5-tester">the API
 339 tester</a> so far, while getting to know the code base.  The API
 340 tester currently use
 341 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HATEOAS">the HATEOAS links</a>
 342 to traverse the entire exposed service API and verify that the exposed
 343 operations and objects match the specification, as well as trying to
 344 create objects holding metadata and uploading a simple XML file to
 345 store.  The tester has proved very useful for finding flaws in our
 346 implementation, as well as flaws in the reference site and the
 347 specification.</p>
 348
 349 <p>The test document I uploaded is a summary of all the specification
 350 defects we have collected so far while implementing the web service.
 351 There are several unclear and conflicting parts of the specification,
 352 and we have
 353 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/noark5-tester/tree/master/mangelmelding">started
 354 writing down</a> the questions we get from implementing it.  We use a
 355 format inspired by how <a href="http://www.opengroup.org/austin/">The
 356 Austin Group</a> collect defect reports for the POSIX standard with
 357 <a href="http://www.opengroup.org/austin/mantis.html">their
 358 instructions for the MANTIS defect tracker system</a>, in lack of an official way to structure defect reports for Noark 5 (our first submitted defect report was a <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/noark5-tester/blob/master/mangelmelding/sendt/2017-03-15-mangel-prosess.md">request for a procedure for submitting defect reports</a> :).
 359
 360 <p>The Nikita project is implemented using Java and Spring, and is
 361 fairly easy to get up and running using Docker containers for those
 362 that want to test the current code base.  The API tester is
 363 implemented in Python.</p>
 364
 365       </div>
 366       <div class="tags">
 367
 368
 369         Tags: <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/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
 370
 371
 372       </div>
 373     </div>
 374     <div class="padding"></div>
 375
 376     <div class="entry">
 377       <div class="title">
 378         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Detecting_NFS_hangs_on_Linux_without_hanging_yourself___.html">Detecting NFS hangs on Linux without hanging yourself...</a>
 379       </div>
 380       <div class="date">
 381          9th March 2017
 382       </div>
 383       <div class="body">
 384         <p>Over the years, administrating thousand of NFS mounting linux
 385 computers at the time, I often needed a way to detect if the machine
 386 was experiencing NFS hang.  If you try to use <tt>df</tt> or look at a
 387 file or directory affected by the hang, the process (and possibly the
 388 shell) will hang too.  So you want to be able to detect this without
 389 risking the detection process getting stuck too.  It has not been
 390 obvious how to do this.  When the hang has lasted a while, it is
 391 possible to find messages like these in dmesg:</p>
 392
 393 <p><blockquote>
 394 nfs: server nfsserver not responding, still trying
 395 <br>nfs: server nfsserver OK
 396 </blockquote></p>
 397
 398 <p>It is hard to know if the hang is still going on, and it is hard to
 399 be sure looking in dmesg is going to work.  If there are lots of other
 400 messages in dmesg the lines might have rotated out of site before they
 401 are noticed.</p>
 402
 403 <p>While reading through the nfs client implementation in linux kernel
 404 code, I came across some statistics that seem to give a way to detect
 405 it.  The om_timeouts sunrpc value in the kernel will increase every
 406 time the above log entry is inserted into dmesg.  And after digging a
 407 bit further, I discovered that this value show up in
 408 /proc/self/mountstats on Linux.</p>
 409
 410 <p>The mountstats content seem to be shared between files using the
 411 same file system context, so it is enough to check one of the
 412 mountstats files to get the state of the mount point for the machine.
 413 I assume this will not show lazy umounted NFS points, nor NFS mount
 414 points in a different process context (ie with a different filesystem
 415 view), but that does not worry me.</p>
 416
 417 <p>The content for a NFS mount point look similar to this:</p>
 418
 419 <p><blockquote><pre>
 420 [...]
 421 device /dev/mapper/Debian-var mounted on /var with fstype ext3
 422 device nfsserver:/mnt/nfsserver/home0 mounted on /mnt/nfsserver/home0 with fstype nfs statvers=1.1
 423         opts:   rw,vers=3,rsize=65536,wsize=65536,namlen=255,acregmin=3,acregmax=60,acdirmin=30,acdirmax=60,soft,nolock,proto=tcp,timeo=600,retrans=2,sec=sys,mountaddr=129.240.3.145,mountvers=3,mountport=4048,mountproto=udp,local_lock=all
 424         age:    7863311
 425         caps:   caps=0x3fe7,wtmult=4096,dtsize=8192,bsize=0,namlen=255
 426         sec:    flavor=1,pseudoflavor=1
 427         events: 61063112 732346265 1028140 35486205 16220064 8162542 761447191 71714012 37189 3891185 45561809 110486139 4850138 420353 15449177 296502 52736725 13523379 0 52182 9016896 1231 0 0 0 0 0
 428         bytes:  166253035039 219519120027 0 0 40783504807 185466229638 11677877 45561809
 429         RPC iostats version: 1.0  p/v: 100003/3 (nfs)
 430         xprt:   tcp 925 1 6810 0 0 111505412 111480497 109 2672418560317 0 248 53869103 22481820
 431         per-op statistics
 432                 NULL: 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
 433              GETATTR: 61063106 61063108 0 9621383060 6839064400 453650 77291321 78926132
 434              SETATTR: 463469 463470 0 92005440 66739536 63787 603235 687943
 435               LOOKUP: 17021657 17021657 0 3354097764 4013442928 57216 35125459 35566511
 436               ACCESS: 14281703 14290009 5 2318400592 1713803640 1709282 4865144 7130140
 437             READLINK: 125 125 0 20472 18620 0 1112 1118
 438                 READ: 4214236 4214237 0 715608524 41328653212 89884 22622768 22806693
 439                WRITE: 8479010 8494376 22 187695798568 1356087148 178264904 51506907 231671771
 440               CREATE: 171708 171708 0 38084748 46702272 873 1041833 1050398
 441                MKDIR: 3680 3680 0 773980 993920 26 23990 24245
 442              SYMLINK: 903 903 0 233428 245488 6 5865 5917
 443                MKNOD: 80 80 0 20148 21760 0 299 304
 444               REMOVE: 429921 429921 0 79796004 61908192 3313 2710416 2741636
 445                RMDIR: 3367 3367 0 645112 484848 22 5782 6002
 446               RENAME: 466201 466201 0 130026184 121212260 7075 5935207 5961288
 447                 LINK: 289155 289155 0 72775556 67083960 2199 2565060 2585579
 448              READDIR: 2933237 2933237 0 516506204 13973833412 10385 3190199 3297917
 449          READDIRPLUS: 1652839 1652839 0 298640972 6895997744 84735 14307895 14448937
 450               FSSTAT: 6144 6144 0 1010516 1032192 51 9654 10022
 451               FSINFO: 2 2 0 232 328 0 1 1
 452             PATHCONF: 1 1 0 116 140 0 0 0
 453               COMMIT: 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
 454
 455 device binfmt_misc mounted on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc with fstype binfmt_misc
 456 [...]
 457 </pre></blockquote></p>
 458
 459 <p>The key number to look at is the third number in the per-op list.
 460 It is the number of NFS timeouts experiences per file system
 461 operation.  Here 22 write timeouts and 5 access timeouts.  If these
 462 numbers are increasing, I believe the machine is experiencing NFS
 463 hang.  Unfortunately the timeout value do not start to increase right
 464 away.  The NFS operations need to time out first, and this can take a
 465 while.  The exact timeout value depend on the setup.  For example the
 466 defaults for TCP and UDP mount points are quite different, and the
 467 timeout value is affected by the soft, hard, timeo and retrans NFS
 468 mount options.</p>
 469
 470 <p>The only way I have been able to get working on Debian and RedHat
 471 Enterprise Linux for getting the timeout count is to peek in /proc/.
 472 But according to
 473 <ahref="http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19253-01/816-4555/netmonitor-12/index.html">Solaris
 474 10 System Administration Guide: Network Services</a>, the 'nfsstat -c'
 475 command can be used to get these timeout values.  But this do not work
 476 on Linux, as far as I can tell.  I
 477 <ahref="http://bugs.debian.org/857043">asked Debian about this</a>,
 478 but have not seen any replies yet.</p>
 479
 480 <p>Is there a better way to figure out if a Linux NFS client is
 481 experiencing NFS hangs?  Is there a way to detect which processes are
 482 affected?  Is there a way to get the NFS mount going quickly once the
 483 network problem causing the NFS hang has been cleared?  I would very
 484 much welcome some clues, as we regularly run into NFS hangs.</p>
 485
 486       </div>
 487       <div class="tags">
 488
 489
 490         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/sysadmin">sysadmin</a>.
 491
 492
 493       </div>
 494     </div>
 495     <div class="padding"></div>
 496
 497     <div class="entry">
 498       <div class="title">
 499         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_does_it_feel_to_be_wiretapped__when_you_should_be_doing_the_wiretapping___.html">How does it feel to be wiretapped, when you should be doing the wiretapping...</a>
 500       </div>
 501       <div class="date">
 502          8th March 2017
 503       </div>
 504       <div class="body">
 505         <p>So the new president in the United States of America claim to be
 506 surprised to discover that he was wiretapped during the election
 507 before he was elected president.  He even claim this must be illegal.
 508 Well, doh, if it is one thing the confirmations from Snowden
 509 documented, it is that the entire population in USA is wiretapped, one
 510 way or another.  Of course the president candidates were wiretapped,
 511 alongside the senators, judges and the rest of the people in USA.</p>
 512
 513 <p>Next, the Federal Bureau of Investigation ask the Department of
 514 Justice to go public rejecting the claims that Donald Trump was
 515 wiretapped illegally.  I fail to see the relevance, given that I am
 516 sure the surveillance industry in USA believe they have all the legal
 517 backing they need to conduct mass surveillance on the entire
 518 world.</p>
 519
 520 <p>There is even the director of the FBI stating that he never saw an
 521 order requesting wiretapping of Donald Trump.  That is not very
 522 surprising, given how the FISA court work, with all its activity being
 523 secret.  Perhaps he only heard about it?</p>
 524
 525 <p>What I find most sad in this story is how Norwegian journalists
 526 present it.  In a news reports the other day in the radio from the
 527 Norwegian National broadcasting Company (NRK), I heard the journalist
 528 claim that 'the FBI denies any wiretapping', while the reality is that
 529 'the FBI denies any illegal wiretapping'.  There is a fundamental and
 530 important difference, and it make me sad that the journalists are
 531 unable to grasp it.</p>
 532
 533 <p><strong>Update 2017-03-13:</strong> Look like
 534 <a href="https://theintercept.com/2017/03/13/rand-paul-is-right-nsa-routinely-monitors-americans-communications-without-warrants/">The
 535 Intercept report that US Senator Rand Paul confirm what I state above</a>.</p>
 536
 537       </div>
 538       <div class="tags">
 539
 540
 541         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
 542
 543
 544       </div>
 545     </div>
 546     <div class="padding"></div>
 547
 548     <div class="entry">
 549       <div class="title">
 550         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Norwegian_Bokm_l_translation_of_The_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook_complete__proofreading_in_progress.html">Norwegian Bokmål translation of The Debian Administrator's Handbook complete, proofreading in progress</a>
 551       </div>
 552       <div class="date">
 553          3rd March 2017
 554       </div>
 555       <div class="body">
 556         <p>For almost a year now, we have been working on making a Norwegian
 557 Bokmål edition of <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/">The Debian
 558 Administrator's Handbook</a>.  Now, thanks to the tireless effort of
 559 Ole-Erik, Ingrid and Andreas, the initial translation is complete, and
 560 we are working on the proof reading to ensure consistent language and
 561 use of correct computer science terms.  The plan is to make the book
 562 available on paper, as well as in electronic form.  For that to
 563 happen, the proof reading must be completed and all the figures need
 564 to be translated.  If you want to help out, get in touch.</p>
 565
 566 <p><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-handbook/debian-handbook-nb-NO.pdf">A
 567
 568 fresh PDF edition</a> in A4 format (the final book will have smaller
 569 pages) of the book created every morning is available for
 570 proofreading.  If you find any errors, please
 571 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-handbook/">visit
 572 Weblate and correct the error</a>.  The
 573 <a href="http://l.github.io/debian-handbook/stat/nb-NO/index.html">state
 574 of the translation including figures</a> is a useful source for those
 575 provide Norwegian bokmål screen shots and figures.</p>
 576
 577       </div>
 578       <div class="tags">
 579
 580
 581         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 582
 583
 584       </div>
 585     </div>
 586     <div class="padding"></div>
 587
 588     <div class="entry">
 589       <div class="title">
 590         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Unlimited_randomness_with_the_ChaosKey_.html">Unlimited randomness with the ChaosKey?</a>
 591       </div>
 592       <div class="date">
 593          1st March 2017
 594       </div>
 595       <div class="body">
 596         <p>A few days ago I ordered a small batch of
 597 <a href="http://altusmetrum.org/ChaosKey/">the ChaosKey</a>, a small
 598 USB dongle for generating entropy created by Bdale Garbee and Keith
 599 Packard.  Yesterday it arrived, and I am very happy to report that it
 600 work great!  According to its designers, to get it to work out of the
 601 box, you need the Linux kernel version 4.1 or later.  I tested on a
 602 Debian Stretch machine (kernel version 4.9), and there it worked just
 603 fine, increasing the available entropy very quickly.  I wrote a small
 604 test oneliner to test.  It first print the current entropy level,
 605 drain /dev/random, and then print the entropy level for five seconds.
 606 Here is the situation without the ChaosKey inserted:</p>
 607
 608 <blockquote><pre>
 609 % cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
 610   dd bs=1M if=/dev/random of=/dev/null count=1; \
 611   for n in $(seq 1 5); do \
 612      cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
 613      sleep 1; \
 614   done
 615 300
 616 0+1 oppføringer inn
 617 0+1 oppføringer ut
 618 28 byte kopiert, 0,000264565 s, 106 kB/s
 619 4
 620 8
 621 12
 622 17
 623 21
 624 %
 625 </pre></blockquote>
 626
 627 <p>The entropy level increases by 3-4 every second.  In such case any
 628 application requiring random bits (like a HTTPS enabled web server)
 629 will halt and wait for more entrpy.  And here is the situation with
 630 the ChaosKey inserted:</p>
 631
 632 <blockquote><pre>
 633 % cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
 634   dd bs=1M if=/dev/random of=/dev/null count=1; \
 635   for n in $(seq 1 5); do \
 636      cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
 637      sleep 1; \
 638   done
 639 1079
 640 0+1 oppføringer inn
 641 0+1 oppføringer ut
 642 104 byte kopiert, 0,000487647 s, 213 kB/s
 643 433
 644 1028
 645 1031
 646 1035
 647 1038
 648 %
 649 </pre></blockquote>
 650
 651 <p>Quite the difference. :) I bought a few more than I need, in case
 652 someone want to buy one here in Norway. :)</p>
 653
 654 <p>Update: The dongle was presented at Debconf last year.  You might
 655 find <a href="https://debconf16.debconf.org/talks/94/">the talk
 656 recording illuminating</a>.  It explains exactly what the source of
 657 randomness is, if you are unable to spot it from the schema drawing
 658 available from the ChaosKey web site linked at the start of this blog
 659 post.</p>
 660
 661       </div>
 662       <div class="tags">
 663
 664
 665         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>.
 666
 667
 668       </div>
 669     </div>
 670     <div class="padding"></div>
 671
 672     <div class="entry">
 673       <div class="title">
 674         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Detect_OOXML_files_with_undefined_behaviour_.html">Detect OOXML files with undefined behaviour?</a>
 675       </div>
 676       <div class="date">
 677         21st February 2017
 678       </div>
 679       <div class="body">
 680         <p>I just noticed
 681 <a href="http://www.arkivrad.no/aktuelt/riksarkivarens-forskrift-pa-horing">the
 682 new Norwegian proposal for archiving rules in the goverment</a> list
 683 <a href="http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-376.htm">ECMA-376</a>
 684 / ISO/IEC 29500 (aka OOXML) as valid formats to put in long term
 685 storage.  Luckily such files will only be accepted based on
 686 pre-approval from the National Archive.  Allowing OOXML files to be
 687 used for long term storage might seem like a good idea as long as we
 688 forget that there are plenty of ways for a "valid" OOXML document to
 689 have content with no defined interpretation in the standard, which
 690 lead to a question and an idea.</p>
 691
 692 <p>Is there any tool to detect if a OOXML document depend on such
 693 undefined behaviour?  It would be useful for the National Archive (and
 694 anyone else interested in verifying that a document is well defined)
 695 to have such tool available when considering to approve the use of
 696 OOXML.  I'm aware of the
 697 <a href="https://github.com/arlm/officeotron/">officeotron OOXML
 698 validator</a>, but do not know how complete it is nor if it will
 699 report use of undefined behaviour.  Are there other similar tools
 700 available?  Please send me an email if you know of any such tool.</p>
 701
 702       </div>
 703       <div class="tags">
 704
 705
 706         Tags: <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>.
 707
 708
 709       </div>
 710     </div>
 711     <div class="padding"></div>
 712
 713     <div class="entry">
 714       <div class="title">
 715         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ruling_ignored_our_objections_to_the_seizure_of_popcorn_time_no___domstolkontroll_.html">Ruling ignored our objections to the seizure of popcorn-time.no (#domstolkontroll)</a>
 716       </div>
 717       <div class="date">
 718         13th February 2017
 719       </div>
 720       <div class="body">
 721         <p>A few days ago, we received the ruling from
 722 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_day_in_court_challenging_seizure_of_popcorn_time_no_for__domstolkontroll.html">my
 723 day in court</a>.  The case in question is a challenge of the seizure
 724 of the DNS domain popcorn-time.no.  The ruling simply did not mention
 725 most of our arguments, and seemed to take everything ØKOKRIM said at
 726 face value, ignoring our demonstration and explanations.  But it is
 727 hard to tell for sure, as we still have not seen most of the documents
 728 in the case and thus were unprepared and unable to contradict several
 729 of the claims made in court by the opposition.  We are considering an
 730 appeal, but it is partly a question of funding, as it is costing us
 731 quite a bit to pay for our lawyer.  If you want to help, please
 732 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/dns-beslag-donasjon.shtml">donate to the
 733 NUUG defense fund</a>.</p>
 734
 735 <p>The details of the case, as far as we know it, is available in
 736 Norwegian from
 737 <a href="https://www.nuug.no/news/tags/dns-domenebeslag/">the NUUG
 738 blog</a>.  This also include
 739 <a href="https://www.nuug.no/news/Avslag_etter_rettslig_h_ring_om_DNS_beslaget___vurderer_veien_videre.shtml">the
 740 ruling itself</a>.</p>
 741
 742       </div>
 743       <div class="tags">
 744
 745
 746         Tags: <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/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>.
 747
 748
 749       </div>
 750     </div>
 751     <div class="padding"></div>
 752
 753     <div class="entry">
 754       <div class="title">
 755         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_day_in_court_challenging_seizure_of_popcorn_time_no_for__domstolkontroll.html">A day in court challenging seizure of popcorn-time.no for #domstolkontroll</a>
 756       </div>
 757       <div class="date">
 758          3rd February 2017
 759       </div>
 760       <div class="body">
 761         <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-02-01-popcorn-time-in-court.jpeg"></p>
 762
 763 <p>On Wednesday, I spent the entire day in court in Follo Tingrett
 764 representing <a href="https://www.nuug.no/">the member association
 765 NUUG</a>, alongside <a href="https://www.efn.no/">the member
 766 association EFN</a> and <a href="http://www.imc.no">the DNS registrar
 767 IMC</a>, challenging the seizure of the DNS name popcorn-time.no.  It
 768 was interesting to sit in a court of law for the first time in my
 769 life.  Our team can be seen in the picture above: attorney Ola
 770 Tellesbø, EFN board member Tom Fredrik Blenning, IMC CEO Morten Emil
 771 Eriksen and NUUG board member Petter Reinholdtsen.</p>
 772
 773 <p><a href="http://www.domstol.no/no/Enkelt-domstol/follo-tingrett/Nar-gar-rettssaken/Beramming/?cid=AAAA1701301512081262234UJFBVEZZZZZEJBAvtale">The
 774 case at hand</a> is that the Norwegian National Authority for
 775 Investigation and Prosecution of Economic and Environmental Crime (aka
 776 Økokrim) decided on their own, to seize a DNS domain early last
 777 year, without following
 778 <a href="https://www.norid.no/no/regelverk/navnepolitikk/#link12">the
 779 official policy of the Norwegian DNS authority</a> which require a
 780 court decision.  The web site in question was a site covering Popcorn
 781 Time.  And Popcorn Time is the name of a technology with both legal
 782 and illegal applications.  Popcorn Time is a client combining
 783 searching a Bittorrent directory available on the Internet with
 784 downloading/distribute content via Bittorrent and playing the
 785 downloaded content on screen.  It can be used illegally if it is used
 786 to distribute content against the will of the right holder, but it can
 787 also be used legally to play a lot of content, for example the
 788 millions of movies
 789 <a href="https://archive.org/details/movies">available from the
 790 Internet Archive</a> or the collection
 791 <a href="http://vodo.net/films/">available from Vodo</a>.  We created
 792 <a href="magnet:?xt=urn:btih:86c1802af5a667ca56d3918aecb7d3c0f7173084&dn=PresentasjonFolloTingrett.mov&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fpublic.popcorn-tracker.org%3A6969%2Fannounce">a
 793 video demonstrating legally use of Popcorn Time</a> and played it in
 794 Court.  It can of course be downloaded using Bittorrent.</p>
 795
 796 <p>I did not quite know what to expect from a day in court.  The
 797 government held on to their version of the story and we held on to
 798 ours, and I hope the judge is able to make sense of it all.  We will
 799 know in two weeks time.  Unfortunately I do not have high hopes, as
 800 the Government have the upper hand here with more knowledge about the
 801 case, better training in handling criminal law and in general higher
 802 standing in the courts than fairly unknown DNS registrar and member
 803 associations.  It is expensive to be right also in Norway.  So far the
 804 case have cost more than NOK 70 000,-.  To help fund the case, NUUG
 805 and EFN have asked for donations, and managed to collect around NOK 25
 806 000,- so far.  Given the presentation from the Government, I expect
 807 the government to appeal if the case go our way.  And if the case do
 808 not go our way, I hope we have enough funding to appeal.</p>
 809
 810 <p>From the other side came two people from Økokrim.  On the benches,
 811 appearing to be part of the group from the government were two people
 812 from the Simonsen Vogt Wiik lawyer office, and three others I am not
 813 quite sure who was.  Økokrim had proposed to present two witnesses
 814 from The Motion Picture Association, but this was rejected because
 815 they did not speak Norwegian and it was a bit late to bring in a
 816 translator, but perhaps the two from MPA were present anyway.  All
 817 seven appeared to know each other.  Good to see the case is take
 818 seriously.</p>
 819
 820 <p>If you, like me, believe the courts should be involved before a DNS
 821 domain is hijacked by the government, or you believe the Popcorn Time
 822 technology have a lot of useful and legal applications, I suggest you
 823 too <a href="http://www.nuug.no/dns-beslag-donasjon.shtml">donate to
 824 the NUUG defense fund</a>.  Both Bitcoin and bank transfer are
 825 available. If NUUG get more than we need for the legal action (very
 826 unlikely), the rest will be spend promoting free software, open
 827 standards and unix-like operating systems in Norway, so no matter what
 828 happens the money will be put to good use.</p>
 829
 830 <p>If you want to lean more about the case, I recommend you check out
 831 <a href="https://www.nuug.no/news/tags/dns-domenebeslag/">the blog
 832 posts from NUUG covering the case</a>.  They cover the legal arguments
 833 on both sides.</p>
 834
 835       </div>
 836       <div class="tags">
 837
 838
 839         Tags: <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/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>.
 840
 841
 842       </div>
 843     </div>
 844     <div class="padding"></div>
 845
 846     <div class="entry">
 847       <div class="title">
 848         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Where_did_that_package_go___mdash__geolocated_IP_traceroute.html">Where did that package go? &mdash; geolocated IP traceroute</a>
 849       </div>
 850       <div class="date">
 851          9th January 2017
 852       </div>
 853       <div class="body">
 854         <p>Did you ever wonder where the web trafic really flow to reach the
 855 web servers, and who own the network equipment it is flowing through?
 856 It is possible to get a glimpse of this from using traceroute, but it
 857 is hard to find all the details.  Many years ago, I wrote a system to
 858 map the Norwegian Internet (trying to figure out if our plans for a
 859 network game service would get low enough latency, and who we needed
 860 to talk to about setting up game servers close to the users.  Back
 861 then I used traceroute output from many locations (I asked my friends
 862 to run a script and send me their traceroute output) to create the
 863 graph and the map.  The output from traceroute typically look like
 864 this:
 865
 866 <p><pre>
 867 traceroute to www.stortinget.no (85.88.67.10), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
 868  1  uio-gw10.uio.no (129.240.202.1)  0.447 ms  0.486 ms  0.621 ms
 869  2  uio-gw8.uio.no (129.240.24.229)  0.467 ms  0.578 ms  0.675 ms
 870  3  oslo-gw1.uninett.no (128.39.65.17)  0.385 ms  0.373 ms  0.358 ms
 871  4  te3-1-2.br1.fn3.as2116.net (193.156.90.3)  1.174 ms  1.172 ms  1.153 ms
 872  5  he16-1-1.cr1.san110.as2116.net (195.0.244.234)  2.627 ms he16-1-1.cr2.oslosda310.as2116.net (195.0.244.48)  3.172 ms he16-1-1.cr1.san110.as2116.net (195.0.244.234)  2.857 ms
 873  6  ae1.ar8.oslosda310.as2116.net (195.0.242.39)  0.662 ms  0.637 ms ae0.ar8.oslosda310.as2116.net (195.0.242.23)  0.622 ms
 874  7  89.191.10.146 (89.191.10.146)  0.931 ms  0.917 ms  0.955 ms
 875  8  * * *
 876  9  * * *
 877 [...]
 878 </pre></p>
 879
 880 <p>This show the DNS names and IP addresses of (at least some of the)
 881 network equipment involved in getting the data traffic from me to the
 882 www.stortinget.no server, and how long it took in milliseconds for a
 883 package to reach the equipment and return to me.  Three packages are
 884 sent, and some times the packages do not follow the same path.  This
 885 is shown for hop 5, where three different IP addresses replied to the
 886 traceroute request.</p>
 887
 888 <p>There are many ways to measure trace routes.  Other good traceroute
 889 implementations I use are traceroute (using ICMP packages) mtr (can do
 890 both ICMP, UDP and TCP) and scapy (python library with ICMP, UDP, TCP
 891 traceroute and a lot of other capabilities).  All of them are easily
 892 available in <a href="https://www.debian.org/">Debian</a>.</p>
 893
 894 <p>This time around, I wanted to know the geographic location of
 895 different route points, to visualize how visiting a web page spread
 896 information about the visit to a lot of servers around the globe.  The
 897 background is that a web site today often will ask the browser to get
 898 from many servers the parts (for example HTML, JSON, fonts,
 899 JavaScript, CSS, video) required to display the content.  This will
 900 leak information about the visit to those controlling these servers
 901 and anyone able to peek at the data traffic passing by (like your ISP,
 902 the ISPs backbone provider, FRA, GCHQ, NSA and others).</p>
 903
 904 <p>Lets pick an example, the Norwegian parliament web site
 905 www.stortinget.no.  It is read daily by all members of parliament and
 906 their staff, as well as political journalists, activits and many other
 907 citizens of Norway.  A visit to the www.stortinget.no web site will
 908 ask your browser to contact 8 other servers: ajax.googleapis.com,
 909 insights.hotjar.com, script.hotjar.com, static.hotjar.com,
 910 stats.g.doubleclick.net, www.google-analytics.com,
 911 www.googletagmanager.com and www.netigate.se.  I extracted this by
 912 asking <a href="http://phantomjs.org/">PhantomJS</a> to visit the
 913 Stortinget web page and tell me all the URLs PhantomJS downloaded to
 914 render the page (in HAR format using
 915 <a href="https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/blob/master/examples/netsniff.js">their
 916 netsniff example</a>.  I am very grateful to Gorm for showing me how
 917 to do this).  My goal is to visualize network traces to all IP
 918 addresses behind these DNS names, do show where visitors personal
 919 information is spread when visiting the page.</p>
 920
 921 <p align="center"><a href="www.stortinget.no-geoip.kml"><img
 922 src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-geoip-small.png" alt="map of combined traces for URLs used by www.stortinget.no using GeoIP"/></a></p>
 923
 924 <p>When I had a look around for options, I could not find any good
 925 free software tools to do this, and decided I needed my own traceroute
 926 wrapper outputting KML based on locations looked up using GeoIP.  KML
 927 is easy to work with and easy to generate, and understood by several
 928 of the GIS tools I have available.  I got good help from by NUUG
 929 colleague Anders Einar with this, and the result can be seen in
 930 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/kmltraceroute">my
 931 kmltraceroute git repository</a>.  Unfortunately, the quality of the
 932 free GeoIP databases I could find (and the for-pay databases my
 933 friends had access to) is not up to the task.  The IP addresses of
 934 central Internet infrastructure would typically be placed near the
 935 controlling companies main office, and not where the router is really
 936 located, as you can see from <a href="www.stortinget.no-geoip.kml">the
 937 KML file I created</a> using the GeoLite City dataset from MaxMind.
 938
 939 <p align="center"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-scapy.svg"><img
 940 src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-scapy-small.png" alt="scapy traceroute graph for URLs used by www.stortinget.no"/></a></p>
 941
 942 <p>I also had a look at the visual traceroute graph created by
 943 <a href="http://www.secdev.org/projects/scapy/">the scrapy project</a>,
 944 showing IP network ownership (aka AS owner) for the IP address in
 945 question.
 946 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-scapy.svg">The
 947 graph display a lot of useful information about the traceroute in SVG
 948 format</a>, and give a good indication on who control the network
 949 equipment involved, but it do not include geolocation.  This graph
 950 make it possible to see the information is made available at least for
 951 UNINETT, Catchcom, Stortinget, Nordunet, Google, Amazon, Telia, Level
 952 3 Communications and NetDNA.</p>
 953
 954 <p align="center"><a href="https://geotraceroute.com/index.php?node=4&host=www.stortinget.no"><img
 955 src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-geotraceroute-small.png" alt="example geotraceroute view for www.stortinget.no"/></a></p>
 956
 957 <p>In the process, I came across the
 958 <a href="https://geotraceroute.com/">web service GeoTraceroute</a> by
 959 Salim Gasmi.  Its methology of combining guesses based on DNS names,
 960 various location databases and finally use latecy times to rule out
 961 candidate locations seemed to do a very good job of guessing correct
 962 geolocation.  But it could only do one trace at the time, did not have
 963 a sensor in Norway and did not make the geolocations easily available
 964 for postprocessing.  So I contacted the developer and asked if he
 965 would be willing to share the code (he refused until he had time to
 966 clean it up), but he was interested in providing the geolocations in a
 967 machine readable format, and willing to set up a sensor in Norway.  So
 968 since yesterday, it is possible to run traces from Norway in this
 969 service thanks to a sensor node set up by
 970 <a href="https://www.nuug.no/">the NUUG assosiation</a>, and get the
 971 trace in KML format for further processing.</p>
 972
 973 <p align="center"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-geotraceroute-kml-join.kml"><img
 974 src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-geotraceroute-kml-join.png" alt="map of combined traces for URLs used by www.stortinget.no using geotraceroute"/></a></p>
 975
 976 <p>Here we can see a lot of trafic passes Sweden on its way to
 977 Denmark, Germany, Holland and Ireland.  Plenty of places where the
 978 Snowden confirmations verified the traffic is read by various actors
 979 without your best interest as their top priority.</p>
 980
 981 <p>Combining KML files is trivial using a text editor, so I could loop
 982 over all the hosts behind the urls imported by www.stortinget.no and
 983 ask for the KML file from GeoTraceroute, and create a combined KML
 984 file with all the traces (unfortunately only one of the IP addresses
 985 behind the DNS name is traced this time.  To get them all, one would
 986 have to request traces using IP number instead of DNS names from
 987 GeoTraceroute).  That might be the next step in this project.</p>
 988
 989 <p>Armed with these tools, I find it a lot easier to figure out where
 990 the IP traffic moves and who control the boxes involved in moving it.
 991 And every time the link crosses for example the Swedish border, we can
 992 be sure Swedish Signal Intelligence (FRA) is listening, as GCHQ do in
 993 Britain and NSA in USA and cables around the globe.  (Hm, what should
 994 we tell them? :) Keep that in mind if you ever send anything
 995 unencrypted over the Internet.</p>
 996
 997 <p>PS: KML files are drawn using
 998 <a href="http://ivanrublev.me/kml/">the KML viewer from Ivan
 999 Rublev<a/>, as it was less cluttered than the local Linux application
1000 Marble.  There are heaps of other options too.</p>
1001
1002 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1003 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1004 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1005
1006       </div>
1007       <div class="tags">
1008
1009
1010         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/kart">kart</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stortinget">stortinget</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
1011
1012
1013       </div>
1014     </div>
1015     <div class="padding"></div>
1016
1017     <div class="entry">
1018       <div class="title">
1019         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Introducing_ical_archiver_to_split_out_old_iCalendar_entries.html">Introducing ical-archiver to split out old iCalendar entries</a>
1020       </div>
1021       <div class="date">
1022          4th January 2017
1023       </div>
1024       <div class="body">
1025         <p>Do you have a large <a href="https://icalendar.org/">iCalendar</a>
1026 file with lots of old entries, and would like to archive them to save
1027 space and resources?  At least those of us using KOrganizer know that
1028 turning on and off an event set become slower and slower the more
1029 entries are in the set.  While working on migrating our calendars to a
1030 <a href="http://radicale.org/">Radicale CalDAV server</a> on our
1031 <a href="https://freedomboxfoundation.org/">Freedombox server</a/>, my
1032 loved one wondered if I could find a way to split up the calendar file
1033 she had in KOrganizer, and I set out to write a tool.  I spent a few
1034 days writing and polishing the system, and it is now ready for general
1035 consumption.  The
1036 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/ical-archiver">code for
1037 ical-archiver</a> is publicly available from a git repository on
1038 github.  The system is written in Python and depend on
1039 <a href="http://eventable.github.io/vobject/">the vobject Python
1040 module</a>.</p>
1041
1042 <p>To use it, locate the iCalendar file you want to operate on and
1043 give it as an argument to the ical-archiver script.  This will
1044 generate a set of new files, one file per component type per year for
1045 all components expiring more than two years in the past.  The vevent,
1046 vtodo and vjournal entries are handled by the script.  The remaining
1047 entries are stored in a 'remaining' file.</p>
1048
1049 <p>This is what a test run can look like:
1050
1051 <p><pre>
1052 % ical-archiver t/2004-2016.ics
1053 Found 3612 vevents
1054 Found 6 vtodos
1055 Found 2 vjournals
1056 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2004.ics
1057 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2005.ics
1058 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2006.ics
1059 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2007.ics
1060 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2008.ics
1061 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2009.ics
1062 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2010.ics
1063 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2011.ics
1064 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2012.ics
1065 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2013.ics
1066 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2014.ics
1067 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vjournal-2007.ics
1068 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vjournal-2011.ics
1069 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vtodo-2012.ics
1070 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-remaining.ics
1071 %
1072 </pre></p>
1073
1074 <p>As you can see, the original file is untouched and new files are
1075 written with names derived from the original file.  If you are happy
1076 with their content, the *-remaining.ics file can replace the original
1077 the the others can be archived or imported as historical calendar
1078 collections.</p>
1079
1080 <p>The script should probably be improved a bit.  The error handling
1081 when discovering broken entries is not good, and I am not sure yet if
1082 it make sense to split different entry types into separate files or
1083 not.  The program is thus likely to change.  If you find it
1084 interesting, please get in touch. :)</p>
1085
1086 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1087 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1088 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1089
1090       </div>
1091       <div class="tags">
1092
1093
1094         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
1095
1096
1097       </div>
1098     </div>
1099     <div class="padding"></div>
1100
1101     <div class="entry">
1102       <div class="title">
1103         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Appstream_just_learned_how_to_map_hardware_to_packages_too_.html">Appstream just learned how to map hardware to packages too!</a>
1104       </div>
1105       <div class="date">
1106         23rd December 2016
1107       </div>
1108       <div class="body">
1109         <p>I received a very nice Christmas present today.  As my regular
1110 readers probably know, I have been working on the
1111 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">the Isenkram
1112 system</a> for many years.  The goal of the Isenkram system is to make
1113 it easier for users to figure out what to install to get a given piece
1114 of hardware to work in Debian, and a key part of this system is a way
1115 to map hardware to packages.  Isenkram have its own mapping database,
1116 and also uses data provided by each package using the AppStream
1117 metadata format.  And today,
1118 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/appstream">AppStream</a> in
1119 Debian learned to look up hardware the same way Isenkram is doing it,
1120 ie using fnmatch():</p>
1121
1122 <p><pre>
1123 % appstreamcli what-provides modalias \
1124   usb:v1130p0202d0100dc00dsc00dp00ic03isc00ip00in00
1125 Identifier: pymissile [generic]
1126 Name: pymissile
1127 Summary: Control original Striker USB Missile Launcher
1128 Package: pymissile
1129 % appstreamcli what-provides modalias usb:v0694p0002d0000
1130 Identifier: libnxt [generic]
1131 Name: libnxt
1132 Summary: utility library for talking to the LEGO Mindstorms NXT brick
1133 Package: libnxt
1134 ---
1135 Identifier: t2n [generic]
1136 Name: t2n
1137 Summary: Simple command-line tool for Lego NXT
1138 Package: t2n
1139 ---
1140 Identifier: python-nxt [generic]
1141 Name: python-nxt
1142 Summary: Python driver/interface/wrapper for the Lego Mindstorms NXT robot
1143 Package: python-nxt
1144 ---
1145 Identifier: nbc [generic]
1146 Name: nbc
1147 Summary: C compiler for LEGO Mindstorms NXT bricks
1148 Package: nbc
1149 %
1150 </pre></p>
1151
1152 <p>A similar query can be done using the combined AppStream and
1153 Isenkram databases using the isenkram-lookup tool:</p>
1154
1155 <p><pre>
1156 % isenkram-lookup usb:v1130p0202d0100dc00dsc00dp00ic03isc00ip00in00
1157 pymissile
1158 % isenkram-lookup usb:v0694p0002d0000
1159 libnxt
1160 nbc
1161 python-nxt
1162 t2n
1163 %
1164 </pre></p>
1165
1166 <p>You can find modalias values relevant for your machine using
1167 <tt>cat $(find /sys/devices/ -name modalias)</tt>.
1168
1169 <p>If you want to make this system a success and help Debian users
1170 make the most of the hardware they have, please
1171 help<a href="https://wiki.debian.org/AppStream/Guidelines">add
1172 AppStream metadata for your package following the guidelines</a>
1173 documented in the wiki.  So far only 11 packages provide such
1174 information, among the several hundred hardware specific packages in
1175 Debian. The Isenkram database on the other hand contain 101 packages,
1176 mostly related to USB dongles.  Most of the packages with hardware
1177 mapping in AppStream are LEGO Mindstorms related, because I have, as
1178 part of my involvement in
1179 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">the Debian LEGO
1180 team</a> given priority to making sure LEGO users get proposed the
1181 complete set of packages in Debian for that particular hardware.  The
1182 team also got a nice Christmas present today.  The
1183 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/nxt-firmware">nxt-firmware
1184 package</a> made it into Debian.  With this package in place, it is
1185 now possible to use the LEGO Mindstorms NXT unit with only free
1186 software, as the nxt-firmware package contain the source and firmware
1187 binaries for the NXT brick.</p>
1188
1189 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1190 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1191 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1192
1193       </div>
1194       <div class="tags">
1195
1196
1197         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
1198
1199
1200       </div>
1201     </div>
1202     <div class="padding"></div>
1203
1204     <div class="entry">
1205       <div class="title">
1206         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Isenkram_updated_with_a_lot_more_hardware_package_mappings.html">Isenkram updated with a lot more hardware-package mappings</a>
1207       </div>
1208       <div class="date">
1209         20th December 2016
1210       </div>
1211       <div class="body">
1212         <p><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">The Isenkram
1213 system</a> I wrote two years ago to make it easier in Debian to find
1214 and install packages to get your hardware dongles to work, is still
1215 going strong.  It is a system to look up the hardware present on or
1216 connected to the current system, and map the hardware to Debian
1217 packages.  It can either be done using the tools in isenkram-cli or
1218 using the user space daemon in the isenkram package.  The latter will
1219 notify you, when inserting new hardware, about what packages to
1220 install to get the dongle working.  It will even provide a button to
1221 click on to ask packagekit to install the packages.</p>
1222
1223 <p>Here is an command line example from my Thinkpad laptop:</p>
1224
1225 <p><pre>
1226 % isenkram-lookup
1227 bluez
1228 cheese
1229 ethtool
1230 fprintd
1231 fprintd-demo
1232 gkrellm-thinkbat
1233 hdapsd
1234 libpam-fprintd
1235 pidgin-blinklight
1236 thinkfan
1237 tlp
1238 tp-smapi-dkms
1239 tp-smapi-source
1240 tpb
1241 %
1242 </pre></p>
1243
1244 <p>It can also list the firware package providing firmware requested
1245 by the load kernel modules, which in my case is an empty list because
1246 I have all the firmware my machine need:
1247
1248 <p><pre>
1249 % /usr/sbin/isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
1250 info: did not find any firmware files requested by loaded kernel modules.  exiting
1251 %
1252 </pre></p>
1253
1254 <p>The last few days I had a look at several of the around 250
1255 packages in Debian with udev rules.  These seem like good candidates
1256 to install when a given hardware dongle is inserted, and I found
1257 several that should be proposed by isenkram.  I have not had time to
1258 check all of them, but am happy to report that now there are 97
1259 packages packages mapped to hardware by Isenkram.  11 of these
1260 packages provide hardware mapping using AppStream, while the rest are
1261 listed in the modaliases file provided in isenkram.</p>
1262
1263 <p>These are the packages with hardware mappings at the moment.  The
1264 <strong>marked packages</strong> are also announcing their hardware
1265 support using AppStream, for everyone to use:</p>
1266
1267 <p>air-quality-sensor, alsa-firmware-loaders, argyll,
1268 <strong>array-info</strong>, avarice, avrdude, b43-fwcutter,
1269 bit-babbler, bluez, bluez-firmware, <strong>brltty</strong>,
1270 <strong>broadcom-sta-dkms</strong>, calibre, cgminer, cheese, colord,
1271 <strong>colorhug-client</strong>, dahdi-firmware-nonfree, dahdi-linux,
1272 dfu-util, dolphin-emu, ekeyd, ethtool, firmware-ipw2x00, fprintd,
1273 fprintd-demo, <strong>galileo</strong>, gkrellm-thinkbat, gphoto2,
1274 gpsbabel, gpsbabel-gui, gpsman, gpstrans, gqrx-sdr, gr-fcdproplus,
1275 gr-osmosdr, gtkpod, hackrf, hdapsd, hdmi2usb-udev, hpijs-ppds, hplip,
1276 ipw3945-source, ipw3945d, kde-config-tablet, kinect-audio-setup,
1277 <strong>libnxt</strong>, libpam-fprintd, <strong>lomoco</strong>,
1278 madwimax, minidisc-utils, mkgmap, msi-keyboard, mtkbabel,
1279 <strong>nbc</strong>, <strong>nqc</strong>, nut-hal-drivers, ola,
1280 open-vm-toolbox, open-vm-tools, openambit, pcgminer, pcmciautils,
1281 pcscd, pidgin-blinklight, printer-driver-splix,
1282 <strong>pymissile</strong>, python-nxt, qlandkartegt,
1283 qlandkartegt-garmin, rosegarden, rt2x00-source, sispmctl,
1284 soapysdr-module-hackrf, solaar, squeak-plugins-scratch, sunxi-tools,
1285 <strong>t2n</strong>, thinkfan, thinkfinger-tools, tlp, tp-smapi-dkms,
1286 tp-smapi-source, tpb, tucnak, uhd-host, usbmuxd, viking,
1287 virtualbox-ose-guest-x11, w1retap, xawtv, xserver-xorg-input-vmmouse,
1288 xserver-xorg-input-wacom, xserver-xorg-video-qxl,
1289 xserver-xorg-video-vmware, yubikey-personalization and
1290 zd1211-firmware</p>
1291
1292 <p>If you know of other packages, please let me know with a wishlist
1293 bug report against the isenkram-cli package, and ask the package
1294 maintainer to
1295 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/AppStream/Guidelines">add AppStream
1296 metadata according to the guidelines</a> to provide the information
1297 for everyone.  In time, I hope to get rid of the isenkram specific
1298 hardware mapping and depend exclusively on AppStream.</p>
1299
1300 <p>Note, the AppStream metadata for broadcom-sta-dkms is matching too
1301 much hardware, and suggest that the package with with any ethernet
1302 card.  See <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/838735">bug #838735</a> for
1303 the details.  I hope the maintainer find time to address it soon.  In
1304 the mean time I provide an override in isenkram.</p>
1305
1306       </div>
1307       <div class="tags">
1308
1309
1310         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
1311
1312
1313       </div>
1314     </div>
1315     <div class="padding"></div>
1316
1317     <div class="entry">
1318       <div class="title">
1319         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Oolite__a_life_in_space_as_vagabond_and_mercenary___nice_free_software.html">Oolite, a life in space as vagabond and mercenary - nice free software</a>
1320       </div>
1321       <div class="date">
1322         11th December 2016
1323       </div>
1324       <div class="body">
1325         <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-12-11-nice-oolite.png"/></p>
1326
1327 <p>In my early years, I played
1328 <a href="http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Classic_Elite">the epic game
1329 Elite</a> on my PC.  I spent many months trading and fighting in
1330 space, and reached the 'elite' fighting status before I moved on.  The
1331 original Elite game was available on Commodore 64 and the IBM PC
1332 edition I played had a 64 KB executable.  I am still impressed today
1333 that the authors managed to squeeze both a 3D engine and details about
1334 more than 2000 planet systems across 7 galaxies into a binary so
1335 small.</p>
1336
1337 <p>I have known about <a href="http://www.oolite.org/">the free
1338 software game Oolite inspired by Elite</a> for a while, but did not
1339 really have time to test it properly until a few days ago.  It was
1340 great to discover that my old knowledge about trading routes were
1341 still valid.  But my fighting and flying abilities were gone, so I had
1342 to retrain to be able to dock on a space station.  And I am still not
1343 able to make much resistance when I am attacked by pirates, so I
1344 bougth and mounted the most powerful laser in the rear to be able to
1345 put up at least some resistance while fleeing for my life. :)</p>
1346
1347 <p>When playing Elite in the late eighties, I had to discover
1348 everything on my own, and I had long lists of prices seen on different
1349 planets to be able to decide where to trade what.  This time I had the
1350 advantages of the
1351 <a href="http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Main_Page">Elite wiki</a>,
1352 where information about each planet is easily available with common
1353 price ranges and suggested trading routes.  This improved my ability
1354 to earn money and I have been able to earn enough to buy a lot of
1355 useful equipent in a few days.  I believe I originally played for
1356 months before I could get a docking computer, while now I could get it
1357 after less then a week.</p>
1358
1359 <p>If you like science fiction and dreamed of a life as a vagabond in
1360 space, you should try out Oolite.  It is available for Linux, MacOSX
1361 and Windows, and is included in Debian and derivatives since 2011.</p>
1362
1363 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1364 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1365 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1366
1367       </div>
1368       <div class="tags">
1369
1370
1371         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/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
1372
1373
1374       </div>
1375     </div>
1376     <div class="padding"></div>
1377
1378     <div class="entry">
1379       <div class="title">
1380         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Quicker_Debian_installations_using_eatmydata.html">Quicker Debian installations using eatmydata</a>
1381       </div>
1382       <div class="date">
1383         25th November 2016
1384       </div>
1385       <div class="body">
1386         <p>Two years ago, I did some experiments with eatmydata and the Debian
1387 installation system, observing how using
1388 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Speeding_up_the_Debian_installer_using_eatmydata_and_dpkg_divert.html">eatmydata
1389 could speed up the installation</a> quite a bit.  My testing measured
1390 speedup around 20-40 percent for Debian Edu, where we install around
1391 1000 packages from within the installer.  The eatmydata package
1392 provide a way to disable/delay file system flushing.  This is a bit
1393 risky in the general case, as files that should be stored on disk will
1394 stay only in memory a bit longer than expected, causing problems if a
1395 machine crashes at an inconvenient time.  But for an installation, if
1396 the machine crashes during installation the process is normally
1397 restarted, and avoiding disk operations as much as possible to speed
1398 up the process make perfect sense.
1399
1400 <p>I added code in the Debian Edu specific installation code to enable
1401 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/libeatmydata">eatmydata</a>,
1402 but did not have time to push it any further.  But a few months ago I
1403 picked it up again and worked with the libeatmydata package maintainer
1404 Mattia Rizzolo to make it easier for everyone to get this installation
1405 speedup in Debian.  Thanks to our cooperation There is now an
1406 eatmydata-udeb package in Debian testing and unstable, and simply
1407 enabling/installing it in debian-installer (d-i) is enough to get the
1408 quicker installations.  It can be enabled using preseeding.  The
1409 following untested kernel argument should do the trick:</p>
1410
1411 <blockquote><pre>
1412 preseed/early_command="anna-install eatmydata-udeb"
1413 </pre></blockquote>
1414
1415 <p>This should ask d-i to install the package inside the d-i
1416 environment early in the installation sequence.  Having it installed
1417 in d-i in turn will make sure the relevant scripts are called just
1418 after debootstrap filled /target/ with the freshly installed Debian
1419 system to configure apt to run dpkg with eatmydata.  This is enough to
1420 speed up the installation process.  There is a proposal to
1421 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/841153">extend the idea a bit further
1422 by using /etc/ld.so.preload instead of apt.conf</a>, but I have not
1423 tested its impact.</p>
1424
1425
1426       </div>
1427       <div class="tags">
1428
1429
1430         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>.
1431
1432
1433       </div>
1434     </div>
1435     <div class="padding"></div>
1436
1437     <div class="entry">
1438       <div class="title">
1439         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Coz_profiler_for_multi_threaded_software_is_now_in_Debian.html">Coz profiler for multi-threaded software is now in Debian</a>
1440       </div>
1441       <div class="date">
1442         13th November 2016
1443       </div>
1444       <div class="body">
1445         <p><a href="http://coz-profiler.org/">The Coz profiler</a>, a nice
1446 profiler able to run benchmarking experiments on the instrumented
1447 multi-threaded program, finally
1448 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/coz-profiler">made it into
1449 Debian unstable yesterday</A>.  Lluís Vilanova and I have spent many
1450 months since
1451 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Coz_can_help_you_find_bottlenecks_in_multi_threaded_software___nice_free_software.html">I
1452 blogged about the coz tool</a> in August working with upstream to make
1453 it suitable for Debian.  There are still issues with clang
1454 compatibility, inline assembly only working x86 and minimized
1455 JavaScript libraries.</p>
1456
1457 <p>To test it, install 'coz-profiler' using apt and run it like this:</p>
1458
1459 <p><blockquote>
1460 <tt>coz run --- /path/to/binary-with-debug-info</tt>
1461 </blockquote></p>
1462
1463 <p>This will produce a profile.coz file in the current working
1464 directory with the profiling information.  This is then given to a
1465 JavaScript application provided in the package and available from
1466 <a href="http://plasma-umass.github.io/coz/">a project web page</a>.
1467 To start the local copy, invoke it in a browser like this:</p>
1468
1469 <p><blockquote>
1470 <tt>sensible-browser /usr/share/coz-profiler/viewer/index.htm</tt>
1471 </blockquote></p>
1472
1473 <p>See the project home page and the
1474 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/summer2016/curtsinger">USENIX
1475 ;login: article on Coz</a> for more information on how it is
1476 working.</p>
1477
1478       </div>
1479       <div class="tags">
1480
1481
1482         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>.
1483
1484
1485       </div>
1486     </div>
1487     <div class="padding"></div>
1488
1489     <div class="entry">
1490       <div class="title">
1491         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_talk_with_your_loved_ones_in_private.html">How to talk with your loved ones in private</a>
1492       </div>
1493       <div class="date">
1494          7th November 2016
1495       </div>
1496       <div class="body">
1497         <p>A few days ago I ran a very biased and informal survey to get an
1498 idea about what options are being used to communicate with end to end
1499 encryption with friends and family.  I explicitly asked people not to
1500 list options only used in a work setting.  The background is the
1501 uneasy feeling I get when using Signal, a feeling shared by others as
1502 a blog post from Sander Venima about
1503 <a href="https://sandervenema.ch/2016/11/why-i-wont-recommend-signal-anymore/">why
1504 he do not recommend Signal anymore</a> (with
1505 <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12883410">feedback from
1506 the Signal author available from ycombinator</a>).  I wanted an
1507 overview of the options being used, and hope to include those options
1508 in a less biased survey later on.  So far I have not taken the time to
1509 look into the individual proposed systems.  They range from text
1510 sharing web pages, via file sharing and email to instant messaging,
1511 VOIP and video conferencing.  For those considering which system to
1512 use, it is also useful to have a look at
1513 <a href="https://www.eff.org/secure-messaging-scorecard">the EFF Secure
1514 messaging scorecard</a> which is slightly out of date but still
1515 provide valuable information.</p>
1516
1517 <p>So, on to the list.  There were some used by many, some used by a
1518 few, some rarely used ones and a few mentioned but without anyone
1519 claiming to use them.  Notice the grouping is in reality quite random
1520 given the biased self selected set of participants.  First the ones
1521 used by many:</p>
1522
1523 <ul>
1524
1525 <li><a href="https://whispersystems.org/">Signal</a></li>
1526 <li>Email w/<a href="http://openpgp.org/">OpenPGP</a> (Enigmail, GPGSuite,etc)</li>
1527 <li><a href="https://www.whatsapp.com/">Whatsapp</a></li>
1528 <li>IRC w/<a href="https://otr.cypherpunks.ca/">OTR</a></li>
1529 <li>XMPP w/<a href="https://otr.cypherpunks.ca/">OTR</a></li>
1530
1531 </ul>
1532
1533 <p>Then the ones used by a few.</p>
1534
1535 <ul>
1536
1537 <li><a href="https://wiki.mumble.info/wiki/Main_Page">Mumble</a></li>
1538 <li>iMessage (included in iOS from Apple)</li>
1539 <li><a href="https://telegram.org/">Telegram</a></li>
1540 <li><a href="https://jitsi.org/">Jitsi</a></li>
1541 <li><a href="https://keybase.io/download">Keybase file</a></li>
1542
1543 </ul>
1544
1545 <p>Then the ones used by even fewer people</p>
1546
1547 <ul>
1548
1549 <li><a href="https://ring.cx/">Ring</a></li>
1550 <li><a href="https://bitmessage.org/">Bitmessage</a></li>
1551 <li><a href="https://wire.com/">Wire</a></li>
1552 <li>VoIP w/<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZRTP">ZRTP</a> or controlled <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Real-time_Transport_Protocol">SRTP</a> (e.g using <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSipSimple">CSipSimple</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linphone">Linphone</a>)</li>
1553 <li><a href="https://matrix.org/">Matrix</a></li>
1554 <li><a href="https://kontalk.org/">Kontalk</a></li>
1555 <li><a href="https://0bin.net/">0bin</a> (encrypted pastebin)</li>
1556 <li><a href="https://appear.in">Appear.in</a></li>
1557 <li><a href="https://riot.im/">riot</a></li>
1558 <li><a href="https://www.wickr.com/">Wickr Me</a></li>
1559
1560 </ul>
1561
1562 <p>And finally the ones mentioned by not marked as used by
1563 anyone. This might be a mistake, perhaps the person adding the entry
1564 forgot to flag it as used?</p>
1565
1566 <ul>
1567
1568 <li>Email w/Certificates <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S/MIME">S/MIME</a></li>
1569 <li><a href="https://www.crypho.com/">Crypho</a></li>
1570 <li><a href="https://cryptpad.fr/">CryptPad</a></li>
1571 <li><a href="https://github.com/ricochet-im/ricochet">ricochet</a></li>
1572
1573 </ul>
1574
1575 <p>Given the network effect it seem obvious to me that we as a society
1576 have been divided and conquered by those interested in keeping
1577 encrypted and secure communication away from the masses.  The
1578 finishing remarks <a href="https://vimeo.com/97505679">from Aral Balkan
1579 in his talk "Free is a lie"</a> about the usability of free software
1580 really come into effect when you want to communicate in private with
1581 your friends and family.  We can not expect them to allow the
1582 usability of communication tool to block their ability to talk to
1583 their loved ones.</p>
1584
1585 <p>Note for example the option IRC w/OTR.  Most IRC clients do not
1586 have OTR support, so in most cases OTR would not be an option, even if
1587 you wanted to.  In my personal experience, about 1 in 20 I talk to
1588 have a IRC client with OTR.  For private communication to really be
1589 available, most people to talk to must have the option in their
1590 currently used client.  I can not simply ask my family to install an
1591 IRC client.  I need to guide them through a technical multi-step
1592 process of adding extensions to the client to get them going.  This is
1593 a non-starter for most.</p>
1594
1595 <p>I would like to be able to do video phone calls, audio phone calls,
1596 exchange instant messages and share files with my loved ones, without
1597 being forced to share with people I do not know.  I do not want to
1598 share the content of the conversations, and I do not want to share who
1599 I communicate with or the fact that I communicate with someone.
1600 Without all these factors in place, my private life is being more or
1601 less invaded.</p>
1602
1603       </div>
1604       <div class="tags">
1605
1606
1607         Tags: <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>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
1608
1609
1610       </div>
1611     </div>
1612     <div class="padding"></div>
1613
1614     <div class="entry">
1615       <div class="title">
1616         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/My_own_self_balancing_Lego_Segway.html">My own self balancing Lego Segway</a>
1617       </div>
1618       <div class="date">
1619          4th November 2016
1620       </div>
1621       <div class="body">
1622         <p>A while back I received a Gyro sensor for the NXT
1623 <a href="mindstorms.lego.com">Mindstorms</a> controller as a birthday
1624 present.  It had been on my wishlist for a while, because I wanted to
1625 build a Segway like balancing lego robot.  I had already built
1626 <a href="http://www.nxtprograms.com/NXT2/segway/">a simple balancing
1627 robot</a> with the kids, using the light/color sensor included in the
1628 NXT kit as the balance sensor, but it was not working very well.  It
1629 could balance for a while, but was very sensitive to the light
1630 condition in the room and the reflective properties of the surface and
1631 would fall over after a short while.  I wanted something more robust,
1632 and had
1633 <a href="https://www.hitechnic.com/cgi-bin/commerce.cgi?preadd=action&key=NGY1044">the
1634 gyro sensor from HiTechnic</a> I believed would solve it on my
1635 wishlist for some years before it suddenly showed up as a gift from my
1636 loved ones. :)</p>
1637
1638 <p>Unfortunately I have not had time to sit down and play with it
1639 since then.  But that changed some days ago, when I was searching for
1640 lego segway information and came across a recipe from HiTechnic for
1641 building
1642 <a href="http://www.hitechnic.com/blog/gyro-sensor/htway/">the
1643 HTWay</a>, a segway like balancing robot.  Build instructions and
1644 <a href="https://www.hitechnic.com/upload/786-HTWayC.nxc">source
1645 code</a> was included, so it was just a question of putting it all
1646 together.  And thanks to the great work of many Debian developers, the
1647 compiler needed to build the source for the NXT is already included in
1648 Debian, so I was read to go in less than an hour.  The resulting robot
1649 do not look very impressive in its simplicity:</p>
1650
1651 <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-11-04-lego-htway-robot.jpeg"></p>
1652
1653 <p>Because I lack the infrared sensor used to control the robot in the
1654 design from HiTechnic, I had to comment out the last task
1655 (taskControl).  I simply placed /* and */ around it get the program
1656 working without that sensor present.  Now it balances just fine until
1657 the battery status run low:</p>
1658
1659 <p align="center"><video width="70%" controls="true">
1660    <source src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-11-04-lego-htway-balancing.ogv" type="video/ogg">
1661 </video></p>
1662
1663 <p>Now we would like to teach it how to follow a line and take remote
1664 control instructions using the included Bluetooth receiver in the NXT.</p>
1665
1666 <p>If you, like me, love LEGO and want to make sure we find the tools
1667 they need to work with LEGO in Debian and all our derivative
1668 distributions like Ubuntu, check out
1669 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">the LEGO designers
1670 project page</a> and join the Debian LEGO team.  Personally I own a
1671 RCX and NXT controller (no EV3), and would like to make sure the
1672 Debian tools needed to program the systems I own work as they
1673 should.</p>
1674
1675       </div>
1676       <div class="tags">
1677
1678
1679         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>.
1680
1681
1682       </div>
1683     </div>
1684     <div class="padding"></div>
1685
1686     <div class="entry">
1687       <div class="title">
1688         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Experience_and_updated_recipe_for_using_the_Signal_app_without_a_mobile_phone.html">Experience and updated recipe for using the Signal app without a mobile phone</a>
1689       </div>
1690       <div class="date">
1691         10th October 2016
1692       </div>
1693       <div class="body">
1694         <p>In July
1695 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_use_the_Signal_app_if_you_only_have_a_land_line__ie_no_mobile_phone_.html">I
1696 wrote how to get the Signal Chrome/Chromium app working</a> without
1697 the ability to receive SMS messages (aka without a cell phone).  It is
1698 time to share some experiences and provide an updated setup.</p>
1699
1700 <p>The Signal app have worked fine for several months now, and I use
1701 it regularly to chat with my loved ones.  I had a major snag at the
1702 end of my summer vacation, when the the app completely forgot my
1703 setup, identity and keys.  The reason behind this major mess was
1704 running out of disk space.  To avoid that ever happening again I have
1705 started storing everything in <tt>userdata/</tt> in git, to be able to
1706 roll back to an earlier version if the files are wiped by mistake.  I
1707 had to use it once after introducing the git backup.  When rolling
1708 back to an earlier version, one need to use the 'reset session' option
1709 in Signal to get going, and notify the people you talk with about the
1710 problem.  I assume there is some sequence number tracking in the
1711 protocol to detect rollback attacks.  The git repository is rather big
1712 (674 MiB so far), but I have not tried to figure out if some of the
1713 content can be added to a .gitignore file due to lack of spare
1714 time.</p>
1715
1716 <p>I've also hit the 90 days timeout blocking, and noticed that this
1717 make it impossible to send messages using Signal.  I could still
1718 receive them, but had to patch the code with a new timestamp to send.
1719 I believe the timeout is added by the developers to force people to
1720 upgrade to the latest version of the app, even when there is no
1721 protocol changes, to reduce the version skew among the user base and
1722 thus try to keep the number of support requests down.</p>
1723
1724 <p>Since my original recipe, the Signal source code changed slightly,
1725 making the old patch fail to apply cleanly.  Below is an updated
1726 patch, including the shell wrapper I use to start Signal.  The
1727 original version required a new user to locate the JavaScript console
1728 and call a function from there.  I got help from a friend with more
1729 JavaScript knowledge than me to modify the code to provide a GUI
1730 button instead.  This mean that to get started you just need to run
1731 the wrapper and click the 'Register without mobile phone' to get going
1732 now.  I've also modified the timeout code to always set it to 90 days
1733 in the future, to avoid having to patch the code regularly.</p>
1734
1735 <p>So, the updated recipe for Debian Jessie:</p>
1736
1737 <ol>
1738
1739 <li>First, install required packages to get the source code and the
1740 browser you need.  Signal only work with Chrome/Chromium, as far as I
1741 know, so you need to install it.
1742
1743 <pre>
1744 apt install git tor chromium
1745 git clone https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Desktop.git
1746 </pre></li>
1747
1748 <li>Modify the source code using command listed in the the patch
1749 block below.</li>
1750
1751 <li>Start Signal using the run-signal-app wrapper (for example using
1752 <tt>`pwd`/run-signal-app</tt>).
1753
1754 <li>Click on the 'Register without mobile phone', will in a phone
1755 number you can receive calls to the next minute, receive the
1756 verification code and enter it into the form field and press
1757 'Register'.  Note, the phone number you use will be user Signal
1758 username, ie the way others can find you on Signal.</li>
1759
1760 <li>You can now use Signal to contact others.  Note, new contacts do
1761 not show up in the contact list until you restart Signal, and there is
1762 no way to assign names to Contacts.  There is also no way to create or
1763 update chat groups.  I suspect this is because the web app do not have
1764 a associated contact database.</li>
1765
1766 </ol>
1767
1768 <p>I am still a bit uneasy about using Signal, because of the way its
1769 main author moxie0 reject federation and accept dependencies to major
1770 corporations like Google (part of the code is fetched from Google) and
1771 Amazon (the central coordination point is owned by Amazon).  See for
1772 example
1773 <a href="https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37">the
1774 LibreSignal issue tracker</a> for a thread documenting the authors
1775 view on these issues.  But the network effect is strong in this case,
1776 and several of the people I want to communicate with already use
1777 Signal.  Perhaps we can all move to <a href="https://ring.cx/">Ring</a>
1778 once it <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/830265">work on my
1779 laptop</a>?  It already work on Windows and Android, and is included
1780 in <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/ring">Debian</a> and
1781 <a href="https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ring">Ubuntu</a>, but not
1782 working on Debian Stable.</p>
1783
1784 <p>Anyway, this is the patch I apply to the Signal code to get it
1785 working.  It switch to the production servers, disable to timeout,
1786 make registration easier and add the shell wrapper:</p>
1787
1788 <pre>
1789 cd Signal-Desktop; cat &lt;&lt;EOF | patch -p1
1790 diff --git a/js/background.js b/js/background.js
1791 index 24b4c1d..579345f 100644
1792 --- a/js/background.js
1793 +++ b/js/background.js
1794 @@ -33,9 +33,9 @@
1795          });
1796      });
1797
1798 -    var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-staging.whispersystems.org';
1799 +    var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-ca.whispersystems.org';
1800      var SERVER_PORTS = [80, 4433, 8443];
1801 -    var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments-staging.s3.amazonaws.com';
1802 +    var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments.s3.amazonaws.com';
1803      var messageReceiver;
1804      window.getSocketStatus = function() {
1805          if (messageReceiver) {
1806 diff --git a/js/expire.js b/js/expire.js
1807 index 639aeae..beb91c3 100644
1808 --- a/js/expire.js
1809 +++ b/js/expire.js
1810 @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
1811  ;(function() {
1812      'use strict';
1813 -    var BUILD_EXPIRATION = 0;
1814 +    var BUILD_EXPIRATION = Date.now() + (90 * 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000);
1815
1816      window.extension = window.extension || {};
1817
1818 diff --git a/js/views/install_view.js b/js/views/install_view.js
1819 index 7816f4f..1d6233b 100644
1820 --- a/js/views/install_view.js
1821 +++ b/js/views/install_view.js
1822 @@ -38,7 +38,8 @@
1823              return {
1824                  'click .step1': this.selectStep.bind(this, 1),
1825                  'click .step2': this.selectStep.bind(this, 2),
1826 -                'click .step3': this.selectStep.bind(this, 3)
1827 +                'click .step3': this.selectStep.bind(this, 3),
1828 +                'click .callreg': function() { extension.install('standalone') },
1829              };
1830          },
1831          clearQR: function() {
1832 diff --git a/options.html b/options.html
1833 index dc0f28e..8d709f6 100644
1834 --- a/options.html
1835 +++ b/options.html
1836 @@ -14,7 +14,10 @@
1837          &lt;div class='nav'>
1838            &lt;h1>{{ installWelcome }}&lt;/h1>
1839            &lt;p>{{ installTagline }}&lt;/p>
1840 -          &lt;div> &lt;a class='button step2'>{{ installGetStartedButton }}&lt;/a> &lt;/div>
1841 +          &lt;div> &lt;a class='button step2'>{{ installGetStartedButton }}&lt;/a>
1842 +           &lt;br> &lt;a class="button callreg">Register without mobile phone&lt;/a>
1843 +
1844 +         &lt;/div>
1845            &lt;span class='dot step1 selected'>&lt;/span>
1846            &lt;span class='dot step2'>&lt;/span>
1847            &lt;span class='dot step3'>&lt;/span>
1848 --- /dev/null   2016-10-07 09:55:13.730181472 +0200
1849 +++ b/run-signal-app   2016-10-10 08:54:09.434172391 +0200
1850 @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@
1851 +#!/bin/sh
1852 +set -e
1853 +cd $(dirname $0)
1854 +mkdir -p userdata
1855 +userdata="`pwd`/userdata"
1856 +if [ -d "$userdata" ] && [ ! -d "$userdata/.git" ] ; then
1857 +    (cd $userdata && git init)
1858 +fi
1859 +(cd $userdata && git add . && git commit -m "Current status." || true)
1860 +exec chromium \
1861 +  --proxy-server="socks://localhost:9050" \
1862 +  --user-data-dir=$userdata --load-and-launch-app=`pwd`
1863 EOF
1864 chmod a+rx run-signal-app
1865 </pre>
1866
1867 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1868 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1869 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1870
1871       </div>
1872       <div class="tags">
1873
1874
1875         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>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
1876
1877
1878       </div>
1879     </div>
1880     <div class="padding"></div>
1881
1882     <div class="entry">
1883       <div class="title">
1884         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Isenkram__Appstream_and_udev_make_life_as_a_LEGO_builder_easier.html">Isenkram, Appstream and udev make life as a LEGO builder easier</a>
1885       </div>
1886       <div class="date">
1887          7th October 2016
1888       </div>
1889       <div class="body">
1890         <p><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">The Isenkram
1891 system</a> provide a practical and easy way to figure out which
1892 packages support the hardware in a given machine.  The command line
1893 tool <tt>isenkram-lookup</tt> and the tasksel options provide a
1894 convenient way to list and install packages relevant for the current
1895 hardware during system installation, both user space packages and
1896 firmware packages. The GUI background daemon on the other hand provide
1897 a pop-up proposing to install packages when a new dongle is inserted
1898 while using the computer.  For example, if you plug in a smart card
1899 reader, the system will ask if you want to install <tt>pcscd</tt> if
1900 that package isn't already installed, and if you plug in a USB video
1901 camera the system will ask if you want to install <tt>cheese</tt> if
1902 cheese is currently missing.  This already work just fine.</p>
1903
1904 <p>But Isenkram depend on a database mapping from hardware IDs to
1905 package names.  When I started no such database existed in Debian, so
1906 I made my own data set and included it with the isenkram package and
1907 made isenkram fetch the latest version of this database from git using
1908 http.  This way the isenkram users would get updated package proposals
1909 as soon as I learned more about hardware related packages.</p>
1910
1911 <p>The hardware is identified using modalias strings.  The modalias
1912 design is from the Linux kernel where most hardware descriptors are
1913 made available as a strings that can be matched using filename style
1914 globbing.  It handle USB, PCI, DMI and a lot of other hardware related
1915 identifiers.</p>
1916
1917 <p>The downside to the Isenkram specific database is that there is no
1918 information about relevant distribution / Debian version, making
1919 isenkram propose obsolete packages too.  But along came AppStream, a
1920 cross distribution mechanism to store and collect metadata about
1921 software packages.  When I heard about the proposal, I contacted the
1922 people involved and suggested to add a hardware matching rule using
1923 modalias strings in the specification, to be able to use AppStream for
1924 mapping hardware to packages.  This idea was accepted and AppStream is
1925 now a great way for a package to announce the hardware it support in a
1926 distribution neutral way.  I wrote
1927 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_appstream_with_isenkram_to_install_hardware_related_packages_in_Debian.html">a
1928 recipe on how to add such meta-information</a> in a blog post last
1929 December.  If you have a hardware related package in Debian, please
1930 announce the relevant hardware IDs using AppStream.</p>
1931
1932 <p>In Debian, almost all packages that can talk to a LEGO Mindestorms
1933 RCX or NXT unit, announce this support using AppStream.  The effect is
1934 that when you insert such LEGO robot controller into your Debian
1935 machine, Isenkram will propose to install the packages needed to get
1936 it working.  The intention is that this should allow the local user to
1937 start programming his robot controller right away without having to
1938 guess what packages to use or which permissions to fix.</p>
1939
1940 <p>But when I sat down with my son the other day to program our NXT
1941 unit using his Debian Stretch computer, I discovered something
1942 annoying.  The local console user (ie my son) did not get access to
1943 the USB device for programming the unit.  This used to work, but no
1944 longer in Jessie and Stretch.  After some investigation and asking
1945 around on #debian-devel, I discovered that this was because udev had
1946 changed the mechanism used to grant access to local devices.  The
1947 ConsoleKit mechanism from <tt>/lib/udev/rules.d/70-udev-acl.rules</tt>
1948 no longer applied, because LDAP users no longer was added to the
1949 plugdev group during login.  Michael Biebl told me that this method
1950 was obsolete and the new method used ACLs instead.  This was good
1951 news, as the plugdev mechanism is a mess when using a remote user
1952 directory like LDAP.  Using ACLs would make sure a user lost device
1953 access when she logged out, even if the user left behind a background
1954 process which would retain the plugdev membership with the ConsoleKit
1955 setup.  Armed with this knowledge I moved on to fix the access problem
1956 for the LEGO Mindstorms related packages.</p>
1957
1958 <p>The new system uses a udev tag, 'uaccess'.  It can either be
1959 applied directly for a device, or is applied in
1960 /lib/udev/rules.d/70-uaccess.rules for classes of devices.  As the
1961 LEGO Mindstorms udev rules did not have a class, I decided to add the
1962 tag directly in the udev rules files included in the packages.  Here
1963 is one example.  For the nqc C compiler for the RCX, the
1964 <tt>/lib/udev/rules.d/60-nqc.rules</tt> file now look like this:
1965
1966 <p><pre>
1967 SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ACTION=="add", ATTR{idVendor}=="0694", ATTR{idProduct}=="0001", \
1968     SYMLINK+="rcx-%k", TAG+="uaccess"
1969 </pre></p>
1970
1971 <p>The key part is the 'TAG+="uaccess"' at the end.  I suspect all
1972 packages using plugdev in their /lib/udev/rules.d/ files should be
1973 changed to use this tag (either directly or indirectly via
1974 <tt>70-uaccess.rules</tt>).  Perhaps a lintian check should be created
1975 to detect this?</p>
1976
1977 <p>I've been unable to find good documentation on the uaccess feature.
1978 It is unclear to me if the uaccess tag is an internal implementation
1979 detail like the udev-acl tag used by
1980 <tt>/lib/udev/rules.d/70-udev-acl.rules</tt>.  If it is, I guess the
1981 indirect method is the preferred way.  Michael
1982 <a href="https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/4288">asked for more
1983 documentation from the systemd project</a> and I hope it will make
1984 this clearer.  For now I use the generic classes when they exist and
1985 is already handled by <tt>70-uaccess.rules</tt>, and add the tag
1986 directly if no such class exist.</p>
1987
1988 <p>To learn more about the isenkram system, please check out
1989 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">my
1990 blog posts tagged isenkram</a>.</p>
1991
1992 <p>To help out making life for LEGO constructors in Debian easier,
1993 please join us on our IRC channel
1994 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">#debian-lego</a> and join
1995 the <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/debian-lego/">Debian
1996 LEGO team</a> in the Alioth project we created yesterday.  A mailing
1997 list is not yet created, but we are working on it. :)</p>
1998
1999 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2000 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2001 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2002
2003       </div>
2004       <div class="tags">
2005
2006
2007         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
2008
2009
2010       </div>
2011     </div>
2012     <div class="padding"></div>
2013
2014     <div class="entry">
2015       <div class="title">
2016         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_draft_Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_The_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook_now_public.html">First draft Norwegian Bokmål edition of The Debian Administrator's Handbook now public</a>
2017       </div>
2018       <div class="date">
2019         30th August 2016
2020       </div>
2021       <div class="body">
2022         <p>In April we
2023 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_a_Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_The_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook.html">started
2024 to work</a> on a Norwegian Bokmål edition of the "open access" book on
2025 how to set up and administrate a Debian system.  Today I am happy to
2026 report that the first draft is now publicly available.  You can find
2027 it on <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/get/">get the Debian
2028 Administrator's Handbook page</a> (under Other languages).  The first
2029 eight chapters have a first draft translation, and we are working on
2030 proofreading the content.  If you want to help out, please start
2031 contributing using
2032 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-handbook/">the
2033 hosted weblate project page</a>, and get in touch using
2034 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/debian-handbook-translators">the
2035 translators mailing list</a>.  Please also check out
2036 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/contribute/">the instructions for
2037 contributors</a>.  A good way to contribute is to proofread the text
2038 and update weblate if you find errors.</p>
2039
2040 <p>Our goal is still to make the Norwegian book available on paper as well as
2041 electronic form.</p>
2042
2043       </div>
2044       <div class="tags">
2045
2046
2047         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2048
2049
2050       </div>
2051     </div>
2052     <div class="padding"></div>
2053
2054     <div class="entry">
2055       <div class="title">
2056         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Coz_can_help_you_find_bottlenecks_in_multi_threaded_software___nice_free_software.html">Coz can help you find bottlenecks in multi-threaded software - nice free software</a>
2057       </div>
2058       <div class="date">
2059         11th August 2016
2060       </div>
2061       <div class="body">
2062         <p>This summer, I read a great article
2063 "<a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/summer2016/curtsinger">coz:
2064 This Is the Profiler You're Looking For</a>" in USENIX ;login: about
2065 how to profile multi-threaded programs.  It presented a system for
2066 profiling software by running experiences in the running program,
2067 testing how run time performance is affected by "speeding up" parts of
2068 the code to various degrees compared to a normal run.  It does this by
2069 slowing down parallel threads while the "faster up" code is running
2070 and measure how this affect processing time.  The processing time is
2071 measured using probes inserted into the code, either using progress
2072 counters (COZ_PROGRESS) or as latency meters (COZ_BEGIN/COZ_END).  It
2073 can also measure unmodified code by measuring complete the program
2074 runtime and running the program several times instead.</p>
2075
2076 <p>The project and presentation was so inspiring that I would like to
2077 get the system into Debian.  I
2078 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=830708">created
2079 a WNPP request for it</a> and contacted upstream to try to make the
2080 system ready for Debian by sending patches.  The build process need to
2081 be changed a bit to avoid running 'git clone' to get dependencies, and
2082 to include the JavaScript web page used to visualize the collected
2083 profiling information included in the source package.
2084 But I expect that should work out fairly soon.</p>
2085
2086 <p>The way the system work is fairly simple.  To run an coz experiment
2087 on a binary with debug symbols available, start the program like this:
2088
2089 <p><blockquote><pre>
2090 coz run --- program-to-run
2091 </pre></blockquote></p>
2092
2093 <p>This will create a text file profile.coz with the instrumentation
2094 information.  To show what part of the code affect the performance
2095 most, use a web browser and either point it to
2096 <a href="http://plasma-umass.github.io/coz/">http://plasma-umass.github.io/coz/</a>
2097 or use the copy from git (in the gh-pages branch).  Check out this web
2098 site to have a look at several example profiling runs and get an idea what the end result from the profile runs look like.  To make the
2099 profiling more useful you include &lt;coz.h&gt; and insert the
2100 COZ_PROGRESS or COZ_BEGIN and COZ_END at appropriate places in the
2101 code, rebuild and run the profiler.  This allow coz to do more
2102 targeted experiments.</p>
2103
2104 <p>A video published by ACM
2105 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jE0V-p1odPg">presenting the
2106 Coz profiler</a> is available from Youtube.  There is also a paper
2107 from the 25th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles available
2108 titled
2109 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc16/technical-sessions/presentation/curtsinger">Coz:
2110 finding code that counts with causal profiling</a>.</p>
2111
2112 <p><a href="https://github.com/plasma-umass/coz">The source code</a>
2113 for Coz is available from github.  It will only build with clang
2114 because it uses a
2115 <a href="https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=55606">C++
2116 feature missing in GCC</a>, but I've submitted
2117 <a href="https://github.com/plasma-umass/coz/pull/67">a patch to solve
2118 it</a> and hope it will be included in the upstream source soon.</p>
2119
2120 <p>Please get in touch if you, like me, would like to see this piece
2121 of software in Debian.  I would very much like some help with the
2122 packaging effort, as I lack the in depth knowledge on how to package
2123 C++ libraries.</p>
2124
2125       </div>
2126       <div class="tags">
2127
2128
2129         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/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
2130
2131
2132       </div>
2133     </div>
2134     <div class="padding"></div>
2135
2136     <div class="entry">
2137       <div class="title">
2138         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sales_number_for_the_Free_Culture_translation__first_half_of_2016.html">Sales number for the Free Culture translation, first half of 2016</a>
2139       </div>
2140       <div class="date">
2141          5th August 2016
2142       </div>
2143       <div class="body">
2144         <p>As my regular readers probably remember, the last year I published
2145 a French and Norwegian translation of the classic
2146 <a href="http://www.free-culture.cc/">Free Culture book</a> by the
2147 founder of the Creative Commons movement, Lawrence Lessig.  A bit less
2148 known is the fact that due to the way I created the translations,
2149 using docbook and po4a, I also recreated the English original.  And
2150 because I already had created a new the PDF edition, I published it
2151 too.  The revenue from the books are sent to the Creative Commons
2152 Corporation.  In other words, I do not earn any money from this
2153 project, I just earn the warm fuzzy feeling that the text is available
2154 for a wider audience and more people can learn why the Creative
2155 Commons is needed.</p>
2156
2157 <p>Today, just for fun, I had a look at the sales number over at
2158 Lulu.com, which take care of payment, printing and shipping.  Much to
2159 my surprise, the English edition is selling better than both the
2160 French and Norwegian edition, despite the fact that it has been
2161 available in English since it was first published.  In total, 24 paper
2162 books was sold for USD $19.99 between 2016-01-01 and 2016-07-31:</p>
2163
2164 <table border="0">
2165 <tr><th>Title / language</th><th>Quantity</th></tr>
2166 <tr><td><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/culture-libre/paperback/product-22645082.html">Culture Libre / French</a></td><td align="right">3</td></tr>
2167 <tr><td><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/fri-kultur/paperback/product-22441576.html">Fri kultur / Norwegian</a></td><td align="right">7</td></tr>
2168 <tr><td><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22440520.html">Free Culture / English</a></td><td align="right">14</td></tr>
2169 </table>
2170
2171 <p>The books are available both from Lulu.com and from large book
2172 stores like Amazon and Barnes&Noble.  Most revenue, around $10 per
2173 book, is sent to the Creative Commons project when the book is sold
2174 directly by Lulu.com.  The other channels give less revenue.  The
2175 summary from Lulu tell me 10 books was sold via the Amazon channel, 10
2176 via Ingram (what is this?) and 4 directly by Lulu.  And Lulu.com tells
2177 me that the revenue sent so far this year is USD $101.42.  No idea
2178 what kind of sales numbers to expect, so I do not know if that is a
2179 good amount of sales for a 10 year old book or not.  But it make me
2180 happy that the buyers find the book, and I hope they enjoy reading it
2181 as much as I did.</p>
2182
2183 <p>The ebook edition is available for free from
2184 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">Github</a>.</p>
2185
2186 <p>If you would like to translate and publish the book in your native
2187 language, I would be happy to help make it happen.  Please get in
2188 touch.</p>
2189
2190       </div>
2191       <div class="tags">
2192
2193
2194         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>.
2195
2196
2197       </div>
2198     </div>
2199     <div class="padding"></div>
2200
2201     <div class="entry">
2202       <div class="title">
2203         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Techno_TV_broadcasting_live_across_Norway_and_the_Internet___debconf16___nuug__on__frikanalen.html">Techno TV broadcasting live across Norway and the Internet (#debconf16, #nuug) on @frikanalen</a>
2204       </div>
2205       <div class="date">
2206          1st August 2016
2207       </div>
2208       <div class="body">
2209         <p>Did you know there is a TV channel broadcasting talks from DebConf
2210 16 across an entire country?  Or that there is a TV channel
2211 broadcasting talks by or about
2212 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/625529/">Linus Torvalds</a>,
2213 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/625599/">Tor</a>,
2214 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/624019/">OpenID</A>,
2215 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/625624/">Common Lisp</a>,
2216 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/625446/">Civic Tech</a>,
2217 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/625090/">EFF founder John Barlow</a>,
2218 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/625432/">how to make 3D
2219 printer electronics</a> and many more fascinating topics?  It works
2220 using only free software (all of it
2221 <a href="http://github.com/Frikanalen">available from Github</a>), and
2222 is administrated using a web browser and a web API.</p>
2223
2224 <p>The TV channel is the Norwegian open channel
2225 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a>, and I am involved
2226 via <a href="https://www.nuug.no/">the NUUG member association</a> in
2227 running and developing the software for the channel.  The channel is
2228 organised as a member organisation where its members can upload and
2229 broadcast what they want (think of it as Youtube for national
2230 broadcasting television).  Individuals can broadcast too.  The time
2231 slots are handled on a first come, first serve basis.  Because the
2232 channel have almost no viewers and very few active members, we can
2233 experiment with TV technology without too much flack when we make
2234 mistakes.  And thanks to the few active members, most of the slots on
2235 the schedule are free.  I see this as an opportunity to spread
2236 knowledge about technology and free software, and have a script I run
2237 regularly to fill up all the open slots the next few days with
2238 technology related video.  The end result is a channel I like to
2239 describe as Techno TV - filled with interesting talks and
2240 presentations.</p>
2241
2242 <p>It is available on channel 50 on the Norwegian national digital TV
2243 network (RiksTV).  It is also available as a multicast stream on
2244 Uninett.  And finally, it is available as
2245 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/">a WebM unicast stream</a> from
2246 Frikanalen and NUUG.  Check it out. :)</p>
2247
2248       </div>
2249       <div class="tags">
2250
2251
2252         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
2253
2254
2255       </div>
2256     </div>
2257     <div class="padding"></div>
2258
2259     <div class="entry">
2260       <div class="title">
2261         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Unlocking_HTC_Desire_HD_on_Linux_using_unruu_and_fastboot.html">Unlocking HTC Desire HD on Linux using unruu and fastboot</a>
2262       </div>
2263       <div class="date">
2264          7th July 2016
2265       </div>
2266       <div class="body">
2267         <p>Yesterday, I tried to unlock a HTC Desire HD phone, and it proved
2268 to be a slight challenge.  Here is the recipe if I ever need to do it
2269 again.  It all started by me wanting to try the recipe to set up
2270 <a href="https://blog.torproject.org/blog/mission-impossible-hardening-android-security-and-privacy">an
2271 hardened Android installation</a> from the Tor project blog on a
2272 device I had access to.  It is a old mobile phone with a broken
2273 microphone The initial idea had been to just
2274 <a href="http://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w/Install_CM_for_ace">install
2275 CyanogenMod on it</a>, but did not quite find time to start on it
2276 until a few days ago.</p>
2277
2278 <p>The unlock process is supposed to be simple: (1) Boot into the boot
2279 loader (press volume down and power at the same time), (2) select
2280 'fastboot' before (3) connecting the device via USB to a Linux
2281 machine, (4) request the device identifier token by running 'fastboot
2282 oem get_identifier_token', (5) request the device unlocking key using
2283 the <a href="http://www.htcdev.com/bootloader/">HTC developer web
2284 site</a> and unlock the phone using the key file emailed to you.</p>
2285
2286 <p>Unfortunately, this only work fi you have hboot version 2.00.0029
2287 or newer, and the device I was working on had 2.00.0027.  This
2288 apparently can be easily fixed by downloading a Windows program and
2289 running it on your Windows machine, if you accept the terms Microsoft
2290 require you to accept to use Windows - which I do not.  So I had to
2291 come up with a different approach.  I got a lot of help from AndyCap
2292 on #nuug, and would not have been able to get this working without
2293 him.</p>
2294
2295 <p>First I needed to extract the hboot firmware from
2296 <a href="http://www.htcdev.com/ruu/PD9810000_Ace_Sense30_S_hboot_2.00.0029.exe">the
2297 windows binary for HTC Desire HD</a> downloaded as 'the RUU' from HTC.
2298 For this there is is <a href="https://github.com/kmdm/unruu/">a github
2299 project named unruu</a> using libunshield.  The unshield tool did not
2300 recognise the file format, but unruu worked and extracted rom.zip,
2301 containing the new hboot firmware and a text file describing which
2302 devices it would work for.</p>
2303
2304 <p>Next, I needed to get the new firmware into the device.  For this I
2305 followed some instructions
2306 <a href="http://www.htc1guru.com/2013/09/new-ruu-zips-posted/">available
2307 from HTC1Guru.com</a>, and ran these commands as root on a Linux
2308 machine with Debian testing:</p>
2309
2310 <p><pre>
2311 adb reboot-bootloader
2312 fastboot oem rebootRUU
2313 fastboot flash zip rom.zip
2314 fastboot flash zip rom.zip
2315 fastboot reboot
2316 </pre></p>
2317
2318 <p>The flash command apparently need to be done twice to take effect,
2319 as the first is just preparations and the second one do the flashing.
2320 The adb command is just to get to the boot loader menu, so turning the
2321 device on while holding volume down and the power button should work
2322 too.</p>
2323
2324 <p>With the new hboot version in place I could start following the
2325 instructions on the HTC developer web site.  I got the device token
2326 like this:</p>
2327
2328 <p><pre>
2329 fastboot oem get_identifier_token 2>&1 | sed 's/(bootloader) //'
2330 </pre>
2331
2332 <p>And once I got the unlock code via email, I could use it like
2333 this:</p>
2334
2335 <p><pre>
2336 fastboot flash unlocktoken Unlock_code.bin
2337 </pre></p>
2338
2339 <p>And with that final step in place, the phone was unlocked and I
2340 could start stuffing the software of my own choosing into the device.
2341 So far I only inserted a replacement recovery image to wipe the phone
2342 before I start.  We will see what happen next.  Perhaps I should
2343 install <a href="https://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> on it. :)</p>
2344
2345       </div>
2346       <div class="tags">
2347
2348
2349         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/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
2350
2351
2352       </div>
2353     </div>
2354     <div class="padding"></div>
2355
2356     <div class="entry">
2357       <div class="title">
2358         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_use_the_Signal_app_if_you_only_have_a_land_line__ie_no_mobile_phone_.html">How to use the Signal app if you only have a land line (ie no mobile phone)</a>
2359       </div>
2360       <div class="date">
2361          3rd July 2016
2362       </div>
2363       <div class="body">
2364         <p>For a while now, I have wanted to test
2365 <a href="https://whispersystems.org/">the Signal app</a>, as it is
2366 said to provide end to end encrypted communication and several of my
2367 friends and family are already using it.  As I by choice do not own a
2368 mobile phone, this proved to be harder than expected.  And I wanted to
2369 have the source of the client and know that it was the code used on my
2370 machine.  But yesterday I managed to get it working.  I used the
2371 Github source, compared it to the source in
2372 <a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/signal-private-messenger/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk?hl=en-US">the
2373 Signal Chrome app</a> available from the Chrome web store, applied
2374 patches to use the production Signal servers, started the app and
2375 asked for the hidden "register without a smart phone" form.  Here is
2376 the recipe how I did it.</p>
2377
2378 <p>First, I fetched the Signal desktop source from Github, using
2379
2380 <pre>
2381 git clone https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Desktop.git
2382 </pre>
2383
2384 <p>Next, I patched the source to use the production servers, to be
2385 able to talk to other Signal users:</p>
2386
2387 <pre>
2388 cat &lt;&lt;EOF | patch -p0
2389 diff -ur ./js/background.js userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/background.js
2390 --- ./js/background.js  2016-06-29 13:43:15.630344628 +0200
2391 +++ userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/background.js    2016-06-29 14:06:29.530300934 +0200
2392 @@ -47,8 +47,8 @@
2393          });
2394      });
2395
2396 -    var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-staging.whispersystems.org';
2397 -    var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments-staging.s3.amazonaws.com';
2398 +    var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-ca.whispersystems.org:4433';
2399 +    var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments.s3.amazonaws.com';
2400      var messageReceiver;
2401      window.getSocketStatus = function() {
2402          if (messageReceiver) {
2403 diff -ur ./js/expire.js userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/expire.js
2404 --- ./js/expire.js      2016-06-29 13:43:15.630344628 +0200
2405 +++ userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/expire.js2016-06-29 14:06:29.530300934 +0200
2406 @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
2407  ;(function() {
2408      'use strict';
2409 -    var BUILD_EXPIRATION = 0;
2410 +    var BUILD_EXPIRATION = 1474492690000;
2411
2412      window.extension = window.extension || {};
2413
2414 EOF
2415 </pre>
2416
2417 <p>The first part is changing the servers, and the second is updating
2418 an expiration timestamp.  This timestamp need to be updated regularly.
2419 It is set 90 days in the future by the build process (Gruntfile.js).
2420 The value is seconds since 1970 times 1000, as far as I can tell.</p>
2421
2422 <p>Based on a tip and good help from the #nuug IRC channel, I wrote a
2423 script to launch Signal in Chromium.</p>
2424
2425 <pre>
2426 #!/bin/sh
2427 cd $(dirname $0)
2428 mkdir -p userdata
2429 exec chromium \
2430   --proxy-server="socks://localhost:9050" \
2431   --user-data-dir=`pwd`/userdata --load-and-launch-app=`pwd`
2432 </pre>
2433
2434 <p> The script start the app and configure Chromium to use the Tor
2435 SOCKS5 proxy to make sure those controlling the Signal servers (today
2436 Amazon and Whisper Systems) as well as those listening on the lines
2437 will have a harder time location my laptop based on the Signal
2438 connections if they use source IP address.</p>
2439
2440 <p>When the script starts, one need to follow the instructions under
2441 "Standalone Registration" in the CONTRIBUTING.md file in the git
2442 repository.  I right clicked on the Signal window to get up the
2443 Chromium debugging tool, visited the 'Console' tab and wrote
2444 'extension.install("standalone")' on the console prompt to get the
2445 registration form.  Then I entered by land line phone number and
2446 pressed 'Call'.  5 seconds later the phone rang and a robot voice
2447 repeated the verification code three times.  After entering the number
2448 into the verification code field in the form, I could start using
2449 Signal from my laptop.
2450
2451 <p>As far as I can tell, The Signal app will leak who is talking to
2452 whom and thus who know who to those controlling the central server,
2453 but such leakage is hard to avoid with a centrally controlled server
2454 setup.  It is something to keep in mind when using Signal - the
2455 content of your chats are harder to intercept, but the meta data
2456 exposing your contact network is available to people you do not know.
2457 So better than many options, but not great.  And sadly the usage is
2458 connected to my land line, thus allowing those controlling the server
2459 to associate it to my home and person.  I would prefer it if only
2460 those I knew could tell who I was on Signal.  There are options
2461 avoiding such information leakage, but most of my friends are not
2462 using them, so I am stuck with Signal for now.</p>
2463
2464 <p><strong>Update 2017-01-10</strong>: There is an updated blog post
2465 on this topic in
2466 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Experience_and_updated_recipe_for_using_the_Signal_app_without_a_mobile_phone.html">Experience
2467 and updated recipe for using the Signal app without a mobile
2468 phone</a>.</p>
2469
2470       </div>
2471       <div class="tags">
2472
2473
2474         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>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
2475
2476
2477       </div>
2478     </div>
2479     <div class="padding"></div>
2480
2481     <div class="entry">
2482       <div class="title">
2483         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_new__best__multimedia_player_in_Debian_.html">The new "best" multimedia player in Debian?</a>
2484       </div>
2485       <div class="date">
2486          6th June 2016
2487       </div>
2488       <div class="body">
2489         <p>When I set out a few weeks ago to figure out
2490 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_best_multimedia_player_in_Debian_.html">which
2491 multimedia player in Debian claimed to support most file formats /
2492 MIME types</a>, I was a bit surprised how varied the sets of MIME types
2493 the various players claimed support for.  The range was from 55 to 130
2494 MIME types.  I suspect most media formats are supported by all
2495 players, but this is not really reflected in the MimeTypes values in
2496 their desktop files.  There are probably also some bogus MIME types
2497 listed, but it is hard to identify which one this is.</p>
2498
2499 <p>Anyway, in the mean time I got in touch with upstream for some of
2500 the players suggesting to add more MIME types to their desktop files,
2501 and decided to spend some time myself improving the situation for my
2502 favorite media player VLC.  The fixes for VLC entered Debian unstable
2503 yesterday. The complete list of MIME types can be seen on the
2504 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMultimedia/PlayerSupport">Multimedia
2505 player MIME type support status</a> Debian wiki page.</p>
2506
2507 <p>The new "best" multimedia player in Debian?  It is VLC, followed by
2508 totem, parole, kplayer, gnome-mpv, mpv, smplayer, mplayer-gui and
2509 kmplayer.  I am sure some of the other players desktop files support
2510 several of the formats currently listed as working only with vlc,
2511 toten and parole.</p>
2512
2513 <p>A sad observation is that only 14 MIME types are listed as
2514 supported by all the tested multimedia players in Debian in their
2515 desktop files: audio/mpeg, audio/vnd.rn-realaudio, audio/x-mpegurl,
2516 audio/x-ms-wma, audio/x-scpls, audio/x-wav, video/mp4, video/mpeg,
2517 video/quicktime, video/vnd.rn-realvideo, video/x-matroska,
2518 video/x-ms-asf, video/x-ms-wmv and video/x-msvideo.  Personally I find
2519 it sad that video/ogg and video/webm is not supported by all the media
2520 players in Debian.  As far as I can tell, all of them can handle both
2521 formats.</p>
2522
2523       </div>
2524       <div class="tags">
2525
2526
2527         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>.
2528
2529
2530       </div>
2531     </div>
2532     <div class="padding"></div>
2533
2534     <div class="entry">
2535       <div class="title">
2536         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_program_should_be_able_to_open_its_own_files_on_Linux.html">A program should be able to open its own files on Linux</a>
2537       </div>
2538       <div class="date">
2539          5th June 2016
2540       </div>
2541       <div class="body">
2542         <p>Many years ago, when koffice was fresh and with few users, I
2543 decided to test its presentation tool when making the slides for a
2544 talk I was giving for NUUG on Japhar, a free Java virtual machine.  I
2545 wrote the first draft of the slides, saved the result and went to bed
2546 the day before I would give the talk.  The next day I took a plane to
2547 the location where the meeting should take place, and on the plane I
2548 started up koffice again to polish the talk a bit, only to discover
2549 that kpresenter refused to load its own data file.  I cursed a bit and
2550 started making the slides again from memory, to have something to
2551 present when I arrived.  I tested that the saved files could be
2552 loaded, and the day seemed to be rescued.  I continued to polish the
2553 slides until I suddenly discovered that the saved file could no longer
2554 be loaded into kpresenter.  In the end I had to rewrite the slides
2555 three times, condensing the content until the talk became shorter and
2556 shorter.  After the talk I was able to pinpoint the problem &ndash;
2557 kpresenter wrote inline images in a way itself could not understand.
2558 Eventually that bug was fixed and kpresenter ended up being a great
2559 program to make slides.  The point I'm trying to make is that we
2560 expect a program to be able to load its own data files, and it is
2561 embarrassing to its developers if it can't.</p>
2562
2563 <p>Did you ever experience a program failing to load its own data
2564 files from the desktop file browser?  It is not a uncommon problem.  A
2565 while back I discovered that the screencast recorder
2566 gtk-recordmydesktop would save an Ogg Theora video file the KDE file
2567 browser would refuse to open.  No video player claimed to understand
2568 such file.  I tracked down the cause being <tt>file --mime-type</tt>
2569 returning the application/ogg MIME type, which no video player I had
2570 installed listed as a MIME type they would understand.  I asked for
2571 <a href="http://bugs.gw.com/view.php?id=382">file to change its
2572 behavour</a> and use the MIME type video/ogg instead.  I also asked
2573 several video players to add video/ogg to their desktop files, to give
2574 the file browser an idea what to do about Ogg Theora files.  After a
2575 while, the desktop file browsers in Debian started to handle the
2576 output from gtk-recordmydesktop properly.</p>
2577
2578 <p>But history repeats itself.  A few days ago I tested the music
2579 system Rosegarden again, and I discovered that the KDE and xfce file
2580 browsers did not know what to do with the Rosegarden project files
2581 (*.rg).  I've reported <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/825993">the
2582 rosegarden problem to BTS</a> and a fix is commited to git and will be
2583 included in the next upload.  To increase the chance of me remembering
2584 how to fix the problem next time some program fail to load its files
2585 from the file browser, here are some notes on how to fix it.</p>
2586
2587 <p>The file browsers in Debian in general operates on MIME types.
2588 There are two sources for the MIME type of a given file.  The output from
2589 <tt>file --mime-type</tt> mentioned above, and the content of the
2590 shared MIME type registry (under /usr/share/mime/).  The file MIME
2591 type is mapped to programs supporting the MIME type, and this
2592 information is collected from
2593 <a href="https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/desktop-entry-spec/">the
2594 desktop files</a> available in /usr/share/applications/.  If there is
2595 one desktop file claiming support for the MIME type of the file, it is
2596 activated when asking to open a given file.  If there are more, one
2597 can normally select which one to use by right-clicking on the file and
2598 selecting the wanted one using 'Open with' or similar.  In general
2599 this work well.  But it depend on each program picking a good MIME
2600 type (preferably
2601 <a href="http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/media-types.xhtml">a
2602 MIME type registered with IANA</a>), file and/or the shared MIME
2603 registry recognizing the file and the desktop file to list the MIME
2604 type in its list of supported MIME types.</p>
2605
2606 <p>The <tt>/usr/share/mime/packages/rosegarden.xml</tt> entry for
2607 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/shared-mime-info-spec">the
2608 Shared MIME database</a> look like this:</p>
2609
2610 <p><blockquote><pre>
2611 &lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?&gt;
2612 &lt;mime-info xmlns="http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/shared-mime-info"&gt;
2613   &lt;mime-type type="audio/x-rosegarden"&gt;
2614     &lt;sub-class-of type="application/x-gzip"/&gt;
2615     &lt;comment&gt;Rosegarden project file&lt;/comment&gt;
2616     &lt;glob pattern="*.rg"/&gt;
2617   &lt;/mime-type&gt;
2618 &lt;/mime-info&gt;
2619 </pre></blockquote></p>
2620
2621 <p>This states that audio/x-rosegarden is a kind of application/x-gzip
2622 (it is a gzipped XML file).  Note, it is much better to use an
2623 official MIME type registered with IANA than it is to make up ones own
2624 unofficial ones like the x-rosegarden type used by rosegarden.</p>
2625
2626 <p>The desktop file of the rosegarden program failed to list
2627 audio/x-rosegarden in its list of supported MIME types, causing the
2628 file browsers to have no idea what to do with *.rg files:</p>
2629
2630 <p><blockquote><pre>
2631 % grep Mime /usr/share/applications/rosegarden.desktop
2632 MimeType=audio/x-rosegarden-composition;audio/x-rosegarden-device;audio/x-rosegarden-project;audio/x-rosegarden-template;audio/midi;
2633 X-KDE-NativeMimeType=audio/x-rosegarden-composition
2634 %
2635 </pre></blockquote></p>
2636
2637 <p>The fix was to add "audio/x-rosegarden;" at the end of the
2638 MimeType= line.</p>
2639
2640 <p>If you run into a file which fail to open the correct program when
2641 selected from the file browser, please check out the output from
2642 <tt>file --mime-type</tt> for the file, ensure the file ending and
2643 MIME type is registered somewhere under /usr/share/mime/ and check
2644 that some desktop file under /usr/share/applications/ is claiming
2645 support for this MIME type.  If not, please report a bug to have it
2646 fixed. :)</p>
2647
2648       </div>
2649       <div class="tags">
2650
2651
2652         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>.
2653
2654
2655       </div>
2656     </div>
2657     <div class="padding"></div>
2658
2659     <div class="entry">
2660       <div class="title">
2661         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Tor___from_its_creators_mouth_11_years_ago.html">Tor - from its creators mouth 11 years ago</a>
2662       </div>
2663       <div class="date">
2664         28th May 2016
2665       </div>
2666       <div class="body">
2667         <p>A little more than 11 years ago, one of the creators of Tor, and
2668 the current President of <a href="https://www.torproject.org/">the Tor
2669 project</a>, Roger Dingledine, gave a talk for the members of the
2670 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User group</a> (NUUG).  A
2671 video of the talk was recorded, and today, thanks to the great help
2672 from David Noble, I finally was able to publish the video of the talk
2673 on Frikanalen, the Norwegian open channel TV station where NUUG
2674 currently publishes its talks.  You can
2675 <a href="http://frikanalen.no/se">watch the live stream using a web
2676 browser</a> with WebM support, or check out the recording on the video
2677 on demand page for the talk
2678 "<a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/625599">Tor: Anonymous
2679 communication for the US Department of Defence...and you.</a>".</p>
2680
2681 <p>Here is the video included for those of you using browsers with
2682 HTML video and Ogg Theora support:</p>
2683
2684 <p><video width="70%" poster="http://simula.gunkies.org/media/625599/large_thumb/20050421-tor-frikanalen.jpg" controls>
2685   <source src="http://simula.gunkies.org/media/625599/theora/20050421-tor-frikanalen.ogv" type="video/ogg"/>
2686 </video></p>
2687
2688 <p>I guess the gist of the talk can be summarised quite simply: If you
2689 want to help the military in USA (and everyone else), use Tor. :)</p>
2690
2691       </div>
2692       <div class="tags">
2693
2694
2695         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
2696
2697
2698       </div>
2699     </div>
2700     <div class="padding"></div>
2701
2702     <div class="entry">
2703       <div class="title">
2704         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Isenkram_with_PackageKit_support___new_version_0_23_available_in_Debian_unstable.html">Isenkram with PackageKit support - new version 0.23 available in Debian unstable</a>
2705       </div>
2706       <div class="date">
2707         25th May 2016
2708       </div>
2709       <div class="body">
2710         <p><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/isenkram">The isenkram
2711 system</a> is a user-focused solution in Debian for handling hardware
2712 related packages.  The idea is to have a database of mappings between
2713 hardware and packages, and pop up a dialog suggesting for the user to
2714 install the packages to use a given hardware dongle.  Some use cases
2715 are when you insert a Yubikey, it proposes to install the software
2716 needed to control it; when you insert a braille reader list it
2717 proposes to install the packages needed to send text to the reader;
2718 and when you insert a ColorHug screen calibrator it suggests to
2719 install the driver for it.  The system work well, and even have a few
2720 command line tools to install firmware packages and packages for the
2721 hardware already in the machine (as opposed to hotpluggable hardware).</p>
2722
2723 <p>The system was initially written using aptdaemon, because I found
2724 good documentation and example code on how to use it.  But aptdaemon
2725 is going away and is generally being replaced by
2726 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/software/PackageKit/">PackageKit</a>,
2727 so Isenkram needed a rewrite.  And today, thanks to the great patch
2728 from my college Sunil Mohan Adapa in the FreedomBox project, the
2729 rewrite finally took place.  I've just uploaded a new version of
2730 Isenkram into Debian Unstable with the patch included, and the default
2731 for the background daemon is now to use PackageKit.  To check it out,
2732 install the <tt>isenkram</tt> package and insert some hardware dongle
2733 and see if it is recognised.</p>
2734
2735 <p>If you want to know what kind of packages isenkram would propose for
2736 the machine it is running on, you can check out the isenkram-lookup
2737 program.  This is what it look like on a Thinkpad X230:</p>
2738
2739 <p><blockquote><pre>
2740 % isenkram-lookup
2741 bluez
2742 cheese
2743 fprintd
2744 fprintd-demo
2745 gkrellm-thinkbat
2746 hdapsd
2747 libpam-fprintd
2748 pidgin-blinklight
2749 thinkfan
2750 tleds
2751 tp-smapi-dkms
2752 tp-smapi-source
2753 tpb
2754 %p
2755 </pre></blockquote></p>
2756
2757 <p>The hardware mappings come from several places.  The preferred way
2758 is for packages to announce their hardware support using
2759 <a href="https://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/">the
2760 cross distribution appstream system</a>.
2761 See
2762 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">previous
2763 blog posts about isenkram</a> to learn how to do that.</p>
2764
2765       </div>
2766       <div class="tags">
2767
2768
2769         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
2770
2771
2772       </div>
2773     </div>
2774     <div class="padding"></div>
2775
2776     <div class="entry">
2777       <div class="title">
2778         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Discharge_rate_estimate_in_new_battery_statistics_collector_for_Debian.html">Discharge rate estimate in new battery statistics collector for Debian</a>
2779       </div>
2780       <div class="date">
2781         23rd May 2016
2782       </div>
2783       <div class="body">
2784         <p>Yesterday I updated the
2785 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats
2786 package in Debian</a> with a few patches sent to me by skilled and
2787 enterprising users.  There were some nice user and visible changes.
2788 First of all, both desktop menu entries now work.  A design flaw in
2789 one of the script made the history graph fail to show up (its PNG was
2790 dumped in ~/.xsession-errors) if no controlling TTY was available.
2791 The script worked when called from the command line, but not when
2792 called from the desktop menu.  I changed this to look for a DISPLAY
2793 variable or a TTY before deciding where to draw the graph, and now the
2794 graph window pop up as expected.</p>
2795
2796 <p>The next new feature is a discharge rate estimator in one of the
2797 graphs (the one showing the last few hours).  New is also the user of
2798 colours showing charging in blue and discharge in red.  The percentages
2799 of this graph is relative to last full charge, not battery design
2800 capacity.</p>
2801
2802 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-05-23-battery-stats-rate.png"/></p>
2803
2804 <p>The other graph show the entire history of the collected battery
2805 statistics, comparing it to the design capacity of the battery to
2806 visualise how the battery life time get shorter over time.  The red
2807 line in this graph is what the previous graph considers 100 percent:
2808
2809 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-05-23-battery-stats-history.png"/></p>
2810
2811 <p>In this graph you can see that I only charge the battery to 80
2812 percent of last full capacity, and how the capacity of the battery is
2813 shrinking. :(</p>
2814
2815 <p>The last new feature is in the collector, which now will handle
2816 more hardware models.  On some hardware, Linux power supply
2817 information is stored in /sys/class/power_supply/ACAD/, while the
2818 collector previously only looked in /sys/class/power_supply/AC/.  Now
2819 both are checked to figure if there is power connected to the
2820 machine.</p>
2821
2822 <p>If you are interested in how your laptop battery is doing, please
2823 check out the
2824 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats</a>
2825 in Debian unstable, or rebuild it on Jessie to get it working on
2826 Debian stable. :) The upstream source is available from <a
2827 href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">github</a>.
2828 Patches are very welcome.</p>
2829
2830 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2831 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2832 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2833
2834       </div>
2835       <div class="tags">
2836
2837
2838         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>.
2839
2840
2841       </div>
2842     </div>
2843     <div class="padding"></div>
2844
2845     <div class="entry">
2846       <div class="title">
2847         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/French_edition_of_Lawrence_Lessigs_book_Cultura_Libre_on_Amazon_and_Barnes___Noble.html">French edition of Lawrence Lessigs book Cultura Libre on Amazon and Barnes & Noble</a>
2848       </div>
2849       <div class="date">
2850         21st May 2016
2851       </div>
2852       <div class="body">
2853         <p>A few weeks ago the French paperback edition of Lawrence Lessigs
2854 2004 book Cultura Libre was published.  Today I noticed that the book
2855 is now available from book stores.  You can now buy it from
2856 <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Culture-Libre-French-Lawrence-Lessig/dp/8269018260">Amazon</a>
2857 ($19.99),
2858 <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/culture-libre-lawrence-lessig/1123776705">Barnes
2859 & Noble</a> ($?) and as always from
2860 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/culture-libre/paperback/product-22645082.html">Lulu.com</a>
2861 ($19.99).  The revenue is donated to the Creative Commons project.  If
2862 you buy from Lulu.com, they currently get $10.59, while if you buy
2863 from one of the book stores most of the revenue go to the book store
2864 and the Creative Commons project get much (not sure how much
2865 less).</p>
2866
2867 <p>I was a bit surprised to discover that there is a kindle edition
2868 sold by Amazon Digital Services LLC on Amazon.  Not quite sure how
2869 that edition was created, but if you want to download a electronic
2870 edition (PDF, EPUB, Mobi) generated from the same files used to create
2871 the paperback edition, they are
2872 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">available
2873 from github</a>.</p>
2874
2875       </div>
2876       <div class="tags">
2877
2878
2879         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>.
2880
2881
2882       </div>
2883     </div>
2884     <div class="padding"></div>
2885
2886     <div class="entry">
2887       <div class="title">
2888         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/I_want_the_courts_to_be_involved_before_the_police_can_hijack_a_news_site_DNS_domain___domstolkontroll_.html">I want the courts to be involved before the police can hijack a news site DNS domain (#domstolkontroll)</a>
2889       </div>
2890       <div class="date">
2891         19th May 2016
2892       </div>
2893       <div class="body">
2894         <p>I just donated to the
2895 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/dns-beslag-donasjon.shtml">NUUG defence
2896 "fond"</a> to fund the effort in Norway to get the seizure of the news
2897 site popcorn-time.no tested in court.  I hope everyone that agree with
2898 me will do the same.</p>
2899
2900 <p>Would you be worried if you knew the police in your country could
2901 hijack DNS domains of news sites covering free software system without
2902 talking to a judge first?  I am.  What if the free software system
2903 combined search engine lookups, bittorrent downloads and video playout
2904 and was called Popcorn Time?  Would that affect your view?  It still
2905 make me worried.</p>
2906
2907 <p>In March 2016, the Norwegian police seized (as in forced NORID to
2908 change the IP address pointed to by it to one controlled by the
2909 police) the DNS domain popcorn-time.no, without any supervision from
2910 the courts.  I did not know about the web site back then, and assumed
2911 the courts had been involved, and was very surprised when I discovered
2912 that the police had hijacked the DNS domain without asking a judge for
2913 permission first.  I was even more surprised when I had a look at
2914 <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://popcorn-time.no">the web
2915 site content on the Internet Archive</A>, and only found news coverage
2916 about Popcorn Time, not any material published without the right
2917 holders permissions.</p>
2918
2919 <p>The seizure was widely covered in the Norwegian press (see for
2920 example <a href="http://www.hegnar.no/Nyheter/Naeringsliv/2016/03/Popcorn-time.no-beslaglagt-av-OEkokrim">Hegnar Online</a> and
2921 <a href="http://itavisen.no/2016/03/08/okokrim-har-beslaglagt-popcorn-time-no/">ITavisen<a/>
2922 and
2923 <a href="http://www.nrk.no/kultur/okokrim-gar-til-aksjon-mot-popcorn-time-1.12842452">NRK</a>),
2924 at first due to the press release sent out by Økokrim, but then based
2925 on
2926 <a href="http://blogg.torvund.net/2016/03/09/okokrims-beslag-i-domenet-popcorn-time-no/">protests
2927 from the law professor Olav Torvund</a> and
2928 <a href="http://www.klassekampen.no/article/20160311/ARTICLE/160319995">lawyer
2929 Jon Wessel-Aas</a>.  It even got some
2930 <a href="https://torrentfreak.com/norwegian-authorities-sued-over-popcorn-time-domain-seizure-160418/">coverage
2931 on TorrentFreak</a>.</p>
2932
2933 <p>I
2934 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/NUUG_contests_Norwegian_police_DNS_seizure_of_popcorn_time_no.html">
2935 wrote about the case a month ago</a>, when the
2936 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a> (NUUG),
2937 where I am an active member, decided to ask the courts to test this seizure.
2938 The request was denied, but NUUG and its co-requestor EFN have not
2939 given up, and now they are rallying for support to get the seizure
2940 legally challenged.  They accept both bank and Bitcoin transfer for
2941 those that want to support the request.</p>
2942
2943 <p>If you as me believe news sites about free software should not be
2944 censored, even if the free software have both legal and illegal
2945 applications, and that DNS hijacking should be tested by the courts, I
2946 suggest you <a href="http://www.nuug.no/dns-beslag-donasjon.shtml">show
2947 your support by donating to NUUG</a>.</a>
2948
2949       </div>
2950       <div class="tags">
2951
2952
2953         Tags: <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/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>.
2954
2955
2956       </div>
2957     </div>
2958     <div class="padding"></div>
2959
2960     <div class="entry">
2961       <div class="title">
2962         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_now_with_ZFS_on_Linux_included.html">Debian now with ZFS on Linux included</a>
2963       </div>
2964       <div class="date">
2965         12th May 2016
2966       </div>
2967       <div class="body">
2968         <p>Today, after many years of hard work from many people,
2969 <a href="http://zfsonlinux.org/">ZFS for Linux</a> finally entered
2970 Debian.  The package status can be seen on
2971 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/zfs-linux">the package tracker
2972 for zfs-linux</a>.  and
2973 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=pkg-zfsonlinux-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
2974 team status page</a>. If you want to help out, please join us.
2975 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-zfsonlinux/zfs.git">The
2976 source code</a> is available via git on Alioth.  It would also be
2977 great if you could help out with
2978 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/dkms">the dkms package</a>, as
2979 it is an important piece of the puzzle to get ZFS working.</p>
2980
2981       </div>
2982       <div class="tags">
2983
2984
2985         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>.
2986
2987
2988       </div>
2989     </div>
2990     <div class="padding"></div>
2991
2992     <div class="entry">
2993       <div class="title">
2994         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_best_multimedia_player_in_Debian_.html">What is the best multimedia player in Debian?</a>
2995       </div>
2996       <div class="date">
2997          8th May 2016
2998       </div>
2999       <div class="body">
3000         <p><strong>Where I set out to figure out which multimedia player in
3001 Debian claim support for most file formats.</strong></p>
3002
3003 <p>A few years ago, I had a look at the media support for Browser
3004 plugins in Debian, to get an idea which plugins to include in Debian
3005 Edu.  I created a script to extract the set of supported MIME types
3006 for each plugin, and used this to find out which multimedia browser
3007 plugin supported most file formats / media types.
3008 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">The
3009 result</a> can still be seen on the Debian wiki, even though it have
3010 not been updated for a while.  But browser plugins are less relevant
3011 these days, so I thought it was time to look at standalone
3012 players.</p>
3013
3014 <p>A few days ago I was tired of VLC not being listed as a viable
3015 player when I wanted to play videos from the Norwegian National
3016 Broadcasting Company, and decided to investigate why.  The cause is a
3017 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/822245">missing MIME type in the VLC
3018 desktop file</a>.  In the process I wrote a script to compare the set
3019 of MIME types announced in the desktop file and the browser plugin,
3020 only to discover that there is quite a large difference between the
3021 two for VLC.  This discovery made me dig up the script I used to
3022 compare browser plugins, and adjust it to compare desktop files
3023 instead, to try to figure out which multimedia player in Debian
3024 support most file formats.</p>
3025
3026 <p>The result can be seen on the Debian Wiki, as
3027 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMultimedia/PlayerSupport">a
3028 table listing all MIME types supported by one of the packages included
3029 in the table</a>, with the package supporting most MIME types being
3030 listed first in the table.</p>
3031
3032 </p>The best multimedia player in Debian?  It is totem, followed by
3033 parole, kplayer, mpv, vlc, smplayer mplayer-gui gnome-mpv and
3034 kmplayer.  Time for the other players to update their announced MIME
3035 support?</p>
3036
3037       </div>
3038       <div class="tags">
3039
3040
3041         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>.
3042
3043
3044       </div>
3045     </div>
3046     <div class="padding"></div>
3047
3048     <div class="entry">
3049       <div class="title">
3050         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Pyra___handheld_computer_with_Debian_preinstalled.html">The Pyra - handheld computer with Debian preinstalled</a>
3051       </div>
3052       <div class="date">
3053          4th May 2016
3054       </div>
3055       <div class="body">
3056         A friend of mine made me aware of
3057 <a href="https://pyra-handheld.com/boards/pages/pyra/">The Pyra</a>, a
3058 handheld computer which will be delivered with Debian preinstalled.  I
3059 would love to get one of those for my birthday. :)</p>
3060
3061 <p>The machine is a complete ARM-based PC with micro HDMI, SATA, USB
3062 plugs and many others connectors, and include a full keyboard and a 5"
3063 LCD touch screen.  The 6000mAh battery is claimed to provide a whole
3064 day of battery life time, but I have not seen any independent tests
3065 confirming this.  The vendor is still collecting preorders, and the
3066 last I heard last night was that 22 more orders were needed before
3067 production started.</p>
3068
3069 <p>As far as I know, this is the first handheld preinstalled with
3070 Debian.  Please let me know if you know of any others.  Is it the
3071 first computer being sold with Debian preinstalled?</p>
3072
3073       </div>
3074       <div class="tags">
3075
3076
3077         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>.
3078
3079
3080       </div>
3081     </div>
3082     <div class="padding"></div>
3083
3084     <div class="entry">
3085       <div class="title">
3086         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/NUUG_contests_Norwegian_police_DNS_seizure_of_popcorn_time_no.html">NUUG contests Norwegian police DNS seizure of popcorn-time.no</a>
3087       </div>
3088       <div class="date">
3089         18th April 2016
3090       </div>
3091       <div class="body">
3092         <p>It is days like today I am really happy to be a member of
3093 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the Norwegian Unix User group</a>, a
3094 member association for those of us believing in free software, open
3095 standards and unix-like operating systems.  NUUG announced today it
3096 will
3097 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Pressemelding__NUUG_og_EFN_begj_rer_rettslig_pr_ving_for_DNS_domenebeslag_av_popcorn_time_no.shtml">try
3098 to bring the seizure of the DNS domain popcorn-time.no as
3099 unlawful</a>, to stand up for the principle that writing about a
3100 controversial topic is not infringing copyrights, and censuring web
3101 pages by hijacking DNS domain should be decided by the courts, not the
3102 police.  The DNS domain was seized by the Norwegian National Authority
3103 for Investigation and Prosecution of Economic and Environmental Crime
3104 a month ago.  I hope this bring more paying members to NUUG to give
3105 the association the financial muscle needed to bring this case as far
3106 as it must go to stop this kind of DNS hijacking.</p>
3107
3108       </div>
3109       <div class="tags">
3110
3111
3112         Tags: <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/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>.
3113
3114
3115       </div>
3116     </div>
3117     <div class="padding"></div>
3118
3119     <div class="entry">
3120       <div class="title">
3121         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/I_F__Stone___an_inspiration_for_us_all.html">I.F. Stone - an inspiration for us all</a>
3122       </div>
3123       <div class="date">
3124         13th April 2016
3125       </div>
3126       <div class="body">
3127         <p>I first got to know I.F. Stone when I came across an article by Jon
3128 Schwarz on The Intercept
3129 <a href="https://theintercept.com/2015/05/07/new-documentary-legacy-f-stone/">about
3130 his extraordinary contribution to investigative journalism in
3131 USA</a>. The article is about a new documentary in two parts
3132 (<a href="https://vimeo.com/123974841">part one is 12 minutes</a> and
3133 <a href="https://vimeo.com/123974842">part two is 30 minutes</a>), and
3134 I found both truly fascinating.  It is amazing what he was able to
3135 find by digging up public sources and government papers.  He
3136 documented lots of government abuse and cover ups, and I find
3137 <a href="http://www.ifstone.org/weekly.php">his weekly news letters</a>
3138 inspiring to read even today.</p>
3139
3140 <p><blockquote>
3141 All governments are run by liars and nothing they say should be believed.
3142 <br>- I. F. Stone
3143 </blockquote></p>
3144
3145 <p>His starting point was that reporters should not assume governments
3146 and corporations are telling the truth, but verify all their claims as
3147 much as possible.  I wonder how many Norwegian reporters can be said
3148 to follow the principles of I. F. Stone.  They are definitely in short
3149 supply.  If you, like me half a year ago, have never heard of him,
3150 check him out.</p>
3151
3152       </div>
3153       <div class="tags">
3154
3155
3156         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn</a>.
3157
3158
3159       </div>
3160     </div>
3161     <div class="padding"></div>
3162
3163     <div class="entry">
3164       <div class="title">
3165         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_French_paperback_edition_of_the_book_Free_Culture_by_Lawrence_Lessig_is_now_available.html">A French paperback edition of the book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig is now available</a>
3166       </div>
3167       <div class="date">
3168         12th April 2016
3169       </div>
3170       <div class="body">
3171         <p>I'm happy to report that
3172 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/culture-libre/paperback/product-22645082.html">the
3173 French paperback edition</a> of
3174 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">my
3175 project to translate</a> the <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free
3176 Culture</a> book by Lawrence Lessig is now available for sale on
3177 Lulu.com.  Once I have formally verified my proof reading copy, which
3178 should be in the mail, the paperback edition should be available in
3179 book stores like Amazon and Barnes & Noble too.</p>
3180
3181 <p>This French edition, Culture Libre, is the work of the
3182 <a href="http://dblatex.sourceforge.net/">dblatex</a> developer Benoît
3183 Guillon, who created the PO file from the initial translation
3184 available from
3185 <a href="http://www.wikilivres.ca/wiki/Culture_libre">the Wikilivres
3186 wiki pages</a> and completed and corrected the translation to match
3187 the original docbook edition my project is using, as well as
3188 coordinated the proof reading of the final result.  I believe the end
3189 result look great, but I am biased and do not read French.  In
3190 addition to the paperback edition, the book is available in PDF, EPUB
3191 and Mobi format from the github project page linked to above.</p>
3192
3193 <p>When enabling book store distribution on Lulu.com, I had to nearly
3194 triple the price to allow the book stores some profit.  I also had to
3195 accept that I will get some revenue when a book is sold via Lulu.com.
3196 But because of the non-commercial clause in the book license
3197 (CC-BY-NC), this might be a problem.  To bypass the problem I
3198 discussed how to handle the revenue with the author, and we agreed
3199 that the revenue for these editions go to the
3200 <a href="https://creativecommons.org/">Creative Commons non-profit
3201 Corporation</a> who handle donations to the Creative Commons project.
3202 So far they have earned around USD 70 on sales of the
3203 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22440520.html">English</a>
3204 and
3205 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/fri-kultur/paperback/product-22441576.html">Norwegian
3206 Bokmål</a> editions, according to Lulu.com.  They will get the revenue
3207 for the French edition too.  Their revenue is higher if you buy the
3208 book directly from Lulu.com instead of via a book store, so I
3209 recommend you buy directly from Lulu.com.</p>
3210
3211 <p>Perhaps you would like to get the book published in your language?
3212 The translation is done using a web based translator service, so the
3213 technical bar to enter is fairly low.  Get in touch if you would like
3214 to make this happen.</p>
3215
3216       </div>
3217       <div class="tags">
3218
3219
3220         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>.
3221
3222
3223       </div>
3224     </div>
3225     <div class="padding"></div>
3226
3227     <div class="entry">
3228       <div class="title">
3229         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_a_Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_The_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook.html">Lets make a Norwegian Bokmål edition of The Debian Administrator's Handbook</a>
3230       </div>
3231       <div class="date">
3232         10th April 2016
3233       </div>
3234       <div class="body">
3235         <p>During this weekends
3236 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Oslo__Takk_for_feilfiksingsfesten.shtml">bug
3237 squashing party and developer gathering</a>, we decided to do our part
3238 to make sure there are good books about Debian available in Norwegian
3239 Bokmål, and got in touch with the people behind the
3240 <a href="http://debian-handbook.info/">Debian Administrator's Handbook
3241 project</a> to get started.  If you want to help out, please start
3242 contributing using
3243 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-handbook/">the
3244 hosted weblate project page</a>, and get in touch using
3245 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/debian-handbook-translators">the
3246 translators mailing list</a>.  Please also check out
3247 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/contribute/">the instructions for
3248 contributors</a>.</p>
3249
3250 <p>The book is already available on paper in English, French and
3251 Japanese, and our goal is to get it available on paper in Norwegian
3252 Bokmål too.  In addition to the paper edition, there are also EPUB and
3253 Mobi versions available.  And there are incomplete translations
3254 available for many more languages.</p>
3255
3256       </div>
3257       <div class="tags">
3258
3259
3260         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3261
3262
3263       </div>
3264     </div>
3265     <div class="padding"></div>
3266
3267     <div class="entry">
3268       <div class="title">
3269         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/One_in_two_hundred_Debian_users_using_ZFS_on_Linux_.html">One in two hundred Debian users using ZFS on Linux?</a>
3270       </div>
3271       <div class="date">
3272          7th April 2016
3273       </div>
3274       <div class="body">
3275         <p>Just for fun I had a look at the popcon number of ZFS related
3276 packages in Debian, and was quite surprised with what I found.  I use
3277 ZFS myself at home, but did not really expect many others to do so.
3278 But I might be wrong.</p>
3279
3280 <p>According to
3281 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=spl-linux">the popcon
3282 results for spl-linux</a>, there are 1019 Debian installations, or
3283 0.53% of the population, with the package installed.  As far as I know
3284 the only use of the spl-linux package is as a support library for ZFS
3285 on Linux, so I use it here as proxy for measuring the number of ZFS
3286 installation on Linux in Debian.  In the kFreeBSD variant of Debian
3287 the ZFS feature is already available, and there
3288 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=zfsutils">the popcon
3289 results for zfsutils</a> show 1625 Debian installations or 0.84% of
3290 the population.  So I guess I am not alone in using ZFS on Debian.</p>
3291
3292 <p>But even though the Debian project leader Lucas Nussbaum
3293 <a href="https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2015/04/msg00006.html">announced
3294 in April 2015</a> that the legal obstacles blocking ZFS on Debian were
3295 cleared, the package is still not in Debian.  The package is again in
3296 the NEW queue.  Several uploads have been rejected so far because the
3297 debian/copyright file was incomplete or wrong, but there is no reason
3298 to give up.  The current status can be seen on
3299 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=pkg-zfsonlinux-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
3300 team status page</a>, and
3301 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-zfsonlinux/zfs.git">the
3302 source code</a> is available on Alioth.</p>
3303
3304 <p>As I want ZFS to be included in next version of Debian to make sure
3305 my home server can function in the future using only official Debian
3306 packages, and the current blocker is to get the debian/copyright file
3307 accepted by the FTP masters in Debian, I decided a while back to try
3308 to help out the team.  This was the background for my blog post about
3309 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Creating__updating_and_checking_debian_copyright_semi_automatically.html">creating,
3310 updating and checking debian/copyright semi-automatically</a>, and I
3311 used the techniques I explored there to try to find any errors in the
3312 copyright file.  It is not very easy to check every one of the around
3313 2000 files in the source package, but I hope we this time got it
3314 right.  If you want to help out, check out the git source and try to
3315 find missing entries in the debian/copyright file.</p>
3316
3317       </div>
3318       <div class="tags">
3319
3320
3321         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>.
3322
3323
3324       </div>
3325     </div>
3326     <div class="padding"></div>
3327
3328     <div class="entry">
3329       <div class="title">
3330         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/syslog_trusted_timestamp___chain_of_trusted_timestamps_for_your_syslog.html">syslog-trusted-timestamp - chain of trusted timestamps for your syslog</a>
3331       </div>
3332       <div class="date">
3333          2nd April 2016
3334       </div>
3335       <div class="body">
3336         <p>Two years ago, I had
3337 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Public_Trusted_Timestamping_services_for_everyone.html">a
3338 look at trusted timestamping options available</a>, and among
3339 other things noted a still open
3340 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/742553">bug in the tsget script</a>
3341 included in openssl that made it harder than necessary to use openssl
3342 as a trusted timestamping client.  A few days ago I was told
3343 <a href="https:/www.difi.no/">the Norwegian government office DIFI</a> is
3344 close to releasing their own trusted timestamp service, and in the
3345 process I was happy to learn about a replacement for the tsget script
3346 using only curl:</p>
3347
3348 <p><pre>
3349 openssl ts -query -data "/etc/shells" -cert -sha256 -no_nonce \
3350   | curl -s -H "Content-Type: application/timestamp-query" \
3351          --data-binary "@-" http://zeitstempel.dfn.de > etc-shells.tsr
3352 openssl ts -reply -text -in etc-shells.tsr
3353 </pre></p>
3354
3355 <p>This produces a binary timestamp file (etc-shells.tsr) which can be
3356 used to verify that the content of the file /etc/shell with the
3357 calculated sha256 hash existed at the point in time when the request
3358 was made.  The last command extract the content of the etc-shells.tsr
3359 in human readable form.  The idea behind such timestamp is to be able
3360 to prove using cryptography that the content of a file have not
3361 changed since the file was stamped.</p>
3362
3363 <p>To verify that the file on disk match the public key signature in
3364 the timestamp file, run the following commands.  It make sure you have
3365 the required certificate for the trusted timestamp service available
3366 and use it to compare the file content with the timestamp.  In
3367 production, one should of course use a better method to verify the
3368 service certificate.</p>
3369
3370 <p><pre>
3371 wget -O ca-cert.txt https://pki.pca.dfn.de/global-services-ca/pub/cacert/chain.txt
3372 openssl ts -verify -data /etc/shells -in etc-shells.tsr -CAfile ca-cert.txt -text
3373 </pre></p>
3374
3375 <p>Wikipedia have a lot more information about
3376 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_timestamping">trusted
3377 Timestamping</a> and
3378 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linked_timestamping">linked
3379 timestamping</a>, and there are several trusted timestamping services
3380 around, both as commercial services and as free and public services.
3381 Among the latter is
3382 <a href="https://www.pki.dfn.de/zeitstempeldienst/">the
3383 zeitstempel.dfn.de service</a> mentioned above and
3384 <a href="https://freetsa.org/">freetsa.org service</a> linked to from the
3385 wikipedia web site.  I believe the DIFI service should show up on
3386 https://tsa.difi.no, but it is not available to the public at the
3387 moment.  I hope this will change when it is into production.  The
3388 <a href="https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3161">RFC 3161</a> trusted
3389 timestamping protocol standard is even implemented in LibreOffice,
3390 Microsoft Office and Adobe Acrobat, making it possible to verify when
3391 a document was created.</p>
3392
3393 <p>I would find it useful to be able to use such trusted timestamp
3394 service to make it possible to verify that my stored syslog files have
3395 not been tampered with.  This is not a new idea.  I found one example
3396 implemented on the Endian network appliances where
3397 <a href="http://help.endian.com/entries/21518508-Enabling-Timestamping-on-log-files-">the
3398 configuration of such feature was described in 2012</a>.</p>
3399
3400 <p>But I could not find any free implementation of such feature when I
3401 searched, so I decided to try to
3402 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/syslog-trusted-timestamp">build
3403 a prototype named syslog-trusted-timestamp</a>.  My idea is to
3404 generate a timestamp of the old log files after they are rotated, and
3405 store the timestamp in the new log file just after rotation.  This
3406 will form a chain that would make it possible to see if any old log
3407 files are tampered with.  But syslog is bad at handling kilobytes of
3408 binary data, so I decided to base64 encode the timestamp and add an ID
3409 and line sequence numbers to the base64 data to make it possible to
3410 reassemble the timestamp file again.  To use it, simply run it like
3411 this:
3412
3413 <p><pre>
3414 syslog-trusted-timestamp /path/to/list-of-log-files
3415 </pre></p>
3416
3417 <p>This will send a timestamp from one or more timestamp services (not
3418 yet decided nor implemented) for each listed file to the syslog using
3419 logger(1).  To verify the timestamp, the same program is used with the
3420 --verify option:</p>
3421
3422 <p><pre>
3423 syslog-trusted-timestamp --verify /path/to/log-file /path/to/log-with-timestamp
3424 </pre></p>
3425
3426 <p>The verification step is not yet well designed.  The current
3427 implementation depend on the file path being unique and unchanging,
3428 and this is not a solid assumption.  It also uses process number as
3429 timestamp ID, and this is bound to create ID collisions.  I hope to
3430 have time to come up with a better way to handle timestamp IDs and
3431 verification later.</p>
3432
3433 <p>Please check out
3434 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/syslog-trusted-timestamp">the
3435 prototype for syslog-trusted-timestamp on github</a> and send
3436 suggestions and improvement, or let me know if there already exist a
3437 similar system for timestamping logs already to allow me to join
3438 forces with others with the same interest.</p>
3439
3440 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3441 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3442 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3443
3444       </div>
3445       <div class="tags">
3446
3447
3448         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
3449
3450
3451       </div>
3452     </div>
3453     <div class="padding"></div>
3454
3455     <div class="entry">
3456       <div class="title">
3457         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Full_battery_stats_collector_is_now_available_in_Debian.html">Full battery stats collector is now available in Debian</a>
3458       </div>
3459       <div class="date">
3460         23rd March 2016
3461       </div>
3462       <div class="body">
3463         <p>Since this morning, the battery-stats package in Debian include an
3464 extended collector that will collect the complete battery history for
3465 later processing and graphing.  The original collector store the
3466 battery level as percentage of last full level, while the new
3467 collector also record battery vendor, model, serial number, design
3468 full level, last full level and current battery level.  This make it
3469 possible to predict the lifetime of the battery as well as visualise
3470 the energy flow when the battery is charging or discharging.</p>
3471
3472 <p>The new tools are available in <tt>/usr/share/battery-stats/</tt>
3473 in the version 0.5.1 package in unstable.  Get the new battery level graph
3474 and lifetime prediction by running:
3475
3476 <p><pre>
3477 /usr/share/battery-stats/battery-stats-graph /var/log/battery-stats.csv
3478 </pre></p>
3479
3480 <p>Or select the 'Battery Level Graph' from your application menu.</p>
3481
3482 <p>The flow in/out of the battery can be seen by running (no menu
3483 entry yet):</p>
3484
3485 <p><pre>
3486 /usr/share/battery-stats/battery-stats-graph-flow
3487 </pre></p>
3488
3489 <p>I'm not quite happy with the way the data is visualised, at least
3490 when there are few data points.  The graphs look a bit better with a
3491 few years of data.</p>
3492
3493 <p>A while back one important feature I use in the battery stats
3494 collector broke in Debian.  The scripts in
3495 <tt>/usr/lib/pm-utils/power.d/</tt> were no longer executed.  I
3496 suspect it happened when Jessie started using systemd, but I do not
3497 know.  The issue is reported as
3498 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/818649">bug #818649</a> against
3499 pm-utils.  I managed to work around it by adding an udev rule to call
3500 the collector script every time the power connector is connected and
3501 disconnected.  With this fix in place it was finally time to make a
3502 new release of the package, and get it into Debian.</p>
3503
3504 <p>If you are interested in how your laptop battery is doing, please
3505 check out the
3506 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats</a>
3507 in Debian unstable, or rebuild it on Jessie to get it working on
3508 Debian stable. :) The upstream source is available from
3509 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">github</a>.
3510 As always, patches are very welcome.</p>
3511
3512       </div>
3513       <div class="tags">
3514
3515
3516         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>.
3517
3518
3519       </div>
3520     </div>
3521     <div class="padding"></div>
3522
3523     <div class="entry">
3524       <div class="title">
3525         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/UsingQR____Electronic__paper_invoices_using_JSON_and_QR_codes.html">UsingQR - "Electronic" paper invoices using JSON and QR codes</a>
3526       </div>
3527       <div class="date">
3528         19th March 2016
3529       </div>
3530       <div class="body">
3531         <p>Back in 2013 I proposed
3532 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/_Electronic__paper_invoices___using_vCard_in_a_QR_code.html">a
3533 way to make paper and PDF invoices easier to process electronically by
3534 adding a QR code with the key information about the invoice</a>.  I
3535 suggested using vCard field definition, to get some standard format
3536 for name and address, but any format would work.  I did not do
3537 anything about the proposal, but hoped someone one day would make
3538 something like it.  It would make it possible to efficiently send
3539 machine readable invoices directly between seller and buyer.</p>
3540
3541 <p>This was the background when I came across a proposal and
3542 specification from the web based accounting and invoicing supplier
3543 <a href="http://www.visma.com/">Visma</a> in Sweden called
3544 <a href="http://usingqr.com/">UsingQR</a>.  Their PDF invoices contain
3545 a QR code with the key information of the invoice in JSON format.
3546 This is the typical content of a QR code following the UsingQR
3547 specification (based on a real world example, some numbers replaced to
3548 get a more bogus entry).  I've reformatted the JSON to make it easier
3549 to read.  Normally this is all on one long line:</p>
3550
3551 <p><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-03-19-qr-invoice.png" align="right"><pre>
3552 {
3553  "vh":500.00,
3554  "vm":0,
3555  "vl":0,
3556  "uqr":1,
3557  "tp":1,
3558  "nme":"Din Leverandør",
3559  "cc":"NO",
3560  "cid":"997912345 MVA",
3561  "iref":"12300001",
3562  "idt":"20151022",
3563  "ddt":"20151105",
3564  "due":2500.0000,
3565  "cur":"NOK",
3566  "pt":"BBAN",
3567  "acc":"17202612345",
3568  "bc":"BIENNOK1",
3569  "adr":"0313 OSLO"
3570 }
3571 </pre></p>
3572
3573 </p>The interpretation of the fields can be found in the
3574 <a href="http://usingqr.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/UsingQR_specification1.pdf">format
3575 specification</a> (revision 2 from june 2014).  The format seem to
3576 have most of the information needed to handle accounting and payment
3577 of invoices, at least the fields I have needed so far here in
3578 Norway.</p>
3579
3580 <p>Unfortunately, the site and document do not mention anything about
3581 the patent, trademark and copyright status of the format and the
3582 specification.  Because of this, I asked the people behind it back in
3583 November to clarify.  Ann-Christine Savlid (ann-christine.savlid (at)
3584 visma.com) replied that Visma had not applied for patent or trademark
3585 protection for this format, and that there were no copyright based
3586 usage limitations for the format.  I urged her to make sure this was
3587 explicitly written on the web pages and in the specification, but
3588 unfortunately this has not happened yet.  So I guess if there is
3589 submarine patents, hidden trademarks or a will to sue for copyright
3590 infringements, those starting to use the UsingQR format might be at
3591 risk, but if this happen there is some legal defense in the fact that
3592 the people behind the format claimed it was safe to do so.  At least
3593 with patents, there is always
3594 <a href="http://www.paperspecs.com/paper-news/beware-the-qr-code-patent-trap/">a
3595 chance of getting sued...</a></p>
3596
3597 <p>I also asked if they planned to maintain the format in an
3598 independent standard organization to give others more confidence that
3599 they would participate in the standardization process on equal terms
3600 with Visma, but they had no immediate plans for this.  Their plan was
3601 to work with banks to try to get more users of the format, and
3602 evaluate the way forward if the format proved to be popular.  I hope
3603 they conclude that using an open standard organisation like
3604 <a href="http://www.ietf.org/">IETF</a> is the correct place to
3605 maintain such specification.</p>
3606
3607 <p><strong>Update 2016-03-20</strong>: Via Twitter I became aware of
3608 <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11319492">some comments
3609 about this blog post</a> that had several useful links and references to
3610 similar systems.  In the Czech republic, the Czech Banking Association
3611 standard #26, with short name SPAYD, uses QR codes with payment
3612 information.  More information is available from the Wikipedia page on
3613 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_Payment_Descriptor">Short
3614 Payment Descriptor</a>.  And in Germany, there is a system named
3615 <a href="http://www.bezahlcode.de/">BezahlCode</a>,
3616 (<a href="http://www.bezahlcode.de/wp-content/uploads/BezahlCode_TechDok.pdf">specification
3617 v1.8 2013-12-05 available as PDF</a>), which uses QR codes with
3618 URL-like formatting using "bank:" as the URI schema/protocol to
3619 provide the payment information.  There is also the
3620 <a href="http://www.ferd-net.de/front_content.php?idcat=231">ZUGFeRD</a>
3621 file format that perhaps could be transfered using QR codes, but I am
3622 not sure if it is done already.  Last, in Bolivia there are reports
3623 that tax information since november 2014 need to be printed in QR
3624 format on invoices.  I have not been able to track down a
3625 specification for this format, because of my limited language skill
3626 sets.</p>
3627
3628       </div>
3629       <div class="tags">
3630
3631
3632         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
3633
3634
3635       </div>
3636     </div>
3637     <div class="padding"></div>
3638
3639     <div class="entry">
3640       <div class="title">
3641         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Making_battery_measurements_a_little_easier_in_Debian.html">Making battery measurements a little easier in Debian</a>
3642       </div>
3643       <div class="date">
3644         15th March 2016
3645       </div>
3646       <div class="body">
3647         <p>Back in September, I blogged about
3648 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_life_and_death_of_a_laptop_battery.html">the
3649 system I wrote to collect statistics about my laptop battery</a>, and
3650 how it showed the decay and death of this battery (now replaced).  I
3651 created a simple deb package to handle the collection and graphing,
3652 but did not want to upload it to Debian as there were already
3653 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">a battery-stats
3654 package in Debian</a> that should do the same thing, and I did not see
3655 a point of uploading a competing package when battery-stats could be
3656 fixed instead.  I reported a few bugs about its non-function, and
3657 hoped someone would step in and fix it.  But no-one did.</p>
3658
3659 <p>I got tired of waiting a few days ago, and took matters in my own
3660 hands.  The end result is that I am now the new upstream developer of
3661 battery stats (<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">available from github</a>) and part of the team maintaining
3662 battery-stats in Debian, and the package in Debian unstable is finally
3663 able to collect battery status using the <tt>/sys/class/power_supply/</tt>
3664 information provided by the Linux kernel.  If you install the
3665 battery-stats package from unstable now, you will be able to get a
3666 graph of the current battery fill level, to get some idea about the
3667 status of the battery.  The source package build and work just fine in
3668 Debian testing and stable (and probably oldstable too, but I have not
3669 tested).  The default graph you get for that system look like this:</p>
3670
3671 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-03-15-battery-stats-graph-example.png" width="70%" align="center"></p>
3672
3673 <p>My plans for the future is to merge my old scripts into the
3674 battery-stats package, as my old scripts collected a lot more details
3675 about the battery.  The scripts are merged into the upstream
3676 battery-stats git repository already, but I am not convinced they work
3677 yet, as I changed a lot of paths along the way.  Will have to test a
3678 bit more before I make a new release.</p>
3679
3680 <p>I will also consider changing the file format slightly, as I
3681 suspect the way I combine several values into one field might make it
3682 impossible to know the type of the value when using it for processing
3683 and graphing.</p>
3684
3685 <p>If you would like I would like to keep an close eye on your laptop
3686 battery, check out the battery-stats package in
3687 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">Debian</a> and
3688 on
3689 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">github</a>.
3690 I would love some help to improve the system further.</p>
3691
3692       </div>
3693       <div class="tags">
3694
3695
3696         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>.
3697
3698
3699       </div>
3700     </div>
3701     <div class="padding"></div>
3702
3703     <div class="entry">
3704       <div class="title">
3705         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Creating__updating_and_checking_debian_copyright_semi_automatically.html">Creating, updating and checking debian/copyright semi-automatically</a>
3706       </div>
3707       <div class="date">
3708         19th February 2016
3709       </div>
3710       <div class="body">
3711         <p>Making packages for Debian requires quite a lot of attention to
3712 details.  And one of the details is the content of the
3713 debian/copyright file, which should list all relevant licenses used by
3714 the code in the package in question, preferably in
3715 <a href="https://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/">machine
3716 readable DEP5 format</a>.</p>
3717
3718 <p>For large packages with lots of contributors it is hard to write
3719 and update this file manually, and if you get some detail wrong, the
3720 package is normally rejected by the ftpmasters.  So getting it right
3721 the first time around get the package into Debian faster, and save
3722 both you and the ftpmasters some work..  Today, while trying to figure
3723 out what was wrong with
3724 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=686447">the
3725 zfsonlinux copyright file</a>, I decided to spend some time on
3726 figuring out the options for doing this job automatically, or at least
3727 semi-automatically.</p>
3728
3729 <p>Lucikly, there are at least two tools available for generating the
3730 file based on the code in the source package,
3731 <tt><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/debmake">debmake</a></tt>
3732 and <tt><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cme">cme</a></tt>.  I'm
3733 not sure which one of them came first, but both seem to be able to
3734 create a sensible draft file.  As far as I can tell, none of them can
3735 be trusted to get the result just right, so the content need to be
3736 polished a bit before the file is OK to upload.  I found the debmake
3737 option in
3738 <a href="http://goofying-with-debian.blogspot.com/2014/07/debmake-checking-source-against-dep-5.html">a
3739 blog posts from 2014</a>.
3740
3741 <p>To generate using debmake, use the -cc option:
3742
3743 <p><pre>
3744 debmake -cc > debian/copyright
3745 </pre></p>
3746
3747 <p>Note there are some problems with python and non-ASCII names, so
3748 this might not be the best option.</p>
3749
3750 <p>The cme option is based on a config parsing library, and I found
3751 this approach in
3752 <a href="https://ddumont.wordpress.com/2015/04/05/improving-creation-of-debian-copyright-file/">a
3753 blog post from 2015</a>.  To generate using cme, use the 'update
3754 dpkg-copyright' option:
3755
3756 <p><pre>
3757 cme update dpkg-copyright
3758 </pre></p>
3759
3760 <p>This will create or update debian/copyright.  The cme tool seem to
3761 handle UTF-8 names better than debmake.</p>
3762
3763 <p>When the copyright file is created, I would also like some help to
3764 check if the file is correct.  For this I found two good options,
3765 <tt>debmake -k</tt> and <tt>license-reconcile</tt>.  The former seem
3766 to focus on license types and file matching, and is able to detect
3767 ineffective blocks in the copyright file.  The latter reports missing
3768 copyright holders and years, but was confused by inconsistent license
3769 names (like CDDL vs. CDDL-1.0).  I suspect it is good to use both and
3770 fix all issues reported by them before uploading.  But I do not know
3771 if the tools and the ftpmasters agree on what is important to fix in a
3772 copyright file, so the package might still be rejected.</p>
3773
3774 <p>The devscripts tool <tt>licensecheck</tt> deserve mentioning.  It
3775 will read through the source and try to find all copyright statements.
3776 It is not comparing the result to the content of debian/copyright, but
3777 can be useful when verifying the content of the copyright file.</p>
3778
3779 <p>Are you aware of better tools in Debian to create and update
3780 debian/copyright file.  Please let me know, or blog about it on
3781 planet.debian.org.</p>
3782
3783 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3784 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3785 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3786
3787 <p><strong>Update 2016-02-20</strong>: I got a tip from Mike Gabriel
3788 on how to use licensecheck and cdbs to create a draft copyright file
3789
3790 <p><pre>
3791 licensecheck --copyright -r `find * -type f` | \
3792   /usr/lib/cdbs/licensecheck2dep5 > debian/copyright.auto
3793 </pre></p>
3794
3795 <p>He mentioned that he normally check the generated file into the
3796 version control system to make it easier to discover license and
3797 copyright changes in the upstream source.  I will try to do the same
3798 with my packages in the future.</p>
3799
3800 <p><strong>Update 2016-02-21</strong>: The cme author recommended
3801 against using -quiet for new users, so I removed it from the proposed
3802 command line.</p>
3803
3804       </div>
3805       <div class="tags">
3806
3807
3808         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>.
3809
3810
3811       </div>
3812     </div>
3813     <div class="padding"></div>
3814
3815     <div class="entry">
3816       <div class="title">
3817         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_appstream_in_Debian_to_locate_packages_with_firmware_and_mime_type_support.html">Using appstream in Debian to locate packages with firmware and mime type support</a>
3818       </div>
3819       <div class="date">
3820          4th February 2016
3821       </div>
3822       <div class="body">
3823         <p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-11">appstream system</a>
3824 is taking shape in Debian, and one provided feature is a very
3825 convenient way to tell you which package to install to make a given
3826 firmware file available when the kernel is looking for it.  This can
3827 be done using apt-file too, but that is for someone else to blog
3828 about. :)</p>
3829
3830 <p>Here is a small recipe to find the package with a given firmware
3831 file, in this example I am looking for ctfw-3.2.3.0.bin, randomly
3832 picked from the set of firmware announced using appstream in Debian
3833 unstable.  In general you would be looking for the firmware requested
3834 by the kernel during kernel module loading.  To find the package
3835 providing the example file, do like this:</p>
3836
3837 <blockquote><pre>
3838 % apt install appstream
3839 [...]
3840 % apt update
3841 [...]
3842 % appstreamcli what-provides firmware:runtime ctfw-3.2.3.0.bin | \
3843   awk '/Package:/ {print $2}'
3844 firmware-qlogic
3845 %
3846 </pre></blockquote>
3847
3848 <p>See <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/AppStream/Guidelines">the
3849 appstream wiki</a> page to learn how to embed the package metadata in
3850 a way appstream can use.</p>
3851
3852 <p>This same approach can be used to find any package supporting a
3853 given MIME type.  This is very useful when you get a file you do not
3854 know how to handle.  First find the mime type using <tt>file
3855 --mime-type</tt>, and next look up the package providing support for
3856 it.  Lets say you got an SVG file.  Its MIME type is image/svg+xml,
3857 and you can find all packages handling this type like this:</p>
3858
3859 <blockquote><pre>
3860 % apt install appstream
3861 [...]
3862 % apt update
3863 [...]
3864 % appstreamcli what-provides mimetype image/svg+xml | \
3865   awk '/Package:/ {print $2}'
3866 bkchem
3867 phototonic
3868 inkscape
3869 shutter
3870 tetzle
3871 geeqie
3872 xia
3873 pinta
3874 gthumb
3875 karbon
3876 comix
3877 mirage
3878 viewnior
3879 postr
3880 ristretto
3881 kolourpaint4
3882 eog
3883 eom
3884 gimagereader
3885 midori
3886 %
3887 </pre></blockquote>
3888
3889 <p>I believe the MIME types are fetched from the desktop file for
3890 packages providing appstream metadata.</p>
3891
3892       </div>
3893       <div class="tags">
3894
3895
3896         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>.
3897
3898
3899       </div>
3900     </div>
3901     <div class="padding"></div>
3902
3903     <div class="entry">
3904       <div class="title">
3905         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Creepy__visualise_geotagged_social_media_information___nice_free_software.html">Creepy, visualise geotagged social media information - nice free software</a>
3906       </div>
3907       <div class="date">
3908         24th January 2016
3909       </div>
3910       <div class="body">
3911         <p>Most people seem not to realise that every time they walk around
3912 with the computerised radio beacon known as a mobile phone their
3913 position is tracked by the phone company and often stored for a long
3914 time (like every time a SMS is received or sent).  And if their
3915 computerised radio beacon is capable of running programs (often called
3916 mobile apps) downloaded from the Internet, these programs are often
3917 also capable of tracking their location (if the app requested access
3918 during installation).  And when these programs send out information to
3919 central collection points, the location is often included, unless
3920 extra care is taken to not send the location.  The provided
3921 information is used by several entities, for good and bad (what is
3922 good and bad, depend on your point of view).  What is certain, is that
3923 the private sphere and the right to free movement is challenged and
3924 perhaps even eradicated for those announcing their location this way,
3925 when they share their whereabouts with private and public
3926 entities.</p>
3927
3928 <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-01-24-nice-creepy-desktop-window.png"></p>
3929
3930 <p>The phone company logs provide a register of locations to check out
3931 when one want to figure out what the tracked person was doing.  It is
3932 unavailable for most of us, but provided to selected government
3933 officials, company staff, those illegally buying information from
3934 unfaithful servants and crackers stealing the information.  But the
3935 public information can be collected and analysed, and a free software
3936 tool to do so is called
3937 <a href="http://www.geocreepy.com/">Creepy or Cree.py</a>.  I
3938 discovered it when I read
3939 <a href="http://www.aftenposten.no/kultur/Slik-kan-du-bli-overvaket-pa-Twitter-og-Instagram-uten-a-ane-det-7787884.html">an
3940 article about Creepy</a> in the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten i
3941 November 2014, and decided to check if it was available in Debian.
3942 The python program was in Debian, but
3943 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/creepy">the version in
3944 Debian</a> was completely broken and practically unmaintained.  I
3945 uploaded a new version which did not work quite right, but did not
3946 have time to fix it then.  This Christmas I decided to finally try to
3947 get Creepy operational in Debian.  Now a fixed version is available in
3948 Debian unstable and testing, and almost all Debian specific patches
3949 are now included
3950 <a href="https://github.com/jkakavas/creepy">upstream</a>.</p>
3951
3952 <p>The Creepy program visualises geolocation information fetched from
3953 Twitter, Instagram, Flickr and Google+, and allow one to get a
3954 complete picture of every social media message posted recently in a
3955 given area, or track the movement of a given individual across all
3956 these services.  Earlier it was possible to use the search API of at
3957 least some of these services without identifying oneself, but these
3958 days it is impossible.  This mean that to use Creepy, you need to
3959 configure it to log in as yourself on these services, and provide
3960 information to them about your search interests.  This should be taken
3961 into account when using Creepy, as it will also share information
3962 about yourself with the services.</p>
3963
3964 <p>The picture above show the twitter messages sent from (or at least
3965 geotagged with a position from) the city centre of Oslo, the capital
3966 of Norway.  One useful way to use Creepy is to first look at
3967 information tagged with an area of interest, and next look at all the
3968 information provided by one or more individuals who was in the area.
3969 I tested it by checking out which celebrity provide their location in
3970 twitter messages by checkout out who sent twitter messages near a
3971 Norwegian TV station, and next could track their position over time,
3972 making it possible to locate their home and work place, among other
3973 things.  A similar technique have been
3974 <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/maxseddon/does-this-soldiers-instagram-account-prove-russia-is-covertl">used
3975 to locate Russian soldiers in Ukraine</a>, and it is both a powerful
3976 tool to discover lying governments, and a useful tool to help people
3977 understand the value of the private information they provide to the
3978 public.</p>
3979
3980 <p>The package is not trivial to backport to Debian Stable/Jessie, as
3981 it depend on several python modules currently missing in Jessie (at
3982 least python-instagram, python-flickrapi and
3983 python-requests-toolbelt).</p>
3984
3985 <p>(I have uploaded
3986 <a href="https://screenshots.debian.net/package/creepy">the image to
3987 screenshots.debian.net</a> and licensed it under the same terms as the
3988 Creepy program in Debian.)</p>
3989
3990       </div>
3991       <div class="tags">
3992
3993
3994         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/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
3995
3996
3997       </div>
3998     </div>
3999     <div class="padding"></div>
4000
4001     <div class="entry">
4002       <div class="title">
4003         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Always_download_Debian_packages_using_Tor___the_simple_recipe.html">Always download Debian packages using Tor - the simple recipe</a>
4004       </div>
4005       <div class="date">
4006         15th January 2016
4007       </div>
4008       <div class="body">
4009         <p>During his DebConf15 keynote, Jacob Appelbaum
4010 <a href="https://summit.debconf.org/debconf15/meeting/331/what-is-to-be-done/">observed
4011 that those listening on the Internet lines would have good reason to
4012 believe a computer have a given security hole</a> if it download a
4013 security fix from a Debian mirror.  This is a good reason to always
4014 use encrypted connections to the Debian mirror, to make sure those
4015 listening do not know which IP address to attack.  In August, Richard
4016 Hartmann observed that encryption was not enough, when it was possible
4017 to interfere download size to security patches or the fact that
4018 download took place shortly after a security fix was released, and
4019 <a href="http://richardhartmann.de/blog/posts/2015/08/24-Tor-enabled_Debian_mirror/">proposed
4020 to always use Tor to download packages from the Debian mirror</a>.  He
4021 was not the first to propose this, as the
4022 <tt><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/apt-transport-tor">apt-transport-tor</a></tt>
4023 package by Tim Retout already existed to make it easy to convince apt
4024 to use <a href="https://www.torproject.org/">Tor</a>, but I was not
4025 aware of that package when I read the blog post from Richard.</p>
4026
4027 <p>Richard discussed the idea with Peter Palfrader, one of the Debian
4028 sysadmins, and he set up a Tor hidden service on one of the central
4029 Debian mirrors using the address vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion, thus making
4030 it possible to download packages directly between two tor nodes,
4031 making sure the network traffic always were encrypted.</p>
4032
4033 <p>Here is a short recipe for enabling this on your machine, by
4034 installing <tt>apt-transport-tor</tt> and replacing http and https
4035 urls with tor+http and tor+https, and using the hidden service instead
4036 of the official Debian mirror site.  I recommend installing
4037 <tt>etckeeper</tt> before you start to have a history of the changes
4038 done in /etc/.</p>
4039
4040 <blockquote><pre>
4041 apt install apt-transport-tor
4042 sed -i 's% http://ftp.debian.org/% tor+http://vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion/%' /etc/apt/sources.list
4043 sed -i 's% http% tor+http%' /etc/apt/sources.list
4044 </pre></blockquote>
4045
4046 <p>If you have more sources listed in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/, run
4047 the sed commands for these too.  The sed command is assuming your are
4048 using the ftp.debian.org Debian mirror.  Adjust the command (or just
4049 edit the file manually) to match your mirror.</p>
4050
4051 <p>This work in Debian Jessie and later.  Note that tools like
4052 <tt>apt-file</tt> only recently started using the apt transport
4053 system, and do not work with these tor+http URLs.  For
4054 <tt>apt-file</tt> you need the version currently in experimental,
4055 which need a recent apt version currently only in unstable.  So if you
4056 need a working <tt>apt-file</tt>, this is not for you.</p>
4057
4058 <p>Another advantage from this change is that your machine will start
4059 using Tor regularly and at fairly random intervals (every time you
4060 update the package lists or upgrade or install a new package), thus
4061 masking other Tor traffic done from the same machine.  Using Tor will
4062 become normal for the machine in question.</p>
4063
4064 <p>On <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox</a>, APT
4065 is set up by default to use <tt>apt-transport-tor</tt> when Tor is
4066 enabled.  It would be great if it was the default on any Debian
4067 system.</p>
4068
4069       </div>
4070       <div class="tags">
4071
4072
4073         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>.
4074
4075
4076       </div>
4077     </div>
4078     <div class="padding"></div>
4079
4080     <div class="entry">
4081       <div class="title">
4082         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/OpenALPR__find_car_license_plates_in_video_streams___nice_free_software.html">OpenALPR, find car license plates in video streams - nice free software</a>
4083       </div>
4084       <div class="date">
4085         23rd December 2015
4086       </div>
4087       <div class="body">
4088         <p>When I was a kid, we used to collect "car numbers", as we used to
4089 call the car license plate numbers in those days.  I would write the
4090 numbers down in my little book and compare notes with the other kids
4091 to see how many region codes we had seen and if we had seen some
4092 exotic or special region codes and numbers.  It was a fun game to pass
4093 time, as we kids have plenty of it.</p>
4094
4095 <p>A few days I came across
4096 <a href="https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr">the OpenALPR
4097 project</a>, a free software project to automatically discover and
4098 report license plates in images and video streams, and provide the
4099 "car numbers" in a machine readable format.  I've been looking for
4100 such system for a while now, because I believe it is a bad idea that the
4101 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number_plate_recognition">automatic
4102 number plate recognition</a> tool only is available in the hands of
4103 the powerful, and want it to be available also for the powerless to
4104 even the score when it comes to surveillance and sousveillance.  I
4105 discovered the developer
4106 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/747509">wanted to get the tool into
4107 Debian</a>, and as I too wanted it to be in Debian, I volunteered to
4108 help him get it into shape to get the package uploaded into the Debian
4109 archive.</p>
4110
4111 <p>Today we finally managed to get the package into shape and uploaded
4112 it into Debian, where it currently
4113 <a href="https://ftp-master.debian.org//new/openalpr_2.2.1-1.html">waits
4114 in the NEW queue</a> for review by the Debian ftpmasters.</p>
4115
4116 <p>I guess you are wondering why on earth such tool would be useful
4117 for the common folks, ie those not running a large government
4118 surveillance system?  Well, I plan to put it in a computer on my bike
4119 and in my car, tracking the cars nearby and allowing me to be notified
4120 when number plates on my watch list are discovered.  Another use case
4121 was suggested by a friend of mine, who wanted to set it up at his home
4122 to open the car port automatically when it discovered the plate on his
4123 car.  When I mentioned it perhaps was a bit foolhardy to allow anyone
4124 capable of placing his license plate number of a piece of cardboard to
4125 open his car port, men replied that it was always unlocked anyway.  I
4126 guess for such use case it make sense.  I am sure there are other use
4127 cases too, for those with imagination and a vision.</p>
4128
4129 <p>If you want to build your own version of the Debian package, check
4130 out the upstream git source and symlink ./distros/debian to ./debian/
4131 before running "debuild" to build the source.  Or wait a bit until the
4132 package show up in unstable.</p>
4133
4134       </div>
4135       <div class="tags">
4136
4137
4138         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/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
4139
4140
4141       </div>
4142     </div>
4143     <div class="padding"></div>
4144
4145     <div class="entry">
4146       <div class="title">
4147         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_appstream_with_isenkram_to_install_hardware_related_packages_in_Debian.html">Using appstream with isenkram to install hardware related packages in Debian</a>
4148       </div>
4149       <div class="date">
4150         20th December 2015
4151       </div>
4152       <div class="body">
4153         <p>Around three years ago, I created
4154 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">the isenkram
4155 system</a> to get a more practical solution in Debian for handing
4156 hardware related packages.  A GUI system in the isenkram package will
4157 present a pop-up dialog when some hardware dongle supported by
4158 relevant packages in Debian is inserted into the machine.  The same
4159 lookup mechanism to detect packages is available as command line
4160 tools in the isenkram-cli package.  In addition to mapping hardware,
4161 it will also map kernel firmware files to packages and make it easy to
4162 install needed firmware packages automatically.  The key for this
4163 system to work is a good way to map hardware to packages, in other
4164 words, allow packages to announce what hardware they will work
4165 with.</p>
4166
4167 <p>I started by providing data files in the isenkram source, and
4168 adding code to download the latest version of these data files at run
4169 time, to ensure every user had the most up to date mapping available.
4170 I also added support for storing the mapping in the Packages file in
4171 the apt repositories, but did not push this approach because while I
4172 was trying to figure out how to best store hardware/package mappings,
4173 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/">the
4174 appstream system</a> was announced.  I got in touch and suggested to
4175 add the hardware mapping into that data set to be able to use
4176 appstream as a data source, and this was accepted at least for the
4177 Debian version of appstream.</p>
4178
4179 <p>A few days ago using appstream in Debian for this became possible,
4180 and today I uploaded a new version 0.20 of isenkram adding support for
4181 appstream as a data source for mapping hardware to packages.  The only
4182 package so far using appstream to announce its hardware support is my
4183 pymissile package.  I got help from Matthias Klumpp with figuring out
4184 how do add the required
4185 <a href="https://appstream.debian.org/html/sid/main/metainfo/pymissile.html">metadata
4186 in pymissile</a>.  I added a file debian/pymissile.metainfo.xml with
4187 this content:</p>
4188
4189 <blockquote><pre>
4190 &lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?&gt;
4191 &lt;component&gt;
4192   &lt;id&gt;pymissile&lt;/id&gt;
4193   &lt;metadata_license&gt;MIT&lt;/metadata_license&gt;
4194   &lt;name&gt;pymissile&lt;/name&gt;
4195   &lt;summary&gt;Control original Striker USB Missile Launcher&lt;/summary&gt;
4196   &lt;description&gt;
4197     &lt;p&gt;
4198       Pymissile provides a curses interface to control an original
4199       Marks and Spencer / Striker USB Missile Launcher, as well as a
4200       motion control script to allow a webcamera to control the
4201       launcher.
4202     &lt;/p&gt;
4203   &lt;/description&gt;
4204   &lt;provides&gt;
4205     &lt;modalias&gt;usb:v1130p0202d*&lt;/modalias&gt;
4206   &lt;/provides&gt;
4207 &lt;/component&gt;
4208 </pre></blockquote>
4209
4210 <p>The key for isenkram is the component/provides/modalias value,
4211 which is a glob style match rule for hardware specific strings
4212 (modalias strings) provided by the Linux kernel.  In this case, it
4213 will map to all USB devices with vendor code 1130 and product code
4214 0202.</p>
4215
4216 <p>Note, it is important that the license of all the metadata files
4217 are compatible to have permissions to aggregate them into archive wide
4218 appstream files.  Matthias suggested to use MIT or BSD licenses for
4219 these files.  A challenge is figuring out a good id for the data, as
4220 it is supposed to be globally unique and shared across distributions
4221 (in other words, best to coordinate with upstream what to use).  But
4222 it can be changed later or, so we went with the package name as
4223 upstream for this project is dormant.</p>
4224
4225 <p>To get the metadata file installed in the correct location for the
4226 mirror update scripts to pick it up and include its content the
4227 appstream data source, the file must be installed in the binary
4228 package under /usr/share/appdata/.  I did this by adding the following
4229 line to debian/pymissile.install:</p>
4230
4231 <blockquote><pre>
4232 debian/pymissile.metainfo.xml usr/share/appdata
4233 </pre></blockquote>
4234
4235 <p>With that in place, the command line tool isenkram-lookup will list
4236 all packages useful on the current computer automatically, and the GUI
4237 pop-up handler will propose to install the package not already
4238 installed if a hardware dongle is inserted into the machine in
4239 question.</p>
4240
4241 <p>Details of the modalias field in appstream is available from the
4242 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-11">DEP-11</a> proposal.</p>
4243
4244 <p>To locate the modalias values of all hardware present in a machine,
4245 try running this command on the command line:</p>
4246
4247 <blockquote><pre>
4248 cat $(find /sys/devices/|grep modalias)
4249 </pre></blockquote>
4250
4251 <p>To learn more about the isenkram system, please check out
4252 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">my
4253 blog posts tagged isenkram</a>.</p>
4254
4255       </div>
4256       <div class="tags">
4257
4258
4259         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
4260
4261
4262       </div>
4263     </div>
4264     <div class="padding"></div>
4265
4266     <div class="entry">
4267       <div class="title">
4268         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_GNU_General_Public_License_is_not_magic_pixie_dust.html">The GNU General Public License is not magic pixie dust</a>
4269       </div>
4270       <div class="date">
4271         30th November 2015
4272       </div>
4273       <div class="body">
4274         <p>A blog post from my fellow Debian developer Paul Wise titled
4275 "<a href="http://bonedaddy.net/pabs3/log/2015/11/27/sfc-supporter/">The
4276 GPL is not magic pixie dust</a>" explain the importance of making sure
4277 the <a href="http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html">GPL</a> is enforced.
4278 I quote the blog post from Paul in full here with his permission:<p>
4279
4280 <blockquote>
4281
4282 <p><a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/"><img src="https://sfconservancy.org/img/supporter-badge.png" width="194" height="90" alt="Become a Software Freedom Conservancy Supporter!" align="right" border="0" /></a></p>
4283
4284 <blockquote>
4285 The GPL is not magic pixie dust. It does not work by itself.<br/>
4286
4287 The first step is to choose a
4288 <a href="https://copyleft.org/">copyleft</a> license for your
4289 code.<br/>
4290
4291 The next step is, when someone fails to follow that copyleft license,
4292 <b>it must be enforced</b><br/>
4293
4294 and its a simple fact of our modern society that such type of
4295 work<br/>
4296
4297 is incredibly expensive to do and incredibly difficult to do.
4298 </blockquote>
4299
4300 <p><small>-- <a href="http://ebb.org/bkuhn/">Bradley Kuhn</a>, in
4301 <a href="http://faif.us/" title="Free as in Freedom">FaiF</a>
4302 <a href="http://faif.us/cast/2015/nov/24/0x57/">episode
4303 0x57</a></small></p>
4304
4305 <p>As the Debian Website
4306 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/794116">used</a>
4307 <a href="https://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/webwml/webwml/english/intro/free.wml?r1=1.24&amp;r2=1.25">to</a>
4308 imply, public domain and permissively licensed software can lead to
4309 the production of more proprietary software as people discover useful
4310 software, extend it and or incorporate it into their hardware or
4311 software products.  Copyleft licenses such as the GNU GPL were created
4312 to close off this avenue to the production of proprietary software but
4313 such licenses are not enough.  With the ongoing adoption of Free
4314 Software by individuals and groups, inevitably the community's
4315 expectations of license compliance are violated, usually out of
4316 ignorance of the way Free Software works, but not always.  As Karen
4317 and Bradley explained in <a href="http://faif.us/" title="Free as in
4318 Freedom">FaiF</a>
4319 <a href="http://faif.us/cast/2015/nov/24/0x57/">episode 0x57</a>,
4320 copyleft is nothing if no-one is willing and able to stand up in court
4321 to protect it.  The reality of today's world is that legal
4322 representation is expensive, difficult and time consuming.  With
4323 <a href="http://gpl-violations.org/">gpl-violations.org</a> in hiatus
4324 <a href="http://gpl-violations.org/news/20151027-homepage-recovers/">until</a>
4325 some time in 2016, the <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/">Software
4326 Freedom Conservancy</a> (a tax-exempt charity) is the major defender
4327 of the Linux project, Debian and other groups against GPL violations.
4328 In March the SFC supported a
4329 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/mar/05/vmware-lawsuit/">lawsuit
4330 by Christoph Hellwig</a> against VMware for refusing to
4331 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/linux-compliance/vmware-lawsuit-faq.html">comply
4332 with the GPL</a> in relation to their use of parts of the Linux
4333 kernel.  Since then two of their sponsors pulled corporate funding and
4334 conferences
4335 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/nov/24/faif-carols-fundraiser/">blocked
4336 or cancelled their talks</a>.  As a result they have decided to rely
4337 less on corporate funding and more on the broad community of
4338 individuals who support Free Software and copyleft.  So the SFC has
4339 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/nov/23/2015fundraiser/">launched</a>
4340 a <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/">campaign</a> to create
4341 a community of folks who stand up for copyleft and the GPL by
4342 supporting their work on promoting and supporting copyleft and Free
4343 Software.</p>
4344
4345 <p>If you support Free Software,
4346 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/nov/26/like-what-I-do/">like</a>
4347 what the SFC do, agree with their
4348 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/linux-compliance/principles.html">compliance
4349 principles</a>, are happy about their
4350 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/">successes</a> in 2015,
4351 work on a project that is an SFC
4352 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/members/current/">member</a> and or
4353 just want to stand up for copyleft, please join
4354 <a href="https://identi.ca/cwebber/image/JQGPA4qbTyyp3-MY8QpvuA">Christopher
4355 Allan Webber</a>,
4356 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/nov/24/faif-carols-fundraiser/">Carol
4357 Smith</a>,
4358 <a href="http://www.jonobacon.org/2015/11/25/supporting-software-freedom-conservancy/">Jono
4359 Bacon</a>, myself and
4360 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/sponsors/#supporters">others</a> in
4361 becoming a
4362 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/">supporter</a>.  For the
4363 next week your donation will be
4364 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/nov/27/black-friday/">matched</a>
4365 by an anonymous donor.  Please also consider asking your employer to
4366 match your donation or become a sponsor of SFC.  Don't forget to
4367 spread the word about your support for SFC via email, your blog and or
4368 social media accounts.</p>
4369
4370 </blockquote>
4371
4372 <p>I agree with Paul on this topic and just signed up as a Supporter
4373 of Software Freedom Conservancy myself.  Perhaps you should be a
4374 supporter too?</p>
4375
4376       </div>
4377       <div class="tags">
4378
4379
4380         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/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>.
4381
4382
4383       </div>
4384     </div>
4385     <div class="padding"></div>
4386
4387     <div class="entry">
4388       <div class="title">
4389         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/PGP_key_transition_statement_for_key_EE4E02F9.html">PGP key transition statement for key EE4E02F9</a>
4390       </div>
4391       <div class="date">
4392         17th November 2015
4393       </div>
4394       <div class="body">
4395         <p>I've needed a new OpenPGP key for a while, but have not had time to
4396 set it up properly.  I wanted to generate it offline and have it
4397 available on <a href="http://shop.kernelconcepts.de/#openpgp">a OpenPGP
4398 smart card</a> for daily use, and learning how to do it and finding
4399 time to sit down with an offline machine almost took forever.  But
4400 finally I've been able to complete the process, and have now moved
4401 from my old GPG key to a new GPG key.  See
4402 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-11-17-new-gpg-key-transition.txt">the
4403 full transition statement, signed with both my old and new key</a> for
4404 the details.  This is my new key:</p>
4405
4406 <pre>
4407 pub   3936R/<a href="http://pgp.cs.uu.nl/stats/111D6B29EE4E02F9.html">111D6B29EE4E02F9</a> 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-14]
4408       Key fingerprint = 3AC7 B2E3 ACA5 DF87 78F1  D827 111D 6B29 EE4E 02F9
4409 uid                  Petter Reinholdtsen &lt;pere@hungry.com&gt;
4410 uid                  Petter Reinholdtsen &lt;pere@debian.org&gt;
4411 sub   4096R/87BAFB0E 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-02]
4412 sub   4096R/F91E6DE9 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-02]
4413 sub   4096R/A0439BAB 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-02]
4414 </pre>
4415
4416 <p>The key can be downloaded from the OpenPGP key servers, signed by
4417 my old key.</p>
4418
4419 <p>If you signed my old key
4420 (<a href="http://pgp.cs.uu.nl/stats/DB4CCC4B2A30D729.html">DB4CCC4B2A30D729</a>),
4421 I'd very much appreciate a signature on my new key, details and
4422 instructions in the transition statement. I m happy to reciprocate if
4423 you have a similarly signed transition statement to present.</p>
4424
4425       </div>
4426       <div class="tags">
4427
4428
4429         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>.
4430
4431
4432       </div>
4433     </div>
4434     <div class="padding"></div>
4435
4436     <div class="entry">
4437       <div class="title">
4438         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_Pentagon_deciding_the_Norwegian_negotiating_position_on_Internet_governance_.html">Is Pentagon deciding the Norwegian negotiating position on Internet governance?</a>
4439       </div>
4440       <div class="date">
4441          3rd November 2015
4442       </div>
4443       <div class="body">
4444         <p>In Norway, all government offices are required by law to keep a
4445 list of every document or letter arriving and leaving their offices.
4446 Internal notes should also be documented.  The document list (called a mail
4447 journal - "postjournal" in Norwegian) is public information and thanks
4448 to the Norwegian Freedom of Information Act (Offentleglova) the mail
4449 journal is available for everyone.  Most offices even publish the mail
4450 journal on their web pages, as PDFs or tables in web pages.  The state-level offices even have a shared web based search service (called
4451 <a href="https://www.oep.no/">Offentlig Elektronisk Postjournal -
4452 OEP</a>) to make it possible to search the entries in the list.  Not
4453 all journal entries show up on OEP, and the search service is hard to
4454 use, but OEP does make it easier to find at least some interesting
4455 journal entries .</p>
4456
4457 <p>In 2012 I came across a document in the mail journal for the
4458 Norwegian Ministry of Transport and Communications on OEP that
4459 piqued my interest.  The title of the document was
4460 "<a href="https://www.oep.no/search/resultSingle.html?journalPostId=4192362">Internet
4461 Governance and how it affects national security</a>" (Norwegian:
4462 "Internet Governance og påvirkning på nasjonal sikkerhet").  The
4463 document date was 2012-05-22, and it was said to be sent from the
4464 "Permanent Mission of Norway to the United Nations".  I asked for a
4465 copy, but my request was rejected with a reference to a legal clause said to authorize them to reject it
4466 (<a href="http://lovdata.no/lov/2006-05-19-16/§20">offentleglova § 20,
4467 letter c</a>) and an explanation that the document was exempt because
4468 of foreign policy interests as it contained information related to the
4469 Norwegian negotiating position, negotiating strategies or similar.  I
4470 was told the information in the document related to the ongoing
4471 negotiation in the International Telecommunications Union (ITU).  The
4472 explanation made sense to me in early January 2013, as a ITU
4473 conference in Dubay discussing Internet Governance
4474 (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Telecommunication_Union#World_Conference_on_International_Telecommunications_2012_.28WCIT-12.29">World
4475 Conference on International Telecommunications - WCIT-12</a>) had just
4476 ended,
4477 <a href="http://www.digi.no/kommentarer/2012/12/18/tvil-om-usas-rolle-pa-teletoppmote">reportedly
4478 in chaos</a> when USA walked out of the negotiations and 25 countries
4479 including Norway refused to sign the new treaty.  It seemed
4480 reasonable to believe talks were still going on a few weeks later.
4481 Norway was represented at the ITU meeting by two authorities, the
4482 <a href="http://www.nkom.no/">Norwegian Communications Authority</a>
4483 and the <a href="https://www.regjeringen.no/no/dep/sd/">Ministry of
4484 Transport and Communications</a>.  This might be the reason the letter
4485 was sent to the ministry.  As I was unable to find the document in the
4486 mail journal of any Norwegian UN mission, I asked the ministry who had
4487 sent the document to the ministry, and was told that it was the Deputy
4488 Permanent Representative with the Permanent Mission of Norway in
4489 Geneva.</p>
4490
4491 <p>Three years later, I was still curious about the content of that
4492 document, and again asked for a copy, believing the negotiation was
4493 over now.  This time
4494 <a href="https://mimesbronn.no/request/kopi_av_dokumenter_i_sak_2012914">I
4495 asked both the Ministry of Transport and Communications as the
4496 receiver</a> and
4497 <a href="https://mimesbronn.no/request/brev_om_internet_governance_og_p">asked
4498 the Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva as the sender</a> for a
4499 copy, to see if they both agreed that it should be withheld from the
4500 public.  The ministry upheld its rejection quoting the same law
4501 reference as before, while the permanent mission rejected it quoting a
4502 different clause
4503 (<a href="http://lovdata.no/lov/2006-05-19-16/§20">offentleglova § 20
4504 letter b</a>), claiming that they were required to keep the
4505 content of the document from the public because it contained
4506 information given to Norway with the expressed or implied expectation
4507 that the information should not be made public.  I asked the permanent
4508 mission for an explanation, and was told that the document contained
4509 an account from a meeting held in the Pentagon for a limited group of NATO
4510 nations where the organiser of the meeting did not intend the content
4511 of the meeting to be publicly known.  They explained that giving me a
4512 copy might cause Norway to not get access to similar information in
4513 the future and thus hurt the future foreign interests of Norway.  They
4514 also explained that the Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva was not
4515 the author of the document, they only got a copy of it, and because of
4516 this had not listed it in their mail journal.</p>
4517
4518 <p>Armed with this
4519 knowledge I asked the Ministry to reconsider and asked who was the
4520 author of the document, now realising that it was not same as the
4521 "sender" according to Ministry of Transport and Communications.  The
4522 ministry upheld its rejection but told me the name of the author of
4523 the document.  According to
4524 <a href="https://www.regjeringen.no/no/aktuelt/unga69_rapport1/id2001204/">a
4525 government report</a> the author was with the Permanent Mission of
4526 Norway in New York a bit more than a year later (2014-09-22), so I
4527 guessed that might be the office responsible for writing and sending
4528 the report initially and
4529 <a href="https://www.mimesbronn.no/request/mote_2012_i_pentagon_om_itu">asked
4530 them for a copy</a> but I was obviously wrong as I was told that the
4531 document was unknown to them and that the author did not work there
4532 when the document was written.  Next, I asked the Permanent Mission of
4533 Norway in Geneva and the Foreign Ministry to reconsider and at least
4534 tell me who sent the document to Deputy Permanent Representative with
4535 the Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva.  The Foreign Ministry also
4536 upheld its rejection, but told me that the person sending the document
4537 to Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva was the defence attaché with
4538 the Norwegian Embassy in Washington.  I do not know if this is the
4539 same person as the author of the document.</p>
4540
4541 <p>If I understand the situation correctly, someone capable of
4542 inviting selected NATO nations to a meeting in Pentagon organised a
4543 meeting where someone representing the Norwegian defence attaché in
4544 Washington attended, and the account from this meeting is interpreted
4545 by the Ministry of Transport and Communications to expose Norways
4546 negotiating position, negotiating strategies and similar regarding the
4547 ITU negotiations on Internet Governance.  It is truly amazing what can
4548 be derived from mere meta-data.</p>
4549
4550 <p>I wonder which NATO countries besides Norway attended this meeting?
4551 And what exactly was said and done at the meeting?  Anyone know?</p>
4552
4553       </div>
4554       <div class="tags">
4555
4556
4557         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn</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>.
4558
4559
4560       </div>
4561     </div>
4562     <div class="padding"></div>
4563
4564     <div class="entry">
4565       <div class="title">
4566         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_book___Fri_kultur__by__lessig__a_Norwegian_Bokm_l_translation_of__Free_Culture__from_2004.html">New book, "Fri kultur" by @lessig, a Norwegian Bokmål translation of "Free Culture" from 2004</a>
4567       </div>
4568       <div class="date">
4569         31st October 2015
4570       </div>
4571       <div class="body">
4572         <p>People keep asking me where to get the various forms of the book I
4573 published last week, the Norwegian Bokmål edition of Lawrence Lessigs
4574 book <a href="http://www.free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a>.  It was
4575 published on paper via lulu.com, and is also available in PDF, ePub
4576 and MOBI format.  I currently sell the paper edition for self cost
4577 from lulu.com, but might extend the distribution to book stores like
4578 Amazon and Barnes & Noble later.  This will double the price and force
4579 me to make a profit from selling the book.  Anyway, here are links to
4580 get the book in different formats:</p>
4581
4582 <ul>
4583
4584   <li><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/fri-kultur/paperback/product-22406445.html">Buy
4585     paper edition from lulu.com</a></li>
4586
4587   <li><a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf">Download
4588     PDF, size 7.9 MiB</a> (gratis/free)</li>
4589
4590   <li><a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub">Download
4591     ePub, size 11 MiB</a> (gratis/free)</li>
4592
4593   <li><a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/archive/freeculture.nb.mobi">Download
4594     MOBI, size 3.8 MiB</a> (gratis/free)</li>
4595
4596 </ul>
4597
4598 <p>Note that the MOBI version have problems with the table of content,
4599 at least with the viewers I have been able to test.  And the ePub file
4600 have several problems according to
4601 <a href="https://github.com/IDPF/epubcheck">epubcheck</a>, but seem
4602 to display fine in the viewers I have tested.  All the files needed to
4603 create the book in various forms are available from
4604 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">the
4605 github project page</a>.</p>
4606
4607 <p>The project got press coverage from the Norwegian IT news site
4608 digi.no.  Check out the article
4609 "<a href="http://www.digi.no/juss_og_samfunn/2015/10/29/vil-apne-politikernes-oyne-for-creative-commons">Vil
4610 åpne politikernes øyne for Creative Commons</a>".</li>
4611
4612 <p>I've <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">blogged
4613 about the project</a> as it moved along.  The blogs document the translation
4614 progress and insights I had along the way.</p>
4615
4616       </div>
4617       <div class="tags">
4618
4619
4620         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>.
4621
4622
4623       </div>
4624     </div>
4625     <div class="padding"></div>
4626
4627     <div class="entry">
4628       <div class="title">
4629         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/_Free_Culture__by__lessig___The_background_story_for_Creative_Commons___new_edition_available.html">"Free Culture" by @lessig - The background story for Creative Commons - new edition available</a>
4630       </div>
4631       <div class="date">
4632         23rd October 2015
4633       </div>
4634       <div class="body">
4635         <p><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22402863.html">Click
4636 here to buy the book</a>.</p>
4637
4638 <p>In 2004, as the <a href="https://creativecommons.org/">Creative Commons
4639 movement</a> gained momentum, its creator Lawrence Lessig wrote the
4640 book <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Culture_(book)">Free
4641 Culture</a> to explain the problems with increasing copyright
4642 regulation and suggest some solutions.  I read the book back then and
4643 was very moved by it.  Reading the book inspired me and changed the
4644 way I looked on copyright law, and I would love it if more people
4645 would read it too.</p>
4646
4647 <p>Because of this, I decided in the summer of 2012 to translate it to
4648 Norwegian Bokmål and publish it for those of my friends and family
4649 that prefer to read books in Norwegian.  I translated the book using
4650 docbook and a gettext PO file, and a byproduct of this process is a
4651 new edition of the English original.  I've been in touch with the
4652 author during by work, and he said it was fine with him if I also
4653 published an English version.  So I decided to do so.  Today, I made
4654 this edition
4655 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22402863.html">available
4656 for sale on Lulu.com</a>, for those interested in a paper book.  This
4657 is the cover:
4658
4659 <p align="center"><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22402863.html"><img align="center" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-10-23-free-culture-english-published-cover.png"/></a></p>
4660
4661 <p>The Norwegian Bokmål version will be available for purchase in a
4662 few days.  I also plan to publish a French version in a few weeks or
4663 months, depending on the amount of people with knowledge of French to
4664 join the translation project.  So far there is only one active
4665 person, but the French book is almost completely translated but
4666 need some proof reading.</p>
4667
4668 <p>The book is also available in PDF, ePub and MOBI formats from
4669 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">my
4670 github project page</a>.  Note the ePub and MOBI versions have some
4671 formatting problems I believe is due to bugs in the docbook tool
4672 dbtoepub (Debian BTS issues
4673 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=795842">#795842</a>
4674 and
4675 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=796871">#796871</a>),
4676 but I have not taken the time to investigate.  I recommend the PDF and
4677 ePub version for now, as they seem to show up fine in the viewers I
4678 have available.</p>
4679
4680 <p>After the translation to Norwegian Bokmål was complete, I was able
4681 to secure some sponsoring from
4682 <a href="http://www.nuugfoundation.no/">the NUUG Foundation</a> to
4683 print the book.  This is the reason their logo is located on the back
4684 cover. I am very grateful for their contribution, and will use it to
4685 give a copy of the Norwegian edition to members of the Norwegian
4686 Parliament and other decision makers here in Norway.</p>
4687
4688       </div>
4689       <div class="tags">
4690
4691
4692         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>.
4693
4694
4695       </div>
4696     </div>
4697     <div class="padding"></div>
4698
4699     <div class="entry">
4700       <div class="title">
4701         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lawrence_Lessig_interviewed_Edward_Snowden_a_year_ago.html">Lawrence Lessig interviewed Edward Snowden a year ago</a>
4702       </div>
4703       <div class="date">
4704         19th October 2015
4705       </div>
4706       <div class="body">
4707         <p>Last year, <a href="https://lessig2016.us/">US president candidate
4708 in the Democratic Party</a> Lawrence interviewed Edward Snowden.  The
4709 one hour interview was
4710 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_Sr96TFQQE">published by
4711 Harvard Law School 2014-10-23 on Youtube</a>, and the meeting took
4712 place 2014-10-20.</p>
4713
4714 <p>The questions are very good, and there is lots of useful
4715 information to be learned and very interesting issues to think about
4716 being raised.  Please check it out.</p>
4717
4718 <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/o_Sr96TFQQE" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
4719
4720 <p>I find it especially interesting to hear again that Snowden did try
4721 to bring up his reservations through the official channels without any
4722 luck.  It is in sharp contrast to the answers made 2013-11-06 by the
4723 Norwegian prime minister Erna Solberg to the Norwegian Parliament,
4724 <a href="https://tale.holderdeord.no/speeches/s131106/68">claiming
4725 Snowden is no Whistle-Blower</a> because he should have taken up his
4726 concerns internally and using official channels.  It make me sad
4727 that this is the political leadership we have here in Norway.</p>
4728
4729       </div>
4730       <div class="tags">
4731
4732
4733         Tags: <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>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
4734
4735
4736       </div>
4737     </div>
4738     <div class="padding"></div>
4739
4740     <div class="entry">
4741       <div class="title">
4742         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Story_of_Aaron_Swartz___Let_us_all_weep_.html">The Story of Aaron Swartz - Let us all weep!</a>
4743       </div>
4744       <div class="date">
4745          8th October 2015
4746       </div>
4747       <div class="body">
4748         <p>The movie "<a href="http://www.takepart.com/internets-own-boy">The
4749 Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz</a>" is both inspiring
4750 and depressing at the same time.  The work of Aaron Swartz has
4751 inspired me in my work, and I am grateful of all the improvements he
4752 was able to initiate or complete.  I wish I am able to do as much good
4753 in my life as he did in his.  Every minute of this 1:45 long movie is
4754 inspiring in documenting how much impact a single person can have on
4755 improving the society and this world.  And it is depressing in
4756 documenting how the law enforcement of USA (and other countries) is
4757 corrupted to a point where they can push a bright kid to his death for
4758 downloading too many scientific articles.  Aaron is dead.  Let us all
4759 weep.</p>
4760
4761 <p>The movie is also available on
4762 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXr-2hwTk58">Youtube</a>.  I
4763 wish there were Norwegian subtitles available, so I could show it to
4764 my parents.</p>
4765
4766       </div>
4767       <div class="tags">
4768
4769
4770         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>.
4771
4772
4773       </div>
4774     </div>
4775     <div class="padding"></div>
4776
4777     <div class="entry">
4778       <div class="title">
4779         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/French_Docbook_PDF_EPUB_MOBI_edition_of_the_Free_Culture_book.html">French Docbook/PDF/EPUB/MOBI edition of the Free Culture book</a>
4780       </div>
4781       <div class="date">
4782          1st October 2015
4783       </div>
4784       <div class="body">
4785         <p>As I wrap up the Norwegian version of
4786 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">Free
4787 Culture</a> book by Lawrence Lessig (still waiting for my final proof
4788 reading copy to arrive in the mail), my great
4789 <a href="http://dblatex.sourceforge.net/">dblatex</a> helper and
4790 developer of the dblatex docbook processor, Benoît Guillon, decided a
4791 to try to create a French version of the book.  He started with the
4792 French translation available from the
4793 <a href="http://www.wikilivres.ca/wiki/Culture_libre">Wikilivres wiki
4794 pages</a>, and wrote a program to convert it into a PO file, allowing
4795 the translation to be integrated into the po4a based framework I use
4796 to create the Norwegian translation from the English edition.  We meet
4797 on the <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23dblatex">#dblatex IRC
4798 channel</a> to discuss the work.  If you want to help create a French
4799 edition, check out
4800 <a href="https://github.com/marsgui/free-culture-lessig">his git
4801 repository</a> and join us on IRC.  If the French edition look good,
4802 we might publish it as a paper book on lulu.com.  A French version of
4803 the drawings and the cover need to be provided for this to happen.</p>
4804
4805       </div>
4806       <div class="tags">
4807
4808
4809         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>.
4810
4811
4812       </div>
4813     </div>
4814     <div class="padding"></div>
4815
4816     <div class="entry">
4817       <div class="title">
4818         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_life_and_death_of_a_laptop_battery.html">The life and death of a laptop battery</a>
4819       </div>
4820       <div class="date">
4821         24th September 2015
4822       </div>
4823       <div class="body">
4824         <p>When I get a new laptop, the battery life time at the start is OK.
4825 But this do not last.  The last few laptops gave me a feeling that
4826 within a year, the life time is just a fraction of what it used to be,
4827 and it slowly become painful to use the laptop without power connected
4828 all the time.  Because of this, when I got a new Thinkpad X230 laptop
4829 about two years ago, I decided to monitor its battery state to have
4830 more hard facts when the battery started to fail.</p>
4831
4832 <img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-09-24-laptop-battery-graph.png"/>
4833
4834 <p>First I tried to find a sensible Debian package to record the
4835 battery status, assuming that this must be a problem already handled
4836 by someone else.  I found
4837 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats</a>,
4838 which collects statistics from the battery, but it was completely
4839 broken.  I sent a few suggestions to the maintainer, but decided to
4840 write my own collector as a shell script while I waited for feedback
4841 from him.  Via
4842 <a href="http://www.ifweassume.com/2013/08/the-de-evolution-of-my-laptop-battery.html">a
4843 blog post about the battery development on a MacBook Air</a> I also
4844 discovered
4845 <a href="https://github.com/jradavenport/batlog.git">batlog</a>, not
4846 available in Debian.</p>
4847
4848 <p>I started my collector 2013-07-15, and it has been collecting
4849 battery stats ever since. Now my
4850 /var/log/hjemmenett-battery-status.log file contain around 115,000
4851 measurements, from the time the battery was working great until now,
4852 when it is unable to charge above 7% of original capacity.  My
4853 collector shell script is quite simple and look like this:</p>
4854
4855 <pre>
4856 #!/bin/sh
4857 # Inspired by
4858 # http://www.ifweassume.com/2013/08/the-de-evolution-of-my-laptop-battery.html
4859 # See also
4860 # http://blog.sleeplessbeastie.eu/2013/01/02/debian-how-to-monitor-battery-capacity/
4861 logfile=/var/log/hjemmenett-battery-status.log
4862
4863 files="manufacturer model_name technology serial_number \
4864     energy_full energy_full_design energy_now cycle_count status"
4865
4866 if [ ! -e "$logfile" ] ; then
4867     (
4868         printf "timestamp,"
4869         for f in $files; do
4870             printf "%s," $f
4871         done
4872         echo
4873     ) > "$logfile"
4874 fi
4875
4876 log_battery() {
4877     # Print complete message in one echo call, to avoid race condition
4878     # when several log processes run in parallel.
4879     msg=$(printf "%s," $(date +%s); \
4880         for f in $files; do \
4881             printf "%s," $(cat $f); \
4882         done)
4883     echo "$msg"
4884 }
4885
4886 cd /sys/class/power_supply
4887
4888 for bat in BAT*; do
4889     (cd $bat && log_battery >> "$logfile")
4890 done
4891 </pre>
4892
4893 <p>The script is called when the power management system detect a
4894 change in the power status (power plug in or out), and when going into
4895 and out of hibernation and suspend.  In addition, it collect a value
4896 every 10 minutes.  This make it possible for me know when the battery
4897 is discharging, charging and how the maximum charge change over time.
4898 The code for the Debian package
4899 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-status">is now
4900 available on github</a>.</p>
4901
4902 <p>The collected log file look like this:</p>
4903
4904 <pre>
4905 timestamp,manufacturer,model_name,technology,serial_number,energy_full,energy_full_design,energy_now,cycle_count,status,
4906 1376591133,LGC,45N1025,Li-ion,974,62800000,62160000,39050000,0,Discharging,
4907 [...]
4908 1443090528,LGC,45N1025,Li-ion,974,4900000,62160000,4900000,0,Full,
4909 1443090601,LGC,45N1025,Li-ion,974,4900000,62160000,4900000,0,Full,
4910 </pre>
4911
4912 <p>I wrote a small script to create a graph of the charge development
4913 over time.  This graph depicted above show the slow death of my laptop
4914 battery.</p>
4915
4916 <p>But why is this happening?  Why are my laptop batteries always
4917 dying in a year or two, while the batteries of space probes and
4918 satellites keep working year after year.  If we are to believe
4919 <a href="http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_prolong_lithium_based_batteries">Battery
4920 University</a>, the cause is me charging the battery whenever I have a
4921 chance, and the fix is to not charge the Lithium-ion batteries to 100%
4922 all the time, but to stay below 90% of full charge most of the time.
4923 I've been told that the Tesla electric cars
4924 <a href="http://my.teslamotors.com/de_CH/forum/forums/battery-charge-limit">limit
4925 the charge of their batteries to 80%</a>, with the option to charge to
4926 100% when preparing for a longer trip (not that I would want a car
4927 like Tesla where rights to privacy is abandoned, but that is another
4928 story), which I guess is the option we should have for laptops on
4929 Linux too.</p>
4930
4931 <p>Is there a good and generic way with Linux to tell the battery to
4932 stop charging at 80%, unless requested to charge to 100% once in
4933 preparation for a longer trip?  I found
4934 <a href="http://askubuntu.com/questions/34452/how-can-i-limit-battery-charging-to-80-capacity">one
4935 recipe on askubuntu for Ubuntu to limit charging on Thinkpad to
4936 80%</a>, but could not get it to work (kernel module refused to
4937 load).</p>
4938
4939 <p>I wonder why the battery capacity was reported to be more than 100%
4940 at the start.  I also wonder why the "full capacity" increases some
4941 times, and if it is possible to repeat the process to get the battery
4942 back to design capacity.  And I wonder if the discharge and charge
4943 speed change over time, or if this stay the same.  I did not yet try
4944 to write a tool to calculate the derivative values of the battery
4945 level, but suspect some interesting insights might be learned from
4946 those.</p>
4947
4948 <p>Update 2015-09-24: I got a tip to install the packages
4949 acpi-call-dkms and tlp (unfortunately missing in Debian stable)
4950 packages instead of the tp-smapi-dkms package I had tried to use
4951 initially, and use 'tlp setcharge 40 80' to change when charging start
4952 and stop.  I've done so now, but expect my existing battery is toast
4953 and need to be replaced.  The proposal is unfortunately Thinkpad
4954 specific.</p>
4955
4956       </div>
4957       <div class="tags">
4958
4959
4960         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>.
4961
4962
4963       </div>
4964     </div>
4965     <div class="padding"></div>
4966
4967     <div class="entry">
4968       <div class="title">
4969         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Book_cover_for_the_Free_Culture_book_finally_done.html">Book cover for the Free Culture book finally done</a>
4970       </div>
4971       <div class="date">
4972          3rd September 2015
4973       </div>
4974       <div class="body">
4975         <p>Creating a good looking book cover proved harder than I expected.
4976 I wanted to create a cover looking similar to the original cover of
4977 the
4978 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">Free
4979 Culture</a> book we are translating to Norwegian, and I wanted it in
4980 vector format for high resolution printing.  But my inkscape knowledge
4981 were not nearly good enough to pull that off.
4982
4983 <p>But thanks to the great inkscape community, I was able to wrap up
4984 the cover yesterday evening.  I asked on the
4985 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23inkscape">#inkscape IRC channel</a>
4986 on Freenode for help and clues, and Marc Jeanmougin (Mc-) volunteered
4987 to try to recreate it based on the PDF of the cover from the HTML
4988 version.  Not only did he create a
4989 <a href="https://marc.jeanmougin.fr/share/copy1.svg ">SVG document with
4990 the original and his vector version side by side</a>, he even provided
4991 an <a href="https://marc.jeanmougin.fr/share/out-1.ogv">instruction
4992 video</a> explaining how he did it</a>.  But the instruction video is
4993 not easy to follow for an untrained inkscape user. The video is a
4994 recording on how he did it, and he is obviously very experienced as
4995 the menu selections are very quick and he mentioned on IRC that he did
4996 use some keyboard shortcuts that can't be seen on the video, but it
4997 give a good idea about the inkscape operations to use to create the
4998 stripes with the embossed copyright sign in the center.</p>
4999
5000 <p>I took his SVG file, copied the vector image and re-sized it to fit
5001 on the cover I was drawing.  I am happy with the end result, and the
5002 current english version look like this:</p>
5003
5004 <img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-09-03-free-culture-cover.png" width="70%" align="center"/>
5005
5006 <p>I am not quite sure about the text on the back, but guess it will
5007 do.  I picked three quotes from the official site for the book, and
5008 hope it will work to trigger the interest of potential readers.  The
5009 Norwegian cover will look the same, but with the texts and bar code
5010 replaced with the Norwegian version.</p>
5011
5012 <p>The book is very close to being ready for publication, and I expect
5013 to upload the final draft to Lulu in the next few days and order a
5014 final proof reading copy to verify that everything look like it should
5015 before allowing everyone to order their own copy of Free Culture, in
5016 English or Norwegian Bokmål.  I'm waiting to give the the productive
5017 proof readers a chance to complete their work.</p>
5018
5019       </div>
5020       <div class="tags">
5021
5022
5023         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>.
5024
5025
5026       </div>
5027     </div>
5028     <div class="padding"></div>
5029
5030     <div class="entry">
5031       <div class="title">
5032         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/In_my_hand__a_pocket_book_edition_of_the_Norwegian_Free_Culture_book_.html">In my hand, a pocket book edition of the Norwegian Free Culture book!</a>
5033       </div>
5034       <div class="date">
5035         19th August 2015
5036       </div>
5037       <div class="body">
5038         <p>Today, finally, my first printed draft edition of the Norwegian
5039 translation of Free Culture I have been working on for the last few
5040 years arrived in the mail.  I had to fake a cover to get the interior
5041 printed, and the exterior of the book look awful, but that is
5042 irrelevant at this point.  I asked for a printed pocket book version
5043 to get an idea about the font sizes and paper format as well as how
5044 good the figures and images look in print, but also to test what the
5045 pocket book version would look like.  After receiving the 500 page
5046 pocket book, it became obvious to me that that pocket book size is too
5047 small for this book.  I believe the book is too thick, and several
5048 tables and figures do not look good in the size they get with that
5049 small page sizes.  I believe I will go with the 5.5x8.5 inch size
5050 instead.  A surprise discovery from the paper version was how bad the
5051 URLs look in print.  They are very hard to read in the colophon page.
5052 The URLs are red in the PDF, but light gray on paper.  I need to
5053 change the color of links somehow to look better.  But there is a
5054 printed book in my hand, and it feels great. :)</p>
5055
5056 <p>Now I only need to fix the cover, wrap up the postscript with the
5057 store behind the book, and collect the last corrections from the proof
5058 readers before the book is ready for proper printing.  Cover artists
5059 willing to work for free and create a Creative Commons licensed vector
5060 file looking similar to the original is most welcome, as my skills as
5061 a graphics designer are mostly missing.</p>
5062
5063       </div>
5064       <div class="tags">
5065
5066
5067         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>.
5068
5069
5070       </div>
5071     </div>
5072     <div class="padding"></div>
5073
5074     <div class="entry">
5075       <div class="title">
5076         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_paper_version_of_the_Norwegian_Free_Culture_book_heading_my_way.html">First paper version of the Norwegian Free Culture book heading my way</a>
5077       </div>
5078       <div class="date">
5079          9th August 2015
5080       </div>
5081       <div class="body">
5082         <p>Typesetting a book is harder than I hoped.  As the translation is
5083 mostly done, and a volunteer proof reader was going to check the text
5084 on paper, it was time this summer to focus on formatting my translated
5085 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> based version of the
5086 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> book by Lawrence
5087 Lessig.  I've been trying to get both docboox-xsl+fop and dblatex to
5088 give me a good looking PDF, but in the end I went with dblatex, because
5089 its Debian maintainer and upstream developer were responsive and very
5090 helpful in solving my formatting challenges.</p>
5091
5092 <p>Last night, I finally managed to create a PDF that no longer made
5093 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/">Lulu.com</a> complain after uploading,
5094 and I ordered a text version of the book on paper.  It is lacking a
5095 proper book cover and is not tagged with the correct ISBN number, but
5096 should give me an idea what the finished book will look like.</p>
5097
5098 <p>Instead of using Lulu, I did consider printing the book using
5099 <a href="http://www.createspace.com/">CreateSpace</a>, but ended up
5100 using Lulu because it had smaller book size options (CreateSpace seem
5101 to lack pocket book with extended distribution).  I looked for a
5102 similar service in Norway, but have not seen anything so far.  Please
5103 let me know if I am missing out on something here.</p>
5104
5105 <p>But I still struggle to decide the book size.  Should I go for
5106 pocket book (4.25x6.875 inches / 10.8x17.5 cm) with 556 pages, Digest
5107 (5.5x8.5 inches / 14x21.6 cm) with 323 pages or US Trade (6x8 inches /
5108 15.3x22.9 cm) with 280 pages?  Fewer pager give a cheaper book, and a
5109 smaller book is easier to carry around.  The test book I ordered was
5110 pocket book sized, to give me an idea how well that fit in my hand,
5111 but I suspect I will end up using a digest sized book in the end to
5112 bring the prize down further.</p>
5113
5114 <p>My biggest challenge at the moment is making nice cover art.  My
5115 inkscape skills are not yet up to the task of replicating the original
5116 cover in SVG format.  I also need to figure out what to write about
5117 the book on the back (will most likely use the same text as the
5118 description on web based book stores).  I would love help with this,
5119 if you are willing to license the art source and final version using
5120 the same CC license as the book.  My artistic skills are not really up
5121 to the task.</p>
5122
5123 <p>I plan to publish the book in both English and Norwegian and on
5124 paper, in PDF form as well as EPUB and MOBI format.  The current
5125 status can as usual be found on
5126 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>
5127 in the archive/ directory.  So far I have spent all time on making the
5128 PDF version look good.  Someone should probably do the same with the
5129 dbtoepub generated e-book.  Help is definitely needed here, as I
5130 expect to run out of steem before I find time to improve the epub
5131 formatting.</p>
5132
5133 <p>Please let me know via github if you find typos in the book or
5134 discover translations that should be improved.  The final proof
5135 reading is being done right now, and I expect to publish the finished
5136 result in a few months.</p>
5137
5138       </div>
5139       <div class="tags">
5140
5141
5142         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>.
5143
5144
5145       </div>
5146     </div>
5147     <div class="padding"></div>
5148
5149     <div class="entry">
5150       <div class="title">
5151         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Typesetting_DocBook_footnotes_as_endnotes_with_dblatex.html">Typesetting DocBook footnotes as endnotes with dblatex</a>
5152       </div>
5153       <div class="date">
5154         16th July 2015
5155       </div>
5156       <div class="body">
5157         <p>I'm still working on the Norwegian version of the
5158 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture book by Lawrence
5159 Lessig</a>, and is now working on the final typesetting and layout.
5160 One of the features I want to get the structure similar to the
5161 original book is to typeset the footnotes as endnotes in the notes
5162 chapter.  Based on the
5163 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/685063">feedback from the Debian
5164 maintainer and the dblatex developer</a>, I came up with this recipe I
5165 would like to share with you.  The proposal was to create a new LaTeX
5166 class file and add the LaTeX code there, but this is not always
5167 practical, when I want to be able to replace the class using a make
5168 file variable.  So my proposal misuses the latex.begindocument XSL
5169 parameter value, to get a small fragment into the correct location in
5170 the generated LaTeX File.</p>
5171
5172 <p>First, decide where in the DocBook document to place the endnotes,
5173 and add this text there:</p>
5174
5175 <pre>
5176 &lt;?latex \theendnotes ?&gt;
5177 </pre>
5178
5179 <p>Next, create a xsl stylesheet file dblatex-endnotes.xsl to add the
5180 code needed to add the endnote instructions in the preamble of the
5181 generated LaTeX document, with content like this:</p>
5182
5183 <pre>
5184 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
5185 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'&gt;
5186   &lt;xsl:param name="latex.begindocument"&gt;
5187     &lt;xsl:text&gt;
5188 \usepackage{endnotes}
5189 \let\footnote=\endnote
5190 \def\enoteheading{\mbox{}\par\vskip-\baselineskip }
5191 \begin{document}
5192     &lt;/xsl:text&gt;
5193   &lt;/xsl:param&gt;
5194 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
5195 </pre>
5196
5197 <p>Finally, load this xsl file when running dblatex, for example like
5198 this:</p>
5199
5200 <pre>
5201 dblatex --xsl-user=dblatex-endnotes.xsl freeculture.nb.xml
5202 </pre>
5203
5204 <p>The end result can be seen on github, where
5205 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">my
5206 book project</a> is located.</p>
5207
5208       </div>
5209       <div class="tags">
5210
5211
5212         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>.
5213
5214
5215       </div>
5216     </div>
5217     <div class="padding"></div>
5218
5219     <div class="entry">
5220       <div class="title">
5221         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/MPEG_LA_on__Internet_Broadcast_AVC_Video__licensing_and_non_private_use.html">MPEG LA on "Internet Broadcast AVC Video" licensing and non-private use</a>
5222       </div>
5223       <div class="date">
5224          7th July 2015
5225       </div>
5226       <div class="body">
5227         <p>After asking the Norwegian Broadcasting Company (NRK)
5228 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Hva_gj_r_at_NRK_kan_distribuere_H_264_video_uten_patentavtale_med_MPEG_LA_.html">why
5229 they can broadcast and stream H.264 video without an agreement with
5230 the MPEG LA</a>, I was wiser, but still confused.  So I asked MPEG LA
5231 if their understanding matched that of NRK.  As far as I can tell, it
5232 does not.</p>
5233
5234 <p>I started by asking for more information about the various
5235 licensing classes and what exactly is covered by the "Internet
5236 Broadcast AVC Video" class that NRK pointed me at to explain why NRK
5237 did not need a license for streaming H.264 video:
5238
5239 <p><blockquote>
5240
5241 <p>According to
5242 <a href="http://www.mpegla.com/Lists/MPEG%20LA%20News%20List/Attachments/226/n-10-02-02.pdf">a
5243 MPEG LA press release dated 2010-02-02</a>, there is no charge when
5244 using MPEG AVC/H.264 according to the terms of "Internet Broadcast AVC
5245 Video".  I am trying to understand exactly what the terms of "Internet
5246 Broadcast AVC Video" is, and wondered if you could help me.  What
5247 exactly is covered by these terms, and what is not?</p>
5248
5249 <p>The only source of more information I have been able to find is a
5250 PDF named
5251 <a href="http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/avc/Documents/avcweb.pdf">AVC
5252 Patent Portfolio License Briefing</a>, which states this about the
5253 fees:</p>
5254
5255 <ul>
5256  <li>Where End User pays for AVC Video
5257   <ul>
5258    <li>Subscription (not limited by title) – 100,000 or fewer
5259      subscribers/yr = no royalty; &gt; 100,000 to 250,000 subscribers/yr =
5260      $25,000; &gt;250,000 to 500,000 subscribers/yr = $50,000; &gt;500,000 to
5261      1M subscribers/yr = $75,000; &gt;1M subscribers/yr = $100,000</li>
5262
5263    <li>Title-by-Title - 12 minutes or less = no royalty; &gt;12 minutes in
5264      length = lower of (a) 2% or (b) $0.02 per title</li>
5265   </ul></li>
5266
5267  <li>Where remuneration is from other sources
5268   <ul>
5269    <li>Free Television - (a) one-time $2,500 per transmission encoder or
5270      (b) annual fee starting at $2,500 for &gt; 100,000 HH rising to
5271      maximum $10,000 for &gt;1,000,000 HH</li>
5272
5273    <li>Internet Broadcast AVC Video (not title-by-title, not subscription)
5274      – no royalty for life of the AVC Patent Portfolio License</li>
5275   </ul></li>
5276 </ul>
5277
5278 <p>Am I correct in assuming that the four categories listed is the
5279 categories used when selecting licensing terms, and that "Internet
5280 Broadcast AVC Video" is the category for things that do not fall into
5281 one of the other three categories?  Can you point me to a good source
5282 explaining what is ment by "title-by-title" and "Free Television" in
5283 the license terms for AVC/H.264?</p>
5284
5285 <p>Will a web service providing H.264 encoded video content in a
5286 "video on demand" fashing similar to Youtube and Vimeo, where no
5287 subscription is required and no payment is required from end users to
5288 get access to the videos, fall under the terms of the "Internet
5289 Broadcast AVC Video", ie no royalty for life of the AVC Patent
5290 Portfolio license?  Does it matter if some users are subscribed to get
5291 access to personalized services?</p>
5292
5293 <p>Note, this request and all answers will be published on the
5294 Internet.</p>
5295 </blockquote></p>
5296
5297 <p>The answer came quickly from Benjamin J. Myers, Licensing Associate
5298 with the MPEG LA:</p>
5299
5300 <p><blockquote>
5301 <p>Thank you for your message and for your interest in MPEG LA.  We
5302 appreciate hearing from you and I will be happy to assist you.</p>
5303
5304 <p>As you are aware, MPEG LA offers our AVC Patent Portfolio License
5305 which provides coverage under patents that are essential for use of
5306 the AVC/H.264 Standard (MPEG-4 Part 10).  Specifically, coverage is
5307 provided for end products and video content that make use of AVC/H.264
5308 technology.  Accordingly, the party offering such end products and
5309 video to End Users concludes the AVC License and is responsible for
5310 paying the applicable royalties.</p>
5311
5312 <p>Regarding Internet Broadcast AVC Video, the AVC License generally
5313 defines such content to be video that is distributed to End Users over
5314 the Internet free-of-charge.  Therefore, if a party offers a service
5315 which allows users to upload AVC/H.264 video to its website, and such
5316 AVC Video is delivered to End Users for free, then such video would
5317 receive coverage under the sublicense for Internet Broadcast AVC
5318 Video, which is not subject to any royalties for the life of the AVC
5319 License.  This would also apply in the scenario where a user creates a
5320 free online account in order to receive a customized offering of free
5321 AVC Video content.  In other words, as long as the End User is given
5322 access to or views AVC Video content at no cost to the End User, then
5323 no royalties would be payable under our AVC License.</p>
5324
5325 <p>On the other hand, if End Users pay for access to AVC Video for a
5326 specific period of time (e.g., one month, one year, etc.), then such
5327 video would constitute Subscription AVC Video.  In cases where AVC
5328 Video is delivered to End Users on a pay-per-view basis, then such
5329 content would constitute Title-by-Title AVC Video.  If a party offers
5330 Subscription or Title-by-Title AVC Video to End Users, then they would
5331 be responsible for paying the applicable royalties you noted below.</p>
5332
5333 <p>Finally, in the case where AVC Video is distributed for free
5334 through an "over-the-air, satellite and/or cable transmission", then
5335 such content would constitute Free Television AVC Video and would be
5336 subject to the applicable royalties.</p>
5337
5338 <p>For your reference, I have attached
5339 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-07-07-mpegla.pdf">a
5340 .pdf copy of the AVC License</a>. You will find the relevant
5341 sublicense information regarding AVC Video in Sections 2.2 through
5342 2.5, and the corresponding royalties in Section 3.1.2 through 3.1.4.
5343 You will also find the definitions of Title-by-Title AVC Video,
5344 Subscription AVC Video, Free Television AVC Video, and Internet
5345 Broadcast AVC Video in Section 1 of the License.  Please note that the
5346 electronic copy is provided for informational purposes only and cannot
5347 be used for execution.</p>
5348
5349 <p>I hope the above information is helpful.  If you have additional
5350 questions or need further assistance with the AVC License, please feel
5351 free to contact me directly.</p>
5352 </blockquote></p>
5353
5354 <p>Having a fresh copy of the license text was useful, and knowing
5355 that the definition of Title-by-Title required payment per title made
5356 me aware that my earlier understanding of that phrase had been wrong.
5357 But I still had a few questions:</p>
5358
5359 <p><blockquote>
5360 <p>I have a small followup question.  Would it be possible for me to get
5361 a license with MPEG LA even if there are no royalties to be paid?  The
5362 reason I ask, is that some video related products have a copyright
5363 clause limiting their use without a license with MPEG LA.  The clauses
5364 typically look similar to this:
5365
5366 <p><blockquote>
5367   This product is licensed under the AVC patent portfolio license for
5368   the personal and non-commercial use of a consumer to (a) encode
5369   video in compliance with the AVC standard ("AVC video") and/or (b)
5370   decode AVC video that was encoded by a consumer engaged in a
5371   personal and non-commercial activity and/or AVC video that was
5372   obtained from a video provider licensed to provide AVC video. No
5373   license is granted or shall be implied for any other use. additional
5374   information may be obtained from MPEG LA L.L.C.
5375 </blockquote></p>
5376
5377 <p>It is unclear to me if this clause mean that I need to enter into
5378 an agreement with MPEG LA to use the product in question, even if
5379 there are no royalties to be paid to MPEG LA.  I suspect it will
5380 differ depending on the jurisdiction, and mine is Norway.  What is
5381 MPEG LAs view on this?</p>
5382 </blockquote></p>
5383
5384 <p>According to the answer, MPEG LA believe those using such tools for
5385 non-personal or commercial use need a license with them:</p>
5386
5387 <p><blockquote>
5388
5389 <p>With regard to the Notice to Customers, I would like to begin by
5390 clarifying that the Notice from Section 7.1 of the AVC License
5391 reads:</p>
5392
5393 <p>THIS PRODUCT IS LICENSED UNDER THE AVC PATENT PORTFOLIO LICENSE FOR
5394 THE PERSONAL USE OF A CONSUMER OR OTHER USES IN WHICH IT DOES NOT
5395 RECEIVE REMUNERATION TO (i) ENCODE VIDEO IN COMPLIANCE WITH THE AVC
5396 STANDARD ("AVC VIDEO") AND/OR (ii) DECODE AVC VIDEO THAT WAS ENCODED
5397 BY A CONSUMER ENGAGED IN A PERSONAL ACTIVITY AND/OR WAS OBTAINED FROM
5398 A VIDEO PROVIDER LICENSED TO PROVIDE AVC VIDEO. NO LICENSE IS GRANTED
5399 OR SHALL BE IMPLIED FOR ANY OTHER USE. ADDITIONAL INFORMATION MAY BE
5400 OBTAINED FROM MPEG LA, L.L.C. SEE HTTP://WWW.MPEGLA.COM</p>
5401
5402 <p>The Notice to Customers is intended to inform End Users of the
5403 personal usage rights (for example, to watch video content) included
5404 with the product they purchased, and to encourage any party using the
5405 product for commercial purposes to contact MPEG LA in order to become
5406 licensed for such use (for example, when they use an AVC Product to
5407 deliver Title-by-Title, Subscription, Free Television or Internet
5408 Broadcast AVC Video to End Users, or to re-Sell a third party's AVC
5409 Product as their own branded AVC Product).</p>
5410
5411 <p>Therefore, if a party is to be licensed for its use of an AVC
5412 Product to Sell AVC Video on a Title-by-Title, Subscription, Free
5413 Television or Internet Broadcast basis, that party would need to
5414 conclude the AVC License, even in the case where no royalties were
5415 payable under the License.  On the other hand, if that party (either a
5416 Consumer or business customer) simply uses an AVC Product for their
5417 own internal purposes and not for the commercial purposes referenced
5418 above, then such use would be included in the royalty paid for the AVC
5419 Products by the licensed supplier.</p>
5420
5421 <p>Finally, I note that our AVC License provides worldwide coverage in
5422 countries that have AVC Patent Portfolio Patents, including
5423 Norway.</p>
5424
5425 <p>I hope this clarification is helpful.  If I may be of any further
5426 assistance, just let me know.</p>
5427 </blockquote></p>
5428
5429 <p>The mentioning of Norwegian patents made me a bit confused, so I
5430 asked for more information:</p>
5431
5432 <p><blockquote>
5433
5434 <p>But one minor question at the end.  If I understand you correctly,
5435 you state in the quote above that there are patents in the AVC Patent
5436 Portfolio that are valid in Norway.  This make me believe I read the
5437 list available from &lt;URL:
5438 <a href="http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/PatentList.aspx">http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/PatentList.aspx</a>
5439 &gt; incorrectly, as I believed the "NO" prefix in front of patents
5440 were Norwegian patents, and the only one I could find under Mitsubishi
5441 Electric Corporation expired in 2012.  Which patents are you referring
5442 to that are relevant for Norway?</p>
5443
5444 </blockquote></p>
5445
5446 <p>Again, the quick answer explained how to read the list of patents
5447 in that list:</p>
5448
5449 <p><blockquote>
5450
5451 <p>Your understanding is correct that the last AVC Patent Portfolio
5452 Patent in Norway expired on 21 October 2012.  Therefore, where AVC
5453 Video is both made and Sold in Norway after that date, then no
5454 royalties would be payable for such AVC Video under the AVC License.
5455 With that said, our AVC License provides historic coverage for AVC
5456 Products and AVC Video that may have been manufactured or Sold before
5457 the last Norwegian AVC patent expired.  I would also like to clarify
5458 that coverage is provided for the country of manufacture and the
5459 country of Sale that has active AVC Patent Portfolio Patents.</p>
5460
5461 <p>Therefore, if a party offers AVC Products or AVC Video for Sale in
5462 a country with active AVC Patent Portfolio Patents (for example,
5463 Sweden, Denmark, Finland, etc.), then that party would still need
5464 coverage under the AVC License even if such products or video are
5465 initially made in a country without active AVC Patent Portfolio
5466 Patents (for example, Norway).  Similarly, a party would need to
5467 conclude the AVC License if they make AVC Products or AVC Video in a
5468 country with active AVC Patent Portfolio Patents, but eventually Sell
5469 such AVC Products or AVC Video in a country without active AVC Patent
5470 Portfolio Patents.</p>
5471 </blockquote></p>
5472
5473 <p>As far as I understand it, MPEG LA believe anyone using Adobe
5474 Premiere and other video related software with a H.264 distribution
5475 license need a license agreement with MPEG LA to use such tools for
5476 anything non-private or commercial, while it is OK to set up a
5477 Youtube-like service as long as no-one pays to get access to the
5478 content.  I still have no clear idea how this applies to Norway, where
5479 none of the patents MPEG LA is licensing are valid.  Will the
5480 copyright terms take precedence or can those terms be ignored because
5481 the patents are not valid in Norway?</p>
5482
5483       </div>
5484       <div class="tags">
5485
5486
5487         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</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>.
5488
5489
5490       </div>
5491     </div>
5492     <div class="padding"></div>
5493
5494     <div class="entry">
5495       <div class="title">
5496         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_laptop___some_more_clues_and_ideas_based_on_feedback.html">New laptop - some more clues and ideas based on feedback</a>
5497       </div>
5498       <div class="date">
5499          5th July 2015
5500       </div>
5501       <div class="body">
5502         <p>Several people contacted me after my previous blog post about my
5503 need for a new laptop, and provided very useful feedback.  I wish to
5504 thank every one of these.  Several pointed me to the possibility of
5505 fixing my X230, and I am already in the process of getting Lenovo to
5506 do so thanks to the on site, next day support contract covering the
5507 machine.  But the battery is almost useless (I expect to replace it
5508 with a non-official battery) and I do not expect the machine to live
5509 for many more years, so it is time to plan its replacement.  If I did
5510 not have a support contract, it was suggested to find replacement parts
5511 using <a href="http://www.francecrans.com/">FrancEcrans</a>, but it
5512 might present a language barrier as I do not understand French.</p>
5513
5514 <p>One tip I got was to use the
5515 <a href="https://skinflint.co.uk/?cat=nb">Skinflint</a> web service to
5516 compare laptop models.  It seem to have more models available than
5517 prisjakt.no.  Another tip I got from someone I know have similar
5518 keyboard preferences was that the HP EliteBook 840 keyboard is not
5519 very good, and this matches my experience with earlier EliteBook
5520 keyboards I tested.  Because of this, I will not consider it any further.
5521
5522 <p>When I wrote my blog post, I was not aware of Thinkpad X250, the
5523 newest Thinkpad X model.  The keyboard reintroduces mouse buttons
5524 (which is missing from the X240), and is working fairly well with
5525 Debian Sid/Unstable according to
5526 <a href="http://www.corsac.net/X250/">Corsac.net</a>.  The reports I
5527 got on the keyboard quality are not consistent.  Some say the keyboard
5528 is good, others say it is ok, while others say it is not very good.
5529 Those with experience from X41 and and X60 agree that the X250
5530 keyboard is not as good as those trusty old laptops, and suggest I
5531 keep and fix my X230 instead of upgrading, or get a used X230 to
5532 replace it.  I'm also told that the X250 lack leds for caps lock, disk
5533 activity and battery status, which is very convenient on my X230.  I'm
5534 also told that the CPU fan is running very often, making it a bit
5535 noisy.  In any case, the X250 do not work out of the box with Debian
5536 Stable/Jessie, one of my requirements.</p>
5537
5538 <p>I have also gotten a few vendor proposals, one was
5539 <a href="http://pro-star.com">Pro-Star</a>, another was
5540 <a href="http://shop.gluglug.org.uk/product/libreboot-x200/">Libreboot</a>.
5541 The latter look very attractive to me.</p>
5542
5543 <p>Again, thank you all for the very useful feedback.  It help a lot
5544 as I keep looking for a replacement.</p>
5545
5546 <p>Update 2015-07-06: I was recommended to check out the
5547 <a href="">lapstore.de</a> web shop for used laptops.  They got several
5548 different
5549 <a href="http://www.lapstore.de/f.php/shop/lapstore/f/411/lang/x/kw/Lenovo_ThinkPad_X_Serie/">old
5550 thinkpad X models</a>, and provide one year warranty.</p>
5551
5552       </div>
5553       <div class="tags">
5554
5555
5556         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>.
5557
5558
5559       </div>
5560     </div>
5561     <div class="padding"></div>
5562
5563     <div class="entry">
5564       <div class="title">
5565         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_to_find_a_new_laptop__as_the_old_one_is_broken_after_only_two_years.html">Time to find a new laptop, as the old one is broken after only two years</a>
5566       </div>
5567       <div class="date">
5568          3rd July 2015
5569       </div>
5570       <div class="body">
5571         <p>My primary work horse laptop is failing, and will need a
5572 replacement soon.  The left 5 cm of the screen on my Thinkpad X230
5573 started flickering yesterday, and I suspect the cause is a broken
5574 cable, as changing the angle of the screen some times get rid of the
5575 flickering.</p>
5576
5577 <p>My requirements have not really changed since I bought it, and is
5578 still as
5579 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html">I
5580 described them in 2013</a>.  The last time I bought a laptop, I had
5581 good help from
5582 <a href="http://www.prisjakt.no/category.php?k=353">prisjakt.no</a>
5583 where I could select at least a few of the requirements (mouse pin,
5584 wifi, weight) and go through the rest manually.  Three button mouse
5585 and a good keyboard is not available as an option, and all the three
5586 laptop models proposed today (Thinkpad X240, HP EliteBook 820 G1 and
5587 G2) lack three mouse buttons).  It is also unclear to me how good the
5588 keyboard on the HP EliteBooks are.  I hope Lenovo have not messed up
5589 the keyboard, even if the quality and robustness in the X series have
5590 deteriorated since X41.</p>
5591
5592 <p>I wonder how I can find a sensible laptop when none of the options
5593 seem sensible to me?  Are there better services around to search the
5594 set of available laptops for features?  Please send me an email if you
5595 have suggestions.</p>
5596
5597 <p>Update 2015-07-23: I got a suggestion to check out the FSF
5598 <a href="http://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/endorsement/respects-your-freedom">list
5599 of endorsed hardware</a>, which is useful background information.</p>
5600
5601       </div>
5602       <div class="tags">
5603
5604
5605         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>.
5606
5607
5608       </div>
5609     </div>
5610     <div class="padding"></div>
5611
5612     <div class="entry">
5613       <div class="title">
5614         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/MakerCon_Nordic_videos_now_available_on_Frikanalen.html">MakerCon Nordic videos now available on Frikanalen</a>
5615       </div>
5616       <div class="date">
5617          2nd July 2015
5618       </div>
5619       <div class="body">
5620         <p>Last oktober I was involved on behalf of
5621 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG</a> with recording the talks at
5622 <a href="http://www.makercon.no/">MakerCon Nordic</a>, a conference for
5623 the Maker movement.  Since then it has been the plan to publish the
5624 recordings on <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a>, which
5625 finally happened the last few days.  A few talks are missing because
5626 the speakers asked the organizers to not publish them, but most of the
5627 talks are available.  The talks are being broadcasted on RiksTV
5628 channel 50 and using multicast on Uninett, as well as being available
5629 from the Frikanalen web site.  The unedited recordings are
5630 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/MakerConNordic/">available on
5631 Youtube too</a>.</p>
5632
5633 <p>This is the list of talks available at the moment.  Visit the
5634 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/?q=makercon">Frikanalen video
5635 pages</a> to view them.</p>
5636
5637 <ul>
5638
5639   <li>Evolutionary algorithms as a design tool - from art
5640       to robotics (Kyrre Glette)</li>
5641
5642   <li>Make and break (Hans Gerhard Meier)</li>
5643
5644   <li>Making a one year school course for young makers
5645       (Olav Helland)</li>
5646
5647   <li>Innovation Inspiration - IPR Databases as a Source of
5648       Inspiration (Hege Langlo)</li>
5649
5650   <li>Making a toy for makers (Erik Torstensson)</li>
5651
5652   <li>How to make 3D printer electronics (Elias Bakken)</li>
5653
5654   <li>Hovering Clouds: Looking at online tool offerings for Product
5655       Design and 3D Printing (William Kempton)</li>
5656
5657   <li>Travelling maker stories (Øyvind Nydal Dahl)</li>
5658
5659   <li>Making the first Maker Faire in Sweden (Nils Olander)</li>
5660
5661   <li>Breaking the mold: Printing 1000’s of parts (Espen Sivertsen)</li>
5662
5663   <li>Ultimaker — and open source 3D printing (Erik de Bruijn)</li>
5664
5665   <li>Autodesk’s 3D Printing Platform: Sparking innovation (Hilde
5666       Sevens)</li>
5667
5668   <li>How Making is Changing the World – and How You Can Too!
5669       (Jennifer Turliuk)</li>
5670
5671   <li>Open-Source Adventuring: OpenROV, OpenExplorer and the Future of
5672       Connected Exploration (David Lang)</li>
5673
5674   <li>Making in Norway (Haakon Karlsen Jr., Graham Hayward and Jens
5675       Dyvik)</li>
5676
5677   <li>The Impact of the Maker Movement (Mike Senese)</li>
5678
5679 </ul>
5680
5681 <p>Part of the reason this took so long was that the scripts NUUG had
5682 to prepare a recording for publication were five years old and no
5683 longer worked with the current video processing tools (command line
5684 argument changes).  In addition, we needed better audio normalization,
5685 which sent me on a detour to
5686 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Measuring_and_adjusting_the_loudness_of_a_TV_channel_using_bs1770gain.html">package
5687 bs1770gain for Debian</a>.  Now this is in place and it became a lot
5688 easier to publish NUUG videos on Frikanalen.</p>
5689
5690       </div>
5691       <div class="tags">
5692
5693
5694         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen</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>.
5695
5696
5697       </div>
5698     </div>
5699     <div class="padding"></div>
5700
5701     <div class="entry">
5702       <div class="title">
5703         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Graphing_the_Norwegian_company_ownership_structure.html">Graphing the Norwegian company ownership structure</a>
5704       </div>
5705       <div class="date">
5706         15th June 2015
5707       </div>
5708       <div class="body">
5709         <p>It is a bit work to figure out the ownership structure of companies
5710 in Norway.  The information is publicly available, but one need to
5711 recursively look up ownership for all owners to figure out the complete
5712 ownership graph of a given set of companies.  To save me the work in
5713 the future, I wrote a script to do this automatically, outputting the
5714 ownership structure using the Graphviz/dotty format.  The data source
5715 is web scraping from <a href="http://www.proff.no/">Proff</a>, because
5716 I failed to find a useful source directly from the official keepers of
5717 the ownership data, <a href="http://www.brreg.no/">Brønnøysundsregistrene</a>.</p>
5718
5719 <p>To get an ownership graph for a set of companies, fetch
5720 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/brreg-norway-ownership-graph">the code from git</a> and run it using the organisation number.  I'm
5721 using the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet as an example here, as its
5722 ownership structure is very simple:</p>
5723
5724 <pre>
5725 % time ./bin/eierskap-dotty 958033540 > dagbladet.dot
5726
5727 real    0m2.841s
5728 user    0m0.184s
5729 sys     0m0.036s
5730 %
5731 </pre>
5732
5733 <p>The script accept several organisation numbers on the command line,
5734 allowing a cluster of companies to be graphed in the same image.  The
5735 resulting dot file for the example above look like this.  The edges
5736 are labeled with the ownership percentage, and the nodes uses the
5737 organisation number as their name and the name as the label:</p>
5738
5739 <pre>
5740 digraph ownership {
5741 rankdir = LR;
5742 "Aller Holding A/s" -> "910119877" [label="100%"]
5743 "910119877" -> "998689015" [label="100%"]
5744 "998689015" -> "958033540" [label="99%"]
5745 "974530600" -> "958033540" [label="1%"]
5746 "958033540" [label="AS DAGBLADET"]
5747 "998689015" [label="Berner Media Holding AS"]
5748 "974530600" [label="Dagbladets Stiftelse"]
5749 "910119877" [label="Aller Media AS"]
5750 }
5751 </pre>
5752
5753 <p>To view the ownership graph, run "<tt>dotty dagbladet.dot</tt>" or
5754 convert it to a PNG using "<tt>dot -T png dagbladet.dot >
5755 dagbladet.png</tt>".  The result can be seen below:</p>
5756
5757 <img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-06-15-ownership-graphs-norway-dagbladet.png" width="80%">
5758
5759 <p>Note that I suspect the "Aller Holding A/S" entry to be incorrect
5760 data in the official ownership register, as that name is not
5761 registered in the official company register for Norway.  The ownership
5762 register is sensitive to typos and there seem to be no strict checking
5763 of the ownership links.</p>
5764
5765 <p>Let me know if you improve the script or find better data sources.
5766 The code is licensed according to GPL 2 or newer.</p>
5767
5768 <p>Update 2015-06-15: Since the initial post I've been told that
5769 "<a href="http://www.proff.dk/firma/carl-allers-etablissement-aktieselskab/københavn-v/hovedkontorer/13624518-3/">Aller
5770 Holding A/S</a>" is a Danish company, which explain why it did not
5771 have a Norwegian organisation number.  I've also been told that there
5772 is a <a href="http://www.brreg.no/automatiske/webservices/">web
5773 services API available</a> from Brønnøysundsregistrene, for those
5774 willing to accept the terms or pay the price.</p>
5775
5776       </div>
5777       <div class="tags">
5778
5779
5780         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn</a>.
5781
5782
5783       </div>
5784     </div>
5785     <div class="padding"></div>
5786
5787     <div class="entry">
5788       <div class="title">
5789         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Measuring_and_adjusting_the_loudness_of_a_TV_channel_using_bs1770gain.html">Measuring and adjusting the loudness of a TV channel using bs1770gain</a>
5790       </div>
5791       <div class="date">
5792         11th June 2015
5793       </div>
5794       <div class="body">
5795         <p>Television loudness is the source of frustration for viewers
5796 everywhere.  Some channels are very load, others are less loud, and
5797 ads tend to shout very high to get the attention of the viewers, and
5798 the viewers do not like this.  This fact is well known to the TV
5799 channels.  See for example the BBC white paper
5800 "<a href="http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rd/pubs/whp/whp-pdf-files/WHP202.pdf">Terminology
5801 for loudness and level dBTP, LU, and all that</a>" from 2011 for a
5802 summary of the problem domain.  To better address the need for even
5803 loadness, the TV channels got together several years ago to agree on a
5804 new way to measure loudness in digital files as one step in
5805 standardizing loudness.  From this came the ITU-R standard BS.1770,
5806 "<a href="http://www.itu.int/rec/R-REC-BS.1770/en">Algorithms to
5807 measure audio programme loudness and true-peak audio level</a>".</p>
5808
5809 <p>The ITU-R BS.1770 specification describe an algorithm to measure
5810 loadness in LUFS (Loudness Units, referenced to Full Scale). But
5811 having a way to measure is not enough.  To get the same loudness
5812 across TV channels, one also need to decide which value to standardize
5813 on.  For European TV channels, this was done in the EBU Recommondaton
5814 R128, "<a href="https://tech.ebu.ch/docs/r/r128.pdf">Loudness
5815 normalisation and permitted maximum level of audio signals</a>", which
5816 specifies a recommended level of -23 LUFS.  In Norway, I have been
5817 told that NRK, TV2, MTG and SBS have decided among themselves to
5818 follow the R128 recommondation for playout from 2016-03-01.</p>
5819
5820 <p>There are free software available to measure and adjust the loudness
5821 level using the LUFS.  In Debian, I am aware of a library named
5822 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/libebur128">libebur128</a>
5823 able to measure the loudness and since yesterday morning a new binary
5824 named <a href="http://bs1770gain.sourceforge.net">bs1770gain</a>
5825 capable of both measuring and adjusting was uploaded and is waiting
5826 for NEW processing.  I plan to maintain the latter in Debian under the
5827 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?email=pkg-multimedia-maintainers%40lists.alioth.debian.org">Debian
5828 multimedia</a> umbrella.</p>
5829
5830 <p>The free software based TV channel I am involved in,
5831 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a>, plan to follow the
5832 R128 recommondation ourself as soon as we can adjust the software to
5833 do so, and the bs1770gain tool seem like a good fit for that part of
5834 the puzzle to measure loudness on new video uploaded to Frikanalen.
5835 Personally, I plan to use bs1770gain to adjust the loudness of videos
5836 I upload to Frikanalen on behalf of <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the
5837 NUUG member organisation</a>.  The program seem to be able to measure
5838 the LUFS value of any media file handled by ffmpeg, but I've only
5839 successfully adjusted the LUFS value of WAV files.  I suspect it
5840 should be able to adjust it for all the formats handled by ffmpeg.</p>
5841
5842       </div>
5843       <div class="tags">
5844
5845
5846         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen</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>.
5847
5848
5849       </div>
5850     </div>
5851     <div class="padding"></div>
5852
5853     <div class="entry">
5854       <div class="title">
5855         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Norwegian_citizens_now_required_by_law_to_give_their_fingerprint_to_the_police.html">Norwegian citizens now required by law to give their fingerprint to the police</a>
5856       </div>
5857       <div class="date">
5858         10th May 2015
5859       </div>
5860       <div class="body">
5861         <p>5 days ago, the Norwegian Parliament decided, unanimously, that all
5862 citizens of Norway, no matter if they are suspected of something
5863 criminal or not, are
5864 <a href="https://www.holderdeord.no/votes/1430838871e">required to
5865 give fingerprints to the police</a> (vote details from Holder de
5866 ord).  The law make it sound like it will be optional, but in a few
5867 years there will be no option any more.  The ID will be required to
5868 vote, to get a bank account, a bank card, to change address on the
5869 post office, to receive an electronic ID or to get a drivers license
5870 and many other tasks required to function in Norway.  The banks plan
5871 to stop providing their own ID on the bank cards when this new
5872 national ID is introduced, and the national road authorities plan to
5873 change the drivers license to no longer be usable as identity cards.
5874 In effect, to function as a citizen in Norway a national ID card will
5875 be required, and to get it one need to provide the fingerprints to
5876 the police.</p>
5877
5878 <p>In addition to handing the fingerprint to the police (which
5879 promised to not make a copy of the fingerprint image at that point in
5880 time, but say nothing about doing it later), a picture of the
5881 fingerprint will be stored on the RFID chip, along with a picture of
5882 the face and other information about the person.  Some of the
5883 information will be encrypted, but the encryption will be the same
5884 system as currently used in the passports.  The codes to decrypt will
5885 be available to a lot of government offices and their suppliers around
5886 the globe, but for those that do not know anyone in those circles it
5887 is good to know that
5888 <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2006/nov/17/news.homeaffairs">the
5889 encryption is already broken</a>.  And they
5890 <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/article/2215057/wireless/bad-guys-could-read-rfid-passports-at-217-feet--maybe-a-lot-more.html">can
5891 be read from 70 meters away</a>.  This can be mitigated a bit by
5892 keeping it in a Faraday cage (metal box or metal wire container), but
5893 one will be required to take it out of there often enough to expose
5894 ones private and personal information to a lot of people that have no
5895 business getting access to that information.</p>
5896
5897 <p>The new Norwegian national IDs are a vehicle for identity theft,
5898 and I feel sorry for us all having politicians accepting such invasion
5899 of privacy without any objections.  So are the Norwegian passports,
5900 but it has been possible to function in Norway without those so far.
5901 That option is going away with the passing of the new law.  In this, I
5902 envy the Germans, because for them it is optional how much biometric
5903 information is stored in their national ID.</p>
5904
5905 <p>And if forced collection of fingerprints was not bad enough, the
5906 information collected in the national ID card register can be handed
5907 over to foreign intelligence services and police authorities, "when
5908 extradition is not considered disproportionate".</p>
5909
5910 <p>Update 2015-05-12: For those unable to believe that the Parliament
5911 really could make such decision, I wrote
5912 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Blir_det_virkelig_krav_om_fingeravtrykk_i_nasjonale_ID_kort_.html">a
5913 summary of the sources I have</a> for concluding the way I do
5914 (Norwegian Only, as the sources are all in Norwegian).</p>
5915
5916       </div>
5917       <div class="tags">
5918
5919
5920         Tags: <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/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
5921
5922
5923       </div>
5924     </div>
5925     <div class="padding"></div>
5926
5927     <div class="entry">
5928       <div class="title">
5929         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_would_it_cost_to_store_all_phone_calls_in_Norway_.html">What would it cost to store all phone calls in Norway?</a>
5930       </div>
5931       <div class="date">
5932          1st May 2015
5933       </div>
5934       <div class="body">
5935         <p>Many years ago, a friend of mine calculated how much it would cost
5936 to store the sound of all phone calls in Norway, and came up with the
5937 cost of around 20 million NOK (2.4 mill EUR) for all the calls in a
5938 year.  I got curious and wondered what the same calculation would look
5939 like today.  To do so one need an idea of how much data storage is
5940 needed for each minute of sound, how many minutes all the calls in
5941 Norway sums up to, and the cost of data storage.</p>
5942
5943 <p>The 2005 numbers are from
5944 <a href="http://www.digi.no/analyser/2005/10/04/vi-prater-stadig-mindre-i-roret">digi.no</a>,
5945 the 2012 numbers are from
5946 <a href="http://www.nkom.no/aktuelt/nyheter/fortsatt-vekst-i-det-norske-ekommarkedet">a
5947 NKOM report</a>, and I got the 2013 numbers after asking NKOM via
5948 email.  I was told the numbers for 2014 will be presented May 20th,
5949 and decided not to wait for those, as I doubt they will be very
5950 different from the numbers from 2013.</p>
5951
5952 <p>The amount of data storage per minute sound depend on the wanted
5953 quality, and for phone calls it is generally believed that 8 Kbit/s is
5954 enough.  See for example a
5955 <a href="http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/voice/voice-quality/7934-bwidth-consume.html#topic1">summary
5956 on voice quality from Cisco</a> for some alternatives.  8 Kbit/s is 60
5957 Kbytes/min, and this can be multiplied with the number of call minutes
5958 to get the storage requirements.</p>
5959
5960 <p>Storage prices varies a lot, depending on speed, backup strategies,
5961 availability requirements etc.  But a simple way to calculate can be
5962 to use the price of a TiB-disk (around 1000 NOK / 120 EUR) and double
5963 it to take space, power and redundancy into account.  It could be much
5964 higher with high speed and good redundancy requirements.</p>
5965
5966 <p>But back to the question, What would it cost to store all phone
5967 calls in Norway?  Not much.  Here is a small table showing the
5968 estimated cost, which is within the budget constraint of most medium
5969 and large organisations:</p>
5970
5971 <table border="1">
5972 <tr><th>Year</th><th>Call minutes</th><th>Size</th><th>Price in NOK / EUR</th></tr>
5973 <tr><td>2005</td><td align="right">24 000 000 000</td><td align="right">1.3 PiB</td><td align="right">3 mill / 358 000</td></tr>
5974 <tr><td>2012</td><td align="right">18 000 000 000</td><td align="right">1.0 PiB</td><td align="right">2.2 mill / 262 000</td></tr>
5975 <tr><td>2013</td><td align="right">17 000 000 000</td><td align="right">950 TiB</td><td align="right">2.1 mill / 250 000</td></tr>
5976 </table>
5977
5978 <p>This is the cost of buying the storage.  Maintenance need to be
5979 taken into account too, but calculating that is left as an exercise
5980 for the reader.  But it is obvious to me from those numbers that
5981 recording the sound of all phone calls in Norway is not going to be
5982 stopped because it is too expensive.  I wonder if someone already is
5983 collecting the data?</p>
5984
5985       </div>
5986       <div class="tags">
5987
5988
5989         Tags: <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/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
5990
5991
5992       </div>
5993     </div>
5994     <div class="padding"></div>
5995
5996     <div class="entry">
5997       <div class="title">
5998         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Jessie_based_Debian_Edu_beta_release.html">First Jessie based Debian Edu beta release</a>
5999       </div>
6000       <div class="date">
6001         26th April 2015
6002       </div>
6003       <div class="body">
6004         <p>I am happy to report that the Debian Edu team sent out
6005 <a href="https://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2015/04/msg00000.html">this
6006 announcement today</a>:</p>
6007
6008 <pre>
6009 the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project is pleased to announce the first
6010 *beta* release of Debian Edu "Jessie" 8.0+edu0~b1, which for the first
6011 time is composed entirely of packages from the current Debian stable
6012 release, Debian 8 "Jessie".
6013
6014 (As most reading this will know, Debian "Jessie" hasn't actually been
6015 released by now. The release is still in progress but should finish
6016 later today ;)
6017
6018 We expect to make a final release of Debian Edu "Jessie" in the coming
6019 weeks, timed with the first point release of Debian Jessie. Upgrades
6020 from this beta release of Debian Edu Jessie to the final release will
6021 be possible and encouraged!
6022
6023 Please report feedback to debian-edu@lists.debian.org and/or submit
6024 bugs: http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs
6025
6026 Debian Edu - sometimes also known as "Skolelinux" - is a complete
6027 operating system for schools, universities and other
6028 organisations. Through its pre- prepared installation profiles
6029 administrators can install servers, workstations and laptops which
6030 will work in harmony on the school network.  With Debian Edu, the
6031 teachers themselves or their technical support staff can roll out a
6032 complete multi-user, multi-machine study environment within hours or
6033 days.
6034
6035 Debian Edu is already in use at several hundred schools all over the
6036 world, particularly in Germany, Spain and Norway. Installations come
6037 with hundreds of applications pre-installed, plus the whole Debian
6038 archive of thousands of compatible packages within easy reach.
6039
6040 For those who want to give Debian Edu Jessie a try, download and
6041 installation instructions are available, including detailed
6042 instructions in the manual explaining the first steps, such as setting
6043 up a network or adding users.  Please note that the password for the
6044 user your prompted for during installation must have a length of at
6045 least 5 characters!
6046
6047 == Where to download ==
6048
6049 A multi-architecture CD / usbstick image (649 MiB) for network booting
6050 can be downloaded at the following locations:
6051
6052     http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~b1-CD.iso
6053     rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~b1-CD.iso .
6054
6055 The SHA1SUM of this image is: 54a524d16246cddd8d2cfd6ea52f2dd78c47ee0a
6056
6057 Alternatively an extended DVD / usbstick image (4.9 GiB) is also
6058 available, with more software included (saving additional download
6059 time):
6060
6061     http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~b1-USB.iso
6062     rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~b1-USB.iso
6063
6064 The SHA1SUM of this image is: fb1f1504a490c077a48653898f9d6a461cb3c636
6065
6066 Sources are available from the Debian archive, see
6067 http://ftp.debian.org/debian-cd/8.0.0/source/ for some download
6068 options.
6069
6070 == Debian Edu Jessie manual in seven languages ==
6071
6072 Please see https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie/ for
6073 the English version of the Debian Edu jessie manual.
6074
6075 This manual has been fully translated to German, French, Italian,
6076 Danish, Dutch and Norwegian Bokmål. A partly translated version exists
6077 for Spanish.  See http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/ for
6078 online version of the translated manual.
6079
6080 More information about Debian 8 "Jessie" itself is provided in the
6081 release notes and the installation manual:
6082 - http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/releasenotes
6083 - http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/installmanual
6084
6085
6086 == Errata / known problems ==
6087
6088     It takes up to 15 minutes for a changed hostname to be updated via
6089     DHCP (#780461).
6090
6091     The hostname script fails to update LTSP server hostname (#783087).
6092
6093 Workaround: run update-hostname-from-ip on the client to update the
6094 hostname immediately.
6095
6096 Check https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie for a possibly
6097 more current and complete list.
6098
6099 == Some more details about Debian Edu 8.0+edu0~b1 Codename Jessie released 2015-04-25 ==
6100
6101 === Software updates ===
6102
6103 Everything which is new in Debian 8 Jessie, e.g.:
6104
6105  * Linux kernel 3.16.7-ctk9; for the i386 architecture, support for
6106    i486 processors has been dropped; oldest supported ones: i586 (like
6107    Intel Pentium and AMD K5).
6108
6109  * Desktop environments KDE Plasma Workspaces 4.11.13, GNOME 3.14,
6110    Xfce 4.12, LXDE 0.5.6
6111    * new optional desktop environment: MATE 1.8
6112    * KDE Plasma Workspaces is installed by default; to choose one of
6113      the others see the manual.
6114  * the browsers Iceweasel 31 ESR and Chromium 41
6115  * LibreOffice 4.3.3
6116  * GOsa 2.7.4
6117  * LTSP 5.5.4
6118  * CUPS print system 1.7.5
6119  * new boot framework: systemd
6120  * Educational toolbox GCompris 14.12
6121  * Music creator Rosegarden 14.02
6122  * Image editor Gimp 2.8.14
6123  * Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.13.1
6124  * golearn 0.9
6125  * tuxpaint 0.9.22
6126  * New version of debian-installer from Debian Jessie.
6127  * Debian Jessie includes about 43000 packages available for installation.
6128  * More information about Debian 8 Jessie is provided in its release
6129    notes and the installation manual, see the link above.
6130
6131 === Installation changes ===
6132
6133     Installations done via PXE now also install firmware automatically
6134     for the hardware present.
6135
6136 === Fixed bugs ===
6137
6138 A number of bugs have been fixed in this release; the most noticeable
6139 from a user perspective:
6140
6141  * Inserting incorrect DNS information in Gosa will no longer break
6142    DNS completely, but instead stop DNS updates until the incorrect
6143    information is corrected (710362)
6144
6145  * shutdown-at-night now shuts the system down if gdm3 is used (775608).
6146
6147 === Sugar desktop removed ===
6148
6149 As the Sugar desktop was removed from Debian Jessie, it is also not
6150 available in Debian Edu jessie.
6151
6152
6153 == About Debian Edu / Skolelinux ==
6154
6155 Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux, is a Linux distribution based on
6156 Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
6157 configured school network. Directly after installation a school server
6158 running all services needed for a school network is set up just
6159 waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
6160 Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
6161 initial installation of the main server from CD or USB stick all other
6162 machines can be installed via the network. The provided school server
6163 provides LDAP database and Kerberos authentication service,
6164 centralized home directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other
6165 services.  The desktop contains more than 60 educational software
6166 packages and more are available from the Debian archive, and schools
6167 can choose between KDE, GNOME, LXDE, Xfce and MATE desktop
6168 environment.
6169
6170 == About Debian ==
6171
6172 The Debian Project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly
6173 free community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of
6174 the largest and most influential open source projects. Thousands of
6175 volunteers from all over the world work together to create and
6176 maintain Debian software. Available in 70 languages, and supporting a
6177 huge range of computer types, Debian calls itself the universal
6178 operating system.
6179
6180 == Thanks ==
6181
6182 Thanks to everyone making Debian and Debian Edu / Skolelinux happen!
6183 You rock.
6184 </pre>
6185
6186       </div>
6187       <div class="tags">
6188
6189
6190         Tags: <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>.
6191
6192
6193       </div>
6194     </div>
6195     <div class="padding"></div>
6196
6197     <div class="entry">
6198       <div class="title">
6199         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Shirish_Agarwal.html">Debian Edu interview: Shirish Agarwal</a>
6200       </div>
6201       <div class="date">
6202         15th April 2015
6203       </div>
6204       <div class="body">
6205         <p>It was a surprise to me to learn that project to create a complete
6206 computer system for schools I've involved in,
6207 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>, was
6208 being used in India.  But apparently it is, and I managed to get an
6209 interview with one of the friends of the project there, Shirish
6210 Agarwal.</p>
6211
6212 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
6213
6214 <p>My name is Shirish Agarwal. Based out of the educational and
6215 historical city of Pune, from the western state of Maharashtra, India.
6216 My bread comes from giving training, giving policy tips,
6217 installations on free software to mom and pop shops in different
6218 fields from Desktop publishing to retail shops as well as work with
6219 few software start-ups as well.</p>
6220
6221 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
6222 project?</strong></p>
6223
6224 <p>It started innocently enough. I have been using Debian for a few
6225 years and in one local minidebconf / debutsav I was asked if there was
6226 anything for schools or education. I had worked / played with free
6227 educational softwares such as Gcompris and Stellarium for my many
6228 nieces and nephews so researched and found Debian Edu or Skolelinux as
6229 it was known then.  Since then I have started using the various
6230 education meta-packages provided by the project.</p>
6231
6232 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
6233 Edu?</strong></p>
6234
6235 <p>It's closest I have seen where a package full of educational
6236 software are packed, which are free and open (both literally and
6237 figuratively).  Even if I take the simplest software which is
6238 gcompris, the number of activities therein are amazing. Another one of
6239 the softwares that I have liked for a long time is stellarium. Even
6240 pysycache is cool except for couple of issues I encountered
6241 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/781841">#781841</a> and
6242 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/781842">#781842</a>.</p>
6243
6244 <p>I prefer software installed on the system over web based solutions,
6245 as a web site can disappear any time but the software on disk has the
6246 possibility of a larger life span.  Of course with both it's more a
6247 question if it has enough users who make it fun or sustainable or both
6248 for the developer per-se.</p>
6249
6250 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
6251 Edu?</strong></p>
6252
6253 <p>I do see that the Debian Edu team seems to be short-handed and I
6254 think more efforts should be made to make it popular and ask and take
6255 help from people and the larger community wherever possible.</p>
6256
6257 <p>I don't see any disadvantage to use Skolelinux apart from the fact
6258 that most apps. are generic which is good or bad how you see it.
6259 However, saying that I do acknowledge the fact that the canvas is
6260 pretty big and there are lot of interesting ideas that could be done
6261 but for reasons not known not done or if done I don't know about them.
6262 Let me share some of the ideas (these are more upstream based but
6263 still) I have had for a long time :</p>
6264
6265 <p>1. Classical maths question of two trains in opposing directions
6266 each running @x kmph/mph at y distance, when they will meet and how
6267 far would each travel and similar questions like these.
6268
6269 <p>The computer is a fantastic system where questions like these can
6270 be drawn, animated and the methodology and answers teased out in
6271 interactive manner. While sites such as the
6272 <a href="http://mathforum.org/dr.math/faq/faq.two.trains.html">Ask
6273 Dr. Math FAQ on The Two Trains problem</a> (as an example or point of
6274 inspiration) can be used there is lot more that can be done.  I dunno
6275 if there is a free software which does something like this.  The idea
6276 being a blend of objects + animation + interaction which does
6277 this. The whole interaction could be gamified with points or sounds or
6278 colourful celebration whenever the user gets even part of the question
6279 or/and methodology right. That would help reinforce good behaviour.
6280 This understanding could be used to share/showcase everything from how
6281 the first wheel came to be, to evolution to how astronomy started,
6282 psychics and everything in-between.</p>
6283
6284 <p>One specific idea in the train part was having the Linux mascot on
6285 one train and the BSD or GNU mascot on the other train and they
6286 meeting somewhere in-between. Characters from blender movies could
6287 also be used.</p>
6288
6289 <p>2. Loads of crossword-puzzles with reference to subjects: We have
6290 enormous data sets in Wikipedia and Wikitionary.  I don't think it
6291 should be a big job to design crossword puzzles. Using categories and
6292 sub-categories it should be doable to have Q&A single word answers
6293 from the existing data-sets. What would make it easy or hard could be
6294 the length of the word + existence of many or few vowels depending on
6295 the user's input.</p>
6296
6297 <p>3. Jigsaw puzzles - We already have a great software called
6298 palapeli with number of slicers making it pretty interesting. What
6299 needs to be done is to download large number of public domain and
6300 copyleft images, tease and use IPTC tags to categorise them into
6301 nature, history etc.  and let it loose. This could turn to be really
6302 huge collection of images. One source could be taken from
6303 commons.wikimedia.org, others could be huge collection of royalty-free
6304 stock photos. Potential is immense.</p>
6305
6306 <p>Apart from this, free software suffers in two directions, we lag
6307 both in development (of using new features per-se) and maintenance a
6308 lot.  This is more so in educational software as these applications
6309 need to be timely and the opportunity cost of missing deadlines is
6310 immense. If we are able to solve issues of funding for development and
6311 maintenance of such software I don't see any big difficulties. I know
6312 of few start-ups in and around India who would love to develop and
6313 maintain such software if funding issues could be solved.</p>
6314
6315 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
6316
6317 <p>That would be huge list. Some of the softwares are obviously apt,
6318 aptitude, debdelta, leafpad, the shell of course (zsh nowadays),
6319 quassel for IRC. In games I use shisen-sho while card-games are evenly
6320 between kpat and Aiselriot.  In desktops it's a tie between
6321 gnome-flashback and mate.</p>
6322
6323 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
6324 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
6325
6326 <p>I think it should first start with using specific FOSS apps. in
6327 whatever environment they are. If it's MS-Windows or Mac so be it.
6328 Once they are habitual with the apps. and there is buy-in from the
6329 school management then it could be installed anywhere. Most of the
6330 people now understand the concept of a repository because of the
6331 various online stores so it isn't hard to convince on that front.</p>
6332
6333 <p>What is harder is having enough people with technical skills and
6334 passion to service them. If you get buy-in from one or two teachers
6335 then ideas like above could also be asked to be done as a project as
6336 well.</p>
6337
6338 <p>I think where we fall short more than anything is in marketing. For
6339 instance, Debian has this whole range of fonts in its archive but
6340 there isn't even a page where all those different fonts in the La
6341 Ipsum format could be tried out for newcomers.</p>
6342
6343 <p>One of the issues faced constantly in installations is with updates
6344 and upgrades.  People have this myth that each update and upgrade
6345 means the user interface will / has to change. I have seen this
6346 innumerable times.  That perhaps is one of the reasons which browsers
6347 like Iceweasel / Firefox change user interfaces so much, not because
6348 it might be needed or be functional but because people believe that
6349 changed user interfaces are better. This, can easily be pointed with
6350 the user interfaces changed with almost every MS-Windows and Mac OS
6351 releases.</p>
6352
6353 <p>The problems with Debian Edu for deployment are many. The biggest
6354 is the huge gap between what is taught in schools and what Debian Edu
6355 is aimed at.
6356
6357 <p>Me and my friends did teach on week-ends in a government school for
6358 around 2 years, and
6359 <a href="https://flossexperiences.wordpress.com/2012/10/08/sharings/">gathered
6360 some experience</a> there.  Some of the things we learnt/discovered
6361 there was :</p>
6362
6363 <ol>
6364
6365   <li>Most of the teachers are very territorial about their subjects
6366    and they do not want you to teach anything out of the
6367    portion/syllabus given.</li>
6368
6369   <li>They want any activity on the system in accordance to whatever
6370    is in the syllabus.</li>
6371
6372   <li>There are huge barriers both with the English language and at
6373    times with objects or whatever. An example, let's say in gcompris
6374    you have objects falling down and you have to name them and let's
6375    say the falling object is a hat or a fedora hat, this would not be
6376    as recognizable as say a
6377    <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puneri_Pagadi">Puneri
6378    Pagdi</a> so there is need to inject local objects, words wherever
6379    possible. Especially for word-games there are so many hindi words
6380    which have become part of english vocabulary (for instance in
6381    parley), those could be made into a hinglish collection or
6382    something but that is something for upstream to do.</li>
6383
6384 </ol>
6385
6386       </div>
6387       <div class="tags">
6388
6389
6390         Tags: <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/intervju">intervju</a>.
6391
6392
6393       </div>
6394     </div>
6395     <div class="padding"></div>
6396
6397     <div class="entry">
6398       <div class="title">
6399         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/I_m_going_to_the_Open_Source_Developers__Conference_Nordic_2015_.html">I'm going to the Open Source Developers' Conference Nordic 2015!</a>
6400       </div>
6401       <div class="date">
6402          7th April 2015
6403       </div>
6404       <div class="body">
6405         <p>I am happy to let you all know that I'm going to the <a
6406 href="http://act.osdc.no/osdc2015no/">Open Source Developers'
6407 Conference Nordic 2015</a>!</p>
6408
6409 <p>It take place Friday 8th to Sunday 10th of May in Oslo next to
6410 where I work, and I finally got around to submitting
6411 <a href="http://act.osdc.no/osdc2015no/talk/6192">a talk proposal for
6412 it</a> (dead link for most people until the talk is accepted).  As
6413 part of my involvement with the
6414 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group member
6415 association</a> I have been slightly involved in the planning of this
6416 conference for a while now, with a focus on organising a Civic Hacking
6417 Hackathon with our friends
6418 over at <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a> and
6419 <a href="http://www.holderdeord.no/">Holder de ord</a>.  This part is
6420 named the 'My Society' track in the program.  There is still space for
6421 more talks and participants.  I hope to see you there.</p>
6422
6423 <p>Check out <a href="http://act.osdc.no/osdc2015no/talks">the talks
6424 submitted and accepted so far</a>.</p>
6425
6426       </div>
6427       <div class="tags">
6428
6429
6430         Tags: <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/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn</a>.
6431
6432
6433       </div>
6434     </div>
6435     <div class="padding"></div>
6436
6437     <div class="entry">
6438       <div class="title">
6439         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Proof_reading_the_Norwegian_translation_of_Free_Culture_by_Lessig.html">Proof reading the Norwegian translation of Free Culture by Lessig</a>
6440       </div>
6441       <div class="date">
6442          4th April 2015
6443       </div>
6444       <div class="body">
6445         <p>During eastern I had some time to continue working on the Norwegian
6446 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book
6447 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig.
6448 At the moment I am proof reading the finished text, looking for typos,
6449 inconsistent wordings and sentences that do not flow as they should.
6450 I'm more than two thirds done with the text, and welcome others to
6451 check the text up to chapter 13.  The current status is available on the
6452 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>
6453 project pages.  You can also check out the
6454 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>,
6455 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
6456 and HTML version available in the
6457 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/tree/master/archive">archive
6458 directory</a>.</p>
6459
6460 <p>Please report typos, bugs and improvements to the github project if
6461 you find any.</p>
6462
6463       </div>
6464       <div class="tags">
6465
6466
6467         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>.
6468
6469
6470       </div>
6471     </div>
6472     <div class="padding"></div>
6473
6474     <div class="entry">
6475       <div class="title">
6476         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Frikanalen__Norwegian_TV_channel_for_technical_topics.html">Frikanalen, Norwegian TV channel for technical topics</a>
6477       </div>
6478       <div class="date">
6479          9th March 2015
6480       </div>
6481       <div class="body">
6482         <p>The <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a>,
6483 where I am a member, and where people interested in free software,
6484 open standards and UNIX like operating systems like Linux and the BSDs
6485 come together, record our monthly technical presentations on video.
6486 The purpose is to document the talks and spread them to a wider
6487 audience.  For this, the the Norwegian nationwide open channel
6488 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a> is a useful venue.
6489 Since a few days ago, when I figured out the
6490 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/api/">REST API</a> to program the
6491 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/guide/">channel time schedule</a>,
6492 the channel has been filled with NUUG talks, related recordings and
6493 some Creative Commons licensed TED talks (from archive.org).  I fill
6494 all "leftover bits" on the channel with content from NUUG, which at
6495 the moment is almost 17 of 24 hours every day.</p>
6496
6497 <p>The list of NUUG videos
6498 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/organization/82">uploaded so far</a>
6499 include things like a
6500 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/625090">one hour talk by John
6501 Perry Barlow when he visited Oslo</a>, a presentation of
6502 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/624275">Haiku, the BeOS
6503 re-implementation</a>, the
6504 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/624493">history of FiksGataMi,
6505 the Norwegian version of FixMyStreet</a>, the good old
6506 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/623566">Warriors of the net
6507 video</A> and many others.</p>
6508
6509 <p>We have a large backlog of NUUG talks not yet uploaded to
6510 Frikanalen, and plan to upload every useful bit to the channel to
6511 spread the word there.  I also hope to find useful recordings from the
6512 Chaos Computer Club and Debian conferences and spread them on the
6513 channel as well.  But this require locating the videos and their meta
6514 information (title, description, license, etc), and preparing the
6515 recordings for broadcast, and I have not yet had the spare time to
6516 focus on this.  Perhaps you want to help.  Please join us on IRC,
6517 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23nuug">#nuug on irc.freenode.net</a>
6518 if you want to help make this happen.</p>
6519
6520 <p>But as I said, already the channel is already almost exclusively
6521 filled with technical topics, and if you want to learn something new
6522 today, check out the <a href="http://www.frikanalen.tv/se">Ogg Theora
6523 web stream</a> or use one of the other ways to get access to the
6524 channel.  Unfortunately the Ogg Theora recoding for distribution still
6525 do not properly sync the video and sound.  It is generated by recoding
6526 a internal MPEG transport stream with MPEG4 coded video (ie H.264) to
6527 Ogg Theora / Vorbis, and we have not been able to find a way that
6528 produces acceptable quality.  Help needed, please get in touch if you
6529 know how to fix it using free software.</p>
6530
6531       </div>
6532       <div class="tags">
6533
6534
6535         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
6536
6537
6538       </div>
6539     </div>
6540     <div class="padding"></div>
6541
6542     <div class="entry">
6543       <div class="title">
6544         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Citizenfour_documentary_on_the_Snowden_confirmations_to_Norway.html">The Citizenfour documentary on the Snowden confirmations to Norway</a>
6545       </div>
6546       <div class="date">
6547         28th February 2015
6548       </div>
6549       <div class="body">
6550         <p>Today I was happy to learn that the documentary
6551 <a href="https://citizenfourfilm.com/">Citizenfour</a> by
6552 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Poitras">Laura Poitras</a>
6553 finally will show up in Norway.  According to the magazine
6554 <a href="http://montages.no/">Montages</a>, a deal has finally been
6555 made for
6556 <a href="http://montages.no/nyheter/snowden-dokumentaren-citizenfour-far-norsk-kinodistribusjon/">Cinema
6557 distribution in Norway</a> and the movie will have its premiere soon.
6558 This is great news.  As part of my involvement with
6559 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the Norwegian Unix User Group</a>, me and
6560 a friend have
6561 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Dokumentar_om_Snowdenbekreftelsene_til_Norge_.shtml">tried
6562 to get the movie to Norway</a> ourselves, but obviously
6563 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Dokumentar_om_Snowdenbekreftelsene_endelig_til_Norge_.shtml">we
6564 were too late</a> and Tor Fosse beat us to it.  I am happy he did, as
6565 the movie will make its way to the public and we do not have to make
6566 it happen ourselves.
6567 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiGwAvd5mvM">The trailer</a>
6568 can be seen on youtube, if you are curious what kind of film this
6569 is.</p>
6570
6571 <p>The whistle blower Edward Snowden really deserve political asylum
6572 here in Norway, but I am afraid he would not be safe.</p>
6573
6574       </div>
6575       <div class="tags">
6576
6577
6578         Tags: <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/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
6579
6580
6581       </div>
6582     </div>
6583     <div class="padding"></div>
6584
6585     <div class="entry">
6586       <div class="title">
6587         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Norwegian_open_channel_Frikanalen___24x7_on_the_Internet.html">The Norwegian open channel Frikanalen - 24x7 on the Internet</a>
6588       </div>
6589       <div class="date">
6590         25th February 2015
6591       </div>
6592       <div class="body">
6593         <p>The Norwegian nationwide open channel
6594 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a> is still going
6595 strong.  It allow everyone to send the video they want on national
6596 television.  It is a TV station administrated completely using a web
6597 browser, running only <ahref="https://github.com/Frikanalen">Free
6598 Software</a>, providing <ahref="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/api">a REST
6599 api</a> for administrators and members, and with distribution on the
6600 national DVB-T distribution network RiksTV.  But only between 12:00
6601 and 17:30 Norwegian time.  This has finally changed, after many years
6602 with limited distribution.  A few weeks ago, we set up a Ogg Theora
6603 stream via icecast to allow everyone with Internet access to check out
6604 the channel the rest of the day.  This is presented on
6605 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.tv/se">the Frikanalen web site now</a>.  And
6606 since a few days ago, the channel is also available
6607 via <a href="https://www.uninett.no/iptv-tilgang">multicast on
6608 UNINETT</a>, available for those using IPTV TVs and set-top boxes in
6609 the Norwegian National Research and Education network.</p>
6610
6611 <p>If you want to see what is on the channel, point your media player
6612 to one of these sources.  The first should work with most players and
6613 browsers, while as far as I know, the multicast UDP stream only work
6614 with VLC.</p>
6615
6616 <ul>
6617   <li><a href="http://video.nuug.no/frikanalen.ogv">http://video.nuug.no/frikanalen.ogv</a></li>
6618   <li>udp://@224.17.43.129:1234</li>
6619 </ul>
6620
6621 <p>The Ogg Theora / icecast stream is not working well, as the video
6622 and audio is slightly out of sync.  We have not been able to figure
6623 out how to fix it.  It is generated by recoding a internal MPEG
6624 transport stream with MPEG4 coded video (ie H.264) to Ogg Theora /
6625 Vorbis, and the result is less then stellar.  If you have ideas how to
6626 fix it, please let us know on frikanalen (at) nuug.no.  We currently
6627 use this with ffmpeg2theora 0.29:</p>
6628
6629 <blockquote><pre>
6630 ./ffmpeg2theora.linux &lt;OBE_gemini_URL.ts&gt; -F 25 -x 720 -y 405 \
6631  --deinterlace --inputfps 25 -c 1 -H 48000 --keyint 8 --buf-delay 100 \
6632  --nosync -V 700 -o - | oggfwd video.nuug.no 8000 &lt;pw&gt; /frikanalen.ogv
6633 </pre></blockquote>
6634
6635 <p>If you get the multicast UDP stream working, please let me know, as
6636 I am curious how far the multicast stream reach.  It do not make it to
6637 my home network, nor any other commercially available network in
6638 Norway that I am aware of.</p>
6639
6640       </div>
6641       <div class="tags">
6642
6643
6644         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
6645
6646
6647       </div>
6648     </div>
6649     <div class="padding"></div>
6650
6651     <div class="entry">
6652       <div class="title">
6653         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Nude_body_scanner_now_present_on_Norwegian_airport.html">Nude body scanner now present on Norwegian airport</a>
6654       </div>
6655       <div class="date">
6656         10th February 2015
6657       </div>
6658       <div class="body">
6659         <p>Aftenposten, one of the largest newspapers in Norway, today report
6660 that
6661 <a href="http://www.aftenposten.no/reise/Slik-skannes-kroppen-din-i-fremtidens-sikkerhetskontroll-490666_1.snd">three
6662 of the nude body scanners now is put to use at Gardermoen</a>, the
6663 main airport in Norway.  This way the travelers can have their body
6664 photographed without cloths when visiting Norway.  Of course this
6665 horrible news is presented with a positive spin, stating that "now
6666 travelers can move past the security check point faster and more
6667 efficiently", but fail to mention that the machines in question take
6668 pictures of their nude bodies and store them internally in the
6669 computer, while only presenting sketch figure of the body to the
6670 public.  The article is written in a way that leave the impression
6671 that the new machines do not take these nude pictures and only create
6672 the sketch figures.  In reality the same nude pictures are still
6673 taken, but not presented to everyone.  They are still available for
6674 the owners of the system and the people doing maintenance of the
6675 scanners, as long as they are taken and stored.</p>
6676
6677 <p>Wikipedia have a more on
6678 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_body_scanner">Full body
6679 scanners</a>, including example images and a summary of the
6680 controversy about these scanners.</p>
6681
6682 <p>Personally I will decline to use these machines, as I believe strip
6683 searches of my body is a very intrusive attack on my privacy, and not
6684 something everyone should have to accept to travel.</p>
6685
6686       </div>
6687       <div class="tags">
6688
6689
6690         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>.
6691
6692
6693       </div>
6694     </div>
6695     <div class="padding"></div>
6696
6697     <div class="entry">
6698       <div class="title">
6699         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Nagios_module_to_check_if_the_Frikanalen_video_stream_is_working.html">Nagios module to check if the Frikanalen video stream is working</a>
6700       </div>
6701       <div class="date">
6702          8th February 2015
6703       </div>
6704       <div class="body">
6705         <p>When running a TV station with both broadcast and web stream
6706 distribution, it is useful to know that the stream is working.  As I
6707 am involved in the Norwegian open channel
6708 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a> as part of my
6709 activity in the <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG member
6710 organisation</a>, I wrote a script to use mplayer to connect to a
6711 video stream, pick two images 35 seconds apart and compare them.  If
6712 the images are missing or identical, something is probably wrong with
6713 the stream and an alarm should be triggered.  The script is written as
6714 a Nagios plugin, allowing us to use Nagios to run the check regularly
6715 and sound the alarm when something is wrong.  It is able to detect
6716 both a hanging and a broken video stream.</p>
6717
6718 <p>I just uploaded the code for the script into the
6719 <a href="https://github.com/Frikanalen/frikanalen/blob/master/nagios-plugin/check_video_stream_images">Frikanalen
6720 git repository</a> on github.  If you run a TV station with web
6721 streaming, perhaps you can find it useful too.</p>
6722
6723 <p>Last year, the Frikanalen public TV station transformed into using
6724 only Linux based free software to administrate, schedule and
6725 distribute the TV content.  The
6726 <a href="https://github.com/Frikanalen">source code for the entire TV
6727 station</a> is available from the Github project page.  Everyone can
6728 use it to send their content on national TV, and we provide both a web
6729 GUI and <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/api/">a web API</a> to
6730 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/login/?next=/members/video/">add</a>
6731 and <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/members/plan/">schedule
6732 content</a>.  And thanks to last weeks developer gathering and
6733 following activity, we now have the schedule
6734 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/xmltv/2015/01/01">available as
6735 XMLTV</a> too.  Still a lot of work left to do, especially with the
6736 process to add videos and with the scheduling, so your contribution is
6737 most welcome.  Perhaps you want to set up your own TV station?</p>
6738
6739 <p>Update 2015-02-25: Got a tip from Uninett about their
6740 <a href="https://scm.uninett.no/maalepaaler/qstream/">qstream
6741 monitoring system</a>, which gather connection time, jitter, packet
6742 loss and burst bandwidth usage.  It look useful to check if UDP
6743 streams are working as they should.</p>
6744
6745       </div>
6746       <div class="tags">
6747
6748
6749         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
6750
6751
6752       </div>
6753     </div>
6754     <div class="padding"></div>
6755
6756     <div class="entry">
6757       <div class="title">
6758         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Norwegian_Bokm_l_subtitles_for_the_FSF_video_User_Liberation.html">Norwegian Bokmål subtitles for the FSF video User Liberation</a>
6759       </div>
6760       <div class="date">
6761         12th January 2015
6762       </div>
6763       <div class="body">
6764         <p>A few days ago, the <a href="https://www.fsf.org/">Free Software
6765 Foundation</a> announced a new video
6766 <a href="https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/user-liberation-watch-and-share-our-new-video">explaining
6767 Free software</a> in simple terms.  The video named User Liberation is
6768 3 minutes long, and I recommend showing it to everyone you know as a
6769 way to explain what Free Software is all about.  Unfortunately several
6770 of the people I know do not understand English and Spanish, so it did
6771 not make sense to show it to them.</p>
6772
6773 <p>But today I was told that
6774 <a href="https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/user-liberation-watch-and-share-our-new-video">English
6775 subtitles were available</a> and set out to provide Norwegian Bokmål
6776 subtitles based on these.  The result has been sent to FSF and made
6777 available in
6778 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/fsf-video-user-liberation-subtitles">a
6779 git repository</a> provided by Github.  Please let me know if you find
6780 errors or have improvements to the subtitles.</p>
6781
6782 <p>Update 2015-02-03: Since I publised this post, FSF created a
6783 Libreplanet
6784 <a href="http://libreplanet.org/wiki/Group:FSF/User_Liberation_Video_Translation">project
6785 to track subtitles</A> for the video.</p>
6786
6787       </div>
6788       <div class="tags">
6789
6790
6791         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
6792
6793
6794       </div>
6795     </div>
6796     <div class="padding"></div>
6797
6798     <div class="entry">
6799       <div class="title">
6800         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Updated_version_of_the_Norwegian_web_service_FiksGataMi.html">Updated version of the Norwegian web service FiksGataMi</a>
6801       </div>
6802       <div class="date">
6803         30th December 2014
6804       </div>
6805       <div class="body">
6806         <p>I am very happy that we in the
6807 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User group (NUUG)</a>,
6808 spearheaded by Marius Halden from NUUG and Matthew Somerville from
6809 <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a>, finally managed to
6810 upgrade the code base for the Norwegian version of
6811 <a href="http://fixmystreet.org/">FixMyStreet</a>.  This
6812 was the first major update since 2011. The refurbished
6813 <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a> is already live, and
6814 seem to hold up the pressure.  The
6815 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Pressemelding__FiksGataMi_i_oppdatert_og_mobilvennlig_klesdrakt.shtml">press
6816 release and announcement</a> went out this morning.</p>
6817
6818 <p>FixMyStreet is a web platform for allowing the citizens to easily
6819 report problems with public infrastructure to the responsible
6820 authorities.  Think of it as a shared mail client with map support,
6821 allowing everyone to see what already was reported and comment on the
6822 reports in public.</p>
6823
6824       </div>
6825       <div class="tags">
6826
6827
6828         Tags: <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/nuug">nuug</a>.
6829
6830
6831       </div>
6832     </div>
6833     <div class="padding"></div>
6834
6835     <div class="entry">
6836       <div class="title">
6837         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Of_course_USA_loses_in_cyber_war___NSA_and_friends_made_sure_it_would_happen.html">Of course USA loses in cyber war - NSA and friends made sure it would happen</a>
6838       </div>
6839       <div class="date">
6840         19th December 2014
6841       </div>
6842       <div class="body">
6843         <p>So, Sony caved in
6844 (<a href="https://twitter.com/RobLowe/status/545338568512917504">according
6845 to Rob Lowe</a>) and demonstrated that America lost its first cyberwar
6846 (<a href="https://twitter.com/newtgingrich/status/545339074975109122">according
6847 to Newt Gingrich</a>).  It should not surprise anyone, after the
6848 whistle blower Edward Snowden documented that the government of USA
6849 and their allies for many years have done their best to make sure the
6850 technology used by its citizens is filled with security holes allowing
6851 the secret services to spy on its own population.  No one in their
6852 right minds could believe that the ability to snoop on the people all
6853 over the globe could only be used by the personnel authorized to do so
6854 by the president of the United States of America.  If the capabilities
6855 are there, they will be used by friend and foe alike, and now they are
6856 being used to bring Sony on its knees.</p>
6857
6858 <p>I doubt it will a lesson learned, and expect USA to lose its next
6859 cyber war too, given how eager the western intelligence communities
6860 (and probably the non-western too, but it is less in the news) seem to
6861 be to continue its current dragnet surveillance practice.</p>
6862
6863 <p>There is a reason why China and others are trying to move away from
6864 Windows to Linux and other alternatives, and it is not to avoid
6865 sending its hard earned dollars to Cayman Islands (or whatever
6866 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_haven">tax haven</a>
6867 Microsoft is using these days to collect the majority of its
6868 income. :)</p>
6869
6870       </div>
6871       <div class="tags">
6872
6873
6874         Tags: <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/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
6875
6876
6877       </div>
6878     </div>
6879     <div class="padding"></div>
6880
6881     <div class="entry">
6882       <div class="title">
6883         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_stay_with_sysvinit_in_Debian_Jessie.html">How to stay with sysvinit in Debian Jessie</a>
6884       </div>
6885       <div class="date">
6886         22nd November 2014
6887       </div>
6888       <div class="body">
6889         <p>By now, it is well known that Debian Jessie will not be using
6890 sysvinit as its boot system by default.  But how can one keep using
6891 sysvinit in Jessie?  It is fairly easy, and here are a few recipes,
6892 courtesy of
6893 <a href="http://www.vitavonni.de/blog/201410/2014102101-avoiding-systemd.html">Erich
6894 Schubert</a> and
6895 <a href="http://smcv.pseudorandom.co.uk/2014/still_universal/">Simon
6896 McVittie</a>.
6897
6898 <p>If you already are using Wheezy and want to upgrade to Jessie and
6899 keep sysvinit as your boot system, create a file
6900 <tt>/etc/apt/preferences.d/use-sysvinit</tt> with this content before
6901 you upgrade:</p>
6902
6903 <p><blockquote><pre>
6904 Package: systemd-sysv
6905 Pin: release o=Debian
6906 Pin-Priority: -1
6907 </pre></blockquote><p>
6908
6909 <p>This file content will tell apt and aptitude to not consider
6910 installing systemd-sysv as part of any installation and upgrade
6911 solution when resolving dependencies, and thus tell it to avoid
6912 systemd as a default boot system.  The end result should be that the
6913 upgraded system keep using sysvinit.</p>
6914
6915 <p>If you are installing Jessie for the first time, there is no way to
6916 get sysvinit installed by default (debootstrap used by
6917 debian-installer have no option for this), but one can tell the
6918 installer to switch to sysvinit before the first boot.  Either by
6919 using a kernel argument to the installer, or by adding a line to the
6920 preseed file used.  First, the kernel command line argument:
6921
6922 <p><blockquote><pre>
6923 preseed/late_command="in-target apt-get install --purge -y sysvinit-core"
6924 </pre></blockquote><p>
6925
6926 <p>Next, the line to use in a preseed file:</p>
6927
6928 <p><blockquote><pre>
6929 d-i preseed/late_command string in-target apt-get install -y sysvinit-core
6930 </pre></blockquote><p>
6931
6932 <p>One can of course also do this after the first boot by installing
6933 the sysvinit-core package.</p>
6934
6935 <p>I recommend only using sysvinit if you really need it, as the
6936 sysvinit boot sequence in Debian have several hardware specific bugs
6937 on Linux caused by the fact that it is unpredictable when hardware
6938 devices show up during boot.  But on the other hand, the new default
6939 boot system still have a few rough edges I hope will be fixed before
6940 Jessie is released.</p>
6941
6942 <p>Update 2014-11-26: Inspired by
6943 <ahref="https://www.mirbsd.org/permalinks/wlog-10-tg_e20141125-tg.htm#e20141125-tg_wlog-10-tg">a
6944 blog post by Torsten Glaser</a>, added --purge to the preseed
6945 line.</p>
6946
6947       </div>
6948       <div class="tags">
6949
6950
6951         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>.
6952
6953
6954       </div>
6955     </div>
6956     <div class="padding"></div>
6957
6958     <div class="entry">
6959       <div class="title">
6960         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Debian_package_for_SMTP_via_Tor__aka_SMTorP__using_exim4.html">A Debian package for SMTP via Tor (aka SMTorP) using exim4</a>
6961       </div>
6962       <div class="date">
6963         10th November 2014
6964       </div>
6965       <div class="body">
6966         <p>The right to communicate with your friends and family in private,
6967 without anyone snooping, is a right every citicen have in a liberal
6968 democracy.  But this right is under serious attack these days.</p>
6969
6970 <p>A while back it occurred to me that one way to make the dragnet
6971 surveillance conducted by NSA, GCHQ, FRA and others (and confirmed by
6972 the whisleblower Snowden) more expensive for Internet email,
6973 is to deliver all email using SMTP via Tor.  Such SMTP option would be
6974 a nice addition to the FreedomBox project if we could send email
6975 between FreedomBox machines without leaking metadata about the emails
6976 to the people peeking on the wire.  I
6977 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/2014-October/006493.html">proposed
6978 this on the FreedomBox project mailing list in October</a> and got a
6979 lot of useful feedback and suggestions.  It also became obvious to me
6980 that this was not a novel idea, as the same idea was tested and
6981 documented by Johannes Berg as early as 2006, and both
6982 <a href="https://github.com/pagekite/Mailpile/wiki/SMTorP">the
6983 Mailpile</a> and <a href="http://dee.su/cables">the Cables</a> systems
6984 propose a similar method / protocol to pass emails between users.</p>
6985
6986 <p>To implement such system one need to set up a Tor hidden service
6987 providing the SMTP protocol on port 25, and use email addresses
6988 looking like username@hidden-service-name.onion.  With such addresses
6989 the connections to port 25 on hidden-service-name.onion using Tor will
6990 go to the correct SMTP server.  To do this, one need to configure the
6991 Tor daemon to provide the hidden service and the mail server to accept
6992 emails for this .onion domain.  To learn more about Exim configuration
6993 in Debian and test the design provided by Johannes Berg in his FAQ, I
6994 set out yesterday to create a Debian package for making it trivial to
6995 set up such SMTP over Tor service based on Debian.  Getting it to work
6996 were fairly easy, and
6997 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/exim4-smtorp">the
6998 source code for the Debian package</a> is available from github.  I
6999 plan to move it into Debian if further testing prove this to be a
7000 useful approach.</p>
7001
7002 <p>If you want to test this, set up a blank Debian machine without any
7003 mail system installed (or run <tt>apt-get purge exim4-config</tt> to
7004 get rid of exim4).  Install tor, clone the git repository mentioned
7005 above, build the deb and install it on the machine.  Next, run
7006 <tt>/usr/lib/exim4-smtorp/setup-exim-hidden-service</tt> and follow
7007 the instructions to get the service up and running.  Restart tor and
7008 exim when it is done, and test mail delivery using swaks like
7009 this:</p>
7010
7011 <p><blockquote><pre>
7012 torsocks swaks --server dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion \
7013   --to fbx@dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion
7014 </pre></blockquote></p>
7015
7016 <p>This will test the SMTP delivery using tor.  Replace the email
7017 address with your own address to test your server. :)</p>
7018
7019 <p>The setup procedure is still to complex, and I hope it can be made
7020 easier and more automatic.  Especially the tor setup need more work.
7021 Also, the package include a tor-smtp tool written in C, but its task
7022 should probably be rewritten in some script language to make the deb
7023 architecture independent.  It would probably also make the code easier
7024 to review.  The tor-smtp tool currently need to listen on a socket for
7025 exim to talk to it and is started using xinetd.  It would be better if
7026 no daemon and no socket is needed.  I suspect it is possible to get
7027 exim to run a command line tool for delivery instead of talking to a
7028 socket, and hope to figure out how in a future version of this
7029 system.</p>
7030
7031 <p>Until I wipe my test machine, I can be reached using the
7032 <tt>fbx@dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion</tt> mail address, deliverable over
7033 SMTorP. :)</p>
7034
7035       </div>
7036       <div class="tags">
7037
7038
7039         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/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
7040
7041
7042       </div>
7043     </div>
7044     <div class="padding"></div>
7045
7046     <div class="entry">
7047       <div class="title">
7048         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Jessie_based_Debian_Edu_released__alpha0_.html">First Jessie based Debian Edu released (alpha0)</a>
7049       </div>
7050       <div class="date">
7051         27th October 2014
7052       </div>
7053       <div class="body">
7054         <p>I am happy to report that I on behalf of the Debian Edu team just
7055 sent out
7056 <a href="https://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2014/10/msg00000.html">this
7057 announcement</a>:</p>
7058
7059 <pre>
7060 The Debian Edu Team is pleased to announce the release of Debian Edu
7061 Jessie 8.0+edu0~alpha0
7062
7063 Debian Edu is a complete operating system for schools. Through its
7064 various installation profiles you can install servers, workstations
7065 and laptops which will work together on the school network. With
7066 Debian Edu, the teachers themselves or their technical support can
7067 roll out a complete multi-user multi-machine study environment within
7068 hours or a few days. Debian Edu comes with hundreds of applications
7069 pre-installed, but you can always add more packages from Debian.
7070
7071 For those who want to give Debian Edu Jessie a try, download and
7072 installation instructions are available, including detailed
7073 instructions in the manual[1] explaining the first steps, such as
7074 setting up a network or adding users. Please note that the password
7075 for the user your prompted for during installation must have a length
7076 of at least 5 characters!
7077
7078  [1] &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie">https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie</a> &gt;
7079
7080 Would you like to give your school's computer a longer life? Are you
7081 tired of sneaker administration, running from computer to computer
7082 reinstalling the operating system? Would you like to administrate all
7083 the computers in your school using only a couple of hours every week?
7084 Check out Debian Edu Jessie!
7085
7086 Skolelinux is used by at least two hundred schools all over the world,
7087 mostly in Germany and Norway.
7088
7089 About Debian Edu and Skolelinux
7090 ===============================
7091
7092 Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux[2], is a Linux distribution based
7093 on Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
7094 configured school network. Immediately after installation a school
7095 server running all services needed for a school network is set up just
7096 waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
7097 Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
7098 initial installation of the main server from CD or USB stick all other
7099 machines can be installed via the network.  The provided school server
7100 provides LDAP database and Kerberos authentication service,
7101 centralized home directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other
7102 services.  The desktop contains more than 60 educational software
7103 packages[3] and more are available from the Debian archive, and
7104 schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE, Xfce and MATE desktop
7105 environment.
7106
7107  [2] &lt;URL: <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">http://www.skolelinux.org/</a> &gt;
7108  [3] &lt;URL: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html</a> &gt;
7109
7110 Full release notes and manual
7111 =============================
7112
7113 Below the download URLs there is a list of some of the new features
7114 and bugfixes of Debian Edu 8.0+edu0~alpha0 Codename Jessie. The full
7115 list is part of the manual. (See the feature list in the manual[4] for
7116 the English version.) For some languages manual translations are
7117 available, see the manual translation overview[5].
7118
7119  [4] &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie/Features">https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie/Features</a> &gt;
7120  [5] &lt;URL: <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/">http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/</a> &gt;
7121
7122 Where to get it
7123 ---------------
7124
7125 To download the multiarch netinstall CD release (624 MiB) you can use
7126
7127  * <a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~alpha0-CD.iso">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~alpha0-CD.iso</a>
7128  * <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~alpha0-CD.iso">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~alpha0-CD.iso</a>
7129  * rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~alpha0-CD.iso .
7130
7131 The SHA1SUM of this image is: 361188818e036ce67280a572f757de82ebfeb095
7132
7133 New features for Debian Edu 8.0+edu0~alpha0 Codename Jessie released 2014-10-27
7134 ===============================================================================
7135
7136
7137 Installation changes
7138 --------------------
7139
7140  * PXE installation now installs firmware automatically for the hardware present.
7141
7142 Software updates
7143 ----------------
7144
7145 Everything which is new in Debian Jessie 8.0, eg:
7146
7147  * Linux kernel 3.16.x
7148  * Desktop environments KDE "Plasma" 4.11.12, GNOME 3.14, Xfce 4.10,
7149    LXDE 0.5.6 and MATE 1.8 (KDE "Plasma" is installed by default; to
7150    choose one of the others see manual.)
7151  * the browsers Iceweasel 31 ESR and Chromium 38
7152  * !LibreOffice 4.3.3
7153  * GOsa 2.7.4
7154  * LTSP 5.5.4
7155  * CUPS print system 1.7.5
7156  * new boot framework: systemd
7157  * Educational toolbox GCompris 14.07
7158  * Music creator Rosegarden 14.02
7159  * Image editor Gimp 2.8.14
7160  * Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.13.0
7161  * golearn 0.9
7162  * tuxpaint 0.9.22
7163  * New version of debian-installer from Debian Jessie.
7164  * Debian Jessie includes about 42000 packages available for
7165    installation.
7166  * More information about Debian Jessie 8.0 is provided in the release
7167    notes[6] and the installation manual[7].
7168
7169  [6] &lt;URL: <a href="http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/releasenotes">http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/releasenotes</a> &gt;
7170  [7] &lt;URL: <a href="http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/installmanual">http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/installmanual</a> &gt;
7171
7172 Fixed bugs
7173 ----------
7174
7175  * Inserting incorrect DNS information in Gosa will no longer break
7176    DNS completely, but instead stop DNS updates until the incorrect
7177    information is corrected (Debian bug #710362)
7178  * and many others.
7179
7180 Documentation and translation updates
7181 -------------------------------------
7182
7183  * The Debian Edu Jessie Manual is fully translated to German, French,
7184    Italian, Danish and Dutch. Partly translated versions exist for
7185    Norwegian Bokmal and Spanish.
7186
7187 Other changes
7188 -------------
7189
7190  * Due to new Squid settings, powering off or rebooting the main
7191    server takes more time.
7192  * To manage printers localhost:631 has to be used, currently www:631
7193    doesn't work.
7194
7195 Regressions / known problems
7196 ----------------------------
7197
7198  * Installing LTSP chroot fails with a bug related to eatmydata about
7199    exim4-config failing to run its postinst (see Debian bug #765694
7200    and Debian bug #762103).
7201  * Munin collection is not properly configured on clients (Debian bug
7202    #764594).  The fix is available in a newer version of munin-node.
7203  * PXE setup for Main Server and Thin Client Server setup does not
7204    work when installing on a machine without direct Internet access.
7205    Will be fixed when Debian bug #766960 is fixed in Jessie.
7206
7207 See the status page[8] for the complete list.
7208
7209  [8] &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie">https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie</a> &gt;
7210
7211 How to report bugs
7212 ------------------
7213
7214 &lt;URL: <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a> &gt;
7215
7216 About Debian
7217 ============
7218
7219 The Debian Project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly
7220 free community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of
7221 the largest and most influential open source projects. Thousands of
7222 volunteers from all over the world work together to create and
7223 maintain Debian software. Available in 70 languages, and supporting a
7224 huge range of computer types, Debian calls itself the universal
7225 operating system.
7226
7227 Contact Information
7228 For further information, please visit the Debian web pages[9] or send
7229 mail to press@debian.org.
7230
7231  [9] &lt;URL: <a href="http://www.debian.org/">http://www.debian.org/</a> &gt;
7232 </pre>
7233
7234       </div>
7235       <div class="tags">
7236
7237
7238         Tags: <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>.
7239
7240
7241       </div>
7242     </div>
7243     <div class="padding"></div>
7244
7245     <div class="entry">
7246       <div class="title">
7247         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/I_spent_last_weekend_recording_MakerCon_Nordic.html">I spent last weekend recording MakerCon Nordic</a>
7248       </div>
7249       <div class="date">
7250         23rd October 2014
7251       </div>
7252       <div class="body">
7253         <p>I spent last weekend at <a href="http://www.makercon.no/">Makercon
7254 Nordic</a>, a great conference and workshop for makers in Norway and
7255 the surrounding countries.  I had volunteered on behalf of the
7256 Norwegian Unix Users Group (NUUG) to video record the talks, and we
7257 had a great and exhausting time recording the entire day, two days in
7258 a row.  There were only two of us, Hans-Petter and me, and we used the
7259 regular video equipment for NUUG, with a
7260 <a href="http://dvswitch.alioth.debian.org/wiki/">dvswitch</a>, a
7261 camera and a VGA to DV convert box, and mixed video and slides
7262 live.</p>
7263
7264 <p>Hans-Petter did the post-processing, consisting of uploading the
7265 around 180 GiB of raw video to Youtube, and the result is
7266 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/MakerConNordic/">now becoming
7267 public</a> on the MakerConNordic account.  The videos have the license
7268 NUUG always use on our recordings, which is
7269 <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/no/">Creative
7270 Commons Navngivelse-Del på samme vilkår 3.0 Norge</a>.  Many great
7271 talks available.  Check it out! :)</p>
7272
7273       </div>
7274       <div class="tags">
7275
7276
7277         Tags: <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/video">video</a>.
7278
7279
7280       </div>
7281     </div>
7282     <div class="padding"></div>
7283
7284     <div class="entry">
7285       <div class="title">
7286         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/listadmin__the_quick_way_to_moderate_mailman_lists___nice_free_software.html">listadmin, the quick way to moderate mailman lists - nice free software</a>
7287       </div>
7288       <div class="date">
7289         22nd October 2014
7290       </div>
7291       <div class="body">
7292         <p>If you ever had to moderate a mailman list, like the ones on
7293 alioth.debian.org, you know the web interface is fairly slow to
7294 operate.  First you visit one web page, enter the moderation password
7295 and get a new page shown with a list of all the messages to moderate
7296 and various options for each email address.  This take a while for
7297 every list you moderate, and you need to do it regularly to do a good
7298 job as a list moderator.  But there is a quick alternative,
7299 <a href="http://heim.ifi.uio.no/kjetilho/hacks/#listadmin">the
7300 listadmin program</a>.  It allow you to check lists for new messages
7301 to moderate in a fraction of a second.  Here is a test run on two
7302 lists I recently took over:</p>
7303
7304 <p><blockquote><pre>
7305 % time listadmin xiph
7306 fetching data for pkg-xiph-commits@lists.alioth.debian.org ... nothing in queue
7307 fetching data for pkg-xiph-maint@lists.alioth.debian.org ... nothing in queue
7308
7309 real    0m1.709s
7310 user    0m0.232s
7311 sys     0m0.012s
7312 %
7313 </pre></blockquote></p>
7314
7315 <p>In 1.7 seconds I had checked two mailing lists and confirmed that
7316 there are no message in the moderation queue.  Every morning I
7317 currently moderate 68 mailman lists, and it normally take around two
7318 minutes.  When I took over the two pkg-xiph lists above a few days
7319 ago, there were 400 emails waiting in the moderator queue.  It took me
7320 less than 15 minutes to process them all using the listadmin
7321 program.</p>
7322
7323 <p>If you install
7324 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/listadmin">the listadmin
7325 package</a> from Debian and create a file <tt>~/.listadmin.ini</tt>
7326 with content like this, the moderation task is a breeze:</p>
7327
7328 <p><blockquote><pre>
7329 username username@example.org
7330 spamlevel 23
7331 default discard
7332 discard_if_reason "Posting restricted to members only. Remove us from your mail list."
7333
7334 password secret
7335 adminurl https://{domain}/mailman/admindb/{list}
7336 mailman-list@lists.example.com
7337
7338 password hidden
7339 other-list@otherserver.example.org
7340 </pre></blockquote></p>
7341
7342 <p>There are other options to set as well.  Check the manual page to
7343 learn the details.</p>
7344
7345 <p>If you are forced to moderate lists on a mailman installation where
7346 the SSL certificate is self signed or not properly signed by a
7347 generally accepted signing authority, you can set a environment
7348 variable when calling listadmin to disable SSL verification:</p>
7349
7350 <p><blockquote><pre>
7351 PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=0 listadmin
7352 </pre></blockquote></p>
7353
7354 <p>If you want to moderate a subset of the lists you take care of, you
7355 can provide an argument to the listadmin script like I do in the
7356 initial screen dump (the xiph argument).  Using an argument, only
7357 lists matching the argument string will be processed.  This make it
7358 quick to accept messages if you notice the moderation request in your
7359 email.</p>
7360
7361 <p>Without the listadmin program, I would never be the moderator of 68
7362 mailing lists, as I simply do not have time to spend on that if the
7363 process was any slower. The listadmin program have saved me hours of
7364 time I could spend elsewhere over the years.  It truly is nice free
7365 software.</p>
7366
7367 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
7368 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
7369 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
7370
7371 <p>Update 2014-10-27: Added missing 'username' statement in
7372 configuration example.  Also, I've been told that the
7373 PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=0 setting do not work for everyone.  Not
7374 sure why.</p>
7375
7376       </div>
7377       <div class="tags">
7378
7379
7380         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/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
7381
7382
7383       </div>
7384     </div>
7385     <div class="padding"></div>
7386
7387     <div class="entry">
7388       <div class="title">
7389         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Jessie__PXE_and_automatic_firmware_installation.html">Debian Jessie, PXE and automatic firmware installation</a>
7390       </div>
7391       <div class="date">
7392         17th October 2014
7393       </div>
7394       <div class="body">
7395         <p>When PXE installing laptops with Debian, I often run into the
7396 problem that the WiFi card require some firmware to work properly.
7397 And it has been a pain to fix this using preseeding in Debian.
7398 Normally something more is needed.  But thanks to
7399 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/i/isenkram.html">my isenkram
7400 package</a> and its recent tasksel extension, it has now become easy
7401 to do this using simple preseeding.</p>
7402
7403 <p>The isenkram-cli package provide tasksel tasks which will install
7404 firmware for the hardware found in the machine (actually, requested by
7405 the kernel modules for the hardware).  (It can also install user space
7406 programs supporting the hardware detected, but that is not the focus
7407 of this story.)</p>
7408
7409 <p>To get this working in the default installation, two preeseding
7410 values are needed.  First, the isenkram-cli package must be installed
7411 into the target chroot (aka the hard drive) before tasksel is executed
7412 in the pkgsel step of the debian-installer system.  This is done by
7413 preseeding the base-installer/includes debconf value to include the
7414 isenkram-cli package.  The package name is next passed to debootstrap
7415 for installation.  With the isenkram-cli package in place, tasksel
7416 will automatically use the isenkram tasks to detect hardware specific
7417 packages for the machine being installed and install them, because
7418 isenkram-cli contain tasksel tasks.</p>
7419
7420 <p>Second, one need to enable the non-free APT repository, because
7421 most firmware unfortunately is non-free.  This is done by preseeding
7422 the apt-mirror-setup step.  This is unfortunate, but for a lot of
7423 hardware it is the only option in Debian.</p>
7424
7425 <p>The end result is two lines needed in your preseeding file to get
7426 firmware installed automatically by the installer:</p>
7427
7428 <p><blockquote><pre>
7429 base-installer base-installer/includes string isenkram-cli
7430 apt-mirror-setup apt-setup/non-free boolean true
7431 </pre></blockquote></p>
7432
7433 <p>The current version of isenkram-cli in testing/jessie will install
7434 both firmware and user space packages when using this method.  It also
7435 do not work well, so use version 0.15 or later.  Installing both
7436 firmware and user space packages might give you a bit more than you
7437 want, so I decided to split the tasksel task in two, one for firmware
7438 and one for user space programs.  The firmware task is enabled by
7439 default, while the one for user space programs is not.  This split is
7440 implemented in the package currently in unstable.</p>
7441
7442 <p>If you decide to give this a go, please let me know (via email) how
7443 this recipe work for you. :)</p>
7444
7445 <p>So, I bet you are wondering, how can this work.  First and
7446 foremost, it work because tasksel is modular, and driven by whatever
7447 files it find in /usr/lib/tasksel/ and /usr/share/tasksel/.  So the
7448 isenkram-cli package place two files for tasksel to find.  First there
7449 is the task description file (/usr/share/tasksel/descs/isenkram.desc):</p>
7450
7451 <p><blockquote><pre>
7452 Task: isenkram-packages
7453 Section: hardware
7454 Description: Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)
7455  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific packages are
7456  proposed.
7457 Test-new-install: show show
7458 Relevance: 8
7459 Packages: for-current-hardware
7460
7461 Task: isenkram-firmware
7462 Section: hardware
7463 Description: Hardware specific firmware packages (autodetected by isenkram)
7464  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific firmware
7465  packages are proposed.
7466 Test-new-install: mark show
7467 Relevance: 8
7468 Packages: for-current-hardware-firmware
7469 </pre></blockquote></p>
7470
7471 <p>The key parts are Test-new-install which indicate how the task
7472 should be handled and the Packages line referencing to a script in
7473 /usr/lib/tasksel/packages/.  The scripts use other scripts to get a
7474 list of packages to install.  The for-current-hardware-firmware script
7475 look like this to list relevant firmware for the machine:
7476
7477 <p><blockquote><pre>
7478 #!/bin/sh
7479 #
7480 PATH=/usr/sbin:$PATH
7481 export PATH
7482 isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
7483 </pre></blockquote></p>
7484
7485 <p>With those two pieces in place, the firmware is installed by
7486 tasksel during the normal d-i run. :)</p>
7487
7488 <p>If you want to test what tasksel will install when isenkram-cli is
7489 installed, run <tt>DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical tasksel --test
7490 --new-install</tt> to get the list of packages that tasksel would
7491 install.</p>
7492
7493 <p><a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/">Debian Edu</a> will be
7494 pilots in testing this feature, as isenkram is used there now to
7495 install firmware, replacing the earlier scripts.</p>
7496
7497       </div>
7498       <div class="tags">
7499
7500
7501         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sysadmin">sysadmin</a>.
7502
7503
7504       </div>
7505     </div>
7506     <div class="padding"></div>
7507
7508     <div class="entry">
7509       <div class="title">
7510         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ubuntu_used_to_show_the_bread_prizes_at_ICA_Storo.html">Ubuntu used to show the bread prizes at ICA Storo</a>
7511       </div>
7512       <div class="date">
7513          4th October 2014
7514       </div>
7515       <div class="body">
7516         <p>Today I came across an unexpected Ubuntu boot screen.  Above the
7517 bread shelf on the ICA shop at Storo in Oslo, the grub menu of Ubuntu
7518 with Linux kernel 3.2.0-23 (ie probably version 12.04 LTS) was stuck
7519 on a screen normally showing the bread types and prizes:</p>
7520
7521 <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2014-10-04-ubuntu-ica-storo-crop.jpeg"></p>
7522
7523 <p>If it had booted as it was supposed to, I would never had known
7524 about this hidden Linux installation.  It is interesting what
7525 <a href="http://revealingerrors.com/">errors can reveal</a>.</p>
7526
7527       </div>
7528       <div class="tags">
7529
7530
7531         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>.
7532
7533
7534       </div>
7535     </div>
7536     <div class="padding"></div>
7537
7538     <div class="entry">
7539       <div class="title">
7540         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_lsdvd_release_version_0_17_is_ready.html">New lsdvd release version 0.17 is ready</a>
7541       </div>
7542       <div class="date">
7543          4th October 2014
7544       </div>
7545       <div class="body">
7546         <p>The <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/">lsdvd project</a>
7547 got a new set of developers a few weeks ago, after the original
7548 developer decided to step down and pass the project to fresh blood.
7549 This project is now maintained by Petter Reinholdtsen and Steve
7550 Dibb.</p>
7551
7552 <p>I just wrapped up
7553 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/mailman/message/32896061/">a
7554 new lsdvd release</a>, available in git or from
7555 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/projects/lsdvd/files/lsdvd/">the
7556 download page</a>.  This is the changelog dated 2014-10-03 for version
7557 0.17.</p>
7558
7559 <ul>
7560
7561  <li>Ignore 'phantom' audio, subtitle tracks</li>
7562  <li>Check for garbage in the program chains, which indicate that a track is
7563    non-existant, to work around additional copy protection</li>
7564  <li>Fix displaying content type for audio tracks, subtitles</li>
7565  <li>Fix pallete display of first entry</li>
7566  <li>Fix include orders</li>
7567  <li>Ignore read errors in titles that would not be displayed anyway</li>
7568  <li>Fix the chapter count</li>
7569  <li>Make sure the array size and the array limit used when initialising
7570    the palette size is the same.</li>
7571  <li>Fix array printing.</li>
7572  <li>Correct subsecond calculations.</li>
7573  <li>Add sector information to the output format.</li>
7574  <li>Clean up code to be closer to ANSI C and compile without warnings
7575    with more GCC compiler warnings.</li>
7576
7577 </ul>
7578
7579 <p>This change bring together patches for lsdvd in use in various
7580 Linux and Unix distributions, as well as patches submitted to the
7581 project the last nine years.  Please check it out. :)</p>
7582
7583       </div>
7584       <div class="tags">
7585
7586
7587         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/lsdvd">lsdvd</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>.
7588
7589
7590       </div>
7591     </div>
7592     <div class="padding"></div>
7593
7594     <div class="entry">
7595       <div class="title">
7596         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_test_Debian_Edu_Jessie_despite_some_fatal_problems_with_the_installer.html">How to test Debian Edu Jessie despite some fatal problems with the installer</a>
7597       </div>
7598       <div class="date">
7599         26th September 2014
7600       </div>
7601       <div class="body">
7602         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
7603 project</a> provide a Linux solution for schools, including a
7604 powerful desktop with education software, a central server providing
7605 web pages, user database, user home directories, central login and PXE
7606 boot of both  clients without disk and the installation to install Debian
7607 Edu on machines with disk (and a few other services perhaps to small
7608 to mention here).  We in the Debian Edu team are currently working on
7609 the Jessie based version, trying to get everything in shape before the
7610 freeze, to avoid having to maintain our own package repository in the
7611 future.  The
7612 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie">current
7613 status</a> can be seen on the Debian wiki, and there is still heaps of
7614 work left.  Some fatal problems block testing, breaking the installer,
7615 but it is possible to work around these to get anyway.  Here is a
7616 recipe on how to get the installation limping along.</p>
7617
7618 <p>First, download the test ISO via
7619 <a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.no/cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso">ftp</a>,
7620 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.no/cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso">http</a>
7621 or rsync (use
7622 ftp.skolelinux.org::cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso).
7623 The ISO build was broken on Tuesday, so we do not get a new ISO every
7624 12 hours or so, but thankfully the ISO we already got we are able to
7625 install with some tweaking.</p>
7626
7627 <p>When you get to the Debian Edu profile question, go to tty2
7628 (use Alt-Ctrl-F2), run</p>
7629
7630 <p><blockquote><pre>
7631 nano /usr/bin/edu-eatmydata-install
7632 </pre></blockquote></p>
7633
7634 <p>and add 'exit 0' as the second line, disabling the eatmydata
7635 optimization.  Return to the installation, select the profile you want
7636 and continue.  Without this change, exim4-config will fail to install
7637 due to a known bug in eatmydata.</p>
7638
7639 <p>When you get the grub question at the end, answer /dev/sda (or if
7640 this do not work, figure out what your correct value would be.  All my
7641 test machines need /dev/sda, so I have no advice if it do not fit
7642 your need.</p>
7643
7644 <p>If you installed a profile including a graphical desktop, log in as
7645 root after the initial boot from hard drive, and install the
7646 education-desktop-XXX metapackage.  XXX can be kde, gnome, lxde, xfce
7647 or mate.  If you want several desktop options, install more than one
7648 metapackage.  Once this is done, reboot and you should have a working
7649 graphical login screen.  This workaround should no longer be needed
7650 once the education-tasks package version 1.801 enter testing in two
7651 days.</p>
7652
7653 <p>I believe the ISO build will start working on two days when the new
7654 tasksel package enter testing and Steve McIntyre get a chance to
7655 update the debian-cd git repository.  The eatmydata, grub and desktop
7656 issues are already fixed in unstable and testing, and should show up
7657 on the ISO as soon as the ISO build start working again.  Well the
7658 eatmydata optimization is really just disabled.  The proper fix
7659 require an upload by the eatmydata maintainer applying the patch
7660 provided in bug <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/702711">#702711</a>.
7661 The rest have proper fixes in unstable.</p>
7662
7663 <p>I hope this get you going with the installation testing, as we are
7664 quickly running out of time trying to get our Jessie based
7665 installation ready before the distribution freeze in a month.</p>
7666
7667       </div>
7668       <div class="tags">
7669
7670
7671         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>.
7672
7673
7674       </div>
7675     </div>
7676     <div class="padding"></div>
7677
7678     <div class="entry">
7679       <div class="title">
7680         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Suddenly_I_am_the_new_upstream_of_the_lsdvd_command_line_tool.html">Suddenly I am the new upstream of the lsdvd command line tool</a>
7681       </div>
7682       <div class="date">
7683         25th September 2014
7684       </div>
7685       <div class="body">
7686         <p>I use the <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/">lsdvd tool</a>
7687 to handle my fairly large DVD collection.  It is a nice command line
7688 tool to get details about a DVD, like title, tracks, track length,
7689 etc, in XML, Perl or human readable format.  But lsdvd have not seen
7690 any new development since 2006 and had a few irritating bugs affecting
7691 its use with some DVDs.  Upstream seemed to be dead, and in January I
7692 sent a small probe asking for a version control repository for the
7693 project, without any reply.  But I use it regularly and would like to
7694 get <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/lsdvd">an updated version
7695 into Debian</a>.  So two weeks ago I tried harder to get in touch with
7696 the project admin, and after getting a reply from him explaining that
7697 he was no longer interested in the project, I asked if I could take
7698 over.  And yesterday, I became project admin.</p>
7699
7700 <p>I've been in touch with a Gentoo developer and the Debian
7701 maintainer interested in joining forces to maintain the upstream
7702 project, and I hope we can get a new release out fairly quickly,
7703 collecting the patches spread around on the internet into on place.
7704 I've added the relevant Debian patches to the freshly created git
7705 repository, and expect the Gentoo patches to make it too.  If you got
7706 a DVD collection and care about command line tools, check out
7707 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/git/ci/master/tree/">the git source</a> and join
7708 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/mailman/">the project mailing
7709 list</a>. :)</p>
7710
7711       </div>
7712       <div class="tags">
7713
7714
7715         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/lsdvd">lsdvd</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>.
7716
7717
7718       </div>
7719     </div>
7720     <div class="padding"></div>
7721
7722     <div class="entry">
7723       <div class="title">
7724         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Speeding_up_the_Debian_installer_using_eatmydata_and_dpkg_divert.html">Speeding up the Debian installer using eatmydata and dpkg-divert</a>
7725       </div>
7726       <div class="date">
7727         16th September 2014
7728       </div>
7729       <div class="body">
7730         <p>The <a href="https://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> installer could be
7731 a lot quicker.  When we install more than 2000 packages in
7732 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a> using
7733 tasksel in the installer, unpacking the binary packages take forever.
7734 A part of the slow I/O issue was discussed in
7735 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/613428">bug #613428</a> about too
7736 much file system sync-ing done by dpkg, which is the package
7737 responsible for unpacking the binary packages.  Other parts (like code
7738 executed by postinst scripts) might also sync to disk during
7739 installation.  All this sync-ing to disk do not really make sense to
7740 me.  If the machine crash half-way through, I start over, I do not try
7741 to salvage the half installed system.  So the failure sync-ing is
7742 supposed to protect against, hardware or system crash, is not really
7743 relevant while the installer is running.</p>
7744
7745 <p>A few days ago, I thought of a way to get rid of all the file
7746 system sync()-ing in a fairly non-intrusive way, without the need to
7747 change the code in several packages.  The idea is not new, but I have
7748 not heard anyone propose the approach using dpkg-divert before.  It
7749 depend on the small and clever package
7750 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/eatmydata">eatmydata</a>, which
7751 uses LD_PRELOAD to replace the system functions for syncing data to
7752 disk with functions doing nothing, thus allowing programs to live
7753 dangerous while speeding up disk I/O significantly.  Instead of
7754 modifying the implementation of dpkg, apt and tasksel (which are the
7755 packages responsible for selecting, fetching and installing packages),
7756 it occurred to me that we could just divert the programs away, replace
7757 them with a simple shell wrapper calling
7758 "eatmydata&nbsp;$program&nbsp;$@", to get the same effect.
7759 Two days ago I decided to test the idea, and wrapped up a simple
7760 implementation for the Debian Edu udeb.</p>
7761
7762 <p>The effect was stunning.  In my first test it reduced the running
7763 time of the pkgsel step (installing tasks) from 64 to less than 44
7764 minutes (20 minutes shaved off the installation) on an old Dell
7765 Latitude D505 machine.  I am not quite sure what the optimised time
7766 would have been, as I messed up the testing a bit, causing the debconf
7767 priority to get low enough for two questions to pop up during
7768 installation.  As soon as I saw the questions I moved the installation
7769 along, but do not know how long the question were holding up the
7770 installation.  I did some more measurements using Debian Edu Jessie,
7771 and got these results.  The time measured is the time stamp in
7772 /var/log/syslog between the "pkgsel: starting tasksel" and the
7773 "pkgsel: finishing up" lines, if you want to do the same measurement
7774 yourself.  In Debian Edu, the tasksel dialog do not show up, and the
7775 timing thus do not depend on how quickly the user handle the tasksel
7776 dialog.</p>
7777
7778 <p><table>
7779
7780 <tr>
7781 <th>Machine/setup</th>
7782 <th>Original tasksel</th>
7783 <th>Optimised tasksel</th>
7784 <th>Reduction</th>
7785 </tr>
7786
7787 <tr>
7788 <td>Latitude D505 Main+LTSP LXDE</td>
7789 <td>64 min (07:46-08:50)</td>
7790 <td><44 min (11:27-12:11)</td>
7791 <td>>20 min 18%</td>
7792 </tr>
7793
7794 <tr>
7795 <td>Latitude D505 Roaming LXDE</td>
7796 <td>57 min (08:48-09:45)</td>
7797 <td>34 min (07:43-08:17)</td>
7798 <td>23 min 40%</td>
7799 </tr>
7800
7801 <tr>
7802 <td>Latitude D505 Minimal</td>
7803 <td>22 min (10:37-10:59)</td>
7804 <td>11 min (11:16-11:27)</td>
7805 <td>11 min 50%</td>
7806 </tr>
7807
7808 <tr>
7809 <td>Thinkpad X200 Minimal</td>
7810 <td>6 min (08:19-08:25)</td>
7811 <td>4 min (08:04-08:08)</td>
7812 <td>2 min 33%</td>
7813 </tr>
7814
7815 <tr>
7816 <td>Thinkpad X200 Roaming KDE</td>
7817 <td>19 min (09:21-09:40)</td>
7818 <td>15 min (10:25-10:40)</td>
7819 <td>4 min 21%</td>
7820 </tr>
7821
7822 </table></p>
7823
7824 <p>The test is done using a netinst ISO on a USB stick, so some of the
7825 time is spent downloading packages.  The connection to the Internet
7826 was 100Mbit/s during testing, so downloading should not be a
7827 significant factor in the measurement.  Download typically took a few
7828 seconds to a few minutes, depending on the amount of packages being
7829 installed.</p>
7830
7831 <p>The speedup is implemented by using two hooks in
7832 <a href="https://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/">Debian
7833 Installer</a>, the pre-pkgsel.d hook to set up the diverts, and the
7834 finish-install.d hook to remove the divert at the end of the
7835 installation.  I picked the pre-pkgsel.d hook instead of the
7836 post-base-installer.d hook because I test using an ISO without the
7837 eatmydata package included, and the post-base-installer.d hook in
7838 Debian Edu can only operate on packages included in the ISO.  The
7839 negative effect of this is that I am unable to activate this
7840 optimization for the kernel installation step in d-i.  If the code is
7841 moved to the post-base-installer.d hook, the speedup would be larger
7842 for the entire installation.</p>
7843
7844 <p>I've implemented this in the
7845 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/debian-edu-install">debian-edu-install</a>
7846 git repository, and plan to provide the optimization as part of the
7847 Debian Edu installation.  If you want to test this yourself, you can
7848 create two files in the installer (or in an udeb).  One shell script
7849 need do go into /usr/lib/pre-pkgsel.d/, with content like this:</p>
7850
7851 <p><blockquote><pre>
7852 #!/bin/sh
7853 set -e
7854 . /usr/share/debconf/confmodule
7855 info() {
7856     logger -t my-pkgsel "info: $*"
7857 }
7858 error() {
7859     logger -t my-pkgsel "error: $*"
7860 }
7861 override_install() {
7862     apt-install eatmydata || true
7863     if [ -x /target/usr/bin/eatmydata ] ; then
7864         for bin in dpkg apt-get aptitude tasksel ; do
7865             file=/usr/bin/$bin
7866             # Test that the file exist and have not been diverted already.
7867             if [ -f /target$file ] ; then
7868                 info "diverting $file using eatmydata"
7869                 printf "#!/bin/sh\neatmydata $bin.distrib \"\$@\"\n" \
7870                     > /target$file.edu
7871                 chmod 755 /target$file.edu
7872                 in-target dpkg-divert --package debian-edu-config \
7873                     --rename --quiet --add $file
7874                 ln -sf ./$bin.edu /target$file
7875             else
7876                 error "unable to divert $file, as it is missing."
7877             fi
7878         done
7879     else
7880         error "unable to find /usr/bin/eatmydata after installing the eatmydata pacage"
7881     fi
7882 }
7883
7884 override_install
7885 </pre></blockquote></p>
7886
7887 <p>To clean up, another shell script should go into
7888 /usr/lib/finish-install.d/ with code like this:
7889
7890 <p><blockquote><pre>
7891 #! /bin/sh -e
7892 . /usr/share/debconf/confmodule
7893 error() {
7894     logger -t my-finish-install "error: $@"
7895 }
7896 remove_install_override() {
7897     for bin in dpkg apt-get aptitude tasksel ; do
7898         file=/usr/bin/$bin
7899         if [ -x /target$file.edu ] ; then
7900             rm /target$file
7901             in-target dpkg-divert --package debian-edu-config \
7902                 --rename --quiet --remove $file
7903             rm /target$file.edu
7904         else
7905             error "Missing divert for $file."
7906         fi
7907     done
7908     sync # Flush file buffers before continuing
7909 }
7910
7911 remove_install_override
7912 </pre></blockquote></p>
7913
7914 <p>In Debian Edu, I placed both code fragments in a separate script
7915 edu-eatmydata-install and call it from the pre-pkgsel.d and
7916 finish-install.d scripts.</p>
7917
7918 <p>By now you might ask if this change should get into the normal
7919 Debian installer too?  I suspect it should, but am not sure the
7920 current debian-installer coordinators find it useful enough.  It also
7921 depend on the side effects of the change.  I'm not aware of any, but I
7922 guess we will see if the change is safe after some more testing.
7923 Perhaps there is some package in Debian depending on sync() and
7924 fsync() having effect?  Perhaps it should go into its own udeb, to
7925 allow those of us wanting to enable it to do so without affecting
7926 everyone.</p>
7927
7928 <p>Update 2014-09-24: Since a few days ago, enabling this optimization
7929 will break installation of all programs using gnutls because of
7930 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/702711">bug #702711</a>.  An updated
7931 eatmydata package in Debian will solve it.</p>
7932
7933 <p>Update 2014-10-17: The bug mentioned above is fixed in testing and
7934 the optimization work again.  And I have discovered that the
7935 dpkg-divert trick is not really needed and implemented a slightly
7936 simpler approach as part of the debian-edu-install package.  See
7937 tools/edu-eatmydata-install in the source package.</p>
7938
7939 <p>Update 2014-11-11: Unfortunately, a new
7940 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/765738">bug #765738</a> in eatmydata only
7941 triggering on i386 made it into testing, and broke this installation
7942 optimization again.  If <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/768893">unblock
7943 request 768893</a> is accepted, it should be working again.</p>
7944
7945       </div>
7946       <div class="tags">
7947
7948
7949         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>.
7950
7951
7952       </div>
7953     </div>
7954     <div class="padding"></div>
7955
7956     <div class="entry">
7957       <div class="title">
7958         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Good_bye_subkeys_pgp_net__welcome_pool_sks_keyservers_net.html">Good bye subkeys.pgp.net, welcome pool.sks-keyservers.net</a>
7959       </div>
7960       <div class="date">
7961         10th September 2014
7962       </div>
7963       <div class="body">
7964         <p>Yesterday, I had the pleasure of attending a talk with the
7965 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a> about
7966 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20140909-sks-keyservers/">the
7967 OpenPGP keyserver pool sks-keyservers.net</a>, and was very happy to
7968 learn that there is a large set of publicly available key servers to
7969 use when looking for peoples public key.  So far I have used
7970 subkeys.pgp.net, and some times wwwkeys.nl.pgp.net when the former
7971 were misbehaving, but those days are ended.  The servers I have used
7972 up until yesterday have been slow and some times unavailable.  I hope
7973 those problems are gone now.</p>
7974
7975 <p>Behind the round robin DNS entry of the
7976 <a href="https://sks-keyservers.net/">sks-keyservers.net</a> service
7977 there is a pool of more than 100 keyservers which are checked every
7978 day to ensure they are well connected and up to date.  It must be
7979 better than what I have used so far. :)</p>
7980
7981 <p>Yesterdays speaker told me that the service is the default
7982 keyserver provided by the default configuration in GnuPG, but this do
7983 not seem to be used in Debian.  Perhaps it should?</p>
7984
7985 <p>Anyway, I've updated my ~/.gnupg/options file to now include this
7986 line:</p>
7987
7988 <p><blockquote><pre>
7989 keyserver pool.sks-keyservers.net
7990 </pre></blockquote></p>
7991
7992 <p>With GnuPG version 2 one can also locate the keyserver using SRV
7993 entries in DNS.  Just for fun, I did just that at work, so now every
7994 user of GnuPG at the University of Oslo should find a OpenGPG
7995 keyserver automatically should their need it:</p>
7996
7997 <p><blockquote><pre>
7998 % host -t srv _pgpkey-http._tcp.uio.no
7999 _pgpkey-http._tcp.uio.no has SRV record 0 100 11371 pool.sks-keyservers.net.
8000 %
8001 </pre></blockquote></p>
8002
8003 <p>Now if only
8004 <a href="http://ietfreport.isoc.org/idref/draft-shaw-openpgp-hkp/">the
8005 HKP lookup protocol</a> supported finding signature paths, I would be
8006 very happy.  It can look up a given key or search for a user ID, but I
8007 normally do not want that, but to find a trust path from my key to
8008 another key.  Given a user ID or key ID, I would like to find (and
8009 download) the keys representing a signature path from my key to the
8010 key in question, to be able to get a trust path between the two keys.
8011 This is as far as I can tell not possible today.  Perhaps something
8012 for a future version of the protocol?</p>
8013
8014       </div>
8015       <div class="tags">
8016
8017
8018         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/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
8019
8020
8021       </div>
8022     </div>
8023     <div class="padding"></div>
8024
8025     <div class="entry">
8026       <div class="title">
8027         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Do_you_need_an_agreement_with_MPEG_LA_to_publish_and_broadcast_H_264_video_in_Norway_.html">Do you need an agreement with MPEG-LA to publish and broadcast H.264 video in Norway?</a>
8028       </div>
8029       <div class="date">
8030         25th August 2014
8031       </div>
8032       <div class="body">
8033         <p>Two years later, I am still not sure if it is legal here in Norway
8034 to use or publish a video in H.264 or MPEG4 format edited by the
8035 commercially licensed video editors, without limiting the use to
8036 create "personal" or "non-commercial" videos or get a license
8037 agreement with <a href="http://www.mpegla.com">MPEG LA</a>.  If one
8038 want to publish and broadcast video in a non-personal or commercial
8039 setting, it might be that those tools can not be used, or that video
8040 format can not be used, without breaking their copyright license.  I
8041 am not sure.
8042 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Trenger_en_avtale_med_MPEG_LA_for___publisere_og_kringkaste_H_264_video_.html">Back
8043 then</a>, I found that the copyright license terms for Adobe Premiere
8044 and Apple Final Cut Pro both specified that one could not use the
8045 program to produce anything else without a patent license from MPEG
8046 LA.  The issue is not limited to those two products, though.  Other
8047 much used products like those from Avid and Sorenson Media have terms
8048 of use are similar to those from Adobe and Apple.  The complicating
8049 factor making me unsure if those terms have effect in Norway or not is
8050 that the patents in question are not valid in Norway, but copyright
8051 licenses are.</p>
8052
8053 <p>These are the terms for Avid Artist Suite, according to their
8054 <a href="http://www.avid.com/US/about-avid/legal-notices/legal-enduserlicense2">published
8055 end user</a>
8056 <a href="http://www.avid.com/static/resources/common/documents/corporate/LICENSE.pdf">license
8057 text</a> (converted to lower case text for easier reading):</p>
8058
8059 <p><blockquote>
8060 <p>18.2. MPEG-4. MPEG-4 technology may be included with the
8061 software. MPEG LA, L.L.C. requires this notice: </p>
8062
8063 <p>This product is licensed under the MPEG-4 visual patent portfolio
8064 license for the personal and non-commercial use of a consumer for (i)
8065 encoding video in compliance with the MPEG-4 visual standard (“MPEG-4
8066 video”) and/or (ii) decoding MPEG-4 video that was encoded by a
8067 consumer engaged in a personal and non-commercial activity and/or was
8068 obtained from a video provider licensed by MPEG LA to provide MPEG-4
8069 video.  No license is granted or shall be implied for any other
8070 use. Additional information including that relating to promotional,
8071 internal and commercial uses and licensing may be obtained from MPEG
8072 LA, LLC.  See http://www.mpegla.com. This product is licensed under
8073 the MPEG-4 systems patent portfolio license for encoding in compliance
8074 with the MPEG-4 systems standard, except that an additional license
8075 and payment of royalties are necessary for encoding in connection with
8076 (i) data stored or replicated in physical media which is paid for on a
8077 title by title basis and/or (ii) data which is paid for on a title by
8078 title basis and is transmitted to an end user for permanent storage
8079 and/or use, such additional license may be obtained from MPEG LA,
8080 LLC. See http://www.mpegla.com for additional details.</p>
8081
8082 <p>18.3. H.264/AVC. H.264/AVC technology may be included with the
8083 software.  MPEG LA, L.L.C. requires this notice:</p>
8084
8085 <p>This product is licensed under the AVC patent portfolio license for
8086 the personal use of a consumer or other uses in which it does not
8087 receive remuneration to (i) encode video in compliance with the AVC
8088 standard (“AVC video”) and/or (ii) decode AVC video that was encoded
8089 by a consumer engaged in a personal activity and/or was obtained from
8090 a video provider licensed to provide AVC video. No license is granted
8091 or shall be implied for any other use. Additional information may be
8092 obtained from MPEG LA, L.L.C. See http://www.mpegla.com.</p>
8093 </blockquote></p>
8094
8095 <p>Note the requirement that the videos created can only be used for
8096 personal or non-commercial purposes.</p>
8097
8098 <p>The Sorenson Media software have
8099 <a href="http://www.sorensonmedia.com/terms/">similar terms</a>:</p>
8100
8101 <p><blockquote>
8102
8103 <p>With respect to a license from Sorenson pertaining to MPEG-4 Video
8104 Decoders and/or Encoders: Any such product is licensed under the
8105 MPEG-4 visual patent portfolio license for the personal and
8106 non-commercial use of a consumer for (i) encoding video in compliance
8107 with the MPEG-4 visual standard (“MPEG-4 video”) and/or (ii) decoding
8108 MPEG-4 video that was encoded by a consumer engaged in a personal and
8109 non-commercial activity and/or was obtained from a video provider
8110 licensed by MPEG LA to provide MPEG-4 video. No license is granted or
8111 shall be implied for any other use. Additional information including
8112 that relating to promotional, internal and commercial uses and
8113 licensing may be obtained from MPEG LA, LLC. See
8114 http://www.mpegla.com.</p>
8115
8116 <p>With respect to a license from Sorenson pertaining to MPEG-4
8117 Consumer Recorded Data Encoder, MPEG-4 Systems Internet Data Encoder,
8118 MPEG-4 Mobile Data Encoder, and/or MPEG-4 Unique Use Encoder: Any such
8119 product is licensed under the MPEG-4 systems patent portfolio license
8120 for encoding in compliance with the MPEG-4 systems standard, except
8121 that an additional license and payment of royalties are necessary for
8122 encoding in connection with (i) data stored or replicated in physical
8123 media which is paid for on a title by title basis and/or (ii) data
8124 which is paid for on a title by title basis and is transmitted to an
8125 end user for permanent storage and/or use. Such additional license may
8126 be obtained from MPEG LA, LLC. See http://www.mpegla.com for
8127 additional details.</p>
8128
8129 </blockquote></p>
8130
8131 <p>Some free software like
8132 <a href="https://handbrake.fr/">Handbrake</A> and
8133 <a href="http://ffmpeg.org/">FFMPEG</a> uses GPL/LGPL licenses and do
8134 not have any such terms included, so for those, there is no
8135 requirement to limit the use to personal and non-commercial.</p>
8136
8137       </div>
8138       <div class="tags">
8139
8140
8141         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</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>.
8142
8143
8144       </div>
8145     </div>
8146     <div class="padding"></div>
8147
8148     <div class="entry">
8149       <div class="title">
8150         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Bernd_Zeitzen.html">Debian Edu interview: Bernd Zeitzen</a>
8151       </div>
8152       <div class="date">
8153         31st July 2014
8154       </div>
8155       <div class="body">
8156         <p>The complete and free “out of the box” software solution for
8157 schools, <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
8158 Skolelinux</a>, is used quite a lot in Germany, and one of the people
8159 involved is Bernd Zeitzen, who show up on the project mailing lists
8160 from time to time with interesting questions and tips on how to adjust
8161 the setup.  I managed to interview him this summer.</p>
8162
8163 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
8164
8165 <p>My name is Bernd Zeitzen and I'm married with Hedda, a self
8166 employed physiotherapist.  My former profession is tool maker, but I
8167 haven't worked for 30 years in this job.  30 years ago I started to
8168 support my wife and become her officeworker and a few years later the
8169 administrator for a small computer network, today based on Ubuntu
8170 Server (Samba, OpenVPN). For her daily work she has to use Windows
8171 Desktops because the software she needs to organize her business only
8172 works with Windows . :-(</p>
8173
8174 <p>In 1988 we started with one PC and DOS, then I learned to use
8175 Windows 98, 2000, XP, …, 8, Ubuntu, MacOSX.  Today we are running a
8176 Linux server with 6 Windows clients and 10 persons (teacher of
8177 children with special needs, speech therapist, occupational therapist,
8178 psychologist and officeworkers) using our Samba shares via OpenVPN to
8179 work with the documentations of our patients.</p>
8180
8181 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
8182 project?</strong></p>
8183
8184 <p>Two years ago a friend of mine asked me, if I want to get a job in
8185 his school (<a href="http://www.gymnasium-harsewinkel.de/">Gymnasium
8186 Harsewinkel</a>).  They started with Skolelinux / Debian Edu and they
8187 were looking for people to give support to the teachers using the
8188 software and the network and teaching the pupils increasing their
8189 computer skills in optional lessons.  I'm spending 4-6 hours a week
8190 with this job.</p>
8191
8192 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
8193 Edu?</strong></p>
8194
8195 <p>The independence.</p>
8196
8197 <p>First: Every person is allowed to use, share and develop the
8198 software. Even if you are poor, you are allowed to use the software
8199 included in Skolelinux/Debian Edu and all the other Free Software.</p>
8200
8201 <p>Second: The software runs on old machines and this gives us the
8202 possibility to recycle computers, weeded out from offices.  The
8203 servers and desktops are running for more than two years and they are
8204 working reliable. </p>
8205
8206 <p>We have two servers (one tjener and one terminal server), 45
8207 workstations in three classrooms and seven laptops as a mobile
8208 solution for all classrooms.  These machines are all booting from the
8209 terminal server.  In the moment we are installing 30 laptops as mobile
8210 workstations.  Then the pupils have the possibility to work with these
8211 machines in their classrooms.  Internet access is realized by a WLAN
8212 router, connected to the schools network. This is all done without a
8213 dedicated system administrator or a computer science teacher.</p>
8214
8215 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
8216 Edu?</strong></p>
8217
8218 <p>Teachers and pupils are Windows users.  &lt;Irony on&gt; And Linux
8219 isn't cool. It's software for freaks using the command line. &lt;Irony
8220 off&gt; They don't realize the stability of the system. </p>
8221
8222 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
8223
8224 <p>Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, Ubuntu Server 12.04 (Samba,
8225 Apache, MySQL, Joomla!, … and Skolelinux / Debian Edu)</p>
8226
8227 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
8228 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
8229
8230 <p>In Germany we have the situation: every school is free to decide
8231 which software they want to use. This decision is influenced by
8232 teachers who learned to use Windows and MS Office. They buy a PC with
8233 Windows preinstalled and an additional testing version of MS
8234 Office. They don't know about the possibility to use Free Software
8235 instead.  Another problem are the publisher of school books.  They
8236 develop their software, added to the school books, for Windows.</p>
8237
8238       </div>
8239       <div class="tags">
8240
8241
8242         Tags: <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/intervju">intervju</a>.
8243
8244
8245       </div>
8246     </div>
8247     <div class="padding"></div>
8248
8249     <div class="entry">
8250       <div class="title">
8251         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/98_6_percent_done_with_the_Norwegian_draft_translation_of_Free_Culture.html">98.6 percent done with the Norwegian draft translation of Free Culture</a>
8252       </div>
8253       <div class="date">
8254         23rd July 2014
8255       </div>
8256       <div class="body">
8257         <p>This summer I finally had time to continue working on the Norwegian
8258 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book
8259 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig,
8260 to get a Norwegian text explaining the problems with todays copyright
8261 law.  Yesterday, I finally completed translated the book text.  There
8262 are still some foot/end notes left to translate, the colophon page
8263 need to be rewritten, and a few words and phrases still need to be
8264 translated, but the Norwegian text is ready for the first proof
8265 reading. :) More spell checking is needed, and several illustrations
8266 need to be cleaned up.  The work stopped up because I had to give
8267 priority to other projects the last year, and the progress graph of
8268 the translation show this very well:</p>
8269
8270 <p><img width="80%" align="center" src="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png"></p>
8271
8272 <p>If you want to read the result, check out the
8273 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>
8274 project pages and the
8275 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>,
8276 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
8277 and HTML version available in the
8278 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/tree/master/archive">archive
8279 directory</a>.</p>
8280
8281 <p>Please report typos, bugs and improvements to the github project if
8282 you find any.</p>
8283
8284       </div>
8285       <div class="tags">
8286
8287
8288         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>.
8289
8290
8291       </div>
8292     </div>
8293     <div class="padding"></div>
8294
8295     <div class="entry">
8296       <div class="title">
8297         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/From_English_wiki_to_translated_PDF_and_epub_via_Docbook.html">From English wiki to translated PDF and epub via Docbook</a>
8298       </div>
8299       <div class="date">
8300         17th June 2014
8301       </div>
8302       <div class="body">
8303         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
8304 project</a> provide an instruction manual for teachers, system
8305 administrators and other users that contain useful tips for setting up
8306 and maintaining a Debian Edu installation.  This text is about how the
8307 text processing of this manual is handled in the project.</p>
8308
8309 <p>One goal of the project is to provide information in the native
8310 language of its users, and for this we need to handle translations.
8311 But we also want to make sure each language contain the same
8312 information, so for this we need a good way to keep the translations
8313 in sync.  And we want it to be easy for our users to improve the
8314 documentation, avoiding the need to learn special formats or tools to
8315 contribute, and the obvious way to do this is to make it possible to
8316 edit the documentation using a web browser.  We also want it to be
8317 easy for translators to keep the translation up to date, and give them
8318 help in figuring out what need to be translated. Here is the list of
8319 tools and the process we have found trying to reach all these
8320 goals.</p>
8321
8322 <p>We maintain the authoritative source of our manual in the
8323 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/">Debian
8324 wiki</a>, as several wiki pages written in English.  It consist of one
8325 front page with references to the different chapters, several pages
8326 for each chapter, and finally one "collection page" gluing all the
8327 chapters together into one large web page (aka
8328 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/AllInOne">the
8329 AllInOne page</a>).  The AllInOne page is the one used for further
8330 processing and translations.  Thanks to the fact that the
8331 <a href="http://moinmo.in/">MoinMoin</a> installation on
8332 wiki.debian.org support exporting pages in
8333 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">the Docbook format</a>, we can fetch
8334 the list of pages to export using the raw version of the AllInOne
8335 page, loop over each of them to generate a Docbook XML version of the
8336 manual.  This process also download images and transform image
8337 references to use the locally downloaded images.  The generated
8338 Docbook XML files are slightly broken, so some post-processing is done
8339 using the <tt>documentation/scripts/get_manual</tt> program, and the
8340 result is a nice Docbook XML file (debian-edu-wheezy-manual.xml) and
8341 a handfull of images.  The XML file can now be used to generate PDF, HTML
8342 and epub versions of the English manual.  This is the basic step of
8343 our process, making PDF (using dblatex), HTML (using xsltproc) and
8344 epub (using dbtoepub) version from Docbook XML, and the resulting files
8345 are placed in the debian-edu-doc-en binary package.</p>
8346
8347 <p>But English documentation is not enough for us.  We want translated
8348 documentation too, and we want to make it easy for translators to
8349 track the English original.  For this we use the
8350 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/poxml.html">poxml</a> package,
8351 which allow us to transform the English Docbook XML file into a
8352 translation file (a .pot file), usable with the normal gettext based
8353 translation tools used by those translating free software.  The pot
8354 file is used to create and maintain translation files (several .po
8355 files), which the translations update with the native language
8356 translations of all titles, paragraphs and blocks of text in the
8357 original.  The next step is combining the original English Docbook XML
8358 and the translation file (say debian-edu-wheezy-manual.nb.po), to
8359 create a translated Docbook XML file (in this case
8360 debian-edu-wheezy-manual.nb.xml).  This translated (or partly
8361 translated, if the translation is not complete) Docbook XML file can
8362 then be used like the original to create a PDF, HTML and epub version
8363 of the documentation.</p>
8364
8365 <p>The translators use different tools to edit the .po files.  We
8366 recommend using
8367 <a href="http://www.kde.org/applications/development/lokalize/">lokalize</a>,
8368 while some use emacs and vi, others can use web based editors like
8369 <a href="http://pootle.translatehouse.org/">Poodle</a> or
8370 <a href="https://www.transifex.com/">Transifex</a>.  All we care about
8371 is where the .po file end up, in our git repository.  Updated
8372 translations can either be committed directly to git, or submitted as
8373 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/src:debian-edu-doc">bug reports
8374 against the debian-edu-doc package</a>.</p>
8375
8376 <p>One challenge is images, which both might need to be translated (if
8377 they show translated user applications), and are needed in different
8378 formats when creating PDF and HTML versions (epub is a HTML version in
8379 this regard).  For this we transform the original PNG images to the
8380 needed density and format during build, and have a way to provide
8381 translated images by storing translated versions in
8382 images/$LANGUAGECODE/.  I am a bit unsure about the details here.  The
8383 package maintainers know more.</p>
8384
8385 <p>If you wonder what the result look like, we provide
8386 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/">the content
8387 of the documentation packages on the web</a>.  See for example the
8388 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/it/debian-edu-wheezy-manual.pdf">Italian
8389 PDF version</a> or the
8390 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/de/debian-edu-wheezy-manual.html">German
8391 HTML version</a>.  We do not yet build the epub version by default,
8392 but perhaps it will be done in the future.</p>
8393
8394 <p>To learn more, check out
8395 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/debian-edu-doc.html">the
8396 debian-edu-doc package</a>,
8397 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/">the
8398 manual on the wiki</a> and
8399 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/Translations">the
8400 translation instructions</a> in the manual.</p>
8401
8402       </div>
8403       <div class="tags">
8404
8405
8406         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/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8407
8408
8409       </div>
8410     </div>
8411     <div class="padding"></div>
8412
8413     <div class="entry">
8414       <div class="title">
8415         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_software_car_computer_solution_.html">Free software car computer solution?</a>
8416       </div>
8417       <div class="date">
8418         29th May 2014
8419       </div>
8420       <div class="body">
8421         <p>Dear lazyweb.  I'm planning to set up a small Raspberry Pi computer
8422 in my car, connected to
8423 <a href="http://www.dx.com/p/400a-4-0-tft-lcd-digital-monitor-for-vehicle-parking-reverse-camera-1440x272-12v-dc-57776">a
8424 small screen</a> next to the rear mirror.  I plan to hook it up with a
8425 GPS and a USB wifi card too.  The idea is to get my own
8426 "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carputer">Carputer</a>".  But I
8427 wonder if someone already created a good free software solution for
8428 such car computer.</p>
8429
8430 <p>This is my current wish list for such system:</p>
8431
8432 <ul>
8433
8434  <li>Work on Raspberry Pi.</li>
8435
8436  <li>Show current speed limit based on location, and warn if going too
8437    fast (for example using color codes yellow and red on the screen,
8438    or make a sound).  This could be done either using either data from
8439    <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/">Openstreetmap</a> or OCR
8440    info gathered from a dashboard camera.</li>
8441
8442  <li>Track automatic toll road passes and their cost, show total spent
8443    and make it possible to calculate toll costs for planned
8444    route.</li>
8445
8446  <li>Collect GPX tracks for use with OpenStreetMap.</li>
8447
8448  <li>Automatically detect and use any wireless connection to connect
8449    to home server.  Try IP over DNS
8450    (<a href="http://dev.kryo.se/iodine/">iodine</a>) or ICMP
8451    (<a href="http://code.gerade.org/hans/">Hans</a>) if direct
8452    connection do not work.</li>
8453
8454  <li>Set up mesh network to talk to other cars with the same system,
8455    or some standard car mesh protocol.</li>
8456
8457  <li>Warn when approaching speed cameras and speed camera ranges
8458    (speed calculated between two cameras).</li>
8459
8460  <li>Suport dashboard/front facing camera to discover speed limits and
8461    run OCR to track registration number of passing cars.</li>
8462
8463 </ul>
8464
8465 <p>If you know of any free software car computer system supporting
8466 some or all of these features, please let me know.</p>
8467
8468       </div>
8469       <div class="tags">
8470
8471
8472         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8473
8474
8475       </div>
8476     </div>
8477     <div class="padding"></div>
8478
8479     <div class="entry">
8480       <div class="title">
8481         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Half_the_Coverity_issues_in_Gnash_fixed_in_the_next_release.html">Half the Coverity issues in Gnash fixed in the next release</a>
8482       </div>
8483       <div class="date">
8484         29th April 2014
8485       </div>
8486       <div class="body">
8487         <p>I've been following <a href="http://www.getgnash.org/">the Gnash
8488 project</a> for quite a while now.  It is a free software
8489 implementation of Adobe Flash, both a standalone player and a browser
8490 plugin.  Gnash implement support for the AVM1 format (and not the
8491 newer AVM2 format - see
8492 <a href="http://lightspark.github.io/">Lightspark</a> for that one),
8493 allowing several flash based sites to work.  Thanks to the friendly
8494 developers at Youtube, it also work with Youtube videos, because the
8495 Javascript code at Youtube detect Gnash and serve a AVM1 player to
8496 those users. :) Would be great if someone found time to implement AVM2
8497 support, but it has not happened yet.  If you install both Lightspark
8498 and Gnash, Lightspark will invoke Gnash if it find a AVM1 flash file,
8499 so you can get both handled as free software.  Unfortunately,
8500 Lightspark so far only implement a small subset of AVM2, and many
8501 sites do not work yet.</p>
8502
8503 <p>A few months ago, I started looking at
8504 <a href="http://scan.coverity.com/">Coverity</a>, the static source
8505 checker used to find heaps and heaps of bugs in free software (thanks
8506 to the donation of a scanning service to free software projects by the
8507 company developing this non-free code checker), and Gnash was one of
8508 the projects I decided to check out.  Coverity is able to find lock
8509 errors, memory errors, dead code and more.  A few days ago they even
8510 extended it to also be able to find the heartbleed bug in OpenSSL.
8511 There are heaps of checks being done on the instrumented code, and the
8512 amount of bogus warnings is quite low compared to the other static
8513 code checkers I have tested over the years.</p>
8514
8515 <p>Since a few weeks ago, I've been working with the other Gnash
8516 developers squashing bugs discovered by Coverity.  I was quite happy
8517 today when I checked the current status and saw that of the 777 issues
8518 detected so far, 374 are marked as fixed.  This make me confident that
8519 the next Gnash release will be more stable and more dependable than
8520 the previous one.  Most of the reported issues were and are in the
8521 test suite, but it also found a few in the rest of the code.</p>
8522
8523 <p>If you want to help out, you find us on
8524 <a href="https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnash-dev">the
8525 gnash-dev mailing list</a> and on
8526 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/#gnash">the #gnash channel on
8527 irc.freenode.net IRC server</a>.</p>
8528
8529       </div>
8530       <div class="tags">
8531
8532
8533         Tags: <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>.
8534
8535
8536       </div>
8537     </div>
8538     <div class="padding"></div>
8539
8540     <div class="entry">
8541       <div class="title">
8542         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Install_hardware_dependent_packages_using_tasksel__Isenkram_0_7_.html">Install hardware dependent packages using tasksel (Isenkram 0.7)</a>
8543       </div>
8544       <div class="date">
8545         23rd April 2014
8546       </div>
8547       <div class="body">
8548         <p>It would be nice if it was easier in Debian to get all the hardware
8549 related packages relevant for the computer installed automatically.
8550 So I implemented one, using
8551 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">my Isenkram
8552 package</a>.  To use it, install the tasksel and isenkram packages and
8553 run tasksel as user root.  You should be presented with a new option,
8554 "Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)".  When you
8555 select it, tasksel will install the packages isenkram claim is fit for
8556 the current hardware, hot pluggable or not.<p>
8557
8558 <p>The implementation is in two files, one is the tasksel menu entry
8559 description, and the other is the script used to extract the list of
8560 packages to install.  The first part is in
8561 <tt>/usr/share/tasksel/descs/isenkram.desc</tt> and look like
8562 this:</p>
8563
8564 <p><blockquote><pre>
8565 Task: isenkram
8566 Section: hardware
8567 Description: Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)
8568  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific packages are
8569  proposed.
8570 Test-new-install: mark show
8571 Relevance: 8
8572 Packages: for-current-hardware
8573 </pre></blockquote></p>
8574
8575 <p>The second part is in
8576 <tt>/usr/lib/tasksel/packages/for-current-hardware</tt> and look like
8577 this:</p>
8578
8579 <p><blockquote><pre>
8580 #!/bin/sh
8581 #
8582 (
8583     isenkram-lookup
8584     isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
8585 ) | sort -u
8586 </pre></blockquote></p>
8587
8588 <p>All in all, a very short and simple implementation making it
8589 trivial to install the hardware dependent package we all may want to
8590 have installed on our machines.  I've not been able to find a way to
8591 get tasksel to tell you exactly which packages it plan to install
8592 before doing the installation.  So if you are curious or careful,
8593 check the output from the isenkram-* command line tools first.</p>
8594
8595 <p>The information about which packages are handling which hardware is
8596 fetched either from the isenkram package itself in
8597 /usr/share/isenkram/, from git.debian.org or from the APT package
8598 database (using the Modaliases header).  The APT package database
8599 parsing have caused a nasty resource leak in the isenkram daemon (bugs
8600 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/719837">#719837</a> and
8601 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/730704">#730704</a>).  The cause is in
8602 the python-apt code (bug
8603 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/745487">#745487</a>), but using a
8604 workaround I was able to get rid of the file descriptor leak and
8605 reduce the memory leak from ~30 MiB per hardware detection down to
8606 around 2 MiB per hardware detection.  It should make the desktop
8607 daemon a lot more useful.  The fix is in version 0.7 uploaded to
8608 unstable today.</p>
8609
8610 <p>I believe the current way of mapping hardware to packages in
8611 Isenkram is is a good draft, but in the future I expect isenkram to
8612 use the AppStream data source for this.  A proposal for getting proper
8613 AppStream support into Debian is floating around as
8614 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-11">DEP-11</a>, and
8615 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2014/Projects#SummerOfCode2014.2FProjects.2FAppStreamDEP11Implementation.AppStream.2FDEP-11_for_the_Debian_Archive">GSoC
8616 project</a> will take place this summer to improve the situation.  I
8617 look forward to seeing the result, and welcome patches for isenkram to
8618 start using the information when it is ready.</p>
8619
8620 <p>If you want your package to map to some specific hardware, either
8621 add a "Xb-Modaliases" header to your control file like I did in
8622 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pymissile">the pymissile
8623 package</a> or submit a bug report with the details to the isenkram
8624 package.  See also
8625 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">all my
8626 blog posts tagged isenkram</a> for details on the notation.  I expect
8627 the information will be migrated to AppStream eventually, but for the
8628 moment I got no better place to store it.</p>
8629
8630       </div>
8631       <div class="tags">
8632
8633
8634         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
8635
8636
8637       </div>
8638     </div>
8639     <div class="padding"></div>
8640
8641     <div class="entry">
8642       <div class="title">
8643         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/FreedomBox_milestone___all_packages_now_in_Debian_Sid.html">FreedomBox milestone - all packages now in Debian Sid</a>
8644       </div>
8645       <div class="date">
8646         15th April 2014
8647       </div>
8648       <div class="body">
8649         <p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox
8650 project</a> is working on providing the software and hardware to make
8651 it easy for non-technical people to host their data and communication
8652 at home, and being able to communicate with their friends and family
8653 encrypted and away from prying eyes.  It is still going strong, and
8654 today a major mile stone was reached.</p>
8655
8656 <p>Today, the last of the packages currently used by the project to
8657 created the system images were accepted into Debian Unstable.  It was
8658 the freedombox-setup package, which is used to configure the images
8659 during build and on the first boot.  Now all one need to get going is
8660 the build code from the freedom-maker git repository and packages from
8661 Debian.  And once the freedombox-setup package enter testing, we can
8662 build everything directly from Debian. :)</p>
8663
8664 <p>Some key packages used by Freedombox are
8665 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/freedombox-setup">freedombox-setup</a>,
8666 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/plinth">plinth</a>,
8667 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pagekite">pagekite</a>,
8668 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/tor">tor</a>,
8669 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/privoxy">privoxy</a>,
8670 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/owncloud">owncloud</a> and
8671 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/dnsmasq">dnsmasq</a>.  There
8672 are plans to integrate more packages into the setup.  User
8673 documentation is maintained on the Debian wiki.  Please
8674 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/Manual/Jessie">check out
8675 the manual</a> and help us improve it.</p>
8676
8677 <p>To test for yourself and create boot images with the FreedomBox
8678 setup, run this on a Debian machine using a user with sudo rights to
8679 become root:</p>
8680
8681 <p><pre>
8682 sudo apt-get install git vmdebootstrap mercurial python-docutils \
8683   mktorrent extlinux virtualbox qemu-user-static binfmt-support \
8684   u-boot-tools
8685 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/freedombox/freedom-maker.git \
8686   freedom-maker
8687 make -C freedom-maker dreamplug-image raspberry-image virtualbox-image
8688 </pre></p>
8689
8690 <p>Root access is needed to run debootstrap and mount loopback
8691 devices.  See the README in the freedom-maker git repo for more
8692 details on the build.  If you do not want all three images, trim the
8693 make line.  Note that the virtualbox-image target is not really
8694 virtualbox specific.  It create a x86 image usable in kvm, qemu,
8695 vmware and any other x86 virtual machine environment.  You might need
8696 the version of vmdebootstrap in Jessie to get the build working, as it
8697 include fixes for a race condition with kpartx.</p>
8698
8699 <p>If you instead want to install using a Debian CD and the preseed
8700 method, boot a Debian Wheezy ISO and use this boot argument to load
8701 the preseed values:</p>
8702
8703 <p><pre>
8704 url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat</a>
8705 </pre></p>
8706
8707 <p>I have not tested it myself the last few weeks, so I do not know if
8708 it still work.</p>
8709
8710 <p>If you wonder how to help, one task you could look at is using
8711 systemd as the boot system.  It will become the default for Linux in
8712 Jessie, so we need to make sure it is usable on the Freedombox.  I did
8713 a simple test a few weeks ago, and noticed dnsmasq failed to start
8714 during boot when using systemd.  I suspect there are other problems
8715 too. :) To detect problems, there is a test suite included, which can
8716 be run from the plinth web interface.</p>
8717
8718 <p>Give it a go and let us know how it goes on the mailing list, and help
8719 us get the new release published. :) Please join us on
8720 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC (#freedombox on
8721 irc.debian.org)</a> and
8722 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
8723 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
8724
8725       </div>
8726       <div class="tags">
8727
8728
8729         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/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
8730
8731
8732       </div>
8733     </div>
8734     <div class="padding"></div>
8735
8736     <div class="entry">
8737       <div class="title">
8738         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/S3QL__a_locally_mounted_cloud_file_system___nice_free_software.html">S3QL, a locally mounted cloud file system - nice free software</a>
8739       </div>
8740       <div class="date">
8741          9th April 2014
8742       </div>
8743       <div class="body">
8744         <p>For a while now, I have been looking for a sensible offsite backup
8745 solution for use at home.  My requirements are simple, it must be
8746 cheap and locally encrypted (in other words, I keep the encryption
8747 keys, the storage provider do not have access to my private files).
8748 One idea me and my friends had many years ago, before the cloud
8749 storage providers showed up, was to use Google mail as storage,
8750 writing a Linux block device storing blocks as emails in the mail
8751 service provided by Google, and thus get heaps of free space.  On top
8752 of this one can add encryption, RAID and volume management to have
8753 lots of (fairly slow, I admit that) cheap and encrypted storage.  But
8754 I never found time to implement such system.  But the last few weeks I
8755 have looked at a system called
8756 <a href="https://bitbucket.org/nikratio/s3ql/">S3QL</a>, a locally
8757 mounted network backed file system with the features I need.</p>
8758
8759 <p>S3QL is a fuse file system with a local cache and cloud storage,
8760 handling several different storage providers, any with Amazon S3,
8761 Google Drive or OpenStack API.  There are heaps of such storage
8762 providers.  S3QL can also use a local directory as storage, which
8763 combined with sshfs allow for file storage on any ssh server.  S3QL
8764 include support for encryption, compression, de-duplication, snapshots
8765 and immutable file systems, allowing me to mount the remote storage as
8766 a local mount point, look at and use the files as if they were local,
8767 while the content is stored in the cloud as well.  This allow me to
8768 have a backup that should survive fire.  The file system can not be
8769 shared between several machines at the same time, as only one can
8770 mount it at the time, but any machine with the encryption key and
8771 access to the storage service can mount it if it is unmounted.</p>
8772
8773 <p>It is simple to use.  I'm using it on Debian Wheezy, where the
8774 package is included already.  So to get started, run <tt>apt-get
8775 install s3ql</tt>.  Next, pick a storage provider.  I ended up picking
8776 Greenqloud, after reading their nice recipe on
8777 <a href="https://greenqloud.zendesk.com/entries/44611757-How-To-Use-S3QL-to-mount-a-StorageQloud-bucket-on-Debian-Wheezy">how
8778 to use S3QL with their Amazon S3 service</a>, because I trust the laws
8779 in Iceland more than those in USA when it come to keeping my personal
8780 data safe and private, and thus would rather spend money on a company
8781 in Iceland.  Another nice recipe is available from the article
8782 <a href="http://www.admin-magazine.com/HPC/Articles/HPC-Cloud-Storage">S3QL
8783 Filesystem for HPC Storage</a> by Jeff Layton in the HPC section of
8784 Admin magazine.  When the provider is picked, figure out how to get
8785 the API key needed to connect to the storage API.  With Greencloud,
8786 the key did not show up until I had added payment details to my
8787 account.</p>
8788
8789 <p>Armed with the API access details, it is time to create the file
8790 system.  First, create a new bucket in the cloud.  This bucket is the
8791 file system storage area.  I picked a bucket name reflecting the
8792 machine that was going to store data there, but any name will do.
8793 I'll refer to it as <tt>bucket-name</tt> below.  In addition, one need
8794 the API login and password, and a locally created password.  Store it
8795 all in ~root/.s3ql/authinfo2 like this:
8796
8797 <p><blockquote><pre>
8798 [s3c]
8799 storage-url: s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
8800 backend-login: API-login
8801 backend-password: API-password
8802 fs-passphrase: local-password
8803 </pre></blockquote></p>
8804
8805 <p>I create my local passphrase using <tt>pwget 50</tt> or similar,
8806 but any sensible way to create a fairly random password should do it.
8807 Armed with these details, it is now time to run mkfs, entering the API
8808 details and password to create it:</p>
8809
8810 <p><blockquote><pre>
8811 # mkdir -m 700 /var/lib/s3ql-cache
8812 # mkfs.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
8813   --ssl s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
8814 Enter backend login:
8815 Enter backend password:
8816 Before using S3QL, make sure to read the user's guide, especially
8817 the 'Important Rules to Avoid Loosing Data' section.
8818 Enter encryption password:
8819 Confirm encryption password:
8820 Generating random encryption key...
8821 Creating metadata tables...
8822 Dumping metadata...
8823 ..objects..
8824 ..blocks..
8825 ..inodes..
8826 ..inode_blocks..
8827 ..symlink_targets..
8828 ..names..
8829 ..contents..
8830 ..ext_attributes..
8831 Compressing and uploading metadata...
8832 Wrote 0.00 MB of compressed metadata.
8833 # </pre></blockquote></p>
8834
8835 <p>The next step is mounting the file system to make the storage available.
8836
8837 <p><blockquote><pre>
8838 # mount.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
8839   --ssl --allow-root s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name /s3ql
8840 Using 4 upload threads.
8841 Downloading and decompressing metadata...
8842 Reading metadata...
8843 ..objects..
8844 ..blocks..
8845 ..inodes..
8846 ..inode_blocks..
8847 ..symlink_targets..
8848 ..names..
8849 ..contents..
8850 ..ext_attributes..
8851 Mounting filesystem...
8852 # df -h /s3ql
8853 Filesystem                              Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
8854 s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name  1.0T     0  1.0T   0% /s3ql
8855 #
8856 </pre></blockquote></p>
8857
8858 <p>The file system is now ready for use.  I use rsync to store my
8859 backups in it, and as the metadata used by rsync is downloaded at
8860 mount time, no network traffic (and storage cost) is triggered by
8861 running rsync.  To unmount, one should not use the normal umount
8862 command, as this will not flush the cache to the cloud storage, but
8863 instead running the umount.s3ql command like this:
8864
8865 <p><blockquote><pre>
8866 # umount.s3ql /s3ql
8867 #
8868 </pre></blockquote></p>
8869
8870 <p>There is a fsck command available to check the file system and
8871 correct any problems detected.  This can be used if the local server
8872 crashes while the file system is mounted, to reset the "already
8873 mounted" flag.  This is what it look like when processing a working
8874 file system:</p>
8875
8876 <p><blockquote><pre>
8877 # fsck.s3ql --force --ssl s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
8878 Using cached metadata.
8879 File system seems clean, checking anyway.
8880 Checking DB integrity...
8881 Creating temporary extra indices...
8882 Checking lost+found...
8883 Checking cached objects...
8884 Checking names (refcounts)...
8885 Checking contents (names)...
8886 Checking contents (inodes)...
8887 Checking contents (parent inodes)...
8888 Checking objects (reference counts)...
8889 Checking objects (backend)...
8890 ..processed 5000 objects so far..
8891 ..processed 10000 objects so far..
8892 ..processed 15000 objects so far..
8893 Checking objects (sizes)...
8894 Checking blocks (referenced objects)...
8895 Checking blocks (refcounts)...
8896 Checking inode-block mapping (blocks)...
8897 Checking inode-block mapping (inodes)...
8898 Checking inodes (refcounts)...
8899 Checking inodes (sizes)...
8900 Checking extended attributes (names)...
8901 Checking extended attributes (inodes)...
8902 Checking symlinks (inodes)...
8903 Checking directory reachability...
8904 Checking unix conventions...
8905 Checking referential integrity...
8906 Dropping temporary indices...
8907 Backing up old metadata...
8908 Dumping metadata...
8909 ..objects..
8910 ..blocks..
8911 ..inodes..
8912 ..inode_blocks..
8913 ..symlink_targets..
8914 ..names..
8915 ..contents..
8916 ..ext_attributes..
8917 Compressing and uploading metadata...
8918 Wrote 0.89 MB of compressed metadata.
8919 #
8920 </pre></blockquote></p>
8921
8922 <p>Thanks to the cache, working on files that fit in the cache is very
8923 quick, about the same speed as local file access.  Uploading large
8924 amount of data is to me limited by the bandwidth out of and into my
8925 house.  Uploading 685 MiB with a 100 MiB cache gave me 305 kiB/s,
8926 which is very close to my upload speed, and downloading the same
8927 Debian installation ISO gave me 610 kiB/s, close to my download speed.
8928 Both were measured using <tt>dd</tt>.  So for me, the bottleneck is my
8929 network, not the file system code.  I do not know what a good cache
8930 size would be, but suspect that the cache should e larger than your
8931 working set.</p>
8932
8933 <p>I mentioned that only one machine can mount the file system at the
8934 time.  If another machine try, it is told that the file system is
8935 busy:</p>
8936
8937 <p><blockquote><pre>
8938 # mount.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
8939   --ssl --allow-root s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name /s3ql
8940 Using 8 upload threads.
8941 Backend reports that fs is still mounted elsewhere, aborting.
8942 #
8943 </pre></blockquote></p>
8944
8945 <p>The file content is uploaded when the cache is full, while the
8946 metadata is uploaded once every 24 hour by default.  To ensure the
8947 file system content is flushed to the cloud, one can either umount the
8948 file system, or ask S3QL to flush the cache and metadata using
8949 s3qlctrl:
8950
8951 <p><blockquote><pre>
8952 # s3qlctrl upload-meta /s3ql
8953 # s3qlctrl flushcache /s3ql
8954 #
8955 </pre></blockquote></p>
8956
8957 <p>If you are curious about how much space your data uses in the
8958 cloud, and how much compression and deduplication cut down on the
8959 storage usage, you can use s3qlstat on the mounted file system to get
8960 a report:</p>
8961
8962 <p><blockquote><pre>
8963 # s3qlstat /s3ql
8964 Directory entries:    9141
8965 Inodes:               9143
8966 Data blocks:          8851
8967 Total data size:      22049.38 MB
8968 After de-duplication: 21955.46 MB (99.57% of total)
8969 After compression:    21877.28 MB (99.22% of total, 99.64% of de-duplicated)
8970 Database size:        2.39 MB (uncompressed)
8971 (some values do not take into account not-yet-uploaded dirty blocks in cache)
8972 #
8973 </pre></blockquote></p>
8974
8975 <p>I mentioned earlier that there are several possible suppliers of
8976 storage.  I did not try to locate them all, but am aware of at least
8977 <a href="https://www.greenqloud.com/">Greenqloud</a>,
8978 <a href="http://drive.google.com/">Google Drive</a>,
8979 <a href="http://aws.amazon.com/s3/">Amazon S3 web serivces</a>,
8980 <a href="http://www.rackspace.com/">Rackspace</a> and
8981 <a href="http://crowncloud.net/">Crowncloud</A>.  The latter even
8982 accept payment in Bitcoin.  Pick one that suit your need.  Some of
8983 them provide several GiB of free storage, but the prize models are
8984 quite different and you will have to figure out what suits you
8985 best.</p>
8986
8987 <p>While researching this blog post, I had a look at research papers
8988 and posters discussing the S3QL file system.  There are several, which
8989 told me that the file system is getting a critical check by the
8990 science community and increased my confidence in using it.  One nice
8991 poster is titled
8992 "<a href="http://www.lanl.gov/orgs/adtsc/publications/science_highlights_2013/docs/pg68_69.pdf">An
8993 Innovative Parallel Cloud Storage System using OpenStack’s SwiftObject
8994 Store and Transformative Parallel I/O Approach</a>" by Hsing-Bung
8995 Chen, Benjamin McClelland, David Sherrill, Alfred Torrez, Parks Fields
8996 and Pamela Smith.  Please  have a look.</p>
8997
8998 <p>Given my problems with different file systems earlier, I decided to
8999 check out the mounted S3QL file system to see if it would be usable as
9000 a home directory (in other word, that it provided POSIX semantics when
9001 it come to locking and umask handling etc).  Running
9002 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_if_a_file_system_can_be_used_for_home_directories___.html">my
9003 test code to check file system semantics</a>, I was happy to discover that
9004 no error was found.  So the file system can be used for home
9005 directories, if one chooses to do so.</p>
9006
9007 <p>If you do not want a locally file system, and want something that
9008 work without the Linux fuse file system, I would like to mention the
9009 <a href="http://www.tarsnap.com/">Tarsnap service</a>, which also
9010 provide locally encrypted backup using a command line client.  It have
9011 a nicer access control system, where one can split out read and write
9012 access, allowing some systems to write to the backup and others to
9013 only read from it.</p>
9014
9015 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
9016 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
9017 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
9018
9019       </div>
9020       <div class="tags">
9021
9022
9023         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/nice free software">nice free software</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>.
9024
9025
9026       </div>
9027     </div>
9028     <div class="padding"></div>
9029
9030     <div class="entry">
9031       <div class="title">
9032         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ReactOS_Windows_clone___nice_free_software.html">ReactOS Windows clone - nice free software</a>
9033       </div>
9034       <div class="date">
9035          1st April 2014
9036       </div>
9037       <div class="body">
9038         <p>Microsoft have announced that Windows XP reaches its end of life
9039 2014-04-08, in 7 days.  But there are heaps of machines still running
9040 Windows XP, and depending on Windows XP to run their applications, and
9041 upgrading will be expensive, both when it comes to money and when it
9042 comes to the amount of effort needed to migrate from Windows XP to a
9043 new operating system.  Some obvious options (buy new a Windows
9044 machine, buy a MacOSX machine, install Linux on the existing machine)
9045 are already well known and covered elsewhere.  Most of them involve
9046 leaving the user applications installed on Windows XP behind and
9047 trying out replacements or updated versions. In this blog post I want
9048 to mention one strange bird that allow people to keep the hardware and
9049 the existing Windows XP applications and run them on a free software
9050 operating system that is Windows XP compatible.</p>
9051
9052 <p><a href="http://www.reactos.org/">ReactOS</a> is a free software
9053 operating system (GNU GPL licensed) working on providing a operating
9054 system that is binary compatible with Windows, able to run windows
9055 programs directly and to use Windows drivers for hardware directly.
9056 The project goal is for Windows user to keep their existing machines,
9057 drivers and software, and gain the advantages from user a operating
9058 system without usage limitations caused by non-free licensing.  It is
9059 a Windows clone running directly on the hardware, so quite different
9060 from the approach taken by <a href="http://www.winehq.org/">the Wine
9061 project</a>, which make it possible to run Windows binaries on
9062 Linux.</p>
9063
9064 <p>The ReactOS project share code with the Wine project, so most
9065 shared libraries available on Windows are already implemented already.
9066 There is also a software manager like the one we are used to on Linux,
9067 allowing the user to install free software applications with a simple
9068 click directly from the Internet.  Check out the
9069 <a href="http://www.reactos.org/screenshots">screen shots on the
9070 project web site</a> for an idea what it look like (it looks just like
9071 Windows before metro).</p>
9072
9073 <p>I do not use ReactOS myself, preferring Linux and Unix like
9074 operating systems.  I've tested it, and it work fine in a virt-manager
9075 virtual machine.  The browser, minesweeper, notepad etc is working
9076 fine as far as I can tell.  Unfortunately, my main test application
9077 is the software included on a CD with the Lego Mindstorms NXT, which
9078 seem to install just fine from CD but fail to leave any binaries on
9079 the disk after the installation.  So no luck with that test software.
9080 No idea why, but hope someone else figure out and fix the problem.
9081 I've tried the ReactOS Live ISO on a physical machine, and it seemed
9082 to work just fine.  If you like Windows and want to keep running your
9083 old Windows binaries, check it out by
9084 <a href="http://www.reactos.org/download">downloading</a> the
9085 installation CD, the live CD or the preinstalled virtual machine
9086 image.</p>
9087
9088       </div>
9089       <div class="tags">
9090
9091
9092         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reactos">reactos</a>.
9093
9094
9095       </div>
9096     </div>
9097     <div class="padding"></div>
9098
9099     <div class="entry">
9100       <div class="title">
9101         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Roger_Marsal.html">Debian Edu interview: Roger Marsal</a>
9102       </div>
9103       <div class="date">
9104         30th March 2014
9105       </div>
9106       <div class="body">
9107         <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
9108 keep gaining new users.  Some weeks ago, a person showed up on IRC,
9109 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/#debian-edu">#debian-edu</a>, with a
9110 wish to contribute, and I managed to get a interview with this great
9111 contributor Roger Marsal to learn more about his background.</p>
9112
9113 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
9114
9115 <p>My name is Roger Marsal, I'm 27 years old (1986 generation) and I
9116 live in Barcelona, Spain. I've got a strong business background and I
9117 work as a patrimony manager and as a real estate agent.  Additionally,
9118 I've co-founded a British based tech company that is nowadays on the
9119 last development phase of a new social networking concept.</p>
9120
9121 <p>I'm a Linux enthusiast that started its journey with Ubuntu four years
9122 ago and have recently switched to Debian seeking rock solid stability
9123 and as a necessary step to gain expertise.</p>
9124
9125 <p>In a nutshell, I spend my days working and learning as much as I
9126 can to face both my job, entrepreneur project and feed my Linux
9127 hunger.</p>
9128
9129 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
9130 project?</strong></p>
9131
9132 <p>I discovered the <a href="http://www.ltsp.org/">LTSP</a> advantages
9133 with "Ubuntu 12.04 alternate install" and after a year of use I
9134 started looking for an alternative.  Even though I highly value and
9135 respect the Ubuntu project, I thought it was necessary for me to
9136 change to a more robust and stable alternative.  As far as I was using
9137 Debian on my personal laptop I thought it would be fine to install
9138 Debian and configure an LTSP server myself.  Surprised, I discovered
9139 that the Debian project also supported a kind of Edubuntu equivalent,
9140 and after having some pain I obtained a Debian Edu network up and
9141 running.  I just loved it.</p>
9142
9143 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
9144 Edu?</strong></p>
9145
9146 <p>I found a main advantage in that, once you know "the tips and
9147 tricks", a new installation just works out of the box. It's the most
9148 complete alternative I've found to create an LTSP network. All the
9149 other distributions seems to be made of plastic, Debian Edu seems to
9150 be made of steel.</p>
9151
9152 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
9153 Edu?</strong></p>
9154
9155 <p>I found two main disadvantages.</p>
9156
9157 <p>I'm not an expert but I've got notions and I had to spent a considerable
9158 amount of time trying to bring up a standard network topology. I'm quite
9159 stubborn and I just worked until I did but I'm sure many people with few
9160 resources (not big schools, but academies for example) would have switched
9161 or dropped.</p>
9162
9163 <p>It's amazing how such a complex system like Debian Edu has achieved
9164 this out-of-the-box state. Even though tweaking without breaking gets
9165 more difficult, as more factors have to be considered. This can
9166 discourage many people too.</p>
9167
9168 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
9169
9170 <p>I use Debian, Firefox, Okular, Inkscape, LibreOffice and
9171 Virtualbox.</p>
9172
9173
9174 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
9175 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
9176
9177 <p>I don't think there is a need for a particular strategy. The free
9178 attribute in both "freedom" and "no price" meanings is what will
9179 really bring free software to schools. In my experience I can think of
9180 the <a href="http://www.r-project.org/">"R" statistical language</a>; a
9181 few years a ago was an extremely nerd tool for university people.
9182 Today it's being increasingly used to teach statistics at many
9183 different level of studies.  I believe free and open software will
9184 increasingly gain popularity, but I'm sure schools will be one of the
9185 first scenarios where this will happen.</p>
9186
9187       </div>
9188       <div class="tags">
9189
9190
9191         Tags: <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/intervju">intervju</a>.
9192
9193
9194       </div>
9195     </div>
9196     <div class="padding"></div>
9197
9198     <div class="entry">
9199       <div class="title">
9200         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Public_Trusted_Timestamping_services_for_everyone.html">Public Trusted Timestamping services for everyone</a>
9201       </div>
9202       <div class="date">
9203         25th March 2014
9204       </div>
9205       <div class="body">
9206         <p>Did you ever need to store logs or other files in a way that would
9207 allow it to be used as evidence in court, and needed a way to
9208 demonstrate without reasonable doubt that the file had not been
9209 changed since it was created?  Or, did you ever need to document that
9210 a given document was received at some point in time, like some
9211 archived document or the answer to an exam, and not changed after it
9212 was received?  The problem in these settings is to remove the need to
9213 trust yourself and your computers, while still being able to prove
9214 that a file is the same as it was at some given time in the past.</p>
9215
9216 <p>A solution to these problems is to have a trusted third party
9217 "stamp" the document and verify that at some given time the document
9218 looked a given way.  Such
9219 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notarius">notarius</a> service
9220 have been around for thousands of years, and its digital equivalent is
9221 called a
9222 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_timestamping">trusted
9223 timestamping service</a>.  <a href="http://www.ietf.org/">The Internet
9224 Engineering Task Force</a> standardised how such service could work a
9225 few years ago as <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3161">RFC
9226 3161</a>.  The mechanism is simple.  Create a hash of the file in
9227 question, send it to a trusted third party which add a time stamp to
9228 the hash and sign the result with its private key, and send back the
9229 signed hash + timestamp.  Both email, FTP and HTTP can be used to
9230 request such signature, depending on what is provided by the service
9231 used. Anyone with the document and the signature can then verify that
9232 the document matches the signature by creating their own hash and
9233 checking the signature using the trusted third party public key.
9234 There are several commercial services around providing such
9235 timestamping.  A quick search for
9236 "<a href="https://duckduckgo.com/?q=rfc+3161+service">rfc 3161
9237 service</a>" pointed me to at least
9238 <a href="https://www.digistamp.com/technical/how-a-digital-time-stamp-works/">DigiStamp</a>,
9239 <a href="http://www.quovadisglobal.co.uk/CertificateServices/SigningServices/TimeStamp.aspx">Quo
9240 Vadis</a>,
9241 <a href="https://www.globalsign.com/timestamp-service/">Global Sign</a>
9242 and <a href="http://www.globaltrustfinder.com/TSADefault.aspx">Global
9243 Trust Finder</a>.  The system work as long as the private key of the
9244 trusted third party is not compromised.</p>
9245
9246 <p>But as far as I can tell, there are very few public trusted
9247 timestamp services available for everyone.  I've been looking for one
9248 for a while now. But yesterday I found one over at
9249 <a href="https://www.pki.dfn.de/zeitstempeldienst/">Deutches
9250 Forschungsnetz</a> mentioned in
9251 <a href="http://www.d-mueller.de/blog/dealing-with-trusted-timestamps-in-php-rfc-3161/">a
9252 blog by David Müller</a>.  I then found
9253 <a href="http://www.rz.uni-greifswald.de/support/dfn-pki-zertifikate/zeitstempeldienst.html">a
9254 good recipe on how to use the service</a> over at the University of
9255 Greifswald.</p>
9256
9257 <p><a href="http://www.openssl.org/">The OpenSSL library</a> contain
9258 both server and tools to use and set up your own signing service.  See
9259 the ts(1SSL), tsget(1SSL) manual pages for more details.  The
9260 following shell script demonstrate how to extract a signed timestamp
9261 for any file on the disk in a Debian environment:</p>
9262
9263 <p><blockquote><pre>
9264 #!/bin/sh
9265 set -e
9266 url="http://zeitstempel.dfn.de"
9267 caurl="https://pki.pca.dfn.de/global-services-ca/pub/cacert/chain.txt"
9268 reqfile=$(mktemp -t tmp.XXXXXXXXXX.tsq)
9269 resfile=$(mktemp -t tmp.XXXXXXXXXX.tsr)
9270 cafile=chain.txt
9271 if [ ! -f $cafile ] ; then
9272     wget -O $cafile "$caurl"
9273 fi
9274 openssl ts -query -data "$1" -cert | tee "$reqfile" \
9275     | /usr/lib/ssl/misc/tsget -h "$url" -o "$resfile"
9276 openssl ts -reply -in "$resfile" -text 1>&2
9277 openssl ts -verify -data "$1" -in "$resfile" -CAfile "$cafile" 1>&2
9278 base64 < "$resfile"
9279 rm "$reqfile" "$resfile"
9280 </pre></blockquote></p>
9281
9282 <p>The argument to the script is the file to timestamp, and the output
9283 is a base64 encoded version of the signature to STDOUT and details
9284 about the signature to STDERR.  Note that due to
9285 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=742553">a bug
9286 in the tsget script</a>, you might need to modify the included script
9287 and remove the last line.  Or just write your own HTTP uploader using
9288 curl. :) Now you too can prove and verify that files have not been
9289 changed.</p>
9290
9291 <p>But the Internet need more public trusted timestamp services.
9292 Perhaps something for <a href="http://www.uninett.no/">Uninett</a> or
9293 my work place the <a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a>
9294 to set up?</p>
9295
9296       </div>
9297       <div class="tags">
9298
9299
9300         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
9301
9302
9303       </div>
9304     </div>
9305     <div class="padding"></div>
9306
9307     <div class="entry">
9308       <div class="title">
9309         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Video_DVD_reader_library___python_dvdvideo___nice_free_software.html">Video DVD reader library / python-dvdvideo - nice free software</a>
9310       </div>
9311       <div class="date">
9312         21st March 2014
9313       </div>
9314       <div class="body">
9315         <p>Keeping your DVD collection safe from scratches and curious
9316 children fingers while still having it available when you want to see a
9317 movie is not straight forward.  My preferred method at the moment is
9318 to store a full copy of the ISO on a hard drive, and use VLC, Popcorn
9319 Hour or other useful players to view the resulting file.  This way the
9320 subtitles and bonus material are still available and using the ISO is
9321 just like inserting the original DVD record in the DVD player.</p>
9322
9323 <p>Earlier I used dd for taking security copies, but it do not handle
9324 DVDs giving read errors (which are quite a few of them).  I've also
9325 tried using
9326 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ripping_problematic_DVDs_using_dvdbackup_and_genisoimage.html">dvdbackup
9327 and genisoimage</a>, but these days I use the marvellous python library
9328 and program
9329 <a href="http://bblank.thinkmo.de/blog/new-software-python-dvdvideo">python-dvdvideo</a>
9330 written by Bastian Blank.  It is
9331 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/python-dvdvideo.html">in Debian
9332 already</a> and the binary package name is python3-dvdvideo. Instead
9333 of trying to read every block from the DVD, it parses the file
9334 structure and figure out which block on the DVD is actually in used,
9335 and only read those blocks from the DVD.  This work surprisingly well,
9336 and I have been able to almost backup my entire DVD collection using
9337 this method.</p>
9338
9339 <p>So far, python-dvdvideo have failed on between 10 and
9340 20 DVDs, which is a small fraction of my collection.  The most common
9341 problem is
9342 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=720831">DVDs
9343 using UTF-16 instead of UTF-8 characters</a>, which according to
9344 Bastian is against the DVD specification (and seem to cause some
9345 players to fail too).  A rarer problem is what seem to be inconsistent
9346 DVD structures, as the python library
9347 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=723079">claim
9348 there is a overlap between objects</a>.  An equally rare problem claim
9349 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=741878">some
9350 value is out of range</a>.  No idea what is going on there.  I wish I
9351 knew enough about the DVD format to fix these, to ensure my movie
9352 collection will stay with me in the future.</p>
9353
9354 <p>So, if you need to keep your DVDs safe, back them up using
9355 python-dvdvideo. :)</p>
9356
9357       </div>
9358       <div class="tags">
9359
9360
9361         Tags: <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/nice free software">nice free software</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
9362
9363
9364       </div>
9365     </div>
9366     <div class="padding"></div>
9367
9368     <div class="entry">
9369       <div class="title">
9370         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Freedombox_on_Dreamplug__Raspberry_Pi_and_virtual_x86_machine.html">Freedombox on Dreamplug, Raspberry Pi and virtual x86 machine</a>
9371       </div>
9372       <div class="date">
9373         14th March 2014
9374       </div>
9375       <div class="body">
9376         <p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox
9377 project</a> is working on providing the software and hardware for
9378 making it easy for non-technical people to host their data and
9379 communication at home, and being able to communicate with their
9380 friends and family encrypted and away from prying eyes.  It has been
9381 going on for a while, and is slowly progressing towards a new test
9382 release (0.2).</p>
9383
9384 <p>And what day could be better than the Pi day to announce that the
9385 new version will provide "hard drive" / SD card / USB stick images for
9386 Dreamplug, Raspberry Pi and VirtualBox (or any other virtualization
9387 system), and can also be installed using a Debian installer preseed
9388 file.  The Debian based Freedombox is now based on Debian Jessie,
9389 where most of the needed packages used are already present.  Only one,
9390 the freedombox-setup package, is missing.  To try to build your own
9391 boot image to test the current status, fetch the freedom-maker scripts
9392 and build using
9393 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/vmdebootstrap">vmdebootstrap</a>
9394 with a user with sudo access to become root:
9395
9396 <pre>
9397 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/freedombox/freedom-maker.git \
9398   freedom-maker
9399 sudo apt-get install git vmdebootstrap mercurial python-docutils \
9400   mktorrent extlinux virtualbox qemu-user-static binfmt-support \
9401   u-boot-tools
9402 make -C freedom-maker dreamplug-image raspberry-image virtualbox-image
9403 </pre>
9404
9405 <p>Root access is needed to run debootstrap and mount loopback
9406 devices.  See the README for more details on the build. If you do not
9407 want all three images, trim the make line.  But note that thanks to <a
9408 href="https://bugs.debian.org/741407">a race condition in
9409 vmdebootstrap</a>, the build might fail without the patch to the
9410 kpartx call.</p>
9411
9412 <p>If you instead want to install using a Debian CD and the preseed
9413 method, boot a Debian Wheezy ISO and use this boot argument to load
9414 the preseed values:</p>
9415
9416 <pre>
9417 url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat</a>
9418 </pre>
9419
9420 <p>But note that due to <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/740673">a
9421 recently introduced bug in apt in Jessie</a>, the installer will
9422 currently hang while setting up APT sources.  Killing the
9423 '<tt>apt-cdrom ident</tt>' process when it hang a few times during the
9424 installation will get the installation going.  This affect all
9425 installations in Jessie, and I expect it will be fixed soon.</p>
9426
9427 <p>Give it a go and let us know how it goes on the mailing list, and help
9428 us get the new release published. :) Please join us on
9429 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC (#freedombox on
9430 irc.debian.org)</a> and
9431 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
9432 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
9433
9434       </div>
9435       <div class="tags">
9436
9437
9438         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/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
9439
9440
9441       </div>
9442     </div>
9443     <div class="padding"></div>
9444
9445     <div class="entry">
9446       <div class="title">
9447         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_add_extra_storage_servers_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux.html">How to add extra storage servers in Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
9448       </div>
9449       <div class="date">
9450         12th March 2014
9451       </div>
9452       <div class="body">
9453         <p>On larger sites, it is useful to use a dedicated storage server for
9454 storing user home directories and data.  The design for handling this
9455 in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>, is
9456 to update the automount rules in LDAP and let the automount daemon on
9457 the clients take care of the rest.  I was reminded about the need to
9458 document this better when one of the customers of
9459 <a href="http://www.slxdrift.no/">Skolelinux Drift AS</a>, where I am
9460 on the board of directors, asked about how to do this.  The steps to
9461 get this working are the following:</p>
9462
9463 <p><ol>
9464
9465 <li>Add new storage server in DNS.  I use nas-server.intern as the
9466 example host here.</li>
9467
9468 <li>Add automoun LDAP information about this server in LDAP, to allow
9469 all clients to automatically mount it on reqeust.</li>
9470
9471 <li>Add the relevant entries in tjener.intern:/etc/fstab, because
9472 tjener.intern do not use automount to avoid mounting loops.</li>
9473
9474 </ol></p>
9475
9476 <p>DNS entries are added in GOsa², and not described here.  Follow the
9477 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/GettingStarted">instructions
9478 in the manual</a> (Machine Management with GOsa² in section Getting
9479 started).</p>
9480
9481 <p>Ensure that the NFS export points on the server are exported to the
9482 relevant subnets or machines:</p>
9483
9484 <p><blockquote><pre>
9485 root@tjener:~# showmount -e nas-server
9486 Export list for nas-server:
9487 /storage         10.0.0.0/8
9488 root@tjener:~#
9489 </pre></blockquote></p>
9490
9491 <p>Here everything on the backbone network is granted access to the
9492 /storage export.  With NFSv3 it is slightly better to limit it to
9493 netgroup membership or single IP addresses to have some limits on the
9494 NFS access.</p>
9495
9496 <p>The next step is to update LDAP.  This can not be done using GOsa²,
9497 because it lack a module for automount.  Instead, use ldapvi and add
9498 the required LDAP objects using an editor.</p>
9499
9500 <p><blockquote><pre>
9501 ldapvi --ldap-conf -ZD '(cn=admin)' -b ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
9502 </pre></blockquote></p>
9503
9504 <p>When the editor show up, add the following LDAP objects at the
9505 bottom of the document.  The "/&" part in the last LDAP object is a
9506 wild card matching everything the nas-server exports, removing the
9507 need to list individual mount points in LDAP.</p>
9508
9509 <p><blockquote><pre>
9510 add cn=nas-server,ou=auto.skole,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
9511 objectClass: automount
9512 cn: nas-server
9513 automountInformation: -fstype=autofs --timeout=60 ldap:ou=auto.nas-server,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
9514
9515 add ou=auto.nas-server,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
9516 objectClass: top
9517 objectClass: automountMap
9518 ou: auto.nas-server
9519
9520 add cn=/,ou=auto.nas-server,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
9521 objectClass: automount
9522 cn: /
9523 automountInformation: -fstype=nfs,tcp,rsize=32768,wsize=32768,rw,intr,hard,nodev,nosuid,noatime nas-server.intern:/&
9524 </pre></blockquote></p>
9525
9526 <p>The last step to remember is to mount the relevant mount points in
9527 tjener.intern by adding them to /etc/fstab, creating the mount
9528 directories using mkdir and running "mount -a" to mount them.</p>
9529
9530 <p>When this is done, your users should be able to access the files on
9531 the storage server directly by just visiting the
9532 /tjener/nas-server/storage/ directory using any application on any
9533 workstation, LTSP client or LTSP server.</p>
9534
9535       </div>
9536       <div class="tags">
9537
9538
9539         Tags: <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>.
9540
9541
9542       </div>
9543     </div>
9544     <div class="padding"></div>
9545
9546     <div class="entry">
9547       <div class="title">
9548         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_home_and_release_1_0_for_netgroup_and_innetgr__aka_ng_utils_.html">New home and release 1.0 for netgroup and innetgr (aka ng-utils)</a>
9549       </div>
9550       <div class="date">
9551         22nd February 2014
9552       </div>
9553       <div class="body">
9554         <p>Many years ago, I wrote a GPL licensed version of the netgroup and
9555 innetgr tools, because I needed them in
9556 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a>.  I called the project
9557 ng-utils, and it has served me well.  I placed the project under the
9558 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/">Hungry Programmer</a> umbrella, and it was maintained in our CVS
9559 repository.  But many years ago, the CVS repository was dropped (lost,
9560 not migrated to new hardware, not sure), and the project have lacked a
9561 proper home since then.</p>
9562
9563 <p>Last summer, I had a look at the package and made a new release
9564 fixing a irritating crash bug, but was unable to store the changes in
9565 a proper source control system.  I applied for a project on
9566 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/">Alioth</a>, but did not have time
9567 to follow up on it.  Until today. :)</p>
9568
9569 <p>After many hours of cleaning and migration, the ng-utils project
9570 now have a new home, and a git repository with the highlight of the
9571 history of the project.  I published all release tarballs and imported
9572 them into the git repository.  As the project is really stable and not
9573 expected to gain new features any time soon, I decided to make a new
9574 release and call it 1.0.  Visit the new project home on
9575 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/ng-utils/">https://alioth.debian.org/projects/ng-utils/</a>
9576 if you want to check it out.  The new version is also uploaded into
9577 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/ng-utils.html">Debian Unstable</a>.</p>
9578
9579       </div>
9580       <div class="tags">
9581
9582
9583         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>.
9584
9585
9586       </div>
9587     </div>
9588     <div class="padding"></div>
9589
9590     <div class="entry">
9591       <div class="title">
9592         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_sysvinit_from_experimental_in_Debian_Hurd.html">Testing sysvinit from experimental in Debian Hurd</a>
9593       </div>
9594       <div class="date">
9595          3rd February 2014
9596       </div>
9597       <div class="body">
9598         <p>A few days ago I decided to try to help the Hurd people to get
9599 their changes into sysvinit, to allow them to use the normal sysvinit
9600 boot system instead of their old one.  This follow up on the
9601 <a href="https://teythoon.cryptobitch.de//categories/gsoc.html">great
9602 Google Summer of Code work</a> done last summer by Justus Winter to
9603 get Debian on Hurd working more like Debian on Linux.  To get started,
9604 I downloaded a prebuilt hard disk image from
9605 <a href="http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian-cd/hurd-i386/current/debian-hurd.img.tar.gz">http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian-cd/hurd-i386/current/debian-hurd.img.tar.gz</a>,
9606 and started it using virt-manager.</p>
9607
9608 <p>The first think I had to do after logging in (root without any
9609 password) was to get the network operational.  I followed
9610 <a href="https://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/hurd-install">the
9611 instructions on the Debian GNU/Hurd ports page</a> and ran these
9612 commands as root to get the machine to accept a IP address from the
9613 kvm internal DHCP server:</p>
9614
9615 <p><blockquote><pre>
9616 settrans -fgap /dev/netdde /hurd/netdde
9617 kill $(ps -ef|awk '/[p]finet/ { print $2}')
9618 kill $(ps -ef|awk '/[d]evnode/ { print $2}')
9619 dhclient /dev/eth0
9620 </pre></blockquote></p>
9621
9622 <p>After this, the machine had internet connectivity, and I could
9623 upgrade it and install the sysvinit packages from experimental and
9624 enable it as the default boot system in Hurd.</p>
9625
9626 <p>But before I did that, I set a password on the root user, as ssh is
9627 running on the machine it for ssh login to work a password need to be
9628 set.  Also, note that a bug somewhere in openssh on Hurd block
9629 compression from working.  Remember to turn that off on the client
9630 side.</p>
9631
9632 <p>Run these commands as root to upgrade and test the new sysvinit
9633 stuff:</p>
9634
9635 <p><blockquote><pre>
9636 cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/experimental.list &lt;&lt;EOF
9637 deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ experimental main
9638 EOF
9639 apt-get update
9640 apt-get dist-upgrade
9641 apt-get install -t experimental initscripts sysv-rc sysvinit \
9642     sysvinit-core sysvinit-utils
9643 update-alternatives --config runsystem
9644 </pre></blockquote></p>
9645
9646 <p>To reboot after switching boot system, you have to use
9647 <tt>reboot-hurd</tt> instead of just <tt>reboot</tt>, as there is not
9648 yet a sysvinit process able to receive the signals from the normal
9649 'reboot' command.  After switching to sysvinit as the boot system,
9650 upgrading every package and rebooting, the network come up with DHCP
9651 after boot as it should, and the settrans/pkill hack mentioned at the
9652 start is no longer needed.  But for some strange reason, there are no
9653 longer any login prompt in the virtual console, so I logged in using
9654 ssh instead.
9655
9656 <p>Note that there are some race conditions in Hurd making the boot
9657 fail some times.  No idea what the cause is, but hope the Hurd porters
9658 figure it out.  At least Justus said on IRC (#debian-hurd on
9659 irc.debian.org) that they are aware of the problem.  A way to reduce
9660 the impact is to upgrade to the Hurd packages built by Justus by
9661 adding this repository to the machine:</p>
9662
9663 <p><blockquote><pre>
9664 cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hurd-ci.list &lt;&lt;EOF
9665 deb http://darnassus.sceen.net/~teythoon/hurd-ci/ sid main
9666 EOF
9667 </pre></blockquote></p>
9668
9669 <p>At the moment the prebuilt virtual machine get some packages from
9670 http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian, because some of the packages in
9671 unstable do not yet include the required patches that are lingering in
9672 BTS.  This is the completely list of "unofficial" packages installed:</p>
9673
9674 <p><blockquote><pre>
9675 # aptitude search '?narrow(?version(CURRENT),?origin(Debian Ports))'
9676 i   emacs                   - GNU Emacs editor (metapackage)
9677 i   gdb                     - GNU Debugger
9678 i   hurd-recommended        - Miscellaneous translators
9679 i   isc-dhcp-client         - ISC DHCP client
9680 i   isc-dhcp-common         - common files used by all the isc-dhcp* packages
9681 i   libc-bin                - Embedded GNU C Library: Binaries
9682 i   libc-dev-bin            - Embedded GNU C Library: Development binaries
9683 i   libc0.3                 - Embedded GNU C Library: Shared libraries
9684 i A libc0.3-dbg             - Embedded GNU C Library: detached debugging symbols
9685 i   libc0.3-dev             - Embedded GNU C Library: Development Libraries and Hea
9686 i   multiarch-support       - Transitional package to ensure multiarch compatibilit
9687 i A x11-common              - X Window System (X.Org) infrastructure
9688 i   xorg                    - X.Org X Window System
9689 i A xserver-xorg            - X.Org X server
9690 i A xserver-xorg-input-all  - X.Org X server -- input driver metapackage
9691 #
9692 </pre></blockquote></p>
9693
9694 <p>All in all, testing hurd has been an interesting experience. :)
9695 X.org did not work out of the box and I never took the time to follow
9696 the porters instructions to fix it.  This time I was interested in the
9697 command line stuff.<p>
9698
9699       </div>
9700       <div class="tags">
9701
9702
9703         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>.
9704
9705
9706       </div>
9707     </div>
9708     <div class="padding"></div>
9709
9710     <div class="entry">
9711       <div class="title">
9712         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_fist_full_of_non_anonymous_Bitcoins.html">A fist full of non-anonymous Bitcoins</a>
9713       </div>
9714       <div class="date">
9715         29th January 2014
9716       </div>
9717       <div class="body">
9718         <p>Bitcoin is a incredible use of peer to peer communication and
9719 encryption, allowing direct and immediate money transfer without any
9720 central control.  It is sometimes claimed to be ideal for illegal
9721 activity, which I believe is quite a long way from the truth.  At least
9722 I would not conduct illegal money transfers using a system where the
9723 details of every transaction are kept forever.  This point is
9724 investigated in
9725 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login">USENIX ;login:</a>
9726 from December 2013, in the article
9727 "<a href="https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/articles/03_meiklejohn-online.pdf">A
9728 Fistful of Bitcoins - Characterizing Payments Among Men with No
9729 Names</a>" by Sarah Meiklejohn, Marjori Pomarole,Grant Jordan, Kirill
9730 Levchenko, Damon McCoy, Geoffrey M. Voelker, and Stefan Savage.  They
9731 analyse the transaction log in the Bitcoin system, using it to find
9732 addresses belong to individuals and organisations and follow the flow
9733 of money from both Bitcoin theft and trades on Silk Road to where the
9734 money end up.  This is how they wrap up their article:</p>
9735
9736 <p><blockquote>
9737 <p>"To demonstrate the usefulness of this type of analysis, we turned
9738 our attention to criminal activity. In the Bitcoin economy, criminal
9739 activity can appear in a number of forms, such as dealing drugs on
9740 Silk Road or simply stealing someone else’s bitcoins. We followed the
9741 flow of bitcoins out of Silk Road (in particular, from one notorious
9742 address) and from a number of highly publicized thefts to see whether
9743 we could track the bitcoins to known services. Although some of the
9744 thieves attempted to use sophisticated mixing techniques (or possibly
9745 mix services) to obscure the flow of bitcoins, for the most part
9746 tracking the bitcoins was quite straightforward, and we ultimately saw
9747 large quantities of bitcoins flow to a variety of exchanges directly
9748 from the point of theft (or the withdrawal from Silk Road).</p>
9749
9750 <p>As acknowledged above, following stolen bitcoins to the point at
9751 which they are deposited into an exchange does not in itself identify
9752 the thief; however, it does enable further de-anonymization in the
9753 case in which certain agencies can determine (through, for example,
9754 subpoena power) the real-world owner of the account into which the
9755 stolen bitcoins were deposited.  Because such exchanges seem to serve
9756 as chokepoints into and out of the Bitcoin economy (i.e., there are
9757 few alternative ways to cash out), we conclude that using Bitcoin for
9758 money laundering or other illicit purposes does not (at least at
9759 present) seem to be particularly attractive."</p>
9760 </blockquote><p>
9761
9762 <p>These researches are not the first to analyse the Bitcoin
9763 transaction log.  The 2011 paper
9764 "<a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/1107.4524">An Analysis of Anonymity in
9765 the Bitcoin System</A>" by Fergal Reid and Martin Harrigan is
9766 summarized like this:</p>
9767
9768 <p><blockquote>
9769 "Anonymity in Bitcoin, a peer-to-peer electronic currency system, is a
9770 complicated issue. Within the system, users are identified by
9771 public-keys only. An attacker wishing to de-anonymize its users will
9772 attempt to construct the one-to-many mapping between users and
9773 public-keys and associate information external to the system with the
9774 users. Bitcoin tries to prevent this attack by storing the mapping of
9775 a user to his or her public-keys on that user's node only and by
9776 allowing each user to generate as many public-keys as required. In
9777 this chapter we consider the topological structure of two networks
9778 derived from Bitcoin's public transaction history. We show that the
9779 two networks have a non-trivial topological structure, provide
9780 complementary views of the Bitcoin system and have implications for
9781 anonymity. We combine these structures with external information and
9782 techniques such as context discovery and flow analysis to investigate
9783 an alleged theft of Bitcoins, which, at the time of the theft, had a
9784 market value of approximately half a million U.S. dollars."
9785 </blockquote></p>
9786
9787 <p>I hope these references can help kill the urban myth that Bitcoin
9788 is anonymous.  It isn't really a good fit for illegal activites.  Use
9789 cash if you need to stay anonymous, at least until regular DNA
9790 sampling of notes and coins become the norm. :)</p>
9791
9792 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
9793 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
9794 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
9795
9796       </div>
9797       <div class="tags">
9798
9799
9800         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</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>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/usenix">usenix</a>.
9801
9802
9803       </div>
9804     </div>
9805     <div class="padding"></div>
9806
9807     <div class="entry">
9808       <div class="title">
9809         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_chrpath_release_0_16.html">New chrpath release 0.16</a>
9810       </div>
9811       <div class="date">
9812         14th January 2014
9813       </div>
9814       <div class="body">
9815         <p><a href="http://www.coverity.com/">Coverity</a> is a nice tool to
9816 find problems in C, C++ and Java code using static source code
9817 analysis.  It can detect a lot of different problems, and is very
9818 useful to find memory and locking bugs in the error handling part of
9819 the source.  The company behind it provide
9820 <a href="https://scan.coverity.com/">check of free software projects as
9821 a community service</a>, and many hundred free software projects are
9822 already checked.  A few days ago I decided to have a closer look at
9823 the Coverity system, and discovered that the
9824 <a href="http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/">gnash</a> and
9825 <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/ipmitool/">ipmitool</a>
9826 projects I am involved with was already registered.  But these are
9827 fairly big, and I would also like to have a small and easy project to
9828 check, and decided to <a href="http://scan.coverity.com/projects/1179">request
9829 checking of the chrpath project</a>.  It was
9830 added to the checker and discovered seven potential defects.  Six of
9831 these were real, mostly resource "leak" when the program detected an
9832 error.  Nothing serious, as the resources would be released a fraction
9833 of a second later when the program exited because of the error, but it
9834 is nice to do it right in case the source of the program some time in
9835 the future end up in a library.  Having fixed all defects and added
9836 <a href="https://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/chrpath-devel">a
9837 mailing list for the chrpath developers</a>, I decided it was time to
9838 publish a new release.  These are the release notes:</p>
9839
9840 <p>New in 0.16 released 2014-01-14:</p>
9841
9842 <ul>
9843
9844   <li>Fixed all minor bugs discovered by Coverity.</li>
9845   <li>Updated config.sub and config.guess from the GNU project.</li>
9846   <li>Mention new project mailing list in the documentation.</li>
9847
9848 </ul>
9849
9850 <p>You can
9851 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/frs/?group_id=31052">download the
9852 new version 0.16 from alioth</a>.  Please let us know via the Alioth
9853 project if something is wrong with the new release.  The test suite
9854 did not discover any old errors, so if you find a new one, please also
9855 include a test suite check.</p>
9856
9857       </div>
9858       <div class="tags">
9859
9860
9861         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/chrpath">chrpath</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>.
9862
9863
9864       </div>
9865     </div>
9866     <div class="padding"></div>
9867
9868     <div class="entry">
9869       <div class="title">
9870         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Dominik_George.html">Debian Edu interview: Dominik George</a>
9871       </div>
9872       <div class="date">
9873         25th December 2013
9874       </div>
9875       <div class="body">
9876         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
9877 project</a> consist of both newcomers and old timers, and this time I
9878 was able to get an interview with a newcomer in the project who showed
9879 up on the IRC channel a few weeks ago to let us know about his
9880 successful installation of Debian Edu Wheezy in his School.  Say hello
9881 to <a href="https://www.ohloh.net/accounts/Natureshadow">Dominik
9882 George</a>.</p>
9883
9884 <!-- http://www.dominik-george.de/images/foto.jpg -->
9885
9886 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
9887
9888 <p>I am a 23 year-old student from Germany who has spent half of his
9889 life with open source. In "real life", I am, as already mentioned, a
9890 student in the fields of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering,
9891 Information Technologies and Anglistics. Due to my (only partially
9892 voluntary) huge engagement in the open source world, these things are
9893 a bit vacant right now however.</p>
9894
9895 <p>I also have been working as a project teacher at a Gymasnium
9896 (public school) for various years now. I took up that work some time
9897 around 2005 when still attending that school myself and have continued
9898 it until today. I also had been running the (kind of very advanced)
9899 network of that school together with a team of very interested and
9900 talented students in the age of 11 to 15 years, who took the chance to
9901 learn a lot about open source and networking before I left the school
9902 to help building another school's informational education concept from
9903 scratch.</p>
9904
9905 <p>That said, one might see me as a kind of "glue" between school kids
9906 and the elderly of teachers as well as between the open source
9907 ecosystem and the (even more complex) educational ecosystem.</p>
9908
9909 <p>When I am not busy with open source or education, I like Geocaching
9910 and cycling.</p>
9911
9912 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
9913 project?</strong></p>
9914
9915 <p>I think that happened some time around 2009 when I first attended
9916 <a href="http://www.froscon.org">FrOSCon</a> and visited the project
9917 booth. I think I wasn't too interested back then because I used to
9918 have an attitude of disliking software that does too much stuff on its
9919 own. Maybe I was too inexperienced to realise the upsides of an
9920 "out-of-the-box" solution ;).</p>
9921
9922 <p>The first time I actively talked to Skolelinux people was at
9923 <a href="http://www.openrheinruhr.de">OpenRheinRuhr</a> 2011 when the
9924 BiscuIT project, a home-grewn software used by my school for various
9925 really cool things from timetables and class contact lists to lunch
9926 ordering, student ID card printing and project elections first got to
9927 a stage where it could have been published. I asked the Skolelinux
9928 guys running the booth if the project were interested in it and gave a
9929 small demonstration, but there wasn't any real feedback and the guys
9930 seemed rather uninterested.</p>
9931
9932 <p>After I left the school where I developed the software, it got
9933 mostly lost, but I am now reimplementing it for my new school. I have
9934 reusability and compatibility in mind, and I hop there will be a new
9935 basis for contributing it to the Skolelinux project ;)!</p>
9936
9937 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
9938 Edu?</strong></p>
9939
9940 <p>The most important advantage seems to be that it "just
9941 works". After overcoming some minor (but still very annoying) glitches
9942 in the installer, I got a fully functional, working school network,
9943 without the month-long hassle I experienced when setting all that up
9944 from scratch in earlier years. And above that, it rocked - I didn't
9945 have any real hardware at hand, because the school was just founded
9946 and has no money whatsoever, so I installed a combined server (main
9947 server, terminal services and workstation) in a VM on my personal
9948 notebook, bridging the LTSP network interface to the ethernet port,
9949 and then PXE-booted the Windows notebooks that were lying around from
9950 it. I could use 8 clients without any performance issues, by using a
9951 tiny little VM on a tiny little notebook. I think that's enough to say
9952 that it rocks!</p>
9953
9954 <p>Secondly, there are marketing reasons. Life's bad, and so no
9955 politician will ever permit a setup described as "Debian, an universal
9956 operating system, with some really cool educational tools" while they
9957 will be jsut fine with "Skolelinux, a single-purpose solution for your
9958 school network", even if both turn out to be the very same thing (yes,
9959 this is unfair towards the Skolelinux project, and must not be taken
9960 too seriously - you get the idea, anyway).</p>
9961
9962 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
9963 Edu?</strong></p>
9964
9965 <p>I have not been involved with Skolelinux long enough to really
9966 answer this question in a fair way. Thus, please allow me to put it in
9967 other words: "What do you expect from Skolelinux to keep liking it?" I
9968 can list a few points about that:</p>
9969
9970 <ul>
9971
9972  <li>always strive to get all things integrated into Debian upstream
9973  <li>be open to discussion about changes and the like, even with newcomers
9974  <li>be helpful at being helpful ;)
9975
9976 </ul>
9977
9978 <p>I'm really sorry I cannot say much more about that :(!</p>
9979
9980 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
9981
9982 <p>First of all, all software I use is free and open. I have abandoned
9983 all non-free software (except for firmware on my darned phone) this
9984 year.</p>
9985
9986 <p>I run Debian GNU/Linux on all PC systems I use. On that, I mostly
9987 run text tools. I use
9988 <a href="https://www.mirbsd.org/mksh.htm">mksh</a> as shell,
9989 <a href="https://www.mirbsd.org/jupp.htm">jupp</a> as very advanced
9990 text editor (I even got the developer to help me write a script/macro
9991 based full-featured student management software with the two),
9992 <a href="http://mcabber.com/">mcabber</a> for XMPP and
9993 <a href="http://www.irssi.org/">irssi</a> for IRC. For that overly
9994 coloured world called the WWW, I use
9995 <a href="https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/">Iceweasel
9996 (Firefox)</a>. Oh, and <a href="http://www.mutt.org/">mutt</a> for
9997 e-mail.</p>
9998
9999 <p>However, while I am personally aware of the fact that text tools
10000 are more efficient and powerful than anything else, I also use (or at
10001 least operate) some tools that are suitable to bring open source to
10002 kids. One of these things is <a href="http://jappix.org/">Jappix</a>,
10003 which I already introduced to some kids even before they got aware of
10004 Facebook, making them see for themselves that they do not need
10005 Facebook now ;).</p>
10006
10007 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
10008 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
10009
10010 <p>Well, that's a two-sided thing. One side is what I believe, and one
10011 side is what I have experienced.</p>
10012
10013 <p>I believe that the right strategy is showing them the benefits. But
10014 that won't work out as long as the acceptance of free alternatives
10015 grows globally. What I mean is that if all the kids are almost forced
10016 to use Windows, Facebook, Skype, you name it at home, they will not
10017 see why they would want to use alternatives at school. I have seen
10018 students take seat in front of a fully-functional, modern Debian
10019 desktop that could do anything their Windows at home could do, and
10020 they jsut refused to use it because "Linux sucks". It is something
10021 that makes the council of our city spend around 600000 € to buy
10022 software - not including hardware, mind you - for operating school
10023 networks, and for installing a system that, as has been proved, does
10024 not work. For those of you readers who are good at maths, have you
10025 already found out how many lives could have been saved with that money
10026 if we had instead used it to bring education to parts of the world
10027 that need it? I have, and found it to be nothing less dramatic than
10028 plain criminal.</p>
10029
10030 <p>That said, the only feasible way appears to be the bottom up
10031 method. We have to bring free software to kids and parents. I have
10032 founded an association named
10033 <a href="https://www.teckids.org">Teckids</a> here in Germany that does
10034 just that. We organise several events for kids and adolescents in the
10035 area of free and open source software, for example the
10036 <a href="http://kids.froscon.org">FrogLabs</a>, which share staff with
10037 Teckids and are the youth programme of
10038 <a href="http://www.froscon.org">the Free and Open Source Software
10039 Conference (FrOSCon)</a>. We do a lot more than most other conferences
10040 - this year, we first offered the FrogLabs as a holiday camp for kids
10041 aged 10 to 16. It was a huge success, with approx. 30 kids taking part
10042 and learning with and about free software through a whole weekend. All
10043 of us had a lot of fun, and the results were really exciting.</p>
10044
10045 <p>Apart from that, we are preparing a campaign that is supposed to bring
10046 the message of free alternatives to stuff kids use every day to them and
10047 their parents, e.g. the use of Jabber / Jappix instead of Facebook and
10048 Skype. To make that possible, we are planning to get together a team of
10049 clever kids who understand very well what their peers need and can bring
10050 it across to them. So we will have a peer-driven network of adolescents
10051 who teach each other and collect feedback from the community of minors.
10052 We then take that feedback and our own experience to work closely with
10053 open source projects, such as Skolelinux or Jappix, at improving their
10054 software in a way that makes it more and more attractive for the target
10055 group. At least I hope that we will have good cooperation with
10056 Skolelinux in the future ;)!</p>
10057
10058 <p>So in conclusion, what I believe is that, if it weren't for the world
10059 being so bad, it should be very clear to the political decision makers
10060 that the only way to go nowadays is free software for various reasons,
10061 but I have learnt that the only way that seems to work is bottom up.</p>
10062
10063 <!--
10064
10065 >  * Who should be interviewed with this questions in the future?
10066
10067 That's probably the hardest question of them all, as I do not know the
10068 community. However, I would be willing to do the following:
10069
10070  <li>Run an interview with a German headteacher who is very open to
10071    free software, and also prefers it, but cannot really use it because
10072    of the decision makers above;
10073  <li>Run interviews with some kids, both with and without previous
10074    knowledge about free software
10075
10076 If that is wanted, just let me know ;).
10077
10078 -->
10079
10080       </div>
10081       <div class="tags">
10082
10083
10084         Tags: <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/intervju">intervju</a>.
10085
10086
10087       </div>
10088     </div>
10089     <div class="padding"></div>
10090
10091     <div class="entry">
10092       <div class="title">
10093         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Klaus_Knopper.html">Debian Edu interview: Klaus Knopper</a>
10094       </div>
10095       <div class="date">
10096          6th December 2013
10097       </div>
10098       <div class="body">
10099         <p>It has been a while since I managed to publish the last interview,
10100 but the <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
10101 Skolelinux</a> community is still going strong, and yesterday we even
10102 had a new school administrator show up on
10103 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/#debian-edu">#debian-edu</a> to share
10104 his success story with installing Debian Edu at their school.  This
10105 time I have been able to get some helpful comments from the creator of
10106 Knoppix, Klaus Knopper, who was involved in a Skolelinux project in
10107 Germany a few years ago.</p>
10108
10109 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
10110
10111 <p>I am Klaus Knopper.  I have a master degree in electrical
10112 engineering, and is currently professor in information management at
10113 the university of applied sciences Kaiserslautern / Germany and
10114 freelance Open Source software developer and consultant.</p>
10115
10116 <p>All of this is pretty much of the work I spend my days with. Apart
10117 from teaching, I'm also conducting some more or less experimental
10118 projects like the <a href="http://www.knoppix.org">Knoppix GNU/Linux live
10119 system</a> (Debian-based like Skolelinux),
10120 <a href="http://www.knopper.net/knoppix-adriane/index-en.html">ADRIANE</a>
10121 (a blind-friendly talking desktop system) and
10122 <a href="http://www.knopper.net/linbo/index-en.html">LINBO</a>
10123 (Linux-based network boot console, a fast remote install and repair
10124 system supporting various operating systems).</p>
10125
10126 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
10127 project?</strong></p>
10128
10129 <p>The credit for this have to go to Kurt Gramlich, who is the German
10130 coordinator for Skolelinux.  We were looking for an all-in-one open
10131 source community-supported distribution for schools, and Kurt
10132 introduced us to Skolelinux for this purpose.</p>
10133
10134 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
10135 Edu?</strong></p>
10136
10137 <ul>
10138   <li>Quick installation,</li>
10139   <li>works (almost) out of the box,</li>
10140   <li>contains many useful software packages for teaching and learning,</li>
10141   <li>is a purely community-based distro and not controlled by a
10142     single company,</li>
10143   <li>has a large number of supporters and teachers who share their
10144     experience and problem solutions.</li>
10145 </ul>
10146
10147 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
10148 Edu?</strong></p>
10149
10150 <ul>
10151   <li>Skolelinux is - as we had to learn - not easily upgradable to
10152   the next version.  Opposed to its genuine Debian base, upgrading to
10153   a new version means a full new installation from scratch to get it
10154   working again reliably.
10155
10156   <li>Skolelinux is based on Debian/stable, and therefore always a
10157   little outdated in terms of program versions compared to Edubuntu or
10158   similar educational Linux distros, which rather use Debian/testing
10159   as their base.
10160
10161   <li>Skolelinux has some very self-opinionated and stubborn default
10162   configuration which in my opinion adds unnecessary complexity and is
10163   not always suitable for a schools needs, the preset network
10164   configuration is actually a core definition feature of Skolelinux
10165   and not easy to change, so schools sometimes have to change their
10166   network configuration to make it "Skolelinux-compatible".
10167
10168   <li>Some proposed extensions, which were made available as
10169   contribution, like secure examination mode and lecture material
10170   distribution and collection, were not accepted into the mainline
10171   Skolelinux development and are now not easy to maintain in the
10172   future because of Skolelinux somewhat undeterministic update
10173   schemes.</li>
10174
10175   <li>Skolelinux has only a very tiny number of base developers
10176   compared to Debian.</li>
10177
10178 </ul>
10179
10180 <p>For these reasons and experience from our project, I would now
10181 rather consider using plain Debian for schools next time, until
10182 Skolelinux is more closely integrated into Debian and becomes
10183 upgradeable without reinstallation.</p>
10184
10185 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
10186
10187 <p>GNU/Linux with LXDE desktop, bash for interactive dialog and
10188 programming, texlive for documentation and correspondence,
10189 occasionally LibreOffice for document format conversion. Various
10190 programming languages for teaching.</p>
10191
10192 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
10193 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
10194
10195 <p>Strong arguments are</p>
10196
10197 <ul>
10198
10199   <li>Knowledge is free, and so should be methods and tools for
10200     teaching and learning.</li>
10201
10202   <li>Students can learn with and use the same software at school, at
10203     home, and at their working place without running into license or
10204     conversion problems.</li>
10205
10206   <li>Closed source or proprietary software hides knowledge rather
10207     than exposing it, and proprietary software vendors try to bind
10208     customers to certain products.  But teachers need to teach
10209     science, not products.</li>
10210
10211   <li>If you have everything you for daily work as open source, what
10212     would you need proprietary software for?</li>
10213
10214 </ul>
10215
10216       </div>
10217       <div class="tags">
10218
10219
10220         Tags: <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/intervju">intervju</a>.
10221
10222
10223       </div>
10224     </div>
10225     <div class="padding"></div>
10226
10227     <div class="entry">
10228       <div class="title">
10229         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnadsnett_for_alle__a_wireless_community_network_in_Oslo__take_shape.html">Dugnadsnett for alle, a wireless community network in Oslo, take shape</a>
10230       </div>
10231       <div class="date">
10232         30th November 2013
10233       </div>
10234       <div class="body">
10235         <p>If you want the ability to electronically communicate directly with
10236 your neighbors and friends using a network controlled by your peers in
10237 stead of centrally controlled by a few corporations, or would like to
10238 experiment with interesting network technology, the
10239 <a href="http://www.dugnadsnett.no/">Dugnasnett for alle i Oslo</a>
10240 might be project for you.  39 mesh nodes are currently being planned,
10241 in the freshly started initiative from NUUG and Hackeriet to create a
10242 wireless community network.  The work is inspired by
10243 <a href="http://freifunk.net/">Freifunk</a>,
10244 <a href="http://www.awmn.net/">Athens Wireless Metropolitan
10245 Network</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roofnet">Roofnet</a>
10246 and other successful mesh networks around the globe.  Two days ago we
10247 held a workshop to try to get people started on setting up their own
10248 mesh node, and there we decided to create a new mailing list
10249 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/dugnadsnett">dugnadsnett
10250 (at) nuug.no</a> and IRC channel
10251 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/#dugnadsnett.no">#dugnadsnett.no</a> to
10252 coordinate the work.  See also the NUUG blog post
10253 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/E_postliste_og_IRC_kanal_for_Dugnadsnett_for_alle_i_Oslo.shtml">announcing
10254 the mailing list and IRC channel</a>.</p>
10255
10256       </div>
10257       <div class="tags">
10258
10259
10260         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/mesh network">mesh network</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
10261
10262
10263       </div>
10264     </div>
10265     <div class="padding"></div>
10266
10267     <div class="entry">
10268       <div class="title">
10269         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_chrpath_release_0_15.html">New chrpath release 0.15</a>
10270       </div>
10271       <div class="date">
10272         24th November 2013
10273       </div>
10274       <div class="body">
10275         <p>After many years break from the package and a vain hope that
10276 development would be continued by someone else, I finally pulled my
10277 acts together this morning and wrapped up a new release of chrpath,
10278 the command line tool to modify the rpath and runpath of already
10279 compiled ELF programs.  The update was triggered by the persistence of
10280 Isha Vishnoi at IBM, which needed a new config.guess file to get
10281 support for the ppc64le architecture (powerpc 64-bit Little Endian) he
10282 is working on.  I checked the
10283 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/chrpath">Debian</a>,
10284 <a href="https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/chrpath">Ubuntu</a> and
10285 <a href="https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/acls/name/chrpath">Fedora</a>
10286 packages for interesting patches (failed to find the source from
10287 OpenSUSE and Mandriva packages), and found quite a few nice fixes.
10288 These are the release notes:</p>
10289
10290 <p>New in 0.15 released 2013-11-24:</p>
10291
10292 <ul>
10293
10294   <li>Updated config.sub and config.guess from the GNU project to work
10295    with newer architectures.  Thanks to isha vishnoi for the heads
10296    up.</li>
10297
10298   <li>Updated README with current URLs.</li>
10299
10300   <li>Added byteswap fix found in Ubuntu, credited Jeremy Kerr and
10301    Matthias Klose.</li>
10302
10303   <li>Added missing help for -k|--keepgoing option, using patch by
10304    Petr Machata found in Fedora.</li>
10305
10306   <li>Rewrite removal of RPATH/RUNPATH to make sure the entry in
10307    .dynamic is a NULL terminated string.  Based on patch found in
10308    Fedora credited Axel Thimm and Christian Krause.</li>
10309
10310 </ul>
10311
10312 <p>You can
10313 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/frs/?group_id=31052">download the
10314 new version 0.15 from alioth</a>.  Please let us know via the Alioth
10315 project if something is wrong with the new release.  The test suite
10316 did not discover any old errors, so if you find a new one, please also
10317 include a testsuite check.</p>
10318
10319       </div>
10320       <div class="tags">
10321
10322
10323         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/chrpath">chrpath</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>.
10324
10325
10326       </div>
10327     </div>
10328     <div class="padding"></div>
10329
10330     <div class="entry">
10331       <div class="title">
10332         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/All_drones_should_be_radio_marked_with_what_they_do_and_who_they_belong_to.html">All drones should be radio marked with what they do and who they belong to</a>
10333       </div>
10334       <div class="date">
10335         21st November 2013
10336       </div>
10337       <div class="body">
10338         <p>Drones, flying robots, are getting more and more popular.  The most
10339 know ones are the killer drones used by some government to murder
10340 people they do not like without giving them the chance of a fair
10341 trial, but the technology have many good uses too, from mapping and
10342 forest maintenance to photography and search and rescue.  I am sure it
10343 is just a question of time before "bad drones" are in the hands of
10344 private enterprises and not only state criminals but petty criminals
10345 too.  The drone technology is very useful and very dangerous.  To have
10346 some control over the use of drones, I agree with Daniel Suarez in his
10347 TED talk
10348 "<a href="https://archive.org/details/DanielSuarez_2013G">The kill
10349 decision shouldn't belong to a robot</a>", where he suggested this
10350 little gem to keep the good while limiting the bad use of drones:</p>
10351
10352 <blockquote>
10353
10354 <p>Each robot and drone should have a cryptographically signed
10355 I.D. burned in at the factory that can be used to track its movement
10356 through public spaces. We have license plates on cars, tail numbers on
10357 aircraft. This is no different. And every citizen should be able to
10358 download an app that shows the population of drones and autonomous
10359 vehicles moving through public spaces around them, both right now and
10360 historically. And civic leaders should deploy sensors and civic drones
10361 to detect rogue drones, and instead of sending killer drones of their
10362 own up to shoot them down, they should notify humans to their
10363 presence. And in certain very high-security areas, perhaps civic
10364 drones would snare them and drag them off to a bomb disposal facility.</p>
10365
10366 <p>But notice, this is more an immune system than a weapons system. It
10367 would allow us to avail ourselves of the use of autonomous vehicles
10368 and drones while still preserving our open, civil society.</p>
10369
10370 </blockquote>
10371
10372 <p>The key is that <em>every citizen</em> should be able to read the
10373 radio beacons sent from the drones in the area, to be able to check
10374 both the government and others use of drones.  For such control to be
10375 effective, everyone must be able to do it.  What should such beacon
10376 contain?  At least formal owner, purpose, contact information and GPS
10377 location.  Probably also the origin and target position of the current
10378 flight.  And perhaps some registration number to be able to look up
10379 the drone in a central database tracking their movement.  Robots
10380 should not have privacy.  It is people who need privacy.</p>
10381
10382       </div>
10383       <div class="tags">
10384
10385
10386         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
10387
10388
10389       </div>
10390     </div>
10391     <div class="padding"></div>
10392
10393     <div class="entry">
10394       <div class="title">
10395         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_a_wireless_community_network_in_Oslo_.html">Lets make a wireless community network in Oslo!</a>
10396       </div>
10397       <div class="date">
10398         13th November 2013
10399       </div>
10400       <div class="body">
10401         <p>Today NUUG and Hackeriet announced
10402 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Bli_med___bygge_dugnadsnett_for_alle_i_Oslo.shtml">our
10403 plans to join forces and create a wireless community network in
10404 Oslo</a>.  The workshop to help people get started will take place
10405 Thursday 2013-11-28, but we already are collecting the geolocation of
10406 people joining forces to make this happen.  We have
10407 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node/blob/master/oslo-nodes.geojson">9
10408 locations plotted on the map</a>, but we will need more before we have
10409 a connected mesh spread across Oslo.  If this sound interesting to
10410 you, please join us at the workshop.  If you are too impatient to wait
10411 15 days, please join us on the IRC channel
10412 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23nuug">#nuug on irc.freenode.net</a>
10413 right away. :)</p>
10414
10415       </div>
10416       <div class="tags">
10417
10418
10419         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/mesh network">mesh network</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
10420
10421
10422       </div>
10423     </div>
10424     <div class="padding"></div>
10425
10426     <div class="entry">
10427       <div class="title">
10428         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Running_TP_Link_MR3040_as_a_batman_adv_mesh_node_using_openwrt.html">Running TP-Link MR3040 as a batman-adv mesh node using openwrt</a>
10429       </div>
10430       <div class="date">
10431         10th November 2013
10432       </div>
10433       <div class="body">
10434         <p>Continuing my research into mesh networking, I was recommended to
10435 use TP-Link 3040 and 3600 access points as mesh nodes, and the pair I
10436 bought arrived on Friday.  Here are my notes on how to set up the
10437 MR3040 as a mesh node using
10438 <a href="http://www.openwrt.org/">OpenWrt</a>.</p>
10439
10440 <p>I started by following the instructions on the OpenWRT wiki for
10441 <a href="http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/tl-mr3040">TL-MR3040</a>,
10442 and downloaded
10443 <a href="http://downloads.openwrt.org/snapshots/trunk/ar71xx/openwrt-ar71xx-generic-tl-mr3040-v2-squashfs-factory.bin">the
10444 recommended firmware image</a>
10445 (openwrt-ar71xx-generic-tl-mr3040-v2-squashfs-factory.bin) and
10446 uploaded it into the original web interface.  The flashing went fine,
10447 and the machine was available via telnet on the ethernet port.  After
10448 logging in and setting the root password, ssh was available and I
10449 could start to set it up as a batman-adv mesh node.</p>
10450
10451 <p>I started off by reading the instructions from
10452 <a href="http://wirelessafrica.meraka.org.za/wiki/index.php?title=Antoine's_Research">Wireless
10453 Africa</a>, which had quite a lot of useful information, but
10454 eventually I followed the recipe from the Open Mesh wiki for
10455 <a href="http://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki/Batman-adv-openwrt-config">using
10456 batman-adv on OpenWrt</a>.  A small snag was the fact that the
10457 <tt>opkg install kmod-batman-adv</tt> command did not work as it
10458 should.  The batman-adv kernel module would fail to load because its
10459 dependency crc16 was not already loaded.  I
10460 <a href="https://dev.openwrt.org/ticket/14452">reported the bug</a> to
10461 the openwrt project and hope it will be fixed soon.  But the problem
10462 only seem to affect initial testing of batman-adv, as configuration
10463 seem to work when booting from scratch.</p>
10464
10465 <p>The setup is done using files in /etc/config/.  I did not bridge
10466 the Ethernet and mesh interfaces this time, to be able to hook up the
10467 box on my local network and log into it for configuration updates.
10468 The following files were changed and look like this after modifying
10469 them:</p>
10470
10471 <p><tt>/etc/config/network</tt></p>
10472
10473 <pre>
10474
10475 config interface 'loopback'
10476         option ifname 'lo'
10477         option proto 'static'
10478         option ipaddr '127.0.0.1'
10479         option netmask '255.0.0.0'
10480
10481 config globals 'globals'
10482         option ula_prefix 'fdbf:4c12:3fed::/48'
10483
10484 config interface 'lan'
10485         option ifname 'eth0'
10486         option type 'bridge'
10487         option proto 'dhcp'
10488         option ipaddr '192.168.1.1'
10489         option netmask '255.255.255.0'
10490         option hostname 'tl-mr3040'
10491         option ip6assign '60'
10492
10493 config interface 'mesh'
10494         option ifname 'adhoc0'
10495         option mtu '1528'
10496         option proto 'batadv'
10497         option mesh 'bat0'
10498 </pre>
10499
10500 <p><tt>/etc/config/wireless</tt></p>
10501 <pre>
10502
10503 config wifi-device 'radio0'
10504         option type 'mac80211'
10505         option channel '11'
10506         option hwmode '11ng'
10507         option path 'platform/ar933x_wmac'
10508         option htmode 'HT20'
10509         list ht_capab 'SHORT-GI-20'
10510         list ht_capab 'SHORT-GI-40'
10511         list ht_capab 'RX-STBC1'
10512         list ht_capab 'DSSS_CCK-40'
10513         option disabled '0'
10514
10515 config wifi-iface 'wmesh'
10516         option device 'radio0'
10517         option ifname 'adhoc0'
10518         option network 'mesh'
10519         option encryption 'none'
10520         option mode 'adhoc'
10521         option bssid '02:BA:00:00:00:01'
10522         option ssid 'meshfx@hackeriet'
10523 </pre>
10524 <p><tt>/etc/config/batman-adv</tt></p>
10525 <pre>
10526
10527 config 'mesh' 'bat0'
10528         option interfaces 'adhoc0'
10529         option 'aggregated_ogms'
10530         option 'ap_isolation'
10531         option 'bonding'
10532         option 'fragmentation'
10533         option 'gw_bandwidth'
10534         option 'gw_mode'
10535         option 'gw_sel_class'
10536         option 'log_level'
10537         option 'orig_interval'
10538         option 'vis_mode'
10539         option 'bridge_loop_avoidance'
10540         option 'distributed_arp_table'
10541         option 'network_coding'
10542         option 'hop_penalty'
10543
10544 # yet another batX instance
10545 # config 'mesh' 'bat5'
10546 #       option 'interfaces' 'second_mesh'
10547 </pre>
10548
10549 <p>The mesh node is now operational.  I have yet to test its range,
10550 but I hope it is good.  I have not yet tested the TP-Link 3600 box
10551 still wrapped up in plastic.</p>
10552
10553       </div>
10554       <div class="tags">
10555
10556
10557         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/mesh network">mesh network</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
10558
10559
10560       </div>
10561     </div>
10562     <div class="padding"></div>
10563
10564     <div class="entry">
10565       <div class="title">
10566         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_init_d_boot_script_example_for_rsyslog.html">Debian init.d boot script example for rsyslog</a>
10567       </div>
10568       <div class="date">
10569          2nd November 2013
10570       </div>
10571       <div class="body">
10572         <p>If one of the points of switching to a new init system in Debian is
10573 <a href="http://thomas.goirand.fr/blog/?p=147">to get rid of huge
10574 init.d scripts</a>, I doubt we need to switch away from sysvinit and
10575 init.d scripts at all.  Here is an example init.d script, ie a rewrite
10576 of /etc/init.d/rsyslog:</p>
10577
10578 <p><pre>
10579 #!/lib/init/init-d-script
10580 ### BEGIN INIT INFO
10581 # Provides:          rsyslog
10582 # Required-Start:    $remote_fs $time
10583 # Required-Stop:     umountnfs $time
10584 # X-Stop-After:      sendsigs
10585 # Default-Start:     2 3 4 5
10586 # Default-Stop:      0 1 6
10587 # Short-Description: enhanced syslogd
10588 # Description:       Rsyslog is an enhanced multi-threaded syslogd.
10589 #                    It is quite compatible to stock sysklogd and can be
10590 #                    used as a drop-in replacement.
10591 ### END INIT INFO
10592 DESC="enhanced syslogd"
10593 DAEMON=/usr/sbin/rsyslogd
10594 </pre></p>
10595
10596 <p>Pretty minimalistic to me... For the record, the original sysv-rc
10597 script was 137 lines, and the above is just 15 lines, most of it meta
10598 info/comments.</p>
10599
10600 <p>How to do this, you ask?  Well, one create a new script
10601 /lib/init/init-d-script looking something like this:
10602
10603 <p><pre>
10604 #!/bin/sh
10605
10606 # Define LSB log_* functions.
10607 # Depend on lsb-base (>= 3.2-14) to ensure that this file is present
10608 # and status_of_proc is working.
10609 . /lib/lsb/init-functions
10610
10611 #
10612 # Function that starts the daemon/service
10613
10614 #
10615 do_start()
10616 {
10617         # Return
10618         #   0 if daemon has been started
10619         #   1 if daemon was already running
10620         #   2 if daemon could not be started
10621         start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --exec $DAEMON --test > /dev/null \
10622                 || return 1
10623         start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --exec $DAEMON -- \
10624                 $DAEMON_ARGS \
10625                 || return 2
10626         # Add code here, if necessary, that waits for the process to be ready
10627         # to handle requests from services started subsequently which depend
10628         # on this one.  As a last resort, sleep for some time.
10629 }
10630
10631 #
10632 # Function that stops the daemon/service
10633 #
10634 do_stop()
10635 {
10636         # Return
10637         #   0 if daemon has been stopped
10638         #   1 if daemon was already stopped
10639         #   2 if daemon could not be stopped
10640         #   other if a failure occurred
10641         start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --retry=TERM/30/KILL/5 --pidfile $PIDFILE --name $NAME
10642         RETVAL="$?"
10643         [ "$RETVAL" = 2 ] && return 2
10644         # Wait for children to finish too if this is a daemon that forks
10645         # and if the daemon is only ever run from this initscript.
10646         # If the above conditions are not satisfied then add some other code
10647         # that waits for the process to drop all resources that could be
10648         # needed by services started subsequently.  A last resort is to
10649         # sleep for some time.
10650         start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --oknodo --retry=0/30/KILL/5 --exec $DAEMON
10651         [ "$?" = 2 ] && return 2
10652         # Many daemons don't delete their pidfiles when they exit.
10653         rm -f $PIDFILE
10654         return "$RETVAL"
10655 }
10656
10657 #
10658 # Function that sends a SIGHUP to the daemon/service
10659 #
10660 do_reload() {
10661         #
10662         # If the daemon can reload its configuration without
10663         # restarting (for example, when it is sent a SIGHUP),
10664         # then implement that here.
10665         #
10666         start-stop-daemon --stop --signal 1 --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --name $NAME
10667         return 0
10668 }
10669
10670 SCRIPTNAME=$1
10671 scriptbasename="$(basename $1)"
10672 echo "SN: $scriptbasename"
10673 if [ "$scriptbasename" != "init-d-library" ] ; then
10674     script="$1"
10675     shift
10676     . $script
10677 else
10678     exit 0
10679 fi
10680
10681 NAME=$(basename $DAEMON)
10682 PIDFILE=/var/run/$NAME.pid
10683
10684 # Exit if the package is not installed
10685 #[ -x "$DAEMON" ] || exit 0
10686
10687 # Read configuration variable file if it is present
10688 [ -r /etc/default/$NAME ] && . /etc/default/$NAME
10689
10690 # Load the VERBOSE setting and other rcS variables
10691 . /lib/init/vars.sh
10692
10693 case "$1" in
10694   start)
10695         [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_daemon_msg "Starting $DESC" "$NAME"
10696         do_start
10697         case "$?" in
10698                 0|1) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 0 ;;
10699                 2) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 1 ;;
10700         esac
10701         ;;
10702   stop)
10703         [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_daemon_msg "Stopping $DESC" "$NAME"
10704         do_stop
10705         case "$?" in
10706                 0|1) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 0 ;;
10707                 2) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 1 ;;
10708         esac
10709         ;;
10710   status)
10711         status_of_proc "$DAEMON" "$NAME" && exit 0 || exit $?
10712         ;;
10713   #reload|force-reload)
10714         #
10715         # If do_reload() is not implemented then leave this commented out
10716         # and leave 'force-reload' as an alias for 'restart'.
10717         #
10718         #log_daemon_msg "Reloading $DESC" "$NAME"
10719         #do_reload
10720         #log_end_msg $?
10721         #;;
10722   restart|force-reload)
10723         #
10724         # If the "reload" option is implemented then remove the
10725         # 'force-reload' alias
10726         #
10727         log_daemon_msg "Restarting $DESC" "$NAME"
10728         do_stop
10729         case "$?" in
10730           0|1)
10731                 do_start
10732                 case "$?" in
10733                         0) log_end_msg 0 ;;
10734                         1) log_end_msg 1 ;; # Old process is still running
10735                         *) log_end_msg 1 ;; # Failed to start
10736                 esac
10737                 ;;
10738           *)
10739                 # Failed to stop
10740                 log_end_msg 1
10741                 ;;
10742         esac
10743         ;;
10744   *)
10745         echo "Usage: $SCRIPTNAME {start|stop|status|restart|force-reload}" >&2
10746         exit 3
10747         ;;
10748 esac
10749
10750 :
10751 </pre></p>
10752
10753 <p>It is based on /etc/init.d/skeleton, and could be improved quite a
10754 lot.  I did not really polish the approach, so it might not always
10755 work out of the box, but you get the idea.  I did not try very hard to
10756 optimize it nor make it more robust either.</p>
10757
10758 <p>A better argument for switching init system in Debian than reducing
10759 the size of init scripts (which is a good thing to do anyway), is to
10760 get boot system that is able to handle the kernel events sensibly and
10761 robustly, and do not depend on the boot to run sequentially.  The boot
10762 and the kernel have not behaved sequentially in years.</p>
10763
10764       </div>
10765       <div class="tags">
10766
10767
10768         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>.
10769
10770
10771       </div>
10772     </div>
10773     <div class="padding"></div>
10774
10775     <div class="entry">
10776       <div class="title">
10777         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Browser_plugin_for_SPICE__spice_xpi__uploaded_to_Debian.html">Browser plugin for SPICE (spice-xpi) uploaded to Debian</a>
10778       </div>
10779       <div class="date">
10780          1st November 2013
10781       </div>
10782       <div class="body">
10783         <p><a href="http://www.spice-space.org/">The SPICE protocol</a> for
10784 remote display access is the preferred solution with oVirt and RedHat
10785 Enterprise Virtualization, and I was sad to discover the other day
10786 that the browser plugin needed to use these systems seamlessly was
10787 missing in Debian.  The <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/668284">request
10788 for a package</a> was from 2012-04-10 with no progress since
10789 2013-04-01, so I decided to wrap up a package based on the great work
10790 from Cajus Pollmeier and put it in a collab-maint maintained git
10791 repository to get a package I could use.  I would very much like
10792 others to help me maintain the package (or just take over, I do not
10793 mind), but as no-one had volunteered so far, I just uploaded it to
10794 NEW.  I hope it will be available in Debian in a few days.</p>
10795
10796 <p>The source is now available from
10797 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/spice-xpi.git;a=summary">http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/spice-xpi.git;a=summary</a>.</p>
10798
10799       </div>
10800       <div class="tags">
10801
10802
10803         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>.
10804
10805
10806       </div>
10807     </div>
10808     <div class="padding"></div>
10809
10810     <div class="entry">
10811       <div class="title">
10812         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Teaching_vmdebootstrap_to_create_Raspberry_Pi_SD_card_images.html">Teaching vmdebootstrap to create Raspberry Pi SD card images</a>
10813       </div>
10814       <div class="date">
10815         27th October 2013
10816       </div>
10817       <div class="body">
10818         <p>The
10819 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/v/vmdebootstrap.html">vmdebootstrap</a>
10820 program is a a very nice system to create virtual machine images.  It
10821 create a image file, add a partition table, mount it and run
10822 debootstrap in the mounted directory to create a Debian system on a
10823 stick.  Yesterday, I decided to try to teach it how to make images for
10824 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi">Raspberry Pi</a>, as part
10825 of a plan to simplify the build system for
10826 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the FreedomBox
10827 project</a>.  The FreedomBox project already uses vmdebootstrap for
10828 the virtualbox images, but its current build system made multistrap
10829 based system for Dreamplug images, and it is lacking support for
10830 Raspberry Pi.</p>
10831
10832 <p>Armed with the knowledge on how to build "foreign" (aka non-native
10833 architecture) chroots for Raspberry Pi, I dived into the vmdebootstrap
10834 code and adjusted it to be able to build armel images on my amd64
10835 Debian laptop.  I ended up giving vmdebootstrap five new options,
10836 allowing me to replicate the image creation process I use to make
10837 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Raspberry_Pi_based_batman_adv_Mesh_network_node.html">Debian
10838 Jessie based mesh node images for the Raspberry Pi</a>.  First, the
10839 <tt>--foreign /path/to/binfm_handler</tt> option tell vmdebootstrap to
10840 call debootstrap with --foreign and to copy the handler into the
10841 generated chroot before running the second stage.  This allow
10842 vmdebootstrap to create armel images on an amd64 host.  Next I added
10843 two new options <tt>--bootsize size</tt> and <tt>--boottype
10844 fstype</tt> to teach it to create a separate /boot/ partition with the
10845 given file system type, allowing me to create an image with a vfat
10846 partition for the /boot/ stuff.  I also added a <tt>--variant
10847 variant</tt> option to allow me to create smaller images without the
10848 Debian base system packages installed.  Finally, I added an option
10849 <tt>--no-extlinux</tt> to tell vmdebootstrap to not install extlinux
10850 as a boot loader.  It is not needed on the Raspberry Pi and probably
10851 most other non-x86 architectures.  The changes were accepted by the
10852 upstream author of vmdebootstrap yesterday and today, and is now
10853 available from
10854 <a href="http://git.liw.fi/cgi-bin/cgit/cgit.cgi/vmdebootstrap/">the
10855 upstream project page</a>.</p>
10856
10857 <p>To use it to build a Raspberry Pi image using Debian Jessie, first
10858 create a small script (the customize script) to add the non-free
10859 binary blob needed to boot the Raspberry Pi and the APT source
10860 list:</p>
10861
10862 <p><pre>
10863 #!/bin/sh
10864 set -e # Exit on first error
10865 rootdir="$1"
10866 cd "$rootdir"
10867 cat &lt;&lt;EOF > etc/apt/sources.list
10868 deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ jessie main contrib non-free
10869 EOF
10870 # Install non-free binary blob needed to boot Raspberry Pi.  This
10871 # install a kernel somewhere too.
10872 wget https://raw.github.com/Hexxeh/rpi-update/master/rpi-update \
10873     -O $rootdir/usr/bin/rpi-update
10874 chmod a+x $rootdir/usr/bin/rpi-update
10875 mkdir -p $rootdir/lib/modules
10876 touch $rootdir/boot/start.elf
10877 chroot $rootdir rpi-update
10878 </pre></p>
10879
10880 <p>Next, fetch the latest vmdebootstrap script and call it like this
10881 to build the image:</p>
10882
10883 <pre>
10884 sudo ./vmdebootstrap \
10885     --variant minbase \
10886     --arch armel \
10887     --distribution jessie \
10888     --mirror http://http.debian.net/debian \
10889     --image test.img \
10890     --size 600M \
10891     --bootsize 64M \
10892     --boottype vfat \
10893     --log-level debug \
10894     --verbose \
10895     --no-kernel \
10896     --no-extlinux \
10897     --root-password raspberry \
10898     --hostname raspberrypi \
10899     --foreign /usr/bin/qemu-arm-static \
10900     --customize `pwd`/customize \
10901     --package netbase \
10902     --package git-core \
10903     --package binutils \
10904     --package ca-certificates \
10905     --package wget \
10906     --package kmod
10907 </pre></p>
10908
10909 <p>The list of packages being installed are the ones needed by
10910 rpi-update to make the image bootable on the Raspberry Pi, with the
10911 exception of netbase, which is needed by debootstrap to find
10912 /etc/hosts with the minbase variant.  I really wish there was a way to
10913 set up an Raspberry Pi using only packages in the Debian archive, but
10914 that is not possible as far as I know, because it boots from the GPU
10915 using a non-free binary blob.</p>
10916
10917 <p>The build host need debootstrap, kpartx and qemu-user-static and
10918 probably a few others installed.  I have not checked the complete
10919 build dependency list.</p>
10920
10921 <p>The resulting image will not use the hardware floating point unit
10922 on the Raspberry PI, because the armel architecture in Debian is not
10923 optimized for that use.  So the images created will be a bit slower
10924 than <a href="http://www.raspbian.org/">Raspbian</a> based images.</p>
10925
10926       </div>
10927       <div class="tags">
10928
10929
10930         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/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/mesh network">mesh network</a>.
10931
10932
10933       </div>
10934     </div>
10935     <div class="padding"></div>
10936
10937     <div class="entry">
10938       <div class="title">
10939         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Raspberry_Pi_based_batman_adv_Mesh_network_node.html">A Raspberry Pi based batman-adv Mesh network node</a>
10940       </div>
10941       <div class="date">
10942         21st October 2013
10943       </div>
10944       <div class="body">
10945         <p>The last few days I have been experimenting with
10946 <a href="http://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki">the
10947 batman-adv mesh technology</a>.  I want to gain some experience to see
10948 if it will fit <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the
10949 Freedombox project</a>, and together with my neighbors try to build a
10950 mesh network around the park where I live.  Batman-adv is a layer 2
10951 mesh system ("ethernet" in other words), where the mesh network appear
10952 as if all the mesh clients are connected to the same switch.</p>
10953
10954 <p>My hardware of choice was the Linksys WRT54GL routers I had lying
10955 around, but I've been unable to get them working with batman-adv.  So
10956 instead, I started playing with a
10957 <a href="http://www.raspberrypi.org/">Raspberry Pi</a>, and tried to
10958 get it working as a mesh node.  My idea is to use it to create a mesh
10959 node which function as a switch port, where everything connected to
10960 the Raspberry Pi ethernet plug is connected (bridged) to the mesh
10961 network.  This allow me to hook a wifi base station like the Linksys
10962 WRT54GL to the mesh by plugging it into a Raspberry Pi, and allow
10963 non-mesh clients to hook up to the mesh.  This in turn is useful for
10964 Android phones using <a href="http://servalproject.org/">the Serval
10965 Project</a> voip client, allowing every one around the playground to
10966 phone and message each other for free.  The reason is that Android
10967 phones do not see ad-hoc wifi networks (they are filtered away from
10968 the GUI view), and can not join the mesh without being rooted.  But if
10969 they are connected using a normal wifi base station, they can talk to
10970 every client on the local network.</p>
10971
10972 <p>To get this working, I've created a debian package
10973 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node">meshfx-node</a>
10974 and a script
10975 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node/blob/master/build-rpi-mesh-node">build-rpi-mesh-node</a>
10976 to create the Raspberry Pi boot image.  I'm using Debian Jessie (and
10977 not Raspbian), to get more control over the packages available.
10978 Unfortunately a huge binary blob need to be inserted into the boot
10979 image to get it booting, but I'll ignore that for now.  Also, as
10980 Debian lack support for the CPU features available in the Raspberry
10981 Pi, the system do not use the hardware floating point unit.  I hope
10982 the routing performance isn't affected by the lack of hardware FPU
10983 support.</p>
10984
10985 <p>To create an image, run the following with a sudo enabled user
10986 after inserting the target SD card into the build machine:</p>
10987
10988 <p><pre>
10989 % wget -O build-rpi-mesh-node \
10990     https://raw.github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node/master/build-rpi-mesh-node
10991 % sudo bash -x ./build-rpi-mesh-node > build.log 2>&1
10992 % dd if=/root/rpi/rpi_basic_jessie_$(date +%Y%m%d).img of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=1M
10993 %
10994 </pre></p>
10995
10996 <p>Booting with the resulting SD card on a Raspberry PI with a USB
10997 wifi card inserted should give you a mesh node.  At least it does for
10998 me with a the wifi card I am using. The default mesh settings are the
10999 ones used by the Oslo mesh project at Hackeriet, as I mentioned in
11000 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Oslo_community_mesh_network___with_NUUG_and_Hackeriet_at_Hausmania.html">an
11001 earlier blog post about this mesh testing</a>.</p>
11002
11003 <p>The mesh node was not horribly expensive either.  I bought
11004 everything over the counter in shops nearby.  If I had ordered online
11005 from the lowest bidder, the price should be significantly lower:</p>
11006
11007 <p><table>
11008
11009 <tr><th>Supplier</th><th>Model</th><th>NOK</th></tr>
11010 <tr><td>Teknikkmagasinet</td><td>Raspberry Pi model B</td><td>349.90</td></tr>
11011 <tr><td>Teknikkmagasinet</td><td>Raspberry Pi type B case</td><td>99.90</td></tr>
11012 <tr><td>Lefdal</td><td>Jensen Air:Link 25150</td><td>295.-</td></tr>
11013 <tr><td>Clas Ohlson</td><td>Kingston 16 GB SD card</td><td>199.-</td></tr>
11014 <tr><td>Total cost</td><td></td><td>943.80</td></tr>
11015
11016 </table></p>
11017
11018 <p>Now my mesh network at home consist of one laptop in the basement
11019 connected to my production network, one Raspberry Pi node on the 1th
11020 floor that can be seen by my neighbor across the park, and one
11021 play-node I use to develop the image building script.  And some times
11022 I hook up my work horse laptop to the mesh to test it.  I look forward
11023 to figuring out what kind of latency the batman-adv setup will give,
11024 and how much packet loss we will experience around the park. :)</p>
11025
11026       </div>
11027       <div class="tags">
11028
11029
11030         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/mesh network">mesh network</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
11031
11032
11033       </div>
11034     </div>
11035     <div class="padding"></div>
11036
11037     <div class="entry">
11038       <div class="title">
11039         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Perl_library_to_control_the_Spykee_robot_moved_to_github.html">Perl library to control the Spykee robot moved to github</a>
11040       </div>
11041       <div class="date">
11042         19th October 2013
11043       </div>
11044       <div class="body">
11045         <p>Back in 2010, I created a Perl library to talk to
11046 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spykee">the Spykee robot</a>
11047 (with two belts, wifi, USB and Linux) and made it available from my
11048 web page.  Today I concluded that it should move to a site that is
11049 easier to use to cooperate with others, and moved it to github.  If
11050 you got a Spykee robot, you might want to check out
11051 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/libspykee-perl">the
11052 libspykee-perl github repository</a>.</p>
11053
11054       </div>
11055       <div class="tags">
11056
11057
11058         Tags: <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/robot">robot</a>.
11059
11060
11061       </div>
11062     </div>
11063     <div class="padding"></div>
11064
11065     <div class="entry">
11066       <div class="title">
11067         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Good_causes__Debian_Outreach_Program_for_Women__EFF_documenting_the_spying_and_Open_access_in_Norway.html">Good causes: Debian Outreach Program for Women, EFF documenting the spying and Open access in Norway</a>
11068       </div>
11069       <div class="date">
11070         15th October 2013
11071       </div>
11072       <div class="body">
11073         <p>The last few days I came across a few good causes that should get
11074 wider attention.  I recommend signing and donating to each one of
11075 these. :)</p>
11076
11077 <p>Via <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2013/18/">Debian
11078 Project News for 2013-10-14</a> I came across the Outreach Program for
11079 Women program which is a Google Summer of Code like initiative to get
11080 more women involved in free software.  One debian sponsor has offered
11081 to match <a href="http://debian.ch/opw2013">any donation done to Debian
11082 earmarked</a> for this initiative.  I donated a few minutes ago, and
11083 hope you will to. :)</p>
11084
11085 <p>And the Electronic Frontier Foundation just announced plans to
11086 create <a href="https://supporters.eff.org/donate/nsa-videos">video
11087 documentaries about the excessive spying</a> on every Internet user that
11088 take place these days, and their need to fund the work.  I've already
11089 donated.  Are you next?</p>
11090
11091 <p>For my Norwegian audience, the organisation Studentenes og
11092 Akademikernes Internasjonale Hjelpefond is collecting signatures for a
11093 statement under the heading
11094 <a href="http://saih.no/Bloggers_United/">Bloggers United for Open
11095 Access</a> for those of us asking for more focus on open access in the
11096 Norwegian government.  So far 499 signatures.  I hope you will sign it
11097 too.</p>
11098
11099       </div>
11100       <div class="tags">
11101
11102
11103         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/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
11104
11105
11106       </div>
11107     </div>
11108     <div class="padding"></div>
11109
11110     <div class="entry">
11111       <div class="title">
11112         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Oslo_community_mesh_network___with_NUUG_and_Hackeriet_at_Hausmania.html">Oslo community mesh network - with NUUG and Hackeriet at Hausmania</a>
11113       </div>
11114       <div class="date">
11115         11th October 2013
11116       </div>
11117       <div class="body">
11118         <p>Wireless mesh networks are self organising and self healing
11119 networks that can be used to connect computers across small and large
11120 areas, depending on the radio technology used.  Normal wifi equipment
11121 can be used to create home made radio networks, and there are several
11122 successful examples like
11123 <a href="http://www.freifunk.net/">Freifunk</a> and
11124 <a href="http://www.awmn.net/">Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network</a>
11125 (see
11126 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wireless_community_networks_by_region#Greece">wikipedia
11127 for a large list</a>) around the globe.  To give you an idea how it
11128 work, check out the nice overview of the Kiel Freifunk community which
11129 can be seen from their
11130 <a href="http://freifunk.in-kiel.de/ffmap/nodes.html">dynamically
11131 updated node graph and map</a>, where one can see how the mesh nodes
11132 automatically handle routing and recover from nodes disappearing.
11133 There is also a small community mesh network group in Oslo, Norway,
11134 and that is the main topic of this blog post.</p>
11135
11136 <p>I've wanted to check out mesh networks for a while now, and hoped
11137 to do it as part of my involvement with the <a
11138 href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG member organisation</a> community, and
11139 my recent involvement in
11140 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the Freedombox project</a>
11141 finally lead me to give mesh networks some priority, as I suspect a
11142 Freedombox should use mesh networks to connect neighbours and family
11143 when possible, given that most communication between people are
11144 between those nearby (as shown for example by research on Facebook
11145 communication patterns).  It also allow people to communicate without
11146 any central hub to tap into for those that want to listen in on the
11147 private communication of citizens, which have become more and more
11148 important over the years.</p>
11149
11150 <p>So far I have only been able to find one group of people in Oslo
11151 working on community mesh networks, over at the hack space
11152 <a href="http://hackeriet.no/">Hackeriet</a> at Husmania.  They seem to
11153 have started with some Freifunk based effort using OLSR, called
11154 <a href="http://oslo.freifunk.net/index.php?title=Main_Page">the Oslo
11155 Freifunk project</a>, but that effort is now dead and the people
11156 behind it have moved on to a batman-adv based system called
11157 <a href="http://meshfx.org/trac">meshfx</a>.  Unfortunately the wiki
11158 site for the Oslo Freifunk project is no longer possible to update to
11159 reflect this fact, so the old project page can't be updated to point to
11160 the new project.  A while back, the people at Hackeriet invited people
11161 from the Freifunk community to Oslo to talk about mesh networks.  I
11162 came across this video where Hans Jørgen Lysglimt interview the
11163 speakers about this talk (from
11164 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2Kd7CLkhSY">youtube</a>):</p>
11165
11166 <p><iframe width="420" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/N2Kd7CLkhSY" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></p>
11167
11168 <p>I mentioned OLSR and batman-adv, which are mesh routing protocols.
11169 There are heaps of different protocols, and I am still struggling to
11170 figure out which one would be "best" for some definitions of best, but
11171 given that the community mesh group in Oslo is so small, I believe it
11172 is best to hook up with the existing one instead of trying to create a
11173 completely different setup, and thus I have decided to focus on
11174 batman-adv for now.  It sure help me to  know that the very cool
11175 <a href="http://www.servalproject.org/">Serval project in Australia</a>
11176 is using batman-adv as their meshing technology when it create a self
11177 organizing and self healing telephony system for disaster areas and
11178 less industrialized communities.  Check out this cool video presenting
11179 that project (from
11180 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30qNfzJCQOA">youtube</a>):</p>
11181
11182 <p><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/30qNfzJCQOA" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></p>
11183
11184 <p>According to the wikipedia page on
11185 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_mesh_network">Wireless
11186 mesh network</a> there are around 70 competing schemes for routing
11187 packets across mesh networks, and OLSR, B.A.T.M.A.N. and
11188 B.A.T.M.A.N. advanced are protocols used by several free software
11189 based community mesh networks.</p>
11190
11191 <p>The batman-adv protocol is a bit special, as it provide layer 2
11192 (as in ethernet ) routing, allowing ipv4 and ipv6 to work on the same
11193 network.  One way to think about it is that it provide a mesh based
11194 vlan you can bridge to or handle like any other vlan connected to your
11195 computer.  The required drivers are already in the Linux kernel at
11196 least since Debian Wheezy, and it is fairly easy to set up.  A
11197 <a href="http://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki/Quick-start-guide">good
11198 introduction</a> is available from the Open Mesh project.  These are
11199 the key settings needed to join the Oslo meshfx network:</p>
11200
11201 <p><table>
11202 <tr><th>Setting</th><th>Value</th></tr>
11203 <tr><td>Protocol / kernel module</td><td>batman-adv</td></tr>
11204 <tr><td>ESSID</td><td>meshfx@hackeriet</td></tr>
11205 <td>Channel / Frequency</td><td>11 / 2462</td></tr>
11206 <td>Cell ID</td><td>02:BA:00:00:00:01</td>
11207 </table></p>
11208
11209 <p>The reason for setting ad-hoc wifi Cell ID is to work around bugs
11210 in firmware used in wifi card and wifi drivers.  (See a nice post from
11211 VillageTelco about
11212 "<a href="http://tiebing.blogspot.no/2009/12/ad-hoc-cell-splitting-re-post-original.html">Information
11213 about cell-id splitting, stuck beacons, and failed IBSS merges!</a>
11214 for details.)  When these settings are activated and you have some
11215 other mesh node nearby, your computer will be connected to the mesh
11216 network and can communicate with any mesh node that is connected to
11217 any of the nodes in your network of nodes. :)</p>
11218
11219 <p>My initial plan was to reuse my old Linksys WRT54GL as a mesh node,
11220 but that seem to be very hard, as I have not been able to locate a
11221 firmware supporting batman-adv.  If anyone know how to use that old
11222 wifi access point with batman-adv these days, please let me know.</p>
11223
11224 <p>If you find this project interesting and want to join, please join
11225 us on IRC, either channel
11226 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/#oslohackerspace">#oslohackerspace</a>
11227 or <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/#nuug">#nuug</a> on
11228 irc.freenode.net.</p>
11229
11230 <p>While investigating mesh networks in Oslo, I came across an old
11231 research paper from the university of Stavanger and Telenor Research
11232 and Innovation called
11233 <a href="http://folk.uio.no/paalee/publications/netrel-egeland-iswcs-2008.pdf">The
11234 reliability of wireless backhaul mesh networks</a> and elsewhere
11235 learned that Telenor have been experimenting with mesh networks at
11236 Grünerløkka in Oslo.  So mesh networks are also interesting for
11237 commercial companies, even though Telenor discovered that it was hard
11238 to figure out a good business plan for mesh networking and as far as I
11239 know have closed down the experiment.  Perhaps Telenor or others would
11240 be interested in a cooperation?</p>
11241
11242 <p><strong>Update 2013-10-12</strong>: I was just
11243 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/2013-October/005900.html">told
11244 by the Serval project developers</a> that they no longer use
11245 batman-adv (but are compatible with it), but their own crypto based
11246 mesh system.</p>
11247
11248       </div>
11249       <div class="tags">
11250
11251
11252         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/mesh network">mesh network</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
11253
11254
11255       </div>
11256     </div>
11257     <div class="padding"></div>
11258
11259     <div class="entry">
11260       <div class="title">
11261         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Skolelinux___Debian_Edu_7_1_install_and_overview_video_from_Marcelo_Salvador.html">Skolelinux / Debian Edu 7.1 install and overview video from Marcelo Salvador</a>
11262       </div>
11263       <div class="date">
11264          8th October 2013
11265       </div>
11266       <div class="body">
11267         <p>The other day I was pleased and surprised to discover that Marcelo
11268 Salvador had published a
11269 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-GgpdqgLFc">video on
11270 Youtube</a> showing how to install the standalone Debian Edu /
11271 Skolelinux profile.  This is the profile intended for use at home or
11272 on laptops that should not be integrated into the provided network
11273 services (no central home directory, no Kerberos / LDAP directory etc,
11274 in other word a single user machine).  The result is 11 minutes long,
11275 and show some user applications (seem to be rather randomly picked).
11276 Missed a few of my favorites like celestia, planets and chromium
11277 showing the <a href="http://www.zygotebody.com/">Zygote Body 3D model
11278 of the human body</a>, but I guess he did not know about those or find
11279 other programs more interesting. :) And the video do not show the
11280 advantages I believe is one of the most valuable featuers in Debian
11281 Edu, its central school server making it possible to run hundreds of
11282 computers without hard drives by installing one central
11283 <a href="http://www.ltsp.org/">LTSP server</a>.</p>
11284
11285 <p>Anyway, check out the video, embedded below and linked to above:</p>
11286
11287 <iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/w-GgpdqgLFc" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
11288
11289 <p>Are there other nice videos demonstrating Skolelinux?  Please let
11290 me know. :)</p>
11291
11292       </div>
11293       <div class="tags">
11294
11295
11296         Tags: <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/video">video</a>.
11297
11298
11299       </div>
11300     </div>
11301     <div class="padding"></div>
11302
11303     <div class="entry">
11304       <div class="title">
11305         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Finally__Debian_Edu_Wheezy_is_released_today_.html">Finally, Debian Edu Wheezy is released today!</a>
11306       </div>
11307       <div class="date">
11308         29th September 2013
11309       </div>
11310       <div class="body">
11311         <p>A few hours ago, the announcement for the first stable release of
11312 Debian Edu Wheezy went out from the Debian publicity team.  The
11313 complete announcement text can be found at
11314 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2013/20130928">the Debian News
11315 section</a>, translated to several languages.  Please check it out.</p>
11316
11317 <p>There is one minor known problem that we will fix very soon.  One
11318 can not install a amd64 Thin Client Server using PXE, as the /var/
11319 partition is too small.  A workaround is to extend the partition (use
11320 lvresize + resize2fs in tty 2 while installing).</p>
11321
11322       </div>
11323       <div class="tags">
11324
11325
11326         Tags: <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>.
11327
11328
11329       </div>
11330     </div>
11331     <div class="padding"></div>
11332
11333     <div class="entry">
11334       <div class="title">
11335         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Videos_about_the_Freedombox_project___for_inspiration_and_learning.html">Videos about the Freedombox project - for inspiration and learning</a>
11336       </div>
11337       <div class="date">
11338         27th September 2013
11339       </div>
11340       <div class="body">
11341         <p>The <a href="http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/">Freedombox
11342 project</a> have been going on for a while, and have presented the
11343 vision, ideas and solution several places.  Here is a little
11344 collection of videos of talks and presentation of the project.</p>
11345
11346 <ul>
11347
11348 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukvUz5taxvA">FreedomBox -
11349 2,5 minute marketing film</a> (Youtube)</li>
11350
11351 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzW25QTVWsE">Eben Moglen
11352 discusses the Freedombox on CBS news 2011</a> (Youtube)</li>
11353
11354 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ae8SZbxfE0g">Eben Moglen -
11355 Freedom in the Cloud - Software Freedom, Privacy and and Security for
11356 Web 2.0 and Cloud computing at ISOC-NY Public Meeting 2010</a>
11357 (Youtube)</li>
11358
11359 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNaIji_3xBE">Fosdem 2011
11360 Keynote by Eben Moglen presenting the Freedombox</a> (Youtube)</li>
11361
11362 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bDDUyJSQ9s">Presentation of
11363 the Freedombox by James Vasile at Elevate in Gratz 2011</a> (Youtube)</li>
11364
11365 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQTmnk27g9s"> Freedombox -
11366 Discovery, Identity, and Trust by Nick Daly at Freedombox Hackfest New
11367 York City in 2012</a> (Youtube)</li>
11368
11369 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkbSB4Ba7Ck">Introduction
11370 to the Freedombox at Freedombox Hackfest New York City in 2012</a>
11371 (Youtube)</li>
11372
11373 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-P2Jaeg0aQ">Freedom, Out
11374 of the Box! by Bdale Garbee at linux.conf.au Ballarat, 2012</a> (Youtube) </li>
11375
11376 <li><a href="https://archive.fosdem.org/2013/schedule/event/freedombox/">Freedombox
11377 1.0 by Eben Moglen and Bdale Garbee at Fosdem 2013</a> (FOSDEM) </li>
11378
11379 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1LpYX2zVYg">What is the
11380 FreedomBox today by Bdale Garbee at Debconf13 in Vaumarcus
11381 2013</a> (Youtube)</li>
11382
11383 </ul>
11384
11385 <p>A larger list is available from
11386 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/TalksAndPresentations">the
11387 Freedombox Wiki</a>.</p>
11388
11389 <p>On other news, I am happy to report that Freedombox based on Debian
11390 Jessie is coming along quite well, and soon both Owncloud and using
11391 Tor should be available for testers of the Freedombox solution. :) In
11392 a few weeks I hope everything needed to test it is included in Debian.
11393 The withsqlite package is already in Debian, and the plinth package is
11394 pending in NEW.  The third and vital part of that puzzle is the
11395 metapackage/setup framework, which is still pending an upload.  Join
11396 us on <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC
11397 (#freedombox on irc.debian.org)</a> and
11398 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
11399 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
11400
11401       </div>
11402       <div class="tags">
11403
11404
11405         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/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
11406
11407
11408       </div>
11409     </div>
11410     <div class="padding"></div>
11411
11412     <div class="entry">
11413       <div class="title">
11414         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Third_and_probably_last_beta_release_of_Debian_Edu_Wheezy.html">Third and probably last beta release of Debian Edu Wheezy</a>
11415       </div>
11416       <div class="date">
11417         16th September 2013
11418       </div>
11419       <div class="body">
11420         <p>The third wheezy based beta release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
11421 today.  This is the release announcement from Holger Levsen:</p>
11422
11423 <blockquote>
11424 <p>Hi,</p>
11425
11426 <p>it is my pleasure to announce the third beta release (beta 2 for
11427 short) of <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
11428 Skolelinux</a> based on Debian Wheezy!</p>
11429
11430 <p>Please test these images extensivly, if no new problems are found
11431 we plan to do this final Debian Edu Wheezy release this coming
11432 weekend.  We are not aware of any major problems or blockers in beta2,
11433 if you find something, please notify us immediately!</p>
11434
11435 <p>(More about the remaining steps for the Edu Wheezy release in
11436 another mail to the edu list tonight or tomorrow...)</p>
11437
11438 <p>Noteworthy changes and software updates for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~b2
11439 compared to beta1:</p>
11440
11441 <ul>
11442
11443 <li>The KDE proxy setup has been adjusted to use the provided wpad.dat. This
11444 also gets Chromium to use this proxy.</li>
11445 <li>Install kdepim-groupware with KDE desktops to make sure korganizer
11446 understand ical/dav sources.</li>
11447 <li>Increased default maximum size of /var/spool/squid and /skole/backup on the
11448 main server.</li>
11449 <li>A source DVD image containing all source packages is now available as well.</li>
11450 <li>Updates for chromium (29.0.1547.57-1~deb7u1), imagemagick
11451 (6.7.7.10-5+deb7u2), php5 (5.4.4-14+deb7u4), libmodplug
11452 (0.8.8.4-3+deb7u1+git20130828), tiff (4.0.2-6+deb7u2), linux-image
11453 (3.2.0-4-486_3.2.46-1+deb7u1).</li>
11454
11455 </ul>
11456
11457 <p>Where to get it:</p>
11458
11459 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
11460
11461 <ul>
11462 <li><a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-CD.iso">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-CD.iso</a></li>
11463 <li><a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-CD.iso">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-CD.iso</a></li>
11464 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-CD.iso .</li>
11465 </ul>
11466
11467 <p>The SHA1SUM of this image is:  3a1c89f4666df80eebcd46c5bf5fedb866f9472f</p>
11468
11469 <p>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use
11470 <ul>
11471 <li><a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-USB.iso">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-USB.iso</a></li>
11472 <li><a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-USB.iso">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-USB.iso</a></li>
11473 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-USB.iso .</li>
11474 </ul>
11475
11476 <p>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 702d1718548f401c74bfa6df9f032cc3ee16597e</p>
11477
11478 <p>The Source DVD image has the filename
11479 debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-source-DVD.iso and the SHA1SUM
11480 089eed8b3f962db47aae1f6a9685e9bb2fa30ca5 and is available the same way
11481 as the other isos.</p>
11482
11483 <p>How to report bugs</p>
11484
11485 <p>For information how to report bugs please see
11486 <br><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a></p>
11487
11488
11489 <p>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</p>
11490
11491 <p>Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux, is a Linux distribution based
11492 on Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
11493 configured school network. Immediately after installation a school
11494 server running all services needed for a school network is set up just
11495 waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
11496 Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
11497 initial installation of the main server from CD or USB stick all other
11498 machines can be installed via the network. The provided school server
11499 provides LDAP database and Kerberos authentication service,
11500 centralized home directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other
11501 services.  The desktop contains more than 60 educational software
11502 packages and more are available from the Debian archive, and schools
11503 can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
11504
11505 <p>This is the seventh test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
11506 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
11507 Squeeze release.</p>
11508
11509 <p>Notes for upgrades from Alpha Prereleases</p>
11510
11511 <p>Alpha based installations should reinstall or downgrade the
11512 versions of gosa and libpam-mklocaluser to the ones used in this beta
11513 release. Both alpha and beta0 based installations should reinstall or
11514 deal with gosa.conf manually; there are two options: (1) Keep
11515 gosa.conf and edit this file as outlined on the mailing list. (2)
11516 Accept the new version of gosa.conf and replace both contained admin
11517 password placeholders with the password hashes found in the old one
11518 (backup copy!). In both cases all users need to change their password
11519 to make sure a password is set for CIFS access to their home
11520 directory.</p>
11521
11522
11523 <p>cheers,
11524 <br>        Holger</p>
11525 </blockquote>
11526
11527       </div>
11528       <div class="tags">
11529
11530
11531         Tags: <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>.
11532
11533
11534       </div>
11535     </div>
11536     <div class="padding"></div>
11537
11538     <div class="entry">
11539       <div class="title">
11540         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Recipe_to_test_the_Freedombox_project_on_amd64_or_Raspberry_Pi.html">Recipe to test the Freedombox project on amd64 or Raspberry Pi</a>
11541       </div>
11542       <div class="date">
11543         10th September 2013
11544       </div>
11545       <div class="body">
11546         <p>I was introduced to the
11547 <a href="http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/">Freedombox project</a>
11548 in 2010, when Eben Moglen presented his vision about serving the need
11549 of non-technical people to keep their personal information private and
11550 within the legal protection of their own homes.  The idea is to give
11551 people back the power over their network and machines, and return
11552 Internet back to its intended peer-to-peer architecture.  Instead of
11553 depending on a central service, the Freedombox will give everyone
11554 control over their own basic infrastructure.</p>
11555
11556 <p>I've intended to join the effort since then, but other tasks have
11557 taken priority.  But this summers nasty news about the misuse of trust
11558 and privilege exercised by the "western" intelligence gathering
11559 communities increased my eagerness to contribute to a point where I
11560 actually started working on the project a while back.</p>
11561
11562 <p>The <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/freedombox/">initial
11563 Debian initiative</a> based on the vision from Eben Moglen, is to
11564 create a simple and cheap Debian based appliance that anyone can hook
11565 up in their home and get access to secure and private services and
11566 communication.  The initial deployment platform have been the
11567 <a href="http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/t-dreamplugdetails.aspx">Dreamplug</a>,
11568 which is a piece of hardware I do not own.  So to be able to test what
11569 the current Freedombox setup look like, I had to come up with a way to install
11570 it on some hardware I do have access to.  I have rewritten the
11571 <a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/freedom-maker">freedom-maker</a>
11572 image build framework to use .deb packages instead of only copying
11573 setup into the boot images, and thanks to this rewrite I am able to
11574 set up any machine supported by Debian Wheezy as a Freedombox, using
11575 the previously mentioned deb (and a few support debs for packages
11576 missing in Debian).</p>
11577
11578 <p>The current Freedombox setup consist of a set of bootstrapping
11579 scripts
11580 (<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/freedombox-setup">freedombox-setup</a>),
11581 and a administrative web interface
11582 (<a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/Plinth">plinth</a> + exmachina +
11583 withsqlite), as well as a privacy enhancing proxy based on
11584 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/privoxy">privoxy</a>
11585 (freedombox-privoxy).  There is also a web/javascript based XMPP
11586 client (<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/jwchat">jwchat</a>)
11587 trying (unsuccessfully so far) to talk to the XMPP server
11588 (<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/ejabberd">ejabberd</a>).  The
11589 web interface is pluggable, and the goal is to use it to enable OpenID
11590 services, mesh network connectivity, use of TOR, etc, etc.  Not much of
11591 this is really working yet, see
11592 <a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/freedombox-todos/blob/master/TODO">the
11593 project TODO</a> for links to GIT repositories.  Most of the code is
11594 on github at the moment.  The HTTP proxy is operational out of the
11595 box, and the admin web interface can be used to add/remove plinth
11596 users.  I've not been able to do anything else with it so far, but
11597 know there are several branches spread around github and other places
11598 with lots of half baked features.</p>
11599
11600 <p>Anyway, if you want to have a look at the current state, the
11601 following recipes should work to give you a test machine to poke
11602 at.</p>
11603
11604 <p><strong>Debian Wheezy amd64</strong></p>
11605
11606 <ol>
11607
11608 <li>Fetch normal Debian Wheezy installation ISO.</li>
11609 <li>Boot from it, either as CD or USB stick.</li>
11610 <li><p>Press [tab] on the boot prompt and add this as a boot argument
11611 to the Debian installer:<p>
11612 <pre>url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-wheezy.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-wheezy.dat</a></pre></li>
11613
11614 <li>Answer the few language/region/password questions and pick disk to
11615 install on.</li>
11616
11617 <li>When the installation is finished and the machine have rebooted a
11618 few times, your Freedombox is ready for testing.</li>
11619
11620 </ol>
11621
11622 <p><strong>Raspberry Pi Raspbian</strong></p>
11623
11624 <ol>
11625
11626 <li>Fetch a Raspbian SD card image, create SD card.</li>
11627 <li>Boot from SD card, extend file system to fill the card completely.</li>
11628 <li><p>Log in and add this to /etc/sources.list:</p>
11629 <pre>
11630 deb <a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox</a> wheezy main
11631 </pre></li>
11632 <li><p>Run this as root:</p>
11633 <pre>
11634 wget -O - http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/BE1A583D.asc | \
11635    apt-key add -
11636 apt-get update
11637 apt-get install freedombox-setup
11638 /usr/lib/freedombox/setup
11639 </pre></li>
11640 <li>Reboot into your freshly created Freedombox.</li>
11641
11642 </ol>
11643
11644 <p>You can test it on other architectures too, but because the
11645 freedombox-privoxy package is binary, it will only work as intended on
11646 the architectures where I have had time to build the binary and put it
11647 in my APT repository.  But do not let this stop you.  It is only a
11648 short "<tt>apt-get source -b freedombox-privoxy</tt>" away. :)</p>
11649
11650 <p>Note that by default Freedombox is a DHCP server on the
11651 192.168.1.0/24 subnet, so if this is your subnet be careful and turn
11652 off the DHCP server by running "<tt>update-rc.d isc-dhcp-server
11653 disable</tt>" as root.</p>
11654
11655 <p>Please let me know if this works for you, or if you have any
11656 problems.  We gather on the IRC channel
11657 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">#freedombox</a> on
11658 irc.debian.org and the
11659 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">project
11660 mailing list</a>.</p>
11661
11662 <p>Once you get your freedombox operational, you can visit
11663 <tt>http://your-host-name:8001/</tt> to see the state of the plint
11664 welcome screen (dead end - do not be surprised if you are unable to
11665 get past it), and next visit <tt>http://your-host-name:8001/help/</tt>
11666 to look at the rest of plinth.  The default user is 'admin' and the
11667 default password is 'secret'.</p>
11668
11669       </div>
11670       <div class="tags">
11671
11672
11673         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/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
11674
11675
11676       </div>
11677     </div>
11678     <div class="padding"></div>
11679
11680     <div class="entry">
11681       <div class="title">
11682         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Second_beta_release__beta_1__of_Debian_Edu_Skolelinux_based_on_Debian_Wheezy.html">Second beta release (beta 1) of Debian Edu/Skolelinux based on Debian Wheezy</a>
11683       </div>
11684       <div class="date">
11685         22nd August 2013
11686       </div>
11687       <div class="body">
11688         <p>The second wheezy based beta release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
11689 today, slightly delayed because of some bugs in the initial Windows
11690 integration fixes .  This is the release announcement:</p>
11691
11692 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~b1 released 2013-08-22</strong></p>
11693
11694 <p>These are the release notes for Debian Edu / Skolelinux
11695 7.1+edu0~b1, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
11696
11697 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
11698
11699 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
11700 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
11701 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
11702 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
11703 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
11704 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
11705 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
11706 the main server from CD or USB stick all other machines can be
11707 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
11708 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
11709 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
11710 desktop contains
11711 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">more
11712 than 60 educational software packages</a> and more are available from
11713 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
11714 and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
11715
11716 <p>This is the sixth test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically this
11717 is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the Squeeze
11718 release.</p>
11719
11720 <p>ALERT: Alpha based installations should reinstall or downgrade the
11721 versions of gosa and libpam-mklocaluser to the ones used in this beta
11722 release. Both alpha and beta0 based installations should reinstall or
11723 deal with gosa.conf manually; there are two options: (1) Keep
11724 gosa.conf and edit this file as outlined
11725 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/2013/08/msg00127.html">on
11726 the mailing list</a>. (2) Accept the new version of gosa.conf and
11727 replace both contained admin password placeholders with the password
11728 hashes found in the old one (backup copy!). In both cases every user
11729 need to change their their password to make sure a password is set for
11730 CIFS access to their home directory.</p>
11731
11732 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
11733
11734 <ul>
11735
11736 <li>Added ssh askpass packages to default installation, to ensure ssh
11737     work also without a attached tty.</li>
11738 <li>Add the command-not-found package to the default installation to
11739     make it easier to figure out where to find missing command line
11740     tools. Please note, that the command 'update-command-not-found'
11741     has to be run as root to actually make it useful (internet access
11742     required).</li>
11743
11744 </ul>
11745
11746 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
11747
11748 <ul>
11749
11750 <li>Adjusted the USB stick ISO image build to include every tool
11751 needed for desktop=xfce installations.</li>
11752 <li>Adjust thin-client-server task to work when installing from USB
11753 stick ISO image.</li>
11754 <li>Made new grub artwork (changed png from indexed to RGB format).</li>
11755 <li>Minor cleanup in the CUPS setup.</li>
11756 <li>Make sure that bootstrapping of the Samba domain really happens
11757     during installation of the main server and adjust SID handling to
11758     cope with this.</li>
11759 <li>Make Samba passwords changeable (again) via GOsa².</li>
11760 <li>Fix generation of LM and NT password hashes via GOsa² to avoid
11761     empty password hashes.</li>
11762 <li>Adapted Samba machine domain joining to latest change in the
11763     smbldap-tools Perl package, fixing bugs blocking Windows machines
11764     from joining the Samba domain.</li>
11765
11766 </ul>
11767
11768 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
11769
11770 <ul>
11771
11772 <li>KDE fails to understand the wpad.dat file provided, causing it to
11773     not use the http proxy as it should.</li>
11774 <li>Chromium also fails to use the proxy when using the KDE desktop
11775     (using the KDE configuration).</li>
11776
11777 </ul>
11778
11779 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
11780
11781 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
11782
11783 <ul>
11784
11785 <li><a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-CD.iso">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-CD.iso</a></li>
11786
11787 <li><a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-CD.iso">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-CD.iso</a></li>
11788
11789 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-CD.iso .</li>
11790
11791 </ul>
11792
11793 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 1e357f80b55e703523f2254adde6d78b
11794 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 7157f9be5fd27c7694d713c6ecfed61c3edda3b2</p>
11795
11796 <p>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use</p>
11797
11798 <ul>
11799
11800 <li><a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-USB.iso">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-USB.iso</a></li>
11801 <li><a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-USB.iso">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-USB.iso</a></li>
11802 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-USB.iso .</li>
11803
11804 </ul>
11805
11806 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 7a8408ead59cf7e3cef25afb6e91590b
11807 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: f1817c031f02790d5edb3bfa0dcf8451088ad119</p>
11808
11809
11810 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
11811
11812 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a>
11813
11814       </div>
11815       <div class="tags">
11816
11817
11818         Tags: <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>.
11819
11820
11821       </div>
11822     </div>
11823     <div class="padding"></div>
11824
11825     <div class="entry">
11826       <div class="title">
11827         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Intel_180_SSD_disk_with_Lenovo_firmware_can_not_use_Intel_firmware.html">Intel 180 SSD disk with Lenovo firmware can not use Intel firmware</a>
11828       </div>
11829       <div class="date">
11830         18th August 2013
11831       </div>
11832       <div class="body">
11833         <p>Earlier, I reported about
11834 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_fix_a_Thinkpad_X230_with_a_broken_180_GB_SSD_disk.html">my
11835 problems using an Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB disk</a>.  Friday I was
11836 told by IBM that the original disk should be thrown away.  And as
11837 there no longer was a problem if I bricked the firmware, I decided
11838 today to try to install Intel firmware to replace the Lenovo firmware
11839 currently on the disk.</p>
11840
11841 <p>I searched the Intel site for firmware, and found
11842 <a href="https://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&ProdId=3472&DwnldID=18363&ProductFamily=Solid-State+Drives+and+Caching&ProductLine=Intel%c2%ae+High+Performance+Solid-State+Drive&ProductProduct=Intel%c2%ae+SSD+520+Series+(180GB%2c+2.5in+SATA+6Gb%2fs%2c+25nm%2c+MLC)&lang=eng">issdfut_2.0.4.iso</a>
11843 (aka Intel SATA Solid-State Drive Firmware Update Tool) which
11844 according to the site should contain the latest firmware for SSD
11845 disks.  I inserted the broken disk in one of my spare laptops and
11846 booted the ISO from a USB stick.  The disk was recognized, but the
11847 program claimed the newest firmware already were installed and refused
11848 to insert any Intel firmware.  So no change, and the disk is still
11849 unable to handle write load. :( I guess the only way to get them
11850 working would be if Lenovo releases new firmware.  No idea how likely
11851 that is.  Anyway, just blogging about this test for completeness.  I
11852 got a working Samsung disk, and see no point in spending more time on
11853 the broken disks.</p>
11854
11855       </div>
11856       <div class="tags">
11857
11858
11859         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>.
11860
11861
11862       </div>
11863     </div>
11864     <div class="padding"></div>
11865
11866     <div class="entry">
11867       <div class="title">
11868         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/90_percent_done_with_the_Norwegian_draft_translation_of_Free_Culture.html">90 percent done with the Norwegian draft translation of Free Culture</a>
11869       </div>
11870       <div class="date">
11871          2nd August 2013
11872       </div>
11873       <div class="body">
11874         <p>It has been a while since my last update.  Since last summer, I
11875 have worked on a Norwegian
11876 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book
11877 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig,
11878 to get a Norwegian text explaining the problems with the copyright
11879 law.  Yesterday, I finally broken the 90% mark, when counting the
11880 number of strings to translate.  Due to real life constraints, I have
11881 not had time to work on it since March, but when the summer broke out,
11882 I found time to work on it again.  Still lots of work left, but the
11883 first draft is nearing completion.  I created a graph to show the
11884 progress of the translation:</p>
11885
11886 <p><img width="80%" align="center" src="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png"></p>
11887
11888 <p>When the first draft is done, the translated text need to be
11889 proof read, and the remaining formatting problems with images and SVG
11890 drawings need to be fixed.  There are probably also some index entries
11891 missing that need to be added.  This can be done by comparing the
11892 index entries listed in the SiSU version of the book, or comparing the
11893 English docbook version with the paper version.  Last, the colophon
11894 page with ISBN numbers etc need to be wrapped up before the release is
11895 done.  I should also figure out how to get correct Norwegian sorting
11896 of the index pages.  All docbook tools I have tried so far (xmlto,
11897 docbook-xsl, dblatex) get the order of symbols and the special
11898 Norwegian letters ÆØÅ wrong.</p>
11899
11900 <p>There is still need for translators and people with docbook
11901 knowledge, to be able to get a good looking book (I still struggle
11902 with dblatex, xmlto and docbook-xsl) as well as to do the draft
11903 translation and proof reading.  And I would like the figures to be
11904 redrawn as SVGs to make it easy to translate them.  Any SVG master
11905 around?  There are also some legal terms that are unfamiliar to me.
11906 If you want to help, please get in touch with me, and check out the
11907 project files currently available from
11908 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
11909
11910 <p>If you are curious what the translated book currently look like,
11911 the updated
11912 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>
11913 and
11914 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
11915 are published on github.  The HTML version is published as well, but
11916 github hand it out with MIME type text/plain, confusing browsers, so I
11917 saw no point in linking to that version.</p>
11918
11919       </div>
11920       <div class="tags">
11921
11922
11923         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>.
11924
11925
11926       </div>
11927     </div>
11928     <div class="padding"></div>
11929
11930     <div class="entry">
11931       <div class="title">
11932         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_beta_release_of_Debian_Edu_Skolelinux_based_on_Debian_Wheezy.html">First beta release of Debian Edu/Skolelinux based on Debian Wheezy</a>
11933       </div>
11934       <div class="date">
11935         27th July 2013
11936       </div>
11937       <div class="body">
11938         <p>The first wheezy based beta release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
11939 today.  This is the release announcement:</p>
11940
11941 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~b0 released
11942 2013-07-27</strong></p>
11943
11944 <p>These are the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux
11945 7.1+edu0~b0, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
11946
11947 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
11948
11949 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
11950 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
11951 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
11952 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
11953 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
11954 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
11955 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
11956 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
11957 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
11958 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
11959 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
11960 desktop contains
11961 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">more
11962 than 60 educational software packages</a> and more are available from
11963 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
11964 and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
11965
11966 <p>This is the fifth test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
11967 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
11968 Squeeze release.</p>
11969
11970 <p>ALERT: Alpha based installations should reinstall or downgrade the
11971 versions of gosa and libpam-mklocaluser to the ones used in this beta
11972 release.</p>
11973
11974 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
11975
11976 <ul>
11977
11978 <li>Switched roaming workstation profiles from wicd to network-manager
11979    for network configuration, as wicd didn't work any more.</li>
11980 <li>Changed version numbers of patched gosa and libpam-mklocaluser
11981    packages to make sure our locally patched versions will be replaced
11982    by the official packages when they are released from Debian. Those
11983    installing alpha version need to reinstall or manually downgrade gosa
11984    and libpam-mklocaluser.</li>
11985 <li>Added bluetooth tools to the default desktop (bluedevil, blueman).</li>
11986 <li>Added tools for sharing the desktop on KDE (krdc, krfb).</li>
11987 <li>Added valgrind to the default installation for easier debugging of
11988    crash bugs.</li>
11989
11990 </ul>
11991
11992 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
11993
11994 <ul>
11995
11996 <li>Fixed artwork package to work with gnome, no longer break
11997    desktop=gnome installations.</li>
11998 <li>Adjusted installer to now work when forced to use a proxy with the
11999    netinst CD.</li>
12000 <li>Fixed code detecting and setting/loading hardware specific
12001    setup/firmware to work more robust out of the box.</li>
12002 <li>Adjusted Kerberos setup to detect realm and server settings at
12003    install time instead of dynamically at run time. This avoid a crash
12004    with krb5-auth-dialog on diskless workstations without a DNS name.</li>
12005 <li>Worked around misfeature in network-manager not calling the dhclient
12006    exit hooks, causing automatic proxy configuration and automatic host
12007    name setting at run time to work again.</li>
12008 <li>Fixed feature setting the default Iceweasel start page from URL
12009    fetched from LDAP, to allow schools to set the global default by
12010    updating the dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no LDAP object.</li>
12011 <li>Changed default host name on all networked machines to be unique
12012    (generated from MAC or reverse DNS) after boot.</li>
12013 <li>Adjusted partition sizes to make sure they are big enough.</li>
12014
12015 </ul>
12016
12017 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
12018
12019 <ul>
12020
12021 <li>Grub is missing the new artwork.</li>
12022 <li>KDE fail to understand the wpad.dat file provided, causing it to
12023     not use the http proxy as it should.</li>
12024 <li>Chromium also fail to use the proxy.</li>
12025
12026 </ul>
12027
12028 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
12029
12030 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
12031
12032 <ul>
12033
12034 <li><a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b0-CD.iso">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b0-CD.iso</a></li>
12035
12036 <li><a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b0-CD.iso">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b0-CD.iso</a></li>
12037
12038 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b0-CD.iso .</li>
12039
12040 </ul>
12041
12042 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 55d5de9765b6dccd5d9ec33cf1a07109
12043 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 996a1d9517740e4d627d100de2d12b23dd545a3f</p>
12044
12045 <p>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use</p>
12046
12047 <ul>
12048
12049 <li><a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b0-USB.iso">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b0-USB.iso</a></li>
12050 <li><a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b0-USB.iso">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b0-USB.iso</a></li>
12051 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b0-USB.iso .</li>
12052
12053 </ul>
12054
12055 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: d8f0818c51a78d357de794066f289f69
12056 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 49185ca354e8d0543240423746924f76a6cee733</p>
12057
12058
12059 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
12060
12061 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a>
12062
12063       </div>
12064       <div class="tags">
12065
12066
12067         Tags: <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>.
12068
12069
12070       </div>
12071     </div>
12072     <div class="padding"></div>
12073
12074     <div class="entry">
12075       <div class="title">
12076         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_fix_a_Thinkpad_X230_with_a_broken_180_GB_SSD_disk.html">How to fix a Thinkpad X230 with a broken 180 GB SSD disk</a>
12077       </div>
12078       <div class="date">
12079         17th July 2013
12080       </div>
12081       <div class="body">
12082         <p>Today I switched to
12083 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html">my
12084 new laptop</a>.  I've previously written about the problems I had with
12085 my new Thinkpad X230, which was delivered with an
12086 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Intel_SSD_520_Series_180_GB_with_Lenovo_firmware_still_lock_up_from_sustained_writes.html">180
12087 GB Intel SSD disk with Lenovo firmware</a> that did not handle
12088 sustained writes.  My hardware supplier have been very forthcoming in
12089 trying to find a solution, and after first trying with another
12090 identical 180 GB disks they decided to send me a 256 GB Samsung SSD
12091 disk instead to fix it once and for all.  The Samsung disk survived
12092 the installation of Debian with encrypted disks (filling the disk with
12093 random data during installation killed the first two), and I thus
12094 decided to trust it with my data.  I have installed it as a Debian Edu
12095 Wheezy roaming workstation hooked up with my Debian Edu Squeeze main
12096 server at home using Kerberos and LDAP, and will use it as my work
12097 station from now on.</p>
12098
12099 <p>As this is a solid state disk with no moving parts, I believe the
12100 Debian Wheezy default installation need to be tuned a bit to increase
12101 performance and increase life time of the disk.  The Linux kernel and
12102 user space applications do not yet adjust automatically to such
12103 environment.  To make it easier for my self, I created a draft Debian
12104 package <tt>ssd-setup</tt> to handle this tuning.  The
12105 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/ssd-setup.git">source
12106 for the ssd-setup package</a> is available from collab-maint, and it
12107 is set up to adjust the setup of the machine by just installing the
12108 package.  If there is any non-SSD disk in the machine, the package
12109 will refuse to install, as I did not try to write any logic to sort
12110 file systems in SSD and non-SSD file systems.</p>
12111
12112 <p>I consider the package a draft, as I am a bit unsure how to best
12113 set up Debian Wheezy with an SSD.  It is adjusted to my use case,
12114 where I set up the machine with one large encrypted partition (in
12115 addition to /boot), put LVM on top of this and set up partitions on
12116 top of this again.  See the README file in the package source for the
12117 references I used to pick the settings.  At the moment these
12118 parameters are tuned:</p>
12119
12120 <ul>
12121
12122 <li>Set up cryptsetup to pass TRIM commands to the physical disk
12123     (adding discard to /etc/crypttab)</li>
12124
12125 <li>Set up LVM to pass on TRIM commands to the underlying device (in
12126     this case a cryptsetup partition) by changing issue_discards from
12127     0 to 1 in /etc/lvm/lvm.conf.</li>
12128
12129 <li>Set relatime as a file system option for ext3 and ext4 file
12130     systems.</li>
12131
12132 <li>Tell swap to use TRIM commands by adding 'discard' to
12133     /etc/fstab.</li>
12134
12135 <li>Change I/O scheduler from cfq to deadline using a udev rule.</li>
12136
12137 <li>Run fstrim on every ext3 and ext4 file system every night (from
12138     cron.daily).</li>
12139
12140 <li>Adjust sysctl values vm.swappiness to 1 and vm.vfs_cache_pressure
12141     to 50 to reduce the kernel eagerness to swap out processes.</li>
12142
12143 </ul>
12144
12145 <p>During installation, I cancelled the part where the installer fill
12146 the disk with random data, as this would kill the SSD performance for
12147 little gain.  My goal with the encrypted file system is to ensure
12148 those stealing my laptop end up with a brick and not a working
12149 computer.  I have no hope in keeping the really resourceful people
12150 from getting the data on the disk (see
12151 <a href="http://xkcd.com/538/">XKCD #538</a> for an explanation why).
12152 Thus I concluded that adding the discard option to crypttab is the
12153 right thing to do.</p>
12154
12155 <p>I considered using the noop I/O scheduler, as several recommended
12156 it for SSD, but others recommended deadline and a benchmark I found
12157 indicated that deadline might be better for interactive use.</p>
12158
12159 <p>I also considered using the 'discard' file system option for ext3
12160 and ext4, but read that it would give a performance hit ever time a
12161 file is removed, and thought it best to that that slowdown once a day
12162 instead of during my work.</p>
12163
12164 <p>My package do not set up tmpfs on /var/run, /var/lock and /tmp, as
12165 this is already done by Debian Edu.</p>
12166
12167 <p>I have not yet started on the user space tuning.  I expect
12168 iceweasel need some tuning, and perhaps other applications too, but
12169 have not yet had time to investigate those parts.</p>
12170
12171 <p>The package should work on Ubuntu too, but I have not yet tested it
12172 there.</p>
12173
12174 <p>As for the answer to the question in the title of this blog post,
12175 as far as I know, the only solution I know about is to replace the
12176 disk.  It might be possible to flash it with Intel firmware instead of
12177 the Lenovo firmware.  But I have not tried and did not want to do so
12178 without approval from Lenovo as I wanted to keep the warranty on the
12179 disk until a solution was found and they wanted the broken disks
12180 back.</p>
12181
12182       </div>
12183       <div class="tags">
12184
12185
12186         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>.
12187
12188
12189       </div>
12190     </div>
12191     <div class="padding"></div>
12192
12193     <div class="entry">
12194       <div class="title">
12195         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Intel_SSD_520_Series_180_GB_with_Lenovo_firmware_still_lock_up_from_sustained_writes.html">Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB with Lenovo firmware still lock up from sustained writes</a>
12196       </div>
12197       <div class="date">
12198         10th July 2013
12199       </div>
12200       <div class="body">
12201         <p>A few days ago, I wrote about
12202 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html">the
12203 problems I experienced with my new X230 and its SSD disk</a>, which
12204 was dying during installation because it is unable to cope with
12205 sustained write.  My supplier is in contact with
12206 <a href="http://www.lenovo.com/">Lenovo</a>, and they wanted to send a
12207 replacement disk to try to fix the problem.  They decided to send an
12208 identical model, so my hopes for a permanent fix was slim.</p>
12209
12210 <p>Anyway, today I got the replacement disk and tried to install
12211 Debian Edu Wheezy with encrypted disk on it.  The new disk have the
12212 same firmware version as the original.  This time my hope raised
12213 slightly as the installation progressed, as the original disk used to
12214 die after 4-7% of the disk was written to, while this time it kept
12215 going past 10%, 20%, 40% and even past 50%.  But around 60%, the disk
12216 died again and I was back on square one.  I still do not have a new
12217 laptop with a disk I can trust.  I can not live with a disk that might
12218 lock up when I download a new
12219 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> ISO or
12220 other large files.  I look forward to hearing from my supplier with
12221 the next proposal from Lenovo.</p>
12222
12223 <p>The original disk is marked Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB,
12224 11S0C38722Z1ZNME35X1TR, ISN: CVCV321407HB180EGN, SA: G57560302, FW:
12225 LF1i, 29MAY2013, PBA: G39779-300, LBA 351,651,888, LI P/N: 0C38722,
12226 Pb-free 2LI, LC P/N: 16-200366, WWN: 55CD2E40002756C4, Model:
12227 SSDSC2BW180A3L 2.5" 6Gb/s SATA SSD 180G 5V 1A, ASM P/N 0C38732, FRU
12228 P/N 45N8295, P0C38732.</p>
12229
12230 <p>The replacement disk is marked Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB,
12231 11S0C38722Z1ZNDE34N0L0, ISN: CVCV315306RK180EGN, SA: G57560-302, FW:
12232 LF1i, 22APR2013, PBA: G39779-300, LBA 351,651,888, LI P/N: 0C38722,
12233 Pb-free 2LI, LC P/N: 16-200366, WWN: 55CD2E40000AB69E, Model:
12234 SSDSC2BW180A3L 2.5" 6Gb/s SATA SSD 180G 5V 1A, ASM P/N 0C38732, FRU
12235 P/N 45N8295, P0C38732.</p>
12236
12237 <p>The only difference is in the first number (serial number?), ISN,
12238 SA, date and WNPP values.  Mentioning all the details here in case
12239 someone is able to use the information to find a way to identify the
12240 failing disk among working ones (if any such working disk actually
12241 exist).</p>
12242
12243       </div>
12244       <div class="tags">
12245
12246
12247         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>.
12248
12249
12250       </div>
12251     </div>
12252     <div class="padding"></div>
12253
12254     <div class="entry">
12255       <div class="title">
12256         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/July_13th__Debian_Ubuntu_BSP_and_Skolelinux_Debian_Edu_developer_gathering_in_Oslo.html">July 13th: Debian/Ubuntu BSP and Skolelinux/Debian Edu developer gathering in Oslo</a>
12257       </div>
12258       <div class="date">
12259          9th July 2013
12260       </div>
12261       <div class="body">
12262         <p>The upcoming Saturday, 2013-07-13, we are organising a combined
12263 Debian Edu developer gathering and Debian and Ubuntu bug squashing
12264 party in Oslo.  It is organised by <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the
12265 member assosiation NUUG</a> and
12266 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">the Debian Edu / Skolelinux
12267 project</a> together with <a href="http://bitraf.no/">the hack space
12268 Bitraf</a>.</p>
12269
12270 <p>It starts 10:00 and continue until late evening.  Everyone is
12271 welcome, and there is no fee to participate.  There is on the other
12272 hand limited space, and only room for 30 people.  Please put your name
12273 on <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/BSP/2013/07/13/no/Oslo">the event
12274 wiki page</a> if you plan to join us.</p>
12275
12276       </div>
12277       <div class="tags">
12278
12279
12280         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>.
12281
12282
12283       </div>
12284     </div>
12285     <div class="padding"></div>
12286
12287     <div class="entry">
12288       <div class="title">
12289         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html">The Thinkpad is dead, long live the Thinkpad X230?</a>
12290       </div>
12291       <div class="date">
12292          5th July 2013
12293       </div>
12294       <div class="body">
12295         <p>Half a year ago, I reported that I had to find a
12296 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html">replacement
12297 for my trusty old Thinkpad X41</a>.  Unfortunately I did not have much
12298 time to spend on it, and it took a while to find a model I believe
12299 will do the job, but two days ago the replacement finally arrived.  I
12300 ended up picking a
12301 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/lenovo_thinkpad_x230">Thinkpad X230</a>
12302 with SSD disk (NZDAJMN).  I first test installed Debian Edu Wheezy as
12303 a roaming workstation, and it seemed to work flawlessly.  But my
12304 second installation with encrypted disk was not as successful.  More
12305 on that below.</p>
12306
12307 <p>I had a hard time trying to track down a good laptop, as my most
12308 important requirements (robust and with a good keyboard) are never
12309 listed in the feature list.  But I did get good help from the search
12310 feature at <a href="http://www.prisjakt.no/">Prisjakt</a>, which
12311 allowed me to limit the list of interesting laptops based on my other
12312 requirements.  A bit surprising that SSD disk are not disks according
12313 to that search interface, so I had to drop specifying the number of
12314 disks from my search parameters.  I also asked around among friends to
12315 get their impression on keyboards and robustness.</p>
12316
12317 <p>So the new laptop arrived, and it is quite a lot wider than the
12318 X41.  I am not quite convinced about the keyboard, as it is
12319 significantly wider than my old keyboard, and I have to stretch my
12320 hand a lot more to reach the edges.  But the key response is fairly
12321 good and the individual key shape is fairly easy to handle, so I hope
12322 I will get used to it.  My old X40 was starting to fail, and I really
12323 needed a new laptop now. :)</p>
12324
12325 <p>Turning off the touch pad was simple.  All it took was a quick
12326 visit to the BIOS during boot it disable it.</p>
12327
12328 <p>But there is a fatal problem with the laptop.  The 180 GB SSD disk
12329 lock up during load.  And this happen when installing Debian Wheezy
12330 with encrypted disk, while the disk is being filled with random data.
12331 I also tested to install Ubuntu Raring, and it happen there too if I
12332 reenable the code to fill the disk with random data (it is disabled by
12333 default in Ubuntu).  And the bug with is already known.  It was
12334 reported to Debian as <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/691427">BTS
12335 report #691427 2012-10-25</a> (journal commit I/O error on brand-new
12336 Thinkpad T430s ext4 on lvm on SSD).  It is also reported to the Linux
12337 kernel developers as
12338 <a href="https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=51861">Kernel bugzilla
12339 report #51861 2012-12-20</a> (Intel SSD 520 stops working under load
12340 (SSDSC2BW180A3L in Lenovo ThinkPad T430s)). It is also reported on the
12341 Lenovo forums, both for
12342 <a href="http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T400-T500-and-newer-T-series/T430s-Intel-SSD-520-180GB-issue/m-p/1070549">T430
12343 2012-11-10</a> and for
12344 <a href="http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/X-Series-ThinkPad-Laptops/x230-SATA-errors-with-180GB-Intel-520-SSD-under-heavy-write-load/m-p/1068147">X230
12345 03-20-2013</a>.  The problem do not only affect installation.  The
12346 reports state that the disk lock up during use if many writes are done
12347 on the disk, so it is much no use to work around the installation
12348 problem and end up with a computer that can lock up at any moment.
12349 There is even a
12350 <a href="https://git.efficios.com/?p=test-ssd.git">small C program
12351 available</a> that will lock up the hard drive after running a few
12352 minutes by writing to a file.</p>
12353
12354 <p>I've contacted my supplier and asked how to handle this, and after
12355 contacting PCHELP Norway (request 01D1FDP) which handle support
12356 requests for Lenovo, his first suggestion was to upgrade the disk
12357 firmware.  Unfortunately there is no newer firmware available from
12358 Lenovo, as my disk already have the most recent one (version LF1i).  I
12359 hope to hear more from him today and hope the problem can be
12360 fixed. :)</p>
12361
12362       </div>
12363       <div class="tags">
12364
12365
12366         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>.
12367
12368
12369       </div>
12370     </div>
12371     <div class="padding"></div>
12372
12373     <div class="entry">
12374       <div class="title">
12375         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230.html">The Thinkpad is dead, long live the Thinkpad X230</a>
12376       </div>
12377       <div class="date">
12378          4th July 2013
12379       </div>
12380       <div class="body">
12381         <p>Half a year ago, I reported that I had to find a replacement for my
12382 trusty old Thinkpad X41.  Unfortunately I did not have much time to
12383 spend on it, but today the replacement finally arrived.  I ended up
12384 picking a <a href="http://www.linlap.com/lenovo_thinkpad_x230">Thinkpad
12385 X230</a> with SSD disk (NZDAJMN).  I first test installed Debian Edu
12386 Wheezy as a roaming workstation, and it worked flawlessly.  As I write
12387 this, it is installing what I hope will be a more final installation,
12388 with a encrypted hard drive to ensure any dope head stealing it end up
12389 with an expencive door stop.</p>
12390
12391 <p>I had a hard time trying to track down a good laptop, as my most
12392 important requirements (robust and with a good keyboard) are never
12393 listed in the feature list.  But I did get good help from the search
12394 feature at <ahref="http://www.prisjakt.no/">Prisjakt</a>, which
12395 allowed me to limit the list of interesting laptops based on my other
12396 requirements.  A bit surprising that SSD disk are not disks, so I had
12397 to drop number of disks from my search parameters.</p>
12398
12399 <p>I am not quite convinced about the keyboard, as it is significantly
12400 wider than my old keyboard, and I have to stretch my hand a lot more
12401 to reach the edges.  But the key response is fairly good and the
12402 individual key shape is fairly easy to handle, so I hope I will get
12403 used to it.  My old X40 was starting to fail, and I really needed a
12404 new laptop now. :)</p>
12405
12406 <p>I look forward to figuring out how to turn off the touch pad.</p>
12407
12408       </div>
12409       <div class="tags">
12410
12411
12412         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>.
12413
12414
12415       </div>
12416     </div>
12417     <div class="padding"></div>
12418
12419     <div class="entry">
12420       <div class="title">
12421         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Fourth_alpha_release_of_Debian_Edu_Skolelinux_based_on_Debian_Wheezy.html">Fourth alpha release of Debian Edu/Skolelinux based on Debian Wheezy</a>
12422       </div>
12423       <div class="date">
12424          3rd July 2013
12425       </div>
12426       <div class="body">
12427         <p>The fourth wheezy based alpha release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
12428 today.  This is the release announcement:</p>
12429
12430 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~alpha3 released
12431 2013-07-03</strong></p>
12432
12433 <p>These are the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux
12434 7.1+edu0~alpha3, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
12435
12436 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
12437
12438 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
12439 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
12440 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
12441 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
12442 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
12443 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
12444 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
12445 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
12446 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
12447 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
12448 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
12449 desktop contains
12450 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">more
12451 than 60 educational software packages</a> and more are available from
12452 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
12453 and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
12454
12455 <p>This is the fourth test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
12456 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
12457 Squeeze release.</p>
12458
12459 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
12460 <ul>
12461   <li>Dropped ispell dictionaries from our default installation.</li>
12462   <li>Dropped menu-xdg from the KDE desktop option, to drop the Debian
12463     submenu.  It was not included with Gnome, LXDE or Xfce, so this
12464     brings KDE in line with the others.</li>
12465   <li>Dropped xdrawchem, xjig and xsok from our default installation as
12466     they don't have a desktop menu entry and thus won't show up in the
12467     menu now that menu-xdg was removed.</li>
12468   <li>Removed the killer system to kill left behind processes on
12469     multi-user machines, as it was no longer able to understand when a
12470     X display was in use and killed the processes of the active users
12471     too.</li>
12472   <li>Dropped the golearn (from goplay) package as the debtags in wheezy
12473     are too few to make the package useful.</li>
12474 </ul>
12475 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
12476 <ul>
12477   <li>Updated artwork matching http://wiki.debian.org/DebianArt/Themes/Joy
12478   <li>Multi-arch i386/amd64 USB stick ISO available.</li>
12479   <li>Got rid of ispell/wordlist related debconf questions that showed
12480     up for some language options.</li>
12481   <li>Switched to using http.debian.net as APT source by default.</li>
12482   <li>Fixed proxy configuration on Main Server installations.</li>
12483   <li>Changed LTSP setup to ask dpkg to use force-unsafe-io the same way
12484     d-i is doing it.</li>
12485   <li>Made sure root and user passwords were not left behind in the
12486     debconf database after installation on Main Server installations.</li>
12487   <li>Made Roaming Workstation dynamic setup more robust and added draft
12488     script setup-ad-client to hook a Roaming Workstation up to a
12489     Active Directory server instead of a Debian Edu Main Server.</li>
12490   <li>Update system to install needed firmware packages during
12491     installation, to work properly in Wheezy.</li>
12492   <li>Update system to handle hardware quirks (debian-edu-hwsetup).</li>
12493   <li>Corrected PXE installation setup to properly pass selected desktop
12494     and keymap settings to PXE installation clients.</li>
12495   <li>LTSP diskless workstations use sshfs by default, allowing them to
12496     work without adding them to DNS and NIS netgroups for NFS access.</li>
12497 </ul>
12498 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
12499 <ul>
12500   <li>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv)
12501     available yet (698840).</li>
12502   <li>Artwork not enabled for all desktops.</li>
12503 </ul>
12504 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
12505
12506 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
12507 <ul>
12508   <li><a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~a3-CD.iso">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~a3-CD.iso</a></li>
12509   <li><a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~a3-CD.iso">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~a3-CD.iso</a></li>
12510   <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~a3-CD.iso .</li>
12511 </ul>
12512
12513 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 2b161a99d2a848c376d8d04e3854e30c
12514 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 498922e9c508c0a7ee9dbe1dfe5bf830d779c3c8</p>
12515
12516 <p>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use</p>
12517 <ul>
12518   <li><a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~a3-USB.iso">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~a3-USB.iso</a></li>
12519   <li><a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~a3-USB.iso">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~a3-USB.iso</a></li>
12520   <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~a3-USB.iso .</li>
12521 </ul>
12522
12523 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 25e808e403a4c15dbef1d13c37d572ac
12524 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 15ecfc93eb6b4f453b7eb0bc04b6a279262d9721</p>
12525
12526 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
12527
12528 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a></p>
12529
12530       </div>
12531       <div class="tags">
12532
12533
12534         Tags: <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>.
12535
12536
12537       </div>
12538     </div>
12539     <div class="padding"></div>
12540
12541     <div class="entry">
12542       <div class="title">
12543         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatically_locate_and_install_required_firmware_packages_on_Debian__Isenkram_0_4_.html">Automatically locate and install required firmware packages on Debian (Isenkram 0.4)</a>
12544       </div>
12545       <div class="date">
12546         25th June 2013
12547       </div>
12548       <div class="body">
12549         <p>It annoys me when the computer fail to do automatically what it is
12550 perfectly capable of, and I have to do it manually to get things
12551 working.  One such task is to find out what firmware packages are
12552 needed to get the hardware on my computer working.  Most often this
12553 affect the wifi card, but some times it even affect the RAID
12554 controller or the ethernet card.  Today I pushed version 0.4 of the
12555 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">Isenkram package</a>
12556 including a new script isenkram-autoinstall-firmware handling the
12557 process of asking all the loaded kernel modules what firmware files
12558 they want, find debian packages providing these files and install the
12559 debian packages.  Here is a test run on my laptop:</p>
12560
12561 <p><pre>
12562 # isenkram-autoinstall-firmware
12563 info: kernel drivers requested extra firmware: ipw2200-bss.fw ipw2200-ibss.fw ipw2200-sniffer.fw
12564 info: fetching http://http.debian.net/debian/dists/squeeze/Contents-i386.gz
12565 info: locating packages with the requested firmware files
12566 info: Updating APT sources after adding non-free APT source
12567 info: trying to install firmware-ipw2x00
12568 firmware-ipw2x00
12569 firmware-ipw2x00
12570 Preconfiguring packages ...
12571 Selecting previously deselected package firmware-ipw2x00.
12572 (Reading database ... 259727 files and directories currently installed.)
12573 Unpacking firmware-ipw2x00 (from .../firmware-ipw2x00_0.28+squeeze1_all.deb) ...
12574 Setting up firmware-ipw2x00 (0.28+squeeze1) ...
12575 #
12576 </pre></p>
12577
12578 <p>When all the requested firmware is present, a simple message is
12579 printed instead:</p>
12580
12581 <p><pre>
12582 # isenkram-autoinstall-firmware
12583 info: did not find any firmware files requested by loaded kernel modules.  exiting
12584 #
12585 </pre></p>
12586
12587 <p>It could use some polish, but it is already working well and saving
12588 me some time when setting up new machines. :)</p>
12589
12590 <p>So, how does it work?  It look at the set of currently loaded
12591 kernel modules, and look up each one of them using modinfo, to find
12592 the firmware files listed in the module meta-information.  Next, it
12593 download the Contents file from a nearby APT mirror, and search for
12594 the firmware files in this file to locate the package with the
12595 requested firmware file.  If the package is in the non-free section, a
12596 non-free APT source is added and the package is installed using
12597 <tt>apt-get install</tt>.  The end result is a slightly better working
12598 machine.</p>
12599
12600 <p>I hope someone find time to implement a more polished version of
12601 this script as part of the hw-detect debian-installer module, to
12602 finally fix <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/655507">BTS report
12603 #655507</a>.  There really is no need to insert USB sticks with
12604 firmware during a PXE install when the packages already are available
12605 from the nearby Debian mirror.</p>
12606
12607       </div>
12608       <div class="tags">
12609
12610
12611         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
12612
12613
12614       </div>
12615     </div>
12616     <div class="padding"></div>
12617
12618     <div class="entry">
12619       <div class="title">
12620         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_value_of_a_good_distro_wide_test_suite___.html">The value of a good distro wide test suite...</a>
12621       </div>
12622       <div class="date">
12623         22nd June 2013
12624       </div>
12625       <div class="body">
12626         <p>In the <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
12627 Skolelinux</a> project, we include a post-installation test suite,
12628 which check that services are running, working, and return the
12629 expected results.  It runs automatically just after the first boot on
12630 test installations (using test ISOs), but not on production
12631 installations (using non-test ISOs).  It test that the LDAP service is
12632 operating, Kerberos is responding, DNS is replying, file systems are
12633 online resizable, etc, etc.  And it check that the PXE service is
12634 configured, which is the topic of this post.</p>
12635
12636 <p>The last week I've fixed the DVD and USB stick ISOs for our Debian
12637 Edu Wheezy release.  These ISOs are supposed to be able to install a
12638 complete system without any Internet connection, but for that to
12639 happen all the needed packages need to be on them.  Thanks to our test
12640 suite, I discovered that we had forgotten to adjust our PXE setup to
12641 cope with the new names and paths used by the netboot d-i packages.
12642 When Internet connectivity was available, the installer fall back to
12643 using wget to fetch d-i boot images, but when offline it require
12644 working packages to get it working.  And the packages changed name
12645 from debian-installer-6.0-netboot-$arch to
12646 debian-installer-7.0-netboot-$arch, we no longer pulled in the
12647 packages during installation.  Without our test suite, I suspect we
12648 would never have discovered this before release.  Now it is fixed
12649 right after we got the ISOs operational.</p>
12650
12651 <p>Another by-product of the test suite is that we can ask system
12652 administrators with problems getting Debian Edu to work, to run the
12653 test suite using <tt>/usr/sbin/debian-edu-test-install</tt> and see if
12654 any errors are detected.  This usually pinpoint the subsystem causing
12655 the problem.</p>
12656
12657 <p>If you want to help us help kids learn how to share and create,
12658 please join us on
12659 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">#debian-edu on
12660 irc.debian.org</a> and the
12661 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/">debian-edu@</a> mailing
12662 list.</p>
12663
12664       </div>
12665       <div class="tags">
12666
12667
12668         Tags: <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>.
12669
12670
12671       </div>
12672     </div>
12673     <div class="padding"></div>
12674
12675     <div class="entry">
12676       <div class="title">
12677         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Victor_Ni_u.html">Debian Edu interview: Victor Nițu</a>
12678       </div>
12679       <div class="date">
12680         17th June 2013
12681       </div>
12682       <div class="body">
12683         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and
12684 Skolelinux</a> distribution have users and contributors all around the
12685 globe.  And a while back, an enterprising young man showed up on
12686 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">our IRC channel
12687 #debian-edu</a> and started asking questions about how Debian Edu
12688 worked.  We answered as good as we could, and even convinced him to
12689 help us with translations.  And today I managed to get an interview
12690 with him, to learn more about him.</p>
12691
12692 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
12693
12694 <p>I'm a 25 year old free software enthusiast, living in Romania,
12695 which is also my country of origin. Back in 2009, at a New Year's Eve
12696 party, I had a very nice <strike>beer</strike> discussion with a
12697 friend, when we realized we have no organised Debian community in our
12698 country. A few days later, we put together the infrastructure for such
12699 community and even gathered a nice Debian-ish crowd. Since then, I
12700 began my quest as a free software hacker and activist and I am
12701 constantly trying to cover as much ground as possible on that
12702 field.</p>
12703
12704 <p>A few years ago I founded a small web development company, which
12705 provided me the flexible schedule I needed so much for my
12706 activities. For the last 13 months, I have been the Technical Director
12707 of <a href="http://ceata.org/">Fundația Ceata</a>, which is a free
12708 software activist organisation endorsed by the FSF and the FSFE, and
12709 the only one we have in our country.</p>
12710
12711 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
12712 project?</strong></p>
12713
12714 <p>The idea of participating in the Debian Edu project was a surprise
12715 even to me, since I never used it before I began getting involved in
12716 it. This year I had a great opportunity to deliver a talk on
12717 educational software, and I knew immediately where to look. It was a
12718 love at first sight, since I was previously involved with some of the
12719 technologies the project incorporates, and I rapidly found a lot of
12720 ways to contribute.</p>
12721
12722 <p>My first contributions consisted in translating the installer and
12723 configuration dialogs, then I found some bugs to squash (I still
12724 haven't fixed them yet though), and I even got my eyes on some other
12725 areas where I can prove myself helpful. Since the appetite for free
12726 software in my country is pretty low, I'll be happy to be the first
12727 one around here advocating for the project's adoption in educational
12728 environments, and maybe even get my hands dirty in creating a flavour
12729 for our own needs. I am not used to make very advanced plannings, so
12730 from now on, time will tell what I'll be doing next, but I think I
12731 have a pretty consistent starting point.</p>
12732
12733 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
12734 Edu?</strong></p>
12735
12736 <p>Not a long time ago, I was in the position of configuring and
12737 maintaining a LDAP server on some Debian derivative, and I must say it
12738 took me a while. A long time ago, I was maintaining a bigger
12739 Samba-powered infrastructure, and I must say I spent quite a lot of
12740 time on it. I have similar stories about many of the services included
12741 with Skolelinux, and the main advantage I see about it is the
12742 out-of-the box availability of them, making it quite competitive when
12743 it comes to managing a school's network, for example.</p>
12744
12745 <p>Of course, there is more to say about Skolelinux than the
12746 availability of the software included, its flexibility in various
12747 scenarios is something I can't wait to experiment "into the wild" (I
12748 only played with virtual machines so far). And I am sure there is a
12749 lot more I haven't discovered yet about it, being so new within the
12750 project.</p>
12751
12752 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
12753 Edu?</strong></p>
12754
12755 <p>As usual, when it comes to Debian Blends, I see as the biggest
12756 disadvantage the lack of a numerous team dedicated to the
12757 project. Every day I see the same names in the changelogs, and I have
12758 a constantly fear of the bus factor in this story.  I'd like to see
12759 Debian Edu advertised more as an entry point into the Debian
12760 ecosystem, especially amongst newcomers and students. IMHO there are a
12761 lot low-hanging fruits in terms of bug squashing, and enough
12762 opportunities to get the feeling of the Debian Project's dynamics. Not
12763 to mention it's a very fun blend to work on!</p>
12764
12765 <p>Derived from the previous statement, is the delay in catching up
12766 with the main Debian release and documentation. This is common though
12767 to all blends and derivatives, but it's an issue we can all work
12768 on.</p>
12769
12770 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
12771
12772 <p>I can hardly imagine myself spending a day without Vim, since my
12773 daily routine covers writing code and hacking configuration files. I
12774 am a fan of the Awesome window manager (but I also like the
12775 Enlightenment project a lot!),
12776 <a href="http://www.claws-mail.org/‎">Claws Mail</a> due to its ease of
12777 use and very configurable behaviour. Recently I fell in love with
12778 <a href="https://launchpad.net/redshift">Redshift</a>, which helps me
12779 get through the night without headaches. Of course, there is much more
12780 stuff in this bag, but I'll need a blog on my own for doing this!</p>
12781
12782 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
12783 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
12784
12785 <p>Well, on this field, I cannot do much more than experiment right
12786 now. So, being far from having a recipe for success, I can only assume
12787 that:</p>
12788
12789 <ul>
12790
12791 <li>schools would like to get rid of proprietary software</li>
12792
12793 <li>students will love the openness of the system, and will want to
12794     experiment with it - maybe we need to harvest the native curiosity
12795     of teenagers more?</li>
12796
12797 <li>there is no "right one" when it comes to strategies, but it would
12798     be useful to have some success stories published somewhere, so
12799     other can get some inspiration from them (I know I'd promote
12800     them!)</li>
12801
12802 <li>more active promotion - talks, conferences, even small school
12803     lectures can do magical things if they encounter at least one
12804     person interested. Who knows who that person might be? ;-)</li>
12805
12806 </ul>
12807
12808 <p>I also see some problems in getting Skolelinux into schools; for
12809 example, in our country we have a great deal of corruption issues, so
12810 it might be hard(er) to fight against proprietary solutions. Also,
12811 people who relied on commercial software for all their lives, would be
12812 very hard to convert against their will.</p>
12813
12814       </div>
12815       <div class="tags">
12816
12817
12818         Tags: <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/intervju">intervju</a>.
12819
12820
12821       </div>
12822     </div>
12823     <div class="padding"></div>
12824
12825     <div class="entry">
12826       <div class="title">
12827         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Jonathan_Carter.html">Debian Edu interview: Jonathan Carter</a>
12828       </div>
12829       <div class="date">
12830         12th June 2013
12831       </div>
12832       <div class="body">
12833         <p>There is a certain cross-over between the
12834 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
12835 project</a> and <a href="http://www.edubuntu.org/">the Edubuntu
12836 project</a>, and for example the LTSP packages in Debian are a joint
12837 effort between the projects.  One person with a foot in both camps is
12838 Jonathan Carter, which I am now happy to present to you.</p>
12839
12840 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
12841
12842 <p>I'm a South-African free software geek who lives in Cape Town. My
12843 days vary quite a bit since I'm involved in too many things. As I'm
12844 getting older I'm learning how to focus a bit more :)</p>
12845
12846 <p>I'm also an Edubuntu contributor and I love when there are
12847 opportunities for the Edubuntu and Debian Edu projects to benefit from
12848 each other.</p>
12849
12850 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
12851 project?</strong></p>
12852
12853 <p>I've been somewhat familiar with the project before, but I think my
12854 first direct exposure to the project was when I met Petter
12855 [Reinholdtsen] and Knut [Yrvin] at the Edubuntu summit in 2005 in
12856 London. They provided great feedback that helped the bootstrapping of
12857 Edubuntu. Back then Edubuntu (and even Ubuntu) was still very new and
12858 it was great getting input from people who have been around longer. I
12859 was also still very excitable and said yes to everything and to this
12860 day I have a big todo list backlog that I'm catching up with. I think
12861 over the years the relationship between Edubuntu and Debian-Edu has
12862 been gradually improving, although I think there's a lot that we could
12863 still improve on in terms of working together on packages. I'm sure
12864 we'll get there one day.</p>
12865
12866 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
12867 Edu?</strong></p>
12868
12869 <p>Debian itself already has so many advantages. I could go on about
12870 it for pages, but in essence I love that it's a very honest project
12871 that puts its users first with no hidden agendas and also produces
12872 very high quality work.</p>
12873
12874 <p>I think the advantage of Debian Edu is that it makes many common
12875 set-up tasks simpler so that administrators can get up and running
12876 with a lot less effort and frustration. At the same time I think it
12877 helps to standardise installations in schools so that it's easier for
12878 community members and commercial suppliers to support.</p>
12879
12880 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
12881 Edu?</strong></p>
12882
12883 <p>I had to re-type this one a few times because I'm trying to
12884 separate "disadvantages" from "areas that need improvement" (which is
12885 what I originally rambled on about)</p>
12886
12887 <p>The biggest disadvantage I can think of is lack of manpower. The
12888 project could do so much more if there were more good contributors. I
12889 think some of the problems are external too. Free software and free
12890 content in education is a no-brainer but it takes some time to catch
12891 on. When you've been working with the same proprietary eco-system for
12892 years and have gotten used to it, it can be hard to adjust to some
12893 concepts in the free software world. It would be nice if there were
12894 more Debian Edu consultants across the world. I'd love to be one
12895 myself but I'm already so over-committed that it's just not possible
12896 currently.</p>
12897
12898 <p>I think the best short-term solution to that large-scale problem is
12899 for schools to be pro-active and share their experiences and grow
12900 their skills in-house. I'm often saddened to see how much money
12901 educational institutions spend on 3rd party solutions that they don't
12902 have access to after the service has ended and they could've gotten so
12903 much more value otherwise by being more self-sustainable and
12904 autonomous.</p>
12905
12906 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
12907
12908 <p>My main laptop dual-boots between Debian and Windows 7. I was
12909 Windows free for years but started dual-booting again last year for
12910 some games which help me focus and relax (Starcraft II in
12911 particular). Gaming support on Linux is improving in leaps and bounds
12912 so I suppose I'll soon be able to regain that disk space :)</p>
12913
12914 <p>Besides that I rely on Icedove, Chromium, Terminator, Byobu, irssi,
12915 git, Tomboy, KVM, VLC and LibreOffice. Recently I've been torn on
12916 which desktop environment I like and I'm taking some refuge in Xfce
12917 while I figure that out. I like tools that keep things simple. I enjoy
12918 Python and shell scripting. I went to an Arduino workshop recently and
12919 it was awesome seeing how easy and simple the IDE software was to get
12920 up and running in Debian compared to the users running Windows and OS
12921 X.</p>
12922
12923 <p>I also use mc which some people frown upon slightly. I got used to
12924 using Norton Commander in the early 90's and it stuck (I think the
12925 people who sneer at it is just jealous that they don't know how to use
12926 it :p)
12927
12928 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
12929 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
12930
12931 <p>I think trying to force it is unproductive. I also think that in
12932 many cases it's appropriate for schools to use non-free systems and I
12933 don't think that there's any particular moral or ethical problem with
12934 that.</p>
12935
12936 <p>I do think though that free software can already solve so so many
12937 problems in educational institutions and it's just a shame not taking
12938 advantage of that.</p>
12939
12940 <p>I also think that some curricula need serious review. For example,
12941 some areas of the world rely heavily on very specific versions of MS
12942 Office, teaching students to parrot menu items instead of learning the
12943 general concepts. I think that's very unproductive because firstly, MS
12944 Office's interface changes drastically every few years and on top of
12945 that it also locks in a generation to a product that might not be the
12946 best solution for them.</p>
12947
12948 <p>To answer your question, I believe that the right strategy is to
12949 educate and inform, giving someone the information they require to
12950 make a decision that would work for them.</p>
12951
12952       </div>
12953       <div class="tags">
12954
12955
12956         Tags: <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/intervju">intervju</a>.
12957
12958
12959       </div>
12960     </div>
12961     <div class="padding"></div>
12962
12963     <div class="entry">
12964       <div class="title">
12965         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Fixing_the_Linux_black_screen_of_death_on_machines_with_Intel_HD_video.html">Fixing the Linux black screen of death on machines with Intel HD video</a>
12966       </div>
12967       <div class="date">
12968         11th June 2013
12969       </div>
12970       <div class="body">
12971         <p>When installing RedHat, Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu on some machines,
12972 the screen just turn black when Linux boot, either during installation
12973 or on first boot from the hard disk.  I've seen it once in a while the
12974 last few years, but only recently understood the cause.  I've seen it
12975 on HP laptops, and on my latest acquaintance the Packard Bell laptop.
12976 The reason seem to be in the wiring of some laptops.  The system to
12977 control the screen background light is inverted, so when Linux try to
12978 turn the brightness fully on, it end up turning it off instead.  I do
12979 not know which Linux drivers are affected, but this post is about the
12980 i915 driver used by the
12981 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Packard Bell
12982 EasyNote LV</a>, Thinkpad X40 and many other laptops.</p>
12983
12984 <p>The problem can be worked around two ways.  Either by adding
12985 i915.invert_brightness=1 as a kernel option, or by adding a file in
12986 /etc/modprobe.d/ to tell modprobe to add the invert_brightness=1
12987 option when it load the i915 kernel module.  On Debian and Ubuntu, it
12988 can be done by running these commands as root:</p>
12989
12990 <pre>
12991 echo options i915 invert_brightness=1 | tee /etc/modprobe.d/i915.conf
12992 update-initramfs -u -k all
12993 </pre>
12994
12995 <p>Since March 2012 there is
12996 <a href="http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=4dca20efb1a9c2efefc28ad2867e5d6c3f5e1955">a
12997 mechanism in the Linux kernel</a> to tell the i915 driver which
12998 hardware have this problem, and get the driver to invert the
12999 brightness setting automatically.  To use it, one need to add a row in
13000 <a href="http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_display.c">the
13001 intel_quirks array</a> in the driver source
13002 <tt>drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_display.c</tt> (look for "<tt>static
13003 struct intel_quirk intel_quirks</tt>"), specifying the PCI device
13004 number (vendor number 8086 is assumed) and subdevice vendor and device
13005 number.</p>
13006
13007 <p>My Packard Bell EasyNote LV got this output from <tt>lspci
13008 -vvnn</tt> for the video card in question:</p>
13009
13010 <p><pre>
13011 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation \
13012     3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller [8086:0156] \
13013     (rev 09) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
13014  Subsystem: Acer Incorporated [ALI] Device [1025:0688]
13015  Control: I/O+ Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- \
13016     ParErr- Stepping- SE RR- FastB2B- DisINTx+
13017  Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort- \
13018     <TAbort- <MAbort->SERR- <PERR- INTx-
13019  Latency: 0
13020  Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 42
13021  Region 0: Memory at c2000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4M]
13022  Region 2: Memory at b0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
13023  Region 4: I/O ports at 4000 [size=64]
13024  Expansion ROM at <unassigned> [disabled]
13025  Capabilities: <access denied>
13026  Kernel driver in use: i915
13027 </pre></p>
13028
13029 <p>The resulting intel_quirks entry would then look like this:</p>
13030
13031 <p><pre>
13032 struct intel_quirk intel_quirks[] = {
13033        ...
13034         /* Packard Bell EasyNote LV11HC needs invert brightness quirk */
13035         { 0x0156, 0x1025, 0x0688, quirk_invert_brightness },
13036        ...
13037 }
13038 </pre></p>
13039
13040 <p>According to the kernel module instructions (as seen using
13041 <tt>modinfo i915</tt>), information about hardware needing the
13042 invert_brightness flag should be sent to the
13043 <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/dri-devel">dri-devel
13044 (at) lists.freedesktop.org</a> mailing list to reach the kernel
13045 developers.  But my email about the laptop sent 2013-06-03 have not
13046 yet shown up in
13047 <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2013-June/thread.html">the
13048 web archive for the mailing list</a>, so I suspect they do not accept
13049 emails from non-subscribers.  Because of this, I sent my patch also to
13050 the Debian bug tracking system instead as
13051 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/710938">BTS report #710938</a>, to make
13052 sure the patch is not lost.</p>
13053
13054 <p>Unfortunately, it is not enough to fix the kernel to get Laptops
13055 with this problem working properly with Linux.  If you use Gnome, your
13056 worries should be over at this point.  But if you use KDE, there is
13057 something in KDE ignoring the invert_brightness setting and turning on
13058 the screen during login.  I've reported it to Debian as
13059 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/711237">BTS report #711237</a>, and
13060 have no idea yet how to figure out exactly what subsystem is doing
13061 this.  Perhaps you can help?  Perhaps you know what the Gnome
13062 developers did to handle this, and this can give a clue to the KDE
13063 developers?  Or you know where in KDE the screen brightness is changed
13064 during login?  If so, please update the BTS report (or get in touch if
13065 you do not know how to update BTS).</p>
13066
13067 <p>Update 2013-07-19: The correct fix for this machine seem to be
13068 acpi_backlight=vendor, to disable ACPI backlight support completely,
13069 as the ACPI information on the machine is trash and it is better to
13070 leave it to the intel video driver to control the screen
13071 backlight.</p>
13072
13073       </div>
13074       <div class="tags">
13075
13076
13077         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>.
13078
13079
13080       </div>
13081     </div>
13082     <div class="padding"></div>
13083
13084     <div class="entry">
13085       <div class="title">
13086         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Third_alpha_release_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Debian_Wheezy.html">Third alpha release of Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Debian Wheezy</a>
13087       </div>
13088       <div class="date">
13089         10th June 2013
13090       </div>
13091       <div class="body">
13092         <p>The third wheezy based alpha release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
13093 today.  This is the release announcement:</p>
13094
13095 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.0.0 alpha2 released
13096 2013-06-10</strong></p>
13097
13098 <p>This is the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux 7.0.0 edu
13099 alpha2, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
13100
13101 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
13102
13103 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
13104 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
13105 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
13106 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
13107 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
13108 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
13109 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
13110 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
13111 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
13112 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
13113 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
13114 desktop contains
13115 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">more
13116 than 60 educational software packages</a> and more are available from
13117 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
13118 and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
13119
13120 <p>This is the third test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
13121 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
13122 Squeeze release.</p>
13123
13124 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
13125
13126 <ul>
13127
13128 <li>Iceweasel was updated from 10 to 17. (DSA 2699-1)
13129 <li>Updated libxv (DSA-2674), libxvmc (DSA-2675), libxfixes (DSA-2676), libxrender (DSA-2677), mesa (DSA-2678), xserver-xorg-video-openchrome (DSA-2679), libxt (DSA-2680), libxcursor (DSA-2681), libxext (DSA-2682), libxi (DSA-2683), libxrandr (DSA-2684), libxp (DSA-2685), libxcb (DSA-2686), libfs (DSA-2687), libxres (DSA-2688), libxtst (DSA-2689), libxxf86dga (DSA-2690), libxinerama (DSA-2691), libxxf86vm (DSA-2692), libx11 (DSA-2693), chromium-browser (DSA-2695), gnutls26 (DSA-2697), wireshark (DSA-2700), krb5 (DSA-2701), telepathy-gabble (DSA-2702) and subversion (DSA-2703).
13130 <li>Switched xrdp on thin client servers to use tightvncserver instead of xvnc4.
13131 <li>Now install software oscilloscope xoscope by default.
13132 <li>Now install music tools gtick, lingot and pianobooster by default.
13133
13134 </ul>
13135
13136 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
13137
13138 <ul>
13139
13140 <li>The subnet-change script is now able to change all files needing a change on the main-server when changing the IP network used.
13141 <li>Updated translation of the installation.
13142 <li>New Romanian translation.
13143 <li>Fix security problem causing root and first user password to no longer show up in /var/cache/debconf/templates.dat.
13144 <li>Fix roaming workstation setup (Closed in libpam-mklocaluser/0.8, libpam-mklocaluser/0.8~deb7u1: #706753: libpam-mklocaluser: Fail to create local user during first login).
13145 <li>Made roaming workstation setup more robust in non-Debian Edu environments.
13146 <li>New script debian-edu-bless to transform a Debian installation to a Debian Edu profile.
13147 <li>Adjust Iceweasel setup to improve performance when $HOME is on NFS.
13148 <li>More testsuite tests.
13149 <li>Make automatic proxy configuration more robust.
13150 <li>Adjust GOsa² GUI configuration.
13151
13152 <li>Update thin client and diskless workstation setup to work with
13153 LTSP in Wheezy.</li>
13154
13155 <li>Diskless workstations now run out of the box -- no need to set
13156 them up with GOsa².</li>
13157
13158 <li>Update IMAP server setup. </li>
13159
13160 <li>Fix login into Skolelinux Backup Tool (Closed in
13161 slbackup-php/0.4.4-1: #700257: slbackup-php: Fails to submit correctly
13162 entered password). </li>
13163
13164 </ul>
13165
13166 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
13167
13168 <ul>
13169
13170 <li>DVD binary and source images are not yet ready.</li>
13171
13172 <li>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv)
13173 available yet (Open in gosa/2.7.4-4: #698840: gosa-plugin-ldapmanager:
13174 missing import feature).</li>
13175
13176 <li>Missing artwork for the KDE desktop (and probably a few others). </li>
13177
13178 <li>KDE Debian submenu lacks icons (Closed: #502192: menu-xdg: invents
13179 own icon names instead of using existing). This will remain
13180 unfixed.</li>
13181
13182 </ul>
13183
13184 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
13185
13186 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
13187
13188 <ul>
13189
13190 <li><a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.0+edu0~a2-CD.iso">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.0+edu0~a2-CD.iso</a></li>
13191
13192 <li><a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.0+edu0~a2-CD.iso">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.0+edu0~a2-CD.iso</a></li>
13193
13194 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.0+edu0~a2-CD.iso .</li>
13195
13196 </ul>
13197
13198 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 27bbcace407743382f3c42c08dbe8178
13199 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: e35f7d7908566cd3075375b3721fa10ee420d419</p>
13200
13201 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
13202
13203 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a>
13204
13205       </div>
13206       <div class="tags">
13207
13208
13209         Tags: <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>.
13210
13211
13212       </div>
13213     </div>
13214     <div class="padding"></div>
13215
13216     <div class="entry">
13217       <div class="title">
13218         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_there_a_PHP_expert_in_the_building___Debian_Edu_need_help_.html">Is there a PHP expert in the building?  Debian Edu need help!</a>
13219       </div>
13220       <div class="date">
13221          5th June 2013
13222       </div>
13223       <div class="body">
13224         <p>Here is a call for help from the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project.
13225 We have two problems blocking the release of the Wheezy version we
13226 hope to get released soon.  The two problems require some with PHP
13227 skills, and we seem to lack anyone with both time and PHP skills in
13228 the project:
13229
13230 <ol>
13231
13232 <li>It is impossible to log into the slbackup web interface
13233   (slbackup-php) using the root user and password.  This is
13234   <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/700257">BTS report #700257</a>.
13235   This used to work, but stopped working some time since Squeeze.
13236   Perhaps some obsolete PHP feature was used?</li>
13237
13238 <li>It is not possible to "mass import" user lists in Gosa, neither
13239   using ldif nor using CSV files.  The feature was disabled after a
13240   major rewrite of Gosa, and need to be ported to the new system.
13241   This is <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/698840">BTS report
13242   #698840</a>.</li>
13243
13244 </ol>
13245
13246 <p>If you can help us, please join us on IRC
13247 (<a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">#debian-edu on
13248 irc.debian.org</a>) and provide patches via the BTS.</p>
13249
13250       </div>
13251       <div class="tags">
13252
13253
13254         Tags: <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>.
13255
13256
13257       </div>
13258     </div>
13259     <div class="padding"></div>
13260
13261     <div class="entry">
13262       <div class="title">
13263         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__C_dric_Boutillier.html">Debian Edu interview: Cédric Boutillier</a>
13264       </div>
13265       <div class="date">
13266          4th June 2013
13267       </div>
13268       <div class="body">
13269         <p>It has been a while since my last English
13270 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
13271 interview last November.  But the developers and translators are still
13272 pulling along to get the Wheezy based release out the door, and this
13273 time I managed to get an interview from one of the French translators
13274 in the project, Cédric Boutillier.</p>
13275
13276 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
13277
13278 <p>I am 34 year old. I live near Paris, France. I am an assistant
13279 professor in probability theory. I spend my daytime teaching
13280 mathematics at the university and doing fundamental research in
13281 probability in connexion with combinatorics and statistical physics.</p>
13282
13283 <p>I have been involved in the Debian project for a couple of years
13284 and became Debian Developer a few months ago. I am working on Ruby
13285 packaging, publicity and translation.</p>
13286
13287 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
13288 project?</strong></p>
13289
13290 <p>I came to the Debian Edu project after a call for translation of
13291 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Manuals">the
13292 Debian Edu manual</a> for the release of Debian Edu Squeeze. Since
13293 then, I have been working on updating the French translation of the
13294 manual.
13295
13296 <p>I had the opportunity to make an installation of Debian Edu in a
13297 virtual machine when I was preparing localised version of some screen
13298 shots for the manual. I was amazed to see it worked out of the box and
13299 how comprehensive the list of software installed by default was.</p>
13300
13301 <p>What amazed me was the complete network infrastructure directly
13302 ready to use, which can and the nice administration interface provided
13303 by <a href="https://oss.gonicus.de/labs/gosa/">GOsa²</a>.  What pleased
13304 me also was the fact that among the software installed by default,
13305 there were many "traditional" educative software to learn languages,
13306 to count, to program... but also software to develop creativity and
13307 artistic skills with music (<a href="http://ardour.org/">Ardour</a>,
13308 <a href="http://audacity.sourceforge.net/">Audacity</a>) and
13309 movies/animation (I was especially thinking of
13310 <a href="http://linuxstopmotion.sourceforge.net/">Stopmotion</a>).</p>
13311
13312 <p>I am following the development of Debian Edu and am hanging out on
13313 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">#debian-edu</a>.
13314 Unfortunately, I don't much time to get more involved in this
13315 beautiful project.</p>
13316
13317 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
13318 Edu?</strong></p>
13319
13320 <p>For me, the main advantages of Skolelinux/Debian Edu are its
13321 community of experts and its precise documentation, as well as the
13322 fact that it provides a solution ready to use.</p>
13323
13324 <p>I would add also the fact that it is based on the rock solid Debian
13325 distribution, which ensures stability and provides a huge collection
13326 of educational free software.</p>
13327
13328 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
13329 Edu?</strong></p>
13330
13331 <p>Maybe the lack of manpower to do lobbying on the
13332 project. Sometimes, people who need to take decisions concerning IT do
13333 not have all the elements to evaluate properly free software
13334 solutions. The fact that support by a company may be difficult to find
13335 is probably a problem if the school does not have IT personnel.</p>
13336
13337 <p>One can find support from a company by looking at
13338 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Help/ProfessionalHelp">the
13339 wiki dokumentation</a>, where some countries already have a number of
13340 companies providing support for Debian Edu, like Germany or
13341 Norway. This list is easy to find readily from the manual. However,
13342 for other countries, like France, the list is empty. I guess that
13343 consultants proposing support for Debian would be able to provide some
13344 support for Debian Edu as well.</p>
13345
13346 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
13347
13348 <p>I am using the KDE Plasma Desktop. But the pieces of software I use
13349 most runs in a terminal: Mutt and OfflineIMAP for emails, latex for
13350 scientific documents, mpd for music. VIM is my editor of choice.  I am
13351 also using the mathematical software
13352 <a href="http://www.scilab.org/en/scilab/about‎">Scilab</a> and
13353 <a href="http://www.sagemath.org/index.html‎">Sage</a> (built from
13354 source as not completely packaged for Debian, yet).
13355
13356 <p><strong>Do you have any suggestions for teachers interested in
13357 using the free software in Debian to teach mathematics and
13358 statistics?</strong></p>
13359
13360 <p>I do not have any "nice" recommendations for statistics. At our
13361 university, we use both <a href="http://www.r-project.org/‎">R</a> and
13362 Scilab to teach statistics and probabilistic simulations. For
13363 geometry, there are nice programs:</p>
13364
13365 <ul>
13366
13367 <li><a href="http://www.drgeo.eu/">drgeo</a> and
13368 <a href="http://edu.kde.org/applications/all/kig‎">kig</a> to do
13369 constructions in planar geometry
13370
13371 <li><a href="http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/software/download/kali.html">kali</a>
13372 to discover symmetry groups (the so-called wallpapers and frieze
13373 groups), although the interface looks a bit old.</li>
13374
13375 </ul>
13376
13377 <p>I like also
13378 <a href="http://edu.kde.org/applications/all/cantor">cantor</a>, which
13379 provides a uniform interface to SciLab, Sage,
13380 <a href="http://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Octave‎">Octave</a>, etc...</p>
13381
13382 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
13383 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
13384
13385 <p>My suggestions would be to</p>
13386
13387 <ul>
13388
13389 <li>advertise the reduction of costs when free software is used.</li>
13390
13391 <li>communicate about the quality of free software projects, using
13392     well known examples like Firefox, ThunderBird and
13393     OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice.</li>
13394
13395 <li>advertise the living and strong community around the project.</li>
13396
13397 <li>show that it is not more difficult to use than any other
13398     system.</li>
13399
13400 </ul>
13401
13402       </div>
13403       <div class="tags">
13404
13405
13406         Tags: <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/intervju">intervju</a>.
13407
13408
13409       </div>
13410     </div>
13411     <div class="padding"></div>
13412
13413     <div class="entry">
13414       <div class="title">
13415         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">Educational applications included in Debian Edu / Skolelinux (the screenshot collection :-)</a>
13416       </div>
13417       <div class="date">
13418          1st June 2013
13419       </div>
13420       <div class="body">
13421         <p>Included in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
13422 Skolelinux</a>, there are quite a lot of educational software.
13423 Created to help teachers teach, and pupils learn.  We have tried to
13424 tag them all using debtags use::learning and role::program, and using
13425 the debtags I was happy to be able to create a collage of the
13426 educational software packages installed by default, sorted by the
13427 debtag field.  Here it is.  Click on a image to learn more about the
13428 program.</p>
13429
13430 <!-- for f in $(debtags tagcat|grep field::|awk '{print $2}'); do   echo; echo "<p><strong>$f</strong></p>"; echo "<p>";   (     for p in $(debtags search --names "use::learning && interface::x11 && role::program && $f"); do img="<img src='http://screenshots.debian.net/thumbnail/$p' alt='$p'>"; if dpkg -s $p > /dev/null 2>&1; then           echo "<a href='http://packages.qa.debian.org/$p'>$img</a>"; fi;     done;   ) | LANG=C sort; echo "</p>"; done -->
13431
13432 <p><strong>field::arts</strong></p>
13433 <p>
13434 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=audacity'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/audacity.png' alt='audacity'></a>
13435 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=childsplay'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/childsplay.png' alt='childsplay'></a>
13436 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=denemo'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/denemo.png' alt='denemo'></a>
13437 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=freebirth'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/freebirth.png' alt='freebirth'></a>
13438 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gcompris'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/gcompris.png' alt='gcompris'></a>
13439 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gimp'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/gimp.png' alt='gimp'></a>
13440 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=hydrogen'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/hydrogen.png' alt='hydrogen'></a>
13441 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=lilypond'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/lilypond.png' alt='lilypond'></a>
13442 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=lmms'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/lmms.png' alt='lmms'></a>
13443 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=rosegarden'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/rosegarden.png' alt='rosegarden'></a>
13444 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=scribus'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/scribus.png' alt='scribus'></a>
13445 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=solfege'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/solfege.png' alt='solfege'></a>
13446 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=stopmotion'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/stopmotion.png' alt='stopmotion'></a>
13447 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=tuxpaint'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/tuxpaint.png' alt='tuxpaint'></a>
13448 </p>
13449
13450 <p><strong>field::astronomy</strong></p>
13451 <p>
13452 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=celestia-gnome'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/celestia-gnome.png' alt='celestia-gnome'></a>
13453 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gpredict'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/gpredict.png' alt='gpredict'></a>
13454 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=kstars'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/kstars.png' alt='kstars'></a>
13455 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=planets'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/planets.png' alt='planets'></a>
13456 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=stellarium'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/stellarium.png' alt='stellarium'></a>
13457 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=xplanet'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/xplanet.png' alt='xplanet'></a>
13458 </p>
13459
13460 <p><strong>field::biology:structural</strong></p>
13461 <p>
13462 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=pymol'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/pymol.png' alt='pymol'></a>
13463 </p>
13464
13465 <p><strong>field::chemistry</strong></p>
13466 <p>
13467 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=atomix'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/atomix.png' alt='atomix'></a>
13468 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=chemtool'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/chemtool.png' alt='chemtool'></a>
13469 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=easychem'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/easychem.png' alt='easychem'></a>
13470 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gchempaint'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/gchempaint.png' alt='gchempaint'></a>
13471 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gdis'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/gdis.png' alt='gdis'></a>
13472 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=ghemical'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/ghemical.png' alt='ghemical'></a>
13473 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gperiodic'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/gperiodic.png' alt='gperiodic'></a>
13474 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=kalzium'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/kalzium.png' alt='kalzium'></a>
13475 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=pymol'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/pymol.png' alt='pymol'></a>
13476 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=viewmol'>[viewmol]</a>
13477 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=xdrawchem'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/xdrawchem.png' alt='xdrawchem'></a>
13478 </p>
13479
13480 <p><strong>field::electronics</strong></p>
13481 <p>
13482 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gcompris'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/gcompris.png' alt='gcompris'></a>
13483 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gpsim'>[gpsim]</a>
13484 </p>
13485
13486 <p><strong>field::geography</strong></p>
13487 <p>
13488 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=kgeography'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/kgeography.png' alt='kgeography'></a>
13489 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=marble'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/marble.png' alt='marble'></a>
13490 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=xplanet'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/xplanet.png' alt='xplanet'></a>
13491 </p>
13492
13493 <p><strong>field::linguistics</strong></p>
13494 <p>
13495 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gcompris'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/gcompris.png' alt='gcompris'></a>
13496 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=kanagram'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/kanagram.png' alt='kanagram'></a>
13497 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=khangman'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/khangman.png' alt='khangman'></a>
13498 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=klettres'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/klettres.png' alt='klettres'></a>
13499 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=parley'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/parley.png' alt='parley'></a>
13500 </p>
13501
13502 <p><strong>field::mathematics</strong></p>
13503 <p>
13504 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=childsplay'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/childsplay.png' alt='childsplay'></a>
13505 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=drgeo'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/drgeo.png' alt='drgeo'></a>
13506 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gcompris'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/gcompris.png' alt='gcompris'></a>
13507 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=geogebra'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/geogebra.png' alt='geogebra'></a>
13508 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=geomview'>[geomview]</a>
13509 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=grace'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/grace.png' alt='grace'></a>
13510 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=graphmonkey'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/graphmonkey.png' alt='graphmonkey'></a>
13511 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=graphthing'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/graphthing.png' alt='graphthing'></a>
13512 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=kalgebra'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/kalgebra.png' alt='kalgebra'></a>
13513 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=kbruch'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/kbruch.png' alt='kbruch'></a>
13514 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=kig'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/kig.png' alt='kig'></a>
13515 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=kmplot'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/kmplot.png' alt='kmplot'></a>
13516 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=mathwar'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/mathwar.png' alt='mathwar'></a>
13517 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=rocs'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/rocs.png' alt='rocs'></a>
13518 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=scratch'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/scratch.png' alt='scratch'></a>
13519 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=tuxmath'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/tuxmath.png' alt='tuxmath'></a>
13520 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=xabacus'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/xabacus.png' alt='xabacus'></a>
13521 </p>
13522
13523 <p><strong>field::physics</strong></p>
13524 <p>
13525 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gcompris'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/gcompris.png' alt='gcompris'></a>
13526 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=step'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/step.png' alt='step'></a>
13527 </p>
13528
13529 <p><strong>field::TODO</strong></p>
13530 <p>
13531 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=blinken'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/blinken.png' alt='blinken'></a>
13532 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=cgoban'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/cgoban.png' alt='cgoban'></a>
13533 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=childsplay'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/childsplay.png' alt='childsplay'></a>
13534 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gcompris'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/gcompris.png' alt='gcompris'></a>
13535 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gnuchess'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/gnuchess.png' alt='gnuchess'></a>
13536 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gnugo'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/gnugo.png' alt='gnugo'></a>
13537 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gtans'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/gtans.png' alt='gtans'></a>
13538 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=ktouch'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/ktouch.png' alt='ktouch'></a>
13539 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=librecad'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/librecad.png' alt='librecad'></a>
13540 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=scratch'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/scratch.png' alt='scratch'></a>
13541 </p>
13542
13543 <p>In total, 61 applications.  3 of them lacked screen shots on
13544 <a href="http://screenshot.debian.net">screenshot.debian.net</a>.  If
13545 you know of some packages we should install by default, please let us
13546 know on <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">IRC, #debian-edu
13547 on irc.debian.org</a>, or our
13548 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/">mailing list
13549 debian-edu@</a>.</p>
13550
13551       </div>
13552       <div class="tags">
13553
13554
13555         Tags: <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>.
13556
13557
13558       </div>
13559     </div>
13560     <div class="padding"></div>
13561
13562     <div class="entry">
13563       <div class="title">
13564         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_install_Linux_on_a_Packard_Bell_Easynote_LV_preinstalled_with_Windows_8.html">How to install Linux on a Packard Bell Easynote LV preinstalled with Windows 8</a>
13565       </div>
13566       <div class="date">
13567         27th May 2013
13568       </div>
13569       <div class="body">
13570         <p>Two days ago, I asked
13571 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_can_I_install_Linux_on_a_Packard_Bell_Easynote_LV_preinstalled_with_Windows_8_.html">how
13572 I could install Linux on a Packard Bell EasyNote LV computer
13573 preinstalled with Windows 8</a>.  I found a solution, but am horrified
13574 with the obstacles put in the way of Linux users on a laptop with UEFI
13575 and Windows 8.</p>
13576
13577 <p>I never found out if the cause of my problems were the use of UEFI
13578 secure booting or fast boot.  I suspect fast boot was the problem,
13579 causing the firmware to boot directly from HD without considering any
13580 key presses and alternative devices, but do not know UEFI settings
13581 enough to tell.</p>
13582
13583 <p>There is no way to install Linux on the machine in question without
13584 opening the box and disconnecting the hard drive!  This is as far as I
13585 can tell, the only way to get access to the firmware setup menu
13586 without accepting the Windows 8 license agreement.  I am told (and
13587 found description on how to) that it is possible to configure the
13588 firmware setup once booted into Windows 8.  But as I believe the terms
13589 of that agreement are completely unacceptable, accepting the license
13590 was never an alternative.  I do not enter agreements I do not intend
13591 to follow.</p>
13592
13593 <p>I feared I had to return the laptops and ask for a refund, and
13594 waste many hours on this, but luckily there was a way to get it to
13595 work.  But I would not recommend it to anyone planning to run Linux on
13596 it, and I have become sceptical to Windows 8 certified laptops.  Is
13597 this the way Linux will be forced out of the market place, by making
13598 it close to impossible for "normal" users to install Linux without
13599 accepting the Microsoft Windows license terms?  Or at least not
13600 without risking to loose the warranty?</p>
13601
13602 <p>I've updated the
13603 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Linux Laptop
13604 wiki page for Packard Bell EasyNote LV</a>, to ensure the next person
13605 do not have to struggle as much as I did to get Linux into the
13606 machine.</p>
13607
13608 <p>Thanks to Bob Rosbag, Florian Weimer, Philipp Kern, Ben Hutching,
13609 Michael Tokarev and others for feedback and ideas.</p>
13610
13611       </div>
13612       <div class="tags">
13613
13614
13615         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>.
13616
13617
13618       </div>
13619     </div>
13620     <div class="padding"></div>
13621
13622     <div class="entry">
13623       <div class="title">
13624         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_can_I_install_Linux_on_a_Packard_Bell_Easynote_LV_preinstalled_with_Windows_8_.html">How can I install Linux on a Packard Bell Easynote LV preinstalled with Windows 8?</a>
13625       </div>
13626       <div class="date">
13627         25th May 2013
13628       </div>
13629       <div class="body">
13630         <p>I've run into quite a problem the last few days.  I bought three
13631 new laptops for my parents and a few others.  I bought Packard Bell
13632 Easynote LV to run Kubuntu on and use as their home computer.  But I
13633 am completely unable to figure out how to install Linux on it.  The
13634 computer is preinstalled with Windows 8, and I suspect it uses UEFI
13635 instead of a BIOS to boot.</p>
13636
13637 <p>The problem is that I am unable to get it to PXE boot, and unable
13638 to get it to boot the Linux installer from my USB stick.  I have yet
13639 to try the DVD install, and still hope it will work.  when I turn on
13640 the computer, there is no information on what buttons to press to get
13641 the normal boot menu.  I expect to get some boot menu to select PXE or
13642 USB stick booting.  When booting, it first ask for the language to
13643 use, then for some regional settings, and finally if I will accept the
13644 Windows 8 terms of use.  As these terms are completely unacceptable to
13645 me, I have no other choice but to turn off the computer and try again
13646 to get it to boot the Linux installer.</p>
13647
13648 <p>I have gathered my findings so far on a Linlap page about the
13649 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Packard Bell
13650 EasyNote LV</a> model.  If you have any idea how to get Linux
13651 installed on this machine, please get in touch or update that wiki
13652 page.  If I can't find a way to install Linux, I will have to return
13653 the laptop to the seller and find another machine for my parents.</p>
13654
13655 <p>I wonder, is this the way Linux will be forced out of the market
13656 using UEFI and "secure boot" by making it impossible to install Linux
13657 on new Laptops?</p>
13658
13659       </div>
13660       <div class="tags">
13661
13662
13663         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>.
13664
13665
13666       </div>
13667     </div>
13668     <div class="padding"></div>
13669
13670     <div class="entry">
13671       <div class="title">
13672         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_transform_a_Debian_based_system_to_a_Debian_Edu_installation.html">How to transform a Debian based system to a Debian Edu installation</a>
13673       </div>
13674       <div class="date">
13675         17th May 2013
13676       </div>
13677       <div class="body">
13678         <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> is
13679 an operating system based on Debian intended for use in schools.  It
13680 contain a turn-key solution for the computer network provided to
13681 pupils in the primary schools.  It provide both the central server,
13682 network boot servers and desktop environments with heaps of
13683 educational software.  The project was founded almost 12 years ago,
13684 2001-07-02.  If you want to support the project, which is in need for
13685 cash to fund developer gatherings and other project related activity,
13686 <a href="http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">please
13687 donate some money</a>.
13688
13689 <p>A topic that come up again and again on the Debian Edu mailing
13690 lists and elsewhere, is the question on how to transform a Debian or
13691 Ubuntu installation into a Debian Edu installation.  It isn't very
13692 hard, and last week I wrote a script to replicate the steps done by
13693 the Debian Edu installer.</p>
13694
13695 <p>The script,
13696 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/branches/wheezy/debian-edu-config/share/debian-edu-config/tools/debian-edu-bless?view=markup">debian-edu-bless<a/>
13697 in the debian-edu-config package, will go through these six steps and
13698 transform an existing Debian Wheezy or Ubuntu (untested) installation
13699 into a Debian Edu Workstation:</p>
13700
13701 <ol>
13702
13703 <li>Add skolelinux related APT sources.</li>
13704 <li>Create /etc/debian-edu/config with the wanted configuration.</li>
13705 <li>Install debian-edu-install to load preseeding values and pull in
13706     our configuration.</li>
13707 <li>Preseed debconf database with profile setup in
13708     /etc/debian-edu/config, and run tasksel to install packages
13709     according to the profile specified in the config above,
13710     overriding some of the Debian automation machinery.</li>
13711 <li>Run debian-edu-cfengine-D installation to configure everything
13712     that could not be done using preseeding.</li>
13713 <li>Ask for a reboot to enable all the configuration changes.</li>
13714
13715 </ol>
13716
13717 <p>There are some steps in the Debian Edu installation that can not be
13718 replicated like this.  Disk partitioning and LVM setup, for example.
13719 So this script just assume there is enough disk space to install all
13720 the needed packages.</p>
13721
13722 <p>The script was created to help a Debian Edu student working on
13723 setting up <a href="http://www.raspberrypi.org">Raspberry Pi</a> as a
13724 Debian Edu client, and using it he can take the existing
13725 <a href="http://www.raspbian.org/FrontPage‎">Raspbian</a> installation and
13726 transform it into a fully functioning Debian Edu Workstation (or
13727 Roaming Workstation, or whatever :).</p>
13728
13729 <p>The default setting in the script is to create a KDE Workstation.
13730 If a LXDE based Roaming workstation is wanted instead, modify the
13731 PROFILE and DESKTOP values at the top to look like this instead:</p>
13732
13733 <p><pre>
13734 PROFILE="Roaming-Workstation"
13735 DESKTOP="lxde"
13736 </pre></p>
13737
13738 <p>The script could even become useful to set up Debian Edu servers in
13739 the cloud, by starting with a virtual Debian installation at some
13740 virtual hosting service and setting up all the services on first
13741 boot.</p>
13742
13743       </div>
13744       <div class="tags">
13745
13746
13747         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>.
13748
13749
13750       </div>
13751     </div>
13752     <div class="padding"></div>
13753
13754     <div class="entry">
13755       <div class="title">
13756         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Second_alpha_release_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Debian_Wheezy.html">Second alpha release of Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Debian Wheezy</a>
13757       </div>
13758       <div class="date">
13759         14th May 2013
13760       </div>
13761       <div class="body">
13762         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
13763 project</a> is making great progress and made its second Wheezy based
13764 release today.  This is the release announcement:</p>
13765
13766 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.0.0 alpha1 released
13767 2013-05-14</strong></p>
13768
13769 <p>This is the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux 7.0.0 edu
13770 alpha1, based on <a href="http://www.debian.org">Debian</a> with
13771 codename "Wheezy".</p>
13772
13773 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
13774
13775 <p>Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux, is a Linux distribution based
13776 on Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
13777 configured school network. Immediatly after installation a school
13778 server running all services needed for a school network is set up just
13779 waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
13780 Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
13781 initial installation of the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all
13782 other machines can be installed via the network.</p>
13783
13784 <p>This is the first test release based on Wheezy (which currently is
13785 not released yet). Basically this is an updated and slightly improved
13786 version compared to the Squeeze release.</p>
13787
13788 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
13789 <ul>
13790   <li>Install freemind (0.9.0) by default, and stop installing vym by
13791     default.</li>
13792   <li>Install chromium (26.0.1410.43) by default.</li>
13793   <li>Install goplay (0.5-1.1) to make golearn available by default.</li>
13794   <li>Updated support for Japanese input methods, now based on
13795     ibus-anthy.</li>
13796 </ul>
13797
13798 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
13799 <ul>
13800
13801   <li>Switched default file system from ext3 to ext4 for speed and
13802     reliability improvements.</li>
13803   <li>Got rid of unwanted winbind daemon and PAM setup activated because
13804     of <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/706434">706434</a>.</li>
13805   <li>Extended and improved the testsuite tests to detect more possible
13806     problems.</li>
13807   <li>Corrected proxy handling to not set http_proxy to a bogus
13808     direct:// URL.</li>
13809   <li>Corrected proxy setup for diskless workstations.</li>
13810   <li>Corrected PXE setup to use our updated udebs during installation.</li>
13811   <li>Made installation handling of low entropy level more robust.</li>
13812   <li>Create larger partitions for Roaming workstations and Thin client
13813     servers, to make room for all the software installed.</li>
13814   <li>Fix bug in Roaming workstation PAM setup, making it impossible to
13815     log in (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/706753">706753</a>).</li>
13816 </ul>
13817
13818 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
13819 <ul>
13820
13821   <li>IP resolution for the local hostname give useless IPv6 address
13822     (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/705900">705900</a>).  Only install
13823     libnss-myhostname on roaming workstations until it is fixed.</li>
13824   <li>DVD images are not yet ready.</li>
13825   <li>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv)
13826     available yet (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/698840">698840</a>).</li>
13827   <li>Missing artwork for the KDE desktop (and probably a few others).</li>
13828   <li>KDE Debian submenu lacks icons.</li>
13829   <li>LXDE menu lacks entry for changing GOsa password
13830     (website). Installing gosa-desktop will be an option.</li>
13831   <li>Backup configuration via web interface is impossible due to
13832     password submission problem
13833     (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/700257">700257</a>).</li>
13834
13835 </ul>
13836
13837 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
13838
13839 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
13840 <ul>
13841
13842   <li><a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu~7.0+edu0~a1-CD.iso">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu~7.0+edu0~a1-CD.iso</a></li>
13843   <li><a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu~7.0+edu0~a1-CD.iso">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu~7.0+edu0~a1-CD.iso</a></li>
13844   <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu~7.0+edu0~a1-CD.iso debian-edu~7.0+edu0~a1-CD.iso</li>
13845
13846 </ul>
13847
13848 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 685ed76c1aa8e44b12d3fde21faf450b</p>
13849
13850 <p>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 6c874de157024da13e115bab29c068080a11ec4c</p>
13851
13852 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
13853
13854 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a></p>
13855
13856       </div>
13857       <div class="tags">
13858
13859
13860         Tags: <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>.
13861
13862
13863       </div>
13864     </div>
13865     <div class="padding"></div>
13866
13867     <div class="entry">
13868       <div class="title">
13869         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian__the_Linux_distribution_of_choice_for_LEGO_designers_.html">Debian, the Linux distribution of choice for LEGO designers?</a>
13870       </div>
13871       <div class="date">
13872         11th May 2013
13873       </div>
13874       <div class="body">
13875         <P>In January,
13876 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_IRC_channel_for_LEGO_designers_using_Debian.html">I
13877 announced a</a> new <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">IRC
13878 channel #debian-lego</a>, for those of us in the Debian and Linux
13879 community interested in <a href="http://www.lego.com/">LEGO</a>, the
13880 marvellous construction system from Denmark.  We also created
13881 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">a wiki page</a> to have
13882 a place to take notes and write down our plans and hopes.  And several
13883 people showed up to help.  I was very happy to see the effect of my
13884 call.  Since the small start, we have a debtags tag
13885 <a href="http://debtags.debian.net/search/bytag?wl=hardware::hobby:lego">hardware::hobby:lego</a>
13886 tag for LEGO related packages, and now count 10 packages related to
13887 LEGO and <a href="http://mindstorms.lego.com/">Mindstorms</a>:</p>
13888
13889 <p><table>
13890 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/brickos">brickos</a></td><td>alternative OS for LEGO Mindstorms RCX. Supports development in C/C++</td></tr>
13891 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/leocad">leocad</a></td><td>virtual brick CAD software</td></tr>
13892 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/libnxt">libnxt</a></td><td>utility library for talking to the LEGO Mindstorms NX</td></tr>
13893 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/lnpd">lnpd</a></td><td>daemon for LNP communication with BrickOS</td></tr>
13894 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/nbc">nbc</a></td><td>compiler for LEGO Mindstorms NXT bricks</td></tr>
13895 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/nqc">nqc</a></td><td>Not Quite C compiler for LEGO Mindstorms RCX</td></tr>
13896 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/python-nxt">python-nxt</a></td><td>python driver/interface/wrapper for the Lego Mindstorms NXT robot</td></tr>
13897 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/python-nxt-filer">python-nxt-filer</a></td><td>simple GUI to manage files on a LEGO Mindstorms NXT</td></tr>
13898 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/scratch">scratch</a></td><td>easy to use programming environment for ages 8 and up</td></tr>
13899 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/t2n">t2n</a></td><td>simple command-line tool for Lego NXT</td></tr>
13900 </table></p>
13901
13902 <p>Some of these are available in Wheezy, and all but one are
13903 currently available in Jessie/testing.  leocad is so far only
13904 available in experimental.</p>
13905
13906 <p>If you care about LEGO in Debian, please join us on IRC and help
13907 adding the rest of the great free software tools available on Linux
13908 for LEGO designers.</p>
13909
13910       </div>
13911       <div class="tags">
13912
13913
13914         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>.
13915
13916
13917       </div>
13918     </div>
13919     <div class="padding"></div>
13920
13921     <div class="entry">
13922       <div class="title">
13923         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Wheezy_is_out___and_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_should_soon_follow___newinwheezy.html">Debian Wheezy is out - and Debian Edu / Skolelinux should soon follow! #newinwheezy</a>
13924       </div>
13925       <div class="date">
13926          5th May 2013
13927       </div>
13928       <div class="body">
13929         <p>When I woke up this morning, I was very happy to see that the
13930 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2013/20130504">release announcement
13931 for Debian Wheezy</a> was waiting in my mail box.  This is a great
13932 Debian release, and I expect to move my machines at home over to it fairly
13933 soon.</p>
13934
13935 <p>The new debian release contain heaps of new stuff, and one program
13936 in particular make me very happy to see included.  The
13937 <a href="http://scratch.mit.edu/">Scratch</a> program, made famous by
13938 the <a href="http://www.code.org/">Teach kids code</a> movement, is
13939 included for the first time.  Alongside similar programs like
13940 <a href="http://edu.kde.org/kturtle/">kturtle</a> and
13941 <a href="http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Turtle_Art">turtleart</a>,
13942 it allow for visual programming where syntax errors can not happen,
13943 and a friendly programming environment for learning to control the
13944 computer.  Scratch will also be included in the next release of Debian
13945 Edu.</a>
13946
13947 <p>And now that Wheezy is wrapped up, we can wrap up the next Debian
13948 Edu/Skolelinux release too.  The
13949 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/2013/04/msg00132.html">first
13950 alpha release</a> went out last week, and the next should soon
13951 follow.<p>
13952
13953       </div>
13954       <div class="tags">
13955
13956
13957         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>.
13958
13959
13960       </div>
13961     </div>
13962     <div class="padding"></div>
13963
13964     <div class="entry">
13965       <div class="title">
13966         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_alpha_release_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Debian_Wheezy.html">First alpha release of Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Debian Wheezy</a>
13967       </div>
13968       <div class="date">
13969         26th April 2013
13970       </div>
13971       <div class="body">
13972         <p>The Debian Edu / Skolelinux project is still going strong and made
13973 its first Wheezy based release today.  This is the release
13974 announcement:</p>
13975
13976 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu ~7.0.0 alpha0 released
13977 2013-04-26</strong></p>
13978
13979 <p>This is the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux ~7.0.0
13980 edu alpha0, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
13981
13982 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
13983
13984 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
13985 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
13986 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
13987 network. Immediatly after installation a school server running all
13988 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
13989 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
13990 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
13991 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
13992 installed via the network.</p>
13993
13994 <p>This is the first test release based on Wheezy (which currently is
13995 not released yet). Basically this is an updated and slightly improved
13996 version compared to the Squeeze release.</p>
13997
13998 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
13999
14000 <ul>
14001 <li>Everything which is new in Debian Wheezy, eg:
14002   <ul>
14003      <li>Linux kernel 3.2.x</li>
14004      <li>Desktop environments KDE "Plasma" 4.8.4, GNOME 3.4, and LXDE 4
14005          (KDE is installed by default; to choose GNOME or LXDE: see
14006          manual.)</li>
14007      <li>Web browser Iceweasel 10 ESR</li>
14008      <li>LibreOffice 3.5.4</li>
14009      <li>LTSP 5.4.2</li>
14010      <li>GOsa 2.7.4</li>
14011      <li>CUPS print system 1.5.3</li>
14012      <li>Educational toolbox GCompris 12.01</li>
14013      <li>Music creator Rosegarden 12.04</li>
14014      <li>Image editor Gimp 2.8.2</li>
14015      <li>Virtual universe Celestia 1.6.1</li>
14016      <li>Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.11.3</li>
14017      <li>Scratch visual programming environment 1.4.0.6</li>
14018      <li>New version of debian-installer from Debian Wheezy, see
14019          <a href="http://www.debian.org/releases/wheezy/installmanual">installation
14020          manual</a> for more details.</li>
14021      <li>Debian Wheezy includes about 37000 packages available for
14022          installation.</li>
14023      <li>More information about Debian Wheezy 7.0 is provided in the
14024          <a href="http://www.debian.org/releases/wheezy/releasenotes">release notes</a> and the <a href="http://www.debian.org/releases/wheezy/installmanual">installation manual</a>.</li>
14025   </ul></li>
14026 </ul>
14027
14028 <p><strong>Documentation</strong></p>
14029 <ul>
14030 <li>The (<a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy">English</a>) Debian Edu Wheezy Manual is fully translated to
14031     German, French, Italian and Danish. Partly translated versions exist
14032     for Norwegian Bokmal and Spanish.</li>
14033 </ul>
14034
14035 <p><Strong>LDAP related changes</strong></p>
14036 <ul>
14037 <li>Slight changes to some objects and acls to have more types to
14038     choose from when adding systems in GOsa. Now systems can be of type
14039     server, workstation, printer, terminal or netdevice.</li>
14040 </ul>
14041
14042 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
14043 <ul>
14044 <li>LTSP clients start as diskless workstation / thin client can be
14045     configured via command line argument -- or individually adding an
14046     entry in lts.conf or LDAP.<li>
14047 <li>GOsa gui: Now some options that seemed to be available, but are non
14048     functional, are greyed out (or are not clickable). Some tabs are
14049     completely hidden to the end user, others even to the GOsa admin.</li>
14050 </ul>
14051
14052 <p><strong>Regressions</strong></p>
14053 <ul>
14054 <li>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv) available
14055     yet.</li>
14056 </ul>
14057
14058 <p><strong>No updated artwork</strong></p>
14059
14060 <ul>
14061 <li>Updated artwork which is visible during installation, in the login
14062     screen and as desktop wallpaper is still missing or the same as we
14063     had for our Squeeze based release.</li>
14064 </ul>
14065
14066 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
14067
14068 To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use
14069 <ul>
14070 <li><a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/</a></li>
14071 <li><a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/</a></li>
14072 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/</li>
14073 </ul>
14074
14075 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: c5e773ddafdaa4f48c409c682f598b6c</p>
14076
14077 <p>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 25934fabb9b7d20235499a0a51f08ce6c54215f2</p>
14078
14079 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
14080
14081 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a></p>
14082
14083       </div>
14084       <div class="tags">
14085
14086
14087         Tags: <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>.
14088
14089
14090       </div>
14091     </div>
14092     <div class="padding"></div>
14093
14094     <div class="entry">
14095       <div class="title">
14096         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_developer_gathering_in_2013_take_place_in_Trondheim.html">First Debian Edu / Skolelinux developer gathering in 2013 take place in Trondheim</a>
14097       </div>
14098       <div class="date">
14099         16th April 2013
14100       </div>
14101       <div class="body">
14102         <p>This years first <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux /
14103 Debian Edu</a> developer gathering take place the coming weekend in Trondheim.
14104 Details about the gathering can be found
14105 <a href="http://www.friprogramvareiskolen.no/Gathering/2013-04-19-21-Trondheim">on
14106 the FRiSK wiki</a>.  The dates are 19-21th of April 2013, and online
14107 participation for those unable to make it in person is very welcome,
14108 and I plan to participate online myself as I could not leave Oslo this
14109 weekend.</p>
14110
14111 <p>The focus of the gathering is to work on the web pages and project
14112 infrastructure, and to continue the work on the Wheezy based Debian
14113 Edu release.</p>
14114
14115 <p>See you on <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">IRC, #debian-edu on irc.debian.org,</a> then?</p>
14116
14117       </div>
14118       <div class="tags">
14119
14120
14121         Tags: <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>.
14122
14123
14124       </div>
14125     </div>
14126     <div class="padding"></div>
14127
14128     <div class="entry">
14129       <div class="title">
14130         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Isenkram_0_2_finally_in_the_Debian_archive.html">Isenkram 0.2 finally in the Debian archive</a>
14131       </div>
14132       <div class="date">
14133          3rd April 2013
14134       </div>
14135       <div class="body">
14136         <p>Today the <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">Isenkram
14137 package</a> finally made it into the archive, after lingering in NEW
14138 for many months.  I uploaded it to the Debian experimental suite
14139 2013-01-27, and today it was accepted into the archive.</p>
14140
14141 <p>Isenkram is a system for suggesting to users what packages to
14142 install to work with a pluggable hardware device.  The suggestion pop
14143 up when the device is plugged in.  For example if a Lego Mindstorm NXT
14144 is inserted, it will suggest to install the program needed to program
14145 the NXT controller.  Give it a go, and report bugs and suggestions to
14146 BTS. :)</p>
14147
14148       </div>
14149       <div class="tags">
14150
14151
14152         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
14153
14154
14155       </div>
14156     </div>
14157     <div class="padding"></div>
14158
14159     <div class="entry">
14160       <div class="title">
14161         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Change_the_font__save_the_world__and_save_some_money_in_the_process_.html">Change the font, save the world (and save some money in the process)</a>
14162       </div>
14163       <div class="date">
14164         26th March 2013
14165       </div>
14166       <div class="body">
14167         <p>Would you like to help the environment and save money at the same
14168 time, without much sacrifice?  A small step could be to change the
14169 font you use when printing.</p>
14170
14171 <p>Three years ago,
14172 <a href="http://arstechnica.com/business/2010/04/last-year-printer-comparison-website/">Ars
14173 Technica</a> reported how the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay
14174 changed their default front from
14175 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arial">Arial</a> to
14176 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_Gothic">Century
14177 Gothic</a> to save money.  The Century Gothic font uses 30% less toner
14178 than Arial to print the same text.  In other word, you could cut your
14179 toner costs by 30% (or actually, increase your toner supply life time
14180 by more than 30%), by simply changing the default font used in your
14181 prints.</p>
14182
14183 <p>But it is not quite obvious how much one will save by switching.
14184 The University of Wisconsin-Green Bay said it used $100,000 per year
14185 on ink and toner cartridges, according to
14186 <a href="http://www.twincities.com/ci_14833097">a report from
14187 TwinCities.com</a>, and expected to save between $5,000 and $10,000
14188 per year by asking staff and students to use a different font.  Not
14189 all PDFs and documents are created internally, and those from external
14190 sources will most likely still use a different font.  Also, the
14191 Century Gothic font is slightly wider than Arial, and thus might use
14192 more sheets of paper to print the same text, so the total saving
14193 depend on the documents printed.</p>
14194
14195 <p>But it is definitely something to consider, if you want to reduce
14196 the amount of trash, decrease the amount of toner used in the world,
14197 and save some money in the process.</p>
14198
14199 <p>Update 2013-04-10: If you want to know how much ink/toner could be
14200 saved when switching between fonts, Inkfarm got a
14201 <a href="http://www.inkfarm.com/What-the-Font">service to calculate the
14202 difference between font pairs</a>.  They also
14203 <a href="http://www.inkfarm.com/Recommended-Ink-Saving-Fonts---">recommend
14204 which fonts to use</a> to save ink.  Check it out. :) While updating
14205 this blog post, I also came across a blog post from InkCloners,
14206 <a href="http://inkcloners.com/blog/ink-cartridges/change-fonts-to-save-ink-costs/">listing
14207 the fonts they recommend</a>, with Centory Gothic at the top.</p>
14208
14209       </div>
14210       <div class="tags">
14211
14212
14213         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
14214
14215
14216       </div>
14217     </div>
14218     <div class="padding"></div>
14219
14220     <div class="entry">
14221       <div class="title">
14222         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Typesetting_a_short_story_using_docbook_for_PDF__HTML_and_EPUB.html">Typesetting a short story using docbook for PDF, HTML and EPUB</a>
14223       </div>
14224       <div class="date">
14225         24th March 2013
14226       </div>
14227       <div class="body">
14228         <p>A few days ago, during a discussion in
14229 <a href="http://www.efn.no/">EFN</a> about interesting books to read
14230 about copyright and the data retention directive, a suggestion to read
14231 the 1968 short story Kodémus by
14232 <a href="http://web2.gyldendal.no/toraage/">Tore Åge Bringsværd</a>
14233 came up.  The text was only available in old paper books, and thus not
14234 easily available for current and future generations.  Some of the
14235 people participating in the discussion contacted the author, and
14236 reported back 2013-03-19 that the author was OK with releasing the
14237 short story using a <a href="http://www.creativecommons.org/">Creative
14238 Commons</a> license.  The text was quickly scanned and OCR-ed, and we
14239 were ready to start on the editing and typesetting.</p>
14240
14241 <p>As I already had some experience formatting text in my project to
14242 provide a Norwegian version of the Free Culture book by Lawrence
14243 Lessig, I chipped in and set up a
14244 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">DocBook</a> processing framework to
14245 generate PDF, HTML and EPUB version of the short story.  The tools to
14246 transform DocBook to different formats are already in my Linux
14247 distribution of choice, <a href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian</a>, so
14248 all I had to do was to use the
14249 <a href="http://dblatex.sourceforge.net/">dblatex</a>,
14250 <a href="http://docbook.sourceforge.net/release/xsl/current/epub/README">dbtoepub</a>
14251 and <a href="https://fedorahosted.org/xmlto/">xmlto</a> tools to do the
14252 conversion.  After a few days, we decided to replace dblatex with
14253 xsltproc/fop (aka
14254 <a href="http://wiki.docbook.org/DocBookXslStylesheets">docbook-xsl</a>),
14255 to get the copyright information to show up in the PDF and to get a
14256 nicer &lt;variablelist&gt; typesetting, but that is just a minor
14257 technical detail.</p>
14258
14259 <p>There were a few challenges, of course.  We want to typeset the
14260 short story to look like the original, and that require fairly good
14261 control over the layout.  The original short story have three
14262 parts/scenes separated by a single horizontally centred star (*), and
14263 the paragraphs do not contain only flowing text, but dialogs and text
14264 that started on a new line in the middle of the paragraph.</p>
14265
14266 <p>I initially solved the first challenge by using a paragraph with a
14267 single star in it, ie &lt;para&gt;*&lt;/para&gt;, but it made sure a
14268 placeholder indicated where the scene shifted.  This did not look too
14269 good without the centring.  The next approach was to create a new
14270 preprocessor directive &lt;?newscene?&gt;, mapping to "&lt;hr/&gt;"
14271 for HTML and "&lt;fo:block text-align="center"&gt;&lt;fo:leader
14272 leader-pattern="rule" rule-thickness="0.5pt"/&gt;&lt;/fo:block&gt;"
14273 for FO/PDF output (did not try to implement this in dblatex, as we had
14274 switched at this time).  The HTML XSL file looked like this:</p>
14275
14276 <p><blockquote><pre>
14277 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
14278 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'&gt;
14279   &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('newscene')"&gt;
14280     &lt;hr/&gt;
14281   &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
14282 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
14283 </pre></blockquote></p>
14284
14285 <p>And the FO/PDF XSL file looked like this:</p>
14286
14287 <p><blockquote><pre>
14288 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
14289 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'&gt;
14290   &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('newscene')"&gt;
14291     &lt;fo:block text-align="center"&gt;
14292       &lt;fo:leader leader-pattern="rule" rule-thickness="0.5pt"/&gt;
14293     &lt;/fo:block&gt;
14294   &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
14295 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
14296 </pre></blockquote></p>
14297
14298 <p>Finally, I came across the &lt;bridgehead&gt; tag, which seem to be
14299 a good fit for the task at hand, and I replaced &lt;?newscene?&gt;
14300 with &lt;bridgehead&gt;*&lt;/bridgehead&gt;.  It isn't centred, but we
14301 can fix it with some XSL rule if the current visual layout isn't
14302 enough.</p>
14303
14304 <p>I did not find a good DocBook compliant way to solve the
14305 linebreak/paragraph challenge, so I ended up creating a new processor
14306 directive &lt;?linebreak?&gt;, mapping to &lt;br/&gt; in HTML, and
14307 &lt;fo:block/&gt; in FO/PDF.  I suspect there are better ways to do
14308 this, and welcome ideas and patches on github.  The HTML XSL file now
14309 look like this:</p>
14310
14311 <p><blockquote><pre>
14312 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
14313 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'&gt;
14314   &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('linebreak)"&gt;
14315     &lt;br/&gt;
14316   &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
14317 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
14318 </pre></blockquote></p>
14319
14320 <p>And the FO/PDF XSL file looked like this:</p>
14321
14322 <p><blockquote><pre>
14323 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
14324 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'
14325   xmlns:fo="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Format"&gt;
14326   &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('linebreak)"&gt;
14327     &lt;fo:block/&gt;
14328   &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
14329 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
14330 </pre></blockquote></p>
14331
14332 <p>One unsolved challenge is our wish to expose different ISBN numbers
14333 per publication format, while keeping all of them in some conditional
14334 structure in the DocBook source.  No idea how to do this, so we ended
14335 up listing all the ISBN numbers next to their format in the colophon
14336 page.</p>
14337
14338 <p>If you want to check out the finished result, check out the
14339 <a href="https://github.com/sickel/kodemus">source repository at
14340 github</a>
14341 (<a href="https://github.com/EFN/kodemus">future/new/official
14342 repository</a>).  We expect it to be ready and announced in a few
14343 days.</p>
14344
14345       </div>
14346       <div class="tags">
14347
14348
14349         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>.
14350
14351
14352       </div>
14353     </div>
14354     <div class="padding"></div>
14355
14356     <div class="entry">
14357       <div class="title">
14358         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Skolelinux_6_got_a_video_review_from_Pcwizz.html">Skolelinux 6 got a video review from Pcwizz</a>
14359       </div>
14360       <div class="date">
14361         17th March 2013
14362       </div>
14363       <div class="body">
14364         <p>Via
14365 <a href="https://twitter.com/pcwizz/status/313044373262716930">twitter</a>
14366 I just discovered that <a href="http://pcwizz.net/">Pcwizz</a> have
14367 done a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPzTZ61Pcuc">video
14368 review</a> on Youtube of <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux
14369 / Debian Edu</a> version 6.  He installed the standalone profile and
14370 the video show a walk-through of of the menu content, demonstration of
14371 a few programs and his view of our distribution.</p>
14372
14373 <p>There is also some really nice quotes (transcribed by me, might
14374 have heard wrong).  While looking thought the Graphics menu:</p>
14375
14376 <blockquote>
14377 "Basically everything you ever need in a school environment."
14378 </blockquote>
14379
14380 <p>And as a general evaluation of the entire distribution:</p>
14381
14382 <blockquote>
14383 "So, yeah, a bit bloated.  It kept all the Debian stuff in there, just
14384 to keep it nice and GNU.  So, I do not want to go on about it, but
14385 lets give it 7 out of 10.  I am not going to use it.  That is because
14386 I am not deploying a school network.  There may be some mythical
14387 feature to help you deploy Skolelinux on a school network."
14388 </blockquote>
14389
14390 <p>To bad he did not test the server profile, and discovered the PXE
14391 installation option.  It make it possible to install only the main
14392 server from CD, and the rest of the machines via the net, and might be
14393 considered the mythical feature he talk about. :)</p>
14394
14395 <p>While looking through the menus, there is also this funny comment
14396 about the part of the K menu generated from the Debian menu subsystem:
14397
14398 <blockquote>
14399 "[The K menu] have a special Debian section for software that no-one
14400 is going to look at, because it contain lots of junky stuff that you
14401 actually don't need in the education distribution, but have just been
14402 included because it isn't stripped out for some reason."
14403 </blockquote>
14404
14405 <p>I guess it is yet another argument for merging the Debian menu and
14406 Gnome/KDE desktop menu entries into
14407 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/Proposals/DebianMenuUsingDesktopEntries">one
14408 consistent menu system</a> instead of two incomplete and partly
14409 inconsistent menu systems.</p>
14410
14411 <p>The entire video is available below for those accepting iframe
14412 embedding:</p>
14413
14414 <iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/wPzTZ61Pcuc" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
14415
14416       </div>
14417       <div class="tags">
14418
14419
14420         Tags: <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/video">video</a>.
14421
14422
14423       </div>
14424     </div>
14425     <div class="padding"></div>
14426
14427     <div class="entry">
14428       <div class="title">
14429         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Skolelinux___Debian_Edu_Squeeze_update_released.html">First Skolelinux / Debian Edu Squeeze update released</a>
14430       </div>
14431       <div class="date">
14432          8th March 2013
14433       </div>
14434       <div class="body">
14435         <p>Last Sunday, 2013-03-03,, Holger Levsen announced the first update
14436 of <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a>
14437 based on Debian Squeeze.  This is the first update since
14438 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00001.html">the
14439 initial release 2012-03-11</a>.  This is the
14440 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2013/03/msg00000.html">release
14441 announcement email from Holger</a>:</p>
14442
14443 <blockquote><p>Hi,</p>
14444
14445 <p>it's my pleasure to announce the immediate availability of Debian
14446 Edu 6.0.7+r1 ("Debian Edu Squeeze").</p>
14447
14448 <p>Debian Edu 6.0.7+r1 is an incremental update to Debian Edu
14449 6.0.4+r0, containing all the changes between Debian 6.0.4 and 6.0.7 as
14450 well Debian Edu specific bugfixes and enhancements. See below (in this
14451 mail) for the full list of (edu) changes.  Please see
14452 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311">http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311</a>
14453 for more information on "Debian Edu Squeeze".</p>
14454
14455 <p>Images are available for download at
14456 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/</a></p>
14457
14458 <p>md5sums:
14459 <br>1fe79eb4f0f9ae1c58fc318e26cc1e2e  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-CD.iso
14460 <br>a6ddd924a8bd9a1b5ca122e8fe1c34ec  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-DVD.iso
14461 <br>ac6c72cd7925ccec51bfbf58e2a7c69c  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-source-DVD.iso</p>
14462
14463 <p>sha1sums:
14464 <br>a4b58233b672a99c7df8dc24fb6de3327654a5c3  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-CD.iso
14465 <br>9b524915e0ff2aa793f13d93123e5bd2bab2dbaa  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-DVD.iso
14466 <br>43997614893fc5e9e59ad6ce066b05d07fd836fa  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-source-DVD.iso</p>
14467
14468 <p>These images are suitable for amd64+i386.</p>
14469
14470 <p>Changes for Debian Edu 6.0.7+r1 Codename "Squeeze", released
14471 2013-03-03:</p>
14472
14473 <ul>
14474   <li>sitesummary was updated from 0.1.3 to 0.1.8
14475   <ul>
14476         <li>Make Nagios configuration more robust and efficient</li>
14477         <li>Comply with 3.X kernel</li>
14478   </ul></li>
14479   <li>debian-edu-doc from 1.4~20120310~6.0.4+r0 to 1.4~20130228~6.0.7+r1
14480   <ul>
14481         <li>Minor updates from the wiki</li>
14482         <li>Danish translation now complete</li>
14483   </ul></li>
14484   <li>debian-edu-config from 1.453 to 1.455
14485      <ul>
14486         <li>Fix /etc/hosts for LTSP diskless workstations. Closes: #699880</li>
14487         <li>Make ltsp_local_mount script work for multiple devices.</li>
14488         <li>Correct Kerberos user policy: don't expire password after 2 days.
14489                 Closes: #664596</li>
14490         <li>Handle '#' characters in the root or first users password.
14491                 Closes: #664976</li>
14492         <li>Fixes for gosa-sync:
14493            <ul>
14494                 <li>Don't fail if password contains "</li>
14495                 <li>Don't disclose new password string in syslog</li>
14496            </ul></li>
14497         <li>Fixes for gosa-create:
14498            <ul>
14499                 <li>Invalidate libnss cache before applying changes</li>
14500                 <li>Multiple failures during mass user import into GOsa²</li>
14501                 <li>gosa-netgroups plugin: don't erase entries of attribute type
14502                          "memberNisNetgroup". Closes: #687256</li>
14503                 <li>First user now uses the same Kerberos policy as all other users</li>
14504            </ul></li>
14505         <li>Add Danish web page</li>
14506     </ul>
14507   <li>debian-edu-install from 1.528 to 1.530
14508     <ul>
14509         <li>Improve preseeding support and documentation</li>
14510     </ul></li>
14511 </ul>
14512
14513 <p>End-user documentation in English is available at
14514 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze/">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze/</a>
14515 - translations to French, Italian, Danish and German are available in
14516 the debian-edu-doc package. (Other languages could use your help!)</p>
14517
14518 <p>If you want to contribute to Debian Edu, please join our
14519 mailinglist
14520 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/">debian-edu@lists.debian.org</a>!
14521 </p></blockquote>
14522
14523 <p>I am very happy to see the fruits of a year of hard work. :)</p>
14524
14525       </div>
14526       <div class="tags">
14527
14528
14529         Tags: <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>.
14530
14531
14532       </div>
14533     </div>
14534     <div class="padding"></div>
14535
14536     <div class="entry">
14537       <div class="title">
14538         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Frikanalen___Complete_TV_station_organised_using_the_web.html">Frikanalen - Complete TV station organised using the web</a>
14539       </div>
14540       <div class="date">
14541          3rd March 2013
14542       </div>
14543       <div class="body">
14544         <p>Do you want to set up your own TV station, schedule videos and
14545 broadcast them on the air?  Using free software?  With video on demand
14546 support using
14547 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">free and
14548 open standards</a>?  Included a web based video stream as well?  And
14549 administrate it all in your web browser from anywhere in the world?  A
14550 few years now the Norwegian public access TV-channel
14551 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a> have been building a
14552 system to do just this.  The source code for the solution is licensed
14553 using the GNU LGPL, and
14554 <a href="http://github.com/Frikanalen">available from github</a>.</p>
14555
14556 <p>The idea is simple.  You upload a video file over the web, and
14557 attach meta information to the file.  You select a time slot in the
14558 program schedule, and when the time come it is played on the air and
14559 in the web stream.  It is also made available in a video on demand
14560 solution for anyone to see it also outside its scheduled time.  All
14561 you need to run a TV station - using your web browser.</p>
14562
14563 <p>There are several parts to this web based solution.  I'll mention
14564 the three most important ones.  The first part is the database of
14565 videos and the schedule.  This is written in Django and include a REST
14566 API.  The current database is SQLite, but the plan is to migrate it to
14567 PostgreSQL.  At the moment this system can be tested on
14568 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/">beta.frikanalen.tv</a>.  The
14569 second part is the video playout, taking the schedule information from
14570 the database and providing a video stream to broadcast.  This is done
14571 using <a href="http://www.casparcg.com/">CasparCG from SVT</a> and
14572 <a href="http://www.mltframework.org/">Media Lovin' Toolkit</a>.  Video
14573 signal distribution is handled using
14574 <a href="http://www.ob-encoder.com/">Open Broadcast Encoder</a>.  The
14575 third part is the converter, handling the transformation of uploaded
14576 video files to a format useful for broadcasting, streaming and video
14577 on demand.  It is still very much work in progress, so it is not yet
14578 decided what it will end up using.  Note that the source of the latter
14579 two parts are not yet pushed to github.  The lead author want to clean
14580 them up a bit more first.</p>
14581
14582 <p>The development is coordinated on the
14583 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23frikanalen">#frikanalen IRC
14584 channel</a> (irc.freenode.net), and discussed on
14585 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/frikanalen">the
14586 frikanalen mailing list</a>. The lead developer is Benjamin Bruheim
14587 (phed on IRC).  Anyone is welcome to participate in the
14588 development.</p>
14589
14590       </div>
14591       <div class="tags">
14592
14593
14594         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
14595
14596
14597       </div>
14598     </div>
14599     <div class="padding"></div>
14600
14601     <div class="entry">
14602       <div class="title">
14603         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dr__Richard_Stallman__founder_of_Free_Software_Foundation__give_a_talk_in_Oslo_March_1st_2013.html">Dr. Richard Stallman, founder of Free Software Foundation, give a talk in Oslo March 1st 2013</a>
14604       </div>
14605       <div class="date">
14606         27th February 2013
14607       </div>
14608       <div class="body">
14609         <p>Dr. <a href="http://www.stallman.org/">Richard Stallman</a>,
14610 founder of <a href="http://www.fsf.org/">Free Software Foundation</a>,
14611 is giving <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20130301-rms/">a
14612 talk in Oslo March 1st 2013 17:00 to 19:00</a>.  The event is public
14613 and organised by <a href="">Norwegian Unix Users Group (NUUG)</a>
14614 (where I am the chair of the board) and
14615 <a href="http://www.friprog.no/">The Norwegian Open Source Competence
14616 Center</a>.  The title of the talk is «The Free Software Movement and
14617 GNU», with this description:
14618
14619 <p><blockquote>
14620 The Free Software Movement campaigns for computer users' freedom to
14621 cooperate and control their own computing. The Free Software Movement
14622 developed the GNU operating system, typically used together with the
14623 kernel Linux, specifically to make these freedoms possible.
14624 </blockquote></p>
14625
14626 <p>The meeting is open for everyone.  Due to space limitations, the
14627 doors opens for NUUG members at 16:15, and everyone else at 16:45.  I
14628 am really curious how many will show up.  See
14629 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20130301-rms/">the event
14630 page</a> for the location details.</p>
14631
14632       </div>
14633       <div class="tags">
14634
14635
14636         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</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>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
14637
14638
14639       </div>
14640     </div>
14641     <div class="padding"></div>
14642
14643     <div class="entry">
14644       <div class="title">
14645         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Frikart___Free_Garmin_maps_for_European_countries_based_on_OpenStreetmap.html">Frikart - Free Garmin maps for European countries based on OpenStreetmap</a>
14646       </div>
14647       <div class="date">
14648         15th February 2013
14649       </div>
14650       <div class="body">
14651         <p>If you, like me, want an updated a map for your Garmin GPS, there is
14652 now a great source of free maps available from
14653 <a href="http://www.frikart.no/garmin/index.html">Frikart</a>.  To
14654 download a map, just click on the country you are interested in, and
14655 download the map type you want.  There are 8 different maps available,
14656 using different colours and data selection.  Pick one of Roadmap, Topo
14657 Summer, Topo Winter, Roadmap II, Topo Summer II, Topo Winter II,
14658 "Trails - overlay map" and "Cross country - overlay map" (see the web
14659 page for descriptions).</p>
14660
14661 <p>The maps are updated weekly, so if you find something wrong in the
14662 map you can just edit the
14663 <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/">OpenStreetmap</a> map source
14664 (anyone can contribute) and fetch a fixed map a week later. :)</p>
14665
14666       </div>
14667       <div class="tags">
14668
14669
14670         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kart">kart</a>.
14671
14672
14673       </div>
14674     </div>
14675     <div class="padding"></div>
14676
14677     <div class="entry">
14678       <div class="title">
14679         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/_Electronic__paper_invoices___using_vCard_in_a_QR_code.html">"Electronic" paper invoices - using vCard in a QR code</a>
14680       </div>
14681       <div class="date">
14682         12th February 2013
14683       </div>
14684       <div class="body">
14685         <p>Here in Norway, electronic invoices are spreading, and the
14686 <a href="http://www.anskaffelser.no/e-handel/faktura">solution promoted
14687 by the Norwegian government</a> require that invoices are sent through
14688 one of the approved facilitators, and it is not possible to send
14689 electronic invoices without an agreement with one of these
14690 facilitators.  This seem like a needless limitation to be able to
14691 transfer invoice information between buyers and sellers.  My preferred
14692 solution would be to just transfer the invoice information directly
14693 between seller and buyer, for example using SMTP, or some HTTP based
14694 protocol like REST or SOAP.  But this might also be overkill, as the
14695 "electronic" information can be transferred using paper invoices too,
14696 using a simple bar code.  My bar code encoding of choice would be QR
14697 codes, as this encoding can be read by any smart phone out there.  The
14698 content of the code could be anything, but I would go with
14699 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VCard">the vCard format</a>, as
14700 it too is supported by a lot of computer equipment these days.</p>
14701
14702 <p>The vCard format support extentions, and the invoice specific
14703 information can be included using such extentions.  For example an
14704 invoice from SLX Debian Labs (picked because we
14705 <a href="http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">ask
14706 for donations to the Debian Edu project</a> and thus have bank account
14707 information publicly available) for NOK 1000.00 could have these extra
14708 fields:</p>
14709
14710 <p><pre>
14711 X-INVOICE-NUMBER:1
14712 X-INVOICE-AMOUNT:NOK1000.00
14713 X-INVOICE-KID:123412341234
14714 X-INVOICE-MSG:Donation to Debian Edu
14715 X-BANK-ACCOUNT-NUMBER:16040884339
14716 X-BANK-IBAN-NUMBER:NO8516040884339
14717 X-BANK-SWIFT-NUMBER:DNBANOKKXXX
14718 </pre></p>
14719
14720 <p>The X-BANK-ACCOUNT-NUMBER field was proposed in a stackoverflow
14721 answer regarding
14722 <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10045664/storing-bank-account-in-vcard-file">how
14723 to put bank account information into a vCard</a>.  For payments in
14724 Norway, either X-INVOICE-KID (payment ID) or X-INVOICE-MSG could be
14725 used to pass on information to the seller when paying the invoice.</p>
14726
14727 <p>The complete vCard could look like this:</p>
14728
14729 <p><pre>
14730 BEGIN:VCARD
14731 VERSION:2.1
14732 ORG:SLX Debian Labs Foundation
14733 ADR;WORK:;;Gunnar Schjelderups vei 29D;OSLO;;0485;Norway
14734 URL;WORK:http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/
14735 EMAIL;PREF;INTERNET:sdl-styret@rt.nuug.no
14736 REV:20130212T095000Z
14737 X-INVOICE-NUMBER:1
14738 X-INVOICE-AMOUNT:NOK1000.00
14739 X-INVOICE-MSG:Donation to Debian Edu
14740 X-BANK-ACCOUNT-NUMBER:16040884339
14741 X-BANK-IBAN-NUMBER:NO8516040884339
14742 X-BANK-SWIFT-NUMBER:DNBANOKKXXX
14743 END:VCARD
14744 </pre></p>
14745
14746 <p>The resulting QR code created using
14747 <a href="http://fukuchi.org/works/qrencode/">qrencode</a> would look
14748 like this, and should be readable (and thus checkable) by any smart
14749 phone, or for example the <a href="http://zbar.sourceforge.net/">zbar
14750 bar code reader</a> and feed right into the approval and accounting
14751 system.</p>
14752
14753 <p><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-02-12-qr-invoice.png"></p>
14754
14755 <p>The extension fields will most likely not show up in any normal
14756 vCard reader, so those parts would have to go directly into a system
14757 handling invoices.  I am a bit unsure how vCards without name parts
14758 are handled, but a simple test indicate that this work just fine.</p>
14759
14760 <p><strong>Update 2013-02-12 11:30</strong>: Added KID to the proposal
14761 based on feedback from Sturle Sunde.</p>
14762
14763       </div>
14764       <div class="tags">
14765
14766
14767         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
14768
14769
14770       </div>
14771     </div>
14772     <div class="padding"></div>
14773
14774     <div class="entry">
14775       <div class="title">
14776         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sleep_until_morning___home_automation_for_the_kids.html">Sleep until morning - home automation for the kids</a>
14777       </div>
14778       <div class="date">
14779         10th February 2013
14780       </div>
14781       <div class="body">
14782         <p><img align="left" style="margin-right:25px;" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-02-10-morning-light.jpeg"></p>
14783
14784 <p>With kids in the house, one challenge is getting them to sleep
14785 during the night and wake up when it is morning.  I mean, when I
14786 believe it is morning, and not two hours earlier.  In our household we
14787 have decided that 07:00 is the turning point, but getting the kids to
14788 sleep until 07:00 is a small challenge every day.  They have adapted
14789 quite well, and rarely wake up at 05:00 any more, but some times wake
14790 up at times like 05:50, 06:15, 06:30 or 06:45, and it is hard to put
14791 the awake one to bed again without disturbing and waking the rest.
14792 And I understand perfectly well that they fail to sleep until 07:00
14793 some times, as there is no way for them to know if it is before or
14794 after the magic moment without coming and asking us parents.</p>
14795
14796 <p>But yesterday I came up with a method to solve this problem.  It
14797 involve home automation.  A few years ago I bought a
14798 <a href="http://www.telldus.se/products/tellstick">Tellstick</a> and RF
14799 switches at the local <a href="http://www.clasohlson.com/">Clas
14800 Ohlson</a> shop, allowing me to control lights and other electrical
14801 gadgets using my Linux server.  When I moved from the old flat to a
14802 small house, I put away all this equipment as most of the lighting in
14803 the house was not using wall sockets and thus not easy to connect to
14804 the gadgets I had.  But recently I bought a
14805 <a href="http://www.telldus.se/products/tellstick_net">Tellstick
14806 Net</a> to be able to read sensor input as well as control power
14807 sockets.  I want to control ovens in the basement to avoid the pipes
14808 to freeze, and monitor the humidity to detect flooding.  The default
14809 setup for Tellstick Net is to be controlled by the vendor web service,
14810 which to me is a security problem, but it is also possible to build
14811 ones own
14812 <a href="http://developer.telldus.com/blog/2012/03/02/help-us-develop-local-access-using-tellstick-net-build-your-own-firmware">firmware
14813 with local access</A> instead of being controlled by a Swedish
14814 company, thanks to the release of the GPL licensed firmware source
14815 code.  I plan to get that running before I let it control anything
14816 important.  But while working on this, one idea to make it easier for
14817 the kids came to me yesterday.  We can set up a night light controlled
14818 by the computer, and turn it automatically on at 07:00.  The kids can
14819 then check the light in the morning to know if they are supposed to
14820 get up or not.  They joined me in setting everything up, and I
14821 repeated the concept several times before bed times to make sure they
14822 remembered to check the light before getting up in the morning.</p>
14823
14824 <p>We tested it this morning, and all the kids stayed in bed until
14825 after 07:00, and every one of them commented on the fact that the
14826 "morning light" was turned on and signalled that the morning had
14827 arrived.  So this look like a success, and I am excited to see how
14828 this develops the next few days. :) I really hope this can allow us
14829 all to sleep a bit longer in the morning.</p>
14830
14831 <p>A nice advantage of this setup is that we can remote control when
14832 to tell the kids to get up.  We do not have to wait until 07:00, and
14833 can also delay it if we want to.</p>
14834
14835       </div>
14836       <div class="tags">
14837
14838
14839         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
14840
14841
14842       </div>
14843     </div>
14844     <div class="padding"></div>
14845
14846     <div class="entry">
14847       <div class="title">
14848         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Bitcoin_GUI_now_available_from_Debian_unstable__and_Ubuntu_raring_.html">Bitcoin GUI now available from Debian/unstable (and Ubuntu/raring)</a>
14849       </div>
14850       <div class="date">
14851          2nd February 2013
14852       </div>
14853       <div class="body">
14854         <p>My
14855 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_backport_bitcoin_qt_version_0_7_2_2_to_Debian_Squeeze.html">last
14856 bitcoin related blog post</a> mentioned that the new
14857 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">bitcoin package</a> for
14858 Debian was waiting in NEW.  It was accepted by the Debian ftp-masters
14859 2013-01-19, and have been available in unstable since then.  It was
14860 automatically copied to Ubuntu, and is available in their Raring
14861 version too.</p>
14862
14863 <p>But there is a strange problem with the build that block this new
14864 version from being available on the i386 and kfreebsd-i386
14865 architectures.  For some strange reason, the autobuilders in Debian
14866 for these architectures fail to run the test suite on these
14867 architectures (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/672524">BTS #672524</a>).
14868 We are so far unable to reproduce it when building it manually, and
14869 no-one have been able to propose a fix.  If you got an idea what is
14870 failing, please let us know via the BTS.</p>
14871
14872 <p>One feature that is annoying me with of the bitcoin client, because
14873 I often run low on disk space, is the fact that the client will exit
14874 if it run short on space (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/696715">BTS
14875 #696715</a>).  So make sure you have enough disk space when you run
14876 it. :)</p>
14877
14878 <p>As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
14879 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
14880 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
14881
14882       </div>
14883       <div class="tags">
14884
14885
14886         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>.
14887
14888
14889       </div>
14890     </div>
14891     <div class="padding"></div>
14892
14893     <div class="entry">
14894       <div class="title">
14895         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html">Welcome to the world, Isenkram!</a>
14896       </div>
14897       <div class="date">
14898         22nd January 2013
14899       </div>
14900       <div class="body">
14901         <p>Yesterday, I
14902 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_prototype_ready_making_hardware_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">asked
14903 for testers</a> for my prototype for making Debian better at handling
14904 pluggable hardware devices, which I
14905 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">set
14906 out to create</a> earlier this month.  Several valuable testers showed
14907 up, and caused me to really want to to open up the development to more
14908 people.  But before I did this, I want to come up with a sensible name
14909 for this project.  Today I finally decided on a new name, and I have
14910 renamed the project from hw-support-handler to this new name.  In the
14911 process, I moved the source to git and made it available as a
14912 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/isenkram.git">collab-maint</a>
14913 repository in Debian.  The new name?  It is <strong>Isenkram</strong>.
14914 To fetch and build the latest version of the source, use</p>
14915
14916 <pre>
14917 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/collab-maint/isenkram.git
14918 cd isenkram && git-buildpackage -us -uc
14919 </pre>
14920
14921 <p>I have not yet adjusted all files to use the new name yet.  If you
14922 want to hack on the source or improve the package, please go ahead.
14923 But please talk to me first on IRC or via email before you do major
14924 changes, to make sure we do not step on each others toes. :)</p>
14925
14926 <p>If you wonder what 'isenkram' is, it is a Norwegian word for iron
14927 stuff, typically meaning tools, nails, screws, etc.  Typical hardware
14928 stuff, in other words.  I've been told it is the Norwegian variant of
14929 the German word eisenkram, for those that are familiar with that
14930 word.</p>
14931
14932 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-26</strong>: Added -us -us to build
14933 instructions, to avoid confusing people with an error from the signing
14934 process.</p>
14935
14936 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-27</strong>: Switch to HTTP URL for the git
14937 clone argument to avoid the need for authentication.</p>
14938
14939       </div>
14940       <div class="tags">
14941
14942
14943         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
14944
14945
14946       </div>
14947     </div>
14948     <div class="padding"></div>
14949
14950     <div class="entry">
14951       <div class="title">
14952         <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>
14953       </div>
14954       <div class="date">
14955         21st January 2013
14956       </div>
14957       <div class="body">
14958         <p>Early this month I set out to try to
14959 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">improve
14960 the Debian support for pluggable hardware devices</a>.  Now my
14961 prototype is working, and it is ready for a larger audience.  To test
14962 it, fetch the
14963 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">source
14964 from the Debian Edu subversion repository</a>, build and install the
14965 package.  You might have to log out and in again activate the
14966 autostart script.</p>
14967
14968 <p>The design is simple:</p>
14969
14970 <ul>
14971
14972 <li>Add desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ causing a program
14973 hw-support-handlerd to start when the user log in.</li>
14974
14975 <li>This program listen for kernel events about new hardware (directly
14976 from the kernel like udev does), not using HAL dbus events as I
14977 initially did.</li>
14978
14979 <li>When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware modalias in
14980 the APT database, a database
14981 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=markup">available
14982 via HTTP</a> and a database available as part of the package.</li>
14983
14984 <li>If a package is mapped to the hardware in question, the package
14985 isn't installed yet and this is the first time the hardware was
14986 plugged in, show a desktop notification suggesting to install the
14987 package or packages.</li>
14988
14989 <li>If the user click on the 'install package now' button, ask
14990 aptdaemon via the PackageKit API to install the requrired package.</li>
14991
14992 <li>aptdaemon ask for root password or sudo password, and install the
14993 package while showing progress information in a window.</li>
14994
14995 </ul>
14996
14997 <p>I still need to come up with a better name for the system.  Here
14998 are some screen shots showing the prototype in action.  First the
14999 notification, then the password request, and finally the request to
15000 approve all the dependencies.  Sorry for the Norwegian Bokmål GUI.</p>
15001
15002 <p><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-1-notification.png">
15003 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-2-password.png">
15004 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-3-dependencies.png">
15005 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-4-installing.png">
15006 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-5-installing-details.png" width="70%"></p>
15007
15008 <p>The prototype still need to be improved with longer timeouts, but
15009 is already useful.  The database of hardware to package mappings also
15010 need more work.  It is currently compatible with the Ubuntu way of
15011 storing such information in the package control file, but could be
15012 changed to use other formats instead or in addition to the current
15013 method.  I've dropped the use of discover for this mapping, as the
15014 modalias approach is more flexible and easier to use on Linux as long
15015 as the Linux kernel expose its modalias strings directly.</p>
15016
15017 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-21 16:50</strong>: Due to popular demand,
15018 here is the command required to check out and build the source: Use
15019 '<tt>svn checkout
15020 svn://svn.debian.org/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/; cd
15021 hw-support-handler; debuild</tt>'.  If you lack debuild, install the
15022 devscripts package.</p>
15023
15024 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-23 12:00</strong>: The project is now
15025 renamed to Isenkram and the source moved from the Debian Edu
15026 subversion repository to a Debian collab-maint git repository.  See
15027 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html">build
15028 instructions</a> for details.</p>
15029
15030       </div>
15031       <div class="tags">
15032
15033
15034         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
15035
15036
15037       </div>
15038     </div>
15039     <div class="padding"></div>
15040
15041     <div class="entry">
15042       <div class="title">
15043         <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>
15044       </div>
15045       <div class="date">
15046         19th January 2013
15047       </div>
15048       <div class="body">
15049         <p>This Christmas my trusty old laptop died.  It died quietly and
15050 suddenly in bed.  With a quiet whimper, it went completely quiet and
15051 black.  The power button was no longer able to turn it on.  It was a
15052 IBM Thinkpad X41, and the best laptop I ever had.  Better than both
15053 Thinkpads X30, X31, X40, X60, X61 and X61S.  Far better than the
15054 Compaq I had before that.  Now I need to find a replacement.  To keep
15055 going during Christmas, I moved the one year old SSD disk to my old
15056 X40 where it fitted (only one I had left that could use it), but it is
15057 not a durable solution.
15058
15059 <p>My laptop needs are fairly modest.  This is my wishlist from when I
15060 got a new one more than 10 years ago.  It still holds true.:)</p>
15061
15062 <ul>
15063
15064 <li>Lightweight (around 1 kg) and small volume (preferably smaller
15065   than A4).</li>
15066 <li>Robust, it will be in my backpack every day.</li>
15067 <li>Three button mouse and a mouse pin instead of touch pad.</li>
15068 <li>Long battery life time.  Preferable a week.</li>
15069 <li>Internal WIFI network card.</li>
15070 <li>Internal Twisted Pair network card.</li>
15071 <li>Some USB slots (2-3 is plenty)</li>
15072 <li>Good keyboard - similar to the Thinkpad.</li>
15073 <li>Video resolution at least 1024x768, with size around 12" (A4 paper
15074 size).</li>
15075 <li>Hardware supported by Debian Stable, ie the default kernel and
15076   X.org packages.</li>
15077 <li>Quiet, preferably fan free (or at least not using the fan most of
15078   the time).
15079
15080 </ul>
15081
15082 <p>You will notice that there are no RAM and CPU requirements in the
15083 list.  The reason is simply that the specifications on laptops the
15084 last 10-15 years have been sufficient for my needs, and I have to look
15085 at other features to choose my laptop.  But are there still made as
15086 robust laptops as my X41?  The Thinkpad X60/X61 proved to be less
15087 robust, and Thinkpads seem to be heading in the wrong direction since
15088 Lenovo took over.  But I've been told that X220 and X1 Carbon might
15089 still be useful.</p>
15090
15091 <p>Perhaps I should rethink my needs, and look for a pad with an
15092 external keyboard?  I'll have to check the
15093 <a href="http://www.linux-laptop.net/">Linux Laptops site</a> for
15094 well-supported laptops, or perhaps just buy one preinstalled from one
15095 of the vendors listed on the <a href="http://linuxpreloaded.com/">Linux
15096 Pre-loaded site</a>.</p>
15097
15098       </div>
15099       <div class="tags">
15100
15101
15102         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>.
15103
15104
15105       </div>
15106     </div>
15107     <div class="padding"></div>
15108
15109     <div class="entry">
15110       <div class="title">
15111         <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>
15112       </div>
15113       <div class="date">
15114         18th January 2013
15115       </div>
15116       <div class="body">
15117         <p>Some times I try to figure out which Iceweasel browser plugin to
15118 install to get support for a given MIME type.  Thanks to
15119 <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MozillaTeam/Plugins">specifications
15120 done by Ubuntu</a> and Mozilla, it is possible to do this in Debian.
15121 Unfortunately, not very many packages provide the needed meta
15122 information, Anyway, here is a small script to look up all browser
15123 plugin packages announcing ther MIME support using this specification:</p>
15124
15125 <pre>
15126 #!/usr/bin/python
15127 import sys
15128 import apt
15129 def pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
15130     cache = apt.Cache()
15131     cache.open(None)
15132     thepkgs = []
15133     for pkg in cache:
15134         version = pkg.candidate
15135         if version is None:
15136             version = pkg.installed
15137         if version is None:
15138             continue
15139         record = version.record
15140         if not record.has_key('Npp-MimeType'):
15141             continue
15142         mime_types = record['Npp-MimeType'].split(',')
15143         for t in mime_types:
15144             t = t.rstrip().strip()
15145             if t == mimetype:
15146                 thepkgs.append(pkg.name)
15147     return thepkgs
15148 mimetype = "audio/ogg"
15149 if 1 < len(sys.argv):
15150     mimetype = sys.argv[1]
15151 print "Browser plugin packages supporting %s:" % mimetype
15152 for pkg in pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
15153     print "  %s" %pkg
15154 </pre>
15155
15156 <p>It can be used like this to look up a given MIME type:</p>
15157
15158 <pre>
15159 % ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype
15160 Browser plugin packages supporting audio/ogg:
15161   gecko-mediaplayer
15162 % ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype application/x-shockwave-flash
15163 Browser plugin packages supporting application/x-shockwave-flash:
15164   browser-plugin-gnash
15165 %
15166 </pre>
15167
15168 <p>In Ubuntu this mechanism is combined with support in the browser
15169 itself to query for plugins and propose to install the needed
15170 packages.  It would be great if Debian supported such feature too.  Is
15171 anyone working on adding it?</p>
15172
15173 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-18 14:20</strong>: The Debian BTS
15174 request for icweasel support for this feature is
15175 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/484010">#484010</a> from 2008 (and
15176 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/698426">#698426</a> from today).  Lack
15177 of manpower and wish for a different design is the reason thus feature
15178 is not yet in iceweasel from Debian.</p>
15179
15180       </div>
15181       <div class="tags">
15182
15183
15184         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>.
15185
15186
15187       </div>
15188     </div>
15189     <div class="padding"></div>
15190
15191     <div class="entry">
15192       <div class="title">
15193         <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>
15194       </div>
15195       <div class="date">
15196         16th January 2013
15197       </div>
15198       <div class="body">
15199         <p>The <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/AppStreamDebianProposal">DEP-11
15200 proposal to add AppStream information to the Debian archive</a>, is a
15201 proposal to make it possible for a Desktop application to propose to
15202 the user some package to install to gain support for a given MIME
15203 type, font, library etc. that is currently missing.  With such
15204 mechanism in place, it would be possible for the desktop to
15205 automatically propose and install leocad if some LDraw file is
15206 downloaded by the browser.</p>
15207
15208 <p>To get some idea about the current content of the archive, I decided
15209 to write a simple program to extract all .desktop files from the
15210 Debian archive and look up the claimed MIME support there.  The result
15211 can be found on the
15212 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/pub/AppStreamTest">Skolelinux FTP
15213 site</a>.  Using the collected information, it become possible to
15214 answer the question in the title.  Here are the 20 most supported MIME
15215 types in Debian stable (Squeeze), testing (Wheezy) and unstable (Sid).
15216 The complete list is available from the link above.</p>
15217
15218 <p><strong>Debian Stable:</strong></p>
15219
15220 <pre>
15221   count MIME type
15222   ----- -----------------------
15223      32 text/plain
15224      30 audio/mpeg
15225      29 image/png
15226      28 image/jpeg
15227      27 application/ogg
15228      26 audio/x-mp3
15229      25 image/tiff
15230      25 image/gif
15231      22 image/bmp
15232      22 audio/x-wav
15233      20 audio/x-flac
15234      19 audio/x-mpegurl
15235      18 video/x-ms-asf
15236      18 audio/x-musepack
15237      18 audio/x-mpeg
15238      18 application/x-ogg
15239      17 video/mpeg
15240      17 audio/x-scpls
15241      17 audio/ogg
15242      16 video/x-ms-wmv
15243 </pre>
15244
15245 <p><strong>Debian Testing:</strong></p>
15246
15247 <pre>
15248   count MIME type
15249   ----- -----------------------
15250      33 text/plain
15251      32 image/png
15252      32 image/jpeg
15253      29 audio/mpeg
15254      27 image/gif
15255      26 image/tiff
15256      26 application/ogg
15257      25 audio/x-mp3
15258      22 image/bmp
15259      21 audio/x-wav
15260      19 audio/x-mpegurl
15261      19 audio/x-mpeg
15262      18 video/mpeg
15263      18 audio/x-scpls
15264      18 audio/x-flac
15265      18 application/x-ogg
15266      17 video/x-ms-asf
15267      17 text/html
15268      17 audio/x-musepack
15269      16 image/x-xbitmap
15270 </pre>
15271
15272 <p><strong>Debian Unstable:</strong></p>
15273
15274 <pre>
15275   count MIME type
15276   ----- -----------------------
15277      31 text/plain
15278      31 image/png
15279      31 image/jpeg
15280      29 audio/mpeg
15281      28 application/ogg
15282      27 image/gif
15283      26 image/tiff
15284      26 audio/x-mp3
15285      23 audio/x-wav
15286      22 image/bmp
15287      21 audio/x-flac
15288      20 audio/x-mpegurl
15289      19 audio/x-mpeg
15290      18 video/x-ms-asf
15291      18 video/mpeg
15292      18 audio/x-scpls
15293      18 application/x-ogg
15294      17 audio/x-musepack
15295      16 video/x-ms-wmv
15296      16 video/x-msvideo
15297 </pre>
15298
15299 <p>I am told that PackageKit can provide an API to access the kind of
15300 information mentioned in DEP-11.  I have not yet had time to look at
15301 it, but hope the PackageKit people in Debian are on top of these
15302 issues.</p>
15303
15304 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-16 13:35</strong>: Updated numbers after
15305 discovering a typo in my script.</p>
15306
15307       </div>
15308       <div class="tags">
15309
15310
15311         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>.
15312
15313
15314       </div>
15315     </div>
15316     <div class="padding"></div>
15317
15318     <div class="entry">
15319       <div class="title">
15320         <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>
15321       </div>
15322       <div class="date">
15323         15th January 2013
15324       </div>
15325       <div class="body">
15326         <p>Yesterday, I wrote about the
15327 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Modalias_strings___a_practical_way_to_map__stuff__to_hardware.html">modalias
15328 values provided by the Linux kernel</a> following my hope for
15329 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">better
15330 dongle support in Debian</a>.  Using this knowledge, I have tested how
15331 modalias values attached to package names can be used to map packages
15332 to hardware.  This allow the system to look up and suggest relevant
15333 packages when I plug in some new hardware into my machine, and replace
15334 discover and discover-data as the database used to map hardware to
15335 packages.</p>
15336
15337 <p>I create a modaliases file with entries like the following,
15338 containing package name, kernel module name (if relevant, otherwise
15339 the package name) and globs matching the relevant hardware
15340 modalias.</p>
15341
15342 <p><blockquote>
15343 Package: package-name
15344 <br>Modaliases: module(modaliasglob, modaliasglob, modaliasglob)</p>
15345 </blockquote></p>
15346
15347 <p>It is fairly trivial to write code to find the relevant packages
15348 for a given modalias value using this file.</p>
15349
15350 <p>An entry like this would suggest the video and picture application
15351 cheese for many USB web cameras (interface bus class 0E01):</p>
15352
15353 <p><blockquote>
15354 Package: cheese
15355 <br>Modaliases: cheese(usb:v*p*d*dc*dsc*dp*ic0Eisc01ip*)</p>
15356 </blockquote></p>
15357
15358 <p>An entry like this would suggest the pcmciautils package when a
15359 CardBus bridge (bus class 0607) PCI device is present:</p>
15360
15361 <p><blockquote>
15362 Package: pcmciautils
15363 <br>Modaliases: pcmciautils(pci:v*d*sv*sd*bc06sc07i*)
15364 </blockquote></p>
15365
15366 <p>An entry like this would suggest the package colorhug-client when
15367 plugging in a ColorHug with USB IDs 04D8:F8DA:</p>
15368
15369 <p><blockquote>
15370 Package: colorhug-client
15371 <br>Modaliases: colorhug-client(usb:v04D8pF8DAd*)</p>
15372 </blockquote></p>
15373
15374 <p>I believe the format is compatible with the format of the Packages
15375 file in the Debian archive.  Ubuntu already uses their Packages file
15376 to store their mappings from packages to hardware.</p>
15377
15378 <p>By adding a XB-Modaliases: header in debian/control, any .deb can
15379 announce the hardware it support in a way my prototype understand.
15380 This allow those publishing packages in an APT source outside the
15381 Debian archive as well as those backporting packages to make sure the
15382 hardware mapping are included in the package meta information.  I've
15383 tested such header in the pymissile package, and its modalias mapping
15384 is working as it should with my prototype.  It even made it to Ubuntu
15385 Raring.</p>
15386
15387 <p>To test if it was possible to look up supported hardware using only
15388 the shell tools available in the Debian installer, I wrote a shell
15389 implementation of the lookup code.  The idea is to create files for
15390 each modalias and let the shell do the matching.  Please check out and
15391 try the
15392 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/hw-support-lookup?view=co">hw-support-lookup</a>
15393 shell script.  It run without any extra dependencies and fetch the
15394 hardware mappings from the Debian archive and the subversion
15395 repository where I currently work on my prototype.</p>
15396
15397 <p>When I use it on a machine with a yubikey inserted, it suggest to
15398 install yubikey-personalization:</p>
15399
15400 <p><blockquote>
15401 % ./hw-support-lookup
15402 <br>yubikey-personalization
15403 <br>%
15404 </blockquote></p>
15405
15406 <p>When I run it on my Thinkpad X40 with a PCMCIA/CardBus slot, it
15407 propose to install the pcmciautils package:</p>
15408
15409 <p><blockquote>
15410 % ./hw-support-lookup
15411 <br>pcmciautils
15412 <br>%
15413 </blockquote></p>
15414
15415 <p>If you know of any hardware-package mapping that should be added to
15416 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=co">my
15417 database</a>, please tell me about it.</p>
15418
15419 <p>It could be possible to generate several of the mappings between
15420 packages and hardware.  One source would be to look at packages with
15421 kernel modules, ie packages with *.ko files in /lib/modules/, and
15422 extract their modalias information.  Another would be to look at
15423 packages with udev rules, ie packages with files in
15424 /lib/udev/rules.d/, and extract their vendor/model information to
15425 generate a modalias matching rule.  I have not tested any of these to
15426 see if it work.</p>
15427
15428 <p>If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
15429 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
15430 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
15431 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-devel">#debian-devel</a>.</p>
15432
15433       </div>
15434       <div class="tags">
15435
15436
15437         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
15438
15439
15440       </div>
15441     </div>
15442     <div class="padding"></div>
15443
15444     <div class="entry">
15445       <div class="title">
15446         <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>
15447       </div>
15448       <div class="date">
15449         14th January 2013
15450       </div>
15451       <div class="body">
15452         <p>While looking into how to look up Debian packages based on hardware
15453 information, to find the packages that support a given piece of
15454 hardware, I refreshed my memory regarding modalias values, and decided
15455 to document the details.  Here are my findings so far, also available
15456 in
15457 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">the
15458 Debian Edu subversion repository</a>:
15459
15460 <p><strong>Modalias decoded</strong></p>
15461
15462 <p>This document try to explain what the different types of modalias
15463 values stands for.  It is in part based on information from
15464 &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias">https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias</a> &gt;,
15465 &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;,
15466 &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
15467 &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;.
15468
15469 <p>The modalias entries for a given Linux machine can be found using
15470 this shell script:</p>
15471
15472 <pre>
15473 find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -0 cat | sort -u
15474 </pre>
15475
15476 <p>The supported modalias globs for a given kernel module can be found
15477 using modinfo:</p>
15478
15479 <pre>
15480 % /sbin/modinfo psmouse | grep alias:
15481 alias:          serio:ty05pr*id*ex*
15482 alias:          serio:ty01pr*id*ex*
15483 %
15484 </pre>
15485
15486 <p><strong>PCI subtype</strong></p>
15487
15488 <p>A typical PCI entry can look like this.  This is an Intel Host
15489 Bridge memory controller:</p>
15490
15491 <p><blockquote>
15492 pci:v00008086d00002770sv00001028sd000001ADbc06sc00i00
15493 </blockquote></p>
15494
15495 <p>This represent these values:</p>
15496
15497 <pre>
15498  v   00008086  (vendor)
15499  d   00002770  (device)
15500  sv  00001028  (subvendor)
15501  sd  000001AD  (subdevice)
15502  bc  06        (bus class)
15503  sc  00        (bus subclass)
15504  i   00        (interface)
15505 </pre>
15506
15507 <p>The vendor/device values are the same values outputted from 'lspci
15508 -n' as 8086:2770.  The bus class/subclass is also shown by lspci as
15509 0600.  The 0600 class is a host bridge.  Other useful bus values are
15510 0300 (VGA compatible card) and 0200 (Ethernet controller).</p>
15511
15512 <p>Not sure how to figure out the interface value, nor what it
15513 means.</p>
15514
15515 <p><strong>USB subtype</strong></p>
15516
15517 <p>Some typical USB entries can look like this.  This is an internal
15518 USB hub in a laptop:</p>
15519
15520 <p><blockquote>
15521 usb:v1D6Bp0001d0206dc09dsc00dp00ic09isc00ip00
15522 </blockquote></p>
15523
15524 <p>Here is the values included in this alias:</p>
15525
15526 <pre>
15527  v    1D6B  (device vendor)
15528  p    0001  (device product)
15529  d    0206  (bcddevice)
15530  dc     09  (device class)
15531  dsc    00  (device subclass)
15532  dp     00  (device protocol)
15533  ic     09  (interface class)
15534  isc    00  (interface subclass)
15535  ip     00  (interface protocol)
15536 </pre>
15537
15538 <p>The 0900 device class/subclass means hub.  Some times the relevant
15539 class is in the interface class section.  For a simple USB web camera,
15540 these alias entries show up:</p>
15541
15542 <p><blockquote>
15543 usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc01ip00
15544 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc02ip00
15545 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc01ip00
15546 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc02ip00
15547 </blockquote></p>
15548
15549 <p>Interface class 0E01 is video control, 0E02 is video streaming (aka
15550 camera), 0101 is audio control device and 0102 is audio streaming (aka
15551 microphone).  Thus this is a camera with microphone included.</p>
15552
15553 <p><strong>ACPI subtype</strong></p>
15554
15555 <p>The ACPI type is used for several non-PCI/USB stuff.  This is an IR
15556 receiver in a Thinkpad X40:</p>
15557
15558 <p><blockquote>
15559 acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
15560 </blockquote></p>
15561
15562 <p>The values between the colons are IDs.</p>
15563
15564 <p><strong>DMI subtype</strong></p>
15565
15566 <p>The DMI table contain lots of information about the computer case
15567 and model.  This is an entry for a IBM Thinkpad X40, fetched from
15568 /sys/devices/virtual/dmi/id/modalias:</p>
15569
15570 <p><blockquote>
15571 dmi:bvnIBM:bvr1UETB6WW(1.66):bd06/15/2005:svnIBM:pn2371H4G:pvrThinkPadX40:rvnIBM:rn2371H4G:rvrNotAvailable:cvnIBM:ct10:cvrNotAvailable:
15572 </blockquote></p>
15573
15574 <p>The values present are</p>
15575
15576 <pre>
15577  bvn  IBM            (BIOS vendor)
15578  bvr  1UETB6WW(1.66) (BIOS version)
15579  bd   06/15/2005     (BIOS date)
15580  svn  IBM            (system vendor)
15581  pn   2371H4G        (product name)
15582  pvr  ThinkPadX40    (product version)
15583  rvn  IBM            (board vendor)
15584  rn   2371H4G        (board name)
15585  rvr  NotAvailable   (board version)
15586  cvn  IBM            (chassis vendor)
15587  ct   10             (chassis type)
15588  cvr  NotAvailable   (chassis version)
15589 </pre>
15590
15591 <p>The chassis type 10 is Notebook.  Other interesting values can be
15592 found in the dmidecode source:</p>
15593
15594 <pre>
15595   3 Desktop
15596   4 Low Profile Desktop
15597   5 Pizza Box
15598   6 Mini Tower
15599   7 Tower
15600   8 Portable
15601   9 Laptop
15602  10 Notebook
15603  11 Hand Held
15604  12 Docking Station
15605  13 All In One
15606  14 Sub Notebook
15607  15 Space-saving
15608  16 Lunch Box
15609  17 Main Server Chassis
15610  18 Expansion Chassis
15611  19 Sub Chassis
15612  20 Bus Expansion Chassis
15613  21 Peripheral Chassis
15614  22 RAID Chassis
15615  23 Rack Mount Chassis
15616  24 Sealed-case PC
15617  25 Multi-system
15618  26 CompactPCI
15619  27 AdvancedTCA
15620  28 Blade
15621  29 Blade Enclosing
15622 </pre>
15623
15624 <p>The chassis type values are not always accurately set in the DMI
15625 table.  For example my home server is a tower, but the DMI modalias
15626 claim it is a desktop.</p>
15627
15628 <p><strong>SerIO subtype</strong></p>
15629
15630 <p>This type is used for PS/2 mouse plugs.  One example is from my
15631 test machine:</p>
15632
15633 <p><blockquote>
15634 serio:ty01pr00id00ex00
15635 </blockquote></p>
15636
15637 <p>The values present are</p>
15638
15639 <pre>
15640   ty  01  (type)
15641   pr  00  (prototype)
15642   id  00  (id)
15643   ex  00  (extra)
15644 </pre>
15645
15646 <p>This type is supported by the psmouse driver.  I am not sure what
15647 the valid values are.</p>
15648
15649 <p><strong>Other subtypes</strong></p>
15650
15651 <p>There are heaps of other modalias subtypes according to
15652 file2alias.c.  There is the rest of the list from that source: amba,
15653 ap, bcma, ccw, css, eisa, hid, i2c, ieee1394, input, ipack, isapnp,
15654 mdio, of, parisc, pcmcia, platform, scsi, sdio, spi, ssb, vio, virtio,
15655 vmbus, x86cpu and zorro.  I did not spend time documenting all of
15656 these, as they do not seem relevant for my intended use with mapping
15657 hardware to packages when new stuff is inserted during run time.</p>
15658
15659 <p><strong>Looking up kernel modules using modalias values</strong></p>
15660
15661 <p>To check which kernel modules provide support for a given modalias,
15662 one can use the following shell script:</p>
15663
15664 <pre>
15665   for id in $(find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -0 cat | sort -u); do \
15666     echo "$id" ; \
15667     /sbin/modprobe --show-depends "$id"|sed 's/^/  /' ; \
15668   done
15669 </pre>
15670
15671 <p>The output can look like this (only the first few entries as the
15672 list is very long on my test machine):</p>
15673
15674 <pre>
15675   acpi:ACPI0003:
15676     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/acpi/ac.ko
15677   acpi:device:
15678   FATAL: Module acpi:device: not found.
15679   acpi:IBM0068:
15680     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/char/nvram.ko
15681     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/leds/led-class.ko
15682     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/net/rfkill/rfkill.ko
15683     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/platform/x86/thinkpad_acpi.ko
15684   acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
15685     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/lib/crc-ccitt.ko
15686     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/net/irda/irda.ko
15687     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/net/irda/nsc-ircc.ko
15688   [...]
15689 </pre>
15690
15691 <p>If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
15692 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
15693 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
15694 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-devel">#debian-devel</a>.</p>
15695
15696 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-15:</strong> Rewrite "cat $(find ...)" to
15697 "find ... -print0 | xargs -0 cat" to make sure it handle directories
15698 in /sys/ with space in them.</p>
15699
15700       </div>
15701       <div class="tags">
15702
15703
15704         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
15705
15706
15707       </div>
15708     </div>
15709     <div class="padding"></div>
15710
15711     <div class="entry">
15712       <div class="title">
15713         <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>
15714       </div>
15715       <div class="date">
15716         10th January 2013
15717       </div>
15718       <div class="body">
15719         <p>As part of my investigation on how to improve the support in Debian
15720 for hardware dongles, I dug up my old Mark and Spencer USB Rocket
15721 Launcher and updated the Debian package
15722 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pymissile">pymissile</a> to make
15723 sure udev will fix the device permissions when it is plugged in.  I
15724 also added a "Modaliases" header to test it in the Debian archive and
15725 hopefully make the package be proposed by jockey in Ubuntu when a user
15726 plug in his rocket launcher.  In the process I moved the source to a
15727 git repository under collab-maint, to make it easier for any DD to
15728 contribute.  <a href="http://code.google.com/p/pymissile/">Upstream</a>
15729 is not very active, but the software still work for me even after five
15730 years of relative silence.  The new git repository is not listed in
15731 the uploaded package yet, because I want to test the other changes a
15732 bit more before I upload the new version.  If you want to check out
15733 the new version with a .desktop file included, visit the
15734 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/pymissile.git">gitweb
15735 view</a> or use "<tt>git clone
15736 git://anonscm.debian.org/collab-maint/pymissile.git</tt>".</p>
15737
15738       </div>
15739       <div class="tags">
15740
15741
15742         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
15743
15744
15745       </div>
15746     </div>
15747     <div class="padding"></div>
15748
15749     <div class="entry">
15750       <div class="title">
15751         <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>
15752       </div>
15753       <div class="date">
15754          9th January 2013
15755       </div>
15756       <div class="body">
15757         <p>One thing that annoys me with Debian and Linux distributions in
15758 general, is that there is a great package management system with the
15759 ability to automatically install software packages by downloading them
15760 from the distribution mirrors, but no way to get it to automatically
15761 install the packages I need to use the hardware I plug into my
15762 machine.  Even if the package to use it is easily available from the
15763 Linux distribution.  When I plug in a LEGO Mindstorms NXT, it could
15764 suggest to automatically install the python-nxt, nbc and t2n packages
15765 I need to talk to it.  When I plug in a Yubikey, it could propose the
15766 yubikey-personalization package.  The information required to do this
15767 is available, but no-one have pulled all the pieces together.</p>
15768
15769 <p>Some years ago, I proposed to
15770 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg01206.html">use
15771 the discover subsystem to implement this</a>.  The idea is fairly
15772 simple:
15773
15774 <ul>
15775
15776 <li>Add a desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ pointing to a program
15777   starting when a user log in.</li>
15778
15779 <li>Set this program up to listen for kernel events emitted when new
15780   hardware is inserted into the computer.</li>
15781
15782 <li>When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware ID in a
15783   database mapping to packages, and take note of any non-installed
15784   packages.</li>
15785
15786 <li>Show a message to the user proposing to install the discovered
15787   package, and make it easy to install it.</li>
15788
15789 </ul>
15790
15791 <p>I am not sure what the best way to implement this is, but my
15792 initial idea was to use dbus events to discover new hardware, the
15793 discover database to find packages and
15794 <a href="http://www.packagekit.org/">PackageKit</a> to install
15795 packages.</p>
15796
15797 <p>Yesterday, I found time to try to implement this idea, and the
15798 draft package is now checked into
15799 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">the
15800 Debian Edu subversion repository</a>.  In the process, I updated the
15801 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover-data.html">discover-data</a>
15802 package to map the USB ids of LEGO Mindstorms and Yubikey devices to
15803 the relevant packages in Debian, and uploaded a new version
15804 2.2013.01.09 to unstable.  I also discovered that the current
15805 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover.html">discover</a>
15806 package in Debian no longer discovered any USB devices, because
15807 /proc/bus/usb/devices is no longer present.  I ported it to use
15808 libusb as a fall back option to get it working.  The fixed package
15809 version 2.1.2-6 is now in experimental (didn't upload it to unstable
15810 because of the freeze).</p>
15811
15812 <p>With this prototype in place, I can insert my Yubikey, and get this
15813 desktop notification to show up (only once, the first time it is
15814 inserted):</p>
15815
15816 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-09-hw-autoinstall.png"></p>
15817
15818 <p>For this prototype to be really useful, some way to automatically
15819 install the proposed packages by pressing the "Please install
15820 program(s)" button should to be implemented.</p>
15821
15822 <p>If this idea seem useful to you, and you want to help make it
15823 happen, please help me update the discover-data database with mappings
15824 from hardware to Debian packages.  Check if 'discover-pkginstall -l'
15825 list the package you would like to have installed when a given
15826 hardware device is inserted into your computer, and report bugs using
15827 reportbug if it isn't.  Or, if you know of a better way to provide
15828 such mapping, please let me know.</p>
15829
15830 <p>This prototype need more work, and there are several questions that
15831 should be considered before it is ready for production use.  Is dbus
15832 the correct way to detect new hardware?  At the moment I look for HAL
15833 dbus events on the system bus, because that is the events I could see
15834 on my Debian Squeeze KDE desktop.  Are there better events to use?
15835 How should the user be notified?  Is the desktop notification
15836 mechanism the best option, or should the background daemon raise a
15837 popup instead?  How should packages be installed?  When should they
15838 not be installed?</p>
15839
15840 <p>If you want to help getting such feature implemented in Debian,
15841 please send me an email. :)</p>
15842
15843       </div>
15844       <div class="tags">
15845
15846
15847         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
15848
15849
15850       </div>
15851     </div>
15852     <div class="padding"></div>
15853
15854     <div class="entry">
15855       <div class="title">
15856         <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>
15857       </div>
15858       <div class="date">
15859          2nd January 2013
15860       </div>
15861       <div class="body">
15862         <p>During Christmas, I have worked a bit on the Debian support for
15863 <a href="http://mindstorms.lego.com/en-us/Default.aspx">LEGO Mindstorm
15864 NXT</a>.  My son and I have played a bit with my NXT set, and I
15865 discovered I had to build all the tools myself because none were
15866 already in Debian Squeeze.  If Debian support for LEGO is something
15867 you care about, please join me on the IRC channel
15868 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">#debian-lego</a> (server
15869 irc.debian.org).  There is a lot that could be done to improve the
15870 Debian support for LEGO designers.  For example both CAD software
15871 and Mindstorm compilers are missing. :)</p>
15872
15873 <p>Update 2012-01-03: A
15874 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">project page</a>
15875 including links to Lego related packages is now available.</p>
15876
15877       </div>
15878       <div class="tags">
15879
15880
15881         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>.
15882
15883
15884       </div>
15885     </div>
15886     <div class="padding"></div>
15887
15888     <div class="entry">
15889       <div class="title">
15890         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Christmas_present_for_Skolelinux___Debian_Edu.html">A Christmas present for Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a>
15891       </div>
15892       <div class="date">
15893         28th December 2012
15894       </div>
15895       <div class="body">
15896         <p>I was happy to discover a few days ago that the
15897 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a>
15898 project also this year received a Christmas present from Another
15899 Agency in Trondheim.  NOK 1000,- showed up on our donation account
15900 December 24th.  I want to express our thanks for this very welcome
15901 present.  As the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project is very short on
15902 funding these days, and thus lack the money to do regular developer
15903 gatherings, this donation was most welcome.  One developer gathering
15904 cost around NOK 15&nbsp;000,-, so we need quite a lot more to keep the
15905 development pace we want.  Thus, I hope their example this year is
15906 followed by many others. :)</p>
15907
15908 <p>The public list of donors can be found on
15909 <a href="http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">the
15910 donation page</a> for the project, which also contain instructions if
15911 you want to donate to the project.</p>
15912
15913       </div>
15914       <div class="tags">
15915
15916
15917         Tags: <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>.
15918
15919
15920       </div>
15921     </div>
15922     <div class="padding"></div>
15923
15924     <div class="entry">
15925       <div class="title">
15926         <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>
15927       </div>
15928       <div class="date">
15929         25th December 2012
15930       </div>
15931       <div class="body">
15932         <p>Let me start by wishing you all marry Christmas and a happy new
15933 year!  I hope next year will prove to be a good year.</p>
15934
15935 <p><a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">Bitcoin</a>, the digital
15936 decentralised "currency" that allow people to transfer bitcoins
15937 between each other with minimal overhead, is a very interesting
15938 experiment.  And as I wrote a few days ago, the bitcoin situation in
15939 <a href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> is about to improve a bit.
15940 The <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">new debian source
15941 package</a> (version 0.7.2-2) was uploaded yesterday, and is waiting
15942 in <a href="http://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html">the NEW queue</A>
15943 for one of the ftpmasters to approve the new bitcoin-qt package
15944 name.</p>
15945
15946 <p>And thanks to the great work of Jonas and the rest of the bitcoin
15947 team in Debian, you can easily test the package in Debian Squeeze
15948 using the following steps to get a set of working packages:</p>
15949
15950 <blockquote><pre>
15951 git clone git://git.debian.org/git/collab-maint/bitcoin
15952 cd bitcoin
15953 DEB_MAINTAINER_MODE=1 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp fakeroot debian/rules clean
15954 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp git-buildpackage --git-ignore-new
15955 </pre></blockquote>
15956
15957 <p>You might have to install some build dependencies as well.  The
15958 list of commands should give you two packages, bitcoind and
15959 bitcoin-qt, ready for use in a Squeeze environment.  Note that the
15960 client will download the complete set of bitcoin "blocks", which need
15961 around 5.6 GiB of data on my machine at the moment.  Make sure your
15962 ~/.bitcoin/ directory have lots of spare room if you want to download
15963 all the blocks.  The client will warn if the disk is getting full, so
15964 there is not really a problem if you got too little room, but you will
15965 not be able to get all the features out of the client.</p>
15966
15967 <p>As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
15968 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
15969 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
15970
15971       </div>
15972       <div class="tags">
15973
15974
15975         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>.
15976
15977
15978       </div>
15979     </div>
15980     <div class="padding"></div>
15981
15982     <div class="entry">
15983       <div class="title">
15984         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_word_on_bitcoin_support_in_Debian.html">A word on bitcoin support in Debian</a>
15985       </div>
15986       <div class="date">
15987         21st December 2012
15988       </div>
15989       <div class="body">
15990         <p>It has been a while since I wrote about
15991 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">bitcoin</a>, the decentralised
15992 peer-to-peer based crypto-currency, and the reason is simply that I
15993 have been busy elsewhere.  But two days ago, I started looking at the
15994 state of <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">bitcoin in
15995 Debian</a> again to try to recover my old bitcoin wallet.  The package
15996 is now maintained by a
15997 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-bitcoin/">team of
15998 people</a>, and the grunt work had already been done by this team.  We
15999 owe a huge thank you to all these team members. :)
16000 But I was sad to discover that the bitcoin client is missing in
16001 Wheezy.  It is only available in Sid (and an outdated client from
16002 backports).  The client had several RC bugs registered in BTS blocking
16003 it from entering testing.  To try to help the team and improve the
16004 situation, I spent some time providing patches and triaging the bug
16005 reports.  I also had a look at the bitcoin package available from Matt
16006 Corallo in a
16007 <a href="https://launchpad.net/~bitcoin/+archive/bitcoin">PPA for
16008 Ubuntu</a>, and moved the useful pieces from that version into the
16009 Debian package.</p>
16010
16011 <p>After checking with the main package maintainer Jonas Smedegaard on
16012 IRC, I pushed several patches into the collab-maint git repository to
16013 improve the package.  It now contains fixes for the RC issues (not from
16014 me, but fixed by Scott Howard), build rules for a Qt GUI client
16015 package, konqueror support for the bitcoin: URI and bash completion
16016 setup.  As I work on Debian Squeeze, I also created
16017 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-bitcoin-devel/Week-of-Mon-20121217/000041.html">a
16018 patch to backport</a> the latest version.  Jonas is going to look at
16019 it and try to integrate it into the git repository before uploading a
16020 new version to unstable.
16021
16022 <p>I would very much like bitcoin to succeed, to get rid of the
16023 centralized control currently exercised in the monetary system.  I
16024 find it completely unacceptable that the USA government is collecting
16025 transaction data for almost all international money transfers (most are done in USD and transaction logs shipped to the spooks), and
16026 that the major credit card companies can block legal money
16027 transactions to Wikileaks.  But for bitcoin to succeed, more people
16028 need to use bitcoins, and more people need to accept bitcoins when
16029 they sell products and services.  Improving the bitcoin support in
16030 Debian is a small step in the right direction, but not enough.
16031 Unfortunately the user experience when browsing the web and wanting to
16032 pay with bitcoin is still not very good.  The bitcoin: URI is a step
16033 in the right direction, but need to work in most or every browser in
16034 use.  Also the bitcoin-qt client is too heavy to fire up to do a
16035 quick transaction.  I believe there are other clients available, but
16036 have not tested them.</p>
16037
16038 <p>My
16039 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html">experiment
16040 with bitcoins</a> showed that at least some of my readers use bitcoin.
16041 I received 20.15 BTC so far on the address I provided in my blog two
16042 years ago, as can be
16043 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">seen
16044 on the blockexplorer service</a>.  Thank you everyone for your
16045 donation.  The blockexplorer service demonstrates quite well that
16046 bitcoin is not quite anonymous and untracked. :) I wonder if the
16047 number of users have gone up since then.  If you use bitcoin and want
16048 to show your support of my activity, please send Bitcoin donations to
16049 the same address as last time,
16050 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
16051
16052       </div>
16053       <div class="tags">
16054
16055
16056         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>.
16057
16058
16059       </div>
16060     </div>
16061     <div class="padding"></div>
16062
16063     <div class="entry">
16064       <div class="title">
16065         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ledger___double_entry_accounting_using_text_based_storage_format.html">Ledger - double-entry accounting using text based storage format</a>
16066       </div>
16067       <div class="date">
16068         18th December 2012
16069       </div>
16070       <div class="body">
16071         <p>A few days ago I came across
16072 <a href="http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/hledger/">a blog post from Joey
16073 Hess</a> describing <a href="http://ledger-cli.org/">ledger</a> and
16074 hledger, a text based system for double-entry accounting.  I found it
16075 interesting, as I am involved with several organizations where
16076 accounting is an issue, and I have not really become too friendly with
16077 the different web based systems we use.  I find it hard to find what I
16078 look for in the menus and even harder try to get sensible data out of
16079 the systems.  Ledger seem different.  The accounting data is kept in
16080 text files that can be stored in a version control system, and there
16081
16082 are at least <a href="https://github.com/ledger/ledger/wiki/Ports">five
16083 different implementations</a> able to read the format.  An example
16084 entry look like this, and is simple enough that it will be trivial to
16085 generate entries based on CVS files fetched from the bank:</p>
16086
16087 <blockquote><pre>
16088 2004-05-27 Book Store
16089       Expenses:Books                 $20.00
16090       Liabilities:Visa
16091 </pre></blockquote>
16092
16093 <p>The concept seemed interesting enough for me to check it out and
16094 look for others using it.  I found blog posts from
16095 <a href="http://blog.spang.cc/posts/hledger_rocks_my_world/">Christine
16096 Spang</a>,
16097 <a href="http://bugsplat.info/2010-05-23-keeping-finances-with-ledger.html">Pete
16098 Keen</a>,
16099 <a href="http://blog.andrewcantino.com/blog/2010/11/06/command-line-accounting-with-ledger-and-reckon/">Andrew
16100 Cantino</a> and
16101 <a href="http://blog.iphoting.com/blog/2012/11/29/command-line-double-entry-accounting/">Ronald
16102 Ip</a> describing how they use it, as well as a post from
16103 <a href="https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/ledger-cli/r0oWjwbQ9Bo">Bradley
16104 M. Kuhn</a> at the Software Freedom Conservancy.  All seemed like good
16105 recommendations fitting my need.</p>
16106
16107 <p>The <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/l/ledger.html">ledger</a>
16108 package is available in Debian Squeeze, while the
16109 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/h/haskell-hledger.html">hledger</a>
16110 package only is available in Debian Sid.  As I use Squeeze, ledger
16111 seemed the best choice to get started.</p>
16112
16113 <p>To get some real data to test on, I wrote a
16114 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/tools/lodo2ledger">web scraper</a> for
16115 <a href="http://www.lodo.no/">LODO</a>, the accounting system used by
16116 the <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG</a> association, and started to
16117 play with the data set.  I'm not really deeply into accounting, but I
16118 am able to get a simple balance and accounting status for example
16119 using the "<tt>ledger balance</tt>" command.  But I will have to
16120 gather more experience before I know if the ledger way is a good fit
16121 for the organisations I am involved in.</p>
16122
16123       </div>
16124       <div class="tags">
16125
16126
16127         Tags: <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>.
16128
16129
16130       </div>
16131     </div>
16132     <div class="padding"></div>
16133
16134     <div class="entry">
16135       <div class="title">
16136         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Scripting_the_Cerebrum_bofhd_user_administration_system_using_XML_RPC.html">Scripting the Cerebrum/bofhd user administration system using XML-RPC</a>
16137       </div>
16138       <div class="date">
16139          6th December 2012
16140       </div>
16141       <div class="body">
16142         <p>Where I work at the <a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of
16143 Oslo</a>, we use the
16144 <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/cerebrum/">Cerebrum user
16145 administration system</a> to maintain users, groups, DNS, DHCP, etc.
16146 I've known since the system was written that the server is providing
16147 an <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML-RPC">XML-RPC</a> API, but
16148 I have never spent time to try to figure out how to use it, as we
16149 always use the bofh command line client at work.  Until today.  I want
16150 to script the updating of DNS and DHCP to make it easier to set up
16151 virtual machines.  Here are a few notes on how to use it with
16152 Python.</p>
16153
16154 <p>I started by looking at the source of the Java
16155 <a href="http://cerebrum.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/cerebrum/trunk/cerebrum/clients/jbofh/">bofh
16156 client</a>, to figure out how it connected to the API server.  I also
16157 googled for python examples on how to use XML-RPC, and found
16158 <a href="http://tldp.org/HOWTO/XML-RPC-HOWTO/xmlrpc-howto-python.html">a
16159 simple example in</a> the XML-RPC howto.</p>
16160
16161 <p>This simple example code show how to connect, get the list of
16162 commands (as a JSON dump), and how to get the information about the
16163 user currently logged in:</p>
16164
16165 <blockquote><pre>
16166 #!/usr/bin/env python
16167 import getpass
16168 import xmlrpclib
16169 server_url = 'https://cerebrum-uio.uio.no:8000';
16170 username = getpass.getuser()
16171 password = getpass.getpass()
16172 server = xmlrpclib.Server(server_url);
16173 #print server.get_commands(sessionid)
16174 sessionid = server.login(username, password)
16175 print server.run_command(sessionid, "user_info", username)
16176 result = server.logout(sessionid)
16177 print result
16178 </pre></blockquote>
16179
16180 <p>Armed with this knowledge I can now move forward and script the DNS
16181 and DHCP updates I wanted to do.</p>
16182
16183       </div>
16184       <div class="tags">
16185
16186
16187         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sysadmin">sysadmin</a>.
16188
16189
16190       </div>
16191     </div>
16192     <div class="padding"></div>
16193
16194     <div class="entry">
16195       <div class="title">
16196         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_isn_t_the_value_of_copyright_taxed_.html">Why isn't the value of copyright taxed?</a>
16197       </div>
16198       <div class="date">
16199         17th November 2012
16200       </div>
16201       <div class="body">
16202         <p>While working on a
16203 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">Norwegian
16204 translation of the Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig</a> (76% done),
16205 which cover the problems with todays copyright law and how it stifles
16206 creativity, one idea occurred to me.  The idea is to get the tax
16207 office to help make more works enter the public domain and also help
16208 make it easier to clear rights for using copyrighted works.</p>
16209
16210 <p>I mentioned this idea briefly during Yesterdays
16211 <a href="http://www.farmann.no/2012/11/14/john-perry-barlow-in-oslo-friday-nov-16
16212 -15-30-19-00/">presentation
16213 by John Perry Barlow</a>, and concluded that it was best to put it
16214 in writing for a wider audience.  The idea is not really based on the
16215 argument that copyrighted works are "intellectual property", as the
16216 core requirement is that copyrighted work have value for the copyright
16217 holder and the tax office like to collect their share from any value
16218 controlled by the citizens in a country.  I'm sharing the idea here to
16219 let others consider it and perhaps shoot it down with a fresh set of
16220 arguments.</p>
16221
16222 <p>Most valuables are taxed by the government.  At least here in
16223 Norway, the amount of money you have, the value of our land property,
16224 the value of your house, the value of your car, the value of our
16225 stocks and other valuables are all added together.  If the tax value
16226 of these values exceed your debt, you have to pay the tax office some
16227 taxes for these values.  And copyrighted work have value.  It have
16228 value for the rights holder, who can earn money selling access to the
16229 work.  But it is not included in the tax calculations?  Why not?</p>
16230
16231 <p>If the government want to tax copyrighted works, it would want to
16232 maintain a database of all the copyrighted works and who are the
16233 rights holders for a given works, to be able to associate the works
16234 value to the right citizen or company for tax purposes.  If such
16235 database exist, it will become a lot easier to find out who to talk to
16236 for clearing permissions to use a copyrighted work, which is a very
16237 hard operation with todays copyright law.  To ensure that copyright
16238 holders keep the database up-to-date, it would have to become a
16239 requirement to be able to collect money for granting access to
16240 copyrighted works that the work is listed in the database with the
16241 correct right holder.</p>
16242
16243 <p>If copyright causes copyright holders to have to pay more taxes,
16244 they will have a small incentive to "disown" their copyright, and let
16245 the work enter the public domain. For works with several right holders
16246 one of the right holders could state (and get it registered in the
16247 database) that she do not need to be consulted when clearing rights to
16248 use the work in question and thus will not get any income from that
16249 work.  Stating this would have to be impossible to revert and stop the
16250 tax office from adding the value of that work to the given citizens
16251 tax calculation.  I assume the copyright law would stay the same,
16252 allowing creators to pick a license of their choosing, and also
16253 allowing them to put their work directly in the public domain.  The
16254 existence of such database will make it even easier to clear rights,
16255 and if the right holders listed in the database is taxed, this system
16256 would increase the amount of works that enter the public domain.</p>
16257
16258 <p>The effect would be that the tax office help to make it easier to
16259 get rights to use the works that have not yet entered the public
16260 domain and help to get more work into the public domain and .</p>
16261
16262 <p>Why have such taxing not happened yet?  I am sure the tax office
16263 would like to tax copyrighted work values if they could.</p>
16264
16265       </div>
16266       <div class="tags">
16267
16268
16269         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>.
16270
16271
16272       </div>
16273     </div>
16274     <div class="padding"></div>
16275
16276     <div class="entry">
16277       <div class="title">
16278         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Angela_Fu_.html">Debian Edu interview: Angela Fuß</a>
16279       </div>
16280       <div class="date">
16281         14th November 2012
16282       </div>
16283       <div class="body">
16284         <p>Here is another interview with one of the people in the <a
16285 href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
16286 community.  I am running short on people willing to be interviewed, so
16287 if you know about someone I should interview, Please send me an email.
16288 After asking for many months, I finally managed to lure another one of
16289 the people behind the German
16290 "<a href="http://wiki.it-zukunft-schule.de/">IT-Zukunft Schule</a>"
16291 project out from maternity leave to conduct an interview.  Give a warm
16292 welcome to Angela Fuß. :)</p>
16293
16294 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
16295
16296 <p>I am a 39-year-old woman living in the very north of Germany near
16297 Denmark. I live in a patchwork family with "my man" Mike Gabriel, my
16298 two daughters, Mikes daughter and Mikes and my rather newborn son.
16299
16300 <p>At the moment - because of our little baby - I am spending most of
16301 the day by being a caring and organising mom for all the kids.
16302 Besides that I am really involved into and occupied with several inner
16303 growth processes: New born souls always bring the whole familiar
16304 system into movement and that needs time and focus ;-).  We are also
16305 in the middle of buying a house and moving to it.</p>
16306
16307 <p>In 2013 I will work again in my job in a German foundation for
16308 nature conservation. I am doing public relation work there.  Besides
16309 that - and that is the connection to Skolelinux / Debian Edu - I am
16310 working in our own school project "IT-Zukunft Schule" in North
16311 Germany. I am responsible for the quality assurance, the customer
16312 relationship management and the communication processes in the
16313 project.</p>
16314
16315 <p>Since 2001 I constantly have been training myself in communication
16316 and leadership. Besides that I am a forester, a landscaping gardener
16317 and a yoga teacher.</p>
16318
16319 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
16320 project?</strong></p>
16321
16322 <p>I fell in love with Mike ;-).</p>
16323
16324 <p>Very soon after getting to know him I was completely enrolled into
16325 Free Software.  At this time Mike did IT-services for one newly
16326 founded school in Kiel. Other schools in Kiel needed concepts for
16327 their IT environment.  Often when Mike came home from working at the
16328 newly founded school I found myself listening to his complaints about
16329 several points where the communication with the schools head or the
16330 teachers did not work.  So we were clear that he would not work for
16331 one more school if we did not set up a structure for communication
16332 between him, the schools head, the teachers, the students and the
16333 parents.</p>
16334
16335 <p>Together with our friend and hardware supplier Andreas Buchholz we
16336 started to get an overview of free software solutions suitable for
16337 schools. One day before Christmas 2010 Mike and I had a date with Kurt
16338 Gramlich in Gütersloh. As Kurt and I are really interested in building
16339 networks of people and in being in communication we dived into
16340 Skolelinux and brought it to the first grammar schools in Northern
16341 Germany.</p>
16342
16343 <p>For information about our school project you can read
16344 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Mike_Gabriel.html">the
16345 interview with Mike Gabriel</a>.</p>
16346
16347 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
16348 Edu?</strong></p>
16349
16350 <p>First I have to say: I cannot answer this question technically. My
16351 answer comes rather from a social point of view.</p>
16352
16353 <p>The biggest advantage of Skolelinux / Debian Edu I see is the large
16354 and strong international community of Debian Developers in the
16355 background which is very alive and connected over mailinglists, blogs
16356 and meetings. My constant feeling for the Debian Community is: If
16357 something does not work they will somehow fix it. All is well
16358 ;-). This is of course a user experience.  What I also get as a big
16359 advantage of Skolelinux / Debian Edu is that everybody who uses it and
16360 works with it can also contribute to it - that includes students,
16361 teachers, parents...</p>
16362
16363 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
16364 Edu?</strong></p>
16365
16366 <p>I will answer this question relating to the internal structure of
16367 Skolelinux / Debian Edu.</p>
16368
16369 <p>What I see as a major disadvantage is that there is a gap between
16370 the group of developers for Debian Edu and the people who make the
16371 marketing, that means the people that bring Skolelinux to the
16372 schools. There is a lack of communication between these two groups and
16373 I think that does not really work for Skolelinux / Debian Edu.</p>
16374
16375 <p>Further I appreciate that Skolelinux / Debian Edu is known as a
16376 do-ocracy. Nevertheless I keep asking myself if at some points a
16377 democracy or some kind of hierarchical project structure would be good
16378 and helpful.  I am also missing some kind of contact between the
16379 Skolelinux / Debian Edu communities in Europe or on an international
16380 level. I think it would be good if there was more sharing between the
16381 different countries using Skolelinux / Debian Edu.</p>
16382
16383 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
16384
16385 <p>On my laptop I am still using an Ubuntu 10.04 with a Gnome Desktop
16386 on.  As applications I use Openoffice.org, Gedit, Firefox, Pidgin,
16387 LaTeX and GnuCash. For mails I am using Horde. And I am really fond of
16388 my N900 running with Maemo.</p>
16389
16390 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
16391 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
16392
16393 <p>I am really convinced that in our school project "IT-Zukunft
16394 Schule" we have developed (and keep developing) a great way to get
16395 schools to use Free Software. We have written a detailed concept for
16396 that so I cannot explain the whole thing here. But in a nutshell the
16397 strategy has three crucial pillars:</p>
16398
16399 <ul>
16400
16401 <li>We really take time to get what sort of stories, questions and
16402 concerns the schools head and the teachers have about using different
16403 kinds of IT and we take time to enrol them into Free Software.</li>
16404
16405 <li>Our solution for schools is never just technical. In the centre
16406 are always the people who are going to use the software. From the very
16407 beginning of the planning for a school, we tell the schools head that
16408 they are paying us not only for a technical solution for their school,
16409 they also pay us for leading all the communication processes
16410 needed. If they do not want that, we are not working with them because
16411 we cannot give a guarantee for the quality of our work then.</li>
16412
16413 <li>Another focus lies in the training of teachers and students in
16414 co-administrating the IT-System at their school. They start getting in
16415 contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu community and they get the
16416 offer to become more and more independent from us.</li>
16417
16418 </ul>
16419
16420       </div>
16421       <div class="tags">
16422
16423
16424         Tags: <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/intervju">intervju</a>.
16425
16426
16427       </div>
16428     </div>
16429     <div class="padding"></div>
16430
16431     <div class="entry">
16432       <div class="title">
16433         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_European_Central_Bank__ECB__take_a_look_at_bitcoin.html">The European Central Bank (ECB) take a look at bitcoin</a>
16434       </div>
16435       <div class="date">
16436          4th November 2012
16437       </div>
16438       <div class="body">
16439         <p>Slashdot just ran a story about the European Central Bank (ECB)
16440 <a href="http://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/other/virtualcurrencyschemes201210en.pdf">releasing
16441 a report (PDF)</a> about virtual currencies and
16442 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">bitcoin</a>.  It is interesting to
16443 see how a member of the bitcoin community
16444 <a href="http://blog.bitinstant.com/blog/2012/10/30/the-ecb-report-on-bitcoin-and-virtual-currencies.html">receive
16445 the report</a>.  As for the future, I suspect the central banks and
16446 the governments will outlaw bitcoin if it gain any popularity, to avoid
16447 competition.  My thoughts go to the
16448 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wörgl">Wörgl experiment</a> with
16449 negative inflation on cash which was such a success that it was
16450 terminated by the Austrian National Bank in 1933.  A successful
16451 alternative would be a threat to the current money system and gain
16452 powerful forces to work against it.</p>
16453
16454 <p>While checking out the current status of bitcoin, I also discovered
16455 that the community already seem to have
16456 <a href="http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/27/3271637/bitcoin-savings-trust-pyramid-scheme-shuts-down">experienced
16457 its first pyramid game / Ponzi scheme</a>.  Not very surprising, given
16458 how members of "small" communities tend to trust each other.  I guess
16459 enterprising crocks will try again and again, as they do anywhere
16460 wealth is available.</p>
16461
16462       </div>
16463       <div class="tags">
16464
16465
16466         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</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>.
16467
16468
16469       </div>
16470     </div>
16471     <div class="padding"></div>
16472
16473     <div class="entry">
16474       <div class="title">
16475         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/12_years_of_outages___summarised_by_Stuart_Kendrick.html">12 years of outages - summarised by Stuart Kendrick</a>
16476       </div>
16477       <div class="date">
16478         26th October 2012
16479       </div>
16480       <div class="body">
16481         <p>I work at the <a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a>
16482 looking after the computers, mostly on the unix side, but in general
16483 all over the place.  I am also a member (and currently leader) of
16484 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the NUUG association</a>, which in turn
16485 make me a member of <a href="http://www.usenix.org/">USENIX</a>.  NUUG
16486 is an member organisation for us in Norway interested in free
16487 software, open standards and unix like operating systems, and USENIX
16488 is a US based member organisation with similar targets.  And thanks to
16489 these memberships, I get all issues of the great USENIX magazine
16490 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login">;login:</a> in the
16491 mail several times a year.  The magazine is great, and I read most of
16492 it every time.</p>
16493
16494 <p>In the last issue of the USENIX magazine ;login:, there is an
16495 article by <a href="http://www.skendric.com/">Stuart Kendrick</a> from
16496 Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center titled
16497 "<a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/october-2012-volume-37-number-5/what-takes-us-down">What
16498 Takes Us Down</a>" (longer version also
16499 <a href="http://www.skendric.com/problem/incident-analysis/2012-06-30/What-Takes-Us-Down.pdf">available
16500 from his own site</a>), where he report what he found when he
16501 processed the outage reports (both planned and unplanned) from the
16502 last twelve years and classified them according to cause, time of day,
16503 etc etc.  The article is a good read to get some empirical data on
16504 what kind of problems affect a data centre, but what really inspired
16505 me was the kind of reporting they had put in place since 2000.<p>
16506
16507 <p>The centre set up a mailing list, and started to send fairly
16508 standardised messages to this list when a outage was planned or when
16509 it already occurred, to announce the plan and get feedback on the
16510 assumtions on scope and user impact.  Here is the two example from the
16511 article: First the unplanned outage:
16512
16513 <blockquote><pre>
16514 Subject:     Exchange 2003 Cluster Issues
16515 Severity:    Critical (Unplanned)
16516 Start:       Monday, May 7, 2012, 11:58
16517 End:         Monday, May 7, 2012, 12:38
16518 Duration:    40 minutes
16519 Scope:       Exchange 2003
16520 Description: The HTTPS service on the Exchange cluster crashed, triggering
16521              a cluster failover.
16522
16523 User Impact: During this period, all Exchange users were unable to
16524              access e-mail. Zimbra users were unaffected.
16525 Technician:  [xxx]
16526 </pre></blockquote>
16527
16528 Next the planned outage:
16529
16530 <blockquote><pre>
16531 Subject:     H Building Switch Upgrades
16532 Severity:    Major (Planned)
16533 Start:       Saturday, June 16, 2012, 06:00
16534 End:         Saturday, June 16, 2012, 16:00
16535 Duration:    10 hours
16536 Scope:       H2 Transport
16537 Description: Currently, Catalyst 4006s provide 10/100 Ethernet to end-
16538              stations. We will replace these with newer Catalyst
16539              4510s.
16540 User Impact: All users on H2 will be isolated from the network during
16541              this work. Afterward, they will have gigabit
16542              connectivity.
16543 Technician:  [xxx]
16544 </pre></blockquote>
16545
16546 <p>He notes in his article that the date formats and other fields have
16547 been a bit too free form to make it easy to automatically process them
16548 into a database for further analysis, and I would have used ISO 8601
16549 dates myself to make it easier to process (in other words I would ask
16550 people to write '2012-06-16 06:00 +0000' instead of the start time
16551 format listed above).  There are also other issues with the format
16552 that could be improved, read the article for the details.</p>
16553
16554 <p>I find the idea of standardising outage messages seem to be such a
16555 good idea that I would like to get it implemented here at the
16556 university too.  We do register
16557 <a href="http://www.uio.no/tjenester/it/aktuelt/planlagte-tjenesteavbrudd/">planned
16558 changes and outages in a calendar</a>, and report the to a mailing
16559 list, but we do not do so in a structured format and there is not a
16560 report to the same location for unplanned outages.  Perhaps something
16561 for other sites to consider too?</p>
16562
16563       </div>
16564       <div class="tags">
16565
16566
16567         Tags: <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>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/usenix">usenix</a>.
16568
16569
16570       </div>
16571     </div>
16572     <div class="padding"></div>
16573
16574     <div class="entry">
16575       <div class="title">
16576         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Amazon_steal_books_from_customer_and_throw_out_her_out_without_any_explanation.html">Amazon steal books from customer and throw out her out without any explanation</a>
16577       </div>
16578       <div class="date">
16579         22nd October 2012
16580       </div>
16581       <div class="body">
16582         <p>A blog post from Martin Bekkelund today tell the story of
16583 <a href="http://www.bekkelund.net/2012/10/22/outlawed-by-amazon-drm/">how
16584 Amazon erased the books from a customer's kindle, locked the account
16585 and refuse to tell the customer why</a>.  If a real book store did
16586 this to a customer, it would be called breaking into private property
16587 and theft.  The story has spread around the net today.  A bit more
16588 background information is available in Norwegian from
16589 <a href="http://www.digi.no/904658/hun-ble-kastet-ut-av-amazon">digi.no</a>.
16590 It is no surprise that digital restriction mechanisms (DRM) are used
16591 this way, as it has been warned about such abuse since DRM was
16592 introduced many years back.  And Amazon proved in 2009 that it was
16593 willing to
16594 <a href="http://boingboing.net/2009/07/20/amazons-orwellian-de.html">
16595 break into customers equipment and remove the books</a> people had
16596 bought, when it removed the book 1984 by George Orwell from all the
16597 customers who had bought it.  From the official comments, it even
16598 sounded like
16599 <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html">Amazon
16600 would never do that again</a>.  And here we are, three years
16601 later.</p>
16602
16603 <p>And thought this action is
16604 <a href="http://www.itavisen.no/904648/forbrukerraadet-helt-haarreisende">against
16605 Norwegian regulations and law</a>, it is according to the terms of use
16606 as written by Amazon, and it is hard to hold Amazon accountable to
16607 Norwegian laws.  It is just yet another example of unacceptable terms
16608 of use on the web, and how they are used to remove customer
16609 rights.</p>
16610
16611 <p>Luckily for electronic books, there are alternatives without
16612 unacceptable terms.  For example
16613 <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/">Project Gutenberg</a> (about 40,000
16614 books), <a href="http://runeberg.org/">Project Runenberg</a> (1,652
16615 books) and <a href="http://www.archive.org/details/texts">The Internet
16616 Archive</a> (3,641,797 books) have heaps of books without DRM, which
16617 can read by anyone and shared with anyone.</p>
16618
16619 <p>Update 2012-10-23: This story broke in the morning on Monday. In
16620 the evening after the story had spread all across the Internet, Amazon
16621 restored the account of the user, as reported by
16622 <a href="http://www.digi.no/904675/helomvending-fra-amazon">digi.no</a>
16623 and <a href="http://nrk.no/kultur-og-underholdning/1.8368487">NRK</a>.
16624 Apparently public pressure work.  The story from Martin have seen
16625 several twitter messages per minute the last 24 hours, which is quite
16626 a lot, and is still drawing a lot of attention.  But even when the
16627 account is restored, the fundamental problem still exist.  I recommend
16628 reading two opinions from
16629 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2012/10/rights-you-have-no-right-to-your-ebooks/index.htm">Simon
16630 Phipps</a> and
16631 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2012/10/is-amazon-playing-fair/index.htm">Glen
16632 Moody</a> if you want to learn more about the fundamentals and more
16633 details about the original story.</p>
16634
16635       </div>
16636       <div class="tags">
16637
16638
16639         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</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>.
16640
16641
16642       </div>
16643     </div>
16644     <div class="padding"></div>
16645
16646     <div class="entry">
16647       <div class="title">
16648         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_fight_for_freedom_and_privacy.html">The fight for freedom and privacy</a>
16649       </div>
16650       <div class="date">
16651         18th October 2012
16652       </div>
16653       <div class="body">
16654         <p>Civil liberties and privacy in the western world are going down the
16655 drain, and it is hard to fight against it.  I try to do my best, but
16656 time is limited.  I hope you do your best too.  A few years ago I came
16657 across a marvellous drawing by
16658 <a href="http://www.claybennett.com/about.html">Clay Bennett</a>
16659 visualising some of what is going on.
16660
16661 <p><a href="http://www.claybennett.com/pages/security_fence.html">
16662 <img src="http://www.claybennett.com/images/archivetoons/security_fence.jpg"></a></p>
16663
16664 <blockquote>
16665 «They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
16666 safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.» - Benjamin Franklin
16667 </blockquote>
16668
16669 <p>Do you feel safe at the airport?  I do not.  Do you feel safe when
16670 you see a surveillance camera?  I do not.  Do you feel safe when you
16671 leave electronic traces of your behaviour and opinions?  I do not.  I
16672 just remember <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon">the
16673 Panopticon</a>, and can not help to think that we are slowly
16674 transforming our society to a huge Panopticon on our own.</p>
16675
16676       </div>
16677       <div class="tags">
16678
16679
16680         Tags: <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>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
16681
16682
16683       </div>
16684     </div>
16685     <div class="padding"></div>
16686
16687     <div class="entry">
16688       <div class="title">
16689         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ColonHelp_produser_sue_WordPress_to_silence_critic.html">ColonHelp produser sue WordPress to silence critic</a>
16690       </div>
16691       <div class="date">
16692         12th October 2012
16693       </div>
16694       <div class="body">
16695         <p>Thanks to a blog post by
16696 <a href="http://ramblingfoo.blogspot.no/2012/10/a-shitstorm-is-comming.html">Eddy
16697 Petrișor</a>, I became aware of yet another "alternative medicine"
16698 company using legal intimidation tactics to scare off critics.
16699 According to the originating blog post about the detox "cure"
16700 <a href="http://insulaindoielii.wordpress.com/2012/10/11/colon-help-sues-wordpress/">ColonHelp
16701 and its producers Zenyth Pharmaceuticals actions</a>, the producer
16702 sues Wordpress to get rid of the critical information.  To check if
16703 the story was for real, I contacted Automattic, the company behind
16704 wordpress.com, and they reply was "We can confirm that Zenyth is
16705 seeking a court order against WordPress / Automattic.  However, we
16706 don't believe the Terms of Service have been violated in this
16707 matter".</p>
16708
16709 <p>The story seem to be simply that a blogger checked the scientific
16710 foundation for a popular health product in Rumania, ColonHelp, and
16711 reported that there was no reason at all to believe it improved the
16712 health of its users.  This caused the company behind the product,
16713 Zenyth Pharmaceuticals, to use legal intimidation to try to silence
16714 the critic, instead of presenting its views and scientific foundation
16715 to argue its side.</p>
16716
16717 <p>This is the usual story, and the Zenyth Pharmaceuticals company
16718 deserve everyone to know how it failed to act properly.  Lets hope the
16719 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect">Streisand
16720 effect</a> can make it rethink its strategy.</p>
16721
16722 <p>What is the harm, you might think.  I suggest you take a look at
16723 <a href="http://www.whatstheharm.net/detoxification.html">a list of
16724 victims of detoxification</a>.</p>
16725
16726       </div>
16727       <div class="tags">
16728
16729
16730         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/skepsis">skepsis</a>.
16731
16732
16733       </div>
16734     </div>
16735     <div class="padding"></div>
16736
16737     <div class="entry">
16738       <div class="title">
16739         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_is_your_local_library_collecting_the__wrong__computer_books_.html">Why is your local library collecting the "wrong" computer books?</a>
16740       </div>
16741       <div class="date">
16742          3rd October 2012
16743       </div>
16744       <div class="body">
16745         <p>I just read the blog post from Tim Retout
16746 <a href="http://retout.co.uk/blog/2012/10/02/the-library-challenge">about
16747 the computer science book collection available in his local
16748 library</a>, and just wanted to share my comment on his theory about
16749 computer books becoming obsolete so soon.  That is part of the reason
16750 why the selection is so sad in almost any local library (it is in mine
16751 too), but I believe the major contributing factor is that the people
16752 buying books to the library have no way to know a good and future
16753 computer classic from trash.  And they need to know which one will
16754 become a classic in the future, as they would normally buy one of the
16755 recently published books.</p>
16756
16757 <p>During my university years, I worked for a while at the university
16758 library, and even there the person in charge of buying computer
16759 related books (and in fact any natural science related book), did not
16760 know enough about computers to make a good educated guess.  Once, just
16761 before Christmas, they had some leftover money on the book budget and
16762 I was asked if I could pick out a lot of computer books in the
16763 university book store, for the library to buy for their collection.  I
16764 had a great time picking all the books I dreamt of buying and reading,
16765 and the books I knew were classics (like most of the
16766 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Richard_Stevens">Stevens
16767 collection</a>).  I picked several of the generic O'Reilly books (ie
16768 documenting protocols, formats and systems, not specific versions of
16769 products) and stayed away from the 'teach yourself X in N days' class.
16770 I had a great time, and probably picked out more than a hundred books
16771 for the library that evening.</p>
16772
16773 <p>The sad fact is that there is no way a overworked librarian is
16774 going to know that for example
16775 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Practice_of_Programming">The
16776 Practice of Programming</a> is a must-have in any computer library,
16777 and they will most of the time end up picking the wrong books to buy.
16778 Perhaps you can help your local library make better choices by giving
16779 the suggestions for books to get?  I know they would love to hear from
16780 you, even if their budget might block them from getting your favourite
16781 book right away.</p>
16782
16783       </div>
16784       <div class="tags">
16785
16786
16787         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
16788
16789
16790       </div>
16791     </div>
16792     <div class="padding"></div>
16793
16794     <div class="entry">
16795       <div class="title">
16796         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Seventy_percent_done_with_Norwegian_docbook_version_of_Free_Culture.html">Seventy percent done with Norwegian docbook version of Free Culture</a>
16797       </div>
16798       <div class="date">
16799         23rd September 2012
16800       </div>
16801       <div class="body">
16802         <p>Since this summer, I have worked in my spare time on a Norwegian <a
16803 href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book <a
16804 href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig.
16805 The reason is that this book is a great primer on what problems exist
16806 in the current copyright laws, and I want it to be available also for
16807 those that are reluctant do read an English book.
16808
16809 When I started, I
16810 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">called
16811 for volunteers</a> to help me, but too few have volunteered so far,
16812 and progress is a bit slow.  Anyway, today I broken the 70 percent
16813 mark for the first rough translation.  At the moment, less than 700
16814 strings (paragraphs, index terms, titles) are left to translate.  With
16815 my current progress of 10-20 strings per day, it will take a while to
16816 complete the translation.  This graph show the updated progress:</p>
16817
16818 <img width="80%" align="center" src="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png">
16819
16820 <p>Progress have slowed down lately due to family and work
16821 commitments.  If you want to help, please get in touch, and check out
16822 the project files currently available from
16823 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
16824
16825 <p>If you are curious what the translated book currently look like,
16826 the updated
16827 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>
16828 and
16829 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
16830 are published on github.  The HTML version is published as well, but
16831 github hand it out with MIME type text/plain, confusing browsers, so I
16832 saw no point in linking to that version.</p>
16833
16834       </div>
16835       <div class="tags">
16836
16837
16838         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>.
16839
16840
16841       </div>
16842     </div>
16843     <div class="padding"></div>
16844
16845     <div class="entry">
16846       <div class="title">
16847         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Giorgio_Pioda.html">Debian Edu interview: Giorgio Pioda</a>
16848       </div>
16849       <div class="date">
16850         17th September 2012
16851       </div>
16852       <div class="body">
16853         <p>After a long break in my row of interviews with people in the
16854 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
16855 community, I finally found time to wrap up another.  This time it is
16856 Giorgio Pioda, which showed up on the mailing list at the start of
16857 this year, asking questions and inspiring us to improve the first time
16858 administrators experience with Skolelinux. :) The interview was
16859 conduced in May, but I only found time to publish it now.</p>
16860
16861 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
16862
16863 <p>I have a PhD in chemistry but since several years I work as teacher
16864 in secondary (15-18 year old students) and tertiary (a kind of "light"
16865 university) schools. Five years ago I started to manage a Learning
16866 Management Service server and slowly I got more and more involved with
16867 IT. 3 years ago the graduating schools moved completely to Linux and I
16868 got the head of the IT for this. The experience collected in chemistry
16869 labs computers (for example NMR analysis of protein folding) and in
16870 the IT-courses during university where sufficient to start. Self
16871 training is anyway very important</p>
16872
16873 <p>I live in the Italian speaking part of Switzerland, and the
16874 <a href="http://www.spse.ch/">SPSE school</a> (secondary) is a very
16875 special sport school for young people who try to became sport pro (for
16876 all sports, we have dozens of disciplines represented) and we are
16877 recognised by the Olympic Swiss Organisation.
16878
16879 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
16880 project?</strong></p>
16881
16882 <p>Looking for Linux / Primary Domain Controller (PDC) I found it
16883 already several years ago. But since the system was still not
16884 Kerberized and since our schools relies strongly on laptops I didn't
16885 use it. I plan to introduce it in the next future, probably for the
16886 next school year, since the squeeze release solved this security
16887 hole.</p>
16888
16889 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
16890 Edu?</strong></p>
16891
16892 <p>Many. First of all there is a strong and living community that is
16893 very generous for help and hints.  Chat help is crucial, together with
16894 the mailing list.  Second. With Skolelinux you get an already well
16895 engineered platform and you don't have to start to build up your PDC
16896 and your clients from GNU/scratch; I've already done this once and I
16897 can tell it, it is hard. Third, since Skolelinux is a standard
16898 platform, it is way easier to educate other IT people and even if the
16899 head IT is sick another one could pick up the task without too much
16900 hassle.</p>
16901
16902 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
16903 Edu?</strong></p>
16904
16905 <p>The only real problem I see is that it is a little too less
16906 flexible at client level. Debian stable is rocky and desirable, but
16907 there are many reasons that force for another choice. For example the
16908 need of new drivers for new PC, or the need for a specific OS for some
16909 devices that have specific software packages for another specific
16910 distribution (I have such a case for whiteboards that have only
16911 Ubuntu packages). Thus, I prepared compatibility packages educlient
16912 and eduroaming, hoping not to use them ;-)</p>
16913
16914 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
16915
16916 <p>I have a Debian Stable PDC at school (Kerberos, NIS, NFS) with
16917 mixed Debian and Ubuntu clients. If you think that this triad
16918 combination is exotic... well I discovered right yesterday that
16919 <a href="http://moo.nac.uci.edu/~hjm/Perceus-Report.html">Perceus</a>
16920 has the same...</p>
16921
16922 <p>For myself I run Debian wheezy/sid, but this combination is good
16923 only I you have enough competence to fix stuff for yourself, if
16924 something breaks.  Daily I use texmacs, gnumeric, a little bit of R
16925 statistics, kmplot, and less frequently OpenOffice.org.</p>
16926
16927 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
16928 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
16929
16930 <P>I think that the only real argument that school managers "hear" is
16931 cost reduction. They don't give too much weight on quality, stability,
16932 just because they are normally not open to change.</p>
16933
16934 <p>Students adapts very quickly to GNU/Linux (and for them being able
16935 to switch between different OS is a plus value); teachers and managers
16936 don't.</p>
16937
16938 <p>We decided to move to Linux because students at our school have own
16939 laptop and we have the responsibility to keep the laptop ready to use;
16940 we were really unsatisfied with Microsoft since every Monday we had 20
16941 machine to fix for viral infections... With Linux this has been
16942 reduced to zero, since people installs almost only from official
16943 repositories. I think that our special needs brought us to Linux.
16944 Those who don't have such needs will hardly move to Linux.</p>
16945
16946       </div>
16947       <div class="tags">
16948
16949
16950         Tags: <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/intervju">intervju</a>.
16951
16952
16953       </div>
16954     </div>
16955     <div class="padding"></div>
16956
16957     <div class="entry">
16958       <div class="title">
16959         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IETF_activity_to_standardise_video_codec.html">IETF activity to standardise video codec</a>
16960       </div>
16961       <div class="date">
16962         15th September 2012
16963       </div>
16964       <div class="body">
16965         <p>After the
16966 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IETF_standardize_its_first_multimedia_codec__Opus.html">Opus
16967 codec made</a> it into <a href="http://www.ietf.org/">IETF</a> as
16968 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6716">RFC 6716</a>, I had a look
16969 to see if there is any activity in IETF to standardise a video codec
16970 too, and I was happy to discover that there is some activity in this
16971 area.  A non-"working group" mailing list
16972 <a href="https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/video-codec">video-codec</a>
16973 was
16974 <a href="http://ietf.10.n7.nabble.com/New-Non-WG-Mailing-List-video-codec-Video-codec-BoF-discussion-list-td119548.html">created 2012-08-20</a>.  It is intended to discuss the topic and if a
16975 formal working group should be formed.</p>
16976
16977 <p>I look forward to see how this plays out.  There is already
16978 <a href="http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/video-codec/current/msg00003.html">an
16979 email from someone</a> in the MPEG group at ISO asking people to
16980 participate in the ISO group.  Given how ISO failed with OOXML and given
16981 that it so far (as far as I can remember) only have produced
16982 multimedia formats requiring royalty payments, I suspect
16983 joining the ISO group would be a complete waste of time, but I am not
16984 involved in any codec work and my opinion will not matter much.</p>
16985
16986 <p>If one of my readers is involved with codec work, I hope she will
16987 join this work to standardise a royalty free video codec within
16988 IETF.</p>
16989
16990       </div>
16991       <div class="tags">
16992
16993
16994         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen</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>.
16995
16996
16997       </div>
16998     </div>
16999     <div class="padding"></div>
17000
17001     <div class="entry">
17002       <div class="title">
17003         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IETF_standardize_its_first_multimedia_codec__Opus.html">IETF standardize its first multimedia codec: Opus</a>
17004       </div>
17005       <div class="date">
17006         12th September 2012
17007       </div>
17008       <div class="body">
17009         <p>Yesterday, <a href="http://www.ietf.org/">IETF</a> announced the
17010 publication of of
17011 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6716">RFC 6716, the Definition
17012 of the Opus Audio Codec</a>, a low latency, variable bandwidth, codec
17013 intended for both VoIP, film and music.  This is the first time, as
17014 far as I know, that IETF have standardized a multimedia codec.  In
17015 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3533">RFC 3533</a>, IETF
17016 standardized the OGG container format, and it has proven to be a great
17017 royalty free container for audio, video and movies.  I hope IETF will
17018 continue to standardize more royalty free codeces, after ISO and MPEG
17019 have proven incapable of securing everyone equal rights to publish
17020 multimedia content on the Internet.</p>
17021
17022 <p>IETF require two interoperating independent implementations to
17023 ratify a standard, and have so far ensured to only standardize royalty
17024 free specifications.  Both are key factors to allow everyone (rich and
17025 poor), to compete on equal terms on the Internet.</p>
17026
17027 <p>Visit the <a href="http://opus-codec.org/">Opus project page</a> if
17028 you want to learn more about the solution.</p>
17029
17030       </div>
17031       <div class="tags">
17032
17033
17034         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen</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>.
17035
17036
17037       </div>
17038     </div>
17039     <div class="padding"></div>
17040
17041     <div class="entry">
17042       <div class="title">
17043         <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>
17044       </div>
17045       <div class="date">
17046          7th September 2012
17047       </div>
17048       <div class="body">
17049         <p>As I
17050 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">mentioned
17051 this summer</a>, I have created a Computer Science song book a few
17052 years ago, and today I finally found time to create a public
17053 <a href="https://gitorious.org/pere-cs-songbook/pere-cs-songbook">Gitorious
17054 repository for the project</a>.</p>
17055
17056 <p>If you want to help out, please clone the source and submit patches
17057 to the HTML version.  To generate the PDF and PostScript version,
17058 please use prince XML, or let me know about a useful free software
17059 processor capable of creating a good looking PDF from the HTML.</p>
17060
17061 <p>Want to sing?  You can still find the song book in HTML, PDF and
17062 PostScript formats at
17063 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/">Petter's Computer
17064 Science Songbook</a>.</p>
17065
17066       </div>
17067       <div class="tags">
17068
17069
17070         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>.
17071
17072
17073       </div>
17074     </div>
17075     <div class="padding"></div>
17076
17077     <div class="entry">
17078       <div class="title">
17079         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_software_forced_Microsoft_to_open_Office__and_don_t_forget_Officeshots_.html">Free software forced Microsoft to open Office (and don't forget Officeshots)</a>
17080       </div>
17081       <div class="date">
17082         23rd August 2012
17083       </div>
17084       <div class="body">
17085         <p>I came across a great comment from Simon Phipps today, about how
17086 <a href="http://www.infoworld.com/d/open-source-software/how-microsoft-was-forced-open-office-200233">Microsoft
17087 have been forced to open Office</a>, and it made me remember and
17088 revisit the great site
17089 <a href="http://www.officeshots.org/">officeshots</a> which allow you
17090 to check out how different programs present the ODF file format.  I
17091 recommend both to those of my readers interested in ODF. :)</p>
17092
17093       </div>
17094       <div class="tags">
17095
17096
17097         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
17098
17099
17100       </div>
17101     </div>
17102     <div class="padding"></div>
17103
17104     <div class="entry">
17105       <div class="title">
17106         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Half_way_there_with_translated_docbook_version_of_Free_Culture.html">Half way there with translated docbook version of Free Culture</a>
17107       </div>
17108       <div class="date">
17109         17th August 2012
17110       </div>
17111       <div class="body">
17112         <p>In my spare time, I currently work on a Norwegian
17113 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book
17114 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig,
17115 to get a Norwegian text explaining the problems with the copyright law
17116 I can give to my parents and others that are reluctant to read an
17117 English book.  It is a marvellous set of examples on how the ever
17118 expanding copyright regulations hurt culture and society.  When the
17119 translation is done, I hope to find funding to print and ship a copy
17120 to all the members of the Norwegian parliament, before they sit down
17121 to debate the latest revisions to the Norwegian copyright law.  This
17122 summer I
17123 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">called
17124 for volunteers</a> to help me, and I have been able to secure the
17125 valuable contribution from at least one other Norwegian.</p>
17126
17127 <p>Two days ago, we finally broke the 50% mark.  Then more than 50% of
17128 the number of strings to translate (normally paragraphs, but also
17129 titles and index entries are also counted).  All parts from the
17130 beginning up to and including chapter four is translated.  So is
17131 chapters six, seven and the conclusion.  I created a graph to show the
17132 progress:</p>
17133
17134 <img width="80%" align="center" src="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png">
17135
17136 <p>The number of strings to translate increase as I insert the index
17137 entries into the docbook.  They were missing with the docbook version
17138 I initially started with.  There are still quite a few index entries
17139 missing, but everyone starting with A, B, O, Z and Y are done.  I
17140 currently focus on completing the index entries, to get a complete
17141 english version of the docbook source.</p>
17142
17143 <p>There is still need for translators and people with docbook
17144 knowledge, to be able to get a good looking book (I still struggle
17145 with dblatex, xmlto and docbook-xsl) as well as to do the draft
17146 translation and proof reading.  And I would like the figures to be
17147 redrawn as SVGs to make it easy to translate them.  Any SVG master
17148 around?  I am sure there are some legal terms that are unfamiliar to
17149 me.  If you want to help, please get in touch, and check out the
17150 project files currently available from <a
17151 href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
17152
17153 <p>If you are curious what the translated book currently look like,
17154 the updated
17155 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>
17156 and
17157 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
17158 are published on github.  The HTML version is published as well, but
17159 github hand it out with MIME type text/plain, confusing browsers, so I
17160 saw no point in linking to that version.</p>
17161
17162       </div>
17163       <div class="tags">
17164
17165
17166         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>.
17167
17168
17169       </div>
17170     </div>
17171     <div class="padding"></div>
17172
17173     <div class="entry">
17174       <div class="title">
17175         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Notes_on_language_codes_for_Norwegian_docbook_processing___.html">Notes on language codes for Norwegian docbook processing...</a>
17176       </div>
17177       <div class="date">
17178         10th August 2012
17179       </div>
17180       <div class="body">
17181         <p>In <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> one can specify
17182 the language used at the top, and the processing pipeline will use
17183 this information to pick the correct translations for 'chapter', 'see
17184 also', 'index' etc.  And for most languages used with docbook, I guess
17185 this work just fine.  For example a German user can start the document
17186 with &lt;book lang="de"&gt;, and the document will show up with the
17187 correct content with any of the docbook processors.  This is not the
17188 case for the language
17189 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Culture_in_Norwegian___5_chapters_done__74_percent_left_to_do.html">I
17190 am working with at the moment</a>, Norwegian Bokmål.</p>
17191
17192 <p>For a while, I was confused about which language code to use,
17193 because I was unable to find any language code that would work across
17194 all tools.  I am currently testing dblatex, xmlto, docbook-xsl, and
17195 dbtoepub, and they do not handle Norwegian Bokmål the same way.  Some
17196 of them do not handle it at all.</p>
17197
17198 <p>A bit of background information is probably needed to understand
17199 this mess.  Norwegian is not one, but two written variants.  The
17200 variants are Norwegian Nynorsk and Norwegian Bokmål.  There are three
17201 two letter language codes associated with these languages, Norwegian
17202 is 'no', Norwegian Nynorsk is 'nn' and Norwegian Bokmål is 'nb'.
17203 Historically the 'no' language code was used for Norwegian Bokmål, but
17204 many years ago this was found to be å bad idea, and the recommendation
17205 is to use the most specific language code instead, to avoid confusion.
17206 In the transition period it is a good idea to make sure 'no' was an
17207 alias for 'nb'.</p>
17208
17209 <p>Back to docbook processing tools in Debian.  The dblatex tool only
17210 understand 'nn'.  There are translations for 'no', but not 'nb' (BTS
17211 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/684391">#684391</a>), but due to a bug
17212 (BTS <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/682936">#682936</a>) the 'no'
17213 language code is not recognised.  The docbook-xsl tool chain only
17214 recognise 'nn' and 'nb', but not 'no'.  The xmlto tool only recognise
17215 'nn' and 'nb', but not 'no'.  The end result that there is no language
17216 code I can use to get the docbook file working with all of these tools
17217 at the same time. :(</p>
17218
17219 <p>The correct solution is to use &lt;book lang="nb"&gt;, but it will
17220 take time before that will work with all the free software docbook
17221 processors. :(</p>
17222
17223 <p>Oh, the joy of well integrated tools. :/</p>
17224
17225       </div>
17226       <div class="tags">
17227
17228
17229         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>.
17230
17231
17232       </div>
17233     </div>
17234     <div class="padding"></div>
17235
17236     <div class="entry">
17237       <div class="title">
17238         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Best_way_to_create_a_docbook_book_.html">Best way to create a docbook book?</a>
17239       </div>
17240       <div class="date">
17241         31st July 2012
17242       </div>
17243       <div class="body">
17244         <p>I tried to send this text to the
17245 <a href="https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-apps/">docbook-apps
17246 mailing list at lists.oasis-open.org</a>, but it only accept messages
17247 from subscribers and rejected my post, and I completely lack the
17248 bandwidth required to subscribe to another mailing list, so instead I
17249 try to post my message here and hope my blog readers can help me
17250 out.</p>
17251
17252 <p>I am quite new to docbook processing, and am climbing a steep
17253 learning curve at the moment.</p>
17254
17255 <p>To give you some background, I am working on a Norwegian
17256 translation of the book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig, and I use
17257 docbook to handle the process.  The files to build the book are
17258 available from
17259 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.
17260 The book got around 400 pages with parts, images, footnotes, tables,
17261 index entries etc, which has proven to be a challenge for the free
17262 software docbook processors.  My build platform is Debian GNU/Linux
17263 Squeeze.</p>
17264
17265 <p>I want to build PDF, EPUB and HTML version of the book, and have
17266 tried different tool chains to do the conversion from docbook to these
17267 formats.  I am currently focusing on the PDF version, and have a few
17268 problems.</p>
17269
17270 <ul>
17271
17272 <li>Using dblatex, the &lt;part&gt; handling is not the way I want to,
17273    as &lt;/part&gt; do not really end the &lt;part&gt;. (See
17274    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/683166">BTS report #683166</a>), the
17275    xetex backend (needed to process UTF-8) give incorrect hyphens in
17276    index references spanning several pages (See
17277    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/682901">BTS report #682901</a>), and
17278    I am unable to get the norwegian template texts (See
17279    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/682936">BTS report #682936</a>).</li>
17280
17281 <li>Using straight xmlto fail with some latex error (See
17282    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/683163">BTS report
17283    #683163</a>).</li>
17284
17285 <li>Using xmlto with the fop backend fail to handle images (do not
17286    show up in the PDF), fail to handle a long footnote (overlap
17287    footnote and text body, see
17288    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/683197">BTS report #683197</a>), and
17289    fail to create a correct index (some lack page ref, and the page
17290    refs listed are not right).</li>
17291
17292 <li>Using xmlto with the dblatex backend behave like dblatex.</li>
17293
17294 <li>Using docbook-xls with xsltproc + fop have the same footnote and
17295    index problems the xmlto + fop processing.</li>
17296
17297 </ul>
17298
17299 <p>So I wonder, what would be the best way to create the PDF version
17300 of this book?  Are some of the bugs found above solved in new or
17301 experimental versions of some docbook tool chain?</p>
17302
17303 <p>What about HTML and EPUB versions?</p>
17304
17305       </div>
17306       <div class="tags">
17307
17308
17309         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>.
17310
17311
17312       </div>
17313     </div>
17314     <div class="padding"></div>
17315
17316     <div class="entry">
17317       <div class="title">
17318         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Culture_in_Norwegian___5_chapters_done__74_percent_left_to_do.html">Free Culture in Norwegian - 5 chapters done, 74 percent left to do</a>
17319       </div>
17320       <div class="date">
17321         21st July 2012
17322       </div>
17323       <div class="body">
17324         <p>I reported earlier that I am working on
17325 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">a
17326 norwegian version</a> of the book
17327 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig.
17328 Progress is good, and yesterday I got a major contribution from Anders
17329 Hagen Jarmund completing chapter six.  The source files as well as a
17330 PDF and EPUB version of this book are available from
17331 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
17332
17333 <p>I am happy to report that the draft for the first two chapters
17334 (preface, introduction) is complete, and three other chapters are also
17335 completely translated.  This completes 26 percent of the number of
17336 strings (equivalent to paragraphs) in the book, and there is thus 74
17337 percent left to translate.  A graph of the progress is present at the
17338 bottom of the github project page.  There is still room for more
17339 contributors.  Get in touch or send github pull requests with fixes if
17340 you got time and are willing to help make this book make it to
17341 print. :)</p>
17342
17343 <p>The book translation framework could also be a good basis for other
17344 translations, if you want the book to be available in your
17345 language.</p>
17346
17347       </div>
17348       <div class="tags">
17349
17350
17351         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</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>.
17352
17353
17354       </div>
17355     </div>
17356     <div class="padding"></div>
17357
17358     <div class="entry">
17359       <div class="title">
17360         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Call_for_help_from_docbook_expert_to_tag_Free_Culture_by_Lawrence_Lessig.html">Call for help from docbook expert to tag Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig</a>
17361       </div>
17362       <div class="date">
17363         16th July 2012
17364       </div>
17365       <div class="body">
17366         <p>I am currently working on a
17367 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">project
17368 to translate</a> the book
17369 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig
17370 to Norwegian.  And the source we base our translation on is the
17371 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DocBook">docbook</a> version, to
17372 allow us to use po4a and .po files to handle the translation, and for
17373 this to work well the docbook source document need to be properly
17374 tagged.  The source files of this project is available from
17375 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
17376
17377 <p>The problem is that the docbook source have flaws, and we have
17378 no-one involved in the project that is a docbook expert.  Is there a
17379 docbook expert somewhere that is interested in helping us create a
17380 well tagged docbook version of the book, and adjust our build process
17381 for the PDF, EPUB and HTML version of the book?  This will provide a
17382 well tagged English version (our source document), and make it a lot
17383 easier for us to create a good Norwegian version.  If you can and want
17384 to help, please get in touch with me or fork the github project and
17385 send pull requests with fixes. :)</p>
17386
17387       </div>
17388       <div class="tags">
17389
17390
17391         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</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>.
17392
17393
17394       </div>
17395     </div>
17396     <div class="padding"></div>
17397
17398     <div class="entry">
17399       <div class="title">
17400         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__George_Bredberg.html">Debian Edu interview: George Bredberg</a>
17401       </div>
17402       <div class="date">
17403          9th July 2012
17404       </div>
17405       <div class="body">
17406         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
17407 Skolelinux</a> project have users all over the globe, but until
17408 recently we have not known about any users in Norway's neighbour
17409 country Sweden.  This changed when George Bredberg showed up in March
17410 this year on the mailing list, asking interesting questions about how
17411 to adjust and scale the just released
17412 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
17413 Wheezy</a> setup to his liking.  He granted me an interview, and I am
17414 happy to share his answers with you here.</p>
17415
17416 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
17417
17418 <p>I'm a 44 year old country guy that have been working 12 years at
17419 the same school as 50% IT-manager and 50% Teacher. My educational
17420 background is fil.kand in history and religious beliefs, an exam as a
17421 "folkhighschool" teacher, that is, for teaching grownups.  In
17422 Norwegian I believe it's called "Vuxenupplaring". I also have a master
17423 in "Technology and social change". So I'm not really a tech guy, I
17424 just like to study how humans and technology interact and that is my
17425 perspective when working with IT.</p>
17426
17427 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
17428 project?</strong></p>
17429
17430 I have followed the Skolelinux project for quite some time by
17431 now. Earlier I tested out the K12-LTSP project, which we used for some
17432 time, but I really like the idea of having a distribution aimed to be
17433 a complete solution for schools with necessary tools integrated. When
17434 K12-LTSP abandoned that idea some years ago, I started to look more
17435 seriously into Skolelinux instead.
17436
17437 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
17438 Edu?</strong></p>
17439
17440 The big point of Skolelinux to me is that it is a complete
17441 distribution, ready to install. It has LDAP-support, MS Windows
17442 integration tools and so forth already configured, saving an
17443 administrator a lot of time and headache. We were using another Linux
17444 based thin-client system called Thinlinc, that has served us very
17445 well. But that Skolelinux is based on VNC and LTSP, to me, is better
17446 when it comes to the kind of multimedia used in schools. That is
17447 showing videos from Youtube or educational TV. It is also easier to
17448 mix thin clients with workstations, since the user settings will be the
17449 same. In our VNC-based solution you had to "beat around the bush" by
17450 setting up a second, hidden, home-directory for user settings for the
17451 workstations, because they will be different from the ones used on the
17452 thin clients. Skolelinux support for diskless workstations are very
17453 convenient since a school today often need to use a class room
17454 projector showing videos in full screen. That is easily done with a
17455 small integrated media computer running as a diskless workstation. You
17456 have only two installs to update and configure. One for the thin
17457 clients and one for the workstations. Also saving a lot of time.  Our
17458 old system was also based on Redhat and CentOS. They are both very
17459 nice distributions, but they are sometimes painfully slow when it
17460 comes to updating multimedia support and multimedia programs (even
17461 such as Gimp), leaving us with a bit "oldish" applications. Debian is
17462 quicker to update.
17463
17464 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
17465 Edu?</strong></p>
17466
17467 <p>Debian is a bit too quick when it comes to updating. As an example
17468 we use old HP terminals as thinclients, and two times already this
17469 year (2012) the updates you get from the repositories has stopped
17470 sound from working with them.  It's a kernel/ALSA issue. So you have
17471 to be more careful properly testing the updates before you run them in
17472 a production environment. This has never happened with CentOS.</p>
17473
17474 <p>I also would like to be able to set my own domain-settings at
17475 install time.  In Skolelinux they are kind of hard coded into the
17476 distribution, when it comes to LDAP and at least samba integration.
17477 That is more a cosmetic/translation issue, and not a real problem.
17478 Running MS Windows applications within the Skolelinux environment needs
17479 to be better supported. That is, running them seamlessly via RDP, and
17480 support for single-sign on.  That will make the transition to free
17481 software easier, because you can keep the applications you really
17482 need.  No support will make it impossible if you work in a school where
17483 some applications can't be open source. As for us we really need to
17484 run Adobe InDesign in our journalist classes.  We run a journalist
17485 education, and is one of the very few non university ones that is ok:d
17486 by Svenska journalistförbundet (Swedish journalist association).  Our
17487 education gives the pupils the right of membership there, once they
17488 are done.  This is important if you want to get a job.</p>
17489
17490 <p>Adobe InDesign is the program most commonly used in newspapers and
17491 magazines.  We used Quark Express before, but they seem to loose there
17492 market to Adobe. The only "equivalent" to InDesign in the opensource
17493 world is Scribus, and its not advanced enough. At least not according
17494 to the teacher. I think it would be possible to use it, because they
17495 are not supposed to learn a program, they are supposed to learn how to
17496 edit and compile a newspaper.  But politically at our school we are not
17497 there yet.  And Scribus lacks a lot of things you find i InDesign.</p>
17498
17499 <p>We used even a windows program for sound editing when it comes to
17500 the radio-journalist part. The year to come we are going to try
17501 Audacity. That software has the same kind of limitations compared to
17502 Adobe Audition, but that teacher is a bit more open minded. We have
17503 tried Ardour also, but that instead is more like a music studio
17504 program, not intended for the kind of editing taking place in a radio
17505 studio. Its way to complex and the GUI is to scattered when you only
17506 want to cut, make pass-overs, add extra channels and normalise.  Those
17507 things you can do in Audacity, but its not as easy as in Audition. You
17508 have to do more things manually with envelopes, and that is a bit old
17509 fashion and timewasting. Its also harder to cut and move sound from
17510 one channel to another, which is a thing that you do frequently
17511 because you often find yourself needing to rearrange parts of the
17512 sound file.</p>
17513
17514 <p>So, I am not sure we will succeed in replacing even Audition, but we
17515 will try.  The problem is the students have certain expectations when
17516 they start an education towards a profession.  So the programs has to
17517 look and feel professional.  Good thing with radio, there are many
17518 programs out there, that radio studios use, so its not as standardised
17519 as Newspaper editing. That means, it does not really matter what
17520 program they learn, because once they start working they still have to
17521 learn the program the studio uses, so instead focus has to be to learn
17522 the editing part without to much focus on a specific software.</p>
17523
17524 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
17525
17526 <p>Myself I'm running Linux Mint, or Ubuntu these days.  I use almost
17527 only open source software, and preferably Linux based. When it comes
17528 to most used applications its OpenOffice, and Firefox (of course ;)
17529 )</p>
17530
17531 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
17532 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
17533
17534 <p>To get schools to use free software there has to be good open
17535 source software that are windows based, to ease the transition. But
17536 it's also very important that the multimedia support is working
17537 flawlessly.  The problems with Youtube, Twitter, Facebook and whatever
17538 will create problems when it comes to both teachers and
17539 students. Economy are also important for schools, so using thin
17540 clients, as long as they have good multimedia support, is a very good
17541 idea. It's also important that the open source software works even for
17542 the administration.  It's hard to convince the teachers to stick with
17543 open source, if the principal has to run Windows.  It also creates a
17544 problem if some classes has to use Windows for there tasks, since that
17545 will create a difference in "status" between classes, so a good
17546 support for running windows applications via the thin client (Linux)
17547 desktop is essential.  At least at our school, where we have mixed
17548 level of educations, from high-school to journalist-school.</p>
17549
17550 <p>Update 2012-07-09 08:30: Paul Wise tipped me on IRC about three
17551 useful sources related to Free Software for radio stations: the LWN
17552 article <a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/481607/">Radio station
17553 management with Airtime</a>,
17554 <a href="http://www.sourcefabric.org/en/airtime/">Airtime</a> which
17555 claim to be a Free open source radio automation software and
17556 <a href="http://www.rivendellaudio.org/">Rivendell</a> which claim to
17557 be complete radio broadcast automation solution.  All of them seem
17558 useful to the aspiring radio producer.</p>
17559
17560       </div>
17561       <div class="tags">
17562
17563
17564         Tags: <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/intervju">intervju</a>.
17565
17566
17567       </div>
17568     </div>
17569     <div class="padding"></div>
17570
17571     <div class="entry">
17572       <div class="title">
17573         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_do_schools_waste_money_on_IT_.html">Why do schools waste money on IT?</a>
17574       </div>
17575       <div class="date">
17576          8th July 2012
17577       </div>
17578       <div class="body">
17579         <p>In the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project, we have realised that one
17580 of the major blockers for the project success is the purchasing skills
17581 in schools and municipalities.  We provide what the happy users of
17582 Debian Edu / Skolelinux say they need and to a lower cost than the
17583 alternatives, and yet so few schools decide to use our solution.  I
17584 was pleased to discover the same observation done by mySociety and Tom
17585 Steinberg in his blog post
17586 "<a href="http://www.mysociety.org/2012/06/19/can-you-recognize-the-million-pound-chair/">Can
17587 you recognize the million pound chair?</a>".  Read it and weep for the
17588 spending of your tax money.</p>
17589
17590 <p>Of course there are other factors involved as well, like our
17591 projects bad marketing skills and the Linux community fragmentation
17592 causing worry with the people on the outside, so we as a project need
17593 to keep working hard to gain users, but it is a up-hill battle when
17594 public decision makers are unable to understand computer system
17595 purchases.</p>
17596
17597       </div>
17598       <div class="tags">
17599
17600
17601         Tags: <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>.
17602
17603
17604       </div>
17605     </div>
17606     <div class="padding"></div>
17607
17608     <div class="entry">
17609       <div class="title">
17610         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Timetabling_Software___nice_free_software.html">Free Timetabling Software - nice free software</a>
17611       </div>
17612       <div class="date">
17613          7th July 2012
17614       </div>
17615       <div class="body">
17616         <p>Included in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
17617 Skolelinux</a> is a large collection of end user and school specific
17618 software.  It is one of the packages not installed by default but
17619 provided in the Debian archive for schools to install if they want to,
17620 is a system to automatically plan the school time table using
17621 information about available teachers, classes and rooms, combined with
17622 the list of required courses and how many hours each topic should
17623 receive.  The software is
17624
17625 <a href="http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/">named FET</a>, and it provide a
17626 graphical user interface to input the required information, save the
17627 result in a fairly simple XML format, and generate time tables for
17628 both teachers and students.  It is available both for
17629 <a href="http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/download.html">Linux, MacOSX and
17630 Windows</a>.</p>
17631
17632 <p>This is <a href="http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/features.html">the
17633 feature list</a>, liftet from the project web site:</p>
17634
17635 <p><ul>
17636
17637   <li>FET is free software, licensed under the GNU GPL v2 or later.
17638     You can freely use, copy, modify and redistribute it </li>
17639
17640   <li>Localized to en_US (US English, default), ar (Arabic), ca
17641     (Catalan), da (Danish), de (German), el (Greek), es (Spanish), fa
17642     (Persian), fr (French), gl (Galician), he (Hebrew), hu
17643     (Hungarian), id (Indonesian), it (Italian), lt (Lithuanian), mk
17644     (Macedonian), ms (Malay), nl (Dutch), pl (Polish), pt_BR
17645     (Brazilian Portuguese), ro (Romanian), ru (Russian), si (Sinhala),
17646     sk (Slovak), sr (Serbian), tr (Turkish), uk (Ukrainian), uz
17647     (Uzbek) and vi (Vietnamese) (incompletely for some languages)
17648     </li>
17649
17650   <li>Fully automatic generation algorithm, allowing also
17651     semi-automatic or manual allocation</li>
17652
17653   <li>Platform independent implementation, allowing running on
17654     GNU/Linux, Windows, Mac and any system that Qt supports </li>
17655
17656   <li>Flexible modular XML format for the input file, allowing editing
17657     with an XML editor or by hand (besides FET interface)</li>
17658
17659   <li>Import/export from CSV format</li>
17660
17661   <li>The resulted timetables are exported into HTML, XML and CSV
17662     formats </li>
17663
17664   <li>Flexible students structure, organized into sets: years, groups
17665     and subgroups. FET allows overlapping years and groups and
17666     non-overlapping subgroups. You can even define individual students
17667     (as separate sets)</li>
17668
17669   <li>Each constraint has a weight percentage, from 0.0% to 100.0%
17670     (but some special constraints are allowed to have only 100% weight
17671     percentage)</li>
17672
17673   <li>Limits for the algorithm (all these limits can be increased on
17674     demand, as a custom version, because this would require a bit more
17675     memory):
17676     <ul>
17677       <li>Maximum total number of hours (periods) per day: 60</li>
17678       <li>Maximum number of working days per week: 35</li>
17679       <li>Maximum total number of teachers: 6000</li>
17680       <li>Maximum total number of sets of students: 30000</li>
17681       <li>Maximum total number of subjects: 6000</li>
17682       <li>Virtually unlimited number of activity tags</li>
17683       <li>Maximum number of activities: 30000</li>
17684       <li>Maximum number of rooms: 6000</li>
17685       <li>Maximum number of buildings: 6000</li>
17686       <li>Possibility of adding multiple teachers and
17687           students sets for each activity.  (it is possible
17688           also to have no teachers or no students sets for an
17689           activity)</li>
17690       <li>Virtually unlimited number of time constraints</li>
17691       <li>Virtually unlimited number of space constraints</li>
17692     </ul></li>
17693
17694   <li>A large and flexible palette of time constraints:
17695     <ul>
17696       <li>Break periods</li>
17697       <li>For teacher(s):
17698         <ul>
17699           <li>Not available periods</li>
17700           <li>Max/min days per week</li>
17701           <li>Max gaps per day/week</li>
17702           <li>Max hours daily/continuously</li>
17703           <li>Min hours daily</li>
17704           <li>Max hours daily/continuously with an activity tag</li>
17705
17706           <li>Respect working in an hourly interval a max number of
17707             days per week</li>
17708         </ul></li>
17709       <li>For students (sets):
17710         <ul>
17711           <li>Not available periods</li>
17712           <li>Begins early (specify max allowed beginnings at second hour)</li>
17713           <li>Max gaps per day/week</li>
17714           <li>Max hours daily/continuously</li>
17715           <li>Min hours daily</li>
17716           <li>Max hours daily/continuously with an activity tag</li>
17717
17718           <li>Respect working in an hourly interval a max number of
17719             days per week</li>
17720         </ul></li>
17721       <li>For an activity or a set of activities/subactivities:
17722         <ul>
17723           <li>A single preferred starting time</li>
17724           <li>A set of preferred starting times</li>
17725           <li>A set of preferred time slots</li>
17726           <li>Min/max days between them</li>
17727           <li>End(s) students day</li>
17728           <li>Same starting time/day/hour</li>
17729           <li>Occupy max time slots from selection (a complex and
17730             flexible constraint, useful in many situations)</li>
17731           <li>Consecutive, ordered, grouped (for 2 or 3 (sub)activities)</li>
17732           <li>Not overlapping</li>
17733           <li>Max simultaneous in selected time slots</li>
17734           <li>Min gaps between a set of (sub)activities</li>
17735         </ul></li>
17736     </ul></li>
17737
17738   <li>A large and flexible palette of space constraints:
17739     <ul>
17740       <li>Room not available periods</li>
17741       <li>For teacher(s):
17742         <ul>
17743           <li>Home room(s)</li>
17744           <li>Max building changes per day/week</li>
17745           <li>Min gaps between building changes</li>
17746         </ul>
17747       </li>
17748
17749       <li>For students (sets):
17750         <ul>
17751           <li>Home room(s)</li>
17752           <li>Max building changes per day/week</li>
17753           <li>Min gaps between building changes</li>
17754         </ul>
17755       </li>
17756       <li>Preferred room(s):
17757         <ul>
17758           <li>For a subject</li>
17759           <li>For an activity tag</li>
17760           <li>For a subject and an activity tag</li>
17761           <li>Individually for a (sub)activity</li>
17762         </ul>
17763       </li>
17764
17765       <li>For a set of activities:
17766         <ul>
17767           <li>Occupy a maximum number of different rooms</li>
17768         </ul>
17769       </li>
17770     </ul>
17771   </li>
17772 </ul></p>
17773
17774 <p>I have not used it myself, as I am not involved in time table
17775 planning at a school, but it seem to work fine when I test it.  If you
17776 need to set up your schools time table, and is tired of doing it
17777 manually, check it out.
17778
17779 A quick summary on how to use it can be found in
17780 <a href="http://marvelsoft.co.in/wp/2012/03/generate-timetable-for-state-cbse-icse-igcse-schools-free/">a
17781 blog post from MarvelSoft</a>.  If you find FET useful, please provide
17782 a recipe for the Debian Edu project in the
17783 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu#Howtos">Debian Edu HowTo
17784 section</a>.</p>
17785
17786       </div>
17787       <div class="tags">
17788
17789
17790         Tags: <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/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
17791
17792
17793       </div>
17794     </div>
17795     <div class="padding"></div>
17796
17797     <div class="entry">
17798       <div class="title">
17799         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Can_Zimbra_be_told_to_send_autoreplies_to_the_From__address_.html">Can Zimbra be told to send autoreplies to the From: address?</a>
17800       </div>
17801       <div class="date">
17802          3rd July 2012
17803       </div>
17804       <div class="body">
17805         <p>In the NUUG <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a>
17806 project (Norwegian version of
17807 <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com/">FixMyStreet</a> from
17808 <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a>), we have discovered
17809 a problem with the municipalities using
17810 <a href="http://www.zimbra.com/">Zimbra</a>.  When FiksGataMi send a
17811 problem report to the government, the email From: address is set to
17812 the address of the person reporting the problem, while envelope sender
17813 is set to the FiksGataMi contact address.  The intention is to make
17814 sure the municipality send any replies to the person reporting the
17815 problem, while any email delivery problems are sent to us in NUUG.
17816 This work well in most cases, but not for Karmøy municipality using
17817 Zimbra.  Karmøy is using the vacation message function in Zimbra to
17818 send an automatic reply to report that the message has been received,
17819 and this message is sent to the envelope sender and not the address in
17820 the From: header.</p>
17821
17822 <p>This causes the automatic message from Karmøy to go to NUUGs
17823 request-tracker instance instead of to the person reporting the
17824 problem.  We can not really change the envelope sender address, as
17825 this would make it impossible for us to discover when there are
17826 problems with the MTAs receiving problem reports.  We have been in
17827 contact with the people at Karmøy municipality, and they are willing
17828 to adjust Zimbra if something can be changed there to get a better
17829 behaviour.</p>
17830
17831 <p>The default behaviour of Zimbra is as far as I can tell according
17832 to the specification in RFC 3834, which recommend that vacation
17833 messages are sent to the envelope sender and not to the From: address.
17834 But I wonder if it is possible to adjust or configure Zimbra to behave
17835 differently.  Anyone know?  Please let us know at
17836 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/fiksgatami">fiksgatami
17837 (at) nuug.no</a>.</p>
17838
17839       </div>
17840       <div class="tags">
17841
17842
17843         Tags: <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/nuug">nuug</a>.
17844
17845
17846       </div>
17847     </div>
17848     <div class="padding"></div>
17849
17850     <div class="entry">
17851       <div class="title">
17852         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Jos__Luis_Redrejo_Rodr_guez.html">Debian Edu interview: José Luis Redrejo Rodríguez</a>
17853       </div>
17854       <div class="date">
17855         26th June 2012
17856       </div>
17857       <div class="body">
17858         <p>I've been too busy at home, but finally I found time to wrap up
17859 another interview with the people behind
17860 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>.
17861 This time we get to know José Luis Redrejo Rodríguez, one of our great
17862 helpers from Spain.  His effort was the reason we added support for
17863 several desktop types (KDE, Gnome and most recently LXDE) in Debian
17864 Edu, and have all of these available in the recently published
17865 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
17866 Squeeze</a> version.</p>
17867
17868 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
17869
17870 <p>I'm a father, teacher and engineer who is working for the Education
17871 ministry of the Region of Extremadura (Spain) in the implementation of
17872 ICT in schools</p>
17873
17874 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
17875 project?</strong></p>
17876
17877 <p>At 2006, I verified that both, we in Extremadura and Skolelinux
17878 project, had been working in parallel for some years, doing very
17879 similar things, using very similar tools and with similar targets, so
17880 I decided it was time to join forces as much as possible.</p>
17881
17882 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
17883 Edu?</strong></p>
17884
17885 <p>A community of highly skilled experts working together, with a
17886 really open schema of collaboration and work. I really love the
17887 concepts of Do-ocracy and Merit-ocracy and the way these concepts are
17888 been used everyday inside Debian Edu.</p>
17889
17890 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
17891 Edu?</strong></p>
17892
17893 <p>Sometimes the differences in the implementations, laws or
17894 economical and technical resources in the different countries don't
17895 allow us to agree in the same solution for all of us, and several
17896 approaches are needed, what is a waste of effort. Also, there is a
17897 lack of more man power to be able to follow the fast evolution of the
17898 technologies in school.</p>
17899
17900 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
17901
17902 <p>Debian, of course, and due to my kind of job I am most of my time
17903 between Iceweasel, <a href="http://www.geany.org/">Geany</a> and
17904 <a href="http://www.ohloh.net/p/gnome-terminator">Terminator</a>.</p>
17905
17906 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
17907 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
17908
17909 <p>I think there is not a single strategy because there are very
17910 different scenarios: schools with mixed proprietary and free
17911 environments, schools using only workstations, other schools using
17912 laptops, netbooks, tablets, interactive white-boards, etc.</p>
17913
17914 <p>Also the range of ages of the students is very broad and you can
17915 not use the same solutions for primary schools and secondary or even
17916 universities. So different strategies are needed.</p>
17917
17918 <p>But, looking at these differences, and looking back to the things
17919 we've done and implemented, and the places were we have spent most of
17920 our forces, I think we should focus as much as possible in free
17921 multi-platform environments, using only standards tools, and moving
17922 more and more to Internet or network solutions that could be deployed
17923 using wireless. I think we'll see more and more personal devices in
17924 the schools, devices the students and teachers will take home with
17925 them, so the solutions must be able to be taken at home and continue
17926 working there.</p>
17927
17928       </div>
17929       <div class="tags">
17930
17931
17932         Tags: <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/intervju">intervju</a>.
17933
17934
17935       </div>
17936     </div>
17937     <div class="padding"></div>
17938
17939     <div class="entry">
17940       <div class="title">
17941         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">Song book for Computer Scientists</a>
17942       </div>
17943       <div class="date">
17944         24th June 2012
17945       </div>
17946       <div class="body">
17947         <p>Many years ago, while studying Computer Science at the
17948 <a href="http://www.uit.no/">University of Tromsø</a>, I started
17949 collecting computer related songs for use at parties.  The original
17950 version was written in LaTeX, but a few years ago I got help from
17951 Håkon W. Lie, one of the inventors of W3C CSS, to convert it to HTML
17952 while keeping the ability to create a nice book in PDF format.  I have
17953 not had time to maintain the book for a while now, and guess I should
17954 put it up on some public version control repository where others can
17955 help me extend and update the book.  If anyone is volunteering to help
17956 me with this, send me an email.  Also let me know if there are songs
17957 missing in my book.</p>
17958
17959 <p>I have not mentioned the book on my blog so far, and it occured to
17960 me today that I really should let all my readers share the joys of
17961 singing out load about programming, computers and computer networks.
17962 Especially now that <a href="http://debconf12.debconf.org/">Debconf
17963 12</a> is about to start (and I am not going).  Want to sing?  Check
17964 out <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/">Petter's
17965 Computer Science Songbook</a>.
17966
17967       </div>
17968       <div class="tags">
17969
17970
17971         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>.
17972
17973
17974       </div>
17975     </div>
17976     <div class="padding"></div>
17977
17978     <div class="entry">
17979       <div class="title">
17980         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu___some_ideas_for_the_future_versions.html">Debian Edu - some ideas for the future versions</a>
17981       </div>
17982       <div class="date">
17983         11th June 2012
17984       </div>
17985       <div class="body">
17986         <p>During my work on
17987 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.nb.html">Debian Edu
17988 based on Squeeze</a>, I came across some issues that should be
17989 addressed in the Wheezy release.  I finally found time to wrap up my
17990 notes and provide quick summary of what I found, with a bit
17991 explanation.</p>
17992
17993 <p><ul>
17994
17995 <li>We need to rewrite our package installation framework, as tasksel
17996 changed from using tasksel tasks to using meta packages (aka packages
17997 with dependencies like our education-* packages), and our installation
17998 system depend on tasksel tasks in
17999 /usr/share/tasksel/debian-edu-tasks.desc for package
18000 installation.</li>
18001
18002 <li>Enable Kerberos login for more services.  Now with the Kerberos
18003 foundation in place, we should use it to get single sign on with more
18004 services, and avoiding unneeded password / login questions.  We should
18005 at least try to enable it for these services:
18006 <ul>
18007
18008   <li>CUPS for admins to add/configure printers and users when using
18009     quotas.</li>
18010   <li>Nagios for admins checking the system status.</li>
18011   <li>GOsa for admins updating LDAP and users changing their passwords.</li>
18012   <li>LDAP for admins updating LDAP.</li>
18013   <li>Squid for users when exam mode / filtering is active.</li>
18014   <li>ssh for admins and users to save a password prompt.</li>
18015
18016 </ul></li>
18017
18018 <li>When we move GOsa to use Kerberos instead of LDAP bind to
18019 authenticate users, we should try to block or at least limit access to
18020 use LDAP bind for authentication, to ensure Kerberos is used when it
18021 is intended, and nothing fall back to using the less safe LDAP bind</li>
18022
18023 <li>Merge debian-edu-config and debian-edu-install.  The split made
18024 sense when d-e-install did a lot more, but these days it is just an
18025 inconvenience when we update the debconf preseeding values.</li>
18026
18027 <li>Fix partman-auto to allow us to abort the installation before
18028 touching the disk if the disk is too small.  This is
18029 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/653305">BTS report #653305</a> and the
18030 d-i developers are fine with the patch and someone just need to apply
18031 it and upload.  After this is done we need to adjust
18032 debian-edu-install to use this new hook.</li>
18033
18034 <li>Adjust to new LTSP framework (boot time config instead of install
18035 time config).  LTSP changed its design, and our hooks to install
18036 packages and update the configuration is most likely not going to work
18037 in Wheezy.
18038
18039 <li>Consider switching to NBD instead of NFS for LTSP root, to allow
18040 the Kernel to cache files in its normal file cache, possibly speeding
18041 up KDE login on slow networks.</li>
18042
18043 <li>Make it possible to create expired user passwords that need to
18044 change on first login.  This is useful when handing out password on
18045 paper, to make sure only the user know the password.  This require
18046 fixes to the PAM handling of kdm and gdm.</li>
18047
18048 <li>Make GUI for adding new machines automatically from sitesummary.
18049 The current command line script is not very friendly to people most
18050 familiar with GUIs.  This should probably be integrated into GOsa to
18051 have it available where the admin will be looking for it..</li>
18052
18053 <li>We should find way for Nagios to check that the DHCP service
18054 actually is working (as in handling out IP addresses).  None of the
18055 Nagios checks I have found so far have been working for me.</li>
18056
18057 <li>We should switch from libpam-nss-ldapd to sssd for all profiles
18058 using LDAP, and not only on for roaming workstations, to have less
18059 packages to configure and consistent setup across all profiles.</li>
18060
18061 <li>We should configure Kerberos to update LDAP and Samba password
18062 when changing password using the Kerberos protocol.  The hook was
18063 requested in <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/588968">BTS report
18064 #588968</a> and is now available in Wheezy.  We might need to write a
18065 MIT Kerberos plugin in C to get this.</li>
18066
18067 <li>We should clean up the set of applications installed by default.
18068 <ul>
18069
18070 <li>reduce the number of chemistry visualisers</li>
18071 <li>consider dropping xpaint</li>
18072 <li>and probably more?</li>
18073 </ul></li>
18074
18075 <li>Some hardware need external firmware to work properly.  This is
18076 mostly the case for WiFi network cards, but there are some other
18077 examples too.  For popular laptops to work out of the box, such
18078 firmware need to be installed from non-free, and we should provide
18079 some GUI to do this.  Ubuntu already have this implemented, and we
18080 could consider using their packages.  At the moment we have some
18081 command line script to do this (one for the running system, another
18082 for the LTSP chroot).</li>
18083
18084
18085 <li>In Squeeze, we provide KDE, Gnome and LXDE as desktop options.  We
18086 should extend the list to Xfce and Sugar, and preferably find a way to
18087 install several and allow the admin or the user to select which one to
18088 use.</li>
18089
18090 <li>The golearn tool from the goplay package make it easy to check out
18091 interesting educational packages.  We should work on the package
18092 tagging in Debian to ensure it represent all the useful educational
18093 packages, and extend the tool to allow it to use packagekit to install
18094 new applications with a simple mouse click.</li>
18095
18096 <li>The Squeeze version got half a exam solution already in place,
18097 with the introduction of iptable based network blocking, but for it to
18098 be a complete exam solution the Squid proxy need to enable
18099 filtering/blocking as well when the exam mode is enabled.  We should
18100 implement a way to easily enable this for the schools that want it,
18101 instead of the "it is documented" method of today.</li>
18102
18103 <li>A feature used in several schools is the ability for a teacher to
18104 "take over" the desktop of individual or all computers in the room.
18105 There are at least three implementations,
18106 <a href="italc.sourceforge.net/">italc</a>,
18107 <a href="http://www.itais.net/help/en/">controlaula</a> og
18108 <a href="http://www.epoptes.org/">epoptes</a> and we should pick one of
18109 them and make it trivial to set it up in a school.  The challenges is
18110 how to distribute crypto keys and how to group computers in one room
18111 and how to set up which machine/user can control the machines in a
18112 given room.</li>
18113
18114 <li>Tablets and surf boards are getting more and more popular, and we
18115 should look into providing a good solution for integrating these into
18116 the Debian Edu network.  Not quite sure how.  Perhaps we should
18117 provide a installation profile with better touch screen support for
18118 them, or add some sync services to allow them to exchange
18119 configuration and data with the central server.  This should be
18120 investigated.</li>
18121
18122 </ul></p>
18123
18124 <p>I guess we will discover more as we continue to work on the Wheezy
18125 version.</p>
18126
18127       </div>
18128       <div class="tags">
18129
18130
18131         Tags: <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>.
18132
18133
18134       </div>
18135     </div>
18136     <div class="padding"></div>
18137
18138     <div class="entry">
18139       <div class="title">
18140         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/TV_with_face_recognition__for_improved_viewer_experience.html">TV with face recognition, for improved viewer experience</a>
18141       </div>
18142       <div class="date">
18143          9th June 2012
18144       </div>
18145       <div class="body">
18146         <p>Slashdot got a story about Intel planning a
18147 <a href="http://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/12/06/09/0012247/intel-to-launch-tv-service-with-facial-recognition-by-end-of-the-year">TV
18148 with face recognition</a> to recognise the viewer, and it occurred to
18149 me that it would be more interesting to turn it around, and do face
18150 recognition on the TV image itself.  It could let the viewer know who
18151 is present on the screen, and perhaps look up their credibility,
18152 company affiliation, previous appearances etc for the viewer to better
18153 evaluate what is being said and done.  That would be a feature I would
18154 be willing to pay for.</p>
18155
18156 <p>I would not be willing to pay for a TV that point a camera on my
18157 household, like the big brother feature apparently proposed by Intel.
18158 It is the telescreen idea fetched straight out of the book
18159 <a href="http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100021.txt">1984 by George
18160 Orwell</a>.</p>
18161
18162       </div>
18163       <div class="tags">
18164
18165
18166         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
18167
18168
18169       </div>
18170     </div>
18171     <div class="padding"></div>
18172
18173     <div class="entry">
18174       <div class="title">
18175         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Web_service_to_look_up_HP_and_Dell_computer_hardware_support_status.html">Web service to look up HP and Dell computer hardware support status</a>
18176       </div>
18177       <div class="date">
18178          6th June 2012
18179       </div>
18180       <div class="body">
18181         <p>A few days ago
18182 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/SOAP_based_webservice_from_Dell_to_check_server_support_status.html">I
18183 reported how to get</a> the support status out of Dell using an
18184 unofficial and undocumented SOAP API, which I since have found out was
18185 <a href="http://lists.us.dell.com/pipermail/linux-poweredge/2012-February/045959.html">discovered
18186 by Daniel De Marco in february</a>.  Combined with my web scraping
18187 code for HP, Dell and IBM
18188 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Checking_server_hardware_support_status_for_Dell__HP_and_IBM_servers.html">from
18189 2009</a>, I got inspired and wrote
18190 <a href="https://views.scraperwiki.com/run/computer-hardware-support-status/">a
18191 web service</a> based on Scraperwiki to make it easy to look up the
18192 support status and get a machine readable result back.</p>
18193
18194 <p>This is what it look like at the moment when asking for the JSON
18195 output:
18196
18197 <blockquote><pre>
18198 % GET <a href="https://views.scraperwiki.com/run/computer-hardware-support-status/?format=json&vendor=Dell&servicetag=2v1xwn1">https://views.scraperwiki.com/run/computer-hardware-support-status/?format=json&vendor=Dell&servicetag=2v1xwn1</a>
18199 supportstatus({"servicetag": "2v1xwn1", "warrantyend": "2013-11-24", "shipped": "2010-11-24", "scrapestamputc": "2012-06-06T20:26:56.965847", "scrapedurl": "http://143.166.84.118/services/assetservice.asmx?WSDL", "vendor": "Dell", "productid": ""})
18200 %
18201 </pre></blockquote>
18202
18203 <p>It currently support Dell and HP, and I am hoping for help to add
18204 support for other vendors.  The python source is available on
18205 Scraperwiki and I welcome help with adding more features.</p>
18206
18207       </div>
18208       <div class="tags">
18209
18210
18211         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
18212
18213
18214       </div>
18215     </div>
18216     <div class="padding"></div>
18217
18218     <div class="entry">
18219       <div class="title">
18220         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Mike_Gabriel.html">Debian Edu interview: Mike Gabriel</a>
18221       </div>
18222       <div class="date">
18223          2nd June 2012
18224       </div>
18225       <div class="body">
18226         <p>Back in 2010, Mike Gabriel showed up on the
18227 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
18228 mailing list.  He quickly proved to be a valuable developer, and
18229 thanks to his tireless effort we now have Kerberos integrated into the
18230 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
18231 Squeeze</a> version.</p>
18232
18233 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
18234
18235 <p>My name is Mike Gabriel, I am 38 years old and live near Kiel,
18236 Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. I live together with a wonderful partner
18237 (Angela Fuß) and two own children and two bonus children (contributed
18238 by Angela).</p>
18239
18240 <p>During the day I am part-time employed as a system administrator
18241 and part-time working as an IT consultant. The consultancy work
18242 touches free software topics wherever and whenever possible. During
18243 the nights I am a free software developer. In the gaps I also train in
18244 becoming an osteopath.</p>
18245
18246 <p>Starting in 2010 we (Andreas Buchholz, Angela Fuß, Mike Gabriel)
18247 have set up a free software project in the area of Kiel that aims at
18248 introducing free software into schools. The project's name is
18249 "IT-Zukunft Schule" (IT future for schools). The project links IT
18250 skills with communication skills.</p>
18251
18252 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
18253 project?</strong></p>
18254
18255 <p>While preparing our own customised Linux distribution for
18256 "IT-Zukunft Schule" we were repeatedly asked if we really wanted to
18257 reinvent the wheel. What schools really need is already available,
18258 people said.  From this impulse we started evaluating other Linux
18259 distributions that target being used for school networks.</p>
18260
18261 <p>At the end we short-listed two approaches and compared them: a
18262 commercial Linux distribution developed by a company in Bremen,
18263 Germany, and Skolelinux / Debian Edu. Between 12/2010 and 03/2011 we
18264 went to several events and met people being responsible for marketing
18265 and development of either of the distributions. Skolelinux / Debian
18266 Edu was by far much more convincing compared to the other product that
18267 got short-listed beforehand--across the full spectrum. What was most
18268 attractive for me personally: the perspective of collaboration within
18269 the developmental branch of the Debian Edu project itself.</p>
18270
18271 <p>In parallel with this, we talked to many local and not-so-local
18272 people.  People teaching at schools, headmasters, politicians, data
18273 protection experts, other IT professionals.</p>
18274
18275 <p>We came to two conclusions:</p>
18276
18277 <p>First, a technical conclusion: What schools need is available in
18278 bits and pieces here and there, and none of the solutions really fit
18279 by 100%. Any school we have seen has a very individual IT setup
18280 whereas most of each school's requirements could mapped by a standard
18281 IT solution.  The requirement to this IT solution is flexibility and
18282 customisability, so that individual adaptations here and there are
18283 possible.  In terms of re-distributing and rolling out such a
18284 standardised IT system for schools (a system that is still to some
18285 degree customisable) there is still a lot of work to do here
18286 locally. Debian Edu / Skolelinux has been our choice as the starting
18287 point.</p>
18288
18289 <p>Second, a holistic conclusion: What schools need does not exist at
18290 all (or we missed it so far). There are several technical solutions
18291 for handling IT at schools that tend to make a good impression. What
18292 has been missing completely here in Germany, though, is the enrolment
18293 of people into using IT and teaching with IT. "IT-Zukunft Schule"
18294 tries to provide an approach for this.</p>
18295
18296 <p>Only some schools have some sort of a media concept which explains,
18297 defines and gives guidance on how to use IT in class. Most schools in
18298 Northern Germany do not have an IT service provider, the school's IT
18299 equipment is managed by one or (if the school is lucky) two (admin)
18300 teachers, most of the workload these admin teachers get done in there
18301 spare time.</p>
18302
18303 <p>We were surprised that only a very few admin teachers were
18304 networked with colleagues from other schools. Basically, every school
18305 here around has its individual approach of providing IT equipment to
18306 teachers and students and the exchange of ideas has been quasi
18307 non-existent until 2010/2011.</p>
18308
18309 <p>Quite some (non-admin) teachers try to avoid using IT technology in
18310 class as a learning medium completely. Several reasons for this
18311 avoidance do exist.</p>
18312
18313 <p>We discovered that no-one has ever taken a closer look at this
18314 social part of IT management in schools, so far. On our quest journey
18315 for a technical IT solution for schools, we discussed this issue with
18316 several teachers, headmasters, politicians, other IT professionals and
18317 they all confirmed: a holistic approach of considering IT management
18318 at schools, an approach that includes the people in place, will be new
18319 and probably a gain for all.</p>
18320
18321 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
18322 Edu?</strong></p>
18323
18324 <p>There is a list of advantages: international context, openness to
18325 any kind of contributions, do-ocracy policy, the closeness to Debian,
18326 the different installation scenarios possible (from stand-alone
18327 workstation to complex multi-server sites), the transparency within
18328 project communication, honest communication within the group of
18329 developers, etc.</p>
18330
18331 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
18332 Edu?</strong></p>
18333
18334 <p>Every coin has two sides:</p>
18335
18336 <p>Technically: <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/311188">BTS issue
18337 #311188</a>, tricky upgradability of a Debian Edu main server, network
18338 client installations on top of a plain vanilla Debian installation
18339 should become possible sometime in the near future, one could think
18340 about splitting the very complex package debian-edu-config into
18341 several portions (to make it easier for new developers to
18342 contribute).</p>
18343
18344 <p>Another issue I see is that we (as Debian Edu developers) should
18345 find out more about the network of people who do the marketing for
18346 Debian Edu / Skolelinux. There is a very active group in Germany
18347 promoting Skolelinux on the bigger Linux Days within Germany. Are
18348 there other groups like that in other countries? How can we bring
18349 these marketing people together (marketing group A with group B and
18350 all of them with the group of Debian Edu developers)? During the last
18351 meeting of the German Skolelinux group, I got the impression of people
18352 there being rather disconnected from the development department of
18353 Debian Edu / Skolelinux.</p>
18354
18355 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
18356
18357 <p>For my daily business, I do not use commercial software at all.</p>
18358
18359 <p>For normal stuff I use Iceweasel/Firefox, Libreoffice.org. For
18360 serious text writing I prefer LaTeX. I use gimp, inkscape, scribus for
18361 more artistic tasks. I run virtual machines in KVM and Virtualbox.</p>
18362
18363 <p>I am one of the upstream developers of X2Go. In 2010 I started the
18364 development of a Python based X2Go Client, called PyHoca-GUI.
18365 PyHoca-GUI has brought forth a Python X2Go Client API that currently
18366 is being integrated in Ubuntu's software center.</p>
18367
18368 <p>For communications I have my own Kolab server running using Horde
18369 as web-based groupware client. For IRC I love to use irssi, for Jabber
18370 I have several clients that I use, mostly pidgin, though. I am also
18371 the Debian maintainer of Coccinella, a Jabber-based interactive
18372 whiteboard.</p>
18373
18374 <p>My favourite terminal emulator is KDE's Yakuake.</p>
18375
18376 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
18377 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
18378
18379 <p>Communicate, communicate, communicate. Enrol people, enrol people,
18380 enrol people.</p>
18381
18382       </div>
18383       <div class="tags">
18384
18385
18386         Tags: <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/intervju">intervju</a>.
18387
18388
18389       </div>
18390     </div>
18391     <div class="padding"></div>
18392
18393     <div class="entry">
18394       <div class="title">
18395         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/SOAP_based_webservice_from_Dell_to_check_server_support_status.html">SOAP based webservice from Dell to check server support status</a>
18396       </div>
18397       <div class="date">
18398          1st June 2012
18399       </div>
18400       <div class="body">
18401         <p>A few years ago I wrote
18402 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Checking_server_hardware_support_status_for_Dell__HP_and_IBM_servers.html">how
18403 to extract support status</a> for your Dell and HP servers.  Recently
18404 I have learned from colleges here at the
18405 <a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a> that Dell have
18406 made this even easier, by providing a SOAP based web service.  Given
18407 the service tag, one can now query the Dell servers and get machine
18408 readable information about the support status.  This perl code
18409 demonstrate how to do it:</p>
18410
18411 <p><pre>
18412 use strict;
18413 use warnings;
18414 use SOAP::Lite;
18415 use Data::Dumper;
18416 my $GUID = '11111111-1111-1111-1111-111111111111';
18417 my $App = 'test';
18418 my $servicetag = $ARGV[0] or die "Please supply a servicetag. $!\n";
18419 my ($deal, $latest, @dates);
18420 my $s = SOAP::Lite
18421     -> uri('http://support.dell.com/WebServices/')
18422     -> on_action( sub { join '', @_ } )
18423     -> proxy('http://xserv.dell.com/services/assetservice.asmx')
18424     ;
18425 my $a = $s->GetAssetInformation(
18426     SOAP::Data->name('guid')->value($GUID)->type(''),
18427     SOAP::Data->name('applicationName')->value($App)->type(''),
18428     SOAP::Data->name('serviceTags')->value($servicetag)->type(''),
18429 );
18430 print Dumper($a -> result) ;
18431 </pre></p>
18432
18433 <p>The output can look like this:</p>
18434
18435 <p><pre>
18436 $VAR1 = {
18437           'Asset' => {
18438                      'Entitlements' => {
18439                                        'EntitlementData' => [
18440                                                             {
18441                                                               'EntitlementType' => 'Expired',
18442                                                               'EndDate' => '2009-07-29T00:00:00',
18443                                                               'Provider' => '',
18444                                                               'StartDate' => '2006-07-29T00:00:00',
18445                                                               'DaysLeft' => '0'
18446                                                             },
18447                                                             {
18448                                                               'EntitlementType' => 'Expired',
18449                                                               'EndDate' => '2009-07-29T00:00:00',
18450                                                               'Provider' => '',
18451                                                               'StartDate' => '2006-07-29T00:00:00',
18452                                                               'DaysLeft' => '0'
18453                                                             },
18454                                                             {
18455                                                               'EntitlementType' => 'Expired',
18456                                                               'EndDate' => '2007-07-29T00:00:00',
18457                                                               'Provider' => '',
18458                                                               'StartDate' => '2006-07-29T00:00:00',
18459                                                               'DaysLeft' => '0'
18460                                                             }
18461                                                           ]
18462                                      },
18463                      'AssetHeaderData' => {
18464                                           'SystemModel' => 'GX620',
18465                                           'ServiceTag' => '8DSGD2J',
18466                                           'SystemShipDate' => '2006-07-29T19:00:00-05:00',
18467                                           'Buid' => '2323',
18468                                           'Region' => 'Europe',
18469                                           'SystemID' => 'PLX_GX620',
18470                                           'SystemType' => 'OptiPlex'
18471                                         }
18472                    }
18473         };
18474 </pre></p>
18475
18476 <p>I have not been able to find any documentation from Dell about this
18477 service outside the
18478 <a href="http://xserv.dell.com/services/assetservice.asmx?op=GetAssetInformation">inline
18479 documentation</a>, and according to
18480 <a href="http://iboyd.net/index.php/2012/02/14/updated-dell-warranty-information-script/">one
18481 comment</a> it can have stability issues, but it is a lot better than
18482 scraping HTML pages. :)</p>
18483
18484 <p>Wonder if HP and other server vendors have a similar service.  If
18485 you know of one, drop me an email. :)</p>
18486
18487       </div>
18488       <div class="tags">
18489
18490
18491         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
18492
18493
18494       </div>
18495     </div>
18496     <div class="padding"></div>
18497
18498     <div class="entry">
18499       <div class="title">
18500         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_monitor_calibration_using_ColorHug.html">First monitor calibration using ColorHug</a>
18501       </div>
18502       <div class="date">
18503         31st May 2012
18504       </div>
18505       <div class="body">
18506         <p>A few days ago my color calibration gadget
18507 <a href="http://www.hughski.com/index.html">ColorHug</a> arrived in the
18508 mail, and I've had a few days to test it.  As all my machines are
18509 running Debian Squeeze, where
18510 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/c/colorhug-client.html">the
18511 calibration software</a> is missing (it is present in Wheezy and Sid),
18512 I ran the calibration using the Fedora based live CD.  This worked
18513 just fine.  So far I have only done the quick calibration.  It was
18514 slow enough for me, so I will leave the more extensive calibration for
18515 another day.</p>
18516
18517 <p>After calibration, I get a
18518 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICC_profile">ICC color
18519 profile</a> file that can be passed to programs understanding such
18520 tools.  KDE do not seem to understand it out of the box, so I searched
18521 for command line tools to use to load the color profile into X.
18522 xcalib was the first one I found, and it seem to work fine for single
18523 monitor setups.  But for my video player, a laptop with a flat screen
18524 attached, it was unable to load the color profile for the correct
18525 monitor.  After searching a bit, I
18526 <a href="http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1347896">discovered</a>
18527 that the dispwin tool from the argyll package would do what I wanted,
18528 and a simple</p>
18529
18530 <p><pre>
18531 dispwin -d 1 profile.icc
18532 </pre></p>
18533
18534 <p>later I had the color profile loaded for the correct monitor.  The
18535 result was a bit more pink than I expected.  I guess I picked the
18536 wrong monitor type for the "led" monitor I got, but the result is good
18537 enough for now.</p>
18538
18539       </div>
18540       <div class="tags">
18541
18542
18543         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
18544
18545
18546       </div>
18547     </div>
18548     <div class="padding"></div>
18549
18550     <div class="entry">
18551       <div class="title">
18552         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Ralf_Gesellensetter.html">Debian Edu interview: Ralf Gesellensetter</a>
18553       </div>
18554       <div class="date">
18555         27th May 2012
18556       </div>
18557       <div class="body">
18558         <p>In 2003, a German teacher showed up on the
18559 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
18560 mailing list with interesting problems and reports proving he setting
18561 up Linux for a (for us at the time) lot of pupils.  His name was Ralf
18562 Gesellensetter, and he has been an important tester and contributor
18563 since then, helping to make sure the
18564 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
18565 Squeeze</a> release became as good as it is..</p>
18566
18567 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
18568
18569 <p>I am a teacher from Germany, and my subjects are Geography,
18570 Mathematics, and Computer Science ("Informatik"). During the past 12
18571 years (since 2000), I have been working for a comprehensive (and soon,
18572 also inclusive) school leading to all kind of general levels, such as
18573 O- or A-level ("Abitur").  For quite as long, I've been taking care of
18574 our computer network.</p>
18575
18576 <p>Now, in my early 40s, I enjoy the privilege of spending a lot of my
18577 spare time together with my wife, our son (3 years) and our daughter
18578 (4 months).</p>
18579
18580 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
18581 project?</strong></p>
18582
18583 <p>We had tried different Linux based school servers, when members of
18584 my local Linux User Group (LUG OWL) detected Skolelinux. I remember
18585 very well, being part of a party celebrating the Linux New Media Award
18586 ("Best Newcomer Distribution", also nominated: Ubuntu) that was given
18587 to Skolelinux at Linux World Exposition in Frankfurt, 2005 (IIRC). Few
18588 months later, I had the chance to join a developer meeting in Ulsrud
18589 (Oslo) and to hand out the award to Knut Yrvin and others.  For more
18590 than 7 years, Skolelinux is part of our schools infrastructure, namely
18591 our main server (tjener), one LTSP (today without thin clients), and
18592 approximately 50 work stations. Most of these have the option to boot a
18593 locally installed Skolelinux image.  As a consequence, I joined quite
18594 a few events dealing with free software or Linux, and met many Debian
18595 (Edu) developers. All of them seemed quite nice and competent to me,
18596 one more reason to stick to Skolelinux.</p>
18597
18598 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
18599 Edu?</strong></p>
18600
18601 <p>Debian driven, you are given all the advantages of a community
18602 project including well maintained updates. Once, you are familiar with
18603 the network layout, you can easily roll out an entire educational
18604 computer infrastructure, from just one installation media. As only
18605 free software (FOSS) is used, that supports even elderly hardware,
18606 up-sizing your IT equipment is only limited by space (i.e. available
18607 labs).  Especially if you run a LTSP thin client server, your
18608 administration costs tend towards zero.</p>
18609
18610 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
18611 Edu?</strong></p>
18612
18613 <p>While Debian's stability has loads of advantages for servers, this
18614 might be different in some cases for clients: Schools with unlimited
18615 budget might buy new hardware with components that are not yet
18616 supported by Debian stable, or wish to use more recent versions of
18617 office packages or desktop environments.  These schools have the
18618 option to run Debian testing or other distributions - if they have the
18619 capacity to do so.  Another issue is that Debian release cycles
18620 include a wide range of changes; therefor a high percentage of human
18621 power seems to be absorbed by just keeping the features of Skolelinux
18622 within the new setting of the version to come. During this process,
18623 the cogs of Debian Edu are getting more and more professional,
18624 i.e. harder to understand for novices.</p>
18625
18626 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
18627
18628 <p>LibreOffice, Wikipedia, Openstreetmap, Iceweasel (Mozilla Firefox),
18629 KMail, Gimp, Inkscape - and of course the Linux Kernel (not only on
18630 PC, Laptop, Mobile, but also our SAT receiver)</p>
18631
18632 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
18633 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
18634
18635 <p><ol>
18636
18637 <li>Support computer science as regular subject in schools to make
18638 people really "own" their hardware, to make them understand the
18639 difference between proprietary software products, and free software
18640 developing.</li>
18641
18642 <li>Make budget baskets corresponding: In Germany's public schools
18643 there are more or less fixed budgets for IT equipment (including
18644 licenses), so schools won't benefit from any savings here. This
18645 privilege is left to private schools which have consequently a large
18646 share among German Skolelinux schools.</li>
18647
18648 <li>Get free software in the seminars where would-be teachers are
18649 trained. In many cases, teachers' software customs are respected by
18650 decision makers rather than the expertise of any IT experts.</li>
18651
18652 <li>Don't limit ourself to free software run natively. Everybody uses
18653 free software or free licenses (for instance Wikipedia), and this
18654 general concept should get expanded to free educational content to be
18655 shared world wide (school books e.g.).</li>
18656
18657 <li>Make clear where ever you can that the market share of free (libre)
18658 office suites is much above 20 p.c. today, and that you pupils don't
18659 need to know the "ribbon menu" in order to get employed.</li>
18660
18661 <li>Talk about the difference between freeware and free software.</li>
18662
18663 <li>Spread free software, or even collections of portable free apps
18664 for USB pen drives. Endorse students to get a legal copy of
18665 Libreoffice rather than accepting them to use illegal serials.  And
18666 keep sending documents in ODF formats.</li>
18667
18668 </ol></p>
18669
18670       </div>
18671       <div class="tags">
18672
18673
18674         Tags: <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/intervju">intervju</a>.
18675
18676
18677       </div>
18678     </div>
18679     <div class="padding"></div>
18680
18681     <div class="entry">
18682       <div class="title">
18683         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_cost_of_ODF_and_OOXML.html">The cost of ODF and OOXML</a>
18684       </div>
18685       <div class="date">
18686         26th May 2012
18687       </div>
18688       <div class="body">
18689         <p>I just come across a blog post from Glyn Moody reporting the
18690 claimed cost from Microsoft on requiring ODF to be used by the UK
18691 government.  I just sent him an email to let him know that his
18692 assumption are most likely wrong.  Sharing it here in case some of my
18693 blog readers have seem the same numbers float around in the UK.</p>
18694
18695 <p><blockquote> <p>Hi.  I just noted your
18696 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2012/04/does-microsoft-office-lock-in-cost-the-uk-government-500-million/index.htm">http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2012/04/does-microsoft-office-lock-in-cost-the-uk-government-500-million/index.htm</a>
18697 comment:</p>
18698
18699 <p><blockquote>"They're all in Danish, not unreasonably, but even
18700 with the help of Google Translate I can't find any figures about the
18701 savings of "moving to a flexible two standard" as claimed by the
18702 Microsoft email. But I assume it is backed up somewhere, so let's take
18703 it, and the £500 million figure for the UK, on trust."
18704 </blockquote></p>
18705
18706 <p>I can tell you that the Danish reports are inflated.  I believe it is
18707 the same reports that were used in the Norwegian debate around 2007,
18708 and Gisle Hannemyr (a well known IT commentator in Norway) had a look
18709 at the content.  In short, the reason it is claimed that using ODF
18710 will be so costly, is based on the assumption that this mean every
18711 existing document need to be converted from one of the MS Office
18712 formats to ODF, transferred to the receiver, and converted back from
18713 ODF to one of the MS Office formats, and that the conversion will cost
18714 10 minutes of work time for both the sender and the receiver.  In
18715 reality the sender would have a tool capable of saving to ODF, and the
18716 receiver would have a tool capable of reading it, and the time spent
18717 would at most be a few seconds for saving and loading, not 20 minutes
18718 of wasted effort.</p>
18719
18720 <p>Microsoft claimed all these costs were saved by allowing people to
18721 transfer the original files from MS Office instead of spending 10
18722 minutes converting to ODF. :)</p>
18723
18724 <p>See
18725 <a href="http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12_vl02.php">http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12_vl02.php</a>
18726 and
18727 <a href="http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12.php">http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12.php</a>
18728 for background information.  Norwegian only, sorry. :)</p>
18729 </blockquote></p>
18730
18731       </div>
18732       <div class="tags">
18733
18734
18735         Tags: <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>.
18736
18737
18738       </div>
18739     </div>
18740     <div class="padding"></div>
18741
18742     <div class="entry">
18743       <div class="title">
18744         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ColorHug___USB_and_free_software_based_screen_color_calibration.html">ColorHug - USB and free software based screen color calibration</a>
18745       </div>
18746       <div class="date">
18747         18th May 2012
18748       </div>
18749       <div class="body">
18750         <p>In january, I
18751 <a href="http://blog.cihar.com/archives/2012/01/17/colorhug-has-arrived/">discovered
18752 the ColorHug</a>, a USB dongle from
18753 <a href="http://www.hughski.com/index.html">Hughski</a> to calibrate
18754 the color on a computer screen.  The software required is
18755 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/c/colorhug-client.html">included
18756 in Debian</a>, and I decided back then to preorder from the next
18757 batch.  Yesterday I finally heard back from them, and got the
18758 opportunity to order.  Today I ordered mine, and eagerly await the
18759 delivery.  I hope it arrive next week, as I got a confirmation that it
18760 should go in the mail on monday. :)</p>
18761
18762 <p>If you want to ensure the colors on the screen match the intended
18763 colors, I suggest you check out this cheap tool with free software
18764 drivers. :)</p>
18765
18766       </div>
18767       <div class="tags">
18768
18769
18770         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
18771
18772
18773       </div>
18774     </div>
18775     <div class="padding"></div>
18776
18777     <div class="entry">
18778       <div class="title">
18779         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__J_rgen_Leibner.html">Debian Edu interview: Jürgen Leibner</a>
18780       </div>
18781       <div class="date">
18782         13th May 2012
18783       </div>
18784       <div class="body">
18785         <p>It has been a few busy weeks for me, but I am finally back to
18786 publish another interview with the people behind
18787 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>.
18788 This time it is one of our German developers, who have helped out over the
18789 years to make sure both a lot of major but also a lot of the minor
18790 details get right before release.
18791
18792 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
18793
18794 <p>My name is Jürgen Leibner, I'm 49 years old and living in
18795 Bielefeld, a town in northern Germany.  I worked nearly 20 years as
18796 certified engineer in the department for plant design and layout of an
18797 international company for machinery and equipment.  Since 2011 I'm a
18798 certified technical writer (tekom e.V.) and doing technical
18799 documentations for a steam turbine manufacturer.  From April this year
18800 I will manage the department of technical documentation at a
18801 manufacturer of automation and assembly line engineering.</p>
18802
18803 <p>My first contact with linux was around 1993. Since that time I used
18804 it at work and at home repeatedly but not exclusively as I do now at
18805 home since 2006.</p>
18806
18807 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
18808 project?</strong></p>
18809
18810 <p>Once a day in the early year of 2001 when I wanted to fetch my
18811 daughter from primary school, there was a teacher sitting in the
18812 middle of 20 old computers trying to boot them and he failed. I helped
18813 him to get them booting. That was seen by the school director and she
18814 asked me if I would like to manage that the school gets all that old
18815 computers in use. I answered: "Yes".</p>
18816
18817 <p>Some weeks later every of the 10 classrooms had one computer
18818 running Windows98. I began to collect old computers and equipment as
18819 gifts and installed the first computer room with a peer-to-peer
18820 network. I did my work at school without being payed in my spare time
18821 and with a lot of fun.  About one year later the school was connected
18822 to Internet and a local area network was installed in the school
18823 building.  That was the time to have a server and I knew it must be a
18824 Linux server to be able to fulfil all the wishes of the teachers and
18825 being able to do this in a transparent and economic way, without extra
18826 costs for things like licence and software.  So I searched for a
18827 school server system running under Linux and I found a couple of
18828 people nearby who founded 'skolelinux.de'. It was the Skolelinux
18829 prerelease 32 I first tried out for being used at the school.  I
18830 managed the IT of that school until the municipal authority took over
18831 the IT management and centralised the services for all schools in
18832 Bielefeld in December of 2006.</p>
18833
18834 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
18835 Edu?</strong></p>
18836
18837 <p>When I'm looking back to the beginning, there were other advantages
18838 for me as today.</p>
18839
18840 <p>In the past there were advantages like:</p>
18841
18842 <p><ul>
18843
18844 <li>I don't need to buy it so it generates no costs to the school as
18845 they had little money to spent for computers and software.</li>
18846
18847 <li>It has a licence which grands all rights to use it without
18848 cost.</li>
18849
18850 <li>It was more able to fit all requirements of a server system for
18851 schools than a Microsoft server system, even if there are only Windows
18852 clients because of it's preconfigured overall concept of being a
18853 infrastructure solution and community for schools, not only a
18854 server</li>
18855
18856 <li>I was able to configure the server to the needs of the
18857 school.</li>
18858
18859 </ul></p>
18860
18861 <p>Today some of the advantages has been lost, changed or new ones
18862 came up in this way:</p>
18863
18864 <p><ul>
18865
18866 <li>Most schools here do have money to buy hardware and software
18867 now.</li>
18868
18869 <li>They are today mostly managed from central IT departments which
18870 have own concepts which often do not fit to Debian Edu concepts
18871 because they are to close to Microsoft ideology.</li>
18872
18873 <li>With the Squeeze version of Debian Edu which now uses GOsa² for
18874 management I feel more able to manage the daily tasks than with the
18875 interfaces used in the past.</li>
18876
18877 <li>It is more modular than in the past and fits even better to the
18878 different needs.</li>
18879
18880 <li>The documentation is usable and gets better every day.</li>
18881
18882 <li>More people than ever before are using Debian Edu all over the
18883 world and so the community, which is an very important part I think,
18884 is sharing knowledge and minds.</li>
18885
18886 <li>Most, maybe all, of the technical requirements for schools are
18887 solved today by Debian Edu. </li>
18888
18889 </ul></p>
18890
18891 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
18892 Edu?</strong></p>
18893
18894 <p><ul>
18895
18896 <li>There are too few IT companies able to integrate Debian Edu into
18897 their product portfolio for serving schools with concepts or even
18898 whole municipality areas.</li>
18899
18900 <li>Debian Edu has beside other free and open software projects not
18901 enough lobbyists which promote free and open software to
18902 politicians.</li>
18903
18904 <li>Technically there are no disadvantages I'm aware of.</li>
18905
18906 </ul></p>
18907
18908 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
18909
18910 <p>I use Debian stable on my home server and on my little desktop
18911 computer. On my laptop I use Debian testing/sid. The applications I
18912 use on my laptop and my desktop are Open/Libre-office, Iceweasel,
18913 KMail, DigiKam, Amarok, Dolphin, okular and all the other programs I
18914 need from the KDE environment.  On console I use newsbeuter, mutt,
18915 screen, irssi and all the other famous and useful tools.</p>
18916
18917 <p>My home server provides mail services with exim, dovecot, roundcube
18918 and mutt over ssh on the console, file services with samba, NFS,
18919 rsync, web services with apache, moinmoin-wiki, multimedia services
18920 with gallery2 and mediatomb and database services with MySQL for me
18921 and the whole family.  I probably forgot something.</p>
18922
18923 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
18924 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
18925
18926 <p>I believe, we should provide concepts for IT companies to integrate
18927 Debian Edu into their product portfolio with use cases for different
18928 countries and areas all over the world.</p>
18929
18930       </div>
18931       <div class="tags">
18932
18933
18934         Tags: <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/intervju">intervju</a>.
18935
18936
18937       </div>
18938     </div>
18939     <div class="padding"></div>
18940
18941     <div class="entry">
18942       <div class="title">
18943         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Cutting_it_short___and_picking_the_right_tool_for_the_job.html">Cutting it short - and picking the right tool for the job</a>
18944       </div>
18945       <div class="date">
18946         30th April 2012
18947       </div>
18948       <div class="body">
18949         <p><!-- IMG_5869.JPG -->
18950 <img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/panasonic-er-1611.jpeg"></p>
18951
18952 <p>I normally cut my hair short, and my tool of choice has been a
18953 common hair/beard cutter, bought in a electrical shop here in Norway.
18954 But the last ones have not really been up to the task.  My last
18955 cutter, some model from Braun, could only cut a few of my hairs at the
18956 time, and cutting my head took forever.  And the one before that did
18957 not work very well either.  We have looked for something better for a
18958 while, but it was not until I ended up visiting a hairdresser that we
18959 discovered that there are indeed better tools available.  But these
18960 are not marketed and sold to "regular consumers".  The hair saloons
18961 can get them through their suppliers, but their suppliers only sell
18962 companies.  The models they sell, are very different from the ones
18963 available from Elkjøp and Lefdal.  The main difference is their
18964 efficiency.  It would cut my hair in 5 minutes, instead of the 30-40
18965 minutes required by my impotent Braun.  The hairdresser I visited had
18966 a Panasonic ER160, which unfortunately is no longer available from the
18967 producer.  But I found it had a successor, the Panasonic ER1611.</p>
18968
18969 <p>The next step was to find somewhere to buy it.  This was not
18970 straight forward.  The list of suppliers I got from the hairdresser
18971 did not want to sell anything to me.  But searching for the model on
18972 the web we found a supplier in Norway willing to sell it to us for
18973 around NOK 4000,-.  This was a bit much.  We kept searching and
18974 finally found a Danish supplier
18975 <a href="http://nicehair.dk/panasonic-er-1611-professionel-hartrimmer.html">selling
18976 it for around NOK 1800,-</a>.  We ordered one, and it arrived a few
18977 days ago.</p>
18978
18979 <p>The instructions said it had to charge for 8 hours when we started
18980 to use it, so we left it charging over night.  Normally it will only
18981 need one hour to charge.  The following evening we successfully tested
18982 it, and I can warmly recommend it to anyone looking for a real hair
18983 cutter.  The ones we have used until now have been hair cutter
18984 toys.</p>
18985
18986       </div>
18987       <div class="tags">
18988
18989
18990         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
18991
18992
18993       </div>
18994     </div>
18995     <div class="padding"></div>
18996
18997     <div class="entry">
18998       <div class="title">
18999         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/HTC_One_X___Your_video___What_do_you_mean_.html">HTC One X - Your video?  What do you mean?</a>
19000       </div>
19001       <div class="date">
19002         26th April 2012
19003       </div>
19004       <div class="body">
19005         <p>In <a href="http://www.idg.no/computerworld/article243690.ece">an
19006 article today</a> published by Computerworld Norway, the photographer
19007 <a href="http://www.urke.com/eirik/">Eirik Helland Urke</a> reports
19008 that the video editor application included with
19009 <a href="http://www.htc.com/www/smartphones/htc-one-x/#specs">HTC One
19010 X</a> have some quite surprising terms of use.  The article is mostly
19011 based on the twitter message from mister Urke, stating:
19012
19013 <p><blockquote>
19014 "<a href="http://twitter.com/urke/status/194062269724897280">Drøy
19015 brukeravtale: HTC kan bruke MINE redigerte videoer kommersielt. Selv
19016 kan jeg KUN bruke dem privat.</a>"
19017 </blockquote></p>
19018
19019 <p>I quickly translated it to this English message:</p>
19020
19021 <p><blockquote>
19022 "Arrogant user agreement: HTC can use MY edited videos
19023 commercially.  Although I can ONLY use them privately."
19024 </blockquote></p>
19025
19026 <p>I've been unable to find the text of the license term myself, but
19027 suspect it is a variation of the MPEG-LA terms I
19028 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Terms_of_use_for_video_produced_by_a_Canon_IXUS_130_digital_camera.html">discovered
19029 with my Canon IXUS 130</a>.  The HTC One X specification specifies that
19030 the recording format of the phone is .amr for audio and .mp3 for
19031 video.  AMR is
19032 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_Multi-Rate_audio_codec#Licensing_and_patent_issues">Adaptive
19033 Multi-Rate audio codec</a> with patents which according to the
19034 Wikipedia article require an license agreement with
19035 <a href="http://www.voiceage.com/">VoiceAge</a>.  MP4 is
19036 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC#Patent_licensing">MPEG4 with
19037 H.264</a>, which according to Wikipedia require a licence agreement
19038 with <a href="http://www.mpegla.com/">MPEG-LA</a>.</p>
19039
19040 <p>I know why I prefer
19041 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">free and open
19042 standards</a> also for video.</p>
19043
19044       </div>
19045       <div class="tags">
19046
19047
19048         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</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>.
19049
19050
19051       </div>
19052     </div>
19053     <div class="padding"></div>
19054
19055     <div class="entry">
19056       <div class="title">
19057         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/RAND_terms___non_reasonable_and_discriminatory.html">RAND terms - non-reasonable and discriminatory</a>
19058       </div>
19059       <div class="date">
19060         19th April 2012
19061       </div>
19062       <div class="body">
19063         <p>Here in Norway, the
19064 <a href="http://www.regjeringen.no/nb/dep/fad.html?id=339"> Ministry of
19065 Government Administration, Reform and Church Affairs</a> is behind
19066 a <a href="http://standard.difi.no/forvaltningsstandarder">directory of
19067 standards</a> that are recommended or mandatory for use by the
19068 government.  When the directory was created, the people behind it made
19069 an effort to ensure that everyone would be able to implement the
19070 standards and compete on equal terms to supply software and solutions
19071 to the government.  Free software and non-free software could compete
19072 on the same level.</p>
19073
19074 <p>But recently, some standards with RAND
19075 (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_and_non-discriminatory_licensing">Reasonable
19076 And Non-Discriminatory</a>) terms have made their way into the
19077 directory.  And while this might not sound too bad, the fact is that
19078 standard specifications with RAND terms often block free software from
19079 implementing them.  The reasonable part of RAND mean that the cost per
19080 user/unit is low,and the non-discriminatory part mean that everyone
19081 willing to pay will get a license.  Both sound great in theory.  In
19082 practice, to get such license one need to be able to count users, and
19083 be able to pay a small amount of money per unit or user.  By
19084 definition, users of free software do not need to register their use.
19085 So counting users or units is not possible for free software projects.
19086 And given that people will use the software without handing any money
19087 to the author, it is not really economically possible for a free
19088 software author to pay a small amount of money to license the rights
19089 to implement a standard when the income available is zero.  The result
19090 in these situations is that free software are locked out from
19091 implementing standards with RAND terms.</p>
19092
19093 <p>Because of this, when I see someone claiming the terms of a
19094 standard is reasonable and non-discriminatory, all I can think of is
19095 how this really is non-reasonable and discriminatory.  Because free
19096 software developers are working in a global market, it does not really
19097 help to know that software patents are not supposed to be enforceable
19098 in Norway.  The patent regimes in other countries affect us even here.
19099 I really hope the people behind the standard directory will pay more
19100 attention to these issues in the future.</p>
19101
19102 <p>You can find more on the issues with RAND, FRAND and RAND-Z terms
19103 from Simon Phipps
19104 (<a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2010/11/rand-not-so-reasonable/">RAND:
19105 Not So Reasonable?</a>).</p>
19106
19107 <p>Update 2012-04-21: Just came across a
19108 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2012/04/of-microsoft-netscape-patents-and-open-standards/index.htm">blog
19109 post from Glyn Moody</a> over at Computer World UK warning about the
19110 same issue, and urging people to speak out to the UK government.  I
19111 can only urge Norwegian users to do the same for
19112 <a href="http://www.standard.difi.no/hoyring/hoyring-om-nye-anbefalte-it-standarder">the
19113 hearing taking place at the moment</a> (respond before 2012-04-27).
19114 It proposes to require video conferencing standards including
19115 specifications with RAND terms.</p>
19116
19117       </div>
19118       <div class="tags">
19119
19120
19121         Tags: <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/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
19122
19123
19124       </div>
19125     </div>
19126     <div class="padding"></div>
19127
19128     <div class="entry">
19129       <div class="title">
19130         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Andreas_Mundt.html">Debian Edu interview: Andreas Mundt</a>
19131       </div>
19132       <div class="date">
19133         15th April 2012
19134       </div>
19135       <div class="body">
19136         <p>Behind <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and
19137 Skolelinux</a> there are a lot of people doing the hard work of
19138 setting together all the pieces.  This time I present to you Andreas
19139 Mundt, who have been part of the technical development team several
19140 years.  He was also a key contributor in getting GOsa and Kerberos set
19141 up in the recently released
19142 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze">Debian
19143 Edu Squeeze</a> version.</p>
19144
19145 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
19146
19147 <p>My name is Andreas Mundt, I grew up in south Germany.  After
19148 studying Physics I spent several years at university doing research in
19149 Quantum Optics.  After that I worked some years in an optics company.
19150 Finally I decided to turn over a new leaf in my life and started
19151 teaching 10 to 19 years old kids at school.  I teach math, physics,
19152 information technology and science/technology.</p>
19153
19154 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
19155 project?</strong></p>
19156
19157 <p>Already before I switched to teaching, I followed the Debian Edu
19158 project because of my interest in education and Debian.  Within the
19159 qualification/training period for the teaching, I started
19160 contributing.</p>
19161
19162 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
19163 Edu?</strong></p>
19164
19165 <p>The advantages of Debian Edu are the well known name, the
19166 out-of-the-box philosophy and of course the great free software of the
19167 Debian Project!</p>
19168
19169 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
19170 Edu?</strong></p>
19171
19172 <p>As every coin has two sides, the out-of-the-box philosophy has its
19173 downside, too.  In my opinion, it is hard to modify and tweak the
19174 setup, if you need or want that.  Further more, it is not easily
19175 possible to upgrade the system to a new release.  It takes much too
19176 long after a Debian release to prepare the -Edu release, perhaps
19177 because the number of developers working on the core of the code is
19178 rather small and often busy elsewhere.</p>
19179
19180 <p>The <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianLAN">Debian LAN</a>
19181 project might fill the use case of a more flexible system.</p>
19182
19183 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
19184
19185 <p>I am only using non-free software if I am forced to and run Debian
19186 on all my machines.  For documents I prefer LaTeX and PGF/TikZ, then
19187 mutt and iceweasel for email respectively web browsing.  At school I
19188 have Arduino and Fritzing in use for a micro controller project.</p>
19189
19190 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
19191 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
19192
19193 <p>One of the major problems is the vendor lock-in from top to bottom:
19194 Especially in combination with ignorant government employees and
19195 politicians, this works out great for the "market-leader".  The school
19196 administration here in Baden-Wuerttemberg is occupied by that vendor.
19197 Documents have to be prepared in non-free, proprietary formats.  Even
19198 free browsers do not work for the school administration.  Publishers
19199 of school books provide software only for proprietary platforms.</p>
19200
19201 <p>To change this, political work is very important.  Parts of the
19202 political spectrum have become aware of the problem in the last years.
19203 However it takes quite some time and courageous politicians to 'free'
19204 the system.  There is currently some discussion about "Open Data" and
19205 "Free/Open Standards".  I am not sure if all the involved parties have
19206 a clue about the potential of these ideas, and probably only a
19207 fraction takes them seriously.  However it might slowly make free
19208 software and the philosophy behind it more known and popular.</p>
19209
19210       </div>
19211       <div class="tags">
19212
19213
19214         Tags: <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/intervju">intervju</a>.
19215
19216
19217       </div>
19218     </div>
19219     <div class="padding"></div>
19220
19221     <div class="entry">
19222       <div class="title">
19223         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Justin_B__Rye.html">Debian Edu interview: Justin B. Rye</a>
19224       </div>
19225       <div class="date">
19226          8th April 2012
19227       </div>
19228       <div class="body">
19229         <p>It take all kind of contributions to create a Linux distribution
19230 like <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>,
19231 and this time I lend the ear to Justin B. Rye, who is listed as a big
19232 contributor to the
19233 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze">Debian
19234 Edu Squeeze release manual</a>.
19235
19236 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
19237
19238 <p>I'm a 44-year-old linguistics graduate living in Edinburgh who has
19239 occasionally been employed as a sysadmin.</p>
19240
19241 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
19242 project?</strong></p>
19243
19244 <p>I'm neither a developer nor a Skolelinux/Debian Edu user!  The only
19245 reason my name's in the credits for the documentation is that I hang
19246 around on debian-l10n-english waiting for people to mention things
19247 they'd like a native English speaker to proofread...  So I did a sweep
19248 through the wiki for typos and Norglish and inconsistent spellings of
19249 "localisation".</p>
19250
19251 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
19252 Edu?</strong></p>
19253
19254 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
19255 Edu?</strong></p>
19256
19257 <p>These questions are too hard for me - I don't use it!  In fact I
19258 had hardly any contact with I.T. until long after I'd got out of the
19259 education system.</p>
19260
19261 <p>I can tell you the advantages of Debian for me though: it soaks up
19262 as much of my free time as I want and no more, and lets me do
19263 everything I want a computer for without ever forcing me to spend
19264 money on the latest hardware.</p>
19265
19266 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
19267
19268 <p>I've been using Debian since Rex; popularity-contest says the
19269 software that I use most is xinit, xterm, and xulrunner (in other
19270 words, I use a distinctly retro sort of desktop).</p>
19271
19272 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
19273 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
19274
19275 <p>Well, I don't know.  I suppose I'd be inclined to try reasoning
19276 with the people who make the decisions, but obviously if that worked
19277 you would hardly need a strategy.</p>
19278
19279       </div>
19280       <div class="tags">
19281
19282
19283         Tags: <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/intervju">intervju</a>.
19284
19285
19286       </div>
19287     </div>
19288     <div class="padding"></div>
19289
19290     <div class="entry">
19291       <div class="title">
19292         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_the_KDE_menu_is_slow_when__usr__is_NFS_mounted___and_a_workaround.html">Why the KDE menu is slow when /usr/ is NFS mounted - and a workaround</a>
19293       </div>
19294       <div class="date">
19295          6th April 2012
19296       </div>
19297       <div class="body">
19298         <p>Recently I have spent time with
19299 <a href="http://www.slxdrift.no/">Skolelinux Drift AS</a> on speeding
19300 up a <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
19301 Lenny installation using LTSP diskless workstations, and in the
19302 process I discovered something very surprising.  The reason the KDE
19303 menu was responding slow when using it for the first time, was mostly
19304 due to the way KDE find application icons.  I discovered that showing
19305 the Multimedia menu would cause more than 20 000 IP packages to be
19306 passed between the LTSP client and the NFS server.  Most of these were
19307
19308 NFS LOOKUP calls, resulting in a NFS3ERR_NOENT response.  Because the
19309 ping times between the client and the server were in the range 2-20
19310 ms, the menus would be very slow.  Looking at the strace of kicker in
19311 Lenny (or plasma-desktop i Squeeze - same problem there), I see that
19312 the source of these NFS calls are access(2) system calls for
19313 non-existing files.  KDE can do hundreds of access(2) calls to find
19314 one icon file.  In my example, just finding the mplayer icon required
19315 around 230 access(2) calls.</p>
19316
19317 <p>The KDE code seem to search for icons using a list of icon
19318 directories, and the list of possible directories is large.  In
19319 (almost) each directory, it look for files ending in .png, .svgz, .svg
19320 and .xpm.  The result is a very slow KDE menu when /usr/ is NFS
19321 mounted.  Showing a single sub menu may result in thousands of NFS
19322 requests.  I am not the first one to discover this.  I found a
19323 <a href="https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=211416">KDE bug report
19324 from 2009</a> about this problem, and it is still unsolved.</p>
19325
19326 <p>My solution to speed up the KDE menu was to create a package
19327 kde-icon-cache that upon installation will look at all .desktop files
19328 used to generate the KDE menu, find their icons, search the icon paths
19329 for the file that KDE will end up finding at run time, and copying the
19330 icon file to /var/lib/kde-icon-cache/.  Finally, I add symlinks to
19331 these icon files in one of the first directories where KDE will look
19332 for them.  This cut down the number of file accesses required to find
19333 one icon from several hundred to less than 5, and make the KDE menu
19334 almost instantaneous.  I'm not quite sure where to make the package
19335 publicly available, so for now it is only available on request.</p>
19336
19337 <p>The bug report mention that this do not only affect the KDE menu
19338 and icon handling, but also the login process.  Not quite sure how to
19339 speed up that part without replacing NFS with for example NBD, and
19340 that is not really an option at the moment.</p>
19341
19342 <p>If you got feedback on this issue, please let us know on debian-edu
19343 (at) lists.debian.org.</p>
19344
19345 <p>Update 2015-08-04: The
19346 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/debian-edu/upstream/kde-icon-cache.git/">source
19347 of the scripts and associated Debian package</a> is available from the
19348 Debian Edu github repository.</p>
19349
19350       </div>
19351       <div class="tags">
19352
19353
19354         Tags: <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>.
19355
19356
19357       </div>
19358     </div>
19359     <div class="padding"></div>
19360
19361     <div class="entry">
19362       <div class="title">
19363         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_in_the_Linux_Weekly_News.html">Debian Edu in the Linux Weekly News</a>
19364       </div>
19365       <div class="date">
19366          5th April 2012
19367       </div>
19368       <div class="body">
19369         <p>About two weeks ago, I was interviewed via email about
19370 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a> by
19371 Bruce Byfield in Linux Weekly News.  The result was made public for
19372 non-subscribers today.  I am pleased to see liked our Linux solution
19373 for schools.  Check out his article
19374 <a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/488805/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux: A
19375 distribution for education</a> if you want to learn more.</p>
19376
19377       </div>
19378       <div class="tags">
19379
19380
19381         Tags: <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>.
19382
19383
19384       </div>
19385     </div>
19386     <div class="padding"></div>
19387
19388     <div class="entry">
19389       <div class="title">
19390         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Wolfgang_Schweer.html">Debian Edu interview: Wolfgang Schweer</a>
19391       </div>
19392       <div class="date">
19393          1st April 2012
19394       </div>
19395       <div class="body">
19396         <p>Germany is a core area for the
19397 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
19398 user community, and this time I managed to get hold of Wolfgang
19399 Schweer, a valuable contributor to the project from Germany.
19400
19401 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
19402
19403 <p>I've studied Mathematics at the university 'Ruhr-Universität' in
19404 Bochum, Germany. Since 1981 I'm working as a teacher at the school
19405 "<a href="http://www.westfalenkolleg-dortmund.de/">Westfalen-Kolleg
19406 Dortmund</a>", a second chance school.  Here, young adults is given
19407 the opportunity to get further education in order to do the school
19408 examination 'Abitur', which will allow to study at a university. This
19409 second chance is of value for those who want a better job perspective
19410 or failed to get a higher school examination being teens.</p>
19411
19412 <p>Besides teaching I was involved in developing online courses for a
19413 blended learning project called 'abitur-online.nrw' and in some other
19414 information technology related projects. For about ten years I've been
19415 teacher and coordinator for the 'abitur-online' project at my
19416 school. Being now in my early sixties, I've decided to leave school at
19417 the end of April this year.</p>
19418
19419 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
19420 project?</strong></p>
19421
19422 <p>The first information about Skolelinux must have come to my
19423 attention years ago and somehow related to LTSP (Linux Terminal Server
19424 Project).  At school, we had set up a network at the beginning of 1997
19425 using Suse Linux on the desktop, replacing a Novell network. Since
19426 2002, we used old machines from the city council of Dortmund as thin
19427 clients (LTSP, later Ubuntu/Lessdisks) cause new hardware was out of
19428 reach. At home I'm using Debian since years and - subscribed to the
19429 Debian news letter - heard from time to time about Skolelinux. About
19430 two years ago I proposed to replace the (somehow undocumented and only
19431 known to me) system at school by a well known Debian based system:
19432 Skolelinux.</p>
19433
19434 <p>Students and teachers appreciated the new system because of a
19435 better look and feel and an enhanced access to local media on thin
19436 clients.  The possibility to alter and/or reset passwords using a GUI
19437 was welcomed, too. Being able to do administrative tasks using a GUI
19438 and to easily set up workstations using PXE was of very high value for
19439 the admin teachers.</p>
19440
19441 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
19442 Edu?</strong></p>
19443
19444 <p>It's open source, easy to set up, stable and flexible due to it's
19445 Debian base. It integrates LTSP out-of-the-box. And it is documented!
19446 So it was a perfect choice.</p>
19447
19448 <p>Being open source, there are no license problems and so it's
19449 possible to point teachers and students to programs like
19450 OpenOffice.org, ViewYourMind (mind mapping) and The Gimp.  It's of
19451 high value to be able to adapt parts of the system to special needs of
19452 a school and to choose where to get support for this.</p>
19453
19454 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
19455 Edu?</strong></p>
19456
19457 <p>Nothing yet.</p>
19458
19459 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
19460
19461 <p>At home (Debian Sid with Gnome Desktop): Iceweasel, LibreOffice,
19462 Mutt, Gedit, Document Viewer, Midnight Commander, flpsed (PDF
19463 Annotator).  At school (Skolelinux Lenny): Iceweasel, Gedit,
19464 LibreOffice.</p>
19465
19466 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
19467 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
19468
19469 <p>Some time ago I thought it was enough to tell people about it. But
19470 that doesn't seem to work quite well. Now I concentrate on those more
19471 interested and hope to get multiplicators that way.</p>
19472
19473       </div>
19474       <div class="tags">
19475
19476
19477         Tags: <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/intervju">intervju</a>.
19478
19479
19480       </div>
19481     </div>
19482     <div class="padding"></div>
19483
19484     <div class="entry">
19485       <div class="title">
19486         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_screencast__Checking_email_with_kmail_using_Kerberos_authentication.html">Debian Edu screencast: Checking email with kmail using Kerberos authentication</a>
19487       </div>
19488       <div class="date">
19489         25th March 2012
19490       </div>
19491       <div class="body">
19492         <!-- Video HTML based on http://www.diveintohtml5.net/video.html -->
19493
19494 <p>The same Debian Edu developer that did the last screen cast I
19495 published, Wolfgang Schweer, has created a new screen cast showing how
19496 to set up Kmail in Debian Edu Squeze to authenticate using Kerberos,
19497 allowing users to check their local email account without providing
19498 any password. The video is embedded here in quarter size,
19499 and also available from <a href="https://vimeo.com/38601767">vimeo</a>
19500 and download as a
19501 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-03-14-Debian-Edu_Configure_Kmail_for_internal_usage.ogv">Ogg
19502 Theora</a> file.  Check it out below.</p>
19503
19504 <p><video id="kmail-kerberos-movie" width="256" height="184" preload controls>
19505   <source src="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-03-14-Debian-Edu_Configure_Kmail_for_internal_usage.ogv" type='video/ogg; codecs="theora, vorbis"' />
19506     <p>Download video as
19507       <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-03-14-Debian-Edu_Configure_Kmail_for_internal_usage.ogv">Ogg</a>.</p>
19508 </video></p>
19509
19510       </div>
19511       <div class="tags">
19512
19513
19514         Tags: <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>.
19515
19516
19517       </div>
19518     </div>
19519     <div class="padding"></div>
19520
19521     <div class="entry">
19522       <div class="title">
19523         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__John_Ingleby.html">Debian Edu interview: John Ingleby</a>
19524       </div>
19525       <div class="date">
19526         19th March 2012
19527       </div>
19528       <div class="body">
19529         <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
19530 users are spread all across the globe.  The second inteview after
19531 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00001.html">the
19532 Squeeze release</a> was publised is with John Ingleby, a teacher and
19533 long time Linux user in United Kingdom.</p>
19534
19535 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
19536
19537 <p>I teach ICT part time at the Rudolf Steiner School in Kings
19538 Langley, near London, UK. Previously I worked as a technical
19539 author/trainer while my children attended the school, and I also
19540 contributed to the Schoolforge UK community with the aim of
19541 encouraging UK schools to adopt free/open source software. Five or six
19542 years ago we had about 50 schools interested in some way, but we
19543 weren't able to convert many of them into sustainable
19544 installations.</p>
19545
19546 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
19547 project?</strong></p>
19548
19549 <p>Skolelinux had two representatives at an early Edubuntu meeting in
19550 London which I attended. However at that time our school network had
19551 just been installed using CentOS, LTSP 4 and GNOME. When LTSP 5 came
19552 along we switched to Edubuntu thin client servers so now we have a
19553 mixed environment which includes Windows PCs and student laptops, as
19554 well as their MacBooks and iPads. However, the proprietary systems
19555 have always been rather problematic, and we never built a GUI for the
19556 LDAP server, so when I discovered Skolelinux is configured for all
19557 these things we decided to try it.</p>
19558
19559 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
19560 Edu?</strong></p>
19561
19562 <p>By far the biggest advantage is the Debian Edu community. Apart
19563 from that I have always believed in the same "sustainable computing"
19564 goals that Skolelinux is built on: installing Linux on computers which
19565 would otherwise be thrown away, to provide a reliable, secure and
19566 low-cost IT environment for schools. From my own experience I know
19567 that a part-time person can teach and manage a network of about 25
19568 Linux computers, but it would take much more of my time if we had
19569 proprietary software everywhere.</p>
19570
19571 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
19572 Edu?</strong></p>
19573
19574 <p>As a newcomer I'm just finding out who's who in the community and
19575 how you're organised, and what your procedures are for dealing with
19576 various things such as editing manual pages and so-on. The only
19577 English language mailing list seems to be for developers as well as
19578 users, so my inbox needs heavy pruning each day!</p>
19579
19580 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
19581
19582 <p>Besides the software already mentioned at school we use Samba,
19583 OpenLDAP, CUPS, Nagios and Dansguardian for the network, and on the
19584 desktops we have LibreOffice, Firefox, GIMP and Inkscape. At home I
19585 use Ubuntu and an Android 4 eePad Transformer (but I'm not sure if
19586 that counts...)</p>
19587
19588 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
19589 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
19590
19591 <p>That's a tough question! For very many years UK schools installed
19592 and taught only proprietary software, so that at the highest levels
19593 the notion of "computer" means simply "proprietary office
19594 applications".  However, schools today are experiencing budget
19595 constraints, and many are having to think hard about upgrading Windows
19596 XP.  At the same time, we have students showing teachers how to use
19597 iPads, MacBooks and Android, so the choice of operating system is no
19598 longer quite so automatic. What is more, our government at last
19599 realised that we need people with programming skills, so they're
19600 putting coding back in the curriculum! And it's encouraging that the
19601 first 10,000 Raspberry Pi units sold out in 2 hours.</p>
19602
19603 <p>I don't really know what strategy is going to get UK schools to use
19604 free software, but building an active community of Skolelinux/Debian
19605 Edu users in this country has to be part of it.</p>
19606
19607       </div>
19608       <div class="tags">
19609
19610
19611         Tags: <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/intervju">intervju</a>.
19612
19613
19614       </div>
19615     </div>
19616     <div class="padding"></div>
19617
19618     <div class="entry">
19619       <div class="title">
19620         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Writing_and_translating_documentation_in_Debian_Edu.html">Writing and translating documentation in Debian Edu</a>
19621       </div>
19622       <div class="date">
19623         16th March 2012
19624       </div>
19625       <div class="body">
19626         <p>Documentation in Debian Edu is provided in several languages, and
19627 it is important to make it both easy to contribute and to keep the
19628 translated versions in sync.  To do this we have come up with what we
19629 believe is a very efficient work flow.</p>
19630
19631 <ol>
19632
19633 <li>The documentation is written in a
19634 <a href="http://moinmo.in">moinmoin wiki</a> (see for example
19635 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze">the
19636 Squeeze release manual</a>) with support for exporting the content as
19637 docbook XML.</li>
19638
19639 <li>This docbook document is given to po4a to extract a gettext style
19640 .pot file with the content, which in turn is used to create .po files
19641 with the translated text.</li>
19642
19643 <li>The .po files are given to translators, and they can always tell
19644 which part of the original wiki document is new or changed.  They can
19645 use their normal translation tools like lokalize or poedit to write
19646 the translation.  There is even a system in place to handle translated
19647 images.</li>
19648
19649 <li>The translated .po files are combined with the original docbook
19650 XML document using po4a to create a translated docbook document.</li>
19651
19652 <li>The final step is to use all the generated docbook files and
19653 create PDF and HTML version of the original and translated documents.</li>
19654
19655 </ol>
19656
19657 <p>This setup work very well, but have a few issues.  The biggest
19658 issue is that <a href="http://moinmo.in/DocBook">the docbook support
19659 we use in moinmoin</a> is not actively maintained.  The docbook
19660 support is also buggy, and our build system contain workarounds to
19661 make sure the generated docbook is usable despite these bugs.</p>
19662
19663 <p>If you want to have a look at our setup, it is all there in the
19664 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/debian-edu-doc">debian-edu-doc
19665 package</a>.</p>
19666
19667       </div>
19668       <div class="tags">
19669
19670
19671         Tags: <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>.
19672
19673
19674       </div>
19675     </div>
19676     <div class="padding"></div>
19677
19678     <div class="entry">
19679       <div class="title">
19680         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Skolelinux___Debian_Edu_Squeeze_is_out_.html">Skolelinux / Debian Edu Squeeze is out!</a>
19681       </div>
19682       <div class="date">
19683         11th March 2012
19684       </div>
19685       <div class="body">
19686         <p>This weekend we finally published the first stable release of
19687 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a> based
19688 on Debian/Squeeze.  The full announcement is
19689 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00001.html">available</a>
19690 from the project announcement list.  Now is a good time to test if it
19691 you have not done so already.</p>
19692
19693 <p>I plan to present the new version at
19694 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20120313-skolelinux/">a NUUG
19695 meeting</a> on tuesday.  I look forward to seeing you there if you are
19696 in Oslo, Norway.</p>
19697
19698       </div>
19699       <div class="tags">
19700
19701
19702         Tags: <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>.
19703
19704
19705       </div>
19706     </div>
19707     <div class="padding"></div>
19708
19709     <div class="entry">
19710       <div class="title">
19711         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Nigel_Barker.html">Debian Edu interview: Nigel Barker</a>
19712       </div>
19713       <div class="date">
19714          9th March 2012
19715       </div>
19716       <div class="body">
19717         <p>Inspired by <a href="http://raphaelhertzog.com/tag/interview/">the
19718 interview series</a> conducted by Raphael, I started a Norwegian
19719 interview series with people involved in the Debian Edu / Skolelinux
19720 community.  This was so popular that I believe it is time to move to a
19721 more international audience.</p>
19722
19723 <p>While <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and
19724 Skolelinux</a> originated in France and Norway, and have most users in
19725 Europe, there are users all around the globe.  One of those far away
19726 from me is Nigel Barker, a long time Debian Edu system administrator
19727 and contributor.  It is thanks to him that Debian Edu is adjusted to
19728 work out of the box in Japan.  I got him to answer a few questions,
19729 and am happy to share the response with you. :)
19730
19731
19732 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
19733
19734 <p>My name is Nigel Barker, and I am British. I am married to Yumiko,
19735 and we have three lovely children, aged 15, 14 and 4(!) I am the IT
19736 Coordinator at Hiroshima International School, Japan. I am also a
19737 teacher, and in fact I spend most of my day teaching Mathematics,
19738 Science, IT, and Chemistry. I was originally a Chemistry teacher, but
19739 I have always had an interest in computers. Another teacher teaches
19740 primary school IT, but apart from that I am the only computer person,
19741 so that means I am the network manager, technician and webmaster,
19742 also, and I help people with their computer problems. I teach python
19743 to beginners in an after-school club. I am way too busy, so I really
19744 appreciate the simplicity of Skolelinux.</p>
19745
19746 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
19747 project?</strong></p>
19748
19749 <p>In around 2004 or 5 I discovered the ltsp project, and set up a
19750 server in the IT lab. I wanted some way to connect it to our central
19751 samba server, which I was also quite poor at configuring. I discovered
19752 Edubuntu when it came out, but it didn't really improve my setup. I
19753 did various desperate searches for things like "school Linux server"
19754 and ended up in a document called "Drift" something or other. Reading
19755 there it became clear that Skolelinux was going to solve all my
19756 problems in one go. I was very excited, but apprehensive, because my
19757 previous attempts to install Debian had ended in failure (I used
19758 Mandrake for everything - ltsp, samba, apache, mail, ns...). I
19759 downloaded a beta version, had some problems, so subscribed to the
19760 Debian Edu list for help. I have remained subscribed ever since, and
19761 my school has run a Skolelinux network since Sarge.</p>
19762
19763 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
19764 Edu?</strong></p>
19765
19766 <p>For me the integrated setup. This is not just the server, or the
19767 workstation, or the ltsp. Its all of them, and its all configured
19768 ready to go. I read somewhere in the early documentation that it is
19769 designed to be setup and managed by the Maths or Science teacher, who
19770 doesn't necessarily know much about computers, in a small Norwegian
19771 school. That describes me perfectly if you replace Norway with
19772 Japan.</p>
19773
19774 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
19775 Edu?</strong></p>
19776
19777 <p>The desktop is fairly plain. If you compare it with Edubuntu, who
19778 have fun themes for children, or with distributions such as Mint, who
19779 make the desktop beautiful. They create a good impression on people
19780 who don't need to understand how to use any of it, but who might be
19781 important to the school. School administrators or directors, for
19782 instance, or parents. Even kids. Debian itself usually has ugly
19783 default theme settings. It was my dream a few years back that some
19784 kind of integration would allow Edubuntu to do the desktop stuff and
19785 Debian Edu the servers, but now I realise how impossible that is.  A
19786 second disadvantage is that if something goes wrong, or you need to
19787 customise something, then suddenly the level of expertise required
19788 multiplies. For example, backup wasn't working properly in Lenny. It
19789 took me ages to learn how to set up my own server to do rsync backups.
19790 I am afraid of anything to do with ldap, but perhaps Gosa will
19791 help.</p>
19792
19793 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
19794
19795 <p>Nowadays I only use Debian on my personal computers. I have one for
19796 studio work (I play guitar and write songs), running AV Linux
19797 (customised Debian) a netbook running Squeeze, and a bigger laptop
19798 still running Skolelinux Lenny workstation. I have a Tjener in my
19799 house, that's very useful for the family photos and music.  At school
19800 the students only use Skolelinux. (Some teachers and the office still
19801 have windows). So that means we only use free software all day every
19802 day. Open office, The GIMP, Firefox/Iceweasel, VLC and Audacity are
19803 installed on every computer in school, irrespective of OS.  We also
19804 have Koha on Debian for the library, and Apache, Moodle, b2evolution
19805 and Etomite on Debian for the www. The firewall is Untangle.</p>
19806
19807 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
19808 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
19809
19810 <p>Current trends are in our favour. Open source is big in industry,
19811 and ordinary people have heard of it. The spread of Android and the
19812 popularity of Apple have helped to weaken the impression that you have
19813 to have Microsoft on everything. People complain to me much less about
19814 file formats and Word than they did 5 years ago.  The Edu aspect is
19815 also a selling point. This is all customised for schools. Where is the
19816 Windows-edu, or the Mac-edu?  But of course the main attraction is
19817 budget.The trick is to convince people that the quality is not
19818 compromised when you stop paying and use free software instead. That
19819 is one reason why I say the desktop experience is a weakness. People
19820 are not impressed when their USB drive doesn't work, or their browser
19821 doesn't play flash, for example.</p>
19822
19823       </div>
19824       <div class="tags">
19825
19826
19827         Tags: <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/intervju">intervju</a>.
19828
19829
19830       </div>
19831     </div>
19832     <div class="padding"></div>
19833
19834     <div class="entry">
19835       <div class="title">
19836         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_screencast__Mass_creation_of_user_accounts_in_Squeeze.html">Debian Edu screencast: Mass creation of user accounts in Squeeze</a>
19837       </div>
19838       <div class="date">
19839          7th March 2012
19840       </div>
19841       <div class="body">
19842         <!-- Video HTML based on http://www.diveintohtml5.net/video.html -->
19843
19844 <p>One of the Debian Edu developers, Wolfgang Schweer, just created a
19845 screen cast documenting how to create a lot of new users in LDAP on
19846 Debian Edu Squeeze.  The video is embedded here in quarter size, and
19847 also available from <a href="http://vimeo.com/37675399">vimeo</a> and
19848 download as a
19849 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-02-29-debian_edu_mass_create_user_accounts.ogv">Ogg
19850 Theora</a> file.  Check it out below.</p>
19851
19852 <p><video id="gosa-mass-user-create-movie" width="256" height="184" preload controls>
19853   <source src="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-02-29-debian_edu_mass_create_user_accounts.ogv" type='video/ogg; codecs="theora, vorbis"' />
19854     <p>Download video as
19855       <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-02-29-debian_edu_mass_create_user_accounts.ogv">Ogg</a>.</p>
19856 </video></p>
19857
19858       </div>
19859       <div class="tags">
19860
19861
19862         Tags: <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>.
19863
19864
19865       </div>
19866     </div>
19867     <div class="padding"></div>
19868
19869     <div class="entry">
19870       <div class="title">
19871         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Third_release_candidate_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Squeeze.html">Third release candidate of Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Squeeze</a>
19872       </div>
19873       <div class="date">
19874          4th March 2012
19875       </div>
19876       <div class="body">
19877         <p>This weekend we wrapped up and published the third release
19878 candidate for <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
19879 Skolelinux</a> based on Squeeze.  The full announcement is
19880 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00000.html">available</a>
19881 from the project announcement list.  Check it out if you
19882 need a software solution for your school.</p>
19883
19884       </div>
19885       <div class="tags">
19886
19887
19888         Tags: <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>.
19889
19890
19891       </div>
19892     </div>
19893     <div class="padding"></div>
19894
19895     <div class="entry">
19896       <div class="title">
19897         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Stopmotion_for_making_stop_motion_animations_on_Linux___reloaded.html">Stopmotion for making stop motion animations on Linux - reloaded</a>
19898       </div>
19899       <div class="date">
19900          3rd March 2012
19901       </div>
19902       <div class="body">
19903         <p>Many years ago, the <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux
19904 / Debian Edu project</a> initiated a student project to create a tool
19905 for making stop motion movies.  The proposal came from a teacher
19906 needing such tool on Skolelinux.  The project, called "stopmotion",
19907 was manned by two extraordinary students and won a school award and a
19908 national aware with this great project.  The project was initiated and
19909 mentored by Herman Robak, and manned by the students Bjørn Erik Nilsen
19910 and Fredrik Berg Kjølstad.  They got in touch with people at Aardman
19911 Animation studio and received feedback on how professionals would like
19912 such stopmotion tool to work, and the end result was and is used by
19913 animators around the globe.  But as is usual after studying, both got
19914 jobs and went elsewhere, and did not have time to properly tend to the
19915 project, and it has been lingering for a few years now.  Until last
19916 year...</p>
19917
19918 <p>Last year some of the users got together with Herman, and moved the
19919 project to Sourceforge and in effect restarted the project under a new
19920 name,
19921 <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/linuxstopmotion/">linuxstopmotion</a>.
19922 The name change was done to make it possible to find the project using
19923 Internet search engines (try to search for 'stopmotion' to see what I
19924 mean). I've been following
19925 <a href="https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/linuxstopmotion-community">the
19926 mailing list</a> and the improvement already in place and planned for
19927 the future is encouraging.  If you want to make stop motion movies.
19928 Check it out. :)</p>
19929
19930       </div>
19931       <div class="tags">
19932
19933
19934         Tags: <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/video">video</a>.
19935
19936
19937       </div>
19938     </div>
19939     <div class="padding"></div>
19940
19941     <div class="entry">
19942       <div class="title">
19943         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Second_release_candidate_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Squeeze.html">Second release candidate of Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Squeeze</a>
19944       </div>
19945       <div class="date">
19946         27th February 2012
19947       </div>
19948       <div class="body">
19949         <p>This weekend we wrapped up and published the second release
19950 candidate for <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
19951 Skolelinux</a> based on Squeeze.  The full announcement did for some
19952 reason not make it the project announcement list, but is
19953 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2012/02/msg00015.html">available</a>
19954 from the Debian development announcement list.  Check it out if you
19955 need a software solution for your school.</p>
19956
19957       </div>
19958       <div class="tags">
19959
19960
19961         Tags: <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>.
19962
19963
19964       </div>
19965     </div>
19966     <div class="padding"></div>
19967
19968     <div class="entry">
19969       <div class="title">
19970         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_release_candidate_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Squeeze.html">First release candidate of Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Squeeze</a>
19971       </div>
19972       <div class="date">
19973         19th February 2012
19974       </div>
19975       <div class="body">
19976         <p>One week delayed due to DVD build problems, we managed today to
19977 wrap up and publish the first release candidate for
19978 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> based
19979 on Squeeze.  The full announcement is
19980 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/02/msg00001.html">available</a>
19981 on the project announcement list.  Check it out if you need a software
19982 solution for your school.</p>
19983
19984       </div>
19985       <div class="tags">
19986
19987
19988         Tags: <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>.
19989
19990
19991       </div>
19992     </div>
19993     <div class="padding"></div>
19994
19995     <div class="entry">
19996       <div class="title">
19997         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_figure_out_which_RAID_disk_to_replace_when_it_fail.html">How to figure out which RAID disk to replace when it fail</a>
19998       </div>
19999       <div class="date">
20000         14th February 2012
20001       </div>
20002       <div class="body">
20003         <p>Once in a while my home server have disk problems.  Thanks to Linux
20004 Software RAID, I have not lost data yet (but
20005 <a href="http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.raid/34532">I was
20006 close</a> this summer :).  But once a disk is starting to behave
20007 funny, a practical problem present itself.  How to get from the Linux
20008 device name (like /dev/sdd) to something that can be used to identify
20009 the disk when the computer is turned off?  In my case I have SATA
20010 disks with a unique ID printed on the label.  All I need is a way to
20011 figure out how to query the disk to get the ID out.</p>
20012
20013 <p>After fumbling a bit, I
20014 <a href="http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-getting-scsi-ide-harddisk-information/">found
20015 that hdparm -I</a> will report the disk serial number, which is
20016 printed on the disk label.  The following (almost) one-liner can be
20017 used to look up the ID of all the failed disks:</p>
20018
20019 <blockquote><pre>
20020 for d in $(cat /proc/mdstat |grep '(F)'|tr ' ' "\n"|grep '(F)'|cut -d\[ -f1|sort -u);
20021 do
20022     printf "Failed disk $d: "
20023     hdparm -I /dev/$d |grep 'Serial Num'
20024 done
20025 </blockquote></pre>
20026
20027 <p>Putting it here to make sure I do not have to search for it the
20028 next time, and in case other find it useful.</p>
20029
20030 <p>At the moment I have two failing disk. :(</p>
20031
20032 <blockquote><pre>
20033 Failed disk sdd1:       Serial Number:      WD-WCASJ1860823
20034 Failed disk sdd2:       Serial Number:      WD-WCASJ1860823
20035 Failed disk sde2:       Serial Number:      WD-WCASJ1840589
20036 </blockquote></pre>
20037
20038 <p>The last time I had failing disks, I added the serial number on
20039 labels I printed and stuck on the short sides of each disk, to be able
20040 to figure out which disk to take out of the box without having to
20041 remove each disk to look at the physical vendor label.  The vendor
20042 label is at the top of the disk, which is hidden when the disks are
20043 mounted inside my box.</p>
20044
20045 <p>I really wish the check_linux_raid Nagios plugin for checking Linux
20046 Software RAID in the
20047 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/nagios-plugins.html">nagios-plugins-standard</a>
20048 debian package would look up this value automatically, as it would
20049 make the plugin a lot more useful when my disks fail.  At the moment
20050 it only report a failure when there are no more spares left (it really
20051 should warn as soon as a disk is failing), and it do not tell me which
20052 disk(s) is failing when the RAID is running short on disks.</p>
20053
20054       </div>
20055       <div class="tags">
20056
20057
20058         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/raid">raid</a>.
20059
20060
20061       </div>
20062     </div>
20063     <div class="padding"></div>
20064
20065     <div class="entry">
20066       <div class="title">
20067         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_proxy_configuration_with_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux.html">Automatic proxy configuration with Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
20068       </div>
20069       <div class="date">
20070         13th February 2012
20071       </div>
20072       <div class="body">
20073         <p>New in the Squeeze version of
20074 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> is the
20075 ability for clients to automatically configure their proxy settings
20076 based on their environment.  We want all systems on the client to use
20077 the WPAD based proxy definition fetched from <tt>http://wpad/wpad.dat</tt>, to
20078 allow sites to control the proxy setting from a central place and make
20079 sure clients do not have hard coded proxy settings.  The schools can
20080 change the global proxy setting by editing
20081 <tt>tjener:/etc/debian-edu/www/wpad.dat</tt> and the change propagate
20082 to all Debian Edu clients in the network.</p>
20083
20084 <p>The problem is that some systems do not understand the WPAD system.
20085 In other words, how do one get from a WPAD file like this (this is a
20086 simple one, they can run arbitrary code):</p>
20087
20088 <blockquote><pre>
20089 function FindProxyForURL(url, host)
20090 {
20091    if (!isResolvable(host) ||
20092        isPlainHostName(host) ||
20093        dnsDomainIs(host, ".intern"))
20094       return "DIRECT";
20095    else
20096       return "PROXY webcache:3128; DIRECT";
20097 }
20098 </pre></blockquote>
20099
20100 <p>to a proxy setting in the process environment looking like this:</p>
20101
20102 <blockquote><pre>
20103 http_proxy=http://webcache:3128/
20104 ftp_proxy=http://webcache:3128/
20105 </pre></blockquote>
20106
20107 <p>To do this conversion I developed a perl script that will execute
20108 the javascript fragment in the WPAD file and return the proxy that
20109 would be used for
20110 <tt><a href="http://www.debian.org/">http://www.debian.org/</a></tt>,
20111 and insert this extracted proxy URL in <tt>/etc/environment</tt> and
20112 <tt>/etc/apt/apt.conf</tt>.  The perl script wpad-extract work just
20113 fine in Squeeze, but in Wheezy the library it need to run the
20114 javascript code is <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/631045">no longer
20115 able to build</a> because the C library it depended on is now a C++
20116 library.  I hope someone find a solution to that problem before Wheezy
20117 is frozen.  An alternative would be for us to rewrite wpad-extract to
20118 use some other javascript library currently working in Wheezy, but no
20119 known alternative is known at the moment.</p>
20120
20121 <p>This automatic proxy system allow the roaming workstation (aka
20122 laptop) setup in Debian Edu/Squeeze to use the proxy when the laptop
20123 is connected to the backbone network in a Debian Edu setup, and to
20124 automatically use any proxy present and announced using the WPAD
20125 feature when it is connected to other networks.  And if no proxy is
20126 announced, direct connections will be used instead.</p>
20127
20128 <p>Silently using a proxy announced on the network might be a privacy
20129 or security problem.  But those controlling DHCP and DNS on a network
20130 could just as easily set up a transparent proxy, and force all HTTP
20131 and FTP connections to use a proxy anyway, so I consider that
20132 distinction to be academic.  If you are afraid of using the wrong
20133 proxy, you should avoid connecting to the network in question in the
20134 first place.  In Debian Edu, the proxy setup is updated using dhcp and
20135 ifupdown hooks, to make sure the configuration is updated every time
20136 the network setup changes.</p>
20137
20138 <p>The WPAD system is documented in a
20139 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-wrec-wpad-01">IETF
20140 draft</a> and a
20141 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Proxy_Autodiscovery_Protocol">Wikipedia
20142 page</a> for those that want to learn more.</p>
20143
20144       </div>
20145       <div class="tags">
20146
20147
20148         Tags: <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>.
20149
20150
20151       </div>
20152     </div>
20153     <div class="padding"></div>
20154
20155     <div class="entry">
20156       <div class="title">
20157         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Saving_power_with_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_using_shutdown_at_night.html">Saving power with Debian Edu / Skolelinux using shutdown-at-night</a>
20158       </div>
20159       <div class="date">
20160          5th February 2012
20161       </div>
20162       <div class="body">
20163         <p>Since the Lenny version of
20164 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>, a
20165 feature to save power have been included.  It is as simple as it is
20166 practical: Shut down unused clients at night, and turn them on again
20167 in the morning.  This is done using the
20168 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/shutdown-at-night.html">shutdown-at-night</a> Debian package.</p>
20169
20170 <p>To enable this feature on a client, the machine need to be added to
20171 the netgroup shutdown-at-night-hosts.  For Debian Edu, this is done in
20172 LDAP, and once this is in place, the machine in question will check
20173 every hour from 16:00 until 06:00 to see if the machine is unused, and
20174 shut it down if it is.  If the hardware in question is supported by
20175 the
20176 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/nvram-wakeup.html">nvram-wakeup</a>
20177 package, the BIOS is told to turn the machine back on around 07:00 +-
20178 10 minutes.  If this isn't working, one can configure wake-on-lan to
20179 try to turn on the client.  The wake-on-lan option is only documented
20180 and not enabled by default in Debian Edu.</p>
20181
20182 <p>It is important to not turn all machines on at once, as this can
20183 blow a fuse if several computers are connected to the same fuse like
20184 the common setup for a classroom.  The nvram-wakeup method only work
20185 for machines with a functioning hardware/BIOS clock.  I've seen old
20186 machines where the BIOS battery were dead and the hardware clock were
20187 starting from 0 (or was it 1990?) every boot.  If you have one of
20188 those, you have to turn on the computer manually.</p>
20189
20190 <p>The shutdown-at-night package is completely self contained, and can
20191 also be used outside the Debian Edu environment.  For those without a
20192 central LDAP server with netgroups, one can instead touch the file
20193 <tt>/etc/shutdown-at-night/shutdown-at-night</tt> to enable it.
20194 Perhaps you too can use it to save some power?</p>
20195
20196       </div>
20197       <div class="tags">
20198
20199
20200         Tags: <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>.
20201
20202
20203       </div>
20204     </div>
20205     <div class="padding"></div>
20206
20207     <div class="entry">
20208       <div class="title">
20209         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Third_beta_version_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Squeeze.html">Third beta version of Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Squeeze</a>
20210       </div>
20211       <div class="date">
20212          4th February 2012
20213       </div>
20214       <div class="body">
20215         <p>I am happy to announce that finally we managed today to wrap up and
20216 publish the third beta version of
20217 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> based
20218 on Squeeze.  If you want to test a LDAP backed Kerberos server with
20219 out of the box PXE configuration for running diskless machines and
20220 installing new machines, check it out.  If you need a software
20221 solution for your school, check it out too.  The full announcement is
20222 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/02/msg00000.html">available</a>
20223 on the project announcement list.</p>
20224
20225 <p>I am very happy to report these changes and improvements since
20226 beta2 (there are more, see announcement for full list):</p>
20227
20228 <ul>
20229
20230 <li>It is now possible to change the pre-configured IP subnet from
20231   10.0.0.0/8 to something else by using the subnet-change tool after
20232   the installation.</li>
20233
20234 <li>Too full partitions are now automatically extended on the Main
20235   Server, based on the rules specified in /etc/fsautoresizetab.</li>
20236
20237 <li>The CUPS queues are now automatically flushed every night, and all
20238   disabled queues are restarted every hour.  This should cut down on
20239   the amount of manual administration needed for printers.</li>
20240
20241 <li>The set of initial users have been changed.  Now a personal user
20242   for the local system administrator is created during installation
20243   instead of the previously created localadmin and super-admin users,
20244   and this user is granted administrative privileges using group
20245   membership.  This reduces the number of passwords one need to keep
20246   up to date on the system.</li>
20247
20248 </ul>
20249
20250 <p>The new main server seem to work so well that I am testing it as my
20251 private DNS/LDAP/Kerberos/PXE/LTSP server at home.  I will use it look
20252 for issues we could fix to polish Debian Edu even further before the
20253 final Squeeze release is published.</p>
20254
20255 <p>Next weekend the project organise a
20256 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/01/msg00001.html">developer
20257 gathering</a> in Oslo.  We will continue the work on the Squeeze
20258 version, and start initial planning for the Wheezy version.  Perhaps I
20259 will see you there?</p>
20260
20261       </div>
20262       <div class="tags">
20263
20264
20265         Tags: <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>.
20266
20267
20268       </div>
20269     </div>
20270     <div class="padding"></div>
20271
20272     <div class="entry">
20273       <div class="title">
20274         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Handling_non_free_firmware_in_Debian_Edu_Squeeze.html">Handling non-free firmware in Debian Edu/Squeeze</a>
20275       </div>
20276       <div class="date">
20277         27th January 2012
20278       </div>
20279       <div class="body">
20280         <p>With some computer hardware, one need non-free firmware blobs.
20281 This is the sad fact of todays computers.  In the next version of
20282 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> based
20283 on Squeeze, we provide several scripts and modifications to make
20284 firmware blobs easier to handle.  The common use case I run into is a
20285 laptop with a wireless network card requiring non-free firmware to
20286 work, but there are other use cases as well.</p>
20287
20288 <p>First and foremost, Debian Edu provide ISO images for DVD and CD
20289 with all firmware packages in the Debian sections main and non-free
20290 included, to ensure debian-installer find and can install all of them
20291 during installation.  This take care firmware for network devices used
20292 by the installer when installing from from local media.  But for
20293 example multimedia devices are not activated in the installer and are
20294 not taken care of by this.</p>
20295
20296 <p>For non-network devices, we provide the script
20297 <tt>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/auto-addfirmware</tt> which
20298 search through the <tt>dmesg</tt> output for drivers requesting extra
20299 firmware.  The firmware file name is looked up in the Contents-ARCH.gz
20300 file available in the package repository, and the packages providing
20301 the requested firmware file(s) is installed.  I have proposed to do
20302 something similar in debian-installer (BTS report
20303 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/655507">#655507</a>), to allow PXE
20304 installs of Debian to handle firmware installation better.  Run the
20305 script as root from the command line to fetch and install the needed
20306 firmware packages.</p>
20307
20308 <p>Debian Edu provide PXE installation of Debian out of the box, and
20309 because some machines need firmware to get their network cards
20310 working, the installation initrd some times need extra firmware
20311 included to be able to install at all.  To fill the PXE installation
20312 initrd with extra firmware, the
20313 <tt>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/pxe-addfirmware</tt> script is
20314 provided.  Again, just run it as root on the command line to fill the
20315 PXE initrd with firmware packages.</p>
20316
20317 <p>Last, some LTSP clients might also need firmware to get their
20318 network cards working.  For this,
20319 <tt>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/ltsp-addfirmware</tt> is
20320 provided to update the LTSP initrd with firmware blobs.  It is used
20321 the same way as the other firmware related tools.</p>
20322
20323 <p>At the moment, we do not run any of these during installation.  We
20324 do not know if this is acceptable for the local administrator to use
20325 non-free software, and it is their choice.</p>
20326
20327 <p>We plan to release beta3 this weekend.  You might want to give it a
20328 try.</p>
20329
20330       </div>
20331       <div class="tags">
20332
20333
20334         Tags: <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>.
20335
20336
20337       </div>
20338     </div>
20339     <div class="padding"></div>
20340
20341     <div class="entry">
20342       <div class="title">
20343         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Setting_up_a_new_school_with_Debian_Edu_Squeeze.html">Setting up a new school with Debian Edu/Squeeze</a>
20344       </div>
20345       <div class="date">
20346         25th January 2012
20347       </div>
20348       <div class="body">
20349         <p>The next version of <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu
20350 / Skolelinux</a> will include a new tool
20351 <tt>sitesummary2ldapdhcp</tt>, which can be used to quickly set up all
20352 the computers in a school without much manual labour.  Here is a short
20353 summary on how to use it to set up a new school.</p>
20354
20355 <p>First, install a combined Main Server and Thin Client Server as the
20356 central server in the network.  Next, PXE boot all the client machines
20357 as thin clients and wait 5 minutes after the last client booted to
20358 allow the clients to report their existence to the central server.  When
20359 this is done, log on to the central server and run
20360 <tt>sitesummary2ldapdhcp -a</tt> in the <tt>konsole</tt> to use the
20361 collected information to generate system objects in LDAP.  The output
20362 will look similar to this:</p>
20363
20364 <p><blockquote><pre>
20365 % sitesummary2ldapdhcp -a
20366 info: Updating machine tjener.intern [10.0.2.2] id ether-00:01:02:03:04:05.
20367 info: Create GOsa machine for auto-mac-00-01-02-03-04-06 [10.0.16.20] id ether-00:01:02:03:04:06.
20368
20369 Enter password if you want to activate these changes, and ^c to abort.
20370
20371 Connecting to LDAP as cn=admin,ou=ldap-access,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
20372 enter password: *******
20373 %
20374 </pre></blockquote></p>
20375
20376 <p>After providing the LDAP administrative password (the same as the
20377 root password set during installation), the LDAP database will be
20378 populated with system objects for each PXE booted machine with
20379 automatically generated names.  The final step to set up the school is
20380 then to log into <a href="https://oss.gonicus.de/labs/gosa/">GOsa</a>,
20381 the web based user, group and system administration system to change
20382 system names, add systems to the correct host groups and finally
20383 enable DHCP and DNS for the systems.  All clients that should be used
20384 as diskless workstations should be added to the workstation-hosts
20385 group.  After this is done, all computers can be booted again via PXE
20386 and get their assigned names and group based configuration
20387 automatically.</p>
20388
20389 <p>We plan to release beta3 with the updated version of this feature
20390 enabled this weekend.  You might want to give it a try.</p>
20391
20392 <p>Update 2012-01-28: When calling sitesummary2ldapdhcp to add new
20393 hosts, one need to add the option -a.  I forgot to mention this in my
20394 original text, and have added it to the text now.</p>
20395
20396       </div>
20397       <div class="tags">
20398
20399
20400         Tags: <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>.
20401
20402
20403       </div>
20404     </div>
20405     <div class="padding"></div>
20406
20407     <div class="entry">
20408       <div class="title">
20409         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Changing_the_default_Iceweasel_start_page_in_Debian_Edu_Squeeze.html">Changing the default Iceweasel start page in Debian Edu/Squeeze</a>
20410       </div>
20411       <div class="date">
20412         10th January 2012
20413       </div>
20414       <div class="body">
20415         <p>In the Squeeze version of
20416 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> soon
20417 to be released, users of the system will get their default browser
20418 start page set from LDAP, allowing the system administrator to point
20419 all users to the school web page by updating one setting in LDAP.  In
20420 addition to setting the default start page when a machine boots, users
20421 are shown the same page as a welcome page when they log in for the
20422 first time.</p>
20423
20424 <p>The LDAP object dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no have an attribute
20425 labeledURI with "http://www/ LDAP for Debian Edu/Skolelinux" as the
20426 default content.  By changing this value to another URL, all users get
20427 to see the page behind this new URL.</p>
20428
20429 <p>An easy way to update it is by using the ldapvi tool.  It can be
20430 called as "<tt>ldapvi -ZD '(cn=admin)'</tt>' to update LDAP with the
20431 new setting.</p>
20432
20433 <p>We have written the code to adjust the default start page and show
20434 the welcome page, and I wonder if there is an easier way to do this
20435 from within Iceweasel instead.</p>
20436
20437       </div>
20438       <div class="tags">
20439
20440
20441         Tags: <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/web">web</a>.
20442
20443
20444       </div>
20445     </div>
20446     <div class="padding"></div>
20447
20448     <div class="entry">
20449       <div class="title">
20450         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Second_beta_version_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Squeeze.html">Second beta version of Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Squeeze</a>
20451       </div>
20452       <div class="date">
20453          7th January 2012
20454       </div>
20455       <div class="body">
20456         <p>I am happy to announce that today we managed to wrap up and publish
20457 the second beta version of
20458 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>.  If
20459 you want to test a LDAP backed Kerberos server with out of the box PXE
20460 configuration for running diskless machines and installing new
20461 machines, check it out.  If you need a software solution for your
20462 school, check it out too.  The full announcement is
20463 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/01/msg00000.html">available</a>
20464 on the project announcement list.</p>
20465
20466       </div>
20467       <div class="tags">
20468
20469
20470         Tags: <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>.
20471
20472
20473       </div>
20474     </div>
20475     <div class="padding"></div>
20476
20477     <div class="entry">
20478       <div class="title">
20479         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Fixing_an_hanging_debian_installer_for_Debian_Edu.html">Fixing an hanging debian installer for Debian Edu</a>
20480       </div>
20481       <div class="date">
20482          3rd January 2012
20483       </div>
20484       <div class="body">
20485         <p>During christmas, I have been working getting the next version of
20486 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> ready
20487 for release.  The initial problem I looked at was particularly
20488 interesting.</p>
20489
20490 <P>The installer would hang at the end when it was doing it
20491 post-installation configuration, and whatevery I did to try to find
20492 the cause and fix it always worked while I tested it, but never when I
20493 integrated it into the installer and ran the installation from
20494 scratch.  I would try to restart processes, close file descriptors,
20495 remove or create files, and the installer would always unblock and
20496 wrap up its tasks.</p>
20497
20498 <p>Eventually the cause was found.  The kernel was simply running out
20499 of entropy, causing the Kerberos setup to hang waiting for more.
20500 Pressing keys was adding entropy to the kernel, and thus all my tries
20501 to fix the problem worked not because what I was typing to fix it, but
20502 because I was typing.</P>
20503
20504 <p>The fix I implemented was to add a background process looking at
20505 the level of entropy in the kernel (by checking
20506 /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail), and if it was too small, the
20507 installer will flush the kernel file buffers and do 'find /' to
20508 generate some disk IO.  Disk IO generate entropy in the kernel, and is
20509 one of the few things that can be initated from within the system to
20510 generate entropy.</p>
20511
20512 <p>The fix is in
20513 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze/Installation">beta1
20514 of the Debian Edu/Squeeze</a> version, and we
20515 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu">welcome more testers and
20516 developers</a>.  We plan to release beta2 this weekend.</p>
20517
20518       </div>
20519       <div class="tags">
20520
20521
20522         Tags: <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>.
20523
20524
20525       </div>
20526     </div>
20527     <div class="padding"></div>
20528
20529     <div class="entry">
20530       <div class="title">
20531         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatically_upgrading_server_firmware_on_Dell_PowerEdge.html">Automatically upgrading server firmware on Dell PowerEdge</a>
20532       </div>
20533       <div class="date">
20534         21st November 2011
20535       </div>
20536       <div class="body">
20537         <p>At work we have heaps of servers.  I believe the total count is
20538 around 1000 at the moment.  To be able to get help from the vendors
20539 when something go wrong, we want to keep the firmware on the servers
20540 up to date.  If the firmware isn't the latest and greatest, the
20541 vendors typically refuse to start debugging any problems until the
20542 firmware is upgraded.  So before every reboot, we want to upgrade the
20543 firmware, and we would really like everyone handling servers at the
20544 university to do this themselves when they plan to reboot a machine.
20545 For that to happen we at the unix server admin group need to provide
20546 the tools to do so.</p>
20547
20548 <p>To make firmware upgrading easier, I am working on a script to
20549 fetch and install the latest firmware for the servers we got.  Most of
20550 our hardware are from Dell and HP, so I have focused on these servers
20551 so far.  This blog post is about the Dell part.</P>
20552
20553 <p>On the Dell FTP site I was lucky enough to find
20554 <a href="ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz">an XML file</a>
20555 with firmware information for all 11th generation servers, listing
20556 which firmware should be used on a given model and where on the FTP
20557 site I can find it.  Using a simple perl XML parser I can then
20558 download the shell scripts Dell provides to do firmware upgrades from
20559 within Linux and reboot when all the firmware is primed and ready to
20560 be activated on the first reboot.</p>
20561
20562 <p>This is the Dell related fragment of the perl code I am working on.
20563 Are there anyone working on similar tools for firmware upgrading all
20564 servers at a site?  Please get in touch and lets share resources.</p>
20565
20566 <p><pre>
20567 #!/usr/bin/perl
20568 use strict;
20569 use warnings;
20570 use File::Temp qw(tempdir);
20571 BEGIN {
20572     # Install needed RHEL packages if missing
20573     my %rhelmodules = (
20574         'XML::Simple' => 'perl-XML-Simple',
20575         );
20576     for my $module (keys %rhelmodules) {
20577         eval "use $module;";
20578         if ($@) {
20579             my $pkg = $rhelmodules{$module};
20580             system("yum install -y $pkg");
20581             eval "use $module;";
20582         }
20583     }
20584 }
20585 my $errorsto = 'pere@hungry.com';
20586
20587 upgrade_dell();
20588
20589 exit 0;
20590
20591 sub run_firmware_script {
20592     my ($opts, $script) = @_;
20593     unless ($script) {
20594         print STDERR "fail: missing script name\n";
20595         exit 1
20596     }
20597     print STDERR "Running $script\n\n";
20598
20599     if (0 == system("sh $script $opts")) { # FIXME correct exit code handling
20600         print STDERR "success: firmware script ran succcessfully\n";
20601     } else {
20602         print STDERR "fail: firmware script returned error\n";
20603     }
20604 }
20605
20606 sub run_firmware_scripts {
20607     my ($opts, @dirs) = @_;
20608     # Run firmware packages
20609     for my $dir (@dirs) {
20610         print STDERR "info: Running scripts in $dir\n";
20611         opendir(my $dh, $dir) or die "Unable to open directory $dir: $!";
20612         while (my $s = readdir $dh) {
20613             next if $s =~ m/^\.\.?/;
20614             run_firmware_script($opts, "$dir/$s");
20615         }
20616         closedir $dh;
20617     }
20618 }
20619
20620 sub download {
20621     my $url = shift;
20622     print STDERR "info: Downloading $url\n";
20623     system("wget --quiet \"$url\"");
20624 }
20625
20626 sub upgrade_dell {
20627     my @dirs;
20628     my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
20629     chomp $product;
20630
20631     if ($product =~ m/PowerEdge/) {
20632
20633         # on RHEL, these pacakges are needed by the firwmare upgrade scripts
20634         system('yum install -y compat-libstdc++-33.i686 libstdc++.i686 libxml2.i686 procmail');
20635
20636         my $tmpdir = tempdir(
20637             CLEANUP => 1
20638             );
20639         chdir($tmpdir);
20640         fetch_dell_fw('catalog/Catalog.xml.gz');
20641         system('gunzip Catalog.xml.gz');
20642         my @paths = fetch_dell_fw_list('Catalog.xml');
20643         # -q is quiet, disabling interactivity and reducing console output
20644         my $fwopts = "-q";
20645         if (@paths) {
20646             for my $url (@paths) {
20647                 fetch_dell_fw($url);
20648             }
20649             run_firmware_scripts($fwopts, $tmpdir);
20650         } else {
20651             print STDERR "error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
20652             print STDERR "error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
20653         }
20654         chdir('/');
20655     } else {
20656         print STDERR "error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
20657         print STDERR "error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
20658     }
20659 }
20660
20661 sub fetch_dell_fw {
20662     my $path = shift;
20663     my $url = "ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/$path";
20664     download($url);
20665 }
20666
20667 # Using ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz, figure out which
20668 # firmware packages to download from Dell.  Only work for Linux
20669 # machines and 11th generation Dell servers.
20670 sub fetch_dell_fw_list {
20671     my $filename = shift;
20672
20673     my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
20674     chomp $product;
20675     my ($mybrand, $mymodel) = split(/\s+/, $product);
20676
20677     print STDERR "Finding firmware bundles for $mybrand $mymodel\n";
20678
20679     my $xml = XMLin($filename);
20680     my @paths;
20681     for my $bundle (@{$xml->{SoftwareBundle}}) {
20682         my $brand = $bundle->{TargetSystems}->{Brand}->{Display}->{content};
20683         my $model = $bundle->{TargetSystems}->{Brand}->{Model}->{Display}->{content};
20684         my $oscode;
20685         if ("ARRAY" eq ref $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}) {
20686             $oscode = $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}[0]->{osCode};
20687         } else {
20688             $oscode = $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}->{osCode};
20689         }
20690         if ($mybrand eq $brand && $mymodel eq $model && "LIN" eq $oscode)
20691         {
20692             @paths = map { $_->{path} } @{$bundle->{Contents}->{Package}};
20693         }
20694     }
20695     for my $component (@{$xml->{SoftwareComponent}}) {
20696         my $componenttype = $component->{ComponentType}->{value};
20697
20698         # Drop application packages, only firmware and BIOS
20699         next if 'APAC' eq $componenttype;
20700
20701         my $cpath = $component->{path};
20702         for my $path (@paths) {
20703             if ($cpath =~ m%/$path$%) {
20704                 push(@paths, $cpath);
20705             }
20706         }
20707     }
20708     return @paths;
20709 }
20710 </pre>
20711
20712 <p>The code is only tested on RedHat Enterprise Linux, but I suspect
20713 it could work on other platforms with some tweaking.  Anyone know a
20714 index like Catalog.xml is available from HP for HP servers?  At the
20715 moment I maintain a similar list manually and it is quickly getting
20716 outdated.</p>
20717
20718       </div>
20719       <div class="tags">
20720
20721
20722         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>.
20723
20724
20725       </div>
20726     </div>
20727     <div class="padding"></div>
20728
20729     <div class="entry">
20730       <div class="title">
20731         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_e_book_kiosk_for_the_public_libraries_.html">Free e-book kiosk for the public libraries?</a>
20732       </div>
20733       <div class="date">
20734          7th October 2011
20735       </div>
20736       <div class="body">
20737         <p>Here in Norway the public libraries are debating with the
20738 publishing houses how to handle electronic books.  Surprisingly, the
20739 libraries seem to be willing to accept digital restriction mechanisms
20740 (DRM) on books and renting e-books with artificial scarcity from the
20741 publishing houses.  Time limited renting (2-3 years) is one proposed
20742 model, and only allowing X borrowers for each book is another.
20743 Personally I find it amazing that libraries are even considering such
20744 models.</p>
20745
20746 <p>Anyway, while reading <a href="http://boklaben.no/?p=220">part of
20747 this debate</a>, it occurred to me that someone should present a more
20748 sensible approach to the libraries, to allow its borrowers to get used
20749 to a better model.  The idea is simple:</p>
20750
20751 <p>Create a computer system for the libraries, either in the form of a
20752 Live DVD or a installable distribution, that provide a simple kiosk
20753 solution to hand out free e-books.  As a start, the books distributed
20754 by <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/">Project Gutenberg</a> (about
20755 36,000 books), <a href="http://runeberg.org/">Project Runenberg</a>
20756 (1149 books) and <a href="http://www.archive.org/details/texts">The
20757 Internet Archive</a> (3,033,748 books) could be included, but any book
20758 where the copyright has expired or with a free licence could be
20759 distributed.</p>
20760
20761 <p>The computer system would make it easy to:</p>
20762
20763 <ul>
20764
20765 <li>Copy e-books into a USB stick, reading tablets, cell phones and
20766   other relevant equipment.</li>
20767
20768 <li>Show the books for reading on the the screen in the library.</li>
20769
20770 </ul>
20771
20772 <p>In addition to such kiosk solution, there should probably be a web
20773 site as well to allow people easy access to these books without
20774 visiting the library.  The site would be the distribution point for
20775 the kiosk systems, which would connect regularly to fetch any new
20776 books available.</p>
20777
20778 <p>Are there anyone working on a system like this?  I guess it would
20779 fit any library in the world, and not just the Norwegian public
20780 libraries. :)</p>
20781
20782       </div>
20783       <div class="tags">
20784
20785
20786         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>.
20787
20788
20789       </div>
20790     </div>
20791     <div class="padding"></div>
20792
20793     <div class="entry">
20794       <div class="title">
20795         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ripping_problematic_DVDs_using_dvdbackup_and_genisoimage.html">Ripping problematic DVDs using dvdbackup and genisoimage</a>
20796       </div>
20797       <div class="date">
20798         17th September 2011
20799       </div>
20800       <div class="body">
20801         <p>For convenience, I want to store copies of all my DVDs on my file
20802 server.  It allow me to save shelf space flat while still having my
20803 movie collection easily available.  It also make it possible to let
20804 the kids see their favourite DVDs without wearing the physical copies
20805 down.  I prefer to store the DVDs as ISOs to keep the DVD menu and
20806 subtitle options intact.  It also ensure that the entire film is one
20807 file on the disk.  As this is for personal use, the ripping is
20808 perfectly legal here in Norway.</p>
20809
20810 <p>Normally I rip the DVDs using dd like this:</p>
20811
20812 <blockquote><pre>
20813 #!/bin/sh
20814 # apt-get install lsdvd
20815 title=$(lsdvd 2>/dev/null|awk '/Disc Title: / {print $3}')
20816 dd if=/dev/dvd of=/storage/dvds/$title.iso bs=1M
20817 </pre></blockquote>
20818
20819 <p>But some DVDs give a input/output error when I read it, and I have
20820 been looking for a better alternative.  I have no idea why this I/O
20821 error occur, but suspect my DVD drive, the Linux kernel driver or
20822 something fishy with the DVDs in question.  Or perhaps all three.</p>
20823
20824 <p>Anyway, I believe I found a solution today using dvdbackup and
20825 genisoimage.  This script gave me a working ISO for a problematic
20826 movie by first extracting the DVD file system and then re-packing it
20827 back as an ISO.
20828
20829 <blockquote><pre>
20830 #!/bin/sh
20831 # apt-get install lsdvd dvdbackup genisoimage
20832 set -e
20833 tmpdir=/storage/dvds/
20834 title=$(lsdvd 2>/dev/null|awk '/Disc Title: / {print $3}')
20835 dvdbackup -i /dev/dvd -M -o $tmpdir -n$title
20836 genisoimage -dvd-video -o $tmpdir/$title.iso $tmpdir/$title
20837 rm -rf $tmpdir/$title
20838 </pre></blockquote>
20839
20840 <p>Anyone know of a better way available in Debian/Squeeze?</p>
20841
20842 <p>Update 2011-09-18: I got a tip from Konstantin Khomoutov about the
20843 readom program from the wodim package.  It is specially written to
20844 read optical media, and is called like this: <tt>readom dev=/dev/dvd
20845 f=image.iso</tt>.  It got 6 GB along with the problematic Cars DVD
20846 before it failed, and failed right away with a Timmy Time DVD.</p>
20847
20848 <p>Next, I got a tip from Bastian Blank about
20849 <a href="http://bblank.thinkmo.de/blog/new-software-python-dvdvideo">his
20850 program python-dvdvideo</a>, which seem to be just what I am looking
20851 for.  Tested it with my problematic Timmy Time DVD, and it succeeded
20852 creating a ISO image.  The git source built and installed just fine in
20853 Squeeze, so I guess this will be my tool of choice in the future.</p>
20854
20855       </div>
20856       <div class="tags">
20857
20858
20859         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
20860
20861
20862       </div>
20863     </div>
20864     <div class="padding"></div>
20865
20866     <div class="entry">
20867       <div class="title">
20868         <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>
20869       </div>
20870       <div class="date">
20871          4th August 2011
20872       </div>
20873       <div class="body">
20874         <p>Wouter Verhelst have some
20875 <a href="http://grep.be/blog/en/retorts/pere_kubuntu_boot">interesting
20876 comments and opinions</a> on my blog post on
20877 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_should_start_from__etc_rcS_d__in_Debian____almost_nothing.html">the
20878 need to clean up /etc/rcS.d/ in Debian</a> and my blog post about
20879 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_missing_in_the_Debian_desktop__or_why_my_parents_use_Kubuntu.html">the
20880 default KDE desktop in Debian</a>.  I only have time to address one
20881 small piece of his comment now, and though it best to address the
20882 misunderstanding he bring forward:</p>
20883
20884 <p><blockquote>
20885 Currently, a system admin has four options: [...] boot to a
20886 single-user system (by adding 'single' to the kernel command line;
20887 this runs rcS and rc1 scripts)
20888 </blockquote></p>
20889
20890 <p>This make me believe Wouter believe booting into single user mode
20891 and booting into runlevel 1 is the same.  I am not surprised he
20892 believe this, because it would make sense and is a quite sensible
20893 thing to believe.  But because the boot in Debian is slightly broken,
20894 runlevel 1 do not work properly and it isn't the same as single user
20895 mode.  I'll try to explain what is actually happing, but it is a bit
20896 hard to explain.</p>
20897
20898 <p>Single user mode is defined like this in /etc/inittab:
20899 "<tt>~~:S:wait:/sbin/sulogin</tt>".  This means the only thing that is
20900 executed in single user mode is sulogin.  Single user mode is a boot
20901 state "between" the runlevels, and when booting into single user mode,
20902 only the scripts in /etc/rcS.d/ are executed before the init process
20903 enters the single user state.  When switching to runlevel 1, the state
20904 is in fact not ending in runlevel 1, but it passes through runlevel 1
20905 and end up in the single user mode (see /etc/rc1.d/S03single, which
20906 runs "init -t1 S" to switch to single user mode at the end of runlevel
20907 1.  It is confusing that the 'S' (single user) init mode is not the
20908 mode enabled by /etc/rcS.d/ (which is more like the initial boot
20909 mode).</p>
20910
20911 <p>This summary might make it clearer.  When booting for the first
20912 time into single user mode, the following commands are executed:
20913 "<tt>/etc/init.d/rc S; /sbin/sulogin</tt>".  When booting into
20914 runlevel 1, the following commands are executed: "<tt>/etc/init.d/rc
20915 S; /etc/init.d/rc 1; /sbin/sulogin</tt>".  A problem show up when
20916 trying to continue after visiting single user mode.  Not all services
20917 are started again as they should, causing the machine to end up in an
20918 unpredicatble state.  This is why Debian admins recommend rebooting
20919 after visiting single user mode.</p>
20920
20921 <p>A similar problem with runlevel 1 is caused by the amount of
20922 scripts executed from /etc/rcS.d/.  When switching from say runlevel 2
20923 to runlevel 1, the services started from /etc/rcS.d/ are not properly
20924 stopped when passing through the scripts in /etc/rc1.d/, and not
20925 started again when switching away from runlevel 1 to the runlevels
20926 2-5.  I believe the problem is best fixed by moving all the scripts
20927 out of /etc/rcS.d/ that are not <strong>required</strong> to get a
20928 functioning single user mode during boot.</p>
20929
20930 <p>I have spent several years investigating the Debian boot system,
20931 and discovered this problem a few years ago.  I suspect it originates
20932 from when sysvinit was introduced into Debian, a long time ago.</p>
20933
20934       </div>
20935       <div class="tags">
20936
20937
20938         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>.
20939
20940
20941       </div>
20942     </div>
20943     <div class="padding"></div>
20944
20945     <div class="entry">
20946       <div class="title">
20947         <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>
20948       </div>
20949       <div class="date">
20950         30th July 2011
20951       </div>
20952       <div class="body">
20953         <p>In the Debian boot system, several packages include scripts that
20954 are started from /etc/rcS.d/.  In fact, there is a bite more of them
20955 than make sense, and this causes a few problems.  What kind of
20956 problems, you might ask.  There are at least two problems.  The first
20957 is that it is not possible to recover a machine after switching to
20958 runlevel 1.  One need to actually reboot to get the machine back to
20959 the expected state.  The other is that single user boot will sometimes
20960 run into problems because some of the subsystems are activated before
20961 the root login is presented, causing problems when trying to recover a
20962 machine from a problem in that subsystem.  A minor additional point is
20963 that moving more scripts out of rcS.d/ and into the other rc#.d/
20964 directories will increase the amount of scripts that can run in
20965 parallel during boot, and thus decrease the boot time.</p>
20966
20967 <p>So, which scripts should start from rcS.d/.  In short, only the
20968 scripts that _have_ to execute before the root login prompt is
20969 presented during a single user boot should go there.  Everything else
20970 should go into the numeric runlevels.  This means things like
20971 lm-sensors, fuse and x11-common should not run from rcS.d, but from
20972 the numeric runlevels.  Today in Debian, there are around 115 init.d
20973 scripts that are started from rcS.d/, and most of them should be moved
20974 out.  Do your package have one of them?  Please help us make single
20975 user and runlevel 1 better by moving it.</p>
20976
20977 <p>Scripts setting up the screen, keyboard, system partitions
20978 etc. should still be started from rcS.d/, but there is for example no
20979 need to have the network enabled before the single user login prompt
20980 is presented.</p>
20981
20982 <p>As always, things are not so easy to fix as they sound.  To keep
20983 Debian systems working while scripts migrate and during upgrades, the
20984 scripts need to be moved from rcS.d/ to rc2.d/ in reverse dependency
20985 order, ie the scripts that nothing in rcS.d/ depend on can be moved,
20986 and the next ones can only be moved when their dependencies have been
20987 moved first.  This migration must be done sequentially while we ensure
20988 that the package system upgrade packages in the right order to keep
20989 the system state correct.  This will require some coordination when it
20990 comes to network related packages, but most of the packages with
20991 scripts that should migrate do not have anything in rcS.d/ depending
20992 on them.  Some packages have already been updated, like the sudo
20993 package, while others are still left to do.  I wish I had time to work
20994 on this myself, but real live constrains make it unlikely that I will
20995 find time to push this forward.</p>
20996
20997       </div>
20998       <div class="tags">
20999
21000
21001         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>.
21002
21003
21004       </div>
21005     </div>
21006     <div class="padding"></div>
21007
21008     <div class="entry">
21009       <div class="title">
21010         <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>
21011       </div>
21012       <div class="date">
21013         29th July 2011
21014       </div>
21015       <div class="body">
21016         <p>While at Debconf11, I have several times during discussions
21017 mentioned the issues I believe should be improved in Debian for its
21018 desktop to be useful for more people.  The use case for this is my
21019 parents, which are currently running Kubuntu which solve the
21020 issues.</p>
21021
21022 <p>I suspect these four missing features are not very hard to
21023 implement.  After all, they are present in Ubuntu, so if we wanted to
21024 do this in Debian we would have a source.</p>
21025
21026 <ol>
21027
21028 <li><strong>Simple GUI based upgrade of packages.</strong> When there
21029 are new packages available for upgrades, a icon in the KDE status bar
21030 indicate this, and clicking on it will activate the simple upgrade
21031 tool to handle it.  I have no problem guiding both of my parents
21032 through the process over the phone.  If a kernel reboot is required,
21033 this too is indicated by the status bars and the upgrade tool.  Last
21034 time I checked, nothing with the same features was working in KDE in
21035 Debian.</li>
21036
21037 <li><strong>Simple handling of missing Firefox browser
21038 plugins.</strong> When the browser encounter a MIME type it do not
21039 currently have a handler for, it will ask the user if the system
21040 should search for a package that would add support for this MIME type,
21041 and if the user say yes, the APT sources will be searched for packages
21042 advertising the MIME type in their control file (visible in the
21043 Packages file in the APT archive).  If one or more packages are found,
21044 it is a simple click of the mouse to add support for the missing mime
21045 type.  If the package require the user to accept some non-free
21046 license, this is explained to the user.  The entire process make it
21047 more clear to the user why something do not work in the browser, and
21048 make the chances higher for the user to blame the web page authors and
21049 not the browser for any missing features.</li>
21050
21051 <li><strong>Simple handling of missing multimedia codec/format
21052 handlers.</strong> When the media players encounter a format or codec
21053 it is not supporting, a dialog pop up asking the user if the system
21054 should search for a package that would add support for it.  This
21055 happen with things like MP3, Windows Media or H.264.  The selection
21056 and installation procedure is very similar to the Firefox browser
21057 plugin handling.  This is as far as I know implemented using a
21058 gstreamer hook.  The end result is that the user easily get access to
21059 the codecs that are present from the APT archives available, while
21060 explaining more on why a given format is unsupported by Ubuntu.</li>
21061
21062 <li><strong>Better browser handling of some MIME types.</strong> When
21063 displaying a text/plain file in my Debian browser, it will propose to
21064 start emacs to show it.  If I remember correctly, when doing the same
21065 in Kunbutu it show the file as a text file in the browser.  At least I
21066 know Opera will show text files within the browser.  I much prefer the
21067 latter behaviour.</li>
21068
21069 </ol>
21070
21071 <p>There are other nice features as well, like the simplified suite
21072 upgrader, but given that I am the one mostly doing the dist-upgrade,
21073 it do not matter much.</p>
21074
21075 <p>I really hope we could get these features in place for the next
21076 Debian release.  It would require the coordinated effort of several
21077 maintainers, but would make the end user experience a lot better.</p>
21078
21079       </div>
21080       <div class="tags">
21081
21082
21083         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/h264">h264</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>.
21084
21085
21086       </div>
21087     </div>
21088     <div class="padding"></div>
21089
21090     <div class="entry">
21091       <div class="title">
21092         <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>
21093       </div>
21094       <div class="date">
21095         26th July 2011
21096       </div>
21097       <div class="body">
21098         <p>The Norwegian <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</A>
21099 site is build on Debian/Squeeze, and this platform was chosen because
21100 I am most familiar with Debian (being a Debian Developer for around 10
21101 years) because it is the latest stable Debian release which should get
21102 security support for a few years.</p>
21103
21104 <p>The web service is written in Perl, and depend on some perl modules
21105 that are missing in Debian at the moment.  It would be great if these
21106 modules were added to the Debian archive, allowing anyone to set up
21107 their own <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com">FixMyStreet</a> clone
21108 in their own country using only Debian packages.  The list of modules
21109 missing in Debian/Squeeze isn't very long, and I hope the perl group
21110 will find time to package the 12 modules Catalyst::Plugin::SmartURI,
21111 Catalyst::Plugin::Unicode::Encoding, Catalyst::View::TT, Devel::Hide,
21112 Sort::Key, Statistics::Distributions, Template::Plugin::Comma,
21113 Template::Plugin::DateTime::Format, Term::Size::Any, Term::Size::Perl,
21114 URI::SmartURI and Web::Scraper to make the maintenance of FixMyStreet
21115 easier in the future.</p>
21116
21117 <p>Thanks to the great tools in Debian, getting the missing modules
21118 installed on my server was a simple call to 'cpan2deb Module::Name'
21119 and 'dpkg -i' to install the resulting package.  But this leave me
21120 with the responsibility of tracking security problems, which I really
21121 do not have time for.</p>
21122
21123       </div>
21124       <div class="tags">
21125
21126
21127         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>.
21128
21129
21130       </div>
21131     </div>
21132     <div class="padding"></div>
21133
21134     <div class="entry">
21135       <div class="title">
21136         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Software_vs__proprietary_softare___.html">Free Software vs. proprietary softare...</a>
21137       </div>
21138       <div class="date">
21139         20th June 2011
21140       </div>
21141       <div class="body">
21142         <p>Reading
21143 <a href="http://blog.thingiverse.com/2011/06/20/open-source-vs-closed-source-eulas/">the
21144 thingiverse blog</a>, I came across two highlights of interesting
21145 parts of the
21146 <a href="http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Autodesk_EULA">Autodesk</a>
21147 and
21148 <a href="http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2011/06/things-you-cant-do-with-the-microsoft-kinect-sdk.html">Microsoft
21149 Kinect</a> End User License Agreements (EULAs), which illustrates
21150 quite well why I stay away from software with EULAs.  Whenever I take
21151 the time to read their content, the terms are simply unacceptable.</p>
21152
21153       </div>
21154       <div class="tags">
21155
21156
21157         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>.
21158
21159
21160       </div>
21161     </div>
21162     <div class="padding"></div>
21163
21164     <div class="entry">
21165       <div class="title">
21166         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Experimental_Open311_API_for_the_mySociety_fixmystreet_system.html">Experimental Open311 API for the mySociety fixmystreet system</a>
21167       </div>
21168       <div class="date">
21169         30th April 2011
21170       </div>
21171       <div class="body">
21172         <p>Today, the first draft implementation of an
21173 <a href="http://www.open311.org/">Open311 API</a> for the Norwegian
21174 service <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a> started to
21175 work.  It is only available on the developer server for now, and I
21176 have not tested it using any existing Open311 client (I lack the
21177 platforms needed to run the clients I have found so far), but it is
21178 able to query the database and extract a list of open and closed
21179 requests within a given category and reported to a given municipality.
21180 I believe that is a good start to create a useful service for those
21181 that want to do data mining on the requests submitted so far.</p>
21182
21183 <p>Where is it?  Visit
21184 <a href="http://fiksgatami-dev.nuug.no/open311.cgi/v2/">http://fiksgatami-dev.nuug.no/open311.cgi/v2/</a>
21185 to have a look.  Please send feedback to the
21186 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/fiksgatami">fiksgatami
21187 (at) nuug.no</a> mailing list.</p>
21188
21189       </div>
21190       <div class="tags">
21191
21192
21193         Tags: <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/open311">open311</a>.
21194
21195
21196       </div>
21197     </div>
21198     <div class="padding"></div>
21199
21200     <div class="entry">
21201       <div class="title">
21202         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Initial_notes_on_adding_Open311_server_API_on_FixMyStreet.html">Initial notes on adding Open311 server API on FixMyStreet</a>
21203       </div>
21204       <div class="date">
21205         29th April 2011
21206       </div>
21207       <div class="body">
21208         <p>The last few days I have spent some time trying to add support for
21209 the <a href="http://www.open311.org/">Open311 API</a> in the
21210 <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">Norwegian FixMyStreet service</a>.
21211 Earlier I believed Open311 would be a useful API to use to submit
21212 reports to the municipalities, but when I noticed that the
21213 <a href="http://fixmystreet.org.nz/">New Zealand version</a> of
21214 FixMyStreet had implemented Open311 on the server side, it occurred to
21215 me that this was a nice way to allow the public, press and
21216 municipalities to do data mining directly in the FixMyStreet service.
21217 Thus I went to work implementing the Open311 specification for
21218 FixMyStreet.  The implementation is not yet ready, but I am starting
21219 to get a draft limping along.  In the process, I have discovered a few
21220 issues with the Open311 specification.</p>
21221
21222 <p>One obvious missing feature is the lack of natural language
21223 handling in the specification.  The specification seem to assume all
21224 reports will be written in English, and do not provide a way for the
21225 receiving end to specify which languages are understood there.  To be
21226 able to use the same client and submit to several Open311 receivers,
21227 it would be useful to know which language to use when writing reports.
21228 I believe the specification should be extended to allow the receivers
21229 of problem reports to specify which language they accept, and the
21230 submitter to specify which language the report is written in.
21231 Language of a text can also be automatically guessed using statistical
21232 methods, but for multi-lingual persons like myself, it is useful to
21233 know which language to use when writing a problem report.  I suspect
21234 some lang=nb,nn kind of attribute would solve it.</p>
21235
21236 <p>A key part of the Open311 API is the list of services provided,
21237 which is similar to the categories used by FixMyStreet.  One issue I
21238 run into is the need to specify both name and unique identifier for
21239 each category.  The specification do not state that the identifier
21240 should be numeric, but all example implementations have used numbers
21241 here.  In FixMyStreet, there is no number associated with each
21242 category.  As the specification do not forbid it, I will use the name
21243 as the unique identifier for now and see how open311 clients handle
21244 it.</p>
21245
21246 <p>The report format in open311 and the report format in FixMyStreet
21247 differ in a key part.  FixMyStreet have a title and a description,
21248 while Open311 only have a description and lack the title.  I'm not
21249 quite sure how to best handle this yet.  When asking for a FixMyStreet
21250 report in Open311 format, I just merge title an description into the
21251 open311 description, but this is not going to work if the open311 API
21252 should be used for submitting new reports to FixMyStreet.</p>
21253
21254 <p>The search feature in Open311 is missing a way to ask for problems
21255 near a geographic location.  I believe this is important if one is to
21256 use Open311 as the query language for mobile units.  The specification
21257 should be extended to handle this, probably using some new lat=, lon=
21258 and range= options.</p>
21259
21260 <p>The final challenge I see is that the FixMyStreet code handle
21261 several administrations in one interface, while the Open311 API seem
21262 to assume only one administration.  For FixMyStreet, this mean a
21263 report can be sent to several administrations, and the categories
21264 available depend on the location of the problem.  Not quite sure how
21265 to best handle this.  I've noticed
21266 <a href="http://seeclickfix.com/open311/">SeeClickFix</a> added
21267 latitude and longitude options to the services request, but it do not
21268 solve the problem of what to return when no location is specified.
21269 Will have to investigate this a bit more.</p>
21270
21271 <p>My distaste for web forums have kept me from bringing these issues
21272 up with the open311 developer group.  I really wish they had a email
21273 list available via <a href="http://www.gmane.org/">Gmane</a> to use for
21274 discussions instead of only
21275 <a href="http://lists.open311.org/groups/discuss">a forum<a/>.  Oh,
21276 well.  That will probably resolve itself, one way or another.  I've
21277 also tried visiting the IRC channel #open311 on FreeNode, but no-one
21278 seem to reply to my questions there.  This make me wonder if I just
21279 fail to understand how the open311 community work.  It sure do not
21280 work like the free software project communities I am used to.</p>
21281
21282       </div>
21283       <div class="tags">
21284
21285
21286         Tags: <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/open311">open311</a>.
21287
21288
21289       </div>
21290     </div>
21291     <div class="padding"></div>
21292
21293     <div class="entry">
21294       <div class="title">
21295         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_enteres_Google_Summer_of_Code_2011.html">Gnash enteres Google Summer of Code 2011</a>
21296       </div>
21297       <div class="date">
21298          6th April 2011
21299       </div>
21300       <div class="body">
21301         <p><a href="http://www.getgnash.org/">The Gnash project</a> is still
21302 the most promising solution for a Free Software Flash implementation.
21303 A few days ago the project
21304 <a href="http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnash-dev/2011-04/msg00011.html">announced</a>
21305 that it will participate in Google Summer of Code.  I hope many
21306 students apply, and that some of them succeed in getting AVM2 support
21307 into Gnash.</p>
21308
21309       </div>
21310       <div class="tags">
21311
21312
21313         Tags: <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>.
21314
21315
21316       </div>
21317     </div>
21318     <div class="padding"></div>
21319
21320     <div class="entry">
21321       <div class="title">
21322         <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>
21323       </div>
21324       <div class="date">
21325          3rd April 2011
21326       </div>
21327       <div class="body">
21328         <p>Here is a small update for my English readers.  Most of my blog
21329 posts have been in Norwegian the last few weeks, so here is a short
21330 update in English.</p>
21331
21332 <p>The kids still keep me too busy to get much free software work
21333 done, but I did manage to organise a project to get a Norwegian port
21334 of the British service
21335 <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com/">FixMyStreet</a> up and running,
21336 and it has been running for a month now.  The entire project has been
21337 organised by me and two others.  Around Christmas we gathered sponsors
21338 to fund the development work.  In January I drafted a contract with
21339 <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a> on what to develop,
21340 and in February the development took place.  Most of it involved
21341 converting the source to use GPS coordinates instead of British
21342 easting/northing, and the resulting code should be a lot easier to get
21343 running in any country by now.  The Norwegian
21344 <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a> is using
21345 <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/">OpenStreetmap</a> as the map
21346 source and the source for administrative borders in Norway, and
21347 support for this had to be added/fixed.</p>
21348
21349 <p>The Norwegian version went live March 3th, and we spent the weekend
21350 polishing the system before we announced it March 7th.  The system is
21351 running on a KVM instance of Debian/Squeeze, and has seen almost 3000
21352 problem reports in a few weeks.  Soon we hope to announce the Android
21353 and iPhone versions making it even easier to report problems with the
21354 public infrastructure.</p>
21355
21356 <p>Perhaps something to consider for those of you in countries without
21357 such service?</p>
21358
21359       </div>
21360       <div class="tags">
21361
21362
21363         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>.
21364
21365
21366       </div>
21367     </div>
21368     <div class="padding"></div>
21369
21370     <div class="entry">
21371       <div class="title">
21372         <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>
21373       </div>
21374       <div class="date">
21375         28th January 2011
21376       </div>
21377       <div class="body">
21378         <p>The last few days I have looked at ways to track open security
21379 issues here at my work with the University of Oslo.  My idea is that
21380 it should be possible to use the information about security issues
21381 available on the Internet, and check our locally
21382 maintained/distributed software against this information.  It should
21383 allow us to verify that no known security issues are forgotten.  The
21384 CVE database listing vulnerabilities seem like a great central point,
21385 and by using the package lists from Debian mapped to CVEs provided by
21386 the testing security team, I believed it should be possible to figure
21387 out which security holes were present in our free software
21388 collection.</p>
21389
21390 <p>After reading up on the topic, it became obvious that the first
21391 building block is to be able to name software packages in a unique and
21392 consistent way across data sources.  I considered several ways to do
21393 this, for example coming up with my own naming scheme like using URLs
21394 to project home pages or URLs to the Freshmeat entries, or using some
21395 existing naming scheme.  And it seem like I am not the first one to
21396 come across this problem, as MITRE already proposed and implemented a
21397 solution.  Enter the <a href="http://cpe.mitre.org/index.html">Common
21398 Platform Enumeration</a> dictionary, a vocabulary for referring to
21399 software, hardware and other platform components.  The CPE ids are
21400 mapped to CVEs in the <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/">National
21401 Vulnerability Database</a>, allowing me to look up know security
21402 issues for any CPE name.  With this in place, all I need to do is to
21403 locate the CPE id for the software packages we use at the university.
21404 This is fairly trivial (I google for 'cve cpe $package' and check the
21405 NVD entry if a CVE for the package exist).</p>
21406
21407 <p>To give you an example.  The GNU gzip source package have the CPE
21408 name cpe:/a:gnu:gzip.  If the old version 1.3.3 was the package to
21409 check out, one could look up
21410 <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
21411 in NVD</a> and get a list of 6 security holes with public CVE entries.
21412 The most recent one is
21413 <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2010-0001">CVE-2010-0001</a>,
21414 and at the bottom of the NVD page for this vulnerability the complete
21415 list of affected versions is provided.</p>
21416
21417 <p>The NVD database of CVEs is also available as a XML dump, allowing
21418 for offline processing of issues.  Using this dump, I've written a
21419 small script taking a list of CPEs as input and list all CVEs
21420 affecting the packages represented by these CPEs.  One give it CPEs
21421 with version numbers as specified above and get a list of open
21422 security issues out.</p>
21423
21424 <p>Of course for this approach to be useful, the quality of the NVD
21425 information need to be high.  For that to happen, I believe as many as
21426 possible need to use and contribute to the NVD database.  I notice
21427 RHEL is providing
21428 <a href="https://www.redhat.com/security/data/metrics/rhsamapcpe.txt">a
21429 map from CVE to CPE</a>, indicating that they are using the CPE
21430 information.  I'm not aware of Debian and Ubuntu doing the same.</p>
21431
21432 <p>To get an idea about the quality for free software, I spent some
21433 time making it possible to compare the CVE database from Debian with
21434 the CVE database in NVD.  The result look fairly good, but there are
21435 some inconsistencies in NVD (same software package having several
21436 CPEs), and some inaccuracies (NVD not mentioning buggy packages that
21437 Debian believe are affected by a CVE).  Hope to find time to improve
21438 the quality of NVD, but that require being able to get in touch with
21439 someone maintaining it.  So far my three emails with questions and
21440 corrections have not seen any reply, but I hope contact can be
21441 established soon.</p>
21442
21443 <p>An interesting application for CPEs is cross platform package
21444 mapping.  It would be useful to know which packages in for example
21445 RHEL, OpenSuSe and Mandriva are missing from Debian and Ubuntu, and
21446 this would be trivial if all linux distributions provided CPE entries
21447 for their packages.</p>
21448
21449       </div>
21450       <div class="tags">
21451
21452
21453         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>.
21454
21455
21456       </div>
21457     </div>
21458     <div class="padding"></div>
21459
21460     <div class="entry">
21461       <div class="title">
21462         <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>
21463       </div>
21464       <div class="date">
21465         23rd January 2011
21466       </div>
21467       <div class="body">
21468         <p>In the
21469 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/discover-data">discover-data</a>
21470 package in Debian, there is a script to report useful information
21471 about the running hardware for use when people report missing
21472 information.  One part of this script that I find very useful when
21473 debugging hardware problems, is the part mapping loaded kernel module
21474 to the PCI device it claims.  It allow me to quickly see if the kernel
21475 module I expect is driving the hardware I am struggling with.  To see
21476 the output, make sure discover-data is installed and run
21477 <tt>/usr/share/bug/discover-data 3>&1</tt>.  The relevant output on
21478 one of my machines like this:</p>
21479
21480 <pre>
21481 loaded modules:
21482 10de:03eb i2c_nforce2
21483 10de:03f1 ohci_hcd
21484 10de:03f2 ehci_hcd
21485 10de:03f0 snd_hda_intel
21486 10de:03ec pata_amd
21487 10de:03f6 sata_nv
21488 1022:1103 k8temp
21489 109e:036e bttv
21490 109e:0878 snd_bt87x
21491 11ab:4364 sky2
21492 </pre>
21493
21494 <p>The code in question look like this, slightly modified for
21495 readability and to drop the output to file descriptor 3:</p>
21496
21497 <pre>
21498 if [ -d /sys/bus/pci/devices/ ] ; then
21499     echo loaded pci modules:
21500     (
21501         cd /sys/bus/pci/devices/
21502         for address in * ; do
21503             if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
21504                 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
21505                 if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
21506                     address=$(echo $address |sed s/0000://)
21507                     id=`lspci -n -s $address | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $3}'`
21508                     echo "$id $module"
21509                 fi
21510             fi
21511         done
21512     )
21513     echo
21514 fi
21515 </pre>
21516
21517 <p>Similar code could be used to extract USB device module
21518 mappings:</p>
21519
21520 <pre>
21521 if [ -d /sys/bus/usb/devices/ ] ; then
21522     echo loaded usb modules:
21523     (
21524         cd /sys/bus/usb/devices/
21525         for address in * ; do
21526             if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
21527                 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
21528                 if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
21529                     address=$(echo $address |sed s/0000://)
21530                     id=$(lsusb -s $address | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $6}')
21531                     if [ "$id" ] ; then
21532                         echo "$id $module"
21533                     fi
21534                 fi
21535             fi
21536         done
21537     )
21538     echo
21539 fi
21540 </pre>
21541
21542 <p>This might perhaps be something to include in other tools as
21543 well.</p>
21544
21545       </div>
21546       <div class="tags">
21547
21548
21549         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>.
21550
21551
21552       </div>
21553     </div>
21554     <div class="padding"></div>
21555
21556     <div class="entry">
21557       <div class="title">
21558         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_video_format_most_supported_in_web_browsers_.html">The video format most supported in web browsers?</a>
21559       </div>
21560       <div class="date">
21561         16th January 2011
21562       </div>
21563       <div class="body">
21564         <p>The video format struggle on the web continues, and the three
21565 contenders seem to be Ogg Theora, H.264 and WebM.  Most video sites
21566 seem to use H.264, while others use Ogg Theora.  Interestingly enough,
21567 the comments I see give me the feeling that a lot of people believe
21568 H.264 is the most supported video format in browsers, but according to
21569 the Wikipedia article on
21570 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video">HTML5 video</a>,
21571 this is not true.  Check out the nice table of supprted formats in
21572 different browsers there.  The format supported by most browsers is
21573 Ogg Theora, supported by released versions of Mozilla Firefox, Google
21574 Chrome, Chromium, Opera, Konqueror, Epiphany, Origyn Web Browser and
21575 BOLT browser, while not supported by Internet Explorer nor Safari.
21576 The runner up is WebM supported by released versions of Google Chrome
21577 Chromium Opera and Origyn Web Browser, and test versions of Mozilla
21578 Firefox.  H.264 is supported by released versions of Safari, Origyn
21579 Web Browser and BOLT browser, and the test version of Internet
21580 Explorer.  Those wanting Ogg Theora support in Internet Explorer and
21581 Safari can install plugins to get it.</p>
21582
21583 <p>To me, the simple conclusion from this is that to reach most users
21584 without any extra software installed, one uses Ogg Theora with the
21585 HTML5 video tag.   Of course to reach all those without a browser
21586 handling HTML5, one need fallback mechanisms.  In
21587 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG</a>, we provide first fallback to a
21588 plugin capable of playing MPEG1 video, and those without such support
21589 we have a second fallback to the Cortado java applet playing Ogg
21590 Theora.  This seem to work quite well, as can be seen in an <a
21591 href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20110111-semantic-web/">example
21592 from last week</a>.</p>
21593
21594 <p>The reason Ogg Theora is the most supported format, and H.264 is
21595 the least supported is simple.  Implementing and using H.264
21596 require royalty payment to MPEG-LA, and the terms of use from MPEG-LA
21597 are incompatible with free software licensing.  If you believed H.264
21598 was without royalties and license terms, check out
21599 "<a href="http://webmink.com/essays/h-264/">H.264 – Not The Kind Of
21600 Free That Matters</a>" by Simon Phipps.</p>
21601
21602 <p>A incomplete list of sites providing video in Ogg Theora is
21603 available from
21604 <a href="http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/List_of_Theora_videos">the
21605 Xiph.org wiki</a>, if you want to have a look.  I'm not aware of a
21606 similar list for WebM nor H.264.</p>
21607
21608 <p>Update 2011-01-16 09:40: A question from Tollef on IRC made me
21609 realise that I failed to make it clear enough this text is about the
21610 &lt;video&gt; tag support in browsers and not the video support
21611 provided by external plugins like the Flash plugins.</p>
21612
21613       </div>
21614       <div class="tags">
21615
21616
21617         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</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>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
21618
21619
21620       </div>
21621     </div>
21622     <div class="padding"></div>
21623
21624     <div class="entry">
21625       <div class="title">
21626         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Chrome_plan_to_drop_H_264_support_for_HTML5__lt_video_gt_.html">Chrome plan to drop H.264 support for HTML5 &lt;video&gt;</a>
21627       </div>
21628       <div class="date">
21629         12th January 2011
21630       </div>
21631       <div class="body">
21632         <p>Today I discovered
21633 <a href="http://www.digi.no/860070/google-dropper-h264-stotten-i-chrome">via
21634 digi.no</a> that the Chrome developers, in a surprising announcement,
21635 <a href="http://blog.chromium.org/2011/01/html-video-codec-support-in-chrome.html">yesterday
21636 announced</a> plans to drop H.264 support for HTML5 &lt;video&gt; in
21637 the browser.  The argument used is that H.264 is not a "completely
21638 open" codec technology.  If you believe H.264 was free for everyone
21639 to use, I recommend having a look at the essay
21640 "<a href="http://webmink.com/essays/h-264/">H.264 – Not The Kind Of
21641 Free That Matters</a>".  It is not free of cost for creators of video
21642 tools, nor those of us that want to publish on the Internet, and the
21643 terms provided by MPEG-LA excludes free software projects from
21644 licensing the patents needed for H.264.  Some background information
21645 on the Google announcement is available from
21646 <a href="http://www.osnews.com/story/24243/Google_To_Drop_H264_Support_from_Chrome">OSnews</a>.
21647 A good read. :)</p>
21648
21649 <p>Personally, I believe it is great that Google is taking a stand to
21650 promote equal terms for everyone when it comes to video publishing on
21651 the Internet.  This can only be done by publishing using free and open
21652 standards, which is only possible if the web browsers provide support
21653 for these free and open standards.  At the moment there seem to be two
21654 camps in the web browser world when it come to video support.  Some
21655 browsers support H.264, and others support
21656 <a href="http://www.theora.org/">Ogg Theora</a> and
21657 <a href="http://www.webmproject.org/">WebM</a>
21658 (<a href="http://www.diracvideo.org/">Dirac</a> is not really an option
21659 yet), forcing those of us that want to publish video on the Internet
21660 and which can not accept the terms of use presented by MPEG-LA for
21661 H.264 to not reach all potential viewers.
21662 Wikipedia keep <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video">an
21663 updated summary</a> of the current browser support.</p>
21664
21665 <p>Not surprising, several people would prefer Google to keep
21666 promoting H.264, and John Gruber
21667 <a href="http://daringfireball.net/2011/01/simple_questions">presents
21668 the mind set</a> of these people quite well.  His rhetorical questions
21669 provoked a reply from Thom Holwerda with another set of questions
21670 <a href="http://www.osnews.com/story/24245/10_Questions_for_John_Gruber_Regarding_H_264_WebM">presenting
21671 the issues with H.264</a>. Both are worth a read.</p>
21672
21673 <p>Some argue that if Google is dropping H.264 because it isn't free,
21674 they should also drop support for the Adobe Flash plugin.  This
21675 argument was covered by Simon Phipps in
21676 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2011/01/google-and-h264---far-from-hypocritical/index.htm">todays
21677 blog post</a>, which I find to put the issue in context.  To me it
21678 make perfect sense to drop native H.264 support for HTML5 in the
21679 browser while still allowing plugins.</p>
21680
21681 <p>I suspect the reason this announcement make so many people protest,
21682 is that all the users and promoters of H.264 suddenly get an uneasy
21683 feeling that they might be backing the wrong horse.  A lot of TV
21684 broadcasters have been moving to H.264 the last few years, and a lot
21685 of money has been invested in hardware based on the belief that they
21686 could use the same video format for both broadcasting and web
21687 publishing.  Suddenly this belief is shaken.</p>
21688
21689 <p>An interesting question is why Google is doing this.  While the
21690 presented argument might be true enough, I believe Google would only
21691 present the argument if the change make sense from a business
21692 perspective.  One reason might be that they are currently negotiating
21693 with MPEG-LA over royalties or usage terms, and giving MPEG-LA the
21694 feeling that dropping H.264 completely from Chroome, Youtube and
21695 Google Video would improve the negotiation position of Google.
21696 Another reason might be that Google want to save money by not having
21697 to pay the video tax to MPEG-LA at all, and thus want to move to a
21698 video format not requiring royalties at all.  A third reason might be
21699 that the Chrome development team simply want to avoid the
21700 Chrome/Chromium split to get more help with the development of Chrome.
21701 I guess time will tell.</p>
21702
21703 <p>Update 2011-01-15: The Google Chrome team provided
21704 <a href="http://blog.chromium.org/2011/01/more-about-chrome-html-video-codec.html">more
21705 background and information on the move</a> it a blog post yesterday.</p>
21706
21707       </div>
21708       <div class="tags">
21709
21710
21711         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
21712
21713
21714       </div>
21715     </div>
21716     <div class="padding"></div>
21717
21718     <div class="entry">
21719       <div class="title">
21720         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_standards_are_Free_and_Open_as_defined_by_Digistan_.html">What standards are Free and Open as defined by Digistan?</a>
21721       </div>
21722       <div class="date">
21723         30th December 2010
21724       </div>
21725       <div class="body">
21726         <p>After trying to
21727 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_Ogg_Theora_a_free_and_open_standard_.html">compare
21728 Ogg Theora</a> to
21729 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">the Digistan
21730 definition</a> of a free and open standard, I concluded that this need
21731 to be done for more standards and started on a framework for doing
21732 this.  As a start, I want to get the status for all the standards in
21733 the Norwegian reference directory, which include UTF-8, HTML, PDF, ODF,
21734 JPEG, PNG, SVG and others.  But to be able to complete this in a
21735 reasonable time frame, I will need help.</p>
21736
21737 <p>If you want to help out with this work, please visit
21738 <a href="http://wiki.nuug.no/grupper/standard/digistan-analyse">the
21739 wiki pages I have set up for this</a>, and let me know that you want
21740 to help out.  The IRC channel #nuug on irc.freenode.net is a good
21741 place to coordinate this for now, as it is the IRC channel for the
21742 NUUG association where I have created the framework (I am the leader
21743 of the Norwegian Unix User Group).</p>
21744
21745 <p>The framework is still forming, and a lot is left to do.  Do not be
21746 scared by the sketchy form of the current pages. :)</p>
21747
21748       </div>
21749       <div class="tags">
21750
21751
21752         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan</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>.
21753
21754
21755       </div>
21756     </div>
21757     <div class="padding"></div>
21758
21759     <div class="entry">
21760       <div class="title">
21761         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_many_definitions_of_a_open_standard.html">The many definitions of a open standard</a>
21762       </div>
21763       <div class="date">
21764         27th December 2010
21765       </div>
21766       <div class="body">
21767         <p>One of the reasons I like the Digistan definition of
21768 "<a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">Free and
21769 Open Standard</a>" is that this is a new term, and thus the meaning of
21770 the term has been decided by Digistan.  The term "Open Standard" has
21771 become so misunderstood that it is no longer very useful when talking
21772 about standards.  One end up discussing which definition is the best
21773 one and with such frame the only one gaining are the proponents of
21774 de-facto standards and proprietary solutions.</p>
21775
21776 <p>But to give us an idea about the diversity of definitions of open
21777 standards, here are a few that I know about.  This list is not
21778 complete, but can be a starting point for those that want to do a
21779 complete survey.  More definitions are available on the
21780 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard">wikipedia
21781 page</a>.</p>
21782
21783 <p>First off is my favourite, the definition from the European
21784 Interoperability Framework version 1.0.  Really sad to notice that BSA
21785 and others has succeeded in getting it removed from version 2.0 of the
21786 framework by stacking the committee drafting the new version with
21787 their own people.  Anyway, the definition is still available and it
21788 include the key properties needed to make sure everyone can use a
21789 specification on equal terms.</p>
21790
21791 <blockquote>
21792
21793 <p>The following are the minimal characteristics that a specification
21794 and its attendant documents must have in order to be considered an
21795 open standard:</p>
21796
21797 <ul>
21798
21799 <li>The standard is adopted and will be maintained by a not-for-profit
21800 organisation, and its ongoing development occurs on the basis of an
21801 open decision-making procedure available to all interested parties
21802 (consensus or majority decision etc.).</li>
21803
21804 <li>The standard has been published and the standard specification
21805 document is available either freely or at a nominal charge. It must be
21806 permissible to all to copy, distribute and use it for no fee or at a
21807 nominal fee.</li>
21808
21809 <li>The intellectual property - i.e. patents possibly present - of
21810 (parts of) the standard is made irrevocably available on a royalty-
21811 free basis.</li>
21812
21813 <li>There are no constraints on the re-use of the standard.</li>
21814
21815 </ul>
21816 </blockquote>
21817
21818 <p>Another one originates from my friends over at
21819 <a href="http://www.dkuug.dk/">DKUUG</a>, who coined and gathered
21820 support for <a href="http://www.aaben-standard.dk/">this
21821 definition</a> in 2004.  It even made it into the Danish parlament as
21822 <a href="http://www.ft.dk/dokumenter/tingdok.aspx?/samling/20051/beslutningsforslag/B103/som_fremsat.htm">their
21823 definition of a open standard</a>.  Another from a different part of
21824 the Danish government is available from the wikipedia page.</p>
21825
21826 <blockquote>
21827
21828 <p>En åben standard opfylder følgende krav:</p>
21829
21830 <ol>
21831
21832 <li>Veldokumenteret med den fuldstændige specifikation offentligt
21833 tilgængelig.</li>
21834
21835 <li>Frit implementerbar uden økonomiske, politiske eller juridiske
21836 begrænsninger på implementation og anvendelse.</li>
21837
21838 <li>Standardiseret og vedligeholdt i et åbent forum (en såkaldt
21839 "standardiseringsorganisation") via en åben proces.</li>
21840
21841 </ol>
21842
21843 </blockquote>
21844
21845 <p>Then there is <a href="http://www.fsfe.org/projects/os/def.html">the
21846 definition</a> from Free Software Foundation Europe.</p>
21847
21848 <blockquote>
21849
21850 <p>An Open Standard refers to a format or protocol that is</p>
21851
21852 <ol>
21853
21854 <li>subject to full public assessment and use without constraints in a
21855 manner equally available to all parties;</li>
21856
21857 <li>without any components or extensions that have dependencies on
21858 formats or protocols that do not meet the definition of an Open
21859 Standard themselves;</li>
21860
21861 <li>free from legal or technical clauses that limit its utilisation by
21862 any party or in any business model;</li>
21863
21864 <li>managed and further developed independently of any single vendor
21865 in a process open to the equal participation of competitors and third
21866 parties;</li>
21867
21868 <li>available in multiple complete implementations by competing
21869 vendors, or as a complete implementation equally available to all
21870 parties.</li>
21871
21872 </ol>
21873
21874 </blockquote>
21875
21876 <p>A long time ago, SUN Microsystems, now bought by Oracle, created
21877 its
21878 <a href="http://blogs.sun.com/dennisding/resource/Open%20Standard%20Definition.pdf">Open
21879 Standards Checklist</a> with a fairly detailed description.</p>
21880
21881 <blockquote>
21882 <p>Creation and Management of an Open Standard
21883
21884 <ul>
21885
21886 <li>Its development and management process must be collaborative and
21887   democratic:
21888
21889          <ul>
21890
21891          <li>Participation must be accessible to all those who wish to
21892             participate and can meet fair and reasonable criteria
21893             imposed by the organization under which it is developed
21894             and managed.</li>
21895
21896          <li>The processes must be documented and, through a known
21897             method, can be changed through input from all
21898             participants.</li>
21899
21900          <li>The process must be based on formal and binding commitments for
21901             the disclosure and licensing of intellectual property rights.</li>
21902
21903          <li>Development and management should strive for consensus,
21904             and an appeals process must be clearly outlined.</li>
21905
21906          <li>The standard specification must be open to extensive
21907             public review at least once in its life-cycle, with
21908             comments duly discussed and acted upon, if required.</li>
21909
21910          </ul>
21911
21912 </li>
21913
21914 </ul>
21915
21916 <p>Use and Licensing of an Open Standard</p>
21917 <ul>
21918
21919 <li>The standard must describe an interface, not an implementation,
21920   and the industry must be capable of creating multiple, competing
21921   implementations to the interface described in the standard without
21922   undue or restrictive constraints.  Interfaces include APIs,
21923   protocols, schemas, data formats and their encoding.</li>
21924
21925 <li> The standard must not contain any proprietary "hooks" that create
21926   a technical or economic barriers</li>
21927
21928 <li>Faithful implementations of the standard must
21929   interoperate. Interoperability means the ability of a computer
21930   program to communicate and exchange information with other computer
21931   programs and mutually to use the information which has been
21932   exchanged. This includes the ability to use, convert, or exchange
21933   file formats, protocols, schemas, interface information or
21934   conventions, so as to permit the computer program to work with other
21935   computer programs and users in all the ways in which they are
21936   intended to function.</li>
21937
21938 <li>It must be permissible for anyone to copy, distribute and read the
21939   standard for a nominal fee, or even no fee. If there is a fee, it
21940   must be low enough to not preclude widespread use.</li>
21941
21942 <li>It must be possible for anyone to obtain free (no royalties or
21943   fees; also known as "royalty free"), worldwide, non-exclusive and
21944   perpetual licenses to all essential patent claims to make, use and
21945   sell products based on the standard.  The only exceptions are
21946   terminations per the reciprocity and defensive suspension terms
21947   outlined below. Essential patent claims include pending, unpublished
21948   patents, published patents, and patent applications. The license is
21949   only for the exact scope of the standard in question.
21950
21951       <ul>
21952
21953       <li> May be conditioned only on reciprocal licenses to any of
21954         licensees' patent claims essential to practice that standard
21955         (also known as a reciprocity clause)</li>
21956
21957       <li> May be terminated as to any licensee who sues the licensor
21958         or any other licensee for infringement of patent claims
21959         essential to practice that standard (also known as a
21960         "defensive suspension" clause)</li>
21961
21962       <li> The same licensing terms are available to every potential
21963         licensor</li>
21964
21965       </ul>
21966 </li>
21967
21968 <li>The licensing terms of an open standards must not preclude
21969   implementations of that standard under open source licensing terms
21970   or restricted licensing terms</li>
21971
21972 </ul>
21973
21974 </blockquote>
21975
21976 <p>It is said that one of the nice things about standards is that
21977 there are so many of them.  As you can see, the same holds true for
21978 open standard definitions.  Most of the definitions have a lot in
21979 common, and it is not really controversial what properties a open
21980 standard should have, but the diversity of definitions have made it
21981 possible for those that want to avoid a level marked field and real
21982 competition to downplay the significance of open standards.  I hope we
21983 can turn this tide by focusing on the advantages of Free and Open
21984 Standards.</p>
21985
21986       </div>
21987       <div class="tags">
21988
21989
21990         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan</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>.
21991
21992
21993       </div>
21994     </div>
21995     <div class="padding"></div>
21996
21997     <div class="entry">
21998       <div class="title">
21999         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_Ogg_Theora_a_free_and_open_standard_.html">Is Ogg Theora a free and open standard?</a>
22000       </div>
22001       <div class="date">
22002         25th December 2010
22003       </div>
22004       <div class="body">
22005         <p><a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">The
22006 Digistan definition</a> of a free and open standard reads like this:</p>
22007
22008 <blockquote>
22009
22010 <p>The Digital Standards Organization defines free and open standard
22011 as follows:</p>
22012
22013 <ol>
22014
22015 <li>A free and open standard is immune to vendor capture at all stages
22016 in its life-cycle. Immunity from vendor capture makes it possible to
22017 freely use, improve upon, trust, and extend a standard over time.</li>
22018
22019 <li>The standard is adopted and will be maintained by a not-for-profit
22020 organisation, and its ongoing development occurs on the basis of an
22021 open decision-making procedure available to all interested
22022 parties.</li>
22023
22024 <li>The standard has been published and the standard specification
22025 document is available freely. It must be permissible to all to copy,
22026 distribute, and use it freely.</li>
22027
22028 <li>The patents possibly present on (parts of) the standard are made
22029 irrevocably available on a royalty-free basis.</li>
22030
22031 <li>There are no constraints on the re-use of the standard.</li>
22032
22033 </ol>
22034
22035 <p>The economic outcome of a free and open standard, which can be
22036 measured, is that it enables perfect competition between suppliers of
22037 products based on the standard.</p>
22038 </blockquote>
22039
22040 <p>For a while now I have tried to figure out of Ogg Theora is a free
22041 and open standard according to this definition.  Here is a short
22042 writeup of what I have been able to gather so far.  I brought up the
22043 topic on the Xiph advocacy mailing list
22044 <a href="http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/advocacy/2009-July/001632.html">in
22045 July 2009</a>, for those that want to see some background information.
22046 According to Ivo Emanuel Gonçalves and Monty Montgomery on that list
22047 the Ogg Theora specification fulfils the Digistan definition.</p>
22048
22049 <p><strong>Free from vendor capture?</strong></p>
22050
22051 <p>As far as I can see, there is no single vendor that can control the
22052 Ogg Theora specification.  It can be argued that the
22053 <a href="http://www.xiph.org/">Xiph foundation</A> is such vendor, but
22054 given that it is a non-profit foundation with the expressed goal
22055 making free and open protocols and standards available, it is not
22056 obvious that this is a real risk.  One issue with the Xiph
22057 foundation is that its inner working (as in board member list, or who
22058 control the foundation) are not easily available on the web.  I've
22059 been unable to find out who is in the foundation board, and have not
22060 seen any accounting information documenting how money is handled nor
22061 where is is spent in the foundation.  It is thus not obvious for an
22062 external observer who control The Xiph foundation, and for all I know
22063 it is possible for a single vendor to take control over the
22064 specification.  But it seem unlikely.</p>
22065
22066 <p><strong>Maintained by open not-for-profit organisation?</strong></p>
22067
22068 <p>Assuming that the Xiph foundation is the organisation its web pages
22069 claim it to be, this point is fulfilled.  If Xiph foundation is
22070 controlled by a single vendor, it isn't, but I have not found any
22071 documentation indicating this.</p>
22072
22073 <p>According to
22074 <a href="http://media.hiof.no/diverse/fad/rapport_4.pdf">a report</a>
22075 prepared by Audun Vaaler og Børre Ludvigsen for the Norwegian
22076 government, the Xiph foundation is a non-commercial organisation and
22077 the development process is open, transparent and non-Discrimatory.
22078 Until proven otherwise, I believe it make most sense to believe the
22079 report is correct.</p>
22080
22081 <p><strong>Specification freely available?</strong></p>
22082
22083 <p>The specification for the <a href="http://www.xiph.org/ogg/doc/">Ogg
22084 container format</a> and both the
22085 <a href="http://www.xiph.org/vorbis/doc/">Vorbis</a> and
22086 <a href="http://theora.org/doc/">Theora</a> codeces are available on
22087 the web.  This are the terms in the Vorbis and Theora specification:
22088
22089 <blockquote>
22090
22091 Anyone may freely use and distribute the Ogg and [Vorbis/Theora]
22092 specifications, whether in private, public, or corporate
22093 capacity. However, the Xiph.Org Foundation and the Ogg project reserve
22094 the right to set the Ogg [Vorbis/Theora] specification and certify
22095 specification compliance.
22096
22097 </blockquote>
22098
22099 <p>The Ogg container format is specified in IETF
22100 <a href="http://www.xiph.org/ogg/doc/rfc3533.txt">RFC 3533</a>, and
22101 this is the term:<p>
22102
22103 <blockquote>
22104
22105 <p>This document and translations of it may be copied and furnished to
22106 others, and derivative works that comment on or otherwise explain it
22107 or assist in its implementation may be prepared, copied, published and
22108 distributed, in whole or in part, without restriction of any kind,
22109 provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph are
22110 included on all such copies and derivative works.  However, this
22111 document itself may not be modified in any way, such as by removing
22112 the copyright notice or references to the Internet Society or other
22113 Internet organizations, except as needed for the purpose of developing
22114 Internet standards in which case the procedures for copyrights defined
22115 in the Internet Standards process must be followed, or as required to
22116 translate it into languages other than English.</p>
22117
22118 <p>The limited permissions granted above are perpetual and will not be
22119 revoked by the Internet Society or its successors or assigns.</p>
22120 </blockquote>
22121
22122 <p>All these terms seem to allow unlimited distribution and use, an
22123 this term seem to be fulfilled.  There might be a problem with the
22124 missing permission to distribute modified versions of the text, and
22125 thus reuse it in other specifications.  Not quite sure if that is a
22126 requirement for the Digistan definition.</p>
22127
22128 <p><strong>Royalty-free?</strong></p>
22129
22130 <p>There are no known patent claims requiring royalties for the Ogg
22131 Theora format.
22132 <a href="http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=65782">MPEG-LA</a>
22133 and
22134 <a href="http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/04/30/237238/Steve-Jobs-Hints-At-Theora-Lawsuit">Steve
22135 Jobs</a> in Apple claim to know about some patent claims (submarine
22136 patents) against the Theora format, but no-one else seem to believe
22137 them.  Both Opera Software and the Mozilla Foundation have looked into
22138 this and decided to implement Ogg Theora support in their browsers
22139 without paying any royalties.  For now the claims from MPEG-LA and
22140 Steve Jobs seem more like FUD to scare people to use the H.264 codec
22141 than any real problem with Ogg Theora.</p>
22142
22143 <p><strong>No constraints on re-use?</strong></p>
22144
22145 <p>I am not aware of any constraints on re-use.</p>
22146
22147 <p><strong>Conclusion</strong></p>
22148
22149 <p>3 of 5 requirements seem obviously fulfilled, and the remaining 2
22150 depend on the governing structure of the Xiph foundation.  Given the
22151 background report used by the Norwegian government, I believe it is
22152 safe to assume the last two requirements are fulfilled too, but it
22153 would be nice if the Xiph foundation web site made it easier to verify
22154 this.</p>
22155
22156 <p>It would be nice to see other analysis of other specifications to
22157 see if they are free and open standards.</p>
22158
22159       </div>
22160       <div class="tags">
22161
22162
22163         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
22164
22165
22166       </div>
22167     </div>
22168     <div class="padding"></div>
22169
22170     <div class="entry">
22171       <div class="title">
22172         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_reply_from_Edgar_Villanueva_to_Microsoft_in_Peru.html">The reply from Edgar Villanueva to Microsoft in Peru</a>
22173       </div>
22174       <div class="date">
22175         25th December 2010
22176       </div>
22177       <div class="body">
22178         <p>A few days ago
22179 <a href="http://www.idg.no/computerworld/article189879.ece">an
22180 article</a> in the Norwegian Computerworld magazine about how version
22181 2.0 of
22182 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Interoperability_Framework">European
22183 Interoperability Framework</a> has been successfully lobbied by the
22184 proprietary software industry to remove the focus on free software.
22185 Nothing very surprising there, given
22186 <a href="http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/03/29/2115235/Open-Source-Open-Standards-Under-Attack-In-Europe">earlier
22187 reports</a> on how Microsoft and others have stacked the committees in
22188 this work.  But I find this very sad.   The definition of
22189 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/dokumenter/standard-presse-def-200506.txt">an
22190 open standard from version 1</a> was very good, and something I
22191 believe should be used also in the future, alongside
22192 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">the
22193 definition from Digistan</A>.  Version 2 have removed the open
22194 standard definition from its content.</p>
22195
22196 <p>Anyway, the news reminded me of the great reply sent by Dr. Edgar
22197 Villanueva, congressman in Peru at the time, to Microsoft as a reply
22198 to Microsofts attack on his proposal regarding the use of free software
22199 in the public sector in Peru.  As the text was not available from a
22200 few of the URLs where it used to be available, I copy it here from
22201 <a href="http://gnuwin.epfl.ch/articles/en/reponseperou/villanueva_to_ms.html">my
22202 source</a> to ensure it is available also in the future.  Some
22203 background information about that story is available in
22204 <a href="http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6099">an article</a> from
22205 Linux Journal in 2002.</p>
22206
22207 <blockquote>
22208 <p>Lima, 8th of April, 2002<br>
22209 To: Señor JUAN ALBERTO GONZÁLEZ<br>
22210 General Manager of Microsoft Perú</p>
22211
22212 <p>Dear Sir:</p>
22213
22214 <p>First of all, I thank you for your letter of March 25, 2002 in which you state the official position of Microsoft relative to Bill Number 1609, Free Software in Public Administration, which is indubitably inspired by the desire for Peru to find a suitable place in the global technological context. In the same spirit, and convinced that we will find the best solutions through an exchange of clear and open ideas, I will take this opportunity to reply to the commentaries included in your letter.</p>
22215
22216 <p>While acknowledging that opinions such as yours constitute a significant contribution, it would have been even more worthwhile for me if, rather than formulating objections of a general nature (which we will analyze in detail later) you had gathered solid arguments for the advantages that proprietary software could bring to the Peruvian State, and to its citizens in general, since this would have allowed a more enlightening exchange in respect of each of our positions.</p>
22217
22218 <p>With the aim of creating an orderly debate, we will assume that what you call "open source software" is what the Bill defines as "free software", since there exists software for which the source code is distributed together with the program, but which does not fall within the definition established by the Bill; and that what you call "commercial software" is what the Bill defines as "proprietary" or "unfree", given that there exists free software which is sold in the market for a price like any other good or service.</p>
22219
22220 <p>It is also necessary to make it clear that the aim of the Bill we are discussing is not directly related to the amount of direct savings that can by made by using free software in state institutions. That is in any case a marginal aggregate value, but in no way is it the chief focus of the Bill. The basic principles which inspire the Bill are linked to the basic guarantees of a state of law, such as:</p>
22221
22222 <p>
22223 <ul>
22224 <li>Free access to public information by the citizen. </li>
22225 <li>Permanence of public data. </li>
22226 <li>Security of the State and citizens.</li>
22227 </ul>
22228 </p>
22229
22230 <p>To guarantee the free access of citizens to public information, it is indispensable that the encoding of data is not tied to a single provider. The use of standard and open formats gives a guarantee of this free access, if necessary through the creation of compatible free software.</p>
22231
22232 <p>To guarantee the permanence of public data, it is necessary that the usability and maintenance of the software does not depend on the goodwill of the suppliers, or on the monopoly conditions imposed by them. For this reason the State needs systems the development of which can be guaranteed due to the availability of the source code.</p>
22233
22234 <p>To guarantee national security or the security of the State, it is indispensable to be able to rely on systems without elements which allow control from a distance or the undesired transmission of information to third parties. Systems with source code freely accessible to the public are required to allow their inspection by the State itself, by the citizens, and by a large number of independent experts throughout the world. Our proposal brings further security, since the knowledge of the source code will eliminate the growing number of programs with *spy code*. </p>
22235
22236 <p>In the same way, our proposal strengthens the security of the citizens, both in their role as legitimate owners of information managed by the state, and in their role as consumers. In this second case, by allowing the growth of a widespread availability of free software not containing *spy code* able to put at risk privacy and individual freedoms.</p>
22237
22238 <p>In this sense, the Bill is limited to establishing the conditions under which the state bodies will obtain software in the future, that is, in a way compatible with these basic principles.</p>
22239
22240
22241 <p>From reading the Bill it will be clear that once passed:<br>
22242 <li>the law does not forbid the production of proprietary software</li>
22243 <li>the law does not forbid the sale of proprietary software</li>
22244 <li>the law does not specify which concrete software to use</li>
22245 <li>the law does not dictate the supplier from whom software will be bought</li>
22246 <li>the law does not limit the terms under which a software product can be licensed.</li>
22247
22248 </p>
22249
22250 <p>What the Bill does express clearly, is that, for software to be acceptable for the state it is not enough that it is technically capable of fulfilling a task, but that further the contractual conditions must satisfy a series of requirements regarding the license, without which the State cannot guarantee the citizen adequate processing of his data, watching over its integrity, confidentiality, and accessibility throughout time, as these are very critical aspects for its normal functioning.</p>
22251
22252 <p>We agree, Mr. Gonzalez, that information and communication technology have a significant impact on the quality of life of the citizens (whether it be positive or negative). We surely also agree that the basic values I have pointed out above are fundamental in a democratic state like Peru. So we are very interested to know of any other way of guaranteeing these principles, other than through the use of free software in the terms defined by the Bill.</p>
22253
22254 <p>As for the observations you have made, we will now go on to analyze them in detail:</p>
22255
22256 <p>Firstly, you point out that: "1. The bill makes it compulsory for all public bodies to use only free software, that is to say open source software, which breaches the principles of equality before the law, that of non-discrimination and the right of free private enterprise, freedom of industry and of contract, protected by the constitution."</p>
22257
22258 <p>This understanding is in error. The Bill in no way affects the rights you list; it limits itself entirely to establishing conditions for the use of software on the part of state institutions, without in any way meddling in private sector transactions. It is a well established principle that the State does not enjoy the wide spectrum of contractual freedom of the private sector, as it is limited in its actions precisely by the requirement for transparency of public acts; and in this sense, the preservation of the greater common interest must prevail when legislating on the matter.</p>
22259
22260 <p>The Bill protects equality under the law, since no natural or legal person is excluded from the right of offering these goods to the State under the conditions defined in the Bill and without more limitations than those established by the Law of State Contracts and Purchasing (T.U.O. by Supreme Decree No. 012-2001-PCM).</p>
22261
22262 <p>The Bill does not introduce any discrimination whatever, since it only establishes *how* the goods have to be provided (which is a state power) and not *who* has to provide them (which would effectively be discriminatory, if restrictions based on national origin, race religion, ideology, sexual preference etc. were imposed). On the contrary, the Bill is decidedly antidiscriminatory. This is so because by defining with no room for doubt the conditions for the provision of software, it prevents state bodies from using software which has a license including discriminatory conditions.</p>
22263
22264 <p>It should be obvious from the preceding two paragraphs that the Bill does not harm free private enterprise, since the latter can always choose under what conditions it will produce software; some of these will be acceptable to the State, and others will not be since they contradict the guarantee of the basic principles listed above. This free initiative is of course compatible with the freedom of industry and freedom of contract (in the limited form in which the State can exercise the latter). Any private subject can produce software under the conditions which the State requires, or can refrain from doing so. Nobody is forced to adopt a model of production, but if they wish to provide software to the State, they must provide the mechanisms which guarantee the basic principles, and which are those described in the Bill.</p>
22265
22266 <p>By way of an example: nothing in the text of the Bill would prevent your company offering the State bodies an office "suite", under the conditions defined in the Bill and setting the price that you consider satisfactory. If you did not, it would not be due to restrictions imposed by the law, but to business decisions relative to the method of commercializing your products, decisions with which the State is not involved.</p>
22267
22268 <p>To continue; you note that:" 2. The bill, by making the use of open source software compulsory, would establish discriminatory and non competitive practices in the contracting and purchasing by public bodies..."</p>
22269
22270 <p>This statement is just a reiteration of the previous one, and so the response can be found above. However, let us concern ourselves for a moment with your comment regarding "non-competitive ... practices."</p>
22271
22272 <p>Of course, in defining any kind of purchase, the buyer sets conditions which relate to the proposed use of the good or service. From the start, this excludes certain manufacturers from the possibility of competing, but does not exclude them "a priori", but rather based on a series of principles determined by the autonomous will of the purchaser, and so the process takes place in conformance with the law. And in the Bill it is established that *no one* is excluded from competing as far as he guarantees the fulfillment of the basic principles.</p>
22273
22274 <p>Furthermore, the Bill *stimulates* competition, since it tends to generate a supply of software with better conditions of usability, and to better existing work, in a model of continuous improvement.</p>
22275
22276 <p>On the other hand, the central aspect of competivity is the chance to provide better choices to the consumer. Now, it is impossible to ignore the fact that marketing does not play a neutral role when the product is offered on the market (since accepting the opposite would lead one to suppose that firms' expenses in marketing lack any sense), and that therefore a significant expense under this heading can influence the decisions of the purchaser. This influence of marketing is in large measure reduced by the bill that we are backing, since the choice within the framework proposed is based on the *technical merits* of the product and not on the effort put into commercialization by the producer; in this sense, competitiveness is increased, since the smallest software producer can compete on equal terms with the most powerful corporations.</p>
22277
22278 <p>It is necessary to stress that there is no position more anti-competitive than that of the big software producers, which frequently abuse their dominant position, since in innumerable cases they propose as a solution to problems raised by users: "update your software to the new version" (at the user's expense, naturally); furthermore, it is common to find arbitrary cessation of technical help for products, which, in the provider's judgment alone, are "old"; and so, to receive any kind of technical assistance, the user finds himself forced to migrate to new versions (with non-trivial costs, especially as changes in hardware platform are often involved). And as the whole infrastructure is based on proprietary data formats, the user stays "trapped" in the need to continue using products from the same supplier, or to make the huge effort to change to another environment (probably also proprietary).</p>
22279
22280 <p>You add: "3. So, by compelling the State to favor a business model based entirely on open source, the bill would only discourage the local and international manufacturing companies, which are the ones which really undertake important expenditures, create a significant number of direct and indirect jobs, as well as contributing to the GNP, as opposed to a model of open source software which tends to have an ever weaker economic impact, since it mainly creates jobs in the service sector."</p>
22281
22282 <p>I do not agree with your statement. Partly because of what you yourself point out in paragraph 6 of your letter, regarding the relative weight of services in the context of software use. This contradiction alone would invalidate your position. The service model, adopted by a large number of companies in the software industry, is much larger in economic terms, and with a tendency to increase, than the licensing of programs.</p>
22283
22284 <p>On the other hand, the private sector of the economy has the widest possible freedom to choose the economic model which best suits its interests, even if this freedom of choice is often obscured subliminally by the disproportionate expenditure on marketing by the producers of proprietary software.</p>
22285
22286 <p>In addition, a reading of your opinion would lead to the conclusion that the State market is crucial and essential for the proprietary software industry, to such a point that the choice made by the State in this bill would completely eliminate the market for these firms. If that is true, we can deduce that the State must be subsidizing the proprietary software industry. In the unlikely event that this were true, the State would have the right to apply the subsidies in the area it considered of greatest social value; it is undeniable, in this improbable hypothesis, that if the State decided to subsidize software, it would have to do so choosing the free over the proprietary, considering its social effect and the rational use of taxpayers money.</p>
22287
22288 <p>In respect of the jobs generated by proprietary software in countries like ours, these mainly concern technical tasks of little aggregate value; at the local level, the technicians who provide support for proprietary software produced by transnational companies do not have the possibility of fixing bugs, not necessarily for lack of technical capability or of talent, but because they do not have access to the source code to fix it. With free software one creates more technically qualified employment and a framework of free competence where success is only tied to the ability to offer good technical support and quality of service, one stimulates the market, and one increases the shared fund of knowledge, opening up alternatives to generate services of greater total value and a higher quality level, to the benefit of all involved: producers, service organizations, and consumers.</p>
22289
22290 <p>It is a common phenomenon in developing countries that local software industries obtain the majority of their takings in the service sector, or in the creation of "ad hoc" software. Therefore, any negative impact that the application of the Bill might have in this sector will be more than compensated by a growth in demand for services (as long as these are carried out to high quality standards). If the transnational software companies decide not to compete under these new rules of the game, it is likely that they will undergo some decrease in takings in terms of payment for licenses; however, considering that these firms continue to allege that much of the software used by the State has been illegally copied, one can see that the impact will not be very serious. Certainly, in any case their fortune will be determined by market laws, changes in which cannot be avoided; many firms traditionally associated with proprietary software have already set out on the road (supported by copious expense) of providing services associated with free software, which shows that the models are not mutually exclusive.</p>
22291
22292 <p>With this bill the State is deciding that it needs to preserve certain fundamental values. And it is deciding this based on its sovereign power, without affecting any of the constitutional guarantees. If these values could be guaranteed without having to choose a particular economic model, the effects of the law would be even more beneficial. In any case, it should be clear that the State does not choose an economic model; if it happens that there only exists one economic model capable of providing software which provides the basic guarantee of these principles, this is because of historical circumstances, not because of an arbitrary choice of a given model.</p>
22293
22294 <p>Your letter continues: "4. The bill imposes the use of open source software without considering the dangers that this can bring from the point of view of security, guarantee, and possible violation of the intellectual property rights of third parties."</p>
22295
22296 <p>Alluding in an abstract way to "the dangers this can bring", without specifically mentioning a single one of these supposed dangers, shows at the least some lack of knowledge of the topic. So, allow me to enlighten you on these points.</p>
22297
22298 <p>On security:</p>
22299
22300 <p>National security has already been mentioned in general terms in the initial discussion of the basic principles of the bill. In more specific terms, relative to the security of the software itself, it is well known that all software (whether proprietary or free) contains errors or "bugs" (in programmers' slang). But it is also well known that the bugs in free software are fewer, and are fixed much more quickly, than in proprietary software. It is not in vain that numerous public bodies responsible for the IT security of state systems in developed countries require the use of free software for the same conditions of security and efficiency.</p>
22301
22302 <p>What is impossible to prove is that proprietary software is more secure than free, without the public and open inspection of the scientific community and users in general. This demonstration is impossible because the model of proprietary software itself prevents this analysis, so that any guarantee of security is based only on promises of good intentions (biased, by any reckoning) made by the producer itself, or its contractors.</p>
22303
22304 <p>It should be remembered that in many cases, the licensing conditions include Non-Disclosure clauses which prevent the user from publicly revealing security flaws found in the licensed proprietary product.</p>
22305
22306 <p>In respect of the guarantee:</p>
22307
22308 <p>As you know perfectly well, or could find out by reading the "End User License Agreement" of the products you license, in the great majority of cases the guarantees are limited to replacement of the storage medium in case of defects, but in no case is compensation given for direct or indirect damages, loss of profits, etc... If as a result of a security bug in one of your products, not fixed in time by yourselves, an attacker managed to compromise crucial State systems, what guarantees, reparations and compensation would your company make in accordance with your licensing conditions? The guarantees of proprietary software, inasmuch as programs are delivered ``AS IS'', that is, in the state in which they are, with no additional responsibility of the provider in respect of function, in no way differ from those normal with free software.</p>
22309
22310 <p>On Intellectual Property:</p>
22311
22312 <p>Questions of intellectual property fall outside the scope of this bill, since they are covered by specific other laws. The model of free software in no way implies ignorance of these laws, and in fact the great majority of free software is covered by copyright. In reality, the inclusion of this question in your observations shows your confusion in respect of the legal framework in which free software is developed. The inclusion of the intellectual property of others in works claimed as one's own is not a practice that has been noted in the free software community; whereas, unfortunately, it has been in the area of proprietary software. As an example, the condemnation by the Commercial Court of Nanterre, France, on 27th September 2001 of Microsoft Corp. to a penalty of 3 million francs in damages and interest, for violation of intellectual property (piracy, to use the unfortunate term that your firm commonly uses in its publicity).</p>
22313
22314 <p>You go on to say that: "The bill uses the concept of open source software incorrectly, since it does not necessarily imply that the software is free or of zero cost, and so arrives at mistaken conclusions regarding State savings, with no cost-benefit analysis to validate its position."</p>
22315
22316 <p>This observation is wrong; in principle, freedom and lack of cost are orthogonal concepts: there is software which is proprietary and charged for (for example, MS Office), software which is proprietary and free of charge (MS Internet Explorer), software which is free and charged for (Red Hat, SuSE etc GNU/Linux distributions), software which is free and not charged for (Apache, Open Office, Mozilla), and even software which can be licensed in a range of combinations (MySQL).</p>
22317
22318 <p>Certainly free software is not necessarily free of charge. And the text of the bill does not state that it has to be so, as you will have noted after reading it. The definitions included in the Bill state clearly *what* should be considered free software, at no point referring to freedom from charges. Although the possibility of savings in payments for proprietary software licenses are mentioned, the foundations of the bill clearly refer to the fundamental guarantees to be preserved and to the stimulus to local technological development. Given that a democratic State must support these principles, it has no other choice than to use software with publicly available source code, and to exchange information only in standard formats.</p>
22319
22320 <p>If the State does not use software with these characteristics, it will be weakening basic republican principles. Luckily, free software also implies lower total costs; however, even given the hypothesis (easily disproved) that it was more expensive than proprietary software, the simple existence of an effective free software tool for a particular IT function would oblige the State to use it; not by command of this Bill, but because of the basic principles we enumerated at the start, and which arise from the very essence of the lawful democratic State.</p>
22321
22322 <p>You continue: "6. It is wrong to think that Open Source Software is free of charge. Research by the Gartner Group (an important investigator of the technological market recognized at world level) has shown that the cost of purchase of software (operating system and applications) is only 8% of the total cost which firms and institutions take on for a rational and truly beneficial use of the technology. The other 92% consists of: installation costs, enabling, support, maintenance, administration, and down-time."</p>
22323
22324 <p>This argument repeats that already given in paragraph 5 and partly contradicts paragraph 3. For the sake of brevity we refer to the comments on those paragraphs. However, allow me to point out that your conclusion is logically false: even if according to Gartner Group the cost of software is on average only 8% of the total cost of use, this does not in any way deny the existence of software which is free of charge, that is, with a licensing cost of zero.</p>
22325
22326 <p>In addition, in this paragraph you correctly point out that the service components and losses due to down-time make up the largest part of the total cost of software use, which, as you will note, contradicts your statement regarding the small value of services suggested in paragraph 3. Now the use of free software contributes significantly to reduce the remaining life-cycle costs. This reduction in the costs of installation, support etc. can be noted in several areas: in the first place, the competitive service model of free software, support and maintenance for which can be freely contracted out to a range of suppliers competing on the grounds of quality and low cost. This is true for installation, enabling, and support, and in large part for maintenance. In the second place, due to the reproductive characteristics of the model, maintenance carried out for an application is easily replicable, without incurring large costs (that is, without paying more than once for the same thing) since modifications, if one wishes, can be incorporated in the common fund of knowledge. Thirdly, the huge costs caused by non-functioning software ("blue screens of death", malicious code such as virus, worms, and trojans, exceptions, general protection faults and other well-known problems) are reduced considerably by using more stable software; and it is well known that one of the most notable virtues of free software is its stability.</p>
22327
22328 <p>You further state that: "7. One of the arguments behind the bill is the supposed freedom from costs of open-source software, compared with the costs of commercial software, without taking into account the fact that there exist types of volume licensing which can be highly advantageous for the State, as has happened in other countries."</p>
22329
22330 <p>I have already pointed out that what is in question is not the cost of the software but the principles of freedom of information, accessibility, and security. These arguments have been covered extensively in the preceding paragraphs to which I would refer you.</p>
22331
22332 <p>On the other hand, there certainly exist types of volume licensing (although unfortunately proprietary software does not satisfy the basic principles). But as you correctly pointed out in the immediately preceding paragraph of your letter, they only manage to reduce the impact of a component which makes up no more than 8% of the total.</p>
22333
22334 <p>You continue: "8. In addition, the alternative adopted by the bill (I) is clearly more expensive, due to the high costs of software migration, and (II) puts at risk compatibility and interoperability of the IT platforms within the State, and between the State and the private sector, given the hundreds of versions of open source software on the market."</p>
22335
22336 <p>Let us analyze your statement in two parts. Your first argument, that migration implies high costs, is in reality an argument in favor of the Bill. Because the more time goes by, the more difficult migration to another technology will become; and at the same time, the security risks associated with proprietary software will continue to increase. In this way, the use of proprietary systems and formats will make the State ever more dependent on specific suppliers. Once a policy of using free software has been established (which certainly, does imply some cost) then on the contrary migration from one system to another becomes very simple, since all data is stored in open formats. On the other hand, migration to an open software context implies no more costs than migration between two different proprietary software contexts, which invalidates your argument completely.</p>
22337
22338 <p>The second argument refers to "problems in interoperability of the IT platforms within the State, and between the State and the private sector" This statement implies a certain lack of knowledge of the way in which free software is built, which does not maximize the dependence of the user on a particular platform, as normally happens in the realm of proprietary software. Even when there are multiple free software distributions, and numerous programs which can be used for the same function, interoperability is guaranteed as much by the use of standard formats, as required by the bill, as by the possibility of creating interoperable software given the availability of the source code.</p>
22339
22340 <p>You then say that: "9. The majority of open source code does not offer adequate levels of service nor the guarantee from recognized manufacturers of high productivity on the part of the users, which has led various public organizations to retract their decision to go with an open source software solution and to use commercial software in its place."</p>
22341
22342 <p>This observation is without foundation. In respect of the guarantee, your argument was rebutted in the response to paragraph 4. In respect of support services, it is possible to use free software without them (just as also happens with proprietary software), but anyone who does need them can obtain support separately, whether from local firms or from international corporations, again just as in the case of proprietary software.</p>
22343
22344 <p>On the other hand, it would contribute greatly to our analysis if you could inform us about free software projects *established* in public bodies which have already been abandoned in favor of proprietary software. We know of a good number of cases where the opposite has taken place, but not know of any where what you describe has taken place.</p>
22345
22346 <p>You continue by observing that: "10. The bill discourages the creativity of the Peruvian software industry, which invoices 40 million US$/year, exports 4 million US$ (10th in ranking among non-traditional exports, more than handicrafts) and is a source of highly qualified employment. With a law that encourages the use of open source, software programmers lose their intellectual property rights and their main source of payment."</p>
22347
22348 <p>It is clear enough that nobody is forced to commercialize their code as free software. The only thing to take into account is that if it is not free software, it cannot be sold to the public sector. This is not in any case the main market for the national software industry. We covered some questions referring to the influence of the Bill on the generation of employment which would be both highly technically qualified and in better conditions for competition above, so it seems unnecessary to insist on this point.</p>
22349
22350 <p>What follows in your statement is incorrect. On the one hand, no author of free software loses his intellectual property rights, unless he expressly wishes to place his work in the public domain. The free software movement has always been very respectful of intellectual property, and has generated widespread public recognition of its authors. Names like those of Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, Guido van Rossum, Larry Wall, Miguel de Icaza, Andrew Tridgell, Theo de Raadt, Andrea Arcangeli, Bruce Perens, Darren Reed, Alan Cox, Eric Raymond, and many others, are recognized world-wide for their contributions to the development of software that is used today by millions of people throughout the world. On the other hand, to say that the rewards for authors rights make up the main source of payment of Peruvian programmers is in any case a guess, in particular since there is no proof to this effect, nor a demonstration of how the use of free software by the State would influence these payments.</p>
22351
22352 <p>You go on to say that: "11. Open source software, since it can be distributed without charge, does not allow the generation of income for its developers through exports. In this way, the multiplier effect of the sale of software to other countries is weakened, and so in turn is the growth of the industry, while Government rules ought on the contrary to stimulate local industry."</p>
22353
22354 <p>This statement shows once again complete ignorance of the mechanisms of and market for free software. It tries to claim that the market of sale of non- exclusive rights for use (sale of licenses) is the only possible one for the software industry, when you yourself pointed out several paragraphs above that it is not even the most important one. The incentives that the bill offers for the growth of a supply of better qualified professionals, together with the increase in experience that working on a large scale with free software within the State will bring for Peruvian technicians, will place them in a highly competitive position to offer their services abroad.</p>
22355
22356 <p>You then state that: "12. In the Forum, the use of open source software in education was discussed, without mentioning the complete collapse of this initiative in a country like Mexico, where precisely the State employees who founded the project now state that open source software did not make it possible to offer a learning experience to pupils in the schools, did not take into account the capability at a national level to give adequate support to the platform, and that the software did not and does not allow for the levels of platform integration that now exist in schools."</p>
22357
22358 <p>In fact Mexico has gone into reverse with the Red Escolar (Schools Network) project. This is due precisely to the fact that the driving forces behind the Mexican project used license costs as their main argument, instead of the other reasons specified in our project, which are far more essential. Because of this conceptual mistake, and as a result of the lack of effective support from the SEP (Secretary of State for Public Education), the assumption was made that to implant free software in schools it would be enough to drop their software budget and send them a CD ROM with Gnu/Linux instead. Of course this failed, and it couldn't have been otherwise, just as school laboratories fail when they use proprietary software and have no budget for implementation and maintenance. That's exactly why our bill is not limited to making the use of free software mandatory, but recognizes the need to create a viable migration plan, in which the State undertakes the technical transition in an orderly way in order to then enjoy the advantages of free software.</p>
22359
22360 <p>You end with a rhetorical question: "13. If open source software satisfies all the requirements of State bodies, why do you need a law to adopt it? Shouldn't it be the market which decides freely which products give most benefits or value?"</p>
22361
22362 <p>We agree that in the private sector of the economy, it must be the market that decides which products to use, and no state interference is permissible there. However, in the case of the public sector, the reasoning is not the same: as we have already established, the state archives, handles, and transmits information which does not belong to it, but which is entrusted to it by citizens, who have no alternative under the rule of law. As a counterpart to this legal requirement, the State must take extreme measures to safeguard the integrity, confidentiality, and accessibility of this information. The use of proprietary software raises serious doubts as to whether these requirements can be fulfilled, lacks conclusive evidence in this respect, and so is not suitable for use in the public sector.</p>
22363
22364 <p>The need for a law is based, firstly, on the realization of the fundamental principles listed above in the specific area of software; secondly, on the fact that the State is not an ideal homogeneous entity, but made up of multiple bodies with varying degrees of autonomy in decision making. Given that it is inappropriate to use proprietary software, the fact of establishing these rules in law will prevent the personal discretion of any state employee from putting at risk the information which belongs to citizens. And above all, because it constitutes an up-to-date reaffirmation in relation to the means of management and communication of information used today, it is based on the republican principle of openness to the public.</p>
22365
22366 <p>In conformance with this universally accepted principle, the citizen has the right to know all information held by the State and not covered by well- founded declarations of secrecy based on law. Now, software deals with information and is itself information. Information in a special form, capable of being interpreted by a machine in order to execute actions, but crucial information all the same because the citizen has a legitimate right to know, for example, how his vote is computed or his taxes calculated. And for that he must have free access to the source code and be able to prove to his satisfaction the programs used for electoral computations or calculation of his taxes.</p>
22367
22368 <p>I wish you the greatest respect, and would like to repeat that my office will always be open for you to expound your point of view to whatever level of detail you consider suitable.</p>
22369
22370 <p>Cordially,<br>
22371 DR. EDGAR DAVID VILLANUEVA NUÑEZ<br>
22372 Congressman of the Republic of Perú.</p>
22373 </blockquote>
22374
22375       </div>
22376       <div class="tags">
22377
22378
22379         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan</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>.
22380
22381
22382       </div>
22383     </div>
22384     <div class="padding"></div>
22385
22386     <div class="entry">
22387       <div class="title">
22388         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_still_going_strong.html">Officeshots still going strong</a>
22389       </div>
22390       <div class="date">
22391         25th December 2010
22392       </div>
22393       <div class="body">
22394         <p>Half a year ago I
22395 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_taking_shape.html">wrote
22396 a bit</a> about <a href="http://www.officeshots.org/">OfficeShots</a>,
22397 a web service to allow anyone to test how ODF documents are handled by
22398 the different programs reading and writing the ODF format.</p>
22399
22400 <p>I just had a look at the service, and it seem to be going strong.
22401 Very interesting to see the results reported in the gallery, how
22402 different Office implementations handle different ODF features.  Sad
22403 to see that KOffice was not doing it very well, and happy to see that
22404 LibreOffice has been tested already (but sadly not listed as a option
22405 for OfficeShots users yet).  I am glad to see that the ODF community
22406 got such a great test tool available.</p>
22407
22408       </div>
22409       <div class="tags">
22410
22411
22412         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
22413
22414
22415       </div>
22416     </div>
22417     <div class="padding"></div>
22418
22419     <div class="entry">
22420       <div class="title">
22421         <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>
22422       </div>
22423       <div class="date">
22424         22nd December 2010
22425       </div>
22426       <div class="body">
22427         <p>The last few days I have spent at work here at the <a
22428 href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a> testing if the new
22429 batch of computers will work with Linux.  Every year for the last few
22430 years the university have organised shared bid of a few thousand
22431 computers, and this year HP won the bid.  Two different desktops and
22432 five different laptops are on the list this year.  We in the UNIX
22433 group want to know which one of these computers work well with RHEL
22434 and Ubuntu, the two Linux distributions we currently handle at the
22435 university.</p>
22436
22437 <p>My test method is simple, and I share it here to get feedback and
22438 perhaps inspire others to test hardware as well.  To test, I PXE
22439 install the OS version of choice, and log in as my normal user and run
22440 a few applications and plug in selected pieces of hardware.  When
22441 something fail, I make a note about this in the test matrix and move
22442 on.  If I have some spare time I try to report the bug to the OS
22443 vendor, but as I only have the machines for a short time, I rarely
22444 have the time to do this for all the problems I find.</p>
22445
22446 <p>Anyway, to get to the point of this post.  Here is the simple tests
22447 I perform on a new model.</p>
22448
22449 <ul>
22450
22451 <li>Is PXE installation working?  I'm testing with RHEL6, Ubuntu Lucid
22452 and Ubuntu Maverik at the moment.  If I feel like it, I also test with
22453 RHEL5 and Debian Edu/Squeeze.</li>
22454
22455 <li>Is X.org working?  If the graphical login screen show up after
22456 installation, X.org is working.</li>
22457
22458 <li>Is hardware accelerated OpenGL working?  Running glxgears (in
22459 package mesa-utils on Ubuntu) and writing down the frames per second
22460 reported by the program.</li>
22461
22462 <li>Is sound working?  With Gnome and KDE, a sound is played when
22463 logging in, and if I can hear this the test is successful.  If there
22464 are several audio exits on the machine, I try them all and check if
22465 the Gnome/KDE audio mixer can control where to send the sound.  I
22466 normally test this by playing
22467 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20101012-chef/ ">a HTML5
22468 video</a> in Firefox/Iceweasel.</li>
22469
22470 <li>Is the USB subsystem working?  I test this by plugging in a USB
22471 memory stick and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.</li>
22472
22473 <li>Is the CD/DVD player working?  I test this by inserting any CD/DVD
22474 I have lying around, and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.</li>
22475
22476 <li>Is any built in camera working?  Test using cheese, and see if a
22477 picture from the v4l device show up.</li>
22478
22479 <li>Is bluetooth working?  Use the Gnome/KDE browsing tool to see if
22480 any bluetooth devices are discovered.  In my office, I normally see a
22481 few.</li>
22482
22483 <li>For laptops, is the SD or Compaq Flash reader working.  I have
22484 memory modules lying around, and stick them in and see if Gnome/KDE
22485 notice this.</li>
22486
22487 <li>For laptops, is suspend/hibernate working?  I'm testing if the
22488 special button work, and if the laptop continue to work after
22489 resume.</li>
22490
22491 <li>For laptops, is the extra buttons working, like audio level,
22492 adjusting background light, switching on/off external video output,
22493 switching on/off wifi, bluetooth, etc?  The set of buttons differ from
22494 laptop to laptop, so I just write down which are working and which are
22495 not.</li>
22496
22497 <li>Some laptops have smart card readers, finger print readers,
22498 acceleration sensors etc.  I rarely test these, as I do not know how
22499 to quickly test if they are working or not, so I only document their
22500 existence.</li>
22501
22502 </ul>
22503
22504 <p>By now I suspect you are really curious what the test results are
22505 for the HP machines I am testing.  I'm not done yet, so I will report
22506 the test results later.  For now I can report that HP 8100 Elite work
22507 fine, and hibernation fail with HP EliteBook 8440p on Ubuntu Lucid,
22508 and audio fail on RHEL6.  Ubuntu Maverik worked with 8440p.  As you
22509 can see, I have most machines left to test.  One interesting
22510 observation is that Ubuntu Lucid has almost twice the frame rate than
22511 RHEL6 with glxgears.  No idea why.</p>
22512
22513       </div>
22514       <div class="tags">
22515
22516
22517         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>.
22518
22519
22520       </div>
22521     </div>
22522     <div class="padding"></div>
22523
22524     <div class="entry">
22525       <div class="title">
22526         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_thoughts_on_BitCoins.html">Some thoughts on BitCoins</a>
22527       </div>
22528       <div class="date">
22529         11th December 2010
22530       </div>
22531       <div class="body">
22532         <p>As I continue to explore
22533 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin</a>, I've starting to wonder
22534 what properties the system have, and how it will be affected by laws
22535 and regulations here in Norway.  Here are some random notes.</p>
22536
22537 <p>One interesting thing to note is that since the transactions are
22538 verified using a peer to peer network, all details about a transaction
22539 is known to everyone.  This means that if a BitCoin address has been
22540 published like I did with mine in my initial post about BitCoin, it is
22541 possible for everyone to see how many BitCoins have been transfered to
22542 that address.  There is even a web service to look at the details for
22543 all transactions.  There I can see that my address
22544 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a>
22545 have received 16.06 Bitcoin, the
22546 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3">1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3</a>
22547 address of Simon Phipps have received 181.97 BitCoin and the address
22548 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt">1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt</A>
22549 of EFF have received 2447.38 BitCoins so far.  Thank you to each and
22550 every one of you that donated bitcoins to support my activity. The
22551 fact that anyone can see how much money was transfered to a given
22552 address make it more obvious why the BitCoin community recommend to
22553 generate and hand out a new address for each transaction.  I'm told
22554 there is no way to track which addresses belong to a given person or
22555 organisation without the person or organisation revealing it
22556 themselves, as Simon, EFF and I have done.</p>
22557
22558 <p>In Norway, and in most other countries, there are laws and
22559 regulations limiting how much money one can transfer across the border
22560 without declaring it.  There are money laundering, tax and accounting
22561 laws and regulations I would expect to apply to the use of BitCoin.
22562 If the Skolelinux foundation
22563 (<a href="http://linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">SLX
22564 Debian Labs</a>) were to accept donations in BitCoin in addition to
22565 normal bank transfers like EFF is doing, how should this be accounted?
22566 Given that it is impossible to know if money can cross the border or
22567 not, should everything or nothing be declared?  What exchange rate
22568 should be used when calculating taxes?  Would receivers have to pay
22569 income tax if the foundation were to pay Skolelinux contributors in
22570 BitCoin?  I have no idea, but it would be interesting to know.</p>
22571
22572 <p>For a currency to be useful and successful, it must be trusted and
22573 accepted by a lot of users.  It must be possible to get easy access to
22574 the currency (as a wage or using currency exchanges), and it must be
22575 easy to spend it.  At the moment BitCoin seem fairly easy to get
22576 access to, but there are very few places to spend it.  I am not really
22577 a regular user of any of the vendor types currently accepting BitCoin,
22578 so I wonder when my kind of shop would start accepting BitCoins.  I
22579 would like to buy electronics, travels and subway tickets, not herbs
22580 and books. :) The currency is young, and this will improve over time
22581 if it become popular, but I suspect regular banks will start to lobby
22582 to get BitCoin declared illegal if it become popular.  I'm sure they
22583 will claim it is helping fund terrorism and money laundering (which
22584 probably would be true, as is any currency in existence), but I
22585 believe the problems should be solved elsewhere and not by blaming
22586 currencies.</p>
22587
22588 <p>The process of creating new BitCoins is called mining, and it is
22589 CPU intensive process that depend on a bit of luck as well (as one is
22590 competing against all the other miners currently spending CPU cycles
22591 to see which one get the next lump of cash).  The "winner" get 50
22592 BitCoin when this happen.  Yesterday I came across the obvious way to
22593 join forces to increase ones changes of getting at least some coins,
22594 by coordinating the work on mining BitCoins across several machines
22595 and people, and sharing the result if one is lucky and get the 50
22596 BitCoins.  Check out
22597 <a href="http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/bitcoin-pool/">BitCoin Pool</a>
22598 if this sounds interesting.  I have not had time to try to set up a
22599 machine to participate there yet, but have seen that running on ones
22600 own for a few days have not yield any BitCoins througth mining
22601 yet.</p>
22602
22603 <p>Update 2010-12-15: Found an <a
22604 href="http://inertia.posterous.com/reply-to-the-underground-economist-why-bitcoi">interesting
22605 criticism</a> of bitcoin.  Not quite sure how valid it is, but thought
22606 it was interesting to read.  The arguments presented seem to be
22607 equally valid for gold, which was used as a currency for many years.</p>
22608
22609       </div>
22610       <div class="tags">
22611
22612
22613         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>.
22614
22615
22616       </div>
22617     </div>
22618     <div class="padding"></div>
22619
22620     <div class="entry">
22621       <div class="title">
22622         <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>
22623       </div>
22624       <div class="date">
22625         10th December 2010
22626       </div>
22627       <div class="body">
22628         <p>With this weeks lawless
22629 <a href="http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/06/wikileaks/index.html">governmental
22630 attacks</a> on Wikileak and
22631 <a href="http://www.salon.com/technology/dan_gillmor/2010/12/06/war_on_speech">free
22632 speech</a>, it has become obvious that PayPal, visa and mastercard can
22633 not be trusted to handle money transactions.
22634 A blog post from
22635 <a href="http://webmink.com/2010/12/06/now-accepting-bitcoin/">Simon
22636 Phipps on bitcoin</a> reminded me about a project that a friend of
22637 mine mentioned earlier.  I decided to follow Simon's example, and get
22638 involved with <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin</a>.  I got
22639 some help from my friend to get it all running, and he even handed me
22640 some bitcoins to get started.  I even donated a few bitcoins to Simon
22641 for helping me remember BitCoin.</p>
22642
22643 <p>So, what is bitcoins, you probably wonder?  It is a digital
22644 crypto-currency, decentralised and handled using peer-to-peer
22645 networks.  It allows anonymous transactions and prohibits central
22646 control over the transactions, making it impossible for governments
22647 and companies alike to block donations and other transactions.  The
22648 source is free software, and while the key dependency wxWidgets 2.9
22649 for the graphical user interface is missing in Debian, the command
22650 line client builds just fine.  Hopefully Jonas
22651 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/578157">will get the package into
22652 Debian</a> soon.</p>
22653
22654 <p>Bitcoins can be converted to other currencies, like USD and EUR.
22655 There are <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/trade">companies accepting
22656 bitcoins</a> when selling services and goods, and there are even
22657 currency "stock" markets where the exchange rate is decided.  There
22658 are not many users so far, but the concept seems promising.  If you
22659 want to get started and lack a friend with any bitcoins to spare,
22660 you can even get
22661 <a href="https://freebitcoins.appspot.com/">some for free</a> (0.05
22662 bitcoin at the time of writing).  Use
22663 <a href="http://www.bitcoinwatch.com/">BitcoinWatch</a> to keep an eye
22664 on the current exchange rates.</p>
22665
22666 <p>As an experiment, I have decided to set up bitcoind on one of my
22667 machines.  If you want to support my activity, please send Bitcoin
22668 donations to the address
22669 <b>15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</b>.  Thank you!</p>
22670
22671       </div>
22672       <div class="tags">
22673
22674
22675         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>.
22676
22677
22678       </div>
22679     </div>
22680     <div class="padding"></div>
22681
22682     <div class="entry">
22683       <div class="title">
22684         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Student_group_continue_the_work_on_my_Reprap_3D_printer.html">Student group continue the work on my Reprap 3D printer</a>
22685       </div>
22686       <div class="date">
22687          9th December 2010
22688       </div>
22689       <div class="body">
22690         <p>A few days ago, I was introduces to some students in the robot
22691 student assosiation <a href="http://www.robotica.no/">Robotica
22692 Osloensis</a> at the University of Oslo where I work, who planned to
22693 get their own 3D printer.  They wanted to learn from me based on my
22694 work in the area.  After having a short lunch meeting with them, I
22695 offered them to borrow my reprap kit, as I never had time to complete
22696 the build and this seem unlike to change any time soon.  I look
22697 forward to see how this goes.  This monday their volunteer driver
22698 picked up my kit and drove it to their lab, and tomorrow I am told the
22699 last exam is over so they can start work on getting the 3D printer
22700 operational.</p>
22701
22702 <p>The robotic group have already build several robots on their own,
22703 and seem capable of getting the reprap operational.  I really look
22704 forward to being able to print all the cool 3D designs published on
22705 <a href="http://www.thingiverse.com/">Thingiverse</a>.  I even got
22706 some 3D scans I got made during Dagen@IFI when one of the groups at
22707 the computer science department at the university demonstrated their
22708 very cool 3D scanner.</p>
22709
22710       </div>
22711       <div class="tags">
22712
22713
22714         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reprap">reprap</a>.
22715
22716
22717       </div>
22718     </div>
22719     <div class="padding"></div>
22720
22721     <div class="entry">
22722       <div class="title">
22723         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_development_gathering_and_General_Assembly_for_FRiSK.html">Debian Edu development gathering and General Assembly for FRiSK</a>
22724       </div>
22725       <div class="date">
22726         29th November 2010
22727       </div>
22728       <div class="body">
22729         <p>On friday, the first Debian Edu / Skolelinux
22730 <a href="http://www.friprogramvareiskolen.no/Gathering/2010-12-03-05-Oslo">development
22731 gathering</a> in a long time take place here in Oslo, Norway.  I
22732 really look forward to seeing all the good people working on the
22733 Squeeze release.  The gathering is open for everyone interested in
22734 learning more about Debian Edu / Skolelinux.</p>
22735
22736 <p>On Saturday, the Norwegian member organization taking care of
22737 organizing these development gatherings, Fri Programvare i Skolen,
22738 will hold its
22739 <a href="http://friprogramvareiskolen.no/Genfors/2010">General Assembly
22740 for 2010</a>.  Membership is open for all, and currently there are 388
22741 people registered as members.  Last year 32 members cast their vote in
22742 the memberdb based election system.  I hope more people find time to
22743 vote this year.</p>
22744
22745       </div>
22746       <div class="tags">
22747
22748
22749         Tags: <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>.
22750
22751
22752       </div>
22753     </div>
22754     <div class="padding"></div>
22755
22756     <div class="entry">
22757       <div class="title">
22758         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_isn_t_Debian_Edu_using_VLC_.html">Why isn't Debian Edu using VLC?</a>
22759       </div>
22760       <div class="date">
22761         27th November 2010
22762       </div>
22763       <div class="body">
22764         <p>In the latest issue of Linux Journal, the readers choices were
22765 presented, and the winner among the multimedia player were VLC.
22766 Personally, I like VLC, and it is my player of choice when I first try
22767 to play a video file or stream.  Only if VLC fail will I drag out
22768 gmplayer to see if it can do better.  The reason is mostly the failure
22769 model and trust.  When VLC fail, it normally pop up a error message
22770 reporting the problem.  When mplayer fail, it normally segfault or
22771 just hangs.  The latter failure mode drain my trust in the program.<p>
22772
22773 <p>But even if VLC is my player of choice, we have choosen to use
22774 mplayer in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
22775 Edu/Skolelinux</a>.  The reason is simple.  We need a good browser
22776 plugin to play web videos seamlessly, and the VLC browser plugin is
22777 not very good.  For example, it lack in-line control buttons, so there
22778 is no way for the user to pause the video.  Also, when I
22779 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">last
22780 tested the browser plugins</a> available in Debian, the VLC plugin
22781 failed on several video pages where mplayer based plugins worked.  If
22782 the browser plugin for VLC was as good as the gecko-mediaplayer
22783 package (which uses mplayer), we would switch.</P>
22784
22785 <p>While VLC is a good player, its user interface is slightly
22786 annoying.  The most annoying feature is its inconsistent use of
22787 keyboard shortcuts.  When the player is in full screen mode, its
22788 shortcuts are different from when it is playing the video in a window.
22789 For example, space only work as pause when in full screen mode.  I
22790 wish it had consisten shortcuts and that space also would work when in
22791 window mode.  Another nice shortcut in gmplayer is [enter] to restart
22792 the current video.  It is very nice when playing short videos from the
22793 web and want to restart it when new people arrive to have a look at
22794 what is going on.</p>
22795
22796       </div>
22797       <div class="tags">
22798
22799
22800         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>.
22801
22802
22803       </div>
22804     </div>
22805     <div class="padding"></div>
22806
22807     <div class="entry">
22808       <div class="title">
22809         <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>
22810       </div>
22811       <div class="date">
22812         22nd November 2010
22813       </div>
22814       <div class="body">
22815         <p>Michael Biebl suggested to me on IRC, that I changed my automated
22816 upgrade testing of the
22817 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
22818 Gnome and KDE Desktop</a> to do <tt>apt-get autoremove</tt> when using apt-get.
22819 This seem like a very good idea, so I adjusted by test scripts and
22820 can now present the updated result from today:</p>
22821
22822 <p>This is for Gnome:</p>
22823
22824 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
22825
22826 <blockquote><p>
22827   apache2.2-bin
22828   aptdaemon
22829   baobab
22830   binfmt-support
22831   browser-plugin-gnash
22832   cheese-common
22833   cli-common
22834   cups-pk-helper
22835   dmz-cursor-theme
22836   empathy
22837   empathy-common
22838   freedesktop-sound-theme
22839   freeglut3
22840   gconf-defaults-service
22841   gdm-themes
22842   gedit-plugins
22843   geoclue
22844   geoclue-hostip
22845   geoclue-localnet
22846   geoclue-manual
22847   geoclue-yahoo
22848   gnash
22849   gnash-common
22850   gnome
22851   gnome-backgrounds
22852   gnome-cards-data
22853   gnome-codec-install
22854   gnome-core
22855   gnome-desktop-environment
22856   gnome-disk-utility
22857   gnome-screenshot
22858   gnome-search-tool
22859   gnome-session-canberra
22860   gnome-system-log
22861   gnome-themes-extras
22862   gnome-themes-more
22863   gnome-user-share
22864   gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
22865   gstreamer0.10-tools
22866   gtk2-engines
22867   gtk2-engines-pixbuf
22868   gtk2-engines-smooth
22869   hamster-applet
22870   libapache2-mod-dnssd
22871   libapr1
22872   libaprutil1
22873   libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3
22874   libaprutil1-ldap
22875   libart2.0-cil
22876   libboost-date-time1.42.0
22877   libboost-python1.42.0
22878   libboost-thread1.42.0
22879   libchamplain-0.4-0
22880   libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0
22881   libcheese-gtk18
22882   libclutter-gtk-0.10-0
22883   libcryptui0
22884   libdiscid0
22885   libelf1
22886   libepc-1.0-2
22887   libepc-common
22888   libepc-ui-1.0-2
22889   libfreerdp-plugins-standard
22890   libfreerdp0
22891   libgconf2.0-cil
22892   libgdata-common
22893   libgdata7
22894   libgdu-gtk0
22895   libgee2
22896   libgeoclue0
22897   libgexiv2-0
22898   libgif4
22899   libglade2.0-cil
22900   libglib2.0-cil
22901   libgmime2.4-cil
22902   libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
22903   libgnome2.24-cil
22904   libgnomepanel2.24-cil
22905   libgpod-common
22906   libgpod4
22907   libgtk2.0-cil
22908   libgtkglext1
22909   libgtksourceview2.0-common
22910   libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
22911   libmono-addins0.2-cil
22912   libmono-cairo2.0-cil
22913   libmono-corlib2.0-cil
22914   libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil
22915   libmono-posix2.0-cil
22916   libmono-security2.0-cil
22917   libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
22918   libmono-system2.0-cil
22919   libmtp8
22920   libmusicbrainz3-6
22921   libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil
22922   libndesk-dbus1.0-cil
22923   libopal3.6.8
22924   libpolkit-gtk-1-0
22925   libpt2.6.7
22926   libpython2.6
22927   librpm1
22928   librpmio1
22929   libsdl1.2debian
22930   libsrtp0
22931   libssh-4
22932   libtelepathy-farsight0
22933   libtelepathy-glib0
22934   libtidy-0.99-0
22935   media-player-info
22936   mesa-utils
22937   mono-2.0-gac
22938   mono-gac
22939   mono-runtime
22940   nautilus-sendto
22941   nautilus-sendto-empathy
22942   p7zip-full
22943   pkg-config
22944   python-aptdaemon
22945   python-aptdaemon-gtk
22946   python-axiom
22947   python-beautifulsoup
22948   python-bugbuddy
22949   python-clientform
22950   python-coherence
22951   python-configobj
22952   python-crypto
22953   python-cupshelpers
22954   python-elementtree
22955   python-epsilon
22956   python-evolution
22957   python-feedparser
22958   python-gdata
22959   python-gdbm
22960   python-gst0.10
22961   python-gtkglext1
22962   python-gtksourceview2
22963   python-httplib2
22964   python-louie
22965   python-mako
22966   python-markupsafe
22967   python-mechanize
22968   python-nevow
22969   python-notify
22970   python-opengl
22971   python-openssl
22972   python-pam
22973   python-pkg-resources
22974   python-pyasn1
22975   python-pysqlite2
22976   python-rdflib
22977   python-serial
22978   python-tagpy
22979   python-twisted-bin
22980   python-twisted-conch
22981   python-twisted-core
22982   python-twisted-web
22983   python-utidylib
22984   python-webkit
22985   python-xdg
22986   python-zope.interface
22987   remmina
22988   remmina-plugin-data
22989   remmina-plugin-rdp
22990   remmina-plugin-vnc
22991   rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
22992   rhythmbox-plugins
22993   rpm-common
22994   rpm2cpio
22995   seahorse-plugins
22996   shotwell
22997   software-center
22998   system-config-printer-udev
22999   telepathy-gabble
23000   telepathy-mission-control-5
23001   telepathy-salut
23002   tomboy
23003   totem
23004   totem-coherence
23005   totem-mozilla
23006   totem-plugins
23007   transmission-common
23008   xdg-user-dirs
23009   xdg-user-dirs-gtk
23010   xserver-xephyr
23011 </p></blockquote>
23012
23013 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
23014
23015 <blockquote><p>
23016   cheese
23017   ekiga
23018   eog
23019   epiphany-extensions
23020   evolution-exchange
23021   fast-user-switch-applet
23022   file-roller
23023   gcalctool
23024   gconf-editor
23025   gdm
23026   gedit
23027   gedit-common
23028   gnome-games
23029   gnome-games-data
23030   gnome-nettool
23031   gnome-system-tools
23032   gnome-themes
23033   gnuchess
23034   gucharmap
23035   guile-1.8-libs
23036   libavahi-ui0
23037   libdmx1
23038   libgalago3
23039   libgtk-vnc-1.0-0
23040   libgtksourceview2.0-0
23041   liblircclient0
23042   libsdl1.2debian-alsa
23043   libspeexdsp1
23044   libsvga1
23045   rhythmbox
23046   seahorse
23047   sound-juicer
23048   system-config-printer
23049   totem-common
23050   transmission-gtk
23051   vinagre
23052   vino
23053 </p></blockquote>
23054
23055 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
23056
23057 <blockquote><p>
23058   gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
23059 </p></blockquote>
23060
23061 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
23062
23063 <blockquote><p>
23064 [nothing]
23065 </p></blockquote>
23066
23067 <p>This is for KDE:</p>
23068
23069 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
23070
23071 <blockquote><p>
23072   ksmserver
23073 </p></blockquote>
23074
23075 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
23076
23077 <blockquote><p>
23078   kwin
23079   network-manager-kde
23080 </p></blockquote>
23081
23082 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
23083
23084 <blockquote><p>
23085   arts
23086   dolphin
23087   freespacenotifier
23088   google-gadgets-gst
23089   google-gadgets-xul
23090   kappfinder
23091   kcalc
23092   kcharselect
23093   kde-core
23094   kde-plasma-desktop
23095   kde-standard
23096   kde-window-manager
23097   kdeartwork
23098   kdeartwork-emoticons
23099   kdeartwork-style
23100   kdeartwork-theme-icon
23101   kdebase
23102   kdebase-apps
23103   kdebase-workspace
23104   kdebase-workspace-bin
23105   kdebase-workspace-data
23106   kdeeject
23107   kdelibs
23108   kdeplasma-addons
23109   kdeutils
23110   kdewallpapers
23111   kdf
23112   kfloppy
23113   kgpg
23114   khelpcenter4
23115   kinfocenter
23116   konq-plugins-l10n
23117   konqueror-nsplugins
23118   kscreensaver
23119   kscreensaver-xsavers
23120   ktimer
23121   kwrite
23122   libgle3
23123   libkde4-ruby1.8
23124   libkonq5
23125   libkonq5-templates
23126   libnetpbm10
23127   libplasma-ruby
23128   libplasma-ruby1.8
23129   libqt4-ruby1.8
23130   marble-data
23131   marble-plugins
23132   netpbm
23133   nuvola-icon-theme
23134   plasma-dataengines-workspace
23135   plasma-desktop
23136   plasma-desktopthemes-artwork
23137   plasma-runners-addons
23138   plasma-scriptengine-googlegadgets
23139   plasma-scriptengine-python
23140   plasma-scriptengine-qedje
23141   plasma-scriptengine-ruby
23142   plasma-scriptengine-webkit
23143   plasma-scriptengines
23144   plasma-wallpapers-addons
23145   plasma-widget-folderview
23146   plasma-widget-networkmanagement
23147   ruby
23148   sweeper
23149   update-notifier-kde
23150   xscreensaver-data-extra
23151   xscreensaver-gl
23152   xscreensaver-gl-extra
23153   xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
23154 </p></blockquote>
23155
23156 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
23157
23158 <blockquote><p>
23159   ark
23160   google-gadgets-common
23161   google-gadgets-qt
23162   htdig
23163   kate
23164   kdebase-bin
23165   kdebase-data
23166   kdepasswd
23167   kfind
23168   klipper
23169   konq-plugins
23170   konqueror
23171   ksysguard
23172   ksysguardd
23173   libarchive1
23174   libcln6
23175   libeet1
23176   libeina-svn-06
23177   libggadget-1.0-0b
23178   libggadget-qt-1.0-0b
23179   libgps19
23180   libkdecorations4
23181   libkephal4
23182   libkonq4
23183   libkonqsidebarplugin4a
23184   libkscreensaver5
23185   libksgrd4
23186   libksignalplotter4
23187   libkunitconversion4
23188   libkwineffects1a
23189   libmarblewidget4
23190   libntrack-qt4-1
23191   libntrack0
23192   libplasma-geolocation-interface4
23193   libplasmaclock4a
23194   libplasmagenericshell4
23195   libprocesscore4a
23196   libprocessui4a
23197   libqalculate5
23198   libqedje0a
23199   libqtruby4shared2
23200   libqzion0a
23201   libruby1.8
23202   libscim8c2a
23203   libsmokekdecore4-3
23204   libsmokekdeui4-3
23205   libsmokekfile3
23206   libsmokekhtml3
23207   libsmokekio3
23208   libsmokeknewstuff2-3
23209   libsmokeknewstuff3-3
23210   libsmokekparts3
23211   libsmokektexteditor3
23212   libsmokekutils3
23213   libsmokenepomuk3
23214   libsmokephonon3
23215   libsmokeplasma3
23216   libsmokeqtcore4-3
23217   libsmokeqtdbus4-3
23218   libsmokeqtgui4-3
23219   libsmokeqtnetwork4-3
23220   libsmokeqtopengl4-3
23221   libsmokeqtscript4-3
23222   libsmokeqtsql4-3
23223   libsmokeqtsvg4-3
23224   libsmokeqttest4-3
23225   libsmokeqtuitools4-3
23226   libsmokeqtwebkit4-3
23227   libsmokeqtxml4-3
23228   libsmokesolid3
23229   libsmokesoprano3
23230   libtaskmanager4a
23231   libtidy-0.99-0
23232   libweather-ion4a
23233   libxklavier16
23234   libxxf86misc1
23235   okteta
23236   oxygencursors
23237   plasma-dataengines-addons
23238   plasma-scriptengine-superkaramba
23239   plasma-widget-lancelot
23240   plasma-widgets-addons
23241   plasma-widgets-workspace
23242   polkit-kde-1
23243   ruby1.8
23244   systemsettings
23245   update-notifier-common
23246 </p></blockquote>
23247
23248 <p>Running apt-get autoremove made the results using apt-get and
23249 aptitude a bit more similar, but there are still quite a lott of
23250 differences.  I have no idea what packages should be installed after
23251 the upgrade, but hope those that do can have a look.</p>
23252
23253       </div>
23254       <div class="tags">
23255
23256
23257         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>.
23258
23259
23260       </div>
23261     </div>
23262     <div class="padding"></div>
23263
23264     <div class="entry">
23265       <div class="title">
23266         <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>
23267       </div>
23268       <div class="date">
23269         22nd November 2010
23270       </div>
23271       <div class="body">
23272         <p>Most of the computers in use by the
23273 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux project</a>
23274 are virtual machines.  And they have been Xen machines running on a
23275 fairly old IBM eserver xseries 345 machine, and we wanted to migrate
23276 them to KVM on a newer Dell PowerEdge 2950 host machine.  This was a
23277 bit harder that it could have been, because we set up the Xen virtual
23278 machines to get the virtual partitions from LVM, which as far as I
23279 know is not supported by KVM.  So to migrate, we had to convert
23280 several LVM logical volumes to partitions on a virtual disk file.</p>
23281
23282 <p>I found
23283 <a href="http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM">a
23284 nice recipe</a> to do this, and wrote the following script to do the
23285 migration.  It uses qemu-img from the qemu package to make the disk
23286 image, parted to partition it, losetup and kpartx to present the disk
23287 image partions as devices, and dd to copy the data.  I NFS mounted the
23288 new servers storage area on the old server to do the migration.</p>
23289
23290 <pre>
23291 #!/bin/sh
23292
23293 # Based on
23294 # http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM
23295
23296 set -e
23297 set -x
23298
23299 if [ -z "$1" ] ; then
23300     echo "Usage: $0 &lt;hostname&gt;"
23301     exit 1
23302 else
23303     host="$1"
23304 fi
23305
23306 if [ ! -e /dev/vg_data/$host-disk ] ; then
23307     echo "error: unable to find LVM volume for $host"
23308     exit 1
23309 fi
23310
23311 # Partitions need to be a bit bigger than the LVM LVs.  not sure why.
23312 disksize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-disk | awk '{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }')
23313 swapsize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-swap | awk '{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }')
23314 totalsize=$(( ( $disksize + $swapsize ) ))
23315
23316 img=$host.img
23317 #dd if=/dev/zero of=$img bs=1M count=$(( $disksize + $swapsize ))
23318 qemu-img create $img ${totalsize}MMaking room on the Debian Edu/Sqeeze DVD
23319
23320 parted $img mklabel msdos
23321 parted $img mkpart primary linux-swap 0 $disksize
23322 parted $img mkpart primary ext2 $disksize $totalsize
23323 parted $img set 1 boot on
23324
23325 modprobe dm-mod
23326 losetup /dev/loop0 $img
23327 kpartx -a /dev/loop0
23328
23329 dd if=/dev/vg_data/$host-disk of=/dev/mapper/loop0p1 bs=1M
23330 fsck.ext3 -f /dev/mapper/loop0p1 || true
23331 mkswap /dev/mapper/loop0p2
23332
23333 kpartx -d /dev/loop0
23334 losetup -d /dev/loop0
23335 </pre>
23336
23337 <p>The script is perhaps so simple that it is not copyrightable, but
23338 if it is, it is licenced using GPL v2 or later at your discretion.</p>
23339
23340 <p>After doing this, I booted a Debian CD in rescue mode in KVM with
23341 the new disk image attached, installed grub-pc and linux-image-686 and
23342 set up grub to boot from the disk image.  After this, the KVM machines
23343 seem to work just fine.</p>
23344
23345       </div>
23346       <div class="tags">
23347
23348
23349         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>.
23350
23351
23352       </div>
23353     </div>
23354     <div class="padding"></div>
23355
23356     <div class="entry">
23357       <div class="title">
23358         <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>
23359       </div>
23360       <div class="date">
23361         20th November 2010
23362       </div>
23363       <div class="body">
23364         <p>I'm still running upgrade testing of the
23365 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
23366 Gnome and KDE Desktop</a>, but have not had time to spend on reporting the
23367 status.  Here is a short update based on a test I ran 20101118.</p>
23368
23369 <p>I still do not know what a correct migration should look like, so I
23370 report any differences between apt and aptitude and hope someone else
23371 can see if anything should be changed.</p>
23372
23373 <p>This is for Gnome:</p>
23374
23375 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
23376
23377 <blockquote><p>
23378   apache2.2-bin aptdaemon at-spi baobab binfmt-support
23379   browser-plugin-gnash cheese-common cli-common cpp-4.3 cups-pk-helper
23380   dmz-cursor-theme empathy empathy-common finger
23381   freedesktop-sound-theme freeglut3 gconf-defaults-service gdm-themes
23382   gedit-plugins geoclue geoclue-hostip geoclue-localnet geoclue-manual
23383   geoclue-yahoo gnash gnash-common gnome gnome-backgrounds
23384   gnome-cards-data gnome-codec-install gnome-core
23385   gnome-desktop-environment gnome-disk-utility gnome-screenshot
23386   gnome-search-tool gnome-session-canberra gnome-spell
23387   gnome-system-log gnome-themes-extras gnome-themes-more
23388   gnome-user-share gs-common gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
23389   gstreamer0.10-tools gtk2-engines gtk2-engines-pixbuf
23390   gtk2-engines-smooth hal-info hamster-applet libapache2-mod-dnssd
23391   libapr1 libaprutil1 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3 libaprutil1-ldap
23392   libart2.0-cil libatspi1.0-0 libboost-date-time1.42.0
23393   libboost-python1.42.0 libboost-thread1.42.0 libchamplain-0.4-0
23394   libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0 libcheese-gtk18 libclutter-gtk-0.10-0
23395   libcryptui0 libcupsys2 libdiscid0 libeel2-data libelf1 libepc-1.0-2
23396   libepc-common libepc-ui-1.0-2 libfreerdp-plugins-standard
23397   libfreerdp0 libgail-common libgconf2.0-cil libgdata-common libgdata7
23398   libgdl-1-common libgdu-gtk0 libgee2 libgeoclue0 libgexiv2-0 libgif4
23399   libglade2.0-cil libglib2.0-cil libgmime2.4-cil libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
23400   libgnome2.24-cil libgnomepanel2.24-cil libgnomeprint2.2-data
23401   libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod-common libgpod4
23402   libgtk2.0-cil libgtkglext1 libgtksourceview-common
23403   libgtksourceview2.0-common libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
23404   libmono-addins0.2-cil libmono-cairo2.0-cil libmono-corlib2.0-cil
23405   libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil libmono-posix2.0-cil
23406   libmono-security2.0-cil libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
23407   libmono-system2.0-cil libmtp8 libmusicbrainz3-6
23408   libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil libndesk-dbus1.0-cil libopal3.6.8
23409   libpolkit-gtk-1-0 libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
23410   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libpt2.6.7 libpython2.6 librpm1 librpmio1
23411   libsdl1.2debian libservlet2.4-java libsrtp0 libssh-4
23412   libtelepathy-farsight0 libtelepathy-glib0 libtidy-0.99-0
23413   libxalan2-java libxerces2-java media-player-info mesa-utils
23414   mono-2.0-gac mono-gac mono-runtime nautilus-sendto
23415   nautilus-sendto-empathy openoffice.org-writer2latex
23416   openssl-blacklist p7zip p7zip-full pkg-config python-4suite-xml
23417   python-aptdaemon python-aptdaemon-gtk python-axiom
23418   python-beautifulsoup python-bugbuddy python-clientform
23419   python-coherence python-configobj python-crypto python-cupshelpers
23420   python-cupsutils python-eggtrayicon python-elementtree
23421   python-epsilon python-evolution python-feedparser python-gdata
23422   python-gdbm python-gst0.10 python-gtkglext1 python-gtkmozembed
23423   python-gtksourceview2 python-httplib2 python-louie python-mako
23424   python-markupsafe python-mechanize python-nevow python-notify
23425   python-opengl python-openssl python-pam python-pkg-resources
23426   python-pyasn1 python-pysqlite2 python-rdflib python-serial
23427   python-tagpy python-twisted-bin python-twisted-conch
23428   python-twisted-core python-twisted-web python-utidylib python-webkit
23429   python-xdg python-zope.interface remmina remmina-plugin-data
23430   remmina-plugin-rdp remmina-plugin-vnc rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
23431   rhythmbox-plugins rpm-common rpm2cpio seahorse-plugins shotwell
23432   software-center svgalibg1 system-config-printer-udev
23433   telepathy-gabble telepathy-mission-control-5 telepathy-salut tomboy
23434   totem totem-coherence totem-mozilla totem-plugins
23435   transmission-common xdg-user-dirs xdg-user-dirs-gtk xserver-xephyr
23436   zip
23437 </p></blockquote>
23438
23439 Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude
23440
23441 <blockquote><p>
23442   arj bluez-utils cheese dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop ekiga eog
23443   epiphany-extensions epiphany-gecko evolution-exchange
23444   fast-user-switch-applet file-roller gcalctool gconf-editor gdm gedit
23445   gedit-common gnome-app-install gnome-games gnome-games-data
23446   gnome-nettool gnome-system-tools gnome-themes gnome-utils
23447   gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager gnuchess gucharmap
23448   guile-1.8-libs hal libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5
23449   libavahi-ui0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7
23450   libcucul0 libcurl3 libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdmx1 libdvdread3
23451   libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1
23452   libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3 libfaad0 libgadu3
23453   libgalago3 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
23454   libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
23455   libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
23456   libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtk-vnc-1.0-0
23457   libgtkhtml2-0 libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgtksourceview2.0-0
23458   libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
23459   libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libkpathsea4 liblircclient0 libltdl3 liblwres50
23460   libmagick++10 libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmozjs1d libmpfr1ldbl libmtp7
23461   libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0
23462   libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpisock9
23463   libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8
23464   libsdl1.2debian-alsa libsensors3 libsexy2 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
23465   libspeexdsp1 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libsvga1
23466   libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0
23467   libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12
23468   libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common rhythmbox seahorse
23469   sound-juicer swfdec-gnome system-config-printer totem-common
23470   totem-gstreamer transmission-gtk vinagre vino w3c-dtd-xhtml wodim
23471 </p></blockquote>
23472
23473 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
23474
23475 <blockquote><p>
23476   gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
23477 </p></blockquote>
23478
23479 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
23480
23481 <blockquote><p>
23482 [nothing]
23483 </p></blockquote>
23484
23485 <p>This is for KDE:</p>
23486
23487 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
23488
23489 <blockquote><p>
23490   autopoint bomber bovo cantor cantor-backend-kalgebra cpp-4.3 dcoprss
23491   edict espeak espeak-data eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
23492   ghostscript-x git gnome-audio gnugo granatier gs-common
23493   gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio indi kaddressbook-plugins kalgebra
23494   kalzium-data kanjidic kapman kate-plugins kblocks kbreakout kbstate
23495   kde-icons-mono kdeaccessibility kdeaddons-kfile-plugins
23496   kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
23497   kdeedu kdeedu-data kdeedu-kvtml-data kdegames kdegames-card-data
23498   kdegames-mahjongg-data kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc
23499   kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
23500   kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdessh kdetoys kdewebdev
23501   kdiamond kdnssd kfilereplace kfourinline kgeography-data kigo
23502   killbots kiriki klettres-data kmoon kmrml knewsticker-scripts
23503   kollision kpf krosspython ksirk ksmserver ksquares kstars-data
23504   ksudoku kubrick kweather libasound2-plugins libboost-python1.42.0
23505   libcfitsio3 libconvert-binhex-perl libcrypt-ssleay-perl libdb4.6++
23506   libdjvulibre-text libdotconf1.0 liberror-perl libespeak1
23507   libfinance-quote-perl libgail-common libgsl0ldbl libhtml-parser-perl
23508   libhtml-tableextract-perl libhtml-tagset-perl libhtml-tree-perl
23509   libio-stringy-perl libkdeedu4 libkdegames5 libkiten4 libkpathsea5
23510   libkrossui4 libmailtools-perl libmime-tools-perl
23511   libnews-nntpclient-perl libopenbabel3 libportaudio2 libpulse-browse0
23512   libservlet2.4-java libspeechd2 libtiff-tools libtimedate-perl
23513   libunistring0 liburi-perl libwww-perl libxalan2-java libxerces2-java
23514   lirc luatex marble networkstatus noatun-plugins
23515   openoffice.org-writer2latex palapeli palapeli-data parley
23516   parley-data poster psutils pulseaudio pulseaudio-esound-compat
23517   pulseaudio-module-x11 pulseaudio-utils quanta-data rocs rsync
23518   speech-dispatcher step svgalibg1 texlive-binaries texlive-luatex
23519   ttf-sazanami-gothic
23520 </p></blockquote>
23521
23522 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
23523
23524 <blockquote><p>
23525   amor artsbuilder atlantik atlantikdesigner blinken bluez-utils cvs
23526   dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop imlib-base imlib11 kalzium kanagram kandy
23527   kasteroids katomic kbackgammon kbattleship kblackbox kbounce kbruch
23528   kcron kdat kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data kdeprint kdict kdvi kedit
23529   keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs kgeography kghostview
23530   kgoldrunner khangman khexedit kiconedit kig kimagemapeditor
23531   kitchensync kiten kjumpingcube klatin klettres klickety klines
23532   klinkstatus kmag kmahjongg kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmines
23533   kmousetool kmouth kmplot knetwalk kodo kolf kommander konquest kooka
23534   kpager kpat kpdf kpercentage kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler krec
23535   kregexpeditor kreversi ksame ksayit kshisen ksig ksim ksirc ksirtet
23536   ksmiletris ksnake ksokoban kspaceduel kstars ksvg ksysv kteatime
23537   ktip ktnef ktouch ktron kttsd ktuberling kturtle ktux kuickshow
23538   kverbos kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kwordquiz
23539   kworldclock kxsldbg libakode2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
23540   libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
23541   libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2
23542   libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0
23543   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
23544   libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0 libicu38
23545   libiec61883-0 libindex0 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
23546   libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1 libkdeedu3
23547   libkdegames1 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
23548   libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
23549   libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick10
23550   libmimelib1c2a libmodplug0c2 libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libmpfr1ldbl
23551   libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9 libpoppler-glib3
23552   libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 librss1 libsensors3
23553   libsmbios2 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90
23554   libtalloc1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 lskat
23555   mpeglib network-manager-kde noatun pmount tex-common texlive-base
23556   texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended tidy
23557   ttf-dustin ttf-kochi-gothic ttf-sjfonts
23558 </p></blockquote>
23559
23560 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
23561
23562 <blockquote><p>
23563   dolphin kde-core kde-plasma-desktop kde-standard kde-window-manager
23564   kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-apps kdebase-workspace
23565   kdebase-workspace-bin kdebase-workspace-data kdeutils kscreensaver
23566   kscreensaver-xsavers libgle3 libkonq5 libkonq5-templates libnetpbm10
23567   netpbm plasma-widget-folderview plasma-widget-networkmanagement
23568   xscreensaver-data-extra xscreensaver-gl xscreensaver-gl-extra
23569   xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
23570 </p></blockquote>
23571
23572 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
23573
23574 <blockquote><p>
23575   kdebase-bin konq-plugins konqueror
23576 </p></blockquote>
23577
23578       </div>
23579       <div class="tags">
23580
23581
23582         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>.
23583
23584
23585       </div>
23586     </div>
23587     <div class="padding"></div>
23588
23589     <div class="entry">
23590       <div class="title">
23591         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_buildbot_slave_and_Debian_kfreebsd.html">Gnash buildbot slave and Debian kfreebsd</a>
23592       </div>
23593       <div class="date">
23594         20th November 2010
23595       </div>
23596       <div class="body">
23597         <p>Answering
23598 <a href="http://www.listware.net/201011/gnash-dev/67431-gnash-dev-buildbot-looking-for-slaves.html">the
23599 call from the Gnash project</a> for
23600 <a href="http://www.gnashdev.org:8010">buildbot</a> slaves to test the
23601 current source, I have set up a virtual KVM machine on the Debian
23602 Edu/Skolelinux virtualization host to test the git source on
23603 Debian/Squeeze.  I hope this can help the developers in getting new
23604 releases out more often.</p>
23605
23606 <p>As the developers want less main-stream build platforms tested to,
23607 I have considered setting up a <a
23608 href="http://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/">Debian/kfreebsd</a>
23609 machine as well.  I have also considered using the kfreebsd
23610 architecture in Debian as a file server in NUUG to get access to the 5
23611 TB zfs volume we currently use to store DV video.  Because of this, I
23612 finally got around to do a test installation of Debian/Squeeze with
23613 kfreebsd.  Installation went fairly smooth, thought I noticed some
23614 visual glitches in the cdebconf dialogs (black cursor left on the
23615 screen at random locations).  Have not gotten very far with the
23616 testing.  Noticed cfdisk did not work, but fdisk did so it was not a
23617 fatal problem.  Have to spend some more time on it to see if it is
23618 useful as a file server for NUUG.  Will try to find time to set up a
23619 gnash buildbot slave on the Debian Edu/Skolelinux this weekend.</p>
23620
23621       </div>
23622       <div class="tags">
23623
23624
23625         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>.
23626
23627
23628       </div>
23629     </div>
23630     <div class="padding"></div>
23631
23632     <div class="entry">
23633       <div class="title">
23634         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_in_3D.html">Debian in 3D</a>
23635       </div>
23636       <div class="date">
23637          9th November 2010
23638       </div>
23639       <div class="body">
23640         <p><img src="http://thingiverse-production.s3.amazonaws.com/renders/23/e0/c4/f9/2b/debswagtdose_preview_medium.jpg"></p>
23641
23642 <p>3D printing is just great.  I just came across this Debian logo in
23643 3D linked in from
23644 <a href="http://blog.thingiverse.com/2010/11/09/participatory-branding/">the
23645 thingiverse blog</a>.</p>
23646
23647       </div>
23648       <div class="tags">
23649
23650
23651         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>.
23652
23653
23654       </div>
23655     </div>
23656     <div class="padding"></div>
23657
23658     <div class="entry">
23659       <div class="title">
23660         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Making_room_on_the_Debian_Edu_Sqeeze_DVD.html">Making room on the Debian Edu/Sqeeze DVD</a>
23661       </div>
23662       <div class="date">
23663          7th November 2010
23664       </div>
23665       <div class="body">
23666         <p>Prioritising packages for the Debian Edu /
23667 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a> DVD, which is
23668 supposed provide a school with all the services and user applications
23669 needed on the pupils computer network has always been hard.  Even
23670 schools without Internet connections should be able to get Debian Edu
23671 working using this DVD.</p>
23672
23673 <p>The job became a lot harder when apt and aptitude started
23674 installing recommended packages by default.  We want the same set of
23675 packages to be installed when using the DVD and the netinst CD, and
23676 that means all recommended packages need to be on the DVD.  I created
23677 a patch for debian-cd in <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/601203">BTS
23678 report #601203</a> to do this, and since this change was applied to
23679 the Debian Edu DVD build, we have been seriously short on space.</p>
23680
23681 <p>A few days ago we decided to drop blender, wxmaxima and kicad from
23682 the default installation to save space on the DVD, believing that
23683 those needing these applications are few and can get them from the
23684 Debian archive.</p>
23685
23686 <p>Yesterday, I had a look what source packages to see which packages
23687 were using most space.  A few large packages are well know;
23688 openoffice.org, openclipart and fluid-soundfont.  But I also
23689 discovered that lilypond used 106 MiB and fglrx-driver used 53 MiB.
23690 The lilypond package is pulled in as a dependency for rosegarden, and
23691 when looking a bit closer I discovered that 99 MiB of the 106 MiB were
23692 the documentation package, which is recommended by the binary package.
23693 I decided to drop this documentation package from our DVD, as most of
23694 our users will use the GUI front-ends and do not need the lilypond
23695 documentation.  Similarly, I dropped the non-free fglrx-driver package
23696 which might be installed by d-i when its hardware is detected, as the
23697 free X driver should work.</p>
23698
23699 <p>With this change, we finally got space for the LXDE and Gnome
23700 desktop packages as well as the language specific packages making the
23701 DVD more useful again.</p>
23702
23703       </div>
23704       <div class="tags">
23705
23706
23707         Tags: <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>.
23708
23709
23710       </div>
23711     </div>
23712     <div class="padding"></div>
23713
23714     <div class="entry">
23715       <div class="title">
23716         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_updates_2010_10_24.html">Software updates 2010-10-24</a>
23717       </div>
23718       <div class="date">
23719         24th October 2010
23720       </div>
23721       <div class="body">
23722         <p>Some updates.</p>
23723
23724 <p>My <a href="http://pledgebank.com/gnash-avm2">gnash pledge</a> to
23725 raise money for the project is going well.  The lower limit of 10
23726 signers was reached in 24 hours, and so far 13 people have signed it.
23727 More signers and more funding is most welcome, and I am really curious
23728 how far we can get before the time limit of December 24 is reached.
23729 :)</p>
23730
23731 <p>On the #gnash IRC channel on irc.freenode.net, I was just tipped
23732 about what appear to be a great code coverage tool capable of
23733 generating code coverage stats without any changes to the source code.
23734 It is called
23735 <a href="http://simonkagstrom.github.com/kcov/index.html">kcov</a>,
23736 and can be used using <tt>kcov &lt;directory&gt; &lt;binary&gt;</tt>.
23737 It is missing in Debian, but the git source built just fine in Squeeze
23738 after I installed libelf-dev, libdwarf-dev, pkg-config and
23739 libglib2.0-dev.  Failed to build in Lenny, but suspect that is
23740 solvable.  I hope kcov make it into Debian soon.</p>
23741
23742 <p>Finally found time to wrap up the release notes for <a
23743 href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2010/10/msg00002.html">a
23744 new alpha release of Debian Edu</a>, and just published the second
23745 alpha test release of the Squeeze based Debian Edu /
23746 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a>
23747 release.  Give it a try if you need a complete linux solution for your
23748 school, including central infrastructure server, workstations, thin
23749 client servers and diskless workstations.  A nice touch added
23750 yesterday is RDP support on the thin client servers, for windows
23751 clients to get a Linux desktop on request.</p>
23752
23753       </div>
23754       <div class="tags">
23755
23756
23757         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>.
23758
23759
23760       </div>
23761     </div>
23762     <div class="padding"></div>
23763
23764     <div class="entry">
23765       <div class="title">
23766         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Pledge_for_funding_to_the_Gnash_project_to_get_AVM2_support.html">Pledge for funding to the Gnash project to get AVM2 support</a>
23767       </div>
23768       <div class="date">
23769         19th October 2010
23770       </div>
23771       <div class="body">
23772         <p><a href="http://www.getgnash.org/">The Gnash project</a> is the
23773 most promising solution for a Free Software Flash implementation. It
23774 has done great so far, but there is still far to go, and recently its
23775 funding has dried up.  I believe AVM2 support in Gnash is vital to the
23776 continued progress of the project, as more and more sites show up with
23777 AVM2 flash files.</p>
23778
23779 <p>To try to get funding for developing such support, I have started
23780 <a href="http://www.pledgebank.com/gnash-avm2">a pledge</a> with the
23781 following text:</P>
23782
23783 <p><blockquote>
23784
23785   <p>"I will pay 100$ to the Gnash project to develop AVM2 support but
23786   only if 10 other people will do the same."</p>
23787
23788   <p>- Petter Reinholdtsen, free software developer</p>
23789
23790   <p>Deadline to sign up by: 24th December 2010</p>
23791
23792   <p>The Gnash project need to get support for the new Flash file
23793   format AVM2 to work with a lot of sites using Flash on the
23794   web. Gnash already work with a lot of Flash sites using the old AVM1
23795   format, but more and more sites are using the AVM2 format these
23796   days. The project web page is available from
23797   http://www.getgnash.org/ . Gnash is a free software implementation
23798   of Adobe Flash, allowing those of us that do not accept the terms of
23799   the Adobe Flash license to get access to Flash sites.</p>
23800
23801   <p>The project need funding to get developers to put aside enough
23802   time to develop the AVM2 support, and this pledge is my way to try
23803   to get this to happen.</p>
23804
23805   <p>The project accept donations via the OpenMediaNow foundation,
23806   <a href="http://www.openmedianow.org/?q=node/32">http://www.openmedianow.org/?q=node/32</a> .</p>
23807
23808 </blockquote></p>
23809
23810 <p>I hope you will support this effort too.  I hope more than 10
23811 people will participate to make this happen.  The more money the
23812 project gets, the more features it can develop using these funds.
23813 :)</p>
23814
23815       </div>
23816       <div class="tags">
23817
23818
23819         Tags: <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/nuug">nuug</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>.
23820
23821
23822       </div>
23823     </div>
23824     <div class="padding"></div>
23825
23826     <div class="entry">
23827       <div class="title">
23828         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_version_of_a_Perl_library_to_control_the_Spykee_robot.html">First version of a Perl library to control the Spykee robot</a>
23829       </div>
23830       <div class="date">
23831          9th October 2010
23832       </div>
23833       <div class="body">
23834         <p>This summer I got the chance to buy cheap Spykee robots, and since
23835 then I have worked on getting Linux software in place to control them.
23836 The firmware for the robot is available from the producer, and using
23837 that source it was trivial to figure out the protocol specification.
23838 I've started on a perl library to control it, and made some demo
23839 programs using this perl library to allow one to control the
23840 robots.</p>
23841
23842 <p>The library is quite functional already, and capable of controlling
23843 the driving, fetching video, uploading MP3s and play them.  There are
23844 a few less important features too.</p>
23845
23846 <p>Since a few weeks ago, I ran out of time to spend on this project,
23847 but I never got around to releasing the current source.  I decided
23848 today that it was time to do something about it, and uploaded the
23849 source to my Debian package store at people.skolelinux.org.</p>
23850
23851 <p>Because it was simpler for me, I made a Debian package and
23852 published the source and deb.  If you got a spykee robot, grab the
23853 source or binary package:</p>
23854
23855 <p><ul>
23856 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian/packages/lenny/libspykee-perl_0.0.20101009-1.tar.gz">libspykee-perl_0.0.20101009-1.tar.gz</a></li>
23857 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian/packages/lenny/libspykee-perl_0.0.20101009-1.dsc">libspykee-perl_0.0.20101009-1.dsc</a></li>
23858 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian/packages/lenny/libspykee-perl_0.0.20101009-1_all.deb">libspykee-perl_0.0.20101009-1_all.deb</a></li>
23859 </ul></p>
23860
23861 <p>If you are interested in helping out with developing this library,
23862 please let me know.</p>
23863
23864       </div>
23865       <div class="tags">
23866
23867
23868         Tags: <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/robot">robot</a>.
23869
23870
23871       </div>
23872     </div>
23873     <div class="padding"></div>
23874
23875     <div class="entry">
23876       <div class="title">
23877         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Links_for_2010_10_03.html">Links for 2010-10-03</a>
23878       </div>
23879       <div class="date">
23880          3rd October 2010
23881       </div>
23882       <div class="body">
23883         <p><ul>
23884
23885 <li><a href="http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2010/09/there-is-no-plan-b-why-the-ipv4-to-ipv6-transition-will-be-ugly.ars">There
23886 is no Plan B: why the IPv4-to-IPv6 transition will be ugly</a></li>
23887
23888 <li>Scanner looking under clothes
23889 <a href="http://www.dagbladet.no/2010/10/03/nyheter/utenriks/reise/overvakingskamera/flyplasser/13667192/">has
23890 already been misused at Heathrow</a>.</li>
23891
23892 <li><a href="http://wiki.softwarelivre.org/Landell">Landell
23893 Webcasting</a> - interesting alternative for
23894 <ahref="http://dvswitch.alioth.debian.org/wiki/">DVSwitch</a> with
23895 simple setup.
23896
23897 </ul></p>
23898
23899       </div>
23900       <div class="tags">
23901
23902
23903         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lenker">lenker</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
23904
23905
23906       </div>
23907     </div>
23908     <div class="padding"></div>
23909
23910     <div class="entry">
23911       <div class="title">
23912         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Terms_of_use_for_video_produced_by_a_Canon_IXUS_130_digital_camera.html">Terms of use for video produced by a Canon IXUS 130 digital camera</a>
23913       </div>
23914       <div class="date">
23915          9th September 2010
23916       </div>
23917       <div class="body">
23918         <p>A few days ago I had the mixed pleasure of bying a new digital
23919 camera, a Canon IXUS 130.  It was instructive and very disturbing to
23920 be able to verify that also this camera producer have the nerve to
23921 specify how I can or can not use the videos produced with the camera.
23922 Even thought I was aware of the issue, the options with new cameras
23923 are limited and I ended up bying the camera anyway.  What is the
23924 problem, you might ask?  It is software patents, MPEG-4, H.264 and the
23925 MPEG-LA that is the problem, and our right to record our experiences
23926 without asking for permissions that is at risk.
23927
23928 <p>On page 27 of the Danish instruction manual, this section is
23929 written:</p>
23930
23931 <blockquote>
23932 <p>This product is licensed under AT&T patents for the MPEG-4 standard
23933 and may be used for encoding MPEG-4 compliant video and/or decoding
23934 MPEG-4 compliant video that was encoded only (1) for a personal and
23935 non-commercial purpose or (2) by a video provider licensed under the
23936 AT&T patents to provide MPEG-4 compliant video.</p>
23937
23938 <p>No license is granted or implied for any other use for MPEG-4
23939 standard.</p>
23940 </blockquote>
23941
23942 <p>In short, the camera producer have chosen to use technology
23943 (MPEG-4/H.264) that is only provided if I used it for personal and
23944 non-commercial purposes, or ask for permission from the organisations
23945 holding the knowledge monopoly (patent) for technology used.</p>
23946
23947 <p>This issue has been brewing for a while, and I recommend you to
23948 read
23949 "<a href="http://www.osnews.com/story/23236/Why_Our_Civilization_s_Video_Art_and_Culture_is_Threatened_by_the_MPEG-LA">Why
23950 Our Civilization's Video Art and Culture is Threatened by the
23951 MPEG-LA</a>" by Eugenia Loli-Queru and
23952 "<a href="http://webmink.com/2010/09/03/h-264-and-foss/">H.264 Is Not
23953 The Sort Of Free That Matters</a>" by Simon Phipps to learn more about
23954 the issue.  The solution is to support the
23955 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">free and
23956 open standards</a> for video, like <a href="http://www.theora.org/">Ogg
23957 Theora</a>, and avoid MPEG-4 and H.264 if you can.</p>
23958
23959       </div>
23960       <div class="tags">
23961
23962
23963         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fildeling">fildeling</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</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>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</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>.
23964
23965
23966       </div>
23967     </div>
23968     <div class="padding"></div>
23969
23970     <div class="entry">
23971       <div class="title">
23972         <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>
23973       </div>
23974       <div class="date">
23975          4th September 2010
23976       </div>
23977       <div class="body">
23978         <p>In the <a href="http://popcon.debian.org/unknown/by_vote">Debian
23979 popularity-contest numbers</a>, the adobe-flashplugin package the
23980 second most popular used package that is missing in Debian.  The sixth
23981 most popular is flashplayer-mozilla.  This is a clear indication that
23982 working flash is important for Debian users.  Around 10 percent of the
23983 users submitting data to popcon.debian.org have this package
23984 installed.</p>
23985
23986 <p>In the report written by Lars Risan in August 2008
23987 («<a href="http://wiki.skolelinux.no/Dokumentasjon/Rapporter?action=AttachFile&do=view&target=Skolelinux_i_bruk_rapport_1.0.pdf">Skolelinux
23988 i bruk – Rapport for Hurum kommune, Universitetet i Agder og
23989 stiftelsen SLX Debian Labs</a>»), one of the most important problems
23990 schools experienced with <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
23991 Edu/Skolelinux</a> was the lack of working Flash.  A lot of educational
23992 web sites require Flash to work, and lacking working Flash support in
23993 the web browser and the problems with installing it was perceived as a
23994 good reason to stay with Windows.</p>
23995
23996 <p>I once saw a funny and sad comment in a web forum, where Linux was
23997 said to be the retarded cousin that did not really understand
23998 everything you told him but could work fairly well.  This was a
23999 comment regarding the problems Linux have with proprietary formats and
24000 non-standard web pages, and is sad because it exposes a fairly common
24001 understanding of whose fault it is if web pages that only work in for
24002 example Internet Explorer 6 fail to work on Firefox, and funny because
24003 it explain very well how annoying it is for users when Linux
24004 distributions do not work with the documents they receive or the web
24005 pages they want to visit.</p>
24006
24007 <p>This is part of the reason why I believe it is important for Debian
24008 and Debian Edu to have a well working Flash implementation in the
24009 distribution, to get at least popular sites as Youtube and Google
24010 Video to working out of the box.  For Squeeze, Debian have the chance
24011 to include the latest version of Gnash that will make this happen, as
24012 the new release 0.8.8 was published a few weeks ago and is resting in
24013 unstable.  The new version work with more sites that version 0.8.7.
24014 The Gnash maintainers have asked for a freeze exception, but the
24015 release team have not had time to reply to it yet.  I hope they agree
24016 with me that Flash is important for the Debian desktop users, and thus
24017 accept the new package into Squeeze.</p>
24018
24019       </div>
24020       <div class="tags">
24021
24022
24023         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>.
24024
24025
24026       </div>
24027     </div>
24028     <div class="padding"></div>
24029
24030     <div class="entry">
24031       <div class="title">
24032         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/My_first_perl_GUI_application___controlling_a_Spykee_robot.html">My first perl GUI application - controlling a Spykee robot</a>
24033       </div>
24034       <div class="date">
24035          1st September 2010
24036       </div>
24037       <div class="body">
24038         <p>This evening I made my first Perl GUI application.  The last few
24039 days I have worked on a Perl module for controlling my recently
24040 aquired Spykee robots, and the module is now getting complete enought
24041 that it is possible to use it to control the robot driving at least.
24042 It was now time to figure out how to use it to create some GUI to
24043 allow me to drive the robot around.  I picked PerlQt as I have had
24044 positive experiences with the Qt API before, and spent a few minutes
24045 browsing the web for examples.  Using Qt Designer seemed like a short
24046 cut, so I ended up writing the perl GUI using Qt Designer and
24047 compiling it into a perl program using the puic program from
24048 libqt-perl.  Nothing fancy yet, but it got buttons to connect and
24049 drive around.</p>
24050
24051 <p>The perl module I have written provide a object oriented API for
24052 controlling the robot.  Here is an small example on how to use it:</p>
24053
24054 <p><pre>
24055 use Spykee;
24056 Spykee::discover(sub {$robot{$_[0]} = $_[1]});
24057 my $host = (keys %robot)[0];
24058 my $spykee = Spykee->new();
24059 $spykee->contact($host, "admin", "admin");
24060 $spykee->left();
24061 sleep 2;
24062 $spykee->right();
24063 sleep 2;
24064 $spykee->forward();
24065 sleep 2;
24066 $spykee->back();
24067 sleep 2;
24068 $spykee->stop();
24069 </pre></p>
24070
24071 <p>Thanks to the release of the source of the robot firmware, I could
24072 peek into the implementation at the other end to figure out how to
24073 implement the protocol used by the robot.  I've implemented several of
24074 the commands the robot understand, but is still missing the camera
24075 support to make it possible to control the robot from remote.  First I
24076 want to implement support for uploading new firmware and configuring
24077 the wireless network, to make it possible to bootstrap a Spykee robot
24078 without the producers Windows and MacOSX software (I only have Linux,
24079 so I had to ask a friend to come over to get the robot testing
24080 going. :).</p>
24081
24082 <p>Will release the source to the public soon, but need to figure out
24083 where to make it available first.  I will add a link to
24084 <a href="http://wiki.nuug.no/grupper/robot/">the NUUG wiki</a> for
24085 those that want to check back later to find it.</p>
24086
24087       </div>
24088       <div class="tags">
24089
24090
24091         Tags: <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/robot">robot</a>.
24092
24093
24094       </div>
24095     </div>
24096     <div class="padding"></div>
24097
24098     <div class="entry">
24099       <div class="title">
24100         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_hard_link_handling_with_sshfs.html">Broken hard link handling with sshfs</a>
24101       </div>
24102       <div class="date">
24103         30th August 2010
24104       </div>
24105       <div class="body">
24106         <p>Just got an email from Tobias Gruetzmacher as a followup on my
24107 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_umask_handling_with_sshfs.html">previous
24108 post about sshfs</a>.  He reported another problem with sshfs.  It
24109 fail to handle hard links properly.  A simple way to spot this is to
24110 look at the . and .. entries in the directory tree.  These should have
24111 a link count >1, but on sshfs the count is 1.  I just tested to see
24112 what happen when trying to hardlink, and this fail as well:</p>
24113
24114 <pre>
24115 % ln foo bar
24116 ln: creating hard link `bar' => `foo': Function not implemented
24117 %
24118 </pre>
24119
24120 <p>I have not yet found time to implement a test for this in my file
24121 system test code, but believe having working hard links is useful to
24122 avoid surprised unix programs.  Not as useful as working file locking
24123 and symlinks, which are required to get a working desktop, but useful
24124 nevertheless. :)</p>
24125
24126 <p>The latest version of the file system test code is available via
24127 git from
24128 <a href="http://github.com/gebi/fs-test">http://github.com/gebi/fs-test</a></p>
24129
24130       </div>
24131       <div class="tags">
24132
24133
24134         Tags: <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>.
24135
24136
24137       </div>
24138     </div>
24139     <div class="padding"></div>
24140
24141     <div class="entry">
24142       <div class="title">
24143         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_umask_handling_with_sshfs.html">Broken umask handling with sshfs</a>
24144       </div>
24145       <div class="date">
24146         26th August 2010
24147       </div>
24148       <div class="body">
24149         <p>My file system sematics program
24150 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_if_a_file_system_can_be_used_for_home_directories___.html">presented
24151 a few days ago</a> is very useful to verify that a file system can
24152 work as a unix home directory,and today I had to extend it a bit.  I'm
24153 looking into alternatives for home directory access here at the
24154 University of Oslo, and one of the options is sshfs.  My friend
24155 Finn-Arne mentioned a while back that they had used sshfs with Debian
24156 Edu, but stopped because of problems.  I asked today what the problems
24157 where, and he mentioned that sshfs failed to handle umask properly.
24158 Trying to detect the problem I wrote this addition to my fs testing
24159 script:</p>
24160
24161 <pre>
24162 mode_t touch_get_mode(const char *name, mode_t mode) {
24163   mode_t retval = 0;
24164   int fd = open(name, O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_LARGEFILE, mode);
24165   if (-1 != fd) {
24166     unlink(name);
24167     struct stat statbuf;
24168     if (-1 != fstat(fd, &statbuf)) {
24169       retval = statbuf.st_mode & 0x1ff;
24170     }
24171     close(fd);
24172   }
24173   return retval;
24174 }
24175
24176 /* Try to detect problem discovered using sshfs */
24177 int test_umask(void) {
24178   printf("info: testing umask effect on file creation\n");
24179
24180   mode_t orig_umask = umask(000);
24181   mode_t newmode;
24182   if (0666 != (newmode = touch_get_mode("foobar", 0666))) {
24183     printf("  error: Wrong file mode %o when creating using mode 666 and umask 000\n",
24184            newmode);
24185   }
24186   umask(007);
24187   if (0660 != (newmode = touch_get_mode("foobar", 0666))) {
24188     printf("  error: Wrong file mode %o when creating using mode 666 and umask 007\n",
24189            newmode);
24190   }
24191
24192   umask (orig_umask);
24193   return 0;
24194 }
24195
24196 int main(int argc, char **argv) {
24197   [...]
24198   test_umask();
24199   return 0;
24200 }
24201 </pre>
24202
24203 <p>Sure enough.  On NFS to a netapp, I get this result:</p>
24204
24205 <pre>
24206 Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
24207 info: testing symlink creation
24208 info: testing subdirectory creation
24209 info: testing fcntl locking
24210   Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
24211   Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
24212   Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824
24213   Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
24214   Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
24215   Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824
24216 info: testing umask effect on file creation
24217 </pre>
24218
24219 <p>When mounting the same directory using sshfs, I get this
24220 result:</p>
24221
24222 <pre>
24223 Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
24224 info: testing symlink creation
24225 info: testing subdirectory creation
24226 info: testing fcntl locking
24227   Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
24228   Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
24229   Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824
24230   Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
24231   Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
24232   Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824
24233 info: testing umask effect on file creation
24234   error: Wrong file mode 644 when creating using mode 666 and umask 000
24235   error: Wrong file mode 640 when creating using mode 666 and umask 007
24236 </pre>
24237
24238 <p>So, I can conclude that sshfs is better than smb to a Netapp or a
24239 Windows server, but not good enough to be used as a home
24240 directory.</p>
24241
24242 <p>Update 2010-08-26: Reported the issue in
24243 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/594498">BTS report #594498</a></p>
24244
24245 <p>Update 2010-08-27: Michael Gebetsroither report that he found the
24246 script so useful that he created a GIT repository and stored it in
24247 <a href="http://github.com/gebi/fs-test">http://github.com/gebi/fs-test</a>.</p>
24248
24249       </div>
24250       <div class="tags">
24251
24252
24253         Tags: <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>.
24254
24255
24256       </div>
24257     </div>
24258     <div class="padding"></div>
24259
24260     <div class="entry">
24261       <div class="title">
24262         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Rob_Weir__How_to_Crush_Dissent.html">Rob Weir: How to Crush Dissent</a>
24263       </div>
24264       <div class="date">
24265         15th August 2010
24266       </div>
24267       <div class="body">
24268         <p>I found the notes from Rob Weir on
24269 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/robweir/antic-atom/~3/VGb23-kta8c/how-to-crush-dissent.html">how
24270 to crush dissent</a> matching my own thoughts on the matter quite
24271 well.  Highly recommended for those wondering which road our society
24272 should go down.  In my view we have been heading the wrong way for a
24273 long time.</p>
24274
24275       </div>
24276       <div class="tags">
24277
24278
24279         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lenker">lenker</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</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>.
24280
24281
24282       </div>
24283     </div>
24284     <div class="padding"></div>
24285
24286     <div class="entry">
24287       <div class="title">
24288         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/No_hardcoded_config_on_Debian_Edu_clients.html">No hardcoded config on Debian Edu clients</a>
24289       </div>
24290       <div class="date">
24291          9th August 2010
24292       </div>
24293       <div class="body">
24294         <p>As reported earlier, the last few days I have looked at how Debian
24295 Edu clients are configured, and tried to get rid of all hardcoded
24296 configuration settings on the clients.  I believe the work to be
24297 mostly done, and the clients seem to work just fine with dynamically
24298 generated configuration.</p>
24299
24300 <p>What is the point, you might ask?  The point is to allow a Debian
24301 Edu desktop to integrate into an existing network infrastructure
24302 without any manual configuration.</p>
24303
24304 <p>This is what happens when installing a Debian Edu client here at
24305 the University of Oslo using PXE.  With the PXE installation, I am
24306 asked for language (Norwegian Bokmål), locality (Norway) and keyboard
24307 layout (no-latin1), Debian Edu profile (Roaming Workstation), if I
24308 accept to reformat the hard drive (yes), if I want to submit info to
24309 popcon.debian.org (no) and root password (secret).  After answering
24310 these questions, the installer goes ahead and does its thing, and
24311 after around 50 minutes it is done.  I press enter to finish the
24312 installation, and the machine reboots into KDE.  When the machine is
24313 ready and kdm asks for login information, I enter my university
24314 username and password, am told by kdm that a local home directory has
24315 been created and that I must log in again, and finally log in with the
24316 same username and password to the KDE 4.4 desktop.  At no point during
24317 this process did it ask for university specific settings, and all the
24318 required configuration was dynamically detected using information
24319 fetched via DHCP and DNS.  The roaming workstation is now ready for
24320 use.</p>
24321
24322 <p>How was this done, you might wonder?  First of all, here is the
24323 list of things that need to be configured on the client to get it
24324 working properly out of the box:</p>
24325
24326 <ul>
24327 <li>IP address/netmask and DNS server.</li>
24328 <li>Web proxy URL.</li>
24329 <li>LDAP server for NSS directory information (user, group, etc).</li>
24330 <li>Kerberos server for PAM password checking.</li>
24331 <li>SMB mount point to access the network home directory. (*)</li>
24332 <li>Central syslog server to send syslog messages to. (*)</li>
24333 <li>Sitesummary collector URL to submit info to central server. (*)</li>
24334 </ul>
24335
24336 <p>(Hm, did I forget anything?  Let me knew if I did.)</p>
24337
24338 <p>The points marked (*) are not required to be able to use the
24339 machine, but needed to provide central storage and allowing system
24340 administrators to track their machines.  Since yesterday, everything
24341 but the sitesummary collector URL is dynamically discovered at boot
24342 and installation time in the svn version of Debian Edu.</p>
24343
24344 <p>The IP and DNS setup is fetched during boot using DHCP as usual.
24345 When a DHCP update arrives, the proxy setup is updated by looking for
24346 http://wpat/wpad.dat and using the content of this WPAD file to
24347 configure the http and ftp proxy in /etc/environment and
24348 /etc/apt/apt.conf.  I decided to update the proxy setup using a DHCP
24349 hook to ensure that the client stops using the Debian Edu proxy when
24350 it is moved outside the Debian Edu network, and instead uses any local
24351 proxy present on the new network when it moves around.</p>
24352
24353 <p>The DNS names of the LDAP, Kerberos and syslog server and related
24354 configuration are generated using DNS information at boot.  First the
24355 installer looks for a host named ldap in the current DNS domain.  If
24356 not found, it looks for _ldap._tcp SRV records in DNS instead.  If an
24357 LDAP server is found, its root DSE entry is requested and the
24358 attributes namingContexts and defaultNamingContext are used to
24359 determine which LDAP base to use for NSS.  If there are several
24360 namingContexts attibutes and the defaultNamingContext is present, that
24361 LDAP subtree is used as the base.  If defaultNamingContext is missing,
24362 the subtrees listed as namingContexts are searched in sequence for any
24363 object with class posixAccount or posixGroup, and the first one with
24364 such an object is used as the LDAP base.  For Kerberos, a similar
24365 search is done by first looking for a host named kerberos, and then
24366 for the _kerberos._tcp SRV record.  I've been unable to find a way to
24367 look up the Kerberos realm, so for this the upper case string of the
24368 current DNS domain is used.</p>
24369
24370 <p>For the syslog server, the hosts syslog and loghost are searched
24371 for, and the _syslog._udp SRV record is consulted if no such host is
24372 found.  This algorithm works for both Debian Edu and the University of
24373 Oslo.  A similar strategy would work for locating the sitesummary
24374 server, but have not been implemented yet.  I decided to fetch and
24375 save these settings during installation, to make sure moving to a
24376 different network does not change the set of users being allowed to
24377 log in nor the passwords required to log in.  Usernames and passwords
24378 will be cached by sssd when the user logs in on the Debian Edu
24379 network, and will not change as the laptop move around.  For a
24380 non-roaming machine, there is no caching, but given that it is
24381 supposed to stay in place it should not matter much.  Perhaps we
24382 should switch those to use sssd too?</p>
24383
24384 <p>The user's SMB mount point for the network home directory is
24385 located when the user logs in for the first time.  The LDAP server is
24386 consulted to look for the user's LDAP object and the sambaHomePath
24387 attribute is used if found.  If it isn't found, the home directory
24388 path fetched from NSS is used instead.  Assuming the path is of the
24389 form /site/server/directory/username, the second part is looked up in
24390 DNS and used to generate a SMB URL of the form
24391 smb://server.domain/username.  This algorithm works for both Debian
24392 edu and the University of Oslo.  Perhaps there are better attributes
24393 to use or a better algorithm that works for more sites, but this will
24394 do for now. :)</p>
24395
24396 <p>This work should make it easier to integrate the Debian Edu clients
24397 into any LDAP/Kerberos infrastructure, and make the current setup even
24398 more flexible than before.  I suspect it will also work for thin
24399 client servers, allowing one to easily set up LTSP and hook it into a
24400 existing network infrastructure, but I have not had time to test this
24401 yet.</p>
24402
24403 <p>If you want to help out with implementing these things for Debian
24404 Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
24405
24406 <p>Update 2010-08-09: Simon Farnsworth gave me a heads-up on how to
24407 detect Kerberos realm from DNS, by looking for _kerberos TXT entries
24408 before falling back to the upper case DNS domain name.  Will have to
24409 implement it for Debian Edu. :)</p>
24410
24411       </div>
24412       <div class="tags">
24413
24414
24415         Tags: <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>.
24416
24417
24418       </div>
24419     </div>
24420     <div class="padding"></div>
24421
24422     <div class="entry">
24423       <div class="title">
24424         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_if_a_file_system_can_be_used_for_home_directories___.html">Testing if a file system can be used for home directories...</a>
24425       </div>
24426       <div class="date">
24427          8th August 2010
24428       </div>
24429       <div class="body">
24430         <p>A few years ago, I was involved in a project planning to use
24431 Windows file servers as home directory servers for Debian
24432 Edu/Skolelinux machines.  This was thought to be no problem, as the
24433 access would be through the SMB network file system protocol, and we
24434 knew other sites used SMB with unix and samba as the file server to
24435 mount home directories without any problems.  But, after months of
24436 struggling, we had to conclude that our goal was impossible.</p>
24437
24438 <p>The reason is simply that while SMB can be used for home
24439 directories when the file server is Samba running on Unix, this only
24440 work because of Samba have some extensions and the fact that the
24441 underlying file system is a unix file system.  When using a Windows
24442 file server, the underlying file system do not have POSIX semantics,
24443 and several programs will fail if the users home directory where they
24444 want to store their configuration lack POSIX semantics.</p>
24445
24446 <p>As part of this work, I wrote a small C program I want to share
24447 with you all, to replicate a few of the problematic applications (like
24448 OpenOffice.org and GCompris) and see if the file system was working as
24449 it should.  If you find yourself in spooky file system land, it might
24450 help you find your way out again.  This is the fs-test.c source:</p>
24451
24452 <pre>
24453 /*
24454  * Some tests to check the file system sematics.  Used to verify that
24455  * CIFS from a windows server do not work properly as a linux home
24456  * directory.
24457  * License: GPL v2 or later
24458  *
24459  * needs libsqlite3-dev and build-essential installed
24460  * compile with: gcc -Wall -lsqlite3 -DTEST_SQLITE fs-test.c -o fs-test
24461 */
24462
24463 #define _FILE_OFFSET_BITS 64
24464 #define _LARGEFILE_SOURCE 1
24465 #define _LARGEFILE64_SOURCE 1
24466
24467 #define _GNU_SOURCE /* for asprintf() */
24468
24469 #include &lt;errno.h>
24470 #include &lt;fcntl.h>
24471 #include &lt;stdio.h>
24472 #include &lt;string.h>
24473 #include &lt;stdlib.h>
24474 #include &lt;sys/file.h>
24475 #include &lt;sys/stat.h>
24476 #include &lt;sys/types.h>
24477 #include &lt;unistd.h>
24478
24479 #ifdef TEST_SQLITE
24480 /*
24481  * Test sqlite open, as done by gcompris require the libsqlite3-dev
24482  * package and linking with -lsqlite3.  A more low level test is
24483  * below.
24484  * See also &lt;URL: http://www.sqlite.org./faq.html#q5 >.
24485  */
24486 #include &lt;sqlite3.h>
24487 #define CREATE_TABLE_USERS                                              \
24488   "CREATE TABLE users (user_id INT UNIQUE, login TEXT, lastname TEXT, firstname TEXT, birthdate TEXT, class_id INT ); "
24489 int test_sqlite_open(void) {
24490   char *zErrMsg;
24491   char *name = "testsqlite.db";
24492   sqlite3 *db=NULL;
24493   unlink(name);
24494   int rc = sqlite3_open(name, &db);
24495   if( rc ){
24496     printf("error: sqlite open of %s failed: %s\n", name, sqlite3_errmsg(db));
24497     sqlite3_close(db);
24498     return -1;
24499   }
24500
24501   /* create tables */
24502   rc = sqlite3_exec(db,CREATE_TABLE_USERS, NULL,  0, &zErrMsg);
24503   if( rc != SQLITE_OK ){
24504     printf("error: sqlite table create failed: %s\n", zErrMsg);
24505     sqlite3_close(db);
24506     return -1;
24507   }
24508   printf("info: sqlite worked\n");
24509   sqlite3_close(db);
24510   return 0;
24511 }
24512 #endif /* TEST_SQLITE */
24513
24514 /*
24515  * Demonstrate locking issue found in gcompris using sqlite3.  This
24516  * work with ext3, but not with cifs server on Windows 2003.  This is
24517  * done in the sqlite3 library.
24518  * See also
24519  * &lt;URL:http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2001-08/msg00854.html> and the
24520  * POSIX specification
24521  * &lt;URL:http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/fcntl.html>.
24522  */
24523 int test_gcompris_locking(void) {
24524   struct flock fl;
24525   char *name = "testsqlite.db";
24526   unlink(name);
24527   int fd = open(name, O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_LARGEFILE, 0644);
24528   printf("info: testing fcntl locking\n");
24529
24530   fl.l_whence = SEEK_SET;
24531   fl.l_pid    = getpid();
24532   printf("  Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824");
24533   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
24534   fl.l_len    = 1;
24535   fl.l_type   = F_RDLCK;
24536   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
24537
24538   printf("  Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826");
24539   fl.l_start  = 1073741826;
24540   fl.l_len    = 510;
24541   fl.l_type   = F_RDLCK;
24542   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
24543
24544   printf("  Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824");
24545   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
24546   fl.l_len    = 1;
24547   fl.l_type   = F_UNLCK;
24548   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
24549
24550   printf("  Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824");
24551   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
24552   fl.l_len    = 1;
24553   fl.l_type   = F_WRLCK;
24554   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
24555
24556   printf("  Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826");
24557   fl.l_start  = 1073741826;
24558   fl.l_len    = 510;
24559   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
24560
24561   printf("  Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824");
24562   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
24563   fl.l_len    = 2;
24564   fl.l_type   = F_UNLCK;
24565   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
24566
24567   close(fd);
24568   return 0;
24569 }
24570
24571 /*
24572  * Test if permissions of freshly created directories allow entries
24573  * below them.  This was a problem with OpenOffice.org and gcompris.
24574  * Mounting with option 'sync' seem to solve this problem while
24575  * slowing down file operations.
24576  */
24577 int test_subdirectory_creation(void) {
24578 #define LEVELS 5
24579   char *path = strdup("test");
24580   char *dirs[LEVELS];
24581   int level;
24582   printf("info: testing subdirectory creation\n");
24583   for (level = 0; level &lt; LEVELS; level++) {
24584     char *newpath = NULL;
24585     if (-1 == mkdir(path, 0777)) {
24586       printf("  error: Unable to create directory '%s': %s\n",
24587              path, strerror(errno));
24588       break;
24589     }
24590     asprintf(&newpath, "%s/%s", path, "test");
24591     free(path);
24592     path = newpath;
24593   }
24594   return 0;
24595 }
24596
24597 /*
24598  * Test if symlinks can be created.  This was a problem detected with
24599  * KDE.
24600  */
24601 int test_symlinks(void) {
24602   printf("info: testing symlink creation\n");
24603   unlink("symlink");
24604   if (-1 == symlink("file", "symlink"))
24605     printf("  error: Unable to create symlink\n");
24606   return 0;
24607 }
24608
24609 int main(int argc, char **argv) {
24610   printf("Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system\n");
24611   test_symlinks();
24612   test_subdirectory_creation();
24613 #ifdef TEST_SQLITE
24614   test_sqlite_open();
24615 #endif /* TEST_SQLITE */
24616   test_gcompris_locking();
24617   return 0;
24618 }
24619 </pre>
24620
24621 <p>When everything is working, it should print something like
24622 this:</p>
24623
24624 <pre>
24625 Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
24626 info: testing symlink creation
24627 info: testing subdirectory creation
24628 info: sqlite worked
24629 info: testing fcntl locking
24630   Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
24631   Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
24632   Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824
24633   Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
24634   Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
24635   Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824
24636 </pre>
24637
24638 <p>I do not remember the exact details of the problems we saw, but one
24639 of them was with locking, where if I remember correctly, POSIX allow a
24640 read-only lock to be upgraded to a read-write lock without unlocking
24641 the read-only lock (while Windows do not).  Another was a bug in the
24642 CIFS/SMB client implementation in the Linux kernel where directory
24643 meta information would be wrong for a fraction of a second, making
24644 OpenOffice.org fail to create its deep directory tree because it was
24645 not allowed to create files in its freshly created directory.</p>
24646
24647 <p>Anyway, here is a nice tool for your tool box, might you never need
24648 it. :)</p>
24649
24650 <p>Update 2010-08-27: Michael Gebetsroither report that he found the
24651 script so useful that he created a GIT repository and stored it in
24652 <a href="http://github.com/gebi/fs-test">http://github.com/gebi/fs-test</a>.</p>
24653
24654       </div>
24655       <div class="tags">
24656
24657
24658         Tags: <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>.
24659
24660
24661       </div>
24662     </div>
24663     <div class="padding"></div>
24664
24665     <div class="entry">
24666       <div class="title">
24667         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Autodetecting_Client_setup_for_roaming_workstations_in_Debian_Edu.html">Autodetecting Client setup for roaming workstations in Debian Edu</a>
24668       </div>
24669       <div class="date">
24670          7th August 2010
24671       </div>
24672       <div class="body">
24673         <p>A few days ago, I
24674 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_roaming_workstation___at_the_university_of_Oslo.html">tried
24675 to install</a> a Roaming workation profile from Debian Edu/Squeeze
24676 while on the university network here at the University of Oslo, and
24677 noticed how much had to change to get it operational using the
24678 university infrastructure.  It was fairly easy, but it occured to me
24679 that Debian Edu would improve a lot if I could get the client to
24680 connect without any changes at all, and thus let the client configure
24681 itself during installation and first boot to use the infrastructure
24682 around it.  Now I am a huge step further along that road.</p>
24683
24684 <p>With our current squeeze-test packages, I can select the roaming
24685 workstation profile and get a working laptop connecting to the
24686 university LDAP server for user and group and our active directory
24687 servers for Kerberos authentication.  All this without any
24688 configuration at all during installation.  My users home directory got
24689 a bookmark in the KDE menu to mount it via SMB, with the correct URL.
24690 In short, openldap and sssd is correctly configured.  In addition to
24691 this, the client look for http://wpad/wpad.dat to configure a web
24692 proxy, and when it fail to find it no proxy settings are stored in
24693 /etc/environment and /etc/apt/apt.conf.  Iceweasel and KDE is
24694 configured to look for the same wpad configuration and also do not use
24695 a proxy when at the university network.  If the machine is moved to a
24696 network with such wpad setup, it would automatically use it when DHCP
24697 gave it a IP address.</p>
24698
24699 <p>The LDAP server is located using DNS, by first looking for the DNS
24700 entry ldap.$domain.  If this do not exist, it look for the
24701 _ldap._tcp.$domain SRV records and use the first one as the LDAP
24702 server.  Next, it connects to the LDAP server and search all
24703 namingContexts entries for posixAccount or posixGroup objects, and
24704 pick the first one as the LDAP base.  For Kerberos, a similar
24705 algorithm is used to locate the LDAP server, and the realm is the
24706 uppercase version of $domain.</p>
24707
24708 <p>So, what is not working, you might ask.  SMB mounting my home
24709 directory do not work.  No idea why, but suspected the incorrect
24710 Kerberos settings in /etc/krb5.conf and /etc/samba/smb.conf might be
24711 the cause.  These are not properly configured during installation, and
24712 had to be hand-edited to get the correct Kerberos realm and server,
24713 but SMB mounting still do not work. :(</p>
24714
24715 <p>With this automatic configuration in place, I expect a Debian Edu
24716 roaming profile installation would be able to automatically detect and
24717 connect to any site using LDAP and Kerberos for NSS directory and PAM
24718 authentication.  It should also work out of the box in a Active
24719 Directory environment providing posixAccount and posixGroup objects
24720 with UID and GID values.</p>
24721
24722 <p>If you want to help out with implementing these things for Debian
24723 Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
24724
24725       </div>
24726       <div class="tags">
24727
24728
24729         Tags: <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>.
24730
24731
24732       </div>
24733     </div>
24734     <div class="padding"></div>
24735
24736     <div class="entry">
24737       <div class="title">
24738         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_roaming_workstation___at_the_university_of_Oslo.html">Debian Edu roaming workstation - at the university of Oslo</a>
24739       </div>
24740       <div class="date">
24741          3rd August 2010
24742       </div>
24743       <div class="body">
24744         <p>The new roaming workstation profile in Debian Edu/Squeeze is fairly
24745 similar to the laptop setup am I working on using Ubuntu for the
24746 University of Oslo, and just for the heck of it, I tested today how
24747 hard it would be to integrate that profile into the university
24748 infrastructure.  In this case, it is the university LDAP server,
24749 Active Directory Kerberos server and SMB mounting from the Netapp file
24750 servers.</p>
24751
24752 <p>I was pleasantly surprised that the only three files needed to be
24753 changed (/etc/sssd/sssd.conf, /etc/ldap.conf and
24754 /etc/mklocaluser.d/20-debian-edu-config) and one file had to be added
24755 (/usr/share/perl5/Debian/Edu_Local.pm), to get the client working.
24756 Most of the changes were to get the client to use the university LDAP
24757 for NSS and Kerberos server for PAM, but one was to change a hard
24758 coded DNS domain name in the mklocaluser hook from .intern to
24759 .uio.no.</p>
24760
24761 <p>This testing was so encouraging, that I went ahead and adjusted the
24762 Debian Edu scripts and setup in subversion to centralise the roaming
24763 workstation setup a bit more and avoid the hardcoded DNS domain name,
24764 so that when I test this tomorrow, I expect to get away with modifying
24765 only /etc/sssd/sssd.conf and /etc/ldap.conf to get it to use the
24766 university servers.</p>
24767
24768 <p>My goal is to get the clients to have no hardcoded settings and
24769 fetch all their initial setup during installation and first boot, to
24770 allow them to be inserted also into environments where the default
24771 setup in Debian Edu has been changed or as with the university, where
24772 the environment is different but provides the protocols Debian Edu
24773 uses.</p>
24774
24775       </div>
24776       <div class="tags">
24777
24778
24779         Tags: <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>.
24780
24781
24782       </div>
24783     </div>
24784     <div class="padding"></div>
24785
24786     <div class="entry">
24787       <div class="title">
24788         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Circular_package_dependencies_harms_apt_recovery.html">Circular package dependencies harms apt recovery</a>
24789       </div>
24790       <div class="date">
24791         27th July 2010
24792       </div>
24793       <div class="body">
24794         <p>I discovered this while doing
24795 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">automated
24796 testing of upgrades from Debian Lenny to Squeeze</a>.  A few packages
24797 in Debian still got circular dependencies, and it is often claimed
24798 that apt and aptitude should be able to handle this just fine, but
24799 some times these dependency loops causes apt to fail.</p>
24800
24801 <p>An example is from todays
24802 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing//test-20100727-lenny-squeeze-kde-aptitude.txt">upgrade
24803 of KDE using aptitude</a>.  In it, a bug in kdebase-workspace-data
24804 causes perl-modules to fail to upgrade.  The cause is simple.  If a
24805 package fail to unpack, then only part of packages with the circular
24806 dependency might end up being unpacked when unpacking aborts, and the
24807 ones already unpacked will fail to configure in the recovery phase
24808 because its dependencies are unavailable.</p>
24809
24810 <p>In this log, the problem manifest itself with this error:</p>
24811
24812 <blockquote><pre>
24813 dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of perl-modules:
24814  perl-modules depends on perl (>= 5.10.1-1); however:
24815   Version of perl on system is 5.10.0-19lenny2.
24816 dpkg: error processing perl-modules (--configure):
24817  dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
24818 </pre></blockquote>
24819
24820 <p>The perl/perl-modules circular dependency is already
24821 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/527917">reported as a bug</a>, and will
24822 hopefully be solved as soon as possible, but it is not the only one,
24823 and each one of these loops in the dependency tree can cause similar
24824 failures.  Of course, they only occur when there are bugs in other
24825 packages causing the unpacking to fail, but it is rather nasty when
24826 the failure of one package causes the problem to become worse because
24827 of dependency loops.</p>
24828
24829 <p>Thanks to
24830 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/06/msg00116.html">the
24831 tireless effort by Bill Allombert</a>, the number of circular
24832 dependencies
24833 <a href="http://debian.semistable.com/debgraph.out.html">left in Debian
24834 is dropping</a>, and perhaps it will reach zero one day. :)</p>
24835
24836 <p>Todays testing also exposed a bug in
24837 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/590605">update-notifier</a> and
24838 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/590604">different behaviour</a> between
24839 apt-get and aptitude, the latter possibly caused by some circular
24840 dependency.  Reported both to BTS to try to get someone to look at
24841 it.</p>
24842
24843       </div>
24844       <div class="tags">
24845
24846
24847         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>.
24848
24849
24850       </div>
24851     </div>
24852     <div class="padding"></div>
24853
24854     <div class="entry">
24855       <div class="title">
24856         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Debian_Edu_test_release__alpha0__based_on_Squeeze_is_released.html">First Debian Edu test release (alpha0) based on Squeeze is released</a>
24857       </div>
24858       <div class="date">
24859         27th July 2010
24860       </div>
24861       <div class="body">
24862         <p>I just posted this announcement culminating several months of work
24863 with the next Debian Edu release.  Not nearly done, but one major step
24864 completed.</p>
24865
24866 <blockquote>
24867 <p>This is the first test release based on Squeeze. The focus of this
24868 release is to test the user application selection. To have a look,
24869 install the standalone profile and let the developers know if the set
24870 of installed packages i.e. applications should be modified. If some
24871 user application is missing, or if there are some applications that no
24872 longer make sense to be included in Debian Edu, please let us know.
24873 Also, if a useful application is missing the translation for your
24874 language of choice, please let us know too.</p>
24875
24876 <p>In addition, feedback and help to polish the desktop (menus,
24877 artwork, starters, etc.) is appreciated. We would like to ship a nice
24878 and handy KDE4 desktop targeted for schools out of the box.</p>
24879
24880 <p>The other profiles should be installable, but there is a lot more
24881 work left to be done before they are ready, so do not expect to
24882 much.</p>
24883
24884 <p>Changes compared to the lenny based version</p>
24885
24886 <ul>
24887 <li>Everything from Debian Squeeze
24888 <ul>
24889   <li>Desktop environment KDE 4.4 => the new KDE desktop in
24890          combination with some new artwork
24891   <li>Web browser Iceweasel 3.5
24892   <li>OpenOffice.org 3.2
24893   <li>Educational toolbox GCompris 9.3
24894   <li>Music creator Rosegarden 10.04.2
24895   <li>Image editor Gimp 2.6.10
24896   <li>Virtual universe Celestia 1.6.0
24897   <li>Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.10.4
24898   <li>3D modeler Blender 2.49.2 (new application)
24899   <li>Video editor Kdenlive 0.7.7 (new application)
24900 </ul></li>
24901 <li>Now using Kerberos for password checking (migration not finished).
24902     Enabled for:
24903 <ul>
24904   <li>PAM
24905   <li>LDAP
24906   <li>IMAP
24907   <li>SMTP (sender verification)
24908 </ul>
24909 </li>
24910 <li>New experimental roaming workstation profile for laptops.</li>
24911 <li>Show welcome page to users when they first log in. The URL is
24912     fetched from LDAP.</li>
24913 <li>New LXDE desktop option, in addition to KDE (default) and Gnome.</li>
24914 <li>General cleanup (not finished)</li>
24915 </ul>
24916 <p>The following features are not working as they should</p>
24917
24918 <ul>
24919 <li>No web based administration tool for creating users and groups. The
24920     scripts ldap-createuser-krb and ldap-add-user-to-group can be used
24921     for testing.</li>
24922 <li>DVD installs are missing debian-installer images for the PXE boot,
24923     and do not set up the PXE menu on eth0 because of this. LTSP
24924     clients should still boot from eth1 on thin client servers.</li>
24925 <li>The restructured KDE menu is not implemented.</li>
24926 <li>The LDAP server setup need to be reviewed for security.</li>
24927 <li>The LDAP directory structure need to be reworked.</li>
24928 <li>Different sets of packages are installed when using the DVD and the
24929     netinst CD. More packages are installed using the netinst CD.</li>
24930 <li>The jackd package fail to install. This is believed to be caused by
24931     some ongoing transition, and hopefully should be solved soon. The
24932     jackd1 package can be installed manually for those that need it.</li>
24933 <li>Some packages lack translations. See
24934     http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Squeeze for updated status,
24935     and help out with translations.</li>
24936 </ul>
24937
24938 <p>To download this multiarch netinstall release you can use</p>
24939
24940 <ul>
24941 <li><a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso</a></li>
24942 <li><a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso</a></li>
24943 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso</li>
24944 </ul>
24945 <p>To download this multiarch dvd release you can use</p>
24946
24947 <ul>
24948 <li><a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso</a></li>
24949 <li><a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso</a></li>
24950 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso</li>
24951 </ul>
24952
24953 <p>There is no source DVD available yet. It will be prepared when we
24954 get closer to the final release.</p>
24955
24956 <p>The MD5SUM of these images are</p>
24957
24958 <ul>
24959 <li>3dbf45d59f42a53518b6e3c9ec3b5eb6 debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso</li>
24960 <li>22f2cbfce281d1c6e478be452638675d debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso</li>
24961 </ul>
24962
24963 <p>The SHA1SUM of these images are</p>
24964 <ul>
24965 <li>c53d1b69b40cf37cd27aefaf33f6f6a3821bedf0 debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso</li>
24966 <li>2ec29d7db676d59d32197b05c277ffe16348376c debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso</li>
24967 </ul>
24968 <p>How to report bugs:
24969 http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugsInBugzilla</p>
24970
24971 <p>Please direct replies to debian-edu@lists.debian.org</p>
24972 </blockquote>
24973
24974       </div>
24975       <div class="tags">
24976
24977
24978         Tags: <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>.
24979
24980
24981       </div>
24982     </div>
24983     <div class="padding"></div>
24984
24985     <div class="entry">
24986       <div class="title">
24987         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/One_step_closer_to_single_signon_in_Debian_Edu.html">One step closer to single signon in Debian Edu</a>
24988       </div>
24989       <div class="date">
24990         25th July 2010
24991       </div>
24992       <div class="body">
24993         <p>The last few months me and the other Debian Edu developers have
24994 been working hard to get the Debian/Squeeze based version of Debian
24995 Edu/Skolelinux into shape.  This future version will use Kerberos for
24996 authentication, and services are slowly migrated to single signon,
24997 getting rid of password questions one at the time.</p>
24998
24999 <p>It will also feature a roaming workstation profile with local home
25000 directory, for laptops that are only some times on the Skolelinux
25001 network, and for this profile a shortcut is created in Gnome and KDE
25002 to gain access to the users home directory on the file server.  This
25003 shortcut uses SMB at the moment, and yesterday I had time to test if
25004 SMB mounting had started working in KDE after we added the cifs-utils
25005 package.  I was pleasantly surprised how well it worked.</p>
25006
25007 <p>Thanks to the recent changes to our samba configuration to get it
25008 to use Kerberos for authentication, there were no question about user
25009 password when mounting the SMB volume.  A simple click on the shortcut
25010 in the KDE menu, and a window with the home directory popped
25011 up. :)</p>
25012
25013 <p>One step closer to a single signon solution out of the box in
25014 Debian Edu.  We already had PAM, LDAP, IMAP and SMTP in place, and now
25015 also Samba.  Next step is Cups and hopefully also NFS.</p>
25016
25017 <p>We had planned a alpha0 release of Debian Edu for today, but thanks
25018 to the autobuilder administrators for some architectures being slow to
25019 sign packages, we are still missing the fixed LTSP package we need for
25020 the release.  It was uploaded three days ago with urgency=high, and if
25021 it had entered testing yesterday we would have been able to test it in
25022 time for a alpha0 release today.  As the binaries for ia64 and powerpc
25023 still not uploaded to the Debian archive, we need to delay the alpha
25024 release another day.</p>
25025
25026 <p>If you want to help out with implementing Kerberos for Debian Edu,
25027 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
25028
25029       </div>
25030       <div class="tags">
25031
25032
25033         Tags: <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>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
25034
25035
25036       </div>
25037     </div>
25038     <div class="padding"></div>
25039
25040     <div class="entry">
25041       <div class="title">
25042         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/OpenStreetmap_one_step_closer_to_having_routing_on_its_front_page.html">OpenStreetmap one step closer to having routing on its front page</a>
25043       </div>
25044       <div class="date">
25045         18th July 2010
25046       </div>
25047       <div class="body">
25048         <p>Thanks to
25049 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Opengeodata/~3/wUTCzDZk3lc/project-of-the-week-which-way-home">todays
25050 opengeodata blog entry</a>, I just discovered that the
25051 OpenStreetmap.org site have gotten
25052 <a href="http://nroets.dev.openstreetmap.org/demo/index.html?layers=B000FTFTT">support
25053 for calculating routes</a>.  The support is still experimental and
25054 only available from the development server, until more experience is
25055 gathered on the user interface and any scalability issues.</p>
25056
25057 <p>Earlier, the routing I knew about using the OpenStreetmap.org data
25058 was provided by <a href="http://maps.cloudmade.com/">Cloudmade</a>,
25059 but having it on the main page is required to make everyone aware of
25060 the issue.  I've had people reject Openstreetmap.org as a viable
25061 alternative for them because the front page lacked routing support,
25062 and I hope their needs will be catered for when routing show up on the
25063 www.openstreetmap.org front page.</p>
25064
25065       </div>
25066       <div class="tags">
25067
25068
25069         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kart">kart</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
25070
25071
25072       </div>
25073     </div>
25074     <div class="padding"></div>
25075
25076     <div class="entry">
25077       <div class="title">
25078         <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>
25079       </div>
25080       <div class="date">
25081         17th July 2010
25082       </div>
25083       <div class="body">
25084         <p>This is a
25085 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">followup</a>
25086 on my
25087 <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
25088 work</a> on
25089 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">merging
25090 all</a> the computer related LDAP objects in Debian Edu.</p>
25091
25092 <p>As a step to try to see if it possible to merge the DNS and DHCP
25093 LDAP objects, I have had a look at how the packages pdns-backend-ldap
25094 and dhcp3-server-ldap in Debian use the LDAP server.  The two
25095 implementations are quite different in how they use LDAP.</p>
25096
25097 To get this information, I started slapd with debugging enabled and
25098 dumped the debug output to a file to get the LDAP searches performed
25099 on a Debian Edu main-server.  Here is a summary.
25100
25101 <p><strong>powerdns</strong></p>
25102
25103 <a href="http://www.linuxnetworks.de/doc/index.php/PowerDNS_LDAP_Backend">Clues
25104 on how to</a> set up PowerDNS to use a LDAP backend is available on
25105 the web.
25106
25107 <p>PowerDNS have two modes of operation using LDAP as its backend.
25108 One "strict" mode where the forward and reverse DNS lookups are done
25109 using the same LDAP objects, and a "tree" mode where the forward and
25110 reverse entries are in two different subtrees in LDAP with a structure
25111 based on the DNS names, as in tjener.intern and
25112 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa.</p>
25113
25114 <p>In tree mode, the server is set up to use a LDAP subtree as its
25115 base, and uses a "base" scoped search for the DNS name by adding
25116 "dc=tjener,dc=intern," to the base with a filter for
25117 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" for the forward entry and
25118 "dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa," with a filter for
25119 "(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)" for the reverse entry.  For
25120 forward entries, it is looking for attributes named dnsttl, arecord,
25121 nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord,
25122 txtrecord, rprecord, afsdbrecord, keyrecord, aaaarecord, locrecord,
25123 srvrecord, naptrrecord, kxrecord, certrecord, dsrecord, sshfprecord,
25124 ipseckeyrecord, rrsigrecord, nsecrecord, dnskeyrecord, dhcidrecord,
25125 spfrecord and modifytimestamp.  For reverse entries it is looking for
25126 the attributes dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord,
25127 ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord,
25128 locrecord, srvrecord, naptrrecord and modifytimestamp.  The equivalent
25129 ldapsearch commands could look like this:</p>
25130
25131 <blockquote><pre>
25132 ldapsearch -h ldap \
25133   -b dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
25134   -s base -x '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
25135   cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
25136   rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
25137   nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
25138   rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
25139
25140 ldapsearch -h ldap \
25141   -b dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
25142   -s base -x '(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)'
25143   dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord soarecord ptrrecord \
25144   hinforecord mxrecord txtrecord rprecord aaaarecord locrecord \
25145   srvrecord naptrrecord modifytimestamp
25146 </pre></blockquote>
25147
25148 <p>In Debian Edu/Lenny, the PowerDNS tree mode is used with
25149 ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no as the base, and these are two
25150 example LDAP objects used there.  In addition to these objects, the
25151 parent objects all th way up to ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
25152 also exist.</p>
25153
25154 <blockquote><pre>
25155 dn: dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
25156 objectclass: top
25157 objectclass: dnsdomain
25158 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
25159 dc: tjener
25160 arecord: 10.0.2.2
25161 associateddomain: tjener.intern
25162
25163 dn: dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
25164 objectclass: top
25165 objectclass: dnsdomain2
25166 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
25167 dc: 2
25168 ptrrecord: tjener.intern
25169 associateddomain: 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa
25170 </pre></blockquote>
25171
25172 <p>In strict mode, the server behaves differently.  When looking for
25173 forward DNS entries, it is doing a "subtree" scoped search with the
25174 same base as in the tree mode for a object with filter
25175 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" and requests the attributes dnsttl,
25176 arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord,
25177 mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord, locrecord, srvrecord,
25178 naptrrecord and modifytimestamp.  For reverse entires it also do a
25179 subtree scoped search but this time the filter is "(arecord=10.0.2.2)"
25180 and the requested attributes are associateddomain, dnsttl and
25181 modifytimestamp.  In short, in strict mode the objects with ptrrecord
25182 go away, and the arecord attribute in the forward object is used
25183 instead.</p>
25184
25185 <p>The forward and reverse searches can be simulated using ldapsearch
25186 like this:</p>
25187
25188 <blockquote><pre>
25189 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
25190   '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
25191   cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
25192   rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
25193   nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
25194   rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
25195
25196 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
25197   '(arecord=10.0.2.2)' associateddomain dnsttl modifytimestamp
25198 </pre></blockquote>
25199
25200 <p>In addition to the forward and reverse searches , there is also a
25201 search for SOA records, which behave similar to the forward and
25202 reverse lookups.</p>
25203
25204 <p>A thing to note with the PowerDNS behaviour is that it do not
25205 specify any objectclass names, and instead look for the attributes it
25206 need to generate a DNS reply.  This make it able to work with any
25207 objectclass that provide the needed attributes.</p>
25208
25209 <p>The attributes are normally provided in the cosine (RFC 1274) and
25210 dnsdomain2 schemas.  The latter is used for reverse entries like
25211 ptrrecord and recent DNS additions like aaaarecord and srvrecord.</p>
25212
25213 <p>In Debian Edu, we have created DNS objects using the object classes
25214 dcobject (for dc), dnsdomain or dnsdomain2 (structural, for the DNS
25215 attributes) and domainrelatedobject (for associatedDomain).  The use
25216 of structural object classes make it impossible to combine these
25217 classes with the object classes used by DHCP.</p>
25218
25219 <p>There are other schemas that could be used too, for example the
25220 dnszone structural object class used by Gosa and bind-sdb for the DNS
25221 attributes combined with the domainrelatedobject object class, but in
25222 this case some unused attributes would have to be included as well
25223 (zonename and relativedomainname).</p>
25224
25225 <p>My proposal for Debian Edu would be to switch PowerDNS to strict
25226 mode and not use any of the existing objectclasses (dnsdomain,
25227 dnsdomain2 and dnszone) when one want to combine the DNS information
25228 with DHCP information, and instead create a auxiliary object class
25229 defined something like this (using the attributes defined for
25230 dnsdomain and dnsdomain2 or dnszone):</p>
25231
25232 <blockquote><pre>
25233 objectclass ( some-oid NAME 'dnsDomainAux'
25234     SUP top
25235     AUXILIARY
25236     MAY ( ARecord $ MDRecord $ MXRecord $ NSRecord $ SOARecord $ CNAMERecord $
25237           DNSTTL $ DNSClass $ PTRRecord $ HINFORecord $ MINFORecord $
25238           TXTRecord $ SIGRecord $ KEYRecord $ AAAARecord $ LOCRecord $
25239           NXTRecord $ SRVRecord $ NAPTRRecord $ KXRecord $ CERTRecord $
25240           A6Record $ DNAMERecord
25241     ))
25242 </pre></blockquote>
25243
25244 <p>This will allow any object to become a DNS entry when combined with
25245 the domainrelatedobject object class, and allow any entity to include
25246 all the attributes PowerDNS wants.  I've sent an email to the PowerDNS
25247 developers asking for their view on this schema and if they are
25248 interested in providing such schema with PowerDNS, and I hope my
25249 message will be accepted into their mailing list soon.</p>
25250
25251 <p><strong>ISC dhcp</strong></p>
25252
25253 <p>The DHCP server searches for specific objectclass and requests all
25254 the object attributes, and then uses the attributes it want.  This
25255 make it harder to figure out exactly what attributes are used, but
25256 thanks to the working example in Debian Edu I can at least get an idea
25257 what is needed without having to read the source code.</p>
25258
25259 <p>In the DHCP server configuration, the LDAP base to use and the
25260 search filter to use to locate the correct dhcpServer entity is
25261 stored.  These are the relevant entries from
25262 /etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf:</p>
25263
25264 <blockquote><pre>
25265 ldap-base-dn "dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no";
25266 ldap-dhcp-server-cn "dhcp";
25267 </pre></blockquote>
25268
25269 <p>The DHCP server uses this information to nest all the DHCP
25270 configuration it need.  The cn "dhcp" is located using the given LDAP
25271 base and the filter "(&(objectClass=dhcpServer)(cn=dhcp))".  The
25272 search result is this entry:</p>
25273
25274 <blockquote><pre>
25275 dn: cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
25276 cn: dhcp
25277 objectClass: top
25278 objectClass: dhcpServer
25279 dhcpServiceDN: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
25280 </pre></blockquote>
25281
25282 <p>The content of the dhcpServiceDN attribute is next used to locate the
25283 subtree with DHCP configuration.  The DHCP configuration subtree base
25284 is located using a base scope search with base "cn=DHCP
25285 Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" and filter
25286 "(&(objectClass=dhcpService)(|(dhcpPrimaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)(dhcpSecondaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)))".
25287 The search result is this entry:</p>
25288
25289 <blockquote><pre>
25290 dn: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
25291 cn: DHCP Config
25292 objectClass: top
25293 objectClass: dhcpService
25294 objectClass: dhcpOptions
25295 dhcpPrimaryDN: cn=dhcp, dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
25296 dhcpStatements: ddns-update-style none
25297 dhcpStatements: authoritative
25298 dhcpOption: smtp-server code 69 = array of ip-address
25299 dhcpOption: www-server code 72 = array of ip-address
25300 dhcpOption: wpad-url code 252 = text
25301 </pre></blockquote>
25302
25303 <p>Next, the entire subtree is processed, one level at the time.  When
25304 all the DHCP configuration is loaded, it is ready to receive requests.
25305 The subtree in Debian Edu contain objects with object classes
25306 top/dhcpService/dhcpOptions, top/dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions,
25307 top/dhcpSubnet, top/dhcpGroup and top/dhcpHost.  These provide options
25308 and information about netmasks, dynamic range etc.  Leaving out the
25309 details here because it is not relevant for the focus of my
25310 investigation, which is to see if it is possible to merge dns and dhcp
25311 related computer objects.</p>
25312
25313 <p>When a DHCP request come in, LDAP is searched for the MAC address
25314 of the client (00:00:00:00:00:00 in this example), using a subtree
25315 scoped search with "cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" as
25316 the base and "(&(objectClass=dhcpHost)(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet
25317 00:00:00:00:00:00))" as the filter.  This is what a host object look
25318 like:</p>
25319
25320 <blockquote><pre>
25321 dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
25322 cn: hostname
25323 objectClass: top
25324 objectClass: dhcpHost
25325 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
25326 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname
25327 </pre></blockquote>
25328
25329 <p>There is less flexiblity in the way LDAP searches are done here.
25330 The object classes need to have fixed names, and the configuration
25331 need to be stored in a fairly specific LDAP structure.  On the
25332 positive side, the invidiual dhcpHost entires can be anywhere without
25333 the DN pointed to by the dhcpServer entries.  The latter should make
25334 it possible to group all host entries in a subtree next to the
25335 configuration entries, and this subtree can also be shared with the
25336 DNS server if the schema proposed above is combined with the dhcpHost
25337 structural object class.
25338
25339 <p><strong>Conclusion</strong></p>
25340
25341 <p>The PowerDNS implementation seem to be very flexible when it come
25342 to which LDAP schemas to use.  While its "tree" mode is rigid when it
25343 come to the the LDAP structure, the "strict" mode is very flexible,
25344 allowing DNS objects to be stored anywhere under the base cn specified
25345 in the configuration.</p>
25346
25347 <p>The DHCP implementation on the other hand is very inflexible, both
25348 regarding which LDAP schemas to use and which LDAP structure to use.
25349 I guess one could implement ones own schema, as long as the
25350 objectclasses and attributes have the names used, but this do not
25351 really help when the DHCP subtree need to have a fairly fixed
25352 structure.</p>
25353
25354 <p>Based on the observed behaviour, I suspect a LDAP structure like
25355 this might work for Debian Edu:</p>
25356
25357 <blockquote><pre>
25358 ou=services
25359   cn=machine-info (dhcpService) - dhcpServiceDN points here
25360     cn=dhcp (dhcpServer)
25361     cn=dhcp-internal (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
25362       cn=10.0.2.0 (dhcpSubnet)
25363         cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
25364     cn=dhcp-thinclients (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
25365       cn=192.168.0.0 (dhcpSubnet)
25366         cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
25367     ou=machines - PowerDNS base points here
25368       cn=hostname (dhcpHost/domainrelatedobject/dnsDomainAux)
25369 </pre></blockquote>
25370
25371 <P>This is not tested yet.  If the DHCP server require the dhcpHost
25372 entries to be in the dhcpGroup subtrees, the entries can be stored
25373 there instead of a common machines subtree, and the PowerDNS base
25374 would have to be moved one level up to the machine-info subtree.</p>
25375
25376 <p>The combined object under the machines subtree would look something
25377 like this:</p>
25378
25379 <blockquote><pre>
25380 dn: dc=hostname,ou=machines,cn=machine-info,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
25381 dc: hostname
25382 objectClass: top
25383 objectClass: dhcpHost
25384 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
25385 objectclass: dnsDomainAux
25386 associateddomain: hostname.intern
25387 arecord: 10.11.12.13
25388 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
25389 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname.intern
25390 </pre></blockquote>
25391
25392 </p>One could even add the LTSP configuration associated with a given
25393 machine, as long as the required attributes are available in a
25394 auxiliary object class.</p>
25395
25396       </div>
25397       <div class="tags">
25398
25399
25400         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>.
25401
25402
25403       </div>
25404     </div>
25405     <div class="padding"></div>
25406
25407     <div class="entry">
25408       <div class="title">
25409         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">Combining PowerDNS and ISC DHCP LDAP objects</a>
25410       </div>
25411       <div class="date">
25412         14th July 2010
25413       </div>
25414       <div class="body">
25415         <p>For a while now, I have wanted to find a way to change the DNS and
25416 DHCP services in Debian Edu to use the same LDAP objects for a given
25417 computer, to avoid the possibility of having a inconsistent state for
25418 a computer in LDAP (as in DHCP but no DNS entry or the other way
25419 around) and make it easier to add computers to LDAP.</p>
25420
25421 <p>I've looked at how powerdns and dhcpd is using LDAP, and using this
25422 information finally found a solution that seem to work.</p>
25423
25424 <p>The old setup required three LDAP objects for a given computer.
25425 One forward DNS entry, one reverse DNS entry and one DHCP entry.  If
25426 we switch powerdns to use its strict LDAP method (ldap-method=strict
25427 in pdns-debian-edu.conf), the forward and reverse DNS entries are
25428 merged into one while making it impossible to transfer the reverse map
25429 to a slave DNS server.</p>
25430
25431 <p>If we also replace the object class used to get the DNS related
25432 attributes to one allowing these attributes to be combined with the
25433 dhcphost object class, we can merge the DNS and DHCP entries into one.
25434 I've written such object class in the dnsdomainaux.schema file (need
25435 proper OIDs, but that is a minor issue), and tested the setup.  It
25436 seem to work.</p>
25437
25438 <p>With this test setup in place, we can get away with one LDAP object
25439 for both DNS and DHCP, and even the LTSP configuration I suggested in
25440 an earlier email.  The combined LDAP object will look something like
25441 this:</p>
25442
25443 <blockquote><pre>
25444   dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
25445   cn: hostname
25446   objectClass: dhcphost
25447   objectclass: domainrelatedobject
25448   objectclass: dnsdomainaux
25449   associateddomain: hostname.intern
25450   arecord: 10.11.12.13
25451   dhcphwaddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
25452   dhcpstatements: fixed-address hostname
25453   ldapconfigsound: Y
25454 </pre></blockquote>
25455
25456 <p>The DNS server uses the associateddomain and arecord entries, while
25457 the DHCP server uses the dhcphwaddress and dhcpstatements entries
25458 before asking DNS to resolve the fixed-adddress.  LTSP will use
25459 dhcphwaddress or associateddomain and the ldapconfig* attributes.</p>
25460
25461 <p>I am not yet sure if I can get the DHCP server to look for its
25462 dhcphost in a different location, to allow us to put the objects
25463 outside the "DHCP Config" subtree, but hope to figure out a way to do
25464 that.  If I can't figure out a way to do that, we can still get rid of
25465 the hosts subtree and move all its content into the DHCP Config tree
25466 (which probably should be renamed to be more related to the new
25467 content.  I suspect cn=dnsdhcp,ou=services or something like that
25468 might be a good place to put it.</p>
25469
25470 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
25471 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
25472
25473       </div>
25474       <div class="tags">
25475
25476
25477         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>.
25478
25479
25480       </div>
25481     </div>
25482     <div class="padding"></div>
25483
25484     <div class="entry">
25485       <div class="title">
25486         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_storing_LTSP_configuration_in_LDAP.html">Idea for storing LTSP configuration in LDAP</a>
25487       </div>
25488       <div class="date">
25489         11th July 2010
25490       </div>
25491       <div class="body">
25492         <p>Vagrant mentioned on IRC today that ltsp_config now support
25493 sourcing files from /usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ on the thin
25494 clients, and that this can be used to fetch configuration from LDAP if
25495 Debian Edu choose to store configuration there.</p>
25496
25497 <p>Armed with this information, I got inspired and wrote a test module
25498 to get configuration from LDAP.  The idea is to look up the MAC
25499 address of the client in LDAP, and look for attributes on the form
25500 ltspconfigsetting=value, and use this to export SETTING=value to the
25501 LTSP clients.</p>
25502
25503 <p>The goal is to be able to store the LTSP configuration attributes
25504 in a "computer" LDAP object used by both DNS and DHCP, and thus
25505 allowing us to store all information about a computer in one place.</p>
25506
25507 <p>This is a untested draft implementation, and I welcome feedback on
25508 this approach.  A real LDAP schema for the ltspClientAux objectclass
25509 need to be written.  Comments, suggestions, etc?</p>
25510
25511 <blockquote><pre>
25512 # Store in /opt/ltsp/$arch/usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ldap-config
25513 #
25514 # Fetch LTSP client settings from LDAP based on MAC address
25515 #
25516 # Uses ethernet address as stored in the dhcpHost objectclass using
25517 # the dhcpHWAddress attribute or ethernet address stored in the
25518 # ieee802Device objectclass with the macAddress attribute.
25519 #
25520 # This module is written to be schema agnostic, and only depend on the
25521 # existence of attribute names.
25522 #
25523 # The LTSP configuration variables are saved directly using a
25524 # ltspConfig prefix and uppercasing the rest of the attribute name.
25525 # To set the SERVER variable, set the ltspConfigServer attribute.
25526 #
25527 # Some LDAP schema should be created with all the relevant
25528 # configuration settings.  Something like this should work:
25529 #
25530 # objectclass ( 1.1.2.2 NAME 'ltspClientAux'
25531 #     SUP top
25532 #     AUXILIARY
25533 #     MAY ( ltspConfigServer $ ltsConfigSound $ ... )
25534
25535 LDAPSERVER=$(debian-edu-ldapserver)
25536 if [ "$LDAPSERVER" ] ; then
25537     LDAPBASE=$(debian-edu-ldapserver -b)
25538     for MAC in $(LANG=C ifconfig |grep -i hwaddr| awk '{print $5}'|sort -u) ; do
25539         filter="(|(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet $MAC)(macAddress=$MAC))"
25540         ldapsearch -h "$LDAPSERVER" -b "$LDAPBASE" -v -x "$filter" | \
25541             grep '^ltspConfig' | while read attr value ; do
25542             # Remove prefix and convert to upper case
25543             attr=$(echo $attr | sed 's/^ltspConfig//i' | tr a-z A-Z)
25544             # bass value on to clients
25545             eval "$attr=$value; export $attr"
25546         done
25547     done
25548 fi
25549 </pre></blockquote>
25550
25551 <p>I'm not sure this shell construction will work, because I suspect
25552 the while block might end up in a subshell causing the variables set
25553 there to not show up in ltsp-config, but if that is the case I am sure
25554 the code can be restructured to make sure the variables are passed on.
25555 I expect that can be solved with some testing. :)</p>
25556
25557 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
25558 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
25559
25560 <p>Update 2010-07-17: I am aware of another effort to store LTSP
25561 configuration in LDAP that was created around year 2000 by
25562 <a href="http://www.pcxperience.com/thinclient/documentation/ldap.html">PC
25563 Xperience, Inc., 2000</a>.  I found its
25564 <a href="http://people.redhat.com/alikins/ltsp/ldap/">files</a> on a
25565 personal home page over at redhat.com.</p>
25566
25567       </div>
25568       <div class="tags">
25569
25570
25571         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>.
25572
25573
25574       </div>
25575     </div>
25576     <div class="padding"></div>
25577
25578     <div class="entry">
25579       <div class="title">
25580         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/jXplorer__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">jXplorer, a very nice LDAP GUI</a>
25581       </div>
25582       <div class="date">
25583          9th July 2010
25584       </div>
25585       <div class="body">
25586         <p>Since
25587 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">my
25588 last post</a> about available LDAP tools in Debian, I was told about a
25589 LDAP GUI that is even better than luma.  The java application
25590 <a href="http://jxplorer.org/">jXplorer</a> is claimed to be capable of
25591 moving LDAP objects and subtrees using drag-and-drop, and can
25592 authenticate using Kerberos.  I have only tested the Kerberos
25593 authentication, but do not have a LDAP setup allowing me to rewrite
25594 LDAP with my test user yet.  It is
25595 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/j/jxplorer.html">available in
25596 Debian</a> testing and unstable at the moment.  The only problem I
25597 have with it is how it handle errors.  If something go wrong, its
25598 non-intuitive behaviour require me to go through some query work list
25599 and remove the failing query.  Nothing big, but very annoying.</p>
25600
25601       </div>
25602       <div class="tags">
25603
25604
25605         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>.
25606
25607
25608       </div>
25609     </div>
25610     <div class="padding"></div>
25611
25612     <div class="entry">
25613       <div class="title">
25614         <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>
25615       </div>
25616       <div class="date">
25617          3rd July 2010
25618       </div>
25619       <div class="body">
25620         <p>Here is a short update on my <a
25621 href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">my
25622 Debian Lenny->Squeeze upgrade testing</a>.  Here is a summary of the
25623 difference for Gnome when it is upgraded by apt-get and aptitude.  I'm
25624 not reporting the status for KDE, because the upgrade crashes when
25625 aptitude try because of missing conflicts
25626 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#584861</a> and
25627 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/585716">#585716</a>).</p>
25628
25629 <p>At the end of the upgrade test script, dpkg -l is executed to get a
25630 complete list of the installed packages.  Based on this I see these
25631 differences when I did a test run today.  As usual, I do not really
25632 know what the correct set of packages would be, but thought it best to
25633 publish the difference.</p>
25634
25635 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
25636
25637 <blockquote><p>
25638   at-spi cpp-4.3 finger gnome-spell gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
25639   libatspi1.0-0 libcupsys2 libeel2-data libgail-common libgdl-1-common
25640   libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin
25641   libgtksourceview-common libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
25642   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libservlet2.4-java libxalan2-java
25643   libxerces2-java openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
25644   python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gtkhtml2
25645   python-gtkmozembed svgalibg1 xserver-xephyr zip
25646 </p></blockquote>
25647
25648 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
25649
25650 <blockquote><p>
25651   bluez-utils dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop epiphany-gecko
25652   gnome-app-install gnome-mount gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager
25653   libao2 libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libbind9-50
25654   libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcurl3
25655   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9
25656   libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3
25657   libfaad0 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
25658   libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
25659   libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
25660   libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
25661   libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50
25662   libisccfg50 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick++10
25663   libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4
25664   libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5
25665   libparted1.8-10 libpisock9 libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3
25666   libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8 libsensors3 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
25667   libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1
25668   libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0 libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj
25669   libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3
25670   mysql-common swfdec-gnome totem-gstreamer wodim
25671 </p></blockquote>
25672
25673 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
25674
25675 <blockquote><p>
25676   gnome gnome-desktop-environment hamster-applet python-gnomeapplet
25677   python-gnomekeyring python-wnck rhythmbox-plugins xorg
25678   xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
25679   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
25680   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-video-all
25681   xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark xserver-xorg-video-ati
25682   xserver-xorg-video-chips xserver-xorg-video-cirrus
25683   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
25684   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
25685   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-mach64
25686   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
25687   xserver-xorg-video-nouveau xserver-xorg-video-nv
25688   xserver-xorg-video-r128 xserver-xorg-video-radeon
25689   xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd xserver-xorg-video-rendition
25690   xserver-xorg-video-s3 xserver-xorg-video-s3virge
25691   xserver-xorg-video-savage xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion
25692   xserver-xorg-video-sis xserver-xorg-video-sisusb
25693   xserver-xorg-video-tdfx xserver-xorg-video-tga
25694   xserver-xorg-video-trident xserver-xorg-video-tseng
25695   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vmware
25696   xserver-xorg-video-voodoo
25697 </p></blockquote>
25698
25699 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
25700
25701 <blockquote><p>
25702   deskbar-applet xserver-xorg xserver-xorg-core
25703   xserver-xorg-input-wacom xserver-xorg-video-intel
25704   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome
25705 </p></blockquote>
25706
25707 <p>I was told on IRC that the xorg-xserver package was
25708 <a href="http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-xorg/xserver/xorg-server.git;a=commit;h=9c8080d06c457932d3bfec021c69ac000aa60120">changed
25709 in git</a> today to try to get apt-get to not remove xorg completely.
25710 No idea when it hits Squeeze, but when it does I hope it will reduce
25711 the difference somewhat.
25712
25713       </div>
25714       <div class="tags">
25715
25716
25717         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>.
25718
25719
25720       </div>
25721     </div>
25722     <div class="padding"></div>
25723
25724     <div class="entry">
25725       <div class="title">
25726         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Caching_password__user_and_group_on_a_roaming_Debian_laptop.html">Caching password, user and group on a roaming Debian laptop</a>
25727       </div>
25728       <div class="date">
25729          1st July 2010
25730       </div>
25731       <div class="body">
25732         <p>For a laptop, centralized user directories and password checking is
25733 a bit troubling.  Laptops are typically used also when not connected
25734 to the network, and it is vital for a user to be able to log in or
25735 unlock the screen saver also when a central server is unavailable.
25736 This is possible by caching passwords and directory information (user
25737 and group attributes) locally, and the packages to do so are available
25738 in Debian.  Here follow two recipes to set this up in Debian/Squeeze.
25739 It is also possible to set up in Debian/Lenny, but require more manual
25740 setup there because pam-auth-update is missing in Lenny.</p>
25741
25742 <h2>LDAP/Kerberos + nscd + libpam-ccreds + libpam-mklocaluser/pam_mkhomedir</h2>
25743
25744 This is the traditional method with a twist.  The password caching is
25745 provided by libpam-ccreds (version 10-4 or later is needed on
25746 Squeeze), and the directory caching is done by nscd.  The directory
25747 lookup and password checking is done using LDAP.  If one want to use
25748 Kerberos for password checking the libpam-ldapd package can be
25749 replaced with libpam-krb5 or libpam-heimdal.  If one is happy having a
25750 local home directory with the path listed in LDAP, one can use the
25751 pam_mkhomedir module from pam-modules to make this happen instead of
25752 using libpam-mklocaluser.  A setup for pam-auth-update to enable
25753 pam_mkhomedir will have to be written until a fix for
25754 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/568577">bug #568577</a> is in the
25755 archive.  Because I believe it is a bad idea to have local home
25756 directories using misleading paths like /site/server/partition/, I
25757 prefer to create a local user with the home directory in /home/.  This
25758 is done using the libpam-mklocaluser package.</p>
25759
25760 <p>These packages need to be installed and configured</p>
25761
25762 <blockquote><pre>
25763 libnss-ldapd libpam-ldapd nscd libpam-ccreds libpam-mklocaluser
25764 </pre></blockquote>
25765
25766 <p>The ldapd packages will ask for LDAP connection information, and
25767 one have to fill in the values that fits ones own site.  Make sure the
25768 PAM part uses encrypted connections, to make sure the password is not
25769 sent in clear text to the LDAP server.  I've been unable to get TLS
25770 certificate checking for a self signed certificate working, which make
25771 LDAP authentication unsafe for Debian Edu (nslcd is not checking if it
25772 is talking to the correct LDAP server), and very much welcome feedback
25773 on how to get this working.</p>
25774
25775 <p>Because nscd do not have a default configuration fit for offline
25776 caching until <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/485282">bug #485282</a>
25777 is fixed, this configuration should be used instead of the one
25778 currently in /etc/nscd.conf.  The changes are in the fields
25779 reload-count and positive-time-to-live, and is based on the
25780 instructions I found in the
25781 <a href="http://www.flyn.org/laptopldap/">LDAP for Mobile Laptops</a>
25782 instructions by Flyn Computing.</p>
25783
25784 <blockquote><pre>
25785         debug-level             0
25786         reload-count            unlimited
25787         paranoia                no
25788
25789         enable-cache            passwd          yes
25790         positive-time-to-live   passwd          2592000
25791         negative-time-to-live   passwd          20
25792         suggested-size          passwd          211
25793         check-files             passwd          yes
25794         persistent              passwd          yes
25795         shared                  passwd          yes
25796         max-db-size             passwd          33554432
25797         auto-propagate          passwd          yes
25798
25799         enable-cache            group           yes
25800         positive-time-to-live   group           2592000
25801         negative-time-to-live   group           20
25802         suggested-size          group           211
25803         check-files             group           yes
25804         persistent              group           yes
25805         shared                  group           yes
25806         max-db-size             group           33554432
25807         auto-propagate          group           yes
25808
25809         enable-cache            hosts           no
25810         positive-time-to-live   hosts           2592000
25811         negative-time-to-live   hosts           20
25812         suggested-size          hosts           211
25813         check-files             hosts           yes
25814         persistent              hosts           yes
25815         shared                  hosts           yes
25816         max-db-size             hosts           33554432
25817
25818         enable-cache            services        yes
25819         positive-time-to-live   services        2592000
25820         negative-time-to-live   services        20
25821         suggested-size          services        211
25822         check-files             services        yes
25823         persistent              services        yes
25824         shared                  services        yes
25825         max-db-size             services        33554432
25826 </pre></blockquote>
25827
25828 <p>While we wait for a mechanism to update /etc/nsswitch.conf
25829 automatically like the one provided in
25830 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/496915">bug #496915</a>, the file
25831 content need to be manually replaced to ensure LDAP is used as the
25832 directory service on the machine.  /etc/nsswitch.conf should normally
25833 look like this:</p>
25834
25835 <blockquote><pre>
25836 passwd:         files ldap
25837 group:          files ldap
25838 shadow:         files ldap
25839 hosts:          files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns mdns4
25840 networks:       files
25841 protocols:      files
25842 services:       files
25843 ethers:         files
25844 rpc:            files
25845 netgroup:       files ldap
25846 </pre></blockquote>
25847
25848 <p>The important parts are that ldap is listed last for passwd, group,
25849 shadow and netgroup.</p>
25850
25851 <p>With these changes in place, any user in LDAP will be able to log
25852 in locally on the machine using for example kdm, get a local home
25853 directory created and have the password as well as user and group
25854 attributes cached.
25855
25856 <h2>LDAP/Kerberos + nss-updatedb + libpam-ccreds +
25857   libpam-mklocaluser/pam_mkhomedir</h2>
25858
25859 <p>Because nscd have had its share of problems, and seem to have
25860 problems doing proper caching, I've seen suggestions and recipes to
25861 use nss-updatedb to copy parts of the LDAP database locally when the
25862 LDAP database is available.  I have not tested such setup, because I
25863 discovered sssd.</p>
25864
25865 <h2>LDAP/Kerberos + sssd + libpam-mklocaluser</h2>
25866
25867 <p>A more flexible and robust setup than the nscd combination
25868 mentioned earlier that has shown up recently, is the
25869 <a href="https://fedorahosted.org/sssd/">sssd</a> package from Redhat.
25870 It is part of the <a href="http://www.freeipa.org/">FreeIPA</A> project
25871 to provide a Active Directory like directory service for Linux
25872 machines.  The sssd system combines the caching of passwords and user
25873 information into one package, and remove the need for nscd and
25874 libpam-ccreds.  It support LDAP and Kerberos, but not NIS.  Version
25875 1.2 do not support netgroups, but it is said that it will support this
25876 in version 1.5 expected to show up later in 2010.  Because the
25877 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/sssd.html">sssd package</a>
25878 was missing in Debian, I ended up co-maintaining it with Werner, and
25879 version 1.2 is now in testing.
25880
25881 <p>These packages need to be installed and configured to get the
25882 roaming setup I want</p>
25883
25884 <blockquote><pre>
25885 libpam-sss libnss-sss libpam-mklocaluser
25886 </pre></blockquote>
25887
25888 The complete setup of sssd is done by editing/creating
25889 <tt>/etc/sssd/sssd.conf</tt>.
25890
25891 <blockquote><pre>
25892 [sssd]
25893 config_file_version = 2
25894 reconnection_retries = 3
25895 sbus_timeout = 30
25896 services = nss, pam
25897 domains = INTERN
25898
25899 [nss]
25900 filter_groups = root
25901 filter_users = root
25902 reconnection_retries = 3
25903
25904 [pam]
25905 reconnection_retries = 3
25906
25907 [domain/INTERN]
25908 enumerate = false
25909 cache_credentials = true
25910
25911 id_provider = ldap
25912 auth_provider = ldap
25913 chpass_provider = ldap
25914
25915 ldap_uri = ldap://ldap
25916 ldap_search_base = dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
25917 ldap_tls_reqcert = never
25918 ldap_tls_cacert = /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt
25919 </pre></blockquote>
25920
25921 <p>I got the same problem here with certificate checking.  Had to set
25922 "ldap_tls_reqcert = never" to get it working.</p>
25923
25924 <p>With the libnss-sss package in testing at the moment, the
25925 nsswitch.conf file is update automatically, so there is no need to
25926 modify it manually.</p>
25927
25928 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
25929 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
25930
25931       </div>
25932       <div class="tags">
25933
25934
25935         Tags: <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>.
25936
25937
25938       </div>
25939     </div>
25940     <div class="padding"></div>
25941
25942     <div class="entry">
25943       <div class="title">
25944         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">LUMA, a very nice LDAP GUI</a>
25945       </div>
25946       <div class="date">
25947         28th June 2010
25948       </div>
25949       <div class="body">
25950         <p>The last few days I have been looking into the status of the LDAP
25951 directory in Debian Edu, and in the process I started to miss a GUI
25952 tool to browse the LDAP tree.  The only one I was able to find in
25953 Debian/Squeeze and Lenny is
25954 <a href="http://luma.sourceforge.net/">LUMA</a>, which has proved to
25955 be a great tool to get a overview of the current LDAP directory
25956 populated by default in Skolelinux.  Thanks to it, I have been able to
25957 find empty and obsolete subtrees, misplaced objects and duplicate
25958 objects.  It will be installed by default in Debian/Squeeze.  If you
25959 are working with LDAP, give it a go. :)</p>
25960
25961 <p>I did notice one problem with it I have not had time to report to
25962 the BTS yet.  There is no .desktop file in the package, so the tool do
25963 not show up in the Gnome and KDE menus, but only deep down in in the
25964 Debian submenu in KDE.  I hope that can be fixed before Squeeze is
25965 released.</p>
25966
25967 <p>I have not yet been able to get it to modify the tree yet.  I would
25968 like to move objects and remove subtrees directly in the GUI, but have
25969 not found a way to do that with LUMA yet.  So in the mean time, I use
25970 <a href="http://www.lichteblau.com/ldapvi/">ldapvi</a> for that.</p>
25971
25972 <p>If you have tips on other GUI tools for LDAP that might be useful
25973 in Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
25974
25975 <p>Update 2010-06-29: Ross Reedstrom tipped us about the
25976 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/g/gq.html">gq</a> package as a
25977 useful GUI alternative.  It seem like a good tool, but is unmaintained
25978 in Debian and got a RC bug keeping it out of Squeeze.  Unless that
25979 changes, it will not be an option for Debian Edu based on Squeeze.</p>
25980
25981       </div>
25982       <div class="tags">
25983
25984
25985         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>.
25986
25987
25988       </div>
25989     </div>
25990     <div class="padding"></div>
25991
25992     <div class="entry">
25993       <div class="title">
25994         <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>
25995       </div>
25996       <div class="date">
25997         24th June 2010
25998       </div>
25999       <div class="body">
26000         <p>A while back, I
26001 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">complained
26002 about the fact</a> that it is not possible with the provided schemas
26003 for storing DNS and DHCP information in LDAP to combine the two sets
26004 of information into one LDAP object representing a computer.</p>
26005
26006 <p>In the mean time, I discovered that a simple fix would be to make
26007 the dhcpHost object class auxiliary, to allow it to be combined with
26008 the dNSDomain object class, and thus forming one object for one
26009 computer when storing both DHCP and DNS information in LDAP.</p>
26010
26011 <p>If I understand this correctly, it is not safe to do this change
26012 without also changing the assigned number for the object class, and I
26013 do not know enough about LDAP schema design to do that properly for
26014 Debian Edu.</p>
26015
26016 <p>Anyway, for future reference, this is how I believe we could change
26017 the
26018 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dhc-ldap-schema-00">DHCP
26019 schema</a> to solve at least part of the problem with the LDAP schemas
26020 available today from IETF.</p>
26021
26022 <pre>
26023 --- dhcp.schema    (revision 65192)
26024 +++ dhcp.schema    (working copy)
26025 @@ -376,7 +376,7 @@
26026  objectclass ( 2.16.840.1.113719.1.203.6.6
26027         NAME 'dhcpHost'
26028         DESC 'This represents information about a particular client'
26029 -       SUP top
26030 +       SUP top AUXILIARY
26031         MUST cn
26032         MAY  (dhcpLeaseDN $ dhcpHWAddress $ dhcpOptionsDN $ dhcpStatements $ dhcpComments $ dhcpOption)
26033         X-NDS_CONTAINMENT ('dhcpService' 'dhcpSubnet' 'dhcpGroup') )
26034 </pre>
26035
26036 <p>I very much welcome clues on how to do this properly for Debian
26037 Edu/Squeeze.  We provide the DHCP schema in our debian-edu-config
26038 package, and should thus be free to rewrite it as we see fit.</p>
26039
26040 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
26041 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
26042
26043       </div>
26044       <div class="tags">
26045
26046
26047         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>.
26048
26049
26050       </div>
26051     </div>
26052     <div class="padding"></div>
26053
26054     <div class="entry">
26055       <div class="title">
26056         <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>
26057       </div>
26058       <div class="date">
26059         16th June 2010
26060       </div>
26061       <div class="body">
26062         <p>A few times I have had the need to simulate the way tasksel
26063 installs packages during the normal debian-installer run.  Until now,
26064 I have ended up letting tasksel do the work, with the annoying problem
26065 of not getting any feedback at all when something fails (like a
26066 conffile question from dpkg or a download that fails), using code like
26067 this:
26068
26069 <blockquote><pre>
26070 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
26071 tasksel --new-install
26072 </pre></blockquote>
26073
26074 This would invoke tasksel, let its automatic task selection pick the
26075 tasks to install, and continue to install the requested tasks without
26076 any output what so ever.
26077
26078 Recently I revisited this problem while working on the automatic
26079 package upgrade testing, because tasksel would some times hang without
26080 any useful feedback, and I want to see what is going on when it
26081 happen.  Then it occured to me, I can parse the output from tasksel
26082 when asked to run in test mode, and use that aptitude command line
26083 printed by tasksel then to simulate the tasksel run.  I ended up using
26084 code like this:
26085
26086 <blockquote><pre>
26087 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
26088 cmd="$(in_target tasksel -t --new-install | sed 's/debconf-apt-progress -- //')"
26089 $cmd
26090 </pre></blockquote>
26091
26092 <p>The content of $cmd is typically something like "<tt>aptitude -q
26093 --without-recommends -o APT::Install-Recommends=no -y install
26094 ~t^desktop$ ~t^gnome-desktop$ ~t^laptop$ ~pstandard ~prequired
26095 ~pimportant</tt>", which will install the gnome desktop task, the
26096 laptop task and all packages with priority standard , required and
26097 important, just like tasksel would have done it during
26098 installation.</p>
26099
26100 <p>A better approach is probably to extend tasksel to be able to
26101 install packages without using debconf-apt-progress, for use cases
26102 like this.</p>
26103
26104       </div>
26105       <div class="tags">
26106
26107
26108         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>.
26109
26110
26111       </div>
26112     </div>
26113     <div class="padding"></div>
26114
26115     <div class="entry">
26116       <div class="title">
26117         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_taking_shape.html">Officeshots taking shape</a>
26118       </div>
26119       <div class="date">
26120         13th June 2010
26121       </div>
26122       <div class="body">
26123         <p>For those of us caring about document exchange and
26124 interoperability, <a href="http://www.officeshots.org/">OfficeShots</a>
26125 is a great service.  It is to ODF documents what
26126 <a href="http://browsershots.org/">BrowserShots</a> is for web
26127 pages.</p>
26128
26129 <p>A while back, I was contacted by Knut Yrvin at the part of Nokia
26130 that used to be Trolltech, who wanted to help the OfficeShots project
26131 and wondered if the University of Oslo where I work would be
26132 interested in supporting the project.  I helped him to navigate his
26133 request to the right people at work, and his request was answered with
26134 a spot in the machine room with power and network connected, and Knut
26135 arranged funding for a machine to fill the spot.  The machine is
26136 administrated by the OfficeShots people, so I do not have daily
26137 contact with its progress, and thus from time to time check back to
26138 see how the project is doing.</p>
26139
26140 <p>Today I had a look, and was happy to see that the Dell box in our
26141 machine room now is the host for several virtual machines running as
26142 OfficeShots factories, and the project is able to render ODF documents
26143 in 17 different document processing implementation on Linux and
26144 Windows.  This is great.</p>
26145
26146       </div>
26147       <div class="tags">
26148
26149
26150         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
26151
26152
26153       </div>
26154     </div>
26155     <div class="padding"></div>
26156
26157     <div class="entry">
26158       <div class="title">
26159         <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>
26160       </div>
26161       <div class="date">
26162         13th June 2010
26163       </div>
26164       <div class="body">
26165         <p>My
26166 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">testing
26167 of Debian upgrades</a> from Lenny to Squeeze continues, and I've
26168 finally made the upgrade logs available from
26169 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/</a>.
26170 I am now testing dist-upgrade of Gnome and KDE in a chroot using both
26171 apt and aptitude, and found their differences interesting.  This time
26172 I will only focus on their removal plans.</p>
26173
26174 <p>After installing a Gnome desktop and the laptop task, apt-get wants
26175 to remove 72 packages when dist-upgrading from Lenny to Squeeze.  The
26176 surprising part is that it want to remove xorg and all
26177 xserver-xorg-video* drivers.  Clearly not a good choice, but I am not
26178 sure why.  When asking aptitude to do the same, it want to remove 129
26179 packages, but most of them are library packages I suspect are no
26180 longer needed.  Both of them want to remove bluetooth packages, which
26181 I do not know.  Perhaps these bluetooth packages are obsolete?</p>
26182
26183 <p>For KDE, apt-get want to remove 82 packages, among them kdebase
26184 which seem like a bad idea and xorg the same way as with Gnome. Asking
26185 aptitude for the same, it wants to remove 192 packages, none which are
26186 too surprising.</p>
26187
26188 <p>I guess the removal of xorg during upgrades should be investigated
26189 and avoided, and perhaps others as well.  Here are the complete list
26190 of planned removals.  The complete logs is available from the URL
26191 above.  Note if you want to repeat these tests, that the upgrade test
26192 for kde+apt-get hung in the tasksel setup because of dpkg asking
26193 conffile questions.  No idea why.  I worked around it by using
26194 '<tt>echo >> /proc/<em>pidofdpkg</em>/fd/0</tt>' to tell dpkg to
26195 continue.</p>
26196
26197 <p><b>apt-get gnome 72</b>
26198 <br>bluez-gnome cupsddk-drivers deskbar-applet gnome
26199   gnome-desktop-environment gnome-network-admin gtkhtml3.14
26200   iceweasel-gnome-support libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libgdl-1-0
26201   libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libmetacity0 libslab0 libxcb-xlib0
26202   nautilus-cd-burner python-gnome2-desktop python-gnome2-extras
26203   serpentine swfdec-mozilla update-manager xorg xserver-xorg
26204   xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
26205   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
26206   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
26207   xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
26208   xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
26209   xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
26210   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
26211   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
26212   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
26213   xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
26214   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
26215   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
26216   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
26217   xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
26218   xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
26219   xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
26220   xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
26221   xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
26222   xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
26223   xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
26224   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
26225   xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9
26226   xulrunner-1.9-gnome-support</p>
26227
26228 <p><b>aptitude gnome 129</b>
26229
26230 <br>bluez-gnome bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers dhcdbd
26231   djvulibre-desktop finger gnome-app-install gnome-mount
26232   gnome-network-admin gnome-spell gnome-vfs-obexftp
26233   gnome-volume-manager gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs gtkhtml3.14 libao2
26234   libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
26235   libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcupsys2 libcurl3 libdatrie0
26236   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20
26237   libeel2-data libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libfaad0 libgail-common
26238   libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libgdl-1-0 libgdl-1-common
26239   libggz2 libggzcore9 libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0
26240   libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libgnomeprint2.2-0
26241   libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgnomeprintui2.2-common
26242   libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
26243   libgtksourceview-common libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6
26244   libhesiod0 libicu38 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 libmagick++10
26245   libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmetacity0 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off
26246   libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2
26247   libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10
26248   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libraw1394-8
26249   libsensors3 libslab0 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8 libssh2-1
26250   libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10
26251   libtrackerclient0 libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0
26252   libxerces2-java libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6
26253   libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common nautilus-cd-burner
26254   openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
26255   python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gnome2-desktop
26256   python-gnome2-extras python-gtkhtml2 python-gtkmozembed
26257   python-numeric python-sexy serpentine svgalibg1 swfdec-gnome
26258   swfdec-mozilla totem-gstreamer update-manager wodim
26259   xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
26260   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
26261   zip</p>
26262
26263 <p><b>apt-get kde 82</b>
26264
26265 <br>cupsddk-drivers karm kaudiocreator kcoloredit kcontrol kde kde-core
26266   kdeaddons kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-bin kdebase-bin-kde3
26267   kdebase-kio-plugins kdesktop kdeutils khelpcenter kicker
26268   kicker-applets knewsticker kolourpaint konq-plugins konqueror korn
26269   kpersonalizer kscreensaver ksplash libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libkiten1
26270   libxcb-xlib0 quanta superkaramba texlive-base-bin xorg xserver-xorg
26271   xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
26272   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
26273   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
26274   xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
26275   xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
26276   xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
26277   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
26278   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
26279   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
26280   xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
26281   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
26282   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
26283   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
26284   xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
26285   xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
26286   xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
26287   xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
26288   xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
26289   xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
26290   xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
26291   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
26292   xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9</p>
26293
26294 <p><b>aptitude kde 192</b>
26295 <br>bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers cvs dcoprss dhcdbd
26296   djvulibre-desktop dosfstools eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
26297   ghostscript-x imlib-base imlib11 indi kandy karm kasteroids
26298   kaudiocreator kbackgammon kbstate kcoloredit kcontrol kcron kdat
26299   kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
26300   kdebase-bin-kde3 kdebase-kio-plugins kdeedu-data
26301   kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data
26302   kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
26303   kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdeprint kdesktop kdessh
26304   kdict kdnssd kdvi kedit keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs
26305   kghostview khelpcenter khexedit kiconedit kitchensync klatin
26306   klickety kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmoon kmrml kodo kolourpaint
26307   kooka korn kpager kpdf kpercentage kpf kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler
26308   krec kregexpeditor ksayit ksim ksirc ksirtet ksmiletris ksmserver
26309   ksnake ksokoban ksplash ksvg ksysv ktip ktnef kuickshow kverbos
26310   kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kworldclock
26311   kxsldbg libakode2 libao2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
26312   libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
26313   libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
26314   libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0 libdatrie0
26315   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
26316   libgail-common libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0
26317   libicu38 libiec61883-0 libindex0 libiw29 libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1
26318   libkdeedu3 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkiten1 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
26319   libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
26320   libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 libmagick10 libmimelib1c2a
26321   libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9
26322   libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 libsmbios2
26323   libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libtalloc1 libtiff-tools
26324   libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0 libxerces2-java
26325   libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 mpeglib networkstatus
26326   openoffice.org-writer2latex pmount poster psutils quanta quanta-data
26327   superkaramba svgalibg1 tex-common texlive-base texlive-base-bin
26328   texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended
26329   xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
26330   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
26331   xulrunner-1.9</p>
26332
26333
26334       </div>
26335       <div class="tags">
26336
26337
26338         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>.
26339
26340
26341       </div>
26342     </div>
26343     <div class="padding"></div>
26344
26345     <div class="entry">
26346       <div class="title">
26347         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">Automatic upgrade testing from Lenny to Squeeze</a>
26348       </div>
26349       <div class="date">
26350         11th June 2010
26351       </div>
26352       <div class="body">
26353         <p>The last few days I have done some upgrade testing in Debian, to
26354 see if the upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze will go smoothly.  A few bugs
26355 have been discovered and reported in the process
26356 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/585410">#585410</a> in nagios3-cgi,
26357 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584879">#584879</a> already fixed in
26358 enscript and <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#584861</a> in
26359 kdebase-workspace-data), and to get a more regular testing going on, I
26360 am working on a script to automate the test.</p>
26361
26362 <p>The idea is to create a Lenny chroot and use tasksel to install a
26363 Gnome or KDE desktop installation inside the chroot before upgrading
26364 it.  To ensure no services are started in the chroot, a policy-rc.d
26365 script is inserted.  To make sure tasksel believe it is to install a
26366 desktop on a laptop, the tasksel tests are replaced in the chroot
26367 (only acceptable because this is a throw-away chroot).</p>
26368
26369 <p>A naive upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze using aptitude dist-upgrade
26370 currently always fail because udev refuses to upgrade with the kernel
26371 in Lenny, so to avoid that problem the file /etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
26372 is created.  The bug report
26373 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/566000">#566000</a> make me suspect
26374 this problem do not trigger in a chroot, but I touch the file anyway
26375 to make sure the upgrade go well.  Testing on virtual and real
26376 hardware have failed me because of udev so far, and creating this file
26377 do the trick in such settings anyway.  This is a
26378 <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/debian-26/failed-dist-upgrade-due-to-udev-config_sysfs_deprecated-nonsense-804130/">known
26379 issue</a> and the current udev behaviour is intended by the udev
26380 maintainer because he lack the resources to rewrite udev to keep
26381 working with old kernels or something like that.  I really wish the
26382 udev upstream would keep udev backwards compatible, to avoid such
26383 upgrade problem, but given that they fail to do so, I guess
26384 documenting the way out of this mess is the best option we got for
26385 Debian Squeeze.</p>
26386
26387 <p>Anyway, back to the task at hand, testing upgrades.  This test
26388 script, which I call <tt>upgrade-test</tt> for now, is doing the
26389 trick:</p>
26390
26391 <blockquote><pre>
26392 #!/bin/sh
26393 set -ex
26394
26395 if [ "$1" ] ; then
26396     desktop=$1
26397 else
26398     desktop=gnome
26399 fi
26400
26401 from=lenny
26402 to=squeeze
26403
26404 exec &lt; /dev/null
26405 unset LANG
26406 mirror=http://ftp.skolelinux.org/debian
26407 tmpdir=chroot-$from-upgrade-$to-$desktop
26408 fuser -mv .
26409 debootstrap $from $tmpdir $mirror
26410 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
26411 cat > $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d &lt;&lt;EOF
26412 #!/bin/sh
26413 exit 101
26414 EOF
26415 chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d
26416 exit_cleanup() {
26417     umount $tmpdir/proc
26418 }
26419 mount -t proc proc $tmpdir/proc
26420 # Make sure proc is unmounted also on failure
26421 trap exit_cleanup EXIT INT
26422
26423 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y install debconf-utils
26424
26425 # Make sure tasksel autoselection trigger.  It need the test scripts
26426 # to return the correct answers.
26427 echo tasksel tasksel/desktop multiselect $desktop | \
26428     chroot $tmpdir debconf-set-selections
26429
26430 # Include the desktop and laptop task
26431 for test in desktop laptop ; do
26432     echo > $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test &lt;&lt;EOF
26433 #!/bin/sh
26434 exit 2
26435 EOF
26436     chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test
26437 done
26438
26439 DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
26440 DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical
26441 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND DEBIAN_PRIORITY
26442 chroot $tmpdir tasksel --new-install
26443
26444 echo deb $mirror $to main > $tmpdir/etc/apt/sources.list
26445 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
26446 touch $tmpdir/etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
26447 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y dist-upgrade
26448 fuser -mv
26449 </pre></blockquote>
26450
26451 <p>I suspect it would be useful to test upgrades with both apt-get and
26452 with aptitude, but I have not had time to look at how they behave
26453 differently so far.  I hope to get a cron job running to do the test
26454 regularly and post the result on the web.  The Gnome upgrade currently
26455 work, while the KDE upgrade fail because of the bug in
26456 kdebase-workspace-data</p>
26457
26458 <p>I am not quite sure what kind of extract from the huge upgrade logs
26459 (KDE 167 KiB, Gnome 516 KiB) it make sense to include in this blog
26460 post, so I will refrain from trying.  I can report that for Gnome,
26461 aptitude report 760 packages upgraded, 448 newly installed, 129 to
26462 remove and 1 not upgraded and 1024MB need to be downloaded while for
26463 KDE the same numbers are 702 packages upgraded, 507 newly installed,
26464 193 to remove and 0 not upgraded and 1117MB need to be downloaded</p>
26465
26466 <p>I am very happy to notice that the Gnome desktop + laptop upgrade
26467 is able to migrate to dependency based boot sequencing and parallel
26468 booting without a hitch.  Was unsure if there were still bugs with
26469 packages failing to clean up their obsolete init.d script during
26470 upgrades, and no such problem seem to affect the Gnome desktop+laptop
26471 packages.</p>
26472
26473       </div>
26474       <div class="tags">
26475
26476
26477         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>.
26478
26479
26480       </div>
26481     </div>
26482     <div class="padding"></div>
26483
26484     <div class="entry">
26485       <div class="title">
26486         <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>
26487       </div>
26488       <div class="date">
26489          6th June 2010
26490       </div>
26491       <div class="body">
26492         <p>If Debian is to migrate to upstart on Linux, I expect some init.d
26493 scripts to migrate (some of) their operations to upstart job while
26494 keeping the init.d for hurd and kfreebsd.  The packages with such
26495 needs will need a way to get their init.d scripts to behave
26496 differently when used with sysvinit and with upstart.  Because of
26497 this, I had a look at the environment variables set when a init.d
26498 script is running under upstart, and when it is not.</p>
26499
26500 <p>With upstart, I notice these environment variables are set when a
26501 script is started from rcS.d/ (ignoring some irrelevant ones like
26502 COLUMNS):</p>
26503
26504 <blockquote><pre>
26505 DEFAULT_RUNLEVEL=2
26506 previous=N
26507 PREVLEVEL=
26508 RUNLEVEL=
26509 runlevel=S
26510 UPSTART_EVENTS=startup
26511 UPSTART_INSTANCE=
26512 UPSTART_JOB=rc-sysinit
26513 </pre></blockquote>
26514
26515 <p>With sysvinit, these environment variables are set for the same
26516 script.</p>
26517
26518 <blockquote><pre>
26519 INIT_VERSION=sysvinit-2.88
26520 previous=N
26521 PREVLEVEL=N
26522 RUNLEVEL=S
26523 runlevel=S
26524 </pre></blockquote>
26525
26526 <p>The RUNLEVEL and PREVLEVEL environment variables passed on from
26527 sysvinit are not set by upstart.  Not sure if it is intentional or not
26528 to not be compatible with sysvinit in this regard.</p>
26529
26530 <p>For scripts needing to behave differently when upstart is used,
26531 looking for the UPSTART_JOB environment variable seem to be a good
26532 choice.</p>
26533
26534       </div>
26535       <div class="tags">
26536
26537
26538         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>.
26539
26540
26541       </div>
26542     </div>
26543     <div class="padding"></div>
26544
26545     <div class="entry">
26546       <div class="title">
26547         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_manual_for_standards_wars___.html">A manual for standards wars...</a>
26548       </div>
26549       <div class="date">
26550          6th June 2010
26551       </div>
26552       <div class="body">
26553         <p>Via the
26554 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/robweir/antic-atom/~3/QzU4RgoAGMg/weekly-links-10.html">blog
26555 of Rob Weir</a> I came across the very interesting essay named
26556 <a href="http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/shapiro/wars.pdf">The Art of
26557 Standards Wars</a> (PDF 25 pages).  I recommend it for everyone
26558 following the standards wars of today.</p>
26559
26560       </div>
26561       <div class="tags">
26562
26563
26564         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>.
26565
26566
26567       </div>
26568     </div>
26569     <div class="padding"></div>
26570
26571     <div class="entry">
26572       <div class="title">
26573         <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>
26574       </div>
26575       <div class="date">
26576          3rd June 2010
26577       </div>
26578       <div class="body">
26579         <p>When using sitesummary at a site to track machines, it is possible
26580 to get a list of the machine types in use thanks to the DMI
26581 information extracted from each machine.  The script to do so is
26582 included in the sitesummary package, and here is example output from
26583 the Skolelinux build servers:</p>
26584
26585 <blockquote><pre>
26586 maintainer:~# /usr/lib/sitesummary/hardware-model-summary
26587   vendor                    count
26588   Dell Computer Corporation     1
26589     PowerEdge 1750              1
26590   IBM                           1
26591     eserver xSeries 345 -[8670M1X]-     1
26592   Intel                         2
26593   [no-dmi-info]                 3
26594 maintainer:~#
26595 </pre></blockquote>
26596
26597 <p>The quality of the report depend on the quality of the DMI tables
26598 provided in each machine.  Here there are Intel machines without model
26599 information listed with Intel as vendor and no model, and virtual Xen
26600 machines listed as [no-dmi-info].  One can add -l as a command line
26601 option to list the individual machines.</p>
26602
26603 <p>A larger list is
26604 <a href="http://narvikskolen.no/sitesummary/">available from the the
26605 city of Narvik</a>, which uses Skolelinux on all their shools and also
26606 provide the basic sitesummary report publicly.  In their report there
26607 are ~1400 machines. I know they use both Ubuntu and Skolelinux on
26608 their machines, and as sitesummary is available in both distributions,
26609 it is trivial to get all of them to report to the same central
26610 collector.</p>
26611
26612       </div>
26613       <div class="tags">
26614
26615
26616         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>.
26617
26618
26619       </div>
26620     </div>
26621     <div class="padding"></div>
26622
26623     <div class="entry">
26624       <div class="title">
26625         <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>
26626       </div>
26627       <div class="date">
26628          1st June 2010
26629       </div>
26630       <div class="body">
26631         <p>It is strange to watch how a bug in Debian causing KDM to fail to
26632 start at boot when an NVidia video card is used is handled.  The
26633 problem seem to be that the nvidia X.org driver uses a long time to
26634 initialize, and this duration is longer than kdm is configured to
26635 wait.</p>
26636
26637 <p>I came across two bugs related to this issue,
26638 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">#583312</a> initially filed
26639 against initscripts and passed on to nvidia-glx when it became obvious
26640 that the nvidia drivers were involved, and
26641 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/524751">#524751</a> initially filed against
26642 kdm and passed on to src:nvidia-graphics-drivers for unknown reasons.</p>
26643
26644 <p>To me, it seem that no-one is interested in actually solving the
26645 problem nvidia video card owners experience and make sure the Debian
26646 distribution work out of the box for these users.  The nvidia driver
26647 maintainers expect kdm to be set up to wait longer, while kdm expect
26648 the nvidia driver maintainers to fix the driver to start faster, and
26649 while they wait for each other I guess the users end up switching to a
26650 distribution that work for them.  I have no idea what the solution is,
26651 but I am pretty sure that waiting for each other is not it.</p>
26652
26653 <p>I wonder why we end up handling bugs this way.</p>
26654
26655       </div>
26656       <div class="tags">
26657
26658
26659         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>.
26660
26661
26662       </div>
26663     </div>
26664     <div class="padding"></div>
26665
26666     <div class="entry">
26667       <div class="title">
26668         <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>
26669       </div>
26670       <div class="date">
26671         27th May 2010
26672       </div>
26673       <div class="body">
26674         <p>A few days ago, parallel booting was enabled in Debian/testing.
26675 The feature seem to hold up pretty well, but three fairly serious
26676 issues are known and should be solved:
26677
26678 <p><ul>
26679
26680 <li>The wicd package seen to
26681 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/508289">break NFS mounting</a> and
26682 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/581586">network setup</a> when
26683 parallel booting is enabled.  No idea why, but the wicd maintainer
26684 seem to be on the case.</li>
26685
26686 <li>The nvidia X driver seem to
26687 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">have a race condition</a>
26688 triggered more easily when parallel booting is in effect.  The
26689 maintainer is on the case.</li>
26690
26691 <li>The sysv-rc package fail to properly enable dependency based boot
26692 sequencing (the shutdown is broken) when old file-rc users
26693 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/575080">try to switch back</a> to
26694 sysv-rc.  One way to solve it would be for file-rc to create
26695 /etc/init.d/.legacy-bootordering, and another is to try to make
26696 sysv-rc more robust.  Will investigate some more and probably upload a
26697 workaround in sysv-rc to help those trying to move from file-rc to
26698 sysv-rc get a working shutdown.</li>
26699
26700 </ul></p>
26701
26702 <p>All in all not many surprising issues, and all of them seem
26703 solvable before Squeeze is released.  In addition to these there are
26704 some packages with bugs in their dependencies and run level settings,
26705 which I expect will be fixed in a reasonable time span.</p>
26706
26707 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
26708 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
26709 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
26710 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
26711
26712 <p>Update: Correct bug number to file-rc issue.</p>
26713
26714       </div>
26715       <div class="tags">
26716
26717
26718         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>.
26719
26720
26721       </div>
26722     </div>
26723     <div class="padding"></div>
26724
26725     <div class="entry">
26726       <div class="title">
26727         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/More_flexible_firmware_handling_in_debian_installer.html">More flexible firmware handling in debian-installer</a>
26728       </div>
26729       <div class="date">
26730         22nd May 2010
26731       </div>
26732       <div class="body">
26733         <p>After a long break from debian-installer development, I finally
26734 found time today to return to the project.  Having to spend less time
26735 working dependency based boot in debian, as it is almost complete now,
26736 definitely helped freeing some time.</p>
26737
26738 <p>A while back, I ran into a problem while working on Debian Edu.  We
26739 include some firmware packages on the Debian Edu CDs, those needed to
26740 get disk and network controllers working.  Without having these
26741 firmware packages available during installation, it is impossible to
26742 install Debian Edu on the given machine, and because our target group
26743 are non-technical people, asking them to provide firmware packages on
26744 an external medium is a support pain.  Initially, I expected it to be
26745 enough to include the firmware packages on the CD to get
26746 debian-installer to find and use them.  This proved to be wrong.
26747 Next, I hoped it was enough to symlink the relevant firmware packages
26748 to some useful location on the CD (tried /cdrom/ and
26749 /cdrom/firmware/).  This also proved to not work, and at this point I
26750 found time to look at the debian-installer code to figure out what was
26751 going to work.</p>
26752
26753 <p>The firmware loading code is in the hw-detect package, and a closer
26754 look revealed that it would only look for firmware packages outside
26755 the installation media, so the CD was never checked for firmware
26756 packages.  It would only check USB sticks, floppies and other
26757 "external" media devices.  Today I changed it to also look in the
26758 /cdrom/firmware/ directory on the mounted CD or DVD, which should
26759 solve the problem I ran into with Debian edu.  I also changed it to
26760 look in /firmware/, to make sure the installer also find firmware
26761 provided in the initrd when booting the installer via PXE, to allow us
26762 to provide the same feature in the PXE setup included in Debian
26763 Edu.</p>
26764
26765 <p>To make sure firmware deb packages with a license questions are not
26766 activated without asking if the license is accepted, I extended
26767 hw-detect to look for preinst scripts in the firmware packages, and
26768 run these before activating the firmware during installation.  The
26769 license question is asked using debconf in the preinst, so this should
26770 solve the issue for the firmware packages I have looked at so far.</p>
26771
26772 <p>If you want to discuss the details of these features, please
26773 contact us on debian-boot@lists.debian.org.</p>
26774
26775       </div>
26776       <div class="tags">
26777
26778
26779         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>.
26780
26781
26782       </div>
26783     </div>
26784     <div class="padding"></div>
26785
26786     <div class="entry">
26787       <div class="title">
26788         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Pieces_of_the_roaming_laptop_puzzle_in_Debian.html">Pieces of the roaming laptop puzzle in Debian</a>
26789       </div>
26790       <div class="date">
26791         19th May 2010
26792       </div>
26793       <div class="body">
26794         <p>Today, the last piece of the puzzle for roaming laptops in Debian
26795 Edu finally entered the Debian archive.  Today, the new
26796 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/libp/libpam-mklocaluser.html">libpam-mklocaluser</a>
26797 package was accepted.  Two days ago, two other pieces was accepted
26798 into unstable.  The
26799 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/pam-python.html">pam-python</a>
26800 package needed by libpam-mklocaluser, and the
26801 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/sssd.html">sssd</a> package
26802 passed NEW on Monday.  In addition, the
26803 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/libp/libpam-ccreds.html">libpam-ccreds</a>
26804 package we need is in experimental (version 10-4) since Saturday, and
26805 hopefully will be moved to unstable soon.</p>
26806
26807 <p>This collection of packages allow for two different setups for
26808 roaming laptops.  The traditional setup would be using libpam-ccreds,
26809 nscd and libpam-mklocaluser with LDAP or Kerberos authentication,
26810 which should work out of the box if the configuration changes proposed
26811 for nscd in <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/485282">BTS report
26812 #485282</a> is implemented.  The alternative setup is to use sssd with
26813 libpam-mklocaluser to connect to LDAP or Kerberos and let sssd take
26814 care of the caching of passwords and group information.</p>
26815
26816 <p>I have so far been unable to get sssd to work with the LDAP server
26817 at the University, but suspect the issue is some SSL/GnuTLS related
26818 problem with the server certificate.  I plan to update the Debian
26819 package to version 1.2, which is scheduled for next week, and hope to
26820 find time to make sure the next release will include both the
26821 Debian/Ubuntu specific patches.  Upstream is friendly and responsive,
26822 and I am sure we will find a good solution.</p>
26823
26824 <p>The idea is to set up the roaming laptops to authenticate using
26825 LDAP or Kerberos and create a local user with home directory in /home/
26826 when a usre in LDAP logs in via KDM or GDM for the first time, and
26827 cache the password for offline checking, as well as caching group
26828 memberhips and other relevant LDAP information.  The
26829 libpam-mklocaluser package was created to make sure the local home
26830 directory is in /home/, instead of /site/server/directory/ which would
26831 be the home directory if pam_mkhomedir was used.  To avoid confusion
26832 with support requests and configuration, we do not want local laptops
26833 to have users in a path that is used for the same users home directory
26834 on the home directory servers.</p>
26835
26836 <p>One annoying problem with gdm is that it do not show the PAM
26837 message passed to the user from libpam-mklocaluser when the local user
26838 is created.  Instead gdm simply reject the login with some generic
26839 message.  The message is shown in kdm, ssh and login, so I guess it is
26840 a bug in gdm.  Have not investigated if there is some other message
26841 type that can be used instead to get gdm to also show the message.</p>
26842
26843 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
26844 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
26845
26846       </div>
26847       <div class="tags">
26848
26849
26850         Tags: <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>.
26851
26852
26853       </div>
26854     </div>
26855     <div class="padding"></div>
26856
26857     <div class="entry">
26858       <div class="title">
26859         <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>
26860       </div>
26861       <div class="date">
26862         14th May 2010
26863       </div>
26864       <div class="body">
26865         <p>Since this evening, parallel booting is the default in
26866 Debian/unstable for machines using dependency based boot sequencing.
26867 Apparently the testing of concurrent booting has been wider than
26868 expected, if I am to believe the
26869 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
26870 on debian-devel@</a>, and I concluded a few days ago to move forward
26871 with the feature this weekend, to give us some time to detect any
26872 remaining problems before Squeeze is frozen.  If serious problems are
26873 detected, it is simple to change the default back to sequential boot.
26874 The upload of the new sysvinit package also activate a new upstream
26875 version.</p>
26876
26877 More information about
26878 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
26879 based boot sequencing</a> is available from the Debian wiki.  It is
26880 currently possible to disable parallel booting when one run into
26881 problems caused by it, by adding this line to /etc/default/rcS:</p>
26882
26883 <blockquote><pre>
26884 CONCURRENCY=none
26885 </pre></blockquote>
26886
26887 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
26888 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
26889 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
26890 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
26891
26892       </div>
26893       <div class="tags">
26894
26895
26896         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>.
26897
26898
26899       </div>
26900     </div>
26901     <div class="padding"></div>
26902
26903     <div class="entry">
26904       <div class="title">
26905         <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>
26906       </div>
26907       <div class="date">
26908         14th May 2010
26909       </div>
26910       <div class="body">
26911         <p>In the recent Debian Edu versions, the
26912 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary">sitesummary
26913 system</a> is used to keep track of the machines in the school
26914 network.  Each machine will automatically report its status to the
26915 central server after boot and once per night.  The network setup is
26916 also reported, and using this information it is possible to get the
26917 MAC address of all network interfaces in the machines.  This is useful
26918 to update the DHCP configuration.</p>
26919
26920 <p>To give some idea how to use sitesummary, here is a one-liner to
26921 ist all MAC addresses of all machines reporting to sitesummary.  Run
26922 this on the collector host:</p>
26923
26924 <blockquote><pre>
26925 perl -MSiteSummary -e 'for_all_hosts(sub { print join(" ", get_macaddresses(shift)), "\n"; });'
26926 </pre></blockquote>
26927
26928 <p>This will list all MAC addresses assosiated with all machine, one
26929 line per machine and with space between the MAC addresses.</p>
26930
26931 <p>To allow system administrators easier job at adding static DHCP
26932 addresses for hosts, it would be possible to extend this to fetch
26933 machine information from sitesummary and update the DHCP and DNS
26934 tables in LDAP using this information.  Such tool is unfortunately not
26935 written yet.</p>
26936
26937       </div>
26938       <div class="tags">
26939
26940
26941         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>.
26942
26943
26944       </div>
26945     </div>
26946     <div class="padding"></div>
26947
26948     <div class="entry">
26949       <div class="title">
26950         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/systemd__an_interesting_alternative_to_upstart.html">systemd, an interesting alternative to upstart</a>
26951       </div>
26952       <div class="date">
26953         13th May 2010
26954       </div>
26955       <div class="body">
26956         <p>The last few days a new boot system called
26957 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd">systemd</a>
26958 has been
26959 <a href="http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html">introduced</a>
26960
26961 to the free software world.  I have not yet had time to play around
26962 with it, but it seem to be a very interesting alternative to
26963 <a href="http://upstart.ubuntu.com/">upstart</a>, and might prove to be
26964 a good alternative for Debian when we are able to switch to an event
26965 based boot system.  Tollef is
26966 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/580814">in the process</a> of getting
26967 systemd into Debian, and I look forward to seeing how well it work.  I
26968 like the fact that systemd handles init.d scripts with dependency
26969 information natively, allowing them to run in parallel where upstart
26970 at the moment do not.</p>
26971
26972 <p>Unfortunately do systemd have the same problem as upstart regarding
26973 platform support.  It only work on recent Linux kernels, and also need
26974 some new kernel features enabled to function properly.  This means
26975 kFreeBSD and Hurd ports of Debian will need a port or a different boot
26976 system.  Not sure how that will be handled if systemd proves to be the
26977 way forward.</p>
26978
26979 <p>In the mean time, based on the
26980 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
26981 on debian-devel@</a> regarding parallel booting in Debian, I have
26982 decided to enable full parallel booting as the default in Debian as
26983 soon as possible (probably this weekend or early next week), to see if
26984 there are any remaining serious bugs in the init.d dependencies.  A
26985 new version of the sysvinit package implementing this change is
26986 already in experimental.  If all go well, Squeeze will be released
26987 with parallel booting enabled by default.</p>
26988
26989       </div>
26990       <div class="tags">
26991
26992
26993         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>.
26994
26995
26996       </div>
26997     </div>
26998     <div class="padding"></div>
26999
27000     <div class="entry">
27001       <div class="title">
27002         <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>
27003       </div>
27004       <div class="date">
27005          6th May 2010
27006       </div>
27007       <div class="body">
27008         <p>These days, the init.d script dependencies in Squeeze are quite
27009 complete, so complete that it is actually possible to run all the
27010 init.d scripts in parallell based on these dependencies.  If you want
27011 to test your Squeeze system, make sure
27012 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
27013 based boot sequencing</a> is enabled, and add this line to
27014 /etc/default/rcS:</p>
27015
27016 <blockquote><pre>
27017 CONCURRENCY=makefile
27018 </pre></blockquote>
27019
27020 <p>That is it.  It will cause sysv-rc to use the startpar tool to run
27021 scripts in parallel using the dependency information stored in
27022 /etc/init.d/.depend.boot, /etc/init.d/.depend.start and
27023 /etc/init.d/.depend.stop to order the scripts.  Startpar is configured
27024 to try to start the kdm and gdm scripts as early as possible, and will
27025 start the facilities required by kdm or gdm as early as possible to
27026 make this happen.</p>
27027
27028 <p>Give it a try, and see if you like the result.  If some services
27029 fail to start properly, it is most likely because they have incomplete
27030 init.d script dependencies in their startup script (or some of their
27031 dependent scripts have incomplete dependencies).  Report bugs and get
27032 the package maintainers to fix it. :)</p>
27033
27034 <p>Running scripts in parallel could be the default in Debian when we
27035 manage to get the init.d script dependencies complete and correct.  I
27036 expect we will get there in Squeeze+1, if we get manage to test and
27037 fix the remaining issues.</p>
27038
27039 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
27040 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
27041 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
27042 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
27043
27044       </div>
27045       <div class="tags">
27046
27047
27048         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>.
27049
27050
27051       </div>
27052     </div>
27053     <div class="padding"></div>
27054
27055     <div class="entry">
27056       <div class="title">
27057         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Forcing_new_users_to_change_their_password_on_first_login.html">Forcing new users to change their password on first login</a>
27058       </div>
27059       <div class="date">
27060          2nd May 2010
27061       </div>
27062       <div class="body">
27063         <p>One interesting feature in Active Directory, is the ability to
27064 create a new user with an expired password, and thus force the user to
27065 change the password on the first login attempt.</p>
27066
27067 <p>I'm not quite sure how to do that with the LDAP setup in Debian
27068 Edu, but did some initial testing with a local account.  The account
27069 and password aging information is available in /etc/shadow, but
27070 unfortunately, it is not possible to specify an expiration time for
27071 passwords, only a maximum age for passwords.</p>
27072
27073 <p>A freshly created account (using adduser test) will have these
27074 settings in /etc/shadow:</p>
27075
27076 <blockquote><pre>
27077 root@tjener:~# chage -l test
27078 Last password change                                    : May 02, 2010
27079 Password expires                                        : never
27080 Password inactive                                       : never
27081 Account expires                                         : never
27082 Minimum number of days between password change          : 0
27083 Maximum number of days between password change          : 99999
27084 Number of days of warning before password expires       : 7
27085 root@tjener:~#
27086 </pre></blockquote>
27087
27088 <p>The only way I could come up with to create a user with an expired
27089 account, is to change the date of the last password change to the
27090 lowest value possible (January 1th 1970), and the maximum password age
27091 to the difference in days between that date and today.  To make it
27092 simple, I went for 30 years (30 * 365 = 10950) and January 2th (to
27093 avoid testing if 0 is a valid value).</p>
27094
27095 <p>After using these commands to set it up, it seem to work as
27096 intended:</p>
27097
27098 <blockquote><pre>
27099 root@tjener:~# chage -d 1 test; chage -M 10950 test
27100 root@tjener:~# chage -l test
27101 Last password change                                    : Jan 02, 1970
27102 Password expires                                        : never
27103 Password inactive                                       : never
27104 Account expires                                         : never
27105 Minimum number of days between password change          : 0
27106 Maximum number of days between password change          : 10950
27107 Number of days of warning before password expires       : 7
27108 root@tjener:~#
27109 </pre></blockquote>
27110
27111 <p>So far I have tested this with ssh and console, and kdm (in
27112 Squeeze) login, and all ask for a new password before login in the
27113 user (with ssh, I was thrown out and had to log in again).</p>
27114
27115 <p>Perhaps we should set up something similar for Debian Edu, to make
27116 sure only the user itself have the account password?</p>
27117
27118 <p>If you want to comment on or help out with implementing this for
27119 Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
27120
27121 <p>Update 2010-05-02 17:20: Paul Tötterman tells me on IRC that the
27122 shadow(8) page in Debian/testing now state that setting the date of
27123 last password change to zero (0) will force the password to be changed
27124 on the first login.  This was not mentioned in the manual in Lenny, so
27125 I did not notice this in my initial testing.  I have tested it on
27126 Squeeze, and '<tt>chage -d 0 username</tt>' do work there.  I have not
27127 tested it on Lenny yet.</p>
27128
27129 <p>Update 2010-05-02-19:05: Jim Paris tells me via email that an
27130 equivalent command to expire a password is '<tt>passwd -e
27131 username</tt>', which insert zero into the date of the last password
27132 change.</p>
27133
27134       </div>
27135       <div class="tags">
27136
27137
27138         Tags: <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>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
27139
27140
27141       </div>
27142     </div>
27143     <div class="padding"></div>
27144
27145     <div class="entry">
27146       <div class="title">
27147         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thoughts_on_roaming_laptop_setup_for_Debian_Edu.html">Thoughts on roaming laptop setup for Debian Edu</a>
27148       </div>
27149       <div class="date">
27150         28th April 2010
27151       </div>
27152       <div class="body">
27153         <p>For some years now, I have wondered how we should handle laptops in
27154 Debian Edu.  The Debian Edu infrastructure is mostly designed to
27155 handle stationary computers, and less suited for computers that come
27156 and go.</p>
27157
27158 <p>Now I finally believe I have an sensible idea on how to adjust
27159 Debian Edu for laptops, by introducing a new profile for them, for
27160 example called Roaming Workstations.  Here are my thought on this.
27161 The setup would consist of the following:</p>
27162
27163 <ul>
27164
27165  <li>During installation, the user name of the owner / primary user of
27166    the laptop is requested and a local home directory is set up for
27167    the user, with uid and gid information fetched from the LDAP
27168    server.  This allow the user to work also when offline.  The
27169    central home directory can be available in a subdirectory on
27170    request, for example mounted via CIFS.  It could be mounted
27171    automatically when a user log in while on the Debian Edu network,
27172    and unmounted when the machine is taken away (network down,
27173    hibernate, etc), it can be set up to do automatic mounting on
27174    request (using autofs), or perhaps some GUI button on the desktop
27175    can be used to access it when needed.  Perhaps it is enough to use
27176    the fish protocol in KDE?</li>
27177
27178  <li>Password checking is set up to use LDAP or Kerberos
27179    authentication when the machine is on the Debian Edu network, and
27180    to cache the password for offline checking when the machine unable
27181    to reach the LDAP or Kerberos server.  This can be done using
27182    <a href="http://www.padl.com/OSS/pam_ccreds.html">libpam-ccreds</a>
27183    or the Fedora developed
27184    <a href="https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/SSSD">System
27185    Security Services Daemon</a> packages.</li>
27186
27187  <li>File synchronisation with the central home directory is set up
27188    using a shared directory in both the local and the central home
27189    directory, using unison.</li>
27190
27191  <li>Printing should be set up to print to all printers broadcasting
27192    their existence on the local network, and should then work out of
27193    the box with CUPS.  For sites needing accurate printer quotas, some
27194    system with Kerberos authentication or printing via ssh could be
27195    implemented.</li>
27196
27197  <li>For users that should have local root access to their laptop,
27198    sudo should be used to allow this to the local user.</li>
27199
27200  <li>It would be nice if user and group information from LDAP is
27201    cached on the client, but given that there are entries for the
27202    local user and primary group in /etc/, it should not be needed.</li>
27203
27204 </ul>
27205
27206 <p>I believe all the pieces to implement this are in Debian/testing at
27207 the moment.  If we work quickly, we should be able to get this ready
27208 in time for the Squeeze release to freeze.  Some of the pieces need
27209 tweaking, like libpam-ccreds should get support for pam-auth-update
27210 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/566718">#566718</a>) and nslcd (or
27211 perhaps debian-edu-config) should get some integration code to stop
27212 its daemon when the LDAP server is unavailable to avoid long timeouts
27213 when disconnected from the net.  If we get Kerberos enabled, we need
27214 to make sure we avoid long timeouts there too.</p>
27215
27216 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
27217 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
27218
27219       </div>
27220       <div class="tags">
27221
27222
27223         Tags: <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>.
27224
27225
27226       </div>
27227     </div>
27228     <div class="padding"></div>
27229
27230     <div class="entry">
27231       <div class="title">
27232         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Great_book___Content__Selected_Essays_on_Technology__Creativity__Copyright__and_the_Future_of_the_Future_.html">Great book: "Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future"</a>
27233       </div>
27234       <div class="date">
27235         19th April 2010
27236       </div>
27237       <div class="body">
27238         <p>The last few weeks i have had the pleasure of reading a
27239 thought-provoking collection of essays by Cory Doctorow, on topics
27240 touching copyright, virtual worlds, the future of man when the
27241 conscience mind can be duplicated into a computer and many more. The
27242 book titled "Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity,
27243 Copyright, and the Future of the Future" is available with few
27244 restrictions on the web, for example from
27245 <a href="http://craphound.com/content/">his own site</a>. I read the
27246 epub-version from
27247 <a href="http://www.feedbooks.com/book/2883">feedbooks</a> using
27248 <a href="http://www.fbreader.org/">fbreader</a> and my N810. I
27249 strongly recommend this book.</p>
27250
27251       </div>
27252       <div class="tags">
27253
27254
27255         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fildeling">fildeling</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>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
27256
27257
27258       </div>
27259     </div>
27260     <div class="padding"></div>
27261
27262     <div class="entry">
27263       <div class="title">
27264         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Kerberos_for_Debian_Edu_Squeeze_.html">Kerberos for Debian Edu/Squeeze?</a>
27265       </div>
27266       <div class="date">
27267         14th April 2010
27268       </div>
27269       <div class="body">
27270         <p><a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20100413-kerberos/">Yesterdays
27271 NUUG presentation</a> about Kerberos was inspiring, and reminded me
27272 about the need to start using Kerberos in Skolelinux.  Setting up a
27273 Kerberos server seem to be straight forward, and if we get this in
27274 place a long time before the Squeeze version of Debian freezes, we
27275 have a chance to migrate Skolelinux away from NFSv3 for the home
27276 directories, and over to an architecture where the infrastructure do
27277 not have to trust IP addresses and machines, and instead can trust
27278 users and cryptographic keys instead.</p>
27279
27280 <p>A challenge will be integration and administration.  Is there a
27281 Kerberos implementation for Debian where one can control the
27282 administration access in Kerberos using LDAP groups?  With it, the
27283 school administration will have to maintain access control using flat
27284 files on the main server, which give a huge potential for errors.</p>
27285
27286 <p>A related question I would like to know is how well Kerberos and
27287 pam-ccreds (offline password check) work together.  Anyone know?</p>
27288
27289 <p>Next step will be to use Kerberos for access control in Lwat and
27290 Nagios.  I have no idea how much work that will be to implement.  We
27291 would also need to document how to integrate with Windows AD, as such
27292 shared network will require two Kerberos realms that need to cooperate
27293 to work properly.</p>
27294
27295 <p>I believe a good start would be to start using Kerberos on the
27296 skolelinux.no machines, and this way get ourselves experience with
27297 configuration and integration.  A natural starting point would be
27298 setting up ldap.skolelinux.no as the Kerberos server, and migrate the
27299 rest of the machines from PAM via LDAP to PAM via Kerberos one at the
27300 time.</p>
27301
27302 <p>If you would like to contribute to get this working in Skolelinux,
27303 I recommend you to see the video recording from yesterdays NUUG
27304 presentation, and start using Kerberos at home.  The video show show
27305 up in a few days.</p>
27306
27307       </div>
27308       <div class="tags">
27309
27310
27311         Tags: <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>.
27312
27313
27314       </div>
27315     </div>
27316     <div class="padding"></div>
27317
27318     <div class="entry">
27319       <div class="title">
27320         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/After_6_years_of_waiting__the_Xreset_d_feature_is_implemented.html">After 6 years of waiting, the Xreset.d feature is implemented</a>
27321       </div>
27322       <div class="date">
27323          6th March 2010
27324       </div>
27325       <div class="body">
27326         <p>6 years ago, as part of the Debian Edu development I am involved
27327 in, I asked for a hook in the kdm and gdm setup to run scripts as root
27328 when the user log out.  A bug was submitted against the xfree86-common
27329 package in 2004 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/230422">#230422</a>),
27330 and revisited every time Debian Edu was working on a new release.
27331 Today, this finally paid off.</p>
27332
27333 <p>The framework for this feature was today commited to the git
27334 repositry for the xorg package, and the git repository for xdm has
27335 been updated to use this framework.  Next on my agenda is to make sure
27336 kdm and gdm also add code to use this framework.</p>
27337
27338 <p>In Debian Edu, we want to ability to run commands as root when the
27339 user log out, to get rid of runaway processes and do general cleanup
27340 after a user.  With this framework in place, we finally can do that in
27341 a generic way that work with all display managers using this
27342 framework.  My goal is to get all display managers in Debian use it,
27343 similar to how they use the Xsession.d framework today.<p>
27344
27345       </div>
27346       <div class="tags">
27347
27348
27349         Tags: <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>.
27350
27351
27352       </div>
27353     </div>
27354     <div class="padding"></div>
27355
27356     <div class="entry">
27357       <div class="title">
27358         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Lenny_released__work_continues.html">Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Lenny released, work continues</a>
27359       </div>
27360       <div class="date">
27361         11th February 2010
27362       </div>
27363       <div class="body">
27364         <p>On Tuesday, the Debian/Lenny based version of
27365 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a> was finally
27366 shipped.  This was a major leap forward for the project, and I am very
27367 pleased that we finally got the release wrapped up.  Work on the first
27368 point release starts imediately, as we plan to get that one out a
27369 month after the major release, to include all fixes for bugs we found
27370 and fixed too late in the release process to include last Tuesday.</p>
27371
27372 <p>Perhaps it even is time for some partying?</p>
27373
27374 <p>After this first point release, my plan is to focus again on the
27375 next major release, based on Squeeze.  We will try to get as many of
27376 the fixes we need into the official Debian packages before the freeze,
27377 and have just a few weeks or months to make it happen.</p>
27378
27379       </div>
27380       <div class="tags">
27381
27382
27383         Tags: <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>.
27384
27385
27386       </div>
27387     </div>
27388     <div class="padding"></div>
27389
27390     <div class="entry">
27391       <div class="title">
27392         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_Munin_and_Nagios_configuration.html">Automatic Munin and Nagios configuration</a>
27393       </div>
27394       <div class="date">
27395         27th January 2010
27396       </div>
27397       <div class="body">
27398         <p>One of the new features in the next Debian/Lenny based release of
27399 Debian Edu/Skolelinux, which is scheduled for release in the next few
27400 days, is automatic configuration of the service monitoring system
27401 Nagios.  The previous release had automatic configuration of trend
27402 analysis using Munin, and this Lenny based release take that a step
27403 further.</p>
27404
27405 <p>When installing a Debian Edu Main-server, it is automatically
27406 configured as a Munin and Nagios server.  In addition, it is
27407 configured to be a server for the
27408 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary">SiteSummary
27409 system</a> I have written for use in Debian Edu.  The SiteSummary
27410 system is inspired by a system used by the University of Oslo where I
27411 work.  In short, the system provide a centralised collector of
27412 information about the computers on the network, and a client on each
27413 computer submitting information to this collector.  This allow for
27414 automatic information on which packages are installed on each machine,
27415 which kernel the machines are using, what kind of configuration the
27416 packages got etc.  This also allow us to automatically generate Munin
27417 and Nagios configuration.</p>
27418
27419 <p>All computers reporting to the sitesummary collector with the
27420 munin-node package installed is automatically enabled as a Munin
27421 client and graphs from the statistics collected from that machine show
27422 up automatically on http://www/munin/ on the Main-server.</p>
27423
27424 <p>All non-laptop computers reporting to the sitesummary collector are
27425 automatically monitored for network presence (ping and any network
27426 services detected).  In addition, all computers (also laptops) with
27427 the nagios-nrpe-server package installed and configured the way
27428 sitesummary would configure it, are monitored for full disks, software
27429 raid status, swap free and other checks that need to run locally on
27430 the machine.</p>
27431
27432 <p>The result is that the administrator on a school using Debian Edu
27433 based on Lenny will be able to check the health of his installation
27434 with one look at the Nagios settings, without having to spend any time
27435 keeping the Nagios configuration up-to-date.</p>
27436
27437 <p>The only configuration one need to do to get Nagios up and running
27438 is to set the password used to get access via HTTP.  The system
27439 administrator need to run "<tt>htpasswd /etc/nagios3/htpasswd.users
27440 nagiosadmin</tt>" to create a nagiosadmin user and set a password for
27441 it to be able to log into the Nagios web pages.  After that,
27442 everything is taken care of.</p>
27443
27444       </div>
27445       <div class="tags">
27446
27447
27448         Tags: <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>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary</a>.
27449
27450
27451       </div>
27452     </div>
27453     <div class="padding"></div>
27454
27455     <div class="entry">
27456       <div class="title">
27457         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Relative_popularity_of_document_formats__MS_Office_vs__ODF_.html">Relative popularity of document formats (MS Office vs. ODF)</a>
27458       </div>
27459       <div class="date">
27460         12th August 2009
27461       </div>
27462       <div class="body">
27463         <p>Just for fun, I did a search right now on Google for a few file ODF
27464 and MS Office based formats (not to be mistaken for ISO or ECMA
27465 OOXML), to get an idea of their relative usage.  I searched using
27466 'filetype:odt' and equvalent terms, and got these results:</P>
27467
27468 <table>
27469 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
27470 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:282000</td> <td>docx:308000</td></tr>
27471 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:75600</td> <td>pptx:183000</td></tr>
27472 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:26500     </td> <td>xlsx:145000</td></tr>
27473 </table>
27474
27475 <p>Next, I added a 'site:no' limit to get the numbers for Norway, and
27476 got these numbers:</p>
27477
27478 <table>
27479 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
27480 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:2480 </td> <td>docx:4460</td></tr>
27481 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:299   </td> <td>pptx:741</td></tr>
27482 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:187       </td> <td>xlsx:372</td></tr>
27483 </table>
27484
27485 <p>I wonder how these numbers change over time.</p>
27486
27487 <p>I am aware of Google returning different results and numbers based
27488 on where the search is done, so I guess these numbers will differ if
27489 they are conduced in another country.  Because of this, I did the same
27490 search from a machine in California, USA, a few minutes after the
27491 search done from a machine here in Norway.</p>
27492
27493
27494 <table>
27495 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
27496 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:129000</td> <td>docx:308000</td></tr>
27497 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:44200</td> <td>pptx:93900</td></tr>
27498 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:26500     </td> <td>xlsx:82400</td></tr>
27499 </table>
27500
27501 <p>And with 'site:no':
27502
27503 <table>
27504 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
27505 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:2480</td> <td>docx:3410</td></tr>
27506 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:175</td> <td>pptx:604</td></tr>
27507 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:186       </td> <td>xlsx:296</td></tr>
27508 </table>
27509
27510 <p>Interesting difference, not sure what to conclude from these
27511 numbers.</p>
27512
27513       </div>
27514       <div class="tags">
27515
27516
27517         Tags: <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>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
27518
27519
27520       </div>
27521     </div>
27522     <div class="padding"></div>
27523
27524     <div class="entry">
27525       <div class="title">
27526         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ISO_still_hope_to_fix_OOXML.html">ISO still hope to fix OOXML</a>
27527       </div>
27528       <div class="date">
27529          8th August 2009
27530       </div>
27531       <div class="body">
27532         <p>According to <a
27533 href="http://twerner.blogspot.com/2009/08/defects-of-office-open-xml.html">a
27534 blog post from Torsten Werner</a>, the current defect report for ISO
27535 29500 (ISO OOXML) is 809 pages.  His interesting point is that the
27536 defect report is 71 pages more than the full ODF 1.1 specification.
27537 Personally I find it more interesting that ISO still believe ISO OOXML
27538 can be fixed in ISO.  Personally, I believe it is broken beyon repair,
27539 and I completely lack any trust in ISO for being able to get anywhere
27540 close to solving the problems.  I was part of the Norwegian committee
27541 involved in the OOXML fast track process, and was not impressed with
27542 Standard Norway and ISO in how they handled it.</p>
27543
27544 <p>These days I focus on ODF instead, which seem like a specification
27545 with the future ahead of it.  We are working in NUUG to organise a ODF
27546 seminar this autumn.</p>
27547
27548       </div>
27549       <div class="tags">
27550
27551
27552         Tags: <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>.
27553
27554
27555       </div>
27556     </div>
27557     <div class="padding"></div>
27558
27559     <div class="entry">
27560       <div class="title">
27561         <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>
27562       </div>
27563       <div class="date">
27564         27th July 2009
27565       </div>
27566       <div class="body">
27567         <p>Since this evening, with the upload of sysvinit version 2.87dsf-2,
27568 and the upload of insserv version 1.12.0-10 yesterday, Debian unstable
27569 have been migrated to using dependency based boot sequencing.  This
27570 conclude work me and others have been doing for the last three days.
27571 It feels great to see this finally part of the default Debian
27572 installation.  Now we just need to weed out the last few problems that
27573 are bound to show up, to get everything ready for Squeeze.</p>
27574
27575 <p>The next step is migrating /sbin/init from sysvinit to upstart, and
27576 fixing the more fundamental problem of handing the event based
27577 non-predictable kernel in the early boot.</p>
27578
27579       </div>
27580       <div class="tags">
27581
27582
27583         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>.
27584
27585
27586       </div>
27587     </div>
27588     <div class="padding"></div>
27589
27590     <div class="entry">
27591       <div class="title">
27592         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Taking_over_sysvinit_development.html">Taking over sysvinit development</a>
27593       </div>
27594       <div class="date">
27595         22nd July 2009
27596       </div>
27597       <div class="body">
27598         <p>After several years of frustration with the lack of activity from
27599 the existing sysvinit upstream developer, I decided a few weeks ago to
27600 take over the package and become the new upstream.  The number of
27601 patches to track for the Debian package was becoming a burden, and the
27602 lack of synchronization between the distribution made it hard to keep
27603 the package up to date.</p>
27604
27605 <p>On the new sysvinit team is the SuSe maintainer Dr. Werner Fink,
27606 and my Debian co-maintainer Kel Modderman.  About 10 days ago, I made
27607 a new upstream tarball with version number 2.87dsf (for Debian, SuSe
27608 and Fedora), based on the patches currently in use in these
27609 distributions.  We Debian maintainers plan to move to this tarball as
27610 the new upstream as soon as we find time to do the merge.  Since the
27611 new tarball was created, we agreed with Werner at SuSe to make a new
27612 upstream project at <a href="http://savannah.nongnu.org/">Savannah</a>, and continue
27613 development there.  The project is registered and currently waiting
27614 for approval by the Savannah administrators, and as soon as it is
27615 approved, we will import the old versions from svn and continue
27616 working on the future release.</p>
27617
27618 <p>It is a bit ironic that this is done now, when some of the involved
27619 distributions are moving to upstart as a syvinit replacement.</p>
27620
27621       </div>
27622       <div class="tags">
27623
27624
27625         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>.
27626
27627
27628       </div>
27629     </div>
27630     <div class="padding"></div>
27631
27632     <div class="entry">
27633       <div class="title">
27634         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_boots_quicker_and_quicker.html">Debian boots quicker and quicker</a>
27635       </div>
27636       <div class="date">
27637         24th June 2009
27638       </div>
27639       <div class="body">
27640         <p>I spent Monday and tuesday this week in London with a lot of the
27641 people involved in the boot system on Debian and Ubuntu, to see if we
27642 could find more ways to speed up the boot system.  This was an Ubuntu
27643 funded
27644 <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FoundationsTeam/BootPerformance/DebianUbuntuSprint">developer
27645 gathering</a>. It was quite productive.  We also discussed the future
27646 of boot systems, and ways to handle the increasing number of boot
27647 issues introduced by the Linux kernel becoming more and more
27648 asynchronous and event base.  The Ubuntu approach using udev and
27649 upstart might be a good way forward.  Time will show.</p>
27650
27651 <p>Anyway, there are a few ways at the moment to speed up the boot
27652 process in Debian.  All of these should be applied to get a quick
27653 boot:</p>
27654
27655 <ul>
27656
27657 <li>Use dash as /bin/sh.</li>
27658
27659 <li>Disable the init.d/hwclock*.sh scripts and make sure the hardware
27660    clock is in UTC.</li>
27661
27662 <li>Install and activate the insserv package to enable
27663    <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
27664    based boot sequencing</a>, and enable concurrent booting.</li>
27665
27666 </ul>
27667
27668 These points are based on the Google summer of code work done by
27669 <a href="http://initscripts-ng.alioth.debian.org/soc2006-bootsystem/">Carlos
27670 Villegas</a>.
27671
27672 <p>Support for makefile-style concurrency during boot was uploaded to
27673 unstable yesterday.  When we tested it, we were able to cut 6 seconds
27674 from the boot sequence.  It depend on very correct dependency
27675 declaration in all init.d scripts, so I expect us to find edge cases
27676 where the dependences in some scripts are slightly wrong when we start
27677 using this.</p>
27678
27679 <p>On our IRC channel for this effort, #pkg-sysvinit, a new idea was
27680 introduced by Raphael Geissert today, one that could affect the
27681 startup speed as well.  Instead of starting some scripts concurrently
27682 from rcS.d/ and another set of scripts from rc2.d/, it would be
27683 possible to run a of them in the same process.  A quick way to test
27684 this would be to enable insserv and run 'mv /etc/rc2.d/S* /etc/rcS.d/;
27685 insserv'.  Will need to test if that work. :)</p>
27686
27687       </div>
27688       <div class="tags">
27689
27690
27691         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>.
27692
27693
27694       </div>
27695     </div>
27696     <div class="padding"></div>
27697
27698     <div class="entry">
27699       <div class="title">
27700         <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>
27701       </div>
27702       <div class="date">
27703          2nd May 2009
27704       </div>
27705       <div class="body">
27706         <p>There are two software projects that have had huge influence on the
27707 quality of free software, and I wanted to mention both in case someone
27708 do not yet know them.</p>
27709
27710 <p>The first one is <a href="http://valgrind.org/">valgrind</a>, a
27711 tool to detect and expose errors in the memory handling of programs.
27712 It is easy to use, all one need to do is to run 'valgrind program',
27713 and it will report any problems on stdout.  It is even better if the
27714 program include debug information.  With debug information, it is able
27715 to report the source file name and line number where the problem
27716 occurs.  It can report things like 'reading past memory block in file
27717 X line N, the memory block was allocated in file Y, line M', and
27718 'using uninitialised value in control logic'.  This tool has made it
27719 trivial to investigate reproducible crash bugs in programs, and have
27720 reduced the number of this kind of bugs in free software a lot.
27721
27722 <p>The second one is
27723 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coverity">Coverity</a> which is
27724 a source code checker.  It is able to process the source of a program
27725 and find problems in the logic without running the program.  It
27726 started out as the Stanford Checker and became well known when it was
27727 used to find bugs in the Linux kernel.  It is now a commercial tool
27728 and the company behind it is running
27729 <a href="http://www.scan.coverity.com/">a community service</a> for the
27730 free software community, where a lot of free software projects get
27731 their source checked for free.  Several thousand defects have been
27732 found and fixed so far.  It can find errors like 'lock L taken in file
27733 X line N is never released if exiting in line M', or 'the code in file
27734 Y lines O to P can never be executed'.  The projects included in the
27735 community service project have managed to get rid of a lot of
27736 reliability problems thanks to Coverity.</p>
27737
27738 <p>I believe tools like this, that are able to automatically find
27739 errors in the source, are vital to improve the quality of software and
27740 make sure we can get rid of the crashing and failing software we are
27741 surrounded by today.</p>
27742
27743       </div>
27744       <div class="tags">
27745
27746
27747         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>.
27748
27749
27750       </div>
27751     </div>
27752     <div class="padding"></div>
27753
27754     <div class="entry">
27755       <div class="title">
27756         <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>
27757       </div>
27758       <div class="date">
27759         28th April 2009
27760       </div>
27761       <div class="body">
27762         <p>Julien Blache
27763 <a href="http://blog.technologeek.org/2009/04/12/214">claim that no
27764 patch is better than a useless patch</a>.  I completely disagree, as a
27765 patch allow one to discuss a concrete and proposed solution, and also
27766 prove that the issue at hand is important enough for someone to spent
27767 time on fixing it.  No patch do not provide any of these positive
27768 properties.</p>
27769
27770       </div>
27771       <div class="tags">
27772
27773
27774         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>.
27775
27776
27777       </div>
27778     </div>
27779     <div class="padding"></div>
27780
27781     <div class="entry">
27782       <div class="title">
27783         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Recording_video_from_cron_using_VLC.html">Recording video from cron using VLC</a>
27784       </div>
27785       <div class="date">
27786          5th April 2009
27787       </div>
27788       <div class="body">
27789         <p>One think I have wanted to figure out for a along time is how to
27790 run vlc from cron to do recording of video streams on the net.  The
27791 task is trivial with mplayer, but I do not really trust the security
27792 of mplayer (it crashes too often on strange input), and thus prefer
27793 vlc.  I finally found a way to do it today.  I spent an hour or so
27794 searching the web for recipes and reading the documentation.  The
27795 hardest part was to get rid of the GUI window, but after finding the
27796 dummy interface, the command line finally presented itself:</p>
27797
27798 <blockquote><pre>URL=http://www.ping.uio.no/video/rms-oslo_2009.ogg
27799 SAVEFILE=rms.ogg
27800 DISPLAY= vlc -q $URL \
27801   --sout="#duplicate{dst=std{access=file,url='$SAVEFILE'},dst=nodisplay}" \
27802   --intf=dummy</pre></blockquote>
27803
27804 <p>The command stream the URL and store it in the SAVEFILE by
27805 duplicating the output stream to "nodisplay" and the file, using the
27806 dummy interface.  The dummy interface and the nodisplay output make
27807 sure no X interface is needed.</p>
27808
27809 <p>The cron job then need to start this job with the appropriate URL
27810 and file name to save, sleep for the duration wanted, and then kill
27811 the vlc process with SIGTERM.  Here is a complete script
27812 <tt>vlc-record</tt> to use from <tt>at</tt> or <tt>cron</tt>:</p>
27813
27814 <blockquote><pre>#!/bin/sh
27815 set -e
27816 URL="$1"
27817 SAVEFILE="$2"
27818 DURATION="$3"
27819 DISPLAY= vlc -q "$URL" \
27820   --sout="#duplicate{dst=std{access=file,url='$SAVEFILE'},dst=nodisplay}" \
27821   --intf=dummy < /dev/null > /dev/null 2>&1 &
27822 pid=$!
27823 sleep $DURATION
27824 kill $pid
27825 wait $pid</pre></blockquote>
27826
27827       </div>
27828       <div class="tags">
27829
27830
27831         Tags: <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/video">video</a>.
27832
27833
27834       </div>
27835     </div>
27836     <div class="padding"></div>
27837
27838     <div class="entry">
27839       <div class="title">
27840         <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>
27841       </div>
27842       <div class="date">
27843         30th March 2009
27844       </div>
27845       <div class="body">
27846         <p>Where I work at the University of Oslo, one decision stand out as a
27847 very good one to form a long lived computer infrastructure.  It is the
27848 simple one, lost by many in todays computer industry: Standardize on
27849 open network protocols and open exchange/storage formats, not applications.
27850 Applications come and go, while protocols and files tend to stay, and
27851 thus one want to make it easy to change application and vendor, while
27852 avoiding conversion costs and locking users to a specific platform or
27853 application.</p>
27854
27855 <p>This approach make it possible to replace the client applications
27856 independently of the server applications.  One can even allow users to
27857 use several different applications as long as they handle the selected
27858 protocol and format.  In the normal case, only one client application
27859 is recommended and users only get help if they choose to use this
27860 application, but those that want to deviate from the easy path are not
27861 blocked from doing so.</p>
27862
27863 <p>It also allow us to replace the server side without forcing the
27864 users to replace their applications, and thus allow us to select the
27865 best server implementation at any moment, when scale and resouce
27866 requirements change.</p>
27867
27868 <p>I strongly recommend standardizing - on open network protocols and
27869 open formats, but I would never recommend standardizing on a single
27870 application that do not use open network protocol or open formats.</p>
27871
27872       </div>
27873       <div class="tags">
27874
27875
27876         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>.
27877
27878
27879       </div>
27880     </div>
27881     <div class="padding"></div>
27882
27883     <div class="entry">
27884       <div class="title">
27885         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Returning_from_Skolelinux_developer_gathering.html">Returning from Skolelinux developer gathering</a>
27886       </div>
27887       <div class="date">
27888         29th March 2009
27889       </div>
27890       <div class="body">
27891         <p>I'm sitting on the train going home from this weekends Debian
27892 Edu/Skolelinux development gathering.  I got a bit done tuning the
27893 desktop, and looked into the dynamic service location protocol
27894 implementation avahi.  It look like it could be useful for us.  Almost
27895 30 people participated, and I believe it was a great environment to
27896 get to know the Skolelinux system.  Walter Bender, involved in the
27897 development of the Sugar educational platform, presented his stuff and
27898 also helped me improve my OLPC installation.  He also showed me that
27899 his Turtle Art application can be used in standalone mode, and we
27900 agreed that I would help getting it packaged for Debian.  As a
27901 standalone application it would be great for Debian Edu.  We also
27902 tried to get the video conferencing working with two OLPCs, but that
27903 proved to be too hard for us.  The application seem to need more work
27904 before it is ready for me.  I look forward to getting home and relax
27905 now. :)</p>
27906
27907       </div>
27908       <div class="tags">
27909
27910
27911         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>.
27912
27913
27914       </div>
27915     </div>
27916     <div class="padding"></div>
27917
27918     <div class="entry">
27919       <div class="title">
27920         <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>
27921       </div>
27922       <div class="date">
27923         29th March 2009
27924       </div>
27925       <div class="body">
27926         <p>The state of standardized LDAP schemas on Linux is far from
27927 optimal.  There is RFC 2307 documenting one way to store NIS maps in
27928 LDAP, and a modified version of this normally called RFC 2307bis, with
27929 some modifications to be compatible with Active Directory.  The RFC
27930 specification handle the content of a lot of system databases, but do
27931 not handle DNS zones and DHCP configuration.</p>
27932
27933 <p>In <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux</a>,
27934 we would like to store information about users, SMB clients/hosts,
27935 filegroups, netgroups (users and hosts), DHCP and DNS configuration,
27936 and LTSP configuration in LDAP.  These objects have a lot in common,
27937 but with the current LDAP schemas it is not possible to have one
27938 object per entity.  For example, one need to have at least three LDAP
27939 objects for a given computer, one with the SMB related stuff, one with
27940 DNS information and another with DHCP information.  The schemas
27941 provided for DNS and DHCP are impossible to combine into one LDAP
27942 object.  In addition, it is impossible to implement quick queries for
27943 netgroup membership, because of the way NIS triples are implemented.
27944 It just do not scale.  I believe it is time for a few RFC
27945 specifications to cleam up this mess.</p>
27946
27947 <p>I would like to have one LDAP object representing each computer in
27948 the network, and this object can then keep the SMB (ie host key), DHCP
27949 (mac address/name) and DNS (name/IP address) settings in one place.
27950 It need to be efficently stored to make sure it scale well.</p>
27951
27952 <p>I would also like to have a quick way to map from a user or
27953 computer and to the net group this user or computer is a member.</p>
27954
27955 <p>Active Directory have done a better job than unix heads like myself
27956 in this regard, and the unix side need to catch up.  Time to start a
27957 new IETF work group?</p>
27958
27959       </div>
27960       <div class="tags">
27961
27962
27963         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>.
27964
27965
27966       </div>
27967     </div>
27968     <div class="padding"></div>
27969
27970     <div class="entry">
27971       <div class="title">
27972         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Checking_server_hardware_support_status_for_Dell__HP_and_IBM_servers.html">Checking server hardware support status for Dell, HP and IBM servers</a>
27973       </div>
27974       <div class="date">
27975         28th February 2009
27976       </div>
27977       <div class="body">
27978         <p>At work, we have a few hundred Linux servers, and with that amount
27979 of hardware it is important to keep track of when the hardware support
27980 contract expire for each server.  We have a machine (and service)
27981 register, which until recently did not contain much useful besides the
27982 machine room location and contact information for the system owner for
27983 each machine.  To make it easier for us to track support contract
27984 status, I've recently spent time on extending the machine register to
27985 include information about when the support contract expire, and to tag
27986 machines with expired contracts to make it easy to get a list of such
27987 machines.  I extended a perl script already being used to import
27988 information about machines into the register, to also do some screen
27989 scraping off the sites of Dell, HP and IBM (our majority of machines
27990 are from these vendors), and automatically check the support status
27991 for the relevant machines.  This make the support status information
27992 easily available and I hope it will make it easier for the computer
27993 owner to know when to get new hardware or renew the support contract.
27994 The result of this work documented that 27% of the machines in the
27995 registry is without a support contract, and made it very easy to find
27996 them.  27% might seem like a lot, but I see it more as the case of us
27997 using machines a bit longer than the 3 years a normal support contract
27998 last, to have test machines and a platform for less important
27999 services.  After all, the machines without a contract are working fine
28000 at the moment and the lack of contract is only a problem if any of
28001 them break down.  When that happen, we can either fix it using spare
28002 parts from other machines or move the service to another old
28003 machine.</p>
28004
28005 <p>I believe the code for screen scraping the Dell site was originally
28006 written by Trond Hasle Amundsen, and later adjusted by me and Morten
28007 Werner Forsbring.  The HP scraping was written by me after reading a
28008 nice article in ;login: about how to use WWW::Mechanize, and the IBM
28009 scraping was written by me based on the Dell code.  I know the HTML
28010 parsing could be done using nice libraries, but did not want to
28011 introduce more dependencies.  This is the current incarnation:</p>
28012
28013 <pre>
28014 use LWP::Simple;
28015 use POSIX;
28016 use WWW::Mechanize;
28017 use Date::Parse;
28018 [...]
28019 sub get_support_info {
28020     my ($machine, $model, $serial, $productnumber) = @_;
28021     my $str;
28022
28023     if ( $model =~ m/^Dell / ) {
28024         # fetch website from Dell support
28025         my $url = "http://support.euro.dell.com/support/topics/topic.aspx/emea/shared/support/my_systems_info/no/details?c=no&amp;cs=nodhs1&amp;l=no&amp;s=dhs&amp;ServiceTag=$serial";
28026         my $webpage = get($url);
28027         return undef unless ($webpage);
28028
28029         my $daysleft = -1;
28030         my @lines = split(/\n/, $webpage);
28031         foreach my $line (@lines) {
28032             next unless ($line =~ m/Beskrivelse/);
28033             $line =~ s/&lt;[^>]+?>/;/gm;
28034             $line =~ s/^.+?;(Beskrivelse;)/$1/;
28035
28036             my @f = split(/\;/, $line);
28037             @f = @f[13 .. $#f];
28038             my $lastend = "";
28039             while ($f[3] eq "DELL") {
28040                 my ($type, $startstr, $endstr, $days) = @f[0, 5, 7, 10];
28041
28042                 my $start = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
28043                                             localtime(str2time($startstr)));
28044                 my $end = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
28045                                           localtime(str2time($endstr)));
28046                 $str .= "$type $start -> $end ";
28047                 @f = @f[14 .. $#f];
28048                 $lastend = $end if ($end gt $lastend);
28049             }
28050             my $today = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time));
28051             tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
28052                 if ($lastend lt $today);
28053         }
28054     } elsif ( $model =~ m/^HP / ) {
28055         my $mech = WWW::Mechanize->new();
28056         my $url =
28057             'http://www1.itrc.hp.com/service/ewarranty/warrantyInput.do';
28058         $mech->get($url);
28059         my $fields = {
28060             'BODServiceID' => 'NA',
28061             'RegisteredPurchaseDate' => '',
28062             'country' => 'NO',
28063             'productNumber' => $productnumber,
28064             'serialNumber1' => $serial,
28065         };
28066         $mech->submit_form( form_number => 2,
28067                             fields      => $fields );
28068         # Next step is screen scraping
28069         my $content = $mech->content();
28070
28071         $content =~ s/&lt;[^>]+?>/;/gm;
28072         $content =~ s/\s+/ /gm;
28073         $content =~ s/;\s*;/;;/gm;
28074         $content =~ s/;[\s;]+/;/gm;
28075
28076         my $today = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time));
28077
28078         while ($content =~ m/;Warranty Type;/) {
28079             my ($type, $status, $startstr, $stopstr) = $content =~
28080                 m/;Warranty Type;([^;]+);.+?;Status;(\w+);Start Date;([^;]+);End Date;([^;]+);/;
28081             $content =~ s/^.+?;Warranty Type;//;
28082             my $start = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
28083                                         localtime(str2time($startstr)));
28084             my $end = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
28085                                       localtime(str2time($stopstr)));
28086
28087             $str .= "$type ($status) $start -> $end ";
28088
28089             tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
28090                 if ($end lt $today);
28091         }
28092     } elsif ( $model =~ m/^IBM / ) {
28093         # This code ignore extended support contracts.
28094         my ($producttype) = $model =~ m/.*-\[(.{4}).+\]-/;
28095         if ($producttype &amp;&amp; $serial) {
28096             my $content =
28097                 get("http://www-947.ibm.com/systems/support/supportsite.wss/warranty?action=warranty&amp;brandind=5000008&amp;Submit=Submit&amp;type=$producttype&amp;serial=$serial");
28098             if ($content) {
28099                 $content =~ s/&lt;[^>]+?>/;/gm;
28100                 $content =~ s/\s+/ /gm;
28101                 $content =~ s/;\s*;/;;/gm;
28102                 $content =~ s/;[\s;]+/;/gm;
28103
28104                 $content =~ s/^.+?;Warranty status;//;
28105                 my ($status, $end) = $content =~ m/;Warranty status;([^;]+)\s*;Expiration date;(\S+) ;/;
28106
28107                 $str .= "($status) -> $end ";
28108
28109                 my $today = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time));
28110                 tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
28111                     if ($end lt $today);
28112             }
28113         }
28114     }
28115     return $str;
28116 }
28117 </pre>
28118
28119 <p>Here are some examples on how to use the function, using fake
28120 serial numbers.  The information passed in as arguments are fetched
28121 from dmidecode.</p>
28122
28123 <pre>
28124 print get_support_info("hp.host", "HP ProLiant BL460c G1", "1234567890"
28125                        "447707-B21");
28126 print get_support_info("dell.host", "Dell Inc. PowerEdge 2950", "1234567");
28127 print get_support_info("ibm.host", "IBM eserver xSeries 345 -[867061X]-",
28128                        "1234567");
28129 </pre>
28130
28131 <p>I would recommend this approach for tracking support contracts for
28132 everyone with more than a few computers to administer. :)</p>
28133
28134 <p>Update 2009-03-06: The IBM page do not include extended support
28135 contracts, so it is useless in that case.  The original Dell code do
28136 not handle extended support contracts either, but has been updated to
28137 do so.</p>
28138
28139       </div>
28140       <div class="tags">
28141
28142
28143         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
28144
28145
28146       </div>
28147     </div>
28148     <div class="padding"></div>
28149
28150     <div class="entry">
28151       <div class="title">
28152         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_bar_codes_at_a_computing_center.html">Using bar codes at a computing center</a>
28153       </div>
28154       <div class="date">
28155         20th February 2009
28156       </div>
28157       <div class="body">
28158         <p>At work with the University of Oslo, we have several hundred computers
28159 in our computing center.  This give us a challenge in tracking the
28160 location and cabling of the computers, when they are added, moved and
28161 removed.  Some times the location register is not updated when a
28162 computer is inserted or moved and we then have to search the room for
28163 the "missing" computer.</p>
28164
28165 <p>In the last issue of Linux Journal, I came across a project
28166 <a href="http://www.libdmtx.org/">libdmtx</a> to write and read bar
28167 code blocks as defined in the
28168 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Matrix">The Data Matrix
28169 Standard</a>.  This is bar codes that can be read with a normal
28170 digital camera, for example that on a cell phone, and several such bar
28171 codes can be read by libdmtx from one picture.  The bar code standard
28172 allow up to 2 KiB to be written in the tag.  There is another project
28173 with <a href="http://www.terryburton.co.uk/barcodewriter/">a bar code
28174 writer written in postscript</a> capable of creating such bar codes,
28175 but this was the first time I found a tool to read these bar
28176 codes.</p>
28177
28178 <p>It occurred to me that this could be used to tag and track the
28179 machines in our computing center.  If both racks and computers are
28180 tagged this way, we can use a picture of the rack and all its
28181 computers to detect the rack location of any computer in that rack.
28182 If we do this regularly for the entire room, we will find all
28183 locations, and can detect movements and removals.</p>
28184
28185 <p>I decided to test if this would work in practice, and picked a
28186 random rack and tagged all the machines with their names.  Next, I
28187 took pictures with my digital camera, and gave the dmtxread program
28188 these JPEG pictures to see how many tags it could read.  This worked
28189 fairly well.  If the pictures was well focused and not taken from the
28190 side, all tags in the image could be read.  Because of limited space
28191 between the racks, I was unable to get a good picture of the entire
28192 rack, but could without problem read all tags from a picture covering
28193 about half the rack.  I had to limit the search time used by dmtxread
28194 to 60000 ms to make sure it terminated in a reasonable time frame.</p>
28195
28196 <p>My conclusion is that this could work, and we should probably look
28197 at adjusting our computer tagging procedures to use bar codes for
28198 easier automatic tracking of computers.</p>
28199
28200       </div>
28201       <div class="tags">
28202
28203
28204         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
28205
28206
28207       </div>
28208     </div>
28209     <div class="padding"></div>
28210
28211     <div class="entry">
28212       <div class="title">
28213         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/When_web_browser_developers_make_a_video_player___.html">When web browser developers make a video player...</a>
28214       </div>
28215       <div class="date">
28216         17th January 2009
28217       </div>
28218       <div class="body">
28219         <p>As part of the work we do in <a href="http://www.nuug.no">NUUG</a>
28220 to publish video recordings of our monthly presentations, we provide a
28221 page with embedded video for easy access to the recording.  Putting a
28222 good set of HTML tags together to get working embedded video in all
28223 browsers and across all operating systems is not easy.  I hope this
28224 will become easier when the &lt;video&gt; tag is implemented in all
28225 browsers, but I am not sure.  We provide the recordings in several
28226 formats, MPEG1, Ogg Theora, H.264 and Quicktime, and want the
28227 browser/media plugin to pick one it support and use it to play the
28228 recording, using whatever embed mechanism the browser understand.
28229 There is at least four different tags to use for this, the new HTML5
28230 &lt;video&gt; tag, the &lt;object&gt; tag, the &lt;embed&gt; tag and
28231 the &lt;applet&gt; tag.  All of these take a lot of options, and
28232 finding the best options is a major challenge.</p>
28233
28234 <p>I just tested the experimental Opera browser available from <a
28235 href="http://labs.opera.com">labs.opera.com</a>, to see how it handled
28236 a &lt;video&gt; tag with a few video sources and no extra attributes.
28237 I was not very impressed.  The browser start by fetching a picture
28238 from the video stream.  Not sure if it is the first frame, but it is
28239 definitely very early in the recording.  So far, so good. Next,
28240 instead of streaming the 76 MiB video file, it start to download all
28241 of it, but do not start to play the video.  This mean I have to wait
28242 for several minutes for the downloading to finish.  When the download
28243 is done, the playing of the video do not start!  Waiting for the
28244 download, but I do not get to see the video?  Some testing later, I
28245 discover that I have to add the controls="true" attribute to be able
28246 to get a play button to pres to start the video.  Adding
28247 autoplay="true" did not help.  I sure hope this is a misfeature of the
28248 test version of Opera, and that future implementations of the
28249 &lt;video&gt; tag will stream recordings by default, or at least start
28250 playing when the download is done.</p>
28251
28252 <p>The test page I used (since changed to add more attributes) is
28253 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20090113-foredrag-om-foredrag/">available
28254 from the nuug site</a>.  Will have to test it with the new Firefox
28255 too.</p>
28256
28257 <p>In the test process, I discovered a missing feature.  I was unable
28258 to find a way to get the URL of the playing video out of Opera, so I
28259 am not quite sure it picked the Ogg Theora version of the video.  I
28260 sure hope it was using the announced Ogg Theora support. :)</p>
28261
28262       </div>
28263       <div class="tags">
28264
28265
28266         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</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>.
28267
28268
28269       </div>
28270     </div>
28271     <div class="padding"></div>
28272
28273     <div class="entry">
28274       <div class="title">
28275         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_video_mixer_on_a_USB_stick.html">Software video mixer on a USB stick</a>
28276       </div>
28277       <div class="date">
28278         28th December 2008
28279       </div>
28280       <div class="body">
28281         <p>The <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a> is
28282 recording our montly presentation on video, and recently we have
28283 worked on improving the quality of the recordings by mixing the slides
28284 directly with the video stream.  For this, we use the
28285 <a href="http://dvswitch.alioth.debian.org/">dvswitch</a> package from
28286 the Debian video team.  As this require quite one computer per video
28287 source, and NUUG do not have enough laptops available, we need to
28288 borrow laptops.  And to avoid having to install extra software on
28289 these borrwed laptops, I have wrapped up all the programs needed on a
28290 bootable USB stick.  The software required is dvswitch with assosiated
28291 source, sink and mixer applications and
28292 <a href="http://www.kinodv.org/">dvgrab</a>.  To allow this setup to
28293 work without any configuration, I've patched dvswitch to use
28294 <a href="http://www.avahi.org/">avahi</a> to connect the various parts
28295 together.  And to allow us to use laptops without firewire plugs, I
28296 upgraded dvgrab to the one from Debian/unstable to get one that work
28297 with USB sources.  We have not yet tested this setup in a production
28298 setup, but I hope it will work properly, and allow us to set up a
28299 video mixer in a very short time frame.  We will need it for
28300 <a href="http://www.goopen.no/">Go Open 2009</a>.</p>
28301
28302 <p><a href="http://www.nuug.no/pub/video/bin/usbstick-dvswitch.img.gz">The
28303 USB image</a> is for a 1 GB memory stick, but can be used on any
28304 larger stick as well.</p>
28305
28306       </div>
28307       <div class="tags">
28308
28309
28310         Tags: <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/video">video</a>.
28311
28312
28313       </div>
28314     </div>
28315     <div class="padding"></div>
28316
28317     <div class="entry">
28318       <div class="title">
28319         <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>
28320       </div>
28321       <div class="date">
28322          7th December 2008
28323       </div>
28324       <div class="body">
28325         <p>This weekend we had a small developer gathering for Debian Edu in
28326 Oslo.  Most of Saturday was used for the general assemly for the
28327 member organization, but the rest of the weekend I used to tune the
28328 LTSP installation.  LTSP now work out of the box on the 10-network.
28329 Acer Aspire One proved to be a very nice thin client, with both
28330 screen, mouse and keybard in a small box.  Was working on getting the
28331 diskless workstation setup configured out of the box, but did not
28332 finish it before the weekend was up.</p>
28333
28334 <p>Did not find time to look at the 4 VGA cards in one box we got from
28335 the Brazilian group, so that will have to wait for the next
28336 development gathering.  Would love to have the Debian Edu installer
28337 automatically detect and configure a multiseat setup when it find one
28338 of these cards.</p>
28339
28340       </div>
28341       <div class="tags">
28342
28343
28344         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>.
28345
28346
28347       </div>
28348     </div>
28349     <div class="padding"></div>
28350
28351     <div class="entry">
28352       <div class="title">
28353         <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>
28354       </div>
28355       <div class="date">
28356         25th November 2008
28357       </div>
28358       <div class="body">
28359         <p>Recently I have spent some time evaluating the multimedia browser
28360 plugins available in Debian Lenny, to see which one we should use by
28361 default in Debian Edu.  We need an embedded video playing plugin with
28362 control buttons to pause or stop the video, and capable of streaming
28363 all the multimedia content available on the web.  The test results and
28364 notes are available on
28365 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">the
28366 Debian wiki</a>.  I was surprised how few of the plugins are able to
28367 fill this need.  My personal video player favorite, VLC, has a really
28368 bad plugin which fail on a lot of the test pages.  A lot of the MIME
28369 types I would expect to work with any free software player (like
28370 video/ogg), just do not work.  And simple formats like the
28371 audio/x-mplegurl format (m3u playlists), just isn't supported by the
28372 totem and vlc plugins.  I hope the situation will improve soon.  No
28373 wonder sites use the proprietary Adobe flash to play video.</p>
28374
28375 <p>For Lenny, we seem to end up with the mplayer plugin.  It seem to
28376 be the only one fitting our needs. :/</p>
28377
28378       </div>
28379       <div class="tags">
28380
28381
28382         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>.
28383
28384
28385       </div>
28386     </div>
28387     <div class="padding"></div>
28388
28389     <p style="text-align: right;"><a href="english.rss"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/xml.gif" alt="RSS Feed" width="36" height="14" /></a></p>
28390     <div id="sidebar">
28391
28392
28393
28394 <h2>Archive</h2>
28395 <ul>
28396
28397 <li>2017
28398 <ul>
28399
28400 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/01/">January (4)</a></li>
28401
28402 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/02/">February (3)</a></li>
28403
28404 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/03/">March (5)</a></li>
28405
28406 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/04/">April (2)</a></li>
28407
28408 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/06/">June (5)</a></li>
28409
28410 </ul></li>
28411
28412 <li>2016
28413 <ul>
28414
28415 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/01/">January (3)</a></li>
28416
28417 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/02/">February (2)</a></li>
28418
28419 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/03/">March (3)</a></li>
28420
28421 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/04/">April (8)</a></li>
28422
28423 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/05/">May (8)</a></li>
28424
28425 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/06/">June (2)</a></li>
28426
28427 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/07/">July (2)</a></li>
28428
28429 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/08/">August (5)</a></li>
28430
28431 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/09/">September (2)</a></li>
28432
28433 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/10/">October (3)</a></li>
28434
28435 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/11/">November (8)</a></li>
28436
28437 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/12/">December (5)</a></li>
28438
28439 </ul></li>
28440
28441 <li>2015
28442 <ul>
28443
28444 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/01/">January (7)</a></li>
28445
28446 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/02/">February (6)</a></li>
28447
28448 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/03/">March (1)</a></li>
28449
28450 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/04/">April (4)</a></li>
28451
28452 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/05/">May (3)</a></li>
28453
28454 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/06/">June (4)</a></li>
28455
28456 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/07/">July (6)</a></li>
28457
28458 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/08/">August (2)</a></li>
28459
28460 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/09/">September (2)</a></li>
28461
28462 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/10/">October (9)</a></li>
28463
28464 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/11/">November (6)</a></li>
28465
28466 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/12/">December (3)</a></li>
28467
28468 </ul></li>
28469
28470 <li>2014
28471 <ul>
28472
28473 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/01/">January (2)</a></li>
28474
28475 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/02/">February (3)</a></li>
28476
28477 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/03/">March (8)</a></li>
28478
28479 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/04/">April (7)</a></li>
28480
28481 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/05/">May (1)</a></li>
28482
28483 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/06/">June (2)</a></li>
28484
28485 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/07/">July (2)</a></li>
28486
28487 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/08/">August (2)</a></li>
28488
28489 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/09/">September (5)</a></li>
28490
28491 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/10/">October (6)</a></li>
28492
28493 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/11/">November (3)</a></li>
28494
28495 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/12/">December (5)</a></li>
28496
28497 </ul></li>
28498
28499 <li>2013
28500 <ul>
28501
28502 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/01/">January (11)</a></li>
28503
28504 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/02/">February (9)</a></li>
28505
28506 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/03/">March (9)</a></li>
28507
28508 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/04/">April (6)</a></li>
28509
28510 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/05/">May (9)</a></li>
28511
28512 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/06/">June (10)</a></li>
28513
28514 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/07/">July (7)</a></li>
28515
28516 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/08/">August (3)</a></li>
28517
28518 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/09/">September (5)</a></li>
28519
28520 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/10/">October (7)</a></li>
28521
28522 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/11/">November (9)</a></li>
28523
28524 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/12/">December (3)</a></li>
28525
28526 </ul></li>
28527
28528 <li>2012
28529 <ul>
28530
28531 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/01/">January (7)</a></li>
28532
28533 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/02/">February (10)</a></li>
28534
28535 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/03/">March (17)</a></li>
28536
28537 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/04/">April (12)</a></li>
28538
28539 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/05/">May (12)</a></li>
28540
28541 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/06/">June (20)</a></li>
28542
28543 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/07/">July (17)</a></li>
28544
28545 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/08/">August (6)</a></li>
28546
28547 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/09/">September (9)</a></li>
28548
28549 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/10/">October (17)</a></li>
28550
28551 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/11/">November (10)</a></li>
28552
28553 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/12/">December (7)</a></li>
28554
28555 </ul></li>
28556
28557 <li>2011
28558 <ul>
28559
28560 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/01/">January (16)</a></li>
28561
28562 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/02/">February (6)</a></li>
28563
28564 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/03/">March (6)</a></li>
28565
28566 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/04/">April (7)</a></li>
28567
28568 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/05/">May (3)</a></li>
28569
28570 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/06/">June (2)</a></li>
28571
28572 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/07/">July (7)</a></li>
28573
28574 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/08/">August (6)</a></li>
28575
28576 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/09/">September (4)</a></li>
28577
28578 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/10/">October (2)</a></li>
28579
28580 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/11/">November (3)</a></li>
28581
28582 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/12/">December (1)</a></li>
28583
28584 </ul></li>
28585
28586 <li>2010
28587 <ul>
28588
28589 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/01/">January (2)</a></li>
28590
28591 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/02/">February (1)</a></li>
28592
28593 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/03/">March (3)</a></li>
28594
28595 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/04/">April (3)</a></li>
28596
28597 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/05/">May (9)</a></li>
28598
28599 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/06/">June (14)</a></li>
28600
28601 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/07/">July (12)</a></li>
28602
28603 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/08/">August (13)</a></li>
28604
28605 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/09/">September (7)</a></li>
28606
28607 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/10/">October (9)</a></li>
28608
28609 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/11/">November (13)</a></li>
28610
28611 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/12/">December (12)</a></li>
28612
28613 </ul></li>
28614
28615 <li>2009
28616 <ul>
28617
28618 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/01/">January (8)</a></li>
28619
28620 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/02/">February (8)</a></li>
28621
28622 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/03/">March (12)</a></li>
28623
28624 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/04/">April (10)</a></li>
28625
28626 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/05/">May (9)</a></li>
28627
28628 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/06/">June (3)</a></li>
28629
28630 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/07/">July (4)</a></li>
28631
28632 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/08/">August (3)</a></li>
28633
28634 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/09/">September (1)</a></li>
28635
28636 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/10/">October (2)</a></li>
28637
28638 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/11/">November (3)</a></li>
28639
28640 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/12/">December (3)</a></li>
28641
28642 </ul></li>
28643
28644 <li>2008
28645 <ul>
28646
28647 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/11/">November (5)</a></li>
28648
28649 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/12/">December (7)</a></li>
28650
28651 </ul></li>
28652
28653 </ul>
28654
28655
28656
28657 <h2>Tags</h2>
28658 <ul>
28659
28660  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer (13)</a></li>
28661
28662  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/amiga">amiga (1)</a></li>
28663
28664  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/aros">aros (1)</a></li>
28665
28666  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bankid">bankid (4)</a></li>
28667
28668  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin (9)</a></li>
28669
28670  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem (16)</a></li>
28671
28672  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bsa">bsa (2)</a></li>
28673
28674  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/chrpath">chrpath (2)</a></li>
28675
28676  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian (149)</a></li>
28677
28678  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu (158)</a></li>
28679
28680  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook (3)</a></li>
28681
28682  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan (10)</a></li>
28683
28684  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/dld">dld (16)</a></li>
28685
28686  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook (24)</a></li>
28687
28688  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/drivstoffpriser">drivstoffpriser (4)</a></li>
28689
28690  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english (349)</a></li>
28691
28692  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami (23)</a></li>
28693
28694  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fildeling">fildeling (12)</a></li>
28695
28696  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture (30)</a></li>
28697
28698  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox (9)</a></li>
28699
28700  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen (18)</a></li>
28701
28702  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264 (20)</a></li>
28703
28704  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju (42)</a></li>
28705
28706  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram (15)</a></li>
28707
28708  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kart">kart (20)</a></li>
28709
28710  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap (9)</a></li>
28711
28712  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lenker">lenker (8)</a></li>
28713
28714  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lsdvd">lsdvd (2)</a></li>
28715
28716  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ltsp">ltsp (1)</a></li>
28717
28718  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/mesh network">mesh network (8)</a></li>
28719
28720  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia (39)</a></li>
28721
28722  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software (9)</a></li>
28723
28724  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk (291)</a></li>
28725
28726  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug (189)</a></li>
28727
28728  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn (33)</a></li>
28729
28730  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/open311">open311 (2)</a></li>
28731
28732  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett (64)</a></li>
28733
28734  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern (100)</a></li>
28735
28736  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/raid">raid (1)</a></li>
28737
28738  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reactos">reactos (1)</a></li>
28739
28740  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reprap">reprap (11)</a></li>
28741
28742  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rfid">rfid (3)</a></li>
28743
28744  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot (10)</a></li>
28745
28746  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rss">rss (1)</a></li>
28747
28748  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ruter">ruter (5)</a></li>
28749
28750  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/scraperwiki">scraperwiki (2)</a></li>
28751
28752  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet (53)</a></li>
28753
28754  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary (4)</a></li>
28755
28756  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/skepsis">skepsis (5)</a></li>
28757
28758  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard (55)</a></li>
28759
28760  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stavekontroll">stavekontroll (6)</a></li>
28761
28762  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stortinget">stortinget (11)</a></li>
28763
28764  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance (48)</a></li>
28765
28766  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sysadmin">sysadmin (3)</a></li>
28767
28768  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/usenix">usenix (2)</a></li>
28769
28770  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/valg">valg (8)</a></li>
28771
28772  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video (59)</a></li>
28773
28774  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/vitenskap">vitenskap (4)</a></li>
28775
28776  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web (40)</a></li>
28777
28778 </ul>
28779
28780
28781     </div>
28782     <p style="text-align: right">
28783  Created by <a href="http://steve.org.uk/Software/chronicle">Chronicle v4.6</a>
28784 </p>
28785
28786   </body>
28787 </html>