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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/Generating_3D_prints_in_Debian_using_Cura_and_Slic3r__prusa_.html">Generating 3D prints in Debian using Cura and Slic3r(-prusa)</a>
  26       </div>
  27       <div class="date">
  28          9th October 2017
  29       </div>
  30       <div class="body">
  31         <p>At my nearby maker space,
  32 <a href="http://sonen.ifi.uio.no/">Sonen</a>, I heard the story that it
  33 was easier to generate gcode files for theyr 3D printers (Ultimake 2+)
  34 on Windows and MacOS X than Linux, because the software involved had
  35 to be manually compiled and set up on Linux while premade packages
  36 worked out of the box on Windows and MacOS X.  I found this annoying,
  37 as the software involved,
  38 <a href="https://github.com/Ultimaker/Cura">Cura</a>, is free software
  39 and should be trivial to get up and running on Linux if someone took
  40 the time to package it for the relevant distributions.  I even found
  41 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/706656">a request for adding into
  42 Debian</a> from 2013, which had seem some activity over the years but
  43 never resulted in the software showing up in Debian.  So a few days
  44 ago I offered my help to try to improve the situation.</p>
  45
  46 <p>Now I am very happy to see that all the packages required by a
  47 working Cura in Debian are uploaded into Debian and waiting in the NEW
  48 queue for the ftpmasters to have a look.  You can track the progress
  49 on
  50 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?email=3dprinter-general%40lists.alioth.debian.org">the
  51 status page for the 3D printer team</a>.</p>
  52
  53 <p>The uploaded packages are a bit behind upstream, and was uploaded
  54 now to get slots in <a href="https://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html">the NEW
  55 queue</a> while we work up updating the packages to the latest
  56 upstream version.</p>
  57
  58 <p>On a related note, two competitors for Cura, which I found harder
  59 to use and was unable to configure correctly for Ultimaker 2+ in the
  60 short time I spent on it, are already in Debian.  If you are looking
  61 for 3D printer "slicers" and want something already available in
  62 Debian, check out
  63 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/slic3r">slic3r</a> and
  64 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/slic3r-prusa">slic3r-prusa</a>.
  65 The latter is a fork of the former.</p>
  66
  67       </div>
  68       <div class="tags">
  69
  70
  71         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>.
  72
  73
  74       </div>
  75     </div>
  76     <div class="padding"></div>
  77
  78     <div class="entry">
  79       <div class="title">
  80         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Visualizing_GSM_radio_chatter_using_gr_gsm_and_Hopglass.html">Visualizing GSM radio chatter using gr-gsm and Hopglass</a>
  81       </div>
  82       <div class="date">
  83         29th September 2017
  84       </div>
  85       <div class="body">
  86         <p>Every mobile phone announce its existence over radio to the nearby
  87 mobile cell towers.  And this radio chatter is available for anyone
  88 with a radio receiver capable of receiving them.  Details about the
  89 mobile phones with very good accuracy is of course collected by the
  90 phone companies, but this is not the topic of this blog post.  The
  91 mobile phone radio chatter make it possible to figure out when a cell
  92 phone is nearby, as it include the SIM card ID (IMSI).  By paying
  93 attention over time, one can see when a phone arrive and when it leave
  94 an area.  I believe it would be nice to make this information more
  95 available to the general public, to make more people aware of how
  96 their phones are announcing their whereabouts to anyone that care to
  97 listen.</p>
  98
  99 <p>I am very happy to report that we managed to get something
 100 visualizing this information up and running for
 101 <a href="http://norwaymakers.org/osf17">Oslo Skaperfestival 2017</a>
 102 (Oslo Makers Festival) taking place today and tomorrow at Deichmanske
 103 library.  The solution is based on the
 104 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Easier_recipe_to_observe_the_cell_phones_around_you.html">simple
 105 recipe for listening to GSM chatter</a> I posted a few days ago, and
 106 will show up at the stand of <a href="http://sonen.ifi.uio.no/">Åpen
 107 Sone from the Computer Science department of the University of
 108 Oslo</a>.  The presentation will show the nearby mobile phones (aka
 109 IMSIs) as dots in a web browser graph, with lines to the dot
 110 representing mobile base station it is talking to. It was working in
 111 the lab yesterday, and was moved into place this morning.</p>
 112
 113 <p>We set up a fairly powerful desktop machine using Debian
 114 Buster/Testing with several (five, I believe) RTL2838 DVB-T receivers
 115 connected and visualize the visible cell phone towers using an
 116 <a href="https://github.com/marlow925/hopglass">English version of
 117 Hopglass</a>.  A fairly powerfull machine is needed as the
 118 grgsm_livemon_headless processes from
 119 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/gr-gsm">gr-gsm</a> converting
 120 the radio signal to data packages is quite CPU intensive.</p>
 121
 122 <p>The frequencies to listen to, are identified using a slightly
 123 patched scan-and-livemon (to set the --args values for each receiver),
 124 and the Hopglass data is generated using the
 125 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/IMSI-catcher/tree/meshviewer-output">patches
 126 in my meshviewer-output branch</a>.  For some reason we could not get
 127 more than four SDRs working.  There is also a geographical map trying
 128 to show the location of the base stations, but I believe their
 129 coordinates are hardcoded to some random location in Germany, I
 130 believe.  The code should be replaced with code to look up location in
 131 a text file, a sqlite database or one of the online databases
 132 mentioned in
 133 <a href="https://github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher/issues/14">the github
 134 issue for the topic</a>.
 135
 136 <p>If this sound interesting, visit the stand at the festival!</p>
 137
 138       </div>
 139       <div class="tags">
 140
 141
 142         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/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
 143
 144
 145       </div>
 146     </div>
 147     <div class="padding"></div>
 148
 149     <div class="entry">
 150       <div class="title">
 151         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Easier_recipe_to_observe_the_cell_phones_around_you.html">Easier recipe to observe the cell phones around you</a>
 152       </div>
 153       <div class="date">
 154         24th September 2017
 155       </div>
 156       <div class="body">
 157         <p>A little more than a month ago I wrote
 158 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Simpler_recipe_on_how_to_make_a_simple__7_IMSI_Catcher_using_Debian.html">how
 159 to observe the SIM card ID (aka IMSI number) of mobile phones talking
 160 to nearby mobile phone base stations using Debian GNU/Linux and a
 161 cheap USB software defined radio</a>, and thus being able to pinpoint
 162 the location of people and equipment (like cars and trains) with an
 163 accuracy of a few kilometer.  Since then we have worked to make the
 164 procedure even simpler, and it is now possible to do this without any
 165 manual frequency tuning and without building your own packages.</p>
 166
 167 <p>The <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/gr-gsm">gr-gsm</a>
 168 package is now included in Debian testing and unstable, and the
 169 IMSI-catcher code no longer require root access to fetch and decode
 170 the GSM data collected using gr-gsm.</p>
 171
 172 <p>Here is an updated recipe, using packages built by Debian and a git
 173 clone of two python scripts:</p>
 174
 175 <ol>
 176
 177 <li>Start with a Debian machine running the Buster version (aka
 178   testing).</li>
 179
 180 <li>Run '<tt>apt install gr-gsm python-numpy python-scipy
 181   python-scapy</tt>' as root to install required packages.</li>
 182
 183 <li>Fetch the code decoding GSM packages using '<tt>git clone
 184   github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher.git</tt>'.</li>
 185
 186 <li>Insert USB software defined radio supported by GNU Radio.</li>
 187
 188 <li>Enter the IMSI-catcher directory and run '<tt>python
 189   scan-and-livemon</tt>' to locate the frequency of nearby base
 190   stations and start listening for GSM packages on one of them.</li>
 191
 192 <li>Enter the IMSI-catcher directory and run '<tt>python
 193   simple_IMSI-catcher.py</tt>' to display the collected information.</li>
 194
 195 </ol>
 196
 197 <p>Note, due to a bug somewhere the scan-and-livemon program (actually
 198 <a href="https://github.com/ptrkrysik/gr-gsm/issues/336">its underlying
 199 program grgsm_scanner</a>) do not work with the HackRF radio.  It does
 200 work with RTL 8232 and other similar USB radio receivers you can get
 201 very cheaply
 202 (<a href="https://www.ebay.com/sch/items/?_nkw=rtl+2832">for example
 203 from ebay</a>), so for now the solution is to scan using the RTL radio
 204 and only use HackRF for fetching GSM data.</p>
 205
 206 <p>As far as I can tell, a cell phone only show up on one of the
 207 frequencies at the time, so if you are going to track and count every
 208 cell phone around you, you need to listen to all the frequencies used.
 209 To listen to several frequencies, use the --numrecv argument to
 210 scan-and-livemon to use several receivers.  Further, I am not sure if
 211 phones using 3G or 4G will show as talking GSM to base stations, so
 212 this approach might not see all phones around you.  I typically see
 213 0-400 IMSI numbers an hour when looking around where I live.</p>
 214
 215 <p>I've tried to run the scanner on a
 216 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi">Raspberry Pi 2 and 3
 217 running Debian Buster</a>, but the grgsm_livemon_headless process seem
 218 to be too CPU intensive to keep up.  When GNU Radio print 'O' to
 219 stdout, I am told there it is caused by a buffer overflow between the
 220 radio and GNU Radio, caused by the program being unable to read the
 221 GSM data fast enough.  If you see a stream of 'O's from the terminal
 222 where you started scan-and-livemon, you need a give the process more
 223 CPU power.  Perhaps someone are able to optimize the code to a point
 224 where it become possible to set up RPi3 based GSM sniffers?  I tried
 225 using Raspbian instead of Debian, but there seem to be something wrong
 226 with GNU Radio on raspbian, causing glibc to abort().</p>
 227
 228       </div>
 229       <div class="tags">
 230
 231
 232         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/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
 233
 234
 235       </div>
 236     </div>
 237     <div class="padding"></div>
 238
 239     <div class="entry">
 240       <div class="title">
 241         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Simpler_recipe_on_how_to_make_a_simple__7_IMSI_Catcher_using_Debian.html">Simpler recipe on how to make a simple $7 IMSI Catcher using Debian</a>
 242       </div>
 243       <div class="date">
 244          9th August 2017
 245       </div>
 246       <div class="body">
 247         <p>On friday, I came across an interesting article in the Norwegian
 248 web based ICT news magazine digi.no on
 249 <a href="https://www.digi.no/artikler/sikkerhetsforsker-lagde-enkel-imsi-catcher-for-60-kroner-na-kan-mobiler-kartlegges-av-alle/398588">how
 250 to collect the IMSI numbers of nearby cell phones</a> using the cheap
 251 DVB-T software defined radios.  The article refered to instructions
 252 and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjwgNd_as30">a recipe by
 253 Keld Norman on Youtube on how to make a simple $7 IMSI Catcher</a>, and I decided to test them out.</p>
 254
 255 <p>The instructions said to use Ubuntu, install pip using apt (to
 256 bypass apt), use pip to install pybombs (to bypass both apt and pip),
 257 and the ask pybombs to fetch and build everything you need from
 258 scratch.  I wanted to see if I could do the same on the most recent
 259 Debian packages, but this did not work because pybombs tried to build
 260 stuff that no longer build with the most recent openssl library or
 261 some other version skew problem.  While trying to get this recipe
 262 working, I learned that the apt->pip->pybombs route was a long detour,
 263 and the only piece of software dependency missing in Debian was the
 264 gr-gsm package.  I also found out that the lead upstream developer of
 265 gr-gsm (the name stand for GNU Radio GSM) project already had a set of
 266 Debian packages provided in an Ubuntu PPA repository.  All I needed to
 267 do was to dget the Debian source package and built it.</p>
 268
 269 <p>The IMSI collector is a python script listening for packages on the
 270 loopback network device and printing to the terminal some specific GSM
 271 packages with IMSI numbers in them.  The code is fairly short and easy
 272 to understand.  The reason this work is because gr-gsm include a tool
 273 to read GSM data from a software defined radio like a DVB-T USB stick
 274 and other software defined radios, decode them and inject them into a
 275 network device on your Linux machine (using the loopback device by
 276 default).  This proved to work just fine, and I've been testing the
 277 collector for a few days now.</p>
 278
 279 <p>The updated and simpler recipe is thus to</p>
 280
 281 <ol>
 282
 283 <li>start with a Debian machine running Stretch or newer,</li>
 284
 285 <li>build and install the gr-gsm package available from
 286 <a href="http://ppa.launchpad.net/ptrkrysik/gr-gsm/ubuntu/pool/main/g/gr-gsm/">http://ppa.launchpad.net/ptrkrysik/gr-gsm/ubuntu/pool/main/g/gr-gsm/</a>,</li>
 287
 288 <li>clone the git repostory from <a href="https://github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher">https://github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher</a>,</li>
 289
 290 <li>run grgsm_livemon and adjust the frequency until the terminal
 291 where it was started is filled with a stream of text (meaning you
 292 found a GSM station).</li>
 293
 294 <li>go into the IMSI-catcher directory and run 'sudo python simple_IMSI-catcher.py' to extract the IMSI numbers.</li>
 295
 296 </ol>
 297
 298 <p>To make it even easier in the future to get this sniffer up and
 299 running, I decided to package
 300 <a href="https://github.com/ptrkrysik/gr-gsm/">the gr-gsm project</a>
 301 for Debian (<a href="https://bugs.debian.org/871055">WNPP
 302 #871055</a>), and the package was uploaded into the NEW queue today.
 303 Luckily the gnuradio maintainer has promised to help me, as I do not
 304 know much about gnuradio stuff yet.</p>
 305
 306 <p>I doubt this "IMSI cacher" is anywhere near as powerfull as
 307 commercial tools like
 308 <a href="https://www.thespyphone.com/portable-imsi-imei-catcher/">The
 309 Spy Phone Portable IMSI / IMEI Catcher</a> or the
 310 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingray_phone_tracker">Harris
 311 Stingray</a>, but I hope the existance of cheap alternatives can make
 312 more people realise how their whereabouts when carrying a cell phone
 313 is easily tracked.  Seeing the data flow on the screen, realizing that
 314 I live close to a police station and knowing that the police is also
 315 wearing cell phones, I wonder how hard it would be for criminals to
 316 track the position of the police officers to discover when there are
 317 police near by, or for foreign military forces to track the location
 318 of the Norwegian military forces, or for anyone to track the location
 319 of government officials...</p>
 320
 321 <p>It is worth noting that the data reported by the IMSI-catcher
 322 script mentioned above is only a fraction of the data broadcasted on
 323 the GSM network.  It will only collect one frequency at the time,
 324 while a typical phone will be using several frequencies, and not all
 325 phones will be using the frequencies tracked by the grgsm_livemod
 326 program.  Also, there is a lot of radio chatter being ignored by the
 327 simple_IMSI-catcher script, which would be collected by extending the
 328 parser code.  I wonder if gr-gsm can be set up to listen to more than
 329 one frequency?</p>
 330
 331       </div>
 332       <div class="tags">
 333
 334
 335         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/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
 336
 337
 338       </div>
 339     </div>
 340     <div class="padding"></div>
 341
 342     <div class="entry">
 343       <div class="title">
 344         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook_is_now_available.html">Norwegian Bokmål edition of Debian Administrator's Handbook is now available</a>
 345       </div>
 346       <div class="date">
 347         25th July 2017
 348       </div>
 349       <div class="body">
 350         <p align="center"><img align="center" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-07-25-debian-handbook-nb-testprint.png"/></p>
 351
 352 <p>I finally received a copy of the Norwegian Bokmål edition of
 353 "<a href="https://debian-handbook.info/">The Debian Administrator's
 354 Handbook</a>".  This test copy arrived in the mail a few days ago, and
 355 I am very happy to hold the result in my hand.   We spent around one and a half year translating it. This paperbook edition
 356 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/get/#norwegian">is available
 357 from lulu.com</a>.  If you buy it quickly, you save 25% on the list
 358 price.  The book is also available for download in electronic form as
 359 PDF, EPUB and Mobipocket, as can be
 360 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/browse/nb-NO/stable/">read online
 361 as a web page</a>.</p>
 362
 363 <p>This is the second book I publish (the first was the book
 364 "<a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a>" by Lawrence Lessig
 365 in
 366 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22440520.html">English</a>,
 367 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/culture-libre/paperback/product-22645082.html">French</a>
 368 and
 369 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/fri-kultur/paperback/product-22441576.html">Norwegian
 370 Bokmål</a>), and I am very excited to finally wrap up this
 371 project.  I hope
 372 "<a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/rapha%C3%ABl-hertzog-and-roland-mas/h%C3%A5ndbok-for-debian-administratoren/paperback/product-23262290.html">Håndbok
 373 for Debian-administratoren</a>" will be well received.</p>
 374
 375       </div>
 376       <div class="tags">
 377
 378
 379         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>.
 380
 381
 382       </div>
 383     </div>
 384     <div class="padding"></div>
 385
 386     <div class="entry">
 387       <div class="title">
 388         <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>
 389       </div>
 390       <div class="date">
 391         12th June 2017
 392       </div>
 393       <div class="body">
 394         <p>It is pleasing to see that the work we put down in publishing new
 395 editions of the classic <a href="http://www.free-culture.cc/">Free
 396 Culture book</a> by the founder of the Creative Commons movement,
 397 Lawrence Lessig, is still being appreciated.  I had a look at the
 398 latest sales numbers for the paper edition today.  Not too impressive,
 399 but happy to see some buyers still exist.  All the revenue from the
 400 books is sent to the <a href="https://creativecommons.org/">Creative
 401 Commons Corporation</a>, and they receive the largest cut if you buy
 402 directly from Lulu.  Most books are sold via Amazon, with Ingram
 403 second and only a small fraction directly from Lulu.  The ebook
 404 edition is available for free from
 405 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">Github</a>.</p>
 406
 407 <table border="0">
 408 <tr><th rowspan="2" valign="bottom">Title / language</th><th colspan="3">Quantity</th></tr>
 409 <tr><th>2016 jan-jun</th><th>2016 jul-dec</th><th>2017 jan-may</th></tr>
 410
 411 <tr>
 412   <td><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/culture-libre/paperback/product-22645082.html">Culture Libre / French</a></td>
 413   <td align="right">3</td>
 414   <td align="right">6</td>
 415   <td align="right">15</td>
 416 </tr>
 417
 418 <tr>
 419   <td><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/fri-kultur/paperback/product-22441576.html">Fri kultur / Norwegian</a></td>
 420   <td align="right">7</td>
 421   <td align="right">1</td>
 422   <td align="right">0</td>
 423 </tr>
 424
 425 <tr>
 426   <td><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22440520.html">Free Culture / English</a></td>
 427   <td align="right">14</td>
 428   <td align="right">27</td>
 429   <td align="right">16</td>
 430 </tr>
 431
 432 <tr>
 433   <td>Total</td>
 434   <td align="right">24</td>
 435   <td align="right">34</td>
 436   <td align="right">31</td>
 437 </tr>
 438
 439 </table>
 440
 441 <p>A bit sad to see the low sales number on the Norwegian edition, and
 442 a bit surprising the English edition still selling so well.</p>
 443
 444 <p>If you would like to translate and publish the book in your native
 445 language, I would be happy to help make it happen.  Please get in
 446 touch.</p>
 447
 448       </div>
 449       <div class="tags">
 450
 451
 452         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>.
 453
 454
 455       </div>
 456     </div>
 457     <div class="padding"></div>
 458
 459     <div class="entry">
 460       <div class="title">
 461         <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>
 462       </div>
 463       <div class="date">
 464         10th June 2017
 465       </div>
 466       <div class="body">
 467         <p>I am very happy to report that the
 468 <a href="https://github.com/hiOA-ABI/nikita-noark5-core">Nikita Noark 5
 469 core project</a> tagged its second release today.  The free software
 470 solution is an implementation of the Norwegian archive standard Noark
 471 5 used by government offices in Norway.  These were the changes in
 472 version 0.1.1 since version 0.1.0 (from NEWS.md):
 473
 474 <ul>
 475
 476  <li>Continued work on the angularjs GUI, including document upload.</li>
 477  <li>Implemented correspondencepartPerson, correspondencepartUnit and
 478    correspondencepartInternal</li>
 479  <li>Applied for coverity coverage and started submitting code on
 480    regualr basis.</li>
 481  <li>Started fixing bugs reported by coverity</li>
 482  <li>Corrected and completed HATEOAS links to make sure entire API is
 483    available via URLs in _links.</li>
 484  <li>Corrected all relation URLs to use trailing slash.</li>
 485  <li>Add initial support for storing data in ElasticSearch.</li>
 486  <li>Now able to receive and store uploaded files in the archive.</li>
 487  <li>Changed JSON output for object lists to have relations in _links.</li>
 488  <li>Improve JSON output for empty object lists.</li>
 489  <li>Now uses correct MIME type application/vnd.noark5-v4+json.</li>
 490  <li>Added support for docker container images.</li>
 491  <li>Added simple API browser implemented in JavaScript/Angular.</li>
 492  <li>Started on archive client implemented in JavaScript/Angular.</li>
 493  <li>Started on prototype to show the public mail journal.</li>
 494  <li>Improved performance by disabling Sprint FileWatcher.</li>
 495  <li>Added support for 'arkivskaper', 'saksmappe' and 'journalpost'.</li>
 496  <li>Added support for some metadata codelists.</li>
 497  <li>Added support for Cross-origin resource sharing (CORS).</li>
 498  <li>Changed login method from Basic Auth to JSON Web Token (RFC 7519)
 499    style.</li>
 500  <li>Added support for GET-ing ny-* URLs.</li>
 501  <li>Added support for modifying entities using PUT and eTag.</li>
 502  <li>Added support for returning XML output on request.</li>
 503  <li>Removed support for English field and class names, limiting ourself
 504    to the official names.</li>
 505  <li>...</li>
 506
 507 </ul>
 508
 509 <p>If this sound interesting to you, please contact us on IRC (#nikita
 510 on irc.freenode.net) or email
 511 (<a href="https://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/nikita-noark">nikita-noark
 512 mailing list).</p>
 513
 514       </div>
 515       <div class="tags">
 516
 517
 518         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>.
 519
 520
 521       </div>
 522     </div>
 523     <div class="padding"></div>
 524
 525     <div class="entry">
 526       <div class="title">
 527         <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>
 528       </div>
 529       <div class="date">
 530          7th June 2017
 531       </div>
 532       <div class="body">
 533         <p><em>This is a copy of
 534 <a href="https://lists.nuug.no/pipermail/nikita-noark/2017-June/000297.html">an
 535 email I posted to the nikita-noark mailing list</a>.  Please follow up
 536 there if you would like to discuss this topic.  The background is that
 537 we are making a free software archive system based on the Norwegian
 538 <a href="https://www.arkivverket.no/forvaltning-og-utvikling/regelverk-og-standarder/noark-standarden">Noark
 539 5 standard</a> for government archives.</em></p>
 540
 541 <p>I've been wondering a bit lately how trusted timestamps could be
 542 stored in Noark 5.
 543 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_timestamping">Trusted
 544 timestamps</a> can be used to verify that some information
 545 (document/file/checksum/metadata) have not been changed since a
 546 specific time in the past.  This is useful to verify the integrity of
 547 the documents in the archive.</p>
 548
 549 <p>Then it occured to me, perhaps the trusted timestamps could be
 550 stored as dokument variants (ie dokumentobjekt referered to from
 551 dokumentbeskrivelse) with the filename set to the hash it is
 552 stamping?</p>
 553
 554 <p>Given a "dokumentbeskrivelse" with an associated "dokumentobjekt",
 555 a new dokumentobjekt is associated with "dokumentbeskrivelse" with the
 556 same attributes as the stamped dokumentobjekt except these
 557 attributes:</p>
 558
 559 <ul>
 560
 561 <li>format -> "RFC3161"
 562 <li>mimeType -> "application/timestamp-reply"
 563 <li>formatDetaljer -> "&lt;source URL for timestamp service&gt;"
 564 <li>filenavn -> "&lt;sjekksum&gt;.tsr"
 565
 566 </ul>
 567
 568 <p>This assume a service following
 569 <a href="https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3161">IETF RFC 3161</a> is
 570 used, which specifiy the given MIME type for replies and the .tsr file
 571 ending for the content of such trusted timestamp.  As far as I can
 572 tell from the Noark 5 specifications, it is OK to have several
 573 variants/renderings of a dokument attached to a given
 574 dokumentbeskrivelse objekt.  It might be stretching it a bit to make
 575 some of these variants represent crypto-signatures useful for
 576 verifying the document integrity instead of representing the dokument
 577 itself.</p>
 578
 579 <p>Using the source of the service in formatDetaljer allow several
 580 timestamping services to be used.  This is useful to spread the risk
 581 of key compromise over several organisations.  It would only be a
 582 problem to trust the timestamps if all of the organisations are
 583 compromised.</p>
 584
 585 <p>The following oneliner on Linux can be used to generate the tsr
 586 file.  $input is the path to the file to checksum, and $sha256 is the
 587 SHA-256 checksum of the file (ie the "<sjekksum>.tsr" value mentioned
 588 above).</p>
 589
 590 <p><blockquote><pre>
 591 openssl ts -query -data "$inputfile" -cert -sha256 -no_nonce \
 592   | curl -s -H "Content-Type: application/timestamp-query" \
 593       --data-binary "@-" http://zeitstempel.dfn.de > $sha256.tsr
 594 </pre></blockquote></p>
 595
 596 <p>To verify the timestamp, you first need to download the public key
 597 of the trusted timestamp service, for example using this command:</p>
 598
 599 <p><blockquote><pre>
 600 wget -O ca-cert.txt \
 601   https://pki.pca.dfn.de/global-services-ca/pub/cacert/chain.txt
 602 </pre></blockquote></p>
 603
 604 <p>Note, the public key should be stored alongside the timestamps in
 605 the archive to make sure it is also available 100 years from now.  It
 606 is probably a good idea to standardise how and were to store such
 607 public keys, to make it easier to find for those trying to verify
 608 documents 100 or 1000 years from now. :)</p>
 609
 610 <p>The verification itself is a simple openssl command:</p>
 611
 612 <p><blockquote><pre>
 613 openssl ts -verify -data $inputfile -in $sha256.tsr \
 614   -CAfile ca-cert.txt -text
 615 </pre></blockquote></p>
 616
 617 <p>Is there any reason this approach would not work?  Is it somehow against
 618 the Noark 5 specification?</p>
 619
 620       </div>
 621       <div class="tags">
 622
 623
 624         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>.
 625
 626
 627       </div>
 628     </div>
 629     <div class="padding"></div>
 630
 631     <div class="entry">
 632       <div class="title">
 633         <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>
 634       </div>
 635       <div class="date">
 636         19th March 2017
 637       </div>
 638       <div class="body">
 639         <p>The <a href="https://github.com/hiOA-ABI/nikita-noark5-core">Nikita
 640 Noark 5 core project</a> is implementing the Norwegian standard for
 641 keeping an electronic archive of government documents.
 642 <a href="http://www.arkivverket.no/arkivverket/Offentlig-forvaltning/Noark/Noark-5/English-version">The
 643 Noark 5 standard</a> document the requirement for data systems used by
 644 the archives in the Norwegian government, and the Noark 5 web interface
 645 specification document a REST web service for storing, searching and
 646 retrieving documents and metadata in such archive.  I've been involved
 647 in the project since a few weeks before Christmas, when the Norwegian
 648 Unix User Group
 649 <a href="https://www.nuug.no/news/NOARK5_kjerne_som_fri_programvare_f_r_epostliste_hos_NUUG.shtml">announced
 650 it supported the project</a>.  I believe this is an important project,
 651 and hope it can make it possible for the government archives in the
 652 future to use free software to keep the archives we citizens depend
 653 on.  But as I do not hold such archive myself, personally my first use
 654 case is to store and analyse public mail journal metadata published
 655 from the government.  I find it useful to have a clear use case in
 656 mind when developing, to make sure the system scratches one of my
 657 itches.</p>
 658
 659 <p>If you would like to help make sure there is a free software
 660 alternatives for the archives, please join our IRC channel
 661 (<a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23nikita"">#nikita on
 662 irc.freenode.net</a>) and
 663 <a href="https://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/nikita-noark">the
 664 project mailing list</a>.</p>
 665
 666 <p>When I got involved, the web service could store metadata about
 667 documents.  But a few weeks ago, a new milestone was reached when it
 668 became possible to store full text documents too.  Yesterday, I
 669 completed an implementation of a command line tool
 670 <tt>archive-pdf</tt> to upload a PDF file to the archive using this
 671 API.  The tool is very simple at the moment, and find existing
 672 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fonds">fonds</a>, series and
 673 files while asking the user to select which one to use if more than
 674 one exist.  Once a file is identified, the PDF is associated with the
 675 file and uploaded, using the title extracted from the PDF itself.  The
 676 process is fairly similar to visiting the archive, opening a cabinet,
 677 locating a file and storing a piece of paper in the archive.  Here is
 678 a test run directly after populating the database with test data using
 679 our API tester:</p>
 680
 681 <p><blockquote><pre>
 682 ~/src//noark5-tester$ ./archive-pdf mangelmelding/mangler.pdf
 683 using arkiv: Title of the test fonds created 2017-03-18T23:49:32.103446
 684 using arkivdel: Title of the test series created 2017-03-18T23:49:32.103446
 685
 686  0 - Title of the test case file created 2017-03-18T23:49:32.103446
 687  1 - Title of the test file created 2017-03-18T23:49:32.103446
 688 Select which mappe you want (or search term): 0
 689 Uploading mangelmelding/mangler.pdf
 690   PDF title: Mangler i spesifikasjonsdokumentet for NOARK 5 Tjenestegrensesnitt
 691   File 2017/1: Title of the test case file created 2017-03-18T23:49:32.103446
 692 ~/src//noark5-tester$
 693 </pre></blockquote></p>
 694
 695 <p>You can see here how the fonds (arkiv) and serie (arkivdel) only had
 696 one option, while the user need to choose which file (mappe) to use
 697 among the two created by the API tester.  The <tt>archive-pdf</tt>
 698 tool can be found in the git repository for the API tester.</p>
 699
 700 <p>In the project, I have been mostly working on
 701 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/noark5-tester">the API
 702 tester</a> so far, while getting to know the code base.  The API
 703 tester currently use
 704 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HATEOAS">the HATEOAS links</a>
 705 to traverse the entire exposed service API and verify that the exposed
 706 operations and objects match the specification, as well as trying to
 707 create objects holding metadata and uploading a simple XML file to
 708 store.  The tester has proved very useful for finding flaws in our
 709 implementation, as well as flaws in the reference site and the
 710 specification.</p>
 711
 712 <p>The test document I uploaded is a summary of all the specification
 713 defects we have collected so far while implementing the web service.
 714 There are several unclear and conflicting parts of the specification,
 715 and we have
 716 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/noark5-tester/tree/master/mangelmelding">started
 717 writing down</a> the questions we get from implementing it.  We use a
 718 format inspired by how <a href="http://www.opengroup.org/austin/">The
 719 Austin Group</a> collect defect reports for the POSIX standard with
 720 <a href="http://www.opengroup.org/austin/mantis.html">their
 721 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> :).
 722
 723 <p>The Nikita project is implemented using Java and Spring, and is
 724 fairly easy to get up and running using Docker containers for those
 725 that want to test the current code base.  The API tester is
 726 implemented in Python.</p>
 727
 728       </div>
 729       <div class="tags">
 730
 731
 732         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>.
 733
 734
 735       </div>
 736     </div>
 737     <div class="padding"></div>
 738
 739     <div class="entry">
 740       <div class="title">
 741         <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>
 742       </div>
 743       <div class="date">
 744          9th March 2017
 745       </div>
 746       <div class="body">
 747         <p>Over the years, administrating thousand of NFS mounting linux
 748 computers at the time, I often needed a way to detect if the machine
 749 was experiencing NFS hang.  If you try to use <tt>df</tt> or look at a
 750 file or directory affected by the hang, the process (and possibly the
 751 shell) will hang too.  So you want to be able to detect this without
 752 risking the detection process getting stuck too.  It has not been
 753 obvious how to do this.  When the hang has lasted a while, it is
 754 possible to find messages like these in dmesg:</p>
 755
 756 <p><blockquote>
 757 nfs: server nfsserver not responding, still trying
 758 <br>nfs: server nfsserver OK
 759 </blockquote></p>
 760
 761 <p>It is hard to know if the hang is still going on, and it is hard to
 762 be sure looking in dmesg is going to work.  If there are lots of other
 763 messages in dmesg the lines might have rotated out of site before they
 764 are noticed.</p>
 765
 766 <p>While reading through the nfs client implementation in linux kernel
 767 code, I came across some statistics that seem to give a way to detect
 768 it.  The om_timeouts sunrpc value in the kernel will increase every
 769 time the above log entry is inserted into dmesg.  And after digging a
 770 bit further, I discovered that this value show up in
 771 /proc/self/mountstats on Linux.</p>
 772
 773 <p>The mountstats content seem to be shared between files using the
 774 same file system context, so it is enough to check one of the
 775 mountstats files to get the state of the mount point for the machine.
 776 I assume this will not show lazy umounted NFS points, nor NFS mount
 777 points in a different process context (ie with a different filesystem
 778 view), but that does not worry me.</p>
 779
 780 <p>The content for a NFS mount point look similar to this:</p>
 781
 782 <p><blockquote><pre>
 783 [...]
 784 device /dev/mapper/Debian-var mounted on /var with fstype ext3
 785 device nfsserver:/mnt/nfsserver/home0 mounted on /mnt/nfsserver/home0 with fstype nfs statvers=1.1
 786         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
 787         age:    7863311
 788         caps:   caps=0x3fe7,wtmult=4096,dtsize=8192,bsize=0,namlen=255
 789         sec:    flavor=1,pseudoflavor=1
 790         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
 791         bytes:  166253035039 219519120027 0 0 40783504807 185466229638 11677877 45561809
 792         RPC iostats version: 1.0  p/v: 100003/3 (nfs)
 793         xprt:   tcp 925 1 6810 0 0 111505412 111480497 109 2672418560317 0 248 53869103 22481820
 794         per-op statistics
 795                 NULL: 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
 796              GETATTR: 61063106 61063108 0 9621383060 6839064400 453650 77291321 78926132
 797              SETATTR: 463469 463470 0 92005440 66739536 63787 603235 687943
 798               LOOKUP: 17021657 17021657 0 3354097764 4013442928 57216 35125459 35566511
 799               ACCESS: 14281703 14290009 5 2318400592 1713803640 1709282 4865144 7130140
 800             READLINK: 125 125 0 20472 18620 0 1112 1118
 801                 READ: 4214236 4214237 0 715608524 41328653212 89884 22622768 22806693
 802                WRITE: 8479010 8494376 22 187695798568 1356087148 178264904 51506907 231671771
 803               CREATE: 171708 171708 0 38084748 46702272 873 1041833 1050398
 804                MKDIR: 3680 3680 0 773980 993920 26 23990 24245
 805              SYMLINK: 903 903 0 233428 245488 6 5865 5917
 806                MKNOD: 80 80 0 20148 21760 0 299 304
 807               REMOVE: 429921 429921 0 79796004 61908192 3313 2710416 2741636
 808                RMDIR: 3367 3367 0 645112 484848 22 5782 6002
 809               RENAME: 466201 466201 0 130026184 121212260 7075 5935207 5961288
 810                 LINK: 289155 289155 0 72775556 67083960 2199 2565060 2585579
 811              READDIR: 2933237 2933237 0 516506204 13973833412 10385 3190199 3297917
 812          READDIRPLUS: 1652839 1652839 0 298640972 6895997744 84735 14307895 14448937
 813               FSSTAT: 6144 6144 0 1010516 1032192 51 9654 10022
 814               FSINFO: 2 2 0 232 328 0 1 1
 815             PATHCONF: 1 1 0 116 140 0 0 0
 816               COMMIT: 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
 817
 818 device binfmt_misc mounted on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc with fstype binfmt_misc
 819 [...]
 820 </pre></blockquote></p>
 821
 822 <p>The key number to look at is the third number in the per-op list.
 823 It is the number of NFS timeouts experiences per file system
 824 operation.  Here 22 write timeouts and 5 access timeouts.  If these
 825 numbers are increasing, I believe the machine is experiencing NFS
 826 hang.  Unfortunately the timeout value do not start to increase right
 827 away.  The NFS operations need to time out first, and this can take a
 828 while.  The exact timeout value depend on the setup.  For example the
 829 defaults for TCP and UDP mount points are quite different, and the
 830 timeout value is affected by the soft, hard, timeo and retrans NFS
 831 mount options.</p>
 832
 833 <p>The only way I have been able to get working on Debian and RedHat
 834 Enterprise Linux for getting the timeout count is to peek in /proc/.
 835 But according to
 836 <ahref="http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19253-01/816-4555/netmonitor-12/index.html">Solaris
 837 10 System Administration Guide: Network Services</a>, the 'nfsstat -c'
 838 command can be used to get these timeout values.  But this do not work
 839 on Linux, as far as I can tell.  I
 840 <ahref="http://bugs.debian.org/857043">asked Debian about this</a>,
 841 but have not seen any replies yet.</p>
 842
 843 <p>Is there a better way to figure out if a Linux NFS client is
 844 experiencing NFS hangs?  Is there a way to detect which processes are
 845 affected?  Is there a way to get the NFS mount going quickly once the
 846 network problem causing the NFS hang has been cleared?  I would very
 847 much welcome some clues, as we regularly run into NFS hangs.</p>
 848
 849       </div>
 850       <div class="tags">
 851
 852
 853         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>.
 854
 855
 856       </div>
 857     </div>
 858     <div class="padding"></div>
 859
 860     <div class="entry">
 861       <div class="title">
 862         <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>
 863       </div>
 864       <div class="date">
 865          8th March 2017
 866       </div>
 867       <div class="body">
 868         <p>So the new president in the United States of America claim to be
 869 surprised to discover that he was wiretapped during the election
 870 before he was elected president.  He even claim this must be illegal.
 871 Well, doh, if it is one thing the confirmations from Snowden
 872 documented, it is that the entire population in USA is wiretapped, one
 873 way or another.  Of course the president candidates were wiretapped,
 874 alongside the senators, judges and the rest of the people in USA.</p>
 875
 876 <p>Next, the Federal Bureau of Investigation ask the Department of
 877 Justice to go public rejecting the claims that Donald Trump was
 878 wiretapped illegally.  I fail to see the relevance, given that I am
 879 sure the surveillance industry in USA believe they have all the legal
 880 backing they need to conduct mass surveillance on the entire
 881 world.</p>
 882
 883 <p>There is even the director of the FBI stating that he never saw an
 884 order requesting wiretapping of Donald Trump.  That is not very
 885 surprising, given how the FISA court work, with all its activity being
 886 secret.  Perhaps he only heard about it?</p>
 887
 888 <p>What I find most sad in this story is how Norwegian journalists
 889 present it.  In a news reports the other day in the radio from the
 890 Norwegian National broadcasting Company (NRK), I heard the journalist
 891 claim that 'the FBI denies any wiretapping', while the reality is that
 892 'the FBI denies any illegal wiretapping'.  There is a fundamental and
 893 important difference, and it make me sad that the journalists are
 894 unable to grasp it.</p>
 895
 896 <p><strong>Update 2017-03-13:</strong> Look like
 897 <a href="https://theintercept.com/2017/03/13/rand-paul-is-right-nsa-routinely-monitors-americans-communications-without-warrants/">The
 898 Intercept report that US Senator Rand Paul confirm what I state above</a>.</p>
 899
 900       </div>
 901       <div class="tags">
 902
 903
 904         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>.
 905
 906
 907       </div>
 908     </div>
 909     <div class="padding"></div>
 910
 911     <div class="entry">
 912       <div class="title">
 913         <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>
 914       </div>
 915       <div class="date">
 916          3rd March 2017
 917       </div>
 918       <div class="body">
 919         <p>For almost a year now, we have been working on making a Norwegian
 920 Bokmål edition of <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/">The Debian
 921 Administrator's Handbook</a>.  Now, thanks to the tireless effort of
 922 Ole-Erik, Ingrid and Andreas, the initial translation is complete, and
 923 we are working on the proof reading to ensure consistent language and
 924 use of correct computer science terms.  The plan is to make the book
 925 available on paper, as well as in electronic form.  For that to
 926 happen, the proof reading must be completed and all the figures need
 927 to be translated.  If you want to help out, get in touch.</p>
 928
 929 <p><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-handbook/debian-handbook-nb-NO.pdf">A
 930
 931 fresh PDF edition</a> in A4 format (the final book will have smaller
 932 pages) of the book created every morning is available for
 933 proofreading.  If you find any errors, please
 934 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-handbook/">visit
 935 Weblate and correct the error</a>.  The
 936 <a href="http://l.github.io/debian-handbook/stat/nb-NO/index.html">state
 937 of the translation including figures</a> is a useful source for those
 938 provide Norwegian bokmål screen shots and figures.</p>
 939
 940       </div>
 941       <div class="tags">
 942
 943
 944         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>.
 945
 946
 947       </div>
 948     </div>
 949     <div class="padding"></div>
 950
 951     <div class="entry">
 952       <div class="title">
 953         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Unlimited_randomness_with_the_ChaosKey_.html">Unlimited randomness with the ChaosKey?</a>
 954       </div>
 955       <div class="date">
 956          1st March 2017
 957       </div>
 958       <div class="body">
 959         <p>A few days ago I ordered a small batch of
 960 <a href="http://altusmetrum.org/ChaosKey/">the ChaosKey</a>, a small
 961 USB dongle for generating entropy created by Bdale Garbee and Keith
 962 Packard.  Yesterday it arrived, and I am very happy to report that it
 963 work great!  According to its designers, to get it to work out of the
 964 box, you need the Linux kernel version 4.1 or later.  I tested on a
 965 Debian Stretch machine (kernel version 4.9), and there it worked just
 966 fine, increasing the available entropy very quickly.  I wrote a small
 967 test oneliner to test.  It first print the current entropy level,
 968 drain /dev/random, and then print the entropy level for five seconds.
 969 Here is the situation without the ChaosKey inserted:</p>
 970
 971 <blockquote><pre>
 972 % cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
 973   dd bs=1M if=/dev/random of=/dev/null count=1; \
 974   for n in $(seq 1 5); do \
 975      cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
 976      sleep 1; \
 977   done
 978 300
 979 0+1 oppføringer inn
 980 0+1 oppføringer ut
 981 28 byte kopiert, 0,000264565 s, 106 kB/s
 982 4
 983 8
 984 12
 985 17
 986 21
 987 %
 988 </pre></blockquote>
 989
 990 <p>The entropy level increases by 3-4 every second.  In such case any
 991 application requiring random bits (like a HTTPS enabled web server)
 992 will halt and wait for more entrpy.  And here is the situation with
 993 the ChaosKey inserted:</p>
 994
 995 <blockquote><pre>
 996 % cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
 997   dd bs=1M if=/dev/random of=/dev/null count=1; \
 998   for n in $(seq 1 5); do \
 999      cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
1000      sleep 1; \
1001   done
1002 1079
1003 0+1 oppføringer inn
1004 0+1 oppføringer ut
1005 104 byte kopiert, 0,000487647 s, 213 kB/s
1006 433
1007 1028
1008 1031
1009 1035
1010 1038
1011 %
1012 </pre></blockquote>
1013
1014 <p>Quite the difference. :) I bought a few more than I need, in case
1015 someone want to buy one here in Norway. :)</p>
1016
1017 <p>Update: The dongle was presented at Debconf last year.  You might
1018 find <a href="https://debconf16.debconf.org/talks/94/">the talk
1019 recording illuminating</a>.  It explains exactly what the source of
1020 randomness is, if you are unable to spot it from the schema drawing
1021 available from the ChaosKey web site linked at the start of this blog
1022 post.</p>
1023
1024       </div>
1025       <div class="tags">
1026
1027
1028         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>.
1029
1030
1031       </div>
1032     </div>
1033     <div class="padding"></div>
1034
1035     <div class="entry">
1036       <div class="title">
1037         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Detect_OOXML_files_with_undefined_behaviour_.html">Detect OOXML files with undefined behaviour?</a>
1038       </div>
1039       <div class="date">
1040         21st February 2017
1041       </div>
1042       <div class="body">
1043         <p>I just noticed
1044 <a href="http://www.arkivrad.no/aktuelt/riksarkivarens-forskrift-pa-horing">the
1045 new Norwegian proposal for archiving rules in the goverment</a> list
1046 <a href="http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-376.htm">ECMA-376</a>
1047 / ISO/IEC 29500 (aka OOXML) as valid formats to put in long term
1048 storage.  Luckily such files will only be accepted based on
1049 pre-approval from the National Archive.  Allowing OOXML files to be
1050 used for long term storage might seem like a good idea as long as we
1051 forget that there are plenty of ways for a "valid" OOXML document to
1052 have content with no defined interpretation in the standard, which
1053 lead to a question and an idea.</p>
1054
1055 <p>Is there any tool to detect if a OOXML document depend on such
1056 undefined behaviour?  It would be useful for the National Archive (and
1057 anyone else interested in verifying that a document is well defined)
1058 to have such tool available when considering to approve the use of
1059 OOXML.  I'm aware of the
1060 <a href="https://github.com/arlm/officeotron/">officeotron OOXML
1061 validator</a>, but do not know how complete it is nor if it will
1062 report use of undefined behaviour.  Are there other similar tools
1063 available?  Please send me an email if you know of any such tool.</p>
1064
1065       </div>
1066       <div class="tags">
1067
1068
1069         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>.
1070
1071
1072       </div>
1073     </div>
1074     <div class="padding"></div>
1075
1076     <div class="entry">
1077       <div class="title">
1078         <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>
1079       </div>
1080       <div class="date">
1081         13th February 2017
1082       </div>
1083       <div class="body">
1084         <p>A few days ago, we received the ruling from
1085 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_day_in_court_challenging_seizure_of_popcorn_time_no_for__domstolkontroll.html">my
1086 day in court</a>.  The case in question is a challenge of the seizure
1087 of the DNS domain popcorn-time.no.  The ruling simply did not mention
1088 most of our arguments, and seemed to take everything ØKOKRIM said at
1089 face value, ignoring our demonstration and explanations.  But it is
1090 hard to tell for sure, as we still have not seen most of the documents
1091 in the case and thus were unprepared and unable to contradict several
1092 of the claims made in court by the opposition.  We are considering an
1093 appeal, but it is partly a question of funding, as it is costing us
1094 quite a bit to pay for our lawyer.  If you want to help, please
1095 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/dns-beslag-donasjon.shtml">donate to the
1096 NUUG defense fund</a>.</p>
1097
1098 <p>The details of the case, as far as we know it, is available in
1099 Norwegian from
1100 <a href="https://www.nuug.no/news/tags/dns-domenebeslag/">the NUUG
1101 blog</a>.  This also include
1102 <a href="https://www.nuug.no/news/Avslag_etter_rettslig_h_ring_om_DNS_beslaget___vurderer_veien_videre.shtml">the
1103 ruling itself</a>.</p>
1104
1105       </div>
1106       <div class="tags">
1107
1108
1109         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>.
1110
1111
1112       </div>
1113     </div>
1114     <div class="padding"></div>
1115
1116     <div class="entry">
1117       <div class="title">
1118         <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>
1119       </div>
1120       <div class="date">
1121          3rd February 2017
1122       </div>
1123       <div class="body">
1124         <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-02-01-popcorn-time-in-court.jpeg"></p>
1125
1126 <p>On Wednesday, I spent the entire day in court in Follo Tingrett
1127 representing <a href="https://www.nuug.no/">the member association
1128 NUUG</a>, alongside <a href="https://www.efn.no/">the member
1129 association EFN</a> and <a href="http://www.imc.no">the DNS registrar
1130 IMC</a>, challenging the seizure of the DNS name popcorn-time.no.  It
1131 was interesting to sit in a court of law for the first time in my
1132 life.  Our team can be seen in the picture above: attorney Ola
1133 Tellesbø, EFN board member Tom Fredrik Blenning, IMC CEO Morten Emil
1134 Eriksen and NUUG board member Petter Reinholdtsen.</p>
1135
1136 <p><a href="http://www.domstol.no/no/Enkelt-domstol/follo-tingrett/Nar-gar-rettssaken/Beramming/?cid=AAAA1701301512081262234UJFBVEZZZZZEJBAvtale">The
1137 case at hand</a> is that the Norwegian National Authority for
1138 Investigation and Prosecution of Economic and Environmental Crime (aka
1139 Økokrim) decided on their own, to seize a DNS domain early last
1140 year, without following
1141 <a href="https://www.norid.no/no/regelverk/navnepolitikk/#link12">the
1142 official policy of the Norwegian DNS authority</a> which require a
1143 court decision.  The web site in question was a site covering Popcorn
1144 Time.  And Popcorn Time is the name of a technology with both legal
1145 and illegal applications.  Popcorn Time is a client combining
1146 searching a Bittorrent directory available on the Internet with
1147 downloading/distribute content via Bittorrent and playing the
1148 downloaded content on screen.  It can be used illegally if it is used
1149 to distribute content against the will of the right holder, but it can
1150 also be used legally to play a lot of content, for example the
1151 millions of movies
1152 <a href="https://archive.org/details/movies">available from the
1153 Internet Archive</a> or the collection
1154 <a href="http://vodo.net/films/">available from Vodo</a>.  We created
1155 <a href="magnet:?xt=urn:btih:86c1802af5a667ca56d3918aecb7d3c0f7173084&dn=PresentasjonFolloTingrett.mov&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fpublic.popcorn-tracker.org%3A6969%2Fannounce">a
1156 video demonstrating legally use of Popcorn Time</a> and played it in
1157 Court.  It can of course be downloaded using Bittorrent.</p>
1158
1159 <p>I did not quite know what to expect from a day in court.  The
1160 government held on to their version of the story and we held on to
1161 ours, and I hope the judge is able to make sense of it all.  We will
1162 know in two weeks time.  Unfortunately I do not have high hopes, as
1163 the Government have the upper hand here with more knowledge about the
1164 case, better training in handling criminal law and in general higher
1165 standing in the courts than fairly unknown DNS registrar and member
1166 associations.  It is expensive to be right also in Norway.  So far the
1167 case have cost more than NOK 70 000,-.  To help fund the case, NUUG
1168 and EFN have asked for donations, and managed to collect around NOK 25
1169 000,- so far.  Given the presentation from the Government, I expect
1170 the government to appeal if the case go our way.  And if the case do
1171 not go our way, I hope we have enough funding to appeal.</p>
1172
1173 <p>From the other side came two people from Økokrim.  On the benches,
1174 appearing to be part of the group from the government were two people
1175 from the Simonsen Vogt Wiik lawyer office, and three others I am not
1176 quite sure who was.  Økokrim had proposed to present two witnesses
1177 from The Motion Picture Association, but this was rejected because
1178 they did not speak Norwegian and it was a bit late to bring in a
1179 translator, but perhaps the two from MPA were present anyway.  All
1180 seven appeared to know each other.  Good to see the case is take
1181 seriously.</p>
1182
1183 <p>If you, like me, believe the courts should be involved before a DNS
1184 domain is hijacked by the government, or you believe the Popcorn Time
1185 technology have a lot of useful and legal applications, I suggest you
1186 too <a href="http://www.nuug.no/dns-beslag-donasjon.shtml">donate to
1187 the NUUG defense fund</a>.  Both Bitcoin and bank transfer are
1188 available. If NUUG get more than we need for the legal action (very
1189 unlikely), the rest will be spend promoting free software, open
1190 standards and unix-like operating systems in Norway, so no matter what
1191 happens the money will be put to good use.</p>
1192
1193 <p>If you want to lean more about the case, I recommend you check out
1194 <a href="https://www.nuug.no/news/tags/dns-domenebeslag/">the blog
1195 posts from NUUG covering the case</a>.  They cover the legal arguments
1196 on both sides.</p>
1197
1198       </div>
1199       <div class="tags">
1200
1201
1202         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>.
1203
1204
1205       </div>
1206     </div>
1207     <div class="padding"></div>
1208
1209     <div class="entry">
1210       <div class="title">
1211         <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>
1212       </div>
1213       <div class="date">
1214          9th January 2017
1215       </div>
1216       <div class="body">
1217         <p>Did you ever wonder where the web trafic really flow to reach the
1218 web servers, and who own the network equipment it is flowing through?
1219 It is possible to get a glimpse of this from using traceroute, but it
1220 is hard to find all the details.  Many years ago, I wrote a system to
1221 map the Norwegian Internet (trying to figure out if our plans for a
1222 network game service would get low enough latency, and who we needed
1223 to talk to about setting up game servers close to the users.  Back
1224 then I used traceroute output from many locations (I asked my friends
1225 to run a script and send me their traceroute output) to create the
1226 graph and the map.  The output from traceroute typically look like
1227 this:
1228
1229 <p><pre>
1230 traceroute to www.stortinget.no (85.88.67.10), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
1231  1  uio-gw10.uio.no (129.240.202.1)  0.447 ms  0.486 ms  0.621 ms
1232  2  uio-gw8.uio.no (129.240.24.229)  0.467 ms  0.578 ms  0.675 ms
1233  3  oslo-gw1.uninett.no (128.39.65.17)  0.385 ms  0.373 ms  0.358 ms
1234  4  te3-1-2.br1.fn3.as2116.net (193.156.90.3)  1.174 ms  1.172 ms  1.153 ms
1235  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
1236  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
1237  7  89.191.10.146 (89.191.10.146)  0.931 ms  0.917 ms  0.955 ms
1238  8  * * *
1239  9  * * *
1240 [...]
1241 </pre></p>
1242
1243 <p>This show the DNS names and IP addresses of (at least some of the)
1244 network equipment involved in getting the data traffic from me to the
1245 www.stortinget.no server, and how long it took in milliseconds for a
1246 package to reach the equipment and return to me.  Three packages are
1247 sent, and some times the packages do not follow the same path.  This
1248 is shown for hop 5, where three different IP addresses replied to the
1249 traceroute request.</p>
1250
1251 <p>There are many ways to measure trace routes.  Other good traceroute
1252 implementations I use are traceroute (using ICMP packages) mtr (can do
1253 both ICMP, UDP and TCP) and scapy (python library with ICMP, UDP, TCP
1254 traceroute and a lot of other capabilities).  All of them are easily
1255 available in <a href="https://www.debian.org/">Debian</a>.</p>
1256
1257 <p>This time around, I wanted to know the geographic location of
1258 different route points, to visualize how visiting a web page spread
1259 information about the visit to a lot of servers around the globe.  The
1260 background is that a web site today often will ask the browser to get
1261 from many servers the parts (for example HTML, JSON, fonts,
1262 JavaScript, CSS, video) required to display the content.  This will
1263 leak information about the visit to those controlling these servers
1264 and anyone able to peek at the data traffic passing by (like your ISP,
1265 the ISPs backbone provider, FRA, GCHQ, NSA and others).</p>
1266
1267 <p>Lets pick an example, the Norwegian parliament web site
1268 www.stortinget.no.  It is read daily by all members of parliament and
1269 their staff, as well as political journalists, activits and many other
1270 citizens of Norway.  A visit to the www.stortinget.no web site will
1271 ask your browser to contact 8 other servers: ajax.googleapis.com,
1272 insights.hotjar.com, script.hotjar.com, static.hotjar.com,
1273 stats.g.doubleclick.net, www.google-analytics.com,
1274 www.googletagmanager.com and www.netigate.se.  I extracted this by
1275 asking <a href="http://phantomjs.org/">PhantomJS</a> to visit the
1276 Stortinget web page and tell me all the URLs PhantomJS downloaded to
1277 render the page (in HAR format using
1278 <a href="https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/blob/master/examples/netsniff.js">their
1279 netsniff example</a>.  I am very grateful to Gorm for showing me how
1280 to do this).  My goal is to visualize network traces to all IP
1281 addresses behind these DNS names, do show where visitors personal
1282 information is spread when visiting the page.</p>
1283
1284 <p align="center"><a href="www.stortinget.no-geoip.kml"><img
1285 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>
1286
1287 <p>When I had a look around for options, I could not find any good
1288 free software tools to do this, and decided I needed my own traceroute
1289 wrapper outputting KML based on locations looked up using GeoIP.  KML
1290 is easy to work with and easy to generate, and understood by several
1291 of the GIS tools I have available.  I got good help from by NUUG
1292 colleague Anders Einar with this, and the result can be seen in
1293 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/kmltraceroute">my
1294 kmltraceroute git repository</a>.  Unfortunately, the quality of the
1295 free GeoIP databases I could find (and the for-pay databases my
1296 friends had access to) is not up to the task.  The IP addresses of
1297 central Internet infrastructure would typically be placed near the
1298 controlling companies main office, and not where the router is really
1299 located, as you can see from <a href="www.stortinget.no-geoip.kml">the
1300 KML file I created</a> using the GeoLite City dataset from MaxMind.
1301
1302 <p align="center"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-scapy.svg"><img
1303 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>
1304
1305 <p>I also had a look at the visual traceroute graph created by
1306 <a href="http://www.secdev.org/projects/scapy/">the scrapy project</a>,
1307 showing IP network ownership (aka AS owner) for the IP address in
1308 question.
1309 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-scapy.svg">The
1310 graph display a lot of useful information about the traceroute in SVG
1311 format</a>, and give a good indication on who control the network
1312 equipment involved, but it do not include geolocation.  This graph
1313 make it possible to see the information is made available at least for
1314 UNINETT, Catchcom, Stortinget, Nordunet, Google, Amazon, Telia, Level
1315 3 Communications and NetDNA.</p>
1316
1317 <p align="center"><a href="https://geotraceroute.com/index.php?node=4&host=www.stortinget.no"><img
1318 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>
1319
1320 <p>In the process, I came across the
1321 <a href="https://geotraceroute.com/">web service GeoTraceroute</a> by
1322 Salim Gasmi.  Its methology of combining guesses based on DNS names,
1323 various location databases and finally use latecy times to rule out
1324 candidate locations seemed to do a very good job of guessing correct
1325 geolocation.  But it could only do one trace at the time, did not have
1326 a sensor in Norway and did not make the geolocations easily available
1327 for postprocessing.  So I contacted the developer and asked if he
1328 would be willing to share the code (he refused until he had time to
1329 clean it up), but he was interested in providing the geolocations in a
1330 machine readable format, and willing to set up a sensor in Norway.  So
1331 since yesterday, it is possible to run traces from Norway in this
1332 service thanks to a sensor node set up by
1333 <a href="https://www.nuug.no/">the NUUG assosiation</a>, and get the
1334 trace in KML format for further processing.</p>
1335
1336 <p align="center"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-geotraceroute-kml-join.kml"><img
1337 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>
1338
1339 <p>Here we can see a lot of trafic passes Sweden on its way to
1340 Denmark, Germany, Holland and Ireland.  Plenty of places where the
1341 Snowden confirmations verified the traffic is read by various actors
1342 without your best interest as their top priority.</p>
1343
1344 <p>Combining KML files is trivial using a text editor, so I could loop
1345 over all the hosts behind the urls imported by www.stortinget.no and
1346 ask for the KML file from GeoTraceroute, and create a combined KML
1347 file with all the traces (unfortunately only one of the IP addresses
1348 behind the DNS name is traced this time.  To get them all, one would
1349 have to request traces using IP number instead of DNS names from
1350 GeoTraceroute).  That might be the next step in this project.</p>
1351
1352 <p>Armed with these tools, I find it a lot easier to figure out where
1353 the IP traffic moves and who control the boxes involved in moving it.
1354 And every time the link crosses for example the Swedish border, we can
1355 be sure Swedish Signal Intelligence (FRA) is listening, as GCHQ do in
1356 Britain and NSA in USA and cables around the globe.  (Hm, what should
1357 we tell them? :) Keep that in mind if you ever send anything
1358 unencrypted over the Internet.</p>
1359
1360 <p>PS: KML files are drawn using
1361 <a href="http://ivanrublev.me/kml/">the KML viewer from Ivan
1362 Rublev<a/>, as it was less cluttered than the local Linux application
1363 Marble.  There are heaps of other options too.</p>
1364
1365 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1366 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1367 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1368
1369       </div>
1370       <div class="tags">
1371
1372
1373         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>.
1374
1375
1376       </div>
1377     </div>
1378     <div class="padding"></div>
1379
1380     <div class="entry">
1381       <div class="title">
1382         <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>
1383       </div>
1384       <div class="date">
1385          4th January 2017
1386       </div>
1387       <div class="body">
1388         <p>Do you have a large <a href="https://icalendar.org/">iCalendar</a>
1389 file with lots of old entries, and would like to archive them to save
1390 space and resources?  At least those of us using KOrganizer know that
1391 turning on and off an event set become slower and slower the more
1392 entries are in the set.  While working on migrating our calendars to a
1393 <a href="http://radicale.org/">Radicale CalDAV server</a> on our
1394 <a href="https://freedomboxfoundation.org/">Freedombox server</a/>, my
1395 loved one wondered if I could find a way to split up the calendar file
1396 she had in KOrganizer, and I set out to write a tool.  I spent a few
1397 days writing and polishing the system, and it is now ready for general
1398 consumption.  The
1399 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/ical-archiver">code for
1400 ical-archiver</a> is publicly available from a git repository on
1401 github.  The system is written in Python and depend on
1402 <a href="http://eventable.github.io/vobject/">the vobject Python
1403 module</a>.</p>
1404
1405 <p>To use it, locate the iCalendar file you want to operate on and
1406 give it as an argument to the ical-archiver script.  This will
1407 generate a set of new files, one file per component type per year for
1408 all components expiring more than two years in the past.  The vevent,
1409 vtodo and vjournal entries are handled by the script.  The remaining
1410 entries are stored in a 'remaining' file.</p>
1411
1412 <p>This is what a test run can look like:
1413
1414 <p><pre>
1415 % ical-archiver t/2004-2016.ics
1416 Found 3612 vevents
1417 Found 6 vtodos
1418 Found 2 vjournals
1419 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2004.ics
1420 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2005.ics
1421 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2006.ics
1422 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2007.ics
1423 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2008.ics
1424 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2009.ics
1425 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2010.ics
1426 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2011.ics
1427 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2012.ics
1428 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2013.ics
1429 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2014.ics
1430 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vjournal-2007.ics
1431 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vjournal-2011.ics
1432 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vtodo-2012.ics
1433 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-remaining.ics
1434 %
1435 </pre></p>
1436
1437 <p>As you can see, the original file is untouched and new files are
1438 written with names derived from the original file.  If you are happy
1439 with their content, the *-remaining.ics file can replace the original
1440 the the others can be archived or imported as historical calendar
1441 collections.</p>
1442
1443 <p>The script should probably be improved a bit.  The error handling
1444 when discovering broken entries is not good, and I am not sure yet if
1445 it make sense to split different entry types into separate files or
1446 not.  The program is thus likely to change.  If you find it
1447 interesting, please get in touch. :)</p>
1448
1449 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1450 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1451 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1452
1453       </div>
1454       <div class="tags">
1455
1456
1457         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>.
1458
1459
1460       </div>
1461     </div>
1462     <div class="padding"></div>
1463
1464     <div class="entry">
1465       <div class="title">
1466         <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>
1467       </div>
1468       <div class="date">
1469         23rd December 2016
1470       </div>
1471       <div class="body">
1472         <p>I received a very nice Christmas present today.  As my regular
1473 readers probably know, I have been working on the
1474 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">the Isenkram
1475 system</a> for many years.  The goal of the Isenkram system is to make
1476 it easier for users to figure out what to install to get a given piece
1477 of hardware to work in Debian, and a key part of this system is a way
1478 to map hardware to packages.  Isenkram have its own mapping database,
1479 and also uses data provided by each package using the AppStream
1480 metadata format.  And today,
1481 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/appstream">AppStream</a> in
1482 Debian learned to look up hardware the same way Isenkram is doing it,
1483 ie using fnmatch():</p>
1484
1485 <p><pre>
1486 % appstreamcli what-provides modalias \
1487   usb:v1130p0202d0100dc00dsc00dp00ic03isc00ip00in00
1488 Identifier: pymissile [generic]
1489 Name: pymissile
1490 Summary: Control original Striker USB Missile Launcher
1491 Package: pymissile
1492 % appstreamcli what-provides modalias usb:v0694p0002d0000
1493 Identifier: libnxt [generic]
1494 Name: libnxt
1495 Summary: utility library for talking to the LEGO Mindstorms NXT brick
1496 Package: libnxt
1497 ---
1498 Identifier: t2n [generic]
1499 Name: t2n
1500 Summary: Simple command-line tool for Lego NXT
1501 Package: t2n
1502 ---
1503 Identifier: python-nxt [generic]
1504 Name: python-nxt
1505 Summary: Python driver/interface/wrapper for the Lego Mindstorms NXT robot
1506 Package: python-nxt
1507 ---
1508 Identifier: nbc [generic]
1509 Name: nbc
1510 Summary: C compiler for LEGO Mindstorms NXT bricks
1511 Package: nbc
1512 %
1513 </pre></p>
1514
1515 <p>A similar query can be done using the combined AppStream and
1516 Isenkram databases using the isenkram-lookup tool:</p>
1517
1518 <p><pre>
1519 % isenkram-lookup usb:v1130p0202d0100dc00dsc00dp00ic03isc00ip00in00
1520 pymissile
1521 % isenkram-lookup usb:v0694p0002d0000
1522 libnxt
1523 nbc
1524 python-nxt
1525 t2n
1526 %
1527 </pre></p>
1528
1529 <p>You can find modalias values relevant for your machine using
1530 <tt>cat $(find /sys/devices/ -name modalias)</tt>.
1531
1532 <p>If you want to make this system a success and help Debian users
1533 make the most of the hardware they have, please
1534 help<a href="https://wiki.debian.org/AppStream/Guidelines">add
1535 AppStream metadata for your package following the guidelines</a>
1536 documented in the wiki.  So far only 11 packages provide such
1537 information, among the several hundred hardware specific packages in
1538 Debian. The Isenkram database on the other hand contain 101 packages,
1539 mostly related to USB dongles.  Most of the packages with hardware
1540 mapping in AppStream are LEGO Mindstorms related, because I have, as
1541 part of my involvement in
1542 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">the Debian LEGO
1543 team</a> given priority to making sure LEGO users get proposed the
1544 complete set of packages in Debian for that particular hardware.  The
1545 team also got a nice Christmas present today.  The
1546 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/nxt-firmware">nxt-firmware
1547 package</a> made it into Debian.  With this package in place, it is
1548 now possible to use the LEGO Mindstorms NXT unit with only free
1549 software, as the nxt-firmware package contain the source and firmware
1550 binaries for the NXT brick.</p>
1551
1552 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1553 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1554 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1555
1556       </div>
1557       <div class="tags">
1558
1559
1560         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>.
1561
1562
1563       </div>
1564     </div>
1565     <div class="padding"></div>
1566
1567     <div class="entry">
1568       <div class="title">
1569         <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>
1570       </div>
1571       <div class="date">
1572         20th December 2016
1573       </div>
1574       <div class="body">
1575         <p><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">The Isenkram
1576 system</a> I wrote two years ago to make it easier in Debian to find
1577 and install packages to get your hardware dongles to work, is still
1578 going strong.  It is a system to look up the hardware present on or
1579 connected to the current system, and map the hardware to Debian
1580 packages.  It can either be done using the tools in isenkram-cli or
1581 using the user space daemon in the isenkram package.  The latter will
1582 notify you, when inserting new hardware, about what packages to
1583 install to get the dongle working.  It will even provide a button to
1584 click on to ask packagekit to install the packages.</p>
1585
1586 <p>Here is an command line example from my Thinkpad laptop:</p>
1587
1588 <p><pre>
1589 % isenkram-lookup
1590 bluez
1591 cheese
1592 ethtool
1593 fprintd
1594 fprintd-demo
1595 gkrellm-thinkbat
1596 hdapsd
1597 libpam-fprintd
1598 pidgin-blinklight
1599 thinkfan
1600 tlp
1601 tp-smapi-dkms
1602 tp-smapi-source
1603 tpb
1604 %
1605 </pre></p>
1606
1607 <p>It can also list the firware package providing firmware requested
1608 by the load kernel modules, which in my case is an empty list because
1609 I have all the firmware my machine need:
1610
1611 <p><pre>
1612 % /usr/sbin/isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
1613 info: did not find any firmware files requested by loaded kernel modules.  exiting
1614 %
1615 </pre></p>
1616
1617 <p>The last few days I had a look at several of the around 250
1618 packages in Debian with udev rules.  These seem like good candidates
1619 to install when a given hardware dongle is inserted, and I found
1620 several that should be proposed by isenkram.  I have not had time to
1621 check all of them, but am happy to report that now there are 97
1622 packages packages mapped to hardware by Isenkram.  11 of these
1623 packages provide hardware mapping using AppStream, while the rest are
1624 listed in the modaliases file provided in isenkram.</p>
1625
1626 <p>These are the packages with hardware mappings at the moment.  The
1627 <strong>marked packages</strong> are also announcing their hardware
1628 support using AppStream, for everyone to use:</p>
1629
1630 <p>air-quality-sensor, alsa-firmware-loaders, argyll,
1631 <strong>array-info</strong>, avarice, avrdude, b43-fwcutter,
1632 bit-babbler, bluez, bluez-firmware, <strong>brltty</strong>,
1633 <strong>broadcom-sta-dkms</strong>, calibre, cgminer, cheese, colord,
1634 <strong>colorhug-client</strong>, dahdi-firmware-nonfree, dahdi-linux,
1635 dfu-util, dolphin-emu, ekeyd, ethtool, firmware-ipw2x00, fprintd,
1636 fprintd-demo, <strong>galileo</strong>, gkrellm-thinkbat, gphoto2,
1637 gpsbabel, gpsbabel-gui, gpsman, gpstrans, gqrx-sdr, gr-fcdproplus,
1638 gr-osmosdr, gtkpod, hackrf, hdapsd, hdmi2usb-udev, hpijs-ppds, hplip,
1639 ipw3945-source, ipw3945d, kde-config-tablet, kinect-audio-setup,
1640 <strong>libnxt</strong>, libpam-fprintd, <strong>lomoco</strong>,
1641 madwimax, minidisc-utils, mkgmap, msi-keyboard, mtkbabel,
1642 <strong>nbc</strong>, <strong>nqc</strong>, nut-hal-drivers, ola,
1643 open-vm-toolbox, open-vm-tools, openambit, pcgminer, pcmciautils,
1644 pcscd, pidgin-blinklight, printer-driver-splix,
1645 <strong>pymissile</strong>, python-nxt, qlandkartegt,
1646 qlandkartegt-garmin, rosegarden, rt2x00-source, sispmctl,
1647 soapysdr-module-hackrf, solaar, squeak-plugins-scratch, sunxi-tools,
1648 <strong>t2n</strong>, thinkfan, thinkfinger-tools, tlp, tp-smapi-dkms,
1649 tp-smapi-source, tpb, tucnak, uhd-host, usbmuxd, viking,
1650 virtualbox-ose-guest-x11, w1retap, xawtv, xserver-xorg-input-vmmouse,
1651 xserver-xorg-input-wacom, xserver-xorg-video-qxl,
1652 xserver-xorg-video-vmware, yubikey-personalization and
1653 zd1211-firmware</p>
1654
1655 <p>If you know of other packages, please let me know with a wishlist
1656 bug report against the isenkram-cli package, and ask the package
1657 maintainer to
1658 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/AppStream/Guidelines">add AppStream
1659 metadata according to the guidelines</a> to provide the information
1660 for everyone.  In time, I hope to get rid of the isenkram specific
1661 hardware mapping and depend exclusively on AppStream.</p>
1662
1663 <p>Note, the AppStream metadata for broadcom-sta-dkms is matching too
1664 much hardware, and suggest that the package with with any ethernet
1665 card.  See <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/838735">bug #838735</a> for
1666 the details.  I hope the maintainer find time to address it soon.  In
1667 the mean time I provide an override in isenkram.</p>
1668
1669       </div>
1670       <div class="tags">
1671
1672
1673         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>.
1674
1675
1676       </div>
1677     </div>
1678     <div class="padding"></div>
1679
1680     <div class="entry">
1681       <div class="title">
1682         <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>
1683       </div>
1684       <div class="date">
1685         11th December 2016
1686       </div>
1687       <div class="body">
1688         <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-12-11-nice-oolite.png"/></p>
1689
1690 <p>In my early years, I played
1691 <a href="http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Classic_Elite">the epic game
1692 Elite</a> on my PC.  I spent many months trading and fighting in
1693 space, and reached the 'elite' fighting status before I moved on.  The
1694 original Elite game was available on Commodore 64 and the IBM PC
1695 edition I played had a 64 KB executable.  I am still impressed today
1696 that the authors managed to squeeze both a 3D engine and details about
1697 more than 2000 planet systems across 7 galaxies into a binary so
1698 small.</p>
1699
1700 <p>I have known about <a href="http://www.oolite.org/">the free
1701 software game Oolite inspired by Elite</a> for a while, but did not
1702 really have time to test it properly until a few days ago.  It was
1703 great to discover that my old knowledge about trading routes were
1704 still valid.  But my fighting and flying abilities were gone, so I had
1705 to retrain to be able to dock on a space station.  And I am still not
1706 able to make much resistance when I am attacked by pirates, so I
1707 bougth and mounted the most powerful laser in the rear to be able to
1708 put up at least some resistance while fleeing for my life. :)</p>
1709
1710 <p>When playing Elite in the late eighties, I had to discover
1711 everything on my own, and I had long lists of prices seen on different
1712 planets to be able to decide where to trade what.  This time I had the
1713 advantages of the
1714 <a href="http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Main_Page">Elite wiki</a>,
1715 where information about each planet is easily available with common
1716 price ranges and suggested trading routes.  This improved my ability
1717 to earn money and I have been able to earn enough to buy a lot of
1718 useful equipent in a few days.  I believe I originally played for
1719 months before I could get a docking computer, while now I could get it
1720 after less then a week.</p>
1721
1722 <p>If you like science fiction and dreamed of a life as a vagabond in
1723 space, you should try out Oolite.  It is available for Linux, MacOSX
1724 and Windows, and is included in Debian and derivatives since 2011.</p>
1725
1726 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1727 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1728 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1729
1730       </div>
1731       <div class="tags">
1732
1733
1734         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>.
1735
1736
1737       </div>
1738     </div>
1739     <div class="padding"></div>
1740
1741     <div class="entry">
1742       <div class="title">
1743         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Quicker_Debian_installations_using_eatmydata.html">Quicker Debian installations using eatmydata</a>
1744       </div>
1745       <div class="date">
1746         25th November 2016
1747       </div>
1748       <div class="body">
1749         <p>Two years ago, I did some experiments with eatmydata and the Debian
1750 installation system, observing how using
1751 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Speeding_up_the_Debian_installer_using_eatmydata_and_dpkg_divert.html">eatmydata
1752 could speed up the installation</a> quite a bit.  My testing measured
1753 speedup around 20-40 percent for Debian Edu, where we install around
1754 1000 packages from within the installer.  The eatmydata package
1755 provide a way to disable/delay file system flushing.  This is a bit
1756 risky in the general case, as files that should be stored on disk will
1757 stay only in memory a bit longer than expected, causing problems if a
1758 machine crashes at an inconvenient time.  But for an installation, if
1759 the machine crashes during installation the process is normally
1760 restarted, and avoiding disk operations as much as possible to speed
1761 up the process make perfect sense.
1762
1763 <p>I added code in the Debian Edu specific installation code to enable
1764 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/libeatmydata">eatmydata</a>,
1765 but did not have time to push it any further.  But a few months ago I
1766 picked it up again and worked with the libeatmydata package maintainer
1767 Mattia Rizzolo to make it easier for everyone to get this installation
1768 speedup in Debian.  Thanks to our cooperation There is now an
1769 eatmydata-udeb package in Debian testing and unstable, and simply
1770 enabling/installing it in debian-installer (d-i) is enough to get the
1771 quicker installations.  It can be enabled using preseeding.  The
1772 following untested kernel argument should do the trick:</p>
1773
1774 <blockquote><pre>
1775 preseed/early_command="anna-install eatmydata-udeb"
1776 </pre></blockquote>
1777
1778 <p>This should ask d-i to install the package inside the d-i
1779 environment early in the installation sequence.  Having it installed
1780 in d-i in turn will make sure the relevant scripts are called just
1781 after debootstrap filled /target/ with the freshly installed Debian
1782 system to configure apt to run dpkg with eatmydata.  This is enough to
1783 speed up the installation process.  There is a proposal to
1784 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/841153">extend the idea a bit further
1785 by using /etc/ld.so.preload instead of apt.conf</a>, but I have not
1786 tested its impact.</p>
1787
1788
1789       </div>
1790       <div class="tags">
1791
1792
1793         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>.
1794
1795
1796       </div>
1797     </div>
1798     <div class="padding"></div>
1799
1800     <div class="entry">
1801       <div class="title">
1802         <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>
1803       </div>
1804       <div class="date">
1805         13th November 2016
1806       </div>
1807       <div class="body">
1808         <p><a href="http://coz-profiler.org/">The Coz profiler</a>, a nice
1809 profiler able to run benchmarking experiments on the instrumented
1810 multi-threaded program, finally
1811 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/coz-profiler">made it into
1812 Debian unstable yesterday</A>.  Lluís Vilanova and I have spent many
1813 months since
1814 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Coz_can_help_you_find_bottlenecks_in_multi_threaded_software___nice_free_software.html">I
1815 blogged about the coz tool</a> in August working with upstream to make
1816 it suitable for Debian.  There are still issues with clang
1817 compatibility, inline assembly only working x86 and minimized
1818 JavaScript libraries.</p>
1819
1820 <p>To test it, install 'coz-profiler' using apt and run it like this:</p>
1821
1822 <p><blockquote>
1823 <tt>coz run --- /path/to/binary-with-debug-info</tt>
1824 </blockquote></p>
1825
1826 <p>This will produce a profile.coz file in the current working
1827 directory with the profiling information.  This is then given to a
1828 JavaScript application provided in the package and available from
1829 <a href="http://plasma-umass.github.io/coz/">a project web page</a>.
1830 To start the local copy, invoke it in a browser like this:</p>
1831
1832 <p><blockquote>
1833 <tt>sensible-browser /usr/share/coz-profiler/viewer/index.htm</tt>
1834 </blockquote></p>
1835
1836 <p>See the project home page and the
1837 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/summer2016/curtsinger">USENIX
1838 ;login: article on Coz</a> for more information on how it is
1839 working.</p>
1840
1841       </div>
1842       <div class="tags">
1843
1844
1845         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>.
1846
1847
1848       </div>
1849     </div>
1850     <div class="padding"></div>
1851
1852     <div class="entry">
1853       <div class="title">
1854         <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>
1855       </div>
1856       <div class="date">
1857          7th November 2016
1858       </div>
1859       <div class="body">
1860         <p>A few days ago I ran a very biased and informal survey to get an
1861 idea about what options are being used to communicate with end to end
1862 encryption with friends and family.  I explicitly asked people not to
1863 list options only used in a work setting.  The background is the
1864 uneasy feeling I get when using Signal, a feeling shared by others as
1865 a blog post from Sander Venima about
1866 <a href="https://sandervenema.ch/2016/11/why-i-wont-recommend-signal-anymore/">why
1867 he do not recommend Signal anymore</a> (with
1868 <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12883410">feedback from
1869 the Signal author available from ycombinator</a>).  I wanted an
1870 overview of the options being used, and hope to include those options
1871 in a less biased survey later on.  So far I have not taken the time to
1872 look into the individual proposed systems.  They range from text
1873 sharing web pages, via file sharing and email to instant messaging,
1874 VOIP and video conferencing.  For those considering which system to
1875 use, it is also useful to have a look at
1876 <a href="https://www.eff.org/secure-messaging-scorecard">the EFF Secure
1877 messaging scorecard</a> which is slightly out of date but still
1878 provide valuable information.</p>
1879
1880 <p>So, on to the list.  There were some used by many, some used by a
1881 few, some rarely used ones and a few mentioned but without anyone
1882 claiming to use them.  Notice the grouping is in reality quite random
1883 given the biased self selected set of participants.  First the ones
1884 used by many:</p>
1885
1886 <ul>
1887
1888 <li><a href="https://whispersystems.org/">Signal</a></li>
1889 <li>Email w/<a href="http://openpgp.org/">OpenPGP</a> (Enigmail, GPGSuite,etc)</li>
1890 <li><a href="https://www.whatsapp.com/">Whatsapp</a></li>
1891 <li>IRC w/<a href="https://otr.cypherpunks.ca/">OTR</a></li>
1892 <li>XMPP w/<a href="https://otr.cypherpunks.ca/">OTR</a></li>
1893
1894 </ul>
1895
1896 <p>Then the ones used by a few.</p>
1897
1898 <ul>
1899
1900 <li><a href="https://wiki.mumble.info/wiki/Main_Page">Mumble</a></li>
1901 <li>iMessage (included in iOS from Apple)</li>
1902 <li><a href="https://telegram.org/">Telegram</a></li>
1903 <li><a href="https://jitsi.org/">Jitsi</a></li>
1904 <li><a href="https://keybase.io/download">Keybase file</a></li>
1905
1906 </ul>
1907
1908 <p>Then the ones used by even fewer people</p>
1909
1910 <ul>
1911
1912 <li><a href="https://ring.cx/">Ring</a></li>
1913 <li><a href="https://bitmessage.org/">Bitmessage</a></li>
1914 <li><a href="https://wire.com/">Wire</a></li>
1915 <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>
1916 <li><a href="https://matrix.org/">Matrix</a></li>
1917 <li><a href="https://kontalk.org/">Kontalk</a></li>
1918 <li><a href="https://0bin.net/">0bin</a> (encrypted pastebin)</li>
1919 <li><a href="https://appear.in">Appear.in</a></li>
1920 <li><a href="https://riot.im/">riot</a></li>
1921 <li><a href="https://www.wickr.com/">Wickr Me</a></li>
1922
1923 </ul>
1924
1925 <p>And finally the ones mentioned by not marked as used by
1926 anyone. This might be a mistake, perhaps the person adding the entry
1927 forgot to flag it as used?</p>
1928
1929 <ul>
1930
1931 <li>Email w/Certificates <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S/MIME">S/MIME</a></li>
1932 <li><a href="https://www.crypho.com/">Crypho</a></li>
1933 <li><a href="https://cryptpad.fr/">CryptPad</a></li>
1934 <li><a href="https://github.com/ricochet-im/ricochet">ricochet</a></li>
1935
1936 </ul>
1937
1938 <p>Given the network effect it seem obvious to me that we as a society
1939 have been divided and conquered by those interested in keeping
1940 encrypted and secure communication away from the masses.  The
1941 finishing remarks <a href="https://vimeo.com/97505679">from Aral Balkan
1942 in his talk "Free is a lie"</a> about the usability of free software
1943 really come into effect when you want to communicate in private with
1944 your friends and family.  We can not expect them to allow the
1945 usability of communication tool to block their ability to talk to
1946 their loved ones.</p>
1947
1948 <p>Note for example the option IRC w/OTR.  Most IRC clients do not
1949 have OTR support, so in most cases OTR would not be an option, even if
1950 you wanted to.  In my personal experience, about 1 in 20 I talk to
1951 have a IRC client with OTR.  For private communication to really be
1952 available, most people to talk to must have the option in their
1953 currently used client.  I can not simply ask my family to install an
1954 IRC client.  I need to guide them through a technical multi-step
1955 process of adding extensions to the client to get them going.  This is
1956 a non-starter for most.</p>
1957
1958 <p>I would like to be able to do video phone calls, audio phone calls,
1959 exchange instant messages and share files with my loved ones, without
1960 being forced to share with people I do not know.  I do not want to
1961 share the content of the conversations, and I do not want to share who
1962 I communicate with or the fact that I communicate with someone.
1963 Without all these factors in place, my private life is being more or
1964 less invaded.</p>
1965
1966       </div>
1967       <div class="tags">
1968
1969
1970         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>.
1971
1972
1973       </div>
1974     </div>
1975     <div class="padding"></div>
1976
1977     <div class="entry">
1978       <div class="title">
1979         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/My_own_self_balancing_Lego_Segway.html">My own self balancing Lego Segway</a>
1980       </div>
1981       <div class="date">
1982          4th November 2016
1983       </div>
1984       <div class="body">
1985         <p>A while back I received a Gyro sensor for the NXT
1986 <a href="mindstorms.lego.com">Mindstorms</a> controller as a birthday
1987 present.  It had been on my wishlist for a while, because I wanted to
1988 build a Segway like balancing lego robot.  I had already built
1989 <a href="http://www.nxtprograms.com/NXT2/segway/">a simple balancing
1990 robot</a> with the kids, using the light/color sensor included in the
1991 NXT kit as the balance sensor, but it was not working very well.  It
1992 could balance for a while, but was very sensitive to the light
1993 condition in the room and the reflective properties of the surface and
1994 would fall over after a short while.  I wanted something more robust,
1995 and had
1996 <a href="https://www.hitechnic.com/cgi-bin/commerce.cgi?preadd=action&key=NGY1044">the
1997 gyro sensor from HiTechnic</a> I believed would solve it on my
1998 wishlist for some years before it suddenly showed up as a gift from my
1999 loved ones. :)</p>
2000
2001 <p>Unfortunately I have not had time to sit down and play with it
2002 since then.  But that changed some days ago, when I was searching for
2003 lego segway information and came across a recipe from HiTechnic for
2004 building
2005 <a href="http://www.hitechnic.com/blog/gyro-sensor/htway/">the
2006 HTWay</a>, a segway like balancing robot.  Build instructions and
2007 <a href="https://www.hitechnic.com/upload/786-HTWayC.nxc">source
2008 code</a> was included, so it was just a question of putting it all
2009 together.  And thanks to the great work of many Debian developers, the
2010 compiler needed to build the source for the NXT is already included in
2011 Debian, so I was read to go in less than an hour.  The resulting robot
2012 do not look very impressive in its simplicity:</p>
2013
2014 <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-11-04-lego-htway-robot.jpeg"></p>
2015
2016 <p>Because I lack the infrared sensor used to control the robot in the
2017 design from HiTechnic, I had to comment out the last task
2018 (taskControl).  I simply placed /* and */ around it get the program
2019 working without that sensor present.  Now it balances just fine until
2020 the battery status run low:</p>
2021
2022 <p align="center"><video width="70%" controls="true">
2023    <source src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-11-04-lego-htway-balancing.ogv" type="video/ogg">
2024 </video></p>
2025
2026 <p>Now we would like to teach it how to follow a line and take remote
2027 control instructions using the included Bluetooth receiver in the NXT.</p>
2028
2029 <p>If you, like me, love LEGO and want to make sure we find the tools
2030 they need to work with LEGO in Debian and all our derivative
2031 distributions like Ubuntu, check out
2032 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">the LEGO designers
2033 project page</a> and join the Debian LEGO team.  Personally I own a
2034 RCX and NXT controller (no EV3), and would like to make sure the
2035 Debian tools needed to program the systems I own work as they
2036 should.</p>
2037
2038       </div>
2039       <div class="tags">
2040
2041
2042         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>.
2043
2044
2045       </div>
2046     </div>
2047     <div class="padding"></div>
2048
2049     <div class="entry">
2050       <div class="title">
2051         <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>
2052       </div>
2053       <div class="date">
2054         10th October 2016
2055       </div>
2056       <div class="body">
2057         <p>In July
2058 <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
2059 wrote how to get the Signal Chrome/Chromium app working</a> without
2060 the ability to receive SMS messages (aka without a cell phone).  It is
2061 time to share some experiences and provide an updated setup.</p>
2062
2063 <p>The Signal app have worked fine for several months now, and I use
2064 it regularly to chat with my loved ones.  I had a major snag at the
2065 end of my summer vacation, when the the app completely forgot my
2066 setup, identity and keys.  The reason behind this major mess was
2067 running out of disk space.  To avoid that ever happening again I have
2068 started storing everything in <tt>userdata/</tt> in git, to be able to
2069 roll back to an earlier version if the files are wiped by mistake.  I
2070 had to use it once after introducing the git backup.  When rolling
2071 back to an earlier version, one need to use the 'reset session' option
2072 in Signal to get going, and notify the people you talk with about the
2073 problem.  I assume there is some sequence number tracking in the
2074 protocol to detect rollback attacks.  The git repository is rather big
2075 (674 MiB so far), but I have not tried to figure out if some of the
2076 content can be added to a .gitignore file due to lack of spare
2077 time.</p>
2078
2079 <p>I've also hit the 90 days timeout blocking, and noticed that this
2080 make it impossible to send messages using Signal.  I could still
2081 receive them, but had to patch the code with a new timestamp to send.
2082 I believe the timeout is added by the developers to force people to
2083 upgrade to the latest version of the app, even when there is no
2084 protocol changes, to reduce the version skew among the user base and
2085 thus try to keep the number of support requests down.</p>
2086
2087 <p>Since my original recipe, the Signal source code changed slightly,
2088 making the old patch fail to apply cleanly.  Below is an updated
2089 patch, including the shell wrapper I use to start Signal.  The
2090 original version required a new user to locate the JavaScript console
2091 and call a function from there.  I got help from a friend with more
2092 JavaScript knowledge than me to modify the code to provide a GUI
2093 button instead.  This mean that to get started you just need to run
2094 the wrapper and click the 'Register without mobile phone' to get going
2095 now.  I've also modified the timeout code to always set it to 90 days
2096 in the future, to avoid having to patch the code regularly.</p>
2097
2098 <p>So, the updated recipe for Debian Jessie:</p>
2099
2100 <ol>
2101
2102 <li>First, install required packages to get the source code and the
2103 browser you need.  Signal only work with Chrome/Chromium, as far as I
2104 know, so you need to install it.
2105
2106 <pre>
2107 apt install git tor chromium
2108 git clone https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Desktop.git
2109 </pre></li>
2110
2111 <li>Modify the source code using command listed in the the patch
2112 block below.</li>
2113
2114 <li>Start Signal using the run-signal-app wrapper (for example using
2115 <tt>`pwd`/run-signal-app</tt>).
2116
2117 <li>Click on the 'Register without mobile phone', will in a phone
2118 number you can receive calls to the next minute, receive the
2119 verification code and enter it into the form field and press
2120 'Register'.  Note, the phone number you use will be user Signal
2121 username, ie the way others can find you on Signal.</li>
2122
2123 <li>You can now use Signal to contact others.  Note, new contacts do
2124 not show up in the contact list until you restart Signal, and there is
2125 no way to assign names to Contacts.  There is also no way to create or
2126 update chat groups.  I suspect this is because the web app do not have
2127 a associated contact database.</li>
2128
2129 </ol>
2130
2131 <p>I am still a bit uneasy about using Signal, because of the way its
2132 main author moxie0 reject federation and accept dependencies to major
2133 corporations like Google (part of the code is fetched from Google) and
2134 Amazon (the central coordination point is owned by Amazon).  See for
2135 example
2136 <a href="https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37">the
2137 LibreSignal issue tracker</a> for a thread documenting the authors
2138 view on these issues.  But the network effect is strong in this case,
2139 and several of the people I want to communicate with already use
2140 Signal.  Perhaps we can all move to <a href="https://ring.cx/">Ring</a>
2141 once it <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/830265">work on my
2142 laptop</a>?  It already work on Windows and Android, and is included
2143 in <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/ring">Debian</a> and
2144 <a href="https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ring">Ubuntu</a>, but not
2145 working on Debian Stable.</p>
2146
2147 <p>Anyway, this is the patch I apply to the Signal code to get it
2148 working.  It switch to the production servers, disable to timeout,
2149 make registration easier and add the shell wrapper:</p>
2150
2151 <pre>
2152 cd Signal-Desktop; cat &lt;&lt;EOF | patch -p1
2153 diff --git a/js/background.js b/js/background.js
2154 index 24b4c1d..579345f 100644
2155 --- a/js/background.js
2156 +++ b/js/background.js
2157 @@ -33,9 +33,9 @@
2158          });
2159      });
2160
2161 -    var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-staging.whispersystems.org';
2162 +    var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-ca.whispersystems.org';
2163      var SERVER_PORTS = [80, 4433, 8443];
2164 -    var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments-staging.s3.amazonaws.com';
2165 +    var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments.s3.amazonaws.com';
2166      var messageReceiver;
2167      window.getSocketStatus = function() {
2168          if (messageReceiver) {
2169 diff --git a/js/expire.js b/js/expire.js
2170 index 639aeae..beb91c3 100644
2171 --- a/js/expire.js
2172 +++ b/js/expire.js
2173 @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
2174  ;(function() {
2175      'use strict';
2176 -    var BUILD_EXPIRATION = 0;
2177 +    var BUILD_EXPIRATION = Date.now() + (90 * 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000);
2178
2179      window.extension = window.extension || {};
2180
2181 diff --git a/js/views/install_view.js b/js/views/install_view.js
2182 index 7816f4f..1d6233b 100644
2183 --- a/js/views/install_view.js
2184 +++ b/js/views/install_view.js
2185 @@ -38,7 +38,8 @@
2186              return {
2187                  'click .step1': this.selectStep.bind(this, 1),
2188                  'click .step2': this.selectStep.bind(this, 2),
2189 -                'click .step3': this.selectStep.bind(this, 3)
2190 +                'click .step3': this.selectStep.bind(this, 3),
2191 +                'click .callreg': function() { extension.install('standalone') },
2192              };
2193          },
2194          clearQR: function() {
2195 diff --git a/options.html b/options.html
2196 index dc0f28e..8d709f6 100644
2197 --- a/options.html
2198 +++ b/options.html
2199 @@ -14,7 +14,10 @@
2200          &lt;div class='nav'>
2201            &lt;h1>{{ installWelcome }}&lt;/h1>
2202            &lt;p>{{ installTagline }}&lt;/p>
2203 -          &lt;div> &lt;a class='button step2'>{{ installGetStartedButton }}&lt;/a> &lt;/div>
2204 +          &lt;div> &lt;a class='button step2'>{{ installGetStartedButton }}&lt;/a>
2205 +           &lt;br> &lt;a class="button callreg">Register without mobile phone&lt;/a>
2206 +
2207 +         &lt;/div>
2208            &lt;span class='dot step1 selected'>&lt;/span>
2209            &lt;span class='dot step2'>&lt;/span>
2210            &lt;span class='dot step3'>&lt;/span>
2211 --- /dev/null   2016-10-07 09:55:13.730181472 +0200
2212 +++ b/run-signal-app   2016-10-10 08:54:09.434172391 +0200
2213 @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@
2214 +#!/bin/sh
2215 +set -e
2216 +cd $(dirname $0)
2217 +mkdir -p userdata
2218 +userdata="`pwd`/userdata"
2219 +if [ -d "$userdata" ] && [ ! -d "$userdata/.git" ] ; then
2220 +    (cd $userdata && git init)
2221 +fi
2222 +(cd $userdata && git add . && git commit -m "Current status." || true)
2223 +exec chromium \
2224 +  --proxy-server="socks://localhost:9050" \
2225 +  --user-data-dir=$userdata --load-and-launch-app=`pwd`
2226 EOF
2227 chmod a+rx run-signal-app
2228 </pre>
2229
2230 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2231 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2232 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2233
2234       </div>
2235       <div class="tags">
2236
2237
2238         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>.
2239
2240
2241       </div>
2242     </div>
2243     <div class="padding"></div>
2244
2245     <div class="entry">
2246       <div class="title">
2247         <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>
2248       </div>
2249       <div class="date">
2250          7th October 2016
2251       </div>
2252       <div class="body">
2253         <p><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">The Isenkram
2254 system</a> provide a practical and easy way to figure out which
2255 packages support the hardware in a given machine.  The command line
2256 tool <tt>isenkram-lookup</tt> and the tasksel options provide a
2257 convenient way to list and install packages relevant for the current
2258 hardware during system installation, both user space packages and
2259 firmware packages. The GUI background daemon on the other hand provide
2260 a pop-up proposing to install packages when a new dongle is inserted
2261 while using the computer.  For example, if you plug in a smart card
2262 reader, the system will ask if you want to install <tt>pcscd</tt> if
2263 that package isn't already installed, and if you plug in a USB video
2264 camera the system will ask if you want to install <tt>cheese</tt> if
2265 cheese is currently missing.  This already work just fine.</p>
2266
2267 <p>But Isenkram depend on a database mapping from hardware IDs to
2268 package names.  When I started no such database existed in Debian, so
2269 I made my own data set and included it with the isenkram package and
2270 made isenkram fetch the latest version of this database from git using
2271 http.  This way the isenkram users would get updated package proposals
2272 as soon as I learned more about hardware related packages.</p>
2273
2274 <p>The hardware is identified using modalias strings.  The modalias
2275 design is from the Linux kernel where most hardware descriptors are
2276 made available as a strings that can be matched using filename style
2277 globbing.  It handle USB, PCI, DMI and a lot of other hardware related
2278 identifiers.</p>
2279
2280 <p>The downside to the Isenkram specific database is that there is no
2281 information about relevant distribution / Debian version, making
2282 isenkram propose obsolete packages too.  But along came AppStream, a
2283 cross distribution mechanism to store and collect metadata about
2284 software packages.  When I heard about the proposal, I contacted the
2285 people involved and suggested to add a hardware matching rule using
2286 modalias strings in the specification, to be able to use AppStream for
2287 mapping hardware to packages.  This idea was accepted and AppStream is
2288 now a great way for a package to announce the hardware it support in a
2289 distribution neutral way.  I wrote
2290 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_appstream_with_isenkram_to_install_hardware_related_packages_in_Debian.html">a
2291 recipe on how to add such meta-information</a> in a blog post last
2292 December.  If you have a hardware related package in Debian, please
2293 announce the relevant hardware IDs using AppStream.</p>
2294
2295 <p>In Debian, almost all packages that can talk to a LEGO Mindestorms
2296 RCX or NXT unit, announce this support using AppStream.  The effect is
2297 that when you insert such LEGO robot controller into your Debian
2298 machine, Isenkram will propose to install the packages needed to get
2299 it working.  The intention is that this should allow the local user to
2300 start programming his robot controller right away without having to
2301 guess what packages to use or which permissions to fix.</p>
2302
2303 <p>But when I sat down with my son the other day to program our NXT
2304 unit using his Debian Stretch computer, I discovered something
2305 annoying.  The local console user (ie my son) did not get access to
2306 the USB device for programming the unit.  This used to work, but no
2307 longer in Jessie and Stretch.  After some investigation and asking
2308 around on #debian-devel, I discovered that this was because udev had
2309 changed the mechanism used to grant access to local devices.  The
2310 ConsoleKit mechanism from <tt>/lib/udev/rules.d/70-udev-acl.rules</tt>
2311 no longer applied, because LDAP users no longer was added to the
2312 plugdev group during login.  Michael Biebl told me that this method
2313 was obsolete and the new method used ACLs instead.  This was good
2314 news, as the plugdev mechanism is a mess when using a remote user
2315 directory like LDAP.  Using ACLs would make sure a user lost device
2316 access when she logged out, even if the user left behind a background
2317 process which would retain the plugdev membership with the ConsoleKit
2318 setup.  Armed with this knowledge I moved on to fix the access problem
2319 for the LEGO Mindstorms related packages.</p>
2320
2321 <p>The new system uses a udev tag, 'uaccess'.  It can either be
2322 applied directly for a device, or is applied in
2323 /lib/udev/rules.d/70-uaccess.rules for classes of devices.  As the
2324 LEGO Mindstorms udev rules did not have a class, I decided to add the
2325 tag directly in the udev rules files included in the packages.  Here
2326 is one example.  For the nqc C compiler for the RCX, the
2327 <tt>/lib/udev/rules.d/60-nqc.rules</tt> file now look like this:
2328
2329 <p><pre>
2330 SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ACTION=="add", ATTR{idVendor}=="0694", ATTR{idProduct}=="0001", \
2331     SYMLINK+="rcx-%k", TAG+="uaccess"
2332 </pre></p>
2333
2334 <p>The key part is the 'TAG+="uaccess"' at the end.  I suspect all
2335 packages using plugdev in their /lib/udev/rules.d/ files should be
2336 changed to use this tag (either directly or indirectly via
2337 <tt>70-uaccess.rules</tt>).  Perhaps a lintian check should be created
2338 to detect this?</p>
2339
2340 <p>I've been unable to find good documentation on the uaccess feature.
2341 It is unclear to me if the uaccess tag is an internal implementation
2342 detail like the udev-acl tag used by
2343 <tt>/lib/udev/rules.d/70-udev-acl.rules</tt>.  If it is, I guess the
2344 indirect method is the preferred way.  Michael
2345 <a href="https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/4288">asked for more
2346 documentation from the systemd project</a> and I hope it will make
2347 this clearer.  For now I use the generic classes when they exist and
2348 is already handled by <tt>70-uaccess.rules</tt>, and add the tag
2349 directly if no such class exist.</p>
2350
2351 <p>To learn more about the isenkram system, please check out
2352 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">my
2353 blog posts tagged isenkram</a>.</p>
2354
2355 <p>To help out making life for LEGO constructors in Debian easier,
2356 please join us on our IRC channel
2357 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">#debian-lego</a> and join
2358 the <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/debian-lego/">Debian
2359 LEGO team</a> in the Alioth project we created yesterday.  A mailing
2360 list is not yet created, but we are working on it. :)</p>
2361
2362 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2363 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2364 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2365
2366       </div>
2367       <div class="tags">
2368
2369
2370         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>.
2371
2372
2373       </div>
2374     </div>
2375     <div class="padding"></div>
2376
2377     <div class="entry">
2378       <div class="title">
2379         <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>
2380       </div>
2381       <div class="date">
2382         30th August 2016
2383       </div>
2384       <div class="body">
2385         <p>In April we
2386 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_a_Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_The_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook.html">started
2387 to work</a> on a Norwegian Bokmål edition of the "open access" book on
2388 how to set up and administrate a Debian system.  Today I am happy to
2389 report that the first draft is now publicly available.  You can find
2390 it on <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/get/">get the Debian
2391 Administrator's Handbook page</a> (under Other languages).  The first
2392 eight chapters have a first draft translation, and we are working on
2393 proofreading the content.  If you want to help out, please start
2394 contributing using
2395 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-handbook/">the
2396 hosted weblate project page</a>, and get in touch using
2397 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/debian-handbook-translators">the
2398 translators mailing list</a>.  Please also check out
2399 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/contribute/">the instructions for
2400 contributors</a>.  A good way to contribute is to proofread the text
2401 and update weblate if you find errors.</p>
2402
2403 <p>Our goal is still to make the Norwegian book available on paper as well as
2404 electronic form.</p>
2405
2406       </div>
2407       <div class="tags">
2408
2409
2410         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>.
2411
2412
2413       </div>
2414     </div>
2415     <div class="padding"></div>
2416
2417     <div class="entry">
2418       <div class="title">
2419         <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>
2420       </div>
2421       <div class="date">
2422         11th August 2016
2423       </div>
2424       <div class="body">
2425         <p>This summer, I read a great article
2426 "<a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/summer2016/curtsinger">coz:
2427 This Is the Profiler You're Looking For</a>" in USENIX ;login: about
2428 how to profile multi-threaded programs.  It presented a system for
2429 profiling software by running experiences in the running program,
2430 testing how run time performance is affected by "speeding up" parts of
2431 the code to various degrees compared to a normal run.  It does this by
2432 slowing down parallel threads while the "faster up" code is running
2433 and measure how this affect processing time.  The processing time is
2434 measured using probes inserted into the code, either using progress
2435 counters (COZ_PROGRESS) or as latency meters (COZ_BEGIN/COZ_END).  It
2436 can also measure unmodified code by measuring complete the program
2437 runtime and running the program several times instead.</p>
2438
2439 <p>The project and presentation was so inspiring that I would like to
2440 get the system into Debian.  I
2441 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=830708">created
2442 a WNPP request for it</a> and contacted upstream to try to make the
2443 system ready for Debian by sending patches.  The build process need to
2444 be changed a bit to avoid running 'git clone' to get dependencies, and
2445 to include the JavaScript web page used to visualize the collected
2446 profiling information included in the source package.
2447 But I expect that should work out fairly soon.</p>
2448
2449 <p>The way the system work is fairly simple.  To run an coz experiment
2450 on a binary with debug symbols available, start the program like this:
2451
2452 <p><blockquote><pre>
2453 coz run --- program-to-run
2454 </pre></blockquote></p>
2455
2456 <p>This will create a text file profile.coz with the instrumentation
2457 information.  To show what part of the code affect the performance
2458 most, use a web browser and either point it to
2459 <a href="http://plasma-umass.github.io/coz/">http://plasma-umass.github.io/coz/</a>
2460 or use the copy from git (in the gh-pages branch).  Check out this web
2461 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
2462 profiling more useful you include &lt;coz.h&gt; and insert the
2463 COZ_PROGRESS or COZ_BEGIN and COZ_END at appropriate places in the
2464 code, rebuild and run the profiler.  This allow coz to do more
2465 targeted experiments.</p>
2466
2467 <p>A video published by ACM
2468 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jE0V-p1odPg">presenting the
2469 Coz profiler</a> is available from Youtube.  There is also a paper
2470 from the 25th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles available
2471 titled
2472 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc16/technical-sessions/presentation/curtsinger">Coz:
2473 finding code that counts with causal profiling</a>.</p>
2474
2475 <p><a href="https://github.com/plasma-umass/coz">The source code</a>
2476 for Coz is available from github.  It will only build with clang
2477 because it uses a
2478 <a href="https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=55606">C++
2479 feature missing in GCC</a>, but I've submitted
2480 <a href="https://github.com/plasma-umass/coz/pull/67">a patch to solve
2481 it</a> and hope it will be included in the upstream source soon.</p>
2482
2483 <p>Please get in touch if you, like me, would like to see this piece
2484 of software in Debian.  I would very much like some help with the
2485 packaging effort, as I lack the in depth knowledge on how to package
2486 C++ libraries.</p>
2487
2488       </div>
2489       <div class="tags">
2490
2491
2492         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>.
2493
2494
2495       </div>
2496     </div>
2497     <div class="padding"></div>
2498
2499     <div class="entry">
2500       <div class="title">
2501         <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>
2502       </div>
2503       <div class="date">
2504          5th August 2016
2505       </div>
2506       <div class="body">
2507         <p>As my regular readers probably remember, the last year I published
2508 a French and Norwegian translation of the classic
2509 <a href="http://www.free-culture.cc/">Free Culture book</a> by the
2510 founder of the Creative Commons movement, Lawrence Lessig.  A bit less
2511 known is the fact that due to the way I created the translations,
2512 using docbook and po4a, I also recreated the English original.  And
2513 because I already had created a new the PDF edition, I published it
2514 too.  The revenue from the books are sent to the Creative Commons
2515 Corporation.  In other words, I do not earn any money from this
2516 project, I just earn the warm fuzzy feeling that the text is available
2517 for a wider audience and more people can learn why the Creative
2518 Commons is needed.</p>
2519
2520 <p>Today, just for fun, I had a look at the sales number over at
2521 Lulu.com, which take care of payment, printing and shipping.  Much to
2522 my surprise, the English edition is selling better than both the
2523 French and Norwegian edition, despite the fact that it has been
2524 available in English since it was first published.  In total, 24 paper
2525 books was sold for USD $19.99 between 2016-01-01 and 2016-07-31:</p>
2526
2527 <table border="0">
2528 <tr><th>Title / language</th><th>Quantity</th></tr>
2529 <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>
2530 <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>
2531 <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>
2532 </table>
2533
2534 <p>The books are available both from Lulu.com and from large book
2535 stores like Amazon and Barnes&Noble.  Most revenue, around $10 per
2536 book, is sent to the Creative Commons project when the book is sold
2537 directly by Lulu.com.  The other channels give less revenue.  The
2538 summary from Lulu tell me 10 books was sold via the Amazon channel, 10
2539 via Ingram (what is this?) and 4 directly by Lulu.  And Lulu.com tells
2540 me that the revenue sent so far this year is USD $101.42.  No idea
2541 what kind of sales numbers to expect, so I do not know if that is a
2542 good amount of sales for a 10 year old book or not.  But it make me
2543 happy that the buyers find the book, and I hope they enjoy reading it
2544 as much as I did.</p>
2545
2546 <p>The ebook edition is available for free from
2547 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">Github</a>.</p>
2548
2549 <p>If you would like to translate and publish the book in your native
2550 language, I would be happy to help make it happen.  Please get in
2551 touch.</p>
2552
2553       </div>
2554       <div class="tags">
2555
2556
2557         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>.
2558
2559
2560       </div>
2561     </div>
2562     <div class="padding"></div>
2563
2564     <div class="entry">
2565       <div class="title">
2566         <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>
2567       </div>
2568       <div class="date">
2569          1st August 2016
2570       </div>
2571       <div class="body">
2572         <p>Did you know there is a TV channel broadcasting talks from DebConf
2573 16 across an entire country?  Or that there is a TV channel
2574 broadcasting talks by or about
2575 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/625529/">Linus Torvalds</a>,
2576 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/625599/">Tor</a>,
2577 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/624019/">OpenID</A>,
2578 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/625624/">Common Lisp</a>,
2579 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/625446/">Civic Tech</a>,
2580 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/625090/">EFF founder John Barlow</a>,
2581 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/625432/">how to make 3D
2582 printer electronics</a> and many more fascinating topics?  It works
2583 using only free software (all of it
2584 <a href="http://github.com/Frikanalen">available from Github</a>), and
2585 is administrated using a web browser and a web API.</p>
2586
2587 <p>The TV channel is the Norwegian open channel
2588 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a>, and I am involved
2589 via <a href="https://www.nuug.no/">the NUUG member association</a> in
2590 running and developing the software for the channel.  The channel is
2591 organised as a member organisation where its members can upload and
2592 broadcast what they want (think of it as Youtube for national
2593 broadcasting television).  Individuals can broadcast too.  The time
2594 slots are handled on a first come, first serve basis.  Because the
2595 channel have almost no viewers and very few active members, we can
2596 experiment with TV technology without too much flack when we make
2597 mistakes.  And thanks to the few active members, most of the slots on
2598 the schedule are free.  I see this as an opportunity to spread
2599 knowledge about technology and free software, and have a script I run
2600 regularly to fill up all the open slots the next few days with
2601 technology related video.  The end result is a channel I like to
2602 describe as Techno TV - filled with interesting talks and
2603 presentations.</p>
2604
2605 <p>It is available on channel 50 on the Norwegian national digital TV
2606 network (RiksTV).  It is also available as a multicast stream on
2607 Uninett.  And finally, it is available as
2608 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/">a WebM unicast stream</a> from
2609 Frikanalen and NUUG.  Check it out. :)</p>
2610
2611       </div>
2612       <div class="tags">
2613
2614
2615         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>.
2616
2617
2618       </div>
2619     </div>
2620     <div class="padding"></div>
2621
2622     <div class="entry">
2623       <div class="title">
2624         <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>
2625       </div>
2626       <div class="date">
2627          7th July 2016
2628       </div>
2629       <div class="body">
2630         <p>Yesterday, I tried to unlock a HTC Desire HD phone, and it proved
2631 to be a slight challenge.  Here is the recipe if I ever need to do it
2632 again.  It all started by me wanting to try the recipe to set up
2633 <a href="https://blog.torproject.org/blog/mission-impossible-hardening-android-security-and-privacy">an
2634 hardened Android installation</a> from the Tor project blog on a
2635 device I had access to.  It is a old mobile phone with a broken
2636 microphone The initial idea had been to just
2637 <a href="http://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w/Install_CM_for_ace">install
2638 CyanogenMod on it</a>, but did not quite find time to start on it
2639 until a few days ago.</p>
2640
2641 <p>The unlock process is supposed to be simple: (1) Boot into the boot
2642 loader (press volume down and power at the same time), (2) select
2643 'fastboot' before (3) connecting the device via USB to a Linux
2644 machine, (4) request the device identifier token by running 'fastboot
2645 oem get_identifier_token', (5) request the device unlocking key using
2646 the <a href="http://www.htcdev.com/bootloader/">HTC developer web
2647 site</a> and unlock the phone using the key file emailed to you.</p>
2648
2649 <p>Unfortunately, this only work fi you have hboot version 2.00.0029
2650 or newer, and the device I was working on had 2.00.0027.  This
2651 apparently can be easily fixed by downloading a Windows program and
2652 running it on your Windows machine, if you accept the terms Microsoft
2653 require you to accept to use Windows - which I do not.  So I had to
2654 come up with a different approach.  I got a lot of help from AndyCap
2655 on #nuug, and would not have been able to get this working without
2656 him.</p>
2657
2658 <p>First I needed to extract the hboot firmware from
2659 <a href="http://www.htcdev.com/ruu/PD9810000_Ace_Sense30_S_hboot_2.00.0029.exe">the
2660 windows binary for HTC Desire HD</a> downloaded as 'the RUU' from HTC.
2661 For this there is is <a href="https://github.com/kmdm/unruu/">a github
2662 project named unruu</a> using libunshield.  The unshield tool did not
2663 recognise the file format, but unruu worked and extracted rom.zip,
2664 containing the new hboot firmware and a text file describing which
2665 devices it would work for.</p>
2666
2667 <p>Next, I needed to get the new firmware into the device.  For this I
2668 followed some instructions
2669 <a href="http://www.htc1guru.com/2013/09/new-ruu-zips-posted/">available
2670 from HTC1Guru.com</a>, and ran these commands as root on a Linux
2671 machine with Debian testing:</p>
2672
2673 <p><pre>
2674 adb reboot-bootloader
2675 fastboot oem rebootRUU
2676 fastboot flash zip rom.zip
2677 fastboot flash zip rom.zip
2678 fastboot reboot
2679 </pre></p>
2680
2681 <p>The flash command apparently need to be done twice to take effect,
2682 as the first is just preparations and the second one do the flashing.
2683 The adb command is just to get to the boot loader menu, so turning the
2684 device on while holding volume down and the power button should work
2685 too.</p>
2686
2687 <p>With the new hboot version in place I could start following the
2688 instructions on the HTC developer web site.  I got the device token
2689 like this:</p>
2690
2691 <p><pre>
2692 fastboot oem get_identifier_token 2>&1 | sed 's/(bootloader) //'
2693 </pre>
2694
2695 <p>And once I got the unlock code via email, I could use it like
2696 this:</p>
2697
2698 <p><pre>
2699 fastboot flash unlocktoken Unlock_code.bin
2700 </pre></p>
2701
2702 <p>And with that final step in place, the phone was unlocked and I
2703 could start stuffing the software of my own choosing into the device.
2704 So far I only inserted a replacement recovery image to wipe the phone
2705 before I start.  We will see what happen next.  Perhaps I should
2706 install <a href="https://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> on it. :)</p>
2707
2708       </div>
2709       <div class="tags">
2710
2711
2712         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>.
2713
2714
2715       </div>
2716     </div>
2717     <div class="padding"></div>
2718
2719     <div class="entry">
2720       <div class="title">
2721         <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>
2722       </div>
2723       <div class="date">
2724          3rd July 2016
2725       </div>
2726       <div class="body">
2727         <p>For a while now, I have wanted to test
2728 <a href="https://whispersystems.org/">the Signal app</a>, as it is
2729 said to provide end to end encrypted communication and several of my
2730 friends and family are already using it.  As I by choice do not own a
2731 mobile phone, this proved to be harder than expected.  And I wanted to
2732 have the source of the client and know that it was the code used on my
2733 machine.  But yesterday I managed to get it working.  I used the
2734 Github source, compared it to the source in
2735 <a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/signal-private-messenger/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk?hl=en-US">the
2736 Signal Chrome app</a> available from the Chrome web store, applied
2737 patches to use the production Signal servers, started the app and
2738 asked for the hidden "register without a smart phone" form.  Here is
2739 the recipe how I did it.</p>
2740
2741 <p>First, I fetched the Signal desktop source from Github, using
2742
2743 <pre>
2744 git clone https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Desktop.git
2745 </pre>
2746
2747 <p>Next, I patched the source to use the production servers, to be
2748 able to talk to other Signal users:</p>
2749
2750 <pre>
2751 cat &lt;&lt;EOF | patch -p0
2752 diff -ur ./js/background.js userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/background.js
2753 --- ./js/background.js  2016-06-29 13:43:15.630344628 +0200
2754 +++ userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/background.js    2016-06-29 14:06:29.530300934 +0200
2755 @@ -47,8 +47,8 @@
2756          });
2757      });
2758
2759 -    var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-staging.whispersystems.org';
2760 -    var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments-staging.s3.amazonaws.com';
2761 +    var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-ca.whispersystems.org:4433';
2762 +    var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments.s3.amazonaws.com';
2763      var messageReceiver;
2764      window.getSocketStatus = function() {
2765          if (messageReceiver) {
2766 diff -ur ./js/expire.js userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/expire.js
2767 --- ./js/expire.js      2016-06-29 13:43:15.630344628 +0200
2768 +++ userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/expire.js2016-06-29 14:06:29.530300934 +0200
2769 @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
2770  ;(function() {
2771      'use strict';
2772 -    var BUILD_EXPIRATION = 0;
2773 +    var BUILD_EXPIRATION = 1474492690000;
2774
2775      window.extension = window.extension || {};
2776
2777 EOF
2778 </pre>
2779
2780 <p>The first part is changing the servers, and the second is updating
2781 an expiration timestamp.  This timestamp need to be updated regularly.
2782 It is set 90 days in the future by the build process (Gruntfile.js).
2783 The value is seconds since 1970 times 1000, as far as I can tell.</p>
2784
2785 <p>Based on a tip and good help from the #nuug IRC channel, I wrote a
2786 script to launch Signal in Chromium.</p>
2787
2788 <pre>
2789 #!/bin/sh
2790 cd $(dirname $0)
2791 mkdir -p userdata
2792 exec chromium \
2793   --proxy-server="socks://localhost:9050" \
2794   --user-data-dir=`pwd`/userdata --load-and-launch-app=`pwd`
2795 </pre>
2796
2797 <p> The script start the app and configure Chromium to use the Tor
2798 SOCKS5 proxy to make sure those controlling the Signal servers (today
2799 Amazon and Whisper Systems) as well as those listening on the lines
2800 will have a harder time location my laptop based on the Signal
2801 connections if they use source IP address.</p>
2802
2803 <p>When the script starts, one need to follow the instructions under
2804 "Standalone Registration" in the CONTRIBUTING.md file in the git
2805 repository.  I right clicked on the Signal window to get up the
2806 Chromium debugging tool, visited the 'Console' tab and wrote
2807 'extension.install("standalone")' on the console prompt to get the
2808 registration form.  Then I entered by land line phone number and
2809 pressed 'Call'.  5 seconds later the phone rang and a robot voice
2810 repeated the verification code three times.  After entering the number
2811 into the verification code field in the form, I could start using
2812 Signal from my laptop.
2813
2814 <p>As far as I can tell, The Signal app will leak who is talking to
2815 whom and thus who know who to those controlling the central server,
2816 but such leakage is hard to avoid with a centrally controlled server
2817 setup.  It is something to keep in mind when using Signal - the
2818 content of your chats are harder to intercept, but the meta data
2819 exposing your contact network is available to people you do not know.
2820 So better than many options, but not great.  And sadly the usage is
2821 connected to my land line, thus allowing those controlling the server
2822 to associate it to my home and person.  I would prefer it if only
2823 those I knew could tell who I was on Signal.  There are options
2824 avoiding such information leakage, but most of my friends are not
2825 using them, so I am stuck with Signal for now.</p>
2826
2827 <p><strong>Update 2017-01-10</strong>: There is an updated blog post
2828 on this topic in
2829 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Experience_and_updated_recipe_for_using_the_Signal_app_without_a_mobile_phone.html">Experience
2830 and updated recipe for using the Signal app without a mobile
2831 phone</a>.</p>
2832
2833       </div>
2834       <div class="tags">
2835
2836
2837         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/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>.
2838
2839
2840       </div>
2841     </div>
2842     <div class="padding"></div>
2843
2844     <div class="entry">
2845       <div class="title">
2846         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_new__best__multimedia_player_in_Debian_.html">The new "best" multimedia player in Debian?</a>
2847       </div>
2848       <div class="date">
2849          6th June 2016
2850       </div>
2851       <div class="body">
2852         <p>When I set out a few weeks ago to figure out
2853 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_best_multimedia_player_in_Debian_.html">which
2854 multimedia player in Debian claimed to support most file formats /
2855 MIME types</a>, I was a bit surprised how varied the sets of MIME types
2856 the various players claimed support for.  The range was from 55 to 130
2857 MIME types.  I suspect most media formats are supported by all
2858 players, but this is not really reflected in the MimeTypes values in
2859 their desktop files.  There are probably also some bogus MIME types
2860 listed, but it is hard to identify which one this is.</p>
2861
2862 <p>Anyway, in the mean time I got in touch with upstream for some of
2863 the players suggesting to add more MIME types to their desktop files,
2864 and decided to spend some time myself improving the situation for my
2865 favorite media player VLC.  The fixes for VLC entered Debian unstable
2866 yesterday. The complete list of MIME types can be seen on the
2867 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMultimedia/PlayerSupport">Multimedia
2868 player MIME type support status</a> Debian wiki page.</p>
2869
2870 <p>The new "best" multimedia player in Debian?  It is VLC, followed by
2871 totem, parole, kplayer, gnome-mpv, mpv, smplayer, mplayer-gui and
2872 kmplayer.  I am sure some of the other players desktop files support
2873 several of the formats currently listed as working only with vlc,
2874 toten and parole.</p>
2875
2876 <p>A sad observation is that only 14 MIME types are listed as
2877 supported by all the tested multimedia players in Debian in their
2878 desktop files: audio/mpeg, audio/vnd.rn-realaudio, audio/x-mpegurl,
2879 audio/x-ms-wma, audio/x-scpls, audio/x-wav, video/mp4, video/mpeg,
2880 video/quicktime, video/vnd.rn-realvideo, video/x-matroska,
2881 video/x-ms-asf, video/x-ms-wmv and video/x-msvideo.  Personally I find
2882 it sad that video/ogg and video/webm is not supported by all the media
2883 players in Debian.  As far as I can tell, all of them can handle both
2884 formats.</p>
2885
2886       </div>
2887       <div class="tags">
2888
2889
2890         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>.
2891
2892
2893       </div>
2894     </div>
2895     <div class="padding"></div>
2896
2897     <div class="entry">
2898       <div class="title">
2899         <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>
2900       </div>
2901       <div class="date">
2902          5th June 2016
2903       </div>
2904       <div class="body">
2905         <p>Many years ago, when koffice was fresh and with few users, I
2906 decided to test its presentation tool when making the slides for a
2907 talk I was giving for NUUG on Japhar, a free Java virtual machine.  I
2908 wrote the first draft of the slides, saved the result and went to bed
2909 the day before I would give the talk.  The next day I took a plane to
2910 the location where the meeting should take place, and on the plane I
2911 started up koffice again to polish the talk a bit, only to discover
2912 that kpresenter refused to load its own data file.  I cursed a bit and
2913 started making the slides again from memory, to have something to
2914 present when I arrived.  I tested that the saved files could be
2915 loaded, and the day seemed to be rescued.  I continued to polish the
2916 slides until I suddenly discovered that the saved file could no longer
2917 be loaded into kpresenter.  In the end I had to rewrite the slides
2918 three times, condensing the content until the talk became shorter and
2919 shorter.  After the talk I was able to pinpoint the problem &ndash;
2920 kpresenter wrote inline images in a way itself could not understand.
2921 Eventually that bug was fixed and kpresenter ended up being a great
2922 program to make slides.  The point I'm trying to make is that we
2923 expect a program to be able to load its own data files, and it is
2924 embarrassing to its developers if it can't.</p>
2925
2926 <p>Did you ever experience a program failing to load its own data
2927 files from the desktop file browser?  It is not a uncommon problem.  A
2928 while back I discovered that the screencast recorder
2929 gtk-recordmydesktop would save an Ogg Theora video file the KDE file
2930 browser would refuse to open.  No video player claimed to understand
2931 such file.  I tracked down the cause being <tt>file --mime-type</tt>
2932 returning the application/ogg MIME type, which no video player I had
2933 installed listed as a MIME type they would understand.  I asked for
2934 <a href="http://bugs.gw.com/view.php?id=382">file to change its
2935 behavour</a> and use the MIME type video/ogg instead.  I also asked
2936 several video players to add video/ogg to their desktop files, to give
2937 the file browser an idea what to do about Ogg Theora files.  After a
2938 while, the desktop file browsers in Debian started to handle the
2939 output from gtk-recordmydesktop properly.</p>
2940
2941 <p>But history repeats itself.  A few days ago I tested the music
2942 system Rosegarden again, and I discovered that the KDE and xfce file
2943 browsers did not know what to do with the Rosegarden project files
2944 (*.rg).  I've reported <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/825993">the
2945 rosegarden problem to BTS</a> and a fix is commited to git and will be
2946 included in the next upload.  To increase the chance of me remembering
2947 how to fix the problem next time some program fail to load its files
2948 from the file browser, here are some notes on how to fix it.</p>
2949
2950 <p>The file browsers in Debian in general operates on MIME types.
2951 There are two sources for the MIME type of a given file.  The output from
2952 <tt>file --mime-type</tt> mentioned above, and the content of the
2953 shared MIME type registry (under /usr/share/mime/).  The file MIME
2954 type is mapped to programs supporting the MIME type, and this
2955 information is collected from
2956 <a href="https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/desktop-entry-spec/">the
2957 desktop files</a> available in /usr/share/applications/.  If there is
2958 one desktop file claiming support for the MIME type of the file, it is
2959 activated when asking to open a given file.  If there are more, one
2960 can normally select which one to use by right-clicking on the file and
2961 selecting the wanted one using 'Open with' or similar.  In general
2962 this work well.  But it depend on each program picking a good MIME
2963 type (preferably
2964 <a href="http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/media-types.xhtml">a
2965 MIME type registered with IANA</a>), file and/or the shared MIME
2966 registry recognizing the file and the desktop file to list the MIME
2967 type in its list of supported MIME types.</p>
2968
2969 <p>The <tt>/usr/share/mime/packages/rosegarden.xml</tt> entry for
2970 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/shared-mime-info-spec">the
2971 Shared MIME database</a> look like this:</p>
2972
2973 <p><blockquote><pre>
2974 &lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?&gt;
2975 &lt;mime-info xmlns="http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/shared-mime-info"&gt;
2976   &lt;mime-type type="audio/x-rosegarden"&gt;
2977     &lt;sub-class-of type="application/x-gzip"/&gt;
2978     &lt;comment&gt;Rosegarden project file&lt;/comment&gt;
2979     &lt;glob pattern="*.rg"/&gt;
2980   &lt;/mime-type&gt;
2981 &lt;/mime-info&gt;
2982 </pre></blockquote></p>
2983
2984 <p>This states that audio/x-rosegarden is a kind of application/x-gzip
2985 (it is a gzipped XML file).  Note, it is much better to use an
2986 official MIME type registered with IANA than it is to make up ones own
2987 unofficial ones like the x-rosegarden type used by rosegarden.</p>
2988
2989 <p>The desktop file of the rosegarden program failed to list
2990 audio/x-rosegarden in its list of supported MIME types, causing the
2991 file browsers to have no idea what to do with *.rg files:</p>
2992
2993 <p><blockquote><pre>
2994 % grep Mime /usr/share/applications/rosegarden.desktop
2995 MimeType=audio/x-rosegarden-composition;audio/x-rosegarden-device;audio/x-rosegarden-project;audio/x-rosegarden-template;audio/midi;
2996 X-KDE-NativeMimeType=audio/x-rosegarden-composition
2997 %
2998 </pre></blockquote></p>
2999
3000 <p>The fix was to add "audio/x-rosegarden;" at the end of the
3001 MimeType= line.</p>
3002
3003 <p>If you run into a file which fail to open the correct program when
3004 selected from the file browser, please check out the output from
3005 <tt>file --mime-type</tt> for the file, ensure the file ending and
3006 MIME type is registered somewhere under /usr/share/mime/ and check
3007 that some desktop file under /usr/share/applications/ is claiming
3008 support for this MIME type.  If not, please report a bug to have it
3009 fixed. :)</p>
3010
3011       </div>
3012       <div class="tags">
3013
3014
3015         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>.
3016
3017
3018       </div>
3019     </div>
3020     <div class="padding"></div>
3021
3022     <div class="entry">
3023       <div class="title">
3024         <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>
3025       </div>
3026       <div class="date">
3027         28th May 2016
3028       </div>
3029       <div class="body">
3030         <p>A little more than 11 years ago, one of the creators of Tor, and
3031 the current President of <a href="https://www.torproject.org/">the Tor
3032 project</a>, Roger Dingledine, gave a talk for the members of the
3033 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User group</a> (NUUG).  A
3034 video of the talk was recorded, and today, thanks to the great help
3035 from David Noble, I finally was able to publish the video of the talk
3036 on Frikanalen, the Norwegian open channel TV station where NUUG
3037 currently publishes its talks.  You can
3038 <a href="http://frikanalen.no/se">watch the live stream using a web
3039 browser</a> with WebM support, or check out the recording on the video
3040 on demand page for the talk
3041 "<a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/625599">Tor: Anonymous
3042 communication for the US Department of Defence...and you.</a>".</p>
3043
3044 <p>Here is the video included for those of you using browsers with
3045 HTML video and Ogg Theora support:</p>
3046
3047 <p><video width="70%" poster="http://simula.gunkies.org/media/625599/large_thumb/20050421-tor-frikanalen.jpg" controls>
3048   <source src="http://simula.gunkies.org/media/625599/theora/20050421-tor-frikanalen.ogv" type="video/ogg"/>
3049 </video></p>
3050
3051 <p>I guess the gist of the talk can be summarised quite simply: If you
3052 want to help the military in USA (and everyone else), use Tor. :)</p>
3053
3054       </div>
3055       <div class="tags">
3056
3057
3058         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>.
3059
3060
3061       </div>
3062     </div>
3063     <div class="padding"></div>
3064
3065     <div class="entry">
3066       <div class="title">
3067         <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>
3068       </div>
3069       <div class="date">
3070         25th May 2016
3071       </div>
3072       <div class="body">
3073         <p><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/isenkram">The isenkram
3074 system</a> is a user-focused solution in Debian for handling hardware
3075 related packages.  The idea is to have a database of mappings between
3076 hardware and packages, and pop up a dialog suggesting for the user to
3077 install the packages to use a given hardware dongle.  Some use cases
3078 are when you insert a Yubikey, it proposes to install the software
3079 needed to control it; when you insert a braille reader list it
3080 proposes to install the packages needed to send text to the reader;
3081 and when you insert a ColorHug screen calibrator it suggests to
3082 install the driver for it.  The system work well, and even have a few
3083 command line tools to install firmware packages and packages for the
3084 hardware already in the machine (as opposed to hotpluggable hardware).</p>
3085
3086 <p>The system was initially written using aptdaemon, because I found
3087 good documentation and example code on how to use it.  But aptdaemon
3088 is going away and is generally being replaced by
3089 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/software/PackageKit/">PackageKit</a>,
3090 so Isenkram needed a rewrite.  And today, thanks to the great patch
3091 from my college Sunil Mohan Adapa in the FreedomBox project, the
3092 rewrite finally took place.  I've just uploaded a new version of
3093 Isenkram into Debian Unstable with the patch included, and the default
3094 for the background daemon is now to use PackageKit.  To check it out,
3095 install the <tt>isenkram</tt> package and insert some hardware dongle
3096 and see if it is recognised.</p>
3097
3098 <p>If you want to know what kind of packages isenkram would propose for
3099 the machine it is running on, you can check out the isenkram-lookup
3100 program.  This is what it look like on a Thinkpad X230:</p>
3101
3102 <p><blockquote><pre>
3103 % isenkram-lookup
3104 bluez
3105 cheese
3106 fprintd
3107 fprintd-demo
3108 gkrellm-thinkbat
3109 hdapsd
3110 libpam-fprintd
3111 pidgin-blinklight
3112 thinkfan
3113 tleds
3114 tp-smapi-dkms
3115 tp-smapi-source
3116 tpb
3117 %p
3118 </pre></blockquote></p>
3119
3120 <p>The hardware mappings come from several places.  The preferred way
3121 is for packages to announce their hardware support using
3122 <a href="https://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/">the
3123 cross distribution appstream system</a>.
3124 See
3125 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">previous
3126 blog posts about isenkram</a> to learn how to do that.</p>
3127
3128       </div>
3129       <div class="tags">
3130
3131
3132         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>.
3133
3134
3135       </div>
3136     </div>
3137     <div class="padding"></div>
3138
3139     <div class="entry">
3140       <div class="title">
3141         <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>
3142       </div>
3143       <div class="date">
3144         23rd May 2016
3145       </div>
3146       <div class="body">
3147         <p>Yesterday I updated the
3148 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats
3149 package in Debian</a> with a few patches sent to me by skilled and
3150 enterprising users.  There were some nice user and visible changes.
3151 First of all, both desktop menu entries now work.  A design flaw in
3152 one of the script made the history graph fail to show up (its PNG was
3153 dumped in ~/.xsession-errors) if no controlling TTY was available.
3154 The script worked when called from the command line, but not when
3155 called from the desktop menu.  I changed this to look for a DISPLAY
3156 variable or a TTY before deciding where to draw the graph, and now the
3157 graph window pop up as expected.</p>
3158
3159 <p>The next new feature is a discharge rate estimator in one of the
3160 graphs (the one showing the last few hours).  New is also the user of
3161 colours showing charging in blue and discharge in red.  The percentages
3162 of this graph is relative to last full charge, not battery design
3163 capacity.</p>
3164
3165 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-05-23-battery-stats-rate.png"/></p>
3166
3167 <p>The other graph show the entire history of the collected battery
3168 statistics, comparing it to the design capacity of the battery to
3169 visualise how the battery life time get shorter over time.  The red
3170 line in this graph is what the previous graph considers 100 percent:
3171
3172 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-05-23-battery-stats-history.png"/></p>
3173
3174 <p>In this graph you can see that I only charge the battery to 80
3175 percent of last full capacity, and how the capacity of the battery is
3176 shrinking. :(</p>
3177
3178 <p>The last new feature is in the collector, which now will handle
3179 more hardware models.  On some hardware, Linux power supply
3180 information is stored in /sys/class/power_supply/ACAD/, while the
3181 collector previously only looked in /sys/class/power_supply/AC/.  Now
3182 both are checked to figure if there is power connected to the
3183 machine.</p>
3184
3185 <p>If you are interested in how your laptop battery is doing, please
3186 check out the
3187 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats</a>
3188 in Debian unstable, or rebuild it on Jessie to get it working on
3189 Debian stable. :) The upstream source is available from <a
3190 href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">github</a>.
3191 Patches are very welcome.</p>
3192
3193 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3194 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3195 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3196
3197       </div>
3198       <div class="tags">
3199
3200
3201         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>.
3202
3203
3204       </div>
3205     </div>
3206     <div class="padding"></div>
3207
3208     <div class="entry">
3209       <div class="title">
3210         <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>
3211       </div>
3212       <div class="date">
3213         21st May 2016
3214       </div>
3215       <div class="body">
3216         <p>A few weeks ago the French paperback edition of Lawrence Lessigs
3217 2004 book Cultura Libre was published.  Today I noticed that the book
3218 is now available from book stores.  You can now buy it from
3219 <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Culture-Libre-French-Lawrence-Lessig/dp/8269018260">Amazon</a>
3220 ($19.99),
3221 <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/culture-libre-lawrence-lessig/1123776705">Barnes
3222 & Noble</a> ($?) and as always from
3223 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/culture-libre/paperback/product-22645082.html">Lulu.com</a>
3224 ($19.99).  The revenue is donated to the Creative Commons project.  If
3225 you buy from Lulu.com, they currently get $10.59, while if you buy
3226 from one of the book stores most of the revenue go to the book store
3227 and the Creative Commons project get much (not sure how much
3228 less).</p>
3229
3230 <p>I was a bit surprised to discover that there is a kindle edition
3231 sold by Amazon Digital Services LLC on Amazon.  Not quite sure how
3232 that edition was created, but if you want to download a electronic
3233 edition (PDF, EPUB, Mobi) generated from the same files used to create
3234 the paperback edition, they are
3235 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">available
3236 from github</a>.</p>
3237
3238       </div>
3239       <div class="tags">
3240
3241
3242         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>.
3243
3244
3245       </div>
3246     </div>
3247     <div class="padding"></div>
3248
3249     <div class="entry">
3250       <div class="title">
3251         <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>
3252       </div>
3253       <div class="date">
3254         19th May 2016
3255       </div>
3256       <div class="body">
3257         <p>I just donated to the
3258 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/dns-beslag-donasjon.shtml">NUUG defence
3259 "fond"</a> to fund the effort in Norway to get the seizure of the news
3260 site popcorn-time.no tested in court.  I hope everyone that agree with
3261 me will do the same.</p>
3262
3263 <p>Would you be worried if you knew the police in your country could
3264 hijack DNS domains of news sites covering free software system without
3265 talking to a judge first?  I am.  What if the free software system
3266 combined search engine lookups, bittorrent downloads and video playout
3267 and was called Popcorn Time?  Would that affect your view?  It still
3268 make me worried.</p>
3269
3270 <p>In March 2016, the Norwegian police seized (as in forced NORID to
3271 change the IP address pointed to by it to one controlled by the
3272 police) the DNS domain popcorn-time.no, without any supervision from
3273 the courts.  I did not know about the web site back then, and assumed
3274 the courts had been involved, and was very surprised when I discovered
3275 that the police had hijacked the DNS domain without asking a judge for
3276 permission first.  I was even more surprised when I had a look at
3277 <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://popcorn-time.no">the web
3278 site content on the Internet Archive</A>, and only found news coverage
3279 about Popcorn Time, not any material published without the right
3280 holders permissions.</p>
3281
3282 <p>The seizure was widely covered in the Norwegian press (see for
3283 example <a href="http://www.hegnar.no/Nyheter/Naeringsliv/2016/03/Popcorn-time.no-beslaglagt-av-OEkokrim">Hegnar Online</a> and
3284 <a href="http://itavisen.no/2016/03/08/okokrim-har-beslaglagt-popcorn-time-no/">ITavisen<a/>
3285 and
3286 <a href="http://www.nrk.no/kultur/okokrim-gar-til-aksjon-mot-popcorn-time-1.12842452">NRK</a>),
3287 at first due to the press release sent out by Økokrim, but then based
3288 on
3289 <a href="http://blogg.torvund.net/2016/03/09/okokrims-beslag-i-domenet-popcorn-time-no/">protests
3290 from the law professor Olav Torvund</a> and
3291 <a href="http://www.klassekampen.no/article/20160311/ARTICLE/160319995">lawyer
3292 Jon Wessel-Aas</a>.  It even got some
3293 <a href="https://torrentfreak.com/norwegian-authorities-sued-over-popcorn-time-domain-seizure-160418/">coverage
3294 on TorrentFreak</a>.</p>
3295
3296 <p>I
3297 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/NUUG_contests_Norwegian_police_DNS_seizure_of_popcorn_time_no.html">
3298 wrote about the case a month ago</a>, when the
3299 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a> (NUUG),
3300 where I am an active member, decided to ask the courts to test this seizure.
3301 The request was denied, but NUUG and its co-requestor EFN have not
3302 given up, and now they are rallying for support to get the seizure
3303 legally challenged.  They accept both bank and Bitcoin transfer for
3304 those that want to support the request.</p>
3305
3306 <p>If you as me believe news sites about free software should not be
3307 censored, even if the free software have both legal and illegal
3308 applications, and that DNS hijacking should be tested by the courts, I
3309 suggest you <a href="http://www.nuug.no/dns-beslag-donasjon.shtml">show
3310 your support by donating to NUUG</a>.</a>
3311
3312       </div>
3313       <div class="tags">
3314
3315
3316         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>.
3317
3318
3319       </div>
3320     </div>
3321     <div class="padding"></div>
3322
3323     <div class="entry">
3324       <div class="title">
3325         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_now_with_ZFS_on_Linux_included.html">Debian now with ZFS on Linux included</a>
3326       </div>
3327       <div class="date">
3328         12th May 2016
3329       </div>
3330       <div class="body">
3331         <p>Today, after many years of hard work from many people,
3332 <a href="http://zfsonlinux.org/">ZFS for Linux</a> finally entered
3333 Debian.  The package status can be seen on
3334 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/zfs-linux">the package tracker
3335 for zfs-linux</a>.  and
3336 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=pkg-zfsonlinux-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
3337 team status page</a>. If you want to help out, please join us.
3338 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-zfsonlinux/zfs.git">The
3339 source code</a> is available via git on Alioth.  It would also be
3340 great if you could help out with
3341 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/dkms">the dkms package</a>, as
3342 it is an important piece of the puzzle to get ZFS working.</p>
3343
3344       </div>
3345       <div class="tags">
3346
3347
3348         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>.
3349
3350
3351       </div>
3352     </div>
3353     <div class="padding"></div>
3354
3355     <div class="entry">
3356       <div class="title">
3357         <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>
3358       </div>
3359       <div class="date">
3360          8th May 2016
3361       </div>
3362       <div class="body">
3363         <p><strong>Where I set out to figure out which multimedia player in
3364 Debian claim support for most file formats.</strong></p>
3365
3366 <p>A few years ago, I had a look at the media support for Browser
3367 plugins in Debian, to get an idea which plugins to include in Debian
3368 Edu.  I created a script to extract the set of supported MIME types
3369 for each plugin, and used this to find out which multimedia browser
3370 plugin supported most file formats / media types.
3371 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">The
3372 result</a> can still be seen on the Debian wiki, even though it have
3373 not been updated for a while.  But browser plugins are less relevant
3374 these days, so I thought it was time to look at standalone
3375 players.</p>
3376
3377 <p>A few days ago I was tired of VLC not being listed as a viable
3378 player when I wanted to play videos from the Norwegian National
3379 Broadcasting Company, and decided to investigate why.  The cause is a
3380 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/822245">missing MIME type in the VLC
3381 desktop file</a>.  In the process I wrote a script to compare the set
3382 of MIME types announced in the desktop file and the browser plugin,
3383 only to discover that there is quite a large difference between the
3384 two for VLC.  This discovery made me dig up the script I used to
3385 compare browser plugins, and adjust it to compare desktop files
3386 instead, to try to figure out which multimedia player in Debian
3387 support most file formats.</p>
3388
3389 <p>The result can be seen on the Debian Wiki, as
3390 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMultimedia/PlayerSupport">a
3391 table listing all MIME types supported by one of the packages included
3392 in the table</a>, with the package supporting most MIME types being
3393 listed first in the table.</p>
3394
3395 </p>The best multimedia player in Debian?  It is totem, followed by
3396 parole, kplayer, mpv, vlc, smplayer mplayer-gui gnome-mpv and
3397 kmplayer.  Time for the other players to update their announced MIME
3398 support?</p>
3399
3400       </div>
3401       <div class="tags">
3402
3403
3404         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>.
3405
3406
3407       </div>
3408     </div>
3409     <div class="padding"></div>
3410
3411     <div class="entry">
3412       <div class="title">
3413         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Pyra___handheld_computer_with_Debian_preinstalled.html">The Pyra - handheld computer with Debian preinstalled</a>
3414       </div>
3415       <div class="date">
3416          4th May 2016
3417       </div>
3418       <div class="body">
3419         A friend of mine made me aware of
3420 <a href="https://pyra-handheld.com/boards/pages/pyra/">The Pyra</a>, a
3421 handheld computer which will be delivered with Debian preinstalled.  I
3422 would love to get one of those for my birthday. :)</p>
3423
3424 <p>The machine is a complete ARM-based PC with micro HDMI, SATA, USB
3425 plugs and many others connectors, and include a full keyboard and a 5"
3426 LCD touch screen.  The 6000mAh battery is claimed to provide a whole
3427 day of battery life time, but I have not seen any independent tests
3428 confirming this.  The vendor is still collecting preorders, and the
3429 last I heard last night was that 22 more orders were needed before
3430 production started.</p>
3431
3432 <p>As far as I know, this is the first handheld preinstalled with
3433 Debian.  Please let me know if you know of any others.  Is it the
3434 first computer being sold with Debian preinstalled?</p>
3435
3436       </div>
3437       <div class="tags">
3438
3439
3440         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>.
3441
3442
3443       </div>
3444     </div>
3445     <div class="padding"></div>
3446
3447     <div class="entry">
3448       <div class="title">
3449         <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>
3450       </div>
3451       <div class="date">
3452         18th April 2016
3453       </div>
3454       <div class="body">
3455         <p>It is days like today I am really happy to be a member of
3456 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the Norwegian Unix User group</a>, a
3457 member association for those of us believing in free software, open
3458 standards and unix-like operating systems.  NUUG announced today it
3459 will
3460 <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
3461 to bring the seizure of the DNS domain popcorn-time.no as
3462 unlawful</a>, to stand up for the principle that writing about a
3463 controversial topic is not infringing copyrights, and censuring web
3464 pages by hijacking DNS domain should be decided by the courts, not the
3465 police.  The DNS domain was seized by the Norwegian National Authority
3466 for Investigation and Prosecution of Economic and Environmental Crime
3467 a month ago.  I hope this bring more paying members to NUUG to give
3468 the association the financial muscle needed to bring this case as far
3469 as it must go to stop this kind of DNS hijacking.</p>
3470
3471       </div>
3472       <div class="tags">
3473
3474
3475         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>.
3476
3477
3478       </div>
3479     </div>
3480     <div class="padding"></div>
3481
3482     <div class="entry">
3483       <div class="title">
3484         <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>
3485       </div>
3486       <div class="date">
3487         13th April 2016
3488       </div>
3489       <div class="body">
3490         <p>I first got to know I.F. Stone when I came across an article by Jon
3491 Schwarz on The Intercept
3492 <a href="https://theintercept.com/2015/05/07/new-documentary-legacy-f-stone/">about
3493 his extraordinary contribution to investigative journalism in
3494 USA</a>. The article is about a new documentary in two parts
3495 (<a href="https://vimeo.com/123974841">part one is 12 minutes</a> and
3496 <a href="https://vimeo.com/123974842">part two is 30 minutes</a>), and
3497 I found both truly fascinating.  It is amazing what he was able to
3498 find by digging up public sources and government papers.  He
3499 documented lots of government abuse and cover ups, and I find
3500 <a href="http://www.ifstone.org/weekly.php">his weekly news letters</a>
3501 inspiring to read even today.</p>
3502
3503 <p><blockquote>
3504 All governments are run by liars and nothing they say should be believed.
3505 <br>- I. F. Stone
3506 </blockquote></p>
3507
3508 <p>His starting point was that reporters should not assume governments
3509 and corporations are telling the truth, but verify all their claims as
3510 much as possible.  I wonder how many Norwegian reporters can be said
3511 to follow the principles of I. F. Stone.  They are definitely in short
3512 supply.  If you, like me half a year ago, have never heard of him,
3513 check him out.</p>
3514
3515       </div>
3516       <div class="tags">
3517
3518
3519         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>.
3520
3521
3522       </div>
3523     </div>
3524     <div class="padding"></div>
3525
3526     <div class="entry">
3527       <div class="title">
3528         <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>
3529       </div>
3530       <div class="date">
3531         12th April 2016
3532       </div>
3533       <div class="body">
3534         <p>I'm happy to report that
3535 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/culture-libre/paperback/product-22645082.html">the
3536 French paperback edition</a> of
3537 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">my
3538 project to translate</a> the <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free
3539 Culture</a> book by Lawrence Lessig is now available for sale on
3540 Lulu.com.  Once I have formally verified my proof reading copy, which
3541 should be in the mail, the paperback edition should be available in
3542 book stores like Amazon and Barnes & Noble too.</p>
3543
3544 <p>This French edition, Culture Libre, is the work of the
3545 <a href="http://dblatex.sourceforge.net/">dblatex</a> developer Benoît
3546 Guillon, who created the PO file from the initial translation
3547 available from
3548 <a href="http://www.wikilivres.ca/wiki/Culture_libre">the Wikilivres
3549 wiki pages</a> and completed and corrected the translation to match
3550 the original docbook edition my project is using, as well as
3551 coordinated the proof reading of the final result.  I believe the end
3552 result look great, but I am biased and do not read French.  In
3553 addition to the paperback edition, the book is available in PDF, EPUB
3554 and Mobi format from the github project page linked to above.</p>
3555
3556 <p>When enabling book store distribution on Lulu.com, I had to nearly
3557 triple the price to allow the book stores some profit.  I also had to
3558 accept that I will get some revenue when a book is sold via Lulu.com.
3559 But because of the non-commercial clause in the book license
3560 (CC-BY-NC), this might be a problem.  To bypass the problem I
3561 discussed how to handle the revenue with the author, and we agreed
3562 that the revenue for these editions go to the
3563 <a href="https://creativecommons.org/">Creative Commons non-profit
3564 Corporation</a> who handle donations to the Creative Commons project.
3565 So far they have earned around USD 70 on sales of the
3566 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22440520.html">English</a>
3567 and
3568 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/fri-kultur/paperback/product-22441576.html">Norwegian
3569 Bokmål</a> editions, according to Lulu.com.  They will get the revenue
3570 for the French edition too.  Their revenue is higher if you buy the
3571 book directly from Lulu.com instead of via a book store, so I
3572 recommend you buy directly from Lulu.com.</p>
3573
3574 <p>Perhaps you would like to get the book published in your language?
3575 The translation is done using a web based translator service, so the
3576 technical bar to enter is fairly low.  Get in touch if you would like
3577 to make this happen.</p>
3578
3579       </div>
3580       <div class="tags">
3581
3582
3583         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>.
3584
3585
3586       </div>
3587     </div>
3588     <div class="padding"></div>
3589
3590     <div class="entry">
3591       <div class="title">
3592         <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>
3593       </div>
3594       <div class="date">
3595         10th April 2016
3596       </div>
3597       <div class="body">
3598         <p>During this weekends
3599 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Oslo__Takk_for_feilfiksingsfesten.shtml">bug
3600 squashing party and developer gathering</a>, we decided to do our part
3601 to make sure there are good books about Debian available in Norwegian
3602 Bokmål, and got in touch with the people behind the
3603 <a href="http://debian-handbook.info/">Debian Administrator's Handbook
3604 project</a> to get started.  If you want to help out, please start
3605 contributing using
3606 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-handbook/">the
3607 hosted weblate project page</a>, and get in touch using
3608 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/debian-handbook-translators">the
3609 translators mailing list</a>.  Please also check out
3610 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/contribute/">the instructions for
3611 contributors</a>.</p>
3612
3613 <p>The book is already available on paper in English, French and
3614 Japanese, and our goal is to get it available on paper in Norwegian
3615 Bokmål too.  In addition to the paper edition, there are also EPUB and
3616 Mobi versions available.  And there are incomplete translations
3617 available for many more languages.</p>
3618
3619       </div>
3620       <div class="tags">
3621
3622
3623         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>.
3624
3625
3626       </div>
3627     </div>
3628     <div class="padding"></div>
3629
3630     <div class="entry">
3631       <div class="title">
3632         <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>
3633       </div>
3634       <div class="date">
3635          7th April 2016
3636       </div>
3637       <div class="body">
3638         <p>Just for fun I had a look at the popcon number of ZFS related
3639 packages in Debian, and was quite surprised with what I found.  I use
3640 ZFS myself at home, but did not really expect many others to do so.
3641 But I might be wrong.</p>
3642
3643 <p>According to
3644 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=spl-linux">the popcon
3645 results for spl-linux</a>, there are 1019 Debian installations, or
3646 0.53% of the population, with the package installed.  As far as I know
3647 the only use of the spl-linux package is as a support library for ZFS
3648 on Linux, so I use it here as proxy for measuring the number of ZFS
3649 installation on Linux in Debian.  In the kFreeBSD variant of Debian
3650 the ZFS feature is already available, and there
3651 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=zfsutils">the popcon
3652 results for zfsutils</a> show 1625 Debian installations or 0.84% of
3653 the population.  So I guess I am not alone in using ZFS on Debian.</p>
3654
3655 <p>But even though the Debian project leader Lucas Nussbaum
3656 <a href="https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2015/04/msg00006.html">announced
3657 in April 2015</a> that the legal obstacles blocking ZFS on Debian were
3658 cleared, the package is still not in Debian.  The package is again in
3659 the NEW queue.  Several uploads have been rejected so far because the
3660 debian/copyright file was incomplete or wrong, but there is no reason
3661 to give up.  The current status can be seen on
3662 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=pkg-zfsonlinux-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
3663 team status page</a>, and
3664 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-zfsonlinux/zfs.git">the
3665 source code</a> is available on Alioth.</p>
3666
3667 <p>As I want ZFS to be included in next version of Debian to make sure
3668 my home server can function in the future using only official Debian
3669 packages, and the current blocker is to get the debian/copyright file
3670 accepted by the FTP masters in Debian, I decided a while back to try
3671 to help out the team.  This was the background for my blog post about
3672 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Creating__updating_and_checking_debian_copyright_semi_automatically.html">creating,
3673 updating and checking debian/copyright semi-automatically</a>, and I
3674 used the techniques I explored there to try to find any errors in the
3675 copyright file.  It is not very easy to check every one of the around
3676 2000 files in the source package, but I hope we this time got it
3677 right.  If you want to help out, check out the git source and try to
3678 find missing entries in the debian/copyright file.</p>
3679
3680       </div>
3681       <div class="tags">
3682
3683
3684         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>.
3685
3686
3687       </div>
3688     </div>
3689     <div class="padding"></div>
3690
3691     <div class="entry">
3692       <div class="title">
3693         <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>
3694       </div>
3695       <div class="date">
3696          2nd April 2016
3697       </div>
3698       <div class="body">
3699         <p>Two years ago, I had
3700 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Public_Trusted_Timestamping_services_for_everyone.html">a
3701 look at trusted timestamping options available</a>, and among
3702 other things noted a still open
3703 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/742553">bug in the tsget script</a>
3704 included in openssl that made it harder than necessary to use openssl
3705 as a trusted timestamping client.  A few days ago I was told
3706 <a href="https:/www.difi.no/">the Norwegian government office DIFI</a> is
3707 close to releasing their own trusted timestamp service, and in the
3708 process I was happy to learn about a replacement for the tsget script
3709 using only curl:</p>
3710
3711 <p><pre>
3712 openssl ts -query -data "/etc/shells" -cert -sha256 -no_nonce \
3713   | curl -s -H "Content-Type: application/timestamp-query" \
3714          --data-binary "@-" http://zeitstempel.dfn.de > etc-shells.tsr
3715 openssl ts -reply -text -in etc-shells.tsr
3716 </pre></p>
3717
3718 <p>This produces a binary timestamp file (etc-shells.tsr) which can be
3719 used to verify that the content of the file /etc/shell with the
3720 calculated sha256 hash existed at the point in time when the request
3721 was made.  The last command extract the content of the etc-shells.tsr
3722 in human readable form.  The idea behind such timestamp is to be able
3723 to prove using cryptography that the content of a file have not
3724 changed since the file was stamped.</p>
3725
3726 <p>To verify that the file on disk match the public key signature in
3727 the timestamp file, run the following commands.  It make sure you have
3728 the required certificate for the trusted timestamp service available
3729 and use it to compare the file content with the timestamp.  In
3730 production, one should of course use a better method to verify the
3731 service certificate.</p>
3732
3733 <p><pre>
3734 wget -O ca-cert.txt https://pki.pca.dfn.de/global-services-ca/pub/cacert/chain.txt
3735 openssl ts -verify -data /etc/shells -in etc-shells.tsr -CAfile ca-cert.txt -text
3736 </pre></p>
3737
3738 <p>Wikipedia have a lot more information about
3739 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_timestamping">trusted
3740 Timestamping</a> and
3741 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linked_timestamping">linked
3742 timestamping</a>, and there are several trusted timestamping services
3743 around, both as commercial services and as free and public services.
3744 Among the latter is
3745 <a href="https://www.pki.dfn.de/zeitstempeldienst/">the
3746 zeitstempel.dfn.de service</a> mentioned above and
3747 <a href="https://freetsa.org/">freetsa.org service</a> linked to from the
3748 wikipedia web site.  I believe the DIFI service should show up on
3749 https://tsa.difi.no, but it is not available to the public at the
3750 moment.  I hope this will change when it is into production.  The
3751 <a href="https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3161">RFC 3161</a> trusted
3752 timestamping protocol standard is even implemented in LibreOffice,
3753 Microsoft Office and Adobe Acrobat, making it possible to verify when
3754 a document was created.</p>
3755
3756 <p>I would find it useful to be able to use such trusted timestamp
3757 service to make it possible to verify that my stored syslog files have
3758 not been tampered with.  This is not a new idea.  I found one example
3759 implemented on the Endian network appliances where
3760 <a href="http://help.endian.com/entries/21518508-Enabling-Timestamping-on-log-files-">the
3761 configuration of such feature was described in 2012</a>.</p>
3762
3763 <p>But I could not find any free implementation of such feature when I
3764 searched, so I decided to try to
3765 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/syslog-trusted-timestamp">build
3766 a prototype named syslog-trusted-timestamp</a>.  My idea is to
3767 generate a timestamp of the old log files after they are rotated, and
3768 store the timestamp in the new log file just after rotation.  This
3769 will form a chain that would make it possible to see if any old log
3770 files are tampered with.  But syslog is bad at handling kilobytes of
3771 binary data, so I decided to base64 encode the timestamp and add an ID
3772 and line sequence numbers to the base64 data to make it possible to
3773 reassemble the timestamp file again.  To use it, simply run it like
3774 this:
3775
3776 <p><pre>
3777 syslog-trusted-timestamp /path/to/list-of-log-files
3778 </pre></p>
3779
3780 <p>This will send a timestamp from one or more timestamp services (not
3781 yet decided nor implemented) for each listed file to the syslog using
3782 logger(1).  To verify the timestamp, the same program is used with the
3783 --verify option:</p>
3784
3785 <p><pre>
3786 syslog-trusted-timestamp --verify /path/to/log-file /path/to/log-with-timestamp
3787 </pre></p>
3788
3789 <p>The verification step is not yet well designed.  The current
3790 implementation depend on the file path being unique and unchanging,
3791 and this is not a solid assumption.  It also uses process number as
3792 timestamp ID, and this is bound to create ID collisions.  I hope to
3793 have time to come up with a better way to handle timestamp IDs and
3794 verification later.</p>
3795
3796 <p>Please check out
3797 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/syslog-trusted-timestamp">the
3798 prototype for syslog-trusted-timestamp on github</a> and send
3799 suggestions and improvement, or let me know if there already exist a
3800 similar system for timestamping logs already to allow me to join
3801 forces with others with the same interest.</p>
3802
3803 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3804 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3805 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3806
3807       </div>
3808       <div class="tags">
3809
3810
3811         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>.
3812
3813
3814       </div>
3815     </div>
3816     <div class="padding"></div>
3817
3818     <div class="entry">
3819       <div class="title">
3820         <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>
3821       </div>
3822       <div class="date">
3823         23rd March 2016
3824       </div>
3825       <div class="body">
3826         <p>Since this morning, the battery-stats package in Debian include an
3827 extended collector that will collect the complete battery history for
3828 later processing and graphing.  The original collector store the
3829 battery level as percentage of last full level, while the new
3830 collector also record battery vendor, model, serial number, design
3831 full level, last full level and current battery level.  This make it
3832 possible to predict the lifetime of the battery as well as visualise
3833 the energy flow when the battery is charging or discharging.</p>
3834
3835 <p>The new tools are available in <tt>/usr/share/battery-stats/</tt>
3836 in the version 0.5.1 package in unstable.  Get the new battery level graph
3837 and lifetime prediction by running:
3838
3839 <p><pre>
3840 /usr/share/battery-stats/battery-stats-graph /var/log/battery-stats.csv
3841 </pre></p>
3842
3843 <p>Or select the 'Battery Level Graph' from your application menu.</p>
3844
3845 <p>The flow in/out of the battery can be seen by running (no menu
3846 entry yet):</p>
3847
3848 <p><pre>
3849 /usr/share/battery-stats/battery-stats-graph-flow
3850 </pre></p>
3851
3852 <p>I'm not quite happy with the way the data is visualised, at least
3853 when there are few data points.  The graphs look a bit better with a
3854 few years of data.</p>
3855
3856 <p>A while back one important feature I use in the battery stats
3857 collector broke in Debian.  The scripts in
3858 <tt>/usr/lib/pm-utils/power.d/</tt> were no longer executed.  I
3859 suspect it happened when Jessie started using systemd, but I do not
3860 know.  The issue is reported as
3861 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/818649">bug #818649</a> against
3862 pm-utils.  I managed to work around it by adding an udev rule to call
3863 the collector script every time the power connector is connected and
3864 disconnected.  With this fix in place it was finally time to make a
3865 new release of the package, and get it into Debian.</p>
3866
3867 <p>If you are interested in how your laptop battery is doing, please
3868 check out the
3869 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats</a>
3870 in Debian unstable, or rebuild it on Jessie to get it working on
3871 Debian stable. :) The upstream source is available from
3872 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">github</a>.
3873 As always, patches are very welcome.</p>
3874
3875       </div>
3876       <div class="tags">
3877
3878
3879         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>.
3880
3881
3882       </div>
3883     </div>
3884     <div class="padding"></div>
3885
3886     <div class="entry">
3887       <div class="title">
3888         <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>
3889       </div>
3890       <div class="date">
3891         19th March 2016
3892       </div>
3893       <div class="body">
3894         <p>Back in 2013 I proposed
3895 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/_Electronic__paper_invoices___using_vCard_in_a_QR_code.html">a
3896 way to make paper and PDF invoices easier to process electronically by
3897 adding a QR code with the key information about the invoice</a>.  I
3898 suggested using vCard field definition, to get some standard format
3899 for name and address, but any format would work.  I did not do
3900 anything about the proposal, but hoped someone one day would make
3901 something like it.  It would make it possible to efficiently send
3902 machine readable invoices directly between seller and buyer.</p>
3903
3904 <p>This was the background when I came across a proposal and
3905 specification from the web based accounting and invoicing supplier
3906 <a href="http://www.visma.com/">Visma</a> in Sweden called
3907 <a href="http://usingqr.com/">UsingQR</a>.  Their PDF invoices contain
3908 a QR code with the key information of the invoice in JSON format.
3909 This is the typical content of a QR code following the UsingQR
3910 specification (based on a real world example, some numbers replaced to
3911 get a more bogus entry).  I've reformatted the JSON to make it easier
3912 to read.  Normally this is all on one long line:</p>
3913
3914 <p><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-03-19-qr-invoice.png" align="right"><pre>
3915 {
3916  "vh":500.00,
3917  "vm":0,
3918  "vl":0,
3919  "uqr":1,
3920  "tp":1,
3921  "nme":"Din Leverandør",
3922  "cc":"NO",
3923  "cid":"997912345 MVA",
3924  "iref":"12300001",
3925  "idt":"20151022",
3926  "ddt":"20151105",
3927  "due":2500.0000,
3928  "cur":"NOK",
3929  "pt":"BBAN",
3930  "acc":"17202612345",
3931  "bc":"BIENNOK1",
3932  "adr":"0313 OSLO"
3933 }
3934 </pre></p>
3935
3936 </p>The interpretation of the fields can be found in the
3937 <a href="http://usingqr.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/UsingQR_specification1.pdf">format
3938 specification</a> (revision 2 from june 2014).  The format seem to
3939 have most of the information needed to handle accounting and payment
3940 of invoices, at least the fields I have needed so far here in
3941 Norway.</p>
3942
3943 <p>Unfortunately, the site and document do not mention anything about
3944 the patent, trademark and copyright status of the format and the
3945 specification.  Because of this, I asked the people behind it back in
3946 November to clarify.  Ann-Christine Savlid (ann-christine.savlid (at)
3947 visma.com) replied that Visma had not applied for patent or trademark
3948 protection for this format, and that there were no copyright based
3949 usage limitations for the format.  I urged her to make sure this was
3950 explicitly written on the web pages and in the specification, but
3951 unfortunately this has not happened yet.  So I guess if there is
3952 submarine patents, hidden trademarks or a will to sue for copyright
3953 infringements, those starting to use the UsingQR format might be at
3954 risk, but if this happen there is some legal defense in the fact that
3955 the people behind the format claimed it was safe to do so.  At least
3956 with patents, there is always
3957 <a href="http://www.paperspecs.com/paper-news/beware-the-qr-code-patent-trap/">a
3958 chance of getting sued...</a></p>
3959
3960 <p>I also asked if they planned to maintain the format in an
3961 independent standard organization to give others more confidence that
3962 they would participate in the standardization process on equal terms
3963 with Visma, but they had no immediate plans for this.  Their plan was
3964 to work with banks to try to get more users of the format, and
3965 evaluate the way forward if the format proved to be popular.  I hope
3966 they conclude that using an open standard organisation like
3967 <a href="http://www.ietf.org/">IETF</a> is the correct place to
3968 maintain such specification.</p>
3969
3970 <p><strong>Update 2016-03-20</strong>: Via Twitter I became aware of
3971 <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11319492">some comments
3972 about this blog post</a> that had several useful links and references to
3973 similar systems.  In the Czech republic, the Czech Banking Association
3974 standard #26, with short name SPAYD, uses QR codes with payment
3975 information.  More information is available from the Wikipedia page on
3976 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_Payment_Descriptor">Short
3977 Payment Descriptor</a>.  And in Germany, there is a system named
3978 <a href="http://www.bezahlcode.de/">BezahlCode</a>,
3979 (<a href="http://www.bezahlcode.de/wp-content/uploads/BezahlCode_TechDok.pdf">specification
3980 v1.8 2013-12-05 available as PDF</a>), which uses QR codes with
3981 URL-like formatting using "bank:" as the URI schema/protocol to
3982 provide the payment information.  There is also the
3983 <a href="http://www.ferd-net.de/front_content.php?idcat=231">ZUGFeRD</a>
3984 file format that perhaps could be transfered using QR codes, but I am
3985 not sure if it is done already.  Last, in Bolivia there are reports
3986 that tax information since november 2014 need to be printed in QR
3987 format on invoices.  I have not been able to track down a
3988 specification for this format, because of my limited language skill
3989 sets.</p>
3990
3991       </div>
3992       <div class="tags">
3993
3994
3995         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>.
3996
3997
3998       </div>
3999     </div>
4000     <div class="padding"></div>
4001
4002     <div class="entry">
4003       <div class="title">
4004         <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>
4005       </div>
4006       <div class="date">
4007         15th March 2016
4008       </div>
4009       <div class="body">
4010         <p>Back in September, I blogged about
4011 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_life_and_death_of_a_laptop_battery.html">the
4012 system I wrote to collect statistics about my laptop battery</a>, and
4013 how it showed the decay and death of this battery (now replaced).  I
4014 created a simple deb package to handle the collection and graphing,
4015 but did not want to upload it to Debian as there were already
4016 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">a battery-stats
4017 package in Debian</a> that should do the same thing, and I did not see
4018 a point of uploading a competing package when battery-stats could be
4019 fixed instead.  I reported a few bugs about its non-function, and
4020 hoped someone would step in and fix it.  But no-one did.</p>
4021
4022 <p>I got tired of waiting a few days ago, and took matters in my own
4023 hands.  The end result is that I am now the new upstream developer of
4024 battery stats (<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">available from github</a>) and part of the team maintaining
4025 battery-stats in Debian, and the package in Debian unstable is finally
4026 able to collect battery status using the <tt>/sys/class/power_supply/</tt>
4027 information provided by the Linux kernel.  If you install the
4028 battery-stats package from unstable now, you will be able to get a
4029 graph of the current battery fill level, to get some idea about the
4030 status of the battery.  The source package build and work just fine in
4031 Debian testing and stable (and probably oldstable too, but I have not
4032 tested).  The default graph you get for that system look like this:</p>
4033
4034 <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>
4035
4036 <p>My plans for the future is to merge my old scripts into the
4037 battery-stats package, as my old scripts collected a lot more details
4038 about the battery.  The scripts are merged into the upstream
4039 battery-stats git repository already, but I am not convinced they work
4040 yet, as I changed a lot of paths along the way.  Will have to test a
4041 bit more before I make a new release.</p>
4042
4043 <p>I will also consider changing the file format slightly, as I
4044 suspect the way I combine several values into one field might make it
4045 impossible to know the type of the value when using it for processing
4046 and graphing.</p>
4047
4048 <p>If you would like I would like to keep an close eye on your laptop
4049 battery, check out the battery-stats package in
4050 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">Debian</a> and
4051 on
4052 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">github</a>.
4053 I would love some help to improve the system further.</p>
4054
4055       </div>
4056       <div class="tags">
4057
4058
4059         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>.
4060
4061
4062       </div>
4063     </div>
4064     <div class="padding"></div>
4065
4066     <div class="entry">
4067       <div class="title">
4068         <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>
4069       </div>
4070       <div class="date">
4071         19th February 2016
4072       </div>
4073       <div class="body">
4074         <p>Making packages for Debian requires quite a lot of attention to
4075 details.  And one of the details is the content of the
4076 debian/copyright file, which should list all relevant licenses used by
4077 the code in the package in question, preferably in
4078 <a href="https://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/">machine
4079 readable DEP5 format</a>.</p>
4080
4081 <p>For large packages with lots of contributors it is hard to write
4082 and update this file manually, and if you get some detail wrong, the
4083 package is normally rejected by the ftpmasters.  So getting it right
4084 the first time around get the package into Debian faster, and save
4085 both you and the ftpmasters some work..  Today, while trying to figure
4086 out what was wrong with
4087 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=686447">the
4088 zfsonlinux copyright file</a>, I decided to spend some time on
4089 figuring out the options for doing this job automatically, or at least
4090 semi-automatically.</p>
4091
4092 <p>Lucikly, there are at least two tools available for generating the
4093 file based on the code in the source package,
4094 <tt><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/debmake">debmake</a></tt>
4095 and <tt><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cme">cme</a></tt>.  I'm
4096 not sure which one of them came first, but both seem to be able to
4097 create a sensible draft file.  As far as I can tell, none of them can
4098 be trusted to get the result just right, so the content need to be
4099 polished a bit before the file is OK to upload.  I found the debmake
4100 option in
4101 <a href="http://goofying-with-debian.blogspot.com/2014/07/debmake-checking-source-against-dep-5.html">a
4102 blog posts from 2014</a>.
4103
4104 <p>To generate using debmake, use the -cc option:
4105
4106 <p><pre>
4107 debmake -cc > debian/copyright
4108 </pre></p>
4109
4110 <p>Note there are some problems with python and non-ASCII names, so
4111 this might not be the best option.</p>
4112
4113 <p>The cme option is based on a config parsing library, and I found
4114 this approach in
4115 <a href="https://ddumont.wordpress.com/2015/04/05/improving-creation-of-debian-copyright-file/">a
4116 blog post from 2015</a>.  To generate using cme, use the 'update
4117 dpkg-copyright' option:
4118
4119 <p><pre>
4120 cme update dpkg-copyright
4121 </pre></p>
4122
4123 <p>This will create or update debian/copyright.  The cme tool seem to
4124 handle UTF-8 names better than debmake.</p>
4125
4126 <p>When the copyright file is created, I would also like some help to
4127 check if the file is correct.  For this I found two good options,
4128 <tt>debmake -k</tt> and <tt>license-reconcile</tt>.  The former seem
4129 to focus on license types and file matching, and is able to detect
4130 ineffective blocks in the copyright file.  The latter reports missing
4131 copyright holders and years, but was confused by inconsistent license
4132 names (like CDDL vs. CDDL-1.0).  I suspect it is good to use both and
4133 fix all issues reported by them before uploading.  But I do not know
4134 if the tools and the ftpmasters agree on what is important to fix in a
4135 copyright file, so the package might still be rejected.</p>
4136
4137 <p>The devscripts tool <tt>licensecheck</tt> deserve mentioning.  It
4138 will read through the source and try to find all copyright statements.
4139 It is not comparing the result to the content of debian/copyright, but
4140 can be useful when verifying the content of the copyright file.</p>
4141
4142 <p>Are you aware of better tools in Debian to create and update
4143 debian/copyright file.  Please let me know, or blog about it on
4144 planet.debian.org.</p>
4145
4146 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
4147 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
4148 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
4149
4150 <p><strong>Update 2016-02-20</strong>: I got a tip from Mike Gabriel
4151 on how to use licensecheck and cdbs to create a draft copyright file
4152
4153 <p><pre>
4154 licensecheck --copyright -r `find * -type f` | \
4155   /usr/lib/cdbs/licensecheck2dep5 > debian/copyright.auto
4156 </pre></p>
4157
4158 <p>He mentioned that he normally check the generated file into the
4159 version control system to make it easier to discover license and
4160 copyright changes in the upstream source.  I will try to do the same
4161 with my packages in the future.</p>
4162
4163 <p><strong>Update 2016-02-21</strong>: The cme author recommended
4164 against using -quiet for new users, so I removed it from the proposed
4165 command line.</p>
4166
4167       </div>
4168       <div class="tags">
4169
4170
4171         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>.
4172
4173
4174       </div>
4175     </div>
4176     <div class="padding"></div>
4177
4178     <div class="entry">
4179       <div class="title">
4180         <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>
4181       </div>
4182       <div class="date">
4183          4th February 2016
4184       </div>
4185       <div class="body">
4186         <p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-11">appstream system</a>
4187 is taking shape in Debian, and one provided feature is a very
4188 convenient way to tell you which package to install to make a given
4189 firmware file available when the kernel is looking for it.  This can
4190 be done using apt-file too, but that is for someone else to blog
4191 about. :)</p>
4192
4193 <p>Here is a small recipe to find the package with a given firmware
4194 file, in this example I am looking for ctfw-3.2.3.0.bin, randomly
4195 picked from the set of firmware announced using appstream in Debian
4196 unstable.  In general you would be looking for the firmware requested
4197 by the kernel during kernel module loading.  To find the package
4198 providing the example file, do like this:</p>
4199
4200 <blockquote><pre>
4201 % apt install appstream
4202 [...]
4203 % apt update
4204 [...]
4205 % appstreamcli what-provides firmware:runtime ctfw-3.2.3.0.bin | \
4206   awk '/Package:/ {print $2}'
4207 firmware-qlogic
4208 %
4209 </pre></blockquote>
4210
4211 <p>See <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/AppStream/Guidelines">the
4212 appstream wiki</a> page to learn how to embed the package metadata in
4213 a way appstream can use.</p>
4214
4215 <p>This same approach can be used to find any package supporting a
4216 given MIME type.  This is very useful when you get a file you do not
4217 know how to handle.  First find the mime type using <tt>file
4218 --mime-type</tt>, and next look up the package providing support for
4219 it.  Lets say you got an SVG file.  Its MIME type is image/svg+xml,
4220 and you can find all packages handling this type like this:</p>
4221
4222 <blockquote><pre>
4223 % apt install appstream
4224 [...]
4225 % apt update
4226 [...]
4227 % appstreamcli what-provides mimetype image/svg+xml | \
4228   awk '/Package:/ {print $2}'
4229 bkchem
4230 phototonic
4231 inkscape
4232 shutter
4233 tetzle
4234 geeqie
4235 xia
4236 pinta
4237 gthumb
4238 karbon
4239 comix
4240 mirage
4241 viewnior
4242 postr
4243 ristretto
4244 kolourpaint4
4245 eog
4246 eom
4247 gimagereader
4248 midori
4249 %
4250 </pre></blockquote>
4251
4252 <p>I believe the MIME types are fetched from the desktop file for
4253 packages providing appstream metadata.</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>.
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/Creepy__visualise_geotagged_social_media_information___nice_free_software.html">Creepy, visualise geotagged social media information - nice free software</a>
4269       </div>
4270       <div class="date">
4271         24th January 2016
4272       </div>
4273       <div class="body">
4274         <p>Most people seem not to realise that every time they walk around
4275 with the computerised radio beacon known as a mobile phone their
4276 position is tracked by the phone company and often stored for a long
4277 time (like every time a SMS is received or sent).  And if their
4278 computerised radio beacon is capable of running programs (often called
4279 mobile apps) downloaded from the Internet, these programs are often
4280 also capable of tracking their location (if the app requested access
4281 during installation).  And when these programs send out information to
4282 central collection points, the location is often included, unless
4283 extra care is taken to not send the location.  The provided
4284 information is used by several entities, for good and bad (what is
4285 good and bad, depend on your point of view).  What is certain, is that
4286 the private sphere and the right to free movement is challenged and
4287 perhaps even eradicated for those announcing their location this way,
4288 when they share their whereabouts with private and public
4289 entities.</p>
4290
4291 <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-01-24-nice-creepy-desktop-window.png"></p>
4292
4293 <p>The phone company logs provide a register of locations to check out
4294 when one want to figure out what the tracked person was doing.  It is
4295 unavailable for most of us, but provided to selected government
4296 officials, company staff, those illegally buying information from
4297 unfaithful servants and crackers stealing the information.  But the
4298 public information can be collected and analysed, and a free software
4299 tool to do so is called
4300 <a href="http://www.geocreepy.com/">Creepy or Cree.py</a>.  I
4301 discovered it when I read
4302 <a href="http://www.aftenposten.no/kultur/Slik-kan-du-bli-overvaket-pa-Twitter-og-Instagram-uten-a-ane-det-7787884.html">an
4303 article about Creepy</a> in the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten i
4304 November 2014, and decided to check if it was available in Debian.
4305 The python program was in Debian, but
4306 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/creepy">the version in
4307 Debian</a> was completely broken and practically unmaintained.  I
4308 uploaded a new version which did not work quite right, but did not
4309 have time to fix it then.  This Christmas I decided to finally try to
4310 get Creepy operational in Debian.  Now a fixed version is available in
4311 Debian unstable and testing, and almost all Debian specific patches
4312 are now included
4313 <a href="https://github.com/jkakavas/creepy">upstream</a>.</p>
4314
4315 <p>The Creepy program visualises geolocation information fetched from
4316 Twitter, Instagram, Flickr and Google+, and allow one to get a
4317 complete picture of every social media message posted recently in a
4318 given area, or track the movement of a given individual across all
4319 these services.  Earlier it was possible to use the search API of at
4320 least some of these services without identifying oneself, but these
4321 days it is impossible.  This mean that to use Creepy, you need to
4322 configure it to log in as yourself on these services, and provide
4323 information to them about your search interests.  This should be taken
4324 into account when using Creepy, as it will also share information
4325 about yourself with the services.</p>
4326
4327 <p>The picture above show the twitter messages sent from (or at least
4328 geotagged with a position from) the city centre of Oslo, the capital
4329 of Norway.  One useful way to use Creepy is to first look at
4330 information tagged with an area of interest, and next look at all the
4331 information provided by one or more individuals who was in the area.
4332 I tested it by checking out which celebrity provide their location in
4333 twitter messages by checkout out who sent twitter messages near a
4334 Norwegian TV station, and next could track their position over time,
4335 making it possible to locate their home and work place, among other
4336 things.  A similar technique have been
4337 <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/maxseddon/does-this-soldiers-instagram-account-prove-russia-is-covertl">used
4338 to locate Russian soldiers in Ukraine</a>, and it is both a powerful
4339 tool to discover lying governments, and a useful tool to help people
4340 understand the value of the private information they provide to the
4341 public.</p>
4342
4343 <p>The package is not trivial to backport to Debian Stable/Jessie, as
4344 it depend on several python modules currently missing in Jessie (at
4345 least python-instagram, python-flickrapi and
4346 python-requests-toolbelt).</p>
4347
4348 <p>(I have uploaded
4349 <a href="https://screenshots.debian.net/package/creepy">the image to
4350 screenshots.debian.net</a> and licensed it under the same terms as the
4351 Creepy program in Debian.)</p>
4352
4353       </div>
4354       <div class="tags">
4355
4356
4357         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>.
4358
4359
4360       </div>
4361     </div>
4362     <div class="padding"></div>
4363
4364     <div class="entry">
4365       <div class="title">
4366         <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>
4367       </div>
4368       <div class="date">
4369         15th January 2016
4370       </div>
4371       <div class="body">
4372         <p>During his DebConf15 keynote, Jacob Appelbaum
4373 <a href="https://summit.debconf.org/debconf15/meeting/331/what-is-to-be-done/">observed
4374 that those listening on the Internet lines would have good reason to
4375 believe a computer have a given security hole</a> if it download a
4376 security fix from a Debian mirror.  This is a good reason to always
4377 use encrypted connections to the Debian mirror, to make sure those
4378 listening do not know which IP address to attack.  In August, Richard
4379 Hartmann observed that encryption was not enough, when it was possible
4380 to interfere download size to security patches or the fact that
4381 download took place shortly after a security fix was released, and
4382 <a href="http://richardhartmann.de/blog/posts/2015/08/24-Tor-enabled_Debian_mirror/">proposed
4383 to always use Tor to download packages from the Debian mirror</a>.  He
4384 was not the first to propose this, as the
4385 <tt><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/apt-transport-tor">apt-transport-tor</a></tt>
4386 package by Tim Retout already existed to make it easy to convince apt
4387 to use <a href="https://www.torproject.org/">Tor</a>, but I was not
4388 aware of that package when I read the blog post from Richard.</p>
4389
4390 <p>Richard discussed the idea with Peter Palfrader, one of the Debian
4391 sysadmins, and he set up a Tor hidden service on one of the central
4392 Debian mirrors using the address vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion, thus making
4393 it possible to download packages directly between two tor nodes,
4394 making sure the network traffic always were encrypted.</p>
4395
4396 <p>Here is a short recipe for enabling this on your machine, by
4397 installing <tt>apt-transport-tor</tt> and replacing http and https
4398 urls with tor+http and tor+https, and using the hidden service instead
4399 of the official Debian mirror site.  I recommend installing
4400 <tt>etckeeper</tt> before you start to have a history of the changes
4401 done in /etc/.</p>
4402
4403 <blockquote><pre>
4404 apt install apt-transport-tor
4405 sed -i 's% http://ftp.debian.org/% tor+http://vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion/%' /etc/apt/sources.list
4406 sed -i 's% http% tor+http%' /etc/apt/sources.list
4407 </pre></blockquote>
4408
4409 <p>If you have more sources listed in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/, run
4410 the sed commands for these too.  The sed command is assuming your are
4411 using the ftp.debian.org Debian mirror.  Adjust the command (or just
4412 edit the file manually) to match your mirror.</p>
4413
4414 <p>This work in Debian Jessie and later.  Note that tools like
4415 <tt>apt-file</tt> only recently started using the apt transport
4416 system, and do not work with these tor+http URLs.  For
4417 <tt>apt-file</tt> you need the version currently in experimental,
4418 which need a recent apt version currently only in unstable.  So if you
4419 need a working <tt>apt-file</tt>, this is not for you.</p>
4420
4421 <p>Another advantage from this change is that your machine will start
4422 using Tor regularly and at fairly random intervals (every time you
4423 update the package lists or upgrade or install a new package), thus
4424 masking other Tor traffic done from the same machine.  Using Tor will
4425 become normal for the machine in question.</p>
4426
4427 <p>On <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox</a>, APT
4428 is set up by default to use <tt>apt-transport-tor</tt> when Tor is
4429 enabled.  It would be great if it was the default on any Debian
4430 system.</p>
4431
4432       </div>
4433       <div class="tags">
4434
4435
4436         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>.
4437
4438
4439       </div>
4440     </div>
4441     <div class="padding"></div>
4442
4443     <div class="entry">
4444       <div class="title">
4445         <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>
4446       </div>
4447       <div class="date">
4448         23rd December 2015
4449       </div>
4450       <div class="body">
4451         <p>When I was a kid, we used to collect "car numbers", as we used to
4452 call the car license plate numbers in those days.  I would write the
4453 numbers down in my little book and compare notes with the other kids
4454 to see how many region codes we had seen and if we had seen some
4455 exotic or special region codes and numbers.  It was a fun game to pass
4456 time, as we kids have plenty of it.</p>
4457
4458 <p>A few days I came across
4459 <a href="https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr">the OpenALPR
4460 project</a>, a free software project to automatically discover and
4461 report license plates in images and video streams, and provide the
4462 "car numbers" in a machine readable format.  I've been looking for
4463 such system for a while now, because I believe it is a bad idea that the
4464 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number_plate_recognition">automatic
4465 number plate recognition</a> tool only is available in the hands of
4466 the powerful, and want it to be available also for the powerless to
4467 even the score when it comes to surveillance and sousveillance.  I
4468 discovered the developer
4469 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/747509">wanted to get the tool into
4470 Debian</a>, and as I too wanted it to be in Debian, I volunteered to
4471 help him get it into shape to get the package uploaded into the Debian
4472 archive.</p>
4473
4474 <p>Today we finally managed to get the package into shape and uploaded
4475 it into Debian, where it currently
4476 <a href="https://ftp-master.debian.org//new/openalpr_2.2.1-1.html">waits
4477 in the NEW queue</a> for review by the Debian ftpmasters.</p>
4478
4479 <p>I guess you are wondering why on earth such tool would be useful
4480 for the common folks, ie those not running a large government
4481 surveillance system?  Well, I plan to put it in a computer on my bike
4482 and in my car, tracking the cars nearby and allowing me to be notified
4483 when number plates on my watch list are discovered.  Another use case
4484 was suggested by a friend of mine, who wanted to set it up at his home
4485 to open the car port automatically when it discovered the plate on his
4486 car.  When I mentioned it perhaps was a bit foolhardy to allow anyone
4487 capable of placing his license plate number of a piece of cardboard to
4488 open his car port, men replied that it was always unlocked anyway.  I
4489 guess for such use case it make sense.  I am sure there are other use
4490 cases too, for those with imagination and a vision.</p>
4491
4492 <p>If you want to build your own version of the Debian package, check
4493 out the upstream git source and symlink ./distros/debian to ./debian/
4494 before running "debuild" to build the source.  Or wait a bit until the
4495 package show up in unstable.</p>
4496
4497       </div>
4498       <div class="tags">
4499
4500
4501         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>.
4502
4503
4504       </div>
4505     </div>
4506     <div class="padding"></div>
4507
4508     <div class="entry">
4509       <div class="title">
4510         <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>
4511       </div>
4512       <div class="date">
4513         20th December 2015
4514       </div>
4515       <div class="body">
4516         <p>Around three years ago, I created
4517 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">the isenkram
4518 system</a> to get a more practical solution in Debian for handing
4519 hardware related packages.  A GUI system in the isenkram package will
4520 present a pop-up dialog when some hardware dongle supported by
4521 relevant packages in Debian is inserted into the machine.  The same
4522 lookup mechanism to detect packages is available as command line
4523 tools in the isenkram-cli package.  In addition to mapping hardware,
4524 it will also map kernel firmware files to packages and make it easy to
4525 install needed firmware packages automatically.  The key for this
4526 system to work is a good way to map hardware to packages, in other
4527 words, allow packages to announce what hardware they will work
4528 with.</p>
4529
4530 <p>I started by providing data files in the isenkram source, and
4531 adding code to download the latest version of these data files at run
4532 time, to ensure every user had the most up to date mapping available.
4533 I also added support for storing the mapping in the Packages file in
4534 the apt repositories, but did not push this approach because while I
4535 was trying to figure out how to best store hardware/package mappings,
4536 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/">the
4537 appstream system</a> was announced.  I got in touch and suggested to
4538 add the hardware mapping into that data set to be able to use
4539 appstream as a data source, and this was accepted at least for the
4540 Debian version of appstream.</p>
4541
4542 <p>A few days ago using appstream in Debian for this became possible,
4543 and today I uploaded a new version 0.20 of isenkram adding support for
4544 appstream as a data source for mapping hardware to packages.  The only
4545 package so far using appstream to announce its hardware support is my
4546 pymissile package.  I got help from Matthias Klumpp with figuring out
4547 how do add the required
4548 <a href="https://appstream.debian.org/html/sid/main/metainfo/pymissile.html">metadata
4549 in pymissile</a>.  I added a file debian/pymissile.metainfo.xml with
4550 this content:</p>
4551
4552 <blockquote><pre>
4553 &lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?&gt;
4554 &lt;component&gt;
4555   &lt;id&gt;pymissile&lt;/id&gt;
4556   &lt;metadata_license&gt;MIT&lt;/metadata_license&gt;
4557   &lt;name&gt;pymissile&lt;/name&gt;
4558   &lt;summary&gt;Control original Striker USB Missile Launcher&lt;/summary&gt;
4559   &lt;description&gt;
4560     &lt;p&gt;
4561       Pymissile provides a curses interface to control an original
4562       Marks and Spencer / Striker USB Missile Launcher, as well as a
4563       motion control script to allow a webcamera to control the
4564       launcher.
4565     &lt;/p&gt;
4566   &lt;/description&gt;
4567   &lt;provides&gt;
4568     &lt;modalias&gt;usb:v1130p0202d*&lt;/modalias&gt;
4569   &lt;/provides&gt;
4570 &lt;/component&gt;
4571 </pre></blockquote>
4572
4573 <p>The key for isenkram is the component/provides/modalias value,
4574 which is a glob style match rule for hardware specific strings
4575 (modalias strings) provided by the Linux kernel.  In this case, it
4576 will map to all USB devices with vendor code 1130 and product code
4577 0202.</p>
4578
4579 <p>Note, it is important that the license of all the metadata files
4580 are compatible to have permissions to aggregate them into archive wide
4581 appstream files.  Matthias suggested to use MIT or BSD licenses for
4582 these files.  A challenge is figuring out a good id for the data, as
4583 it is supposed to be globally unique and shared across distributions
4584 (in other words, best to coordinate with upstream what to use).  But
4585 it can be changed later or, so we went with the package name as
4586 upstream for this project is dormant.</p>
4587
4588 <p>To get the metadata file installed in the correct location for the
4589 mirror update scripts to pick it up and include its content the
4590 appstream data source, the file must be installed in the binary
4591 package under /usr/share/appdata/.  I did this by adding the following
4592 line to debian/pymissile.install:</p>
4593
4594 <blockquote><pre>
4595 debian/pymissile.metainfo.xml usr/share/appdata
4596 </pre></blockquote>
4597
4598 <p>With that in place, the command line tool isenkram-lookup will list
4599 all packages useful on the current computer automatically, and the GUI
4600 pop-up handler will propose to install the package not already
4601 installed if a hardware dongle is inserted into the machine in
4602 question.</p>
4603
4604 <p>Details of the modalias field in appstream is available from the
4605 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-11">DEP-11</a> proposal.</p>
4606
4607 <p>To locate the modalias values of all hardware present in a machine,
4608 try running this command on the command line:</p>
4609
4610 <blockquote><pre>
4611 cat $(find /sys/devices/|grep modalias)
4612 </pre></blockquote>
4613
4614 <p>To learn more about the isenkram system, please check out
4615 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">my
4616 blog posts tagged isenkram</a>.</p>
4617
4618       </div>
4619       <div class="tags">
4620
4621
4622         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>.
4623
4624
4625       </div>
4626     </div>
4627     <div class="padding"></div>
4628
4629     <div class="entry">
4630       <div class="title">
4631         <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>
4632       </div>
4633       <div class="date">
4634         30th November 2015
4635       </div>
4636       <div class="body">
4637         <p>A blog post from my fellow Debian developer Paul Wise titled
4638 "<a href="http://bonedaddy.net/pabs3/log/2015/11/27/sfc-supporter/">The
4639 GPL is not magic pixie dust</a>" explain the importance of making sure
4640 the <a href="http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html">GPL</a> is enforced.
4641 I quote the blog post from Paul in full here with his permission:<p>
4642
4643 <blockquote>
4644
4645 <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>
4646
4647 <blockquote>
4648 The GPL is not magic pixie dust. It does not work by itself.<br/>
4649
4650 The first step is to choose a
4651 <a href="https://copyleft.org/">copyleft</a> license for your
4652 code.<br/>
4653
4654 The next step is, when someone fails to follow that copyleft license,
4655 <b>it must be enforced</b><br/>
4656
4657 and its a simple fact of our modern society that such type of
4658 work<br/>
4659
4660 is incredibly expensive to do and incredibly difficult to do.
4661 </blockquote>
4662
4663 <p><small>-- <a href="http://ebb.org/bkuhn/">Bradley Kuhn</a>, in
4664 <a href="http://faif.us/" title="Free as in Freedom">FaiF</a>
4665 <a href="http://faif.us/cast/2015/nov/24/0x57/">episode
4666 0x57</a></small></p>
4667
4668 <p>As the Debian Website
4669 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/794116">used</a>
4670 <a href="https://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/webwml/webwml/english/intro/free.wml?r1=1.24&amp;r2=1.25">to</a>
4671 imply, public domain and permissively licensed software can lead to
4672 the production of more proprietary software as people discover useful
4673 software, extend it and or incorporate it into their hardware or
4674 software products.  Copyleft licenses such as the GNU GPL were created
4675 to close off this avenue to the production of proprietary software but
4676 such licenses are not enough.  With the ongoing adoption of Free
4677 Software by individuals and groups, inevitably the community's
4678 expectations of license compliance are violated, usually out of
4679 ignorance of the way Free Software works, but not always.  As Karen
4680 and Bradley explained in <a href="http://faif.us/" title="Free as in
4681 Freedom">FaiF</a>
4682 <a href="http://faif.us/cast/2015/nov/24/0x57/">episode 0x57</a>,
4683 copyleft is nothing if no-one is willing and able to stand up in court
4684 to protect it.  The reality of today's world is that legal
4685 representation is expensive, difficult and time consuming.  With
4686 <a href="http://gpl-violations.org/">gpl-violations.org</a> in hiatus
4687 <a href="http://gpl-violations.org/news/20151027-homepage-recovers/">until</a>
4688 some time in 2016, the <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/">Software
4689 Freedom Conservancy</a> (a tax-exempt charity) is the major defender
4690 of the Linux project, Debian and other groups against GPL violations.
4691 In March the SFC supported a
4692 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/mar/05/vmware-lawsuit/">lawsuit
4693 by Christoph Hellwig</a> against VMware for refusing to
4694 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/linux-compliance/vmware-lawsuit-faq.html">comply
4695 with the GPL</a> in relation to their use of parts of the Linux
4696 kernel.  Since then two of their sponsors pulled corporate funding and
4697 conferences
4698 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/nov/24/faif-carols-fundraiser/">blocked
4699 or cancelled their talks</a>.  As a result they have decided to rely
4700 less on corporate funding and more on the broad community of
4701 individuals who support Free Software and copyleft.  So the SFC has
4702 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/nov/23/2015fundraiser/">launched</a>
4703 a <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/">campaign</a> to create
4704 a community of folks who stand up for copyleft and the GPL by
4705 supporting their work on promoting and supporting copyleft and Free
4706 Software.</p>
4707
4708 <p>If you support Free Software,
4709 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/nov/26/like-what-I-do/">like</a>
4710 what the SFC do, agree with their
4711 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/linux-compliance/principles.html">compliance
4712 principles</a>, are happy about their
4713 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/">successes</a> in 2015,
4714 work on a project that is an SFC
4715 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/members/current/">member</a> and or
4716 just want to stand up for copyleft, please join
4717 <a href="https://identi.ca/cwebber/image/JQGPA4qbTyyp3-MY8QpvuA">Christopher
4718 Allan Webber</a>,
4719 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/nov/24/faif-carols-fundraiser/">Carol
4720 Smith</a>,
4721 <a href="http://www.jonobacon.org/2015/11/25/supporting-software-freedom-conservancy/">Jono
4722 Bacon</a>, myself and
4723 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/sponsors/#supporters">others</a> in
4724 becoming a
4725 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/">supporter</a>.  For the
4726 next week your donation will be
4727 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/nov/27/black-friday/">matched</a>
4728 by an anonymous donor.  Please also consider asking your employer to
4729 match your donation or become a sponsor of SFC.  Don't forget to
4730 spread the word about your support for SFC via email, your blog and or
4731 social media accounts.</p>
4732
4733 </blockquote>
4734
4735 <p>I agree with Paul on this topic and just signed up as a Supporter
4736 of Software Freedom Conservancy myself.  Perhaps you should be a
4737 supporter too?</p>
4738
4739       </div>
4740       <div class="tags">
4741
4742
4743         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>.
4744
4745
4746       </div>
4747     </div>
4748     <div class="padding"></div>
4749
4750     <div class="entry">
4751       <div class="title">
4752         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/PGP_key_transition_statement_for_key_EE4E02F9.html">PGP key transition statement for key EE4E02F9</a>
4753       </div>
4754       <div class="date">
4755         17th November 2015
4756       </div>
4757       <div class="body">
4758         <p>I've needed a new OpenPGP key for a while, but have not had time to
4759 set it up properly.  I wanted to generate it offline and have it
4760 available on <a href="http://shop.kernelconcepts.de/#openpgp">a OpenPGP
4761 smart card</a> for daily use, and learning how to do it and finding
4762 time to sit down with an offline machine almost took forever.  But
4763 finally I've been able to complete the process, and have now moved
4764 from my old GPG key to a new GPG key.  See
4765 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-11-17-new-gpg-key-transition.txt">the
4766 full transition statement, signed with both my old and new key</a> for
4767 the details.  This is my new key:</p>
4768
4769 <pre>
4770 pub   3936R/<a href="http://pgp.cs.uu.nl/stats/111D6B29EE4E02F9.html">111D6B29EE4E02F9</a> 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-14]
4771       Key fingerprint = 3AC7 B2E3 ACA5 DF87 78F1  D827 111D 6B29 EE4E 02F9
4772 uid                  Petter Reinholdtsen &lt;pere@hungry.com&gt;
4773 uid                  Petter Reinholdtsen &lt;pere@debian.org&gt;
4774 sub   4096R/87BAFB0E 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-02]
4775 sub   4096R/F91E6DE9 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-02]
4776 sub   4096R/A0439BAB 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-02]
4777 </pre>
4778
4779 <p>The key can be downloaded from the OpenPGP key servers, signed by
4780 my old key.</p>
4781
4782 <p>If you signed my old key
4783 (<a href="http://pgp.cs.uu.nl/stats/DB4CCC4B2A30D729.html">DB4CCC4B2A30D729</a>),
4784 I'd very much appreciate a signature on my new key, details and
4785 instructions in the transition statement. I m happy to reciprocate if
4786 you have a similarly signed transition statement to present.</p>
4787
4788       </div>
4789       <div class="tags">
4790
4791
4792         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>.
4793
4794
4795       </div>
4796     </div>
4797     <div class="padding"></div>
4798
4799     <div class="entry">
4800       <div class="title">
4801         <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>
4802       </div>
4803       <div class="date">
4804          3rd November 2015
4805       </div>
4806       <div class="body">
4807         <p>In Norway, all government offices are required by law to keep a
4808 list of every document or letter arriving and leaving their offices.
4809 Internal notes should also be documented.  The document list (called a mail
4810 journal - "postjournal" in Norwegian) is public information and thanks
4811 to the Norwegian Freedom of Information Act (Offentleglova) the mail
4812 journal is available for everyone.  Most offices even publish the mail
4813 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
4814 <a href="https://www.oep.no/">Offentlig Elektronisk Postjournal -
4815 OEP</a>) to make it possible to search the entries in the list.  Not
4816 all journal entries show up on OEP, and the search service is hard to
4817 use, but OEP does make it easier to find at least some interesting
4818 journal entries .</p>
4819
4820 <p>In 2012 I came across a document in the mail journal for the
4821 Norwegian Ministry of Transport and Communications on OEP that
4822 piqued my interest.  The title of the document was
4823 "<a href="https://www.oep.no/search/resultSingle.html?journalPostId=4192362">Internet
4824 Governance and how it affects national security</a>" (Norwegian:
4825 "Internet Governance og påvirkning på nasjonal sikkerhet").  The
4826 document date was 2012-05-22, and it was said to be sent from the
4827 "Permanent Mission of Norway to the United Nations".  I asked for a
4828 copy, but my request was rejected with a reference to a legal clause said to authorize them to reject it
4829 (<a href="http://lovdata.no/lov/2006-05-19-16/§20">offentleglova § 20,
4830 letter c</a>) and an explanation that the document was exempt because
4831 of foreign policy interests as it contained information related to the
4832 Norwegian negotiating position, negotiating strategies or similar.  I
4833 was told the information in the document related to the ongoing
4834 negotiation in the International Telecommunications Union (ITU).  The
4835 explanation made sense to me in early January 2013, as a ITU
4836 conference in Dubay discussing Internet Governance
4837 (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Telecommunication_Union#World_Conference_on_International_Telecommunications_2012_.28WCIT-12.29">World
4838 Conference on International Telecommunications - WCIT-12</a>) had just
4839 ended,
4840 <a href="http://www.digi.no/kommentarer/2012/12/18/tvil-om-usas-rolle-pa-teletoppmote">reportedly
4841 in chaos</a> when USA walked out of the negotiations and 25 countries
4842 including Norway refused to sign the new treaty.  It seemed
4843 reasonable to believe talks were still going on a few weeks later.
4844 Norway was represented at the ITU meeting by two authorities, the
4845 <a href="http://www.nkom.no/">Norwegian Communications Authority</a>
4846 and the <a href="https://www.regjeringen.no/no/dep/sd/">Ministry of
4847 Transport and Communications</a>.  This might be the reason the letter
4848 was sent to the ministry.  As I was unable to find the document in the
4849 mail journal of any Norwegian UN mission, I asked the ministry who had
4850 sent the document to the ministry, and was told that it was the Deputy
4851 Permanent Representative with the Permanent Mission of Norway in
4852 Geneva.</p>
4853
4854 <p>Three years later, I was still curious about the content of that
4855 document, and again asked for a copy, believing the negotiation was
4856 over now.  This time
4857 <a href="https://mimesbronn.no/request/kopi_av_dokumenter_i_sak_2012914">I
4858 asked both the Ministry of Transport and Communications as the
4859 receiver</a> and
4860 <a href="https://mimesbronn.no/request/brev_om_internet_governance_og_p">asked
4861 the Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva as the sender</a> for a
4862 copy, to see if they both agreed that it should be withheld from the
4863 public.  The ministry upheld its rejection quoting the same law
4864 reference as before, while the permanent mission rejected it quoting a
4865 different clause
4866 (<a href="http://lovdata.no/lov/2006-05-19-16/§20">offentleglova § 20
4867 letter b</a>), claiming that they were required to keep the
4868 content of the document from the public because it contained
4869 information given to Norway with the expressed or implied expectation
4870 that the information should not be made public.  I asked the permanent
4871 mission for an explanation, and was told that the document contained
4872 an account from a meeting held in the Pentagon for a limited group of NATO
4873 nations where the organiser of the meeting did not intend the content
4874 of the meeting to be publicly known.  They explained that giving me a
4875 copy might cause Norway to not get access to similar information in
4876 the future and thus hurt the future foreign interests of Norway.  They
4877 also explained that the Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva was not
4878 the author of the document, they only got a copy of it, and because of
4879 this had not listed it in their mail journal.</p>
4880
4881 <p>Armed with this
4882 knowledge I asked the Ministry to reconsider and asked who was the
4883 author of the document, now realising that it was not same as the
4884 "sender" according to Ministry of Transport and Communications.  The
4885 ministry upheld its rejection but told me the name of the author of
4886 the document.  According to
4887 <a href="https://www.regjeringen.no/no/aktuelt/unga69_rapport1/id2001204/">a
4888 government report</a> the author was with the Permanent Mission of
4889 Norway in New York a bit more than a year later (2014-09-22), so I
4890 guessed that might be the office responsible for writing and sending
4891 the report initially and
4892 <a href="https://www.mimesbronn.no/request/mote_2012_i_pentagon_om_itu">asked
4893 them for a copy</a> but I was obviously wrong as I was told that the
4894 document was unknown to them and that the author did not work there
4895 when the document was written.  Next, I asked the Permanent Mission of
4896 Norway in Geneva and the Foreign Ministry to reconsider and at least
4897 tell me who sent the document to Deputy Permanent Representative with
4898 the Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva.  The Foreign Ministry also
4899 upheld its rejection, but told me that the person sending the document
4900 to Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva was the defence attaché with
4901 the Norwegian Embassy in Washington.  I do not know if this is the
4902 same person as the author of the document.</p>
4903
4904 <p>If I understand the situation correctly, someone capable of
4905 inviting selected NATO nations to a meeting in Pentagon organised a
4906 meeting where someone representing the Norwegian defence attaché in
4907 Washington attended, and the account from this meeting is interpreted
4908 by the Ministry of Transport and Communications to expose Norways
4909 negotiating position, negotiating strategies and similar regarding the
4910 ITU negotiations on Internet Governance.  It is truly amazing what can
4911 be derived from mere meta-data.</p>
4912
4913 <p>I wonder which NATO countries besides Norway attended this meeting?
4914 And what exactly was said and done at the meeting?  Anyone know?</p>
4915
4916       </div>
4917       <div class="tags">
4918
4919
4920         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>.
4921
4922
4923       </div>
4924     </div>
4925     <div class="padding"></div>
4926
4927     <div class="entry">
4928       <div class="title">
4929         <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>
4930       </div>
4931       <div class="date">
4932         31st October 2015
4933       </div>
4934       <div class="body">
4935         <p>People keep asking me where to get the various forms of the book I
4936 published last week, the Norwegian Bokmål edition of Lawrence Lessigs
4937 book <a href="http://www.free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a>.  It was
4938 published on paper via lulu.com, and is also available in PDF, ePub
4939 and MOBI format.  I currently sell the paper edition for self cost
4940 from lulu.com, but might extend the distribution to book stores like
4941 Amazon and Barnes & Noble later.  This will double the price and force
4942 me to make a profit from selling the book.  Anyway, here are links to
4943 get the book in different formats:</p>
4944
4945 <ul>
4946
4947   <li><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/fri-kultur/paperback/product-22406445.html">Buy
4948     paper edition from lulu.com</a></li>
4949
4950   <li><a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf">Download
4951     PDF, size 7.9 MiB</a> (gratis/free)</li>
4952
4953   <li><a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub">Download
4954     ePub, size 11 MiB</a> (gratis/free)</li>
4955
4956   <li><a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/archive/freeculture.nb.mobi">Download
4957     MOBI, size 3.8 MiB</a> (gratis/free)</li>
4958
4959 </ul>
4960
4961 <p>Note that the MOBI version have problems with the table of content,
4962 at least with the viewers I have been able to test.  And the ePub file
4963 have several problems according to
4964 <a href="https://github.com/IDPF/epubcheck">epubcheck</a>, but seem
4965 to display fine in the viewers I have tested.  All the files needed to
4966 create the book in various forms are available from
4967 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">the
4968 github project page</a>.</p>
4969
4970 <p>The project got press coverage from the Norwegian IT news site
4971 digi.no.  Check out the article
4972 "<a href="http://www.digi.no/juss_og_samfunn/2015/10/29/vil-apne-politikernes-oyne-for-creative-commons">Vil
4973 åpne politikernes øyne for Creative Commons</a>".</li>
4974
4975 <p>I've <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">blogged
4976 about the project</a> as it moved along.  The blogs document the translation
4977 progress and insights I had along the way.</p>
4978
4979       </div>
4980       <div class="tags">
4981
4982
4983         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>.
4984
4985
4986       </div>
4987     </div>
4988     <div class="padding"></div>
4989
4990     <div class="entry">
4991       <div class="title">
4992         <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>
4993       </div>
4994       <div class="date">
4995         23rd October 2015
4996       </div>
4997       <div class="body">
4998         <p><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22402863.html">Click
4999 here to buy the book</a>.</p>
5000
5001 <p>In 2004, as the <a href="https://creativecommons.org/">Creative Commons
5002 movement</a> gained momentum, its creator Lawrence Lessig wrote the
5003 book <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Culture_(book)">Free
5004 Culture</a> to explain the problems with increasing copyright
5005 regulation and suggest some solutions.  I read the book back then and
5006 was very moved by it.  Reading the book inspired me and changed the
5007 way I looked on copyright law, and I would love it if more people
5008 would read it too.</p>
5009
5010 <p>Because of this, I decided in the summer of 2012 to translate it to
5011 Norwegian Bokmål and publish it for those of my friends and family
5012 that prefer to read books in Norwegian.  I translated the book using
5013 docbook and a gettext PO file, and a byproduct of this process is a
5014 new edition of the English original.  I've been in touch with the
5015 author during by work, and he said it was fine with him if I also
5016 published an English version.  So I decided to do so.  Today, I made
5017 this edition
5018 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22402863.html">available
5019 for sale on Lulu.com</a>, for those interested in a paper book.  This
5020 is the cover:
5021
5022 <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>
5023
5024 <p>The Norwegian Bokmål version will be available for purchase in a
5025 few days.  I also plan to publish a French version in a few weeks or
5026 months, depending on the amount of people with knowledge of French to
5027 join the translation project.  So far there is only one active
5028 person, but the French book is almost completely translated but
5029 need some proof reading.</p>
5030
5031 <p>The book is also available in PDF, ePub and MOBI formats from
5032 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">my
5033 github project page</a>.  Note the ePub and MOBI versions have some
5034 formatting problems I believe is due to bugs in the docbook tool
5035 dbtoepub (Debian BTS issues
5036 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=795842">#795842</a>
5037 and
5038 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=796871">#796871</a>),
5039 but I have not taken the time to investigate.  I recommend the PDF and
5040 ePub version for now, as they seem to show up fine in the viewers I
5041 have available.</p>
5042
5043 <p>After the translation to Norwegian Bokmål was complete, I was able
5044 to secure some sponsoring from
5045 <a href="http://www.nuugfoundation.no/">the NUUG Foundation</a> to
5046 print the book.  This is the reason their logo is located on the back
5047 cover. I am very grateful for their contribution, and will use it to
5048 give a copy of the Norwegian edition to members of the Norwegian
5049 Parliament and other decision makers here in Norway.</p>
5050
5051       </div>
5052       <div class="tags">
5053
5054
5055         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>.
5056
5057
5058       </div>
5059     </div>
5060     <div class="padding"></div>
5061
5062     <div class="entry">
5063       <div class="title">
5064         <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>
5065       </div>
5066       <div class="date">
5067         19th October 2015
5068       </div>
5069       <div class="body">
5070         <p>Last year, <a href="https://lessig2016.us/">US president candidate
5071 in the Democratic Party</a> Lawrence interviewed Edward Snowden.  The
5072 one hour interview was
5073 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_Sr96TFQQE">published by
5074 Harvard Law School 2014-10-23 on Youtube</a>, and the meeting took
5075 place 2014-10-20.</p>
5076
5077 <p>The questions are very good, and there is lots of useful
5078 information to be learned and very interesting issues to think about
5079 being raised.  Please check it out.</p>
5080
5081 <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/o_Sr96TFQQE" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
5082
5083 <p>I find it especially interesting to hear again that Snowden did try
5084 to bring up his reservations through the official channels without any
5085 luck.  It is in sharp contrast to the answers made 2013-11-06 by the
5086 Norwegian prime minister Erna Solberg to the Norwegian Parliament,
5087 <a href="https://tale.holderdeord.no/speeches/s131106/68">claiming
5088 Snowden is no Whistle-Blower</a> because he should have taken up his
5089 concerns internally and using official channels.  It make me sad
5090 that this is the political leadership we have here in Norway.</p>
5091
5092       </div>
5093       <div class="tags">
5094
5095
5096         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>.
5097
5098
5099       </div>
5100     </div>
5101     <div class="padding"></div>
5102
5103     <div class="entry">
5104       <div class="title">
5105         <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>
5106       </div>
5107       <div class="date">
5108          8th October 2015
5109       </div>
5110       <div class="body">
5111         <p>The movie "<a href="http://www.takepart.com/internets-own-boy">The
5112 Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz</a>" is both inspiring
5113 and depressing at the same time.  The work of Aaron Swartz has
5114 inspired me in my work, and I am grateful of all the improvements he
5115 was able to initiate or complete.  I wish I am able to do as much good
5116 in my life as he did in his.  Every minute of this 1:45 long movie is
5117 inspiring in documenting how much impact a single person can have on
5118 improving the society and this world.  And it is depressing in
5119 documenting how the law enforcement of USA (and other countries) is
5120 corrupted to a point where they can push a bright kid to his death for
5121 downloading too many scientific articles.  Aaron is dead.  Let us all
5122 weep.</p>
5123
5124 <p>The movie is also available on
5125 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXr-2hwTk58">Youtube</a>.  I
5126 wish there were Norwegian subtitles available, so I could show it to
5127 my parents.</p>
5128
5129       </div>
5130       <div class="tags">
5131
5132
5133         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>.
5134
5135
5136       </div>
5137     </div>
5138     <div class="padding"></div>
5139
5140     <div class="entry">
5141       <div class="title">
5142         <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>
5143       </div>
5144       <div class="date">
5145          1st October 2015
5146       </div>
5147       <div class="body">
5148         <p>As I wrap up the Norwegian version of
5149 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">Free
5150 Culture</a> book by Lawrence Lessig (still waiting for my final proof
5151 reading copy to arrive in the mail), my great
5152 <a href="http://dblatex.sourceforge.net/">dblatex</a> helper and
5153 developer of the dblatex docbook processor, Benoît Guillon, decided a
5154 to try to create a French version of the book.  He started with the
5155 French translation available from the
5156 <a href="http://www.wikilivres.ca/wiki/Culture_libre">Wikilivres wiki
5157 pages</a>, and wrote a program to convert it into a PO file, allowing
5158 the translation to be integrated into the po4a based framework I use
5159 to create the Norwegian translation from the English edition.  We meet
5160 on the <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23dblatex">#dblatex IRC
5161 channel</a> to discuss the work.  If you want to help create a French
5162 edition, check out
5163 <a href="https://github.com/marsgui/free-culture-lessig">his git
5164 repository</a> and join us on IRC.  If the French edition look good,
5165 we might publish it as a paper book on lulu.com.  A French version of
5166 the drawings and the cover need to be provided for this to happen.</p>
5167
5168       </div>
5169       <div class="tags">
5170
5171
5172         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>.
5173
5174
5175       </div>
5176     </div>
5177     <div class="padding"></div>
5178
5179     <div class="entry">
5180       <div class="title">
5181         <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>
5182       </div>
5183       <div class="date">
5184         24th September 2015
5185       </div>
5186       <div class="body">
5187         <p>When I get a new laptop, the battery life time at the start is OK.
5188 But this do not last.  The last few laptops gave me a feeling that
5189 within a year, the life time is just a fraction of what it used to be,
5190 and it slowly become painful to use the laptop without power connected
5191 all the time.  Because of this, when I got a new Thinkpad X230 laptop
5192 about two years ago, I decided to monitor its battery state to have
5193 more hard facts when the battery started to fail.</p>
5194
5195 <img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-09-24-laptop-battery-graph.png"/>
5196
5197 <p>First I tried to find a sensible Debian package to record the
5198 battery status, assuming that this must be a problem already handled
5199 by someone else.  I found
5200 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats</a>,
5201 which collects statistics from the battery, but it was completely
5202 broken.  I sent a few suggestions to the maintainer, but decided to
5203 write my own collector as a shell script while I waited for feedback
5204 from him.  Via
5205 <a href="http://www.ifweassume.com/2013/08/the-de-evolution-of-my-laptop-battery.html">a
5206 blog post about the battery development on a MacBook Air</a> I also
5207 discovered
5208 <a href="https://github.com/jradavenport/batlog.git">batlog</a>, not
5209 available in Debian.</p>
5210
5211 <p>I started my collector 2013-07-15, and it has been collecting
5212 battery stats ever since. Now my
5213 /var/log/hjemmenett-battery-status.log file contain around 115,000
5214 measurements, from the time the battery was working great until now,
5215 when it is unable to charge above 7% of original capacity.  My
5216 collector shell script is quite simple and look like this:</p>
5217
5218 <pre>
5219 #!/bin/sh
5220 # Inspired by
5221 # http://www.ifweassume.com/2013/08/the-de-evolution-of-my-laptop-battery.html
5222 # See also
5223 # http://blog.sleeplessbeastie.eu/2013/01/02/debian-how-to-monitor-battery-capacity/
5224 logfile=/var/log/hjemmenett-battery-status.log
5225
5226 files="manufacturer model_name technology serial_number \
5227     energy_full energy_full_design energy_now cycle_count status"
5228
5229 if [ ! -e "$logfile" ] ; then
5230     (
5231         printf "timestamp,"
5232         for f in $files; do
5233             printf "%s," $f
5234         done
5235         echo
5236     ) > "$logfile"
5237 fi
5238
5239 log_battery() {
5240     # Print complete message in one echo call, to avoid race condition
5241     # when several log processes run in parallel.
5242     msg=$(printf "%s," $(date +%s); \
5243         for f in $files; do \
5244             printf "%s," $(cat $f); \
5245         done)
5246     echo "$msg"
5247 }
5248
5249 cd /sys/class/power_supply
5250
5251 for bat in BAT*; do
5252     (cd $bat && log_battery >> "$logfile")
5253 done
5254 </pre>
5255
5256 <p>The script is called when the power management system detect a
5257 change in the power status (power plug in or out), and when going into
5258 and out of hibernation and suspend.  In addition, it collect a value
5259 every 10 minutes.  This make it possible for me know when the battery
5260 is discharging, charging and how the maximum charge change over time.
5261 The code for the Debian package
5262 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-status">is now
5263 available on github</a>.</p>
5264
5265 <p>The collected log file look like this:</p>
5266
5267 <pre>
5268 timestamp,manufacturer,model_name,technology,serial_number,energy_full,energy_full_design,energy_now,cycle_count,status,
5269 1376591133,LGC,45N1025,Li-ion,974,62800000,62160000,39050000,0,Discharging,
5270 [...]
5271 1443090528,LGC,45N1025,Li-ion,974,4900000,62160000,4900000,0,Full,
5272 1443090601,LGC,45N1025,Li-ion,974,4900000,62160000,4900000,0,Full,
5273 </pre>
5274
5275 <p>I wrote a small script to create a graph of the charge development
5276 over time.  This graph depicted above show the slow death of my laptop
5277 battery.</p>
5278
5279 <p>But why is this happening?  Why are my laptop batteries always
5280 dying in a year or two, while the batteries of space probes and
5281 satellites keep working year after year.  If we are to believe
5282 <a href="http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_prolong_lithium_based_batteries">Battery
5283 University</a>, the cause is me charging the battery whenever I have a
5284 chance, and the fix is to not charge the Lithium-ion batteries to 100%
5285 all the time, but to stay below 90% of full charge most of the time.
5286 I've been told that the Tesla electric cars
5287 <a href="http://my.teslamotors.com/de_CH/forum/forums/battery-charge-limit">limit
5288 the charge of their batteries to 80%</a>, with the option to charge to
5289 100% when preparing for a longer trip (not that I would want a car
5290 like Tesla where rights to privacy is abandoned, but that is another
5291 story), which I guess is the option we should have for laptops on
5292 Linux too.</p>
5293
5294 <p>Is there a good and generic way with Linux to tell the battery to
5295 stop charging at 80%, unless requested to charge to 100% once in
5296 preparation for a longer trip?  I found
5297 <a href="http://askubuntu.com/questions/34452/how-can-i-limit-battery-charging-to-80-capacity">one
5298 recipe on askubuntu for Ubuntu to limit charging on Thinkpad to
5299 80%</a>, but could not get it to work (kernel module refused to
5300 load).</p>
5301
5302 <p>I wonder why the battery capacity was reported to be more than 100%
5303 at the start.  I also wonder why the "full capacity" increases some
5304 times, and if it is possible to repeat the process to get the battery
5305 back to design capacity.  And I wonder if the discharge and charge
5306 speed change over time, or if this stay the same.  I did not yet try
5307 to write a tool to calculate the derivative values of the battery
5308 level, but suspect some interesting insights might be learned from
5309 those.</p>
5310
5311 <p>Update 2015-09-24: I got a tip to install the packages
5312 acpi-call-dkms and tlp (unfortunately missing in Debian stable)
5313 packages instead of the tp-smapi-dkms package I had tried to use
5314 initially, and use 'tlp setcharge 40 80' to change when charging start
5315 and stop.  I've done so now, but expect my existing battery is toast
5316 and need to be replaced.  The proposal is unfortunately Thinkpad
5317 specific.</p>
5318
5319       </div>
5320       <div class="tags">
5321
5322
5323         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>.
5324
5325
5326       </div>
5327     </div>
5328     <div class="padding"></div>
5329
5330     <div class="entry">
5331       <div class="title">
5332         <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>
5333       </div>
5334       <div class="date">
5335          3rd September 2015
5336       </div>
5337       <div class="body">
5338         <p>Creating a good looking book cover proved harder than I expected.
5339 I wanted to create a cover looking similar to the original cover of
5340 the
5341 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">Free
5342 Culture</a> book we are translating to Norwegian, and I wanted it in
5343 vector format for high resolution printing.  But my inkscape knowledge
5344 were not nearly good enough to pull that off.
5345
5346 <p>But thanks to the great inkscape community, I was able to wrap up
5347 the cover yesterday evening.  I asked on the
5348 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23inkscape">#inkscape IRC channel</a>
5349 on Freenode for help and clues, and Marc Jeanmougin (Mc-) volunteered
5350 to try to recreate it based on the PDF of the cover from the HTML
5351 version.  Not only did he create a
5352 <a href="https://marc.jeanmougin.fr/share/copy1.svg ">SVG document with
5353 the original and his vector version side by side</a>, he even provided
5354 an <a href="https://marc.jeanmougin.fr/share/out-1.ogv">instruction
5355 video</a> explaining how he did it</a>.  But the instruction video is
5356 not easy to follow for an untrained inkscape user. The video is a
5357 recording on how he did it, and he is obviously very experienced as
5358 the menu selections are very quick and he mentioned on IRC that he did
5359 use some keyboard shortcuts that can't be seen on the video, but it
5360 give a good idea about the inkscape operations to use to create the
5361 stripes with the embossed copyright sign in the center.</p>
5362
5363 <p>I took his SVG file, copied the vector image and re-sized it to fit
5364 on the cover I was drawing.  I am happy with the end result, and the
5365 current english version look like this:</p>
5366
5367 <img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-09-03-free-culture-cover.png" width="70%" align="center"/>
5368
5369 <p>I am not quite sure about the text on the back, but guess it will
5370 do.  I picked three quotes from the official site for the book, and
5371 hope it will work to trigger the interest of potential readers.  The
5372 Norwegian cover will look the same, but with the texts and bar code
5373 replaced with the Norwegian version.</p>
5374
5375 <p>The book is very close to being ready for publication, and I expect
5376 to upload the final draft to Lulu in the next few days and order a
5377 final proof reading copy to verify that everything look like it should
5378 before allowing everyone to order their own copy of Free Culture, in
5379 English or Norwegian Bokmål.  I'm waiting to give the the productive
5380 proof readers a chance to complete their work.</p>
5381
5382       </div>
5383       <div class="tags">
5384
5385
5386         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>.
5387
5388
5389       </div>
5390     </div>
5391     <div class="padding"></div>
5392
5393     <div class="entry">
5394       <div class="title">
5395         <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>
5396       </div>
5397       <div class="date">
5398         19th August 2015
5399       </div>
5400       <div class="body">
5401         <p>Today, finally, my first printed draft edition of the Norwegian
5402 translation of Free Culture I have been working on for the last few
5403 years arrived in the mail.  I had to fake a cover to get the interior
5404 printed, and the exterior of the book look awful, but that is
5405 irrelevant at this point.  I asked for a printed pocket book version
5406 to get an idea about the font sizes and paper format as well as how
5407 good the figures and images look in print, but also to test what the
5408 pocket book version would look like.  After receiving the 500 page
5409 pocket book, it became obvious to me that that pocket book size is too
5410 small for this book.  I believe the book is too thick, and several
5411 tables and figures do not look good in the size they get with that
5412 small page sizes.  I believe I will go with the 5.5x8.5 inch size
5413 instead.  A surprise discovery from the paper version was how bad the
5414 URLs look in print.  They are very hard to read in the colophon page.
5415 The URLs are red in the PDF, but light gray on paper.  I need to
5416 change the color of links somehow to look better.  But there is a
5417 printed book in my hand, and it feels great. :)</p>
5418
5419 <p>Now I only need to fix the cover, wrap up the postscript with the
5420 store behind the book, and collect the last corrections from the proof
5421 readers before the book is ready for proper printing.  Cover artists
5422 willing to work for free and create a Creative Commons licensed vector
5423 file looking similar to the original is most welcome, as my skills as
5424 a graphics designer are mostly missing.</p>
5425
5426       </div>
5427       <div class="tags">
5428
5429
5430         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>.
5431
5432
5433       </div>
5434     </div>
5435     <div class="padding"></div>
5436
5437     <div class="entry">
5438       <div class="title">
5439         <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>
5440       </div>
5441       <div class="date">
5442          9th August 2015
5443       </div>
5444       <div class="body">
5445         <p>Typesetting a book is harder than I hoped.  As the translation is
5446 mostly done, and a volunteer proof reader was going to check the text
5447 on paper, it was time this summer to focus on formatting my translated
5448 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> based version of the
5449 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> book by Lawrence
5450 Lessig.  I've been trying to get both docboox-xsl+fop and dblatex to
5451 give me a good looking PDF, but in the end I went with dblatex, because
5452 its Debian maintainer and upstream developer were responsive and very
5453 helpful in solving my formatting challenges.</p>
5454
5455 <p>Last night, I finally managed to create a PDF that no longer made
5456 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/">Lulu.com</a> complain after uploading,
5457 and I ordered a text version of the book on paper.  It is lacking a
5458 proper book cover and is not tagged with the correct ISBN number, but
5459 should give me an idea what the finished book will look like.</p>
5460
5461 <p>Instead of using Lulu, I did consider printing the book using
5462 <a href="http://www.createspace.com/">CreateSpace</a>, but ended up
5463 using Lulu because it had smaller book size options (CreateSpace seem
5464 to lack pocket book with extended distribution).  I looked for a
5465 similar service in Norway, but have not seen anything so far.  Please
5466 let me know if I am missing out on something here.</p>
5467
5468 <p>But I still struggle to decide the book size.  Should I go for
5469 pocket book (4.25x6.875 inches / 10.8x17.5 cm) with 556 pages, Digest
5470 (5.5x8.5 inches / 14x21.6 cm) with 323 pages or US Trade (6x8 inches /
5471 15.3x22.9 cm) with 280 pages?  Fewer pager give a cheaper book, and a
5472 smaller book is easier to carry around.  The test book I ordered was
5473 pocket book sized, to give me an idea how well that fit in my hand,
5474 but I suspect I will end up using a digest sized book in the end to
5475 bring the prize down further.</p>
5476
5477 <p>My biggest challenge at the moment is making nice cover art.  My
5478 inkscape skills are not yet up to the task of replicating the original
5479 cover in SVG format.  I also need to figure out what to write about
5480 the book on the back (will most likely use the same text as the
5481 description on web based book stores).  I would love help with this,
5482 if you are willing to license the art source and final version using
5483 the same CC license as the book.  My artistic skills are not really up
5484 to the task.</p>
5485
5486 <p>I plan to publish the book in both English and Norwegian and on
5487 paper, in PDF form as well as EPUB and MOBI format.  The current
5488 status can as usual be found on
5489 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>
5490 in the archive/ directory.  So far I have spent all time on making the
5491 PDF version look good.  Someone should probably do the same with the
5492 dbtoepub generated e-book.  Help is definitely needed here, as I
5493 expect to run out of steem before I find time to improve the epub
5494 formatting.</p>
5495
5496 <p>Please let me know via github if you find typos in the book or
5497 discover translations that should be improved.  The final proof
5498 reading is being done right now, and I expect to publish the finished
5499 result in a few months.</p>
5500
5501       </div>
5502       <div class="tags">
5503
5504
5505         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>.
5506
5507
5508       </div>
5509     </div>
5510     <div class="padding"></div>
5511
5512     <div class="entry">
5513       <div class="title">
5514         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Typesetting_DocBook_footnotes_as_endnotes_with_dblatex.html">Typesetting DocBook footnotes as endnotes with dblatex</a>
5515       </div>
5516       <div class="date">
5517         16th July 2015
5518       </div>
5519       <div class="body">
5520         <p>I'm still working on the Norwegian version of the
5521 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture book by Lawrence
5522 Lessig</a>, and is now working on the final typesetting and layout.
5523 One of the features I want to get the structure similar to the
5524 original book is to typeset the footnotes as endnotes in the notes
5525 chapter.  Based on the
5526 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/685063">feedback from the Debian
5527 maintainer and the dblatex developer</a>, I came up with this recipe I
5528 would like to share with you.  The proposal was to create a new LaTeX
5529 class file and add the LaTeX code there, but this is not always
5530 practical, when I want to be able to replace the class using a make
5531 file variable.  So my proposal misuses the latex.begindocument XSL
5532 parameter value, to get a small fragment into the correct location in
5533 the generated LaTeX File.</p>
5534
5535 <p>First, decide where in the DocBook document to place the endnotes,
5536 and add this text there:</p>
5537
5538 <pre>
5539 &lt;?latex \theendnotes ?&gt;
5540 </pre>
5541
5542 <p>Next, create a xsl stylesheet file dblatex-endnotes.xsl to add the
5543 code needed to add the endnote instructions in the preamble of the
5544 generated LaTeX document, with content like this:</p>
5545
5546 <pre>
5547 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
5548 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'&gt;
5549   &lt;xsl:param name="latex.begindocument"&gt;
5550     &lt;xsl:text&gt;
5551 \usepackage{endnotes}
5552 \let\footnote=\endnote
5553 \def\enoteheading{\mbox{}\par\vskip-\baselineskip }
5554 \begin{document}
5555     &lt;/xsl:text&gt;
5556   &lt;/xsl:param&gt;
5557 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
5558 </pre>
5559
5560 <p>Finally, load this xsl file when running dblatex, for example like
5561 this:</p>
5562
5563 <pre>
5564 dblatex --xsl-user=dblatex-endnotes.xsl freeculture.nb.xml
5565 </pre>
5566
5567 <p>The end result can be seen on github, where
5568 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">my
5569 book project</a> is located.</p>
5570
5571       </div>
5572       <div class="tags">
5573
5574
5575         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>.
5576
5577
5578       </div>
5579     </div>
5580     <div class="padding"></div>
5581
5582     <div class="entry">
5583       <div class="title">
5584         <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>
5585       </div>
5586       <div class="date">
5587          7th July 2015
5588       </div>
5589       <div class="body">
5590         <p>After asking the Norwegian Broadcasting Company (NRK)
5591 <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
5592 they can broadcast and stream H.264 video without an agreement with
5593 the MPEG LA</a>, I was wiser, but still confused.  So I asked MPEG LA
5594 if their understanding matched that of NRK.  As far as I can tell, it
5595 does not.</p>
5596
5597 <p>I started by asking for more information about the various
5598 licensing classes and what exactly is covered by the "Internet
5599 Broadcast AVC Video" class that NRK pointed me at to explain why NRK
5600 did not need a license for streaming H.264 video:
5601
5602 <p><blockquote>
5603
5604 <p>According to
5605 <a href="http://www.mpegla.com/Lists/MPEG%20LA%20News%20List/Attachments/226/n-10-02-02.pdf">a
5606 MPEG LA press release dated 2010-02-02</a>, there is no charge when
5607 using MPEG AVC/H.264 according to the terms of "Internet Broadcast AVC
5608 Video".  I am trying to understand exactly what the terms of "Internet
5609 Broadcast AVC Video" is, and wondered if you could help me.  What
5610 exactly is covered by these terms, and what is not?</p>
5611
5612 <p>The only source of more information I have been able to find is a
5613 PDF named
5614 <a href="http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/avc/Documents/avcweb.pdf">AVC
5615 Patent Portfolio License Briefing</a>, which states this about the
5616 fees:</p>
5617
5618 <ul>
5619  <li>Where End User pays for AVC Video
5620   <ul>
5621    <li>Subscription (not limited by title) – 100,000 or fewer
5622      subscribers/yr = no royalty; &gt; 100,000 to 250,000 subscribers/yr =
5623      $25,000; &gt;250,000 to 500,000 subscribers/yr = $50,000; &gt;500,000 to
5624      1M subscribers/yr = $75,000; &gt;1M subscribers/yr = $100,000</li>
5625
5626    <li>Title-by-Title - 12 minutes or less = no royalty; &gt;12 minutes in
5627      length = lower of (a) 2% or (b) $0.02 per title</li>
5628   </ul></li>
5629
5630  <li>Where remuneration is from other sources
5631   <ul>
5632    <li>Free Television - (a) one-time $2,500 per transmission encoder or
5633      (b) annual fee starting at $2,500 for &gt; 100,000 HH rising to
5634      maximum $10,000 for &gt;1,000,000 HH</li>
5635
5636    <li>Internet Broadcast AVC Video (not title-by-title, not subscription)
5637      – no royalty for life of the AVC Patent Portfolio License</li>
5638   </ul></li>
5639 </ul>
5640
5641 <p>Am I correct in assuming that the four categories listed is the
5642 categories used when selecting licensing terms, and that "Internet
5643 Broadcast AVC Video" is the category for things that do not fall into
5644 one of the other three categories?  Can you point me to a good source
5645 explaining what is ment by "title-by-title" and "Free Television" in
5646 the license terms for AVC/H.264?</p>
5647
5648 <p>Will a web service providing H.264 encoded video content in a
5649 "video on demand" fashing similar to Youtube and Vimeo, where no
5650 subscription is required and no payment is required from end users to
5651 get access to the videos, fall under the terms of the "Internet
5652 Broadcast AVC Video", ie no royalty for life of the AVC Patent
5653 Portfolio license?  Does it matter if some users are subscribed to get
5654 access to personalized services?</p>
5655
5656 <p>Note, this request and all answers will be published on the
5657 Internet.</p>
5658 </blockquote></p>
5659
5660 <p>The answer came quickly from Benjamin J. Myers, Licensing Associate
5661 with the MPEG LA:</p>
5662
5663 <p><blockquote>
5664 <p>Thank you for your message and for your interest in MPEG LA.  We
5665 appreciate hearing from you and I will be happy to assist you.</p>
5666
5667 <p>As you are aware, MPEG LA offers our AVC Patent Portfolio License
5668 which provides coverage under patents that are essential for use of
5669 the AVC/H.264 Standard (MPEG-4 Part 10).  Specifically, coverage is
5670 provided for end products and video content that make use of AVC/H.264
5671 technology.  Accordingly, the party offering such end products and
5672 video to End Users concludes the AVC License and is responsible for
5673 paying the applicable royalties.</p>
5674
5675 <p>Regarding Internet Broadcast AVC Video, the AVC License generally
5676 defines such content to be video that is distributed to End Users over
5677 the Internet free-of-charge.  Therefore, if a party offers a service
5678 which allows users to upload AVC/H.264 video to its website, and such
5679 AVC Video is delivered to End Users for free, then such video would
5680 receive coverage under the sublicense for Internet Broadcast AVC
5681 Video, which is not subject to any royalties for the life of the AVC
5682 License.  This would also apply in the scenario where a user creates a
5683 free online account in order to receive a customized offering of free
5684 AVC Video content.  In other words, as long as the End User is given
5685 access to or views AVC Video content at no cost to the End User, then
5686 no royalties would be payable under our AVC License.</p>
5687
5688 <p>On the other hand, if End Users pay for access to AVC Video for a
5689 specific period of time (e.g., one month, one year, etc.), then such
5690 video would constitute Subscription AVC Video.  In cases where AVC
5691 Video is delivered to End Users on a pay-per-view basis, then such
5692 content would constitute Title-by-Title AVC Video.  If a party offers
5693 Subscription or Title-by-Title AVC Video to End Users, then they would
5694 be responsible for paying the applicable royalties you noted below.</p>
5695
5696 <p>Finally, in the case where AVC Video is distributed for free
5697 through an "over-the-air, satellite and/or cable transmission", then
5698 such content would constitute Free Television AVC Video and would be
5699 subject to the applicable royalties.</p>
5700
5701 <p>For your reference, I have attached
5702 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-07-07-mpegla.pdf">a
5703 .pdf copy of the AVC License</a>. You will find the relevant
5704 sublicense information regarding AVC Video in Sections 2.2 through
5705 2.5, and the corresponding royalties in Section 3.1.2 through 3.1.4.
5706 You will also find the definitions of Title-by-Title AVC Video,
5707 Subscription AVC Video, Free Television AVC Video, and Internet
5708 Broadcast AVC Video in Section 1 of the License.  Please note that the
5709 electronic copy is provided for informational purposes only and cannot
5710 be used for execution.</p>
5711
5712 <p>I hope the above information is helpful.  If you have additional
5713 questions or need further assistance with the AVC License, please feel
5714 free to contact me directly.</p>
5715 </blockquote></p>
5716
5717 <p>Having a fresh copy of the license text was useful, and knowing
5718 that the definition of Title-by-Title required payment per title made
5719 me aware that my earlier understanding of that phrase had been wrong.
5720 But I still had a few questions:</p>
5721
5722 <p><blockquote>
5723 <p>I have a small followup question.  Would it be possible for me to get
5724 a license with MPEG LA even if there are no royalties to be paid?  The
5725 reason I ask, is that some video related products have a copyright
5726 clause limiting their use without a license with MPEG LA.  The clauses
5727 typically look similar to this:
5728
5729 <p><blockquote>
5730   This product is licensed under the AVC patent portfolio license for
5731   the personal and non-commercial use of a consumer to (a) encode
5732   video in compliance with the AVC standard ("AVC video") and/or (b)
5733   decode AVC video that was encoded by a consumer engaged in a
5734   personal and non-commercial activity and/or AVC video that was
5735   obtained from a video provider licensed to provide AVC video. No
5736   license is granted or shall be implied for any other use. additional
5737   information may be obtained from MPEG LA L.L.C.
5738 </blockquote></p>
5739
5740 <p>It is unclear to me if this clause mean that I need to enter into
5741 an agreement with MPEG LA to use the product in question, even if
5742 there are no royalties to be paid to MPEG LA.  I suspect it will
5743 differ depending on the jurisdiction, and mine is Norway.  What is
5744 MPEG LAs view on this?</p>
5745 </blockquote></p>
5746
5747 <p>According to the answer, MPEG LA believe those using such tools for
5748 non-personal or commercial use need a license with them:</p>
5749
5750 <p><blockquote>
5751
5752 <p>With regard to the Notice to Customers, I would like to begin by
5753 clarifying that the Notice from Section 7.1 of the AVC License
5754 reads:</p>
5755
5756 <p>THIS PRODUCT IS LICENSED UNDER THE AVC PATENT PORTFOLIO LICENSE FOR
5757 THE PERSONAL USE OF A CONSUMER OR OTHER USES IN WHICH IT DOES NOT
5758 RECEIVE REMUNERATION TO (i) ENCODE VIDEO IN COMPLIANCE WITH THE AVC
5759 STANDARD ("AVC VIDEO") AND/OR (ii) DECODE AVC VIDEO THAT WAS ENCODED
5760 BY A CONSUMER ENGAGED IN A PERSONAL ACTIVITY AND/OR WAS OBTAINED FROM
5761 A VIDEO PROVIDER LICENSED TO PROVIDE AVC VIDEO. NO LICENSE IS GRANTED
5762 OR SHALL BE IMPLIED FOR ANY OTHER USE. ADDITIONAL INFORMATION MAY BE
5763 OBTAINED FROM MPEG LA, L.L.C. SEE HTTP://WWW.MPEGLA.COM</p>
5764
5765 <p>The Notice to Customers is intended to inform End Users of the
5766 personal usage rights (for example, to watch video content) included
5767 with the product they purchased, and to encourage any party using the
5768 product for commercial purposes to contact MPEG LA in order to become
5769 licensed for such use (for example, when they use an AVC Product to
5770 deliver Title-by-Title, Subscription, Free Television or Internet
5771 Broadcast AVC Video to End Users, or to re-Sell a third party's AVC
5772 Product as their own branded AVC Product).</p>
5773
5774 <p>Therefore, if a party is to be licensed for its use of an AVC
5775 Product to Sell AVC Video on a Title-by-Title, Subscription, Free
5776 Television or Internet Broadcast basis, that party would need to
5777 conclude the AVC License, even in the case where no royalties were
5778 payable under the License.  On the other hand, if that party (either a
5779 Consumer or business customer) simply uses an AVC Product for their
5780 own internal purposes and not for the commercial purposes referenced
5781 above, then such use would be included in the royalty paid for the AVC
5782 Products by the licensed supplier.</p>
5783
5784 <p>Finally, I note that our AVC License provides worldwide coverage in
5785 countries that have AVC Patent Portfolio Patents, including
5786 Norway.</p>
5787
5788 <p>I hope this clarification is helpful.  If I may be of any further
5789 assistance, just let me know.</p>
5790 </blockquote></p>
5791
5792 <p>The mentioning of Norwegian patents made me a bit confused, so I
5793 asked for more information:</p>
5794
5795 <p><blockquote>
5796
5797 <p>But one minor question at the end.  If I understand you correctly,
5798 you state in the quote above that there are patents in the AVC Patent
5799 Portfolio that are valid in Norway.  This make me believe I read the
5800 list available from &lt;URL:
5801 <a href="http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/PatentList.aspx">http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/PatentList.aspx</a>
5802 &gt; incorrectly, as I believed the "NO" prefix in front of patents
5803 were Norwegian patents, and the only one I could find under Mitsubishi
5804 Electric Corporation expired in 2012.  Which patents are you referring
5805 to that are relevant for Norway?</p>
5806
5807 </blockquote></p>
5808
5809 <p>Again, the quick answer explained how to read the list of patents
5810 in that list:</p>
5811
5812 <p><blockquote>
5813
5814 <p>Your understanding is correct that the last AVC Patent Portfolio
5815 Patent in Norway expired on 21 October 2012.  Therefore, where AVC
5816 Video is both made and Sold in Norway after that date, then no
5817 royalties would be payable for such AVC Video under the AVC License.
5818 With that said, our AVC License provides historic coverage for AVC
5819 Products and AVC Video that may have been manufactured or Sold before
5820 the last Norwegian AVC patent expired.  I would also like to clarify
5821 that coverage is provided for the country of manufacture and the
5822 country of Sale that has active AVC Patent Portfolio Patents.</p>
5823
5824 <p>Therefore, if a party offers AVC Products or AVC Video for Sale in
5825 a country with active AVC Patent Portfolio Patents (for example,
5826 Sweden, Denmark, Finland, etc.), then that party would still need
5827 coverage under the AVC License even if such products or video are
5828 initially made in a country without active AVC Patent Portfolio
5829 Patents (for example, Norway).  Similarly, a party would need to
5830 conclude the AVC License if they make AVC Products or AVC Video in a
5831 country with active AVC Patent Portfolio Patents, but eventually Sell
5832 such AVC Products or AVC Video in a country without active AVC Patent
5833 Portfolio Patents.</p>
5834 </blockquote></p>
5835
5836 <p>As far as I understand it, MPEG LA believe anyone using Adobe
5837 Premiere and other video related software with a H.264 distribution
5838 license need a license agreement with MPEG LA to use such tools for
5839 anything non-private or commercial, while it is OK to set up a
5840 Youtube-like service as long as no-one pays to get access to the
5841 content.  I still have no clear idea how this applies to Norway, where
5842 none of the patents MPEG LA is licensing are valid.  Will the
5843 copyright terms take precedence or can those terms be ignored because
5844 the patents are not valid in Norway?</p>
5845
5846       </div>
5847       <div class="tags">
5848
5849
5850         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>.
5851
5852
5853       </div>
5854     </div>
5855     <div class="padding"></div>
5856
5857     <div class="entry">
5858       <div class="title">
5859         <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>
5860       </div>
5861       <div class="date">
5862          5th July 2015
5863       </div>
5864       <div class="body">
5865         <p>Several people contacted me after my previous blog post about my
5866 need for a new laptop, and provided very useful feedback.  I wish to
5867 thank every one of these.  Several pointed me to the possibility of
5868 fixing my X230, and I am already in the process of getting Lenovo to
5869 do so thanks to the on site, next day support contract covering the
5870 machine.  But the battery is almost useless (I expect to replace it
5871 with a non-official battery) and I do not expect the machine to live
5872 for many more years, so it is time to plan its replacement.  If I did
5873 not have a support contract, it was suggested to find replacement parts
5874 using <a href="http://www.francecrans.com/">FrancEcrans</a>, but it
5875 might present a language barrier as I do not understand French.</p>
5876
5877 <p>One tip I got was to use the
5878 <a href="https://skinflint.co.uk/?cat=nb">Skinflint</a> web service to
5879 compare laptop models.  It seem to have more models available than
5880 prisjakt.no.  Another tip I got from someone I know have similar
5881 keyboard preferences was that the HP EliteBook 840 keyboard is not
5882 very good, and this matches my experience with earlier EliteBook
5883 keyboards I tested.  Because of this, I will not consider it any further.
5884
5885 <p>When I wrote my blog post, I was not aware of Thinkpad X250, the
5886 newest Thinkpad X model.  The keyboard reintroduces mouse buttons
5887 (which is missing from the X240), and is working fairly well with
5888 Debian Sid/Unstable according to
5889 <a href="http://www.corsac.net/X250/">Corsac.net</a>.  The reports I
5890 got on the keyboard quality are not consistent.  Some say the keyboard
5891 is good, others say it is ok, while others say it is not very good.
5892 Those with experience from X41 and and X60 agree that the X250
5893 keyboard is not as good as those trusty old laptops, and suggest I
5894 keep and fix my X230 instead of upgrading, or get a used X230 to
5895 replace it.  I'm also told that the X250 lack leds for caps lock, disk
5896 activity and battery status, which is very convenient on my X230.  I'm
5897 also told that the CPU fan is running very often, making it a bit
5898 noisy.  In any case, the X250 do not work out of the box with Debian
5899 Stable/Jessie, one of my requirements.</p>
5900
5901 <p>I have also gotten a few vendor proposals, one was
5902 <a href="http://pro-star.com">Pro-Star</a>, another was
5903 <a href="http://shop.gluglug.org.uk/product/libreboot-x200/">Libreboot</a>.
5904 The latter look very attractive to me.</p>
5905
5906 <p>Again, thank you all for the very useful feedback.  It help a lot
5907 as I keep looking for a replacement.</p>
5908
5909 <p>Update 2015-07-06: I was recommended to check out the
5910 <a href="">lapstore.de</a> web shop for used laptops.  They got several
5911 different
5912 <a href="http://www.lapstore.de/f.php/shop/lapstore/f/411/lang/x/kw/Lenovo_ThinkPad_X_Serie/">old
5913 thinkpad X models</a>, and provide one year warranty.</p>
5914
5915       </div>
5916       <div class="tags">
5917
5918
5919         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>.
5920
5921
5922       </div>
5923     </div>
5924     <div class="padding"></div>
5925
5926     <div class="entry">
5927       <div class="title">
5928         <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>
5929       </div>
5930       <div class="date">
5931          3rd July 2015
5932       </div>
5933       <div class="body">
5934         <p>My primary work horse laptop is failing, and will need a
5935 replacement soon.  The left 5 cm of the screen on my Thinkpad X230
5936 started flickering yesterday, and I suspect the cause is a broken
5937 cable, as changing the angle of the screen some times get rid of the
5938 flickering.</p>
5939
5940 <p>My requirements have not really changed since I bought it, and is
5941 still as
5942 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html">I
5943 described them in 2013</a>.  The last time I bought a laptop, I had
5944 good help from
5945 <a href="http://www.prisjakt.no/category.php?k=353">prisjakt.no</a>
5946 where I could select at least a few of the requirements (mouse pin,
5947 wifi, weight) and go through the rest manually.  Three button mouse
5948 and a good keyboard is not available as an option, and all the three
5949 laptop models proposed today (Thinkpad X240, HP EliteBook 820 G1 and
5950 G2) lack three mouse buttons).  It is also unclear to me how good the
5951 keyboard on the HP EliteBooks are.  I hope Lenovo have not messed up
5952 the keyboard, even if the quality and robustness in the X series have
5953 deteriorated since X41.</p>
5954
5955 <p>I wonder how I can find a sensible laptop when none of the options
5956 seem sensible to me?  Are there better services around to search the
5957 set of available laptops for features?  Please send me an email if you
5958 have suggestions.</p>
5959
5960 <p>Update 2015-07-23: I got a suggestion to check out the FSF
5961 <a href="http://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/endorsement/respects-your-freedom">list
5962 of endorsed hardware</a>, which is useful background information.</p>
5963
5964       </div>
5965       <div class="tags">
5966
5967
5968         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>.
5969
5970
5971       </div>
5972     </div>
5973     <div class="padding"></div>
5974
5975     <div class="entry">
5976       <div class="title">
5977         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/MakerCon_Nordic_videos_now_available_on_Frikanalen.html">MakerCon Nordic videos now available on Frikanalen</a>
5978       </div>
5979       <div class="date">
5980          2nd July 2015
5981       </div>
5982       <div class="body">
5983         <p>Last oktober I was involved on behalf of
5984 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG</a> with recording the talks at
5985 <a href="http://www.makercon.no/">MakerCon Nordic</a>, a conference for
5986 the Maker movement.  Since then it has been the plan to publish the
5987 recordings on <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a>, which
5988 finally happened the last few days.  A few talks are missing because
5989 the speakers asked the organizers to not publish them, but most of the
5990 talks are available.  The talks are being broadcasted on RiksTV
5991 channel 50 and using multicast on Uninett, as well as being available
5992 from the Frikanalen web site.  The unedited recordings are
5993 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/MakerConNordic/">available on
5994 Youtube too</a>.</p>
5995
5996 <p>This is the list of talks available at the moment.  Visit the
5997 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/?q=makercon">Frikanalen video
5998 pages</a> to view them.</p>
5999
6000 <ul>
6001
6002   <li>Evolutionary algorithms as a design tool - from art
6003       to robotics (Kyrre Glette)</li>
6004
6005   <li>Make and break (Hans Gerhard Meier)</li>
6006
6007   <li>Making a one year school course for young makers
6008       (Olav Helland)</li>
6009
6010   <li>Innovation Inspiration - IPR Databases as a Source of
6011       Inspiration (Hege Langlo)</li>
6012
6013   <li>Making a toy for makers (Erik Torstensson)</li>
6014
6015   <li>How to make 3D printer electronics (Elias Bakken)</li>
6016
6017   <li>Hovering Clouds: Looking at online tool offerings for Product
6018       Design and 3D Printing (William Kempton)</li>
6019
6020   <li>Travelling maker stories (Øyvind Nydal Dahl)</li>
6021
6022   <li>Making the first Maker Faire in Sweden (Nils Olander)</li>
6023
6024   <li>Breaking the mold: Printing 1000’s of parts (Espen Sivertsen)</li>
6025
6026   <li>Ultimaker — and open source 3D printing (Erik de Bruijn)</li>
6027
6028   <li>Autodesk’s 3D Printing Platform: Sparking innovation (Hilde
6029       Sevens)</li>
6030
6031   <li>How Making is Changing the World – and How You Can Too!
6032       (Jennifer Turliuk)</li>
6033
6034   <li>Open-Source Adventuring: OpenROV, OpenExplorer and the Future of
6035       Connected Exploration (David Lang)</li>
6036
6037   <li>Making in Norway (Haakon Karlsen Jr., Graham Hayward and Jens
6038       Dyvik)</li>
6039
6040   <li>The Impact of the Maker Movement (Mike Senese)</li>
6041
6042 </ul>
6043
6044 <p>Part of the reason this took so long was that the scripts NUUG had
6045 to prepare a recording for publication were five years old and no
6046 longer worked with the current video processing tools (command line
6047 argument changes).  In addition, we needed better audio normalization,
6048 which sent me on a detour to
6049 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Measuring_and_adjusting_the_loudness_of_a_TV_channel_using_bs1770gain.html">package
6050 bs1770gain for Debian</a>.  Now this is in place and it became a lot
6051 easier to publish NUUG videos on Frikanalen.</p>
6052
6053       </div>
6054       <div class="tags">
6055
6056
6057         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>.
6058
6059
6060       </div>
6061     </div>
6062     <div class="padding"></div>
6063
6064     <div class="entry">
6065       <div class="title">
6066         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Graphing_the_Norwegian_company_ownership_structure.html">Graphing the Norwegian company ownership structure</a>
6067       </div>
6068       <div class="date">
6069         15th June 2015
6070       </div>
6071       <div class="body">
6072         <p>It is a bit work to figure out the ownership structure of companies
6073 in Norway.  The information is publicly available, but one need to
6074 recursively look up ownership for all owners to figure out the complete
6075 ownership graph of a given set of companies.  To save me the work in
6076 the future, I wrote a script to do this automatically, outputting the
6077 ownership structure using the Graphviz/dotty format.  The data source
6078 is web scraping from <a href="http://www.proff.no/">Proff</a>, because
6079 I failed to find a useful source directly from the official keepers of
6080 the ownership data, <a href="http://www.brreg.no/">Brønnøysundsregistrene</a>.</p>
6081
6082 <p>To get an ownership graph for a set of companies, fetch
6083 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/brreg-norway-ownership-graph">the code from git</a> and run it using the organisation number.  I'm
6084 using the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet as an example here, as its
6085 ownership structure is very simple:</p>
6086
6087 <pre>
6088 % time ./bin/eierskap-dotty 958033540 > dagbladet.dot
6089
6090 real    0m2.841s
6091 user    0m0.184s
6092 sys     0m0.036s
6093 %
6094 </pre>
6095
6096 <p>The script accept several organisation numbers on the command line,
6097 allowing a cluster of companies to be graphed in the same image.  The
6098 resulting dot file for the example above look like this.  The edges
6099 are labeled with the ownership percentage, and the nodes uses the
6100 organisation number as their name and the name as the label:</p>
6101
6102 <pre>
6103 digraph ownership {
6104 rankdir = LR;
6105 "Aller Holding A/s" -> "910119877" [label="100%"]
6106 "910119877" -> "998689015" [label="100%"]
6107 "998689015" -> "958033540" [label="99%"]
6108 "974530600" -> "958033540" [label="1%"]
6109 "958033540" [label="AS DAGBLADET"]
6110 "998689015" [label="Berner Media Holding AS"]
6111 "974530600" [label="Dagbladets Stiftelse"]
6112 "910119877" [label="Aller Media AS"]
6113 }
6114 </pre>
6115
6116 <p>To view the ownership graph, run "<tt>dotty dagbladet.dot</tt>" or
6117 convert it to a PNG using "<tt>dot -T png dagbladet.dot >
6118 dagbladet.png</tt>".  The result can be seen below:</p>
6119
6120 <img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-06-15-ownership-graphs-norway-dagbladet.png" width="80%">
6121
6122 <p>Note that I suspect the "Aller Holding A/S" entry to be incorrect
6123 data in the official ownership register, as that name is not
6124 registered in the official company register for Norway.  The ownership
6125 register is sensitive to typos and there seem to be no strict checking
6126 of the ownership links.</p>
6127
6128 <p>Let me know if you improve the script or find better data sources.
6129 The code is licensed according to GPL 2 or newer.</p>
6130
6131 <p>Update 2015-06-15: Since the initial post I've been told that
6132 "<a href="http://www.proff.dk/firma/carl-allers-etablissement-aktieselskab/københavn-v/hovedkontorer/13624518-3/">Aller
6133 Holding A/S</a>" is a Danish company, which explain why it did not
6134 have a Norwegian organisation number.  I've also been told that there
6135 is a <a href="http://www.brreg.no/automatiske/webservices/">web
6136 services API available</a> from Brønnøysundsregistrene, for those
6137 willing to accept the terms or pay the price.</p>
6138
6139       </div>
6140       <div class="tags">
6141
6142
6143         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>.
6144
6145
6146       </div>
6147     </div>
6148     <div class="padding"></div>
6149
6150     <div class="entry">
6151       <div class="title">
6152         <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>
6153       </div>
6154       <div class="date">
6155         11th June 2015
6156       </div>
6157       <div class="body">
6158         <p>Television loudness is the source of frustration for viewers
6159 everywhere.  Some channels are very load, others are less loud, and
6160 ads tend to shout very high to get the attention of the viewers, and
6161 the viewers do not like this.  This fact is well known to the TV
6162 channels.  See for example the BBC white paper
6163 "<a href="http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rd/pubs/whp/whp-pdf-files/WHP202.pdf">Terminology
6164 for loudness and level dBTP, LU, and all that</a>" from 2011 for a
6165 summary of the problem domain.  To better address the need for even
6166 loadness, the TV channels got together several years ago to agree on a
6167 new way to measure loudness in digital files as one step in
6168 standardizing loudness.  From this came the ITU-R standard BS.1770,
6169 "<a href="http://www.itu.int/rec/R-REC-BS.1770/en">Algorithms to
6170 measure audio programme loudness and true-peak audio level</a>".</p>
6171
6172 <p>The ITU-R BS.1770 specification describe an algorithm to measure
6173 loadness in LUFS (Loudness Units, referenced to Full Scale). But
6174 having a way to measure is not enough.  To get the same loudness
6175 across TV channels, one also need to decide which value to standardize
6176 on.  For European TV channels, this was done in the EBU Recommondaton
6177 R128, "<a href="https://tech.ebu.ch/docs/r/r128.pdf">Loudness
6178 normalisation and permitted maximum level of audio signals</a>", which
6179 specifies a recommended level of -23 LUFS.  In Norway, I have been
6180 told that NRK, TV2, MTG and SBS have decided among themselves to
6181 follow the R128 recommondation for playout from 2016-03-01.</p>
6182
6183 <p>There are free software available to measure and adjust the loudness
6184 level using the LUFS.  In Debian, I am aware of a library named
6185 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/libebur128">libebur128</a>
6186 able to measure the loudness and since yesterday morning a new binary
6187 named <a href="http://bs1770gain.sourceforge.net">bs1770gain</a>
6188 capable of both measuring and adjusting was uploaded and is waiting
6189 for NEW processing.  I plan to maintain the latter in Debian under the
6190 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?email=pkg-multimedia-maintainers%40lists.alioth.debian.org">Debian
6191 multimedia</a> umbrella.</p>
6192
6193 <p>The free software based TV channel I am involved in,
6194 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a>, plan to follow the
6195 R128 recommondation ourself as soon as we can adjust the software to
6196 do so, and the bs1770gain tool seem like a good fit for that part of
6197 the puzzle to measure loudness on new video uploaded to Frikanalen.
6198 Personally, I plan to use bs1770gain to adjust the loudness of videos
6199 I upload to Frikanalen on behalf of <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the
6200 NUUG member organisation</a>.  The program seem to be able to measure
6201 the LUFS value of any media file handled by ffmpeg, but I've only
6202 successfully adjusted the LUFS value of WAV files.  I suspect it
6203 should be able to adjust it for all the formats handled by ffmpeg.</p>
6204
6205       </div>
6206       <div class="tags">
6207
6208
6209         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>.
6210
6211
6212       </div>
6213     </div>
6214     <div class="padding"></div>
6215
6216     <div class="entry">
6217       <div class="title">
6218         <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>
6219       </div>
6220       <div class="date">
6221         10th May 2015
6222       </div>
6223       <div class="body">
6224         <p>5 days ago, the Norwegian Parliament decided, unanimously, that all
6225 citizens of Norway, no matter if they are suspected of something
6226 criminal or not, are
6227 <a href="https://www.holderdeord.no/votes/1430838871e">required to
6228 give fingerprints to the police</a> (vote details from Holder de
6229 ord).  The law make it sound like it will be optional, but in a few
6230 years there will be no option any more.  The ID will be required to
6231 vote, to get a bank account, a bank card, to change address on the
6232 post office, to receive an electronic ID or to get a drivers license
6233 and many other tasks required to function in Norway.  The banks plan
6234 to stop providing their own ID on the bank cards when this new
6235 national ID is introduced, and the national road authorities plan to
6236 change the drivers license to no longer be usable as identity cards.
6237 In effect, to function as a citizen in Norway a national ID card will
6238 be required, and to get it one need to provide the fingerprints to
6239 the police.</p>
6240
6241 <p>In addition to handing the fingerprint to the police (which
6242 promised to not make a copy of the fingerprint image at that point in
6243 time, but say nothing about doing it later), a picture of the
6244 fingerprint will be stored on the RFID chip, along with a picture of
6245 the face and other information about the person.  Some of the
6246 information will be encrypted, but the encryption will be the same
6247 system as currently used in the passports.  The codes to decrypt will
6248 be available to a lot of government offices and their suppliers around
6249 the globe, but for those that do not know anyone in those circles it
6250 is good to know that
6251 <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2006/nov/17/news.homeaffairs">the
6252 encryption is already broken</a>.  And they
6253 <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/article/2215057/wireless/bad-guys-could-read-rfid-passports-at-217-feet--maybe-a-lot-more.html">can
6254 be read from 70 meters away</a>.  This can be mitigated a bit by
6255 keeping it in a Faraday cage (metal box or metal wire container), but
6256 one will be required to take it out of there often enough to expose
6257 ones private and personal information to a lot of people that have no
6258 business getting access to that information.</p>
6259
6260 <p>The new Norwegian national IDs are a vehicle for identity theft,
6261 and I feel sorry for us all having politicians accepting such invasion
6262 of privacy without any objections.  So are the Norwegian passports,
6263 but it has been possible to function in Norway without those so far.
6264 That option is going away with the passing of the new law.  In this, I
6265 envy the Germans, because for them it is optional how much biometric
6266 information is stored in their national ID.</p>
6267
6268 <p>And if forced collection of fingerprints was not bad enough, the
6269 information collected in the national ID card register can be handed
6270 over to foreign intelligence services and police authorities, "when
6271 extradition is not considered disproportionate".</p>
6272
6273 <p>Update 2015-05-12: For those unable to believe that the Parliament
6274 really could make such decision, I wrote
6275 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Blir_det_virkelig_krav_om_fingeravtrykk_i_nasjonale_ID_kort_.html">a
6276 summary of the sources I have</a> for concluding the way I do
6277 (Norwegian Only, as the sources are all in Norwegian).</p>
6278
6279       </div>
6280       <div class="tags">
6281
6282
6283         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>.
6284
6285
6286       </div>
6287     </div>
6288     <div class="padding"></div>
6289
6290     <div class="entry">
6291       <div class="title">
6292         <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>
6293       </div>
6294       <div class="date">
6295          1st May 2015
6296       </div>
6297       <div class="body">
6298         <p>Many years ago, a friend of mine calculated how much it would cost
6299 to store the sound of all phone calls in Norway, and came up with the
6300 cost of around 20 million NOK (2.4 mill EUR) for all the calls in a
6301 year.  I got curious and wondered what the same calculation would look
6302 like today.  To do so one need an idea of how much data storage is
6303 needed for each minute of sound, how many minutes all the calls in
6304 Norway sums up to, and the cost of data storage.</p>
6305
6306 <p>The 2005 numbers are from
6307 <a href="http://www.digi.no/analyser/2005/10/04/vi-prater-stadig-mindre-i-roret">digi.no</a>,
6308 the 2012 numbers are from
6309 <a href="http://www.nkom.no/aktuelt/nyheter/fortsatt-vekst-i-det-norske-ekommarkedet">a
6310 NKOM report</a>, and I got the 2013 numbers after asking NKOM via
6311 email.  I was told the numbers for 2014 will be presented May 20th,
6312 and decided not to wait for those, as I doubt they will be very
6313 different from the numbers from 2013.</p>
6314
6315 <p>The amount of data storage per minute sound depend on the wanted
6316 quality, and for phone calls it is generally believed that 8 Kbit/s is
6317 enough.  See for example a
6318 <a href="http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/voice/voice-quality/7934-bwidth-consume.html#topic1">summary
6319 on voice quality from Cisco</a> for some alternatives.  8 Kbit/s is 60
6320 Kbytes/min, and this can be multiplied with the number of call minutes
6321 to get the storage requirements.</p>
6322
6323 <p>Storage prices varies a lot, depending on speed, backup strategies,
6324 availability requirements etc.  But a simple way to calculate can be
6325 to use the price of a TiB-disk (around 1000 NOK / 120 EUR) and double
6326 it to take space, power and redundancy into account.  It could be much
6327 higher with high speed and good redundancy requirements.</p>
6328
6329 <p>But back to the question, What would it cost to store all phone
6330 calls in Norway?  Not much.  Here is a small table showing the
6331 estimated cost, which is within the budget constraint of most medium
6332 and large organisations:</p>
6333
6334 <table border="1">
6335 <tr><th>Year</th><th>Call minutes</th><th>Size</th><th>Price in NOK / EUR</th></tr>
6336 <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>
6337 <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>
6338 <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>
6339 </table>
6340
6341 <p>This is the cost of buying the storage.  Maintenance need to be
6342 taken into account too, but calculating that is left as an exercise
6343 for the reader.  But it is obvious to me from those numbers that
6344 recording the sound of all phone calls in Norway is not going to be
6345 stopped because it is too expensive.  I wonder if someone already is
6346 collecting the data?</p>
6347
6348       </div>
6349       <div class="tags">
6350
6351
6352         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>.
6353
6354
6355       </div>
6356     </div>
6357     <div class="padding"></div>
6358
6359     <div class="entry">
6360       <div class="title">
6361         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Jessie_based_Debian_Edu_beta_release.html">First Jessie based Debian Edu beta release</a>
6362       </div>
6363       <div class="date">
6364         26th April 2015
6365       </div>
6366       <div class="body">
6367         <p>I am happy to report that the Debian Edu team sent out
6368 <a href="https://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2015/04/msg00000.html">this
6369 announcement today</a>:</p>
6370
6371 <pre>
6372 the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project is pleased to announce the first
6373 *beta* release of Debian Edu "Jessie" 8.0+edu0~b1, which for the first
6374 time is composed entirely of packages from the current Debian stable
6375 release, Debian 8 "Jessie".
6376
6377 (As most reading this will know, Debian "Jessie" hasn't actually been
6378 released by now. The release is still in progress but should finish
6379 later today ;)
6380
6381 We expect to make a final release of Debian Edu "Jessie" in the coming
6382 weeks, timed with the first point release of Debian Jessie. Upgrades
6383 from this beta release of Debian Edu Jessie to the final release will
6384 be possible and encouraged!
6385
6386 Please report feedback to debian-edu@lists.debian.org and/or submit
6387 bugs: http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs
6388
6389 Debian Edu - sometimes also known as "Skolelinux" - is a complete
6390 operating system for schools, universities and other
6391 organisations. Through its pre- prepared installation profiles
6392 administrators can install servers, workstations and laptops which
6393 will work in harmony on the school network.  With Debian Edu, the
6394 teachers themselves or their technical support staff can roll out a
6395 complete multi-user, multi-machine study environment within hours or
6396 days.
6397
6398 Debian Edu is already in use at several hundred schools all over the
6399 world, particularly in Germany, Spain and Norway. Installations come
6400 with hundreds of applications pre-installed, plus the whole Debian
6401 archive of thousands of compatible packages within easy reach.
6402
6403 For those who want to give Debian Edu Jessie a try, download and
6404 installation instructions are available, including detailed
6405 instructions in the manual explaining the first steps, such as setting
6406 up a network or adding users.  Please note that the password for the
6407 user your prompted for during installation must have a length of at
6408 least 5 characters!
6409
6410 == Where to download ==
6411
6412 A multi-architecture CD / usbstick image (649 MiB) for network booting
6413 can be downloaded at the following locations:
6414
6415     http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~b1-CD.iso
6416     rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~b1-CD.iso .
6417
6418 The SHA1SUM of this image is: 54a524d16246cddd8d2cfd6ea52f2dd78c47ee0a
6419
6420 Alternatively an extended DVD / usbstick image (4.9 GiB) is also
6421 available, with more software included (saving additional download
6422 time):
6423
6424     http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~b1-USB.iso
6425     rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~b1-USB.iso
6426
6427 The SHA1SUM of this image is: fb1f1504a490c077a48653898f9d6a461cb3c636
6428
6429 Sources are available from the Debian archive, see
6430 http://ftp.debian.org/debian-cd/8.0.0/source/ for some download
6431 options.
6432
6433 == Debian Edu Jessie manual in seven languages ==
6434
6435 Please see https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie/ for
6436 the English version of the Debian Edu jessie manual.
6437
6438 This manual has been fully translated to German, French, Italian,
6439 Danish, Dutch and Norwegian Bokmål. A partly translated version exists
6440 for Spanish.  See http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/ for
6441 online version of the translated manual.
6442
6443 More information about Debian 8 "Jessie" itself is provided in the
6444 release notes and the installation manual:
6445 - http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/releasenotes
6446 - http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/installmanual
6447
6448
6449 == Errata / known problems ==
6450
6451     It takes up to 15 minutes for a changed hostname to be updated via
6452     DHCP (#780461).
6453
6454     The hostname script fails to update LTSP server hostname (#783087).
6455
6456 Workaround: run update-hostname-from-ip on the client to update the
6457 hostname immediately.
6458
6459 Check https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie for a possibly
6460 more current and complete list.
6461
6462 == Some more details about Debian Edu 8.0+edu0~b1 Codename Jessie released 2015-04-25 ==
6463
6464 === Software updates ===
6465
6466 Everything which is new in Debian 8 Jessie, e.g.:
6467
6468  * Linux kernel 3.16.7-ctk9; for the i386 architecture, support for
6469    i486 processors has been dropped; oldest supported ones: i586 (like
6470    Intel Pentium and AMD K5).
6471
6472  * Desktop environments KDE Plasma Workspaces 4.11.13, GNOME 3.14,
6473    Xfce 4.12, LXDE 0.5.6
6474    * new optional desktop environment: MATE 1.8
6475    * KDE Plasma Workspaces is installed by default; to choose one of
6476      the others see the manual.
6477  * the browsers Iceweasel 31 ESR and Chromium 41
6478  * LibreOffice 4.3.3
6479  * GOsa 2.7.4
6480  * LTSP 5.5.4
6481  * CUPS print system 1.7.5
6482  * new boot framework: systemd
6483  * Educational toolbox GCompris 14.12
6484  * Music creator Rosegarden 14.02
6485  * Image editor Gimp 2.8.14
6486  * Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.13.1
6487  * golearn 0.9
6488  * tuxpaint 0.9.22
6489  * New version of debian-installer from Debian Jessie.
6490  * Debian Jessie includes about 43000 packages available for installation.
6491  * More information about Debian 8 Jessie is provided in its release
6492    notes and the installation manual, see the link above.
6493
6494 === Installation changes ===
6495
6496     Installations done via PXE now also install firmware automatically
6497     for the hardware present.
6498
6499 === Fixed bugs ===
6500
6501 A number of bugs have been fixed in this release; the most noticeable
6502 from a user perspective:
6503
6504  * Inserting incorrect DNS information in Gosa will no longer break
6505    DNS completely, but instead stop DNS updates until the incorrect
6506    information is corrected (710362)
6507
6508  * shutdown-at-night now shuts the system down if gdm3 is used (775608).
6509
6510 === Sugar desktop removed ===
6511
6512 As the Sugar desktop was removed from Debian Jessie, it is also not
6513 available in Debian Edu jessie.
6514
6515
6516 == About Debian Edu / Skolelinux ==
6517
6518 Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux, is a Linux distribution based on
6519 Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
6520 configured school network. Directly after installation a school server
6521 running all services needed for a school network is set up just
6522 waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
6523 Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
6524 initial installation of the main server from CD or USB stick all other
6525 machines can be installed via the network. The provided school server
6526 provides LDAP database and Kerberos authentication service,
6527 centralized home directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other
6528 services.  The desktop contains more than 60 educational software
6529 packages and more are available from the Debian archive, and schools
6530 can choose between KDE, GNOME, LXDE, Xfce and MATE desktop
6531 environment.
6532
6533 == About Debian ==
6534
6535 The Debian Project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly
6536 free community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of
6537 the largest and most influential open source projects. Thousands of
6538 volunteers from all over the world work together to create and
6539 maintain Debian software. Available in 70 languages, and supporting a
6540 huge range of computer types, Debian calls itself the universal
6541 operating system.
6542
6543 == Thanks ==
6544
6545 Thanks to everyone making Debian and Debian Edu / Skolelinux happen!
6546 You rock.
6547 </pre>
6548
6549       </div>
6550       <div class="tags">
6551
6552
6553         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>.
6554
6555
6556       </div>
6557     </div>
6558     <div class="padding"></div>
6559
6560     <div class="entry">
6561       <div class="title">
6562         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Shirish_Agarwal.html">Debian Edu interview: Shirish Agarwal</a>
6563       </div>
6564       <div class="date">
6565         15th April 2015
6566       </div>
6567       <div class="body">
6568         <p>It was a surprise to me to learn that project to create a complete
6569 computer system for schools I've involved in,
6570 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>, was
6571 being used in India.  But apparently it is, and I managed to get an
6572 interview with one of the friends of the project there, Shirish
6573 Agarwal.</p>
6574
6575 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
6576
6577 <p>My name is Shirish Agarwal. Based out of the educational and
6578 historical city of Pune, from the western state of Maharashtra, India.
6579 My bread comes from giving training, giving policy tips,
6580 installations on free software to mom and pop shops in different
6581 fields from Desktop publishing to retail shops as well as work with
6582 few software start-ups as well.</p>
6583
6584 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
6585 project?</strong></p>
6586
6587 <p>It started innocently enough. I have been using Debian for a few
6588 years and in one local minidebconf / debutsav I was asked if there was
6589 anything for schools or education. I had worked / played with free
6590 educational softwares such as Gcompris and Stellarium for my many
6591 nieces and nephews so researched and found Debian Edu or Skolelinux as
6592 it was known then.  Since then I have started using the various
6593 education meta-packages provided by the project.</p>
6594
6595 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
6596 Edu?</strong></p>
6597
6598 <p>It's closest I have seen where a package full of educational
6599 software are packed, which are free and open (both literally and
6600 figuratively).  Even if I take the simplest software which is
6601 gcompris, the number of activities therein are amazing. Another one of
6602 the softwares that I have liked for a long time is stellarium. Even
6603 pysycache is cool except for couple of issues I encountered
6604 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/781841">#781841</a> and
6605 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/781842">#781842</a>.</p>
6606
6607 <p>I prefer software installed on the system over web based solutions,
6608 as a web site can disappear any time but the software on disk has the
6609 possibility of a larger life span.  Of course with both it's more a
6610 question if it has enough users who make it fun or sustainable or both
6611 for the developer per-se.</p>
6612
6613 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
6614 Edu?</strong></p>
6615
6616 <p>I do see that the Debian Edu team seems to be short-handed and I
6617 think more efforts should be made to make it popular and ask and take
6618 help from people and the larger community wherever possible.</p>
6619
6620 <p>I don't see any disadvantage to use Skolelinux apart from the fact
6621 that most apps. are generic which is good or bad how you see it.
6622 However, saying that I do acknowledge the fact that the canvas is
6623 pretty big and there are lot of interesting ideas that could be done
6624 but for reasons not known not done or if done I don't know about them.
6625 Let me share some of the ideas (these are more upstream based but
6626 still) I have had for a long time :</p>
6627
6628 <p>1. Classical maths question of two trains in opposing directions
6629 each running @x kmph/mph at y distance, when they will meet and how
6630 far would each travel and similar questions like these.
6631
6632 <p>The computer is a fantastic system where questions like these can
6633 be drawn, animated and the methodology and answers teased out in
6634 interactive manner. While sites such as the
6635 <a href="http://mathforum.org/dr.math/faq/faq.two.trains.html">Ask
6636 Dr. Math FAQ on The Two Trains problem</a> (as an example or point of
6637 inspiration) can be used there is lot more that can be done.  I dunno
6638 if there is a free software which does something like this.  The idea
6639 being a blend of objects + animation + interaction which does
6640 this. The whole interaction could be gamified with points or sounds or
6641 colourful celebration whenever the user gets even part of the question
6642 or/and methodology right. That would help reinforce good behaviour.
6643 This understanding could be used to share/showcase everything from how
6644 the first wheel came to be, to evolution to how astronomy started,
6645 psychics and everything in-between.</p>
6646
6647 <p>One specific idea in the train part was having the Linux mascot on
6648 one train and the BSD or GNU mascot on the other train and they
6649 meeting somewhere in-between. Characters from blender movies could
6650 also be used.</p>
6651
6652 <p>2. Loads of crossword-puzzles with reference to subjects: We have
6653 enormous data sets in Wikipedia and Wikitionary.  I don't think it
6654 should be a big job to design crossword puzzles. Using categories and
6655 sub-categories it should be doable to have Q&A single word answers
6656 from the existing data-sets. What would make it easy or hard could be
6657 the length of the word + existence of many or few vowels depending on
6658 the user's input.</p>
6659
6660 <p>3. Jigsaw puzzles - We already have a great software called
6661 palapeli with number of slicers making it pretty interesting. What
6662 needs to be done is to download large number of public domain and
6663 copyleft images, tease and use IPTC tags to categorise them into
6664 nature, history etc.  and let it loose. This could turn to be really
6665 huge collection of images. One source could be taken from
6666 commons.wikimedia.org, others could be huge collection of royalty-free
6667 stock photos. Potential is immense.</p>
6668
6669 <p>Apart from this, free software suffers in two directions, we lag
6670 both in development (of using new features per-se) and maintenance a
6671 lot.  This is more so in educational software as these applications
6672 need to be timely and the opportunity cost of missing deadlines is
6673 immense. If we are able to solve issues of funding for development and
6674 maintenance of such software I don't see any big difficulties. I know
6675 of few start-ups in and around India who would love to develop and
6676 maintain such software if funding issues could be solved.</p>
6677
6678 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
6679
6680 <p>That would be huge list. Some of the softwares are obviously apt,
6681 aptitude, debdelta, leafpad, the shell of course (zsh nowadays),
6682 quassel for IRC. In games I use shisen-sho while card-games are evenly
6683 between kpat and Aiselriot.  In desktops it's a tie between
6684 gnome-flashback and mate.</p>
6685
6686 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
6687 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
6688
6689 <p>I think it should first start with using specific FOSS apps. in
6690 whatever environment they are. If it's MS-Windows or Mac so be it.
6691 Once they are habitual with the apps. and there is buy-in from the
6692 school management then it could be installed anywhere. Most of the
6693 people now understand the concept of a repository because of the
6694 various online stores so it isn't hard to convince on that front.</p>
6695
6696 <p>What is harder is having enough people with technical skills and
6697 passion to service them. If you get buy-in from one or two teachers
6698 then ideas like above could also be asked to be done as a project as
6699 well.</p>
6700
6701 <p>I think where we fall short more than anything is in marketing. For
6702 instance, Debian has this whole range of fonts in its archive but
6703 there isn't even a page where all those different fonts in the La
6704 Ipsum format could be tried out for newcomers.</p>
6705
6706 <p>One of the issues faced constantly in installations is with updates
6707 and upgrades.  People have this myth that each update and upgrade
6708 means the user interface will / has to change. I have seen this
6709 innumerable times.  That perhaps is one of the reasons which browsers
6710 like Iceweasel / Firefox change user interfaces so much, not because
6711 it might be needed or be functional but because people believe that
6712 changed user interfaces are better. This, can easily be pointed with
6713 the user interfaces changed with almost every MS-Windows and Mac OS
6714 releases.</p>
6715
6716 <p>The problems with Debian Edu for deployment are many. The biggest
6717 is the huge gap between what is taught in schools and what Debian Edu
6718 is aimed at.
6719
6720 <p>Me and my friends did teach on week-ends in a government school for
6721 around 2 years, and
6722 <a href="https://flossexperiences.wordpress.com/2012/10/08/sharings/">gathered
6723 some experience</a> there.  Some of the things we learnt/discovered
6724 there was :</p>
6725
6726 <ol>
6727
6728   <li>Most of the teachers are very territorial about their subjects
6729    and they do not want you to teach anything out of the
6730    portion/syllabus given.</li>
6731
6732   <li>They want any activity on the system in accordance to whatever
6733    is in the syllabus.</li>
6734
6735   <li>There are huge barriers both with the English language and at
6736    times with objects or whatever. An example, let's say in gcompris
6737    you have objects falling down and you have to name them and let's
6738    say the falling object is a hat or a fedora hat, this would not be
6739    as recognizable as say a
6740    <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puneri_Pagadi">Puneri
6741    Pagdi</a> so there is need to inject local objects, words wherever
6742    possible. Especially for word-games there are so many hindi words
6743    which have become part of english vocabulary (for instance in
6744    parley), those could be made into a hinglish collection or
6745    something but that is something for upstream to do.</li>
6746
6747 </ol>
6748
6749       </div>
6750       <div class="tags">
6751
6752
6753         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>.
6754
6755
6756       </div>
6757     </div>
6758     <div class="padding"></div>
6759
6760     <div class="entry">
6761       <div class="title">
6762         <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>
6763       </div>
6764       <div class="date">
6765          7th April 2015
6766       </div>
6767       <div class="body">
6768         <p>I am happy to let you all know that I'm going to the <a
6769 href="http://act.osdc.no/osdc2015no/">Open Source Developers'
6770 Conference Nordic 2015</a>!</p>
6771
6772 <p>It take place Friday 8th to Sunday 10th of May in Oslo next to
6773 where I work, and I finally got around to submitting
6774 <a href="http://act.osdc.no/osdc2015no/talk/6192">a talk proposal for
6775 it</a> (dead link for most people until the talk is accepted).  As
6776 part of my involvement with the
6777 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group member
6778 association</a> I have been slightly involved in the planning of this
6779 conference for a while now, with a focus on organising a Civic Hacking
6780 Hackathon with our friends
6781 over at <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a> and
6782 <a href="http://www.holderdeord.no/">Holder de ord</a>.  This part is
6783 named the 'My Society' track in the program.  There is still space for
6784 more talks and participants.  I hope to see you there.</p>
6785
6786 <p>Check out <a href="http://act.osdc.no/osdc2015no/talks">the talks
6787 submitted and accepted so far</a>.</p>
6788
6789       </div>
6790       <div class="tags">
6791
6792
6793         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>.
6794
6795
6796       </div>
6797     </div>
6798     <div class="padding"></div>
6799
6800     <div class="entry">
6801       <div class="title">
6802         <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>
6803       </div>
6804       <div class="date">
6805          4th April 2015
6806       </div>
6807       <div class="body">
6808         <p>During eastern I had some time to continue working on the Norwegian
6809 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book
6810 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig.
6811 At the moment I am proof reading the finished text, looking for typos,
6812 inconsistent wordings and sentences that do not flow as they should.
6813 I'm more than two thirds done with the text, and welcome others to
6814 check the text up to chapter 13.  The current status is available on the
6815 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>
6816 project pages.  You can also check out the
6817 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>,
6818 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
6819 and HTML version available in the
6820 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/tree/master/archive">archive
6821 directory</a>.</p>
6822
6823 <p>Please report typos, bugs and improvements to the github project if
6824 you find any.</p>
6825
6826       </div>
6827       <div class="tags">
6828
6829
6830         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>.
6831
6832
6833       </div>
6834     </div>
6835     <div class="padding"></div>
6836
6837     <div class="entry">
6838       <div class="title">
6839         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Frikanalen__Norwegian_TV_channel_for_technical_topics.html">Frikanalen, Norwegian TV channel for technical topics</a>
6840       </div>
6841       <div class="date">
6842          9th March 2015
6843       </div>
6844       <div class="body">
6845         <p>The <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a>,
6846 where I am a member, and where people interested in free software,
6847 open standards and UNIX like operating systems like Linux and the BSDs
6848 come together, record our monthly technical presentations on video.
6849 The purpose is to document the talks and spread them to a wider
6850 audience.  For this, the the Norwegian nationwide open channel
6851 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a> is a useful venue.
6852 Since a few days ago, when I figured out the
6853 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/api/">REST API</a> to program the
6854 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/guide/">channel time schedule</a>,
6855 the channel has been filled with NUUG talks, related recordings and
6856 some Creative Commons licensed TED talks (from archive.org).  I fill
6857 all "leftover bits" on the channel with content from NUUG, which at
6858 the moment is almost 17 of 24 hours every day.</p>
6859
6860 <p>The list of NUUG videos
6861 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/organization/82">uploaded so far</a>
6862 include things like a
6863 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/625090">one hour talk by John
6864 Perry Barlow when he visited Oslo</a>, a presentation of
6865 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/624275">Haiku, the BeOS
6866 re-implementation</a>, the
6867 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/624493">history of FiksGataMi,
6868 the Norwegian version of FixMyStreet</a>, the good old
6869 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/623566">Warriors of the net
6870 video</A> and many others.</p>
6871
6872 <p>We have a large backlog of NUUG talks not yet uploaded to
6873 Frikanalen, and plan to upload every useful bit to the channel to
6874 spread the word there.  I also hope to find useful recordings from the
6875 Chaos Computer Club and Debian conferences and spread them on the
6876 channel as well.  But this require locating the videos and their meta
6877 information (title, description, license, etc), and preparing the
6878 recordings for broadcast, and I have not yet had the spare time to
6879 focus on this.  Perhaps you want to help.  Please join us on IRC,
6880 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23nuug">#nuug on irc.freenode.net</a>
6881 if you want to help make this happen.</p>
6882
6883 <p>But as I said, already the channel is already almost exclusively
6884 filled with technical topics, and if you want to learn something new
6885 today, check out the <a href="http://www.frikanalen.tv/se">Ogg Theora
6886 web stream</a> or use one of the other ways to get access to the
6887 channel.  Unfortunately the Ogg Theora recoding for distribution still
6888 do not properly sync the video and sound.  It is generated by recoding
6889 a internal MPEG transport stream with MPEG4 coded video (ie H.264) to
6890 Ogg Theora / Vorbis, and we have not been able to find a way that
6891 produces acceptable quality.  Help needed, please get in touch if you
6892 know how to fix it using free software.</p>
6893
6894       </div>
6895       <div class="tags">
6896
6897
6898         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>.
6899
6900
6901       </div>
6902     </div>
6903     <div class="padding"></div>
6904
6905     <div class="entry">
6906       <div class="title">
6907         <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>
6908       </div>
6909       <div class="date">
6910         28th February 2015
6911       </div>
6912       <div class="body">
6913         <p>Today I was happy to learn that the documentary
6914 <a href="https://citizenfourfilm.com/">Citizenfour</a> by
6915 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Poitras">Laura Poitras</a>
6916 finally will show up in Norway.  According to the magazine
6917 <a href="http://montages.no/">Montages</a>, a deal has finally been
6918 made for
6919 <a href="http://montages.no/nyheter/snowden-dokumentaren-citizenfour-far-norsk-kinodistribusjon/">Cinema
6920 distribution in Norway</a> and the movie will have its premiere soon.
6921 This is great news.  As part of my involvement with
6922 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the Norwegian Unix User Group</a>, me and
6923 a friend have
6924 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Dokumentar_om_Snowdenbekreftelsene_til_Norge_.shtml">tried
6925 to get the movie to Norway</a> ourselves, but obviously
6926 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Dokumentar_om_Snowdenbekreftelsene_endelig_til_Norge_.shtml">we
6927 were too late</a> and Tor Fosse beat us to it.  I am happy he did, as
6928 the movie will make its way to the public and we do not have to make
6929 it happen ourselves.
6930 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiGwAvd5mvM">The trailer</a>
6931 can be seen on youtube, if you are curious what kind of film this
6932 is.</p>
6933
6934 <p>The whistle blower Edward Snowden really deserve political asylum
6935 here in Norway, but I am afraid he would not be safe.</p>
6936
6937       </div>
6938       <div class="tags">
6939
6940
6941         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>.
6942
6943
6944       </div>
6945     </div>
6946     <div class="padding"></div>
6947
6948     <div class="entry">
6949       <div class="title">
6950         <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>
6951       </div>
6952       <div class="date">
6953         25th February 2015
6954       </div>
6955       <div class="body">
6956         <p>The Norwegian nationwide open channel
6957 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a> is still going
6958 strong.  It allow everyone to send the video they want on national
6959 television.  It is a TV station administrated completely using a web
6960 browser, running only <ahref="https://github.com/Frikanalen">Free
6961 Software</a>, providing <ahref="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/api">a REST
6962 api</a> for administrators and members, and with distribution on the
6963 national DVB-T distribution network RiksTV.  But only between 12:00
6964 and 17:30 Norwegian time.  This has finally changed, after many years
6965 with limited distribution.  A few weeks ago, we set up a Ogg Theora
6966 stream via icecast to allow everyone with Internet access to check out
6967 the channel the rest of the day.  This is presented on
6968 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.tv/se">the Frikanalen web site now</a>.  And
6969 since a few days ago, the channel is also available
6970 via <a href="https://www.uninett.no/iptv-tilgang">multicast on
6971 UNINETT</a>, available for those using IPTV TVs and set-top boxes in
6972 the Norwegian National Research and Education network.</p>
6973
6974 <p>If you want to see what is on the channel, point your media player
6975 to one of these sources.  The first should work with most players and
6976 browsers, while as far as I know, the multicast UDP stream only work
6977 with VLC.</p>
6978
6979 <ul>
6980   <li><a href="http://video.nuug.no/frikanalen.ogv">http://video.nuug.no/frikanalen.ogv</a></li>
6981   <li>udp://@224.17.43.129:1234</li>
6982 </ul>
6983
6984 <p>The Ogg Theora / icecast stream is not working well, as the video
6985 and audio is slightly out of sync.  We have not been able to figure
6986 out how to fix it.  It is generated by recoding a internal MPEG
6987 transport stream with MPEG4 coded video (ie H.264) to Ogg Theora /
6988 Vorbis, and the result is less then stellar.  If you have ideas how to
6989 fix it, please let us know on frikanalen (at) nuug.no.  We currently
6990 use this with ffmpeg2theora 0.29:</p>
6991
6992 <blockquote><pre>
6993 ./ffmpeg2theora.linux &lt;OBE_gemini_URL.ts&gt; -F 25 -x 720 -y 405 \
6994  --deinterlace --inputfps 25 -c 1 -H 48000 --keyint 8 --buf-delay 100 \
6995  --nosync -V 700 -o - | oggfwd video.nuug.no 8000 &lt;pw&gt; /frikanalen.ogv
6996 </pre></blockquote>
6997
6998 <p>If you get the multicast UDP stream working, please let me know, as
6999 I am curious how far the multicast stream reach.  It do not make it to
7000 my home network, nor any other commercially available network in
7001 Norway that I am aware of.</p>
7002
7003       </div>
7004       <div class="tags">
7005
7006
7007         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>.
7008
7009
7010       </div>
7011     </div>
7012     <div class="padding"></div>
7013
7014     <div class="entry">
7015       <div class="title">
7016         <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>
7017       </div>
7018       <div class="date">
7019         10th February 2015
7020       </div>
7021       <div class="body">
7022         <p>Aftenposten, one of the largest newspapers in Norway, today report
7023 that
7024 <a href="http://www.aftenposten.no/reise/Slik-skannes-kroppen-din-i-fremtidens-sikkerhetskontroll-490666_1.snd">three
7025 of the nude body scanners now is put to use at Gardermoen</a>, the
7026 main airport in Norway.  This way the travelers can have their body
7027 photographed without cloths when visiting Norway.  Of course this
7028 horrible news is presented with a positive spin, stating that "now
7029 travelers can move past the security check point faster and more
7030 efficiently", but fail to mention that the machines in question take
7031 pictures of their nude bodies and store them internally in the
7032 computer, while only presenting sketch figure of the body to the
7033 public.  The article is written in a way that leave the impression
7034 that the new machines do not take these nude pictures and only create
7035 the sketch figures.  In reality the same nude pictures are still
7036 taken, but not presented to everyone.  They are still available for
7037 the owners of the system and the people doing maintenance of the
7038 scanners, as long as they are taken and stored.</p>
7039
7040 <p>Wikipedia have a more on
7041 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_body_scanner">Full body
7042 scanners</a>, including example images and a summary of the
7043 controversy about these scanners.</p>
7044
7045 <p>Personally I will decline to use these machines, as I believe strip
7046 searches of my body is a very intrusive attack on my privacy, and not
7047 something everyone should have to accept to travel.</p>
7048
7049       </div>
7050       <div class="tags">
7051
7052
7053         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>.
7054
7055
7056       </div>
7057     </div>
7058     <div class="padding"></div>
7059
7060     <div class="entry">
7061       <div class="title">
7062         <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>
7063       </div>
7064       <div class="date">
7065          8th February 2015
7066       </div>
7067       <div class="body">
7068         <p>When running a TV station with both broadcast and web stream
7069 distribution, it is useful to know that the stream is working.  As I
7070 am involved in the Norwegian open channel
7071 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a> as part of my
7072 activity in the <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG member
7073 organisation</a>, I wrote a script to use mplayer to connect to a
7074 video stream, pick two images 35 seconds apart and compare them.  If
7075 the images are missing or identical, something is probably wrong with
7076 the stream and an alarm should be triggered.  The script is written as
7077 a Nagios plugin, allowing us to use Nagios to run the check regularly
7078 and sound the alarm when something is wrong.  It is able to detect
7079 both a hanging and a broken video stream.</p>
7080
7081 <p>I just uploaded the code for the script into the
7082 <a href="https://github.com/Frikanalen/frikanalen/blob/master/nagios-plugin/check_video_stream_images">Frikanalen
7083 git repository</a> on github.  If you run a TV station with web
7084 streaming, perhaps you can find it useful too.</p>
7085
7086 <p>Last year, the Frikanalen public TV station transformed into using
7087 only Linux based free software to administrate, schedule and
7088 distribute the TV content.  The
7089 <a href="https://github.com/Frikanalen">source code for the entire TV
7090 station</a> is available from the Github project page.  Everyone can
7091 use it to send their content on national TV, and we provide both a web
7092 GUI and <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/api/">a web API</a> to
7093 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/login/?next=/members/video/">add</a>
7094 and <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/members/plan/">schedule
7095 content</a>.  And thanks to last weeks developer gathering and
7096 following activity, we now have the schedule
7097 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/xmltv/2015/01/01">available as
7098 XMLTV</a> too.  Still a lot of work left to do, especially with the
7099 process to add videos and with the scheduling, so your contribution is
7100 most welcome.  Perhaps you want to set up your own TV station?</p>
7101
7102 <p>Update 2015-02-25: Got a tip from Uninett about their
7103 <a href="https://scm.uninett.no/maalepaaler/qstream/">qstream
7104 monitoring system</a>, which gather connection time, jitter, packet
7105 loss and burst bandwidth usage.  It look useful to check if UDP
7106 streams are working as they should.</p>
7107
7108       </div>
7109       <div class="tags">
7110
7111
7112         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>.
7113
7114
7115       </div>
7116     </div>
7117     <div class="padding"></div>
7118
7119     <div class="entry">
7120       <div class="title">
7121         <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>
7122       </div>
7123       <div class="date">
7124         12th January 2015
7125       </div>
7126       <div class="body">
7127         <p>A few days ago, the <a href="https://www.fsf.org/">Free Software
7128 Foundation</a> announced a new video
7129 <a href="https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/user-liberation-watch-and-share-our-new-video">explaining
7130 Free software</a> in simple terms.  The video named User Liberation is
7131 3 minutes long, and I recommend showing it to everyone you know as a
7132 way to explain what Free Software is all about.  Unfortunately several
7133 of the people I know do not understand English and Spanish, so it did
7134 not make sense to show it to them.</p>
7135
7136 <p>But today I was told that
7137 <a href="https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/user-liberation-watch-and-share-our-new-video">English
7138 subtitles were available</a> and set out to provide Norwegian Bokmål
7139 subtitles based on these.  The result has been sent to FSF and made
7140 available in
7141 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/fsf-video-user-liberation-subtitles">a
7142 git repository</a> provided by Github.  Please let me know if you find
7143 errors or have improvements to the subtitles.</p>
7144
7145 <p>Update 2015-02-03: Since I publised this post, FSF created a
7146 Libreplanet
7147 <a href="http://libreplanet.org/wiki/Group:FSF/User_Liberation_Video_Translation">project
7148 to track subtitles</A> for the video.</p>
7149
7150       </div>
7151       <div class="tags">
7152
7153
7154         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>.
7155
7156
7157       </div>
7158     </div>
7159     <div class="padding"></div>
7160
7161     <div class="entry">
7162       <div class="title">
7163         <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>
7164       </div>
7165       <div class="date">
7166         30th December 2014
7167       </div>
7168       <div class="body">
7169         <p>I am very happy that we in the
7170 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User group (NUUG)</a>,
7171 spearheaded by Marius Halden from NUUG and Matthew Somerville from
7172 <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a>, finally managed to
7173 upgrade the code base for the Norwegian version of
7174 <a href="http://fixmystreet.org/">FixMyStreet</a>.  This
7175 was the first major update since 2011. The refurbished
7176 <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a> is already live, and
7177 seem to hold up the pressure.  The
7178 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Pressemelding__FiksGataMi_i_oppdatert_og_mobilvennlig_klesdrakt.shtml">press
7179 release and announcement</a> went out this morning.</p>
7180
7181 <p>FixMyStreet is a web platform for allowing the citizens to easily
7182 report problems with public infrastructure to the responsible
7183 authorities.  Think of it as a shared mail client with map support,
7184 allowing everyone to see what already was reported and comment on the
7185 reports in public.</p>
7186
7187       </div>
7188       <div class="tags">
7189
7190
7191         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>.
7192
7193
7194       </div>
7195     </div>
7196     <div class="padding"></div>
7197
7198     <div class="entry">
7199       <div class="title">
7200         <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>
7201       </div>
7202       <div class="date">
7203         19th December 2014
7204       </div>
7205       <div class="body">
7206         <p>So, Sony caved in
7207 (<a href="https://twitter.com/RobLowe/status/545338568512917504">according
7208 to Rob Lowe</a>) and demonstrated that America lost its first cyberwar
7209 (<a href="https://twitter.com/newtgingrich/status/545339074975109122">according
7210 to Newt Gingrich</a>).  It should not surprise anyone, after the
7211 whistle blower Edward Snowden documented that the government of USA
7212 and their allies for many years have done their best to make sure the
7213 technology used by its citizens is filled with security holes allowing
7214 the secret services to spy on its own population.  No one in their
7215 right minds could believe that the ability to snoop on the people all
7216 over the globe could only be used by the personnel authorized to do so
7217 by the president of the United States of America.  If the capabilities
7218 are there, they will be used by friend and foe alike, and now they are
7219 being used to bring Sony on its knees.</p>
7220
7221 <p>I doubt it will a lesson learned, and expect USA to lose its next
7222 cyber war too, given how eager the western intelligence communities
7223 (and probably the non-western too, but it is less in the news) seem to
7224 be to continue its current dragnet surveillance practice.</p>
7225
7226 <p>There is a reason why China and others are trying to move away from
7227 Windows to Linux and other alternatives, and it is not to avoid
7228 sending its hard earned dollars to Cayman Islands (or whatever
7229 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_haven">tax haven</a>
7230 Microsoft is using these days to collect the majority of its
7231 income. :)</p>
7232
7233       </div>
7234       <div class="tags">
7235
7236
7237         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>.
7238
7239
7240       </div>
7241     </div>
7242     <div class="padding"></div>
7243
7244     <div class="entry">
7245       <div class="title">
7246         <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>
7247       </div>
7248       <div class="date">
7249         22nd November 2014
7250       </div>
7251       <div class="body">
7252         <p>By now, it is well known that Debian Jessie will not be using
7253 sysvinit as its boot system by default.  But how can one keep using
7254 sysvinit in Jessie?  It is fairly easy, and here are a few recipes,
7255 courtesy of
7256 <a href="http://www.vitavonni.de/blog/201410/2014102101-avoiding-systemd.html">Erich
7257 Schubert</a> and
7258 <a href="http://smcv.pseudorandom.co.uk/2014/still_universal/">Simon
7259 McVittie</a>.
7260
7261 <p>If you already are using Wheezy and want to upgrade to Jessie and
7262 keep sysvinit as your boot system, create a file
7263 <tt>/etc/apt/preferences.d/use-sysvinit</tt> with this content before
7264 you upgrade:</p>
7265
7266 <p><blockquote><pre>
7267 Package: systemd-sysv
7268 Pin: release o=Debian
7269 Pin-Priority: -1
7270 </pre></blockquote><p>
7271
7272 <p>This file content will tell apt and aptitude to not consider
7273 installing systemd-sysv as part of any installation and upgrade
7274 solution when resolving dependencies, and thus tell it to avoid
7275 systemd as a default boot system.  The end result should be that the
7276 upgraded system keep using sysvinit.</p>
7277
7278 <p>If you are installing Jessie for the first time, there is no way to
7279 get sysvinit installed by default (debootstrap used by
7280 debian-installer have no option for this), but one can tell the
7281 installer to switch to sysvinit before the first boot.  Either by
7282 using a kernel argument to the installer, or by adding a line to the
7283 preseed file used.  First, the kernel command line argument:
7284
7285 <p><blockquote><pre>
7286 preseed/late_command="in-target apt-get install --purge -y sysvinit-core"
7287 </pre></blockquote><p>
7288
7289 <p>Next, the line to use in a preseed file:</p>
7290
7291 <p><blockquote><pre>
7292 d-i preseed/late_command string in-target apt-get install -y sysvinit-core
7293 </pre></blockquote><p>
7294
7295 <p>One can of course also do this after the first boot by installing
7296 the sysvinit-core package.</p>
7297
7298 <p>I recommend only using sysvinit if you really need it, as the
7299 sysvinit boot sequence in Debian have several hardware specific bugs
7300 on Linux caused by the fact that it is unpredictable when hardware
7301 devices show up during boot.  But on the other hand, the new default
7302 boot system still have a few rough edges I hope will be fixed before
7303 Jessie is released.</p>
7304
7305 <p>Update 2014-11-26: Inspired by
7306 <ahref="https://www.mirbsd.org/permalinks/wlog-10-tg_e20141125-tg.htm#e20141125-tg_wlog-10-tg">a
7307 blog post by Torsten Glaser</a>, added --purge to the preseed
7308 line.</p>
7309
7310       </div>
7311       <div class="tags">
7312
7313
7314         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>.
7315
7316
7317       </div>
7318     </div>
7319     <div class="padding"></div>
7320
7321     <div class="entry">
7322       <div class="title">
7323         <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>
7324       </div>
7325       <div class="date">
7326         10th November 2014
7327       </div>
7328       <div class="body">
7329         <p>The right to communicate with your friends and family in private,
7330 without anyone snooping, is a right every citicen have in a liberal
7331 democracy.  But this right is under serious attack these days.</p>
7332
7333 <p>A while back it occurred to me that one way to make the dragnet
7334 surveillance conducted by NSA, GCHQ, FRA and others (and confirmed by
7335 the whisleblower Snowden) more expensive for Internet email,
7336 is to deliver all email using SMTP via Tor.  Such SMTP option would be
7337 a nice addition to the FreedomBox project if we could send email
7338 between FreedomBox machines without leaking metadata about the emails
7339 to the people peeking on the wire.  I
7340 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/2014-October/006493.html">proposed
7341 this on the FreedomBox project mailing list in October</a> and got a
7342 lot of useful feedback and suggestions.  It also became obvious to me
7343 that this was not a novel idea, as the same idea was tested and
7344 documented by Johannes Berg as early as 2006, and both
7345 <a href="https://github.com/pagekite/Mailpile/wiki/SMTorP">the
7346 Mailpile</a> and <a href="http://dee.su/cables">the Cables</a> systems
7347 propose a similar method / protocol to pass emails between users.</p>
7348
7349 <p>To implement such system one need to set up a Tor hidden service
7350 providing the SMTP protocol on port 25, and use email addresses
7351 looking like username@hidden-service-name.onion.  With such addresses
7352 the connections to port 25 on hidden-service-name.onion using Tor will
7353 go to the correct SMTP server.  To do this, one need to configure the
7354 Tor daemon to provide the hidden service and the mail server to accept
7355 emails for this .onion domain.  To learn more about Exim configuration
7356 in Debian and test the design provided by Johannes Berg in his FAQ, I
7357 set out yesterday to create a Debian package for making it trivial to
7358 set up such SMTP over Tor service based on Debian.  Getting it to work
7359 were fairly easy, and
7360 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/exim4-smtorp">the
7361 source code for the Debian package</a> is available from github.  I
7362 plan to move it into Debian if further testing prove this to be a
7363 useful approach.</p>
7364
7365 <p>If you want to test this, set up a blank Debian machine without any
7366 mail system installed (or run <tt>apt-get purge exim4-config</tt> to
7367 get rid of exim4).  Install tor, clone the git repository mentioned
7368 above, build the deb and install it on the machine.  Next, run
7369 <tt>/usr/lib/exim4-smtorp/setup-exim-hidden-service</tt> and follow
7370 the instructions to get the service up and running.  Restart tor and
7371 exim when it is done, and test mail delivery using swaks like
7372 this:</p>
7373
7374 <p><blockquote><pre>
7375 torsocks swaks --server dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion \
7376   --to fbx@dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion
7377 </pre></blockquote></p>
7378
7379 <p>This will test the SMTP delivery using tor.  Replace the email
7380 address with your own address to test your server. :)</p>
7381
7382 <p>The setup procedure is still to complex, and I hope it can be made
7383 easier and more automatic.  Especially the tor setup need more work.
7384 Also, the package include a tor-smtp tool written in C, but its task
7385 should probably be rewritten in some script language to make the deb
7386 architecture independent.  It would probably also make the code easier
7387 to review.  The tor-smtp tool currently need to listen on a socket for
7388 exim to talk to it and is started using xinetd.  It would be better if
7389 no daemon and no socket is needed.  I suspect it is possible to get
7390 exim to run a command line tool for delivery instead of talking to a
7391 socket, and hope to figure out how in a future version of this
7392 system.</p>
7393
7394 <p>Until I wipe my test machine, I can be reached using the
7395 <tt>fbx@dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion</tt> mail address, deliverable over
7396 SMTorP. :)</p>
7397
7398       </div>
7399       <div class="tags">
7400
7401
7402         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>.
7403
7404
7405       </div>
7406     </div>
7407     <div class="padding"></div>
7408
7409     <div class="entry">
7410       <div class="title">
7411         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Jessie_based_Debian_Edu_released__alpha0_.html">First Jessie based Debian Edu released (alpha0)</a>
7412       </div>
7413       <div class="date">
7414         27th October 2014
7415       </div>
7416       <div class="body">
7417         <p>I am happy to report that I on behalf of the Debian Edu team just
7418 sent out
7419 <a href="https://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2014/10/msg00000.html">this
7420 announcement</a>:</p>
7421
7422 <pre>
7423 The Debian Edu Team is pleased to announce the release of Debian Edu
7424 Jessie 8.0+edu0~alpha0
7425
7426 Debian Edu is a complete operating system for schools. Through its
7427 various installation profiles you can install servers, workstations
7428 and laptops which will work together on the school network. With
7429 Debian Edu, the teachers themselves or their technical support can
7430 roll out a complete multi-user multi-machine study environment within
7431 hours or a few days. Debian Edu comes with hundreds of applications
7432 pre-installed, but you can always add more packages from Debian.
7433
7434 For those who want to give Debian Edu Jessie a try, download and
7435 installation instructions are available, including detailed
7436 instructions in the manual[1] explaining the first steps, such as
7437 setting up a network or adding users. Please note that the password
7438 for the user your prompted for during installation must have a length
7439 of at least 5 characters!
7440
7441  [1] &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie">https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie</a> &gt;
7442
7443 Would you like to give your school's computer a longer life? Are you
7444 tired of sneaker administration, running from computer to computer
7445 reinstalling the operating system? Would you like to administrate all
7446 the computers in your school using only a couple of hours every week?
7447 Check out Debian Edu Jessie!
7448
7449 Skolelinux is used by at least two hundred schools all over the world,
7450 mostly in Germany and Norway.
7451
7452 About Debian Edu and Skolelinux
7453 ===============================
7454
7455 Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux[2], is a Linux distribution based
7456 on Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
7457 configured school network. Immediately after installation a school
7458 server running all services needed for a school network is set up just
7459 waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
7460 Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
7461 initial installation of the main server from CD or USB stick all other
7462 machines can be installed via the network.  The provided school server
7463 provides LDAP database and Kerberos authentication service,
7464 centralized home directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other
7465 services.  The desktop contains more than 60 educational software
7466 packages[3] and more are available from the Debian archive, and
7467 schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE, Xfce and MATE desktop
7468 environment.
7469
7470  [2] &lt;URL: <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">http://www.skolelinux.org/</a> &gt;
7471  [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;
7472
7473 Full release notes and manual
7474 =============================
7475
7476 Below the download URLs there is a list of some of the new features
7477 and bugfixes of Debian Edu 8.0+edu0~alpha0 Codename Jessie. The full
7478 list is part of the manual. (See the feature list in the manual[4] for
7479 the English version.) For some languages manual translations are
7480 available, see the manual translation overview[5].
7481
7482  [4] &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie/Features">https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie/Features</a> &gt;
7483  [5] &lt;URL: <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/">http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/</a> &gt;
7484
7485 Where to get it
7486 ---------------
7487
7488 To download the multiarch netinstall CD release (624 MiB) you can use
7489
7490  * <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>
7491  * <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>
7492  * rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~alpha0-CD.iso .
7493
7494 The SHA1SUM of this image is: 361188818e036ce67280a572f757de82ebfeb095
7495
7496 New features for Debian Edu 8.0+edu0~alpha0 Codename Jessie released 2014-10-27
7497 ===============================================================================
7498
7499
7500 Installation changes
7501 --------------------
7502
7503  * PXE installation now installs firmware automatically for the hardware present.
7504
7505 Software updates
7506 ----------------
7507
7508 Everything which is new in Debian Jessie 8.0, eg:
7509
7510  * Linux kernel 3.16.x
7511  * Desktop environments KDE "Plasma" 4.11.12, GNOME 3.14, Xfce 4.10,
7512    LXDE 0.5.6 and MATE 1.8 (KDE "Plasma" is installed by default; to
7513    choose one of the others see manual.)
7514  * the browsers Iceweasel 31 ESR and Chromium 38
7515  * !LibreOffice 4.3.3
7516  * GOsa 2.7.4
7517  * LTSP 5.5.4
7518  * CUPS print system 1.7.5
7519  * new boot framework: systemd
7520  * Educational toolbox GCompris 14.07
7521  * Music creator Rosegarden 14.02
7522  * Image editor Gimp 2.8.14
7523  * Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.13.0
7524  * golearn 0.9
7525  * tuxpaint 0.9.22
7526  * New version of debian-installer from Debian Jessie.
7527  * Debian Jessie includes about 42000 packages available for
7528    installation.
7529  * More information about Debian Jessie 8.0 is provided in the release
7530    notes[6] and the installation manual[7].
7531
7532  [6] &lt;URL: <a href="http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/releasenotes">http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/releasenotes</a> &gt;
7533  [7] &lt;URL: <a href="http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/installmanual">http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/installmanual</a> &gt;
7534
7535 Fixed bugs
7536 ----------
7537
7538  * Inserting incorrect DNS information in Gosa will no longer break
7539    DNS completely, but instead stop DNS updates until the incorrect
7540    information is corrected (Debian bug #710362)
7541  * and many others.
7542
7543 Documentation and translation updates
7544 -------------------------------------
7545
7546  * The Debian Edu Jessie Manual is fully translated to German, French,
7547    Italian, Danish and Dutch. Partly translated versions exist for
7548    Norwegian Bokmal and Spanish.
7549
7550 Other changes
7551 -------------
7552
7553  * Due to new Squid settings, powering off or rebooting the main
7554    server takes more time.
7555  * To manage printers localhost:631 has to be used, currently www:631
7556    doesn't work.
7557
7558 Regressions / known problems
7559 ----------------------------
7560
7561  * Installing LTSP chroot fails with a bug related to eatmydata about
7562    exim4-config failing to run its postinst (see Debian bug #765694
7563    and Debian bug #762103).
7564  * Munin collection is not properly configured on clients (Debian bug
7565    #764594).  The fix is available in a newer version of munin-node.
7566  * PXE setup for Main Server and Thin Client Server setup does not
7567    work when installing on a machine without direct Internet access.
7568    Will be fixed when Debian bug #766960 is fixed in Jessie.
7569
7570 See the status page[8] for the complete list.
7571
7572  [8] &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie">https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie</a> &gt;
7573
7574 How to report bugs
7575 ------------------
7576
7577 &lt;URL: <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a> &gt;
7578
7579 About Debian
7580 ============
7581
7582 The Debian Project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly
7583 free community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of
7584 the largest and most influential open source projects. Thousands of
7585 volunteers from all over the world work together to create and
7586 maintain Debian software. Available in 70 languages, and supporting a
7587 huge range of computer types, Debian calls itself the universal
7588 operating system.
7589
7590 Contact Information
7591 For further information, please visit the Debian web pages[9] or send
7592 mail to press@debian.org.
7593
7594  [9] &lt;URL: <a href="http://www.debian.org/">http://www.debian.org/</a> &gt;
7595 </pre>
7596
7597       </div>
7598       <div class="tags">
7599
7600
7601         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>.
7602
7603
7604       </div>
7605     </div>
7606     <div class="padding"></div>
7607
7608     <div class="entry">
7609       <div class="title">
7610         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/I_spent_last_weekend_recording_MakerCon_Nordic.html">I spent last weekend recording MakerCon Nordic</a>
7611       </div>
7612       <div class="date">
7613         23rd October 2014
7614       </div>
7615       <div class="body">
7616         <p>I spent last weekend at <a href="http://www.makercon.no/">Makercon
7617 Nordic</a>, a great conference and workshop for makers in Norway and
7618 the surrounding countries.  I had volunteered on behalf of the
7619 Norwegian Unix Users Group (NUUG) to video record the talks, and we
7620 had a great and exhausting time recording the entire day, two days in
7621 a row.  There were only two of us, Hans-Petter and me, and we used the
7622 regular video equipment for NUUG, with a
7623 <a href="http://dvswitch.alioth.debian.org/wiki/">dvswitch</a>, a
7624 camera and a VGA to DV convert box, and mixed video and slides
7625 live.</p>
7626
7627 <p>Hans-Petter did the post-processing, consisting of uploading the
7628 around 180 GiB of raw video to Youtube, and the result is
7629 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/MakerConNordic/">now becoming
7630 public</a> on the MakerConNordic account.  The videos have the license
7631 NUUG always use on our recordings, which is
7632 <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/no/">Creative
7633 Commons Navngivelse-Del på samme vilkår 3.0 Norge</a>.  Many great
7634 talks available.  Check it out! :)</p>
7635
7636       </div>
7637       <div class="tags">
7638
7639
7640         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>.
7641
7642
7643       </div>
7644     </div>
7645     <div class="padding"></div>
7646
7647     <div class="entry">
7648       <div class="title">
7649         <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>
7650       </div>
7651       <div class="date">
7652         22nd October 2014
7653       </div>
7654       <div class="body">
7655         <p>If you ever had to moderate a mailman list, like the ones on
7656 alioth.debian.org, you know the web interface is fairly slow to
7657 operate.  First you visit one web page, enter the moderation password
7658 and get a new page shown with a list of all the messages to moderate
7659 and various options for each email address.  This take a while for
7660 every list you moderate, and you need to do it regularly to do a good
7661 job as a list moderator.  But there is a quick alternative,
7662 <a href="http://heim.ifi.uio.no/kjetilho/hacks/#listadmin">the
7663 listadmin program</a>.  It allow you to check lists for new messages
7664 to moderate in a fraction of a second.  Here is a test run on two
7665 lists I recently took over:</p>
7666
7667 <p><blockquote><pre>
7668 % time listadmin xiph
7669 fetching data for pkg-xiph-commits@lists.alioth.debian.org ... nothing in queue
7670 fetching data for pkg-xiph-maint@lists.alioth.debian.org ... nothing in queue
7671
7672 real    0m1.709s
7673 user    0m0.232s
7674 sys     0m0.012s
7675 %
7676 </pre></blockquote></p>
7677
7678 <p>In 1.7 seconds I had checked two mailing lists and confirmed that
7679 there are no message in the moderation queue.  Every morning I
7680 currently moderate 68 mailman lists, and it normally take around two
7681 minutes.  When I took over the two pkg-xiph lists above a few days
7682 ago, there were 400 emails waiting in the moderator queue.  It took me
7683 less than 15 minutes to process them all using the listadmin
7684 program.</p>
7685
7686 <p>If you install
7687 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/listadmin">the listadmin
7688 package</a> from Debian and create a file <tt>~/.listadmin.ini</tt>
7689 with content like this, the moderation task is a breeze:</p>
7690
7691 <p><blockquote><pre>
7692 username username@example.org
7693 spamlevel 23
7694 default discard
7695 discard_if_reason "Posting restricted to members only. Remove us from your mail list."
7696
7697 password secret
7698 adminurl https://{domain}/mailman/admindb/{list}
7699 mailman-list@lists.example.com
7700
7701 password hidden
7702 other-list@otherserver.example.org
7703 </pre></blockquote></p>
7704
7705 <p>There are other options to set as well.  Check the manual page to
7706 learn the details.</p>
7707
7708 <p>If you are forced to moderate lists on a mailman installation where
7709 the SSL certificate is self signed or not properly signed by a
7710 generally accepted signing authority, you can set a environment
7711 variable when calling listadmin to disable SSL verification:</p>
7712
7713 <p><blockquote><pre>
7714 PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=0 listadmin
7715 </pre></blockquote></p>
7716
7717 <p>If you want to moderate a subset of the lists you take care of, you
7718 can provide an argument to the listadmin script like I do in the
7719 initial screen dump (the xiph argument).  Using an argument, only
7720 lists matching the argument string will be processed.  This make it
7721 quick to accept messages if you notice the moderation request in your
7722 email.</p>
7723
7724 <p>Without the listadmin program, I would never be the moderator of 68
7725 mailing lists, as I simply do not have time to spend on that if the
7726 process was any slower. The listadmin program have saved me hours of
7727 time I could spend elsewhere over the years.  It truly is nice free
7728 software.</p>
7729
7730 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
7731 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
7732 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
7733
7734 <p>Update 2014-10-27: Added missing 'username' statement in
7735 configuration example.  Also, I've been told that the
7736 PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=0 setting do not work for everyone.  Not
7737 sure why.</p>
7738
7739       </div>
7740       <div class="tags">
7741
7742
7743         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>.
7744
7745
7746       </div>
7747     </div>
7748     <div class="padding"></div>
7749
7750     <div class="entry">
7751       <div class="title">
7752         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Jessie__PXE_and_automatic_firmware_installation.html">Debian Jessie, PXE and automatic firmware installation</a>
7753       </div>
7754       <div class="date">
7755         17th October 2014
7756       </div>
7757       <div class="body">
7758         <p>When PXE installing laptops with Debian, I often run into the
7759 problem that the WiFi card require some firmware to work properly.
7760 And it has been a pain to fix this using preseeding in Debian.
7761 Normally something more is needed.  But thanks to
7762 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/i/isenkram.html">my isenkram
7763 package</a> and its recent tasksel extension, it has now become easy
7764 to do this using simple preseeding.</p>
7765
7766 <p>The isenkram-cli package provide tasksel tasks which will install
7767 firmware for the hardware found in the machine (actually, requested by
7768 the kernel modules for the hardware).  (It can also install user space
7769 programs supporting the hardware detected, but that is not the focus
7770 of this story.)</p>
7771
7772 <p>To get this working in the default installation, two preeseding
7773 values are needed.  First, the isenkram-cli package must be installed
7774 into the target chroot (aka the hard drive) before tasksel is executed
7775 in the pkgsel step of the debian-installer system.  This is done by
7776 preseeding the base-installer/includes debconf value to include the
7777 isenkram-cli package.  The package name is next passed to debootstrap
7778 for installation.  With the isenkram-cli package in place, tasksel
7779 will automatically use the isenkram tasks to detect hardware specific
7780 packages for the machine being installed and install them, because
7781 isenkram-cli contain tasksel tasks.</p>
7782
7783 <p>Second, one need to enable the non-free APT repository, because
7784 most firmware unfortunately is non-free.  This is done by preseeding
7785 the apt-mirror-setup step.  This is unfortunate, but for a lot of
7786 hardware it is the only option in Debian.</p>
7787
7788 <p>The end result is two lines needed in your preseeding file to get
7789 firmware installed automatically by the installer:</p>
7790
7791 <p><blockquote><pre>
7792 base-installer base-installer/includes string isenkram-cli
7793 apt-mirror-setup apt-setup/non-free boolean true
7794 </pre></blockquote></p>
7795
7796 <p>The current version of isenkram-cli in testing/jessie will install
7797 both firmware and user space packages when using this method.  It also
7798 do not work well, so use version 0.15 or later.  Installing both
7799 firmware and user space packages might give you a bit more than you
7800 want, so I decided to split the tasksel task in two, one for firmware
7801 and one for user space programs.  The firmware task is enabled by
7802 default, while the one for user space programs is not.  This split is
7803 implemented in the package currently in unstable.</p>
7804
7805 <p>If you decide to give this a go, please let me know (via email) how
7806 this recipe work for you. :)</p>
7807
7808 <p>So, I bet you are wondering, how can this work.  First and
7809 foremost, it work because tasksel is modular, and driven by whatever
7810 files it find in /usr/lib/tasksel/ and /usr/share/tasksel/.  So the
7811 isenkram-cli package place two files for tasksel to find.  First there
7812 is the task description file (/usr/share/tasksel/descs/isenkram.desc):</p>
7813
7814 <p><blockquote><pre>
7815 Task: isenkram-packages
7816 Section: hardware
7817 Description: Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)
7818  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific packages are
7819  proposed.
7820 Test-new-install: show show
7821 Relevance: 8
7822 Packages: for-current-hardware
7823
7824 Task: isenkram-firmware
7825 Section: hardware
7826 Description: Hardware specific firmware packages (autodetected by isenkram)
7827  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific firmware
7828  packages are proposed.
7829 Test-new-install: mark show
7830 Relevance: 8
7831 Packages: for-current-hardware-firmware
7832 </pre></blockquote></p>
7833
7834 <p>The key parts are Test-new-install which indicate how the task
7835 should be handled and the Packages line referencing to a script in
7836 /usr/lib/tasksel/packages/.  The scripts use other scripts to get a
7837 list of packages to install.  The for-current-hardware-firmware script
7838 look like this to list relevant firmware for the machine:
7839
7840 <p><blockquote><pre>
7841 #!/bin/sh
7842 #
7843 PATH=/usr/sbin:$PATH
7844 export PATH
7845 isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
7846 </pre></blockquote></p>
7847
7848 <p>With those two pieces in place, the firmware is installed by
7849 tasksel during the normal d-i run. :)</p>
7850
7851 <p>If you want to test what tasksel will install when isenkram-cli is
7852 installed, run <tt>DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical tasksel --test
7853 --new-install</tt> to get the list of packages that tasksel would
7854 install.</p>
7855
7856 <p><a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/">Debian Edu</a> will be
7857 pilots in testing this feature, as isenkram is used there now to
7858 install firmware, replacing the earlier scripts.</p>
7859
7860       </div>
7861       <div class="tags">
7862
7863
7864         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>.
7865
7866
7867       </div>
7868     </div>
7869     <div class="padding"></div>
7870
7871     <div class="entry">
7872       <div class="title">
7873         <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>
7874       </div>
7875       <div class="date">
7876          4th October 2014
7877       </div>
7878       <div class="body">
7879         <p>Today I came across an unexpected Ubuntu boot screen.  Above the
7880 bread shelf on the ICA shop at Storo in Oslo, the grub menu of Ubuntu
7881 with Linux kernel 3.2.0-23 (ie probably version 12.04 LTS) was stuck
7882 on a screen normally showing the bread types and prizes:</p>
7883
7884 <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2014-10-04-ubuntu-ica-storo-crop.jpeg"></p>
7885
7886 <p>If it had booted as it was supposed to, I would never had known
7887 about this hidden Linux installation.  It is interesting what
7888 <a href="http://revealingerrors.com/">errors can reveal</a>.</p>
7889
7890       </div>
7891       <div class="tags">
7892
7893
7894         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>.
7895
7896
7897       </div>
7898     </div>
7899     <div class="padding"></div>
7900
7901     <div class="entry">
7902       <div class="title">
7903         <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>
7904       </div>
7905       <div class="date">
7906          4th October 2014
7907       </div>
7908       <div class="body">
7909         <p>The <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/">lsdvd project</a>
7910 got a new set of developers a few weeks ago, after the original
7911 developer decided to step down and pass the project to fresh blood.
7912 This project is now maintained by Petter Reinholdtsen and Steve
7913 Dibb.</p>
7914
7915 <p>I just wrapped up
7916 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/mailman/message/32896061/">a
7917 new lsdvd release</a>, available in git or from
7918 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/projects/lsdvd/files/lsdvd/">the
7919 download page</a>.  This is the changelog dated 2014-10-03 for version
7920 0.17.</p>
7921
7922 <ul>
7923
7924  <li>Ignore 'phantom' audio, subtitle tracks</li>
7925  <li>Check for garbage in the program chains, which indicate that a track is
7926    non-existant, to work around additional copy protection</li>
7927  <li>Fix displaying content type for audio tracks, subtitles</li>
7928  <li>Fix pallete display of first entry</li>
7929  <li>Fix include orders</li>
7930  <li>Ignore read errors in titles that would not be displayed anyway</li>
7931  <li>Fix the chapter count</li>
7932  <li>Make sure the array size and the array limit used when initialising
7933    the palette size is the same.</li>
7934  <li>Fix array printing.</li>
7935  <li>Correct subsecond calculations.</li>
7936  <li>Add sector information to the output format.</li>
7937  <li>Clean up code to be closer to ANSI C and compile without warnings
7938    with more GCC compiler warnings.</li>
7939
7940 </ul>
7941
7942 <p>This change bring together patches for lsdvd in use in various
7943 Linux and Unix distributions, as well as patches submitted to the
7944 project the last nine years.  Please check it out. :)</p>
7945
7946       </div>
7947       <div class="tags">
7948
7949
7950         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>.
7951
7952
7953       </div>
7954     </div>
7955     <div class="padding"></div>
7956
7957     <div class="entry">
7958       <div class="title">
7959         <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>
7960       </div>
7961       <div class="date">
7962         26th September 2014
7963       </div>
7964       <div class="body">
7965         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
7966 project</a> provide a Linux solution for schools, including a
7967 powerful desktop with education software, a central server providing
7968 web pages, user database, user home directories, central login and PXE
7969 boot of both  clients without disk and the installation to install Debian
7970 Edu on machines with disk (and a few other services perhaps to small
7971 to mention here).  We in the Debian Edu team are currently working on
7972 the Jessie based version, trying to get everything in shape before the
7973 freeze, to avoid having to maintain our own package repository in the
7974 future.  The
7975 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie">current
7976 status</a> can be seen on the Debian wiki, and there is still heaps of
7977 work left.  Some fatal problems block testing, breaking the installer,
7978 but it is possible to work around these to get anyway.  Here is a
7979 recipe on how to get the installation limping along.</p>
7980
7981 <p>First, download the test ISO via
7982 <a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.no/cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso">ftp</a>,
7983 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.no/cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso">http</a>
7984 or rsync (use
7985 ftp.skolelinux.org::cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso).
7986 The ISO build was broken on Tuesday, so we do not get a new ISO every
7987 12 hours or so, but thankfully the ISO we already got we are able to
7988 install with some tweaking.</p>
7989
7990 <p>When you get to the Debian Edu profile question, go to tty2
7991 (use Alt-Ctrl-F2), run</p>
7992
7993 <p><blockquote><pre>
7994 nano /usr/bin/edu-eatmydata-install
7995 </pre></blockquote></p>
7996
7997 <p>and add 'exit 0' as the second line, disabling the eatmydata
7998 optimization.  Return to the installation, select the profile you want
7999 and continue.  Without this change, exim4-config will fail to install
8000 due to a known bug in eatmydata.</p>
8001
8002 <p>When you get the grub question at the end, answer /dev/sda (or if
8003 this do not work, figure out what your correct value would be.  All my
8004 test machines need /dev/sda, so I have no advice if it do not fit
8005 your need.</p>
8006
8007 <p>If you installed a profile including a graphical desktop, log in as
8008 root after the initial boot from hard drive, and install the
8009 education-desktop-XXX metapackage.  XXX can be kde, gnome, lxde, xfce
8010 or mate.  If you want several desktop options, install more than one
8011 metapackage.  Once this is done, reboot and you should have a working
8012 graphical login screen.  This workaround should no longer be needed
8013 once the education-tasks package version 1.801 enter testing in two
8014 days.</p>
8015
8016 <p>I believe the ISO build will start working on two days when the new
8017 tasksel package enter testing and Steve McIntyre get a chance to
8018 update the debian-cd git repository.  The eatmydata, grub and desktop
8019 issues are already fixed in unstable and testing, and should show up
8020 on the ISO as soon as the ISO build start working again.  Well the
8021 eatmydata optimization is really just disabled.  The proper fix
8022 require an upload by the eatmydata maintainer applying the patch
8023 provided in bug <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/702711">#702711</a>.
8024 The rest have proper fixes in unstable.</p>
8025
8026 <p>I hope this get you going with the installation testing, as we are
8027 quickly running out of time trying to get our Jessie based
8028 installation ready before the distribution freeze in a month.</p>
8029
8030       </div>
8031       <div class="tags">
8032
8033
8034         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>.
8035
8036
8037       </div>
8038     </div>
8039     <div class="padding"></div>
8040
8041     <div class="entry">
8042       <div class="title">
8043         <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>
8044       </div>
8045       <div class="date">
8046         25th September 2014
8047       </div>
8048       <div class="body">
8049         <p>I use the <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/">lsdvd tool</a>
8050 to handle my fairly large DVD collection.  It is a nice command line
8051 tool to get details about a DVD, like title, tracks, track length,
8052 etc, in XML, Perl or human readable format.  But lsdvd have not seen
8053 any new development since 2006 and had a few irritating bugs affecting
8054 its use with some DVDs.  Upstream seemed to be dead, and in January I
8055 sent a small probe asking for a version control repository for the
8056 project, without any reply.  But I use it regularly and would like to
8057 get <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/lsdvd">an updated version
8058 into Debian</a>.  So two weeks ago I tried harder to get in touch with
8059 the project admin, and after getting a reply from him explaining that
8060 he was no longer interested in the project, I asked if I could take
8061 over.  And yesterday, I became project admin.</p>
8062
8063 <p>I've been in touch with a Gentoo developer and the Debian
8064 maintainer interested in joining forces to maintain the upstream
8065 project, and I hope we can get a new release out fairly quickly,
8066 collecting the patches spread around on the internet into on place.
8067 I've added the relevant Debian patches to the freshly created git
8068 repository, and expect the Gentoo patches to make it too.  If you got
8069 a DVD collection and care about command line tools, check out
8070 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/git/ci/master/tree/">the git source</a> and join
8071 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/mailman/">the project mailing
8072 list</a>. :)</p>
8073
8074       </div>
8075       <div class="tags">
8076
8077
8078         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>.
8079
8080
8081       </div>
8082     </div>
8083     <div class="padding"></div>
8084
8085     <div class="entry">
8086       <div class="title">
8087         <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>
8088       </div>
8089       <div class="date">
8090         16th September 2014
8091       </div>
8092       <div class="body">
8093         <p>The <a href="https://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> installer could be
8094 a lot quicker.  When we install more than 2000 packages in
8095 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a> using
8096 tasksel in the installer, unpacking the binary packages take forever.
8097 A part of the slow I/O issue was discussed in
8098 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/613428">bug #613428</a> about too
8099 much file system sync-ing done by dpkg, which is the package
8100 responsible for unpacking the binary packages.  Other parts (like code
8101 executed by postinst scripts) might also sync to disk during
8102 installation.  All this sync-ing to disk do not really make sense to
8103 me.  If the machine crash half-way through, I start over, I do not try
8104 to salvage the half installed system.  So the failure sync-ing is
8105 supposed to protect against, hardware or system crash, is not really
8106 relevant while the installer is running.</p>
8107
8108 <p>A few days ago, I thought of a way to get rid of all the file
8109 system sync()-ing in a fairly non-intrusive way, without the need to
8110 change the code in several packages.  The idea is not new, but I have
8111 not heard anyone propose the approach using dpkg-divert before.  It
8112 depend on the small and clever package
8113 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/eatmydata">eatmydata</a>, which
8114 uses LD_PRELOAD to replace the system functions for syncing data to
8115 disk with functions doing nothing, thus allowing programs to live
8116 dangerous while speeding up disk I/O significantly.  Instead of
8117 modifying the implementation of dpkg, apt and tasksel (which are the
8118 packages responsible for selecting, fetching and installing packages),
8119 it occurred to me that we could just divert the programs away, replace
8120 them with a simple shell wrapper calling
8121 "eatmydata&nbsp;$program&nbsp;$@", to get the same effect.
8122 Two days ago I decided to test the idea, and wrapped up a simple
8123 implementation for the Debian Edu udeb.</p>
8124
8125 <p>The effect was stunning.  In my first test it reduced the running
8126 time of the pkgsel step (installing tasks) from 64 to less than 44
8127 minutes (20 minutes shaved off the installation) on an old Dell
8128 Latitude D505 machine.  I am not quite sure what the optimised time
8129 would have been, as I messed up the testing a bit, causing the debconf
8130 priority to get low enough for two questions to pop up during
8131 installation.  As soon as I saw the questions I moved the installation
8132 along, but do not know how long the question were holding up the
8133 installation.  I did some more measurements using Debian Edu Jessie,
8134 and got these results.  The time measured is the time stamp in
8135 /var/log/syslog between the "pkgsel: starting tasksel" and the
8136 "pkgsel: finishing up" lines, if you want to do the same measurement
8137 yourself.  In Debian Edu, the tasksel dialog do not show up, and the
8138 timing thus do not depend on how quickly the user handle the tasksel
8139 dialog.</p>
8140
8141 <p><table>
8142
8143 <tr>
8144 <th>Machine/setup</th>
8145 <th>Original tasksel</th>
8146 <th>Optimised tasksel</th>
8147 <th>Reduction</th>
8148 </tr>
8149
8150 <tr>
8151 <td>Latitude D505 Main+LTSP LXDE</td>
8152 <td>64 min (07:46-08:50)</td>
8153 <td><44 min (11:27-12:11)</td>
8154 <td>>20 min 18%</td>
8155 </tr>
8156
8157 <tr>
8158 <td>Latitude D505 Roaming LXDE</td>
8159 <td>57 min (08:48-09:45)</td>
8160 <td>34 min (07:43-08:17)</td>
8161 <td>23 min 40%</td>
8162 </tr>
8163
8164 <tr>
8165 <td>Latitude D505 Minimal</td>
8166 <td>22 min (10:37-10:59)</td>
8167 <td>11 min (11:16-11:27)</td>
8168 <td>11 min 50%</td>
8169 </tr>
8170
8171 <tr>
8172 <td>Thinkpad X200 Minimal</td>
8173 <td>6 min (08:19-08:25)</td>
8174 <td>4 min (08:04-08:08)</td>
8175 <td>2 min 33%</td>
8176 </tr>
8177
8178 <tr>
8179 <td>Thinkpad X200 Roaming KDE</td>
8180 <td>19 min (09:21-09:40)</td>
8181 <td>15 min (10:25-10:40)</td>
8182 <td>4 min 21%</td>
8183 </tr>
8184
8185 </table></p>
8186
8187 <p>The test is done using a netinst ISO on a USB stick, so some of the
8188 time is spent downloading packages.  The connection to the Internet
8189 was 100Mbit/s during testing, so downloading should not be a
8190 significant factor in the measurement.  Download typically took a few
8191 seconds to a few minutes, depending on the amount of packages being
8192 installed.</p>
8193
8194 <p>The speedup is implemented by using two hooks in
8195 <a href="https://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/">Debian
8196 Installer</a>, the pre-pkgsel.d hook to set up the diverts, and the
8197 finish-install.d hook to remove the divert at the end of the
8198 installation.  I picked the pre-pkgsel.d hook instead of the
8199 post-base-installer.d hook because I test using an ISO without the
8200 eatmydata package included, and the post-base-installer.d hook in
8201 Debian Edu can only operate on packages included in the ISO.  The
8202 negative effect of this is that I am unable to activate this
8203 optimization for the kernel installation step in d-i.  If the code is
8204 moved to the post-base-installer.d hook, the speedup would be larger
8205 for the entire installation.</p>
8206
8207 <p>I've implemented this in the
8208 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/debian-edu-install">debian-edu-install</a>
8209 git repository, and plan to provide the optimization as part of the
8210 Debian Edu installation.  If you want to test this yourself, you can
8211 create two files in the installer (or in an udeb).  One shell script
8212 need do go into /usr/lib/pre-pkgsel.d/, with content like this:</p>
8213
8214 <p><blockquote><pre>
8215 #!/bin/sh
8216 set -e
8217 . /usr/share/debconf/confmodule
8218 info() {
8219     logger -t my-pkgsel "info: $*"
8220 }
8221 error() {
8222     logger -t my-pkgsel "error: $*"
8223 }
8224 override_install() {
8225     apt-install eatmydata || true
8226     if [ -x /target/usr/bin/eatmydata ] ; then
8227         for bin in dpkg apt-get aptitude tasksel ; do
8228             file=/usr/bin/$bin
8229             # Test that the file exist and have not been diverted already.
8230             if [ -f /target$file ] ; then
8231                 info "diverting $file using eatmydata"
8232                 printf "#!/bin/sh\neatmydata $bin.distrib \"\$@\"\n" \
8233                     > /target$file.edu
8234                 chmod 755 /target$file.edu
8235                 in-target dpkg-divert --package debian-edu-config \
8236                     --rename --quiet --add $file
8237                 ln -sf ./$bin.edu /target$file
8238             else
8239                 error "unable to divert $file, as it is missing."
8240             fi
8241         done
8242     else
8243         error "unable to find /usr/bin/eatmydata after installing the eatmydata pacage"
8244     fi
8245 }
8246
8247 override_install
8248 </pre></blockquote></p>
8249
8250 <p>To clean up, another shell script should go into
8251 /usr/lib/finish-install.d/ with code like this:
8252
8253 <p><blockquote><pre>
8254 #! /bin/sh -e
8255 . /usr/share/debconf/confmodule
8256 error() {
8257     logger -t my-finish-install "error: $@"
8258 }
8259 remove_install_override() {
8260     for bin in dpkg apt-get aptitude tasksel ; do
8261         file=/usr/bin/$bin
8262         if [ -x /target$file.edu ] ; then
8263             rm /target$file
8264             in-target dpkg-divert --package debian-edu-config \
8265                 --rename --quiet --remove $file
8266             rm /target$file.edu
8267         else
8268             error "Missing divert for $file."
8269         fi
8270     done
8271     sync # Flush file buffers before continuing
8272 }
8273
8274 remove_install_override
8275 </pre></blockquote></p>
8276
8277 <p>In Debian Edu, I placed both code fragments in a separate script
8278 edu-eatmydata-install and call it from the pre-pkgsel.d and
8279 finish-install.d scripts.</p>
8280
8281 <p>By now you might ask if this change should get into the normal
8282 Debian installer too?  I suspect it should, but am not sure the
8283 current debian-installer coordinators find it useful enough.  It also
8284 depend on the side effects of the change.  I'm not aware of any, but I
8285 guess we will see if the change is safe after some more testing.
8286 Perhaps there is some package in Debian depending on sync() and
8287 fsync() having effect?  Perhaps it should go into its own udeb, to
8288 allow those of us wanting to enable it to do so without affecting
8289 everyone.</p>
8290
8291 <p>Update 2014-09-24: Since a few days ago, enabling this optimization
8292 will break installation of all programs using gnutls because of
8293 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/702711">bug #702711</a>.  An updated
8294 eatmydata package in Debian will solve it.</p>
8295
8296 <p>Update 2014-10-17: The bug mentioned above is fixed in testing and
8297 the optimization work again.  And I have discovered that the
8298 dpkg-divert trick is not really needed and implemented a slightly
8299 simpler approach as part of the debian-edu-install package.  See
8300 tools/edu-eatmydata-install in the source package.</p>
8301
8302 <p>Update 2014-11-11: Unfortunately, a new
8303 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/765738">bug #765738</a> in eatmydata only
8304 triggering on i386 made it into testing, and broke this installation
8305 optimization again.  If <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/768893">unblock
8306 request 768893</a> is accepted, it should be working again.</p>
8307
8308       </div>
8309       <div class="tags">
8310
8311
8312         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>.
8313
8314
8315       </div>
8316     </div>
8317     <div class="padding"></div>
8318
8319     <div class="entry">
8320       <div class="title">
8321         <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>
8322       </div>
8323       <div class="date">
8324         10th September 2014
8325       </div>
8326       <div class="body">
8327         <p>Yesterday, I had the pleasure of attending a talk with the
8328 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a> about
8329 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20140909-sks-keyservers/">the
8330 OpenPGP keyserver pool sks-keyservers.net</a>, and was very happy to
8331 learn that there is a large set of publicly available key servers to
8332 use when looking for peoples public key.  So far I have used
8333 subkeys.pgp.net, and some times wwwkeys.nl.pgp.net when the former
8334 were misbehaving, but those days are ended.  The servers I have used
8335 up until yesterday have been slow and some times unavailable.  I hope
8336 those problems are gone now.</p>
8337
8338 <p>Behind the round robin DNS entry of the
8339 <a href="https://sks-keyservers.net/">sks-keyservers.net</a> service
8340 there is a pool of more than 100 keyservers which are checked every
8341 day to ensure they are well connected and up to date.  It must be
8342 better than what I have used so far. :)</p>
8343
8344 <p>Yesterdays speaker told me that the service is the default
8345 keyserver provided by the default configuration in GnuPG, but this do
8346 not seem to be used in Debian.  Perhaps it should?</p>
8347
8348 <p>Anyway, I've updated my ~/.gnupg/options file to now include this
8349 line:</p>
8350
8351 <p><blockquote><pre>
8352 keyserver pool.sks-keyservers.net
8353 </pre></blockquote></p>
8354
8355 <p>With GnuPG version 2 one can also locate the keyserver using SRV
8356 entries in DNS.  Just for fun, I did just that at work, so now every
8357 user of GnuPG at the University of Oslo should find a OpenGPG
8358 keyserver automatically should their need it:</p>
8359
8360 <p><blockquote><pre>
8361 % host -t srv _pgpkey-http._tcp.uio.no
8362 _pgpkey-http._tcp.uio.no has SRV record 0 100 11371 pool.sks-keyservers.net.
8363 %
8364 </pre></blockquote></p>
8365
8366 <p>Now if only
8367 <a href="http://ietfreport.isoc.org/idref/draft-shaw-openpgp-hkp/">the
8368 HKP lookup protocol</a> supported finding signature paths, I would be
8369 very happy.  It can look up a given key or search for a user ID, but I
8370 normally do not want that, but to find a trust path from my key to
8371 another key.  Given a user ID or key ID, I would like to find (and
8372 download) the keys representing a signature path from my key to the
8373 key in question, to be able to get a trust path between the two keys.
8374 This is as far as I can tell not possible today.  Perhaps something
8375 for a future version of the protocol?</p>
8376
8377       </div>
8378       <div class="tags">
8379
8380
8381         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>.
8382
8383
8384       </div>
8385     </div>
8386     <div class="padding"></div>
8387
8388     <div class="entry">
8389       <div class="title">
8390         <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>
8391       </div>
8392       <div class="date">
8393         25th August 2014
8394       </div>
8395       <div class="body">
8396         <p>Two years later, I am still not sure if it is legal here in Norway
8397 to use or publish a video in H.264 or MPEG4 format edited by the
8398 commercially licensed video editors, without limiting the use to
8399 create "personal" or "non-commercial" videos or get a license
8400 agreement with <a href="http://www.mpegla.com">MPEG LA</a>.  If one
8401 want to publish and broadcast video in a non-personal or commercial
8402 setting, it might be that those tools can not be used, or that video
8403 format can not be used, without breaking their copyright license.  I
8404 am not sure.
8405 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Trenger_en_avtale_med_MPEG_LA_for___publisere_og_kringkaste_H_264_video_.html">Back
8406 then</a>, I found that the copyright license terms for Adobe Premiere
8407 and Apple Final Cut Pro both specified that one could not use the
8408 program to produce anything else without a patent license from MPEG
8409 LA.  The issue is not limited to those two products, though.  Other
8410 much used products like those from Avid and Sorenson Media have terms
8411 of use are similar to those from Adobe and Apple.  The complicating
8412 factor making me unsure if those terms have effect in Norway or not is
8413 that the patents in question are not valid in Norway, but copyright
8414 licenses are.</p>
8415
8416 <p>These are the terms for Avid Artist Suite, according to their
8417 <a href="http://www.avid.com/US/about-avid/legal-notices/legal-enduserlicense2">published
8418 end user</a>
8419 <a href="http://www.avid.com/static/resources/common/documents/corporate/LICENSE.pdf">license
8420 text</a> (converted to lower case text for easier reading):</p>
8421
8422 <p><blockquote>
8423 <p>18.2. MPEG-4. MPEG-4 technology may be included with the
8424 software. MPEG LA, L.L.C. requires this notice: </p>
8425
8426 <p>This product is licensed under the MPEG-4 visual patent portfolio
8427 license for the personal and non-commercial use of a consumer for (i)
8428 encoding video in compliance with the MPEG-4 visual standard (“MPEG-4
8429 video”) and/or (ii) decoding MPEG-4 video that was encoded by a
8430 consumer engaged in a personal and non-commercial activity and/or was
8431 obtained from a video provider licensed by MPEG LA to provide MPEG-4
8432 video.  No license is granted or shall be implied for any other
8433 use. Additional information including that relating to promotional,
8434 internal and commercial uses and licensing may be obtained from MPEG
8435 LA, LLC.  See http://www.mpegla.com. This product is licensed under
8436 the MPEG-4 systems patent portfolio license for encoding in compliance
8437 with the MPEG-4 systems standard, except that an additional license
8438 and payment of royalties are necessary for encoding in connection with
8439 (i) data stored or replicated in physical media which is paid for on a
8440 title by title basis and/or (ii) data which is paid for on a title by
8441 title basis and is transmitted to an end user for permanent storage
8442 and/or use, such additional license may be obtained from MPEG LA,
8443 LLC. See http://www.mpegla.com for additional details.</p>
8444
8445 <p>18.3. H.264/AVC. H.264/AVC technology may be included with the
8446 software.  MPEG LA, L.L.C. requires this notice:</p>
8447
8448 <p>This product is licensed under the AVC patent portfolio license for
8449 the personal use of a consumer or other uses in which it does not
8450 receive remuneration to (i) encode video in compliance with the AVC
8451 standard (“AVC video”) and/or (ii) decode AVC video that was encoded
8452 by a consumer engaged in a personal activity and/or was obtained from
8453 a video provider licensed to provide AVC video. No license is granted
8454 or shall be implied for any other use. Additional information may be
8455 obtained from MPEG LA, L.L.C. See http://www.mpegla.com.</p>
8456 </blockquote></p>
8457
8458 <p>Note the requirement that the videos created can only be used for
8459 personal or non-commercial purposes.</p>
8460
8461 <p>The Sorenson Media software have
8462 <a href="http://www.sorensonmedia.com/terms/">similar terms</a>:</p>
8463
8464 <p><blockquote>
8465
8466 <p>With respect to a license from Sorenson pertaining to MPEG-4 Video
8467 Decoders and/or Encoders: Any such product is licensed under the
8468 MPEG-4 visual patent portfolio license for the personal and
8469 non-commercial use of a consumer for (i) encoding video in compliance
8470 with the MPEG-4 visual standard (“MPEG-4 video”) and/or (ii) decoding
8471 MPEG-4 video that was encoded by a consumer engaged in a personal and
8472 non-commercial activity and/or was obtained from a video provider
8473 licensed by MPEG LA to provide MPEG-4 video. No license is granted or
8474 shall be implied for any other use. Additional information including
8475 that relating to promotional, internal and commercial uses and
8476 licensing may be obtained from MPEG LA, LLC. See
8477 http://www.mpegla.com.</p>
8478
8479 <p>With respect to a license from Sorenson pertaining to MPEG-4
8480 Consumer Recorded Data Encoder, MPEG-4 Systems Internet Data Encoder,
8481 MPEG-4 Mobile Data Encoder, and/or MPEG-4 Unique Use Encoder: Any such
8482 product is licensed under the MPEG-4 systems patent portfolio license
8483 for encoding in compliance with the MPEG-4 systems standard, except
8484 that an additional license and payment of royalties are necessary for
8485 encoding in connection with (i) data stored or replicated in physical
8486 media which is paid for on a title by title basis and/or (ii) data
8487 which is paid for on a title by title basis and is transmitted to an
8488 end user for permanent storage and/or use. Such additional license may
8489 be obtained from MPEG LA, LLC. See http://www.mpegla.com for
8490 additional details.</p>
8491
8492 </blockquote></p>
8493
8494 <p>Some free software like
8495 <a href="https://handbrake.fr/">Handbrake</A> and
8496 <a href="http://ffmpeg.org/">FFMPEG</a> uses GPL/LGPL licenses and do
8497 not have any such terms included, so for those, there is no
8498 requirement to limit the use to personal and non-commercial.</p>
8499
8500       </div>
8501       <div class="tags">
8502
8503
8504         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>.
8505
8506
8507       </div>
8508     </div>
8509     <div class="padding"></div>
8510
8511     <div class="entry">
8512       <div class="title">
8513         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Bernd_Zeitzen.html">Debian Edu interview: Bernd Zeitzen</a>
8514       </div>
8515       <div class="date">
8516         31st July 2014
8517       </div>
8518       <div class="body">
8519         <p>The complete and free “out of the box” software solution for
8520 schools, <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
8521 Skolelinux</a>, is used quite a lot in Germany, and one of the people
8522 involved is Bernd Zeitzen, who show up on the project mailing lists
8523 from time to time with interesting questions and tips on how to adjust
8524 the setup.  I managed to interview him this summer.</p>
8525
8526 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
8527
8528 <p>My name is Bernd Zeitzen and I'm married with Hedda, a self
8529 employed physiotherapist.  My former profession is tool maker, but I
8530 haven't worked for 30 years in this job.  30 years ago I started to
8531 support my wife and become her officeworker and a few years later the
8532 administrator for a small computer network, today based on Ubuntu
8533 Server (Samba, OpenVPN). For her daily work she has to use Windows
8534 Desktops because the software she needs to organize her business only
8535 works with Windows . :-(</p>
8536
8537 <p>In 1988 we started with one PC and DOS, then I learned to use
8538 Windows 98, 2000, XP, …, 8, Ubuntu, MacOSX.  Today we are running a
8539 Linux server with 6 Windows clients and 10 persons (teacher of
8540 children with special needs, speech therapist, occupational therapist,
8541 psychologist and officeworkers) using our Samba shares via OpenVPN to
8542 work with the documentations of our patients.</p>
8543
8544 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
8545 project?</strong></p>
8546
8547 <p>Two years ago a friend of mine asked me, if I want to get a job in
8548 his school (<a href="http://www.gymnasium-harsewinkel.de/">Gymnasium
8549 Harsewinkel</a>).  They started with Skolelinux / Debian Edu and they
8550 were looking for people to give support to the teachers using the
8551 software and the network and teaching the pupils increasing their
8552 computer skills in optional lessons.  I'm spending 4-6 hours a week
8553 with this job.</p>
8554
8555 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
8556 Edu?</strong></p>
8557
8558 <p>The independence.</p>
8559
8560 <p>First: Every person is allowed to use, share and develop the
8561 software. Even if you are poor, you are allowed to use the software
8562 included in Skolelinux/Debian Edu and all the other Free Software.</p>
8563
8564 <p>Second: The software runs on old machines and this gives us the
8565 possibility to recycle computers, weeded out from offices.  The
8566 servers and desktops are running for more than two years and they are
8567 working reliable. </p>
8568
8569 <p>We have two servers (one tjener and one terminal server), 45
8570 workstations in three classrooms and seven laptops as a mobile
8571 solution for all classrooms.  These machines are all booting from the
8572 terminal server.  In the moment we are installing 30 laptops as mobile
8573 workstations.  Then the pupils have the possibility to work with these
8574 machines in their classrooms.  Internet access is realized by a WLAN
8575 router, connected to the schools network. This is all done without a
8576 dedicated system administrator or a computer science teacher.</p>
8577
8578 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
8579 Edu?</strong></p>
8580
8581 <p>Teachers and pupils are Windows users.  &lt;Irony on&gt; And Linux
8582 isn't cool. It's software for freaks using the command line. &lt;Irony
8583 off&gt; They don't realize the stability of the system. </p>
8584
8585 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
8586
8587 <p>Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, Ubuntu Server 12.04 (Samba,
8588 Apache, MySQL, Joomla!, … and Skolelinux / Debian Edu)</p>
8589
8590 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
8591 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
8592
8593 <p>In Germany we have the situation: every school is free to decide
8594 which software they want to use. This decision is influenced by
8595 teachers who learned to use Windows and MS Office. They buy a PC with
8596 Windows preinstalled and an additional testing version of MS
8597 Office. They don't know about the possibility to use Free Software
8598 instead.  Another problem are the publisher of school books.  They
8599 develop their software, added to the school books, for Windows.</p>
8600
8601       </div>
8602       <div class="tags">
8603
8604
8605         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>.
8606
8607
8608       </div>
8609     </div>
8610     <div class="padding"></div>
8611
8612     <div class="entry">
8613       <div class="title">
8614         <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>
8615       </div>
8616       <div class="date">
8617         23rd July 2014
8618       </div>
8619       <div class="body">
8620         <p>This summer I finally had time to continue working on the Norwegian
8621 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book
8622 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig,
8623 to get a Norwegian text explaining the problems with todays copyright
8624 law.  Yesterday, I finally completed translated the book text.  There
8625 are still some foot/end notes left to translate, the colophon page
8626 need to be rewritten, and a few words and phrases still need to be
8627 translated, but the Norwegian text is ready for the first proof
8628 reading. :) More spell checking is needed, and several illustrations
8629 need to be cleaned up.  The work stopped up because I had to give
8630 priority to other projects the last year, and the progress graph of
8631 the translation show this very well:</p>
8632
8633 <p><img width="80%" align="center" src="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png"></p>
8634
8635 <p>If you want to read the result, check out the
8636 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>
8637 project pages and the
8638 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>,
8639 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
8640 and HTML version available in the
8641 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/tree/master/archive">archive
8642 directory</a>.</p>
8643
8644 <p>Please report typos, bugs and improvements to the github project if
8645 you find any.</p>
8646
8647       </div>
8648       <div class="tags">
8649
8650
8651         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>.
8652
8653
8654       </div>
8655     </div>
8656     <div class="padding"></div>
8657
8658     <div class="entry">
8659       <div class="title">
8660         <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>
8661       </div>
8662       <div class="date">
8663         17th June 2014
8664       </div>
8665       <div class="body">
8666         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
8667 project</a> provide an instruction manual for teachers, system
8668 administrators and other users that contain useful tips for setting up
8669 and maintaining a Debian Edu installation.  This text is about how the
8670 text processing of this manual is handled in the project.</p>
8671
8672 <p>One goal of the project is to provide information in the native
8673 language of its users, and for this we need to handle translations.
8674 But we also want to make sure each language contain the same
8675 information, so for this we need a good way to keep the translations
8676 in sync.  And we want it to be easy for our users to improve the
8677 documentation, avoiding the need to learn special formats or tools to
8678 contribute, and the obvious way to do this is to make it possible to
8679 edit the documentation using a web browser.  We also want it to be
8680 easy for translators to keep the translation up to date, and give them
8681 help in figuring out what need to be translated. Here is the list of
8682 tools and the process we have found trying to reach all these
8683 goals.</p>
8684
8685 <p>We maintain the authoritative source of our manual in the
8686 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/">Debian
8687 wiki</a>, as several wiki pages written in English.  It consist of one
8688 front page with references to the different chapters, several pages
8689 for each chapter, and finally one "collection page" gluing all the
8690 chapters together into one large web page (aka
8691 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/AllInOne">the
8692 AllInOne page</a>).  The AllInOne page is the one used for further
8693 processing and translations.  Thanks to the fact that the
8694 <a href="http://moinmo.in/">MoinMoin</a> installation on
8695 wiki.debian.org support exporting pages in
8696 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">the Docbook format</a>, we can fetch
8697 the list of pages to export using the raw version of the AllInOne
8698 page, loop over each of them to generate a Docbook XML version of the
8699 manual.  This process also download images and transform image
8700 references to use the locally downloaded images.  The generated
8701 Docbook XML files are slightly broken, so some post-processing is done
8702 using the <tt>documentation/scripts/get_manual</tt> program, and the
8703 result is a nice Docbook XML file (debian-edu-wheezy-manual.xml) and
8704 a handfull of images.  The XML file can now be used to generate PDF, HTML
8705 and epub versions of the English manual.  This is the basic step of
8706 our process, making PDF (using dblatex), HTML (using xsltproc) and
8707 epub (using dbtoepub) version from Docbook XML, and the resulting files
8708 are placed in the debian-edu-doc-en binary package.</p>
8709
8710 <p>But English documentation is not enough for us.  We want translated
8711 documentation too, and we want to make it easy for translators to
8712 track the English original.  For this we use the
8713 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/poxml.html">poxml</a> package,
8714 which allow us to transform the English Docbook XML file into a
8715 translation file (a .pot file), usable with the normal gettext based
8716 translation tools used by those translating free software.  The pot
8717 file is used to create and maintain translation files (several .po
8718 files), which the translations update with the native language
8719 translations of all titles, paragraphs and blocks of text in the
8720 original.  The next step is combining the original English Docbook XML
8721 and the translation file (say debian-edu-wheezy-manual.nb.po), to
8722 create a translated Docbook XML file (in this case
8723 debian-edu-wheezy-manual.nb.xml).  This translated (or partly
8724 translated, if the translation is not complete) Docbook XML file can
8725 then be used like the original to create a PDF, HTML and epub version
8726 of the documentation.</p>
8727
8728 <p>The translators use different tools to edit the .po files.  We
8729 recommend using
8730 <a href="http://www.kde.org/applications/development/lokalize/">lokalize</a>,
8731 while some use emacs and vi, others can use web based editors like
8732 <a href="http://pootle.translatehouse.org/">Poodle</a> or
8733 <a href="https://www.transifex.com/">Transifex</a>.  All we care about
8734 is where the .po file end up, in our git repository.  Updated
8735 translations can either be committed directly to git, or submitted as
8736 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/src:debian-edu-doc">bug reports
8737 against the debian-edu-doc package</a>.</p>
8738
8739 <p>One challenge is images, which both might need to be translated (if
8740 they show translated user applications), and are needed in different
8741 formats when creating PDF and HTML versions (epub is a HTML version in
8742 this regard).  For this we transform the original PNG images to the
8743 needed density and format during build, and have a way to provide
8744 translated images by storing translated versions in
8745 images/$LANGUAGECODE/.  I am a bit unsure about the details here.  The
8746 package maintainers know more.</p>
8747
8748 <p>If you wonder what the result look like, we provide
8749 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/">the content
8750 of the documentation packages on the web</a>.  See for example the
8751 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/it/debian-edu-wheezy-manual.pdf">Italian
8752 PDF version</a> or the
8753 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/de/debian-edu-wheezy-manual.html">German
8754 HTML version</a>.  We do not yet build the epub version by default,
8755 but perhaps it will be done in the future.</p>
8756
8757 <p>To learn more, check out
8758 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/debian-edu-doc.html">the
8759 debian-edu-doc package</a>,
8760 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/">the
8761 manual on the wiki</a> and
8762 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/Translations">the
8763 translation instructions</a> in the manual.</p>
8764
8765       </div>
8766       <div class="tags">
8767
8768
8769         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>.
8770
8771
8772       </div>
8773     </div>
8774     <div class="padding"></div>
8775
8776     <div class="entry">
8777       <div class="title">
8778         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_software_car_computer_solution_.html">Free software car computer solution?</a>
8779       </div>
8780       <div class="date">
8781         29th May 2014
8782       </div>
8783       <div class="body">
8784         <p>Dear lazyweb.  I'm planning to set up a small Raspberry Pi computer
8785 in my car, connected to
8786 <a href="http://www.dx.com/p/400a-4-0-tft-lcd-digital-monitor-for-vehicle-parking-reverse-camera-1440x272-12v-dc-57776">a
8787 small screen</a> next to the rear mirror.  I plan to hook it up with a
8788 GPS and a USB wifi card too.  The idea is to get my own
8789 "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carputer">Carputer</a>".  But I
8790 wonder if someone already created a good free software solution for
8791 such car computer.</p>
8792
8793 <p>This is my current wish list for such system:</p>
8794
8795 <ul>
8796
8797  <li>Work on Raspberry Pi.</li>
8798
8799  <li>Show current speed limit based on location, and warn if going too
8800    fast (for example using color codes yellow and red on the screen,
8801    or make a sound).  This could be done either using either data from
8802    <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/">Openstreetmap</a> or OCR
8803    info gathered from a dashboard camera.</li>
8804
8805  <li>Track automatic toll road passes and their cost, show total spent
8806    and make it possible to calculate toll costs for planned
8807    route.</li>
8808
8809  <li>Collect GPX tracks for use with OpenStreetMap.</li>
8810
8811  <li>Automatically detect and use any wireless connection to connect
8812    to home server.  Try IP over DNS
8813    (<a href="http://dev.kryo.se/iodine/">iodine</a>) or ICMP
8814    (<a href="http://code.gerade.org/hans/">Hans</a>) if direct
8815    connection do not work.</li>
8816
8817  <li>Set up mesh network to talk to other cars with the same system,
8818    or some standard car mesh protocol.</li>
8819
8820  <li>Warn when approaching speed cameras and speed camera ranges
8821    (speed calculated between two cameras).</li>
8822
8823  <li>Suport dashboard/front facing camera to discover speed limits and
8824    run OCR to track registration number of passing cars.</li>
8825
8826 </ul>
8827
8828 <p>If you know of any free software car computer system supporting
8829 some or all of these features, please let me know.</p>
8830
8831       </div>
8832       <div class="tags">
8833
8834
8835         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8836
8837
8838       </div>
8839     </div>
8840     <div class="padding"></div>
8841
8842     <div class="entry">
8843       <div class="title">
8844         <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>
8845       </div>
8846       <div class="date">
8847         29th April 2014
8848       </div>
8849       <div class="body">
8850         <p>I've been following <a href="http://www.getgnash.org/">the Gnash
8851 project</a> for quite a while now.  It is a free software
8852 implementation of Adobe Flash, both a standalone player and a browser
8853 plugin.  Gnash implement support for the AVM1 format (and not the
8854 newer AVM2 format - see
8855 <a href="http://lightspark.github.io/">Lightspark</a> for that one),
8856 allowing several flash based sites to work.  Thanks to the friendly
8857 developers at Youtube, it also work with Youtube videos, because the
8858 Javascript code at Youtube detect Gnash and serve a AVM1 player to
8859 those users. :) Would be great if someone found time to implement AVM2
8860 support, but it has not happened yet.  If you install both Lightspark
8861 and Gnash, Lightspark will invoke Gnash if it find a AVM1 flash file,
8862 so you can get both handled as free software.  Unfortunately,
8863 Lightspark so far only implement a small subset of AVM2, and many
8864 sites do not work yet.</p>
8865
8866 <p>A few months ago, I started looking at
8867 <a href="http://scan.coverity.com/">Coverity</a>, the static source
8868 checker used to find heaps and heaps of bugs in free software (thanks
8869 to the donation of a scanning service to free software projects by the
8870 company developing this non-free code checker), and Gnash was one of
8871 the projects I decided to check out.  Coverity is able to find lock
8872 errors, memory errors, dead code and more.  A few days ago they even
8873 extended it to also be able to find the heartbleed bug in OpenSSL.
8874 There are heaps of checks being done on the instrumented code, and the
8875 amount of bogus warnings is quite low compared to the other static
8876 code checkers I have tested over the years.</p>
8877
8878 <p>Since a few weeks ago, I've been working with the other Gnash
8879 developers squashing bugs discovered by Coverity.  I was quite happy
8880 today when I checked the current status and saw that of the 777 issues
8881 detected so far, 374 are marked as fixed.  This make me confident that
8882 the next Gnash release will be more stable and more dependable than
8883 the previous one.  Most of the reported issues were and are in the
8884 test suite, but it also found a few in the rest of the code.</p>
8885
8886 <p>If you want to help out, you find us on
8887 <a href="https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnash-dev">the
8888 gnash-dev mailing list</a> and on
8889 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/#gnash">the #gnash channel on
8890 irc.freenode.net IRC server</a>.</p>
8891
8892       </div>
8893       <div class="tags">
8894
8895
8896         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>.
8897
8898
8899       </div>
8900     </div>
8901     <div class="padding"></div>
8902
8903     <div class="entry">
8904       <div class="title">
8905         <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>
8906       </div>
8907       <div class="date">
8908         23rd April 2014
8909       </div>
8910       <div class="body">
8911         <p>It would be nice if it was easier in Debian to get all the hardware
8912 related packages relevant for the computer installed automatically.
8913 So I implemented one, using
8914 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">my Isenkram
8915 package</a>.  To use it, install the tasksel and isenkram packages and
8916 run tasksel as user root.  You should be presented with a new option,
8917 "Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)".  When you
8918 select it, tasksel will install the packages isenkram claim is fit for
8919 the current hardware, hot pluggable or not.<p>
8920
8921 <p>The implementation is in two files, one is the tasksel menu entry
8922 description, and the other is the script used to extract the list of
8923 packages to install.  The first part is in
8924 <tt>/usr/share/tasksel/descs/isenkram.desc</tt> and look like
8925 this:</p>
8926
8927 <p><blockquote><pre>
8928 Task: isenkram
8929 Section: hardware
8930 Description: Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)
8931  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific packages are
8932  proposed.
8933 Test-new-install: mark show
8934 Relevance: 8
8935 Packages: for-current-hardware
8936 </pre></blockquote></p>
8937
8938 <p>The second part is in
8939 <tt>/usr/lib/tasksel/packages/for-current-hardware</tt> and look like
8940 this:</p>
8941
8942 <p><blockquote><pre>
8943 #!/bin/sh
8944 #
8945 (
8946     isenkram-lookup
8947     isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
8948 ) | sort -u
8949 </pre></blockquote></p>
8950
8951 <p>All in all, a very short and simple implementation making it
8952 trivial to install the hardware dependent package we all may want to
8953 have installed on our machines.  I've not been able to find a way to
8954 get tasksel to tell you exactly which packages it plan to install
8955 before doing the installation.  So if you are curious or careful,
8956 check the output from the isenkram-* command line tools first.</p>
8957
8958 <p>The information about which packages are handling which hardware is
8959 fetched either from the isenkram package itself in
8960 /usr/share/isenkram/, from git.debian.org or from the APT package
8961 database (using the Modaliases header).  The APT package database
8962 parsing have caused a nasty resource leak in the isenkram daemon (bugs
8963 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/719837">#719837</a> and
8964 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/730704">#730704</a>).  The cause is in
8965 the python-apt code (bug
8966 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/745487">#745487</a>), but using a
8967 workaround I was able to get rid of the file descriptor leak and
8968 reduce the memory leak from ~30 MiB per hardware detection down to
8969 around 2 MiB per hardware detection.  It should make the desktop
8970 daemon a lot more useful.  The fix is in version 0.7 uploaded to
8971 unstable today.</p>
8972
8973 <p>I believe the current way of mapping hardware to packages in
8974 Isenkram is is a good draft, but in the future I expect isenkram to
8975 use the AppStream data source for this.  A proposal for getting proper
8976 AppStream support into Debian is floating around as
8977 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-11">DEP-11</a>, and
8978 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2014/Projects#SummerOfCode2014.2FProjects.2FAppStreamDEP11Implementation.AppStream.2FDEP-11_for_the_Debian_Archive">GSoC
8979 project</a> will take place this summer to improve the situation.  I
8980 look forward to seeing the result, and welcome patches for isenkram to
8981 start using the information when it is ready.</p>
8982
8983 <p>If you want your package to map to some specific hardware, either
8984 add a "Xb-Modaliases" header to your control file like I did in
8985 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pymissile">the pymissile
8986 package</a> or submit a bug report with the details to the isenkram
8987 package.  See also
8988 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">all my
8989 blog posts tagged isenkram</a> for details on the notation.  I expect
8990 the information will be migrated to AppStream eventually, but for the
8991 moment I got no better place to store it.</p>
8992
8993       </div>
8994       <div class="tags">
8995
8996
8997         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>.
8998
8999
9000       </div>
9001     </div>
9002     <div class="padding"></div>
9003
9004     <div class="entry">
9005       <div class="title">
9006         <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>
9007       </div>
9008       <div class="date">
9009         15th April 2014
9010       </div>
9011       <div class="body">
9012         <p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox
9013 project</a> is working on providing the software and hardware to make
9014 it easy for non-technical people to host their data and communication
9015 at home, and being able to communicate with their friends and family
9016 encrypted and away from prying eyes.  It is still going strong, and
9017 today a major mile stone was reached.</p>
9018
9019 <p>Today, the last of the packages currently used by the project to
9020 created the system images were accepted into Debian Unstable.  It was
9021 the freedombox-setup package, which is used to configure the images
9022 during build and on the first boot.  Now all one need to get going is
9023 the build code from the freedom-maker git repository and packages from
9024 Debian.  And once the freedombox-setup package enter testing, we can
9025 build everything directly from Debian. :)</p>
9026
9027 <p>Some key packages used by Freedombox are
9028 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/freedombox-setup">freedombox-setup</a>,
9029 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/plinth">plinth</a>,
9030 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pagekite">pagekite</a>,
9031 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/tor">tor</a>,
9032 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/privoxy">privoxy</a>,
9033 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/owncloud">owncloud</a> and
9034 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/dnsmasq">dnsmasq</a>.  There
9035 are plans to integrate more packages into the setup.  User
9036 documentation is maintained on the Debian wiki.  Please
9037 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/Manual/Jessie">check out
9038 the manual</a> and help us improve it.</p>
9039
9040 <p>To test for yourself and create boot images with the FreedomBox
9041 setup, run this on a Debian machine using a user with sudo rights to
9042 become root:</p>
9043
9044 <p><pre>
9045 sudo apt-get install git vmdebootstrap mercurial python-docutils \
9046   mktorrent extlinux virtualbox qemu-user-static binfmt-support \
9047   u-boot-tools
9048 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/freedombox/freedom-maker.git \
9049   freedom-maker
9050 make -C freedom-maker dreamplug-image raspberry-image virtualbox-image
9051 </pre></p>
9052
9053 <p>Root access is needed to run debootstrap and mount loopback
9054 devices.  See the README in the freedom-maker git repo for more
9055 details on the build.  If you do not want all three images, trim the
9056 make line.  Note that the virtualbox-image target is not really
9057 virtualbox specific.  It create a x86 image usable in kvm, qemu,
9058 vmware and any other x86 virtual machine environment.  You might need
9059 the version of vmdebootstrap in Jessie to get the build working, as it
9060 include fixes for a race condition with kpartx.</p>
9061
9062 <p>If you instead want to install using a Debian CD and the preseed
9063 method, boot a Debian Wheezy ISO and use this boot argument to load
9064 the preseed values:</p>
9065
9066 <p><pre>
9067 url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat</a>
9068 </pre></p>
9069
9070 <p>I have not tested it myself the last few weeks, so I do not know if
9071 it still work.</p>
9072
9073 <p>If you wonder how to help, one task you could look at is using
9074 systemd as the boot system.  It will become the default for Linux in
9075 Jessie, so we need to make sure it is usable on the Freedombox.  I did
9076 a simple test a few weeks ago, and noticed dnsmasq failed to start
9077 during boot when using systemd.  I suspect there are other problems
9078 too. :) To detect problems, there is a test suite included, which can
9079 be run from the plinth web interface.</p>
9080
9081 <p>Give it a go and let us know how it goes on the mailing list, and help
9082 us get the new release published. :) Please join us on
9083 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC (#freedombox on
9084 irc.debian.org)</a> and
9085 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
9086 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
9087
9088       </div>
9089       <div class="tags">
9090
9091
9092         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>.
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/S3QL__a_locally_mounted_cloud_file_system___nice_free_software.html">S3QL, a locally mounted cloud file system - nice free software</a>
9102       </div>
9103       <div class="date">
9104          9th April 2014
9105       </div>
9106       <div class="body">
9107         <p>For a while now, I have been looking for a sensible offsite backup
9108 solution for use at home.  My requirements are simple, it must be
9109 cheap and locally encrypted (in other words, I keep the encryption
9110 keys, the storage provider do not have access to my private files).
9111 One idea me and my friends had many years ago, before the cloud
9112 storage providers showed up, was to use Google mail as storage,
9113 writing a Linux block device storing blocks as emails in the mail
9114 service provided by Google, and thus get heaps of free space.  On top
9115 of this one can add encryption, RAID and volume management to have
9116 lots of (fairly slow, I admit that) cheap and encrypted storage.  But
9117 I never found time to implement such system.  But the last few weeks I
9118 have looked at a system called
9119 <a href="https://bitbucket.org/nikratio/s3ql/">S3QL</a>, a locally
9120 mounted network backed file system with the features I need.</p>
9121
9122 <p>S3QL is a fuse file system with a local cache and cloud storage,
9123 handling several different storage providers, any with Amazon S3,
9124 Google Drive or OpenStack API.  There are heaps of such storage
9125 providers.  S3QL can also use a local directory as storage, which
9126 combined with sshfs allow for file storage on any ssh server.  S3QL
9127 include support for encryption, compression, de-duplication, snapshots
9128 and immutable file systems, allowing me to mount the remote storage as
9129 a local mount point, look at and use the files as if they were local,
9130 while the content is stored in the cloud as well.  This allow me to
9131 have a backup that should survive fire.  The file system can not be
9132 shared between several machines at the same time, as only one can
9133 mount it at the time, but any machine with the encryption key and
9134 access to the storage service can mount it if it is unmounted.</p>
9135
9136 <p>It is simple to use.  I'm using it on Debian Wheezy, where the
9137 package is included already.  So to get started, run <tt>apt-get
9138 install s3ql</tt>.  Next, pick a storage provider.  I ended up picking
9139 Greenqloud, after reading their nice recipe on
9140 <a href="https://greenqloud.zendesk.com/entries/44611757-How-To-Use-S3QL-to-mount-a-StorageQloud-bucket-on-Debian-Wheezy">how
9141 to use S3QL with their Amazon S3 service</a>, because I trust the laws
9142 in Iceland more than those in USA when it come to keeping my personal
9143 data safe and private, and thus would rather spend money on a company
9144 in Iceland.  Another nice recipe is available from the article
9145 <a href="http://www.admin-magazine.com/HPC/Articles/HPC-Cloud-Storage">S3QL
9146 Filesystem for HPC Storage</a> by Jeff Layton in the HPC section of
9147 Admin magazine.  When the provider is picked, figure out how to get
9148 the API key needed to connect to the storage API.  With Greencloud,
9149 the key did not show up until I had added payment details to my
9150 account.</p>
9151
9152 <p>Armed with the API access details, it is time to create the file
9153 system.  First, create a new bucket in the cloud.  This bucket is the
9154 file system storage area.  I picked a bucket name reflecting the
9155 machine that was going to store data there, but any name will do.
9156 I'll refer to it as <tt>bucket-name</tt> below.  In addition, one need
9157 the API login and password, and a locally created password.  Store it
9158 all in ~root/.s3ql/authinfo2 like this:
9159
9160 <p><blockquote><pre>
9161 [s3c]
9162 storage-url: s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
9163 backend-login: API-login
9164 backend-password: API-password
9165 fs-passphrase: local-password
9166 </pre></blockquote></p>
9167
9168 <p>I create my local passphrase using <tt>pwget 50</tt> or similar,
9169 but any sensible way to create a fairly random password should do it.
9170 Armed with these details, it is now time to run mkfs, entering the API
9171 details and password to create it:</p>
9172
9173 <p><blockquote><pre>
9174 # mkdir -m 700 /var/lib/s3ql-cache
9175 # mkfs.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
9176   --ssl s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
9177 Enter backend login:
9178 Enter backend password:
9179 Before using S3QL, make sure to read the user's guide, especially
9180 the 'Important Rules to Avoid Loosing Data' section.
9181 Enter encryption password:
9182 Confirm encryption password:
9183 Generating random encryption key...
9184 Creating metadata tables...
9185 Dumping metadata...
9186 ..objects..
9187 ..blocks..
9188 ..inodes..
9189 ..inode_blocks..
9190 ..symlink_targets..
9191 ..names..
9192 ..contents..
9193 ..ext_attributes..
9194 Compressing and uploading metadata...
9195 Wrote 0.00 MB of compressed metadata.
9196 # </pre></blockquote></p>
9197
9198 <p>The next step is mounting the file system to make the storage available.
9199
9200 <p><blockquote><pre>
9201 # mount.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
9202   --ssl --allow-root s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name /s3ql
9203 Using 4 upload threads.
9204 Downloading and decompressing metadata...
9205 Reading metadata...
9206 ..objects..
9207 ..blocks..
9208 ..inodes..
9209 ..inode_blocks..
9210 ..symlink_targets..
9211 ..names..
9212 ..contents..
9213 ..ext_attributes..
9214 Mounting filesystem...
9215 # df -h /s3ql
9216 Filesystem                              Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
9217 s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name  1.0T     0  1.0T   0% /s3ql
9218 #
9219 </pre></blockquote></p>
9220
9221 <p>The file system is now ready for use.  I use rsync to store my
9222 backups in it, and as the metadata used by rsync is downloaded at
9223 mount time, no network traffic (and storage cost) is triggered by
9224 running rsync.  To unmount, one should not use the normal umount
9225 command, as this will not flush the cache to the cloud storage, but
9226 instead running the umount.s3ql command like this:
9227
9228 <p><blockquote><pre>
9229 # umount.s3ql /s3ql
9230 #
9231 </pre></blockquote></p>
9232
9233 <p>There is a fsck command available to check the file system and
9234 correct any problems detected.  This can be used if the local server
9235 crashes while the file system is mounted, to reset the "already
9236 mounted" flag.  This is what it look like when processing a working
9237 file system:</p>
9238
9239 <p><blockquote><pre>
9240 # fsck.s3ql --force --ssl s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
9241 Using cached metadata.
9242 File system seems clean, checking anyway.
9243 Checking DB integrity...
9244 Creating temporary extra indices...
9245 Checking lost+found...
9246 Checking cached objects...
9247 Checking names (refcounts)...
9248 Checking contents (names)...
9249 Checking contents (inodes)...
9250 Checking contents (parent inodes)...
9251 Checking objects (reference counts)...
9252 Checking objects (backend)...
9253 ..processed 5000 objects so far..
9254 ..processed 10000 objects so far..
9255 ..processed 15000 objects so far..
9256 Checking objects (sizes)...
9257 Checking blocks (referenced objects)...
9258 Checking blocks (refcounts)...
9259 Checking inode-block mapping (blocks)...
9260 Checking inode-block mapping (inodes)...
9261 Checking inodes (refcounts)...
9262 Checking inodes (sizes)...
9263 Checking extended attributes (names)...
9264 Checking extended attributes (inodes)...
9265 Checking symlinks (inodes)...
9266 Checking directory reachability...
9267 Checking unix conventions...
9268 Checking referential integrity...
9269 Dropping temporary indices...
9270 Backing up old metadata...
9271 Dumping metadata...
9272 ..objects..
9273 ..blocks..
9274 ..inodes..
9275 ..inode_blocks..
9276 ..symlink_targets..
9277 ..names..
9278 ..contents..
9279 ..ext_attributes..
9280 Compressing and uploading metadata...
9281 Wrote 0.89 MB of compressed metadata.
9282 #
9283 </pre></blockquote></p>
9284
9285 <p>Thanks to the cache, working on files that fit in the cache is very
9286 quick, about the same speed as local file access.  Uploading large
9287 amount of data is to me limited by the bandwidth out of and into my
9288 house.  Uploading 685 MiB with a 100 MiB cache gave me 305 kiB/s,
9289 which is very close to my upload speed, and downloading the same
9290 Debian installation ISO gave me 610 kiB/s, close to my download speed.
9291 Both were measured using <tt>dd</tt>.  So for me, the bottleneck is my
9292 network, not the file system code.  I do not know what a good cache
9293 size would be, but suspect that the cache should e larger than your
9294 working set.</p>
9295
9296 <p>I mentioned that only one machine can mount the file system at the
9297 time.  If another machine try, it is told that the file system is
9298 busy:</p>
9299
9300 <p><blockquote><pre>
9301 # mount.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
9302   --ssl --allow-root s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name /s3ql
9303 Using 8 upload threads.
9304 Backend reports that fs is still mounted elsewhere, aborting.
9305 #
9306 </pre></blockquote></p>
9307
9308 <p>The file content is uploaded when the cache is full, while the
9309 metadata is uploaded once every 24 hour by default.  To ensure the
9310 file system content is flushed to the cloud, one can either umount the
9311 file system, or ask S3QL to flush the cache and metadata using
9312 s3qlctrl:
9313
9314 <p><blockquote><pre>
9315 # s3qlctrl upload-meta /s3ql
9316 # s3qlctrl flushcache /s3ql
9317 #
9318 </pre></blockquote></p>
9319
9320 <p>If you are curious about how much space your data uses in the
9321 cloud, and how much compression and deduplication cut down on the
9322 storage usage, you can use s3qlstat on the mounted file system to get
9323 a report:</p>
9324
9325 <p><blockquote><pre>
9326 # s3qlstat /s3ql
9327 Directory entries:    9141
9328 Inodes:               9143
9329 Data blocks:          8851
9330 Total data size:      22049.38 MB
9331 After de-duplication: 21955.46 MB (99.57% of total)
9332 After compression:    21877.28 MB (99.22% of total, 99.64% of de-duplicated)
9333 Database size:        2.39 MB (uncompressed)
9334 (some values do not take into account not-yet-uploaded dirty blocks in cache)
9335 #
9336 </pre></blockquote></p>
9337
9338 <p>I mentioned earlier that there are several possible suppliers of
9339 storage.  I did not try to locate them all, but am aware of at least
9340 <a href="https://www.greenqloud.com/">Greenqloud</a>,
9341 <a href="http://drive.google.com/">Google Drive</a>,
9342 <a href="http://aws.amazon.com/s3/">Amazon S3 web serivces</a>,
9343 <a href="http://www.rackspace.com/">Rackspace</a> and
9344 <a href="http://crowncloud.net/">Crowncloud</A>.  The latter even
9345 accept payment in Bitcoin.  Pick one that suit your need.  Some of
9346 them provide several GiB of free storage, but the prize models are
9347 quite different and you will have to figure out what suits you
9348 best.</p>
9349
9350 <p>While researching this blog post, I had a look at research papers
9351 and posters discussing the S3QL file system.  There are several, which
9352 told me that the file system is getting a critical check by the
9353 science community and increased my confidence in using it.  One nice
9354 poster is titled
9355 "<a href="http://www.lanl.gov/orgs/adtsc/publications/science_highlights_2013/docs/pg68_69.pdf">An
9356 Innovative Parallel Cloud Storage System using OpenStack’s SwiftObject
9357 Store and Transformative Parallel I/O Approach</a>" by Hsing-Bung
9358 Chen, Benjamin McClelland, David Sherrill, Alfred Torrez, Parks Fields
9359 and Pamela Smith.  Please  have a look.</p>
9360
9361 <p>Given my problems with different file systems earlier, I decided to
9362 check out the mounted S3QL file system to see if it would be usable as
9363 a home directory (in other word, that it provided POSIX semantics when
9364 it come to locking and umask handling etc).  Running
9365 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_if_a_file_system_can_be_used_for_home_directories___.html">my
9366 test code to check file system semantics</a>, I was happy to discover that
9367 no error was found.  So the file system can be used for home
9368 directories, if one chooses to do so.</p>
9369
9370 <p>If you do not want a locally file system, and want something that
9371 work without the Linux fuse file system, I would like to mention the
9372 <a href="http://www.tarsnap.com/">Tarsnap service</a>, which also
9373 provide locally encrypted backup using a command line client.  It have
9374 a nicer access control system, where one can split out read and write
9375 access, allowing some systems to write to the backup and others to
9376 only read from it.</p>
9377
9378 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
9379 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
9380 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
9381
9382       </div>
9383       <div class="tags">
9384
9385
9386         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>.
9387
9388
9389       </div>
9390     </div>
9391     <div class="padding"></div>
9392
9393     <div class="entry">
9394       <div class="title">
9395         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ReactOS_Windows_clone___nice_free_software.html">ReactOS Windows clone - nice free software</a>
9396       </div>
9397       <div class="date">
9398          1st April 2014
9399       </div>
9400       <div class="body">
9401         <p>Microsoft have announced that Windows XP reaches its end of life
9402 2014-04-08, in 7 days.  But there are heaps of machines still running
9403 Windows XP, and depending on Windows XP to run their applications, and
9404 upgrading will be expensive, both when it comes to money and when it
9405 comes to the amount of effort needed to migrate from Windows XP to a
9406 new operating system.  Some obvious options (buy new a Windows
9407 machine, buy a MacOSX machine, install Linux on the existing machine)
9408 are already well known and covered elsewhere.  Most of them involve
9409 leaving the user applications installed on Windows XP behind and
9410 trying out replacements or updated versions. In this blog post I want
9411 to mention one strange bird that allow people to keep the hardware and
9412 the existing Windows XP applications and run them on a free software
9413 operating system that is Windows XP compatible.</p>
9414
9415 <p><a href="http://www.reactos.org/">ReactOS</a> is a free software
9416 operating system (GNU GPL licensed) working on providing a operating
9417 system that is binary compatible with Windows, able to run windows
9418 programs directly and to use Windows drivers for hardware directly.
9419 The project goal is for Windows user to keep their existing machines,
9420 drivers and software, and gain the advantages from user a operating
9421 system without usage limitations caused by non-free licensing.  It is
9422 a Windows clone running directly on the hardware, so quite different
9423 from the approach taken by <a href="http://www.winehq.org/">the Wine
9424 project</a>, which make it possible to run Windows binaries on
9425 Linux.</p>
9426
9427 <p>The ReactOS project share code with the Wine project, so most
9428 shared libraries available on Windows are already implemented already.
9429 There is also a software manager like the one we are used to on Linux,
9430 allowing the user to install free software applications with a simple
9431 click directly from the Internet.  Check out the
9432 <a href="http://www.reactos.org/screenshots">screen shots on the
9433 project web site</a> for an idea what it look like (it looks just like
9434 Windows before metro).</p>
9435
9436 <p>I do not use ReactOS myself, preferring Linux and Unix like
9437 operating systems.  I've tested it, and it work fine in a virt-manager
9438 virtual machine.  The browser, minesweeper, notepad etc is working
9439 fine as far as I can tell.  Unfortunately, my main test application
9440 is the software included on a CD with the Lego Mindstorms NXT, which
9441 seem to install just fine from CD but fail to leave any binaries on
9442 the disk after the installation.  So no luck with that test software.
9443 No idea why, but hope someone else figure out and fix the problem.
9444 I've tried the ReactOS Live ISO on a physical machine, and it seemed
9445 to work just fine.  If you like Windows and want to keep running your
9446 old Windows binaries, check it out by
9447 <a href="http://www.reactos.org/download">downloading</a> the
9448 installation CD, the live CD or the preinstalled virtual machine
9449 image.</p>
9450
9451       </div>
9452       <div class="tags">
9453
9454
9455         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>.
9456
9457
9458       </div>
9459     </div>
9460     <div class="padding"></div>
9461
9462     <div class="entry">
9463       <div class="title">
9464         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Roger_Marsal.html">Debian Edu interview: Roger Marsal</a>
9465       </div>
9466       <div class="date">
9467         30th March 2014
9468       </div>
9469       <div class="body">
9470         <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
9471 keep gaining new users.  Some weeks ago, a person showed up on IRC,
9472 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/#debian-edu">#debian-edu</a>, with a
9473 wish to contribute, and I managed to get a interview with this great
9474 contributor Roger Marsal to learn more about his background.</p>
9475
9476 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
9477
9478 <p>My name is Roger Marsal, I'm 27 years old (1986 generation) and I
9479 live in Barcelona, Spain. I've got a strong business background and I
9480 work as a patrimony manager and as a real estate agent.  Additionally,
9481 I've co-founded a British based tech company that is nowadays on the
9482 last development phase of a new social networking concept.</p>
9483
9484 <p>I'm a Linux enthusiast that started its journey with Ubuntu four years
9485 ago and have recently switched to Debian seeking rock solid stability
9486 and as a necessary step to gain expertise.</p>
9487
9488 <p>In a nutshell, I spend my days working and learning as much as I
9489 can to face both my job, entrepreneur project and feed my Linux
9490 hunger.</p>
9491
9492 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
9493 project?</strong></p>
9494
9495 <p>I discovered the <a href="http://www.ltsp.org/">LTSP</a> advantages
9496 with "Ubuntu 12.04 alternate install" and after a year of use I
9497 started looking for an alternative.  Even though I highly value and
9498 respect the Ubuntu project, I thought it was necessary for me to
9499 change to a more robust and stable alternative.  As far as I was using
9500 Debian on my personal laptop I thought it would be fine to install
9501 Debian and configure an LTSP server myself.  Surprised, I discovered
9502 that the Debian project also supported a kind of Edubuntu equivalent,
9503 and after having some pain I obtained a Debian Edu network up and
9504 running.  I just loved it.</p>
9505
9506 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
9507 Edu?</strong></p>
9508
9509 <p>I found a main advantage in that, once you know "the tips and
9510 tricks", a new installation just works out of the box. It's the most
9511 complete alternative I've found to create an LTSP network. All the
9512 other distributions seems to be made of plastic, Debian Edu seems to
9513 be made of steel.</p>
9514
9515 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
9516 Edu?</strong></p>
9517
9518 <p>I found two main disadvantages.</p>
9519
9520 <p>I'm not an expert but I've got notions and I had to spent a considerable
9521 amount of time trying to bring up a standard network topology. I'm quite
9522 stubborn and I just worked until I did but I'm sure many people with few
9523 resources (not big schools, but academies for example) would have switched
9524 or dropped.</p>
9525
9526 <p>It's amazing how such a complex system like Debian Edu has achieved
9527 this out-of-the-box state. Even though tweaking without breaking gets
9528 more difficult, as more factors have to be considered. This can
9529 discourage many people too.</p>
9530
9531 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
9532
9533 <p>I use Debian, Firefox, Okular, Inkscape, LibreOffice and
9534 Virtualbox.</p>
9535
9536
9537 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
9538 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
9539
9540 <p>I don't think there is a need for a particular strategy. The free
9541 attribute in both "freedom" and "no price" meanings is what will
9542 really bring free software to schools. In my experience I can think of
9543 the <a href="http://www.r-project.org/">"R" statistical language</a>; a
9544 few years a ago was an extremely nerd tool for university people.
9545 Today it's being increasingly used to teach statistics at many
9546 different level of studies.  I believe free and open software will
9547 increasingly gain popularity, but I'm sure schools will be one of the
9548 first scenarios where this will happen.</p>
9549
9550       </div>
9551       <div class="tags">
9552
9553
9554         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>.
9555
9556
9557       </div>
9558     </div>
9559     <div class="padding"></div>
9560
9561     <div class="entry">
9562       <div class="title">
9563         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Public_Trusted_Timestamping_services_for_everyone.html">Public Trusted Timestamping services for everyone</a>
9564       </div>
9565       <div class="date">
9566         25th March 2014
9567       </div>
9568       <div class="body">
9569         <p>Did you ever need to store logs or other files in a way that would
9570 allow it to be used as evidence in court, and needed a way to
9571 demonstrate without reasonable doubt that the file had not been
9572 changed since it was created?  Or, did you ever need to document that
9573 a given document was received at some point in time, like some
9574 archived document or the answer to an exam, and not changed after it
9575 was received?  The problem in these settings is to remove the need to
9576 trust yourself and your computers, while still being able to prove
9577 that a file is the same as it was at some given time in the past.</p>
9578
9579 <p>A solution to these problems is to have a trusted third party
9580 "stamp" the document and verify that at some given time the document
9581 looked a given way.  Such
9582 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notarius">notarius</a> service
9583 have been around for thousands of years, and its digital equivalent is
9584 called a
9585 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_timestamping">trusted
9586 timestamping service</a>.  <a href="http://www.ietf.org/">The Internet
9587 Engineering Task Force</a> standardised how such service could work a
9588 few years ago as <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3161">RFC
9589 3161</a>.  The mechanism is simple.  Create a hash of the file in
9590 question, send it to a trusted third party which add a time stamp to
9591 the hash and sign the result with its private key, and send back the
9592 signed hash + timestamp.  Both email, FTP and HTTP can be used to
9593 request such signature, depending on what is provided by the service
9594 used. Anyone with the document and the signature can then verify that
9595 the document matches the signature by creating their own hash and
9596 checking the signature using the trusted third party public key.
9597 There are several commercial services around providing such
9598 timestamping.  A quick search for
9599 "<a href="https://duckduckgo.com/?q=rfc+3161+service">rfc 3161
9600 service</a>" pointed me to at least
9601 <a href="https://www.digistamp.com/technical/how-a-digital-time-stamp-works/">DigiStamp</a>,
9602 <a href="http://www.quovadisglobal.co.uk/CertificateServices/SigningServices/TimeStamp.aspx">Quo
9603 Vadis</a>,
9604 <a href="https://www.globalsign.com/timestamp-service/">Global Sign</a>
9605 and <a href="http://www.globaltrustfinder.com/TSADefault.aspx">Global
9606 Trust Finder</a>.  The system work as long as the private key of the
9607 trusted third party is not compromised.</p>
9608
9609 <p>But as far as I can tell, there are very few public trusted
9610 timestamp services available for everyone.  I've been looking for one
9611 for a while now. But yesterday I found one over at
9612 <a href="https://www.pki.dfn.de/zeitstempeldienst/">Deutches
9613 Forschungsnetz</a> mentioned in
9614 <a href="http://www.d-mueller.de/blog/dealing-with-trusted-timestamps-in-php-rfc-3161/">a
9615 blog by David Müller</a>.  I then found
9616 <a href="http://www.rz.uni-greifswald.de/support/dfn-pki-zertifikate/zeitstempeldienst.html">a
9617 good recipe on how to use the service</a> over at the University of
9618 Greifswald.</p>
9619
9620 <p><a href="http://www.openssl.org/">The OpenSSL library</a> contain
9621 both server and tools to use and set up your own signing service.  See
9622 the ts(1SSL), tsget(1SSL) manual pages for more details.  The
9623 following shell script demonstrate how to extract a signed timestamp
9624 for any file on the disk in a Debian environment:</p>
9625
9626 <p><blockquote><pre>
9627 #!/bin/sh
9628 set -e
9629 url="http://zeitstempel.dfn.de"
9630 caurl="https://pki.pca.dfn.de/global-services-ca/pub/cacert/chain.txt"
9631 reqfile=$(mktemp -t tmp.XXXXXXXXXX.tsq)
9632 resfile=$(mktemp -t tmp.XXXXXXXXXX.tsr)
9633 cafile=chain.txt
9634 if [ ! -f $cafile ] ; then
9635     wget -O $cafile "$caurl"
9636 fi
9637 openssl ts -query -data "$1" -cert | tee "$reqfile" \
9638     | /usr/lib/ssl/misc/tsget -h "$url" -o "$resfile"
9639 openssl ts -reply -in "$resfile" -text 1>&2
9640 openssl ts -verify -data "$1" -in "$resfile" -CAfile "$cafile" 1>&2
9641 base64 < "$resfile"
9642 rm "$reqfile" "$resfile"
9643 </pre></blockquote></p>
9644
9645 <p>The argument to the script is the file to timestamp, and the output
9646 is a base64 encoded version of the signature to STDOUT and details
9647 about the signature to STDERR.  Note that due to
9648 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=742553">a bug
9649 in the tsget script</a>, you might need to modify the included script
9650 and remove the last line.  Or just write your own HTTP uploader using
9651 curl. :) Now you too can prove and verify that files have not been
9652 changed.</p>
9653
9654 <p>But the Internet need more public trusted timestamp services.
9655 Perhaps something for <a href="http://www.uninett.no/">Uninett</a> or
9656 my work place the <a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a>
9657 to set up?</p>
9658
9659       </div>
9660       <div class="tags">
9661
9662
9663         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>.
9664
9665
9666       </div>
9667     </div>
9668     <div class="padding"></div>
9669
9670     <div class="entry">
9671       <div class="title">
9672         <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>
9673       </div>
9674       <div class="date">
9675         21st March 2014
9676       </div>
9677       <div class="body">
9678         <p>Keeping your DVD collection safe from scratches and curious
9679 children fingers while still having it available when you want to see a
9680 movie is not straight forward.  My preferred method at the moment is
9681 to store a full copy of the ISO on a hard drive, and use VLC, Popcorn
9682 Hour or other useful players to view the resulting file.  This way the
9683 subtitles and bonus material are still available and using the ISO is
9684 just like inserting the original DVD record in the DVD player.</p>
9685
9686 <p>Earlier I used dd for taking security copies, but it do not handle
9687 DVDs giving read errors (which are quite a few of them).  I've also
9688 tried using
9689 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ripping_problematic_DVDs_using_dvdbackup_and_genisoimage.html">dvdbackup
9690 and genisoimage</a>, but these days I use the marvellous python library
9691 and program
9692 <a href="http://bblank.thinkmo.de/blog/new-software-python-dvdvideo">python-dvdvideo</a>
9693 written by Bastian Blank.  It is
9694 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/python-dvdvideo.html">in Debian
9695 already</a> and the binary package name is python3-dvdvideo. Instead
9696 of trying to read every block from the DVD, it parses the file
9697 structure and figure out which block on the DVD is actually in used,
9698 and only read those blocks from the DVD.  This work surprisingly well,
9699 and I have been able to almost backup my entire DVD collection using
9700 this method.</p>
9701
9702 <p>So far, python-dvdvideo have failed on between 10 and
9703 20 DVDs, which is a small fraction of my collection.  The most common
9704 problem is
9705 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=720831">DVDs
9706 using UTF-16 instead of UTF-8 characters</a>, which according to
9707 Bastian is against the DVD specification (and seem to cause some
9708 players to fail too).  A rarer problem is what seem to be inconsistent
9709 DVD structures, as the python library
9710 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=723079">claim
9711 there is a overlap between objects</a>.  An equally rare problem claim
9712 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=741878">some
9713 value is out of range</a>.  No idea what is going on there.  I wish I
9714 knew enough about the DVD format to fix these, to ensure my movie
9715 collection will stay with me in the future.</p>
9716
9717 <p>So, if you need to keep your DVDs safe, back them up using
9718 python-dvdvideo. :)</p>
9719
9720       </div>
9721       <div class="tags">
9722
9723
9724         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>.
9725
9726
9727       </div>
9728     </div>
9729     <div class="padding"></div>
9730
9731     <div class="entry">
9732       <div class="title">
9733         <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>
9734       </div>
9735       <div class="date">
9736         14th March 2014
9737       </div>
9738       <div class="body">
9739         <p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox
9740 project</a> is working on providing the software and hardware for
9741 making it easy for non-technical people to host their data and
9742 communication at home, and being able to communicate with their
9743 friends and family encrypted and away from prying eyes.  It has been
9744 going on for a while, and is slowly progressing towards a new test
9745 release (0.2).</p>
9746
9747 <p>And what day could be better than the Pi day to announce that the
9748 new version will provide "hard drive" / SD card / USB stick images for
9749 Dreamplug, Raspberry Pi and VirtualBox (or any other virtualization
9750 system), and can also be installed using a Debian installer preseed
9751 file.  The Debian based Freedombox is now based on Debian Jessie,
9752 where most of the needed packages used are already present.  Only one,
9753 the freedombox-setup package, is missing.  To try to build your own
9754 boot image to test the current status, fetch the freedom-maker scripts
9755 and build using
9756 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/vmdebootstrap">vmdebootstrap</a>
9757 with a user with sudo access to become root:
9758
9759 <pre>
9760 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/freedombox/freedom-maker.git \
9761   freedom-maker
9762 sudo apt-get install git vmdebootstrap mercurial python-docutils \
9763   mktorrent extlinux virtualbox qemu-user-static binfmt-support \
9764   u-boot-tools
9765 make -C freedom-maker dreamplug-image raspberry-image virtualbox-image
9766 </pre>
9767
9768 <p>Root access is needed to run debootstrap and mount loopback
9769 devices.  See the README for more details on the build. If you do not
9770 want all three images, trim the make line.  But note that thanks to <a
9771 href="https://bugs.debian.org/741407">a race condition in
9772 vmdebootstrap</a>, the build might fail without the patch to the
9773 kpartx call.</p>
9774
9775 <p>If you instead want to install using a Debian CD and the preseed
9776 method, boot a Debian Wheezy ISO and use this boot argument to load
9777 the preseed values:</p>
9778
9779 <pre>
9780 url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat</a>
9781 </pre>
9782
9783 <p>But note that due to <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/740673">a
9784 recently introduced bug in apt in Jessie</a>, the installer will
9785 currently hang while setting up APT sources.  Killing the
9786 '<tt>apt-cdrom ident</tt>' process when it hang a few times during the
9787 installation will get the installation going.  This affect all
9788 installations in Jessie, and I expect it will be fixed soon.</p>
9789
9790 <p>Give it a go and let us know how it goes on the mailing list, and help
9791 us get the new release published. :) Please join us on
9792 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC (#freedombox on
9793 irc.debian.org)</a> and
9794 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
9795 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
9796
9797       </div>
9798       <div class="tags">
9799
9800
9801         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>.
9802
9803
9804       </div>
9805     </div>
9806     <div class="padding"></div>
9807
9808     <div class="entry">
9809       <div class="title">
9810         <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>
9811       </div>
9812       <div class="date">
9813         12th March 2014
9814       </div>
9815       <div class="body">
9816         <p>On larger sites, it is useful to use a dedicated storage server for
9817 storing user home directories and data.  The design for handling this
9818 in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>, is
9819 to update the automount rules in LDAP and let the automount daemon on
9820 the clients take care of the rest.  I was reminded about the need to
9821 document this better when one of the customers of
9822 <a href="http://www.slxdrift.no/">Skolelinux Drift AS</a>, where I am
9823 on the board of directors, asked about how to do this.  The steps to
9824 get this working are the following:</p>
9825
9826 <p><ol>
9827
9828 <li>Add new storage server in DNS.  I use nas-server.intern as the
9829 example host here.</li>
9830
9831 <li>Add automoun LDAP information about this server in LDAP, to allow
9832 all clients to automatically mount it on reqeust.</li>
9833
9834 <li>Add the relevant entries in tjener.intern:/etc/fstab, because
9835 tjener.intern do not use automount to avoid mounting loops.</li>
9836
9837 </ol></p>
9838
9839 <p>DNS entries are added in GOsa², and not described here.  Follow the
9840 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/GettingStarted">instructions
9841 in the manual</a> (Machine Management with GOsa² in section Getting
9842 started).</p>
9843
9844 <p>Ensure that the NFS export points on the server are exported to the
9845 relevant subnets or machines:</p>
9846
9847 <p><blockquote><pre>
9848 root@tjener:~# showmount -e nas-server
9849 Export list for nas-server:
9850 /storage         10.0.0.0/8
9851 root@tjener:~#
9852 </pre></blockquote></p>
9853
9854 <p>Here everything on the backbone network is granted access to the
9855 /storage export.  With NFSv3 it is slightly better to limit it to
9856 netgroup membership or single IP addresses to have some limits on the
9857 NFS access.</p>
9858
9859 <p>The next step is to update LDAP.  This can not be done using GOsa²,
9860 because it lack a module for automount.  Instead, use ldapvi and add
9861 the required LDAP objects using an editor.</p>
9862
9863 <p><blockquote><pre>
9864 ldapvi --ldap-conf -ZD '(cn=admin)' -b ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
9865 </pre></blockquote></p>
9866
9867 <p>When the editor show up, add the following LDAP objects at the
9868 bottom of the document.  The "/&" part in the last LDAP object is a
9869 wild card matching everything the nas-server exports, removing the
9870 need to list individual mount points in LDAP.</p>
9871
9872 <p><blockquote><pre>
9873 add cn=nas-server,ou=auto.skole,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
9874 objectClass: automount
9875 cn: nas-server
9876 automountInformation: -fstype=autofs --timeout=60 ldap:ou=auto.nas-server,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
9877
9878 add ou=auto.nas-server,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
9879 objectClass: top
9880 objectClass: automountMap
9881 ou: auto.nas-server
9882
9883 add cn=/,ou=auto.nas-server,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
9884 objectClass: automount
9885 cn: /
9886 automountInformation: -fstype=nfs,tcp,rsize=32768,wsize=32768,rw,intr,hard,nodev,nosuid,noatime nas-server.intern:/&
9887 </pre></blockquote></p>
9888
9889 <p>The last step to remember is to mount the relevant mount points in
9890 tjener.intern by adding them to /etc/fstab, creating the mount
9891 directories using mkdir and running "mount -a" to mount them.</p>
9892
9893 <p>When this is done, your users should be able to access the files on
9894 the storage server directly by just visiting the
9895 /tjener/nas-server/storage/ directory using any application on any
9896 workstation, LTSP client or LTSP server.</p>
9897
9898       </div>
9899       <div class="tags">
9900
9901
9902         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>.
9903
9904
9905       </div>
9906     </div>
9907     <div class="padding"></div>
9908
9909     <div class="entry">
9910       <div class="title">
9911         <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>
9912       </div>
9913       <div class="date">
9914         22nd February 2014
9915       </div>
9916       <div class="body">
9917         <p>Many years ago, I wrote a GPL licensed version of the netgroup and
9918 innetgr tools, because I needed them in
9919 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a>.  I called the project
9920 ng-utils, and it has served me well.  I placed the project under the
9921 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/">Hungry Programmer</a> umbrella, and it was maintained in our CVS
9922 repository.  But many years ago, the CVS repository was dropped (lost,
9923 not migrated to new hardware, not sure), and the project have lacked a
9924 proper home since then.</p>
9925
9926 <p>Last summer, I had a look at the package and made a new release
9927 fixing a irritating crash bug, but was unable to store the changes in
9928 a proper source control system.  I applied for a project on
9929 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/">Alioth</a>, but did not have time
9930 to follow up on it.  Until today. :)</p>
9931
9932 <p>After many hours of cleaning and migration, the ng-utils project
9933 now have a new home, and a git repository with the highlight of the
9934 history of the project.  I published all release tarballs and imported
9935 them into the git repository.  As the project is really stable and not
9936 expected to gain new features any time soon, I decided to make a new
9937 release and call it 1.0.  Visit the new project home on
9938 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/ng-utils/">https://alioth.debian.org/projects/ng-utils/</a>
9939 if you want to check it out.  The new version is also uploaded into
9940 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/ng-utils.html">Debian Unstable</a>.</p>
9941
9942       </div>
9943       <div class="tags">
9944
9945
9946         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>.
9947
9948
9949       </div>
9950     </div>
9951     <div class="padding"></div>
9952
9953     <div class="entry">
9954       <div class="title">
9955         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_sysvinit_from_experimental_in_Debian_Hurd.html">Testing sysvinit from experimental in Debian Hurd</a>
9956       </div>
9957       <div class="date">
9958          3rd February 2014
9959       </div>
9960       <div class="body">
9961         <p>A few days ago I decided to try to help the Hurd people to get
9962 their changes into sysvinit, to allow them to use the normal sysvinit
9963 boot system instead of their old one.  This follow up on the
9964 <a href="https://teythoon.cryptobitch.de//categories/gsoc.html">great
9965 Google Summer of Code work</a> done last summer by Justus Winter to
9966 get Debian on Hurd working more like Debian on Linux.  To get started,
9967 I downloaded a prebuilt hard disk image from
9968 <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>,
9969 and started it using virt-manager.</p>
9970
9971 <p>The first think I had to do after logging in (root without any
9972 password) was to get the network operational.  I followed
9973 <a href="https://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/hurd-install">the
9974 instructions on the Debian GNU/Hurd ports page</a> and ran these
9975 commands as root to get the machine to accept a IP address from the
9976 kvm internal DHCP server:</p>
9977
9978 <p><blockquote><pre>
9979 settrans -fgap /dev/netdde /hurd/netdde
9980 kill $(ps -ef|awk '/[p]finet/ { print $2}')
9981 kill $(ps -ef|awk '/[d]evnode/ { print $2}')
9982 dhclient /dev/eth0
9983 </pre></blockquote></p>
9984
9985 <p>After this, the machine had internet connectivity, and I could
9986 upgrade it and install the sysvinit packages from experimental and
9987 enable it as the default boot system in Hurd.</p>
9988
9989 <p>But before I did that, I set a password on the root user, as ssh is
9990 running on the machine it for ssh login to work a password need to be
9991 set.  Also, note that a bug somewhere in openssh on Hurd block
9992 compression from working.  Remember to turn that off on the client
9993 side.</p>
9994
9995 <p>Run these commands as root to upgrade and test the new sysvinit
9996 stuff:</p>
9997
9998 <p><blockquote><pre>
9999 cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/experimental.list &lt;&lt;EOF
10000 deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ experimental main
10001 EOF
10002 apt-get update
10003 apt-get dist-upgrade
10004 apt-get install -t experimental initscripts sysv-rc sysvinit \
10005     sysvinit-core sysvinit-utils
10006 update-alternatives --config runsystem
10007 </pre></blockquote></p>
10008
10009 <p>To reboot after switching boot system, you have to use
10010 <tt>reboot-hurd</tt> instead of just <tt>reboot</tt>, as there is not
10011 yet a sysvinit process able to receive the signals from the normal
10012 'reboot' command.  After switching to sysvinit as the boot system,
10013 upgrading every package and rebooting, the network come up with DHCP
10014 after boot as it should, and the settrans/pkill hack mentioned at the
10015 start is no longer needed.  But for some strange reason, there are no
10016 longer any login prompt in the virtual console, so I logged in using
10017 ssh instead.
10018
10019 <p>Note that there are some race conditions in Hurd making the boot
10020 fail some times.  No idea what the cause is, but hope the Hurd porters
10021 figure it out.  At least Justus said on IRC (#debian-hurd on
10022 irc.debian.org) that they are aware of the problem.  A way to reduce
10023 the impact is to upgrade to the Hurd packages built by Justus by
10024 adding this repository to the machine:</p>
10025
10026 <p><blockquote><pre>
10027 cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hurd-ci.list &lt;&lt;EOF
10028 deb http://darnassus.sceen.net/~teythoon/hurd-ci/ sid main
10029 EOF
10030 </pre></blockquote></p>
10031
10032 <p>At the moment the prebuilt virtual machine get some packages from
10033 http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian, because some of the packages in
10034 unstable do not yet include the required patches that are lingering in
10035 BTS.  This is the completely list of "unofficial" packages installed:</p>
10036
10037 <p><blockquote><pre>
10038 # aptitude search '?narrow(?version(CURRENT),?origin(Debian Ports))'
10039 i   emacs                   - GNU Emacs editor (metapackage)
10040 i   gdb                     - GNU Debugger
10041 i   hurd-recommended        - Miscellaneous translators
10042 i   isc-dhcp-client         - ISC DHCP client
10043 i   isc-dhcp-common         - common files used by all the isc-dhcp* packages
10044 i   libc-bin                - Embedded GNU C Library: Binaries
10045 i   libc-dev-bin            - Embedded GNU C Library: Development binaries
10046 i   libc0.3                 - Embedded GNU C Library: Shared libraries
10047 i A libc0.3-dbg             - Embedded GNU C Library: detached debugging symbols
10048 i   libc0.3-dev             - Embedded GNU C Library: Development Libraries and Hea
10049 i   multiarch-support       - Transitional package to ensure multiarch compatibilit
10050 i A x11-common              - X Window System (X.Org) infrastructure
10051 i   xorg                    - X.Org X Window System
10052 i A xserver-xorg            - X.Org X server
10053 i A xserver-xorg-input-all  - X.Org X server -- input driver metapackage
10054 #
10055 </pre></blockquote></p>
10056
10057 <p>All in all, testing hurd has been an interesting experience. :)
10058 X.org did not work out of the box and I never took the time to follow
10059 the porters instructions to fix it.  This time I was interested in the
10060 command line stuff.<p>
10061
10062       </div>
10063       <div class="tags">
10064
10065
10066         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>.
10067
10068
10069       </div>
10070     </div>
10071     <div class="padding"></div>
10072
10073     <div class="entry">
10074       <div class="title">
10075         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_fist_full_of_non_anonymous_Bitcoins.html">A fist full of non-anonymous Bitcoins</a>
10076       </div>
10077       <div class="date">
10078         29th January 2014
10079       </div>
10080       <div class="body">
10081         <p>Bitcoin is a incredible use of peer to peer communication and
10082 encryption, allowing direct and immediate money transfer without any
10083 central control.  It is sometimes claimed to be ideal for illegal
10084 activity, which I believe is quite a long way from the truth.  At least
10085 I would not conduct illegal money transfers using a system where the
10086 details of every transaction are kept forever.  This point is
10087 investigated in
10088 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login">USENIX ;login:</a>
10089 from December 2013, in the article
10090 "<a href="https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/articles/03_meiklejohn-online.pdf">A
10091 Fistful of Bitcoins - Characterizing Payments Among Men with No
10092 Names</a>" by Sarah Meiklejohn, Marjori Pomarole,Grant Jordan, Kirill
10093 Levchenko, Damon McCoy, Geoffrey M. Voelker, and Stefan Savage.  They
10094 analyse the transaction log in the Bitcoin system, using it to find
10095 addresses belong to individuals and organisations and follow the flow
10096 of money from both Bitcoin theft and trades on Silk Road to where the
10097 money end up.  This is how they wrap up their article:</p>
10098
10099 <p><blockquote>
10100 <p>"To demonstrate the usefulness of this type of analysis, we turned
10101 our attention to criminal activity. In the Bitcoin economy, criminal
10102 activity can appear in a number of forms, such as dealing drugs on
10103 Silk Road or simply stealing someone else’s bitcoins. We followed the
10104 flow of bitcoins out of Silk Road (in particular, from one notorious
10105 address) and from a number of highly publicized thefts to see whether
10106 we could track the bitcoins to known services. Although some of the
10107 thieves attempted to use sophisticated mixing techniques (or possibly
10108 mix services) to obscure the flow of bitcoins, for the most part
10109 tracking the bitcoins was quite straightforward, and we ultimately saw
10110 large quantities of bitcoins flow to a variety of exchanges directly
10111 from the point of theft (or the withdrawal from Silk Road).</p>
10112
10113 <p>As acknowledged above, following stolen bitcoins to the point at
10114 which they are deposited into an exchange does not in itself identify
10115 the thief; however, it does enable further de-anonymization in the
10116 case in which certain agencies can determine (through, for example,
10117 subpoena power) the real-world owner of the account into which the
10118 stolen bitcoins were deposited.  Because such exchanges seem to serve
10119 as chokepoints into and out of the Bitcoin economy (i.e., there are
10120 few alternative ways to cash out), we conclude that using Bitcoin for
10121 money laundering or other illicit purposes does not (at least at
10122 present) seem to be particularly attractive."</p>
10123 </blockquote><p>
10124
10125 <p>These researches are not the first to analyse the Bitcoin
10126 transaction log.  The 2011 paper
10127 "<a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/1107.4524">An Analysis of Anonymity in
10128 the Bitcoin System</A>" by Fergal Reid and Martin Harrigan is
10129 summarized like this:</p>
10130
10131 <p><blockquote>
10132 "Anonymity in Bitcoin, a peer-to-peer electronic currency system, is a
10133 complicated issue. Within the system, users are identified by
10134 public-keys only. An attacker wishing to de-anonymize its users will
10135 attempt to construct the one-to-many mapping between users and
10136 public-keys and associate information external to the system with the
10137 users. Bitcoin tries to prevent this attack by storing the mapping of
10138 a user to his or her public-keys on that user's node only and by
10139 allowing each user to generate as many public-keys as required. In
10140 this chapter we consider the topological structure of two networks
10141 derived from Bitcoin's public transaction history. We show that the
10142 two networks have a non-trivial topological structure, provide
10143 complementary views of the Bitcoin system and have implications for
10144 anonymity. We combine these structures with external information and
10145 techniques such as context discovery and flow analysis to investigate
10146 an alleged theft of Bitcoins, which, at the time of the theft, had a
10147 market value of approximately half a million U.S. dollars."
10148 </blockquote></p>
10149
10150 <p>I hope these references can help kill the urban myth that Bitcoin
10151 is anonymous.  It isn't really a good fit for illegal activites.  Use
10152 cash if you need to stay anonymous, at least until regular DNA
10153 sampling of notes and coins become the norm. :)</p>
10154
10155 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
10156 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
10157 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
10158
10159       </div>
10160       <div class="tags">
10161
10162
10163         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>.
10164
10165
10166       </div>
10167     </div>
10168     <div class="padding"></div>
10169
10170     <div class="entry">
10171       <div class="title">
10172         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_chrpath_release_0_16.html">New chrpath release 0.16</a>
10173       </div>
10174       <div class="date">
10175         14th January 2014
10176       </div>
10177       <div class="body">
10178         <p><a href="http://www.coverity.com/">Coverity</a> is a nice tool to
10179 find problems in C, C++ and Java code using static source code
10180 analysis.  It can detect a lot of different problems, and is very
10181 useful to find memory and locking bugs in the error handling part of
10182 the source.  The company behind it provide
10183 <a href="https://scan.coverity.com/">check of free software projects as
10184 a community service</a>, and many hundred free software projects are
10185 already checked.  A few days ago I decided to have a closer look at
10186 the Coverity system, and discovered that the
10187 <a href="http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/">gnash</a> and
10188 <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/ipmitool/">ipmitool</a>
10189 projects I am involved with was already registered.  But these are
10190 fairly big, and I would also like to have a small and easy project to
10191 check, and decided to <a href="http://scan.coverity.com/projects/1179">request
10192 checking of the chrpath project</a>.  It was
10193 added to the checker and discovered seven potential defects.  Six of
10194 these were real, mostly resource "leak" when the program detected an
10195 error.  Nothing serious, as the resources would be released a fraction
10196 of a second later when the program exited because of the error, but it
10197 is nice to do it right in case the source of the program some time in
10198 the future end up in a library.  Having fixed all defects and added
10199 <a href="https://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/chrpath-devel">a
10200 mailing list for the chrpath developers</a>, I decided it was time to
10201 publish a new release.  These are the release notes:</p>
10202
10203 <p>New in 0.16 released 2014-01-14:</p>
10204
10205 <ul>
10206
10207   <li>Fixed all minor bugs discovered by Coverity.</li>
10208   <li>Updated config.sub and config.guess from the GNU project.</li>
10209   <li>Mention new project mailing list in the documentation.</li>
10210
10211 </ul>
10212
10213 <p>You can
10214 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/frs/?group_id=31052">download the
10215 new version 0.16 from alioth</a>.  Please let us know via the Alioth
10216 project if something is wrong with the new release.  The test suite
10217 did not discover any old errors, so if you find a new one, please also
10218 include a test suite check.</p>
10219
10220       </div>
10221       <div class="tags">
10222
10223
10224         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>.
10225
10226
10227       </div>
10228     </div>
10229     <div class="padding"></div>
10230
10231     <div class="entry">
10232       <div class="title">
10233         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Dominik_George.html">Debian Edu interview: Dominik George</a>
10234       </div>
10235       <div class="date">
10236         25th December 2013
10237       </div>
10238       <div class="body">
10239         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
10240 project</a> consist of both newcomers and old timers, and this time I
10241 was able to get an interview with a newcomer in the project who showed
10242 up on the IRC channel a few weeks ago to let us know about his
10243 successful installation of Debian Edu Wheezy in his School.  Say hello
10244 to <a href="https://www.ohloh.net/accounts/Natureshadow">Dominik
10245 George</a>.</p>
10246
10247 <!-- http://www.dominik-george.de/images/foto.jpg -->
10248
10249 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
10250
10251 <p>I am a 23 year-old student from Germany who has spent half of his
10252 life with open source. In "real life", I am, as already mentioned, a
10253 student in the fields of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering,
10254 Information Technologies and Anglistics. Due to my (only partially
10255 voluntary) huge engagement in the open source world, these things are
10256 a bit vacant right now however.</p>
10257
10258 <p>I also have been working as a project teacher at a Gymasnium
10259 (public school) for various years now. I took up that work some time
10260 around 2005 when still attending that school myself and have continued
10261 it until today. I also had been running the (kind of very advanced)
10262 network of that school together with a team of very interested and
10263 talented students in the age of 11 to 15 years, who took the chance to
10264 learn a lot about open source and networking before I left the school
10265 to help building another school's informational education concept from
10266 scratch.</p>
10267
10268 <p>That said, one might see me as a kind of "glue" between school kids
10269 and the elderly of teachers as well as between the open source
10270 ecosystem and the (even more complex) educational ecosystem.</p>
10271
10272 <p>When I am not busy with open source or education, I like Geocaching
10273 and cycling.</p>
10274
10275 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
10276 project?</strong></p>
10277
10278 <p>I think that happened some time around 2009 when I first attended
10279 <a href="http://www.froscon.org">FrOSCon</a> and visited the project
10280 booth. I think I wasn't too interested back then because I used to
10281 have an attitude of disliking software that does too much stuff on its
10282 own. Maybe I was too inexperienced to realise the upsides of an
10283 "out-of-the-box" solution ;).</p>
10284
10285 <p>The first time I actively talked to Skolelinux people was at
10286 <a href="http://www.openrheinruhr.de">OpenRheinRuhr</a> 2011 when the
10287 BiscuIT project, a home-grewn software used by my school for various
10288 really cool things from timetables and class contact lists to lunch
10289 ordering, student ID card printing and project elections first got to
10290 a stage where it could have been published. I asked the Skolelinux
10291 guys running the booth if the project were interested in it and gave a
10292 small demonstration, but there wasn't any real feedback and the guys
10293 seemed rather uninterested.</p>
10294
10295 <p>After I left the school where I developed the software, it got
10296 mostly lost, but I am now reimplementing it for my new school. I have
10297 reusability and compatibility in mind, and I hop there will be a new
10298 basis for contributing it to the Skolelinux project ;)!</p>
10299
10300 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
10301 Edu?</strong></p>
10302
10303 <p>The most important advantage seems to be that it "just
10304 works". After overcoming some minor (but still very annoying) glitches
10305 in the installer, I got a fully functional, working school network,
10306 without the month-long hassle I experienced when setting all that up
10307 from scratch in earlier years. And above that, it rocked - I didn't
10308 have any real hardware at hand, because the school was just founded
10309 and has no money whatsoever, so I installed a combined server (main
10310 server, terminal services and workstation) in a VM on my personal
10311 notebook, bridging the LTSP network interface to the ethernet port,
10312 and then PXE-booted the Windows notebooks that were lying around from
10313 it. I could use 8 clients without any performance issues, by using a
10314 tiny little VM on a tiny little notebook. I think that's enough to say
10315 that it rocks!</p>
10316
10317 <p>Secondly, there are marketing reasons. Life's bad, and so no
10318 politician will ever permit a setup described as "Debian, an universal
10319 operating system, with some really cool educational tools" while they
10320 will be jsut fine with "Skolelinux, a single-purpose solution for your
10321 school network", even if both turn out to be the very same thing (yes,
10322 this is unfair towards the Skolelinux project, and must not be taken
10323 too seriously - you get the idea, anyway).</p>
10324
10325 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
10326 Edu?</strong></p>
10327
10328 <p>I have not been involved with Skolelinux long enough to really
10329 answer this question in a fair way. Thus, please allow me to put it in
10330 other words: "What do you expect from Skolelinux to keep liking it?" I
10331 can list a few points about that:</p>
10332
10333 <ul>
10334
10335  <li>always strive to get all things integrated into Debian upstream
10336  <li>be open to discussion about changes and the like, even with newcomers
10337  <li>be helpful at being helpful ;)
10338
10339 </ul>
10340
10341 <p>I'm really sorry I cannot say much more about that :(!</p>
10342
10343 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
10344
10345 <p>First of all, all software I use is free and open. I have abandoned
10346 all non-free software (except for firmware on my darned phone) this
10347 year.</p>
10348
10349 <p>I run Debian GNU/Linux on all PC systems I use. On that, I mostly
10350 run text tools. I use
10351 <a href="https://www.mirbsd.org/mksh.htm">mksh</a> as shell,
10352 <a href="https://www.mirbsd.org/jupp.htm">jupp</a> as very advanced
10353 text editor (I even got the developer to help me write a script/macro
10354 based full-featured student management software with the two),
10355 <a href="http://mcabber.com/">mcabber</a> for XMPP and
10356 <a href="http://www.irssi.org/">irssi</a> for IRC. For that overly
10357 coloured world called the WWW, I use
10358 <a href="https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/">Iceweasel
10359 (Firefox)</a>. Oh, and <a href="http://www.mutt.org/">mutt</a> for
10360 e-mail.</p>
10361
10362 <p>However, while I am personally aware of the fact that text tools
10363 are more efficient and powerful than anything else, I also use (or at
10364 least operate) some tools that are suitable to bring open source to
10365 kids. One of these things is <a href="http://jappix.org/">Jappix</a>,
10366 which I already introduced to some kids even before they got aware of
10367 Facebook, making them see for themselves that they do not need
10368 Facebook now ;).</p>
10369
10370 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
10371 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
10372
10373 <p>Well, that's a two-sided thing. One side is what I believe, and one
10374 side is what I have experienced.</p>
10375
10376 <p>I believe that the right strategy is showing them the benefits. But
10377 that won't work out as long as the acceptance of free alternatives
10378 grows globally. What I mean is that if all the kids are almost forced
10379 to use Windows, Facebook, Skype, you name it at home, they will not
10380 see why they would want to use alternatives at school. I have seen
10381 students take seat in front of a fully-functional, modern Debian
10382 desktop that could do anything their Windows at home could do, and
10383 they jsut refused to use it because "Linux sucks". It is something
10384 that makes the council of our city spend around 600000 € to buy
10385 software - not including hardware, mind you - for operating school
10386 networks, and for installing a system that, as has been proved, does
10387 not work. For those of you readers who are good at maths, have you
10388 already found out how many lives could have been saved with that money
10389 if we had instead used it to bring education to parts of the world
10390 that need it? I have, and found it to be nothing less dramatic than
10391 plain criminal.</p>
10392
10393 <p>That said, the only feasible way appears to be the bottom up
10394 method. We have to bring free software to kids and parents. I have
10395 founded an association named
10396 <a href="https://www.teckids.org">Teckids</a> here in Germany that does
10397 just that. We organise several events for kids and adolescents in the
10398 area of free and open source software, for example the
10399 <a href="http://kids.froscon.org">FrogLabs</a>, which share staff with
10400 Teckids and are the youth programme of
10401 <a href="http://www.froscon.org">the Free and Open Source Software
10402 Conference (FrOSCon)</a>. We do a lot more than most other conferences
10403 - this year, we first offered the FrogLabs as a holiday camp for kids
10404 aged 10 to 16. It was a huge success, with approx. 30 kids taking part
10405 and learning with and about free software through a whole weekend. All
10406 of us had a lot of fun, and the results were really exciting.</p>
10407
10408 <p>Apart from that, we are preparing a campaign that is supposed to bring
10409 the message of free alternatives to stuff kids use every day to them and
10410 their parents, e.g. the use of Jabber / Jappix instead of Facebook and
10411 Skype. To make that possible, we are planning to get together a team of
10412 clever kids who understand very well what their peers need and can bring
10413 it across to them. So we will have a peer-driven network of adolescents
10414 who teach each other and collect feedback from the community of minors.
10415 We then take that feedback and our own experience to work closely with
10416 open source projects, such as Skolelinux or Jappix, at improving their
10417 software in a way that makes it more and more attractive for the target
10418 group. At least I hope that we will have good cooperation with
10419 Skolelinux in the future ;)!</p>
10420
10421 <p>So in conclusion, what I believe is that, if it weren't for the world
10422 being so bad, it should be very clear to the political decision makers
10423 that the only way to go nowadays is free software for various reasons,
10424 but I have learnt that the only way that seems to work is bottom up.</p>
10425
10426 <!--
10427
10428 >  * Who should be interviewed with this questions in the future?
10429
10430 That's probably the hardest question of them all, as I do not know the
10431 community. However, I would be willing to do the following:
10432
10433  <li>Run an interview with a German headteacher who is very open to
10434    free software, and also prefers it, but cannot really use it because
10435    of the decision makers above;
10436  <li>Run interviews with some kids, both with and without previous
10437    knowledge about free software
10438
10439 If that is wanted, just let me know ;).
10440
10441 -->
10442
10443       </div>
10444       <div class="tags">
10445
10446
10447         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>.
10448
10449
10450       </div>
10451     </div>
10452     <div class="padding"></div>
10453
10454     <div class="entry">
10455       <div class="title">
10456         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Klaus_Knopper.html">Debian Edu interview: Klaus Knopper</a>
10457       </div>
10458       <div class="date">
10459          6th December 2013
10460       </div>
10461       <div class="body">
10462         <p>It has been a while since I managed to publish the last interview,
10463 but the <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
10464 Skolelinux</a> community is still going strong, and yesterday we even
10465 had a new school administrator show up on
10466 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/#debian-edu">#debian-edu</a> to share
10467 his success story with installing Debian Edu at their school.  This
10468 time I have been able to get some helpful comments from the creator of
10469 Knoppix, Klaus Knopper, who was involved in a Skolelinux project in
10470 Germany a few years ago.</p>
10471
10472 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
10473
10474 <p>I am Klaus Knopper.  I have a master degree in electrical
10475 engineering, and is currently professor in information management at
10476 the university of applied sciences Kaiserslautern / Germany and
10477 freelance Open Source software developer and consultant.</p>
10478
10479 <p>All of this is pretty much of the work I spend my days with. Apart
10480 from teaching, I'm also conducting some more or less experimental
10481 projects like the <a href="http://www.knoppix.org">Knoppix GNU/Linux live
10482 system</a> (Debian-based like Skolelinux),
10483 <a href="http://www.knopper.net/knoppix-adriane/index-en.html">ADRIANE</a>
10484 (a blind-friendly talking desktop system) and
10485 <a href="http://www.knopper.net/linbo/index-en.html">LINBO</a>
10486 (Linux-based network boot console, a fast remote install and repair
10487 system supporting various operating systems).</p>
10488
10489 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
10490 project?</strong></p>
10491
10492 <p>The credit for this have to go to Kurt Gramlich, who is the German
10493 coordinator for Skolelinux.  We were looking for an all-in-one open
10494 source community-supported distribution for schools, and Kurt
10495 introduced us to Skolelinux for this purpose.</p>
10496
10497 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
10498 Edu?</strong></p>
10499
10500 <ul>
10501   <li>Quick installation,</li>
10502   <li>works (almost) out of the box,</li>
10503   <li>contains many useful software packages for teaching and learning,</li>
10504   <li>is a purely community-based distro and not controlled by a
10505     single company,</li>
10506   <li>has a large number of supporters and teachers who share their
10507     experience and problem solutions.</li>
10508 </ul>
10509
10510 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
10511 Edu?</strong></p>
10512
10513 <ul>
10514   <li>Skolelinux is - as we had to learn - not easily upgradable to
10515   the next version.  Opposed to its genuine Debian base, upgrading to
10516   a new version means a full new installation from scratch to get it
10517   working again reliably.
10518
10519   <li>Skolelinux is based on Debian/stable, and therefore always a
10520   little outdated in terms of program versions compared to Edubuntu or
10521   similar educational Linux distros, which rather use Debian/testing
10522   as their base.
10523
10524   <li>Skolelinux has some very self-opinionated and stubborn default
10525   configuration which in my opinion adds unnecessary complexity and is
10526   not always suitable for a schools needs, the preset network
10527   configuration is actually a core definition feature of Skolelinux
10528   and not easy to change, so schools sometimes have to change their
10529   network configuration to make it "Skolelinux-compatible".
10530
10531   <li>Some proposed extensions, which were made available as
10532   contribution, like secure examination mode and lecture material
10533   distribution and collection, were not accepted into the mainline
10534   Skolelinux development and are now not easy to maintain in the
10535   future because of Skolelinux somewhat undeterministic update
10536   schemes.</li>
10537
10538   <li>Skolelinux has only a very tiny number of base developers
10539   compared to Debian.</li>
10540
10541 </ul>
10542
10543 <p>For these reasons and experience from our project, I would now
10544 rather consider using plain Debian for schools next time, until
10545 Skolelinux is more closely integrated into Debian and becomes
10546 upgradeable without reinstallation.</p>
10547
10548 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
10549
10550 <p>GNU/Linux with LXDE desktop, bash for interactive dialog and
10551 programming, texlive for documentation and correspondence,
10552 occasionally LibreOffice for document format conversion. Various
10553 programming languages for teaching.</p>
10554
10555 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
10556 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
10557
10558 <p>Strong arguments are</p>
10559
10560 <ul>
10561
10562   <li>Knowledge is free, and so should be methods and tools for
10563     teaching and learning.</li>
10564
10565   <li>Students can learn with and use the same software at school, at
10566     home, and at their working place without running into license or
10567     conversion problems.</li>
10568
10569   <li>Closed source or proprietary software hides knowledge rather
10570     than exposing it, and proprietary software vendors try to bind
10571     customers to certain products.  But teachers need to teach
10572     science, not products.</li>
10573
10574   <li>If you have everything you for daily work as open source, what
10575     would you need proprietary software for?</li>
10576
10577 </ul>
10578
10579       </div>
10580       <div class="tags">
10581
10582
10583         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>.
10584
10585
10586       </div>
10587     </div>
10588     <div class="padding"></div>
10589
10590     <div class="entry">
10591       <div class="title">
10592         <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>
10593       </div>
10594       <div class="date">
10595         30th November 2013
10596       </div>
10597       <div class="body">
10598         <p>If you want the ability to electronically communicate directly with
10599 your neighbors and friends using a network controlled by your peers in
10600 stead of centrally controlled by a few corporations, or would like to
10601 experiment with interesting network technology, the
10602 <a href="http://www.dugnadsnett.no/">Dugnasnett for alle i Oslo</a>
10603 might be project for you.  39 mesh nodes are currently being planned,
10604 in the freshly started initiative from NUUG and Hackeriet to create a
10605 wireless community network.  The work is inspired by
10606 <a href="http://freifunk.net/">Freifunk</a>,
10607 <a href="http://www.awmn.net/">Athens Wireless Metropolitan
10608 Network</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roofnet">Roofnet</a>
10609 and other successful mesh networks around the globe.  Two days ago we
10610 held a workshop to try to get people started on setting up their own
10611 mesh node, and there we decided to create a new mailing list
10612 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/dugnadsnett">dugnadsnett
10613 (at) nuug.no</a> and IRC channel
10614 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/#dugnadsnett.no">#dugnadsnett.no</a> to
10615 coordinate the work.  See also the NUUG blog post
10616 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/E_postliste_og_IRC_kanal_for_Dugnadsnett_for_alle_i_Oslo.shtml">announcing
10617 the mailing list and IRC channel</a>.</p>
10618
10619       </div>
10620       <div class="tags">
10621
10622
10623         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>.
10624
10625
10626       </div>
10627     </div>
10628     <div class="padding"></div>
10629
10630     <div class="entry">
10631       <div class="title">
10632         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_chrpath_release_0_15.html">New chrpath release 0.15</a>
10633       </div>
10634       <div class="date">
10635         24th November 2013
10636       </div>
10637       <div class="body">
10638         <p>After many years break from the package and a vain hope that
10639 development would be continued by someone else, I finally pulled my
10640 acts together this morning and wrapped up a new release of chrpath,
10641 the command line tool to modify the rpath and runpath of already
10642 compiled ELF programs.  The update was triggered by the persistence of
10643 Isha Vishnoi at IBM, which needed a new config.guess file to get
10644 support for the ppc64le architecture (powerpc 64-bit Little Endian) he
10645 is working on.  I checked the
10646 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/chrpath">Debian</a>,
10647 <a href="https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/chrpath">Ubuntu</a> and
10648 <a href="https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/acls/name/chrpath">Fedora</a>
10649 packages for interesting patches (failed to find the source from
10650 OpenSUSE and Mandriva packages), and found quite a few nice fixes.
10651 These are the release notes:</p>
10652
10653 <p>New in 0.15 released 2013-11-24:</p>
10654
10655 <ul>
10656
10657   <li>Updated config.sub and config.guess from the GNU project to work
10658    with newer architectures.  Thanks to isha vishnoi for the heads
10659    up.</li>
10660
10661   <li>Updated README with current URLs.</li>
10662
10663   <li>Added byteswap fix found in Ubuntu, credited Jeremy Kerr and
10664    Matthias Klose.</li>
10665
10666   <li>Added missing help for -k|--keepgoing option, using patch by
10667    Petr Machata found in Fedora.</li>
10668
10669   <li>Rewrite removal of RPATH/RUNPATH to make sure the entry in
10670    .dynamic is a NULL terminated string.  Based on patch found in
10671    Fedora credited Axel Thimm and Christian Krause.</li>
10672
10673 </ul>
10674
10675 <p>You can
10676 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/frs/?group_id=31052">download the
10677 new version 0.15 from alioth</a>.  Please let us know via the Alioth
10678 project if something is wrong with the new release.  The test suite
10679 did not discover any old errors, so if you find a new one, please also
10680 include a testsuite check.</p>
10681
10682       </div>
10683       <div class="tags">
10684
10685
10686         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>.
10687
10688
10689       </div>
10690     </div>
10691     <div class="padding"></div>
10692
10693     <div class="entry">
10694       <div class="title">
10695         <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>
10696       </div>
10697       <div class="date">
10698         21st November 2013
10699       </div>
10700       <div class="body">
10701         <p>Drones, flying robots, are getting more and more popular.  The most
10702 know ones are the killer drones used by some government to murder
10703 people they do not like without giving them the chance of a fair
10704 trial, but the technology have many good uses too, from mapping and
10705 forest maintenance to photography and search and rescue.  I am sure it
10706 is just a question of time before "bad drones" are in the hands of
10707 private enterprises and not only state criminals but petty criminals
10708 too.  The drone technology is very useful and very dangerous.  To have
10709 some control over the use of drones, I agree with Daniel Suarez in his
10710 TED talk
10711 "<a href="https://archive.org/details/DanielSuarez_2013G">The kill
10712 decision shouldn't belong to a robot</a>", where he suggested this
10713 little gem to keep the good while limiting the bad use of drones:</p>
10714
10715 <blockquote>
10716
10717 <p>Each robot and drone should have a cryptographically signed
10718 I.D. burned in at the factory that can be used to track its movement
10719 through public spaces. We have license plates on cars, tail numbers on
10720 aircraft. This is no different. And every citizen should be able to
10721 download an app that shows the population of drones and autonomous
10722 vehicles moving through public spaces around them, both right now and
10723 historically. And civic leaders should deploy sensors and civic drones
10724 to detect rogue drones, and instead of sending killer drones of their
10725 own up to shoot them down, they should notify humans to their
10726 presence. And in certain very high-security areas, perhaps civic
10727 drones would snare them and drag them off to a bomb disposal facility.</p>
10728
10729 <p>But notice, this is more an immune system than a weapons system. It
10730 would allow us to avail ourselves of the use of autonomous vehicles
10731 and drones while still preserving our open, civil society.</p>
10732
10733 </blockquote>
10734
10735 <p>The key is that <em>every citizen</em> should be able to read the
10736 radio beacons sent from the drones in the area, to be able to check
10737 both the government and others use of drones.  For such control to be
10738 effective, everyone must be able to do it.  What should such beacon
10739 contain?  At least formal owner, purpose, contact information and GPS
10740 location.  Probably also the origin and target position of the current
10741 flight.  And perhaps some registration number to be able to look up
10742 the drone in a central database tracking their movement.  Robots
10743 should not have privacy.  It is people who need privacy.</p>
10744
10745       </div>
10746       <div class="tags">
10747
10748
10749         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>.
10750
10751
10752       </div>
10753     </div>
10754     <div class="padding"></div>
10755
10756     <div class="entry">
10757       <div class="title">
10758         <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>
10759       </div>
10760       <div class="date">
10761         13th November 2013
10762       </div>
10763       <div class="body">
10764         <p>Today NUUG and Hackeriet announced
10765 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Bli_med___bygge_dugnadsnett_for_alle_i_Oslo.shtml">our
10766 plans to join forces and create a wireless community network in
10767 Oslo</a>.  The workshop to help people get started will take place
10768 Thursday 2013-11-28, but we already are collecting the geolocation of
10769 people joining forces to make this happen.  We have
10770 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node/blob/master/oslo-nodes.geojson">9
10771 locations plotted on the map</a>, but we will need more before we have
10772 a connected mesh spread across Oslo.  If this sound interesting to
10773 you, please join us at the workshop.  If you are too impatient to wait
10774 15 days, please join us on the IRC channel
10775 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23nuug">#nuug on irc.freenode.net</a>
10776 right away. :)</p>
10777
10778       </div>
10779       <div class="tags">
10780
10781
10782         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>.
10783
10784
10785       </div>
10786     </div>
10787     <div class="padding"></div>
10788
10789     <div class="entry">
10790       <div class="title">
10791         <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>
10792       </div>
10793       <div class="date">
10794         10th November 2013
10795       </div>
10796       <div class="body">
10797         <p>Continuing my research into mesh networking, I was recommended to
10798 use TP-Link 3040 and 3600 access points as mesh nodes, and the pair I
10799 bought arrived on Friday.  Here are my notes on how to set up the
10800 MR3040 as a mesh node using
10801 <a href="http://www.openwrt.org/">OpenWrt</a>.</p>
10802
10803 <p>I started by following the instructions on the OpenWRT wiki for
10804 <a href="http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/tl-mr3040">TL-MR3040</a>,
10805 and downloaded
10806 <a href="http://downloads.openwrt.org/snapshots/trunk/ar71xx/openwrt-ar71xx-generic-tl-mr3040-v2-squashfs-factory.bin">the
10807 recommended firmware image</a>
10808 (openwrt-ar71xx-generic-tl-mr3040-v2-squashfs-factory.bin) and
10809 uploaded it into the original web interface.  The flashing went fine,
10810 and the machine was available via telnet on the ethernet port.  After
10811 logging in and setting the root password, ssh was available and I
10812 could start to set it up as a batman-adv mesh node.</p>
10813
10814 <p>I started off by reading the instructions from
10815 <a href="http://wirelessafrica.meraka.org.za/wiki/index.php?title=Antoine's_Research">Wireless
10816 Africa</a>, which had quite a lot of useful information, but
10817 eventually I followed the recipe from the Open Mesh wiki for
10818 <a href="http://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki/Batman-adv-openwrt-config">using
10819 batman-adv on OpenWrt</a>.  A small snag was the fact that the
10820 <tt>opkg install kmod-batman-adv</tt> command did not work as it
10821 should.  The batman-adv kernel module would fail to load because its
10822 dependency crc16 was not already loaded.  I
10823 <a href="https://dev.openwrt.org/ticket/14452">reported the bug</a> to
10824 the openwrt project and hope it will be fixed soon.  But the problem
10825 only seem to affect initial testing of batman-adv, as configuration
10826 seem to work when booting from scratch.</p>
10827
10828 <p>The setup is done using files in /etc/config/.  I did not bridge
10829 the Ethernet and mesh interfaces this time, to be able to hook up the
10830 box on my local network and log into it for configuration updates.
10831 The following files were changed and look like this after modifying
10832 them:</p>
10833
10834 <p><tt>/etc/config/network</tt></p>
10835
10836 <pre>
10837
10838 config interface 'loopback'
10839         option ifname 'lo'
10840         option proto 'static'
10841         option ipaddr '127.0.0.1'
10842         option netmask '255.0.0.0'
10843
10844 config globals 'globals'
10845         option ula_prefix 'fdbf:4c12:3fed::/48'
10846
10847 config interface 'lan'
10848         option ifname 'eth0'
10849         option type 'bridge'
10850         option proto 'dhcp'
10851         option ipaddr '192.168.1.1'
10852         option netmask '255.255.255.0'
10853         option hostname 'tl-mr3040'
10854         option ip6assign '60'
10855
10856 config interface 'mesh'
10857         option ifname 'adhoc0'
10858         option mtu '1528'
10859         option proto 'batadv'
10860         option mesh 'bat0'
10861 </pre>
10862
10863 <p><tt>/etc/config/wireless</tt></p>
10864 <pre>
10865
10866 config wifi-device 'radio0'
10867         option type 'mac80211'
10868         option channel '11'
10869         option hwmode '11ng'
10870         option path 'platform/ar933x_wmac'
10871         option htmode 'HT20'
10872         list ht_capab 'SHORT-GI-20'
10873         list ht_capab 'SHORT-GI-40'
10874         list ht_capab 'RX-STBC1'
10875         list ht_capab 'DSSS_CCK-40'
10876         option disabled '0'
10877
10878 config wifi-iface 'wmesh'
10879         option device 'radio0'
10880         option ifname 'adhoc0'
10881         option network 'mesh'
10882         option encryption 'none'
10883         option mode 'adhoc'
10884         option bssid '02:BA:00:00:00:01'
10885         option ssid 'meshfx@hackeriet'
10886 </pre>
10887 <p><tt>/etc/config/batman-adv</tt></p>
10888 <pre>
10889
10890 config 'mesh' 'bat0'
10891         option interfaces 'adhoc0'
10892         option 'aggregated_ogms'
10893         option 'ap_isolation'
10894         option 'bonding'
10895         option 'fragmentation'
10896         option 'gw_bandwidth'
10897         option 'gw_mode'
10898         option 'gw_sel_class'
10899         option 'log_level'
10900         option 'orig_interval'
10901         option 'vis_mode'
10902         option 'bridge_loop_avoidance'
10903         option 'distributed_arp_table'
10904         option 'network_coding'
10905         option 'hop_penalty'
10906
10907 # yet another batX instance
10908 # config 'mesh' 'bat5'
10909 #       option 'interfaces' 'second_mesh'
10910 </pre>
10911
10912 <p>The mesh node is now operational.  I have yet to test its range,
10913 but I hope it is good.  I have not yet tested the TP-Link 3600 box
10914 still wrapped up in plastic.</p>
10915
10916       </div>
10917       <div class="tags">
10918
10919
10920         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>.
10921
10922
10923       </div>
10924     </div>
10925     <div class="padding"></div>
10926
10927     <div class="entry">
10928       <div class="title">
10929         <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>
10930       </div>
10931       <div class="date">
10932          2nd November 2013
10933       </div>
10934       <div class="body">
10935         <p>If one of the points of switching to a new init system in Debian is
10936 <a href="http://thomas.goirand.fr/blog/?p=147">to get rid of huge
10937 init.d scripts</a>, I doubt we need to switch away from sysvinit and
10938 init.d scripts at all.  Here is an example init.d script, ie a rewrite
10939 of /etc/init.d/rsyslog:</p>
10940
10941 <p><pre>
10942 #!/lib/init/init-d-script
10943 ### BEGIN INIT INFO
10944 # Provides:          rsyslog
10945 # Required-Start:    $remote_fs $time
10946 # Required-Stop:     umountnfs $time
10947 # X-Stop-After:      sendsigs
10948 # Default-Start:     2 3 4 5
10949 # Default-Stop:      0 1 6
10950 # Short-Description: enhanced syslogd
10951 # Description:       Rsyslog is an enhanced multi-threaded syslogd.
10952 #                    It is quite compatible to stock sysklogd and can be
10953 #                    used as a drop-in replacement.
10954 ### END INIT INFO
10955 DESC="enhanced syslogd"
10956 DAEMON=/usr/sbin/rsyslogd
10957 </pre></p>
10958
10959 <p>Pretty minimalistic to me... For the record, the original sysv-rc
10960 script was 137 lines, and the above is just 15 lines, most of it meta
10961 info/comments.</p>
10962
10963 <p>How to do this, you ask?  Well, one create a new script
10964 /lib/init/init-d-script looking something like this:
10965
10966 <p><pre>
10967 #!/bin/sh
10968
10969 # Define LSB log_* functions.
10970 # Depend on lsb-base (>= 3.2-14) to ensure that this file is present
10971 # and status_of_proc is working.
10972 . /lib/lsb/init-functions
10973
10974 #
10975 # Function that starts the daemon/service
10976
10977 #
10978 do_start()
10979 {
10980         # Return
10981         #   0 if daemon has been started
10982         #   1 if daemon was already running
10983         #   2 if daemon could not be started
10984         start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --exec $DAEMON --test > /dev/null \
10985                 || return 1
10986         start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --exec $DAEMON -- \
10987                 $DAEMON_ARGS \
10988                 || return 2
10989         # Add code here, if necessary, that waits for the process to be ready
10990         # to handle requests from services started subsequently which depend
10991         # on this one.  As a last resort, sleep for some time.
10992 }
10993
10994 #
10995 # Function that stops the daemon/service
10996 #
10997 do_stop()
10998 {
10999         # Return
11000         #   0 if daemon has been stopped
11001         #   1 if daemon was already stopped
11002         #   2 if daemon could not be stopped
11003         #   other if a failure occurred
11004         start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --retry=TERM/30/KILL/5 --pidfile $PIDFILE --name $NAME
11005         RETVAL="$?"
11006         [ "$RETVAL" = 2 ] && return 2
11007         # Wait for children to finish too if this is a daemon that forks
11008         # and if the daemon is only ever run from this initscript.
11009         # If the above conditions are not satisfied then add some other code
11010         # that waits for the process to drop all resources that could be
11011         # needed by services started subsequently.  A last resort is to
11012         # sleep for some time.
11013         start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --oknodo --retry=0/30/KILL/5 --exec $DAEMON
11014         [ "$?" = 2 ] && return 2
11015         # Many daemons don't delete their pidfiles when they exit.
11016         rm -f $PIDFILE
11017         return "$RETVAL"
11018 }
11019
11020 #
11021 # Function that sends a SIGHUP to the daemon/service
11022 #
11023 do_reload() {
11024         #
11025         # If the daemon can reload its configuration without
11026         # restarting (for example, when it is sent a SIGHUP),
11027         # then implement that here.
11028         #
11029         start-stop-daemon --stop --signal 1 --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --name $NAME
11030         return 0
11031 }
11032
11033 SCRIPTNAME=$1
11034 scriptbasename="$(basename $1)"
11035 echo "SN: $scriptbasename"
11036 if [ "$scriptbasename" != "init-d-library" ] ; then
11037     script="$1"
11038     shift
11039     . $script
11040 else
11041     exit 0
11042 fi
11043
11044 NAME=$(basename $DAEMON)
11045 PIDFILE=/var/run/$NAME.pid
11046
11047 # Exit if the package is not installed
11048 #[ -x "$DAEMON" ] || exit 0
11049
11050 # Read configuration variable file if it is present
11051 [ -r /etc/default/$NAME ] && . /etc/default/$NAME
11052
11053 # Load the VERBOSE setting and other rcS variables
11054 . /lib/init/vars.sh
11055
11056 case "$1" in
11057   start)
11058         [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_daemon_msg "Starting $DESC" "$NAME"
11059         do_start
11060         case "$?" in
11061                 0|1) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 0 ;;
11062                 2) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 1 ;;
11063         esac
11064         ;;
11065   stop)
11066         [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_daemon_msg "Stopping $DESC" "$NAME"
11067         do_stop
11068         case "$?" in
11069                 0|1) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 0 ;;
11070                 2) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 1 ;;
11071         esac
11072         ;;
11073   status)
11074         status_of_proc "$DAEMON" "$NAME" && exit 0 || exit $?
11075         ;;
11076   #reload|force-reload)
11077         #
11078         # If do_reload() is not implemented then leave this commented out
11079         # and leave 'force-reload' as an alias for 'restart'.
11080         #
11081         #log_daemon_msg "Reloading $DESC" "$NAME"
11082         #do_reload
11083         #log_end_msg $?
11084         #;;
11085   restart|force-reload)
11086         #
11087         # If the "reload" option is implemented then remove the
11088         # 'force-reload' alias
11089         #
11090         log_daemon_msg "Restarting $DESC" "$NAME"
11091         do_stop
11092         case "$?" in
11093           0|1)
11094                 do_start
11095                 case "$?" in
11096                         0) log_end_msg 0 ;;
11097                         1) log_end_msg 1 ;; # Old process is still running
11098                         *) log_end_msg 1 ;; # Failed to start
11099                 esac
11100                 ;;
11101           *)
11102                 # Failed to stop
11103                 log_end_msg 1
11104                 ;;
11105         esac
11106         ;;
11107   *)
11108         echo "Usage: $SCRIPTNAME {start|stop|status|restart|force-reload}" >&2
11109         exit 3
11110         ;;
11111 esac
11112
11113 :
11114 </pre></p>
11115
11116 <p>It is based on /etc/init.d/skeleton, and could be improved quite a
11117 lot.  I did not really polish the approach, so it might not always
11118 work out of the box, but you get the idea.  I did not try very hard to
11119 optimize it nor make it more robust either.</p>
11120
11121 <p>A better argument for switching init system in Debian than reducing
11122 the size of init scripts (which is a good thing to do anyway), is to
11123 get boot system that is able to handle the kernel events sensibly and
11124 robustly, and do not depend on the boot to run sequentially.  The boot
11125 and the kernel have not behaved sequentially in years.</p>
11126
11127       </div>
11128       <div class="tags">
11129
11130
11131         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>.
11132
11133
11134       </div>
11135     </div>
11136     <div class="padding"></div>
11137
11138     <div class="entry">
11139       <div class="title">
11140         <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>
11141       </div>
11142       <div class="date">
11143          1st November 2013
11144       </div>
11145       <div class="body">
11146         <p><a href="http://www.spice-space.org/">The SPICE protocol</a> for
11147 remote display access is the preferred solution with oVirt and RedHat
11148 Enterprise Virtualization, and I was sad to discover the other day
11149 that the browser plugin needed to use these systems seamlessly was
11150 missing in Debian.  The <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/668284">request
11151 for a package</a> was from 2012-04-10 with no progress since
11152 2013-04-01, so I decided to wrap up a package based on the great work
11153 from Cajus Pollmeier and put it in a collab-maint maintained git
11154 repository to get a package I could use.  I would very much like
11155 others to help me maintain the package (or just take over, I do not
11156 mind), but as no-one had volunteered so far, I just uploaded it to
11157 NEW.  I hope it will be available in Debian in a few days.</p>
11158
11159 <p>The source is now available from
11160 <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>
11161
11162       </div>
11163       <div class="tags">
11164
11165
11166         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>.
11167
11168
11169       </div>
11170     </div>
11171     <div class="padding"></div>
11172
11173     <div class="entry">
11174       <div class="title">
11175         <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>
11176       </div>
11177       <div class="date">
11178         27th October 2013
11179       </div>
11180       <div class="body">
11181         <p>The
11182 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/v/vmdebootstrap.html">vmdebootstrap</a>
11183 program is a a very nice system to create virtual machine images.  It
11184 create a image file, add a partition table, mount it and run
11185 debootstrap in the mounted directory to create a Debian system on a
11186 stick.  Yesterday, I decided to try to teach it how to make images for
11187 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi">Raspberry Pi</a>, as part
11188 of a plan to simplify the build system for
11189 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the FreedomBox
11190 project</a>.  The FreedomBox project already uses vmdebootstrap for
11191 the virtualbox images, but its current build system made multistrap
11192 based system for Dreamplug images, and it is lacking support for
11193 Raspberry Pi.</p>
11194
11195 <p>Armed with the knowledge on how to build "foreign" (aka non-native
11196 architecture) chroots for Raspberry Pi, I dived into the vmdebootstrap
11197 code and adjusted it to be able to build armel images on my amd64
11198 Debian laptop.  I ended up giving vmdebootstrap five new options,
11199 allowing me to replicate the image creation process I use to make
11200 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Raspberry_Pi_based_batman_adv_Mesh_network_node.html">Debian
11201 Jessie based mesh node images for the Raspberry Pi</a>.  First, the
11202 <tt>--foreign /path/to/binfm_handler</tt> option tell vmdebootstrap to
11203 call debootstrap with --foreign and to copy the handler into the
11204 generated chroot before running the second stage.  This allow
11205 vmdebootstrap to create armel images on an amd64 host.  Next I added
11206 two new options <tt>--bootsize size</tt> and <tt>--boottype
11207 fstype</tt> to teach it to create a separate /boot/ partition with the
11208 given file system type, allowing me to create an image with a vfat
11209 partition for the /boot/ stuff.  I also added a <tt>--variant
11210 variant</tt> option to allow me to create smaller images without the
11211 Debian base system packages installed.  Finally, I added an option
11212 <tt>--no-extlinux</tt> to tell vmdebootstrap to not install extlinux
11213 as a boot loader.  It is not needed on the Raspberry Pi and probably
11214 most other non-x86 architectures.  The changes were accepted by the
11215 upstream author of vmdebootstrap yesterday and today, and is now
11216 available from
11217 <a href="http://git.liw.fi/cgi-bin/cgit/cgit.cgi/vmdebootstrap/">the
11218 upstream project page</a>.</p>
11219
11220 <p>To use it to build a Raspberry Pi image using Debian Jessie, first
11221 create a small script (the customize script) to add the non-free
11222 binary blob needed to boot the Raspberry Pi and the APT source
11223 list:</p>
11224
11225 <p><pre>
11226 #!/bin/sh
11227 set -e # Exit on first error
11228 rootdir="$1"
11229 cd "$rootdir"
11230 cat &lt;&lt;EOF > etc/apt/sources.list
11231 deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ jessie main contrib non-free
11232 EOF
11233 # Install non-free binary blob needed to boot Raspberry Pi.  This
11234 # install a kernel somewhere too.
11235 wget https://raw.github.com/Hexxeh/rpi-update/master/rpi-update \
11236     -O $rootdir/usr/bin/rpi-update
11237 chmod a+x $rootdir/usr/bin/rpi-update
11238 mkdir -p $rootdir/lib/modules
11239 touch $rootdir/boot/start.elf
11240 chroot $rootdir rpi-update
11241 </pre></p>
11242
11243 <p>Next, fetch the latest vmdebootstrap script and call it like this
11244 to build the image:</p>
11245
11246 <pre>
11247 sudo ./vmdebootstrap \
11248     --variant minbase \
11249     --arch armel \
11250     --distribution jessie \
11251     --mirror http://http.debian.net/debian \
11252     --image test.img \
11253     --size 600M \
11254     --bootsize 64M \
11255     --boottype vfat \
11256     --log-level debug \
11257     --verbose \
11258     --no-kernel \
11259     --no-extlinux \
11260     --root-password raspberry \
11261     --hostname raspberrypi \
11262     --foreign /usr/bin/qemu-arm-static \
11263     --customize `pwd`/customize \
11264     --package netbase \
11265     --package git-core \
11266     --package binutils \
11267     --package ca-certificates \
11268     --package wget \
11269     --package kmod
11270 </pre></p>
11271
11272 <p>The list of packages being installed are the ones needed by
11273 rpi-update to make the image bootable on the Raspberry Pi, with the
11274 exception of netbase, which is needed by debootstrap to find
11275 /etc/hosts with the minbase variant.  I really wish there was a way to
11276 set up an Raspberry Pi using only packages in the Debian archive, but
11277 that is not possible as far as I know, because it boots from the GPU
11278 using a non-free binary blob.</p>
11279
11280 <p>The build host need debootstrap, kpartx and qemu-user-static and
11281 probably a few others installed.  I have not checked the complete
11282 build dependency list.</p>
11283
11284 <p>The resulting image will not use the hardware floating point unit
11285 on the Raspberry PI, because the armel architecture in Debian is not
11286 optimized for that use.  So the images created will be a bit slower
11287 than <a href="http://www.raspbian.org/">Raspbian</a> based images.</p>
11288
11289       </div>
11290       <div class="tags">
11291
11292
11293         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>.
11294
11295
11296       </div>
11297     </div>
11298     <div class="padding"></div>
11299
11300     <div class="entry">
11301       <div class="title">
11302         <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>
11303       </div>
11304       <div class="date">
11305         21st October 2013
11306       </div>
11307       <div class="body">
11308         <p>The last few days I have been experimenting with
11309 <a href="http://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki">the
11310 batman-adv mesh technology</a>.  I want to gain some experience to see
11311 if it will fit <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the
11312 Freedombox project</a>, and together with my neighbors try to build a
11313 mesh network around the park where I live.  Batman-adv is a layer 2
11314 mesh system ("ethernet" in other words), where the mesh network appear
11315 as if all the mesh clients are connected to the same switch.</p>
11316
11317 <p>My hardware of choice was the Linksys WRT54GL routers I had lying
11318 around, but I've been unable to get them working with batman-adv.  So
11319 instead, I started playing with a
11320 <a href="http://www.raspberrypi.org/">Raspberry Pi</a>, and tried to
11321 get it working as a mesh node.  My idea is to use it to create a mesh
11322 node which function as a switch port, where everything connected to
11323 the Raspberry Pi ethernet plug is connected (bridged) to the mesh
11324 network.  This allow me to hook a wifi base station like the Linksys
11325 WRT54GL to the mesh by plugging it into a Raspberry Pi, and allow
11326 non-mesh clients to hook up to the mesh.  This in turn is useful for
11327 Android phones using <a href="http://servalproject.org/">the Serval
11328 Project</a> voip client, allowing every one around the playground to
11329 phone and message each other for free.  The reason is that Android
11330 phones do not see ad-hoc wifi networks (they are filtered away from
11331 the GUI view), and can not join the mesh without being rooted.  But if
11332 they are connected using a normal wifi base station, they can talk to
11333 every client on the local network.</p>
11334
11335 <p>To get this working, I've created a debian package
11336 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node">meshfx-node</a>
11337 and a script
11338 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node/blob/master/build-rpi-mesh-node">build-rpi-mesh-node</a>
11339 to create the Raspberry Pi boot image.  I'm using Debian Jessie (and
11340 not Raspbian), to get more control over the packages available.
11341 Unfortunately a huge binary blob need to be inserted into the boot
11342 image to get it booting, but I'll ignore that for now.  Also, as
11343 Debian lack support for the CPU features available in the Raspberry
11344 Pi, the system do not use the hardware floating point unit.  I hope
11345 the routing performance isn't affected by the lack of hardware FPU
11346 support.</p>
11347
11348 <p>To create an image, run the following with a sudo enabled user
11349 after inserting the target SD card into the build machine:</p>
11350
11351 <p><pre>
11352 % wget -O build-rpi-mesh-node \
11353     https://raw.github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node/master/build-rpi-mesh-node
11354 % sudo bash -x ./build-rpi-mesh-node > build.log 2>&1
11355 % dd if=/root/rpi/rpi_basic_jessie_$(date +%Y%m%d).img of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=1M
11356 %
11357 </pre></p>
11358
11359 <p>Booting with the resulting SD card on a Raspberry PI with a USB
11360 wifi card inserted should give you a mesh node.  At least it does for
11361 me with a the wifi card I am using. The default mesh settings are the
11362 ones used by the Oslo mesh project at Hackeriet, as I mentioned in
11363 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Oslo_community_mesh_network___with_NUUG_and_Hackeriet_at_Hausmania.html">an
11364 earlier blog post about this mesh testing</a>.</p>
11365
11366 <p>The mesh node was not horribly expensive either.  I bought
11367 everything over the counter in shops nearby.  If I had ordered online
11368 from the lowest bidder, the price should be significantly lower:</p>
11369
11370 <p><table>
11371
11372 <tr><th>Supplier</th><th>Model</th><th>NOK</th></tr>
11373 <tr><td>Teknikkmagasinet</td><td>Raspberry Pi model B</td><td>349.90</td></tr>
11374 <tr><td>Teknikkmagasinet</td><td>Raspberry Pi type B case</td><td>99.90</td></tr>
11375 <tr><td>Lefdal</td><td>Jensen Air:Link 25150</td><td>295.-</td></tr>
11376 <tr><td>Clas Ohlson</td><td>Kingston 16 GB SD card</td><td>199.-</td></tr>
11377 <tr><td>Total cost</td><td></td><td>943.80</td></tr>
11378
11379 </table></p>
11380
11381 <p>Now my mesh network at home consist of one laptop in the basement
11382 connected to my production network, one Raspberry Pi node on the 1th
11383 floor that can be seen by my neighbor across the park, and one
11384 play-node I use to develop the image building script.  And some times
11385 I hook up my work horse laptop to the mesh to test it.  I look forward
11386 to figuring out what kind of latency the batman-adv setup will give,
11387 and how much packet loss we will experience around the park. :)</p>
11388
11389       </div>
11390       <div class="tags">
11391
11392
11393         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>.
11394
11395
11396       </div>
11397     </div>
11398     <div class="padding"></div>
11399
11400     <div class="entry">
11401       <div class="title">
11402         <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>
11403       </div>
11404       <div class="date">
11405         19th October 2013
11406       </div>
11407       <div class="body">
11408         <p>Back in 2010, I created a Perl library to talk to
11409 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spykee">the Spykee robot</a>
11410 (with two belts, wifi, USB and Linux) and made it available from my
11411 web page.  Today I concluded that it should move to a site that is
11412 easier to use to cooperate with others, and moved it to github.  If
11413 you got a Spykee robot, you might want to check out
11414 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/libspykee-perl">the
11415 libspykee-perl github repository</a>.</p>
11416
11417       </div>
11418       <div class="tags">
11419
11420
11421         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>.
11422
11423
11424       </div>
11425     </div>
11426     <div class="padding"></div>
11427
11428     <div class="entry">
11429       <div class="title">
11430         <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>
11431       </div>
11432       <div class="date">
11433         15th October 2013
11434       </div>
11435       <div class="body">
11436         <p>The last few days I came across a few good causes that should get
11437 wider attention.  I recommend signing and donating to each one of
11438 these. :)</p>
11439
11440 <p>Via <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2013/18/">Debian
11441 Project News for 2013-10-14</a> I came across the Outreach Program for
11442 Women program which is a Google Summer of Code like initiative to get
11443 more women involved in free software.  One debian sponsor has offered
11444 to match <a href="http://debian.ch/opw2013">any donation done to Debian
11445 earmarked</a> for this initiative.  I donated a few minutes ago, and
11446 hope you will to. :)</p>
11447
11448 <p>And the Electronic Frontier Foundation just announced plans to
11449 create <a href="https://supporters.eff.org/donate/nsa-videos">video
11450 documentaries about the excessive spying</a> on every Internet user that
11451 take place these days, and their need to fund the work.  I've already
11452 donated.  Are you next?</p>
11453
11454 <p>For my Norwegian audience, the organisation Studentenes og
11455 Akademikernes Internasjonale Hjelpefond is collecting signatures for a
11456 statement under the heading
11457 <a href="http://saih.no/Bloggers_United/">Bloggers United for Open
11458 Access</a> for those of us asking for more focus on open access in the
11459 Norwegian government.  So far 499 signatures.  I hope you will sign it
11460 too.</p>
11461
11462       </div>
11463       <div class="tags">
11464
11465
11466         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>.
11467
11468
11469       </div>
11470     </div>
11471     <div class="padding"></div>
11472
11473     <div class="entry">
11474       <div class="title">
11475         <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>
11476       </div>
11477       <div class="date">
11478         11th October 2013
11479       </div>
11480       <div class="body">
11481         <p>Wireless mesh networks are self organising and self healing
11482 networks that can be used to connect computers across small and large
11483 areas, depending on the radio technology used.  Normal wifi equipment
11484 can be used to create home made radio networks, and there are several
11485 successful examples like
11486 <a href="http://www.freifunk.net/">Freifunk</a> and
11487 <a href="http://www.awmn.net/">Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network</a>
11488 (see
11489 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wireless_community_networks_by_region#Greece">wikipedia
11490 for a large list</a>) around the globe.  To give you an idea how it
11491 work, check out the nice overview of the Kiel Freifunk community which
11492 can be seen from their
11493 <a href="http://freifunk.in-kiel.de/ffmap/nodes.html">dynamically
11494 updated node graph and map</a>, where one can see how the mesh nodes
11495 automatically handle routing and recover from nodes disappearing.
11496 There is also a small community mesh network group in Oslo, Norway,
11497 and that is the main topic of this blog post.</p>
11498
11499 <p>I've wanted to check out mesh networks for a while now, and hoped
11500 to do it as part of my involvement with the <a
11501 href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG member organisation</a> community, and
11502 my recent involvement in
11503 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the Freedombox project</a>
11504 finally lead me to give mesh networks some priority, as I suspect a
11505 Freedombox should use mesh networks to connect neighbours and family
11506 when possible, given that most communication between people are
11507 between those nearby (as shown for example by research on Facebook
11508 communication patterns).  It also allow people to communicate without
11509 any central hub to tap into for those that want to listen in on the
11510 private communication of citizens, which have become more and more
11511 important over the years.</p>
11512
11513 <p>So far I have only been able to find one group of people in Oslo
11514 working on community mesh networks, over at the hack space
11515 <a href="http://hackeriet.no/">Hackeriet</a> at Husmania.  They seem to
11516 have started with some Freifunk based effort using OLSR, called
11517 <a href="http://oslo.freifunk.net/index.php?title=Main_Page">the Oslo
11518 Freifunk project</a>, but that effort is now dead and the people
11519 behind it have moved on to a batman-adv based system called
11520 <a href="http://meshfx.org/trac">meshfx</a>.  Unfortunately the wiki
11521 site for the Oslo Freifunk project is no longer possible to update to
11522 reflect this fact, so the old project page can't be updated to point to
11523 the new project.  A while back, the people at Hackeriet invited people
11524 from the Freifunk community to Oslo to talk about mesh networks.  I
11525 came across this video where Hans Jørgen Lysglimt interview the
11526 speakers about this talk (from
11527 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2Kd7CLkhSY">youtube</a>):</p>
11528
11529 <p><iframe width="420" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/N2Kd7CLkhSY" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></p>
11530
11531 <p>I mentioned OLSR and batman-adv, which are mesh routing protocols.
11532 There are heaps of different protocols, and I am still struggling to
11533 figure out which one would be "best" for some definitions of best, but
11534 given that the community mesh group in Oslo is so small, I believe it
11535 is best to hook up with the existing one instead of trying to create a
11536 completely different setup, and thus I have decided to focus on
11537 batman-adv for now.  It sure help me to  know that the very cool
11538 <a href="http://www.servalproject.org/">Serval project in Australia</a>
11539 is using batman-adv as their meshing technology when it create a self
11540 organizing and self healing telephony system for disaster areas and
11541 less industrialized communities.  Check out this cool video presenting
11542 that project (from
11543 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30qNfzJCQOA">youtube</a>):</p>
11544
11545 <p><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/30qNfzJCQOA" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></p>
11546
11547 <p>According to the wikipedia page on
11548 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_mesh_network">Wireless
11549 mesh network</a> there are around 70 competing schemes for routing
11550 packets across mesh networks, and OLSR, B.A.T.M.A.N. and
11551 B.A.T.M.A.N. advanced are protocols used by several free software
11552 based community mesh networks.</p>
11553
11554 <p>The batman-adv protocol is a bit special, as it provide layer 2
11555 (as in ethernet ) routing, allowing ipv4 and ipv6 to work on the same
11556 network.  One way to think about it is that it provide a mesh based
11557 vlan you can bridge to or handle like any other vlan connected to your
11558 computer.  The required drivers are already in the Linux kernel at
11559 least since Debian Wheezy, and it is fairly easy to set up.  A
11560 <a href="http://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki/Quick-start-guide">good
11561 introduction</a> is available from the Open Mesh project.  These are
11562 the key settings needed to join the Oslo meshfx network:</p>
11563
11564 <p><table>
11565 <tr><th>Setting</th><th>Value</th></tr>
11566 <tr><td>Protocol / kernel module</td><td>batman-adv</td></tr>
11567 <tr><td>ESSID</td><td>meshfx@hackeriet</td></tr>
11568 <td>Channel / Frequency</td><td>11 / 2462</td></tr>
11569 <td>Cell ID</td><td>02:BA:00:00:00:01</td>
11570 </table></p>
11571
11572 <p>The reason for setting ad-hoc wifi Cell ID is to work around bugs
11573 in firmware used in wifi card and wifi drivers.  (See a nice post from
11574 VillageTelco about
11575 "<a href="http://tiebing.blogspot.no/2009/12/ad-hoc-cell-splitting-re-post-original.html">Information
11576 about cell-id splitting, stuck beacons, and failed IBSS merges!</a>
11577 for details.)  When these settings are activated and you have some
11578 other mesh node nearby, your computer will be connected to the mesh
11579 network and can communicate with any mesh node that is connected to
11580 any of the nodes in your network of nodes. :)</p>
11581
11582 <p>My initial plan was to reuse my old Linksys WRT54GL as a mesh node,
11583 but that seem to be very hard, as I have not been able to locate a
11584 firmware supporting batman-adv.  If anyone know how to use that old
11585 wifi access point with batman-adv these days, please let me know.</p>
11586
11587 <p>If you find this project interesting and want to join, please join
11588 us on IRC, either channel
11589 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/#oslohackerspace">#oslohackerspace</a>
11590 or <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/#nuug">#nuug</a> on
11591 irc.freenode.net.</p>
11592
11593 <p>While investigating mesh networks in Oslo, I came across an old
11594 research paper from the university of Stavanger and Telenor Research
11595 and Innovation called
11596 <a href="http://folk.uio.no/paalee/publications/netrel-egeland-iswcs-2008.pdf">The
11597 reliability of wireless backhaul mesh networks</a> and elsewhere
11598 learned that Telenor have been experimenting with mesh networks at
11599 Grünerløkka in Oslo.  So mesh networks are also interesting for
11600 commercial companies, even though Telenor discovered that it was hard
11601 to figure out a good business plan for mesh networking and as far as I
11602 know have closed down the experiment.  Perhaps Telenor or others would
11603 be interested in a cooperation?</p>
11604
11605 <p><strong>Update 2013-10-12</strong>: I was just
11606 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/2013-October/005900.html">told
11607 by the Serval project developers</a> that they no longer use
11608 batman-adv (but are compatible with it), but their own crypto based
11609 mesh system.</p>
11610
11611       </div>
11612       <div class="tags">
11613
11614
11615         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>.
11616
11617
11618       </div>
11619     </div>
11620     <div class="padding"></div>
11621
11622     <div class="entry">
11623       <div class="title">
11624         <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>
11625       </div>
11626       <div class="date">
11627          8th October 2013
11628       </div>
11629       <div class="body">
11630         <p>The other day I was pleased and surprised to discover that Marcelo
11631 Salvador had published a
11632 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-GgpdqgLFc">video on
11633 Youtube</a> showing how to install the standalone Debian Edu /
11634 Skolelinux profile.  This is the profile intended for use at home or
11635 on laptops that should not be integrated into the provided network
11636 services (no central home directory, no Kerberos / LDAP directory etc,
11637 in other word a single user machine).  The result is 11 minutes long,
11638 and show some user applications (seem to be rather randomly picked).
11639 Missed a few of my favorites like celestia, planets and chromium
11640 showing the <a href="http://www.zygotebody.com/">Zygote Body 3D model
11641 of the human body</a>, but I guess he did not know about those or find
11642 other programs more interesting. :) And the video do not show the
11643 advantages I believe is one of the most valuable featuers in Debian
11644 Edu, its central school server making it possible to run hundreds of
11645 computers without hard drives by installing one central
11646 <a href="http://www.ltsp.org/">LTSP server</a>.</p>
11647
11648 <p>Anyway, check out the video, embedded below and linked to above:</p>
11649
11650 <iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/w-GgpdqgLFc" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
11651
11652 <p>Are there other nice videos demonstrating Skolelinux?  Please let
11653 me know. :)</p>
11654
11655       </div>
11656       <div class="tags">
11657
11658
11659         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>.
11660
11661
11662       </div>
11663     </div>
11664     <div class="padding"></div>
11665
11666     <div class="entry">
11667       <div class="title">
11668         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Finally__Debian_Edu_Wheezy_is_released_today_.html">Finally, Debian Edu Wheezy is released today!</a>
11669       </div>
11670       <div class="date">
11671         29th September 2013
11672       </div>
11673       <div class="body">
11674         <p>A few hours ago, the announcement for the first stable release of
11675 Debian Edu Wheezy went out from the Debian publicity team.  The
11676 complete announcement text can be found at
11677 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2013/20130928">the Debian News
11678 section</a>, translated to several languages.  Please check it out.</p>
11679
11680 <p>There is one minor known problem that we will fix very soon.  One
11681 can not install a amd64 Thin Client Server using PXE, as the /var/
11682 partition is too small.  A workaround is to extend the partition (use
11683 lvresize + resize2fs in tty 2 while installing).</p>
11684
11685       </div>
11686       <div class="tags">
11687
11688
11689         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>.
11690
11691
11692       </div>
11693     </div>
11694     <div class="padding"></div>
11695
11696     <div class="entry">
11697       <div class="title">
11698         <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>
11699       </div>
11700       <div class="date">
11701         27th September 2013
11702       </div>
11703       <div class="body">
11704         <p>The <a href="http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/">Freedombox
11705 project</a> have been going on for a while, and have presented the
11706 vision, ideas and solution several places.  Here is a little
11707 collection of videos of talks and presentation of the project.</p>
11708
11709 <ul>
11710
11711 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukvUz5taxvA">FreedomBox -
11712 2,5 minute marketing film</a> (Youtube)</li>
11713
11714 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzW25QTVWsE">Eben Moglen
11715 discusses the Freedombox on CBS news 2011</a> (Youtube)</li>
11716
11717 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ae8SZbxfE0g">Eben Moglen -
11718 Freedom in the Cloud - Software Freedom, Privacy and and Security for
11719 Web 2.0 and Cloud computing at ISOC-NY Public Meeting 2010</a>
11720 (Youtube)</li>
11721
11722 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNaIji_3xBE">Fosdem 2011
11723 Keynote by Eben Moglen presenting the Freedombox</a> (Youtube)</li>
11724
11725 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bDDUyJSQ9s">Presentation of
11726 the Freedombox by James Vasile at Elevate in Gratz 2011</a> (Youtube)</li>
11727
11728 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQTmnk27g9s"> Freedombox -
11729 Discovery, Identity, and Trust by Nick Daly at Freedombox Hackfest New
11730 York City in 2012</a> (Youtube)</li>
11731
11732 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkbSB4Ba7Ck">Introduction
11733 to the Freedombox at Freedombox Hackfest New York City in 2012</a>
11734 (Youtube)</li>
11735
11736 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-P2Jaeg0aQ">Freedom, Out
11737 of the Box! by Bdale Garbee at linux.conf.au Ballarat, 2012</a> (Youtube) </li>
11738
11739 <li><a href="https://archive.fosdem.org/2013/schedule/event/freedombox/">Freedombox
11740 1.0 by Eben Moglen and Bdale Garbee at Fosdem 2013</a> (FOSDEM) </li>
11741
11742 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1LpYX2zVYg">What is the
11743 FreedomBox today by Bdale Garbee at Debconf13 in Vaumarcus
11744 2013</a> (Youtube)</li>
11745
11746 </ul>
11747
11748 <p>A larger list is available from
11749 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/TalksAndPresentations">the
11750 Freedombox Wiki</a>.</p>
11751
11752 <p>On other news, I am happy to report that Freedombox based on Debian
11753 Jessie is coming along quite well, and soon both Owncloud and using
11754 Tor should be available for testers of the Freedombox solution. :) In
11755 a few weeks I hope everything needed to test it is included in Debian.
11756 The withsqlite package is already in Debian, and the plinth package is
11757 pending in NEW.  The third and vital part of that puzzle is the
11758 metapackage/setup framework, which is still pending an upload.  Join
11759 us on <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC
11760 (#freedombox on irc.debian.org)</a> and
11761 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
11762 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
11763
11764       </div>
11765       <div class="tags">
11766
11767
11768         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>.
11769
11770
11771       </div>
11772     </div>
11773     <div class="padding"></div>
11774
11775     <div class="entry">
11776       <div class="title">
11777         <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>
11778       </div>
11779       <div class="date">
11780         16th September 2013
11781       </div>
11782       <div class="body">
11783         <p>The third wheezy based beta release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
11784 today.  This is the release announcement from Holger Levsen:</p>
11785
11786 <blockquote>
11787 <p>Hi,</p>
11788
11789 <p>it is my pleasure to announce the third beta release (beta 2 for
11790 short) of <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
11791 Skolelinux</a> based on Debian Wheezy!</p>
11792
11793 <p>Please test these images extensivly, if no new problems are found
11794 we plan to do this final Debian Edu Wheezy release this coming
11795 weekend.  We are not aware of any major problems or blockers in beta2,
11796 if you find something, please notify us immediately!</p>
11797
11798 <p>(More about the remaining steps for the Edu Wheezy release in
11799 another mail to the edu list tonight or tomorrow...)</p>
11800
11801 <p>Noteworthy changes and software updates for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~b2
11802 compared to beta1:</p>
11803
11804 <ul>
11805
11806 <li>The KDE proxy setup has been adjusted to use the provided wpad.dat. This
11807 also gets Chromium to use this proxy.</li>
11808 <li>Install kdepim-groupware with KDE desktops to make sure korganizer
11809 understand ical/dav sources.</li>
11810 <li>Increased default maximum size of /var/spool/squid and /skole/backup on the
11811 main server.</li>
11812 <li>A source DVD image containing all source packages is now available as well.</li>
11813 <li>Updates for chromium (29.0.1547.57-1~deb7u1), imagemagick
11814 (6.7.7.10-5+deb7u2), php5 (5.4.4-14+deb7u4), libmodplug
11815 (0.8.8.4-3+deb7u1+git20130828), tiff (4.0.2-6+deb7u2), linux-image
11816 (3.2.0-4-486_3.2.46-1+deb7u1).</li>
11817
11818 </ul>
11819
11820 <p>Where to get it:</p>
11821
11822 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
11823
11824 <ul>
11825 <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>
11826 <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>
11827 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-CD.iso .</li>
11828 </ul>
11829
11830 <p>The SHA1SUM of this image is:  3a1c89f4666df80eebcd46c5bf5fedb866f9472f</p>
11831
11832 <p>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use
11833 <ul>
11834 <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>
11835 <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>
11836 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-USB.iso .</li>
11837 </ul>
11838
11839 <p>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 702d1718548f401c74bfa6df9f032cc3ee16597e</p>
11840
11841 <p>The Source DVD image has the filename
11842 debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-source-DVD.iso and the SHA1SUM
11843 089eed8b3f962db47aae1f6a9685e9bb2fa30ca5 and is available the same way
11844 as the other isos.</p>
11845
11846 <p>How to report bugs</p>
11847
11848 <p>For information how to report bugs please see
11849 <br><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a></p>
11850
11851
11852 <p>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</p>
11853
11854 <p>Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux, is a Linux distribution based
11855 on Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
11856 configured school network. Immediately after installation a school
11857 server running all services needed for a school network is set up just
11858 waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
11859 Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
11860 initial installation of the main server from CD or USB stick all other
11861 machines can be installed via the network. The provided school server
11862 provides LDAP database and Kerberos authentication service,
11863 centralized home directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other
11864 services.  The desktop contains more than 60 educational software
11865 packages and more are available from the Debian archive, and schools
11866 can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
11867
11868 <p>This is the seventh test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
11869 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
11870 Squeeze release.</p>
11871
11872 <p>Notes for upgrades from Alpha Prereleases</p>
11873
11874 <p>Alpha based installations should reinstall or downgrade the
11875 versions of gosa and libpam-mklocaluser to the ones used in this beta
11876 release. Both alpha and beta0 based installations should reinstall or
11877 deal with gosa.conf manually; there are two options: (1) Keep
11878 gosa.conf and edit this file as outlined on the mailing list. (2)
11879 Accept the new version of gosa.conf and replace both contained admin
11880 password placeholders with the password hashes found in the old one
11881 (backup copy!). In both cases all users need to change their password
11882 to make sure a password is set for CIFS access to their home
11883 directory.</p>
11884
11885
11886 <p>cheers,
11887 <br>        Holger</p>
11888 </blockquote>
11889
11890       </div>
11891       <div class="tags">
11892
11893
11894         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>.
11895
11896
11897       </div>
11898     </div>
11899     <div class="padding"></div>
11900
11901     <div class="entry">
11902       <div class="title">
11903         <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>
11904       </div>
11905       <div class="date">
11906         10th September 2013
11907       </div>
11908       <div class="body">
11909         <p>I was introduced to the
11910 <a href="http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/">Freedombox project</a>
11911 in 2010, when Eben Moglen presented his vision about serving the need
11912 of non-technical people to keep their personal information private and
11913 within the legal protection of their own homes.  The idea is to give
11914 people back the power over their network and machines, and return
11915 Internet back to its intended peer-to-peer architecture.  Instead of
11916 depending on a central service, the Freedombox will give everyone
11917 control over their own basic infrastructure.</p>
11918
11919 <p>I've intended to join the effort since then, but other tasks have
11920 taken priority.  But this summers nasty news about the misuse of trust
11921 and privilege exercised by the "western" intelligence gathering
11922 communities increased my eagerness to contribute to a point where I
11923 actually started working on the project a while back.</p>
11924
11925 <p>The <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/freedombox/">initial
11926 Debian initiative</a> based on the vision from Eben Moglen, is to
11927 create a simple and cheap Debian based appliance that anyone can hook
11928 up in their home and get access to secure and private services and
11929 communication.  The initial deployment platform have been the
11930 <a href="http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/t-dreamplugdetails.aspx">Dreamplug</a>,
11931 which is a piece of hardware I do not own.  So to be able to test what
11932 the current Freedombox setup look like, I had to come up with a way to install
11933 it on some hardware I do have access to.  I have rewritten the
11934 <a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/freedom-maker">freedom-maker</a>
11935 image build framework to use .deb packages instead of only copying
11936 setup into the boot images, and thanks to this rewrite I am able to
11937 set up any machine supported by Debian Wheezy as a Freedombox, using
11938 the previously mentioned deb (and a few support debs for packages
11939 missing in Debian).</p>
11940
11941 <p>The current Freedombox setup consist of a set of bootstrapping
11942 scripts
11943 (<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/freedombox-setup">freedombox-setup</a>),
11944 and a administrative web interface
11945 (<a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/Plinth">plinth</a> + exmachina +
11946 withsqlite), as well as a privacy enhancing proxy based on
11947 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/privoxy">privoxy</a>
11948 (freedombox-privoxy).  There is also a web/javascript based XMPP
11949 client (<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/jwchat">jwchat</a>)
11950 trying (unsuccessfully so far) to talk to the XMPP server
11951 (<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/ejabberd">ejabberd</a>).  The
11952 web interface is pluggable, and the goal is to use it to enable OpenID
11953 services, mesh network connectivity, use of TOR, etc, etc.  Not much of
11954 this is really working yet, see
11955 <a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/freedombox-todos/blob/master/TODO">the
11956 project TODO</a> for links to GIT repositories.  Most of the code is
11957 on github at the moment.  The HTTP proxy is operational out of the
11958 box, and the admin web interface can be used to add/remove plinth
11959 users.  I've not been able to do anything else with it so far, but
11960 know there are several branches spread around github and other places
11961 with lots of half baked features.</p>
11962
11963 <p>Anyway, if you want to have a look at the current state, the
11964 following recipes should work to give you a test machine to poke
11965 at.</p>
11966
11967 <p><strong>Debian Wheezy amd64</strong></p>
11968
11969 <ol>
11970
11971 <li>Fetch normal Debian Wheezy installation ISO.</li>
11972 <li>Boot from it, either as CD or USB stick.</li>
11973 <li><p>Press [tab] on the boot prompt and add this as a boot argument
11974 to the Debian installer:<p>
11975 <pre>url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-wheezy.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-wheezy.dat</a></pre></li>
11976
11977 <li>Answer the few language/region/password questions and pick disk to
11978 install on.</li>
11979
11980 <li>When the installation is finished and the machine have rebooted a
11981 few times, your Freedombox is ready for testing.</li>
11982
11983 </ol>
11984
11985 <p><strong>Raspberry Pi Raspbian</strong></p>
11986
11987 <ol>
11988
11989 <li>Fetch a Raspbian SD card image, create SD card.</li>
11990 <li>Boot from SD card, extend file system to fill the card completely.</li>
11991 <li><p>Log in and add this to /etc/sources.list:</p>
11992 <pre>
11993 deb <a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox</a> wheezy main
11994 </pre></li>
11995 <li><p>Run this as root:</p>
11996 <pre>
11997 wget -O - http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/BE1A583D.asc | \
11998    apt-key add -
11999 apt-get update
12000 apt-get install freedombox-setup
12001 /usr/lib/freedombox/setup
12002 </pre></li>
12003 <li>Reboot into your freshly created Freedombox.</li>
12004
12005 </ol>
12006
12007 <p>You can test it on other architectures too, but because the
12008 freedombox-privoxy package is binary, it will only work as intended on
12009 the architectures where I have had time to build the binary and put it
12010 in my APT repository.  But do not let this stop you.  It is only a
12011 short "<tt>apt-get source -b freedombox-privoxy</tt>" away. :)</p>
12012
12013 <p>Note that by default Freedombox is a DHCP server on the
12014 192.168.1.0/24 subnet, so if this is your subnet be careful and turn
12015 off the DHCP server by running "<tt>update-rc.d isc-dhcp-server
12016 disable</tt>" as root.</p>
12017
12018 <p>Please let me know if this works for you, or if you have any
12019 problems.  We gather on the IRC channel
12020 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">#freedombox</a> on
12021 irc.debian.org and the
12022 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">project
12023 mailing list</a>.</p>
12024
12025 <p>Once you get your freedombox operational, you can visit
12026 <tt>http://your-host-name:8001/</tt> to see the state of the plint
12027 welcome screen (dead end - do not be surprised if you are unable to
12028 get past it), and next visit <tt>http://your-host-name:8001/help/</tt>
12029 to look at the rest of plinth.  The default user is 'admin' and the
12030 default password is 'secret'.</p>
12031
12032       </div>
12033       <div class="tags">
12034
12035
12036         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>.
12037
12038
12039       </div>
12040     </div>
12041     <div class="padding"></div>
12042
12043     <div class="entry">
12044       <div class="title">
12045         <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>
12046       </div>
12047       <div class="date">
12048         22nd August 2013
12049       </div>
12050       <div class="body">
12051         <p>The second wheezy based beta release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
12052 today, slightly delayed because of some bugs in the initial Windows
12053 integration fixes .  This is the release announcement:</p>
12054
12055 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~b1 released 2013-08-22</strong></p>
12056
12057 <p>These are the release notes for Debian Edu / Skolelinux
12058 7.1+edu0~b1, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
12059
12060 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
12061
12062 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
12063 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
12064 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
12065 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
12066 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
12067 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
12068 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
12069 the main server from CD or USB stick all other machines can be
12070 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
12071 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
12072 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
12073 desktop contains
12074 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">more
12075 than 60 educational software packages</a> and more are available from
12076 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
12077 and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
12078
12079 <p>This is the sixth test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically this
12080 is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the Squeeze
12081 release.</p>
12082
12083 <p>ALERT: Alpha based installations should reinstall or downgrade the
12084 versions of gosa and libpam-mklocaluser to the ones used in this beta
12085 release. Both alpha and beta0 based installations should reinstall or
12086 deal with gosa.conf manually; there are two options: (1) Keep
12087 gosa.conf and edit this file as outlined
12088 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/2013/08/msg00127.html">on
12089 the mailing list</a>. (2) Accept the new version of gosa.conf and
12090 replace both contained admin password placeholders with the password
12091 hashes found in the old one (backup copy!). In both cases every user
12092 need to change their their password to make sure a password is set for
12093 CIFS access to their home directory.</p>
12094
12095 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
12096
12097 <ul>
12098
12099 <li>Added ssh askpass packages to default installation, to ensure ssh
12100     work also without a attached tty.</li>
12101 <li>Add the command-not-found package to the default installation to
12102     make it easier to figure out where to find missing command line
12103     tools. Please note, that the command 'update-command-not-found'
12104     has to be run as root to actually make it useful (internet access
12105     required).</li>
12106
12107 </ul>
12108
12109 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
12110
12111 <ul>
12112
12113 <li>Adjusted the USB stick ISO image build to include every tool
12114 needed for desktop=xfce installations.</li>
12115 <li>Adjust thin-client-server task to work when installing from USB
12116 stick ISO image.</li>
12117 <li>Made new grub artwork (changed png from indexed to RGB format).</li>
12118 <li>Minor cleanup in the CUPS setup.</li>
12119 <li>Make sure that bootstrapping of the Samba domain really happens
12120     during installation of the main server and adjust SID handling to
12121     cope with this.</li>
12122 <li>Make Samba passwords changeable (again) via GOsa².</li>
12123 <li>Fix generation of LM and NT password hashes via GOsa² to avoid
12124     empty password hashes.</li>
12125 <li>Adapted Samba machine domain joining to latest change in the
12126     smbldap-tools Perl package, fixing bugs blocking Windows machines
12127     from joining the Samba domain.</li>
12128
12129 </ul>
12130
12131 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
12132
12133 <ul>
12134
12135 <li>KDE fails to understand the wpad.dat file provided, causing it to
12136     not use the http proxy as it should.</li>
12137 <li>Chromium also fails to use the proxy when using the KDE desktop
12138     (using the KDE configuration).</li>
12139
12140 </ul>
12141
12142 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
12143
12144 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
12145
12146 <ul>
12147
12148 <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>
12149
12150 <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>
12151
12152 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-CD.iso .</li>
12153
12154 </ul>
12155
12156 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 1e357f80b55e703523f2254adde6d78b
12157 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 7157f9be5fd27c7694d713c6ecfed61c3edda3b2</p>
12158
12159 <p>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use</p>
12160
12161 <ul>
12162
12163 <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>
12164 <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>
12165 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-USB.iso .</li>
12166
12167 </ul>
12168
12169 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 7a8408ead59cf7e3cef25afb6e91590b
12170 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: f1817c031f02790d5edb3bfa0dcf8451088ad119</p>
12171
12172
12173 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
12174
12175 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a>
12176
12177       </div>
12178       <div class="tags">
12179
12180
12181         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>.
12182
12183
12184       </div>
12185     </div>
12186     <div class="padding"></div>
12187
12188     <div class="entry">
12189       <div class="title">
12190         <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>
12191       </div>
12192       <div class="date">
12193         18th August 2013
12194       </div>
12195       <div class="body">
12196         <p>Earlier, I reported about
12197 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_fix_a_Thinkpad_X230_with_a_broken_180_GB_SSD_disk.html">my
12198 problems using an Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB disk</a>.  Friday I was
12199 told by IBM that the original disk should be thrown away.  And as
12200 there no longer was a problem if I bricked the firmware, I decided
12201 today to try to install Intel firmware to replace the Lenovo firmware
12202 currently on the disk.</p>
12203
12204 <p>I searched the Intel site for firmware, and found
12205 <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>
12206 (aka Intel SATA Solid-State Drive Firmware Update Tool) which
12207 according to the site should contain the latest firmware for SSD
12208 disks.  I inserted the broken disk in one of my spare laptops and
12209 booted the ISO from a USB stick.  The disk was recognized, but the
12210 program claimed the newest firmware already were installed and refused
12211 to insert any Intel firmware.  So no change, and the disk is still
12212 unable to handle write load. :( I guess the only way to get them
12213 working would be if Lenovo releases new firmware.  No idea how likely
12214 that is.  Anyway, just blogging about this test for completeness.  I
12215 got a working Samsung disk, and see no point in spending more time on
12216 the broken disks.</p>
12217
12218       </div>
12219       <div class="tags">
12220
12221
12222         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>.
12223
12224
12225       </div>
12226     </div>
12227     <div class="padding"></div>
12228
12229     <div class="entry">
12230       <div class="title">
12231         <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>
12232       </div>
12233       <div class="date">
12234          2nd August 2013
12235       </div>
12236       <div class="body">
12237         <p>It has been a while since my last update.  Since last summer, I
12238 have worked on a Norwegian
12239 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book
12240 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig,
12241 to get a Norwegian text explaining the problems with the copyright
12242 law.  Yesterday, I finally broken the 90% mark, when counting the
12243 number of strings to translate.  Due to real life constraints, I have
12244 not had time to work on it since March, but when the summer broke out,
12245 I found time to work on it again.  Still lots of work left, but the
12246 first draft is nearing completion.  I created a graph to show the
12247 progress of the translation:</p>
12248
12249 <p><img width="80%" align="center" src="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png"></p>
12250
12251 <p>When the first draft is done, the translated text need to be
12252 proof read, and the remaining formatting problems with images and SVG
12253 drawings need to be fixed.  There are probably also some index entries
12254 missing that need to be added.  This can be done by comparing the
12255 index entries listed in the SiSU version of the book, or comparing the
12256 English docbook version with the paper version.  Last, the colophon
12257 page with ISBN numbers etc need to be wrapped up before the release is
12258 done.  I should also figure out how to get correct Norwegian sorting
12259 of the index pages.  All docbook tools I have tried so far (xmlto,
12260 docbook-xsl, dblatex) get the order of symbols and the special
12261 Norwegian letters ÆØÅ wrong.</p>
12262
12263 <p>There is still need for translators and people with docbook
12264 knowledge, to be able to get a good looking book (I still struggle
12265 with dblatex, xmlto and docbook-xsl) as well as to do the draft
12266 translation and proof reading.  And I would like the figures to be
12267 redrawn as SVGs to make it easy to translate them.  Any SVG master
12268 around?  There are also some legal terms that are unfamiliar to me.
12269 If you want to help, please get in touch with me, and check out the
12270 project files currently available from
12271 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
12272
12273 <p>If you are curious what the translated book currently look like,
12274 the updated
12275 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>
12276 and
12277 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
12278 are published on github.  The HTML version is published as well, but
12279 github hand it out with MIME type text/plain, confusing browsers, so I
12280 saw no point in linking to that version.</p>
12281
12282       </div>
12283       <div class="tags">
12284
12285
12286         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>.
12287
12288
12289       </div>
12290     </div>
12291     <div class="padding"></div>
12292
12293     <div class="entry">
12294       <div class="title">
12295         <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>
12296       </div>
12297       <div class="date">
12298         27th July 2013
12299       </div>
12300       <div class="body">
12301         <p>The first wheezy based beta release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
12302 today.  This is the release announcement:</p>
12303
12304 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~b0 released
12305 2013-07-27</strong></p>
12306
12307 <p>These are the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux
12308 7.1+edu0~b0, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
12309
12310 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
12311
12312 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
12313 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
12314 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
12315 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
12316 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
12317 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
12318 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
12319 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
12320 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
12321 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
12322 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
12323 desktop contains
12324 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">more
12325 than 60 educational software packages</a> and more are available from
12326 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
12327 and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
12328
12329 <p>This is the fifth test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
12330 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
12331 Squeeze release.</p>
12332
12333 <p>ALERT: Alpha based installations should reinstall or downgrade the
12334 versions of gosa and libpam-mklocaluser to the ones used in this beta
12335 release.</p>
12336
12337 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
12338
12339 <ul>
12340
12341 <li>Switched roaming workstation profiles from wicd to network-manager
12342    for network configuration, as wicd didn't work any more.</li>
12343 <li>Changed version numbers of patched gosa and libpam-mklocaluser
12344    packages to make sure our locally patched versions will be replaced
12345    by the official packages when they are released from Debian. Those
12346    installing alpha version need to reinstall or manually downgrade gosa
12347    and libpam-mklocaluser.</li>
12348 <li>Added bluetooth tools to the default desktop (bluedevil, blueman).</li>
12349 <li>Added tools for sharing the desktop on KDE (krdc, krfb).</li>
12350 <li>Added valgrind to the default installation for easier debugging of
12351    crash bugs.</li>
12352
12353 </ul>
12354
12355 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
12356
12357 <ul>
12358
12359 <li>Fixed artwork package to work with gnome, no longer break
12360    desktop=gnome installations.</li>
12361 <li>Adjusted installer to now work when forced to use a proxy with the
12362    netinst CD.</li>
12363 <li>Fixed code detecting and setting/loading hardware specific
12364    setup/firmware to work more robust out of the box.</li>
12365 <li>Adjusted Kerberos setup to detect realm and server settings at
12366    install time instead of dynamically at run time. This avoid a crash
12367    with krb5-auth-dialog on diskless workstations without a DNS name.</li>
12368 <li>Worked around misfeature in network-manager not calling the dhclient
12369    exit hooks, causing automatic proxy configuration and automatic host
12370    name setting at run time to work again.</li>
12371 <li>Fixed feature setting the default Iceweasel start page from URL
12372    fetched from LDAP, to allow schools to set the global default by
12373    updating the dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no LDAP object.</li>
12374 <li>Changed default host name on all networked machines to be unique
12375    (generated from MAC or reverse DNS) after boot.</li>
12376 <li>Adjusted partition sizes to make sure they are big enough.</li>
12377
12378 </ul>
12379
12380 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
12381
12382 <ul>
12383
12384 <li>Grub is missing the new artwork.</li>
12385 <li>KDE fail to understand the wpad.dat file provided, causing it to
12386     not use the http proxy as it should.</li>
12387 <li>Chromium also fail to use the proxy.</li>
12388
12389 </ul>
12390
12391 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
12392
12393 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
12394
12395 <ul>
12396
12397 <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>
12398
12399 <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>
12400
12401 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b0-CD.iso .</li>
12402
12403 </ul>
12404
12405 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 55d5de9765b6dccd5d9ec33cf1a07109
12406 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 996a1d9517740e4d627d100de2d12b23dd545a3f</p>
12407
12408 <p>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use</p>
12409
12410 <ul>
12411
12412 <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>
12413 <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>
12414 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b0-USB.iso .</li>
12415
12416 </ul>
12417
12418 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: d8f0818c51a78d357de794066f289f69
12419 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 49185ca354e8d0543240423746924f76a6cee733</p>
12420
12421
12422 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
12423
12424 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a>
12425
12426       </div>
12427       <div class="tags">
12428
12429
12430         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>.
12431
12432
12433       </div>
12434     </div>
12435     <div class="padding"></div>
12436
12437     <div class="entry">
12438       <div class="title">
12439         <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>
12440       </div>
12441       <div class="date">
12442         17th July 2013
12443       </div>
12444       <div class="body">
12445         <p>Today I switched to
12446 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html">my
12447 new laptop</a>.  I've previously written about the problems I had with
12448 my new Thinkpad X230, which was delivered with an
12449 <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
12450 GB Intel SSD disk with Lenovo firmware</a> that did not handle
12451 sustained writes.  My hardware supplier have been very forthcoming in
12452 trying to find a solution, and after first trying with another
12453 identical 180 GB disks they decided to send me a 256 GB Samsung SSD
12454 disk instead to fix it once and for all.  The Samsung disk survived
12455 the installation of Debian with encrypted disks (filling the disk with
12456 random data during installation killed the first two), and I thus
12457 decided to trust it with my data.  I have installed it as a Debian Edu
12458 Wheezy roaming workstation hooked up with my Debian Edu Squeeze main
12459 server at home using Kerberos and LDAP, and will use it as my work
12460 station from now on.</p>
12461
12462 <p>As this is a solid state disk with no moving parts, I believe the
12463 Debian Wheezy default installation need to be tuned a bit to increase
12464 performance and increase life time of the disk.  The Linux kernel and
12465 user space applications do not yet adjust automatically to such
12466 environment.  To make it easier for my self, I created a draft Debian
12467 package <tt>ssd-setup</tt> to handle this tuning.  The
12468 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/ssd-setup.git">source
12469 for the ssd-setup package</a> is available from collab-maint, and it
12470 is set up to adjust the setup of the machine by just installing the
12471 package.  If there is any non-SSD disk in the machine, the package
12472 will refuse to install, as I did not try to write any logic to sort
12473 file systems in SSD and non-SSD file systems.</p>
12474
12475 <p>I consider the package a draft, as I am a bit unsure how to best
12476 set up Debian Wheezy with an SSD.  It is adjusted to my use case,
12477 where I set up the machine with one large encrypted partition (in
12478 addition to /boot), put LVM on top of this and set up partitions on
12479 top of this again.  See the README file in the package source for the
12480 references I used to pick the settings.  At the moment these
12481 parameters are tuned:</p>
12482
12483 <ul>
12484
12485 <li>Set up cryptsetup to pass TRIM commands to the physical disk
12486     (adding discard to /etc/crypttab)</li>
12487
12488 <li>Set up LVM to pass on TRIM commands to the underlying device (in
12489     this case a cryptsetup partition) by changing issue_discards from
12490     0 to 1 in /etc/lvm/lvm.conf.</li>
12491
12492 <li>Set relatime as a file system option for ext3 and ext4 file
12493     systems.</li>
12494
12495 <li>Tell swap to use TRIM commands by adding 'discard' to
12496     /etc/fstab.</li>
12497
12498 <li>Change I/O scheduler from cfq to deadline using a udev rule.</li>
12499
12500 <li>Run fstrim on every ext3 and ext4 file system every night (from
12501     cron.daily).</li>
12502
12503 <li>Adjust sysctl values vm.swappiness to 1 and vm.vfs_cache_pressure
12504     to 50 to reduce the kernel eagerness to swap out processes.</li>
12505
12506 </ul>
12507
12508 <p>During installation, I cancelled the part where the installer fill
12509 the disk with random data, as this would kill the SSD performance for
12510 little gain.  My goal with the encrypted file system is to ensure
12511 those stealing my laptop end up with a brick and not a working
12512 computer.  I have no hope in keeping the really resourceful people
12513 from getting the data on the disk (see
12514 <a href="http://xkcd.com/538/">XKCD #538</a> for an explanation why).
12515 Thus I concluded that adding the discard option to crypttab is the
12516 right thing to do.</p>
12517
12518 <p>I considered using the noop I/O scheduler, as several recommended
12519 it for SSD, but others recommended deadline and a benchmark I found
12520 indicated that deadline might be better for interactive use.</p>
12521
12522 <p>I also considered using the 'discard' file system option for ext3
12523 and ext4, but read that it would give a performance hit ever time a
12524 file is removed, and thought it best to that that slowdown once a day
12525 instead of during my work.</p>
12526
12527 <p>My package do not set up tmpfs on /var/run, /var/lock and /tmp, as
12528 this is already done by Debian Edu.</p>
12529
12530 <p>I have not yet started on the user space tuning.  I expect
12531 iceweasel need some tuning, and perhaps other applications too, but
12532 have not yet had time to investigate those parts.</p>
12533
12534 <p>The package should work on Ubuntu too, but I have not yet tested it
12535 there.</p>
12536
12537 <p>As for the answer to the question in the title of this blog post,
12538 as far as I know, the only solution I know about is to replace the
12539 disk.  It might be possible to flash it with Intel firmware instead of
12540 the Lenovo firmware.  But I have not tried and did not want to do so
12541 without approval from Lenovo as I wanted to keep the warranty on the
12542 disk until a solution was found and they wanted the broken disks
12543 back.</p>
12544
12545       </div>
12546       <div class="tags">
12547
12548
12549         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>.
12550
12551
12552       </div>
12553     </div>
12554     <div class="padding"></div>
12555
12556     <div class="entry">
12557       <div class="title">
12558         <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>
12559       </div>
12560       <div class="date">
12561         10th July 2013
12562       </div>
12563       <div class="body">
12564         <p>A few days ago, I wrote about
12565 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html">the
12566 problems I experienced with my new X230 and its SSD disk</a>, which
12567 was dying during installation because it is unable to cope with
12568 sustained write.  My supplier is in contact with
12569 <a href="http://www.lenovo.com/">Lenovo</a>, and they wanted to send a
12570 replacement disk to try to fix the problem.  They decided to send an
12571 identical model, so my hopes for a permanent fix was slim.</p>
12572
12573 <p>Anyway, today I got the replacement disk and tried to install
12574 Debian Edu Wheezy with encrypted disk on it.  The new disk have the
12575 same firmware version as the original.  This time my hope raised
12576 slightly as the installation progressed, as the original disk used to
12577 die after 4-7% of the disk was written to, while this time it kept
12578 going past 10%, 20%, 40% and even past 50%.  But around 60%, the disk
12579 died again and I was back on square one.  I still do not have a new
12580 laptop with a disk I can trust.  I can not live with a disk that might
12581 lock up when I download a new
12582 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> ISO or
12583 other large files.  I look forward to hearing from my supplier with
12584 the next proposal from Lenovo.</p>
12585
12586 <p>The original disk is marked Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB,
12587 11S0C38722Z1ZNME35X1TR, ISN: CVCV321407HB180EGN, SA: G57560302, FW:
12588 LF1i, 29MAY2013, PBA: G39779-300, LBA 351,651,888, LI P/N: 0C38722,
12589 Pb-free 2LI, LC P/N: 16-200366, WWN: 55CD2E40002756C4, Model:
12590 SSDSC2BW180A3L 2.5" 6Gb/s SATA SSD 180G 5V 1A, ASM P/N 0C38732, FRU
12591 P/N 45N8295, P0C38732.</p>
12592
12593 <p>The replacement disk is marked Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB,
12594 11S0C38722Z1ZNDE34N0L0, ISN: CVCV315306RK180EGN, SA: G57560-302, FW:
12595 LF1i, 22APR2013, PBA: G39779-300, LBA 351,651,888, LI P/N: 0C38722,
12596 Pb-free 2LI, LC P/N: 16-200366, WWN: 55CD2E40000AB69E, Model:
12597 SSDSC2BW180A3L 2.5" 6Gb/s SATA SSD 180G 5V 1A, ASM P/N 0C38732, FRU
12598 P/N 45N8295, P0C38732.</p>
12599
12600 <p>The only difference is in the first number (serial number?), ISN,
12601 SA, date and WNPP values.  Mentioning all the details here in case
12602 someone is able to use the information to find a way to identify the
12603 failing disk among working ones (if any such working disk actually
12604 exist).</p>
12605
12606       </div>
12607       <div class="tags">
12608
12609
12610         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>.
12611
12612
12613       </div>
12614     </div>
12615     <div class="padding"></div>
12616
12617     <div class="entry">
12618       <div class="title">
12619         <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>
12620       </div>
12621       <div class="date">
12622          9th July 2013
12623       </div>
12624       <div class="body">
12625         <p>The upcoming Saturday, 2013-07-13, we are organising a combined
12626 Debian Edu developer gathering and Debian and Ubuntu bug squashing
12627 party in Oslo.  It is organised by <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the
12628 member assosiation NUUG</a> and
12629 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">the Debian Edu / Skolelinux
12630 project</a> together with <a href="http://bitraf.no/">the hack space
12631 Bitraf</a>.</p>
12632
12633 <p>It starts 10:00 and continue until late evening.  Everyone is
12634 welcome, and there is no fee to participate.  There is on the other
12635 hand limited space, and only room for 30 people.  Please put your name
12636 on <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/BSP/2013/07/13/no/Oslo">the event
12637 wiki page</a> if you plan to join us.</p>
12638
12639       </div>
12640       <div class="tags">
12641
12642
12643         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>.
12644
12645
12646       </div>
12647     </div>
12648     <div class="padding"></div>
12649
12650     <div class="entry">
12651       <div class="title">
12652         <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>
12653       </div>
12654       <div class="date">
12655          5th July 2013
12656       </div>
12657       <div class="body">
12658         <p>Half a year ago, I reported that I had to find a
12659 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html">replacement
12660 for my trusty old Thinkpad X41</a>.  Unfortunately I did not have much
12661 time to spend on it, and it took a while to find a model I believe
12662 will do the job, but two days ago the replacement finally arrived.  I
12663 ended up picking a
12664 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/lenovo_thinkpad_x230">Thinkpad X230</a>
12665 with SSD disk (NZDAJMN).  I first test installed Debian Edu Wheezy as
12666 a roaming workstation, and it seemed to work flawlessly.  But my
12667 second installation with encrypted disk was not as successful.  More
12668 on that below.</p>
12669
12670 <p>I had a hard time trying to track down a good laptop, as my most
12671 important requirements (robust and with a good keyboard) are never
12672 listed in the feature list.  But I did get good help from the search
12673 feature at <a href="http://www.prisjakt.no/">Prisjakt</a>, which
12674 allowed me to limit the list of interesting laptops based on my other
12675 requirements.  A bit surprising that SSD disk are not disks according
12676 to that search interface, so I had to drop specifying the number of
12677 disks from my search parameters.  I also asked around among friends to
12678 get their impression on keyboards and robustness.</p>
12679
12680 <p>So the new laptop arrived, and it is quite a lot wider than the
12681 X41.  I am not quite convinced about the keyboard, as it is
12682 significantly wider than my old keyboard, and I have to stretch my
12683 hand a lot more to reach the edges.  But the key response is fairly
12684 good and the individual key shape is fairly easy to handle, so I hope
12685 I will get used to it.  My old X40 was starting to fail, and I really
12686 needed a new laptop now. :)</p>
12687
12688 <p>Turning off the touch pad was simple.  All it took was a quick
12689 visit to the BIOS during boot it disable it.</p>
12690
12691 <p>But there is a fatal problem with the laptop.  The 180 GB SSD disk
12692 lock up during load.  And this happen when installing Debian Wheezy
12693 with encrypted disk, while the disk is being filled with random data.
12694 I also tested to install Ubuntu Raring, and it happen there too if I
12695 reenable the code to fill the disk with random data (it is disabled by
12696 default in Ubuntu).  And the bug with is already known.  It was
12697 reported to Debian as <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/691427">BTS
12698 report #691427 2012-10-25</a> (journal commit I/O error on brand-new
12699 Thinkpad T430s ext4 on lvm on SSD).  It is also reported to the Linux
12700 kernel developers as
12701 <a href="https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=51861">Kernel bugzilla
12702 report #51861 2012-12-20</a> (Intel SSD 520 stops working under load
12703 (SSDSC2BW180A3L in Lenovo ThinkPad T430s)). It is also reported on the
12704 Lenovo forums, both for
12705 <a href="http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T400-T500-and-newer-T-series/T430s-Intel-SSD-520-180GB-issue/m-p/1070549">T430
12706 2012-11-10</a> and for
12707 <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
12708 03-20-2013</a>.  The problem do not only affect installation.  The
12709 reports state that the disk lock up during use if many writes are done
12710 on the disk, so it is much no use to work around the installation
12711 problem and end up with a computer that can lock up at any moment.
12712 There is even a
12713 <a href="https://git.efficios.com/?p=test-ssd.git">small C program
12714 available</a> that will lock up the hard drive after running a few
12715 minutes by writing to a file.</p>
12716
12717 <p>I've contacted my supplier and asked how to handle this, and after
12718 contacting PCHELP Norway (request 01D1FDP) which handle support
12719 requests for Lenovo, his first suggestion was to upgrade the disk
12720 firmware.  Unfortunately there is no newer firmware available from
12721 Lenovo, as my disk already have the most recent one (version LF1i).  I
12722 hope to hear more from him today and hope the problem can be
12723 fixed. :)</p>
12724
12725       </div>
12726       <div class="tags">
12727
12728
12729         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>.
12730
12731
12732       </div>
12733     </div>
12734     <div class="padding"></div>
12735
12736     <div class="entry">
12737       <div class="title">
12738         <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>
12739       </div>
12740       <div class="date">
12741          4th July 2013
12742       </div>
12743       <div class="body">
12744         <p>Half a year ago, I reported that I had to find a replacement for my
12745 trusty old Thinkpad X41.  Unfortunately I did not have much time to
12746 spend on it, but today the replacement finally arrived.  I ended up
12747 picking a <a href="http://www.linlap.com/lenovo_thinkpad_x230">Thinkpad
12748 X230</a> with SSD disk (NZDAJMN).  I first test installed Debian Edu
12749 Wheezy as a roaming workstation, and it worked flawlessly.  As I write
12750 this, it is installing what I hope will be a more final installation,
12751 with a encrypted hard drive to ensure any dope head stealing it end up
12752 with an expencive door stop.</p>
12753
12754 <p>I had a hard time trying to track down a good laptop, as my most
12755 important requirements (robust and with a good keyboard) are never
12756 listed in the feature list.  But I did get good help from the search
12757 feature at <ahref="http://www.prisjakt.no/">Prisjakt</a>, which
12758 allowed me to limit the list of interesting laptops based on my other
12759 requirements.  A bit surprising that SSD disk are not disks, so I had
12760 to drop number of disks from my search parameters.</p>
12761
12762 <p>I am not quite convinced about the keyboard, as it is significantly
12763 wider than my old keyboard, and I have to stretch my hand a lot more
12764 to reach the edges.  But the key response is fairly good and the
12765 individual key shape is fairly easy to handle, so I hope I will get
12766 used to it.  My old X40 was starting to fail, and I really needed a
12767 new laptop now. :)</p>
12768
12769 <p>I look forward to figuring out how to turn off the touch pad.</p>
12770
12771       </div>
12772       <div class="tags">
12773
12774
12775         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>.
12776
12777
12778       </div>
12779     </div>
12780     <div class="padding"></div>
12781
12782     <div class="entry">
12783       <div class="title">
12784         <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>
12785       </div>
12786       <div class="date">
12787          3rd July 2013
12788       </div>
12789       <div class="body">
12790         <p>The fourth wheezy based alpha release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
12791 today.  This is the release announcement:</p>
12792
12793 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~alpha3 released
12794 2013-07-03</strong></p>
12795
12796 <p>These are the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux
12797 7.1+edu0~alpha3, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
12798
12799 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
12800
12801 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
12802 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
12803 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
12804 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
12805 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
12806 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
12807 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
12808 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
12809 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
12810 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
12811 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
12812 desktop contains
12813 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">more
12814 than 60 educational software packages</a> and more are available from
12815 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
12816 and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
12817
12818 <p>This is the fourth test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
12819 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
12820 Squeeze release.</p>
12821
12822 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
12823 <ul>
12824   <li>Dropped ispell dictionaries from our default installation.</li>
12825   <li>Dropped menu-xdg from the KDE desktop option, to drop the Debian
12826     submenu.  It was not included with Gnome, LXDE or Xfce, so this
12827     brings KDE in line with the others.</li>
12828   <li>Dropped xdrawchem, xjig and xsok from our default installation as
12829     they don't have a desktop menu entry and thus won't show up in the
12830     menu now that menu-xdg was removed.</li>
12831   <li>Removed the killer system to kill left behind processes on
12832     multi-user machines, as it was no longer able to understand when a
12833     X display was in use and killed the processes of the active users
12834     too.</li>
12835   <li>Dropped the golearn (from goplay) package as the debtags in wheezy
12836     are too few to make the package useful.</li>
12837 </ul>
12838 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
12839 <ul>
12840   <li>Updated artwork matching http://wiki.debian.org/DebianArt/Themes/Joy
12841   <li>Multi-arch i386/amd64 USB stick ISO available.</li>
12842   <li>Got rid of ispell/wordlist related debconf questions that showed
12843     up for some language options.</li>
12844   <li>Switched to using http.debian.net as APT source by default.</li>
12845   <li>Fixed proxy configuration on Main Server installations.</li>
12846   <li>Changed LTSP setup to ask dpkg to use force-unsafe-io the same way
12847     d-i is doing it.</li>
12848   <li>Made sure root and user passwords were not left behind in the
12849     debconf database after installation on Main Server installations.</li>
12850   <li>Made Roaming Workstation dynamic setup more robust and added draft
12851     script setup-ad-client to hook a Roaming Workstation up to a
12852     Active Directory server instead of a Debian Edu Main Server.</li>
12853   <li>Update system to install needed firmware packages during
12854     installation, to work properly in Wheezy.</li>
12855   <li>Update system to handle hardware quirks (debian-edu-hwsetup).</li>
12856   <li>Corrected PXE installation setup to properly pass selected desktop
12857     and keymap settings to PXE installation clients.</li>
12858   <li>LTSP diskless workstations use sshfs by default, allowing them to
12859     work without adding them to DNS and NIS netgroups for NFS access.</li>
12860 </ul>
12861 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
12862 <ul>
12863   <li>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv)
12864     available yet (698840).</li>
12865   <li>Artwork not enabled for all desktops.</li>
12866 </ul>
12867 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
12868
12869 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
12870 <ul>
12871   <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>
12872   <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>
12873   <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~a3-CD.iso .</li>
12874 </ul>
12875
12876 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 2b161a99d2a848c376d8d04e3854e30c
12877 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 498922e9c508c0a7ee9dbe1dfe5bf830d779c3c8</p>
12878
12879 <p>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use</p>
12880 <ul>
12881   <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>
12882   <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>
12883   <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~a3-USB.iso .</li>
12884 </ul>
12885
12886 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 25e808e403a4c15dbef1d13c37d572ac
12887 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 15ecfc93eb6b4f453b7eb0bc04b6a279262d9721</p>
12888
12889 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
12890
12891 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a></p>
12892
12893       </div>
12894       <div class="tags">
12895
12896
12897         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>.
12898
12899
12900       </div>
12901     </div>
12902     <div class="padding"></div>
12903
12904     <div class="entry">
12905       <div class="title">
12906         <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>
12907       </div>
12908       <div class="date">
12909         25th June 2013
12910       </div>
12911       <div class="body">
12912         <p>It annoys me when the computer fail to do automatically what it is
12913 perfectly capable of, and I have to do it manually to get things
12914 working.  One such task is to find out what firmware packages are
12915 needed to get the hardware on my computer working.  Most often this
12916 affect the wifi card, but some times it even affect the RAID
12917 controller or the ethernet card.  Today I pushed version 0.4 of the
12918 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">Isenkram package</a>
12919 including a new script isenkram-autoinstall-firmware handling the
12920 process of asking all the loaded kernel modules what firmware files
12921 they want, find debian packages providing these files and install the
12922 debian packages.  Here is a test run on my laptop:</p>
12923
12924 <p><pre>
12925 # isenkram-autoinstall-firmware
12926 info: kernel drivers requested extra firmware: ipw2200-bss.fw ipw2200-ibss.fw ipw2200-sniffer.fw
12927 info: fetching http://http.debian.net/debian/dists/squeeze/Contents-i386.gz
12928 info: locating packages with the requested firmware files
12929 info: Updating APT sources after adding non-free APT source
12930 info: trying to install firmware-ipw2x00
12931 firmware-ipw2x00
12932 firmware-ipw2x00
12933 Preconfiguring packages ...
12934 Selecting previously deselected package firmware-ipw2x00.
12935 (Reading database ... 259727 files and directories currently installed.)
12936 Unpacking firmware-ipw2x00 (from .../firmware-ipw2x00_0.28+squeeze1_all.deb) ...
12937 Setting up firmware-ipw2x00 (0.28+squeeze1) ...
12938 #
12939 </pre></p>
12940
12941 <p>When all the requested firmware is present, a simple message is
12942 printed instead:</p>
12943
12944 <p><pre>
12945 # isenkram-autoinstall-firmware
12946 info: did not find any firmware files requested by loaded kernel modules.  exiting
12947 #
12948 </pre></p>
12949
12950 <p>It could use some polish, but it is already working well and saving
12951 me some time when setting up new machines. :)</p>
12952
12953 <p>So, how does it work?  It look at the set of currently loaded
12954 kernel modules, and look up each one of them using modinfo, to find
12955 the firmware files listed in the module meta-information.  Next, it
12956 download the Contents file from a nearby APT mirror, and search for
12957 the firmware files in this file to locate the package with the
12958 requested firmware file.  If the package is in the non-free section, a
12959 non-free APT source is added and the package is installed using
12960 <tt>apt-get install</tt>.  The end result is a slightly better working
12961 machine.</p>
12962
12963 <p>I hope someone find time to implement a more polished version of
12964 this script as part of the hw-detect debian-installer module, to
12965 finally fix <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/655507">BTS report
12966 #655507</a>.  There really is no need to insert USB sticks with
12967 firmware during a PXE install when the packages already are available
12968 from the nearby Debian mirror.</p>
12969
12970       </div>
12971       <div class="tags">
12972
12973
12974         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>.
12975
12976
12977       </div>
12978     </div>
12979     <div class="padding"></div>
12980
12981     <div class="entry">
12982       <div class="title">
12983         <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>
12984       </div>
12985       <div class="date">
12986         22nd June 2013
12987       </div>
12988       <div class="body">
12989         <p>In the <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
12990 Skolelinux</a> project, we include a post-installation test suite,
12991 which check that services are running, working, and return the
12992 expected results.  It runs automatically just after the first boot on
12993 test installations (using test ISOs), but not on production
12994 installations (using non-test ISOs).  It test that the LDAP service is
12995 operating, Kerberos is responding, DNS is replying, file systems are
12996 online resizable, etc, etc.  And it check that the PXE service is
12997 configured, which is the topic of this post.</p>
12998
12999 <p>The last week I've fixed the DVD and USB stick ISOs for our Debian
13000 Edu Wheezy release.  These ISOs are supposed to be able to install a
13001 complete system without any Internet connection, but for that to
13002 happen all the needed packages need to be on them.  Thanks to our test
13003 suite, I discovered that we had forgotten to adjust our PXE setup to
13004 cope with the new names and paths used by the netboot d-i packages.
13005 When Internet connectivity was available, the installer fall back to
13006 using wget to fetch d-i boot images, but when offline it require
13007 working packages to get it working.  And the packages changed name
13008 from debian-installer-6.0-netboot-$arch to
13009 debian-installer-7.0-netboot-$arch, we no longer pulled in the
13010 packages during installation.  Without our test suite, I suspect we
13011 would never have discovered this before release.  Now it is fixed
13012 right after we got the ISOs operational.</p>
13013
13014 <p>Another by-product of the test suite is that we can ask system
13015 administrators with problems getting Debian Edu to work, to run the
13016 test suite using <tt>/usr/sbin/debian-edu-test-install</tt> and see if
13017 any errors are detected.  This usually pinpoint the subsystem causing
13018 the problem.</p>
13019
13020 <p>If you want to help us help kids learn how to share and create,
13021 please join us on
13022 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">#debian-edu on
13023 irc.debian.org</a> and the
13024 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/">debian-edu@</a> mailing
13025 list.</p>
13026
13027       </div>
13028       <div class="tags">
13029
13030
13031         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>.
13032
13033
13034       </div>
13035     </div>
13036     <div class="padding"></div>
13037
13038     <div class="entry">
13039       <div class="title">
13040         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Victor_Ni_u.html">Debian Edu interview: Victor Nițu</a>
13041       </div>
13042       <div class="date">
13043         17th June 2013
13044       </div>
13045       <div class="body">
13046         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and
13047 Skolelinux</a> distribution have users and contributors all around the
13048 globe.  And a while back, an enterprising young man showed up on
13049 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">our IRC channel
13050 #debian-edu</a> and started asking questions about how Debian Edu
13051 worked.  We answered as good as we could, and even convinced him to
13052 help us with translations.  And today I managed to get an interview
13053 with him, to learn more about him.</p>
13054
13055 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
13056
13057 <p>I'm a 25 year old free software enthusiast, living in Romania,
13058 which is also my country of origin. Back in 2009, at a New Year's Eve
13059 party, I had a very nice <strike>beer</strike> discussion with a
13060 friend, when we realized we have no organised Debian community in our
13061 country. A few days later, we put together the infrastructure for such
13062 community and even gathered a nice Debian-ish crowd. Since then, I
13063 began my quest as a free software hacker and activist and I am
13064 constantly trying to cover as much ground as possible on that
13065 field.</p>
13066
13067 <p>A few years ago I founded a small web development company, which
13068 provided me the flexible schedule I needed so much for my
13069 activities. For the last 13 months, I have been the Technical Director
13070 of <a href="http://ceata.org/">Fundația Ceata</a>, which is a free
13071 software activist organisation endorsed by the FSF and the FSFE, and
13072 the only one we have in our country.</p>
13073
13074 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
13075 project?</strong></p>
13076
13077 <p>The idea of participating in the Debian Edu project was a surprise
13078 even to me, since I never used it before I began getting involved in
13079 it. This year I had a great opportunity to deliver a talk on
13080 educational software, and I knew immediately where to look. It was a
13081 love at first sight, since I was previously involved with some of the
13082 technologies the project incorporates, and I rapidly found a lot of
13083 ways to contribute.</p>
13084
13085 <p>My first contributions consisted in translating the installer and
13086 configuration dialogs, then I found some bugs to squash (I still
13087 haven't fixed them yet though), and I even got my eyes on some other
13088 areas where I can prove myself helpful. Since the appetite for free
13089 software in my country is pretty low, I'll be happy to be the first
13090 one around here advocating for the project's adoption in educational
13091 environments, and maybe even get my hands dirty in creating a flavour
13092 for our own needs. I am not used to make very advanced plannings, so
13093 from now on, time will tell what I'll be doing next, but I think I
13094 have a pretty consistent starting point.</p>
13095
13096 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
13097 Edu?</strong></p>
13098
13099 <p>Not a long time ago, I was in the position of configuring and
13100 maintaining a LDAP server on some Debian derivative, and I must say it
13101 took me a while. A long time ago, I was maintaining a bigger
13102 Samba-powered infrastructure, and I must say I spent quite a lot of
13103 time on it. I have similar stories about many of the services included
13104 with Skolelinux, and the main advantage I see about it is the
13105 out-of-the box availability of them, making it quite competitive when
13106 it comes to managing a school's network, for example.</p>
13107
13108 <p>Of course, there is more to say about Skolelinux than the
13109 availability of the software included, its flexibility in various
13110 scenarios is something I can't wait to experiment "into the wild" (I
13111 only played with virtual machines so far). And I am sure there is a
13112 lot more I haven't discovered yet about it, being so new within the
13113 project.</p>
13114
13115 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
13116 Edu?</strong></p>
13117
13118 <p>As usual, when it comes to Debian Blends, I see as the biggest
13119 disadvantage the lack of a numerous team dedicated to the
13120 project. Every day I see the same names in the changelogs, and I have
13121 a constantly fear of the bus factor in this story.  I'd like to see
13122 Debian Edu advertised more as an entry point into the Debian
13123 ecosystem, especially amongst newcomers and students. IMHO there are a
13124 lot low-hanging fruits in terms of bug squashing, and enough
13125 opportunities to get the feeling of the Debian Project's dynamics. Not
13126 to mention it's a very fun blend to work on!</p>
13127
13128 <p>Derived from the previous statement, is the delay in catching up
13129 with the main Debian release and documentation. This is common though
13130 to all blends and derivatives, but it's an issue we can all work
13131 on.</p>
13132
13133 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
13134
13135 <p>I can hardly imagine myself spending a day without Vim, since my
13136 daily routine covers writing code and hacking configuration files. I
13137 am a fan of the Awesome window manager (but I also like the
13138 Enlightenment project a lot!),
13139 <a href="http://www.claws-mail.org/‎">Claws Mail</a> due to its ease of
13140 use and very configurable behaviour. Recently I fell in love with
13141 <a href="https://launchpad.net/redshift">Redshift</a>, which helps me
13142 get through the night without headaches. Of course, there is much more
13143 stuff in this bag, but I'll need a blog on my own for doing this!</p>
13144
13145 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
13146 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
13147
13148 <p>Well, on this field, I cannot do much more than experiment right
13149 now. So, being far from having a recipe for success, I can only assume
13150 that:</p>
13151
13152 <ul>
13153
13154 <li>schools would like to get rid of proprietary software</li>
13155
13156 <li>students will love the openness of the system, and will want to
13157     experiment with it - maybe we need to harvest the native curiosity
13158     of teenagers more?</li>
13159
13160 <li>there is no "right one" when it comes to strategies, but it would
13161     be useful to have some success stories published somewhere, so
13162     other can get some inspiration from them (I know I'd promote
13163     them!)</li>
13164
13165 <li>more active promotion - talks, conferences, even small school
13166     lectures can do magical things if they encounter at least one
13167     person interested. Who knows who that person might be? ;-)</li>
13168
13169 </ul>
13170
13171 <p>I also see some problems in getting Skolelinux into schools; for
13172 example, in our country we have a great deal of corruption issues, so
13173 it might be hard(er) to fight against proprietary solutions. Also,
13174 people who relied on commercial software for all their lives, would be
13175 very hard to convert against their will.</p>
13176
13177       </div>
13178       <div class="tags">
13179
13180
13181         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>.
13182
13183
13184       </div>
13185     </div>
13186     <div class="padding"></div>
13187
13188     <div class="entry">
13189       <div class="title">
13190         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Jonathan_Carter.html">Debian Edu interview: Jonathan Carter</a>
13191       </div>
13192       <div class="date">
13193         12th June 2013
13194       </div>
13195       <div class="body">
13196         <p>There is a certain cross-over between the
13197 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
13198 project</a> and <a href="http://www.edubuntu.org/">the Edubuntu
13199 project</a>, and for example the LTSP packages in Debian are a joint
13200 effort between the projects.  One person with a foot in both camps is
13201 Jonathan Carter, which I am now happy to present to you.</p>
13202
13203 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
13204
13205 <p>I'm a South-African free software geek who lives in Cape Town. My
13206 days vary quite a bit since I'm involved in too many things. As I'm
13207 getting older I'm learning how to focus a bit more :)</p>
13208
13209 <p>I'm also an Edubuntu contributor and I love when there are
13210 opportunities for the Edubuntu and Debian Edu projects to benefit from
13211 each other.</p>
13212
13213 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
13214 project?</strong></p>
13215
13216 <p>I've been somewhat familiar with the project before, but I think my
13217 first direct exposure to the project was when I met Petter
13218 [Reinholdtsen] and Knut [Yrvin] at the Edubuntu summit in 2005 in
13219 London. They provided great feedback that helped the bootstrapping of
13220 Edubuntu. Back then Edubuntu (and even Ubuntu) was still very new and
13221 it was great getting input from people who have been around longer. I
13222 was also still very excitable and said yes to everything and to this
13223 day I have a big todo list backlog that I'm catching up with. I think
13224 over the years the relationship between Edubuntu and Debian-Edu has
13225 been gradually improving, although I think there's a lot that we could
13226 still improve on in terms of working together on packages. I'm sure
13227 we'll get there one day.</p>
13228
13229 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
13230 Edu?</strong></p>
13231
13232 <p>Debian itself already has so many advantages. I could go on about
13233 it for pages, but in essence I love that it's a very honest project
13234 that puts its users first with no hidden agendas and also produces
13235 very high quality work.</p>
13236
13237 <p>I think the advantage of Debian Edu is that it makes many common
13238 set-up tasks simpler so that administrators can get up and running
13239 with a lot less effort and frustration. At the same time I think it
13240 helps to standardise installations in schools so that it's easier for
13241 community members and commercial suppliers to support.</p>
13242
13243 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
13244 Edu?</strong></p>
13245
13246 <p>I had to re-type this one a few times because I'm trying to
13247 separate "disadvantages" from "areas that need improvement" (which is
13248 what I originally rambled on about)</p>
13249
13250 <p>The biggest disadvantage I can think of is lack of manpower. The
13251 project could do so much more if there were more good contributors. I
13252 think some of the problems are external too. Free software and free
13253 content in education is a no-brainer but it takes some time to catch
13254 on. When you've been working with the same proprietary eco-system for
13255 years and have gotten used to it, it can be hard to adjust to some
13256 concepts in the free software world. It would be nice if there were
13257 more Debian Edu consultants across the world. I'd love to be one
13258 myself but I'm already so over-committed that it's just not possible
13259 currently.</p>
13260
13261 <p>I think the best short-term solution to that large-scale problem is
13262 for schools to be pro-active and share their experiences and grow
13263 their skills in-house. I'm often saddened to see how much money
13264 educational institutions spend on 3rd party solutions that they don't
13265 have access to after the service has ended and they could've gotten so
13266 much more value otherwise by being more self-sustainable and
13267 autonomous.</p>
13268
13269 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
13270
13271 <p>My main laptop dual-boots between Debian and Windows 7. I was
13272 Windows free for years but started dual-booting again last year for
13273 some games which help me focus and relax (Starcraft II in
13274 particular). Gaming support on Linux is improving in leaps and bounds
13275 so I suppose I'll soon be able to regain that disk space :)</p>
13276
13277 <p>Besides that I rely on Icedove, Chromium, Terminator, Byobu, irssi,
13278 git, Tomboy, KVM, VLC and LibreOffice. Recently I've been torn on
13279 which desktop environment I like and I'm taking some refuge in Xfce
13280 while I figure that out. I like tools that keep things simple. I enjoy
13281 Python and shell scripting. I went to an Arduino workshop recently and
13282 it was awesome seeing how easy and simple the IDE software was to get
13283 up and running in Debian compared to the users running Windows and OS
13284 X.</p>
13285
13286 <p>I also use mc which some people frown upon slightly. I got used to
13287 using Norton Commander in the early 90's and it stuck (I think the
13288 people who sneer at it is just jealous that they don't know how to use
13289 it :p)
13290
13291 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
13292 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
13293
13294 <p>I think trying to force it is unproductive. I also think that in
13295 many cases it's appropriate for schools to use non-free systems and I
13296 don't think that there's any particular moral or ethical problem with
13297 that.</p>
13298
13299 <p>I do think though that free software can already solve so so many
13300 problems in educational institutions and it's just a shame not taking
13301 advantage of that.</p>
13302
13303 <p>I also think that some curricula need serious review. For example,
13304 some areas of the world rely heavily on very specific versions of MS
13305 Office, teaching students to parrot menu items instead of learning the
13306 general concepts. I think that's very unproductive because firstly, MS
13307 Office's interface changes drastically every few years and on top of
13308 that it also locks in a generation to a product that might not be the
13309 best solution for them.</p>
13310
13311 <p>To answer your question, I believe that the right strategy is to
13312 educate and inform, giving someone the information they require to
13313 make a decision that would work for them.</p>
13314
13315       </div>
13316       <div class="tags">
13317
13318
13319         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>.
13320
13321
13322       </div>
13323     </div>
13324     <div class="padding"></div>
13325
13326     <div class="entry">
13327       <div class="title">
13328         <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>
13329       </div>
13330       <div class="date">
13331         11th June 2013
13332       </div>
13333       <div class="body">
13334         <p>When installing RedHat, Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu on some machines,
13335 the screen just turn black when Linux boot, either during installation
13336 or on first boot from the hard disk.  I've seen it once in a while the
13337 last few years, but only recently understood the cause.  I've seen it
13338 on HP laptops, and on my latest acquaintance the Packard Bell laptop.
13339 The reason seem to be in the wiring of some laptops.  The system to
13340 control the screen background light is inverted, so when Linux try to
13341 turn the brightness fully on, it end up turning it off instead.  I do
13342 not know which Linux drivers are affected, but this post is about the
13343 i915 driver used by the
13344 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Packard Bell
13345 EasyNote LV</a>, Thinkpad X40 and many other laptops.</p>
13346
13347 <p>The problem can be worked around two ways.  Either by adding
13348 i915.invert_brightness=1 as a kernel option, or by adding a file in
13349 /etc/modprobe.d/ to tell modprobe to add the invert_brightness=1
13350 option when it load the i915 kernel module.  On Debian and Ubuntu, it
13351 can be done by running these commands as root:</p>
13352
13353 <pre>
13354 echo options i915 invert_brightness=1 | tee /etc/modprobe.d/i915.conf
13355 update-initramfs -u -k all
13356 </pre>
13357
13358 <p>Since March 2012 there is
13359 <a href="http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=4dca20efb1a9c2efefc28ad2867e5d6c3f5e1955">a
13360 mechanism in the Linux kernel</a> to tell the i915 driver which
13361 hardware have this problem, and get the driver to invert the
13362 brightness setting automatically.  To use it, one need to add a row in
13363 <a href="http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_display.c">the
13364 intel_quirks array</a> in the driver source
13365 <tt>drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_display.c</tt> (look for "<tt>static
13366 struct intel_quirk intel_quirks</tt>"), specifying the PCI device
13367 number (vendor number 8086 is assumed) and subdevice vendor and device
13368 number.</p>
13369
13370 <p>My Packard Bell EasyNote LV got this output from <tt>lspci
13371 -vvnn</tt> for the video card in question:</p>
13372
13373 <p><pre>
13374 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation \
13375     3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller [8086:0156] \
13376     (rev 09) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
13377  Subsystem: Acer Incorporated [ALI] Device [1025:0688]
13378  Control: I/O+ Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- \
13379     ParErr- Stepping- SE RR- FastB2B- DisINTx+
13380  Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort- \
13381     <TAbort- <MAbort->SERR- <PERR- INTx-
13382  Latency: 0
13383  Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 42
13384  Region 0: Memory at c2000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4M]
13385  Region 2: Memory at b0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
13386  Region 4: I/O ports at 4000 [size=64]
13387  Expansion ROM at <unassigned> [disabled]
13388  Capabilities: <access denied>
13389  Kernel driver in use: i915
13390 </pre></p>
13391
13392 <p>The resulting intel_quirks entry would then look like this:</p>
13393
13394 <p><pre>
13395 struct intel_quirk intel_quirks[] = {
13396        ...
13397         /* Packard Bell EasyNote LV11HC needs invert brightness quirk */
13398         { 0x0156, 0x1025, 0x0688, quirk_invert_brightness },
13399        ...
13400 }
13401 </pre></p>
13402
13403 <p>According to the kernel module instructions (as seen using
13404 <tt>modinfo i915</tt>), information about hardware needing the
13405 invert_brightness flag should be sent to the
13406 <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/dri-devel">dri-devel
13407 (at) lists.freedesktop.org</a> mailing list to reach the kernel
13408 developers.  But my email about the laptop sent 2013-06-03 have not
13409 yet shown up in
13410 <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2013-June/thread.html">the
13411 web archive for the mailing list</a>, so I suspect they do not accept
13412 emails from non-subscribers.  Because of this, I sent my patch also to
13413 the Debian bug tracking system instead as
13414 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/710938">BTS report #710938</a>, to make
13415 sure the patch is not lost.</p>
13416
13417 <p>Unfortunately, it is not enough to fix the kernel to get Laptops
13418 with this problem working properly with Linux.  If you use Gnome, your
13419 worries should be over at this point.  But if you use KDE, there is
13420 something in KDE ignoring the invert_brightness setting and turning on
13421 the screen during login.  I've reported it to Debian as
13422 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/711237">BTS report #711237</a>, and
13423 have no idea yet how to figure out exactly what subsystem is doing
13424 this.  Perhaps you can help?  Perhaps you know what the Gnome
13425 developers did to handle this, and this can give a clue to the KDE
13426 developers?  Or you know where in KDE the screen brightness is changed
13427 during login?  If so, please update the BTS report (or get in touch if
13428 you do not know how to update BTS).</p>
13429
13430 <p>Update 2013-07-19: The correct fix for this machine seem to be
13431 acpi_backlight=vendor, to disable ACPI backlight support completely,
13432 as the ACPI information on the machine is trash and it is better to
13433 leave it to the intel video driver to control the screen
13434 backlight.</p>
13435
13436       </div>
13437       <div class="tags">
13438
13439
13440         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>.
13441
13442
13443       </div>
13444     </div>
13445     <div class="padding"></div>
13446
13447     <div class="entry">
13448       <div class="title">
13449         <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>
13450       </div>
13451       <div class="date">
13452         10th June 2013
13453       </div>
13454       <div class="body">
13455         <p>The third wheezy based alpha release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
13456 today.  This is the release announcement:</p>
13457
13458 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.0.0 alpha2 released
13459 2013-06-10</strong></p>
13460
13461 <p>This is the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux 7.0.0 edu
13462 alpha2, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
13463
13464 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
13465
13466 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
13467 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
13468 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
13469 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
13470 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
13471 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
13472 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
13473 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
13474 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
13475 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
13476 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
13477 desktop contains
13478 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">more
13479 than 60 educational software packages</a> and more are available from
13480 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
13481 and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
13482
13483 <p>This is the third test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
13484 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
13485 Squeeze release.</p>
13486
13487 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
13488
13489 <ul>
13490
13491 <li>Iceweasel was updated from 10 to 17. (DSA 2699-1)
13492 <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).
13493 <li>Switched xrdp on thin client servers to use tightvncserver instead of xvnc4.
13494 <li>Now install software oscilloscope xoscope by default.
13495 <li>Now install music tools gtick, lingot and pianobooster by default.
13496
13497 </ul>
13498
13499 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
13500
13501 <ul>
13502
13503 <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.
13504 <li>Updated translation of the installation.
13505 <li>New Romanian translation.
13506 <li>Fix security problem causing root and first user password to no longer show up in /var/cache/debconf/templates.dat.
13507 <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).
13508 <li>Made roaming workstation setup more robust in non-Debian Edu environments.
13509 <li>New script debian-edu-bless to transform a Debian installation to a Debian Edu profile.
13510 <li>Adjust Iceweasel setup to improve performance when $HOME is on NFS.
13511 <li>More testsuite tests.
13512 <li>Make automatic proxy configuration more robust.
13513 <li>Adjust GOsa² GUI configuration.
13514
13515 <li>Update thin client and diskless workstation setup to work with
13516 LTSP in Wheezy.</li>
13517
13518 <li>Diskless workstations now run out of the box -- no need to set
13519 them up with GOsa².</li>
13520
13521 <li>Update IMAP server setup. </li>
13522
13523 <li>Fix login into Skolelinux Backup Tool (Closed in
13524 slbackup-php/0.4.4-1: #700257: slbackup-php: Fails to submit correctly
13525 entered password). </li>
13526
13527 </ul>
13528
13529 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
13530
13531 <ul>
13532
13533 <li>DVD binary and source images are not yet ready.</li>
13534
13535 <li>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv)
13536 available yet (Open in gosa/2.7.4-4: #698840: gosa-plugin-ldapmanager:
13537 missing import feature).</li>
13538
13539 <li>Missing artwork for the KDE desktop (and probably a few others). </li>
13540
13541 <li>KDE Debian submenu lacks icons (Closed: #502192: menu-xdg: invents
13542 own icon names instead of using existing). This will remain
13543 unfixed.</li>
13544
13545 </ul>
13546
13547 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
13548
13549 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
13550
13551 <ul>
13552
13553 <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>
13554
13555 <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>
13556
13557 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.0+edu0~a2-CD.iso .</li>
13558
13559 </ul>
13560
13561 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 27bbcace407743382f3c42c08dbe8178
13562 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: e35f7d7908566cd3075375b3721fa10ee420d419</p>
13563
13564 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
13565
13566 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a>
13567
13568       </div>
13569       <div class="tags">
13570
13571
13572         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>.
13573
13574
13575       </div>
13576     </div>
13577     <div class="padding"></div>
13578
13579     <div class="entry">
13580       <div class="title">
13581         <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>
13582       </div>
13583       <div class="date">
13584          5th June 2013
13585       </div>
13586       <div class="body">
13587         <p>Here is a call for help from the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project.
13588 We have two problems blocking the release of the Wheezy version we
13589 hope to get released soon.  The two problems require some with PHP
13590 skills, and we seem to lack anyone with both time and PHP skills in
13591 the project:
13592
13593 <ol>
13594
13595 <li>It is impossible to log into the slbackup web interface
13596   (slbackup-php) using the root user and password.  This is
13597   <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/700257">BTS report #700257</a>.
13598   This used to work, but stopped working some time since Squeeze.
13599   Perhaps some obsolete PHP feature was used?</li>
13600
13601 <li>It is not possible to "mass import" user lists in Gosa, neither
13602   using ldif nor using CSV files.  The feature was disabled after a
13603   major rewrite of Gosa, and need to be ported to the new system.
13604   This is <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/698840">BTS report
13605   #698840</a>.</li>
13606
13607 </ol>
13608
13609 <p>If you can help us, please join us on IRC
13610 (<a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">#debian-edu on
13611 irc.debian.org</a>) and provide patches via the BTS.</p>
13612
13613       </div>
13614       <div class="tags">
13615
13616
13617         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>.
13618
13619
13620       </div>
13621     </div>
13622     <div class="padding"></div>
13623
13624     <div class="entry">
13625       <div class="title">
13626         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__C_dric_Boutillier.html">Debian Edu interview: Cédric Boutillier</a>
13627       </div>
13628       <div class="date">
13629          4th June 2013
13630       </div>
13631       <div class="body">
13632         <p>It has been a while since my last English
13633 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
13634 interview last November.  But the developers and translators are still
13635 pulling along to get the Wheezy based release out the door, and this
13636 time I managed to get an interview from one of the French translators
13637 in the project, Cédric Boutillier.</p>
13638
13639 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
13640
13641 <p>I am 34 year old. I live near Paris, France. I am an assistant
13642 professor in probability theory. I spend my daytime teaching
13643 mathematics at the university and doing fundamental research in
13644 probability in connexion with combinatorics and statistical physics.</p>
13645
13646 <p>I have been involved in the Debian project for a couple of years
13647 and became Debian Developer a few months ago. I am working on Ruby
13648 packaging, publicity and translation.</p>
13649
13650 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
13651 project?</strong></p>
13652
13653 <p>I came to the Debian Edu project after a call for translation of
13654 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Manuals">the
13655 Debian Edu manual</a> for the release of Debian Edu Squeeze. Since
13656 then, I have been working on updating the French translation of the
13657 manual.
13658
13659 <p>I had the opportunity to make an installation of Debian Edu in a
13660 virtual machine when I was preparing localised version of some screen
13661 shots for the manual. I was amazed to see it worked out of the box and
13662 how comprehensive the list of software installed by default was.</p>
13663
13664 <p>What amazed me was the complete network infrastructure directly
13665 ready to use, which can and the nice administration interface provided
13666 by <a href="https://oss.gonicus.de/labs/gosa/">GOsa²</a>.  What pleased
13667 me also was the fact that among the software installed by default,
13668 there were many "traditional" educative software to learn languages,
13669 to count, to program... but also software to develop creativity and
13670 artistic skills with music (<a href="http://ardour.org/">Ardour</a>,
13671 <a href="http://audacity.sourceforge.net/">Audacity</a>) and
13672 movies/animation (I was especially thinking of
13673 <a href="http://linuxstopmotion.sourceforge.net/">Stopmotion</a>).</p>
13674
13675 <p>I am following the development of Debian Edu and am hanging out on
13676 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">#debian-edu</a>.
13677 Unfortunately, I don't much time to get more involved in this
13678 beautiful project.</p>
13679
13680 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
13681 Edu?</strong></p>
13682
13683 <p>For me, the main advantages of Skolelinux/Debian Edu are its
13684 community of experts and its precise documentation, as well as the
13685 fact that it provides a solution ready to use.</p>
13686
13687 <p>I would add also the fact that it is based on the rock solid Debian
13688 distribution, which ensures stability and provides a huge collection
13689 of educational free software.</p>
13690
13691 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
13692 Edu?</strong></p>
13693
13694 <p>Maybe the lack of manpower to do lobbying on the
13695 project. Sometimes, people who need to take decisions concerning IT do
13696 not have all the elements to evaluate properly free software
13697 solutions. The fact that support by a company may be difficult to find
13698 is probably a problem if the school does not have IT personnel.</p>
13699
13700 <p>One can find support from a company by looking at
13701 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Help/ProfessionalHelp">the
13702 wiki dokumentation</a>, where some countries already have a number of
13703 companies providing support for Debian Edu, like Germany or
13704 Norway. This list is easy to find readily from the manual. However,
13705 for other countries, like France, the list is empty. I guess that
13706 consultants proposing support for Debian would be able to provide some
13707 support for Debian Edu as well.</p>
13708
13709 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
13710
13711 <p>I am using the KDE Plasma Desktop. But the pieces of software I use
13712 most runs in a terminal: Mutt and OfflineIMAP for emails, latex for
13713 scientific documents, mpd for music. VIM is my editor of choice.  I am
13714 also using the mathematical software
13715 <a href="http://www.scilab.org/en/scilab/about‎">Scilab</a> and
13716 <a href="http://www.sagemath.org/index.html‎">Sage</a> (built from
13717 source as not completely packaged for Debian, yet).
13718
13719 <p><strong>Do you have any suggestions for teachers interested in
13720 using the free software in Debian to teach mathematics and
13721 statistics?</strong></p>
13722
13723 <p>I do not have any "nice" recommendations for statistics. At our
13724 university, we use both <a href="http://www.r-project.org/‎">R</a> and
13725 Scilab to teach statistics and probabilistic simulations. For
13726 geometry, there are nice programs:</p>
13727
13728 <ul>
13729
13730 <li><a href="http://www.drgeo.eu/">drgeo</a> and
13731 <a href="http://edu.kde.org/applications/all/kig‎">kig</a> to do
13732 constructions in planar geometry
13733
13734 <li><a href="http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/software/download/kali.html">kali</a>
13735 to discover symmetry groups (the so-called wallpapers and frieze
13736 groups), although the interface looks a bit old.</li>
13737
13738 </ul>
13739
13740 <p>I like also
13741 <a href="http://edu.kde.org/applications/all/cantor">cantor</a>, which
13742 provides a uniform interface to SciLab, Sage,
13743 <a href="http://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Octave‎">Octave</a>, etc...</p>
13744
13745 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
13746 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
13747
13748 <p>My suggestions would be to</p>
13749
13750 <ul>
13751
13752 <li>advertise the reduction of costs when free software is used.</li>
13753
13754 <li>communicate about the quality of free software projects, using
13755     well known examples like Firefox, ThunderBird and
13756     OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice.</li>
13757
13758 <li>advertise the living and strong community around the project.</li>
13759
13760 <li>show that it is not more difficult to use than any other
13761     system.</li>
13762
13763 </ul>
13764
13765       </div>
13766       <div class="tags">
13767
13768
13769         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>.
13770
13771
13772       </div>
13773     </div>
13774     <div class="padding"></div>
13775
13776     <div class="entry">
13777       <div class="title">
13778         <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>
13779       </div>
13780       <div class="date">
13781          1st June 2013
13782       </div>
13783       <div class="body">
13784         <p>Included in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
13785 Skolelinux</a>, there are quite a lot of educational software.
13786 Created to help teachers teach, and pupils learn.  We have tried to
13787 tag them all using debtags use::learning and role::program, and using
13788 the debtags I was happy to be able to create a collage of the
13789 educational software packages installed by default, sorted by the
13790 debtag field.  Here it is.  Click on a image to learn more about the
13791 program.</p>
13792
13793 <!-- 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 -->
13794
13795 <p><strong>field::arts</strong></p>
13796 <p>
13797 <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>
13798 <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>
13799 <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>
13800 <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>
13801 <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>
13802 <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>
13803 <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>
13804 <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>
13805 <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>
13806 <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>
13807 <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>
13808 <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>
13809 <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>
13810 <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>
13811 </p>
13812
13813 <p><strong>field::astronomy</strong></p>
13814 <p>
13815 <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>
13816 <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>
13817 <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>
13818 <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>
13819 <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>
13820 <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>
13821 </p>
13822
13823 <p><strong>field::biology:structural</strong></p>
13824 <p>
13825 <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>
13826 </p>
13827
13828 <p><strong>field::chemistry</strong></p>
13829 <p>
13830 <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>
13831 <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>
13832 <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>
13833 <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>
13834 <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>
13835 <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>
13836 <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>
13837 <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>
13838 <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>
13839 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=viewmol'>[viewmol]</a>
13840 <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>
13841 </p>
13842
13843 <p><strong>field::electronics</strong></p>
13844 <p>
13845 <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>
13846 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gpsim'>[gpsim]</a>
13847 </p>
13848
13849 <p><strong>field::geography</strong></p>
13850 <p>
13851 <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>
13852 <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>
13853 <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>
13854 </p>
13855
13856 <p><strong>field::linguistics</strong></p>
13857 <p>
13858 <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>
13859 <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>
13860 <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>
13861 <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>
13862 <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>
13863 </p>
13864
13865 <p><strong>field::mathematics</strong></p>
13866 <p>
13867 <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>
13868 <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>
13869 <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>
13870 <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>
13871 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=geomview'>[geomview]</a>
13872 <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>
13873 <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>
13874 <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>
13875 <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>
13876 <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>
13877 <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>
13878 <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>
13879 <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>
13880 <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>
13881 <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>
13882 <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>
13883 <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>
13884 </p>
13885
13886 <p><strong>field::physics</strong></p>
13887 <p>
13888 <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>
13889 <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>
13890 </p>
13891
13892 <p><strong>field::TODO</strong></p>
13893 <p>
13894 <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>
13895 <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>
13896 <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>
13897 <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>
13898 <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>
13899 <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>
13900 <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>
13901 <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>
13902 <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>
13903 <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>
13904 </p>
13905
13906 <p>In total, 61 applications.  3 of them lacked screen shots on
13907 <a href="http://screenshot.debian.net">screenshot.debian.net</a>.  If
13908 you know of some packages we should install by default, please let us
13909 know on <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">IRC, #debian-edu
13910 on irc.debian.org</a>, or our
13911 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/">mailing list
13912 debian-edu@</a>.</p>
13913
13914       </div>
13915       <div class="tags">
13916
13917
13918         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>.
13919
13920
13921       </div>
13922     </div>
13923     <div class="padding"></div>
13924
13925     <div class="entry">
13926       <div class="title">
13927         <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>
13928       </div>
13929       <div class="date">
13930         27th May 2013
13931       </div>
13932       <div class="body">
13933         <p>Two days ago, I asked
13934 <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
13935 I could install Linux on a Packard Bell EasyNote LV computer
13936 preinstalled with Windows 8</a>.  I found a solution, but am horrified
13937 with the obstacles put in the way of Linux users on a laptop with UEFI
13938 and Windows 8.</p>
13939
13940 <p>I never found out if the cause of my problems were the use of UEFI
13941 secure booting or fast boot.  I suspect fast boot was the problem,
13942 causing the firmware to boot directly from HD without considering any
13943 key presses and alternative devices, but do not know UEFI settings
13944 enough to tell.</p>
13945
13946 <p>There is no way to install Linux on the machine in question without
13947 opening the box and disconnecting the hard drive!  This is as far as I
13948 can tell, the only way to get access to the firmware setup menu
13949 without accepting the Windows 8 license agreement.  I am told (and
13950 found description on how to) that it is possible to configure the
13951 firmware setup once booted into Windows 8.  But as I believe the terms
13952 of that agreement are completely unacceptable, accepting the license
13953 was never an alternative.  I do not enter agreements I do not intend
13954 to follow.</p>
13955
13956 <p>I feared I had to return the laptops and ask for a refund, and
13957 waste many hours on this, but luckily there was a way to get it to
13958 work.  But I would not recommend it to anyone planning to run Linux on
13959 it, and I have become sceptical to Windows 8 certified laptops.  Is
13960 this the way Linux will be forced out of the market place, by making
13961 it close to impossible for "normal" users to install Linux without
13962 accepting the Microsoft Windows license terms?  Or at least not
13963 without risking to loose the warranty?</p>
13964
13965 <p>I've updated the
13966 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Linux Laptop
13967 wiki page for Packard Bell EasyNote LV</a>, to ensure the next person
13968 do not have to struggle as much as I did to get Linux into the
13969 machine.</p>
13970
13971 <p>Thanks to Bob Rosbag, Florian Weimer, Philipp Kern, Ben Hutching,
13972 Michael Tokarev and others for feedback and ideas.</p>
13973
13974       </div>
13975       <div class="tags">
13976
13977
13978         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>.
13979
13980
13981       </div>
13982     </div>
13983     <div class="padding"></div>
13984
13985     <div class="entry">
13986       <div class="title">
13987         <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>
13988       </div>
13989       <div class="date">
13990         25th May 2013
13991       </div>
13992       <div class="body">
13993         <p>I've run into quite a problem the last few days.  I bought three
13994 new laptops for my parents and a few others.  I bought Packard Bell
13995 Easynote LV to run Kubuntu on and use as their home computer.  But I
13996 am completely unable to figure out how to install Linux on it.  The
13997 computer is preinstalled with Windows 8, and I suspect it uses UEFI
13998 instead of a BIOS to boot.</p>
13999
14000 <p>The problem is that I am unable to get it to PXE boot, and unable
14001 to get it to boot the Linux installer from my USB stick.  I have yet
14002 to try the DVD install, and still hope it will work.  when I turn on
14003 the computer, there is no information on what buttons to press to get
14004 the normal boot menu.  I expect to get some boot menu to select PXE or
14005 USB stick booting.  When booting, it first ask for the language to
14006 use, then for some regional settings, and finally if I will accept the
14007 Windows 8 terms of use.  As these terms are completely unacceptable to
14008 me, I have no other choice but to turn off the computer and try again
14009 to get it to boot the Linux installer.</p>
14010
14011 <p>I have gathered my findings so far on a Linlap page about the
14012 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Packard Bell
14013 EasyNote LV</a> model.  If you have any idea how to get Linux
14014 installed on this machine, please get in touch or update that wiki
14015 page.  If I can't find a way to install Linux, I will have to return
14016 the laptop to the seller and find another machine for my parents.</p>
14017
14018 <p>I wonder, is this the way Linux will be forced out of the market
14019 using UEFI and "secure boot" by making it impossible to install Linux
14020 on new Laptops?</p>
14021
14022       </div>
14023       <div class="tags">
14024
14025
14026         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>.
14027
14028
14029       </div>
14030     </div>
14031     <div class="padding"></div>
14032
14033     <div class="entry">
14034       <div class="title">
14035         <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>
14036       </div>
14037       <div class="date">
14038         17th May 2013
14039       </div>
14040       <div class="body">
14041         <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> is
14042 an operating system based on Debian intended for use in schools.  It
14043 contain a turn-key solution for the computer network provided to
14044 pupils in the primary schools.  It provide both the central server,
14045 network boot servers and desktop environments with heaps of
14046 educational software.  The project was founded almost 12 years ago,
14047 2001-07-02.  If you want to support the project, which is in need for
14048 cash to fund developer gatherings and other project related activity,
14049 <a href="http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">please
14050 donate some money</a>.
14051
14052 <p>A topic that come up again and again on the Debian Edu mailing
14053 lists and elsewhere, is the question on how to transform a Debian or
14054 Ubuntu installation into a Debian Edu installation.  It isn't very
14055 hard, and last week I wrote a script to replicate the steps done by
14056 the Debian Edu installer.</p>
14057
14058 <p>The script,
14059 <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/>
14060 in the debian-edu-config package, will go through these six steps and
14061 transform an existing Debian Wheezy or Ubuntu (untested) installation
14062 into a Debian Edu Workstation:</p>
14063
14064 <ol>
14065
14066 <li>Add skolelinux related APT sources.</li>
14067 <li>Create /etc/debian-edu/config with the wanted configuration.</li>
14068 <li>Install debian-edu-install to load preseeding values and pull in
14069     our configuration.</li>
14070 <li>Preseed debconf database with profile setup in
14071     /etc/debian-edu/config, and run tasksel to install packages
14072     according to the profile specified in the config above,
14073     overriding some of the Debian automation machinery.</li>
14074 <li>Run debian-edu-cfengine-D installation to configure everything
14075     that could not be done using preseeding.</li>
14076 <li>Ask for a reboot to enable all the configuration changes.</li>
14077
14078 </ol>
14079
14080 <p>There are some steps in the Debian Edu installation that can not be
14081 replicated like this.  Disk partitioning and LVM setup, for example.
14082 So this script just assume there is enough disk space to install all
14083 the needed packages.</p>
14084
14085 <p>The script was created to help a Debian Edu student working on
14086 setting up <a href="http://www.raspberrypi.org">Raspberry Pi</a> as a
14087 Debian Edu client, and using it he can take the existing
14088 <a href="http://www.raspbian.org/FrontPage‎">Raspbian</a> installation and
14089 transform it into a fully functioning Debian Edu Workstation (or
14090 Roaming Workstation, or whatever :).</p>
14091
14092 <p>The default setting in the script is to create a KDE Workstation.
14093 If a LXDE based Roaming workstation is wanted instead, modify the
14094 PROFILE and DESKTOP values at the top to look like this instead:</p>
14095
14096 <p><pre>
14097 PROFILE="Roaming-Workstation"
14098 DESKTOP="lxde"
14099 </pre></p>
14100
14101 <p>The script could even become useful to set up Debian Edu servers in
14102 the cloud, by starting with a virtual Debian installation at some
14103 virtual hosting service and setting up all the services on first
14104 boot.</p>
14105
14106       </div>
14107       <div class="tags">
14108
14109
14110         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>.
14111
14112
14113       </div>
14114     </div>
14115     <div class="padding"></div>
14116
14117     <div class="entry">
14118       <div class="title">
14119         <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>
14120       </div>
14121       <div class="date">
14122         14th May 2013
14123       </div>
14124       <div class="body">
14125         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
14126 project</a> is making great progress and made its second Wheezy based
14127 release today.  This is the release announcement:</p>
14128
14129 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.0.0 alpha1 released
14130 2013-05-14</strong></p>
14131
14132 <p>This is the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux 7.0.0 edu
14133 alpha1, based on <a href="http://www.debian.org">Debian</a> with
14134 codename "Wheezy".</p>
14135
14136 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
14137
14138 <p>Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux, is a Linux distribution based
14139 on Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
14140 configured school network. Immediatly after installation a school
14141 server running all services needed for a school network is set up just
14142 waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
14143 Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
14144 initial installation of the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all
14145 other machines can be installed via the network.</p>
14146
14147 <p>This is the first test release based on Wheezy (which currently is
14148 not released yet). Basically this is an updated and slightly improved
14149 version compared to the Squeeze release.</p>
14150
14151 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
14152 <ul>
14153   <li>Install freemind (0.9.0) by default, and stop installing vym by
14154     default.</li>
14155   <li>Install chromium (26.0.1410.43) by default.</li>
14156   <li>Install goplay (0.5-1.1) to make golearn available by default.</li>
14157   <li>Updated support for Japanese input methods, now based on
14158     ibus-anthy.</li>
14159 </ul>
14160
14161 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
14162 <ul>
14163
14164   <li>Switched default file system from ext3 to ext4 for speed and
14165     reliability improvements.</li>
14166   <li>Got rid of unwanted winbind daemon and PAM setup activated because
14167     of <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/706434">706434</a>.</li>
14168   <li>Extended and improved the testsuite tests to detect more possible
14169     problems.</li>
14170   <li>Corrected proxy handling to not set http_proxy to a bogus
14171     direct:// URL.</li>
14172   <li>Corrected proxy setup for diskless workstations.</li>
14173   <li>Corrected PXE setup to use our updated udebs during installation.</li>
14174   <li>Made installation handling of low entropy level more robust.</li>
14175   <li>Create larger partitions for Roaming workstations and Thin client
14176     servers, to make room for all the software installed.</li>
14177   <li>Fix bug in Roaming workstation PAM setup, making it impossible to
14178     log in (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/706753">706753</a>).</li>
14179 </ul>
14180
14181 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
14182 <ul>
14183
14184   <li>IP resolution for the local hostname give useless IPv6 address
14185     (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/705900">705900</a>).  Only install
14186     libnss-myhostname on roaming workstations until it is fixed.</li>
14187   <li>DVD images are not yet ready.</li>
14188   <li>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv)
14189     available yet (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/698840">698840</a>).</li>
14190   <li>Missing artwork for the KDE desktop (and probably a few others).</li>
14191   <li>KDE Debian submenu lacks icons.</li>
14192   <li>LXDE menu lacks entry for changing GOsa password
14193     (website). Installing gosa-desktop will be an option.</li>
14194   <li>Backup configuration via web interface is impossible due to
14195     password submission problem
14196     (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/700257">700257</a>).</li>
14197
14198 </ul>
14199
14200 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
14201
14202 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
14203 <ul>
14204
14205   <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>
14206   <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>
14207   <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>
14208
14209 </ul>
14210
14211 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 685ed76c1aa8e44b12d3fde21faf450b</p>
14212
14213 <p>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 6c874de157024da13e115bab29c068080a11ec4c</p>
14214
14215 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
14216
14217 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a></p>
14218
14219       </div>
14220       <div class="tags">
14221
14222
14223         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>.
14224
14225
14226       </div>
14227     </div>
14228     <div class="padding"></div>
14229
14230     <div class="entry">
14231       <div class="title">
14232         <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>
14233       </div>
14234       <div class="date">
14235         11th May 2013
14236       </div>
14237       <div class="body">
14238         <P>In January,
14239 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_IRC_channel_for_LEGO_designers_using_Debian.html">I
14240 announced a</a> new <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">IRC
14241 channel #debian-lego</a>, for those of us in the Debian and Linux
14242 community interested in <a href="http://www.lego.com/">LEGO</a>, the
14243 marvellous construction system from Denmark.  We also created
14244 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">a wiki page</a> to have
14245 a place to take notes and write down our plans and hopes.  And several
14246 people showed up to help.  I was very happy to see the effect of my
14247 call.  Since the small start, we have a debtags tag
14248 <a href="http://debtags.debian.net/search/bytag?wl=hardware::hobby:lego">hardware::hobby:lego</a>
14249 tag for LEGO related packages, and now count 10 packages related to
14250 LEGO and <a href="http://mindstorms.lego.com/">Mindstorms</a>:</p>
14251
14252 <p><table>
14253 <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>
14254 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/leocad">leocad</a></td><td>virtual brick CAD software</td></tr>
14255 <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>
14256 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/lnpd">lnpd</a></td><td>daemon for LNP communication with BrickOS</td></tr>
14257 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/nbc">nbc</a></td><td>compiler for LEGO Mindstorms NXT bricks</td></tr>
14258 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/nqc">nqc</a></td><td>Not Quite C compiler for LEGO Mindstorms RCX</td></tr>
14259 <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>
14260 <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>
14261 <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>
14262 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/t2n">t2n</a></td><td>simple command-line tool for Lego NXT</td></tr>
14263 </table></p>
14264
14265 <p>Some of these are available in Wheezy, and all but one are
14266 currently available in Jessie/testing.  leocad is so far only
14267 available in experimental.</p>
14268
14269 <p>If you care about LEGO in Debian, please join us on IRC and help
14270 adding the rest of the great free software tools available on Linux
14271 for LEGO designers.</p>
14272
14273       </div>
14274       <div class="tags">
14275
14276
14277         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>.
14278
14279
14280       </div>
14281     </div>
14282     <div class="padding"></div>
14283
14284     <div class="entry">
14285       <div class="title">
14286         <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>
14287       </div>
14288       <div class="date">
14289          5th May 2013
14290       </div>
14291       <div class="body">
14292         <p>When I woke up this morning, I was very happy to see that the
14293 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2013/20130504">release announcement
14294 for Debian Wheezy</a> was waiting in my mail box.  This is a great
14295 Debian release, and I expect to move my machines at home over to it fairly
14296 soon.</p>
14297
14298 <p>The new debian release contain heaps of new stuff, and one program
14299 in particular make me very happy to see included.  The
14300 <a href="http://scratch.mit.edu/">Scratch</a> program, made famous by
14301 the <a href="http://www.code.org/">Teach kids code</a> movement, is
14302 included for the first time.  Alongside similar programs like
14303 <a href="http://edu.kde.org/kturtle/">kturtle</a> and
14304 <a href="http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Turtle_Art">turtleart</a>,
14305 it allow for visual programming where syntax errors can not happen,
14306 and a friendly programming environment for learning to control the
14307 computer.  Scratch will also be included in the next release of Debian
14308 Edu.</a>
14309
14310 <p>And now that Wheezy is wrapped up, we can wrap up the next Debian
14311 Edu/Skolelinux release too.  The
14312 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/2013/04/msg00132.html">first
14313 alpha release</a> went out last week, and the next should soon
14314 follow.<p>
14315
14316       </div>
14317       <div class="tags">
14318
14319
14320         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>.
14321
14322
14323       </div>
14324     </div>
14325     <div class="padding"></div>
14326
14327     <div class="entry">
14328       <div class="title">
14329         <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>
14330       </div>
14331       <div class="date">
14332         26th April 2013
14333       </div>
14334       <div class="body">
14335         <p>The Debian Edu / Skolelinux project is still going strong and made
14336 its first Wheezy based release today.  This is the release
14337 announcement:</p>
14338
14339 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu ~7.0.0 alpha0 released
14340 2013-04-26</strong></p>
14341
14342 <p>This is the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux ~7.0.0
14343 edu alpha0, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
14344
14345 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
14346
14347 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
14348 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
14349 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
14350 network. Immediatly after installation a school server running all
14351 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
14352 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
14353 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
14354 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
14355 installed via the network.</p>
14356
14357 <p>This is the first test release based on Wheezy (which currently is
14358 not released yet). Basically this is an updated and slightly improved
14359 version compared to the Squeeze release.</p>
14360
14361 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
14362
14363 <ul>
14364 <li>Everything which is new in Debian Wheezy, eg:
14365   <ul>
14366      <li>Linux kernel 3.2.x</li>
14367      <li>Desktop environments KDE "Plasma" 4.8.4, GNOME 3.4, and LXDE 4
14368          (KDE is installed by default; to choose GNOME or LXDE: see
14369          manual.)</li>
14370      <li>Web browser Iceweasel 10 ESR</li>
14371      <li>LibreOffice 3.5.4</li>
14372      <li>LTSP 5.4.2</li>
14373      <li>GOsa 2.7.4</li>
14374      <li>CUPS print system 1.5.3</li>
14375      <li>Educational toolbox GCompris 12.01</li>
14376      <li>Music creator Rosegarden 12.04</li>
14377      <li>Image editor Gimp 2.8.2</li>
14378      <li>Virtual universe Celestia 1.6.1</li>
14379      <li>Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.11.3</li>
14380      <li>Scratch visual programming environment 1.4.0.6</li>
14381      <li>New version of debian-installer from Debian Wheezy, see
14382          <a href="http://www.debian.org/releases/wheezy/installmanual">installation
14383          manual</a> for more details.</li>
14384      <li>Debian Wheezy includes about 37000 packages available for
14385          installation.</li>
14386      <li>More information about Debian Wheezy 7.0 is provided in the
14387          <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>
14388   </ul></li>
14389 </ul>
14390
14391 <p><strong>Documentation</strong></p>
14392 <ul>
14393 <li>The (<a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy">English</a>) Debian Edu Wheezy Manual is fully translated to
14394     German, French, Italian and Danish. Partly translated versions exist
14395     for Norwegian Bokmal and Spanish.</li>
14396 </ul>
14397
14398 <p><Strong>LDAP related changes</strong></p>
14399 <ul>
14400 <li>Slight changes to some objects and acls to have more types to
14401     choose from when adding systems in GOsa. Now systems can be of type
14402     server, workstation, printer, terminal or netdevice.</li>
14403 </ul>
14404
14405 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
14406 <ul>
14407 <li>LTSP clients start as diskless workstation / thin client can be
14408     configured via command line argument -- or individually adding an
14409     entry in lts.conf or LDAP.<li>
14410 <li>GOsa gui: Now some options that seemed to be available, but are non
14411     functional, are greyed out (or are not clickable). Some tabs are
14412     completely hidden to the end user, others even to the GOsa admin.</li>
14413 </ul>
14414
14415 <p><strong>Regressions</strong></p>
14416 <ul>
14417 <li>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv) available
14418     yet.</li>
14419 </ul>
14420
14421 <p><strong>No updated artwork</strong></p>
14422
14423 <ul>
14424 <li>Updated artwork which is visible during installation, in the login
14425     screen and as desktop wallpaper is still missing or the same as we
14426     had for our Squeeze based release.</li>
14427 </ul>
14428
14429 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
14430
14431 To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use
14432 <ul>
14433 <li><a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/</a></li>
14434 <li><a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/</a></li>
14435 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/</li>
14436 </ul>
14437
14438 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: c5e773ddafdaa4f48c409c682f598b6c</p>
14439
14440 <p>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 25934fabb9b7d20235499a0a51f08ce6c54215f2</p>
14441
14442 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
14443
14444 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a></p>
14445
14446       </div>
14447       <div class="tags">
14448
14449
14450         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>.
14451
14452
14453       </div>
14454     </div>
14455     <div class="padding"></div>
14456
14457     <div class="entry">
14458       <div class="title">
14459         <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>
14460       </div>
14461       <div class="date">
14462         16th April 2013
14463       </div>
14464       <div class="body">
14465         <p>This years first <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux /
14466 Debian Edu</a> developer gathering take place the coming weekend in Trondheim.
14467 Details about the gathering can be found
14468 <a href="http://www.friprogramvareiskolen.no/Gathering/2013-04-19-21-Trondheim">on
14469 the FRiSK wiki</a>.  The dates are 19-21th of April 2013, and online
14470 participation for those unable to make it in person is very welcome,
14471 and I plan to participate online myself as I could not leave Oslo this
14472 weekend.</p>
14473
14474 <p>The focus of the gathering is to work on the web pages and project
14475 infrastructure, and to continue the work on the Wheezy based Debian
14476 Edu release.</p>
14477
14478 <p>See you on <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">IRC, #debian-edu on irc.debian.org,</a> then?</p>
14479
14480       </div>
14481       <div class="tags">
14482
14483
14484         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>.
14485
14486
14487       </div>
14488     </div>
14489     <div class="padding"></div>
14490
14491     <div class="entry">
14492       <div class="title">
14493         <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>
14494       </div>
14495       <div class="date">
14496          3rd April 2013
14497       </div>
14498       <div class="body">
14499         <p>Today the <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">Isenkram
14500 package</a> finally made it into the archive, after lingering in NEW
14501 for many months.  I uploaded it to the Debian experimental suite
14502 2013-01-27, and today it was accepted into the archive.</p>
14503
14504 <p>Isenkram is a system for suggesting to users what packages to
14505 install to work with a pluggable hardware device.  The suggestion pop
14506 up when the device is plugged in.  For example if a Lego Mindstorm NXT
14507 is inserted, it will suggest to install the program needed to program
14508 the NXT controller.  Give it a go, and report bugs and suggestions to
14509 BTS. :)</p>
14510
14511       </div>
14512       <div class="tags">
14513
14514
14515         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>.
14516
14517
14518       </div>
14519     </div>
14520     <div class="padding"></div>
14521
14522     <div class="entry">
14523       <div class="title">
14524         <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>
14525       </div>
14526       <div class="date">
14527         26th March 2013
14528       </div>
14529       <div class="body">
14530         <p>Would you like to help the environment and save money at the same
14531 time, without much sacrifice?  A small step could be to change the
14532 font you use when printing.</p>
14533
14534 <p>Three years ago,
14535 <a href="http://arstechnica.com/business/2010/04/last-year-printer-comparison-website/">Ars
14536 Technica</a> reported how the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay
14537 changed their default front from
14538 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arial">Arial</a> to
14539 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_Gothic">Century
14540 Gothic</a> to save money.  The Century Gothic font uses 30% less toner
14541 than Arial to print the same text.  In other word, you could cut your
14542 toner costs by 30% (or actually, increase your toner supply life time
14543 by more than 30%), by simply changing the default font used in your
14544 prints.</p>
14545
14546 <p>But it is not quite obvious how much one will save by switching.
14547 The University of Wisconsin-Green Bay said it used $100,000 per year
14548 on ink and toner cartridges, according to
14549 <a href="http://www.twincities.com/ci_14833097">a report from
14550 TwinCities.com</a>, and expected to save between $5,000 and $10,000
14551 per year by asking staff and students to use a different font.  Not
14552 all PDFs and documents are created internally, and those from external
14553 sources will most likely still use a different font.  Also, the
14554 Century Gothic font is slightly wider than Arial, and thus might use
14555 more sheets of paper to print the same text, so the total saving
14556 depend on the documents printed.</p>
14557
14558 <p>But it is definitely something to consider, if you want to reduce
14559 the amount of trash, decrease the amount of toner used in the world,
14560 and save some money in the process.</p>
14561
14562 <p>Update 2013-04-10: If you want to know how much ink/toner could be
14563 saved when switching between fonts, Inkfarm got a
14564 <a href="http://www.inkfarm.com/What-the-Font">service to calculate the
14565 difference between font pairs</a>.  They also
14566 <a href="http://www.inkfarm.com/Recommended-Ink-Saving-Fonts---">recommend
14567 which fonts to use</a> to save ink.  Check it out. :) While updating
14568 this blog post, I also came across a blog post from InkCloners,
14569 <a href="http://inkcloners.com/blog/ink-cartridges/change-fonts-to-save-ink-costs/">listing
14570 the fonts they recommend</a>, with Centory Gothic at the top.</p>
14571
14572       </div>
14573       <div class="tags">
14574
14575
14576         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
14577
14578
14579       </div>
14580     </div>
14581     <div class="padding"></div>
14582
14583     <div class="entry">
14584       <div class="title">
14585         <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>
14586       </div>
14587       <div class="date">
14588         24th March 2013
14589       </div>
14590       <div class="body">
14591         <p>A few days ago, during a discussion in
14592 <a href="http://www.efn.no/">EFN</a> about interesting books to read
14593 about copyright and the data retention directive, a suggestion to read
14594 the 1968 short story Kodémus by
14595 <a href="http://web2.gyldendal.no/toraage/">Tore Åge Bringsværd</a>
14596 came up.  The text was only available in old paper books, and thus not
14597 easily available for current and future generations.  Some of the
14598 people participating in the discussion contacted the author, and
14599 reported back 2013-03-19 that the author was OK with releasing the
14600 short story using a <a href="http://www.creativecommons.org/">Creative
14601 Commons</a> license.  The text was quickly scanned and OCR-ed, and we
14602 were ready to start on the editing and typesetting.</p>
14603
14604 <p>As I already had some experience formatting text in my project to
14605 provide a Norwegian version of the Free Culture book by Lawrence
14606 Lessig, I chipped in and set up a
14607 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">DocBook</a> processing framework to
14608 generate PDF, HTML and EPUB version of the short story.  The tools to
14609 transform DocBook to different formats are already in my Linux
14610 distribution of choice, <a href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian</a>, so
14611 all I had to do was to use the
14612 <a href="http://dblatex.sourceforge.net/">dblatex</a>,
14613 <a href="http://docbook.sourceforge.net/release/xsl/current/epub/README">dbtoepub</a>
14614 and <a href="https://fedorahosted.org/xmlto/">xmlto</a> tools to do the
14615 conversion.  After a few days, we decided to replace dblatex with
14616 xsltproc/fop (aka
14617 <a href="http://wiki.docbook.org/DocBookXslStylesheets">docbook-xsl</a>),
14618 to get the copyright information to show up in the PDF and to get a
14619 nicer &lt;variablelist&gt; typesetting, but that is just a minor
14620 technical detail.</p>
14621
14622 <p>There were a few challenges, of course.  We want to typeset the
14623 short story to look like the original, and that require fairly good
14624 control over the layout.  The original short story have three
14625 parts/scenes separated by a single horizontally centred star (*), and
14626 the paragraphs do not contain only flowing text, but dialogs and text
14627 that started on a new line in the middle of the paragraph.</p>
14628
14629 <p>I initially solved the first challenge by using a paragraph with a
14630 single star in it, ie &lt;para&gt;*&lt;/para&gt;, but it made sure a
14631 placeholder indicated where the scene shifted.  This did not look too
14632 good without the centring.  The next approach was to create a new
14633 preprocessor directive &lt;?newscene?&gt;, mapping to "&lt;hr/&gt;"
14634 for HTML and "&lt;fo:block text-align="center"&gt;&lt;fo:leader
14635 leader-pattern="rule" rule-thickness="0.5pt"/&gt;&lt;/fo:block&gt;"
14636 for FO/PDF output (did not try to implement this in dblatex, as we had
14637 switched at this time).  The HTML XSL file looked like this:</p>
14638
14639 <p><blockquote><pre>
14640 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
14641 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'&gt;
14642   &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('newscene')"&gt;
14643     &lt;hr/&gt;
14644   &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
14645 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
14646 </pre></blockquote></p>
14647
14648 <p>And the FO/PDF XSL file looked like this:</p>
14649
14650 <p><blockquote><pre>
14651 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
14652 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'&gt;
14653   &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('newscene')"&gt;
14654     &lt;fo:block text-align="center"&gt;
14655       &lt;fo:leader leader-pattern="rule" rule-thickness="0.5pt"/&gt;
14656     &lt;/fo:block&gt;
14657   &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
14658 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
14659 </pre></blockquote></p>
14660
14661 <p>Finally, I came across the &lt;bridgehead&gt; tag, which seem to be
14662 a good fit for the task at hand, and I replaced &lt;?newscene?&gt;
14663 with &lt;bridgehead&gt;*&lt;/bridgehead&gt;.  It isn't centred, but we
14664 can fix it with some XSL rule if the current visual layout isn't
14665 enough.</p>
14666
14667 <p>I did not find a good DocBook compliant way to solve the
14668 linebreak/paragraph challenge, so I ended up creating a new processor
14669 directive &lt;?linebreak?&gt;, mapping to &lt;br/&gt; in HTML, and
14670 &lt;fo:block/&gt; in FO/PDF.  I suspect there are better ways to do
14671 this, and welcome ideas and patches on github.  The HTML XSL file now
14672 look like this:</p>
14673
14674 <p><blockquote><pre>
14675 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
14676 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'&gt;
14677   &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('linebreak)"&gt;
14678     &lt;br/&gt;
14679   &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
14680 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
14681 </pre></blockquote></p>
14682
14683 <p>And the FO/PDF XSL file looked like this:</p>
14684
14685 <p><blockquote><pre>
14686 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
14687 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'
14688   xmlns:fo="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Format"&gt;
14689   &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('linebreak)"&gt;
14690     &lt;fo:block/&gt;
14691   &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
14692 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
14693 </pre></blockquote></p>
14694
14695 <p>One unsolved challenge is our wish to expose different ISBN numbers
14696 per publication format, while keeping all of them in some conditional
14697 structure in the DocBook source.  No idea how to do this, so we ended
14698 up listing all the ISBN numbers next to their format in the colophon
14699 page.</p>
14700
14701 <p>If you want to check out the finished result, check out the
14702 <a href="https://github.com/sickel/kodemus">source repository at
14703 github</a>
14704 (<a href="https://github.com/EFN/kodemus">future/new/official
14705 repository</a>).  We expect it to be ready and announced in a few
14706 days.</p>
14707
14708       </div>
14709       <div class="tags">
14710
14711
14712         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>.
14713
14714
14715       </div>
14716     </div>
14717     <div class="padding"></div>
14718
14719     <div class="entry">
14720       <div class="title">
14721         <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>
14722       </div>
14723       <div class="date">
14724         17th March 2013
14725       </div>
14726       <div class="body">
14727         <p>Via
14728 <a href="https://twitter.com/pcwizz/status/313044373262716930">twitter</a>
14729 I just discovered that <a href="http://pcwizz.net/">Pcwizz</a> have
14730 done a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPzTZ61Pcuc">video
14731 review</a> on Youtube of <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux
14732 / Debian Edu</a> version 6.  He installed the standalone profile and
14733 the video show a walk-through of of the menu content, demonstration of
14734 a few programs and his view of our distribution.</p>
14735
14736 <p>There is also some really nice quotes (transcribed by me, might
14737 have heard wrong).  While looking thought the Graphics menu:</p>
14738
14739 <blockquote>
14740 "Basically everything you ever need in a school environment."
14741 </blockquote>
14742
14743 <p>And as a general evaluation of the entire distribution:</p>
14744
14745 <blockquote>
14746 "So, yeah, a bit bloated.  It kept all the Debian stuff in there, just
14747 to keep it nice and GNU.  So, I do not want to go on about it, but
14748 lets give it 7 out of 10.  I am not going to use it.  That is because
14749 I am not deploying a school network.  There may be some mythical
14750 feature to help you deploy Skolelinux on a school network."
14751 </blockquote>
14752
14753 <p>To bad he did not test the server profile, and discovered the PXE
14754 installation option.  It make it possible to install only the main
14755 server from CD, and the rest of the machines via the net, and might be
14756 considered the mythical feature he talk about. :)</p>
14757
14758 <p>While looking through the menus, there is also this funny comment
14759 about the part of the K menu generated from the Debian menu subsystem:
14760
14761 <blockquote>
14762 "[The K menu] have a special Debian section for software that no-one
14763 is going to look at, because it contain lots of junky stuff that you
14764 actually don't need in the education distribution, but have just been
14765 included because it isn't stripped out for some reason."
14766 </blockquote>
14767
14768 <p>I guess it is yet another argument for merging the Debian menu and
14769 Gnome/KDE desktop menu entries into
14770 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/Proposals/DebianMenuUsingDesktopEntries">one
14771 consistent menu system</a> instead of two incomplete and partly
14772 inconsistent menu systems.</p>
14773
14774 <p>The entire video is available below for those accepting iframe
14775 embedding:</p>
14776
14777 <iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/wPzTZ61Pcuc" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
14778
14779       </div>
14780       <div class="tags">
14781
14782
14783         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>.
14784
14785
14786       </div>
14787     </div>
14788     <div class="padding"></div>
14789
14790     <div class="entry">
14791       <div class="title">
14792         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Skolelinux___Debian_Edu_Squeeze_update_released.html">First Skolelinux / Debian Edu Squeeze update released</a>
14793       </div>
14794       <div class="date">
14795          8th March 2013
14796       </div>
14797       <div class="body">
14798         <p>Last Sunday, 2013-03-03,, Holger Levsen announced the first update
14799 of <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a>
14800 based on Debian Squeeze.  This is the first update since
14801 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00001.html">the
14802 initial release 2012-03-11</a>.  This is the
14803 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2013/03/msg00000.html">release
14804 announcement email from Holger</a>:</p>
14805
14806 <blockquote><p>Hi,</p>
14807
14808 <p>it's my pleasure to announce the immediate availability of Debian
14809 Edu 6.0.7+r1 ("Debian Edu Squeeze").</p>
14810
14811 <p>Debian Edu 6.0.7+r1 is an incremental update to Debian Edu
14812 6.0.4+r0, containing all the changes between Debian 6.0.4 and 6.0.7 as
14813 well Debian Edu specific bugfixes and enhancements. See below (in this
14814 mail) for the full list of (edu) changes.  Please see
14815 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311">http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311</a>
14816 for more information on "Debian Edu Squeeze".</p>
14817
14818 <p>Images are available for download at
14819 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/</a></p>
14820
14821 <p>md5sums:
14822 <br>1fe79eb4f0f9ae1c58fc318e26cc1e2e  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-CD.iso
14823 <br>a6ddd924a8bd9a1b5ca122e8fe1c34ec  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-DVD.iso
14824 <br>ac6c72cd7925ccec51bfbf58e2a7c69c  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-source-DVD.iso</p>
14825
14826 <p>sha1sums:
14827 <br>a4b58233b672a99c7df8dc24fb6de3327654a5c3  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-CD.iso
14828 <br>9b524915e0ff2aa793f13d93123e5bd2bab2dbaa  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-DVD.iso
14829 <br>43997614893fc5e9e59ad6ce066b05d07fd836fa  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-source-DVD.iso</p>
14830
14831 <p>These images are suitable for amd64+i386.</p>
14832
14833 <p>Changes for Debian Edu 6.0.7+r1 Codename "Squeeze", released
14834 2013-03-03:</p>
14835
14836 <ul>
14837   <li>sitesummary was updated from 0.1.3 to 0.1.8
14838   <ul>
14839         <li>Make Nagios configuration more robust and efficient</li>
14840         <li>Comply with 3.X kernel</li>
14841   </ul></li>
14842   <li>debian-edu-doc from 1.4~20120310~6.0.4+r0 to 1.4~20130228~6.0.7+r1
14843   <ul>
14844         <li>Minor updates from the wiki</li>
14845         <li>Danish translation now complete</li>
14846   </ul></li>
14847   <li>debian-edu-config from 1.453 to 1.455
14848      <ul>
14849         <li>Fix /etc/hosts for LTSP diskless workstations. Closes: #699880</li>
14850         <li>Make ltsp_local_mount script work for multiple devices.</li>
14851         <li>Correct Kerberos user policy: don't expire password after 2 days.
14852                 Closes: #664596</li>
14853         <li>Handle '#' characters in the root or first users password.
14854                 Closes: #664976</li>
14855         <li>Fixes for gosa-sync:
14856            <ul>
14857                 <li>Don't fail if password contains "</li>
14858                 <li>Don't disclose new password string in syslog</li>
14859            </ul></li>
14860         <li>Fixes for gosa-create:
14861            <ul>
14862                 <li>Invalidate libnss cache before applying changes</li>
14863                 <li>Multiple failures during mass user import into GOsa²</li>
14864                 <li>gosa-netgroups plugin: don't erase entries of attribute type
14865                          "memberNisNetgroup". Closes: #687256</li>
14866                 <li>First user now uses the same Kerberos policy as all other users</li>
14867            </ul></li>
14868         <li>Add Danish web page</li>
14869     </ul>
14870   <li>debian-edu-install from 1.528 to 1.530
14871     <ul>
14872         <li>Improve preseeding support and documentation</li>
14873     </ul></li>
14874 </ul>
14875
14876 <p>End-user documentation in English is available at
14877 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze/">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze/</a>
14878 - translations to French, Italian, Danish and German are available in
14879 the debian-edu-doc package. (Other languages could use your help!)</p>
14880
14881 <p>If you want to contribute to Debian Edu, please join our
14882 mailinglist
14883 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/">debian-edu@lists.debian.org</a>!
14884 </p></blockquote>
14885
14886 <p>I am very happy to see the fruits of a year of hard work. :)</p>
14887
14888       </div>
14889       <div class="tags">
14890
14891
14892         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>.
14893
14894
14895       </div>
14896     </div>
14897     <div class="padding"></div>
14898
14899     <div class="entry">
14900       <div class="title">
14901         <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>
14902       </div>
14903       <div class="date">
14904          3rd March 2013
14905       </div>
14906       <div class="body">
14907         <p>Do you want to set up your own TV station, schedule videos and
14908 broadcast them on the air?  Using free software?  With video on demand
14909 support using
14910 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">free and
14911 open standards</a>?  Included a web based video stream as well?  And
14912 administrate it all in your web browser from anywhere in the world?  A
14913 few years now the Norwegian public access TV-channel
14914 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a> have been building a
14915 system to do just this.  The source code for the solution is licensed
14916 using the GNU LGPL, and
14917 <a href="http://github.com/Frikanalen">available from github</a>.</p>
14918
14919 <p>The idea is simple.  You upload a video file over the web, and
14920 attach meta information to the file.  You select a time slot in the
14921 program schedule, and when the time come it is played on the air and
14922 in the web stream.  It is also made available in a video on demand
14923 solution for anyone to see it also outside its scheduled time.  All
14924 you need to run a TV station - using your web browser.</p>
14925
14926 <p>There are several parts to this web based solution.  I'll mention
14927 the three most important ones.  The first part is the database of
14928 videos and the schedule.  This is written in Django and include a REST
14929 API.  The current database is SQLite, but the plan is to migrate it to
14930 PostgreSQL.  At the moment this system can be tested on
14931 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/">beta.frikanalen.tv</a>.  The
14932 second part is the video playout, taking the schedule information from
14933 the database and providing a video stream to broadcast.  This is done
14934 using <a href="http://www.casparcg.com/">CasparCG from SVT</a> and
14935 <a href="http://www.mltframework.org/">Media Lovin' Toolkit</a>.  Video
14936 signal distribution is handled using
14937 <a href="http://www.ob-encoder.com/">Open Broadcast Encoder</a>.  The
14938 third part is the converter, handling the transformation of uploaded
14939 video files to a format useful for broadcasting, streaming and video
14940 on demand.  It is still very much work in progress, so it is not yet
14941 decided what it will end up using.  Note that the source of the latter
14942 two parts are not yet pushed to github.  The lead author want to clean
14943 them up a bit more first.</p>
14944
14945 <p>The development is coordinated on the
14946 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23frikanalen">#frikanalen IRC
14947 channel</a> (irc.freenode.net), and discussed on
14948 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/frikanalen">the
14949 frikanalen mailing list</a>. The lead developer is Benjamin Bruheim
14950 (phed on IRC).  Anyone is welcome to participate in the
14951 development.</p>
14952
14953       </div>
14954       <div class="tags">
14955
14956
14957         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>.
14958
14959
14960       </div>
14961     </div>
14962     <div class="padding"></div>
14963
14964     <div class="entry">
14965       <div class="title">
14966         <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>
14967       </div>
14968       <div class="date">
14969         27th February 2013
14970       </div>
14971       <div class="body">
14972         <p>Dr. <a href="http://www.stallman.org/">Richard Stallman</a>,
14973 founder of <a href="http://www.fsf.org/">Free Software Foundation</a>,
14974 is giving <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20130301-rms/">a
14975 talk in Oslo March 1st 2013 17:00 to 19:00</a>.  The event is public
14976 and organised by <a href="">Norwegian Unix Users Group (NUUG)</a>
14977 (where I am the chair of the board) and
14978 <a href="http://www.friprog.no/">The Norwegian Open Source Competence
14979 Center</a>.  The title of the talk is «The Free Software Movement and
14980 GNU», with this description:
14981
14982 <p><blockquote>
14983 The Free Software Movement campaigns for computer users' freedom to
14984 cooperate and control their own computing. The Free Software Movement
14985 developed the GNU operating system, typically used together with the
14986 kernel Linux, specifically to make these freedoms possible.
14987 </blockquote></p>
14988
14989 <p>The meeting is open for everyone.  Due to space limitations, the
14990 doors opens for NUUG members at 16:15, and everyone else at 16:45.  I
14991 am really curious how many will show up.  See
14992 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20130301-rms/">the event
14993 page</a> for the location details.</p>
14994
14995       </div>
14996       <div class="tags">
14997
14998
14999         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>.
15000
15001
15002       </div>
15003     </div>
15004     <div class="padding"></div>
15005
15006     <div class="entry">
15007       <div class="title">
15008         <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>
15009       </div>
15010       <div class="date">
15011         15th February 2013
15012       </div>
15013       <div class="body">
15014         <p>If you, like me, want an updated a map for your Garmin GPS, there is
15015 now a great source of free maps available from
15016 <a href="http://www.frikart.no/garmin/index.html">Frikart</a>.  To
15017 download a map, just click on the country you are interested in, and
15018 download the map type you want.  There are 8 different maps available,
15019 using different colours and data selection.  Pick one of Roadmap, Topo
15020 Summer, Topo Winter, Roadmap II, Topo Summer II, Topo Winter II,
15021 "Trails - overlay map" and "Cross country - overlay map" (see the web
15022 page for descriptions).</p>
15023
15024 <p>The maps are updated weekly, so if you find something wrong in the
15025 map you can just edit the
15026 <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/">OpenStreetmap</a> map source
15027 (anyone can contribute) and fetch a fixed map a week later. :)</p>
15028
15029       </div>
15030       <div class="tags">
15031
15032
15033         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>.
15034
15035
15036       </div>
15037     </div>
15038     <div class="padding"></div>
15039
15040     <div class="entry">
15041       <div class="title">
15042         <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>
15043       </div>
15044       <div class="date">
15045         12th February 2013
15046       </div>
15047       <div class="body">
15048         <p>Here in Norway, electronic invoices are spreading, and the
15049 <a href="http://www.anskaffelser.no/e-handel/faktura">solution promoted
15050 by the Norwegian government</a> require that invoices are sent through
15051 one of the approved facilitators, and it is not possible to send
15052 electronic invoices without an agreement with one of these
15053 facilitators.  This seem like a needless limitation to be able to
15054 transfer invoice information between buyers and sellers.  My preferred
15055 solution would be to just transfer the invoice information directly
15056 between seller and buyer, for example using SMTP, or some HTTP based
15057 protocol like REST or SOAP.  But this might also be overkill, as the
15058 "electronic" information can be transferred using paper invoices too,
15059 using a simple bar code.  My bar code encoding of choice would be QR
15060 codes, as this encoding can be read by any smart phone out there.  The
15061 content of the code could be anything, but I would go with
15062 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VCard">the vCard format</a>, as
15063 it too is supported by a lot of computer equipment these days.</p>
15064
15065 <p>The vCard format support extentions, and the invoice specific
15066 information can be included using such extentions.  For example an
15067 invoice from SLX Debian Labs (picked because we
15068 <a href="http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">ask
15069 for donations to the Debian Edu project</a> and thus have bank account
15070 information publicly available) for NOK 1000.00 could have these extra
15071 fields:</p>
15072
15073 <p><pre>
15074 X-INVOICE-NUMBER:1
15075 X-INVOICE-AMOUNT:NOK1000.00
15076 X-INVOICE-KID:123412341234
15077 X-INVOICE-MSG:Donation to Debian Edu
15078 X-BANK-ACCOUNT-NUMBER:16040884339
15079 X-BANK-IBAN-NUMBER:NO8516040884339
15080 X-BANK-SWIFT-NUMBER:DNBANOKKXXX
15081 </pre></p>
15082
15083 <p>The X-BANK-ACCOUNT-NUMBER field was proposed in a stackoverflow
15084 answer regarding
15085 <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10045664/storing-bank-account-in-vcard-file">how
15086 to put bank account information into a vCard</a>.  For payments in
15087 Norway, either X-INVOICE-KID (payment ID) or X-INVOICE-MSG could be
15088 used to pass on information to the seller when paying the invoice.</p>
15089
15090 <p>The complete vCard could look like this:</p>
15091
15092 <p><pre>
15093 BEGIN:VCARD
15094 VERSION:2.1
15095 ORG:SLX Debian Labs Foundation
15096 ADR;WORK:;;Gunnar Schjelderups vei 29D;OSLO;;0485;Norway
15097 URL;WORK:http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/
15098 EMAIL;PREF;INTERNET:sdl-styret@rt.nuug.no
15099 REV:20130212T095000Z
15100 X-INVOICE-NUMBER:1
15101 X-INVOICE-AMOUNT:NOK1000.00
15102 X-INVOICE-MSG:Donation to Debian Edu
15103 X-BANK-ACCOUNT-NUMBER:16040884339
15104 X-BANK-IBAN-NUMBER:NO8516040884339
15105 X-BANK-SWIFT-NUMBER:DNBANOKKXXX
15106 END:VCARD
15107 </pre></p>
15108
15109 <p>The resulting QR code created using
15110 <a href="http://fukuchi.org/works/qrencode/">qrencode</a> would look
15111 like this, and should be readable (and thus checkable) by any smart
15112 phone, or for example the <a href="http://zbar.sourceforge.net/">zbar
15113 bar code reader</a> and feed right into the approval and accounting
15114 system.</p>
15115
15116 <p><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-02-12-qr-invoice.png"></p>
15117
15118 <p>The extension fields will most likely not show up in any normal
15119 vCard reader, so those parts would have to go directly into a system
15120 handling invoices.  I am a bit unsure how vCards without name parts
15121 are handled, but a simple test indicate that this work just fine.</p>
15122
15123 <p><strong>Update 2013-02-12 11:30</strong>: Added KID to the proposal
15124 based on feedback from Sturle Sunde.</p>
15125
15126       </div>
15127       <div class="tags">
15128
15129
15130         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>.
15131
15132
15133       </div>
15134     </div>
15135     <div class="padding"></div>
15136
15137     <div class="entry">
15138       <div class="title">
15139         <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>
15140       </div>
15141       <div class="date">
15142         10th February 2013
15143       </div>
15144       <div class="body">
15145         <p><img align="left" style="margin-right:25px;" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-02-10-morning-light.jpeg"></p>
15146
15147 <p>With kids in the house, one challenge is getting them to sleep
15148 during the night and wake up when it is morning.  I mean, when I
15149 believe it is morning, and not two hours earlier.  In our household we
15150 have decided that 07:00 is the turning point, but getting the kids to
15151 sleep until 07:00 is a small challenge every day.  They have adapted
15152 quite well, and rarely wake up at 05:00 any more, but some times wake
15153 up at times like 05:50, 06:15, 06:30 or 06:45, and it is hard to put
15154 the awake one to bed again without disturbing and waking the rest.
15155 And I understand perfectly well that they fail to sleep until 07:00
15156 some times, as there is no way for them to know if it is before or
15157 after the magic moment without coming and asking us parents.</p>
15158
15159 <p>But yesterday I came up with a method to solve this problem.  It
15160 involve home automation.  A few years ago I bought a
15161 <a href="http://www.telldus.se/products/tellstick">Tellstick</a> and RF
15162 switches at the local <a href="http://www.clasohlson.com/">Clas
15163 Ohlson</a> shop, allowing me to control lights and other electrical
15164 gadgets using my Linux server.  When I moved from the old flat to a
15165 small house, I put away all this equipment as most of the lighting in
15166 the house was not using wall sockets and thus not easy to connect to
15167 the gadgets I had.  But recently I bought a
15168 <a href="http://www.telldus.se/products/tellstick_net">Tellstick
15169 Net</a> to be able to read sensor input as well as control power
15170 sockets.  I want to control ovens in the basement to avoid the pipes
15171 to freeze, and monitor the humidity to detect flooding.  The default
15172 setup for Tellstick Net is to be controlled by the vendor web service,
15173 which to me is a security problem, but it is also possible to build
15174 ones own
15175 <a href="http://developer.telldus.com/blog/2012/03/02/help-us-develop-local-access-using-tellstick-net-build-your-own-firmware">firmware
15176 with local access</A> instead of being controlled by a Swedish
15177 company, thanks to the release of the GPL licensed firmware source
15178 code.  I plan to get that running before I let it control anything
15179 important.  But while working on this, one idea to make it easier for
15180 the kids came to me yesterday.  We can set up a night light controlled
15181 by the computer, and turn it automatically on at 07:00.  The kids can
15182 then check the light in the morning to know if they are supposed to
15183 get up or not.  They joined me in setting everything up, and I
15184 repeated the concept several times before bed times to make sure they
15185 remembered to check the light before getting up in the morning.</p>
15186
15187 <p>We tested it this morning, and all the kids stayed in bed until
15188 after 07:00, and every one of them commented on the fact that the
15189 "morning light" was turned on and signalled that the morning had
15190 arrived.  So this look like a success, and I am excited to see how
15191 this develops the next few days. :) I really hope this can allow us
15192 all to sleep a bit longer in the morning.</p>
15193
15194 <p>A nice advantage of this setup is that we can remote control when
15195 to tell the kids to get up.  We do not have to wait until 07:00, and
15196 can also delay it if we want to.</p>
15197
15198       </div>
15199       <div class="tags">
15200
15201
15202         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
15203
15204
15205       </div>
15206     </div>
15207     <div class="padding"></div>
15208
15209     <div class="entry">
15210       <div class="title">
15211         <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>
15212       </div>
15213       <div class="date">
15214          2nd February 2013
15215       </div>
15216       <div class="body">
15217         <p>My
15218 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_backport_bitcoin_qt_version_0_7_2_2_to_Debian_Squeeze.html">last
15219 bitcoin related blog post</a> mentioned that the new
15220 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">bitcoin package</a> for
15221 Debian was waiting in NEW.  It was accepted by the Debian ftp-masters
15222 2013-01-19, and have been available in unstable since then.  It was
15223 automatically copied to Ubuntu, and is available in their Raring
15224 version too.</p>
15225
15226 <p>But there is a strange problem with the build that block this new
15227 version from being available on the i386 and kfreebsd-i386
15228 architectures.  For some strange reason, the autobuilders in Debian
15229 for these architectures fail to run the test suite on these
15230 architectures (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/672524">BTS #672524</a>).
15231 We are so far unable to reproduce it when building it manually, and
15232 no-one have been able to propose a fix.  If you got an idea what is
15233 failing, please let us know via the BTS.</p>
15234
15235 <p>One feature that is annoying me with of the bitcoin client, because
15236 I often run low on disk space, is the fact that the client will exit
15237 if it run short on space (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/696715">BTS
15238 #696715</a>).  So make sure you have enough disk space when you run
15239 it. :)</p>
15240
15241 <p>As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
15242 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
15243 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
15244
15245       </div>
15246       <div class="tags">
15247
15248
15249         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>.
15250
15251
15252       </div>
15253     </div>
15254     <div class="padding"></div>
15255
15256     <div class="entry">
15257       <div class="title">
15258         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html">Welcome to the world, Isenkram!</a>
15259       </div>
15260       <div class="date">
15261         22nd January 2013
15262       </div>
15263       <div class="body">
15264         <p>Yesterday, I
15265 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_prototype_ready_making_hardware_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">asked
15266 for testers</a> for my prototype for making Debian better at handling
15267 pluggable hardware devices, which I
15268 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">set
15269 out to create</a> earlier this month.  Several valuable testers showed
15270 up, and caused me to really want to to open up the development to more
15271 people.  But before I did this, I want to come up with a sensible name
15272 for this project.  Today I finally decided on a new name, and I have
15273 renamed the project from hw-support-handler to this new name.  In the
15274 process, I moved the source to git and made it available as a
15275 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/isenkram.git">collab-maint</a>
15276 repository in Debian.  The new name?  It is <strong>Isenkram</strong>.
15277 To fetch and build the latest version of the source, use</p>
15278
15279 <pre>
15280 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/collab-maint/isenkram.git
15281 cd isenkram && git-buildpackage -us -uc
15282 </pre>
15283
15284 <p>I have not yet adjusted all files to use the new name yet.  If you
15285 want to hack on the source or improve the package, please go ahead.
15286 But please talk to me first on IRC or via email before you do major
15287 changes, to make sure we do not step on each others toes. :)</p>
15288
15289 <p>If you wonder what 'isenkram' is, it is a Norwegian word for iron
15290 stuff, typically meaning tools, nails, screws, etc.  Typical hardware
15291 stuff, in other words.  I've been told it is the Norwegian variant of
15292 the German word eisenkram, for those that are familiar with that
15293 word.</p>
15294
15295 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-26</strong>: Added -us -us to build
15296 instructions, to avoid confusing people with an error from the signing
15297 process.</p>
15298
15299 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-27</strong>: Switch to HTTP URL for the git
15300 clone argument to avoid the need for authentication.</p>
15301
15302       </div>
15303       <div class="tags">
15304
15305
15306         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>.
15307
15308
15309       </div>
15310     </div>
15311     <div class="padding"></div>
15312
15313     <div class="entry">
15314       <div class="title">
15315         <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>
15316       </div>
15317       <div class="date">
15318         21st January 2013
15319       </div>
15320       <div class="body">
15321         <p>Early this month I set out to try to
15322 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">improve
15323 the Debian support for pluggable hardware devices</a>.  Now my
15324 prototype is working, and it is ready for a larger audience.  To test
15325 it, fetch the
15326 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">source
15327 from the Debian Edu subversion repository</a>, build and install the
15328 package.  You might have to log out and in again activate the
15329 autostart script.</p>
15330
15331 <p>The design is simple:</p>
15332
15333 <ul>
15334
15335 <li>Add desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ causing a program
15336 hw-support-handlerd to start when the user log in.</li>
15337
15338 <li>This program listen for kernel events about new hardware (directly
15339 from the kernel like udev does), not using HAL dbus events as I
15340 initially did.</li>
15341
15342 <li>When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware modalias in
15343 the APT database, a database
15344 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=markup">available
15345 via HTTP</a> and a database available as part of the package.</li>
15346
15347 <li>If a package is mapped to the hardware in question, the package
15348 isn't installed yet and this is the first time the hardware was
15349 plugged in, show a desktop notification suggesting to install the
15350 package or packages.</li>
15351
15352 <li>If the user click on the 'install package now' button, ask
15353 aptdaemon via the PackageKit API to install the requrired package.</li>
15354
15355 <li>aptdaemon ask for root password or sudo password, and install the
15356 package while showing progress information in a window.</li>
15357
15358 </ul>
15359
15360 <p>I still need to come up with a better name for the system.  Here
15361 are some screen shots showing the prototype in action.  First the
15362 notification, then the password request, and finally the request to
15363 approve all the dependencies.  Sorry for the Norwegian Bokmål GUI.</p>
15364
15365 <p><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-1-notification.png">
15366 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-2-password.png">
15367 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-3-dependencies.png">
15368 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-4-installing.png">
15369 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-5-installing-details.png" width="70%"></p>
15370
15371 <p>The prototype still need to be improved with longer timeouts, but
15372 is already useful.  The database of hardware to package mappings also
15373 need more work.  It is currently compatible with the Ubuntu way of
15374 storing such information in the package control file, but could be
15375 changed to use other formats instead or in addition to the current
15376 method.  I've dropped the use of discover for this mapping, as the
15377 modalias approach is more flexible and easier to use on Linux as long
15378 as the Linux kernel expose its modalias strings directly.</p>
15379
15380 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-21 16:50</strong>: Due to popular demand,
15381 here is the command required to check out and build the source: Use
15382 '<tt>svn checkout
15383 svn://svn.debian.org/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/; cd
15384 hw-support-handler; debuild</tt>'.  If you lack debuild, install the
15385 devscripts package.</p>
15386
15387 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-23 12:00</strong>: The project is now
15388 renamed to Isenkram and the source moved from the Debian Edu
15389 subversion repository to a Debian collab-maint git repository.  See
15390 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html">build
15391 instructions</a> for details.</p>
15392
15393       </div>
15394       <div class="tags">
15395
15396
15397         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>.
15398
15399
15400       </div>
15401     </div>
15402     <div class="padding"></div>
15403
15404     <div class="entry">
15405       <div class="title">
15406         <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>
15407       </div>
15408       <div class="date">
15409         19th January 2013
15410       </div>
15411       <div class="body">
15412         <p>This Christmas my trusty old laptop died.  It died quietly and
15413 suddenly in bed.  With a quiet whimper, it went completely quiet and
15414 black.  The power button was no longer able to turn it on.  It was a
15415 IBM Thinkpad X41, and the best laptop I ever had.  Better than both
15416 Thinkpads X30, X31, X40, X60, X61 and X61S.  Far better than the
15417 Compaq I had before that.  Now I need to find a replacement.  To keep
15418 going during Christmas, I moved the one year old SSD disk to my old
15419 X40 where it fitted (only one I had left that could use it), but it is
15420 not a durable solution.
15421
15422 <p>My laptop needs are fairly modest.  This is my wishlist from when I
15423 got a new one more than 10 years ago.  It still holds true.:)</p>
15424
15425 <ul>
15426
15427 <li>Lightweight (around 1 kg) and small volume (preferably smaller
15428   than A4).</li>
15429 <li>Robust, it will be in my backpack every day.</li>
15430 <li>Three button mouse and a mouse pin instead of touch pad.</li>
15431 <li>Long battery life time.  Preferable a week.</li>
15432 <li>Internal WIFI network card.</li>
15433 <li>Internal Twisted Pair network card.</li>
15434 <li>Some USB slots (2-3 is plenty)</li>
15435 <li>Good keyboard - similar to the Thinkpad.</li>
15436 <li>Video resolution at least 1024x768, with size around 12" (A4 paper
15437 size).</li>
15438 <li>Hardware supported by Debian Stable, ie the default kernel and
15439   X.org packages.</li>
15440 <li>Quiet, preferably fan free (or at least not using the fan most of
15441   the time).
15442
15443 </ul>
15444
15445 <p>You will notice that there are no RAM and CPU requirements in the
15446 list.  The reason is simply that the specifications on laptops the
15447 last 10-15 years have been sufficient for my needs, and I have to look
15448 at other features to choose my laptop.  But are there still made as
15449 robust laptops as my X41?  The Thinkpad X60/X61 proved to be less
15450 robust, and Thinkpads seem to be heading in the wrong direction since
15451 Lenovo took over.  But I've been told that X220 and X1 Carbon might
15452 still be useful.</p>
15453
15454 <p>Perhaps I should rethink my needs, and look for a pad with an
15455 external keyboard?  I'll have to check the
15456 <a href="http://www.linux-laptop.net/">Linux Laptops site</a> for
15457 well-supported laptops, or perhaps just buy one preinstalled from one
15458 of the vendors listed on the <a href="http://linuxpreloaded.com/">Linux
15459 Pre-loaded site</a>.</p>
15460
15461       </div>
15462       <div class="tags">
15463
15464
15465         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>.
15466
15467
15468       </div>
15469     </div>
15470     <div class="padding"></div>
15471
15472     <div class="entry">
15473       <div class="title">
15474         <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>
15475       </div>
15476       <div class="date">
15477         18th January 2013
15478       </div>
15479       <div class="body">
15480         <p>Some times I try to figure out which Iceweasel browser plugin to
15481 install to get support for a given MIME type.  Thanks to
15482 <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MozillaTeam/Plugins">specifications
15483 done by Ubuntu</a> and Mozilla, it is possible to do this in Debian.
15484 Unfortunately, not very many packages provide the needed meta
15485 information, Anyway, here is a small script to look up all browser
15486 plugin packages announcing ther MIME support using this specification:</p>
15487
15488 <pre>
15489 #!/usr/bin/python
15490 import sys
15491 import apt
15492 def pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
15493     cache = apt.Cache()
15494     cache.open(None)
15495     thepkgs = []
15496     for pkg in cache:
15497         version = pkg.candidate
15498         if version is None:
15499             version = pkg.installed
15500         if version is None:
15501             continue
15502         record = version.record
15503         if not record.has_key('Npp-MimeType'):
15504             continue
15505         mime_types = record['Npp-MimeType'].split(',')
15506         for t in mime_types:
15507             t = t.rstrip().strip()
15508             if t == mimetype:
15509                 thepkgs.append(pkg.name)
15510     return thepkgs
15511 mimetype = "audio/ogg"
15512 if 1 < len(sys.argv):
15513     mimetype = sys.argv[1]
15514 print "Browser plugin packages supporting %s:" % mimetype
15515 for pkg in pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
15516     print "  %s" %pkg
15517 </pre>
15518
15519 <p>It can be used like this to look up a given MIME type:</p>
15520
15521 <pre>
15522 % ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype
15523 Browser plugin packages supporting audio/ogg:
15524   gecko-mediaplayer
15525 % ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype application/x-shockwave-flash
15526 Browser plugin packages supporting application/x-shockwave-flash:
15527   browser-plugin-gnash
15528 %
15529 </pre>
15530
15531 <p>In Ubuntu this mechanism is combined with support in the browser
15532 itself to query for plugins and propose to install the needed
15533 packages.  It would be great if Debian supported such feature too.  Is
15534 anyone working on adding it?</p>
15535
15536 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-18 14:20</strong>: The Debian BTS
15537 request for icweasel support for this feature is
15538 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/484010">#484010</a> from 2008 (and
15539 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/698426">#698426</a> from today).  Lack
15540 of manpower and wish for a different design is the reason thus feature
15541 is not yet in iceweasel from Debian.</p>
15542
15543       </div>
15544       <div class="tags">
15545
15546
15547         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>.
15548
15549
15550       </div>
15551     </div>
15552     <div class="padding"></div>
15553
15554     <div class="entry">
15555       <div class="title">
15556         <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>
15557       </div>
15558       <div class="date">
15559         16th January 2013
15560       </div>
15561       <div class="body">
15562         <p>The <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/AppStreamDebianProposal">DEP-11
15563 proposal to add AppStream information to the Debian archive</a>, is a
15564 proposal to make it possible for a Desktop application to propose to
15565 the user some package to install to gain support for a given MIME
15566 type, font, library etc. that is currently missing.  With such
15567 mechanism in place, it would be possible for the desktop to
15568 automatically propose and install leocad if some LDraw file is
15569 downloaded by the browser.</p>
15570
15571 <p>To get some idea about the current content of the archive, I decided
15572 to write a simple program to extract all .desktop files from the
15573 Debian archive and look up the claimed MIME support there.  The result
15574 can be found on the
15575 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/pub/AppStreamTest">Skolelinux FTP
15576 site</a>.  Using the collected information, it become possible to
15577 answer the question in the title.  Here are the 20 most supported MIME
15578 types in Debian stable (Squeeze), testing (Wheezy) and unstable (Sid).
15579 The complete list is available from the link above.</p>
15580
15581 <p><strong>Debian Stable:</strong></p>
15582
15583 <pre>
15584   count MIME type
15585   ----- -----------------------
15586      32 text/plain
15587      30 audio/mpeg
15588      29 image/png
15589      28 image/jpeg
15590      27 application/ogg
15591      26 audio/x-mp3
15592      25 image/tiff
15593      25 image/gif
15594      22 image/bmp
15595      22 audio/x-wav
15596      20 audio/x-flac
15597      19 audio/x-mpegurl
15598      18 video/x-ms-asf
15599      18 audio/x-musepack
15600      18 audio/x-mpeg
15601      18 application/x-ogg
15602      17 video/mpeg
15603      17 audio/x-scpls
15604      17 audio/ogg
15605      16 video/x-ms-wmv
15606 </pre>
15607
15608 <p><strong>Debian Testing:</strong></p>
15609
15610 <pre>
15611   count MIME type
15612   ----- -----------------------
15613      33 text/plain
15614      32 image/png
15615      32 image/jpeg
15616      29 audio/mpeg
15617      27 image/gif
15618      26 image/tiff
15619      26 application/ogg
15620      25 audio/x-mp3
15621      22 image/bmp
15622      21 audio/x-wav
15623      19 audio/x-mpegurl
15624      19 audio/x-mpeg
15625      18 video/mpeg
15626      18 audio/x-scpls
15627      18 audio/x-flac
15628      18 application/x-ogg
15629      17 video/x-ms-asf
15630      17 text/html
15631      17 audio/x-musepack
15632      16 image/x-xbitmap
15633 </pre>
15634
15635 <p><strong>Debian Unstable:</strong></p>
15636
15637 <pre>
15638   count MIME type
15639   ----- -----------------------
15640      31 text/plain
15641      31 image/png
15642      31 image/jpeg
15643      29 audio/mpeg
15644      28 application/ogg
15645      27 image/gif
15646      26 image/tiff
15647      26 audio/x-mp3
15648      23 audio/x-wav
15649      22 image/bmp
15650      21 audio/x-flac
15651      20 audio/x-mpegurl
15652      19 audio/x-mpeg
15653      18 video/x-ms-asf
15654      18 video/mpeg
15655      18 audio/x-scpls
15656      18 application/x-ogg
15657      17 audio/x-musepack
15658      16 video/x-ms-wmv
15659      16 video/x-msvideo
15660 </pre>
15661
15662 <p>I am told that PackageKit can provide an API to access the kind of
15663 information mentioned in DEP-11.  I have not yet had time to look at
15664 it, but hope the PackageKit people in Debian are on top of these
15665 issues.</p>
15666
15667 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-16 13:35</strong>: Updated numbers after
15668 discovering a typo in my script.</p>
15669
15670       </div>
15671       <div class="tags">
15672
15673
15674         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>.
15675
15676
15677       </div>
15678     </div>
15679     <div class="padding"></div>
15680
15681     <div class="entry">
15682       <div class="title">
15683         <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>
15684       </div>
15685       <div class="date">
15686         15th January 2013
15687       </div>
15688       <div class="body">
15689         <p>Yesterday, I wrote about the
15690 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Modalias_strings___a_practical_way_to_map__stuff__to_hardware.html">modalias
15691 values provided by the Linux kernel</a> following my hope for
15692 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">better
15693 dongle support in Debian</a>.  Using this knowledge, I have tested how
15694 modalias values attached to package names can be used to map packages
15695 to hardware.  This allow the system to look up and suggest relevant
15696 packages when I plug in some new hardware into my machine, and replace
15697 discover and discover-data as the database used to map hardware to
15698 packages.</p>
15699
15700 <p>I create a modaliases file with entries like the following,
15701 containing package name, kernel module name (if relevant, otherwise
15702 the package name) and globs matching the relevant hardware
15703 modalias.</p>
15704
15705 <p><blockquote>
15706 Package: package-name
15707 <br>Modaliases: module(modaliasglob, modaliasglob, modaliasglob)</p>
15708 </blockquote></p>
15709
15710 <p>It is fairly trivial to write code to find the relevant packages
15711 for a given modalias value using this file.</p>
15712
15713 <p>An entry like this would suggest the video and picture application
15714 cheese for many USB web cameras (interface bus class 0E01):</p>
15715
15716 <p><blockquote>
15717 Package: cheese
15718 <br>Modaliases: cheese(usb:v*p*d*dc*dsc*dp*ic0Eisc01ip*)</p>
15719 </blockquote></p>
15720
15721 <p>An entry like this would suggest the pcmciautils package when a
15722 CardBus bridge (bus class 0607) PCI device is present:</p>
15723
15724 <p><blockquote>
15725 Package: pcmciautils
15726 <br>Modaliases: pcmciautils(pci:v*d*sv*sd*bc06sc07i*)
15727 </blockquote></p>
15728
15729 <p>An entry like this would suggest the package colorhug-client when
15730 plugging in a ColorHug with USB IDs 04D8:F8DA:</p>
15731
15732 <p><blockquote>
15733 Package: colorhug-client
15734 <br>Modaliases: colorhug-client(usb:v04D8pF8DAd*)</p>
15735 </blockquote></p>
15736
15737 <p>I believe the format is compatible with the format of the Packages
15738 file in the Debian archive.  Ubuntu already uses their Packages file
15739 to store their mappings from packages to hardware.</p>
15740
15741 <p>By adding a XB-Modaliases: header in debian/control, any .deb can
15742 announce the hardware it support in a way my prototype understand.
15743 This allow those publishing packages in an APT source outside the
15744 Debian archive as well as those backporting packages to make sure the
15745 hardware mapping are included in the package meta information.  I've
15746 tested such header in the pymissile package, and its modalias mapping
15747 is working as it should with my prototype.  It even made it to Ubuntu
15748 Raring.</p>
15749
15750 <p>To test if it was possible to look up supported hardware using only
15751 the shell tools available in the Debian installer, I wrote a shell
15752 implementation of the lookup code.  The idea is to create files for
15753 each modalias and let the shell do the matching.  Please check out and
15754 try the
15755 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/hw-support-lookup?view=co">hw-support-lookup</a>
15756 shell script.  It run without any extra dependencies and fetch the
15757 hardware mappings from the Debian archive and the subversion
15758 repository where I currently work on my prototype.</p>
15759
15760 <p>When I use it on a machine with a yubikey inserted, it suggest to
15761 install yubikey-personalization:</p>
15762
15763 <p><blockquote>
15764 % ./hw-support-lookup
15765 <br>yubikey-personalization
15766 <br>%
15767 </blockquote></p>
15768
15769 <p>When I run it on my Thinkpad X40 with a PCMCIA/CardBus slot, it
15770 propose to install the pcmciautils package:</p>
15771
15772 <p><blockquote>
15773 % ./hw-support-lookup
15774 <br>pcmciautils
15775 <br>%
15776 </blockquote></p>
15777
15778 <p>If you know of any hardware-package mapping that should be added to
15779 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=co">my
15780 database</a>, please tell me about it.</p>
15781
15782 <p>It could be possible to generate several of the mappings between
15783 packages and hardware.  One source would be to look at packages with
15784 kernel modules, ie packages with *.ko files in /lib/modules/, and
15785 extract their modalias information.  Another would be to look at
15786 packages with udev rules, ie packages with files in
15787 /lib/udev/rules.d/, and extract their vendor/model information to
15788 generate a modalias matching rule.  I have not tested any of these to
15789 see if it work.</p>
15790
15791 <p>If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
15792 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
15793 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
15794 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-devel">#debian-devel</a>.</p>
15795
15796       </div>
15797       <div class="tags">
15798
15799
15800         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>.
15801
15802
15803       </div>
15804     </div>
15805     <div class="padding"></div>
15806
15807     <div class="entry">
15808       <div class="title">
15809         <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>
15810       </div>
15811       <div class="date">
15812         14th January 2013
15813       </div>
15814       <div class="body">
15815         <p>While looking into how to look up Debian packages based on hardware
15816 information, to find the packages that support a given piece of
15817 hardware, I refreshed my memory regarding modalias values, and decided
15818 to document the details.  Here are my findings so far, also available
15819 in
15820 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">the
15821 Debian Edu subversion repository</a>:
15822
15823 <p><strong>Modalias decoded</strong></p>
15824
15825 <p>This document try to explain what the different types of modalias
15826 values stands for.  It is in part based on information from
15827 &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias">https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias</a> &gt;,
15828 &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;,
15829 &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
15830 &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;.
15831
15832 <p>The modalias entries for a given Linux machine can be found using
15833 this shell script:</p>
15834
15835 <pre>
15836 find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -0 cat | sort -u
15837 </pre>
15838
15839 <p>The supported modalias globs for a given kernel module can be found
15840 using modinfo:</p>
15841
15842 <pre>
15843 % /sbin/modinfo psmouse | grep alias:
15844 alias:          serio:ty05pr*id*ex*
15845 alias:          serio:ty01pr*id*ex*
15846 %
15847 </pre>
15848
15849 <p><strong>PCI subtype</strong></p>
15850
15851 <p>A typical PCI entry can look like this.  This is an Intel Host
15852 Bridge memory controller:</p>
15853
15854 <p><blockquote>
15855 pci:v00008086d00002770sv00001028sd000001ADbc06sc00i00
15856 </blockquote></p>
15857
15858 <p>This represent these values:</p>
15859
15860 <pre>
15861  v   00008086  (vendor)
15862  d   00002770  (device)
15863  sv  00001028  (subvendor)
15864  sd  000001AD  (subdevice)
15865  bc  06        (bus class)
15866  sc  00        (bus subclass)
15867  i   00        (interface)
15868 </pre>
15869
15870 <p>The vendor/device values are the same values outputted from 'lspci
15871 -n' as 8086:2770.  The bus class/subclass is also shown by lspci as
15872 0600.  The 0600 class is a host bridge.  Other useful bus values are
15873 0300 (VGA compatible card) and 0200 (Ethernet controller).</p>
15874
15875 <p>Not sure how to figure out the interface value, nor what it
15876 means.</p>
15877
15878 <p><strong>USB subtype</strong></p>
15879
15880 <p>Some typical USB entries can look like this.  This is an internal
15881 USB hub in a laptop:</p>
15882
15883 <p><blockquote>
15884 usb:v1D6Bp0001d0206dc09dsc00dp00ic09isc00ip00
15885 </blockquote></p>
15886
15887 <p>Here is the values included in this alias:</p>
15888
15889 <pre>
15890  v    1D6B  (device vendor)
15891  p    0001  (device product)
15892  d    0206  (bcddevice)
15893  dc     09  (device class)
15894  dsc    00  (device subclass)
15895  dp     00  (device protocol)
15896  ic     09  (interface class)
15897  isc    00  (interface subclass)
15898  ip     00  (interface protocol)
15899 </pre>
15900
15901 <p>The 0900 device class/subclass means hub.  Some times the relevant
15902 class is in the interface class section.  For a simple USB web camera,
15903 these alias entries show up:</p>
15904
15905 <p><blockquote>
15906 usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc01ip00
15907 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc02ip00
15908 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc01ip00
15909 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc02ip00
15910 </blockquote></p>
15911
15912 <p>Interface class 0E01 is video control, 0E02 is video streaming (aka
15913 camera), 0101 is audio control device and 0102 is audio streaming (aka
15914 microphone).  Thus this is a camera with microphone included.</p>
15915
15916 <p><strong>ACPI subtype</strong></p>
15917
15918 <p>The ACPI type is used for several non-PCI/USB stuff.  This is an IR
15919 receiver in a Thinkpad X40:</p>
15920
15921 <p><blockquote>
15922 acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
15923 </blockquote></p>
15924
15925 <p>The values between the colons are IDs.</p>
15926
15927 <p><strong>DMI subtype</strong></p>
15928
15929 <p>The DMI table contain lots of information about the computer case
15930 and model.  This is an entry for a IBM Thinkpad X40, fetched from
15931 /sys/devices/virtual/dmi/id/modalias:</p>
15932
15933 <p><blockquote>
15934 dmi:bvnIBM:bvr1UETB6WW(1.66):bd06/15/2005:svnIBM:pn2371H4G:pvrThinkPadX40:rvnIBM:rn2371H4G:rvrNotAvailable:cvnIBM:ct10:cvrNotAvailable:
15935 </blockquote></p>
15936
15937 <p>The values present are</p>
15938
15939 <pre>
15940  bvn  IBM            (BIOS vendor)
15941  bvr  1UETB6WW(1.66) (BIOS version)
15942  bd   06/15/2005     (BIOS date)
15943  svn  IBM            (system vendor)
15944  pn   2371H4G        (product name)
15945  pvr  ThinkPadX40    (product version)
15946  rvn  IBM            (board vendor)
15947  rn   2371H4G        (board name)
15948  rvr  NotAvailable   (board version)
15949  cvn  IBM            (chassis vendor)
15950  ct   10             (chassis type)
15951  cvr  NotAvailable   (chassis version)
15952 </pre>
15953
15954 <p>The chassis type 10 is Notebook.  Other interesting values can be
15955 found in the dmidecode source:</p>
15956
15957 <pre>
15958   3 Desktop
15959   4 Low Profile Desktop
15960   5 Pizza Box
15961   6 Mini Tower
15962   7 Tower
15963   8 Portable
15964   9 Laptop
15965  10 Notebook
15966  11 Hand Held
15967  12 Docking Station
15968  13 All In One
15969  14 Sub Notebook
15970  15 Space-saving
15971  16 Lunch Box
15972  17 Main Server Chassis
15973  18 Expansion Chassis
15974  19 Sub Chassis
15975  20 Bus Expansion Chassis
15976  21 Peripheral Chassis
15977  22 RAID Chassis
15978  23 Rack Mount Chassis
15979  24 Sealed-case PC
15980  25 Multi-system
15981  26 CompactPCI
15982  27 AdvancedTCA
15983  28 Blade
15984  29 Blade Enclosing
15985 </pre>
15986
15987 <p>The chassis type values are not always accurately set in the DMI
15988 table.  For example my home server is a tower, but the DMI modalias
15989 claim it is a desktop.</p>
15990
15991 <p><strong>SerIO subtype</strong></p>
15992
15993 <p>This type is used for PS/2 mouse plugs.  One example is from my
15994 test machine:</p>
15995
15996 <p><blockquote>
15997 serio:ty01pr00id00ex00
15998 </blockquote></p>
15999
16000 <p>The values present are</p>
16001
16002 <pre>
16003   ty  01  (type)
16004   pr  00  (prototype)
16005   id  00  (id)
16006   ex  00  (extra)
16007 </pre>
16008
16009 <p>This type is supported by the psmouse driver.  I am not sure what
16010 the valid values are.</p>
16011
16012 <p><strong>Other subtypes</strong></p>
16013
16014 <p>There are heaps of other modalias subtypes according to
16015 file2alias.c.  There is the rest of the list from that source: amba,
16016 ap, bcma, ccw, css, eisa, hid, i2c, ieee1394, input, ipack, isapnp,
16017 mdio, of, parisc, pcmcia, platform, scsi, sdio, spi, ssb, vio, virtio,
16018 vmbus, x86cpu and zorro.  I did not spend time documenting all of
16019 these, as they do not seem relevant for my intended use with mapping
16020 hardware to packages when new stuff is inserted during run time.</p>
16021
16022 <p><strong>Looking up kernel modules using modalias values</strong></p>
16023
16024 <p>To check which kernel modules provide support for a given modalias,
16025 one can use the following shell script:</p>
16026
16027 <pre>
16028   for id in $(find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -0 cat | sort -u); do \
16029     echo "$id" ; \
16030     /sbin/modprobe --show-depends "$id"|sed 's/^/  /' ; \
16031   done
16032 </pre>
16033
16034 <p>The output can look like this (only the first few entries as the
16035 list is very long on my test machine):</p>
16036
16037 <pre>
16038   acpi:ACPI0003:
16039     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/acpi/ac.ko
16040   acpi:device:
16041   FATAL: Module acpi:device: not found.
16042   acpi:IBM0068:
16043     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/char/nvram.ko
16044     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/leds/led-class.ko
16045     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/net/rfkill/rfkill.ko
16046     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/platform/x86/thinkpad_acpi.ko
16047   acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
16048     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/lib/crc-ccitt.ko
16049     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/net/irda/irda.ko
16050     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/net/irda/nsc-ircc.ko
16051   [...]
16052 </pre>
16053
16054 <p>If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
16055 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
16056 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
16057 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-devel">#debian-devel</a>.</p>
16058
16059 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-15:</strong> Rewrite "cat $(find ...)" to
16060 "find ... -print0 | xargs -0 cat" to make sure it handle directories
16061 in /sys/ with space in them.</p>
16062
16063       </div>
16064       <div class="tags">
16065
16066
16067         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>.
16068
16069
16070       </div>
16071     </div>
16072     <div class="padding"></div>
16073
16074     <div class="entry">
16075       <div class="title">
16076         <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>
16077       </div>
16078       <div class="date">
16079         10th January 2013
16080       </div>
16081       <div class="body">
16082         <p>As part of my investigation on how to improve the support in Debian
16083 for hardware dongles, I dug up my old Mark and Spencer USB Rocket
16084 Launcher and updated the Debian package
16085 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pymissile">pymissile</a> to make
16086 sure udev will fix the device permissions when it is plugged in.  I
16087 also added a "Modaliases" header to test it in the Debian archive and
16088 hopefully make the package be proposed by jockey in Ubuntu when a user
16089 plug in his rocket launcher.  In the process I moved the source to a
16090 git repository under collab-maint, to make it easier for any DD to
16091 contribute.  <a href="http://code.google.com/p/pymissile/">Upstream</a>
16092 is not very active, but the software still work for me even after five
16093 years of relative silence.  The new git repository is not listed in
16094 the uploaded package yet, because I want to test the other changes a
16095 bit more before I upload the new version.  If you want to check out
16096 the new version with a .desktop file included, visit the
16097 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/pymissile.git">gitweb
16098 view</a> or use "<tt>git clone
16099 git://anonscm.debian.org/collab-maint/pymissile.git</tt>".</p>
16100
16101       </div>
16102       <div class="tags">
16103
16104
16105         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>.
16106
16107
16108       </div>
16109     </div>
16110     <div class="padding"></div>
16111
16112     <div class="entry">
16113       <div class="title">
16114         <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>
16115       </div>
16116       <div class="date">
16117          9th January 2013
16118       </div>
16119       <div class="body">
16120         <p>One thing that annoys me with Debian and Linux distributions in
16121 general, is that there is a great package management system with the
16122 ability to automatically install software packages by downloading them
16123 from the distribution mirrors, but no way to get it to automatically
16124 install the packages I need to use the hardware I plug into my
16125 machine.  Even if the package to use it is easily available from the
16126 Linux distribution.  When I plug in a LEGO Mindstorms NXT, it could
16127 suggest to automatically install the python-nxt, nbc and t2n packages
16128 I need to talk to it.  When I plug in a Yubikey, it could propose the
16129 yubikey-personalization package.  The information required to do this
16130 is available, but no-one have pulled all the pieces together.</p>
16131
16132 <p>Some years ago, I proposed to
16133 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg01206.html">use
16134 the discover subsystem to implement this</a>.  The idea is fairly
16135 simple:
16136
16137 <ul>
16138
16139 <li>Add a desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ pointing to a program
16140   starting when a user log in.</li>
16141
16142 <li>Set this program up to listen for kernel events emitted when new
16143   hardware is inserted into the computer.</li>
16144
16145 <li>When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware ID in a
16146   database mapping to packages, and take note of any non-installed
16147   packages.</li>
16148
16149 <li>Show a message to the user proposing to install the discovered
16150   package, and make it easy to install it.</li>
16151
16152 </ul>
16153
16154 <p>I am not sure what the best way to implement this is, but my
16155 initial idea was to use dbus events to discover new hardware, the
16156 discover database to find packages and
16157 <a href="http://www.packagekit.org/">PackageKit</a> to install
16158 packages.</p>
16159
16160 <p>Yesterday, I found time to try to implement this idea, and the
16161 draft package is now checked into
16162 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">the
16163 Debian Edu subversion repository</a>.  In the process, I updated the
16164 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover-data.html">discover-data</a>
16165 package to map the USB ids of LEGO Mindstorms and Yubikey devices to
16166 the relevant packages in Debian, and uploaded a new version
16167 2.2013.01.09 to unstable.  I also discovered that the current
16168 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover.html">discover</a>
16169 package in Debian no longer discovered any USB devices, because
16170 /proc/bus/usb/devices is no longer present.  I ported it to use
16171 libusb as a fall back option to get it working.  The fixed package
16172 version 2.1.2-6 is now in experimental (didn't upload it to unstable
16173 because of the freeze).</p>
16174
16175 <p>With this prototype in place, I can insert my Yubikey, and get this
16176 desktop notification to show up (only once, the first time it is
16177 inserted):</p>
16178
16179 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-09-hw-autoinstall.png"></p>
16180
16181 <p>For this prototype to be really useful, some way to automatically
16182 install the proposed packages by pressing the "Please install
16183 program(s)" button should to be implemented.</p>
16184
16185 <p>If this idea seem useful to you, and you want to help make it
16186 happen, please help me update the discover-data database with mappings
16187 from hardware to Debian packages.  Check if 'discover-pkginstall -l'
16188 list the package you would like to have installed when a given
16189 hardware device is inserted into your computer, and report bugs using
16190 reportbug if it isn't.  Or, if you know of a better way to provide
16191 such mapping, please let me know.</p>
16192
16193 <p>This prototype need more work, and there are several questions that
16194 should be considered before it is ready for production use.  Is dbus
16195 the correct way to detect new hardware?  At the moment I look for HAL
16196 dbus events on the system bus, because that is the events I could see
16197 on my Debian Squeeze KDE desktop.  Are there better events to use?
16198 How should the user be notified?  Is the desktop notification
16199 mechanism the best option, or should the background daemon raise a
16200 popup instead?  How should packages be installed?  When should they
16201 not be installed?</p>
16202
16203 <p>If you want to help getting such feature implemented in Debian,
16204 please send me an email. :)</p>
16205
16206       </div>
16207       <div class="tags">
16208
16209
16210         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>.
16211
16212
16213       </div>
16214     </div>
16215     <div class="padding"></div>
16216
16217     <div class="entry">
16218       <div class="title">
16219         <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>
16220       </div>
16221       <div class="date">
16222          2nd January 2013
16223       </div>
16224       <div class="body">
16225         <p>During Christmas, I have worked a bit on the Debian support for
16226 <a href="http://mindstorms.lego.com/en-us/Default.aspx">LEGO Mindstorm
16227 NXT</a>.  My son and I have played a bit with my NXT set, and I
16228 discovered I had to build all the tools myself because none were
16229 already in Debian Squeeze.  If Debian support for LEGO is something
16230 you care about, please join me on the IRC channel
16231 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">#debian-lego</a> (server
16232 irc.debian.org).  There is a lot that could be done to improve the
16233 Debian support for LEGO designers.  For example both CAD software
16234 and Mindstorm compilers are missing. :)</p>
16235
16236 <p>Update 2012-01-03: A
16237 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">project page</a>
16238 including links to Lego related packages is now available.</p>
16239
16240       </div>
16241       <div class="tags">
16242
16243
16244         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>.
16245
16246
16247       </div>
16248     </div>
16249     <div class="padding"></div>
16250
16251     <div class="entry">
16252       <div class="title">
16253         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Christmas_present_for_Skolelinux___Debian_Edu.html">A Christmas present for Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a>
16254       </div>
16255       <div class="date">
16256         28th December 2012
16257       </div>
16258       <div class="body">
16259         <p>I was happy to discover a few days ago that the
16260 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a>
16261 project also this year received a Christmas present from Another
16262 Agency in Trondheim.  NOK 1000,- showed up on our donation account
16263 December 24th.  I want to express our thanks for this very welcome
16264 present.  As the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project is very short on
16265 funding these days, and thus lack the money to do regular developer
16266 gatherings, this donation was most welcome.  One developer gathering
16267 cost around NOK 15&nbsp;000,-, so we need quite a lot more to keep the
16268 development pace we want.  Thus, I hope their example this year is
16269 followed by many others. :)</p>
16270
16271 <p>The public list of donors can be found on
16272 <a href="http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">the
16273 donation page</a> for the project, which also contain instructions if
16274 you want to donate to the project.</p>
16275
16276       </div>
16277       <div class="tags">
16278
16279
16280         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>.
16281
16282
16283       </div>
16284     </div>
16285     <div class="padding"></div>
16286
16287     <div class="entry">
16288       <div class="title">
16289         <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>
16290       </div>
16291       <div class="date">
16292         25th December 2012
16293       </div>
16294       <div class="body">
16295         <p>Let me start by wishing you all marry Christmas and a happy new
16296 year!  I hope next year will prove to be a good year.</p>
16297
16298 <p><a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">Bitcoin</a>, the digital
16299 decentralised "currency" that allow people to transfer bitcoins
16300 between each other with minimal overhead, is a very interesting
16301 experiment.  And as I wrote a few days ago, the bitcoin situation in
16302 <a href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> is about to improve a bit.
16303 The <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">new debian source
16304 package</a> (version 0.7.2-2) was uploaded yesterday, and is waiting
16305 in <a href="http://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html">the NEW queue</A>
16306 for one of the ftpmasters to approve the new bitcoin-qt package
16307 name.</p>
16308
16309 <p>And thanks to the great work of Jonas and the rest of the bitcoin
16310 team in Debian, you can easily test the package in Debian Squeeze
16311 using the following steps to get a set of working packages:</p>
16312
16313 <blockquote><pre>
16314 git clone git://git.debian.org/git/collab-maint/bitcoin
16315 cd bitcoin
16316 DEB_MAINTAINER_MODE=1 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp fakeroot debian/rules clean
16317 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp git-buildpackage --git-ignore-new
16318 </pre></blockquote>
16319
16320 <p>You might have to install some build dependencies as well.  The
16321 list of commands should give you two packages, bitcoind and
16322 bitcoin-qt, ready for use in a Squeeze environment.  Note that the
16323 client will download the complete set of bitcoin "blocks", which need
16324 around 5.6 GiB of data on my machine at the moment.  Make sure your
16325 ~/.bitcoin/ directory have lots of spare room if you want to download
16326 all the blocks.  The client will warn if the disk is getting full, so
16327 there is not really a problem if you got too little room, but you will
16328 not be able to get all the features out of the client.</p>
16329
16330 <p>As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
16331 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
16332 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
16333
16334       </div>
16335       <div class="tags">
16336
16337
16338         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>.
16339
16340
16341       </div>
16342     </div>
16343     <div class="padding"></div>
16344
16345     <div class="entry">
16346       <div class="title">
16347         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_word_on_bitcoin_support_in_Debian.html">A word on bitcoin support in Debian</a>
16348       </div>
16349       <div class="date">
16350         21st December 2012
16351       </div>
16352       <div class="body">
16353         <p>It has been a while since I wrote about
16354 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">bitcoin</a>, the decentralised
16355 peer-to-peer based crypto-currency, and the reason is simply that I
16356 have been busy elsewhere.  But two days ago, I started looking at the
16357 state of <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">bitcoin in
16358 Debian</a> again to try to recover my old bitcoin wallet.  The package
16359 is now maintained by a
16360 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-bitcoin/">team of
16361 people</a>, and the grunt work had already been done by this team.  We
16362 owe a huge thank you to all these team members. :)
16363 But I was sad to discover that the bitcoin client is missing in
16364 Wheezy.  It is only available in Sid (and an outdated client from
16365 backports).  The client had several RC bugs registered in BTS blocking
16366 it from entering testing.  To try to help the team and improve the
16367 situation, I spent some time providing patches and triaging the bug
16368 reports.  I also had a look at the bitcoin package available from Matt
16369 Corallo in a
16370 <a href="https://launchpad.net/~bitcoin/+archive/bitcoin">PPA for
16371 Ubuntu</a>, and moved the useful pieces from that version into the
16372 Debian package.</p>
16373
16374 <p>After checking with the main package maintainer Jonas Smedegaard on
16375 IRC, I pushed several patches into the collab-maint git repository to
16376 improve the package.  It now contains fixes for the RC issues (not from
16377 me, but fixed by Scott Howard), build rules for a Qt GUI client
16378 package, konqueror support for the bitcoin: URI and bash completion
16379 setup.  As I work on Debian Squeeze, I also created
16380 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-bitcoin-devel/Week-of-Mon-20121217/000041.html">a
16381 patch to backport</a> the latest version.  Jonas is going to look at
16382 it and try to integrate it into the git repository before uploading a
16383 new version to unstable.
16384
16385 <p>I would very much like bitcoin to succeed, to get rid of the
16386 centralized control currently exercised in the monetary system.  I
16387 find it completely unacceptable that the USA government is collecting
16388 transaction data for almost all international money transfers (most are done in USD and transaction logs shipped to the spooks), and
16389 that the major credit card companies can block legal money
16390 transactions to Wikileaks.  But for bitcoin to succeed, more people
16391 need to use bitcoins, and more people need to accept bitcoins when
16392 they sell products and services.  Improving the bitcoin support in
16393 Debian is a small step in the right direction, but not enough.
16394 Unfortunately the user experience when browsing the web and wanting to
16395 pay with bitcoin is still not very good.  The bitcoin: URI is a step
16396 in the right direction, but need to work in most or every browser in
16397 use.  Also the bitcoin-qt client is too heavy to fire up to do a
16398 quick transaction.  I believe there are other clients available, but
16399 have not tested them.</p>
16400
16401 <p>My
16402 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html">experiment
16403 with bitcoins</a> showed that at least some of my readers use bitcoin.
16404 I received 20.15 BTC so far on the address I provided in my blog two
16405 years ago, as can be
16406 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">seen
16407 on the blockexplorer service</a>.  Thank you everyone for your
16408 donation.  The blockexplorer service demonstrates quite well that
16409 bitcoin is not quite anonymous and untracked. :) I wonder if the
16410 number of users have gone up since then.  If you use bitcoin and want
16411 to show your support of my activity, please send Bitcoin donations to
16412 the same address as last time,
16413 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
16414
16415       </div>
16416       <div class="tags">
16417
16418
16419         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>.
16420
16421
16422       </div>
16423     </div>
16424     <div class="padding"></div>
16425
16426     <div class="entry">
16427       <div class="title">
16428         <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>
16429       </div>
16430       <div class="date">
16431         18th December 2012
16432       </div>
16433       <div class="body">
16434         <p>A few days ago I came across
16435 <a href="http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/hledger/">a blog post from Joey
16436 Hess</a> describing <a href="http://ledger-cli.org/">ledger</a> and
16437 hledger, a text based system for double-entry accounting.  I found it
16438 interesting, as I am involved with several organizations where
16439 accounting is an issue, and I have not really become too friendly with
16440 the different web based systems we use.  I find it hard to find what I
16441 look for in the menus and even harder try to get sensible data out of
16442 the systems.  Ledger seem different.  The accounting data is kept in
16443 text files that can be stored in a version control system, and there
16444
16445 are at least <a href="https://github.com/ledger/ledger/wiki/Ports">five
16446 different implementations</a> able to read the format.  An example
16447 entry look like this, and is simple enough that it will be trivial to
16448 generate entries based on CVS files fetched from the bank:</p>
16449
16450 <blockquote><pre>
16451 2004-05-27 Book Store
16452       Expenses:Books                 $20.00
16453       Liabilities:Visa
16454 </pre></blockquote>
16455
16456 <p>The concept seemed interesting enough for me to check it out and
16457 look for others using it.  I found blog posts from
16458 <a href="http://blog.spang.cc/posts/hledger_rocks_my_world/">Christine
16459 Spang</a>,
16460 <a href="http://bugsplat.info/2010-05-23-keeping-finances-with-ledger.html">Pete
16461 Keen</a>,
16462 <a href="http://blog.andrewcantino.com/blog/2010/11/06/command-line-accounting-with-ledger-and-reckon/">Andrew
16463 Cantino</a> and
16464 <a href="http://blog.iphoting.com/blog/2012/11/29/command-line-double-entry-accounting/">Ronald
16465 Ip</a> describing how they use it, as well as a post from
16466 <a href="https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/ledger-cli/r0oWjwbQ9Bo">Bradley
16467 M. Kuhn</a> at the Software Freedom Conservancy.  All seemed like good
16468 recommendations fitting my need.</p>
16469
16470 <p>The <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/l/ledger.html">ledger</a>
16471 package is available in Debian Squeeze, while the
16472 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/h/haskell-hledger.html">hledger</a>
16473 package only is available in Debian Sid.  As I use Squeeze, ledger
16474 seemed the best choice to get started.</p>
16475
16476 <p>To get some real data to test on, I wrote a
16477 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/tools/lodo2ledger">web scraper</a> for
16478 <a href="http://www.lodo.no/">LODO</a>, the accounting system used by
16479 the <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG</a> association, and started to
16480 play with the data set.  I'm not really deeply into accounting, but I
16481 am able to get a simple balance and accounting status for example
16482 using the "<tt>ledger balance</tt>" command.  But I will have to
16483 gather more experience before I know if the ledger way is a good fit
16484 for the organisations I am involved in.</p>
16485
16486       </div>
16487       <div class="tags">
16488
16489
16490         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>.
16491
16492
16493       </div>
16494     </div>
16495     <div class="padding"></div>
16496
16497     <div class="entry">
16498       <div class="title">
16499         <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>
16500       </div>
16501       <div class="date">
16502          6th December 2012
16503       </div>
16504       <div class="body">
16505         <p>Where I work at the <a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of
16506 Oslo</a>, we use the
16507 <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/cerebrum/">Cerebrum user
16508 administration system</a> to maintain users, groups, DNS, DHCP, etc.
16509 I've known since the system was written that the server is providing
16510 an <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML-RPC">XML-RPC</a> API, but
16511 I have never spent time to try to figure out how to use it, as we
16512 always use the bofh command line client at work.  Until today.  I want
16513 to script the updating of DNS and DHCP to make it easier to set up
16514 virtual machines.  Here are a few notes on how to use it with
16515 Python.</p>
16516
16517 <p>I started by looking at the source of the Java
16518 <a href="http://cerebrum.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/cerebrum/trunk/cerebrum/clients/jbofh/">bofh
16519 client</a>, to figure out how it connected to the API server.  I also
16520 googled for python examples on how to use XML-RPC, and found
16521 <a href="http://tldp.org/HOWTO/XML-RPC-HOWTO/xmlrpc-howto-python.html">a
16522 simple example in</a> the XML-RPC howto.</p>
16523
16524 <p>This simple example code show how to connect, get the list of
16525 commands (as a JSON dump), and how to get the information about the
16526 user currently logged in:</p>
16527
16528 <blockquote><pre>
16529 #!/usr/bin/env python
16530 import getpass
16531 import xmlrpclib
16532 server_url = 'https://cerebrum-uio.uio.no:8000';
16533 username = getpass.getuser()
16534 password = getpass.getpass()
16535 server = xmlrpclib.Server(server_url);
16536 #print server.get_commands(sessionid)
16537 sessionid = server.login(username, password)
16538 print server.run_command(sessionid, "user_info", username)
16539 result = server.logout(sessionid)
16540 print result
16541 </pre></blockquote>
16542
16543 <p>Armed with this knowledge I can now move forward and script the DNS
16544 and DHCP updates I wanted to do.</p>
16545
16546       </div>
16547       <div class="tags">
16548
16549
16550         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>.
16551
16552
16553       </div>
16554     </div>
16555     <div class="padding"></div>
16556
16557     <div class="entry">
16558       <div class="title">
16559         <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>
16560       </div>
16561       <div class="date">
16562         17th November 2012
16563       </div>
16564       <div class="body">
16565         <p>While working on a
16566 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">Norwegian
16567 translation of the Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig</a> (76% done),
16568 which cover the problems with todays copyright law and how it stifles
16569 creativity, one idea occurred to me.  The idea is to get the tax
16570 office to help make more works enter the public domain and also help
16571 make it easier to clear rights for using copyrighted works.</p>
16572
16573 <p>I mentioned this idea briefly during Yesterdays
16574 <a href="http://www.farmann.no/2012/11/14/john-perry-barlow-in-oslo-friday-nov-16
16575 -15-30-19-00/">presentation
16576 by John Perry Barlow</a>, and concluded that it was best to put it
16577 in writing for a wider audience.  The idea is not really based on the
16578 argument that copyrighted works are "intellectual property", as the
16579 core requirement is that copyrighted work have value for the copyright
16580 holder and the tax office like to collect their share from any value
16581 controlled by the citizens in a country.  I'm sharing the idea here to
16582 let others consider it and perhaps shoot it down with a fresh set of
16583 arguments.</p>
16584
16585 <p>Most valuables are taxed by the government.  At least here in
16586 Norway, the amount of money you have, the value of our land property,
16587 the value of your house, the value of your car, the value of our
16588 stocks and other valuables are all added together.  If the tax value
16589 of these values exceed your debt, you have to pay the tax office some
16590 taxes for these values.  And copyrighted work have value.  It have
16591 value for the rights holder, who can earn money selling access to the
16592 work.  But it is not included in the tax calculations?  Why not?</p>
16593
16594 <p>If the government want to tax copyrighted works, it would want to
16595 maintain a database of all the copyrighted works and who are the
16596 rights holders for a given works, to be able to associate the works
16597 value to the right citizen or company for tax purposes.  If such
16598 database exist, it will become a lot easier to find out who to talk to
16599 for clearing permissions to use a copyrighted work, which is a very
16600 hard operation with todays copyright law.  To ensure that copyright
16601 holders keep the database up-to-date, it would have to become a
16602 requirement to be able to collect money for granting access to
16603 copyrighted works that the work is listed in the database with the
16604 correct right holder.</p>
16605
16606 <p>If copyright causes copyright holders to have to pay more taxes,
16607 they will have a small incentive to "disown" their copyright, and let
16608 the work enter the public domain. For works with several right holders
16609 one of the right holders could state (and get it registered in the
16610 database) that she do not need to be consulted when clearing rights to
16611 use the work in question and thus will not get any income from that
16612 work.  Stating this would have to be impossible to revert and stop the
16613 tax office from adding the value of that work to the given citizens
16614 tax calculation.  I assume the copyright law would stay the same,
16615 allowing creators to pick a license of their choosing, and also
16616 allowing them to put their work directly in the public domain.  The
16617 existence of such database will make it even easier to clear rights,
16618 and if the right holders listed in the database is taxed, this system
16619 would increase the amount of works that enter the public domain.</p>
16620
16621 <p>The effect would be that the tax office help to make it easier to
16622 get rights to use the works that have not yet entered the public
16623 domain and help to get more work into the public domain and .</p>
16624
16625 <p>Why have such taxing not happened yet?  I am sure the tax office
16626 would like to tax copyrighted work values if they could.</p>
16627
16628       </div>
16629       <div class="tags">
16630
16631
16632         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>.
16633
16634
16635       </div>
16636     </div>
16637     <div class="padding"></div>
16638
16639     <div class="entry">
16640       <div class="title">
16641         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Angela_Fu_.html">Debian Edu interview: Angela Fuß</a>
16642       </div>
16643       <div class="date">
16644         14th November 2012
16645       </div>
16646       <div class="body">
16647         <p>Here is another interview with one of the people in the <a
16648 href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
16649 community.  I am running short on people willing to be interviewed, so
16650 if you know about someone I should interview, Please send me an email.
16651 After asking for many months, I finally managed to lure another one of
16652 the people behind the German
16653 "<a href="http://wiki.it-zukunft-schule.de/">IT-Zukunft Schule</a>"
16654 project out from maternity leave to conduct an interview.  Give a warm
16655 welcome to Angela Fuß. :)</p>
16656
16657 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
16658
16659 <p>I am a 39-year-old woman living in the very north of Germany near
16660 Denmark. I live in a patchwork family with "my man" Mike Gabriel, my
16661 two daughters, Mikes daughter and Mikes and my rather newborn son.
16662
16663 <p>At the moment - because of our little baby - I am spending most of
16664 the day by being a caring and organising mom for all the kids.
16665 Besides that I am really involved into and occupied with several inner
16666 growth processes: New born souls always bring the whole familiar
16667 system into movement and that needs time and focus ;-).  We are also
16668 in the middle of buying a house and moving to it.</p>
16669
16670 <p>In 2013 I will work again in my job in a German foundation for
16671 nature conservation. I am doing public relation work there.  Besides
16672 that - and that is the connection to Skolelinux / Debian Edu - I am
16673 working in our own school project "IT-Zukunft Schule" in North
16674 Germany. I am responsible for the quality assurance, the customer
16675 relationship management and the communication processes in the
16676 project.</p>
16677
16678 <p>Since 2001 I constantly have been training myself in communication
16679 and leadership. Besides that I am a forester, a landscaping gardener
16680 and a yoga teacher.</p>
16681
16682 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
16683 project?</strong></p>
16684
16685 <p>I fell in love with Mike ;-).</p>
16686
16687 <p>Very soon after getting to know him I was completely enrolled into
16688 Free Software.  At this time Mike did IT-services for one newly
16689 founded school in Kiel. Other schools in Kiel needed concepts for
16690 their IT environment.  Often when Mike came home from working at the
16691 newly founded school I found myself listening to his complaints about
16692 several points where the communication with the schools head or the
16693 teachers did not work.  So we were clear that he would not work for
16694 one more school if we did not set up a structure for communication
16695 between him, the schools head, the teachers, the students and the
16696 parents.</p>
16697
16698 <p>Together with our friend and hardware supplier Andreas Buchholz we
16699 started to get an overview of free software solutions suitable for
16700 schools. One day before Christmas 2010 Mike and I had a date with Kurt
16701 Gramlich in Gütersloh. As Kurt and I are really interested in building
16702 networks of people and in being in communication we dived into
16703 Skolelinux and brought it to the first grammar schools in Northern
16704 Germany.</p>
16705
16706 <p>For information about our school project you can read
16707 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Mike_Gabriel.html">the
16708 interview with Mike Gabriel</a>.</p>
16709
16710 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
16711 Edu?</strong></p>
16712
16713 <p>First I have to say: I cannot answer this question technically. My
16714 answer comes rather from a social point of view.</p>
16715
16716 <p>The biggest advantage of Skolelinux / Debian Edu I see is the large
16717 and strong international community of Debian Developers in the
16718 background which is very alive and connected over mailinglists, blogs
16719 and meetings. My constant feeling for the Debian Community is: If
16720 something does not work they will somehow fix it. All is well
16721 ;-). This is of course a user experience.  What I also get as a big
16722 advantage of Skolelinux / Debian Edu is that everybody who uses it and
16723 works with it can also contribute to it - that includes students,
16724 teachers, parents...</p>
16725
16726 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
16727 Edu?</strong></p>
16728
16729 <p>I will answer this question relating to the internal structure of
16730 Skolelinux / Debian Edu.</p>
16731
16732 <p>What I see as a major disadvantage is that there is a gap between
16733 the group of developers for Debian Edu and the people who make the
16734 marketing, that means the people that bring Skolelinux to the
16735 schools. There is a lack of communication between these two groups and
16736 I think that does not really work for Skolelinux / Debian Edu.</p>
16737
16738 <p>Further I appreciate that Skolelinux / Debian Edu is known as a
16739 do-ocracy. Nevertheless I keep asking myself if at some points a
16740 democracy or some kind of hierarchical project structure would be good
16741 and helpful.  I am also missing some kind of contact between the
16742 Skolelinux / Debian Edu communities in Europe or on an international
16743 level. I think it would be good if there was more sharing between the
16744 different countries using Skolelinux / Debian Edu.</p>
16745
16746 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
16747
16748 <p>On my laptop I am still using an Ubuntu 10.04 with a Gnome Desktop
16749 on.  As applications I use Openoffice.org, Gedit, Firefox, Pidgin,
16750 LaTeX and GnuCash. For mails I am using Horde. And I am really fond of
16751 my N900 running with Maemo.</p>
16752
16753 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
16754 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
16755
16756 <p>I am really convinced that in our school project "IT-Zukunft
16757 Schule" we have developed (and keep developing) a great way to get
16758 schools to use Free Software. We have written a detailed concept for
16759 that so I cannot explain the whole thing here. But in a nutshell the
16760 strategy has three crucial pillars:</p>
16761
16762 <ul>
16763
16764 <li>We really take time to get what sort of stories, questions and
16765 concerns the schools head and the teachers have about using different
16766 kinds of IT and we take time to enrol them into Free Software.</li>
16767
16768 <li>Our solution for schools is never just technical. In the centre
16769 are always the people who are going to use the software. From the very
16770 beginning of the planning for a school, we tell the schools head that
16771 they are paying us not only for a technical solution for their school,
16772 they also pay us for leading all the communication processes
16773 needed. If they do not want that, we are not working with them because
16774 we cannot give a guarantee for the quality of our work then.</li>
16775
16776 <li>Another focus lies in the training of teachers and students in
16777 co-administrating the IT-System at their school. They start getting in
16778 contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu community and they get the
16779 offer to become more and more independent from us.</li>
16780
16781 </ul>
16782
16783       </div>
16784       <div class="tags">
16785
16786
16787         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>.
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/The_European_Central_Bank__ECB__take_a_look_at_bitcoin.html">The European Central Bank (ECB) take a look at bitcoin</a>
16797       </div>
16798       <div class="date">
16799          4th November 2012
16800       </div>
16801       <div class="body">
16802         <p>Slashdot just ran a story about the European Central Bank (ECB)
16803 <a href="http://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/other/virtualcurrencyschemes201210en.pdf">releasing
16804 a report (PDF)</a> about virtual currencies and
16805 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">bitcoin</a>.  It is interesting to
16806 see how a member of the bitcoin community
16807 <a href="http://blog.bitinstant.com/blog/2012/10/30/the-ecb-report-on-bitcoin-and-virtual-currencies.html">receive
16808 the report</a>.  As for the future, I suspect the central banks and
16809 the governments will outlaw bitcoin if it gain any popularity, to avoid
16810 competition.  My thoughts go to the
16811 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wörgl">Wörgl experiment</a> with
16812 negative inflation on cash which was such a success that it was
16813 terminated by the Austrian National Bank in 1933.  A successful
16814 alternative would be a threat to the current money system and gain
16815 powerful forces to work against it.</p>
16816
16817 <p>While checking out the current status of bitcoin, I also discovered
16818 that the community already seem to have
16819 <a href="http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/27/3271637/bitcoin-savings-trust-pyramid-scheme-shuts-down">experienced
16820 its first pyramid game / Ponzi scheme</a>.  Not very surprising, given
16821 how members of "small" communities tend to trust each other.  I guess
16822 enterprising crocks will try again and again, as they do anywhere
16823 wealth is available.</p>
16824
16825       </div>
16826       <div class="tags">
16827
16828
16829         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>.
16830
16831
16832       </div>
16833     </div>
16834     <div class="padding"></div>
16835
16836     <div class="entry">
16837       <div class="title">
16838         <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>
16839       </div>
16840       <div class="date">
16841         26th October 2012
16842       </div>
16843       <div class="body">
16844         <p>I work at the <a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a>
16845 looking after the computers, mostly on the unix side, but in general
16846 all over the place.  I am also a member (and currently leader) of
16847 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the NUUG association</a>, which in turn
16848 make me a member of <a href="http://www.usenix.org/">USENIX</a>.  NUUG
16849 is an member organisation for us in Norway interested in free
16850 software, open standards and unix like operating systems, and USENIX
16851 is a US based member organisation with similar targets.  And thanks to
16852 these memberships, I get all issues of the great USENIX magazine
16853 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login">;login:</a> in the
16854 mail several times a year.  The magazine is great, and I read most of
16855 it every time.</p>
16856
16857 <p>In the last issue of the USENIX magazine ;login:, there is an
16858 article by <a href="http://www.skendric.com/">Stuart Kendrick</a> from
16859 Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center titled
16860 "<a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/october-2012-volume-37-number-5/what-takes-us-down">What
16861 Takes Us Down</a>" (longer version also
16862 <a href="http://www.skendric.com/problem/incident-analysis/2012-06-30/What-Takes-Us-Down.pdf">available
16863 from his own site</a>), where he report what he found when he
16864 processed the outage reports (both planned and unplanned) from the
16865 last twelve years and classified them according to cause, time of day,
16866 etc etc.  The article is a good read to get some empirical data on
16867 what kind of problems affect a data centre, but what really inspired
16868 me was the kind of reporting they had put in place since 2000.<p>
16869
16870 <p>The centre set up a mailing list, and started to send fairly
16871 standardised messages to this list when a outage was planned or when
16872 it already occurred, to announce the plan and get feedback on the
16873 assumtions on scope and user impact.  Here is the two example from the
16874 article: First the unplanned outage:
16875
16876 <blockquote><pre>
16877 Subject:     Exchange 2003 Cluster Issues
16878 Severity:    Critical (Unplanned)
16879 Start:       Monday, May 7, 2012, 11:58
16880 End:         Monday, May 7, 2012, 12:38
16881 Duration:    40 minutes
16882 Scope:       Exchange 2003
16883 Description: The HTTPS service on the Exchange cluster crashed, triggering
16884              a cluster failover.
16885
16886 User Impact: During this period, all Exchange users were unable to
16887              access e-mail. Zimbra users were unaffected.
16888 Technician:  [xxx]
16889 </pre></blockquote>
16890
16891 Next the planned outage:
16892
16893 <blockquote><pre>
16894 Subject:     H Building Switch Upgrades
16895 Severity:    Major (Planned)
16896 Start:       Saturday, June 16, 2012, 06:00
16897 End:         Saturday, June 16, 2012, 16:00
16898 Duration:    10 hours
16899 Scope:       H2 Transport
16900 Description: Currently, Catalyst 4006s provide 10/100 Ethernet to end-
16901              stations. We will replace these with newer Catalyst
16902              4510s.
16903 User Impact: All users on H2 will be isolated from the network during
16904              this work. Afterward, they will have gigabit
16905              connectivity.
16906 Technician:  [xxx]
16907 </pre></blockquote>
16908
16909 <p>He notes in his article that the date formats and other fields have
16910 been a bit too free form to make it easy to automatically process them
16911 into a database for further analysis, and I would have used ISO 8601
16912 dates myself to make it easier to process (in other words I would ask
16913 people to write '2012-06-16 06:00 +0000' instead of the start time
16914 format listed above).  There are also other issues with the format
16915 that could be improved, read the article for the details.</p>
16916
16917 <p>I find the idea of standardising outage messages seem to be such a
16918 good idea that I would like to get it implemented here at the
16919 university too.  We do register
16920 <a href="http://www.uio.no/tjenester/it/aktuelt/planlagte-tjenesteavbrudd/">planned
16921 changes and outages in a calendar</a>, and report the to a mailing
16922 list, but we do not do so in a structured format and there is not a
16923 report to the same location for unplanned outages.  Perhaps something
16924 for other sites to consider too?</p>
16925
16926       </div>
16927       <div class="tags">
16928
16929
16930         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>.
16931
16932
16933       </div>
16934     </div>
16935     <div class="padding"></div>
16936
16937     <div class="entry">
16938       <div class="title">
16939         <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>
16940       </div>
16941       <div class="date">
16942         22nd October 2012
16943       </div>
16944       <div class="body">
16945         <p>A blog post from Martin Bekkelund today tell the story of
16946 <a href="http://www.bekkelund.net/2012/10/22/outlawed-by-amazon-drm/">how
16947 Amazon erased the books from a customer's kindle, locked the account
16948 and refuse to tell the customer why</a>.  If a real book store did
16949 this to a customer, it would be called breaking into private property
16950 and theft.  The story has spread around the net today.  A bit more
16951 background information is available in Norwegian from
16952 <a href="http://www.digi.no/904658/hun-ble-kastet-ut-av-amazon">digi.no</a>.
16953 It is no surprise that digital restriction mechanisms (DRM) are used
16954 this way, as it has been warned about such abuse since DRM was
16955 introduced many years back.  And Amazon proved in 2009 that it was
16956 willing to
16957 <a href="http://boingboing.net/2009/07/20/amazons-orwellian-de.html">
16958 break into customers equipment and remove the books</a> people had
16959 bought, when it removed the book 1984 by George Orwell from all the
16960 customers who had bought it.  From the official comments, it even
16961 sounded like
16962 <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html">Amazon
16963 would never do that again</a>.  And here we are, three years
16964 later.</p>
16965
16966 <p>And thought this action is
16967 <a href="http://www.itavisen.no/904648/forbrukerraadet-helt-haarreisende">against
16968 Norwegian regulations and law</a>, it is according to the terms of use
16969 as written by Amazon, and it is hard to hold Amazon accountable to
16970 Norwegian laws.  It is just yet another example of unacceptable terms
16971 of use on the web, and how they are used to remove customer
16972 rights.</p>
16973
16974 <p>Luckily for electronic books, there are alternatives without
16975 unacceptable terms.  For example
16976 <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/">Project Gutenberg</a> (about 40,000
16977 books), <a href="http://runeberg.org/">Project Runenberg</a> (1,652
16978 books) and <a href="http://www.archive.org/details/texts">The Internet
16979 Archive</a> (3,641,797 books) have heaps of books without DRM, which
16980 can read by anyone and shared with anyone.</p>
16981
16982 <p>Update 2012-10-23: This story broke in the morning on Monday. In
16983 the evening after the story had spread all across the Internet, Amazon
16984 restored the account of the user, as reported by
16985 <a href="http://www.digi.no/904675/helomvending-fra-amazon">digi.no</a>
16986 and <a href="http://nrk.no/kultur-og-underholdning/1.8368487">NRK</a>.
16987 Apparently public pressure work.  The story from Martin have seen
16988 several twitter messages per minute the last 24 hours, which is quite
16989 a lot, and is still drawing a lot of attention.  But even when the
16990 account is restored, the fundamental problem still exist.  I recommend
16991 reading two opinions from
16992 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2012/10/rights-you-have-no-right-to-your-ebooks/index.htm">Simon
16993 Phipps</a> and
16994 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2012/10/is-amazon-playing-fair/index.htm">Glen
16995 Moody</a> if you want to learn more about the fundamentals and more
16996 details about the original story.</p>
16997
16998       </div>
16999       <div class="tags">
17000
17001
17002         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>.
17003
17004
17005       </div>
17006     </div>
17007     <div class="padding"></div>
17008
17009     <div class="entry">
17010       <div class="title">
17011         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_fight_for_freedom_and_privacy.html">The fight for freedom and privacy</a>
17012       </div>
17013       <div class="date">
17014         18th October 2012
17015       </div>
17016       <div class="body">
17017         <p>Civil liberties and privacy in the western world are going down the
17018 drain, and it is hard to fight against it.  I try to do my best, but
17019 time is limited.  I hope you do your best too.  A few years ago I came
17020 across a marvellous drawing by
17021 <a href="http://www.claybennett.com/about.html">Clay Bennett</a>
17022 visualising some of what is going on.
17023
17024 <p><a href="http://www.claybennett.com/pages/security_fence.html">
17025 <img src="http://www.claybennett.com/images/archivetoons/security_fence.jpg"></a></p>
17026
17027 <blockquote>
17028 «They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
17029 safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.» - Benjamin Franklin
17030 </blockquote>
17031
17032 <p>Do you feel safe at the airport?  I do not.  Do you feel safe when
17033 you see a surveillance camera?  I do not.  Do you feel safe when you
17034 leave electronic traces of your behaviour and opinions?  I do not.  I
17035 just remember <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon">the
17036 Panopticon</a>, and can not help to think that we are slowly
17037 transforming our society to a huge Panopticon on our own.</p>
17038
17039       </div>
17040       <div class="tags">
17041
17042
17043         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>.
17044
17045
17046       </div>
17047     </div>
17048     <div class="padding"></div>
17049
17050     <div class="entry">
17051       <div class="title">
17052         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ColonHelp_produser_sue_WordPress_to_silence_critic.html">ColonHelp produser sue WordPress to silence critic</a>
17053       </div>
17054       <div class="date">
17055         12th October 2012
17056       </div>
17057       <div class="body">
17058         <p>Thanks to a blog post by
17059 <a href="http://ramblingfoo.blogspot.no/2012/10/a-shitstorm-is-comming.html">Eddy
17060 Petrișor</a>, I became aware of yet another "alternative medicine"
17061 company using legal intimidation tactics to scare off critics.
17062 According to the originating blog post about the detox "cure"
17063 <a href="http://insulaindoielii.wordpress.com/2012/10/11/colon-help-sues-wordpress/">ColonHelp
17064 and its producers Zenyth Pharmaceuticals actions</a>, the producer
17065 sues Wordpress to get rid of the critical information.  To check if
17066 the story was for real, I contacted Automattic, the company behind
17067 wordpress.com, and they reply was "We can confirm that Zenyth is
17068 seeking a court order against WordPress / Automattic.  However, we
17069 don't believe the Terms of Service have been violated in this
17070 matter".</p>
17071
17072 <p>The story seem to be simply that a blogger checked the scientific
17073 foundation for a popular health product in Rumania, ColonHelp, and
17074 reported that there was no reason at all to believe it improved the
17075 health of its users.  This caused the company behind the product,
17076 Zenyth Pharmaceuticals, to use legal intimidation to try to silence
17077 the critic, instead of presenting its views and scientific foundation
17078 to argue its side.</p>
17079
17080 <p>This is the usual story, and the Zenyth Pharmaceuticals company
17081 deserve everyone to know how it failed to act properly.  Lets hope the
17082 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect">Streisand
17083 effect</a> can make it rethink its strategy.</p>
17084
17085 <p>What is the harm, you might think.  I suggest you take a look at
17086 <a href="http://www.whatstheharm.net/detoxification.html">a list of
17087 victims of detoxification</a>.</p>
17088
17089       </div>
17090       <div class="tags">
17091
17092
17093         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>.
17094
17095
17096       </div>
17097     </div>
17098     <div class="padding"></div>
17099
17100     <div class="entry">
17101       <div class="title">
17102         <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>
17103       </div>
17104       <div class="date">
17105          3rd October 2012
17106       </div>
17107       <div class="body">
17108         <p>I just read the blog post from Tim Retout
17109 <a href="http://retout.co.uk/blog/2012/10/02/the-library-challenge">about
17110 the computer science book collection available in his local
17111 library</a>, and just wanted to share my comment on his theory about
17112 computer books becoming obsolete so soon.  That is part of the reason
17113 why the selection is so sad in almost any local library (it is in mine
17114 too), but I believe the major contributing factor is that the people
17115 buying books to the library have no way to know a good and future
17116 computer classic from trash.  And they need to know which one will
17117 become a classic in the future, as they would normally buy one of the
17118 recently published books.</p>
17119
17120 <p>During my university years, I worked for a while at the university
17121 library, and even there the person in charge of buying computer
17122 related books (and in fact any natural science related book), did not
17123 know enough about computers to make a good educated guess.  Once, just
17124 before Christmas, they had some leftover money on the book budget and
17125 I was asked if I could pick out a lot of computer books in the
17126 university book store, for the library to buy for their collection.  I
17127 had a great time picking all the books I dreamt of buying and reading,
17128 and the books I knew were classics (like most of the
17129 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Richard_Stevens">Stevens
17130 collection</a>).  I picked several of the generic O'Reilly books (ie
17131 documenting protocols, formats and systems, not specific versions of
17132 products) and stayed away from the 'teach yourself X in N days' class.
17133 I had a great time, and probably picked out more than a hundred books
17134 for the library that evening.</p>
17135
17136 <p>The sad fact is that there is no way a overworked librarian is
17137 going to know that for example
17138 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Practice_of_Programming">The
17139 Practice of Programming</a> is a must-have in any computer library,
17140 and they will most of the time end up picking the wrong books to buy.
17141 Perhaps you can help your local library make better choices by giving
17142 the suggestions for books to get?  I know they would love to hear from
17143 you, even if their budget might block them from getting your favourite
17144 book right away.</p>
17145
17146       </div>
17147       <div class="tags">
17148
17149
17150         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
17151
17152
17153       </div>
17154     </div>
17155     <div class="padding"></div>
17156
17157     <div class="entry">
17158       <div class="title">
17159         <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>
17160       </div>
17161       <div class="date">
17162         23rd September 2012
17163       </div>
17164       <div class="body">
17165         <p>Since this summer, I have worked in my spare time on a Norwegian <a
17166 href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book <a
17167 href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig.
17168 The reason is that this book is a great primer on what problems exist
17169 in the current copyright laws, and I want it to be available also for
17170 those that are reluctant do read an English book.
17171
17172 When I started, I
17173 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">called
17174 for volunteers</a> to help me, but too few have volunteered so far,
17175 and progress is a bit slow.  Anyway, today I broken the 70 percent
17176 mark for the first rough translation.  At the moment, less than 700
17177 strings (paragraphs, index terms, titles) are left to translate.  With
17178 my current progress of 10-20 strings per day, it will take a while to
17179 complete the translation.  This graph show the updated progress:</p>
17180
17181 <img width="80%" align="center" src="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png">
17182
17183 <p>Progress have slowed down lately due to family and work
17184 commitments.  If you want to help, please get in touch, and check out
17185 the project files currently available from
17186 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
17187
17188 <p>If you are curious what the translated book currently look like,
17189 the updated
17190 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>
17191 and
17192 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
17193 are published on github.  The HTML version is published as well, but
17194 github hand it out with MIME type text/plain, confusing browsers, so I
17195 saw no point in linking to that version.</p>
17196
17197       </div>
17198       <div class="tags">
17199
17200
17201         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>.
17202
17203
17204       </div>
17205     </div>
17206     <div class="padding"></div>
17207
17208     <div class="entry">
17209       <div class="title">
17210         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Giorgio_Pioda.html">Debian Edu interview: Giorgio Pioda</a>
17211       </div>
17212       <div class="date">
17213         17th September 2012
17214       </div>
17215       <div class="body">
17216         <p>After a long break in my row of interviews with people in the
17217 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
17218 community, I finally found time to wrap up another.  This time it is
17219 Giorgio Pioda, which showed up on the mailing list at the start of
17220 this year, asking questions and inspiring us to improve the first time
17221 administrators experience with Skolelinux. :) The interview was
17222 conduced in May, but I only found time to publish it now.</p>
17223
17224 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
17225
17226 <p>I have a PhD in chemistry but since several years I work as teacher
17227 in secondary (15-18 year old students) and tertiary (a kind of "light"
17228 university) schools. Five years ago I started to manage a Learning
17229 Management Service server and slowly I got more and more involved with
17230 IT. 3 years ago the graduating schools moved completely to Linux and I
17231 got the head of the IT for this. The experience collected in chemistry
17232 labs computers (for example NMR analysis of protein folding) and in
17233 the IT-courses during university where sufficient to start. Self
17234 training is anyway very important</p>
17235
17236 <p>I live in the Italian speaking part of Switzerland, and the
17237 <a href="http://www.spse.ch/">SPSE school</a> (secondary) is a very
17238 special sport school for young people who try to became sport pro (for
17239 all sports, we have dozens of disciplines represented) and we are
17240 recognised by the Olympic Swiss Organisation.
17241
17242 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
17243 project?</strong></p>
17244
17245 <p>Looking for Linux / Primary Domain Controller (PDC) I found it
17246 already several years ago. But since the system was still not
17247 Kerberized and since our schools relies strongly on laptops I didn't
17248 use it. I plan to introduce it in the next future, probably for the
17249 next school year, since the squeeze release solved this security
17250 hole.</p>
17251
17252 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
17253 Edu?</strong></p>
17254
17255 <p>Many. First of all there is a strong and living community that is
17256 very generous for help and hints.  Chat help is crucial, together with
17257 the mailing list.  Second. With Skolelinux you get an already well
17258 engineered platform and you don't have to start to build up your PDC
17259 and your clients from GNU/scratch; I've already done this once and I
17260 can tell it, it is hard. Third, since Skolelinux is a standard
17261 platform, it is way easier to educate other IT people and even if the
17262 head IT is sick another one could pick up the task without too much
17263 hassle.</p>
17264
17265 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
17266 Edu?</strong></p>
17267
17268 <p>The only real problem I see is that it is a little too less
17269 flexible at client level. Debian stable is rocky and desirable, but
17270 there are many reasons that force for another choice. For example the
17271 need of new drivers for new PC, or the need for a specific OS for some
17272 devices that have specific software packages for another specific
17273 distribution (I have such a case for whiteboards that have only
17274 Ubuntu packages). Thus, I prepared compatibility packages educlient
17275 and eduroaming, hoping not to use them ;-)</p>
17276
17277 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
17278
17279 <p>I have a Debian Stable PDC at school (Kerberos, NIS, NFS) with
17280 mixed Debian and Ubuntu clients. If you think that this triad
17281 combination is exotic... well I discovered right yesterday that
17282 <a href="http://moo.nac.uci.edu/~hjm/Perceus-Report.html">Perceus</a>
17283 has the same...</p>
17284
17285 <p>For myself I run Debian wheezy/sid, but this combination is good
17286 only I you have enough competence to fix stuff for yourself, if
17287 something breaks.  Daily I use texmacs, gnumeric, a little bit of R
17288 statistics, kmplot, and less frequently OpenOffice.org.</p>
17289
17290 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
17291 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
17292
17293 <P>I think that the only real argument that school managers "hear" is
17294 cost reduction. They don't give too much weight on quality, stability,
17295 just because they are normally not open to change.</p>
17296
17297 <p>Students adapts very quickly to GNU/Linux (and for them being able
17298 to switch between different OS is a plus value); teachers and managers
17299 don't.</p>
17300
17301 <p>We decided to move to Linux because students at our school have own
17302 laptop and we have the responsibility to keep the laptop ready to use;
17303 we were really unsatisfied with Microsoft since every Monday we had 20
17304 machine to fix for viral infections... With Linux this has been
17305 reduced to zero, since people installs almost only from official
17306 repositories. I think that our special needs brought us to Linux.
17307 Those who don't have such needs will hardly move to Linux.</p>
17308
17309       </div>
17310       <div class="tags">
17311
17312
17313         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>.
17314
17315
17316       </div>
17317     </div>
17318     <div class="padding"></div>
17319
17320     <div class="entry">
17321       <div class="title">
17322         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IETF_activity_to_standardise_video_codec.html">IETF activity to standardise video codec</a>
17323       </div>
17324       <div class="date">
17325         15th September 2012
17326       </div>
17327       <div class="body">
17328         <p>After the
17329 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IETF_standardize_its_first_multimedia_codec__Opus.html">Opus
17330 codec made</a> it into <a href="http://www.ietf.org/">IETF</a> as
17331 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6716">RFC 6716</a>, I had a look
17332 to see if there is any activity in IETF to standardise a video codec
17333 too, and I was happy to discover that there is some activity in this
17334 area.  A non-"working group" mailing list
17335 <a href="https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/video-codec">video-codec</a>
17336 was
17337 <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
17338 formal working group should be formed.</p>
17339
17340 <p>I look forward to see how this plays out.  There is already
17341 <a href="http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/video-codec/current/msg00003.html">an
17342 email from someone</a> in the MPEG group at ISO asking people to
17343 participate in the ISO group.  Given how ISO failed with OOXML and given
17344 that it so far (as far as I can remember) only have produced
17345 multimedia formats requiring royalty payments, I suspect
17346 joining the ISO group would be a complete waste of time, but I am not
17347 involved in any codec work and my opinion will not matter much.</p>
17348
17349 <p>If one of my readers is involved with codec work, I hope she will
17350 join this work to standardise a royalty free video codec within
17351 IETF.</p>
17352
17353       </div>
17354       <div class="tags">
17355
17356
17357         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>.
17358
17359
17360       </div>
17361     </div>
17362     <div class="padding"></div>
17363
17364     <div class="entry">
17365       <div class="title">
17366         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IETF_standardize_its_first_multimedia_codec__Opus.html">IETF standardize its first multimedia codec: Opus</a>
17367       </div>
17368       <div class="date">
17369         12th September 2012
17370       </div>
17371       <div class="body">
17372         <p>Yesterday, <a href="http://www.ietf.org/">IETF</a> announced the
17373 publication of of
17374 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6716">RFC 6716, the Definition
17375 of the Opus Audio Codec</a>, a low latency, variable bandwidth, codec
17376 intended for both VoIP, film and music.  This is the first time, as
17377 far as I know, that IETF have standardized a multimedia codec.  In
17378 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3533">RFC 3533</a>, IETF
17379 standardized the OGG container format, and it has proven to be a great
17380 royalty free container for audio, video and movies.  I hope IETF will
17381 continue to standardize more royalty free codeces, after ISO and MPEG
17382 have proven incapable of securing everyone equal rights to publish
17383 multimedia content on the Internet.</p>
17384
17385 <p>IETF require two interoperating independent implementations to
17386 ratify a standard, and have so far ensured to only standardize royalty
17387 free specifications.  Both are key factors to allow everyone (rich and
17388 poor), to compete on equal terms on the Internet.</p>
17389
17390 <p>Visit the <a href="http://opus-codec.org/">Opus project page</a> if
17391 you want to learn more about the solution.</p>
17392
17393       </div>
17394       <div class="tags">
17395
17396
17397         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>.
17398
17399
17400       </div>
17401     </div>
17402     <div class="padding"></div>
17403
17404     <div class="entry">
17405       <div class="title">
17406         <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>
17407       </div>
17408       <div class="date">
17409          7th September 2012
17410       </div>
17411       <div class="body">
17412         <p>As I
17413 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">mentioned
17414 this summer</a>, I have created a Computer Science song book a few
17415 years ago, and today I finally found time to create a public
17416 <a href="https://gitorious.org/pere-cs-songbook/pere-cs-songbook">Gitorious
17417 repository for the project</a>.</p>
17418
17419 <p>If you want to help out, please clone the source and submit patches
17420 to the HTML version.  To generate the PDF and PostScript version,
17421 please use prince XML, or let me know about a useful free software
17422 processor capable of creating a good looking PDF from the HTML.</p>
17423
17424 <p>Want to sing?  You can still find the song book in HTML, PDF and
17425 PostScript formats at
17426 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/">Petter's Computer
17427 Science Songbook</a>.</p>
17428
17429       </div>
17430       <div class="tags">
17431
17432
17433         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>.
17434
17435
17436       </div>
17437     </div>
17438     <div class="padding"></div>
17439
17440     <div class="entry">
17441       <div class="title">
17442         <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>
17443       </div>
17444       <div class="date">
17445         23rd August 2012
17446       </div>
17447       <div class="body">
17448         <p>I came across a great comment from Simon Phipps today, about how
17449 <a href="http://www.infoworld.com/d/open-source-software/how-microsoft-was-forced-open-office-200233">Microsoft
17450 have been forced to open Office</a>, and it made me remember and
17451 revisit the great site
17452 <a href="http://www.officeshots.org/">officeshots</a> which allow you
17453 to check out how different programs present the ODF file format.  I
17454 recommend both to those of my readers interested in ODF. :)</p>
17455
17456       </div>
17457       <div class="tags">
17458
17459
17460         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>.
17461
17462
17463       </div>
17464     </div>
17465     <div class="padding"></div>
17466
17467     <div class="entry">
17468       <div class="title">
17469         <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>
17470       </div>
17471       <div class="date">
17472         17th August 2012
17473       </div>
17474       <div class="body">
17475         <p>In my spare time, I currently work on a Norwegian
17476 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book
17477 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig,
17478 to get a Norwegian text explaining the problems with the copyright law
17479 I can give to my parents and others that are reluctant to read an
17480 English book.  It is a marvellous set of examples on how the ever
17481 expanding copyright regulations hurt culture and society.  When the
17482 translation is done, I hope to find funding to print and ship a copy
17483 to all the members of the Norwegian parliament, before they sit down
17484 to debate the latest revisions to the Norwegian copyright law.  This
17485 summer I
17486 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">called
17487 for volunteers</a> to help me, and I have been able to secure the
17488 valuable contribution from at least one other Norwegian.</p>
17489
17490 <p>Two days ago, we finally broke the 50% mark.  Then more than 50% of
17491 the number of strings to translate (normally paragraphs, but also
17492 titles and index entries are also counted).  All parts from the
17493 beginning up to and including chapter four is translated.  So is
17494 chapters six, seven and the conclusion.  I created a graph to show the
17495 progress:</p>
17496
17497 <img width="80%" align="center" src="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png">
17498
17499 <p>The number of strings to translate increase as I insert the index
17500 entries into the docbook.  They were missing with the docbook version
17501 I initially started with.  There are still quite a few index entries
17502 missing, but everyone starting with A, B, O, Z and Y are done.  I
17503 currently focus on completing the index entries, to get a complete
17504 english version of the docbook source.</p>
17505
17506 <p>There is still need for translators and people with docbook
17507 knowledge, to be able to get a good looking book (I still struggle
17508 with dblatex, xmlto and docbook-xsl) as well as to do the draft
17509 translation and proof reading.  And I would like the figures to be
17510 redrawn as SVGs to make it easy to translate them.  Any SVG master
17511 around?  I am sure there are some legal terms that are unfamiliar to
17512 me.  If you want to help, please get in touch, and check out the
17513 project files currently available from <a
17514 href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
17515
17516 <p>If you are curious what the translated book currently look like,
17517 the updated
17518 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>
17519 and
17520 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
17521 are published on github.  The HTML version is published as well, but
17522 github hand it out with MIME type text/plain, confusing browsers, so I
17523 saw no point in linking to that version.</p>
17524
17525       </div>
17526       <div class="tags">
17527
17528
17529         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>.
17530
17531
17532       </div>
17533     </div>
17534     <div class="padding"></div>
17535
17536     <div class="entry">
17537       <div class="title">
17538         <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>
17539       </div>
17540       <div class="date">
17541         10th August 2012
17542       </div>
17543       <div class="body">
17544         <p>In <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> one can specify
17545 the language used at the top, and the processing pipeline will use
17546 this information to pick the correct translations for 'chapter', 'see
17547 also', 'index' etc.  And for most languages used with docbook, I guess
17548 this work just fine.  For example a German user can start the document
17549 with &lt;book lang="de"&gt;, and the document will show up with the
17550 correct content with any of the docbook processors.  This is not the
17551 case for the language
17552 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Culture_in_Norwegian___5_chapters_done__74_percent_left_to_do.html">I
17553 am working with at the moment</a>, Norwegian Bokmål.</p>
17554
17555 <p>For a while, I was confused about which language code to use,
17556 because I was unable to find any language code that would work across
17557 all tools.  I am currently testing dblatex, xmlto, docbook-xsl, and
17558 dbtoepub, and they do not handle Norwegian Bokmål the same way.  Some
17559 of them do not handle it at all.</p>
17560
17561 <p>A bit of background information is probably needed to understand
17562 this mess.  Norwegian is not one, but two written variants.  The
17563 variants are Norwegian Nynorsk and Norwegian Bokmål.  There are three
17564 two letter language codes associated with these languages, Norwegian
17565 is 'no', Norwegian Nynorsk is 'nn' and Norwegian Bokmål is 'nb'.
17566 Historically the 'no' language code was used for Norwegian Bokmål, but
17567 many years ago this was found to be å bad idea, and the recommendation
17568 is to use the most specific language code instead, to avoid confusion.
17569 In the transition period it is a good idea to make sure 'no' was an
17570 alias for 'nb'.</p>
17571
17572 <p>Back to docbook processing tools in Debian.  The dblatex tool only
17573 understand 'nn'.  There are translations for 'no', but not 'nb' (BTS
17574 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/684391">#684391</a>), but due to a bug
17575 (BTS <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/682936">#682936</a>) the 'no'
17576 language code is not recognised.  The docbook-xsl tool chain only
17577 recognise 'nn' and 'nb', but not 'no'.  The xmlto tool only recognise
17578 'nn' and 'nb', but not 'no'.  The end result that there is no language
17579 code I can use to get the docbook file working with all of these tools
17580 at the same time. :(</p>
17581
17582 <p>The correct solution is to use &lt;book lang="nb"&gt;, but it will
17583 take time before that will work with all the free software docbook
17584 processors. :(</p>
17585
17586 <p>Oh, the joy of well integrated tools. :/</p>
17587
17588       </div>
17589       <div class="tags">
17590
17591
17592         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>.
17593
17594
17595       </div>
17596     </div>
17597     <div class="padding"></div>
17598
17599     <div class="entry">
17600       <div class="title">
17601         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Best_way_to_create_a_docbook_book_.html">Best way to create a docbook book?</a>
17602       </div>
17603       <div class="date">
17604         31st July 2012
17605       </div>
17606       <div class="body">
17607         <p>I tried to send this text to the
17608 <a href="https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-apps/">docbook-apps
17609 mailing list at lists.oasis-open.org</a>, but it only accept messages
17610 from subscribers and rejected my post, and I completely lack the
17611 bandwidth required to subscribe to another mailing list, so instead I
17612 try to post my message here and hope my blog readers can help me
17613 out.</p>
17614
17615 <p>I am quite new to docbook processing, and am climbing a steep
17616 learning curve at the moment.</p>
17617
17618 <p>To give you some background, I am working on a Norwegian
17619 translation of the book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig, and I use
17620 docbook to handle the process.  The files to build the book are
17621 available from
17622 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.
17623 The book got around 400 pages with parts, images, footnotes, tables,
17624 index entries etc, which has proven to be a challenge for the free
17625 software docbook processors.  My build platform is Debian GNU/Linux
17626 Squeeze.</p>
17627
17628 <p>I want to build PDF, EPUB and HTML version of the book, and have
17629 tried different tool chains to do the conversion from docbook to these
17630 formats.  I am currently focusing on the PDF version, and have a few
17631 problems.</p>
17632
17633 <ul>
17634
17635 <li>Using dblatex, the &lt;part&gt; handling is not the way I want to,
17636    as &lt;/part&gt; do not really end the &lt;part&gt;. (See
17637    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/683166">BTS report #683166</a>), the
17638    xetex backend (needed to process UTF-8) give incorrect hyphens in
17639    index references spanning several pages (See
17640    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/682901">BTS report #682901</a>), and
17641    I am unable to get the norwegian template texts (See
17642    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/682936">BTS report #682936</a>).</li>
17643
17644 <li>Using straight xmlto fail with some latex error (See
17645    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/683163">BTS report
17646    #683163</a>).</li>
17647
17648 <li>Using xmlto with the fop backend fail to handle images (do not
17649    show up in the PDF), fail to handle a long footnote (overlap
17650    footnote and text body, see
17651    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/683197">BTS report #683197</a>), and
17652    fail to create a correct index (some lack page ref, and the page
17653    refs listed are not right).</li>
17654
17655 <li>Using xmlto with the dblatex backend behave like dblatex.</li>
17656
17657 <li>Using docbook-xls with xsltproc + fop have the same footnote and
17658    index problems the xmlto + fop processing.</li>
17659
17660 </ul>
17661
17662 <p>So I wonder, what would be the best way to create the PDF version
17663 of this book?  Are some of the bugs found above solved in new or
17664 experimental versions of some docbook tool chain?</p>
17665
17666 <p>What about HTML and EPUB versions?</p>
17667
17668       </div>
17669       <div class="tags">
17670
17671
17672         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>.
17673
17674
17675       </div>
17676     </div>
17677     <div class="padding"></div>
17678
17679     <div class="entry">
17680       <div class="title">
17681         <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>
17682       </div>
17683       <div class="date">
17684         21st July 2012
17685       </div>
17686       <div class="body">
17687         <p>I reported earlier that I am working on
17688 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">a
17689 norwegian version</a> of the book
17690 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig.
17691 Progress is good, and yesterday I got a major contribution from Anders
17692 Hagen Jarmund completing chapter six.  The source files as well as a
17693 PDF and EPUB version of this book are available from
17694 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
17695
17696 <p>I am happy to report that the draft for the first two chapters
17697 (preface, introduction) is complete, and three other chapters are also
17698 completely translated.  This completes 26 percent of the number of
17699 strings (equivalent to paragraphs) in the book, and there is thus 74
17700 percent left to translate.  A graph of the progress is present at the
17701 bottom of the github project page.  There is still room for more
17702 contributors.  Get in touch or send github pull requests with fixes if
17703 you got time and are willing to help make this book make it to
17704 print. :)</p>
17705
17706 <p>The book translation framework could also be a good basis for other
17707 translations, if you want the book to be available in your
17708 language.</p>
17709
17710       </div>
17711       <div class="tags">
17712
17713
17714         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>.
17715
17716
17717       </div>
17718     </div>
17719     <div class="padding"></div>
17720
17721     <div class="entry">
17722       <div class="title">
17723         <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>
17724       </div>
17725       <div class="date">
17726         16th July 2012
17727       </div>
17728       <div class="body">
17729         <p>I am currently working on a
17730 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">project
17731 to translate</a> the book
17732 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig
17733 to Norwegian.  And the source we base our translation on is the
17734 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DocBook">docbook</a> version, to
17735 allow us to use po4a and .po files to handle the translation, and for
17736 this to work well the docbook source document need to be properly
17737 tagged.  The source files of this project is available from
17738 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
17739
17740 <p>The problem is that the docbook source have flaws, and we have
17741 no-one involved in the project that is a docbook expert.  Is there a
17742 docbook expert somewhere that is interested in helping us create a
17743 well tagged docbook version of the book, and adjust our build process
17744 for the PDF, EPUB and HTML version of the book?  This will provide a
17745 well tagged English version (our source document), and make it a lot
17746 easier for us to create a good Norwegian version.  If you can and want
17747 to help, please get in touch with me or fork the github project and
17748 send pull requests with fixes. :)</p>
17749
17750       </div>
17751       <div class="tags">
17752
17753
17754         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>.
17755
17756
17757       </div>
17758     </div>
17759     <div class="padding"></div>
17760
17761     <div class="entry">
17762       <div class="title">
17763         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__George_Bredberg.html">Debian Edu interview: George Bredberg</a>
17764       </div>
17765       <div class="date">
17766          9th July 2012
17767       </div>
17768       <div class="body">
17769         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
17770 Skolelinux</a> project have users all over the globe, but until
17771 recently we have not known about any users in Norway's neighbour
17772 country Sweden.  This changed when George Bredberg showed up in March
17773 this year on the mailing list, asking interesting questions about how
17774 to adjust and scale the just released
17775 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
17776 Wheezy</a> setup to his liking.  He granted me an interview, and I am
17777 happy to share his answers with you here.</p>
17778
17779 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
17780
17781 <p>I'm a 44 year old country guy that have been working 12 years at
17782 the same school as 50% IT-manager and 50% Teacher. My educational
17783 background is fil.kand in history and religious beliefs, an exam as a
17784 "folkhighschool" teacher, that is, for teaching grownups.  In
17785 Norwegian I believe it's called "Vuxenupplaring". I also have a master
17786 in "Technology and social change". So I'm not really a tech guy, I
17787 just like to study how humans and technology interact and that is my
17788 perspective when working with IT.</p>
17789
17790 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
17791 project?</strong></p>
17792
17793 I have followed the Skolelinux project for quite some time by
17794 now. Earlier I tested out the K12-LTSP project, which we used for some
17795 time, but I really like the idea of having a distribution aimed to be
17796 a complete solution for schools with necessary tools integrated. When
17797 K12-LTSP abandoned that idea some years ago, I started to look more
17798 seriously into Skolelinux instead.
17799
17800 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
17801 Edu?</strong></p>
17802
17803 The big point of Skolelinux to me is that it is a complete
17804 distribution, ready to install. It has LDAP-support, MS Windows
17805 integration tools and so forth already configured, saving an
17806 administrator a lot of time and headache. We were using another Linux
17807 based thin-client system called Thinlinc, that has served us very
17808 well. But that Skolelinux is based on VNC and LTSP, to me, is better
17809 when it comes to the kind of multimedia used in schools. That is
17810 showing videos from Youtube or educational TV. It is also easier to
17811 mix thin clients with workstations, since the user settings will be the
17812 same. In our VNC-based solution you had to "beat around the bush" by
17813 setting up a second, hidden, home-directory for user settings for the
17814 workstations, because they will be different from the ones used on the
17815 thin clients. Skolelinux support for diskless workstations are very
17816 convenient since a school today often need to use a class room
17817 projector showing videos in full screen. That is easily done with a
17818 small integrated media computer running as a diskless workstation. You
17819 have only two installs to update and configure. One for the thin
17820 clients and one for the workstations. Also saving a lot of time.  Our
17821 old system was also based on Redhat and CentOS. They are both very
17822 nice distributions, but they are sometimes painfully slow when it
17823 comes to updating multimedia support and multimedia programs (even
17824 such as Gimp), leaving us with a bit "oldish" applications. Debian is
17825 quicker to update.
17826
17827 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
17828 Edu?</strong></p>
17829
17830 <p>Debian is a bit too quick when it comes to updating. As an example
17831 we use old HP terminals as thinclients, and two times already this
17832 year (2012) the updates you get from the repositories has stopped
17833 sound from working with them.  It's a kernel/ALSA issue. So you have
17834 to be more careful properly testing the updates before you run them in
17835 a production environment. This has never happened with CentOS.</p>
17836
17837 <p>I also would like to be able to set my own domain-settings at
17838 install time.  In Skolelinux they are kind of hard coded into the
17839 distribution, when it comes to LDAP and at least samba integration.
17840 That is more a cosmetic/translation issue, and not a real problem.
17841 Running MS Windows applications within the Skolelinux environment needs
17842 to be better supported. That is, running them seamlessly via RDP, and
17843 support for single-sign on.  That will make the transition to free
17844 software easier, because you can keep the applications you really
17845 need.  No support will make it impossible if you work in a school where
17846 some applications can't be open source. As for us we really need to
17847 run Adobe InDesign in our journalist classes.  We run a journalist
17848 education, and is one of the very few non university ones that is ok:d
17849 by Svenska journalistförbundet (Swedish journalist association).  Our
17850 education gives the pupils the right of membership there, once they
17851 are done.  This is important if you want to get a job.</p>
17852
17853 <p>Adobe InDesign is the program most commonly used in newspapers and
17854 magazines.  We used Quark Express before, but they seem to loose there
17855 market to Adobe. The only "equivalent" to InDesign in the opensource
17856 world is Scribus, and its not advanced enough. At least not according
17857 to the teacher. I think it would be possible to use it, because they
17858 are not supposed to learn a program, they are supposed to learn how to
17859 edit and compile a newspaper.  But politically at our school we are not
17860 there yet.  And Scribus lacks a lot of things you find i InDesign.</p>
17861
17862 <p>We used even a windows program for sound editing when it comes to
17863 the radio-journalist part. The year to come we are going to try
17864 Audacity. That software has the same kind of limitations compared to
17865 Adobe Audition, but that teacher is a bit more open minded. We have
17866 tried Ardour also, but that instead is more like a music studio
17867 program, not intended for the kind of editing taking place in a radio
17868 studio. Its way to complex and the GUI is to scattered when you only
17869 want to cut, make pass-overs, add extra channels and normalise.  Those
17870 things you can do in Audacity, but its not as easy as in Audition. You
17871 have to do more things manually with envelopes, and that is a bit old
17872 fashion and timewasting. Its also harder to cut and move sound from
17873 one channel to another, which is a thing that you do frequently
17874 because you often find yourself needing to rearrange parts of the
17875 sound file.</p>
17876
17877 <p>So, I am not sure we will succeed in replacing even Audition, but we
17878 will try.  The problem is the students have certain expectations when
17879 they start an education towards a profession.  So the programs has to
17880 look and feel professional.  Good thing with radio, there are many
17881 programs out there, that radio studios use, so its not as standardised
17882 as Newspaper editing. That means, it does not really matter what
17883 program they learn, because once they start working they still have to
17884 learn the program the studio uses, so instead focus has to be to learn
17885 the editing part without to much focus on a specific software.</p>
17886
17887 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
17888
17889 <p>Myself I'm running Linux Mint, or Ubuntu these days.  I use almost
17890 only open source software, and preferably Linux based. When it comes
17891 to most used applications its OpenOffice, and Firefox (of course ;)
17892 )</p>
17893
17894 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
17895 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
17896
17897 <p>To get schools to use free software there has to be good open
17898 source software that are windows based, to ease the transition. But
17899 it's also very important that the multimedia support is working
17900 flawlessly.  The problems with Youtube, Twitter, Facebook and whatever
17901 will create problems when it comes to both teachers and
17902 students. Economy are also important for schools, so using thin
17903 clients, as long as they have good multimedia support, is a very good
17904 idea. It's also important that the open source software works even for
17905 the administration.  It's hard to convince the teachers to stick with
17906 open source, if the principal has to run Windows.  It also creates a
17907 problem if some classes has to use Windows for there tasks, since that
17908 will create a difference in "status" between classes, so a good
17909 support for running windows applications via the thin client (Linux)
17910 desktop is essential.  At least at our school, where we have mixed
17911 level of educations, from high-school to journalist-school.</p>
17912
17913 <p>Update 2012-07-09 08:30: Paul Wise tipped me on IRC about three
17914 useful sources related to Free Software for radio stations: the LWN
17915 article <a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/481607/">Radio station
17916 management with Airtime</a>,
17917 <a href="http://www.sourcefabric.org/en/airtime/">Airtime</a> which
17918 claim to be a Free open source radio automation software and
17919 <a href="http://www.rivendellaudio.org/">Rivendell</a> which claim to
17920 be complete radio broadcast automation solution.  All of them seem
17921 useful to the aspiring radio producer.</p>
17922
17923       </div>
17924       <div class="tags">
17925
17926
17927         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>.
17928
17929
17930       </div>
17931     </div>
17932     <div class="padding"></div>
17933
17934     <div class="entry">
17935       <div class="title">
17936         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_do_schools_waste_money_on_IT_.html">Why do schools waste money on IT?</a>
17937       </div>
17938       <div class="date">
17939          8th July 2012
17940       </div>
17941       <div class="body">
17942         <p>In the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project, we have realised that one
17943 of the major blockers for the project success is the purchasing skills
17944 in schools and municipalities.  We provide what the happy users of
17945 Debian Edu / Skolelinux say they need and to a lower cost than the
17946 alternatives, and yet so few schools decide to use our solution.  I
17947 was pleased to discover the same observation done by mySociety and Tom
17948 Steinberg in his blog post
17949 "<a href="http://www.mysociety.org/2012/06/19/can-you-recognize-the-million-pound-chair/">Can
17950 you recognize the million pound chair?</a>".  Read it and weep for the
17951 spending of your tax money.</p>
17952
17953 <p>Of course there are other factors involved as well, like our
17954 projects bad marketing skills and the Linux community fragmentation
17955 causing worry with the people on the outside, so we as a project need
17956 to keep working hard to gain users, but it is a up-hill battle when
17957 public decision makers are unable to understand computer system
17958 purchases.</p>
17959
17960       </div>
17961       <div class="tags">
17962
17963
17964         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>.
17965
17966
17967       </div>
17968     </div>
17969     <div class="padding"></div>
17970
17971     <div class="entry">
17972       <div class="title">
17973         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Timetabling_Software___nice_free_software.html">Free Timetabling Software - nice free software</a>
17974       </div>
17975       <div class="date">
17976          7th July 2012
17977       </div>
17978       <div class="body">
17979         <p>Included in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
17980 Skolelinux</a> is a large collection of end user and school specific
17981 software.  It is one of the packages not installed by default but
17982 provided in the Debian archive for schools to install if they want to,
17983 is a system to automatically plan the school time table using
17984 information about available teachers, classes and rooms, combined with
17985 the list of required courses and how many hours each topic should
17986 receive.  The software is
17987
17988 <a href="http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/">named FET</a>, and it provide a
17989 graphical user interface to input the required information, save the
17990 result in a fairly simple XML format, and generate time tables for
17991 both teachers and students.  It is available both for
17992 <a href="http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/download.html">Linux, MacOSX and
17993 Windows</a>.</p>
17994
17995 <p>This is <a href="http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/features.html">the
17996 feature list</a>, liftet from the project web site:</p>
17997
17998 <p><ul>
17999
18000   <li>FET is free software, licensed under the GNU GPL v2 or later.
18001     You can freely use, copy, modify and redistribute it </li>
18002
18003   <li>Localized to en_US (US English, default), ar (Arabic), ca
18004     (Catalan), da (Danish), de (German), el (Greek), es (Spanish), fa
18005     (Persian), fr (French), gl (Galician), he (Hebrew), hu
18006     (Hungarian), id (Indonesian), it (Italian), lt (Lithuanian), mk
18007     (Macedonian), ms (Malay), nl (Dutch), pl (Polish), pt_BR
18008     (Brazilian Portuguese), ro (Romanian), ru (Russian), si (Sinhala),
18009     sk (Slovak), sr (Serbian), tr (Turkish), uk (Ukrainian), uz
18010     (Uzbek) and vi (Vietnamese) (incompletely for some languages)
18011     </li>
18012
18013   <li>Fully automatic generation algorithm, allowing also
18014     semi-automatic or manual allocation</li>
18015
18016   <li>Platform independent implementation, allowing running on
18017     GNU/Linux, Windows, Mac and any system that Qt supports </li>
18018
18019   <li>Flexible modular XML format for the input file, allowing editing
18020     with an XML editor or by hand (besides FET interface)</li>
18021
18022   <li>Import/export from CSV format</li>
18023
18024   <li>The resulted timetables are exported into HTML, XML and CSV
18025     formats </li>
18026
18027   <li>Flexible students structure, organized into sets: years, groups
18028     and subgroups. FET allows overlapping years and groups and
18029     non-overlapping subgroups. You can even define individual students
18030     (as separate sets)</li>
18031
18032   <li>Each constraint has a weight percentage, from 0.0% to 100.0%
18033     (but some special constraints are allowed to have only 100% weight
18034     percentage)</li>
18035
18036   <li>Limits for the algorithm (all these limits can be increased on
18037     demand, as a custom version, because this would require a bit more
18038     memory):
18039     <ul>
18040       <li>Maximum total number of hours (periods) per day: 60</li>
18041       <li>Maximum number of working days per week: 35</li>
18042       <li>Maximum total number of teachers: 6000</li>
18043       <li>Maximum total number of sets of students: 30000</li>
18044       <li>Maximum total number of subjects: 6000</li>
18045       <li>Virtually unlimited number of activity tags</li>
18046       <li>Maximum number of activities: 30000</li>
18047       <li>Maximum number of rooms: 6000</li>
18048       <li>Maximum number of buildings: 6000</li>
18049       <li>Possibility of adding multiple teachers and
18050           students sets for each activity.  (it is possible
18051           also to have no teachers or no students sets for an
18052           activity)</li>
18053       <li>Virtually unlimited number of time constraints</li>
18054       <li>Virtually unlimited number of space constraints</li>
18055     </ul></li>
18056
18057   <li>A large and flexible palette of time constraints:
18058     <ul>
18059       <li>Break periods</li>
18060       <li>For teacher(s):
18061         <ul>
18062           <li>Not available periods</li>
18063           <li>Max/min days per week</li>
18064           <li>Max gaps per day/week</li>
18065           <li>Max hours daily/continuously</li>
18066           <li>Min hours daily</li>
18067           <li>Max hours daily/continuously with an activity tag</li>
18068
18069           <li>Respect working in an hourly interval a max number of
18070             days per week</li>
18071         </ul></li>
18072       <li>For students (sets):
18073         <ul>
18074           <li>Not available periods</li>
18075           <li>Begins early (specify max allowed beginnings at second hour)</li>
18076           <li>Max gaps per day/week</li>
18077           <li>Max hours daily/continuously</li>
18078           <li>Min hours daily</li>
18079           <li>Max hours daily/continuously with an activity tag</li>
18080
18081           <li>Respect working in an hourly interval a max number of
18082             days per week</li>
18083         </ul></li>
18084       <li>For an activity or a set of activities/subactivities:
18085         <ul>
18086           <li>A single preferred starting time</li>
18087           <li>A set of preferred starting times</li>
18088           <li>A set of preferred time slots</li>
18089           <li>Min/max days between them</li>
18090           <li>End(s) students day</li>
18091           <li>Same starting time/day/hour</li>
18092           <li>Occupy max time slots from selection (a complex and
18093             flexible constraint, useful in many situations)</li>
18094           <li>Consecutive, ordered, grouped (for 2 or 3 (sub)activities)</li>
18095           <li>Not overlapping</li>
18096           <li>Max simultaneous in selected time slots</li>
18097           <li>Min gaps between a set of (sub)activities</li>
18098         </ul></li>
18099     </ul></li>
18100
18101   <li>A large and flexible palette of space constraints:
18102     <ul>
18103       <li>Room not available periods</li>
18104       <li>For teacher(s):
18105         <ul>
18106           <li>Home room(s)</li>
18107           <li>Max building changes per day/week</li>
18108           <li>Min gaps between building changes</li>
18109         </ul>
18110       </li>
18111
18112       <li>For students (sets):
18113         <ul>
18114           <li>Home room(s)</li>
18115           <li>Max building changes per day/week</li>
18116           <li>Min gaps between building changes</li>
18117         </ul>
18118       </li>
18119       <li>Preferred room(s):
18120         <ul>
18121           <li>For a subject</li>
18122           <li>For an activity tag</li>
18123           <li>For a subject and an activity tag</li>
18124           <li>Individually for a (sub)activity</li>
18125         </ul>
18126       </li>
18127
18128       <li>For a set of activities:
18129         <ul>
18130           <li>Occupy a maximum number of different rooms</li>
18131         </ul>
18132       </li>
18133     </ul>
18134   </li>
18135 </ul></p>
18136
18137 <p>I have not used it myself, as I am not involved in time table
18138 planning at a school, but it seem to work fine when I test it.  If you
18139 need to set up your schools time table, and is tired of doing it
18140 manually, check it out.
18141
18142 A quick summary on how to use it can be found in
18143 <a href="http://marvelsoft.co.in/wp/2012/03/generate-timetable-for-state-cbse-icse-igcse-schools-free/">a
18144 blog post from MarvelSoft</a>.  If you find FET useful, please provide
18145 a recipe for the Debian Edu project in the
18146 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu#Howtos">Debian Edu HowTo
18147 section</a>.</p>
18148
18149       </div>
18150       <div class="tags">
18151
18152
18153         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>.
18154
18155
18156       </div>
18157     </div>
18158     <div class="padding"></div>
18159
18160     <div class="entry">
18161       <div class="title">
18162         <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>
18163       </div>
18164       <div class="date">
18165          3rd July 2012
18166       </div>
18167       <div class="body">
18168         <p>In the NUUG <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a>
18169 project (Norwegian version of
18170 <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com/">FixMyStreet</a> from
18171 <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a>), we have discovered
18172 a problem with the municipalities using
18173 <a href="http://www.zimbra.com/">Zimbra</a>.  When FiksGataMi send a
18174 problem report to the government, the email From: address is set to
18175 the address of the person reporting the problem, while envelope sender
18176 is set to the FiksGataMi contact address.  The intention is to make
18177 sure the municipality send any replies to the person reporting the
18178 problem, while any email delivery problems are sent to us in NUUG.
18179 This work well in most cases, but not for Karmøy municipality using
18180 Zimbra.  Karmøy is using the vacation message function in Zimbra to
18181 send an automatic reply to report that the message has been received,
18182 and this message is sent to the envelope sender and not the address in
18183 the From: header.</p>
18184
18185 <p>This causes the automatic message from Karmøy to go to NUUGs
18186 request-tracker instance instead of to the person reporting the
18187 problem.  We can not really change the envelope sender address, as
18188 this would make it impossible for us to discover when there are
18189 problems with the MTAs receiving problem reports.  We have been in
18190 contact with the people at Karmøy municipality, and they are willing
18191 to adjust Zimbra if something can be changed there to get a better
18192 behaviour.</p>
18193
18194 <p>The default behaviour of Zimbra is as far as I can tell according
18195 to the specification in RFC 3834, which recommend that vacation
18196 messages are sent to the envelope sender and not to the From: address.
18197 But I wonder if it is possible to adjust or configure Zimbra to behave
18198 differently.  Anyone know?  Please let us know at
18199 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/fiksgatami">fiksgatami
18200 (at) nuug.no</a>.</p>
18201
18202       </div>
18203       <div class="tags">
18204
18205
18206         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>.
18207
18208
18209       </div>
18210     </div>
18211     <div class="padding"></div>
18212
18213     <div class="entry">
18214       <div class="title">
18215         <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>
18216       </div>
18217       <div class="date">
18218         26th June 2012
18219       </div>
18220       <div class="body">
18221         <p>I've been too busy at home, but finally I found time to wrap up
18222 another interview with the people behind
18223 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>.
18224 This time we get to know José Luis Redrejo Rodríguez, one of our great
18225 helpers from Spain.  His effort was the reason we added support for
18226 several desktop types (KDE, Gnome and most recently LXDE) in Debian
18227 Edu, and have all of these available in the recently published
18228 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
18229 Squeeze</a> version.</p>
18230
18231 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
18232
18233 <p>I'm a father, teacher and engineer who is working for the Education
18234 ministry of the Region of Extremadura (Spain) in the implementation of
18235 ICT in schools</p>
18236
18237 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
18238 project?</strong></p>
18239
18240 <p>At 2006, I verified that both, we in Extremadura and Skolelinux
18241 project, had been working in parallel for some years, doing very
18242 similar things, using very similar tools and with similar targets, so
18243 I decided it was time to join forces as much as possible.</p>
18244
18245 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
18246 Edu?</strong></p>
18247
18248 <p>A community of highly skilled experts working together, with a
18249 really open schema of collaboration and work. I really love the
18250 concepts of Do-ocracy and Merit-ocracy and the way these concepts are
18251 been used everyday inside Debian Edu.</p>
18252
18253 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
18254 Edu?</strong></p>
18255
18256 <p>Sometimes the differences in the implementations, laws or
18257 economical and technical resources in the different countries don't
18258 allow us to agree in the same solution for all of us, and several
18259 approaches are needed, what is a waste of effort. Also, there is a
18260 lack of more man power to be able to follow the fast evolution of the
18261 technologies in school.</p>
18262
18263 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
18264
18265 <p>Debian, of course, and due to my kind of job I am most of my time
18266 between Iceweasel, <a href="http://www.geany.org/">Geany</a> and
18267 <a href="http://www.ohloh.net/p/gnome-terminator">Terminator</a>.</p>
18268
18269 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
18270 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
18271
18272 <p>I think there is not a single strategy because there are very
18273 different scenarios: schools with mixed proprietary and free
18274 environments, schools using only workstations, other schools using
18275 laptops, netbooks, tablets, interactive white-boards, etc.</p>
18276
18277 <p>Also the range of ages of the students is very broad and you can
18278 not use the same solutions for primary schools and secondary or even
18279 universities. So different strategies are needed.</p>
18280
18281 <p>But, looking at these differences, and looking back to the things
18282 we've done and implemented, and the places were we have spent most of
18283 our forces, I think we should focus as much as possible in free
18284 multi-platform environments, using only standards tools, and moving
18285 more and more to Internet or network solutions that could be deployed
18286 using wireless. I think we'll see more and more personal devices in
18287 the schools, devices the students and teachers will take home with
18288 them, so the solutions must be able to be taken at home and continue
18289 working there.</p>
18290
18291       </div>
18292       <div class="tags">
18293
18294
18295         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>.
18296
18297
18298       </div>
18299     </div>
18300     <div class="padding"></div>
18301
18302     <div class="entry">
18303       <div class="title">
18304         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">Song book for Computer Scientists</a>
18305       </div>
18306       <div class="date">
18307         24th June 2012
18308       </div>
18309       <div class="body">
18310         <p>Many years ago, while studying Computer Science at the
18311 <a href="http://www.uit.no/">University of Tromsø</a>, I started
18312 collecting computer related songs for use at parties.  The original
18313 version was written in LaTeX, but a few years ago I got help from
18314 Håkon W. Lie, one of the inventors of W3C CSS, to convert it to HTML
18315 while keeping the ability to create a nice book in PDF format.  I have
18316 not had time to maintain the book for a while now, and guess I should
18317 put it up on some public version control repository where others can
18318 help me extend and update the book.  If anyone is volunteering to help
18319 me with this, send me an email.  Also let me know if there are songs
18320 missing in my book.</p>
18321
18322 <p>I have not mentioned the book on my blog so far, and it occured to
18323 me today that I really should let all my readers share the joys of
18324 singing out load about programming, computers and computer networks.
18325 Especially now that <a href="http://debconf12.debconf.org/">Debconf
18326 12</a> is about to start (and I am not going).  Want to sing?  Check
18327 out <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/">Petter's
18328 Computer Science Songbook</a>.
18329
18330       </div>
18331       <div class="tags">
18332
18333
18334         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>.
18335
18336
18337       </div>
18338     </div>
18339     <div class="padding"></div>
18340
18341     <div class="entry">
18342       <div class="title">
18343         <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>
18344       </div>
18345       <div class="date">
18346         11th June 2012
18347       </div>
18348       <div class="body">
18349         <p>During my work on
18350 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.nb.html">Debian Edu
18351 based on Squeeze</a>, I came across some issues that should be
18352 addressed in the Wheezy release.  I finally found time to wrap up my
18353 notes and provide quick summary of what I found, with a bit
18354 explanation.</p>
18355
18356 <p><ul>
18357
18358 <li>We need to rewrite our package installation framework, as tasksel
18359 changed from using tasksel tasks to using meta packages (aka packages
18360 with dependencies like our education-* packages), and our installation
18361 system depend on tasksel tasks in
18362 /usr/share/tasksel/debian-edu-tasks.desc for package
18363 installation.</li>
18364
18365 <li>Enable Kerberos login for more services.  Now with the Kerberos
18366 foundation in place, we should use it to get single sign on with more
18367 services, and avoiding unneeded password / login questions.  We should
18368 at least try to enable it for these services:
18369 <ul>
18370
18371   <li>CUPS for admins to add/configure printers and users when using
18372     quotas.</li>
18373   <li>Nagios for admins checking the system status.</li>
18374   <li>GOsa for admins updating LDAP and users changing their passwords.</li>
18375   <li>LDAP for admins updating LDAP.</li>
18376   <li>Squid for users when exam mode / filtering is active.</li>
18377   <li>ssh for admins and users to save a password prompt.</li>
18378
18379 </ul></li>
18380
18381 <li>When we move GOsa to use Kerberos instead of LDAP bind to
18382 authenticate users, we should try to block or at least limit access to
18383 use LDAP bind for authentication, to ensure Kerberos is used when it
18384 is intended, and nothing fall back to using the less safe LDAP bind</li>
18385
18386 <li>Merge debian-edu-config and debian-edu-install.  The split made
18387 sense when d-e-install did a lot more, but these days it is just an
18388 inconvenience when we update the debconf preseeding values.</li>
18389
18390 <li>Fix partman-auto to allow us to abort the installation before
18391 touching the disk if the disk is too small.  This is
18392 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/653305">BTS report #653305</a> and the
18393 d-i developers are fine with the patch and someone just need to apply
18394 it and upload.  After this is done we need to adjust
18395 debian-edu-install to use this new hook.</li>
18396
18397 <li>Adjust to new LTSP framework (boot time config instead of install
18398 time config).  LTSP changed its design, and our hooks to install
18399 packages and update the configuration is most likely not going to work
18400 in Wheezy.
18401
18402 <li>Consider switching to NBD instead of NFS for LTSP root, to allow
18403 the Kernel to cache files in its normal file cache, possibly speeding
18404 up KDE login on slow networks.</li>
18405
18406 <li>Make it possible to create expired user passwords that need to
18407 change on first login.  This is useful when handing out password on
18408 paper, to make sure only the user know the password.  This require
18409 fixes to the PAM handling of kdm and gdm.</li>
18410
18411 <li>Make GUI for adding new machines automatically from sitesummary.
18412 The current command line script is not very friendly to people most
18413 familiar with GUIs.  This should probably be integrated into GOsa to
18414 have it available where the admin will be looking for it..</li>
18415
18416 <li>We should find way for Nagios to check that the DHCP service
18417 actually is working (as in handling out IP addresses).  None of the
18418 Nagios checks I have found so far have been working for me.</li>
18419
18420 <li>We should switch from libpam-nss-ldapd to sssd for all profiles
18421 using LDAP, and not only on for roaming workstations, to have less
18422 packages to configure and consistent setup across all profiles.</li>
18423
18424 <li>We should configure Kerberos to update LDAP and Samba password
18425 when changing password using the Kerberos protocol.  The hook was
18426 requested in <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/588968">BTS report
18427 #588968</a> and is now available in Wheezy.  We might need to write a
18428 MIT Kerberos plugin in C to get this.</li>
18429
18430 <li>We should clean up the set of applications installed by default.
18431 <ul>
18432
18433 <li>reduce the number of chemistry visualisers</li>
18434 <li>consider dropping xpaint</li>
18435 <li>and probably more?</li>
18436 </ul></li>
18437
18438 <li>Some hardware need external firmware to work properly.  This is
18439 mostly the case for WiFi network cards, but there are some other
18440 examples too.  For popular laptops to work out of the box, such
18441 firmware need to be installed from non-free, and we should provide
18442 some GUI to do this.  Ubuntu already have this implemented, and we
18443 could consider using their packages.  At the moment we have some
18444 command line script to do this (one for the running system, another
18445 for the LTSP chroot).</li>
18446
18447
18448 <li>In Squeeze, we provide KDE, Gnome and LXDE as desktop options.  We
18449 should extend the list to Xfce and Sugar, and preferably find a way to
18450 install several and allow the admin or the user to select which one to
18451 use.</li>
18452
18453 <li>The golearn tool from the goplay package make it easy to check out
18454 interesting educational packages.  We should work on the package
18455 tagging in Debian to ensure it represent all the useful educational
18456 packages, and extend the tool to allow it to use packagekit to install
18457 new applications with a simple mouse click.</li>
18458
18459 <li>The Squeeze version got half a exam solution already in place,
18460 with the introduction of iptable based network blocking, but for it to
18461 be a complete exam solution the Squid proxy need to enable
18462 filtering/blocking as well when the exam mode is enabled.  We should
18463 implement a way to easily enable this for the schools that want it,
18464 instead of the "it is documented" method of today.</li>
18465
18466 <li>A feature used in several schools is the ability for a teacher to
18467 "take over" the desktop of individual or all computers in the room.
18468 There are at least three implementations,
18469 <a href="italc.sourceforge.net/">italc</a>,
18470 <a href="http://www.itais.net/help/en/">controlaula</a> og
18471 <a href="http://www.epoptes.org/">epoptes</a> and we should pick one of
18472 them and make it trivial to set it up in a school.  The challenges is
18473 how to distribute crypto keys and how to group computers in one room
18474 and how to set up which machine/user can control the machines in a
18475 given room.</li>
18476
18477 <li>Tablets and surf boards are getting more and more popular, and we
18478 should look into providing a good solution for integrating these into
18479 the Debian Edu network.  Not quite sure how.  Perhaps we should
18480 provide a installation profile with better touch screen support for
18481 them, or add some sync services to allow them to exchange
18482 configuration and data with the central server.  This should be
18483 investigated.</li>
18484
18485 </ul></p>
18486
18487 <p>I guess we will discover more as we continue to work on the Wheezy
18488 version.</p>
18489
18490       </div>
18491       <div class="tags">
18492
18493
18494         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>.
18495
18496
18497       </div>
18498     </div>
18499     <div class="padding"></div>
18500
18501     <div class="entry">
18502       <div class="title">
18503         <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>
18504       </div>
18505       <div class="date">
18506          9th June 2012
18507       </div>
18508       <div class="body">
18509         <p>Slashdot got a story about Intel planning a
18510 <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
18511 with face recognition</a> to recognise the viewer, and it occurred to
18512 me that it would be more interesting to turn it around, and do face
18513 recognition on the TV image itself.  It could let the viewer know who
18514 is present on the screen, and perhaps look up their credibility,
18515 company affiliation, previous appearances etc for the viewer to better
18516 evaluate what is being said and done.  That would be a feature I would
18517 be willing to pay for.</p>
18518
18519 <p>I would not be willing to pay for a TV that point a camera on my
18520 household, like the big brother feature apparently proposed by Intel.
18521 It is the telescreen idea fetched straight out of the book
18522 <a href="http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100021.txt">1984 by George
18523 Orwell</a>.</p>
18524
18525       </div>
18526       <div class="tags">
18527
18528
18529         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>.
18530
18531
18532       </div>
18533     </div>
18534     <div class="padding"></div>
18535
18536     <div class="entry">
18537       <div class="title">
18538         <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>
18539       </div>
18540       <div class="date">
18541          6th June 2012
18542       </div>
18543       <div class="body">
18544         <p>A few days ago
18545 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/SOAP_based_webservice_from_Dell_to_check_server_support_status.html">I
18546 reported how to get</a> the support status out of Dell using an
18547 unofficial and undocumented SOAP API, which I since have found out was
18548 <a href="http://lists.us.dell.com/pipermail/linux-poweredge/2012-February/045959.html">discovered
18549 by Daniel De Marco in february</a>.  Combined with my web scraping
18550 code for HP, Dell and IBM
18551 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Checking_server_hardware_support_status_for_Dell__HP_and_IBM_servers.html">from
18552 2009</a>, I got inspired and wrote
18553 <a href="https://views.scraperwiki.com/run/computer-hardware-support-status/">a
18554 web service</a> based on Scraperwiki to make it easy to look up the
18555 support status and get a machine readable result back.</p>
18556
18557 <p>This is what it look like at the moment when asking for the JSON
18558 output:
18559
18560 <blockquote><pre>
18561 % 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>
18562 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": ""})
18563 %
18564 </pre></blockquote>
18565
18566 <p>It currently support Dell and HP, and I am hoping for help to add
18567 support for other vendors.  The python source is available on
18568 Scraperwiki and I welcome help with adding more features.</p>
18569
18570       </div>
18571       <div class="tags">
18572
18573
18574         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>.
18575
18576
18577       </div>
18578     </div>
18579     <div class="padding"></div>
18580
18581     <div class="entry">
18582       <div class="title">
18583         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Mike_Gabriel.html">Debian Edu interview: Mike Gabriel</a>
18584       </div>
18585       <div class="date">
18586          2nd June 2012
18587       </div>
18588       <div class="body">
18589         <p>Back in 2010, Mike Gabriel showed up on the
18590 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
18591 mailing list.  He quickly proved to be a valuable developer, and
18592 thanks to his tireless effort we now have Kerberos integrated into the
18593 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
18594 Squeeze</a> version.</p>
18595
18596 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
18597
18598 <p>My name is Mike Gabriel, I am 38 years old and live near Kiel,
18599 Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. I live together with a wonderful partner
18600 (Angela Fuß) and two own children and two bonus children (contributed
18601 by Angela).</p>
18602
18603 <p>During the day I am part-time employed as a system administrator
18604 and part-time working as an IT consultant. The consultancy work
18605 touches free software topics wherever and whenever possible. During
18606 the nights I am a free software developer. In the gaps I also train in
18607 becoming an osteopath.</p>
18608
18609 <p>Starting in 2010 we (Andreas Buchholz, Angela Fuß, Mike Gabriel)
18610 have set up a free software project in the area of Kiel that aims at
18611 introducing free software into schools. The project's name is
18612 "IT-Zukunft Schule" (IT future for schools). The project links IT
18613 skills with communication skills.</p>
18614
18615 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
18616 project?</strong></p>
18617
18618 <p>While preparing our own customised Linux distribution for
18619 "IT-Zukunft Schule" we were repeatedly asked if we really wanted to
18620 reinvent the wheel. What schools really need is already available,
18621 people said.  From this impulse we started evaluating other Linux
18622 distributions that target being used for school networks.</p>
18623
18624 <p>At the end we short-listed two approaches and compared them: a
18625 commercial Linux distribution developed by a company in Bremen,
18626 Germany, and Skolelinux / Debian Edu. Between 12/2010 and 03/2011 we
18627 went to several events and met people being responsible for marketing
18628 and development of either of the distributions. Skolelinux / Debian
18629 Edu was by far much more convincing compared to the other product that
18630 got short-listed beforehand--across the full spectrum. What was most
18631 attractive for me personally: the perspective of collaboration within
18632 the developmental branch of the Debian Edu project itself.</p>
18633
18634 <p>In parallel with this, we talked to many local and not-so-local
18635 people.  People teaching at schools, headmasters, politicians, data
18636 protection experts, other IT professionals.</p>
18637
18638 <p>We came to two conclusions:</p>
18639
18640 <p>First, a technical conclusion: What schools need is available in
18641 bits and pieces here and there, and none of the solutions really fit
18642 by 100%. Any school we have seen has a very individual IT setup
18643 whereas most of each school's requirements could mapped by a standard
18644 IT solution.  The requirement to this IT solution is flexibility and
18645 customisability, so that individual adaptations here and there are
18646 possible.  In terms of re-distributing and rolling out such a
18647 standardised IT system for schools (a system that is still to some
18648 degree customisable) there is still a lot of work to do here
18649 locally. Debian Edu / Skolelinux has been our choice as the starting
18650 point.</p>
18651
18652 <p>Second, a holistic conclusion: What schools need does not exist at
18653 all (or we missed it so far). There are several technical solutions
18654 for handling IT at schools that tend to make a good impression. What
18655 has been missing completely here in Germany, though, is the enrolment
18656 of people into using IT and teaching with IT. "IT-Zukunft Schule"
18657 tries to provide an approach for this.</p>
18658
18659 <p>Only some schools have some sort of a media concept which explains,
18660 defines and gives guidance on how to use IT in class. Most schools in
18661 Northern Germany do not have an IT service provider, the school's IT
18662 equipment is managed by one or (if the school is lucky) two (admin)
18663 teachers, most of the workload these admin teachers get done in there
18664 spare time.</p>
18665
18666 <p>We were surprised that only a very few admin teachers were
18667 networked with colleagues from other schools. Basically, every school
18668 here around has its individual approach of providing IT equipment to
18669 teachers and students and the exchange of ideas has been quasi
18670 non-existent until 2010/2011.</p>
18671
18672 <p>Quite some (non-admin) teachers try to avoid using IT technology in
18673 class as a learning medium completely. Several reasons for this
18674 avoidance do exist.</p>
18675
18676 <p>We discovered that no-one has ever taken a closer look at this
18677 social part of IT management in schools, so far. On our quest journey
18678 for a technical IT solution for schools, we discussed this issue with
18679 several teachers, headmasters, politicians, other IT professionals and
18680 they all confirmed: a holistic approach of considering IT management
18681 at schools, an approach that includes the people in place, will be new
18682 and probably a gain for all.</p>
18683
18684 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
18685 Edu?</strong></p>
18686
18687 <p>There is a list of advantages: international context, openness to
18688 any kind of contributions, do-ocracy policy, the closeness to Debian,
18689 the different installation scenarios possible (from stand-alone
18690 workstation to complex multi-server sites), the transparency within
18691 project communication, honest communication within the group of
18692 developers, etc.</p>
18693
18694 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
18695 Edu?</strong></p>
18696
18697 <p>Every coin has two sides:</p>
18698
18699 <p>Technically: <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/311188">BTS issue
18700 #311188</a>, tricky upgradability of a Debian Edu main server, network
18701 client installations on top of a plain vanilla Debian installation
18702 should become possible sometime in the near future, one could think
18703 about splitting the very complex package debian-edu-config into
18704 several portions (to make it easier for new developers to
18705 contribute).</p>
18706
18707 <p>Another issue I see is that we (as Debian Edu developers) should
18708 find out more about the network of people who do the marketing for
18709 Debian Edu / Skolelinux. There is a very active group in Germany
18710 promoting Skolelinux on the bigger Linux Days within Germany. Are
18711 there other groups like that in other countries? How can we bring
18712 these marketing people together (marketing group A with group B and
18713 all of them with the group of Debian Edu developers)? During the last
18714 meeting of the German Skolelinux group, I got the impression of people
18715 there being rather disconnected from the development department of
18716 Debian Edu / Skolelinux.</p>
18717
18718 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
18719
18720 <p>For my daily business, I do not use commercial software at all.</p>
18721
18722 <p>For normal stuff I use Iceweasel/Firefox, Libreoffice.org. For
18723 serious text writing I prefer LaTeX. I use gimp, inkscape, scribus for
18724 more artistic tasks. I run virtual machines in KVM and Virtualbox.</p>
18725
18726 <p>I am one of the upstream developers of X2Go. In 2010 I started the
18727 development of a Python based X2Go Client, called PyHoca-GUI.
18728 PyHoca-GUI has brought forth a Python X2Go Client API that currently
18729 is being integrated in Ubuntu's software center.</p>
18730
18731 <p>For communications I have my own Kolab server running using Horde
18732 as web-based groupware client. For IRC I love to use irssi, for Jabber
18733 I have several clients that I use, mostly pidgin, though. I am also
18734 the Debian maintainer of Coccinella, a Jabber-based interactive
18735 whiteboard.</p>
18736
18737 <p>My favourite terminal emulator is KDE's Yakuake.</p>
18738
18739 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
18740 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
18741
18742 <p>Communicate, communicate, communicate. Enrol people, enrol people,
18743 enrol people.</p>
18744
18745       </div>
18746       <div class="tags">
18747
18748
18749         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>.
18750
18751
18752       </div>
18753     </div>
18754     <div class="padding"></div>
18755
18756     <div class="entry">
18757       <div class="title">
18758         <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>
18759       </div>
18760       <div class="date">
18761          1st June 2012
18762       </div>
18763       <div class="body">
18764         <p>A few years ago I wrote
18765 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Checking_server_hardware_support_status_for_Dell__HP_and_IBM_servers.html">how
18766 to extract support status</a> for your Dell and HP servers.  Recently
18767 I have learned from colleges here at the
18768 <a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a> that Dell have
18769 made this even easier, by providing a SOAP based web service.  Given
18770 the service tag, one can now query the Dell servers and get machine
18771 readable information about the support status.  This perl code
18772 demonstrate how to do it:</p>
18773
18774 <p><pre>
18775 use strict;
18776 use warnings;
18777 use SOAP::Lite;
18778 use Data::Dumper;
18779 my $GUID = '11111111-1111-1111-1111-111111111111';
18780 my $App = 'test';
18781 my $servicetag = $ARGV[0] or die "Please supply a servicetag. $!\n";
18782 my ($deal, $latest, @dates);
18783 my $s = SOAP::Lite
18784     -> uri('http://support.dell.com/WebServices/')
18785     -> on_action( sub { join '', @_ } )
18786     -> proxy('http://xserv.dell.com/services/assetservice.asmx')
18787     ;
18788 my $a = $s->GetAssetInformation(
18789     SOAP::Data->name('guid')->value($GUID)->type(''),
18790     SOAP::Data->name('applicationName')->value($App)->type(''),
18791     SOAP::Data->name('serviceTags')->value($servicetag)->type(''),
18792 );
18793 print Dumper($a -> result) ;
18794 </pre></p>
18795
18796 <p>The output can look like this:</p>
18797
18798 <p><pre>
18799 $VAR1 = {
18800           'Asset' => {
18801                      'Entitlements' => {
18802                                        'EntitlementData' => [
18803                                                             {
18804                                                               'EntitlementType' => 'Expired',
18805                                                               'EndDate' => '2009-07-29T00:00:00',
18806                                                               'Provider' => '',
18807                                                               'StartDate' => '2006-07-29T00:00:00',
18808                                                               'DaysLeft' => '0'
18809                                                             },
18810                                                             {
18811                                                               'EntitlementType' => 'Expired',
18812                                                               'EndDate' => '2009-07-29T00:00:00',
18813                                                               'Provider' => '',
18814                                                               'StartDate' => '2006-07-29T00:00:00',
18815                                                               'DaysLeft' => '0'
18816                                                             },
18817                                                             {
18818                                                               'EntitlementType' => 'Expired',
18819                                                               'EndDate' => '2007-07-29T00:00:00',
18820                                                               'Provider' => '',
18821                                                               'StartDate' => '2006-07-29T00:00:00',
18822                                                               'DaysLeft' => '0'
18823                                                             }
18824                                                           ]
18825                                      },
18826                      'AssetHeaderData' => {
18827                                           'SystemModel' => 'GX620',
18828                                           'ServiceTag' => '8DSGD2J',
18829                                           'SystemShipDate' => '2006-07-29T19:00:00-05:00',
18830                                           'Buid' => '2323',
18831                                           'Region' => 'Europe',
18832                                           'SystemID' => 'PLX_GX620',
18833                                           'SystemType' => 'OptiPlex'
18834                                         }
18835                    }
18836         };
18837 </pre></p>
18838
18839 <p>I have not been able to find any documentation from Dell about this
18840 service outside the
18841 <a href="http://xserv.dell.com/services/assetservice.asmx?op=GetAssetInformation">inline
18842 documentation</a>, and according to
18843 <a href="http://iboyd.net/index.php/2012/02/14/updated-dell-warranty-information-script/">one
18844 comment</a> it can have stability issues, but it is a lot better than
18845 scraping HTML pages. :)</p>
18846
18847 <p>Wonder if HP and other server vendors have a similar service.  If
18848 you know of one, drop me an email. :)</p>
18849
18850       </div>
18851       <div class="tags">
18852
18853
18854         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>.
18855
18856
18857       </div>
18858     </div>
18859     <div class="padding"></div>
18860
18861     <div class="entry">
18862       <div class="title">
18863         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_monitor_calibration_using_ColorHug.html">First monitor calibration using ColorHug</a>
18864       </div>
18865       <div class="date">
18866         31st May 2012
18867       </div>
18868       <div class="body">
18869         <p>A few days ago my color calibration gadget
18870 <a href="http://www.hughski.com/index.html">ColorHug</a> arrived in the
18871 mail, and I've had a few days to test it.  As all my machines are
18872 running Debian Squeeze, where
18873 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/c/colorhug-client.html">the
18874 calibration software</a> is missing (it is present in Wheezy and Sid),
18875 I ran the calibration using the Fedora based live CD.  This worked
18876 just fine.  So far I have only done the quick calibration.  It was
18877 slow enough for me, so I will leave the more extensive calibration for
18878 another day.</p>
18879
18880 <p>After calibration, I get a
18881 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICC_profile">ICC color
18882 profile</a> file that can be passed to programs understanding such
18883 tools.  KDE do not seem to understand it out of the box, so I searched
18884 for command line tools to use to load the color profile into X.
18885 xcalib was the first one I found, and it seem to work fine for single
18886 monitor setups.  But for my video player, a laptop with a flat screen
18887 attached, it was unable to load the color profile for the correct
18888 monitor.  After searching a bit, I
18889 <a href="http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1347896">discovered</a>
18890 that the dispwin tool from the argyll package would do what I wanted,
18891 and a simple</p>
18892
18893 <p><pre>
18894 dispwin -d 1 profile.icc
18895 </pre></p>
18896
18897 <p>later I had the color profile loaded for the correct monitor.  The
18898 result was a bit more pink than I expected.  I guess I picked the
18899 wrong monitor type for the "led" monitor I got, but the result is good
18900 enough for now.</p>
18901
18902       </div>
18903       <div class="tags">
18904
18905
18906         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
18907
18908
18909       </div>
18910     </div>
18911     <div class="padding"></div>
18912
18913     <div class="entry">
18914       <div class="title">
18915         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Ralf_Gesellensetter.html">Debian Edu interview: Ralf Gesellensetter</a>
18916       </div>
18917       <div class="date">
18918         27th May 2012
18919       </div>
18920       <div class="body">
18921         <p>In 2003, a German teacher showed up on the
18922 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
18923 mailing list with interesting problems and reports proving he setting
18924 up Linux for a (for us at the time) lot of pupils.  His name was Ralf
18925 Gesellensetter, and he has been an important tester and contributor
18926 since then, helping to make sure the
18927 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
18928 Squeeze</a> release became as good as it is..</p>
18929
18930 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
18931
18932 <p>I am a teacher from Germany, and my subjects are Geography,
18933 Mathematics, and Computer Science ("Informatik"). During the past 12
18934 years (since 2000), I have been working for a comprehensive (and soon,
18935 also inclusive) school leading to all kind of general levels, such as
18936 O- or A-level ("Abitur").  For quite as long, I've been taking care of
18937 our computer network.</p>
18938
18939 <p>Now, in my early 40s, I enjoy the privilege of spending a lot of my
18940 spare time together with my wife, our son (3 years) and our daughter
18941 (4 months).</p>
18942
18943 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
18944 project?</strong></p>
18945
18946 <p>We had tried different Linux based school servers, when members of
18947 my local Linux User Group (LUG OWL) detected Skolelinux. I remember
18948 very well, being part of a party celebrating the Linux New Media Award
18949 ("Best Newcomer Distribution", also nominated: Ubuntu) that was given
18950 to Skolelinux at Linux World Exposition in Frankfurt, 2005 (IIRC). Few
18951 months later, I had the chance to join a developer meeting in Ulsrud
18952 (Oslo) and to hand out the award to Knut Yrvin and others.  For more
18953 than 7 years, Skolelinux is part of our schools infrastructure, namely
18954 our main server (tjener), one LTSP (today without thin clients), and
18955 approximately 50 work stations. Most of these have the option to boot a
18956 locally installed Skolelinux image.  As a consequence, I joined quite
18957 a few events dealing with free software or Linux, and met many Debian
18958 (Edu) developers. All of them seemed quite nice and competent to me,
18959 one more reason to stick to Skolelinux.</p>
18960
18961 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
18962 Edu?</strong></p>
18963
18964 <p>Debian driven, you are given all the advantages of a community
18965 project including well maintained updates. Once, you are familiar with
18966 the network layout, you can easily roll out an entire educational
18967 computer infrastructure, from just one installation media. As only
18968 free software (FOSS) is used, that supports even elderly hardware,
18969 up-sizing your IT equipment is only limited by space (i.e. available
18970 labs).  Especially if you run a LTSP thin client server, your
18971 administration costs tend towards zero.</p>
18972
18973 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
18974 Edu?</strong></p>
18975
18976 <p>While Debian's stability has loads of advantages for servers, this
18977 might be different in some cases for clients: Schools with unlimited
18978 budget might buy new hardware with components that are not yet
18979 supported by Debian stable, or wish to use more recent versions of
18980 office packages or desktop environments.  These schools have the
18981 option to run Debian testing or other distributions - if they have the
18982 capacity to do so.  Another issue is that Debian release cycles
18983 include a wide range of changes; therefor a high percentage of human
18984 power seems to be absorbed by just keeping the features of Skolelinux
18985 within the new setting of the version to come. During this process,
18986 the cogs of Debian Edu are getting more and more professional,
18987 i.e. harder to understand for novices.</p>
18988
18989 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
18990
18991 <p>LibreOffice, Wikipedia, Openstreetmap, Iceweasel (Mozilla Firefox),
18992 KMail, Gimp, Inkscape - and of course the Linux Kernel (not only on
18993 PC, Laptop, Mobile, but also our SAT receiver)</p>
18994
18995 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
18996 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
18997
18998 <p><ol>
18999
19000 <li>Support computer science as regular subject in schools to make
19001 people really "own" their hardware, to make them understand the
19002 difference between proprietary software products, and free software
19003 developing.</li>
19004
19005 <li>Make budget baskets corresponding: In Germany's public schools
19006 there are more or less fixed budgets for IT equipment (including
19007 licenses), so schools won't benefit from any savings here. This
19008 privilege is left to private schools which have consequently a large
19009 share among German Skolelinux schools.</li>
19010
19011 <li>Get free software in the seminars where would-be teachers are
19012 trained. In many cases, teachers' software customs are respected by
19013 decision makers rather than the expertise of any IT experts.</li>
19014
19015 <li>Don't limit ourself to free software run natively. Everybody uses
19016 free software or free licenses (for instance Wikipedia), and this
19017 general concept should get expanded to free educational content to be
19018 shared world wide (school books e.g.).</li>
19019
19020 <li>Make clear where ever you can that the market share of free (libre)
19021 office suites is much above 20 p.c. today, and that you pupils don't
19022 need to know the "ribbon menu" in order to get employed.</li>
19023
19024 <li>Talk about the difference between freeware and free software.</li>
19025
19026 <li>Spread free software, or even collections of portable free apps
19027 for USB pen drives. Endorse students to get a legal copy of
19028 Libreoffice rather than accepting them to use illegal serials.  And
19029 keep sending documents in ODF formats.</li>
19030
19031 </ol></p>
19032
19033       </div>
19034       <div class="tags">
19035
19036
19037         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>.
19038
19039
19040       </div>
19041     </div>
19042     <div class="padding"></div>
19043
19044     <div class="entry">
19045       <div class="title">
19046         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_cost_of_ODF_and_OOXML.html">The cost of ODF and OOXML</a>
19047       </div>
19048       <div class="date">
19049         26th May 2012
19050       </div>
19051       <div class="body">
19052         <p>I just come across a blog post from Glyn Moody reporting the
19053 claimed cost from Microsoft on requiring ODF to be used by the UK
19054 government.  I just sent him an email to let him know that his
19055 assumption are most likely wrong.  Sharing it here in case some of my
19056 blog readers have seem the same numbers float around in the UK.</p>
19057
19058 <p><blockquote> <p>Hi.  I just noted your
19059 <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>
19060 comment:</p>
19061
19062 <p><blockquote>"They're all in Danish, not unreasonably, but even
19063 with the help of Google Translate I can't find any figures about the
19064 savings of "moving to a flexible two standard" as claimed by the
19065 Microsoft email. But I assume it is backed up somewhere, so let's take
19066 it, and the £500 million figure for the UK, on trust."
19067 </blockquote></p>
19068
19069 <p>I can tell you that the Danish reports are inflated.  I believe it is
19070 the same reports that were used in the Norwegian debate around 2007,
19071 and Gisle Hannemyr (a well known IT commentator in Norway) had a look
19072 at the content.  In short, the reason it is claimed that using ODF
19073 will be so costly, is based on the assumption that this mean every
19074 existing document need to be converted from one of the MS Office
19075 formats to ODF, transferred to the receiver, and converted back from
19076 ODF to one of the MS Office formats, and that the conversion will cost
19077 10 minutes of work time for both the sender and the receiver.  In
19078 reality the sender would have a tool capable of saving to ODF, and the
19079 receiver would have a tool capable of reading it, and the time spent
19080 would at most be a few seconds for saving and loading, not 20 minutes
19081 of wasted effort.</p>
19082
19083 <p>Microsoft claimed all these costs were saved by allowing people to
19084 transfer the original files from MS Office instead of spending 10
19085 minutes converting to ODF. :)</p>
19086
19087 <p>See
19088 <a href="http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12_vl02.php">http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12_vl02.php</a>
19089 and
19090 <a href="http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12.php">http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12.php</a>
19091 for background information.  Norwegian only, sorry. :)</p>
19092 </blockquote></p>
19093
19094       </div>
19095       <div class="tags">
19096
19097
19098         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>.
19099
19100
19101       </div>
19102     </div>
19103     <div class="padding"></div>
19104
19105     <div class="entry">
19106       <div class="title">
19107         <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>
19108       </div>
19109       <div class="date">
19110         18th May 2012
19111       </div>
19112       <div class="body">
19113         <p>In january, I
19114 <a href="http://blog.cihar.com/archives/2012/01/17/colorhug-has-arrived/">discovered
19115 the ColorHug</a>, a USB dongle from
19116 <a href="http://www.hughski.com/index.html">Hughski</a> to calibrate
19117 the color on a computer screen.  The software required is
19118 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/c/colorhug-client.html">included
19119 in Debian</a>, and I decided back then to preorder from the next
19120 batch.  Yesterday I finally heard back from them, and got the
19121 opportunity to order.  Today I ordered mine, and eagerly await the
19122 delivery.  I hope it arrive next week, as I got a confirmation that it
19123 should go in the mail on monday. :)</p>
19124
19125 <p>If you want to ensure the colors on the screen match the intended
19126 colors, I suggest you check out this cheap tool with free software
19127 drivers. :)</p>
19128
19129       </div>
19130       <div class="tags">
19131
19132
19133         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
19134
19135
19136       </div>
19137     </div>
19138     <div class="padding"></div>
19139
19140     <div class="entry">
19141       <div class="title">
19142         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__J_rgen_Leibner.html">Debian Edu interview: Jürgen Leibner</a>
19143       </div>
19144       <div class="date">
19145         13th May 2012
19146       </div>
19147       <div class="body">
19148         <p>It has been a few busy weeks for me, but I am finally back to
19149 publish another interview with the people behind
19150 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>.
19151 This time it is one of our German developers, who have helped out over the
19152 years to make sure both a lot of major but also a lot of the minor
19153 details get right before release.
19154
19155 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
19156
19157 <p>My name is Jürgen Leibner, I'm 49 years old and living in
19158 Bielefeld, a town in northern Germany.  I worked nearly 20 years as
19159 certified engineer in the department for plant design and layout of an
19160 international company for machinery and equipment.  Since 2011 I'm a
19161 certified technical writer (tekom e.V.) and doing technical
19162 documentations for a steam turbine manufacturer.  From April this year
19163 I will manage the department of technical documentation at a
19164 manufacturer of automation and assembly line engineering.</p>
19165
19166 <p>My first contact with linux was around 1993. Since that time I used
19167 it at work and at home repeatedly but not exclusively as I do now at
19168 home since 2006.</p>
19169
19170 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
19171 project?</strong></p>
19172
19173 <p>Once a day in the early year of 2001 when I wanted to fetch my
19174 daughter from primary school, there was a teacher sitting in the
19175 middle of 20 old computers trying to boot them and he failed. I helped
19176 him to get them booting. That was seen by the school director and she
19177 asked me if I would like to manage that the school gets all that old
19178 computers in use. I answered: "Yes".</p>
19179
19180 <p>Some weeks later every of the 10 classrooms had one computer
19181 running Windows98. I began to collect old computers and equipment as
19182 gifts and installed the first computer room with a peer-to-peer
19183 network. I did my work at school without being payed in my spare time
19184 and with a lot of fun.  About one year later the school was connected
19185 to Internet and a local area network was installed in the school
19186 building.  That was the time to have a server and I knew it must be a
19187 Linux server to be able to fulfil all the wishes of the teachers and
19188 being able to do this in a transparent and economic way, without extra
19189 costs for things like licence and software.  So I searched for a
19190 school server system running under Linux and I found a couple of
19191 people nearby who founded 'skolelinux.de'. It was the Skolelinux
19192 prerelease 32 I first tried out for being used at the school.  I
19193 managed the IT of that school until the municipal authority took over
19194 the IT management and centralised the services for all schools in
19195 Bielefeld in December of 2006.</p>
19196
19197 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
19198 Edu?</strong></p>
19199
19200 <p>When I'm looking back to the beginning, there were other advantages
19201 for me as today.</p>
19202
19203 <p>In the past there were advantages like:</p>
19204
19205 <p><ul>
19206
19207 <li>I don't need to buy it so it generates no costs to the school as
19208 they had little money to spent for computers and software.</li>
19209
19210 <li>It has a licence which grands all rights to use it without
19211 cost.</li>
19212
19213 <li>It was more able to fit all requirements of a server system for
19214 schools than a Microsoft server system, even if there are only Windows
19215 clients because of it's preconfigured overall concept of being a
19216 infrastructure solution and community for schools, not only a
19217 server</li>
19218
19219 <li>I was able to configure the server to the needs of the
19220 school.</li>
19221
19222 </ul></p>
19223
19224 <p>Today some of the advantages has been lost, changed or new ones
19225 came up in this way:</p>
19226
19227 <p><ul>
19228
19229 <li>Most schools here do have money to buy hardware and software
19230 now.</li>
19231
19232 <li>They are today mostly managed from central IT departments which
19233 have own concepts which often do not fit to Debian Edu concepts
19234 because they are to close to Microsoft ideology.</li>
19235
19236 <li>With the Squeeze version of Debian Edu which now uses GOsa² for
19237 management I feel more able to manage the daily tasks than with the
19238 interfaces used in the past.</li>
19239
19240 <li>It is more modular than in the past and fits even better to the
19241 different needs.</li>
19242
19243 <li>The documentation is usable and gets better every day.</li>
19244
19245 <li>More people than ever before are using Debian Edu all over the
19246 world and so the community, which is an very important part I think,
19247 is sharing knowledge and minds.</li>
19248
19249 <li>Most, maybe all, of the technical requirements for schools are
19250 solved today by Debian Edu. </li>
19251
19252 </ul></p>
19253
19254 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
19255 Edu?</strong></p>
19256
19257 <p><ul>
19258
19259 <li>There are too few IT companies able to integrate Debian Edu into
19260 their product portfolio for serving schools with concepts or even
19261 whole municipality areas.</li>
19262
19263 <li>Debian Edu has beside other free and open software projects not
19264 enough lobbyists which promote free and open software to
19265 politicians.</li>
19266
19267 <li>Technically there are no disadvantages I'm aware of.</li>
19268
19269 </ul></p>
19270
19271 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
19272
19273 <p>I use Debian stable on my home server and on my little desktop
19274 computer. On my laptop I use Debian testing/sid. The applications I
19275 use on my laptop and my desktop are Open/Libre-office, Iceweasel,
19276 KMail, DigiKam, Amarok, Dolphin, okular and all the other programs I
19277 need from the KDE environment.  On console I use newsbeuter, mutt,
19278 screen, irssi and all the other famous and useful tools.</p>
19279
19280 <p>My home server provides mail services with exim, dovecot, roundcube
19281 and mutt over ssh on the console, file services with samba, NFS,
19282 rsync, web services with apache, moinmoin-wiki, multimedia services
19283 with gallery2 and mediatomb and database services with MySQL for me
19284 and the whole family.  I probably forgot something.</p>
19285
19286 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
19287 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
19288
19289 <p>I believe, we should provide concepts for IT companies to integrate
19290 Debian Edu into their product portfolio with use cases for different
19291 countries and areas all over the world.</p>
19292
19293       </div>
19294       <div class="tags">
19295
19296
19297         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>.
19298
19299
19300       </div>
19301     </div>
19302     <div class="padding"></div>
19303
19304     <div class="entry">
19305       <div class="title">
19306         <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>
19307       </div>
19308       <div class="date">
19309         30th April 2012
19310       </div>
19311       <div class="body">
19312         <p><!-- IMG_5869.JPG -->
19313 <img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/panasonic-er-1611.jpeg"></p>
19314
19315 <p>I normally cut my hair short, and my tool of choice has been a
19316 common hair/beard cutter, bought in a electrical shop here in Norway.
19317 But the last ones have not really been up to the task.  My last
19318 cutter, some model from Braun, could only cut a few of my hairs at the
19319 time, and cutting my head took forever.  And the one before that did
19320 not work very well either.  We have looked for something better for a
19321 while, but it was not until I ended up visiting a hairdresser that we
19322 discovered that there are indeed better tools available.  But these
19323 are not marketed and sold to "regular consumers".  The hair saloons
19324 can get them through their suppliers, but their suppliers only sell
19325 companies.  The models they sell, are very different from the ones
19326 available from Elkjøp and Lefdal.  The main difference is their
19327 efficiency.  It would cut my hair in 5 minutes, instead of the 30-40
19328 minutes required by my impotent Braun.  The hairdresser I visited had
19329 a Panasonic ER160, which unfortunately is no longer available from the
19330 producer.  But I found it had a successor, the Panasonic ER1611.</p>
19331
19332 <p>The next step was to find somewhere to buy it.  This was not
19333 straight forward.  The list of suppliers I got from the hairdresser
19334 did not want to sell anything to me.  But searching for the model on
19335 the web we found a supplier in Norway willing to sell it to us for
19336 around NOK 4000,-.  This was a bit much.  We kept searching and
19337 finally found a Danish supplier
19338 <a href="http://nicehair.dk/panasonic-er-1611-professionel-hartrimmer.html">selling
19339 it for around NOK 1800,-</a>.  We ordered one, and it arrived a few
19340 days ago.</p>
19341
19342 <p>The instructions said it had to charge for 8 hours when we started
19343 to use it, so we left it charging over night.  Normally it will only
19344 need one hour to charge.  The following evening we successfully tested
19345 it, and I can warmly recommend it to anyone looking for a real hair
19346 cutter.  The ones we have used until now have been hair cutter
19347 toys.</p>
19348
19349       </div>
19350       <div class="tags">
19351
19352
19353         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
19354
19355
19356       </div>
19357     </div>
19358     <div class="padding"></div>
19359
19360     <div class="entry">
19361       <div class="title">
19362         <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>
19363       </div>
19364       <div class="date">
19365         26th April 2012
19366       </div>
19367       <div class="body">
19368         <p>In <a href="http://www.idg.no/computerworld/article243690.ece">an
19369 article today</a> published by Computerworld Norway, the photographer
19370 <a href="http://www.urke.com/eirik/">Eirik Helland Urke</a> reports
19371 that the video editor application included with
19372 <a href="http://www.htc.com/www/smartphones/htc-one-x/#specs">HTC One
19373 X</a> have some quite surprising terms of use.  The article is mostly
19374 based on the twitter message from mister Urke, stating:
19375
19376 <p><blockquote>
19377 "<a href="http://twitter.com/urke/status/194062269724897280">Drøy
19378 brukeravtale: HTC kan bruke MINE redigerte videoer kommersielt. Selv
19379 kan jeg KUN bruke dem privat.</a>"
19380 </blockquote></p>
19381
19382 <p>I quickly translated it to this English message:</p>
19383
19384 <p><blockquote>
19385 "Arrogant user agreement: HTC can use MY edited videos
19386 commercially.  Although I can ONLY use them privately."
19387 </blockquote></p>
19388
19389 <p>I've been unable to find the text of the license term myself, but
19390 suspect it is a variation of the MPEG-LA terms I
19391 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Terms_of_use_for_video_produced_by_a_Canon_IXUS_130_digital_camera.html">discovered
19392 with my Canon IXUS 130</a>.  The HTC One X specification specifies that
19393 the recording format of the phone is .amr for audio and .mp3 for
19394 video.  AMR is
19395 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_Multi-Rate_audio_codec#Licensing_and_patent_issues">Adaptive
19396 Multi-Rate audio codec</a> with patents which according to the
19397 Wikipedia article require an license agreement with
19398 <a href="http://www.voiceage.com/">VoiceAge</a>.  MP4 is
19399 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC#Patent_licensing">MPEG4 with
19400 H.264</a>, which according to Wikipedia require a licence agreement
19401 with <a href="http://www.mpegla.com/">MPEG-LA</a>.</p>
19402
19403 <p>I know why I prefer
19404 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">free and open
19405 standards</a> also for video.</p>
19406
19407       </div>
19408       <div class="tags">
19409
19410
19411         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>.
19412
19413
19414       </div>
19415     </div>
19416     <div class="padding"></div>
19417
19418     <div class="entry">
19419       <div class="title">
19420         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/RAND_terms___non_reasonable_and_discriminatory.html">RAND terms - non-reasonable and discriminatory</a>
19421       </div>
19422       <div class="date">
19423         19th April 2012
19424       </div>
19425       <div class="body">
19426         <p>Here in Norway, the
19427 <a href="http://www.regjeringen.no/nb/dep/fad.html?id=339"> Ministry of
19428 Government Administration, Reform and Church Affairs</a> is behind
19429 a <a href="http://standard.difi.no/forvaltningsstandarder">directory of
19430 standards</a> that are recommended or mandatory for use by the
19431 government.  When the directory was created, the people behind it made
19432 an effort to ensure that everyone would be able to implement the
19433 standards and compete on equal terms to supply software and solutions
19434 to the government.  Free software and non-free software could compete
19435 on the same level.</p>
19436
19437 <p>But recently, some standards with RAND
19438 (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_and_non-discriminatory_licensing">Reasonable
19439 And Non-Discriminatory</a>) terms have made their way into the
19440 directory.  And while this might not sound too bad, the fact is that
19441 standard specifications with RAND terms often block free software from
19442 implementing them.  The reasonable part of RAND mean that the cost per
19443 user/unit is low,and the non-discriminatory part mean that everyone
19444 willing to pay will get a license.  Both sound great in theory.  In
19445 practice, to get such license one need to be able to count users, and
19446 be able to pay a small amount of money per unit or user.  By
19447 definition, users of free software do not need to register their use.
19448 So counting users or units is not possible for free software projects.
19449 And given that people will use the software without handing any money
19450 to the author, it is not really economically possible for a free
19451 software author to pay a small amount of money to license the rights
19452 to implement a standard when the income available is zero.  The result
19453 in these situations is that free software are locked out from
19454 implementing standards with RAND terms.</p>
19455
19456 <p>Because of this, when I see someone claiming the terms of a
19457 standard is reasonable and non-discriminatory, all I can think of is
19458 how this really is non-reasonable and discriminatory.  Because free
19459 software developers are working in a global market, it does not really
19460 help to know that software patents are not supposed to be enforceable
19461 in Norway.  The patent regimes in other countries affect us even here.
19462 I really hope the people behind the standard directory will pay more
19463 attention to these issues in the future.</p>
19464
19465 <p>You can find more on the issues with RAND, FRAND and RAND-Z terms
19466 from Simon Phipps
19467 (<a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2010/11/rand-not-so-reasonable/">RAND:
19468 Not So Reasonable?</a>).</p>
19469
19470 <p>Update 2012-04-21: Just came across a
19471 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2012/04/of-microsoft-netscape-patents-and-open-standards/index.htm">blog
19472 post from Glyn Moody</a> over at Computer World UK warning about the
19473 same issue, and urging people to speak out to the UK government.  I
19474 can only urge Norwegian users to do the same for
19475 <a href="http://www.standard.difi.no/hoyring/hoyring-om-nye-anbefalte-it-standarder">the
19476 hearing taking place at the moment</a> (respond before 2012-04-27).
19477 It proposes to require video conferencing standards including
19478 specifications with RAND terms.</p>
19479
19480       </div>
19481       <div class="tags">
19482
19483
19484         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>.
19485
19486
19487       </div>
19488     </div>
19489     <div class="padding"></div>
19490
19491     <div class="entry">
19492       <div class="title">
19493         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Andreas_Mundt.html">Debian Edu interview: Andreas Mundt</a>
19494       </div>
19495       <div class="date">
19496         15th April 2012
19497       </div>
19498       <div class="body">
19499         <p>Behind <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and
19500 Skolelinux</a> there are a lot of people doing the hard work of
19501 setting together all the pieces.  This time I present to you Andreas
19502 Mundt, who have been part of the technical development team several
19503 years.  He was also a key contributor in getting GOsa and Kerberos set
19504 up in the recently released
19505 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze">Debian
19506 Edu Squeeze</a> version.</p>
19507
19508 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
19509
19510 <p>My name is Andreas Mundt, I grew up in south Germany.  After
19511 studying Physics I spent several years at university doing research in
19512 Quantum Optics.  After that I worked some years in an optics company.
19513 Finally I decided to turn over a new leaf in my life and started
19514 teaching 10 to 19 years old kids at school.  I teach math, physics,
19515 information technology and science/technology.</p>
19516
19517 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
19518 project?</strong></p>
19519
19520 <p>Already before I switched to teaching, I followed the Debian Edu
19521 project because of my interest in education and Debian.  Within the
19522 qualification/training period for the teaching, I started
19523 contributing.</p>
19524
19525 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
19526 Edu?</strong></p>
19527
19528 <p>The advantages of Debian Edu are the well known name, the
19529 out-of-the-box philosophy and of course the great free software of the
19530 Debian Project!</p>
19531
19532 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
19533 Edu?</strong></p>
19534
19535 <p>As every coin has two sides, the out-of-the-box philosophy has its
19536 downside, too.  In my opinion, it is hard to modify and tweak the
19537 setup, if you need or want that.  Further more, it is not easily
19538 possible to upgrade the system to a new release.  It takes much too
19539 long after a Debian release to prepare the -Edu release, perhaps
19540 because the number of developers working on the core of the code is
19541 rather small and often busy elsewhere.</p>
19542
19543 <p>The <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianLAN">Debian LAN</a>
19544 project might fill the use case of a more flexible system.</p>
19545
19546 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
19547
19548 <p>I am only using non-free software if I am forced to and run Debian
19549 on all my machines.  For documents I prefer LaTeX and PGF/TikZ, then
19550 mutt and iceweasel for email respectively web browsing.  At school I
19551 have Arduino and Fritzing in use for a micro controller project.</p>
19552
19553 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
19554 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
19555
19556 <p>One of the major problems is the vendor lock-in from top to bottom:
19557 Especially in combination with ignorant government employees and
19558 politicians, this works out great for the "market-leader".  The school
19559 administration here in Baden-Wuerttemberg is occupied by that vendor.
19560 Documents have to be prepared in non-free, proprietary formats.  Even
19561 free browsers do not work for the school administration.  Publishers
19562 of school books provide software only for proprietary platforms.</p>
19563
19564 <p>To change this, political work is very important.  Parts of the
19565 political spectrum have become aware of the problem in the last years.
19566 However it takes quite some time and courageous politicians to 'free'
19567 the system.  There is currently some discussion about "Open Data" and
19568 "Free/Open Standards".  I am not sure if all the involved parties have
19569 a clue about the potential of these ideas, and probably only a
19570 fraction takes them seriously.  However it might slowly make free
19571 software and the philosophy behind it more known and popular.</p>
19572
19573       </div>
19574       <div class="tags">
19575
19576
19577         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>.
19578
19579
19580       </div>
19581     </div>
19582     <div class="padding"></div>
19583
19584     <div class="entry">
19585       <div class="title">
19586         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Justin_B__Rye.html">Debian Edu interview: Justin B. Rye</a>
19587       </div>
19588       <div class="date">
19589          8th April 2012
19590       </div>
19591       <div class="body">
19592         <p>It take all kind of contributions to create a Linux distribution
19593 like <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>,
19594 and this time I lend the ear to Justin B. Rye, who is listed as a big
19595 contributor to the
19596 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze">Debian
19597 Edu Squeeze release manual</a>.
19598
19599 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
19600
19601 <p>I'm a 44-year-old linguistics graduate living in Edinburgh who has
19602 occasionally been employed as a sysadmin.</p>
19603
19604 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
19605 project?</strong></p>
19606
19607 <p>I'm neither a developer nor a Skolelinux/Debian Edu user!  The only
19608 reason my name's in the credits for the documentation is that I hang
19609 around on debian-l10n-english waiting for people to mention things
19610 they'd like a native English speaker to proofread...  So I did a sweep
19611 through the wiki for typos and Norglish and inconsistent spellings of
19612 "localisation".</p>
19613
19614 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
19615 Edu?</strong></p>
19616
19617 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
19618 Edu?</strong></p>
19619
19620 <p>These questions are too hard for me - I don't use it!  In fact I
19621 had hardly any contact with I.T. until long after I'd got out of the
19622 education system.</p>
19623
19624 <p>I can tell you the advantages of Debian for me though: it soaks up
19625 as much of my free time as I want and no more, and lets me do
19626 everything I want a computer for without ever forcing me to spend
19627 money on the latest hardware.</p>
19628
19629 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
19630
19631 <p>I've been using Debian since Rex; popularity-contest says the
19632 software that I use most is xinit, xterm, and xulrunner (in other
19633 words, I use a distinctly retro sort of desktop).</p>
19634
19635 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
19636 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
19637
19638 <p>Well, I don't know.  I suppose I'd be inclined to try reasoning
19639 with the people who make the decisions, but obviously if that worked
19640 you would hardly need a strategy.</p>
19641
19642       </div>
19643       <div class="tags">
19644
19645
19646         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>.
19647
19648
19649       </div>
19650     </div>
19651     <div class="padding"></div>
19652
19653     <div class="entry">
19654       <div class="title">
19655         <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>
19656       </div>
19657       <div class="date">
19658          6th April 2012
19659       </div>
19660       <div class="body">
19661         <p>Recently I have spent time with
19662 <a href="http://www.slxdrift.no/">Skolelinux Drift AS</a> on speeding
19663 up a <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
19664 Lenny installation using LTSP diskless workstations, and in the
19665 process I discovered something very surprising.  The reason the KDE
19666 menu was responding slow when using it for the first time, was mostly
19667 due to the way KDE find application icons.  I discovered that showing
19668 the Multimedia menu would cause more than 20 000 IP packages to be
19669 passed between the LTSP client and the NFS server.  Most of these were
19670
19671 NFS LOOKUP calls, resulting in a NFS3ERR_NOENT response.  Because the
19672 ping times between the client and the server were in the range 2-20
19673 ms, the menus would be very slow.  Looking at the strace of kicker in
19674 Lenny (or plasma-desktop i Squeeze - same problem there), I see that
19675 the source of these NFS calls are access(2) system calls for
19676 non-existing files.  KDE can do hundreds of access(2) calls to find
19677 one icon file.  In my example, just finding the mplayer icon required
19678 around 230 access(2) calls.</p>
19679
19680 <p>The KDE code seem to search for icons using a list of icon
19681 directories, and the list of possible directories is large.  In
19682 (almost) each directory, it look for files ending in .png, .svgz, .svg
19683 and .xpm.  The result is a very slow KDE menu when /usr/ is NFS
19684 mounted.  Showing a single sub menu may result in thousands of NFS
19685 requests.  I am not the first one to discover this.  I found a
19686 <a href="https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=211416">KDE bug report
19687 from 2009</a> about this problem, and it is still unsolved.</p>
19688
19689 <p>My solution to speed up the KDE menu was to create a package
19690 kde-icon-cache that upon installation will look at all .desktop files
19691 used to generate the KDE menu, find their icons, search the icon paths
19692 for the file that KDE will end up finding at run time, and copying the
19693 icon file to /var/lib/kde-icon-cache/.  Finally, I add symlinks to
19694 these icon files in one of the first directories where KDE will look
19695 for them.  This cut down the number of file accesses required to find
19696 one icon from several hundred to less than 5, and make the KDE menu
19697 almost instantaneous.  I'm not quite sure where to make the package
19698 publicly available, so for now it is only available on request.</p>
19699
19700 <p>The bug report mention that this do not only affect the KDE menu
19701 and icon handling, but also the login process.  Not quite sure how to
19702 speed up that part without replacing NFS with for example NBD, and
19703 that is not really an option at the moment.</p>
19704
19705 <p>If you got feedback on this issue, please let us know on debian-edu
19706 (at) lists.debian.org.</p>
19707
19708 <p>Update 2015-08-04: The
19709 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/debian-edu/upstream/kde-icon-cache.git/">source
19710 of the scripts and associated Debian package</a> is available from the
19711 Debian Edu github repository.</p>
19712
19713       </div>
19714       <div class="tags">
19715
19716
19717         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>.
19718
19719
19720       </div>
19721     </div>
19722     <div class="padding"></div>
19723
19724     <div class="entry">
19725       <div class="title">
19726         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_in_the_Linux_Weekly_News.html">Debian Edu in the Linux Weekly News</a>
19727       </div>
19728       <div class="date">
19729          5th April 2012
19730       </div>
19731       <div class="body">
19732         <p>About two weeks ago, I was interviewed via email about
19733 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a> by
19734 Bruce Byfield in Linux Weekly News.  The result was made public for
19735 non-subscribers today.  I am pleased to see liked our Linux solution
19736 for schools.  Check out his article
19737 <a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/488805/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux: A
19738 distribution for education</a> if you want to learn more.</p>
19739
19740       </div>
19741       <div class="tags">
19742
19743
19744         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>.
19745
19746
19747       </div>
19748     </div>
19749     <div class="padding"></div>
19750
19751     <div class="entry">
19752       <div class="title">
19753         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Wolfgang_Schweer.html">Debian Edu interview: Wolfgang Schweer</a>
19754       </div>
19755       <div class="date">
19756          1st April 2012
19757       </div>
19758       <div class="body">
19759         <p>Germany is a core area for the
19760 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
19761 user community, and this time I managed to get hold of Wolfgang
19762 Schweer, a valuable contributor to the project from Germany.
19763
19764 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
19765
19766 <p>I've studied Mathematics at the university 'Ruhr-Universität' in
19767 Bochum, Germany. Since 1981 I'm working as a teacher at the school
19768 "<a href="http://www.westfalenkolleg-dortmund.de/">Westfalen-Kolleg
19769 Dortmund</a>", a second chance school.  Here, young adults is given
19770 the opportunity to get further education in order to do the school
19771 examination 'Abitur', which will allow to study at a university. This
19772 second chance is of value for those who want a better job perspective
19773 or failed to get a higher school examination being teens.</p>
19774
19775 <p>Besides teaching I was involved in developing online courses for a
19776 blended learning project called 'abitur-online.nrw' and in some other
19777 information technology related projects. For about ten years I've been
19778 teacher and coordinator for the 'abitur-online' project at my
19779 school. Being now in my early sixties, I've decided to leave school at
19780 the end of April this year.</p>
19781
19782 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
19783 project?</strong></p>
19784
19785 <p>The first information about Skolelinux must have come to my
19786 attention years ago and somehow related to LTSP (Linux Terminal Server
19787 Project).  At school, we had set up a network at the beginning of 1997
19788 using Suse Linux on the desktop, replacing a Novell network. Since
19789 2002, we used old machines from the city council of Dortmund as thin
19790 clients (LTSP, later Ubuntu/Lessdisks) cause new hardware was out of
19791 reach. At home I'm using Debian since years and - subscribed to the
19792 Debian news letter - heard from time to time about Skolelinux. About
19793 two years ago I proposed to replace the (somehow undocumented and only
19794 known to me) system at school by a well known Debian based system:
19795 Skolelinux.</p>
19796
19797 <p>Students and teachers appreciated the new system because of a
19798 better look and feel and an enhanced access to local media on thin
19799 clients.  The possibility to alter and/or reset passwords using a GUI
19800 was welcomed, too. Being able to do administrative tasks using a GUI
19801 and to easily set up workstations using PXE was of very high value for
19802 the admin teachers.</p>
19803
19804 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
19805 Edu?</strong></p>
19806
19807 <p>It's open source, easy to set up, stable and flexible due to it's
19808 Debian base. It integrates LTSP out-of-the-box. And it is documented!
19809 So it was a perfect choice.</p>
19810
19811 <p>Being open source, there are no license problems and so it's
19812 possible to point teachers and students to programs like
19813 OpenOffice.org, ViewYourMind (mind mapping) and The Gimp.  It's of
19814 high value to be able to adapt parts of the system to special needs of
19815 a school and to choose where to get support for this.</p>
19816
19817 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
19818 Edu?</strong></p>
19819
19820 <p>Nothing yet.</p>
19821
19822 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
19823
19824 <p>At home (Debian Sid with Gnome Desktop): Iceweasel, LibreOffice,
19825 Mutt, Gedit, Document Viewer, Midnight Commander, flpsed (PDF
19826 Annotator).  At school (Skolelinux Lenny): Iceweasel, Gedit,
19827 LibreOffice.</p>
19828
19829 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
19830 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
19831
19832 <p>Some time ago I thought it was enough to tell people about it. But
19833 that doesn't seem to work quite well. Now I concentrate on those more
19834 interested and hope to get multiplicators that way.</p>
19835
19836       </div>
19837       <div class="tags">
19838
19839
19840         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>.
19841
19842
19843       </div>
19844     </div>
19845     <div class="padding"></div>
19846
19847     <div class="entry">
19848       <div class="title">
19849         <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>
19850       </div>
19851       <div class="date">
19852         25th March 2012
19853       </div>
19854       <div class="body">
19855         <!-- Video HTML based on http://www.diveintohtml5.net/video.html -->
19856
19857 <p>The same Debian Edu developer that did the last screen cast I
19858 published, Wolfgang Schweer, has created a new screen cast showing how
19859 to set up Kmail in Debian Edu Squeze to authenticate using Kerberos,
19860 allowing users to check their local email account without providing
19861 any password. The video is embedded here in quarter size,
19862 and also available from <a href="https://vimeo.com/38601767">vimeo</a>
19863 and download as a
19864 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-03-14-Debian-Edu_Configure_Kmail_for_internal_usage.ogv">Ogg
19865 Theora</a> file.  Check it out below.</p>
19866
19867 <p><video id="kmail-kerberos-movie" width="256" height="184" preload controls>
19868   <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"' />
19869     <p>Download video as
19870       <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-03-14-Debian-Edu_Configure_Kmail_for_internal_usage.ogv">Ogg</a>.</p>
19871 </video></p>
19872
19873       </div>
19874       <div class="tags">
19875
19876
19877         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>.
19878
19879
19880       </div>
19881     </div>
19882     <div class="padding"></div>
19883
19884     <div class="entry">
19885       <div class="title">
19886         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__John_Ingleby.html">Debian Edu interview: John Ingleby</a>
19887       </div>
19888       <div class="date">
19889         19th March 2012
19890       </div>
19891       <div class="body">
19892         <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
19893 users are spread all across the globe.  The second inteview after
19894 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00001.html">the
19895 Squeeze release</a> was publised is with John Ingleby, a teacher and
19896 long time Linux user in United Kingdom.</p>
19897
19898 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
19899
19900 <p>I teach ICT part time at the Rudolf Steiner School in Kings
19901 Langley, near London, UK. Previously I worked as a technical
19902 author/trainer while my children attended the school, and I also
19903 contributed to the Schoolforge UK community with the aim of
19904 encouraging UK schools to adopt free/open source software. Five or six
19905 years ago we had about 50 schools interested in some way, but we
19906 weren't able to convert many of them into sustainable
19907 installations.</p>
19908
19909 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
19910 project?</strong></p>
19911
19912 <p>Skolelinux had two representatives at an early Edubuntu meeting in
19913 London which I attended. However at that time our school network had
19914 just been installed using CentOS, LTSP 4 and GNOME. When LTSP 5 came
19915 along we switched to Edubuntu thin client servers so now we have a
19916 mixed environment which includes Windows PCs and student laptops, as
19917 well as their MacBooks and iPads. However, the proprietary systems
19918 have always been rather problematic, and we never built a GUI for the
19919 LDAP server, so when I discovered Skolelinux is configured for all
19920 these things we decided to try it.</p>
19921
19922 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
19923 Edu?</strong></p>
19924
19925 <p>By far the biggest advantage is the Debian Edu community. Apart
19926 from that I have always believed in the same "sustainable computing"
19927 goals that Skolelinux is built on: installing Linux on computers which
19928 would otherwise be thrown away, to provide a reliable, secure and
19929 low-cost IT environment for schools. From my own experience I know
19930 that a part-time person can teach and manage a network of about 25
19931 Linux computers, but it would take much more of my time if we had
19932 proprietary software everywhere.</p>
19933
19934 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
19935 Edu?</strong></p>
19936
19937 <p>As a newcomer I'm just finding out who's who in the community and
19938 how you're organised, and what your procedures are for dealing with
19939 various things such as editing manual pages and so-on. The only
19940 English language mailing list seems to be for developers as well as
19941 users, so my inbox needs heavy pruning each day!</p>
19942
19943 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
19944
19945 <p>Besides the software already mentioned at school we use Samba,
19946 OpenLDAP, CUPS, Nagios and Dansguardian for the network, and on the
19947 desktops we have LibreOffice, Firefox, GIMP and Inkscape. At home I
19948 use Ubuntu and an Android 4 eePad Transformer (but I'm not sure if
19949 that counts...)</p>
19950
19951 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
19952 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
19953
19954 <p>That's a tough question! For very many years UK schools installed
19955 and taught only proprietary software, so that at the highest levels
19956 the notion of "computer" means simply "proprietary office
19957 applications".  However, schools today are experiencing budget
19958 constraints, and many are having to think hard about upgrading Windows
19959 XP.  At the same time, we have students showing teachers how to use
19960 iPads, MacBooks and Android, so the choice of operating system is no
19961 longer quite so automatic. What is more, our government at last
19962 realised that we need people with programming skills, so they're
19963 putting coding back in the curriculum! And it's encouraging that the
19964 first 10,000 Raspberry Pi units sold out in 2 hours.</p>
19965
19966 <p>I don't really know what strategy is going to get UK schools to use
19967 free software, but building an active community of Skolelinux/Debian
19968 Edu users in this country has to be part of it.</p>
19969
19970       </div>
19971       <div class="tags">
19972
19973
19974         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>.
19975
19976
19977       </div>
19978     </div>
19979     <div class="padding"></div>
19980
19981     <div class="entry">
19982       <div class="title">
19983         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Writing_and_translating_documentation_in_Debian_Edu.html">Writing and translating documentation in Debian Edu</a>
19984       </div>
19985       <div class="date">
19986         16th March 2012
19987       </div>
19988       <div class="body">
19989         <p>Documentation in Debian Edu is provided in several languages, and
19990 it is important to make it both easy to contribute and to keep the
19991 translated versions in sync.  To do this we have come up with what we
19992 believe is a very efficient work flow.</p>
19993
19994 <ol>
19995
19996 <li>The documentation is written in a
19997 <a href="http://moinmo.in">moinmoin wiki</a> (see for example
19998 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze">the
19999 Squeeze release manual</a>) with support for exporting the content as
20000 docbook XML.</li>
20001
20002 <li>This docbook document is given to po4a to extract a gettext style
20003 .pot file with the content, which in turn is used to create .po files
20004 with the translated text.</li>
20005
20006 <li>The .po files are given to translators, and they can always tell
20007 which part of the original wiki document is new or changed.  They can
20008 use their normal translation tools like lokalize or poedit to write
20009 the translation.  There is even a system in place to handle translated
20010 images.</li>
20011
20012 <li>The translated .po files are combined with the original docbook
20013 XML document using po4a to create a translated docbook document.</li>
20014
20015 <li>The final step is to use all the generated docbook files and
20016 create PDF and HTML version of the original and translated documents.</li>
20017
20018 </ol>
20019
20020 <p>This setup work very well, but have a few issues.  The biggest
20021 issue is that <a href="http://moinmo.in/DocBook">the docbook support
20022 we use in moinmoin</a> is not actively maintained.  The docbook
20023 support is also buggy, and our build system contain workarounds to
20024 make sure the generated docbook is usable despite these bugs.</p>
20025
20026 <p>If you want to have a look at our setup, it is all there in the
20027 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/debian-edu-doc">debian-edu-doc
20028 package</a>.</p>
20029
20030       </div>
20031       <div class="tags">
20032
20033
20034         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>.
20035
20036
20037       </div>
20038     </div>
20039     <div class="padding"></div>
20040
20041     <div class="entry">
20042       <div class="title">
20043         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Skolelinux___Debian_Edu_Squeeze_is_out_.html">Skolelinux / Debian Edu Squeeze is out!</a>
20044       </div>
20045       <div class="date">
20046         11th March 2012
20047       </div>
20048       <div class="body">
20049         <p>This weekend we finally published the first stable release of
20050 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a> based
20051 on Debian/Squeeze.  The full announcement is
20052 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00001.html">available</a>
20053 from the project announcement list.  Now is a good time to test if it
20054 you have not done so already.</p>
20055
20056 <p>I plan to present the new version at
20057 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20120313-skolelinux/">a NUUG
20058 meeting</a> on tuesday.  I look forward to seeing you there if you are
20059 in Oslo, Norway.</p>
20060
20061       </div>
20062       <div class="tags">
20063
20064
20065         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>.
20066
20067
20068       </div>
20069     </div>
20070     <div class="padding"></div>
20071
20072     <div class="entry">
20073       <div class="title">
20074         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Nigel_Barker.html">Debian Edu interview: Nigel Barker</a>
20075       </div>
20076       <div class="date">
20077          9th March 2012
20078       </div>
20079       <div class="body">
20080         <p>Inspired by <a href="http://raphaelhertzog.com/tag/interview/">the
20081 interview series</a> conducted by Raphael, I started a Norwegian
20082 interview series with people involved in the Debian Edu / Skolelinux
20083 community.  This was so popular that I believe it is time to move to a
20084 more international audience.</p>
20085
20086 <p>While <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and
20087 Skolelinux</a> originated in France and Norway, and have most users in
20088 Europe, there are users all around the globe.  One of those far away
20089 from me is Nigel Barker, a long time Debian Edu system administrator
20090 and contributor.  It is thanks to him that Debian Edu is adjusted to
20091 work out of the box in Japan.  I got him to answer a few questions,
20092 and am happy to share the response with you. :)
20093
20094
20095 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
20096
20097 <p>My name is Nigel Barker, and I am British. I am married to Yumiko,
20098 and we have three lovely children, aged 15, 14 and 4(!) I am the IT
20099 Coordinator at Hiroshima International School, Japan. I am also a
20100 teacher, and in fact I spend most of my day teaching Mathematics,
20101 Science, IT, and Chemistry. I was originally a Chemistry teacher, but
20102 I have always had an interest in computers. Another teacher teaches
20103 primary school IT, but apart from that I am the only computer person,
20104 so that means I am the network manager, technician and webmaster,
20105 also, and I help people with their computer problems. I teach python
20106 to beginners in an after-school club. I am way too busy, so I really
20107 appreciate the simplicity of Skolelinux.</p>
20108
20109 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
20110 project?</strong></p>
20111
20112 <p>In around 2004 or 5 I discovered the ltsp project, and set up a
20113 server in the IT lab. I wanted some way to connect it to our central
20114 samba server, which I was also quite poor at configuring. I discovered
20115 Edubuntu when it came out, but it didn't really improve my setup. I
20116 did various desperate searches for things like "school Linux server"
20117 and ended up in a document called "Drift" something or other. Reading
20118 there it became clear that Skolelinux was going to solve all my
20119 problems in one go. I was very excited, but apprehensive, because my
20120 previous attempts to install Debian had ended in failure (I used
20121 Mandrake for everything - ltsp, samba, apache, mail, ns...). I
20122 downloaded a beta version, had some problems, so subscribed to the
20123 Debian Edu list for help. I have remained subscribed ever since, and
20124 my school has run a Skolelinux network since Sarge.</p>
20125
20126 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
20127 Edu?</strong></p>
20128
20129 <p>For me the integrated setup. This is not just the server, or the
20130 workstation, or the ltsp. Its all of them, and its all configured
20131 ready to go. I read somewhere in the early documentation that it is
20132 designed to be setup and managed by the Maths or Science teacher, who
20133 doesn't necessarily know much about computers, in a small Norwegian
20134 school. That describes me perfectly if you replace Norway with
20135 Japan.</p>
20136
20137 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
20138 Edu?</strong></p>
20139
20140 <p>The desktop is fairly plain. If you compare it with Edubuntu, who
20141 have fun themes for children, or with distributions such as Mint, who
20142 make the desktop beautiful. They create a good impression on people
20143 who don't need to understand how to use any of it, but who might be
20144 important to the school. School administrators or directors, for
20145 instance, or parents. Even kids. Debian itself usually has ugly
20146 default theme settings. It was my dream a few years back that some
20147 kind of integration would allow Edubuntu to do the desktop stuff and
20148 Debian Edu the servers, but now I realise how impossible that is.  A
20149 second disadvantage is that if something goes wrong, or you need to
20150 customise something, then suddenly the level of expertise required
20151 multiplies. For example, backup wasn't working properly in Lenny. It
20152 took me ages to learn how to set up my own server to do rsync backups.
20153 I am afraid of anything to do with ldap, but perhaps Gosa will
20154 help.</p>
20155
20156 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
20157
20158 <p>Nowadays I only use Debian on my personal computers. I have one for
20159 studio work (I play guitar and write songs), running AV Linux
20160 (customised Debian) a netbook running Squeeze, and a bigger laptop
20161 still running Skolelinux Lenny workstation. I have a Tjener in my
20162 house, that's very useful for the family photos and music.  At school
20163 the students only use Skolelinux. (Some teachers and the office still
20164 have windows). So that means we only use free software all day every
20165 day. Open office, The GIMP, Firefox/Iceweasel, VLC and Audacity are
20166 installed on every computer in school, irrespective of OS.  We also
20167 have Koha on Debian for the library, and Apache, Moodle, b2evolution
20168 and Etomite on Debian for the www. The firewall is Untangle.</p>
20169
20170 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
20171 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
20172
20173 <p>Current trends are in our favour. Open source is big in industry,
20174 and ordinary people have heard of it. The spread of Android and the
20175 popularity of Apple have helped to weaken the impression that you have
20176 to have Microsoft on everything. People complain to me much less about
20177 file formats and Word than they did 5 years ago.  The Edu aspect is
20178 also a selling point. This is all customised for schools. Where is the
20179 Windows-edu, or the Mac-edu?  But of course the main attraction is
20180 budget.The trick is to convince people that the quality is not
20181 compromised when you stop paying and use free software instead. That
20182 is one reason why I say the desktop experience is a weakness. People
20183 are not impressed when their USB drive doesn't work, or their browser
20184 doesn't play flash, for example.</p>
20185
20186       </div>
20187       <div class="tags">
20188
20189
20190         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>.
20191
20192
20193       </div>
20194     </div>
20195     <div class="padding"></div>
20196
20197     <div class="entry">
20198       <div class="title">
20199         <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>
20200       </div>
20201       <div class="date">
20202          7th March 2012
20203       </div>
20204       <div class="body">
20205         <!-- Video HTML based on http://www.diveintohtml5.net/video.html -->
20206
20207 <p>One of the Debian Edu developers, Wolfgang Schweer, just created a
20208 screen cast documenting how to create a lot of new users in LDAP on
20209 Debian Edu Squeeze.  The video is embedded here in quarter size, and
20210 also available from <a href="http://vimeo.com/37675399">vimeo</a> and
20211 download as a
20212 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-02-29-debian_edu_mass_create_user_accounts.ogv">Ogg
20213 Theora</a> file.  Check it out below.</p>
20214
20215 <p><video id="gosa-mass-user-create-movie" width="256" height="184" preload controls>
20216   <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"' />
20217     <p>Download video as
20218       <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-02-29-debian_edu_mass_create_user_accounts.ogv">Ogg</a>.</p>
20219 </video></p>
20220
20221       </div>
20222       <div class="tags">
20223
20224
20225         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>.
20226
20227
20228       </div>
20229     </div>
20230     <div class="padding"></div>
20231
20232     <div class="entry">
20233       <div class="title">
20234         <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>
20235       </div>
20236       <div class="date">
20237          4th March 2012
20238       </div>
20239       <div class="body">
20240         <p>This weekend we wrapped up and published the third release
20241 candidate for <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
20242 Skolelinux</a> based on Squeeze.  The full announcement is
20243 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00000.html">available</a>
20244 from the project announcement list.  Check it out if you
20245 need a software solution for your school.</p>
20246
20247       </div>
20248       <div class="tags">
20249
20250
20251         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>.
20252
20253
20254       </div>
20255     </div>
20256     <div class="padding"></div>
20257
20258     <div class="entry">
20259       <div class="title">
20260         <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>
20261       </div>
20262       <div class="date">
20263          3rd March 2012
20264       </div>
20265       <div class="body">
20266         <p>Many years ago, the <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux
20267 / Debian Edu project</a> initiated a student project to create a tool
20268 for making stop motion movies.  The proposal came from a teacher
20269 needing such tool on Skolelinux.  The project, called "stopmotion",
20270 was manned by two extraordinary students and won a school award and a
20271 national aware with this great project.  The project was initiated and
20272 mentored by Herman Robak, and manned by the students Bjørn Erik Nilsen
20273 and Fredrik Berg Kjølstad.  They got in touch with people at Aardman
20274 Animation studio and received feedback on how professionals would like
20275 such stopmotion tool to work, and the end result was and is used by
20276 animators around the globe.  But as is usual after studying, both got
20277 jobs and went elsewhere, and did not have time to properly tend to the
20278 project, and it has been lingering for a few years now.  Until last
20279 year...</p>
20280
20281 <p>Last year some of the users got together with Herman, and moved the
20282 project to Sourceforge and in effect restarted the project under a new
20283 name,
20284 <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/linuxstopmotion/">linuxstopmotion</a>.
20285 The name change was done to make it possible to find the project using
20286 Internet search engines (try to search for 'stopmotion' to see what I
20287 mean). I've been following
20288 <a href="https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/linuxstopmotion-community">the
20289 mailing list</a> and the improvement already in place and planned for
20290 the future is encouraging.  If you want to make stop motion movies.
20291 Check it out. :)</p>
20292
20293       </div>
20294       <div class="tags">
20295
20296
20297         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>.
20298
20299
20300       </div>
20301     </div>
20302     <div class="padding"></div>
20303
20304     <div class="entry">
20305       <div class="title">
20306         <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>
20307       </div>
20308       <div class="date">
20309         27th February 2012
20310       </div>
20311       <div class="body">
20312         <p>This weekend we wrapped up and published the second release
20313 candidate for <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
20314 Skolelinux</a> based on Squeeze.  The full announcement did for some
20315 reason not make it the project announcement list, but is
20316 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2012/02/msg00015.html">available</a>
20317 from the Debian development announcement list.  Check it out if you
20318 need a software solution for your school.</p>
20319
20320       </div>
20321       <div class="tags">
20322
20323
20324         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>.
20325
20326
20327       </div>
20328     </div>
20329     <div class="padding"></div>
20330
20331     <div class="entry">
20332       <div class="title">
20333         <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>
20334       </div>
20335       <div class="date">
20336         19th February 2012
20337       </div>
20338       <div class="body">
20339         <p>One week delayed due to DVD build problems, we managed today to
20340 wrap up and publish the first release candidate for
20341 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> based
20342 on Squeeze.  The full announcement is
20343 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/02/msg00001.html">available</a>
20344 on the project announcement list.  Check it out if you need a software
20345 solution for your school.</p>
20346
20347       </div>
20348       <div class="tags">
20349
20350
20351         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>.
20352
20353
20354       </div>
20355     </div>
20356     <div class="padding"></div>
20357
20358     <div class="entry">
20359       <div class="title">
20360         <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>
20361       </div>
20362       <div class="date">
20363         14th February 2012
20364       </div>
20365       <div class="body">
20366         <p>Once in a while my home server have disk problems.  Thanks to Linux
20367 Software RAID, I have not lost data yet (but
20368 <a href="http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.raid/34532">I was
20369 close</a> this summer :).  But once a disk is starting to behave
20370 funny, a practical problem present itself.  How to get from the Linux
20371 device name (like /dev/sdd) to something that can be used to identify
20372 the disk when the computer is turned off?  In my case I have SATA
20373 disks with a unique ID printed on the label.  All I need is a way to
20374 figure out how to query the disk to get the ID out.</p>
20375
20376 <p>After fumbling a bit, I
20377 <a href="http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-getting-scsi-ide-harddisk-information/">found
20378 that hdparm -I</a> will report the disk serial number, which is
20379 printed on the disk label.  The following (almost) one-liner can be
20380 used to look up the ID of all the failed disks:</p>
20381
20382 <blockquote><pre>
20383 for d in $(cat /proc/mdstat |grep '(F)'|tr ' ' "\n"|grep '(F)'|cut -d\[ -f1|sort -u);
20384 do
20385     printf "Failed disk $d: "
20386     hdparm -I /dev/$d |grep 'Serial Num'
20387 done
20388 </blockquote></pre>
20389
20390 <p>Putting it here to make sure I do not have to search for it the
20391 next time, and in case other find it useful.</p>
20392
20393 <p>At the moment I have two failing disk. :(</p>
20394
20395 <blockquote><pre>
20396 Failed disk sdd1:       Serial Number:      WD-WCASJ1860823
20397 Failed disk sdd2:       Serial Number:      WD-WCASJ1860823
20398 Failed disk sde2:       Serial Number:      WD-WCASJ1840589
20399 </blockquote></pre>
20400
20401 <p>The last time I had failing disks, I added the serial number on
20402 labels I printed and stuck on the short sides of each disk, to be able
20403 to figure out which disk to take out of the box without having to
20404 remove each disk to look at the physical vendor label.  The vendor
20405 label is at the top of the disk, which is hidden when the disks are
20406 mounted inside my box.</p>
20407
20408 <p>I really wish the check_linux_raid Nagios plugin for checking Linux
20409 Software RAID in the
20410 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/nagios-plugins.html">nagios-plugins-standard</a>
20411 debian package would look up this value automatically, as it would
20412 make the plugin a lot more useful when my disks fail.  At the moment
20413 it only report a failure when there are no more spares left (it really
20414 should warn as soon as a disk is failing), and it do not tell me which
20415 disk(s) is failing when the RAID is running short on disks.</p>
20416
20417       </div>
20418       <div class="tags">
20419
20420
20421         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>.
20422
20423
20424       </div>
20425     </div>
20426     <div class="padding"></div>
20427
20428     <div class="entry">
20429       <div class="title">
20430         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_proxy_configuration_with_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux.html">Automatic proxy configuration with Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
20431       </div>
20432       <div class="date">
20433         13th February 2012
20434       </div>
20435       <div class="body">
20436         <p>New in the Squeeze version of
20437 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> is the
20438 ability for clients to automatically configure their proxy settings
20439 based on their environment.  We want all systems on the client to use
20440 the WPAD based proxy definition fetched from <tt>http://wpad/wpad.dat</tt>, to
20441 allow sites to control the proxy setting from a central place and make
20442 sure clients do not have hard coded proxy settings.  The schools can
20443 change the global proxy setting by editing
20444 <tt>tjener:/etc/debian-edu/www/wpad.dat</tt> and the change propagate
20445 to all Debian Edu clients in the network.</p>
20446
20447 <p>The problem is that some systems do not understand the WPAD system.
20448 In other words, how do one get from a WPAD file like this (this is a
20449 simple one, they can run arbitrary code):</p>
20450
20451 <blockquote><pre>
20452 function FindProxyForURL(url, host)
20453 {
20454    if (!isResolvable(host) ||
20455        isPlainHostName(host) ||
20456        dnsDomainIs(host, ".intern"))
20457       return "DIRECT";
20458    else
20459       return "PROXY webcache:3128; DIRECT";
20460 }
20461 </pre></blockquote>
20462
20463 <p>to a proxy setting in the process environment looking like this:</p>
20464
20465 <blockquote><pre>
20466 http_proxy=http://webcache:3128/
20467 ftp_proxy=http://webcache:3128/
20468 </pre></blockquote>
20469
20470 <p>To do this conversion I developed a perl script that will execute
20471 the javascript fragment in the WPAD file and return the proxy that
20472 would be used for
20473 <tt><a href="http://www.debian.org/">http://www.debian.org/</a></tt>,
20474 and insert this extracted proxy URL in <tt>/etc/environment</tt> and
20475 <tt>/etc/apt/apt.conf</tt>.  The perl script wpad-extract work just
20476 fine in Squeeze, but in Wheezy the library it need to run the
20477 javascript code is <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/631045">no longer
20478 able to build</a> because the C library it depended on is now a C++
20479 library.  I hope someone find a solution to that problem before Wheezy
20480 is frozen.  An alternative would be for us to rewrite wpad-extract to
20481 use some other javascript library currently working in Wheezy, but no
20482 known alternative is known at the moment.</p>
20483
20484 <p>This automatic proxy system allow the roaming workstation (aka
20485 laptop) setup in Debian Edu/Squeeze to use the proxy when the laptop
20486 is connected to the backbone network in a Debian Edu setup, and to
20487 automatically use any proxy present and announced using the WPAD
20488 feature when it is connected to other networks.  And if no proxy is
20489 announced, direct connections will be used instead.</p>
20490
20491 <p>Silently using a proxy announced on the network might be a privacy
20492 or security problem.  But those controlling DHCP and DNS on a network
20493 could just as easily set up a transparent proxy, and force all HTTP
20494 and FTP connections to use a proxy anyway, so I consider that
20495 distinction to be academic.  If you are afraid of using the wrong
20496 proxy, you should avoid connecting to the network in question in the
20497 first place.  In Debian Edu, the proxy setup is updated using dhcp and
20498 ifupdown hooks, to make sure the configuration is updated every time
20499 the network setup changes.</p>
20500
20501 <p>The WPAD system is documented in a
20502 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-wrec-wpad-01">IETF
20503 draft</a> and a
20504 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Proxy_Autodiscovery_Protocol">Wikipedia
20505 page</a> for those that want to learn more.</p>
20506
20507       </div>
20508       <div class="tags">
20509
20510
20511         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>.
20512
20513
20514       </div>
20515     </div>
20516     <div class="padding"></div>
20517
20518     <div class="entry">
20519       <div class="title">
20520         <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>
20521       </div>
20522       <div class="date">
20523          5th February 2012
20524       </div>
20525       <div class="body">
20526         <p>Since the Lenny version of
20527 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>, a
20528 feature to save power have been included.  It is as simple as it is
20529 practical: Shut down unused clients at night, and turn them on again
20530 in the morning.  This is done using the
20531 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/shutdown-at-night.html">shutdown-at-night</a> Debian package.</p>
20532
20533 <p>To enable this feature on a client, the machine need to be added to
20534 the netgroup shutdown-at-night-hosts.  For Debian Edu, this is done in
20535 LDAP, and once this is in place, the machine in question will check
20536 every hour from 16:00 until 06:00 to see if the machine is unused, and
20537 shut it down if it is.  If the hardware in question is supported by
20538 the
20539 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/nvram-wakeup.html">nvram-wakeup</a>
20540 package, the BIOS is told to turn the machine back on around 07:00 +-
20541 10 minutes.  If this isn't working, one can configure wake-on-lan to
20542 try to turn on the client.  The wake-on-lan option is only documented
20543 and not enabled by default in Debian Edu.</p>
20544
20545 <p>It is important to not turn all machines on at once, as this can
20546 blow a fuse if several computers are connected to the same fuse like
20547 the common setup for a classroom.  The nvram-wakeup method only work
20548 for machines with a functioning hardware/BIOS clock.  I've seen old
20549 machines where the BIOS battery were dead and the hardware clock were
20550 starting from 0 (or was it 1990?) every boot.  If you have one of
20551 those, you have to turn on the computer manually.</p>
20552
20553 <p>The shutdown-at-night package is completely self contained, and can
20554 also be used outside the Debian Edu environment.  For those without a
20555 central LDAP server with netgroups, one can instead touch the file
20556 <tt>/etc/shutdown-at-night/shutdown-at-night</tt> to enable it.
20557 Perhaps you too can use it to save some power?</p>
20558
20559       </div>
20560       <div class="tags">
20561
20562
20563         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>.
20564
20565
20566       </div>
20567     </div>
20568     <div class="padding"></div>
20569
20570     <div class="entry">
20571       <div class="title">
20572         <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>
20573       </div>
20574       <div class="date">
20575          4th February 2012
20576       </div>
20577       <div class="body">
20578         <p>I am happy to announce that finally we managed today to wrap up and
20579 publish the third beta version of
20580 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> based
20581 on Squeeze.  If you want to test a LDAP backed Kerberos server with
20582 out of the box PXE configuration for running diskless machines and
20583 installing new machines, check it out.  If you need a software
20584 solution for your school, check it out too.  The full announcement is
20585 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/02/msg00000.html">available</a>
20586 on the project announcement list.</p>
20587
20588 <p>I am very happy to report these changes and improvements since
20589 beta2 (there are more, see announcement for full list):</p>
20590
20591 <ul>
20592
20593 <li>It is now possible to change the pre-configured IP subnet from
20594   10.0.0.0/8 to something else by using the subnet-change tool after
20595   the installation.</li>
20596
20597 <li>Too full partitions are now automatically extended on the Main
20598   Server, based on the rules specified in /etc/fsautoresizetab.</li>
20599
20600 <li>The CUPS queues are now automatically flushed every night, and all
20601   disabled queues are restarted every hour.  This should cut down on
20602   the amount of manual administration needed for printers.</li>
20603
20604 <li>The set of initial users have been changed.  Now a personal user
20605   for the local system administrator is created during installation
20606   instead of the previously created localadmin and super-admin users,
20607   and this user is granted administrative privileges using group
20608   membership.  This reduces the number of passwords one need to keep
20609   up to date on the system.</li>
20610
20611 </ul>
20612
20613 <p>The new main server seem to work so well that I am testing it as my
20614 private DNS/LDAP/Kerberos/PXE/LTSP server at home.  I will use it look
20615 for issues we could fix to polish Debian Edu even further before the
20616 final Squeeze release is published.</p>
20617
20618 <p>Next weekend the project organise a
20619 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/01/msg00001.html">developer
20620 gathering</a> in Oslo.  We will continue the work on the Squeeze
20621 version, and start initial planning for the Wheezy version.  Perhaps I
20622 will see you there?</p>
20623
20624       </div>
20625       <div class="tags">
20626
20627
20628         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>.
20629
20630
20631       </div>
20632     </div>
20633     <div class="padding"></div>
20634
20635     <div class="entry">
20636       <div class="title">
20637         <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>
20638       </div>
20639       <div class="date">
20640         27th January 2012
20641       </div>
20642       <div class="body">
20643         <p>With some computer hardware, one need non-free firmware blobs.
20644 This is the sad fact of todays computers.  In the next version of
20645 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> based
20646 on Squeeze, we provide several scripts and modifications to make
20647 firmware blobs easier to handle.  The common use case I run into is a
20648 laptop with a wireless network card requiring non-free firmware to
20649 work, but there are other use cases as well.</p>
20650
20651 <p>First and foremost, Debian Edu provide ISO images for DVD and CD
20652 with all firmware packages in the Debian sections main and non-free
20653 included, to ensure debian-installer find and can install all of them
20654 during installation.  This take care firmware for network devices used
20655 by the installer when installing from from local media.  But for
20656 example multimedia devices are not activated in the installer and are
20657 not taken care of by this.</p>
20658
20659 <p>For non-network devices, we provide the script
20660 <tt>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/auto-addfirmware</tt> which
20661 search through the <tt>dmesg</tt> output for drivers requesting extra
20662 firmware.  The firmware file name is looked up in the Contents-ARCH.gz
20663 file available in the package repository, and the packages providing
20664 the requested firmware file(s) is installed.  I have proposed to do
20665 something similar in debian-installer (BTS report
20666 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/655507">#655507</a>), to allow PXE
20667 installs of Debian to handle firmware installation better.  Run the
20668 script as root from the command line to fetch and install the needed
20669 firmware packages.</p>
20670
20671 <p>Debian Edu provide PXE installation of Debian out of the box, and
20672 because some machines need firmware to get their network cards
20673 working, the installation initrd some times need extra firmware
20674 included to be able to install at all.  To fill the PXE installation
20675 initrd with extra firmware, the
20676 <tt>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/pxe-addfirmware</tt> script is
20677 provided.  Again, just run it as root on the command line to fill the
20678 PXE initrd with firmware packages.</p>
20679
20680 <p>Last, some LTSP clients might also need firmware to get their
20681 network cards working.  For this,
20682 <tt>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/ltsp-addfirmware</tt> is
20683 provided to update the LTSP initrd with firmware blobs.  It is used
20684 the same way as the other firmware related tools.</p>
20685
20686 <p>At the moment, we do not run any of these during installation.  We
20687 do not know if this is acceptable for the local administrator to use
20688 non-free software, and it is their choice.</p>
20689
20690 <p>We plan to release beta3 this weekend.  You might want to give it a
20691 try.</p>
20692
20693       </div>
20694       <div class="tags">
20695
20696
20697         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>.
20698
20699
20700       </div>
20701     </div>
20702     <div class="padding"></div>
20703
20704     <div class="entry">
20705       <div class="title">
20706         <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>
20707       </div>
20708       <div class="date">
20709         25th January 2012
20710       </div>
20711       <div class="body">
20712         <p>The next version of <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu
20713 / Skolelinux</a> will include a new tool
20714 <tt>sitesummary2ldapdhcp</tt>, which can be used to quickly set up all
20715 the computers in a school without much manual labour.  Here is a short
20716 summary on how to use it to set up a new school.</p>
20717
20718 <p>First, install a combined Main Server and Thin Client Server as the
20719 central server in the network.  Next, PXE boot all the client machines
20720 as thin clients and wait 5 minutes after the last client booted to
20721 allow the clients to report their existence to the central server.  When
20722 this is done, log on to the central server and run
20723 <tt>sitesummary2ldapdhcp -a</tt> in the <tt>konsole</tt> to use the
20724 collected information to generate system objects in LDAP.  The output
20725 will look similar to this:</p>
20726
20727 <p><blockquote><pre>
20728 % sitesummary2ldapdhcp -a
20729 info: Updating machine tjener.intern [10.0.2.2] id ether-00:01:02:03:04:05.
20730 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.
20731
20732 Enter password if you want to activate these changes, and ^c to abort.
20733
20734 Connecting to LDAP as cn=admin,ou=ldap-access,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
20735 enter password: *******
20736 %
20737 </pre></blockquote></p>
20738
20739 <p>After providing the LDAP administrative password (the same as the
20740 root password set during installation), the LDAP database will be
20741 populated with system objects for each PXE booted machine with
20742 automatically generated names.  The final step to set up the school is
20743 then to log into <a href="https://oss.gonicus.de/labs/gosa/">GOsa</a>,
20744 the web based user, group and system administration system to change
20745 system names, add systems to the correct host groups and finally
20746 enable DHCP and DNS for the systems.  All clients that should be used
20747 as diskless workstations should be added to the workstation-hosts
20748 group.  After this is done, all computers can be booted again via PXE
20749 and get their assigned names and group based configuration
20750 automatically.</p>
20751
20752 <p>We plan to release beta3 with the updated version of this feature
20753 enabled this weekend.  You might want to give it a try.</p>
20754
20755 <p>Update 2012-01-28: When calling sitesummary2ldapdhcp to add new
20756 hosts, one need to add the option -a.  I forgot to mention this in my
20757 original text, and have added it to the text now.</p>
20758
20759       </div>
20760       <div class="tags">
20761
20762
20763         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>.
20764
20765
20766       </div>
20767     </div>
20768     <div class="padding"></div>
20769
20770     <div class="entry">
20771       <div class="title">
20772         <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>
20773       </div>
20774       <div class="date">
20775         10th January 2012
20776       </div>
20777       <div class="body">
20778         <p>In the Squeeze version of
20779 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> soon
20780 to be released, users of the system will get their default browser
20781 start page set from LDAP, allowing the system administrator to point
20782 all users to the school web page by updating one setting in LDAP.  In
20783 addition to setting the default start page when a machine boots, users
20784 are shown the same page as a welcome page when they log in for the
20785 first time.</p>
20786
20787 <p>The LDAP object dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no have an attribute
20788 labeledURI with "http://www/ LDAP for Debian Edu/Skolelinux" as the
20789 default content.  By changing this value to another URL, all users get
20790 to see the page behind this new URL.</p>
20791
20792 <p>An easy way to update it is by using the ldapvi tool.  It can be
20793 called as "<tt>ldapvi -ZD '(cn=admin)'</tt>' to update LDAP with the
20794 new setting.</p>
20795
20796 <p>We have written the code to adjust the default start page and show
20797 the welcome page, and I wonder if there is an easier way to do this
20798 from within Iceweasel instead.</p>
20799
20800       </div>
20801       <div class="tags">
20802
20803
20804         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>.
20805
20806
20807       </div>
20808     </div>
20809     <div class="padding"></div>
20810
20811     <div class="entry">
20812       <div class="title">
20813         <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>
20814       </div>
20815       <div class="date">
20816          7th January 2012
20817       </div>
20818       <div class="body">
20819         <p>I am happy to announce that today we managed to wrap up and publish
20820 the second beta version of
20821 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>.  If
20822 you want to test a LDAP backed Kerberos server with out of the box PXE
20823 configuration for running diskless machines and installing new
20824 machines, check it out.  If you need a software solution for your
20825 school, check it out too.  The full announcement is
20826 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/01/msg00000.html">available</a>
20827 on the project announcement list.</p>
20828
20829       </div>
20830       <div class="tags">
20831
20832
20833         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>.
20834
20835
20836       </div>
20837     </div>
20838     <div class="padding"></div>
20839
20840     <div class="entry">
20841       <div class="title">
20842         <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>
20843       </div>
20844       <div class="date">
20845          3rd January 2012
20846       </div>
20847       <div class="body">
20848         <p>During christmas, I have been working getting the next version of
20849 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> ready
20850 for release.  The initial problem I looked at was particularly
20851 interesting.</p>
20852
20853 <P>The installer would hang at the end when it was doing it
20854 post-installation configuration, and whatevery I did to try to find
20855 the cause and fix it always worked while I tested it, but never when I
20856 integrated it into the installer and ran the installation from
20857 scratch.  I would try to restart processes, close file descriptors,
20858 remove or create files, and the installer would always unblock and
20859 wrap up its tasks.</p>
20860
20861 <p>Eventually the cause was found.  The kernel was simply running out
20862 of entropy, causing the Kerberos setup to hang waiting for more.
20863 Pressing keys was adding entropy to the kernel, and thus all my tries
20864 to fix the problem worked not because what I was typing to fix it, but
20865 because I was typing.</P>
20866
20867 <p>The fix I implemented was to add a background process looking at
20868 the level of entropy in the kernel (by checking
20869 /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail), and if it was too small, the
20870 installer will flush the kernel file buffers and do 'find /' to
20871 generate some disk IO.  Disk IO generate entropy in the kernel, and is
20872 one of the few things that can be initated from within the system to
20873 generate entropy.</p>
20874
20875 <p>The fix is in
20876 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze/Installation">beta1
20877 of the Debian Edu/Squeeze</a> version, and we
20878 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu">welcome more testers and
20879 developers</a>.  We plan to release beta2 this weekend.</p>
20880
20881       </div>
20882       <div class="tags">
20883
20884
20885         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>.
20886
20887
20888       </div>
20889     </div>
20890     <div class="padding"></div>
20891
20892     <div class="entry">
20893       <div class="title">
20894         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatically_upgrading_server_firmware_on_Dell_PowerEdge.html">Automatically upgrading server firmware on Dell PowerEdge</a>
20895       </div>
20896       <div class="date">
20897         21st November 2011
20898       </div>
20899       <div class="body">
20900         <p>At work we have heaps of servers.  I believe the total count is
20901 around 1000 at the moment.  To be able to get help from the vendors
20902 when something go wrong, we want to keep the firmware on the servers
20903 up to date.  If the firmware isn't the latest and greatest, the
20904 vendors typically refuse to start debugging any problems until the
20905 firmware is upgraded.  So before every reboot, we want to upgrade the
20906 firmware, and we would really like everyone handling servers at the
20907 university to do this themselves when they plan to reboot a machine.
20908 For that to happen we at the unix server admin group need to provide
20909 the tools to do so.</p>
20910
20911 <p>To make firmware upgrading easier, I am working on a script to
20912 fetch and install the latest firmware for the servers we got.  Most of
20913 our hardware are from Dell and HP, so I have focused on these servers
20914 so far.  This blog post is about the Dell part.</P>
20915
20916 <p>On the Dell FTP site I was lucky enough to find
20917 <a href="ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz">an XML file</a>
20918 with firmware information for all 11th generation servers, listing
20919 which firmware should be used on a given model and where on the FTP
20920 site I can find it.  Using a simple perl XML parser I can then
20921 download the shell scripts Dell provides to do firmware upgrades from
20922 within Linux and reboot when all the firmware is primed and ready to
20923 be activated on the first reboot.</p>
20924
20925 <p>This is the Dell related fragment of the perl code I am working on.
20926 Are there anyone working on similar tools for firmware upgrading all
20927 servers at a site?  Please get in touch and lets share resources.</p>
20928
20929 <p><pre>
20930 #!/usr/bin/perl
20931 use strict;
20932 use warnings;
20933 use File::Temp qw(tempdir);
20934 BEGIN {
20935     # Install needed RHEL packages if missing
20936     my %rhelmodules = (
20937         'XML::Simple' => 'perl-XML-Simple',
20938         );
20939     for my $module (keys %rhelmodules) {
20940         eval "use $module;";
20941         if ($@) {
20942             my $pkg = $rhelmodules{$module};
20943             system("yum install -y $pkg");
20944             eval "use $module;";
20945         }
20946     }
20947 }
20948 my $errorsto = 'pere@hungry.com';
20949
20950 upgrade_dell();
20951
20952 exit 0;
20953
20954 sub run_firmware_script {
20955     my ($opts, $script) = @_;
20956     unless ($script) {
20957         print STDERR "fail: missing script name\n";
20958         exit 1
20959     }
20960     print STDERR "Running $script\n\n";
20961
20962     if (0 == system("sh $script $opts")) { # FIXME correct exit code handling
20963         print STDERR "success: firmware script ran succcessfully\n";
20964     } else {
20965         print STDERR "fail: firmware script returned error\n";
20966     }
20967 }
20968
20969 sub run_firmware_scripts {
20970     my ($opts, @dirs) = @_;
20971     # Run firmware packages
20972     for my $dir (@dirs) {
20973         print STDERR "info: Running scripts in $dir\n";
20974         opendir(my $dh, $dir) or die "Unable to open directory $dir: $!";
20975         while (my $s = readdir $dh) {
20976             next if $s =~ m/^\.\.?/;
20977             run_firmware_script($opts, "$dir/$s");
20978         }
20979         closedir $dh;
20980     }
20981 }
20982
20983 sub download {
20984     my $url = shift;
20985     print STDERR "info: Downloading $url\n";
20986     system("wget --quiet \"$url\"");
20987 }
20988
20989 sub upgrade_dell {
20990     my @dirs;
20991     my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
20992     chomp $product;
20993
20994     if ($product =~ m/PowerEdge/) {
20995
20996         # on RHEL, these pacakges are needed by the firwmare upgrade scripts
20997         system('yum install -y compat-libstdc++-33.i686 libstdc++.i686 libxml2.i686 procmail');
20998
20999         my $tmpdir = tempdir(
21000             CLEANUP => 1
21001             );
21002         chdir($tmpdir);
21003         fetch_dell_fw('catalog/Catalog.xml.gz');
21004         system('gunzip Catalog.xml.gz');
21005         my @paths = fetch_dell_fw_list('Catalog.xml');
21006         # -q is quiet, disabling interactivity and reducing console output
21007         my $fwopts = "-q";
21008         if (@paths) {
21009             for my $url (@paths) {
21010                 fetch_dell_fw($url);
21011             }
21012             run_firmware_scripts($fwopts, $tmpdir);
21013         } else {
21014             print STDERR "error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
21015             print STDERR "error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
21016         }
21017         chdir('/');
21018     } else {
21019         print STDERR "error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
21020         print STDERR "error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
21021     }
21022 }
21023
21024 sub fetch_dell_fw {
21025     my $path = shift;
21026     my $url = "ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/$path";
21027     download($url);
21028 }
21029
21030 # Using ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz, figure out which
21031 # firmware packages to download from Dell.  Only work for Linux
21032 # machines and 11th generation Dell servers.
21033 sub fetch_dell_fw_list {
21034     my $filename = shift;
21035
21036     my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
21037     chomp $product;
21038     my ($mybrand, $mymodel) = split(/\s+/, $product);
21039
21040     print STDERR "Finding firmware bundles for $mybrand $mymodel\n";
21041
21042     my $xml = XMLin($filename);
21043     my @paths;
21044     for my $bundle (@{$xml->{SoftwareBundle}}) {
21045         my $brand = $bundle->{TargetSystems}->{Brand}->{Display}->{content};
21046         my $model = $bundle->{TargetSystems}->{Brand}->{Model}->{Display}->{content};
21047         my $oscode;
21048         if ("ARRAY" eq ref $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}) {
21049             $oscode = $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}[0]->{osCode};
21050         } else {
21051             $oscode = $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}->{osCode};
21052         }
21053         if ($mybrand eq $brand && $mymodel eq $model && "LIN" eq $oscode)
21054         {
21055             @paths = map { $_->{path} } @{$bundle->{Contents}->{Package}};
21056         }
21057     }
21058     for my $component (@{$xml->{SoftwareComponent}}) {
21059         my $componenttype = $component->{ComponentType}->{value};
21060
21061         # Drop application packages, only firmware and BIOS
21062         next if 'APAC' eq $componenttype;
21063
21064         my $cpath = $component->{path};
21065         for my $path (@paths) {
21066             if ($cpath =~ m%/$path$%) {
21067                 push(@paths, $cpath);
21068             }
21069         }
21070     }
21071     return @paths;
21072 }
21073 </pre>
21074
21075 <p>The code is only tested on RedHat Enterprise Linux, but I suspect
21076 it could work on other platforms with some tweaking.  Anyone know a
21077 index like Catalog.xml is available from HP for HP servers?  At the
21078 moment I maintain a similar list manually and it is quickly getting
21079 outdated.</p>
21080
21081       </div>
21082       <div class="tags">
21083
21084
21085         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>.
21086
21087
21088       </div>
21089     </div>
21090     <div class="padding"></div>
21091
21092     <div class="entry">
21093       <div class="title">
21094         <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>
21095       </div>
21096       <div class="date">
21097          7th October 2011
21098       </div>
21099       <div class="body">
21100         <p>Here in Norway the public libraries are debating with the
21101 publishing houses how to handle electronic books.  Surprisingly, the
21102 libraries seem to be willing to accept digital restriction mechanisms
21103 (DRM) on books and renting e-books with artificial scarcity from the
21104 publishing houses.  Time limited renting (2-3 years) is one proposed
21105 model, and only allowing X borrowers for each book is another.
21106 Personally I find it amazing that libraries are even considering such
21107 models.</p>
21108
21109 <p>Anyway, while reading <a href="http://boklaben.no/?p=220">part of
21110 this debate</a>, it occurred to me that someone should present a more
21111 sensible approach to the libraries, to allow its borrowers to get used
21112 to a better model.  The idea is simple:</p>
21113
21114 <p>Create a computer system for the libraries, either in the form of a
21115 Live DVD or a installable distribution, that provide a simple kiosk
21116 solution to hand out free e-books.  As a start, the books distributed
21117 by <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/">Project Gutenberg</a> (about
21118 36,000 books), <a href="http://runeberg.org/">Project Runenberg</a>
21119 (1149 books) and <a href="http://www.archive.org/details/texts">The
21120 Internet Archive</a> (3,033,748 books) could be included, but any book
21121 where the copyright has expired or with a free licence could be
21122 distributed.</p>
21123
21124 <p>The computer system would make it easy to:</p>
21125
21126 <ul>
21127
21128 <li>Copy e-books into a USB stick, reading tablets, cell phones and
21129   other relevant equipment.</li>
21130
21131 <li>Show the books for reading on the the screen in the library.</li>
21132
21133 </ul>
21134
21135 <p>In addition to such kiosk solution, there should probably be a web
21136 site as well to allow people easy access to these books without
21137 visiting the library.  The site would be the distribution point for
21138 the kiosk systems, which would connect regularly to fetch any new
21139 books available.</p>
21140
21141 <p>Are there anyone working on a system like this?  I guess it would
21142 fit any library in the world, and not just the Norwegian public
21143 libraries. :)</p>
21144
21145       </div>
21146       <div class="tags">
21147
21148
21149         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>.
21150
21151
21152       </div>
21153     </div>
21154     <div class="padding"></div>
21155
21156     <div class="entry">
21157       <div class="title">
21158         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ripping_problematic_DVDs_using_dvdbackup_and_genisoimage.html">Ripping problematic DVDs using dvdbackup and genisoimage</a>
21159       </div>
21160       <div class="date">
21161         17th September 2011
21162       </div>
21163       <div class="body">
21164         <p>For convenience, I want to store copies of all my DVDs on my file
21165 server.  It allow me to save shelf space flat while still having my
21166 movie collection easily available.  It also make it possible to let
21167 the kids see their favourite DVDs without wearing the physical copies
21168 down.  I prefer to store the DVDs as ISOs to keep the DVD menu and
21169 subtitle options intact.  It also ensure that the entire film is one
21170 file on the disk.  As this is for personal use, the ripping is
21171 perfectly legal here in Norway.</p>
21172
21173 <p>Normally I rip the DVDs using dd like this:</p>
21174
21175 <blockquote><pre>
21176 #!/bin/sh
21177 # apt-get install lsdvd
21178 title=$(lsdvd 2>/dev/null|awk '/Disc Title: / {print $3}')
21179 dd if=/dev/dvd of=/storage/dvds/$title.iso bs=1M
21180 </pre></blockquote>
21181
21182 <p>But some DVDs give a input/output error when I read it, and I have
21183 been looking for a better alternative.  I have no idea why this I/O
21184 error occur, but suspect my DVD drive, the Linux kernel driver or
21185 something fishy with the DVDs in question.  Or perhaps all three.</p>
21186
21187 <p>Anyway, I believe I found a solution today using dvdbackup and
21188 genisoimage.  This script gave me a working ISO for a problematic
21189 movie by first extracting the DVD file system and then re-packing it
21190 back as an ISO.
21191
21192 <blockquote><pre>
21193 #!/bin/sh
21194 # apt-get install lsdvd dvdbackup genisoimage
21195 set -e
21196 tmpdir=/storage/dvds/
21197 title=$(lsdvd 2>/dev/null|awk '/Disc Title: / {print $3}')
21198 dvdbackup -i /dev/dvd -M -o $tmpdir -n$title
21199 genisoimage -dvd-video -o $tmpdir/$title.iso $tmpdir/$title
21200 rm -rf $tmpdir/$title
21201 </pre></blockquote>
21202
21203 <p>Anyone know of a better way available in Debian/Squeeze?</p>
21204
21205 <p>Update 2011-09-18: I got a tip from Konstantin Khomoutov about the
21206 readom program from the wodim package.  It is specially written to
21207 read optical media, and is called like this: <tt>readom dev=/dev/dvd
21208 f=image.iso</tt>.  It got 6 GB along with the problematic Cars DVD
21209 before it failed, and failed right away with a Timmy Time DVD.</p>
21210
21211 <p>Next, I got a tip from Bastian Blank about
21212 <a href="http://bblank.thinkmo.de/blog/new-software-python-dvdvideo">his
21213 program python-dvdvideo</a>, which seem to be just what I am looking
21214 for.  Tested it with my problematic Timmy Time DVD, and it succeeded
21215 creating a ISO image.  The git source built and installed just fine in
21216 Squeeze, so I guess this will be my tool of choice in the future.</p>
21217
21218       </div>
21219       <div class="tags">
21220
21221
21222         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>.
21223
21224
21225       </div>
21226     </div>
21227     <div class="padding"></div>
21228
21229     <div class="entry">
21230       <div class="title">
21231         <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>
21232       </div>
21233       <div class="date">
21234          4th August 2011
21235       </div>
21236       <div class="body">
21237         <p>Wouter Verhelst have some
21238 <a href="http://grep.be/blog/en/retorts/pere_kubuntu_boot">interesting
21239 comments and opinions</a> on my blog post on
21240 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_should_start_from__etc_rcS_d__in_Debian____almost_nothing.html">the
21241 need to clean up /etc/rcS.d/ in Debian</a> and my blog post about
21242 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_missing_in_the_Debian_desktop__or_why_my_parents_use_Kubuntu.html">the
21243 default KDE desktop in Debian</a>.  I only have time to address one
21244 small piece of his comment now, and though it best to address the
21245 misunderstanding he bring forward:</p>
21246
21247 <p><blockquote>
21248 Currently, a system admin has four options: [...] boot to a
21249 single-user system (by adding 'single' to the kernel command line;
21250 this runs rcS and rc1 scripts)
21251 </blockquote></p>
21252
21253 <p>This make me believe Wouter believe booting into single user mode
21254 and booting into runlevel 1 is the same.  I am not surprised he
21255 believe this, because it would make sense and is a quite sensible
21256 thing to believe.  But because the boot in Debian is slightly broken,
21257 runlevel 1 do not work properly and it isn't the same as single user
21258 mode.  I'll try to explain what is actually happing, but it is a bit
21259 hard to explain.</p>
21260
21261 <p>Single user mode is defined like this in /etc/inittab:
21262 "<tt>~~:S:wait:/sbin/sulogin</tt>".  This means the only thing that is
21263 executed in single user mode is sulogin.  Single user mode is a boot
21264 state "between" the runlevels, and when booting into single user mode,
21265 only the scripts in /etc/rcS.d/ are executed before the init process
21266 enters the single user state.  When switching to runlevel 1, the state
21267 is in fact not ending in runlevel 1, but it passes through runlevel 1
21268 and end up in the single user mode (see /etc/rc1.d/S03single, which
21269 runs "init -t1 S" to switch to single user mode at the end of runlevel
21270 1.  It is confusing that the 'S' (single user) init mode is not the
21271 mode enabled by /etc/rcS.d/ (which is more like the initial boot
21272 mode).</p>
21273
21274 <p>This summary might make it clearer.  When booting for the first
21275 time into single user mode, the following commands are executed:
21276 "<tt>/etc/init.d/rc S; /sbin/sulogin</tt>".  When booting into
21277 runlevel 1, the following commands are executed: "<tt>/etc/init.d/rc
21278 S; /etc/init.d/rc 1; /sbin/sulogin</tt>".  A problem show up when
21279 trying to continue after visiting single user mode.  Not all services
21280 are started again as they should, causing the machine to end up in an
21281 unpredicatble state.  This is why Debian admins recommend rebooting
21282 after visiting single user mode.</p>
21283
21284 <p>A similar problem with runlevel 1 is caused by the amount of
21285 scripts executed from /etc/rcS.d/.  When switching from say runlevel 2
21286 to runlevel 1, the services started from /etc/rcS.d/ are not properly
21287 stopped when passing through the scripts in /etc/rc1.d/, and not
21288 started again when switching away from runlevel 1 to the runlevels
21289 2-5.  I believe the problem is best fixed by moving all the scripts
21290 out of /etc/rcS.d/ that are not <strong>required</strong> to get a
21291 functioning single user mode during boot.</p>
21292
21293 <p>I have spent several years investigating the Debian boot system,
21294 and discovered this problem a few years ago.  I suspect it originates
21295 from when sysvinit was introduced into Debian, a long time ago.</p>
21296
21297       </div>
21298       <div class="tags">
21299
21300
21301         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>.
21302
21303
21304       </div>
21305     </div>
21306     <div class="padding"></div>
21307
21308     <div class="entry">
21309       <div class="title">
21310         <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>
21311       </div>
21312       <div class="date">
21313         30th July 2011
21314       </div>
21315       <div class="body">
21316         <p>In the Debian boot system, several packages include scripts that
21317 are started from /etc/rcS.d/.  In fact, there is a bite more of them
21318 than make sense, and this causes a few problems.  What kind of
21319 problems, you might ask.  There are at least two problems.  The first
21320 is that it is not possible to recover a machine after switching to
21321 runlevel 1.  One need to actually reboot to get the machine back to
21322 the expected state.  The other is that single user boot will sometimes
21323 run into problems because some of the subsystems are activated before
21324 the root login is presented, causing problems when trying to recover a
21325 machine from a problem in that subsystem.  A minor additional point is
21326 that moving more scripts out of rcS.d/ and into the other rc#.d/
21327 directories will increase the amount of scripts that can run in
21328 parallel during boot, and thus decrease the boot time.</p>
21329
21330 <p>So, which scripts should start from rcS.d/.  In short, only the
21331 scripts that _have_ to execute before the root login prompt is
21332 presented during a single user boot should go there.  Everything else
21333 should go into the numeric runlevels.  This means things like
21334 lm-sensors, fuse and x11-common should not run from rcS.d, but from
21335 the numeric runlevels.  Today in Debian, there are around 115 init.d
21336 scripts that are started from rcS.d/, and most of them should be moved
21337 out.  Do your package have one of them?  Please help us make single
21338 user and runlevel 1 better by moving it.</p>
21339
21340 <p>Scripts setting up the screen, keyboard, system partitions
21341 etc. should still be started from rcS.d/, but there is for example no
21342 need to have the network enabled before the single user login prompt
21343 is presented.</p>
21344
21345 <p>As always, things are not so easy to fix as they sound.  To keep
21346 Debian systems working while scripts migrate and during upgrades, the
21347 scripts need to be moved from rcS.d/ to rc2.d/ in reverse dependency
21348 order, ie the scripts that nothing in rcS.d/ depend on can be moved,
21349 and the next ones can only be moved when their dependencies have been
21350 moved first.  This migration must be done sequentially while we ensure
21351 that the package system upgrade packages in the right order to keep
21352 the system state correct.  This will require some coordination when it
21353 comes to network related packages, but most of the packages with
21354 scripts that should migrate do not have anything in rcS.d/ depending
21355 on them.  Some packages have already been updated, like the sudo
21356 package, while others are still left to do.  I wish I had time to work
21357 on this myself, but real live constrains make it unlikely that I will
21358 find time to push this forward.</p>
21359
21360       </div>
21361       <div class="tags">
21362
21363
21364         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>.
21365
21366
21367       </div>
21368     </div>
21369     <div class="padding"></div>
21370
21371     <div class="entry">
21372       <div class="title">
21373         <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>
21374       </div>
21375       <div class="date">
21376         29th July 2011
21377       </div>
21378       <div class="body">
21379         <p>While at Debconf11, I have several times during discussions
21380 mentioned the issues I believe should be improved in Debian for its
21381 desktop to be useful for more people.  The use case for this is my
21382 parents, which are currently running Kubuntu which solve the
21383 issues.</p>
21384
21385 <p>I suspect these four missing features are not very hard to
21386 implement.  After all, they are present in Ubuntu, so if we wanted to
21387 do this in Debian we would have a source.</p>
21388
21389 <ol>
21390
21391 <li><strong>Simple GUI based upgrade of packages.</strong> When there
21392 are new packages available for upgrades, a icon in the KDE status bar
21393 indicate this, and clicking on it will activate the simple upgrade
21394 tool to handle it.  I have no problem guiding both of my parents
21395 through the process over the phone.  If a kernel reboot is required,
21396 this too is indicated by the status bars and the upgrade tool.  Last
21397 time I checked, nothing with the same features was working in KDE in
21398 Debian.</li>
21399
21400 <li><strong>Simple handling of missing Firefox browser
21401 plugins.</strong> When the browser encounter a MIME type it do not
21402 currently have a handler for, it will ask the user if the system
21403 should search for a package that would add support for this MIME type,
21404 and if the user say yes, the APT sources will be searched for packages
21405 advertising the MIME type in their control file (visible in the
21406 Packages file in the APT archive).  If one or more packages are found,
21407 it is a simple click of the mouse to add support for the missing mime
21408 type.  If the package require the user to accept some non-free
21409 license, this is explained to the user.  The entire process make it
21410 more clear to the user why something do not work in the browser, and
21411 make the chances higher for the user to blame the web page authors and
21412 not the browser for any missing features.</li>
21413
21414 <li><strong>Simple handling of missing multimedia codec/format
21415 handlers.</strong> When the media players encounter a format or codec
21416 it is not supporting, a dialog pop up asking the user if the system
21417 should search for a package that would add support for it.  This
21418 happen with things like MP3, Windows Media or H.264.  The selection
21419 and installation procedure is very similar to the Firefox browser
21420 plugin handling.  This is as far as I know implemented using a
21421 gstreamer hook.  The end result is that the user easily get access to
21422 the codecs that are present from the APT archives available, while
21423 explaining more on why a given format is unsupported by Ubuntu.</li>
21424
21425 <li><strong>Better browser handling of some MIME types.</strong> When
21426 displaying a text/plain file in my Debian browser, it will propose to
21427 start emacs to show it.  If I remember correctly, when doing the same
21428 in Kunbutu it show the file as a text file in the browser.  At least I
21429 know Opera will show text files within the browser.  I much prefer the
21430 latter behaviour.</li>
21431
21432 </ol>
21433
21434 <p>There are other nice features as well, like the simplified suite
21435 upgrader, but given that I am the one mostly doing the dist-upgrade,
21436 it do not matter much.</p>
21437
21438 <p>I really hope we could get these features in place for the next
21439 Debian release.  It would require the coordinated effort of several
21440 maintainers, but would make the end user experience a lot better.</p>
21441
21442       </div>
21443       <div class="tags">
21444
21445
21446         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>.
21447
21448
21449       </div>
21450     </div>
21451     <div class="padding"></div>
21452
21453     <div class="entry">
21454       <div class="title">
21455         <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>
21456       </div>
21457       <div class="date">
21458         26th July 2011
21459       </div>
21460       <div class="body">
21461         <p>The Norwegian <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</A>
21462 site is build on Debian/Squeeze, and this platform was chosen because
21463 I am most familiar with Debian (being a Debian Developer for around 10
21464 years) because it is the latest stable Debian release which should get
21465 security support for a few years.</p>
21466
21467 <p>The web service is written in Perl, and depend on some perl modules
21468 that are missing in Debian at the moment.  It would be great if these
21469 modules were added to the Debian archive, allowing anyone to set up
21470 their own <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com">FixMyStreet</a> clone
21471 in their own country using only Debian packages.  The list of modules
21472 missing in Debian/Squeeze isn't very long, and I hope the perl group
21473 will find time to package the 12 modules Catalyst::Plugin::SmartURI,
21474 Catalyst::Plugin::Unicode::Encoding, Catalyst::View::TT, Devel::Hide,
21475 Sort::Key, Statistics::Distributions, Template::Plugin::Comma,
21476 Template::Plugin::DateTime::Format, Term::Size::Any, Term::Size::Perl,
21477 URI::SmartURI and Web::Scraper to make the maintenance of FixMyStreet
21478 easier in the future.</p>
21479
21480 <p>Thanks to the great tools in Debian, getting the missing modules
21481 installed on my server was a simple call to 'cpan2deb Module::Name'
21482 and 'dpkg -i' to install the resulting package.  But this leave me
21483 with the responsibility of tracking security problems, which I really
21484 do not have time for.</p>
21485
21486       </div>
21487       <div class="tags">
21488
21489
21490         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>.
21491
21492
21493       </div>
21494     </div>
21495     <div class="padding"></div>
21496
21497     <div class="entry">
21498       <div class="title">
21499         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Software_vs__proprietary_softare___.html">Free Software vs. proprietary softare...</a>
21500       </div>
21501       <div class="date">
21502         20th June 2011
21503       </div>
21504       <div class="body">
21505         <p>Reading
21506 <a href="http://blog.thingiverse.com/2011/06/20/open-source-vs-closed-source-eulas/">the
21507 thingiverse blog</a>, I came across two highlights of interesting
21508 parts of the
21509 <a href="http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Autodesk_EULA">Autodesk</a>
21510 and
21511 <a href="http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2011/06/things-you-cant-do-with-the-microsoft-kinect-sdk.html">Microsoft
21512 Kinect</a> End User License Agreements (EULAs), which illustrates
21513 quite well why I stay away from software with EULAs.  Whenever I take
21514 the time to read their content, the terms are simply unacceptable.</p>
21515
21516       </div>
21517       <div class="tags">
21518
21519
21520         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>.
21521
21522
21523       </div>
21524     </div>
21525     <div class="padding"></div>
21526
21527     <div class="entry">
21528       <div class="title">
21529         <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>
21530       </div>
21531       <div class="date">
21532         30th April 2011
21533       </div>
21534       <div class="body">
21535         <p>Today, the first draft implementation of an
21536 <a href="http://www.open311.org/">Open311 API</a> for the Norwegian
21537 service <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a> started to
21538 work.  It is only available on the developer server for now, and I
21539 have not tested it using any existing Open311 client (I lack the
21540 platforms needed to run the clients I have found so far), but it is
21541 able to query the database and extract a list of open and closed
21542 requests within a given category and reported to a given municipality.
21543 I believe that is a good start to create a useful service for those
21544 that want to do data mining on the requests submitted so far.</p>
21545
21546 <p>Where is it?  Visit
21547 <a href="http://fiksgatami-dev.nuug.no/open311.cgi/v2/">http://fiksgatami-dev.nuug.no/open311.cgi/v2/</a>
21548 to have a look.  Please send feedback to the
21549 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/fiksgatami">fiksgatami
21550 (at) nuug.no</a> mailing list.</p>
21551
21552       </div>
21553       <div class="tags">
21554
21555
21556         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>.
21557
21558
21559       </div>
21560     </div>
21561     <div class="padding"></div>
21562
21563     <div class="entry">
21564       <div class="title">
21565         <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>
21566       </div>
21567       <div class="date">
21568         29th April 2011
21569       </div>
21570       <div class="body">
21571         <p>The last few days I have spent some time trying to add support for
21572 the <a href="http://www.open311.org/">Open311 API</a> in the
21573 <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">Norwegian FixMyStreet service</a>.
21574 Earlier I believed Open311 would be a useful API to use to submit
21575 reports to the municipalities, but when I noticed that the
21576 <a href="http://fixmystreet.org.nz/">New Zealand version</a> of
21577 FixMyStreet had implemented Open311 on the server side, it occurred to
21578 me that this was a nice way to allow the public, press and
21579 municipalities to do data mining directly in the FixMyStreet service.
21580 Thus I went to work implementing the Open311 specification for
21581 FixMyStreet.  The implementation is not yet ready, but I am starting
21582 to get a draft limping along.  In the process, I have discovered a few
21583 issues with the Open311 specification.</p>
21584
21585 <p>One obvious missing feature is the lack of natural language
21586 handling in the specification.  The specification seem to assume all
21587 reports will be written in English, and do not provide a way for the
21588 receiving end to specify which languages are understood there.  To be
21589 able to use the same client and submit to several Open311 receivers,
21590 it would be useful to know which language to use when writing reports.
21591 I believe the specification should be extended to allow the receivers
21592 of problem reports to specify which language they accept, and the
21593 submitter to specify which language the report is written in.
21594 Language of a text can also be automatically guessed using statistical
21595 methods, but for multi-lingual persons like myself, it is useful to
21596 know which language to use when writing a problem report.  I suspect
21597 some lang=nb,nn kind of attribute would solve it.</p>
21598
21599 <p>A key part of the Open311 API is the list of services provided,
21600 which is similar to the categories used by FixMyStreet.  One issue I
21601 run into is the need to specify both name and unique identifier for
21602 each category.  The specification do not state that the identifier
21603 should be numeric, but all example implementations have used numbers
21604 here.  In FixMyStreet, there is no number associated with each
21605 category.  As the specification do not forbid it, I will use the name
21606 as the unique identifier for now and see how open311 clients handle
21607 it.</p>
21608
21609 <p>The report format in open311 and the report format in FixMyStreet
21610 differ in a key part.  FixMyStreet have a title and a description,
21611 while Open311 only have a description and lack the title.  I'm not
21612 quite sure how to best handle this yet.  When asking for a FixMyStreet
21613 report in Open311 format, I just merge title an description into the
21614 open311 description, but this is not going to work if the open311 API
21615 should be used for submitting new reports to FixMyStreet.</p>
21616
21617 <p>The search feature in Open311 is missing a way to ask for problems
21618 near a geographic location.  I believe this is important if one is to
21619 use Open311 as the query language for mobile units.  The specification
21620 should be extended to handle this, probably using some new lat=, lon=
21621 and range= options.</p>
21622
21623 <p>The final challenge I see is that the FixMyStreet code handle
21624 several administrations in one interface, while the Open311 API seem
21625 to assume only one administration.  For FixMyStreet, this mean a
21626 report can be sent to several administrations, and the categories
21627 available depend on the location of the problem.  Not quite sure how
21628 to best handle this.  I've noticed
21629 <a href="http://seeclickfix.com/open311/">SeeClickFix</a> added
21630 latitude and longitude options to the services request, but it do not
21631 solve the problem of what to return when no location is specified.
21632 Will have to investigate this a bit more.</p>
21633
21634 <p>My distaste for web forums have kept me from bringing these issues
21635 up with the open311 developer group.  I really wish they had a email
21636 list available via <a href="http://www.gmane.org/">Gmane</a> to use for
21637 discussions instead of only
21638 <a href="http://lists.open311.org/groups/discuss">a forum<a/>.  Oh,
21639 well.  That will probably resolve itself, one way or another.  I've
21640 also tried visiting the IRC channel #open311 on FreeNode, but no-one
21641 seem to reply to my questions there.  This make me wonder if I just
21642 fail to understand how the open311 community work.  It sure do not
21643 work like the free software project communities I am used to.</p>
21644
21645       </div>
21646       <div class="tags">
21647
21648
21649         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>.
21650
21651
21652       </div>
21653     </div>
21654     <div class="padding"></div>
21655
21656     <div class="entry">
21657       <div class="title">
21658         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_enteres_Google_Summer_of_Code_2011.html">Gnash enteres Google Summer of Code 2011</a>
21659       </div>
21660       <div class="date">
21661          6th April 2011
21662       </div>
21663       <div class="body">
21664         <p><a href="http://www.getgnash.org/">The Gnash project</a> is still
21665 the most promising solution for a Free Software Flash implementation.
21666 A few days ago the project
21667 <a href="http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnash-dev/2011-04/msg00011.html">announced</a>
21668 that it will participate in Google Summer of Code.  I hope many
21669 students apply, and that some of them succeed in getting AVM2 support
21670 into Gnash.</p>
21671
21672       </div>
21673       <div class="tags">
21674
21675
21676         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>.
21677
21678
21679       </div>
21680     </div>
21681     <div class="padding"></div>
21682
21683     <div class="entry">
21684       <div class="title">
21685         <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>
21686       </div>
21687       <div class="date">
21688          3rd April 2011
21689       </div>
21690       <div class="body">
21691         <p>Here is a small update for my English readers.  Most of my blog
21692 posts have been in Norwegian the last few weeks, so here is a short
21693 update in English.</p>
21694
21695 <p>The kids still keep me too busy to get much free software work
21696 done, but I did manage to organise a project to get a Norwegian port
21697 of the British service
21698 <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com/">FixMyStreet</a> up and running,
21699 and it has been running for a month now.  The entire project has been
21700 organised by me and two others.  Around Christmas we gathered sponsors
21701 to fund the development work.  In January I drafted a contract with
21702 <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a> on what to develop,
21703 and in February the development took place.  Most of it involved
21704 converting the source to use GPS coordinates instead of British
21705 easting/northing, and the resulting code should be a lot easier to get
21706 running in any country by now.  The Norwegian
21707 <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a> is using
21708 <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/">OpenStreetmap</a> as the map
21709 source and the source for administrative borders in Norway, and
21710 support for this had to be added/fixed.</p>
21711
21712 <p>The Norwegian version went live March 3th, and we spent the weekend
21713 polishing the system before we announced it March 7th.  The system is
21714 running on a KVM instance of Debian/Squeeze, and has seen almost 3000
21715 problem reports in a few weeks.  Soon we hope to announce the Android
21716 and iPhone versions making it even easier to report problems with the
21717 public infrastructure.</p>
21718
21719 <p>Perhaps something to consider for those of you in countries without
21720 such service?</p>
21721
21722       </div>
21723       <div class="tags">
21724
21725
21726         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>.
21727
21728
21729       </div>
21730     </div>
21731     <div class="padding"></div>
21732
21733     <div class="entry">
21734       <div class="title">
21735         <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>
21736       </div>
21737       <div class="date">
21738         28th January 2011
21739       </div>
21740       <div class="body">
21741         <p>The last few days I have looked at ways to track open security
21742 issues here at my work with the University of Oslo.  My idea is that
21743 it should be possible to use the information about security issues
21744 available on the Internet, and check our locally
21745 maintained/distributed software against this information.  It should
21746 allow us to verify that no known security issues are forgotten.  The
21747 CVE database listing vulnerabilities seem like a great central point,
21748 and by using the package lists from Debian mapped to CVEs provided by
21749 the testing security team, I believed it should be possible to figure
21750 out which security holes were present in our free software
21751 collection.</p>
21752
21753 <p>After reading up on the topic, it became obvious that the first
21754 building block is to be able to name software packages in a unique and
21755 consistent way across data sources.  I considered several ways to do
21756 this, for example coming up with my own naming scheme like using URLs
21757 to project home pages or URLs to the Freshmeat entries, or using some
21758 existing naming scheme.  And it seem like I am not the first one to
21759 come across this problem, as MITRE already proposed and implemented a
21760 solution.  Enter the <a href="http://cpe.mitre.org/index.html">Common
21761 Platform Enumeration</a> dictionary, a vocabulary for referring to
21762 software, hardware and other platform components.  The CPE ids are
21763 mapped to CVEs in the <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/">National
21764 Vulnerability Database</a>, allowing me to look up know security
21765 issues for any CPE name.  With this in place, all I need to do is to
21766 locate the CPE id for the software packages we use at the university.
21767 This is fairly trivial (I google for 'cve cpe $package' and check the
21768 NVD entry if a CVE for the package exist).</p>
21769
21770 <p>To give you an example.  The GNU gzip source package have the CPE
21771 name cpe:/a:gnu:gzip.  If the old version 1.3.3 was the package to
21772 check out, one could look up
21773 <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
21774 in NVD</a> and get a list of 6 security holes with public CVE entries.
21775 The most recent one is
21776 <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2010-0001">CVE-2010-0001</a>,
21777 and at the bottom of the NVD page for this vulnerability the complete
21778 list of affected versions is provided.</p>
21779
21780 <p>The NVD database of CVEs is also available as a XML dump, allowing
21781 for offline processing of issues.  Using this dump, I've written a
21782 small script taking a list of CPEs as input and list all CVEs
21783 affecting the packages represented by these CPEs.  One give it CPEs
21784 with version numbers as specified above and get a list of open
21785 security issues out.</p>
21786
21787 <p>Of course for this approach to be useful, the quality of the NVD
21788 information need to be high.  For that to happen, I believe as many as
21789 possible need to use and contribute to the NVD database.  I notice
21790 RHEL is providing
21791 <a href="https://www.redhat.com/security/data/metrics/rhsamapcpe.txt">a
21792 map from CVE to CPE</a>, indicating that they are using the CPE
21793 information.  I'm not aware of Debian and Ubuntu doing the same.</p>
21794
21795 <p>To get an idea about the quality for free software, I spent some
21796 time making it possible to compare the CVE database from Debian with
21797 the CVE database in NVD.  The result look fairly good, but there are
21798 some inconsistencies in NVD (same software package having several
21799 CPEs), and some inaccuracies (NVD not mentioning buggy packages that
21800 Debian believe are affected by a CVE).  Hope to find time to improve
21801 the quality of NVD, but that require being able to get in touch with
21802 someone maintaining it.  So far my three emails with questions and
21803 corrections have not seen any reply, but I hope contact can be
21804 established soon.</p>
21805
21806 <p>An interesting application for CPEs is cross platform package
21807 mapping.  It would be useful to know which packages in for example
21808 RHEL, OpenSuSe and Mandriva are missing from Debian and Ubuntu, and
21809 this would be trivial if all linux distributions provided CPE entries
21810 for their packages.</p>
21811
21812       </div>
21813       <div class="tags">
21814
21815
21816         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>.
21817
21818
21819       </div>
21820     </div>
21821     <div class="padding"></div>
21822
21823     <div class="entry">
21824       <div class="title">
21825         <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>
21826       </div>
21827       <div class="date">
21828         23rd January 2011
21829       </div>
21830       <div class="body">
21831         <p>In the
21832 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/discover-data">discover-data</a>
21833 package in Debian, there is a script to report useful information
21834 about the running hardware for use when people report missing
21835 information.  One part of this script that I find very useful when
21836 debugging hardware problems, is the part mapping loaded kernel module
21837 to the PCI device it claims.  It allow me to quickly see if the kernel
21838 module I expect is driving the hardware I am struggling with.  To see
21839 the output, make sure discover-data is installed and run
21840 <tt>/usr/share/bug/discover-data 3>&1</tt>.  The relevant output on
21841 one of my machines like this:</p>
21842
21843 <pre>
21844 loaded modules:
21845 10de:03eb i2c_nforce2
21846 10de:03f1 ohci_hcd
21847 10de:03f2 ehci_hcd
21848 10de:03f0 snd_hda_intel
21849 10de:03ec pata_amd
21850 10de:03f6 sata_nv
21851 1022:1103 k8temp
21852 109e:036e bttv
21853 109e:0878 snd_bt87x
21854 11ab:4364 sky2
21855 </pre>
21856
21857 <p>The code in question look like this, slightly modified for
21858 readability and to drop the output to file descriptor 3:</p>
21859
21860 <pre>
21861 if [ -d /sys/bus/pci/devices/ ] ; then
21862     echo loaded pci modules:
21863     (
21864         cd /sys/bus/pci/devices/
21865         for address in * ; do
21866             if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
21867                 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
21868                 if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
21869                     address=$(echo $address |sed s/0000://)
21870                     id=`lspci -n -s $address | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $3}'`
21871                     echo "$id $module"
21872                 fi
21873             fi
21874         done
21875     )
21876     echo
21877 fi
21878 </pre>
21879
21880 <p>Similar code could be used to extract USB device module
21881 mappings:</p>
21882
21883 <pre>
21884 if [ -d /sys/bus/usb/devices/ ] ; then
21885     echo loaded usb modules:
21886     (
21887         cd /sys/bus/usb/devices/
21888         for address in * ; do
21889             if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
21890                 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
21891                 if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
21892                     address=$(echo $address |sed s/0000://)
21893                     id=$(lsusb -s $address | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $6}')
21894                     if [ "$id" ] ; then
21895                         echo "$id $module"
21896                     fi
21897                 fi
21898             fi
21899         done
21900     )
21901     echo
21902 fi
21903 </pre>
21904
21905 <p>This might perhaps be something to include in other tools as
21906 well.</p>
21907
21908       </div>
21909       <div class="tags">
21910
21911
21912         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>.
21913
21914
21915       </div>
21916     </div>
21917     <div class="padding"></div>
21918
21919     <div class="entry">
21920       <div class="title">
21921         <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>
21922       </div>
21923       <div class="date">
21924         16th January 2011
21925       </div>
21926       <div class="body">
21927         <p>The video format struggle on the web continues, and the three
21928 contenders seem to be Ogg Theora, H.264 and WebM.  Most video sites
21929 seem to use H.264, while others use Ogg Theora.  Interestingly enough,
21930 the comments I see give me the feeling that a lot of people believe
21931 H.264 is the most supported video format in browsers, but according to
21932 the Wikipedia article on
21933 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video">HTML5 video</a>,
21934 this is not true.  Check out the nice table of supprted formats in
21935 different browsers there.  The format supported by most browsers is
21936 Ogg Theora, supported by released versions of Mozilla Firefox, Google
21937 Chrome, Chromium, Opera, Konqueror, Epiphany, Origyn Web Browser and
21938 BOLT browser, while not supported by Internet Explorer nor Safari.
21939 The runner up is WebM supported by released versions of Google Chrome
21940 Chromium Opera and Origyn Web Browser, and test versions of Mozilla
21941 Firefox.  H.264 is supported by released versions of Safari, Origyn
21942 Web Browser and BOLT browser, and the test version of Internet
21943 Explorer.  Those wanting Ogg Theora support in Internet Explorer and
21944 Safari can install plugins to get it.</p>
21945
21946 <p>To me, the simple conclusion from this is that to reach most users
21947 without any extra software installed, one uses Ogg Theora with the
21948 HTML5 video tag.   Of course to reach all those without a browser
21949 handling HTML5, one need fallback mechanisms.  In
21950 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG</a>, we provide first fallback to a
21951 plugin capable of playing MPEG1 video, and those without such support
21952 we have a second fallback to the Cortado java applet playing Ogg
21953 Theora.  This seem to work quite well, as can be seen in an <a
21954 href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20110111-semantic-web/">example
21955 from last week</a>.</p>
21956
21957 <p>The reason Ogg Theora is the most supported format, and H.264 is
21958 the least supported is simple.  Implementing and using H.264
21959 require royalty payment to MPEG-LA, and the terms of use from MPEG-LA
21960 are incompatible with free software licensing.  If you believed H.264
21961 was without royalties and license terms, check out
21962 "<a href="http://webmink.com/essays/h-264/">H.264 – Not The Kind Of
21963 Free That Matters</a>" by Simon Phipps.</p>
21964
21965 <p>A incomplete list of sites providing video in Ogg Theora is
21966 available from
21967 <a href="http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/List_of_Theora_videos">the
21968 Xiph.org wiki</a>, if you want to have a look.  I'm not aware of a
21969 similar list for WebM nor H.264.</p>
21970
21971 <p>Update 2011-01-16 09:40: A question from Tollef on IRC made me
21972 realise that I failed to make it clear enough this text is about the
21973 &lt;video&gt; tag support in browsers and not the video support
21974 provided by external plugins like the Flash plugins.</p>
21975
21976       </div>
21977       <div class="tags">
21978
21979
21980         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>.
21981
21982
21983       </div>
21984     </div>
21985     <div class="padding"></div>
21986
21987     <div class="entry">
21988       <div class="title">
21989         <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>
21990       </div>
21991       <div class="date">
21992         12th January 2011
21993       </div>
21994       <div class="body">
21995         <p>Today I discovered
21996 <a href="http://www.digi.no/860070/google-dropper-h264-stotten-i-chrome">via
21997 digi.no</a> that the Chrome developers, in a surprising announcement,
21998 <a href="http://blog.chromium.org/2011/01/html-video-codec-support-in-chrome.html">yesterday
21999 announced</a> plans to drop H.264 support for HTML5 &lt;video&gt; in
22000 the browser.  The argument used is that H.264 is not a "completely
22001 open" codec technology.  If you believe H.264 was free for everyone
22002 to use, I recommend having a look at the essay
22003 "<a href="http://webmink.com/essays/h-264/">H.264 – Not The Kind Of
22004 Free That Matters</a>".  It is not free of cost for creators of video
22005 tools, nor those of us that want to publish on the Internet, and the
22006 terms provided by MPEG-LA excludes free software projects from
22007 licensing the patents needed for H.264.  Some background information
22008 on the Google announcement is available from
22009 <a href="http://www.osnews.com/story/24243/Google_To_Drop_H264_Support_from_Chrome">OSnews</a>.
22010 A good read. :)</p>
22011
22012 <p>Personally, I believe it is great that Google is taking a stand to
22013 promote equal terms for everyone when it comes to video publishing on
22014 the Internet.  This can only be done by publishing using free and open
22015 standards, which is only possible if the web browsers provide support
22016 for these free and open standards.  At the moment there seem to be two
22017 camps in the web browser world when it come to video support.  Some
22018 browsers support H.264, and others support
22019 <a href="http://www.theora.org/">Ogg Theora</a> and
22020 <a href="http://www.webmproject.org/">WebM</a>
22021 (<a href="http://www.diracvideo.org/">Dirac</a> is not really an option
22022 yet), forcing those of us that want to publish video on the Internet
22023 and which can not accept the terms of use presented by MPEG-LA for
22024 H.264 to not reach all potential viewers.
22025 Wikipedia keep <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video">an
22026 updated summary</a> of the current browser support.</p>
22027
22028 <p>Not surprising, several people would prefer Google to keep
22029 promoting H.264, and John Gruber
22030 <a href="http://daringfireball.net/2011/01/simple_questions">presents
22031 the mind set</a> of these people quite well.  His rhetorical questions
22032 provoked a reply from Thom Holwerda with another set of questions
22033 <a href="http://www.osnews.com/story/24245/10_Questions_for_John_Gruber_Regarding_H_264_WebM">presenting
22034 the issues with H.264</a>. Both are worth a read.</p>
22035
22036 <p>Some argue that if Google is dropping H.264 because it isn't free,
22037 they should also drop support for the Adobe Flash plugin.  This
22038 argument was covered by Simon Phipps in
22039 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2011/01/google-and-h264---far-from-hypocritical/index.htm">todays
22040 blog post</a>, which I find to put the issue in context.  To me it
22041 make perfect sense to drop native H.264 support for HTML5 in the
22042 browser while still allowing plugins.</p>
22043
22044 <p>I suspect the reason this announcement make so many people protest,
22045 is that all the users and promoters of H.264 suddenly get an uneasy
22046 feeling that they might be backing the wrong horse.  A lot of TV
22047 broadcasters have been moving to H.264 the last few years, and a lot
22048 of money has been invested in hardware based on the belief that they
22049 could use the same video format for both broadcasting and web
22050 publishing.  Suddenly this belief is shaken.</p>
22051
22052 <p>An interesting question is why Google is doing this.  While the
22053 presented argument might be true enough, I believe Google would only
22054 present the argument if the change make sense from a business
22055 perspective.  One reason might be that they are currently negotiating
22056 with MPEG-LA over royalties or usage terms, and giving MPEG-LA the
22057 feeling that dropping H.264 completely from Chroome, Youtube and
22058 Google Video would improve the negotiation position of Google.
22059 Another reason might be that Google want to save money by not having
22060 to pay the video tax to MPEG-LA at all, and thus want to move to a
22061 video format not requiring royalties at all.  A third reason might be
22062 that the Chrome development team simply want to avoid the
22063 Chrome/Chromium split to get more help with the development of Chrome.
22064 I guess time will tell.</p>
22065
22066 <p>Update 2011-01-15: The Google Chrome team provided
22067 <a href="http://blog.chromium.org/2011/01/more-about-chrome-html-video-codec.html">more
22068 background and information on the move</a> it a blog post yesterday.</p>
22069
22070       </div>
22071       <div class="tags">
22072
22073
22074         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>.
22075
22076
22077       </div>
22078     </div>
22079     <div class="padding"></div>
22080
22081     <div class="entry">
22082       <div class="title">
22083         <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>
22084       </div>
22085       <div class="date">
22086         30th December 2010
22087       </div>
22088       <div class="body">
22089         <p>After trying to
22090 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_Ogg_Theora_a_free_and_open_standard_.html">compare
22091 Ogg Theora</a> to
22092 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">the Digistan
22093 definition</a> of a free and open standard, I concluded that this need
22094 to be done for more standards and started on a framework for doing
22095 this.  As a start, I want to get the status for all the standards in
22096 the Norwegian reference directory, which include UTF-8, HTML, PDF, ODF,
22097 JPEG, PNG, SVG and others.  But to be able to complete this in a
22098 reasonable time frame, I will need help.</p>
22099
22100 <p>If you want to help out with this work, please visit
22101 <a href="http://wiki.nuug.no/grupper/standard/digistan-analyse">the
22102 wiki pages I have set up for this</a>, and let me know that you want
22103 to help out.  The IRC channel #nuug on irc.freenode.net is a good
22104 place to coordinate this for now, as it is the IRC channel for the
22105 NUUG association where I have created the framework (I am the leader
22106 of the Norwegian Unix User Group).</p>
22107
22108 <p>The framework is still forming, and a lot is left to do.  Do not be
22109 scared by the sketchy form of the current pages. :)</p>
22110
22111       </div>
22112       <div class="tags">
22113
22114
22115         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>.
22116
22117
22118       </div>
22119     </div>
22120     <div class="padding"></div>
22121
22122     <div class="entry">
22123       <div class="title">
22124         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_many_definitions_of_a_open_standard.html">The many definitions of a open standard</a>
22125       </div>
22126       <div class="date">
22127         27th December 2010
22128       </div>
22129       <div class="body">
22130         <p>One of the reasons I like the Digistan definition of
22131 "<a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">Free and
22132 Open Standard</a>" is that this is a new term, and thus the meaning of
22133 the term has been decided by Digistan.  The term "Open Standard" has
22134 become so misunderstood that it is no longer very useful when talking
22135 about standards.  One end up discussing which definition is the best
22136 one and with such frame the only one gaining are the proponents of
22137 de-facto standards and proprietary solutions.</p>
22138
22139 <p>But to give us an idea about the diversity of definitions of open
22140 standards, here are a few that I know about.  This list is not
22141 complete, but can be a starting point for those that want to do a
22142 complete survey.  More definitions are available on the
22143 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard">wikipedia
22144 page</a>.</p>
22145
22146 <p>First off is my favourite, the definition from the European
22147 Interoperability Framework version 1.0.  Really sad to notice that BSA
22148 and others has succeeded in getting it removed from version 2.0 of the
22149 framework by stacking the committee drafting the new version with
22150 their own people.  Anyway, the definition is still available and it
22151 include the key properties needed to make sure everyone can use a
22152 specification on equal terms.</p>
22153
22154 <blockquote>
22155
22156 <p>The following are the minimal characteristics that a specification
22157 and its attendant documents must have in order to be considered an
22158 open standard:</p>
22159
22160 <ul>
22161
22162 <li>The standard is adopted and will be maintained by a not-for-profit
22163 organisation, and its ongoing development occurs on the basis of an
22164 open decision-making procedure available to all interested parties
22165 (consensus or majority decision etc.).</li>
22166
22167 <li>The standard has been published and the standard specification
22168 document is available either freely or at a nominal charge. It must be
22169 permissible to all to copy, distribute and use it for no fee or at a
22170 nominal fee.</li>
22171
22172 <li>The intellectual property - i.e. patents possibly present - of
22173 (parts of) the standard is made irrevocably available on a royalty-
22174 free basis.</li>
22175
22176 <li>There are no constraints on the re-use of the standard.</li>
22177
22178 </ul>
22179 </blockquote>
22180
22181 <p>Another one originates from my friends over at
22182 <a href="http://www.dkuug.dk/">DKUUG</a>, who coined and gathered
22183 support for <a href="http://www.aaben-standard.dk/">this
22184 definition</a> in 2004.  It even made it into the Danish parlament as
22185 <a href="http://www.ft.dk/dokumenter/tingdok.aspx?/samling/20051/beslutningsforslag/B103/som_fremsat.htm">their
22186 definition of a open standard</a>.  Another from a different part of
22187 the Danish government is available from the wikipedia page.</p>
22188
22189 <blockquote>
22190
22191 <p>En åben standard opfylder følgende krav:</p>
22192
22193 <ol>
22194
22195 <li>Veldokumenteret med den fuldstændige specifikation offentligt
22196 tilgængelig.</li>
22197
22198 <li>Frit implementerbar uden økonomiske, politiske eller juridiske
22199 begrænsninger på implementation og anvendelse.</li>
22200
22201 <li>Standardiseret og vedligeholdt i et åbent forum (en såkaldt
22202 "standardiseringsorganisation") via en åben proces.</li>
22203
22204 </ol>
22205
22206 </blockquote>
22207
22208 <p>Then there is <a href="http://www.fsfe.org/projects/os/def.html">the
22209 definition</a> from Free Software Foundation Europe.</p>
22210
22211 <blockquote>
22212
22213 <p>An Open Standard refers to a format or protocol that is</p>
22214
22215 <ol>
22216
22217 <li>subject to full public assessment and use without constraints in a
22218 manner equally available to all parties;</li>
22219
22220 <li>without any components or extensions that have dependencies on
22221 formats or protocols that do not meet the definition of an Open
22222 Standard themselves;</li>
22223
22224 <li>free from legal or technical clauses that limit its utilisation by
22225 any party or in any business model;</li>
22226
22227 <li>managed and further developed independently of any single vendor
22228 in a process open to the equal participation of competitors and third
22229 parties;</li>
22230
22231 <li>available in multiple complete implementations by competing
22232 vendors, or as a complete implementation equally available to all
22233 parties.</li>
22234
22235 </ol>
22236
22237 </blockquote>
22238
22239 <p>A long time ago, SUN Microsystems, now bought by Oracle, created
22240 its
22241 <a href="http://blogs.sun.com/dennisding/resource/Open%20Standard%20Definition.pdf">Open
22242 Standards Checklist</a> with a fairly detailed description.</p>
22243
22244 <blockquote>
22245 <p>Creation and Management of an Open Standard
22246
22247 <ul>
22248
22249 <li>Its development and management process must be collaborative and
22250   democratic:
22251
22252          <ul>
22253
22254          <li>Participation must be accessible to all those who wish to
22255             participate and can meet fair and reasonable criteria
22256             imposed by the organization under which it is developed
22257             and managed.</li>
22258
22259          <li>The processes must be documented and, through a known
22260             method, can be changed through input from all
22261             participants.</li>
22262
22263          <li>The process must be based on formal and binding commitments for
22264             the disclosure and licensing of intellectual property rights.</li>
22265
22266          <li>Development and management should strive for consensus,
22267             and an appeals process must be clearly outlined.</li>
22268
22269          <li>The standard specification must be open to extensive
22270             public review at least once in its life-cycle, with
22271             comments duly discussed and acted upon, if required.</li>
22272
22273          </ul>
22274
22275 </li>
22276
22277 </ul>
22278
22279 <p>Use and Licensing of an Open Standard</p>
22280 <ul>
22281
22282 <li>The standard must describe an interface, not an implementation,
22283   and the industry must be capable of creating multiple, competing
22284   implementations to the interface described in the standard without
22285   undue or restrictive constraints.  Interfaces include APIs,
22286   protocols, schemas, data formats and their encoding.</li>
22287
22288 <li> The standard must not contain any proprietary "hooks" that create
22289   a technical or economic barriers</li>
22290
22291 <li>Faithful implementations of the standard must
22292   interoperate. Interoperability means the ability of a computer
22293   program to communicate and exchange information with other computer
22294   programs and mutually to use the information which has been
22295   exchanged. This includes the ability to use, convert, or exchange
22296   file formats, protocols, schemas, interface information or
22297   conventions, so as to permit the computer program to work with other
22298   computer programs and users in all the ways in which they are
22299   intended to function.</li>
22300
22301 <li>It must be permissible for anyone to copy, distribute and read the
22302   standard for a nominal fee, or even no fee. If there is a fee, it
22303   must be low enough to not preclude widespread use.</li>
22304
22305 <li>It must be possible for anyone to obtain free (no royalties or
22306   fees; also known as "royalty free"), worldwide, non-exclusive and
22307   perpetual licenses to all essential patent claims to make, use and
22308   sell products based on the standard.  The only exceptions are
22309   terminations per the reciprocity and defensive suspension terms
22310   outlined below. Essential patent claims include pending, unpublished
22311   patents, published patents, and patent applications. The license is
22312   only for the exact scope of the standard in question.
22313
22314       <ul>
22315
22316       <li> May be conditioned only on reciprocal licenses to any of
22317         licensees' patent claims essential to practice that standard
22318         (also known as a reciprocity clause)</li>
22319
22320       <li> May be terminated as to any licensee who sues the licensor
22321         or any other licensee for infringement of patent claims
22322         essential to practice that standard (also known as a
22323         "defensive suspension" clause)</li>
22324
22325       <li> The same licensing terms are available to every potential
22326         licensor</li>
22327
22328       </ul>
22329 </li>
22330
22331 <li>The licensing terms of an open standards must not preclude
22332   implementations of that standard under open source licensing terms
22333   or restricted licensing terms</li>
22334
22335 </ul>
22336
22337 </blockquote>
22338
22339 <p>It is said that one of the nice things about standards is that
22340 there are so many of them.  As you can see, the same holds true for
22341 open standard definitions.  Most of the definitions have a lot in
22342 common, and it is not really controversial what properties a open
22343 standard should have, but the diversity of definitions have made it
22344 possible for those that want to avoid a level marked field and real
22345 competition to downplay the significance of open standards.  I hope we
22346 can turn this tide by focusing on the advantages of Free and Open
22347 Standards.</p>
22348
22349       </div>
22350       <div class="tags">
22351
22352
22353         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>.
22354
22355
22356       </div>
22357     </div>
22358     <div class="padding"></div>
22359
22360     <div class="entry">
22361       <div class="title">
22362         <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>
22363       </div>
22364       <div class="date">
22365         25th December 2010
22366       </div>
22367       <div class="body">
22368         <p><a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">The
22369 Digistan definition</a> of a free and open standard reads like this:</p>
22370
22371 <blockquote>
22372
22373 <p>The Digital Standards Organization defines free and open standard
22374 as follows:</p>
22375
22376 <ol>
22377
22378 <li>A free and open standard is immune to vendor capture at all stages
22379 in its life-cycle. Immunity from vendor capture makes it possible to
22380 freely use, improve upon, trust, and extend a standard over time.</li>
22381
22382 <li>The standard is adopted and will be maintained by a not-for-profit
22383 organisation, and its ongoing development occurs on the basis of an
22384 open decision-making procedure available to all interested
22385 parties.</li>
22386
22387 <li>The standard has been published and the standard specification
22388 document is available freely. It must be permissible to all to copy,
22389 distribute, and use it freely.</li>
22390
22391 <li>The patents possibly present on (parts of) the standard are made
22392 irrevocably available on a royalty-free basis.</li>
22393
22394 <li>There are no constraints on the re-use of the standard.</li>
22395
22396 </ol>
22397
22398 <p>The economic outcome of a free and open standard, which can be
22399 measured, is that it enables perfect competition between suppliers of
22400 products based on the standard.</p>
22401 </blockquote>
22402
22403 <p>For a while now I have tried to figure out of Ogg Theora is a free
22404 and open standard according to this definition.  Here is a short
22405 writeup of what I have been able to gather so far.  I brought up the
22406 topic on the Xiph advocacy mailing list
22407 <a href="http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/advocacy/2009-July/001632.html">in
22408 July 2009</a>, for those that want to see some background information.
22409 According to Ivo Emanuel Gonçalves and Monty Montgomery on that list
22410 the Ogg Theora specification fulfils the Digistan definition.</p>
22411
22412 <p><strong>Free from vendor capture?</strong></p>
22413
22414 <p>As far as I can see, there is no single vendor that can control the
22415 Ogg Theora specification.  It can be argued that the
22416 <a href="http://www.xiph.org/">Xiph foundation</A> is such vendor, but
22417 given that it is a non-profit foundation with the expressed goal
22418 making free and open protocols and standards available, it is not
22419 obvious that this is a real risk.  One issue with the Xiph
22420 foundation is that its inner working (as in board member list, or who
22421 control the foundation) are not easily available on the web.  I've
22422 been unable to find out who is in the foundation board, and have not
22423 seen any accounting information documenting how money is handled nor
22424 where is is spent in the foundation.  It is thus not obvious for an
22425 external observer who control The Xiph foundation, and for all I know
22426 it is possible for a single vendor to take control over the
22427 specification.  But it seem unlikely.</p>
22428
22429 <p><strong>Maintained by open not-for-profit organisation?</strong></p>
22430
22431 <p>Assuming that the Xiph foundation is the organisation its web pages
22432 claim it to be, this point is fulfilled.  If Xiph foundation is
22433 controlled by a single vendor, it isn't, but I have not found any
22434 documentation indicating this.</p>
22435
22436 <p>According to
22437 <a href="http://media.hiof.no/diverse/fad/rapport_4.pdf">a report</a>
22438 prepared by Audun Vaaler og Børre Ludvigsen for the Norwegian
22439 government, the Xiph foundation is a non-commercial organisation and
22440 the development process is open, transparent and non-Discrimatory.
22441 Until proven otherwise, I believe it make most sense to believe the
22442 report is correct.</p>
22443
22444 <p><strong>Specification freely available?</strong></p>
22445
22446 <p>The specification for the <a href="http://www.xiph.org/ogg/doc/">Ogg
22447 container format</a> and both the
22448 <a href="http://www.xiph.org/vorbis/doc/">Vorbis</a> and
22449 <a href="http://theora.org/doc/">Theora</a> codeces are available on
22450 the web.  This are the terms in the Vorbis and Theora specification:
22451
22452 <blockquote>
22453
22454 Anyone may freely use and distribute the Ogg and [Vorbis/Theora]
22455 specifications, whether in private, public, or corporate
22456 capacity. However, the Xiph.Org Foundation and the Ogg project reserve
22457 the right to set the Ogg [Vorbis/Theora] specification and certify
22458 specification compliance.
22459
22460 </blockquote>
22461
22462 <p>The Ogg container format is specified in IETF
22463 <a href="http://www.xiph.org/ogg/doc/rfc3533.txt">RFC 3533</a>, and
22464 this is the term:<p>
22465
22466 <blockquote>
22467
22468 <p>This document and translations of it may be copied and furnished to
22469 others, and derivative works that comment on or otherwise explain it
22470 or assist in its implementation may be prepared, copied, published and
22471 distributed, in whole or in part, without restriction of any kind,
22472 provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph are
22473 included on all such copies and derivative works.  However, this
22474 document itself may not be modified in any way, such as by removing
22475 the copyright notice or references to the Internet Society or other
22476 Internet organizations, except as needed for the purpose of developing
22477 Internet standards in which case the procedures for copyrights defined
22478 in the Internet Standards process must be followed, or as required to
22479 translate it into languages other than English.</p>
22480
22481 <p>The limited permissions granted above are perpetual and will not be
22482 revoked by the Internet Society or its successors or assigns.</p>
22483 </blockquote>
22484
22485 <p>All these terms seem to allow unlimited distribution and use, an
22486 this term seem to be fulfilled.  There might be a problem with the
22487 missing permission to distribute modified versions of the text, and
22488 thus reuse it in other specifications.  Not quite sure if that is a
22489 requirement for the Digistan definition.</p>
22490
22491 <p><strong>Royalty-free?</strong></p>
22492
22493 <p>There are no known patent claims requiring royalties for the Ogg
22494 Theora format.
22495 <a href="http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=65782">MPEG-LA</a>
22496 and
22497 <a href="http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/04/30/237238/Steve-Jobs-Hints-At-Theora-Lawsuit">Steve
22498 Jobs</a> in Apple claim to know about some patent claims (submarine
22499 patents) against the Theora format, but no-one else seem to believe
22500 them.  Both Opera Software and the Mozilla Foundation have looked into
22501 this and decided to implement Ogg Theora support in their browsers
22502 without paying any royalties.  For now the claims from MPEG-LA and
22503 Steve Jobs seem more like FUD to scare people to use the H.264 codec
22504 than any real problem with Ogg Theora.</p>
22505
22506 <p><strong>No constraints on re-use?</strong></p>
22507
22508 <p>I am not aware of any constraints on re-use.</p>
22509
22510 <p><strong>Conclusion</strong></p>
22511
22512 <p>3 of 5 requirements seem obviously fulfilled, and the remaining 2
22513 depend on the governing structure of the Xiph foundation.  Given the
22514 background report used by the Norwegian government, I believe it is
22515 safe to assume the last two requirements are fulfilled too, but it
22516 would be nice if the Xiph foundation web site made it easier to verify
22517 this.</p>
22518
22519 <p>It would be nice to see other analysis of other specifications to
22520 see if they are free and open standards.</p>
22521
22522       </div>
22523       <div class="tags">
22524
22525
22526         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>.
22527
22528
22529       </div>
22530     </div>
22531     <div class="padding"></div>
22532
22533     <div class="entry">
22534       <div class="title">
22535         <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>
22536       </div>
22537       <div class="date">
22538         25th December 2010
22539       </div>
22540       <div class="body">
22541         <p>A few days ago
22542 <a href="http://www.idg.no/computerworld/article189879.ece">an
22543 article</a> in the Norwegian Computerworld magazine about how version
22544 2.0 of
22545 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Interoperability_Framework">European
22546 Interoperability Framework</a> has been successfully lobbied by the
22547 proprietary software industry to remove the focus on free software.
22548 Nothing very surprising there, given
22549 <a href="http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/03/29/2115235/Open-Source-Open-Standards-Under-Attack-In-Europe">earlier
22550 reports</a> on how Microsoft and others have stacked the committees in
22551 this work.  But I find this very sad.   The definition of
22552 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/dokumenter/standard-presse-def-200506.txt">an
22553 open standard from version 1</a> was very good, and something I
22554 believe should be used also in the future, alongside
22555 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">the
22556 definition from Digistan</A>.  Version 2 have removed the open
22557 standard definition from its content.</p>
22558
22559 <p>Anyway, the news reminded me of the great reply sent by Dr. Edgar
22560 Villanueva, congressman in Peru at the time, to Microsoft as a reply
22561 to Microsofts attack on his proposal regarding the use of free software
22562 in the public sector in Peru.  As the text was not available from a
22563 few of the URLs where it used to be available, I copy it here from
22564 <a href="http://gnuwin.epfl.ch/articles/en/reponseperou/villanueva_to_ms.html">my
22565 source</a> to ensure it is available also in the future.  Some
22566 background information about that story is available in
22567 <a href="http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6099">an article</a> from
22568 Linux Journal in 2002.</p>
22569
22570 <blockquote>
22571 <p>Lima, 8th of April, 2002<br>
22572 To: Señor JUAN ALBERTO GONZÁLEZ<br>
22573 General Manager of Microsoft Perú</p>
22574
22575 <p>Dear Sir:</p>
22576
22577 <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>
22578
22579 <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>
22580
22581 <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>
22582
22583 <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>
22584
22585 <p>
22586 <ul>
22587 <li>Free access to public information by the citizen. </li>
22588 <li>Permanence of public data. </li>
22589 <li>Security of the State and citizens.</li>
22590 </ul>
22591 </p>
22592
22593 <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>
22594
22595 <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>
22596
22597 <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>
22598
22599 <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>
22600
22601 <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>
22602
22603
22604 <p>From reading the Bill it will be clear that once passed:<br>
22605 <li>the law does not forbid the production of proprietary software</li>
22606 <li>the law does not forbid the sale of proprietary software</li>
22607 <li>the law does not specify which concrete software to use</li>
22608 <li>the law does not dictate the supplier from whom software will be bought</li>
22609 <li>the law does not limit the terms under which a software product can be licensed.</li>
22610
22611 </p>
22612
22613 <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>
22614
22615 <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>
22616
22617 <p>As for the observations you have made, we will now go on to analyze them in detail:</p>
22618
22619 <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>
22620
22621 <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>
22622
22623 <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>
22624
22625 <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>
22626
22627 <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>
22628
22629 <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>
22630
22631 <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>
22632
22633 <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>
22634
22635 <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>
22636
22637 <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>
22638
22639 <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>
22640
22641 <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>
22642
22643 <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>
22644
22645 <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>
22646
22647 <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>
22648
22649 <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>
22650
22651 <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>
22652
22653 <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>
22654
22655 <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>
22656
22657 <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>
22658
22659 <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>
22660
22661 <p>On security:</p>
22662
22663 <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>
22664
22665 <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>
22666
22667 <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>
22668
22669 <p>In respect of the guarantee:</p>
22670
22671 <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>
22672
22673 <p>On Intellectual Property:</p>
22674
22675 <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>
22676
22677 <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>
22678
22679 <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>
22680
22681 <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>
22682
22683 <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>
22684
22685 <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>
22686
22687 <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>
22688
22689 <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>
22690
22691 <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>
22692
22693 <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>
22694
22695 <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>
22696
22697 <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>
22698
22699 <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>
22700
22701 <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>
22702
22703 <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>
22704
22705 <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>
22706
22707 <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>
22708
22709 <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>
22710
22711 <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>
22712
22713 <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>
22714
22715 <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>
22716
22717 <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>
22718
22719 <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>
22720
22721 <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>
22722
22723 <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>
22724
22725 <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>
22726
22727 <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>
22728
22729 <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>
22730
22731 <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>
22732
22733 <p>Cordially,<br>
22734 DR. EDGAR DAVID VILLANUEVA NUÑEZ<br>
22735 Congressman of the Republic of Perú.</p>
22736 </blockquote>
22737
22738       </div>
22739       <div class="tags">
22740
22741
22742         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>.
22743
22744
22745       </div>
22746     </div>
22747     <div class="padding"></div>
22748
22749     <div class="entry">
22750       <div class="title">
22751         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_still_going_strong.html">Officeshots still going strong</a>
22752       </div>
22753       <div class="date">
22754         25th December 2010
22755       </div>
22756       <div class="body">
22757         <p>Half a year ago I
22758 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_taking_shape.html">wrote
22759 a bit</a> about <a href="http://www.officeshots.org/">OfficeShots</a>,
22760 a web service to allow anyone to test how ODF documents are handled by
22761 the different programs reading and writing the ODF format.</p>
22762
22763 <p>I just had a look at the service, and it seem to be going strong.
22764 Very interesting to see the results reported in the gallery, how
22765 different Office implementations handle different ODF features.  Sad
22766 to see that KOffice was not doing it very well, and happy to see that
22767 LibreOffice has been tested already (but sadly not listed as a option
22768 for OfficeShots users yet).  I am glad to see that the ODF community
22769 got such a great test tool available.</p>
22770
22771       </div>
22772       <div class="tags">
22773
22774
22775         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>.
22776
22777
22778       </div>
22779     </div>
22780     <div class="padding"></div>
22781
22782     <div class="entry">
22783       <div class="title">
22784         <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>
22785       </div>
22786       <div class="date">
22787         22nd December 2010
22788       </div>
22789       <div class="body">
22790         <p>The last few days I have spent at work here at the <a
22791 href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a> testing if the new
22792 batch of computers will work with Linux.  Every year for the last few
22793 years the university have organised shared bid of a few thousand
22794 computers, and this year HP won the bid.  Two different desktops and
22795 five different laptops are on the list this year.  We in the UNIX
22796 group want to know which one of these computers work well with RHEL
22797 and Ubuntu, the two Linux distributions we currently handle at the
22798 university.</p>
22799
22800 <p>My test method is simple, and I share it here to get feedback and
22801 perhaps inspire others to test hardware as well.  To test, I PXE
22802 install the OS version of choice, and log in as my normal user and run
22803 a few applications and plug in selected pieces of hardware.  When
22804 something fail, I make a note about this in the test matrix and move
22805 on.  If I have some spare time I try to report the bug to the OS
22806 vendor, but as I only have the machines for a short time, I rarely
22807 have the time to do this for all the problems I find.</p>
22808
22809 <p>Anyway, to get to the point of this post.  Here is the simple tests
22810 I perform on a new model.</p>
22811
22812 <ul>
22813
22814 <li>Is PXE installation working?  I'm testing with RHEL6, Ubuntu Lucid
22815 and Ubuntu Maverik at the moment.  If I feel like it, I also test with
22816 RHEL5 and Debian Edu/Squeeze.</li>
22817
22818 <li>Is X.org working?  If the graphical login screen show up after
22819 installation, X.org is working.</li>
22820
22821 <li>Is hardware accelerated OpenGL working?  Running glxgears (in
22822 package mesa-utils on Ubuntu) and writing down the frames per second
22823 reported by the program.</li>
22824
22825 <li>Is sound working?  With Gnome and KDE, a sound is played when
22826 logging in, and if I can hear this the test is successful.  If there
22827 are several audio exits on the machine, I try them all and check if
22828 the Gnome/KDE audio mixer can control where to send the sound.  I
22829 normally test this by playing
22830 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20101012-chef/ ">a HTML5
22831 video</a> in Firefox/Iceweasel.</li>
22832
22833 <li>Is the USB subsystem working?  I test this by plugging in a USB
22834 memory stick and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.</li>
22835
22836 <li>Is the CD/DVD player working?  I test this by inserting any CD/DVD
22837 I have lying around, and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.</li>
22838
22839 <li>Is any built in camera working?  Test using cheese, and see if a
22840 picture from the v4l device show up.</li>
22841
22842 <li>Is bluetooth working?  Use the Gnome/KDE browsing tool to see if
22843 any bluetooth devices are discovered.  In my office, I normally see a
22844 few.</li>
22845
22846 <li>For laptops, is the SD or Compaq Flash reader working.  I have
22847 memory modules lying around, and stick them in and see if Gnome/KDE
22848 notice this.</li>
22849
22850 <li>For laptops, is suspend/hibernate working?  I'm testing if the
22851 special button work, and if the laptop continue to work after
22852 resume.</li>
22853
22854 <li>For laptops, is the extra buttons working, like audio level,
22855 adjusting background light, switching on/off external video output,
22856 switching on/off wifi, bluetooth, etc?  The set of buttons differ from
22857 laptop to laptop, so I just write down which are working and which are
22858 not.</li>
22859
22860 <li>Some laptops have smart card readers, finger print readers,
22861 acceleration sensors etc.  I rarely test these, as I do not know how
22862 to quickly test if they are working or not, so I only document their
22863 existence.</li>
22864
22865 </ul>
22866
22867 <p>By now I suspect you are really curious what the test results are
22868 for the HP machines I am testing.  I'm not done yet, so I will report
22869 the test results later.  For now I can report that HP 8100 Elite work
22870 fine, and hibernation fail with HP EliteBook 8440p on Ubuntu Lucid,
22871 and audio fail on RHEL6.  Ubuntu Maverik worked with 8440p.  As you
22872 can see, I have most machines left to test.  One interesting
22873 observation is that Ubuntu Lucid has almost twice the frame rate than
22874 RHEL6 with glxgears.  No idea why.</p>
22875
22876       </div>
22877       <div class="tags">
22878
22879
22880         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>.
22881
22882
22883       </div>
22884     </div>
22885     <div class="padding"></div>
22886
22887     <div class="entry">
22888       <div class="title">
22889         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_thoughts_on_BitCoins.html">Some thoughts on BitCoins</a>
22890       </div>
22891       <div class="date">
22892         11th December 2010
22893       </div>
22894       <div class="body">
22895         <p>As I continue to explore
22896 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin</a>, I've starting to wonder
22897 what properties the system have, and how it will be affected by laws
22898 and regulations here in Norway.  Here are some random notes.</p>
22899
22900 <p>One interesting thing to note is that since the transactions are
22901 verified using a peer to peer network, all details about a transaction
22902 is known to everyone.  This means that if a BitCoin address has been
22903 published like I did with mine in my initial post about BitCoin, it is
22904 possible for everyone to see how many BitCoins have been transfered to
22905 that address.  There is even a web service to look at the details for
22906 all transactions.  There I can see that my address
22907 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a>
22908 have received 16.06 Bitcoin, the
22909 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3">1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3</a>
22910 address of Simon Phipps have received 181.97 BitCoin and the address
22911 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt">1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt</A>
22912 of EFF have received 2447.38 BitCoins so far.  Thank you to each and
22913 every one of you that donated bitcoins to support my activity. The
22914 fact that anyone can see how much money was transfered to a given
22915 address make it more obvious why the BitCoin community recommend to
22916 generate and hand out a new address for each transaction.  I'm told
22917 there is no way to track which addresses belong to a given person or
22918 organisation without the person or organisation revealing it
22919 themselves, as Simon, EFF and I have done.</p>
22920
22921 <p>In Norway, and in most other countries, there are laws and
22922 regulations limiting how much money one can transfer across the border
22923 without declaring it.  There are money laundering, tax and accounting
22924 laws and regulations I would expect to apply to the use of BitCoin.
22925 If the Skolelinux foundation
22926 (<a href="http://linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">SLX
22927 Debian Labs</a>) were to accept donations in BitCoin in addition to
22928 normal bank transfers like EFF is doing, how should this be accounted?
22929 Given that it is impossible to know if money can cross the border or
22930 not, should everything or nothing be declared?  What exchange rate
22931 should be used when calculating taxes?  Would receivers have to pay
22932 income tax if the foundation were to pay Skolelinux contributors in
22933 BitCoin?  I have no idea, but it would be interesting to know.</p>
22934
22935 <p>For a currency to be useful and successful, it must be trusted and
22936 accepted by a lot of users.  It must be possible to get easy access to
22937 the currency (as a wage or using currency exchanges), and it must be
22938 easy to spend it.  At the moment BitCoin seem fairly easy to get
22939 access to, but there are very few places to spend it.  I am not really
22940 a regular user of any of the vendor types currently accepting BitCoin,
22941 so I wonder when my kind of shop would start accepting BitCoins.  I
22942 would like to buy electronics, travels and subway tickets, not herbs
22943 and books. :) The currency is young, and this will improve over time
22944 if it become popular, but I suspect regular banks will start to lobby
22945 to get BitCoin declared illegal if it become popular.  I'm sure they
22946 will claim it is helping fund terrorism and money laundering (which
22947 probably would be true, as is any currency in existence), but I
22948 believe the problems should be solved elsewhere and not by blaming
22949 currencies.</p>
22950
22951 <p>The process of creating new BitCoins is called mining, and it is
22952 CPU intensive process that depend on a bit of luck as well (as one is
22953 competing against all the other miners currently spending CPU cycles
22954 to see which one get the next lump of cash).  The "winner" get 50
22955 BitCoin when this happen.  Yesterday I came across the obvious way to
22956 join forces to increase ones changes of getting at least some coins,
22957 by coordinating the work on mining BitCoins across several machines
22958 and people, and sharing the result if one is lucky and get the 50
22959 BitCoins.  Check out
22960 <a href="http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/bitcoin-pool/">BitCoin Pool</a>
22961 if this sounds interesting.  I have not had time to try to set up a
22962 machine to participate there yet, but have seen that running on ones
22963 own for a few days have not yield any BitCoins througth mining
22964 yet.</p>
22965
22966 <p>Update 2010-12-15: Found an <a
22967 href="http://inertia.posterous.com/reply-to-the-underground-economist-why-bitcoi">interesting
22968 criticism</a> of bitcoin.  Not quite sure how valid it is, but thought
22969 it was interesting to read.  The arguments presented seem to be
22970 equally valid for gold, which was used as a currency for many years.</p>
22971
22972       </div>
22973       <div class="tags">
22974
22975
22976         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>.
22977
22978
22979       </div>
22980     </div>
22981     <div class="padding"></div>
22982
22983     <div class="entry">
22984       <div class="title">
22985         <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>
22986       </div>
22987       <div class="date">
22988         10th December 2010
22989       </div>
22990       <div class="body">
22991         <p>With this weeks lawless
22992 <a href="http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/06/wikileaks/index.html">governmental
22993 attacks</a> on Wikileak and
22994 <a href="http://www.salon.com/technology/dan_gillmor/2010/12/06/war_on_speech">free
22995 speech</a>, it has become obvious that PayPal, visa and mastercard can
22996 not be trusted to handle money transactions.
22997 A blog post from
22998 <a href="http://webmink.com/2010/12/06/now-accepting-bitcoin/">Simon
22999 Phipps on bitcoin</a> reminded me about a project that a friend of
23000 mine mentioned earlier.  I decided to follow Simon's example, and get
23001 involved with <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin</a>.  I got
23002 some help from my friend to get it all running, and he even handed me
23003 some bitcoins to get started.  I even donated a few bitcoins to Simon
23004 for helping me remember BitCoin.</p>
23005
23006 <p>So, what is bitcoins, you probably wonder?  It is a digital
23007 crypto-currency, decentralised and handled using peer-to-peer
23008 networks.  It allows anonymous transactions and prohibits central
23009 control over the transactions, making it impossible for governments
23010 and companies alike to block donations and other transactions.  The
23011 source is free software, and while the key dependency wxWidgets 2.9
23012 for the graphical user interface is missing in Debian, the command
23013 line client builds just fine.  Hopefully Jonas
23014 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/578157">will get the package into
23015 Debian</a> soon.</p>
23016
23017 <p>Bitcoins can be converted to other currencies, like USD and EUR.
23018 There are <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/trade">companies accepting
23019 bitcoins</a> when selling services and goods, and there are even
23020 currency "stock" markets where the exchange rate is decided.  There
23021 are not many users so far, but the concept seems promising.  If you
23022 want to get started and lack a friend with any bitcoins to spare,
23023 you can even get
23024 <a href="https://freebitcoins.appspot.com/">some for free</a> (0.05
23025 bitcoin at the time of writing).  Use
23026 <a href="http://www.bitcoinwatch.com/">BitcoinWatch</a> to keep an eye
23027 on the current exchange rates.</p>
23028
23029 <p>As an experiment, I have decided to set up bitcoind on one of my
23030 machines.  If you want to support my activity, please send Bitcoin
23031 donations to the address
23032 <b>15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</b>.  Thank you!</p>
23033
23034       </div>
23035       <div class="tags">
23036
23037
23038         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>.
23039
23040
23041       </div>
23042     </div>
23043     <div class="padding"></div>
23044
23045     <div class="entry">
23046       <div class="title">
23047         <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>
23048       </div>
23049       <div class="date">
23050          9th December 2010
23051       </div>
23052       <div class="body">
23053         <p>A few days ago, I was introduces to some students in the robot
23054 student assosiation <a href="http://www.robotica.no/">Robotica
23055 Osloensis</a> at the University of Oslo where I work, who planned to
23056 get their own 3D printer.  They wanted to learn from me based on my
23057 work in the area.  After having a short lunch meeting with them, I
23058 offered them to borrow my reprap kit, as I never had time to complete
23059 the build and this seem unlike to change any time soon.  I look
23060 forward to see how this goes.  This monday their volunteer driver
23061 picked up my kit and drove it to their lab, and tomorrow I am told the
23062 last exam is over so they can start work on getting the 3D printer
23063 operational.</p>
23064
23065 <p>The robotic group have already build several robots on their own,
23066 and seem capable of getting the reprap operational.  I really look
23067 forward to being able to print all the cool 3D designs published on
23068 <a href="http://www.thingiverse.com/">Thingiverse</a>.  I even got
23069 some 3D scans I got made during Dagen@IFI when one of the groups at
23070 the computer science department at the university demonstrated their
23071 very cool 3D scanner.</p>
23072
23073       </div>
23074       <div class="tags">
23075
23076
23077         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>.
23078
23079
23080       </div>
23081     </div>
23082     <div class="padding"></div>
23083
23084     <div class="entry">
23085       <div class="title">
23086         <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>
23087       </div>
23088       <div class="date">
23089         29th November 2010
23090       </div>
23091       <div class="body">
23092         <p>On friday, the first Debian Edu / Skolelinux
23093 <a href="http://www.friprogramvareiskolen.no/Gathering/2010-12-03-05-Oslo">development
23094 gathering</a> in a long time take place here in Oslo, Norway.  I
23095 really look forward to seeing all the good people working on the
23096 Squeeze release.  The gathering is open for everyone interested in
23097 learning more about Debian Edu / Skolelinux.</p>
23098
23099 <p>On Saturday, the Norwegian member organization taking care of
23100 organizing these development gatherings, Fri Programvare i Skolen,
23101 will hold its
23102 <a href="http://friprogramvareiskolen.no/Genfors/2010">General Assembly
23103 for 2010</a>.  Membership is open for all, and currently there are 388
23104 people registered as members.  Last year 32 members cast their vote in
23105 the memberdb based election system.  I hope more people find time to
23106 vote this year.</p>
23107
23108       </div>
23109       <div class="tags">
23110
23111
23112         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>.
23113
23114
23115       </div>
23116     </div>
23117     <div class="padding"></div>
23118
23119     <div class="entry">
23120       <div class="title">
23121         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_isn_t_Debian_Edu_using_VLC_.html">Why isn't Debian Edu using VLC?</a>
23122       </div>
23123       <div class="date">
23124         27th November 2010
23125       </div>
23126       <div class="body">
23127         <p>In the latest issue of Linux Journal, the readers choices were
23128 presented, and the winner among the multimedia player were VLC.
23129 Personally, I like VLC, and it is my player of choice when I first try
23130 to play a video file or stream.  Only if VLC fail will I drag out
23131 gmplayer to see if it can do better.  The reason is mostly the failure
23132 model and trust.  When VLC fail, it normally pop up a error message
23133 reporting the problem.  When mplayer fail, it normally segfault or
23134 just hangs.  The latter failure mode drain my trust in the program.<p>
23135
23136 <p>But even if VLC is my player of choice, we have choosen to use
23137 mplayer in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
23138 Edu/Skolelinux</a>.  The reason is simple.  We need a good browser
23139 plugin to play web videos seamlessly, and the VLC browser plugin is
23140 not very good.  For example, it lack in-line control buttons, so there
23141 is no way for the user to pause the video.  Also, when I
23142 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">last
23143 tested the browser plugins</a> available in Debian, the VLC plugin
23144 failed on several video pages where mplayer based plugins worked.  If
23145 the browser plugin for VLC was as good as the gecko-mediaplayer
23146 package (which uses mplayer), we would switch.</P>
23147
23148 <p>While VLC is a good player, its user interface is slightly
23149 annoying.  The most annoying feature is its inconsistent use of
23150 keyboard shortcuts.  When the player is in full screen mode, its
23151 shortcuts are different from when it is playing the video in a window.
23152 For example, space only work as pause when in full screen mode.  I
23153 wish it had consisten shortcuts and that space also would work when in
23154 window mode.  Another nice shortcut in gmplayer is [enter] to restart
23155 the current video.  It is very nice when playing short videos from the
23156 web and want to restart it when new people arrive to have a look at
23157 what is going on.</p>
23158
23159       </div>
23160       <div class="tags">
23161
23162
23163         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>.
23164
23165
23166       </div>
23167     </div>
23168     <div class="padding"></div>
23169
23170     <div class="entry">
23171       <div class="title">
23172         <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>
23173       </div>
23174       <div class="date">
23175         22nd November 2010
23176       </div>
23177       <div class="body">
23178         <p>Michael Biebl suggested to me on IRC, that I changed my automated
23179 upgrade testing of the
23180 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
23181 Gnome and KDE Desktop</a> to do <tt>apt-get autoremove</tt> when using apt-get.
23182 This seem like a very good idea, so I adjusted by test scripts and
23183 can now present the updated result from today:</p>
23184
23185 <p>This is for Gnome:</p>
23186
23187 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
23188
23189 <blockquote><p>
23190   apache2.2-bin
23191   aptdaemon
23192   baobab
23193   binfmt-support
23194   browser-plugin-gnash
23195   cheese-common
23196   cli-common
23197   cups-pk-helper
23198   dmz-cursor-theme
23199   empathy
23200   empathy-common
23201   freedesktop-sound-theme
23202   freeglut3
23203   gconf-defaults-service
23204   gdm-themes
23205   gedit-plugins
23206   geoclue
23207   geoclue-hostip
23208   geoclue-localnet
23209   geoclue-manual
23210   geoclue-yahoo
23211   gnash
23212   gnash-common
23213   gnome
23214   gnome-backgrounds
23215   gnome-cards-data
23216   gnome-codec-install
23217   gnome-core
23218   gnome-desktop-environment
23219   gnome-disk-utility
23220   gnome-screenshot
23221   gnome-search-tool
23222   gnome-session-canberra
23223   gnome-system-log
23224   gnome-themes-extras
23225   gnome-themes-more
23226   gnome-user-share
23227   gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
23228   gstreamer0.10-tools
23229   gtk2-engines
23230   gtk2-engines-pixbuf
23231   gtk2-engines-smooth
23232   hamster-applet
23233   libapache2-mod-dnssd
23234   libapr1
23235   libaprutil1
23236   libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3
23237   libaprutil1-ldap
23238   libart2.0-cil
23239   libboost-date-time1.42.0
23240   libboost-python1.42.0
23241   libboost-thread1.42.0
23242   libchamplain-0.4-0
23243   libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0
23244   libcheese-gtk18
23245   libclutter-gtk-0.10-0
23246   libcryptui0
23247   libdiscid0
23248   libelf1
23249   libepc-1.0-2
23250   libepc-common
23251   libepc-ui-1.0-2
23252   libfreerdp-plugins-standard
23253   libfreerdp0
23254   libgconf2.0-cil
23255   libgdata-common
23256   libgdata7
23257   libgdu-gtk0
23258   libgee2
23259   libgeoclue0
23260   libgexiv2-0
23261   libgif4
23262   libglade2.0-cil
23263   libglib2.0-cil
23264   libgmime2.4-cil
23265   libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
23266   libgnome2.24-cil
23267   libgnomepanel2.24-cil
23268   libgpod-common
23269   libgpod4
23270   libgtk2.0-cil
23271   libgtkglext1
23272   libgtksourceview2.0-common
23273   libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
23274   libmono-addins0.2-cil
23275   libmono-cairo2.0-cil
23276   libmono-corlib2.0-cil
23277   libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil
23278   libmono-posix2.0-cil
23279   libmono-security2.0-cil
23280   libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
23281   libmono-system2.0-cil
23282   libmtp8
23283   libmusicbrainz3-6
23284   libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil
23285   libndesk-dbus1.0-cil
23286   libopal3.6.8
23287   libpolkit-gtk-1-0
23288   libpt2.6.7
23289   libpython2.6
23290   librpm1
23291   librpmio1
23292   libsdl1.2debian
23293   libsrtp0
23294   libssh-4
23295   libtelepathy-farsight0
23296   libtelepathy-glib0
23297   libtidy-0.99-0
23298   media-player-info
23299   mesa-utils
23300   mono-2.0-gac
23301   mono-gac
23302   mono-runtime
23303   nautilus-sendto
23304   nautilus-sendto-empathy
23305   p7zip-full
23306   pkg-config
23307   python-aptdaemon
23308   python-aptdaemon-gtk
23309   python-axiom
23310   python-beautifulsoup
23311   python-bugbuddy
23312   python-clientform
23313   python-coherence
23314   python-configobj
23315   python-crypto
23316   python-cupshelpers
23317   python-elementtree
23318   python-epsilon
23319   python-evolution
23320   python-feedparser
23321   python-gdata
23322   python-gdbm
23323   python-gst0.10
23324   python-gtkglext1
23325   python-gtksourceview2
23326   python-httplib2
23327   python-louie
23328   python-mako
23329   python-markupsafe
23330   python-mechanize
23331   python-nevow
23332   python-notify
23333   python-opengl
23334   python-openssl
23335   python-pam
23336   python-pkg-resources
23337   python-pyasn1
23338   python-pysqlite2
23339   python-rdflib
23340   python-serial
23341   python-tagpy
23342   python-twisted-bin
23343   python-twisted-conch
23344   python-twisted-core
23345   python-twisted-web
23346   python-utidylib
23347   python-webkit
23348   python-xdg
23349   python-zope.interface
23350   remmina
23351   remmina-plugin-data
23352   remmina-plugin-rdp
23353   remmina-plugin-vnc
23354   rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
23355   rhythmbox-plugins
23356   rpm-common
23357   rpm2cpio
23358   seahorse-plugins
23359   shotwell
23360   software-center
23361   system-config-printer-udev
23362   telepathy-gabble
23363   telepathy-mission-control-5
23364   telepathy-salut
23365   tomboy
23366   totem
23367   totem-coherence
23368   totem-mozilla
23369   totem-plugins
23370   transmission-common
23371   xdg-user-dirs
23372   xdg-user-dirs-gtk
23373   xserver-xephyr
23374 </p></blockquote>
23375
23376 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
23377
23378 <blockquote><p>
23379   cheese
23380   ekiga
23381   eog
23382   epiphany-extensions
23383   evolution-exchange
23384   fast-user-switch-applet
23385   file-roller
23386   gcalctool
23387   gconf-editor
23388   gdm
23389   gedit
23390   gedit-common
23391   gnome-games
23392   gnome-games-data
23393   gnome-nettool
23394   gnome-system-tools
23395   gnome-themes
23396   gnuchess
23397   gucharmap
23398   guile-1.8-libs
23399   libavahi-ui0
23400   libdmx1
23401   libgalago3
23402   libgtk-vnc-1.0-0
23403   libgtksourceview2.0-0
23404   liblircclient0
23405   libsdl1.2debian-alsa
23406   libspeexdsp1
23407   libsvga1
23408   rhythmbox
23409   seahorse
23410   sound-juicer
23411   system-config-printer
23412   totem-common
23413   transmission-gtk
23414   vinagre
23415   vino
23416 </p></blockquote>
23417
23418 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
23419
23420 <blockquote><p>
23421   gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
23422 </p></blockquote>
23423
23424 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
23425
23426 <blockquote><p>
23427 [nothing]
23428 </p></blockquote>
23429
23430 <p>This is for KDE:</p>
23431
23432 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
23433
23434 <blockquote><p>
23435   ksmserver
23436 </p></blockquote>
23437
23438 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
23439
23440 <blockquote><p>
23441   kwin
23442   network-manager-kde
23443 </p></blockquote>
23444
23445 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
23446
23447 <blockquote><p>
23448   arts
23449   dolphin
23450   freespacenotifier
23451   google-gadgets-gst
23452   google-gadgets-xul
23453   kappfinder
23454   kcalc
23455   kcharselect
23456   kde-core
23457   kde-plasma-desktop
23458   kde-standard
23459   kde-window-manager
23460   kdeartwork
23461   kdeartwork-emoticons
23462   kdeartwork-style
23463   kdeartwork-theme-icon
23464   kdebase
23465   kdebase-apps
23466   kdebase-workspace
23467   kdebase-workspace-bin
23468   kdebase-workspace-data
23469   kdeeject
23470   kdelibs
23471   kdeplasma-addons
23472   kdeutils
23473   kdewallpapers
23474   kdf
23475   kfloppy
23476   kgpg
23477   khelpcenter4
23478   kinfocenter
23479   konq-plugins-l10n
23480   konqueror-nsplugins
23481   kscreensaver
23482   kscreensaver-xsavers
23483   ktimer
23484   kwrite
23485   libgle3
23486   libkde4-ruby1.8
23487   libkonq5
23488   libkonq5-templates
23489   libnetpbm10
23490   libplasma-ruby
23491   libplasma-ruby1.8
23492   libqt4-ruby1.8
23493   marble-data
23494   marble-plugins
23495   netpbm
23496   nuvola-icon-theme
23497   plasma-dataengines-workspace
23498   plasma-desktop
23499   plasma-desktopthemes-artwork
23500   plasma-runners-addons
23501   plasma-scriptengine-googlegadgets
23502   plasma-scriptengine-python
23503   plasma-scriptengine-qedje
23504   plasma-scriptengine-ruby
23505   plasma-scriptengine-webkit
23506   plasma-scriptengines
23507   plasma-wallpapers-addons
23508   plasma-widget-folderview
23509   plasma-widget-networkmanagement
23510   ruby
23511   sweeper
23512   update-notifier-kde
23513   xscreensaver-data-extra
23514   xscreensaver-gl
23515   xscreensaver-gl-extra
23516   xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
23517 </p></blockquote>
23518
23519 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
23520
23521 <blockquote><p>
23522   ark
23523   google-gadgets-common
23524   google-gadgets-qt
23525   htdig
23526   kate
23527   kdebase-bin
23528   kdebase-data
23529   kdepasswd
23530   kfind
23531   klipper
23532   konq-plugins
23533   konqueror
23534   ksysguard
23535   ksysguardd
23536   libarchive1
23537   libcln6
23538   libeet1
23539   libeina-svn-06
23540   libggadget-1.0-0b
23541   libggadget-qt-1.0-0b
23542   libgps19
23543   libkdecorations4
23544   libkephal4
23545   libkonq4
23546   libkonqsidebarplugin4a
23547   libkscreensaver5
23548   libksgrd4
23549   libksignalplotter4
23550   libkunitconversion4
23551   libkwineffects1a
23552   libmarblewidget4
23553   libntrack-qt4-1
23554   libntrack0
23555   libplasma-geolocation-interface4
23556   libplasmaclock4a
23557   libplasmagenericshell4
23558   libprocesscore4a
23559   libprocessui4a
23560   libqalculate5
23561   libqedje0a
23562   libqtruby4shared2
23563   libqzion0a
23564   libruby1.8
23565   libscim8c2a
23566   libsmokekdecore4-3
23567   libsmokekdeui4-3
23568   libsmokekfile3
23569   libsmokekhtml3
23570   libsmokekio3
23571   libsmokeknewstuff2-3
23572   libsmokeknewstuff3-3
23573   libsmokekparts3
23574   libsmokektexteditor3
23575   libsmokekutils3
23576   libsmokenepomuk3
23577   libsmokephonon3
23578   libsmokeplasma3
23579   libsmokeqtcore4-3
23580   libsmokeqtdbus4-3
23581   libsmokeqtgui4-3
23582   libsmokeqtnetwork4-3
23583   libsmokeqtopengl4-3
23584   libsmokeqtscript4-3
23585   libsmokeqtsql4-3
23586   libsmokeqtsvg4-3
23587   libsmokeqttest4-3
23588   libsmokeqtuitools4-3
23589   libsmokeqtwebkit4-3
23590   libsmokeqtxml4-3
23591   libsmokesolid3
23592   libsmokesoprano3
23593   libtaskmanager4a
23594   libtidy-0.99-0
23595   libweather-ion4a
23596   libxklavier16
23597   libxxf86misc1
23598   okteta
23599   oxygencursors
23600   plasma-dataengines-addons
23601   plasma-scriptengine-superkaramba
23602   plasma-widget-lancelot
23603   plasma-widgets-addons
23604   plasma-widgets-workspace
23605   polkit-kde-1
23606   ruby1.8
23607   systemsettings
23608   update-notifier-common
23609 </p></blockquote>
23610
23611 <p>Running apt-get autoremove made the results using apt-get and
23612 aptitude a bit more similar, but there are still quite a lott of
23613 differences.  I have no idea what packages should be installed after
23614 the upgrade, but hope those that do can have a look.</p>
23615
23616       </div>
23617       <div class="tags">
23618
23619
23620         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>.
23621
23622
23623       </div>
23624     </div>
23625     <div class="padding"></div>
23626
23627     <div class="entry">
23628       <div class="title">
23629         <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>
23630       </div>
23631       <div class="date">
23632         22nd November 2010
23633       </div>
23634       <div class="body">
23635         <p>Most of the computers in use by the
23636 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux project</a>
23637 are virtual machines.  And they have been Xen machines running on a
23638 fairly old IBM eserver xseries 345 machine, and we wanted to migrate
23639 them to KVM on a newer Dell PowerEdge 2950 host machine.  This was a
23640 bit harder that it could have been, because we set up the Xen virtual
23641 machines to get the virtual partitions from LVM, which as far as I
23642 know is not supported by KVM.  So to migrate, we had to convert
23643 several LVM logical volumes to partitions on a virtual disk file.</p>
23644
23645 <p>I found
23646 <a href="http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM">a
23647 nice recipe</a> to do this, and wrote the following script to do the
23648 migration.  It uses qemu-img from the qemu package to make the disk
23649 image, parted to partition it, losetup and kpartx to present the disk
23650 image partions as devices, and dd to copy the data.  I NFS mounted the
23651 new servers storage area on the old server to do the migration.</p>
23652
23653 <pre>
23654 #!/bin/sh
23655
23656 # Based on
23657 # http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM
23658
23659 set -e
23660 set -x
23661
23662 if [ -z "$1" ] ; then
23663     echo "Usage: $0 &lt;hostname&gt;"
23664     exit 1
23665 else
23666     host="$1"
23667 fi
23668
23669 if [ ! -e /dev/vg_data/$host-disk ] ; then
23670     echo "error: unable to find LVM volume for $host"
23671     exit 1
23672 fi
23673
23674 # Partitions need to be a bit bigger than the LVM LVs.  not sure why.
23675 disksize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-disk | awk '{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }')
23676 swapsize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-swap | awk '{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }')
23677 totalsize=$(( ( $disksize + $swapsize ) ))
23678
23679 img=$host.img
23680 #dd if=/dev/zero of=$img bs=1M count=$(( $disksize + $swapsize ))
23681 qemu-img create $img ${totalsize}MMaking room on the Debian Edu/Sqeeze DVD
23682
23683 parted $img mklabel msdos
23684 parted $img mkpart primary linux-swap 0 $disksize
23685 parted $img mkpart primary ext2 $disksize $totalsize
23686 parted $img set 1 boot on
23687
23688 modprobe dm-mod
23689 losetup /dev/loop0 $img
23690 kpartx -a /dev/loop0
23691
23692 dd if=/dev/vg_data/$host-disk of=/dev/mapper/loop0p1 bs=1M
23693 fsck.ext3 -f /dev/mapper/loop0p1 || true
23694 mkswap /dev/mapper/loop0p2
23695
23696 kpartx -d /dev/loop0
23697 losetup -d /dev/loop0
23698 </pre>
23699
23700 <p>The script is perhaps so simple that it is not copyrightable, but
23701 if it is, it is licenced using GPL v2 or later at your discretion.</p>
23702
23703 <p>After doing this, I booted a Debian CD in rescue mode in KVM with
23704 the new disk image attached, installed grub-pc and linux-image-686 and
23705 set up grub to boot from the disk image.  After this, the KVM machines
23706 seem to work just fine.</p>
23707
23708       </div>
23709       <div class="tags">
23710
23711
23712         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>.
23713
23714
23715       </div>
23716     </div>
23717     <div class="padding"></div>
23718
23719     <div class="entry">
23720       <div class="title">
23721         <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>
23722       </div>
23723       <div class="date">
23724         20th November 2010
23725       </div>
23726       <div class="body">
23727         <p>I'm still running upgrade testing of the
23728 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
23729 Gnome and KDE Desktop</a>, but have not had time to spend on reporting the
23730 status.  Here is a short update based on a test I ran 20101118.</p>
23731
23732 <p>I still do not know what a correct migration should look like, so I
23733 report any differences between apt and aptitude and hope someone else
23734 can see if anything should be changed.</p>
23735
23736 <p>This is for Gnome:</p>
23737
23738 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
23739
23740 <blockquote><p>
23741   apache2.2-bin aptdaemon at-spi baobab binfmt-support
23742   browser-plugin-gnash cheese-common cli-common cpp-4.3 cups-pk-helper
23743   dmz-cursor-theme empathy empathy-common finger
23744   freedesktop-sound-theme freeglut3 gconf-defaults-service gdm-themes
23745   gedit-plugins geoclue geoclue-hostip geoclue-localnet geoclue-manual
23746   geoclue-yahoo gnash gnash-common gnome gnome-backgrounds
23747   gnome-cards-data gnome-codec-install gnome-core
23748   gnome-desktop-environment gnome-disk-utility gnome-screenshot
23749   gnome-search-tool gnome-session-canberra gnome-spell
23750   gnome-system-log gnome-themes-extras gnome-themes-more
23751   gnome-user-share gs-common gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
23752   gstreamer0.10-tools gtk2-engines gtk2-engines-pixbuf
23753   gtk2-engines-smooth hal-info hamster-applet libapache2-mod-dnssd
23754   libapr1 libaprutil1 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3 libaprutil1-ldap
23755   libart2.0-cil libatspi1.0-0 libboost-date-time1.42.0
23756   libboost-python1.42.0 libboost-thread1.42.0 libchamplain-0.4-0
23757   libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0 libcheese-gtk18 libclutter-gtk-0.10-0
23758   libcryptui0 libcupsys2 libdiscid0 libeel2-data libelf1 libepc-1.0-2
23759   libepc-common libepc-ui-1.0-2 libfreerdp-plugins-standard
23760   libfreerdp0 libgail-common libgconf2.0-cil libgdata-common libgdata7
23761   libgdl-1-common libgdu-gtk0 libgee2 libgeoclue0 libgexiv2-0 libgif4
23762   libglade2.0-cil libglib2.0-cil libgmime2.4-cil libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
23763   libgnome2.24-cil libgnomepanel2.24-cil libgnomeprint2.2-data
23764   libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod-common libgpod4
23765   libgtk2.0-cil libgtkglext1 libgtksourceview-common
23766   libgtksourceview2.0-common libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
23767   libmono-addins0.2-cil libmono-cairo2.0-cil libmono-corlib2.0-cil
23768   libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil libmono-posix2.0-cil
23769   libmono-security2.0-cil libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
23770   libmono-system2.0-cil libmtp8 libmusicbrainz3-6
23771   libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil libndesk-dbus1.0-cil libopal3.6.8
23772   libpolkit-gtk-1-0 libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
23773   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libpt2.6.7 libpython2.6 librpm1 librpmio1
23774   libsdl1.2debian libservlet2.4-java libsrtp0 libssh-4
23775   libtelepathy-farsight0 libtelepathy-glib0 libtidy-0.99-0
23776   libxalan2-java libxerces2-java media-player-info mesa-utils
23777   mono-2.0-gac mono-gac mono-runtime nautilus-sendto
23778   nautilus-sendto-empathy openoffice.org-writer2latex
23779   openssl-blacklist p7zip p7zip-full pkg-config python-4suite-xml
23780   python-aptdaemon python-aptdaemon-gtk python-axiom
23781   python-beautifulsoup python-bugbuddy python-clientform
23782   python-coherence python-configobj python-crypto python-cupshelpers
23783   python-cupsutils python-eggtrayicon python-elementtree
23784   python-epsilon python-evolution python-feedparser python-gdata
23785   python-gdbm python-gst0.10 python-gtkglext1 python-gtkmozembed
23786   python-gtksourceview2 python-httplib2 python-louie python-mako
23787   python-markupsafe python-mechanize python-nevow python-notify
23788   python-opengl python-openssl python-pam python-pkg-resources
23789   python-pyasn1 python-pysqlite2 python-rdflib python-serial
23790   python-tagpy python-twisted-bin python-twisted-conch
23791   python-twisted-core python-twisted-web python-utidylib python-webkit
23792   python-xdg python-zope.interface remmina remmina-plugin-data
23793   remmina-plugin-rdp remmina-plugin-vnc rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
23794   rhythmbox-plugins rpm-common rpm2cpio seahorse-plugins shotwell
23795   software-center svgalibg1 system-config-printer-udev
23796   telepathy-gabble telepathy-mission-control-5 telepathy-salut tomboy
23797   totem totem-coherence totem-mozilla totem-plugins
23798   transmission-common xdg-user-dirs xdg-user-dirs-gtk xserver-xephyr
23799   zip
23800 </p></blockquote>
23801
23802 Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude
23803
23804 <blockquote><p>
23805   arj bluez-utils cheese dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop ekiga eog
23806   epiphany-extensions epiphany-gecko evolution-exchange
23807   fast-user-switch-applet file-roller gcalctool gconf-editor gdm gedit
23808   gedit-common gnome-app-install gnome-games gnome-games-data
23809   gnome-nettool gnome-system-tools gnome-themes gnome-utils
23810   gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager gnuchess gucharmap
23811   guile-1.8-libs hal libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5
23812   libavahi-ui0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7
23813   libcucul0 libcurl3 libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdmx1 libdvdread3
23814   libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1
23815   libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3 libfaad0 libgadu3
23816   libgalago3 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
23817   libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
23818   libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
23819   libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtk-vnc-1.0-0
23820   libgtkhtml2-0 libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgtksourceview2.0-0
23821   libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
23822   libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libkpathsea4 liblircclient0 libltdl3 liblwres50
23823   libmagick++10 libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmozjs1d libmpfr1ldbl libmtp7
23824   libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0
23825   libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpisock9
23826   libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8
23827   libsdl1.2debian-alsa libsensors3 libsexy2 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
23828   libspeexdsp1 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libsvga1
23829   libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0
23830   libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12
23831   libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common rhythmbox seahorse
23832   sound-juicer swfdec-gnome system-config-printer totem-common
23833   totem-gstreamer transmission-gtk vinagre vino w3c-dtd-xhtml wodim
23834 </p></blockquote>
23835
23836 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
23837
23838 <blockquote><p>
23839   gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
23840 </p></blockquote>
23841
23842 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
23843
23844 <blockquote><p>
23845 [nothing]
23846 </p></blockquote>
23847
23848 <p>This is for KDE:</p>
23849
23850 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
23851
23852 <blockquote><p>
23853   autopoint bomber bovo cantor cantor-backend-kalgebra cpp-4.3 dcoprss
23854   edict espeak espeak-data eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
23855   ghostscript-x git gnome-audio gnugo granatier gs-common
23856   gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio indi kaddressbook-plugins kalgebra
23857   kalzium-data kanjidic kapman kate-plugins kblocks kbreakout kbstate
23858   kde-icons-mono kdeaccessibility kdeaddons-kfile-plugins
23859   kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
23860   kdeedu kdeedu-data kdeedu-kvtml-data kdegames kdegames-card-data
23861   kdegames-mahjongg-data kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc
23862   kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
23863   kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdessh kdetoys kdewebdev
23864   kdiamond kdnssd kfilereplace kfourinline kgeography-data kigo
23865   killbots kiriki klettres-data kmoon kmrml knewsticker-scripts
23866   kollision kpf krosspython ksirk ksmserver ksquares kstars-data
23867   ksudoku kubrick kweather libasound2-plugins libboost-python1.42.0
23868   libcfitsio3 libconvert-binhex-perl libcrypt-ssleay-perl libdb4.6++
23869   libdjvulibre-text libdotconf1.0 liberror-perl libespeak1
23870   libfinance-quote-perl libgail-common libgsl0ldbl libhtml-parser-perl
23871   libhtml-tableextract-perl libhtml-tagset-perl libhtml-tree-perl
23872   libio-stringy-perl libkdeedu4 libkdegames5 libkiten4 libkpathsea5
23873   libkrossui4 libmailtools-perl libmime-tools-perl
23874   libnews-nntpclient-perl libopenbabel3 libportaudio2 libpulse-browse0
23875   libservlet2.4-java libspeechd2 libtiff-tools libtimedate-perl
23876   libunistring0 liburi-perl libwww-perl libxalan2-java libxerces2-java
23877   lirc luatex marble networkstatus noatun-plugins
23878   openoffice.org-writer2latex palapeli palapeli-data parley
23879   parley-data poster psutils pulseaudio pulseaudio-esound-compat
23880   pulseaudio-module-x11 pulseaudio-utils quanta-data rocs rsync
23881   speech-dispatcher step svgalibg1 texlive-binaries texlive-luatex
23882   ttf-sazanami-gothic
23883 </p></blockquote>
23884
23885 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
23886
23887 <blockquote><p>
23888   amor artsbuilder atlantik atlantikdesigner blinken bluez-utils cvs
23889   dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop imlib-base imlib11 kalzium kanagram kandy
23890   kasteroids katomic kbackgammon kbattleship kblackbox kbounce kbruch
23891   kcron kdat kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data kdeprint kdict kdvi kedit
23892   keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs kgeography kghostview
23893   kgoldrunner khangman khexedit kiconedit kig kimagemapeditor
23894   kitchensync kiten kjumpingcube klatin klettres klickety klines
23895   klinkstatus kmag kmahjongg kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmines
23896   kmousetool kmouth kmplot knetwalk kodo kolf kommander konquest kooka
23897   kpager kpat kpdf kpercentage kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler krec
23898   kregexpeditor kreversi ksame ksayit kshisen ksig ksim ksirc ksirtet
23899   ksmiletris ksnake ksokoban kspaceduel kstars ksvg ksysv kteatime
23900   ktip ktnef ktouch ktron kttsd ktuberling kturtle ktux kuickshow
23901   kverbos kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kwordquiz
23902   kworldclock kxsldbg libakode2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
23903   libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
23904   libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2
23905   libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0
23906   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
23907   libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0 libicu38
23908   libiec61883-0 libindex0 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
23909   libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1 libkdeedu3
23910   libkdegames1 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
23911   libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
23912   libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick10
23913   libmimelib1c2a libmodplug0c2 libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libmpfr1ldbl
23914   libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9 libpoppler-glib3
23915   libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 librss1 libsensors3
23916   libsmbios2 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90
23917   libtalloc1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 lskat
23918   mpeglib network-manager-kde noatun pmount tex-common texlive-base
23919   texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended tidy
23920   ttf-dustin ttf-kochi-gothic ttf-sjfonts
23921 </p></blockquote>
23922
23923 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
23924
23925 <blockquote><p>
23926   dolphin kde-core kde-plasma-desktop kde-standard kde-window-manager
23927   kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-apps kdebase-workspace
23928   kdebase-workspace-bin kdebase-workspace-data kdeutils kscreensaver
23929   kscreensaver-xsavers libgle3 libkonq5 libkonq5-templates libnetpbm10
23930   netpbm plasma-widget-folderview plasma-widget-networkmanagement
23931   xscreensaver-data-extra xscreensaver-gl xscreensaver-gl-extra
23932   xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
23933 </p></blockquote>
23934
23935 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
23936
23937 <blockquote><p>
23938   kdebase-bin konq-plugins konqueror
23939 </p></blockquote>
23940
23941       </div>
23942       <div class="tags">
23943
23944
23945         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>.
23946
23947
23948       </div>
23949     </div>
23950     <div class="padding"></div>
23951
23952     <div class="entry">
23953       <div class="title">
23954         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_buildbot_slave_and_Debian_kfreebsd.html">Gnash buildbot slave and Debian kfreebsd</a>
23955       </div>
23956       <div class="date">
23957         20th November 2010
23958       </div>
23959       <div class="body">
23960         <p>Answering
23961 <a href="http://www.listware.net/201011/gnash-dev/67431-gnash-dev-buildbot-looking-for-slaves.html">the
23962 call from the Gnash project</a> for
23963 <a href="http://www.gnashdev.org:8010">buildbot</a> slaves to test the
23964 current source, I have set up a virtual KVM machine on the Debian
23965 Edu/Skolelinux virtualization host to test the git source on
23966 Debian/Squeeze.  I hope this can help the developers in getting new
23967 releases out more often.</p>
23968
23969 <p>As the developers want less main-stream build platforms tested to,
23970 I have considered setting up a <a
23971 href="http://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/">Debian/kfreebsd</a>
23972 machine as well.  I have also considered using the kfreebsd
23973 architecture in Debian as a file server in NUUG to get access to the 5
23974 TB zfs volume we currently use to store DV video.  Because of this, I
23975 finally got around to do a test installation of Debian/Squeeze with
23976 kfreebsd.  Installation went fairly smooth, thought I noticed some
23977 visual glitches in the cdebconf dialogs (black cursor left on the
23978 screen at random locations).  Have not gotten very far with the
23979 testing.  Noticed cfdisk did not work, but fdisk did so it was not a
23980 fatal problem.  Have to spend some more time on it to see if it is
23981 useful as a file server for NUUG.  Will try to find time to set up a
23982 gnash buildbot slave on the Debian Edu/Skolelinux this weekend.</p>
23983
23984       </div>
23985       <div class="tags">
23986
23987
23988         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>.
23989
23990
23991       </div>
23992     </div>
23993     <div class="padding"></div>
23994
23995     <div class="entry">
23996       <div class="title">
23997         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_in_3D.html">Debian in 3D</a>
23998       </div>
23999       <div class="date">
24000          9th November 2010
24001       </div>
24002       <div class="body">
24003         <p><img src="http://thingiverse-production.s3.amazonaws.com/renders/23/e0/c4/f9/2b/debswagtdose_preview_medium.jpg"></p>
24004
24005 <p>3D printing is just great.  I just came across this Debian logo in
24006 3D linked in from
24007 <a href="http://blog.thingiverse.com/2010/11/09/participatory-branding/">the
24008 thingiverse blog</a>.</p>
24009
24010       </div>
24011       <div class="tags">
24012
24013
24014         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>.
24015
24016
24017       </div>
24018     </div>
24019     <div class="padding"></div>
24020
24021     <div class="entry">
24022       <div class="title">
24023         <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>
24024       </div>
24025       <div class="date">
24026          7th November 2010
24027       </div>
24028       <div class="body">
24029         <p>Prioritising packages for the Debian Edu /
24030 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a> DVD, which is
24031 supposed provide a school with all the services and user applications
24032 needed on the pupils computer network has always been hard.  Even
24033 schools without Internet connections should be able to get Debian Edu
24034 working using this DVD.</p>
24035
24036 <p>The job became a lot harder when apt and aptitude started
24037 installing recommended packages by default.  We want the same set of
24038 packages to be installed when using the DVD and the netinst CD, and
24039 that means all recommended packages need to be on the DVD.  I created
24040 a patch for debian-cd in <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/601203">BTS
24041 report #601203</a> to do this, and since this change was applied to
24042 the Debian Edu DVD build, we have been seriously short on space.</p>
24043
24044 <p>A few days ago we decided to drop blender, wxmaxima and kicad from
24045 the default installation to save space on the DVD, believing that
24046 those needing these applications are few and can get them from the
24047 Debian archive.</p>
24048
24049 <p>Yesterday, I had a look what source packages to see which packages
24050 were using most space.  A few large packages are well know;
24051 openoffice.org, openclipart and fluid-soundfont.  But I also
24052 discovered that lilypond used 106 MiB and fglrx-driver used 53 MiB.
24053 The lilypond package is pulled in as a dependency for rosegarden, and
24054 when looking a bit closer I discovered that 99 MiB of the 106 MiB were
24055 the documentation package, which is recommended by the binary package.
24056 I decided to drop this documentation package from our DVD, as most of
24057 our users will use the GUI front-ends and do not need the lilypond
24058 documentation.  Similarly, I dropped the non-free fglrx-driver package
24059 which might be installed by d-i when its hardware is detected, as the
24060 free X driver should work.</p>
24061
24062 <p>With this change, we finally got space for the LXDE and Gnome
24063 desktop packages as well as the language specific packages making the
24064 DVD more useful again.</p>
24065
24066       </div>
24067       <div class="tags">
24068
24069
24070         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>.
24071
24072
24073       </div>
24074     </div>
24075     <div class="padding"></div>
24076
24077     <div class="entry">
24078       <div class="title">
24079         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_updates_2010_10_24.html">Software updates 2010-10-24</a>
24080       </div>
24081       <div class="date">
24082         24th October 2010
24083       </div>
24084       <div class="body">
24085         <p>Some updates.</p>
24086
24087 <p>My <a href="http://pledgebank.com/gnash-avm2">gnash pledge</a> to
24088 raise money for the project is going well.  The lower limit of 10
24089 signers was reached in 24 hours, and so far 13 people have signed it.
24090 More signers and more funding is most welcome, and I am really curious
24091 how far we can get before the time limit of December 24 is reached.
24092 :)</p>
24093
24094 <p>On the #gnash IRC channel on irc.freenode.net, I was just tipped
24095 about what appear to be a great code coverage tool capable of
24096 generating code coverage stats without any changes to the source code.
24097 It is called
24098 <a href="http://simonkagstrom.github.com/kcov/index.html">kcov</a>,
24099 and can be used using <tt>kcov &lt;directory&gt; &lt;binary&gt;</tt>.
24100 It is missing in Debian, but the git source built just fine in Squeeze
24101 after I installed libelf-dev, libdwarf-dev, pkg-config and
24102 libglib2.0-dev.  Failed to build in Lenny, but suspect that is
24103 solvable.  I hope kcov make it into Debian soon.</p>
24104
24105 <p>Finally found time to wrap up the release notes for <a
24106 href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2010/10/msg00002.html">a
24107 new alpha release of Debian Edu</a>, and just published the second
24108 alpha test release of the Squeeze based Debian Edu /
24109 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a>
24110 release.  Give it a try if you need a complete linux solution for your
24111 school, including central infrastructure server, workstations, thin
24112 client servers and diskless workstations.  A nice touch added
24113 yesterday is RDP support on the thin client servers, for windows
24114 clients to get a Linux desktop on request.</p>
24115
24116       </div>
24117       <div class="tags">
24118
24119
24120         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>.
24121
24122
24123       </div>
24124     </div>
24125     <div class="padding"></div>
24126
24127     <div class="entry">
24128       <div class="title">
24129         <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>
24130       </div>
24131       <div class="date">
24132         19th October 2010
24133       </div>
24134       <div class="body">
24135         <p><a href="http://www.getgnash.org/">The Gnash project</a> is the
24136 most promising solution for a Free Software Flash implementation. It
24137 has done great so far, but there is still far to go, and recently its
24138 funding has dried up.  I believe AVM2 support in Gnash is vital to the
24139 continued progress of the project, as more and more sites show up with
24140 AVM2 flash files.</p>
24141
24142 <p>To try to get funding for developing such support, I have started
24143 <a href="http://www.pledgebank.com/gnash-avm2">a pledge</a> with the
24144 following text:</P>
24145
24146 <p><blockquote>
24147
24148   <p>"I will pay 100$ to the Gnash project to develop AVM2 support but
24149   only if 10 other people will do the same."</p>
24150
24151   <p>- Petter Reinholdtsen, free software developer</p>
24152
24153   <p>Deadline to sign up by: 24th December 2010</p>
24154
24155   <p>The Gnash project need to get support for the new Flash file
24156   format AVM2 to work with a lot of sites using Flash on the
24157   web. Gnash already work with a lot of Flash sites using the old AVM1
24158   format, but more and more sites are using the AVM2 format these
24159   days. The project web page is available from
24160   http://www.getgnash.org/ . Gnash is a free software implementation
24161   of Adobe Flash, allowing those of us that do not accept the terms of
24162   the Adobe Flash license to get access to Flash sites.</p>
24163
24164   <p>The project need funding to get developers to put aside enough
24165   time to develop the AVM2 support, and this pledge is my way to try
24166   to get this to happen.</p>
24167
24168   <p>The project accept donations via the OpenMediaNow foundation,
24169   <a href="http://www.openmedianow.org/?q=node/32">http://www.openmedianow.org/?q=node/32</a> .</p>
24170
24171 </blockquote></p>
24172
24173 <p>I hope you will support this effort too.  I hope more than 10
24174 people will participate to make this happen.  The more money the
24175 project gets, the more features it can develop using these funds.
24176 :)</p>
24177
24178       </div>
24179       <div class="tags">
24180
24181
24182         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>.
24183
24184
24185       </div>
24186     </div>
24187     <div class="padding"></div>
24188
24189     <div class="entry">
24190       <div class="title">
24191         <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>
24192       </div>
24193       <div class="date">
24194          9th October 2010
24195       </div>
24196       <div class="body">
24197         <p>This summer I got the chance to buy cheap Spykee robots, and since
24198 then I have worked on getting Linux software in place to control them.
24199 The firmware for the robot is available from the producer, and using
24200 that source it was trivial to figure out the protocol specification.
24201 I've started on a perl library to control it, and made some demo
24202 programs using this perl library to allow one to control the
24203 robots.</p>
24204
24205 <p>The library is quite functional already, and capable of controlling
24206 the driving, fetching video, uploading MP3s and play them.  There are
24207 a few less important features too.</p>
24208
24209 <p>Since a few weeks ago, I ran out of time to spend on this project,
24210 but I never got around to releasing the current source.  I decided
24211 today that it was time to do something about it, and uploaded the
24212 source to my Debian package store at people.skolelinux.org.</p>
24213
24214 <p>Because it was simpler for me, I made a Debian package and
24215 published the source and deb.  If you got a spykee robot, grab the
24216 source or binary package:</p>
24217
24218 <p><ul>
24219 <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>
24220 <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>
24221 <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>
24222 </ul></p>
24223
24224 <p>If you are interested in helping out with developing this library,
24225 please let me know.</p>
24226
24227       </div>
24228       <div class="tags">
24229
24230
24231         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>.
24232
24233
24234       </div>
24235     </div>
24236     <div class="padding"></div>
24237
24238     <div class="entry">
24239       <div class="title">
24240         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Links_for_2010_10_03.html">Links for 2010-10-03</a>
24241       </div>
24242       <div class="date">
24243          3rd October 2010
24244       </div>
24245       <div class="body">
24246         <p><ul>
24247
24248 <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
24249 is no Plan B: why the IPv4-to-IPv6 transition will be ugly</a></li>
24250
24251 <li>Scanner looking under clothes
24252 <a href="http://www.dagbladet.no/2010/10/03/nyheter/utenriks/reise/overvakingskamera/flyplasser/13667192/">has
24253 already been misused at Heathrow</a>.</li>
24254
24255 <li><a href="http://wiki.softwarelivre.org/Landell">Landell
24256 Webcasting</a> - interesting alternative for
24257 <ahref="http://dvswitch.alioth.debian.org/wiki/">DVSwitch</a> with
24258 simple setup.
24259
24260 </ul></p>
24261
24262       </div>
24263       <div class="tags">
24264
24265
24266         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>.
24267
24268
24269       </div>
24270     </div>
24271     <div class="padding"></div>
24272
24273     <div class="entry">
24274       <div class="title">
24275         <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>
24276       </div>
24277       <div class="date">
24278          9th September 2010
24279       </div>
24280       <div class="body">
24281         <p>A few days ago I had the mixed pleasure of bying a new digital
24282 camera, a Canon IXUS 130.  It was instructive and very disturbing to
24283 be able to verify that also this camera producer have the nerve to
24284 specify how I can or can not use the videos produced with the camera.
24285 Even thought I was aware of the issue, the options with new cameras
24286 are limited and I ended up bying the camera anyway.  What is the
24287 problem, you might ask?  It is software patents, MPEG-4, H.264 and the
24288 MPEG-LA that is the problem, and our right to record our experiences
24289 without asking for permissions that is at risk.
24290
24291 <p>On page 27 of the Danish instruction manual, this section is
24292 written:</p>
24293
24294 <blockquote>
24295 <p>This product is licensed under AT&T patents for the MPEG-4 standard
24296 and may be used for encoding MPEG-4 compliant video and/or decoding
24297 MPEG-4 compliant video that was encoded only (1) for a personal and
24298 non-commercial purpose or (2) by a video provider licensed under the
24299 AT&T patents to provide MPEG-4 compliant video.</p>
24300
24301 <p>No license is granted or implied for any other use for MPEG-4
24302 standard.</p>
24303 </blockquote>
24304
24305 <p>In short, the camera producer have chosen to use technology
24306 (MPEG-4/H.264) that is only provided if I used it for personal and
24307 non-commercial purposes, or ask for permission from the organisations
24308 holding the knowledge monopoly (patent) for technology used.</p>
24309
24310 <p>This issue has been brewing for a while, and I recommend you to
24311 read
24312 "<a href="http://www.osnews.com/story/23236/Why_Our_Civilization_s_Video_Art_and_Culture_is_Threatened_by_the_MPEG-LA">Why
24313 Our Civilization's Video Art and Culture is Threatened by the
24314 MPEG-LA</a>" by Eugenia Loli-Queru and
24315 "<a href="http://webmink.com/2010/09/03/h-264-and-foss/">H.264 Is Not
24316 The Sort Of Free That Matters</a>" by Simon Phipps to learn more about
24317 the issue.  The solution is to support the
24318 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">free and
24319 open standards</a> for video, like <a href="http://www.theora.org/">Ogg
24320 Theora</a>, and avoid MPEG-4 and H.264 if you can.</p>
24321
24322       </div>
24323       <div class="tags">
24324
24325
24326         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>.
24327
24328
24329       </div>
24330     </div>
24331     <div class="padding"></div>
24332
24333     <div class="entry">
24334       <div class="title">
24335         <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>
24336       </div>
24337       <div class="date">
24338          4th September 2010
24339       </div>
24340       <div class="body">
24341         <p>In the <a href="http://popcon.debian.org/unknown/by_vote">Debian
24342 popularity-contest numbers</a>, the adobe-flashplugin package the
24343 second most popular used package that is missing in Debian.  The sixth
24344 most popular is flashplayer-mozilla.  This is a clear indication that
24345 working flash is important for Debian users.  Around 10 percent of the
24346 users submitting data to popcon.debian.org have this package
24347 installed.</p>
24348
24349 <p>In the report written by Lars Risan in August 2008
24350 («<a href="http://wiki.skolelinux.no/Dokumentasjon/Rapporter?action=AttachFile&do=view&target=Skolelinux_i_bruk_rapport_1.0.pdf">Skolelinux
24351 i bruk – Rapport for Hurum kommune, Universitetet i Agder og
24352 stiftelsen SLX Debian Labs</a>»), one of the most important problems
24353 schools experienced with <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
24354 Edu/Skolelinux</a> was the lack of working Flash.  A lot of educational
24355 web sites require Flash to work, and lacking working Flash support in
24356 the web browser and the problems with installing it was perceived as a
24357 good reason to stay with Windows.</p>
24358
24359 <p>I once saw a funny and sad comment in a web forum, where Linux was
24360 said to be the retarded cousin that did not really understand
24361 everything you told him but could work fairly well.  This was a
24362 comment regarding the problems Linux have with proprietary formats and
24363 non-standard web pages, and is sad because it exposes a fairly common
24364 understanding of whose fault it is if web pages that only work in for
24365 example Internet Explorer 6 fail to work on Firefox, and funny because
24366 it explain very well how annoying it is for users when Linux
24367 distributions do not work with the documents they receive or the web
24368 pages they want to visit.</p>
24369
24370 <p>This is part of the reason why I believe it is important for Debian
24371 and Debian Edu to have a well working Flash implementation in the
24372 distribution, to get at least popular sites as Youtube and Google
24373 Video to working out of the box.  For Squeeze, Debian have the chance
24374 to include the latest version of Gnash that will make this happen, as
24375 the new release 0.8.8 was published a few weeks ago and is resting in
24376 unstable.  The new version work with more sites that version 0.8.7.
24377 The Gnash maintainers have asked for a freeze exception, but the
24378 release team have not had time to reply to it yet.  I hope they agree
24379 with me that Flash is important for the Debian desktop users, and thus
24380 accept the new package into Squeeze.</p>
24381
24382       </div>
24383       <div class="tags">
24384
24385
24386         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>.
24387
24388
24389       </div>
24390     </div>
24391     <div class="padding"></div>
24392
24393     <div class="entry">
24394       <div class="title">
24395         <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>
24396       </div>
24397       <div class="date">
24398          1st September 2010
24399       </div>
24400       <div class="body">
24401         <p>This evening I made my first Perl GUI application.  The last few
24402 days I have worked on a Perl module for controlling my recently
24403 aquired Spykee robots, and the module is now getting complete enought
24404 that it is possible to use it to control the robot driving at least.
24405 It was now time to figure out how to use it to create some GUI to
24406 allow me to drive the robot around.  I picked PerlQt as I have had
24407 positive experiences with the Qt API before, and spent a few minutes
24408 browsing the web for examples.  Using Qt Designer seemed like a short
24409 cut, so I ended up writing the perl GUI using Qt Designer and
24410 compiling it into a perl program using the puic program from
24411 libqt-perl.  Nothing fancy yet, but it got buttons to connect and
24412 drive around.</p>
24413
24414 <p>The perl module I have written provide a object oriented API for
24415 controlling the robot.  Here is an small example on how to use it:</p>
24416
24417 <p><pre>
24418 use Spykee;
24419 Spykee::discover(sub {$robot{$_[0]} = $_[1]});
24420 my $host = (keys %robot)[0];
24421 my $spykee = Spykee->new();
24422 $spykee->contact($host, "admin", "admin");
24423 $spykee->left();
24424 sleep 2;
24425 $spykee->right();
24426 sleep 2;
24427 $spykee->forward();
24428 sleep 2;
24429 $spykee->back();
24430 sleep 2;
24431 $spykee->stop();
24432 </pre></p>
24433
24434 <p>Thanks to the release of the source of the robot firmware, I could
24435 peek into the implementation at the other end to figure out how to
24436 implement the protocol used by the robot.  I've implemented several of
24437 the commands the robot understand, but is still missing the camera
24438 support to make it possible to control the robot from remote.  First I
24439 want to implement support for uploading new firmware and configuring
24440 the wireless network, to make it possible to bootstrap a Spykee robot
24441 without the producers Windows and MacOSX software (I only have Linux,
24442 so I had to ask a friend to come over to get the robot testing
24443 going. :).</p>
24444
24445 <p>Will release the source to the public soon, but need to figure out
24446 where to make it available first.  I will add a link to
24447 <a href="http://wiki.nuug.no/grupper/robot/">the NUUG wiki</a> for
24448 those that want to check back later to find it.</p>
24449
24450       </div>
24451       <div class="tags">
24452
24453
24454         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>.
24455
24456
24457       </div>
24458     </div>
24459     <div class="padding"></div>
24460
24461     <div class="entry">
24462       <div class="title">
24463         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_hard_link_handling_with_sshfs.html">Broken hard link handling with sshfs</a>
24464       </div>
24465       <div class="date">
24466         30th August 2010
24467       </div>
24468       <div class="body">
24469         <p>Just got an email from Tobias Gruetzmacher as a followup on my
24470 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_umask_handling_with_sshfs.html">previous
24471 post about sshfs</a>.  He reported another problem with sshfs.  It
24472 fail to handle hard links properly.  A simple way to spot this is to
24473 look at the . and .. entries in the directory tree.  These should have
24474 a link count >1, but on sshfs the count is 1.  I just tested to see
24475 what happen when trying to hardlink, and this fail as well:</p>
24476
24477 <pre>
24478 % ln foo bar
24479 ln: creating hard link `bar' => `foo': Function not implemented
24480 %
24481 </pre>
24482
24483 <p>I have not yet found time to implement a test for this in my file
24484 system test code, but believe having working hard links is useful to
24485 avoid surprised unix programs.  Not as useful as working file locking
24486 and symlinks, which are required to get a working desktop, but useful
24487 nevertheless. :)</p>
24488
24489 <p>The latest version of the file system test code is available via
24490 git from
24491 <a href="http://github.com/gebi/fs-test">http://github.com/gebi/fs-test</a></p>
24492
24493       </div>
24494       <div class="tags">
24495
24496
24497         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>.
24498
24499
24500       </div>
24501     </div>
24502     <div class="padding"></div>
24503
24504     <div class="entry">
24505       <div class="title">
24506         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_umask_handling_with_sshfs.html">Broken umask handling with sshfs</a>
24507       </div>
24508       <div class="date">
24509         26th August 2010
24510       </div>
24511       <div class="body">
24512         <p>My file system sematics program
24513 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_if_a_file_system_can_be_used_for_home_directories___.html">presented
24514 a few days ago</a> is very useful to verify that a file system can
24515 work as a unix home directory,and today I had to extend it a bit.  I'm
24516 looking into alternatives for home directory access here at the
24517 University of Oslo, and one of the options is sshfs.  My friend
24518 Finn-Arne mentioned a while back that they had used sshfs with Debian
24519 Edu, but stopped because of problems.  I asked today what the problems
24520 where, and he mentioned that sshfs failed to handle umask properly.
24521 Trying to detect the problem I wrote this addition to my fs testing
24522 script:</p>
24523
24524 <pre>
24525 mode_t touch_get_mode(const char *name, mode_t mode) {
24526   mode_t retval = 0;
24527   int fd = open(name, O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_LARGEFILE, mode);
24528   if (-1 != fd) {
24529     unlink(name);
24530     struct stat statbuf;
24531     if (-1 != fstat(fd, &statbuf)) {
24532       retval = statbuf.st_mode & 0x1ff;
24533     }
24534     close(fd);
24535   }
24536   return retval;
24537 }
24538
24539 /* Try to detect problem discovered using sshfs */
24540 int test_umask(void) {
24541   printf("info: testing umask effect on file creation\n");
24542
24543   mode_t orig_umask = umask(000);
24544   mode_t newmode;
24545   if (0666 != (newmode = touch_get_mode("foobar", 0666))) {
24546     printf("  error: Wrong file mode %o when creating using mode 666 and umask 000\n",
24547            newmode);
24548   }
24549   umask(007);
24550   if (0660 != (newmode = touch_get_mode("foobar", 0666))) {
24551     printf("  error: Wrong file mode %o when creating using mode 666 and umask 007\n",
24552            newmode);
24553   }
24554
24555   umask (orig_umask);
24556   return 0;
24557 }
24558
24559 int main(int argc, char **argv) {
24560   [...]
24561   test_umask();
24562   return 0;
24563 }
24564 </pre>
24565
24566 <p>Sure enough.  On NFS to a netapp, I get this result:</p>
24567
24568 <pre>
24569 Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
24570 info: testing symlink creation
24571 info: testing subdirectory creation
24572 info: testing fcntl locking
24573   Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
24574   Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
24575   Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824
24576   Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
24577   Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
24578   Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824
24579 info: testing umask effect on file creation
24580 </pre>
24581
24582 <p>When mounting the same directory using sshfs, I get this
24583 result:</p>
24584
24585 <pre>
24586 Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
24587 info: testing symlink creation
24588 info: testing subdirectory creation
24589 info: testing fcntl locking
24590   Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
24591   Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
24592   Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824
24593   Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
24594   Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
24595   Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824
24596 info: testing umask effect on file creation
24597   error: Wrong file mode 644 when creating using mode 666 and umask 000
24598   error: Wrong file mode 640 when creating using mode 666 and umask 007
24599 </pre>
24600
24601 <p>So, I can conclude that sshfs is better than smb to a Netapp or a
24602 Windows server, but not good enough to be used as a home
24603 directory.</p>
24604
24605 <p>Update 2010-08-26: Reported the issue in
24606 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/594498">BTS report #594498</a></p>
24607
24608 <p>Update 2010-08-27: Michael Gebetsroither report that he found the
24609 script so useful that he created a GIT repository and stored it in
24610 <a href="http://github.com/gebi/fs-test">http://github.com/gebi/fs-test</a>.</p>
24611
24612       </div>
24613       <div class="tags">
24614
24615
24616         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>.
24617
24618
24619       </div>
24620     </div>
24621     <div class="padding"></div>
24622
24623     <div class="entry">
24624       <div class="title">
24625         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Rob_Weir__How_to_Crush_Dissent.html">Rob Weir: How to Crush Dissent</a>
24626       </div>
24627       <div class="date">
24628         15th August 2010
24629       </div>
24630       <div class="body">
24631         <p>I found the notes from Rob Weir on
24632 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/robweir/antic-atom/~3/VGb23-kta8c/how-to-crush-dissent.html">how
24633 to crush dissent</a> matching my own thoughts on the matter quite
24634 well.  Highly recommended for those wondering which road our society
24635 should go down.  In my view we have been heading the wrong way for a
24636 long time.</p>
24637
24638       </div>
24639       <div class="tags">
24640
24641
24642         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>.
24643
24644
24645       </div>
24646     </div>
24647     <div class="padding"></div>
24648
24649     <div class="entry">
24650       <div class="title">
24651         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/No_hardcoded_config_on_Debian_Edu_clients.html">No hardcoded config on Debian Edu clients</a>
24652       </div>
24653       <div class="date">
24654          9th August 2010
24655       </div>
24656       <div class="body">
24657         <p>As reported earlier, the last few days I have looked at how Debian
24658 Edu clients are configured, and tried to get rid of all hardcoded
24659 configuration settings on the clients.  I believe the work to be
24660 mostly done, and the clients seem to work just fine with dynamically
24661 generated configuration.</p>
24662
24663 <p>What is the point, you might ask?  The point is to allow a Debian
24664 Edu desktop to integrate into an existing network infrastructure
24665 without any manual configuration.</p>
24666
24667 <p>This is what happens when installing a Debian Edu client here at
24668 the University of Oslo using PXE.  With the PXE installation, I am
24669 asked for language (Norwegian Bokmål), locality (Norway) and keyboard
24670 layout (no-latin1), Debian Edu profile (Roaming Workstation), if I
24671 accept to reformat the hard drive (yes), if I want to submit info to
24672 popcon.debian.org (no) and root password (secret).  After answering
24673 these questions, the installer goes ahead and does its thing, and
24674 after around 50 minutes it is done.  I press enter to finish the
24675 installation, and the machine reboots into KDE.  When the machine is
24676 ready and kdm asks for login information, I enter my university
24677 username and password, am told by kdm that a local home directory has
24678 been created and that I must log in again, and finally log in with the
24679 same username and password to the KDE 4.4 desktop.  At no point during
24680 this process did it ask for university specific settings, and all the
24681 required configuration was dynamically detected using information
24682 fetched via DHCP and DNS.  The roaming workstation is now ready for
24683 use.</p>
24684
24685 <p>How was this done, you might wonder?  First of all, here is the
24686 list of things that need to be configured on the client to get it
24687 working properly out of the box:</p>
24688
24689 <ul>
24690 <li>IP address/netmask and DNS server.</li>
24691 <li>Web proxy URL.</li>
24692 <li>LDAP server for NSS directory information (user, group, etc).</li>
24693 <li>Kerberos server for PAM password checking.</li>
24694 <li>SMB mount point to access the network home directory. (*)</li>
24695 <li>Central syslog server to send syslog messages to. (*)</li>
24696 <li>Sitesummary collector URL to submit info to central server. (*)</li>
24697 </ul>
24698
24699 <p>(Hm, did I forget anything?  Let me knew if I did.)</p>
24700
24701 <p>The points marked (*) are not required to be able to use the
24702 machine, but needed to provide central storage and allowing system
24703 administrators to track their machines.  Since yesterday, everything
24704 but the sitesummary collector URL is dynamically discovered at boot
24705 and installation time in the svn version of Debian Edu.</p>
24706
24707 <p>The IP and DNS setup is fetched during boot using DHCP as usual.
24708 When a DHCP update arrives, the proxy setup is updated by looking for
24709 http://wpat/wpad.dat and using the content of this WPAD file to
24710 configure the http and ftp proxy in /etc/environment and
24711 /etc/apt/apt.conf.  I decided to update the proxy setup using a DHCP
24712 hook to ensure that the client stops using the Debian Edu proxy when
24713 it is moved outside the Debian Edu network, and instead uses any local
24714 proxy present on the new network when it moves around.</p>
24715
24716 <p>The DNS names of the LDAP, Kerberos and syslog server and related
24717 configuration are generated using DNS information at boot.  First the
24718 installer looks for a host named ldap in the current DNS domain.  If
24719 not found, it looks for _ldap._tcp SRV records in DNS instead.  If an
24720 LDAP server is found, its root DSE entry is requested and the
24721 attributes namingContexts and defaultNamingContext are used to
24722 determine which LDAP base to use for NSS.  If there are several
24723 namingContexts attibutes and the defaultNamingContext is present, that
24724 LDAP subtree is used as the base.  If defaultNamingContext is missing,
24725 the subtrees listed as namingContexts are searched in sequence for any
24726 object with class posixAccount or posixGroup, and the first one with
24727 such an object is used as the LDAP base.  For Kerberos, a similar
24728 search is done by first looking for a host named kerberos, and then
24729 for the _kerberos._tcp SRV record.  I've been unable to find a way to
24730 look up the Kerberos realm, so for this the upper case string of the
24731 current DNS domain is used.</p>
24732
24733 <p>For the syslog server, the hosts syslog and loghost are searched
24734 for, and the _syslog._udp SRV record is consulted if no such host is
24735 found.  This algorithm works for both Debian Edu and the University of
24736 Oslo.  A similar strategy would work for locating the sitesummary
24737 server, but have not been implemented yet.  I decided to fetch and
24738 save these settings during installation, to make sure moving to a
24739 different network does not change the set of users being allowed to
24740 log in nor the passwords required to log in.  Usernames and passwords
24741 will be cached by sssd when the user logs in on the Debian Edu
24742 network, and will not change as the laptop move around.  For a
24743 non-roaming machine, there is no caching, but given that it is
24744 supposed to stay in place it should not matter much.  Perhaps we
24745 should switch those to use sssd too?</p>
24746
24747 <p>The user's SMB mount point for the network home directory is
24748 located when the user logs in for the first time.  The LDAP server is
24749 consulted to look for the user's LDAP object and the sambaHomePath
24750 attribute is used if found.  If it isn't found, the home directory
24751 path fetched from NSS is used instead.  Assuming the path is of the
24752 form /site/server/directory/username, the second part is looked up in
24753 DNS and used to generate a SMB URL of the form
24754 smb://server.domain/username.  This algorithm works for both Debian
24755 edu and the University of Oslo.  Perhaps there are better attributes
24756 to use or a better algorithm that works for more sites, but this will
24757 do for now. :)</p>
24758
24759 <p>This work should make it easier to integrate the Debian Edu clients
24760 into any LDAP/Kerberos infrastructure, and make the current setup even
24761 more flexible than before.  I suspect it will also work for thin
24762 client servers, allowing one to easily set up LTSP and hook it into a
24763 existing network infrastructure, but I have not had time to test this
24764 yet.</p>
24765
24766 <p>If you want to help out with implementing these things for Debian
24767 Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
24768
24769 <p>Update 2010-08-09: Simon Farnsworth gave me a heads-up on how to
24770 detect Kerberos realm from DNS, by looking for _kerberos TXT entries
24771 before falling back to the upper case DNS domain name.  Will have to
24772 implement it for Debian Edu. :)</p>
24773
24774       </div>
24775       <div class="tags">
24776
24777
24778         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>.
24779
24780
24781       </div>
24782     </div>
24783     <div class="padding"></div>
24784
24785     <div class="entry">
24786       <div class="title">
24787         <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>
24788       </div>
24789       <div class="date">
24790          8th August 2010
24791       </div>
24792       <div class="body">
24793         <p>A few years ago, I was involved in a project planning to use
24794 Windows file servers as home directory servers for Debian
24795 Edu/Skolelinux machines.  This was thought to be no problem, as the
24796 access would be through the SMB network file system protocol, and we
24797 knew other sites used SMB with unix and samba as the file server to
24798 mount home directories without any problems.  But, after months of
24799 struggling, we had to conclude that our goal was impossible.</p>
24800
24801 <p>The reason is simply that while SMB can be used for home
24802 directories when the file server is Samba running on Unix, this only
24803 work because of Samba have some extensions and the fact that the
24804 underlying file system is a unix file system.  When using a Windows
24805 file server, the underlying file system do not have POSIX semantics,
24806 and several programs will fail if the users home directory where they
24807 want to store their configuration lack POSIX semantics.</p>
24808
24809 <p>As part of this work, I wrote a small C program I want to share
24810 with you all, to replicate a few of the problematic applications (like
24811 OpenOffice.org and GCompris) and see if the file system was working as
24812 it should.  If you find yourself in spooky file system land, it might
24813 help you find your way out again.  This is the fs-test.c source:</p>
24814
24815 <pre>
24816 /*
24817  * Some tests to check the file system sematics.  Used to verify that
24818  * CIFS from a windows server do not work properly as a linux home
24819  * directory.
24820  * License: GPL v2 or later
24821  *
24822  * needs libsqlite3-dev and build-essential installed
24823  * compile with: gcc -Wall -lsqlite3 -DTEST_SQLITE fs-test.c -o fs-test
24824 */
24825
24826 #define _FILE_OFFSET_BITS 64
24827 #define _LARGEFILE_SOURCE 1
24828 #define _LARGEFILE64_SOURCE 1
24829
24830 #define _GNU_SOURCE /* for asprintf() */
24831
24832 #include &lt;errno.h>
24833 #include &lt;fcntl.h>
24834 #include &lt;stdio.h>
24835 #include &lt;string.h>
24836 #include &lt;stdlib.h>
24837 #include &lt;sys/file.h>
24838 #include &lt;sys/stat.h>
24839 #include &lt;sys/types.h>
24840 #include &lt;unistd.h>
24841
24842 #ifdef TEST_SQLITE
24843 /*
24844  * Test sqlite open, as done by gcompris require the libsqlite3-dev
24845  * package and linking with -lsqlite3.  A more low level test is
24846  * below.
24847  * See also &lt;URL: http://www.sqlite.org./faq.html#q5 >.
24848  */
24849 #include &lt;sqlite3.h>
24850 #define CREATE_TABLE_USERS                                              \
24851   "CREATE TABLE users (user_id INT UNIQUE, login TEXT, lastname TEXT, firstname TEXT, birthdate TEXT, class_id INT ); "
24852 int test_sqlite_open(void) {
24853   char *zErrMsg;
24854   char *name = "testsqlite.db";
24855   sqlite3 *db=NULL;
24856   unlink(name);
24857   int rc = sqlite3_open(name, &db);
24858   if( rc ){
24859     printf("error: sqlite open of %s failed: %s\n", name, sqlite3_errmsg(db));
24860     sqlite3_close(db);
24861     return -1;
24862   }
24863
24864   /* create tables */
24865   rc = sqlite3_exec(db,CREATE_TABLE_USERS, NULL,  0, &zErrMsg);
24866   if( rc != SQLITE_OK ){
24867     printf("error: sqlite table create failed: %s\n", zErrMsg);
24868     sqlite3_close(db);
24869     return -1;
24870   }
24871   printf("info: sqlite worked\n");
24872   sqlite3_close(db);
24873   return 0;
24874 }
24875 #endif /* TEST_SQLITE */
24876
24877 /*
24878  * Demonstrate locking issue found in gcompris using sqlite3.  This
24879  * work with ext3, but not with cifs server on Windows 2003.  This is
24880  * done in the sqlite3 library.
24881  * See also
24882  * &lt;URL:http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2001-08/msg00854.html> and the
24883  * POSIX specification
24884  * &lt;URL:http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/fcntl.html>.
24885  */
24886 int test_gcompris_locking(void) {
24887   struct flock fl;
24888   char *name = "testsqlite.db";
24889   unlink(name);
24890   int fd = open(name, O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_LARGEFILE, 0644);
24891   printf("info: testing fcntl locking\n");
24892
24893   fl.l_whence = SEEK_SET;
24894   fl.l_pid    = getpid();
24895   printf("  Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824");
24896   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
24897   fl.l_len    = 1;
24898   fl.l_type   = F_RDLCK;
24899   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
24900
24901   printf("  Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826");
24902   fl.l_start  = 1073741826;
24903   fl.l_len    = 510;
24904   fl.l_type   = F_RDLCK;
24905   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
24906
24907   printf("  Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824");
24908   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
24909   fl.l_len    = 1;
24910   fl.l_type   = F_UNLCK;
24911   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
24912
24913   printf("  Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824");
24914   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
24915   fl.l_len    = 1;
24916   fl.l_type   = F_WRLCK;
24917   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
24918
24919   printf("  Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826");
24920   fl.l_start  = 1073741826;
24921   fl.l_len    = 510;
24922   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
24923
24924   printf("  Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824");
24925   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
24926   fl.l_len    = 2;
24927   fl.l_type   = F_UNLCK;
24928   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
24929
24930   close(fd);
24931   return 0;
24932 }
24933
24934 /*
24935  * Test if permissions of freshly created directories allow entries
24936  * below them.  This was a problem with OpenOffice.org and gcompris.
24937  * Mounting with option 'sync' seem to solve this problem while
24938  * slowing down file operations.
24939  */
24940 int test_subdirectory_creation(void) {
24941 #define LEVELS 5
24942   char *path = strdup("test");
24943   char *dirs[LEVELS];
24944   int level;
24945   printf("info: testing subdirectory creation\n");
24946   for (level = 0; level &lt; LEVELS; level++) {
24947     char *newpath = NULL;
24948     if (-1 == mkdir(path, 0777)) {
24949       printf("  error: Unable to create directory '%s': %s\n",
24950              path, strerror(errno));
24951       break;
24952     }
24953     asprintf(&newpath, "%s/%s", path, "test");
24954     free(path);
24955     path = newpath;
24956   }
24957   return 0;
24958 }
24959
24960 /*
24961  * Test if symlinks can be created.  This was a problem detected with
24962  * KDE.
24963  */
24964 int test_symlinks(void) {
24965   printf("info: testing symlink creation\n");
24966   unlink("symlink");
24967   if (-1 == symlink("file", "symlink"))
24968     printf("  error: Unable to create symlink\n");
24969   return 0;
24970 }
24971
24972 int main(int argc, char **argv) {
24973   printf("Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system\n");
24974   test_symlinks();
24975   test_subdirectory_creation();
24976 #ifdef TEST_SQLITE
24977   test_sqlite_open();
24978 #endif /* TEST_SQLITE */
24979   test_gcompris_locking();
24980   return 0;
24981 }
24982 </pre>
24983
24984 <p>When everything is working, it should print something like
24985 this:</p>
24986
24987 <pre>
24988 Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
24989 info: testing symlink creation
24990 info: testing subdirectory creation
24991 info: sqlite worked
24992 info: testing fcntl locking
24993   Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
24994   Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
24995   Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824
24996   Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
24997   Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
24998   Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824
24999 </pre>
25000
25001 <p>I do not remember the exact details of the problems we saw, but one
25002 of them was with locking, where if I remember correctly, POSIX allow a
25003 read-only lock to be upgraded to a read-write lock without unlocking
25004 the read-only lock (while Windows do not).  Another was a bug in the
25005 CIFS/SMB client implementation in the Linux kernel where directory
25006 meta information would be wrong for a fraction of a second, making
25007 OpenOffice.org fail to create its deep directory tree because it was
25008 not allowed to create files in its freshly created directory.</p>
25009
25010 <p>Anyway, here is a nice tool for your tool box, might you never need
25011 it. :)</p>
25012
25013 <p>Update 2010-08-27: Michael Gebetsroither report that he found the
25014 script so useful that he created a GIT repository and stored it in
25015 <a href="http://github.com/gebi/fs-test">http://github.com/gebi/fs-test</a>.</p>
25016
25017       </div>
25018       <div class="tags">
25019
25020
25021         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>.
25022
25023
25024       </div>
25025     </div>
25026     <div class="padding"></div>
25027
25028     <div class="entry">
25029       <div class="title">
25030         <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>
25031       </div>
25032       <div class="date">
25033          7th August 2010
25034       </div>
25035       <div class="body">
25036         <p>A few days ago, I
25037 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_roaming_workstation___at_the_university_of_Oslo.html">tried
25038 to install</a> a Roaming workation profile from Debian Edu/Squeeze
25039 while on the university network here at the University of Oslo, and
25040 noticed how much had to change to get it operational using the
25041 university infrastructure.  It was fairly easy, but it occured to me
25042 that Debian Edu would improve a lot if I could get the client to
25043 connect without any changes at all, and thus let the client configure
25044 itself during installation and first boot to use the infrastructure
25045 around it.  Now I am a huge step further along that road.</p>
25046
25047 <p>With our current squeeze-test packages, I can select the roaming
25048 workstation profile and get a working laptop connecting to the
25049 university LDAP server for user and group and our active directory
25050 servers for Kerberos authentication.  All this without any
25051 configuration at all during installation.  My users home directory got
25052 a bookmark in the KDE menu to mount it via SMB, with the correct URL.
25053 In short, openldap and sssd is correctly configured.  In addition to
25054 this, the client look for http://wpad/wpad.dat to configure a web
25055 proxy, and when it fail to find it no proxy settings are stored in
25056 /etc/environment and /etc/apt/apt.conf.  Iceweasel and KDE is
25057 configured to look for the same wpad configuration and also do not use
25058 a proxy when at the university network.  If the machine is moved to a
25059 network with such wpad setup, it would automatically use it when DHCP
25060 gave it a IP address.</p>
25061
25062 <p>The LDAP server is located using DNS, by first looking for the DNS
25063 entry ldap.$domain.  If this do not exist, it look for the
25064 _ldap._tcp.$domain SRV records and use the first one as the LDAP
25065 server.  Next, it connects to the LDAP server and search all
25066 namingContexts entries for posixAccount or posixGroup objects, and
25067 pick the first one as the LDAP base.  For Kerberos, a similar
25068 algorithm is used to locate the LDAP server, and the realm is the
25069 uppercase version of $domain.</p>
25070
25071 <p>So, what is not working, you might ask.  SMB mounting my home
25072 directory do not work.  No idea why, but suspected the incorrect
25073 Kerberos settings in /etc/krb5.conf and /etc/samba/smb.conf might be
25074 the cause.  These are not properly configured during installation, and
25075 had to be hand-edited to get the correct Kerberos realm and server,
25076 but SMB mounting still do not work. :(</p>
25077
25078 <p>With this automatic configuration in place, I expect a Debian Edu
25079 roaming profile installation would be able to automatically detect and
25080 connect to any site using LDAP and Kerberos for NSS directory and PAM
25081 authentication.  It should also work out of the box in a Active
25082 Directory environment providing posixAccount and posixGroup objects
25083 with UID and GID values.</p>
25084
25085 <p>If you want to help out with implementing these things for Debian
25086 Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
25087
25088       </div>
25089       <div class="tags">
25090
25091
25092         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>.
25093
25094
25095       </div>
25096     </div>
25097     <div class="padding"></div>
25098
25099     <div class="entry">
25100       <div class="title">
25101         <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>
25102       </div>
25103       <div class="date">
25104          3rd August 2010
25105       </div>
25106       <div class="body">
25107         <p>The new roaming workstation profile in Debian Edu/Squeeze is fairly
25108 similar to the laptop setup am I working on using Ubuntu for the
25109 University of Oslo, and just for the heck of it, I tested today how
25110 hard it would be to integrate that profile into the university
25111 infrastructure.  In this case, it is the university LDAP server,
25112 Active Directory Kerberos server and SMB mounting from the Netapp file
25113 servers.</p>
25114
25115 <p>I was pleasantly surprised that the only three files needed to be
25116 changed (/etc/sssd/sssd.conf, /etc/ldap.conf and
25117 /etc/mklocaluser.d/20-debian-edu-config) and one file had to be added
25118 (/usr/share/perl5/Debian/Edu_Local.pm), to get the client working.
25119 Most of the changes were to get the client to use the university LDAP
25120 for NSS and Kerberos server for PAM, but one was to change a hard
25121 coded DNS domain name in the mklocaluser hook from .intern to
25122 .uio.no.</p>
25123
25124 <p>This testing was so encouraging, that I went ahead and adjusted the
25125 Debian Edu scripts and setup in subversion to centralise the roaming
25126 workstation setup a bit more and avoid the hardcoded DNS domain name,
25127 so that when I test this tomorrow, I expect to get away with modifying
25128 only /etc/sssd/sssd.conf and /etc/ldap.conf to get it to use the
25129 university servers.</p>
25130
25131 <p>My goal is to get the clients to have no hardcoded settings and
25132 fetch all their initial setup during installation and first boot, to
25133 allow them to be inserted also into environments where the default
25134 setup in Debian Edu has been changed or as with the university, where
25135 the environment is different but provides the protocols Debian Edu
25136 uses.</p>
25137
25138       </div>
25139       <div class="tags">
25140
25141
25142         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>.
25143
25144
25145       </div>
25146     </div>
25147     <div class="padding"></div>
25148
25149     <div class="entry">
25150       <div class="title">
25151         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Circular_package_dependencies_harms_apt_recovery.html">Circular package dependencies harms apt recovery</a>
25152       </div>
25153       <div class="date">
25154         27th July 2010
25155       </div>
25156       <div class="body">
25157         <p>I discovered this while doing
25158 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">automated
25159 testing of upgrades from Debian Lenny to Squeeze</a>.  A few packages
25160 in Debian still got circular dependencies, and it is often claimed
25161 that apt and aptitude should be able to handle this just fine, but
25162 some times these dependency loops causes apt to fail.</p>
25163
25164 <p>An example is from todays
25165 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing//test-20100727-lenny-squeeze-kde-aptitude.txt">upgrade
25166 of KDE using aptitude</a>.  In it, a bug in kdebase-workspace-data
25167 causes perl-modules to fail to upgrade.  The cause is simple.  If a
25168 package fail to unpack, then only part of packages with the circular
25169 dependency might end up being unpacked when unpacking aborts, and the
25170 ones already unpacked will fail to configure in the recovery phase
25171 because its dependencies are unavailable.</p>
25172
25173 <p>In this log, the problem manifest itself with this error:</p>
25174
25175 <blockquote><pre>
25176 dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of perl-modules:
25177  perl-modules depends on perl (>= 5.10.1-1); however:
25178   Version of perl on system is 5.10.0-19lenny2.
25179 dpkg: error processing perl-modules (--configure):
25180  dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
25181 </pre></blockquote>
25182
25183 <p>The perl/perl-modules circular dependency is already
25184 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/527917">reported as a bug</a>, and will
25185 hopefully be solved as soon as possible, but it is not the only one,
25186 and each one of these loops in the dependency tree can cause similar
25187 failures.  Of course, they only occur when there are bugs in other
25188 packages causing the unpacking to fail, but it is rather nasty when
25189 the failure of one package causes the problem to become worse because
25190 of dependency loops.</p>
25191
25192 <p>Thanks to
25193 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/06/msg00116.html">the
25194 tireless effort by Bill Allombert</a>, the number of circular
25195 dependencies
25196 <a href="http://debian.semistable.com/debgraph.out.html">left in Debian
25197 is dropping</a>, and perhaps it will reach zero one day. :)</p>
25198
25199 <p>Todays testing also exposed a bug in
25200 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/590605">update-notifier</a> and
25201 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/590604">different behaviour</a> between
25202 apt-get and aptitude, the latter possibly caused by some circular
25203 dependency.  Reported both to BTS to try to get someone to look at
25204 it.</p>
25205
25206       </div>
25207       <div class="tags">
25208
25209
25210         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>.
25211
25212
25213       </div>
25214     </div>
25215     <div class="padding"></div>
25216
25217     <div class="entry">
25218       <div class="title">
25219         <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>
25220       </div>
25221       <div class="date">
25222         27th July 2010
25223       </div>
25224       <div class="body">
25225         <p>I just posted this announcement culminating several months of work
25226 with the next Debian Edu release.  Not nearly done, but one major step
25227 completed.</p>
25228
25229 <blockquote>
25230 <p>This is the first test release based on Squeeze. The focus of this
25231 release is to test the user application selection. To have a look,
25232 install the standalone profile and let the developers know if the set
25233 of installed packages i.e. applications should be modified. If some
25234 user application is missing, or if there are some applications that no
25235 longer make sense to be included in Debian Edu, please let us know.
25236 Also, if a useful application is missing the translation for your
25237 language of choice, please let us know too.</p>
25238
25239 <p>In addition, feedback and help to polish the desktop (menus,
25240 artwork, starters, etc.) is appreciated. We would like to ship a nice
25241 and handy KDE4 desktop targeted for schools out of the box.</p>
25242
25243 <p>The other profiles should be installable, but there is a lot more
25244 work left to be done before they are ready, so do not expect to
25245 much.</p>
25246
25247 <p>Changes compared to the lenny based version</p>
25248
25249 <ul>
25250 <li>Everything from Debian Squeeze
25251 <ul>
25252   <li>Desktop environment KDE 4.4 => the new KDE desktop in
25253          combination with some new artwork
25254   <li>Web browser Iceweasel 3.5
25255   <li>OpenOffice.org 3.2
25256   <li>Educational toolbox GCompris 9.3
25257   <li>Music creator Rosegarden 10.04.2
25258   <li>Image editor Gimp 2.6.10
25259   <li>Virtual universe Celestia 1.6.0
25260   <li>Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.10.4
25261   <li>3D modeler Blender 2.49.2 (new application)
25262   <li>Video editor Kdenlive 0.7.7 (new application)
25263 </ul></li>
25264 <li>Now using Kerberos for password checking (migration not finished).
25265     Enabled for:
25266 <ul>
25267   <li>PAM
25268   <li>LDAP
25269   <li>IMAP
25270   <li>SMTP (sender verification)
25271 </ul>
25272 </li>
25273 <li>New experimental roaming workstation profile for laptops.</li>
25274 <li>Show welcome page to users when they first log in. The URL is
25275     fetched from LDAP.</li>
25276 <li>New LXDE desktop option, in addition to KDE (default) and Gnome.</li>
25277 <li>General cleanup (not finished)</li>
25278 </ul>
25279 <p>The following features are not working as they should</p>
25280
25281 <ul>
25282 <li>No web based administration tool for creating users and groups. The
25283     scripts ldap-createuser-krb and ldap-add-user-to-group can be used
25284     for testing.</li>
25285 <li>DVD installs are missing debian-installer images for the PXE boot,
25286     and do not set up the PXE menu on eth0 because of this. LTSP
25287     clients should still boot from eth1 on thin client servers.</li>
25288 <li>The restructured KDE menu is not implemented.</li>
25289 <li>The LDAP server setup need to be reviewed for security.</li>
25290 <li>The LDAP directory structure need to be reworked.</li>
25291 <li>Different sets of packages are installed when using the DVD and the
25292     netinst CD. More packages are installed using the netinst CD.</li>
25293 <li>The jackd package fail to install. This is believed to be caused by
25294     some ongoing transition, and hopefully should be solved soon. The
25295     jackd1 package can be installed manually for those that need it.</li>
25296 <li>Some packages lack translations. See
25297     http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Squeeze for updated status,
25298     and help out with translations.</li>
25299 </ul>
25300
25301 <p>To download this multiarch netinstall release you can use</p>
25302
25303 <ul>
25304 <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>
25305 <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>
25306 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso</li>
25307 </ul>
25308 <p>To download this multiarch dvd release you can use</p>
25309
25310 <ul>
25311 <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>
25312 <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>
25313 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso</li>
25314 </ul>
25315
25316 <p>There is no source DVD available yet. It will be prepared when we
25317 get closer to the final release.</p>
25318
25319 <p>The MD5SUM of these images are</p>
25320
25321 <ul>
25322 <li>3dbf45d59f42a53518b6e3c9ec3b5eb6 debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso</li>
25323 <li>22f2cbfce281d1c6e478be452638675d debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso</li>
25324 </ul>
25325
25326 <p>The SHA1SUM of these images are</p>
25327 <ul>
25328 <li>c53d1b69b40cf37cd27aefaf33f6f6a3821bedf0 debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso</li>
25329 <li>2ec29d7db676d59d32197b05c277ffe16348376c debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso</li>
25330 </ul>
25331 <p>How to report bugs:
25332 http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugsInBugzilla</p>
25333
25334 <p>Please direct replies to debian-edu@lists.debian.org</p>
25335 </blockquote>
25336
25337       </div>
25338       <div class="tags">
25339
25340
25341         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>.
25342
25343
25344       </div>
25345     </div>
25346     <div class="padding"></div>
25347
25348     <div class="entry">
25349       <div class="title">
25350         <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>
25351       </div>
25352       <div class="date">
25353         25th July 2010
25354       </div>
25355       <div class="body">
25356         <p>The last few months me and the other Debian Edu developers have
25357 been working hard to get the Debian/Squeeze based version of Debian
25358 Edu/Skolelinux into shape.  This future version will use Kerberos for
25359 authentication, and services are slowly migrated to single signon,
25360 getting rid of password questions one at the time.</p>
25361
25362 <p>It will also feature a roaming workstation profile with local home
25363 directory, for laptops that are only some times on the Skolelinux
25364 network, and for this profile a shortcut is created in Gnome and KDE
25365 to gain access to the users home directory on the file server.  This
25366 shortcut uses SMB at the moment, and yesterday I had time to test if
25367 SMB mounting had started working in KDE after we added the cifs-utils
25368 package.  I was pleasantly surprised how well it worked.</p>
25369
25370 <p>Thanks to the recent changes to our samba configuration to get it
25371 to use Kerberos for authentication, there were no question about user
25372 password when mounting the SMB volume.  A simple click on the shortcut
25373 in the KDE menu, and a window with the home directory popped
25374 up. :)</p>
25375
25376 <p>One step closer to a single signon solution out of the box in
25377 Debian Edu.  We already had PAM, LDAP, IMAP and SMTP in place, and now
25378 also Samba.  Next step is Cups and hopefully also NFS.</p>
25379
25380 <p>We had planned a alpha0 release of Debian Edu for today, but thanks
25381 to the autobuilder administrators for some architectures being slow to
25382 sign packages, we are still missing the fixed LTSP package we need for
25383 the release.  It was uploaded three days ago with urgency=high, and if
25384 it had entered testing yesterday we would have been able to test it in
25385 time for a alpha0 release today.  As the binaries for ia64 and powerpc
25386 still not uploaded to the Debian archive, we need to delay the alpha
25387 release another day.</p>
25388
25389 <p>If you want to help out with implementing Kerberos for Debian Edu,
25390 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
25391
25392       </div>
25393       <div class="tags">
25394
25395
25396         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>.
25397
25398
25399       </div>
25400     </div>
25401     <div class="padding"></div>
25402
25403     <div class="entry">
25404       <div class="title">
25405         <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>
25406       </div>
25407       <div class="date">
25408         18th July 2010
25409       </div>
25410       <div class="body">
25411         <p>Thanks to
25412 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Opengeodata/~3/wUTCzDZk3lc/project-of-the-week-which-way-home">todays
25413 opengeodata blog entry</a>, I just discovered that the
25414 OpenStreetmap.org site have gotten
25415 <a href="http://nroets.dev.openstreetmap.org/demo/index.html?layers=B000FTFTT">support
25416 for calculating routes</a>.  The support is still experimental and
25417 only available from the development server, until more experience is
25418 gathered on the user interface and any scalability issues.</p>
25419
25420 <p>Earlier, the routing I knew about using the OpenStreetmap.org data
25421 was provided by <a href="http://maps.cloudmade.com/">Cloudmade</a>,
25422 but having it on the main page is required to make everyone aware of
25423 the issue.  I've had people reject Openstreetmap.org as a viable
25424 alternative for them because the front page lacked routing support,
25425 and I hope their needs will be catered for when routing show up on the
25426 www.openstreetmap.org front page.</p>
25427
25428       </div>
25429       <div class="tags">
25430
25431
25432         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>.
25433
25434
25435       </div>
25436     </div>
25437     <div class="padding"></div>
25438
25439     <div class="entry">
25440       <div class="title">
25441         <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>
25442       </div>
25443       <div class="date">
25444         17th July 2010
25445       </div>
25446       <div class="body">
25447         <p>This is a
25448 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">followup</a>
25449 on my
25450 <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
25451 work</a> on
25452 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">merging
25453 all</a> the computer related LDAP objects in Debian Edu.</p>
25454
25455 <p>As a step to try to see if it possible to merge the DNS and DHCP
25456 LDAP objects, I have had a look at how the packages pdns-backend-ldap
25457 and dhcp3-server-ldap in Debian use the LDAP server.  The two
25458 implementations are quite different in how they use LDAP.</p>
25459
25460 To get this information, I started slapd with debugging enabled and
25461 dumped the debug output to a file to get the LDAP searches performed
25462 on a Debian Edu main-server.  Here is a summary.
25463
25464 <p><strong>powerdns</strong></p>
25465
25466 <a href="http://www.linuxnetworks.de/doc/index.php/PowerDNS_LDAP_Backend">Clues
25467 on how to</a> set up PowerDNS to use a LDAP backend is available on
25468 the web.
25469
25470 <p>PowerDNS have two modes of operation using LDAP as its backend.
25471 One "strict" mode where the forward and reverse DNS lookups are done
25472 using the same LDAP objects, and a "tree" mode where the forward and
25473 reverse entries are in two different subtrees in LDAP with a structure
25474 based on the DNS names, as in tjener.intern and
25475 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa.</p>
25476
25477 <p>In tree mode, the server is set up to use a LDAP subtree as its
25478 base, and uses a "base" scoped search for the DNS name by adding
25479 "dc=tjener,dc=intern," to the base with a filter for
25480 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" for the forward entry and
25481 "dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa," with a filter for
25482 "(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)" for the reverse entry.  For
25483 forward entries, it is looking for attributes named dnsttl, arecord,
25484 nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord,
25485 txtrecord, rprecord, afsdbrecord, keyrecord, aaaarecord, locrecord,
25486 srvrecord, naptrrecord, kxrecord, certrecord, dsrecord, sshfprecord,
25487 ipseckeyrecord, rrsigrecord, nsecrecord, dnskeyrecord, dhcidrecord,
25488 spfrecord and modifytimestamp.  For reverse entries it is looking for
25489 the attributes dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord,
25490 ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord,
25491 locrecord, srvrecord, naptrrecord and modifytimestamp.  The equivalent
25492 ldapsearch commands could look like this:</p>
25493
25494 <blockquote><pre>
25495 ldapsearch -h ldap \
25496   -b dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
25497   -s base -x '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
25498   cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
25499   rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
25500   nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
25501   rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
25502
25503 ldapsearch -h ldap \
25504   -b dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
25505   -s base -x '(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)'
25506   dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord soarecord ptrrecord \
25507   hinforecord mxrecord txtrecord rprecord aaaarecord locrecord \
25508   srvrecord naptrrecord modifytimestamp
25509 </pre></blockquote>
25510
25511 <p>In Debian Edu/Lenny, the PowerDNS tree mode is used with
25512 ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no as the base, and these are two
25513 example LDAP objects used there.  In addition to these objects, the
25514 parent objects all th way up to ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
25515 also exist.</p>
25516
25517 <blockquote><pre>
25518 dn: dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
25519 objectclass: top
25520 objectclass: dnsdomain
25521 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
25522 dc: tjener
25523 arecord: 10.0.2.2
25524 associateddomain: tjener.intern
25525
25526 dn: dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
25527 objectclass: top
25528 objectclass: dnsdomain2
25529 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
25530 dc: 2
25531 ptrrecord: tjener.intern
25532 associateddomain: 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa
25533 </pre></blockquote>
25534
25535 <p>In strict mode, the server behaves differently.  When looking for
25536 forward DNS entries, it is doing a "subtree" scoped search with the
25537 same base as in the tree mode for a object with filter
25538 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" and requests the attributes dnsttl,
25539 arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord,
25540 mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord, locrecord, srvrecord,
25541 naptrrecord and modifytimestamp.  For reverse entires it also do a
25542 subtree scoped search but this time the filter is "(arecord=10.0.2.2)"
25543 and the requested attributes are associateddomain, dnsttl and
25544 modifytimestamp.  In short, in strict mode the objects with ptrrecord
25545 go away, and the arecord attribute in the forward object is used
25546 instead.</p>
25547
25548 <p>The forward and reverse searches can be simulated using ldapsearch
25549 like this:</p>
25550
25551 <blockquote><pre>
25552 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
25553   '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
25554   cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
25555   rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
25556   nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
25557   rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
25558
25559 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
25560   '(arecord=10.0.2.2)' associateddomain dnsttl modifytimestamp
25561 </pre></blockquote>
25562
25563 <p>In addition to the forward and reverse searches , there is also a
25564 search for SOA records, which behave similar to the forward and
25565 reverse lookups.</p>
25566
25567 <p>A thing to note with the PowerDNS behaviour is that it do not
25568 specify any objectclass names, and instead look for the attributes it
25569 need to generate a DNS reply.  This make it able to work with any
25570 objectclass that provide the needed attributes.</p>
25571
25572 <p>The attributes are normally provided in the cosine (RFC 1274) and
25573 dnsdomain2 schemas.  The latter is used for reverse entries like
25574 ptrrecord and recent DNS additions like aaaarecord and srvrecord.</p>
25575
25576 <p>In Debian Edu, we have created DNS objects using the object classes
25577 dcobject (for dc), dnsdomain or dnsdomain2 (structural, for the DNS
25578 attributes) and domainrelatedobject (for associatedDomain).  The use
25579 of structural object classes make it impossible to combine these
25580 classes with the object classes used by DHCP.</p>
25581
25582 <p>There are other schemas that could be used too, for example the
25583 dnszone structural object class used by Gosa and bind-sdb for the DNS
25584 attributes combined with the domainrelatedobject object class, but in
25585 this case some unused attributes would have to be included as well
25586 (zonename and relativedomainname).</p>
25587
25588 <p>My proposal for Debian Edu would be to switch PowerDNS to strict
25589 mode and not use any of the existing objectclasses (dnsdomain,
25590 dnsdomain2 and dnszone) when one want to combine the DNS information
25591 with DHCP information, and instead create a auxiliary object class
25592 defined something like this (using the attributes defined for
25593 dnsdomain and dnsdomain2 or dnszone):</p>
25594
25595 <blockquote><pre>
25596 objectclass ( some-oid NAME 'dnsDomainAux'
25597     SUP top
25598     AUXILIARY
25599     MAY ( ARecord $ MDRecord $ MXRecord $ NSRecord $ SOARecord $ CNAMERecord $
25600           DNSTTL $ DNSClass $ PTRRecord $ HINFORecord $ MINFORecord $
25601           TXTRecord $ SIGRecord $ KEYRecord $ AAAARecord $ LOCRecord $
25602           NXTRecord $ SRVRecord $ NAPTRRecord $ KXRecord $ CERTRecord $
25603           A6Record $ DNAMERecord
25604     ))
25605 </pre></blockquote>
25606
25607 <p>This will allow any object to become a DNS entry when combined with
25608 the domainrelatedobject object class, and allow any entity to include
25609 all the attributes PowerDNS wants.  I've sent an email to the PowerDNS
25610 developers asking for their view on this schema and if they are
25611 interested in providing such schema with PowerDNS, and I hope my
25612 message will be accepted into their mailing list soon.</p>
25613
25614 <p><strong>ISC dhcp</strong></p>
25615
25616 <p>The DHCP server searches for specific objectclass and requests all
25617 the object attributes, and then uses the attributes it want.  This
25618 make it harder to figure out exactly what attributes are used, but
25619 thanks to the working example in Debian Edu I can at least get an idea
25620 what is needed without having to read the source code.</p>
25621
25622 <p>In the DHCP server configuration, the LDAP base to use and the
25623 search filter to use to locate the correct dhcpServer entity is
25624 stored.  These are the relevant entries from
25625 /etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf:</p>
25626
25627 <blockquote><pre>
25628 ldap-base-dn "dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no";
25629 ldap-dhcp-server-cn "dhcp";
25630 </pre></blockquote>
25631
25632 <p>The DHCP server uses this information to nest all the DHCP
25633 configuration it need.  The cn "dhcp" is located using the given LDAP
25634 base and the filter "(&(objectClass=dhcpServer)(cn=dhcp))".  The
25635 search result is this entry:</p>
25636
25637 <blockquote><pre>
25638 dn: cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
25639 cn: dhcp
25640 objectClass: top
25641 objectClass: dhcpServer
25642 dhcpServiceDN: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
25643 </pre></blockquote>
25644
25645 <p>The content of the dhcpServiceDN attribute is next used to locate the
25646 subtree with DHCP configuration.  The DHCP configuration subtree base
25647 is located using a base scope search with base "cn=DHCP
25648 Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" and filter
25649 "(&(objectClass=dhcpService)(|(dhcpPrimaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)(dhcpSecondaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)))".
25650 The search result is this entry:</p>
25651
25652 <blockquote><pre>
25653 dn: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
25654 cn: DHCP Config
25655 objectClass: top
25656 objectClass: dhcpService
25657 objectClass: dhcpOptions
25658 dhcpPrimaryDN: cn=dhcp, dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
25659 dhcpStatements: ddns-update-style none
25660 dhcpStatements: authoritative
25661 dhcpOption: smtp-server code 69 = array of ip-address
25662 dhcpOption: www-server code 72 = array of ip-address
25663 dhcpOption: wpad-url code 252 = text
25664 </pre></blockquote>
25665
25666 <p>Next, the entire subtree is processed, one level at the time.  When
25667 all the DHCP configuration is loaded, it is ready to receive requests.
25668 The subtree in Debian Edu contain objects with object classes
25669 top/dhcpService/dhcpOptions, top/dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions,
25670 top/dhcpSubnet, top/dhcpGroup and top/dhcpHost.  These provide options
25671 and information about netmasks, dynamic range etc.  Leaving out the
25672 details here because it is not relevant for the focus of my
25673 investigation, which is to see if it is possible to merge dns and dhcp
25674 related computer objects.</p>
25675
25676 <p>When a DHCP request come in, LDAP is searched for the MAC address
25677 of the client (00:00:00:00:00:00 in this example), using a subtree
25678 scoped search with "cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" as
25679 the base and "(&(objectClass=dhcpHost)(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet
25680 00:00:00:00:00:00))" as the filter.  This is what a host object look
25681 like:</p>
25682
25683 <blockquote><pre>
25684 dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
25685 cn: hostname
25686 objectClass: top
25687 objectClass: dhcpHost
25688 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
25689 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname
25690 </pre></blockquote>
25691
25692 <p>There is less flexiblity in the way LDAP searches are done here.
25693 The object classes need to have fixed names, and the configuration
25694 need to be stored in a fairly specific LDAP structure.  On the
25695 positive side, the invidiual dhcpHost entires can be anywhere without
25696 the DN pointed to by the dhcpServer entries.  The latter should make
25697 it possible to group all host entries in a subtree next to the
25698 configuration entries, and this subtree can also be shared with the
25699 DNS server if the schema proposed above is combined with the dhcpHost
25700 structural object class.
25701
25702 <p><strong>Conclusion</strong></p>
25703
25704 <p>The PowerDNS implementation seem to be very flexible when it come
25705 to which LDAP schemas to use.  While its "tree" mode is rigid when it
25706 come to the the LDAP structure, the "strict" mode is very flexible,
25707 allowing DNS objects to be stored anywhere under the base cn specified
25708 in the configuration.</p>
25709
25710 <p>The DHCP implementation on the other hand is very inflexible, both
25711 regarding which LDAP schemas to use and which LDAP structure to use.
25712 I guess one could implement ones own schema, as long as the
25713 objectclasses and attributes have the names used, but this do not
25714 really help when the DHCP subtree need to have a fairly fixed
25715 structure.</p>
25716
25717 <p>Based on the observed behaviour, I suspect a LDAP structure like
25718 this might work for Debian Edu:</p>
25719
25720 <blockquote><pre>
25721 ou=services
25722   cn=machine-info (dhcpService) - dhcpServiceDN points here
25723     cn=dhcp (dhcpServer)
25724     cn=dhcp-internal (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
25725       cn=10.0.2.0 (dhcpSubnet)
25726         cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
25727     cn=dhcp-thinclients (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
25728       cn=192.168.0.0 (dhcpSubnet)
25729         cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
25730     ou=machines - PowerDNS base points here
25731       cn=hostname (dhcpHost/domainrelatedobject/dnsDomainAux)
25732 </pre></blockquote>
25733
25734 <P>This is not tested yet.  If the DHCP server require the dhcpHost
25735 entries to be in the dhcpGroup subtrees, the entries can be stored
25736 there instead of a common machines subtree, and the PowerDNS base
25737 would have to be moved one level up to the machine-info subtree.</p>
25738
25739 <p>The combined object under the machines subtree would look something
25740 like this:</p>
25741
25742 <blockquote><pre>
25743 dn: dc=hostname,ou=machines,cn=machine-info,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
25744 dc: hostname
25745 objectClass: top
25746 objectClass: dhcpHost
25747 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
25748 objectclass: dnsDomainAux
25749 associateddomain: hostname.intern
25750 arecord: 10.11.12.13
25751 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
25752 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname.intern
25753 </pre></blockquote>
25754
25755 </p>One could even add the LTSP configuration associated with a given
25756 machine, as long as the required attributes are available in a
25757 auxiliary object class.</p>
25758
25759       </div>
25760       <div class="tags">
25761
25762
25763         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>.
25764
25765
25766       </div>
25767     </div>
25768     <div class="padding"></div>
25769
25770     <div class="entry">
25771       <div class="title">
25772         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">Combining PowerDNS and ISC DHCP LDAP objects</a>
25773       </div>
25774       <div class="date">
25775         14th July 2010
25776       </div>
25777       <div class="body">
25778         <p>For a while now, I have wanted to find a way to change the DNS and
25779 DHCP services in Debian Edu to use the same LDAP objects for a given
25780 computer, to avoid the possibility of having a inconsistent state for
25781 a computer in LDAP (as in DHCP but no DNS entry or the other way
25782 around) and make it easier to add computers to LDAP.</p>
25783
25784 <p>I've looked at how powerdns and dhcpd is using LDAP, and using this
25785 information finally found a solution that seem to work.</p>
25786
25787 <p>The old setup required three LDAP objects for a given computer.
25788 One forward DNS entry, one reverse DNS entry and one DHCP entry.  If
25789 we switch powerdns to use its strict LDAP method (ldap-method=strict
25790 in pdns-debian-edu.conf), the forward and reverse DNS entries are
25791 merged into one while making it impossible to transfer the reverse map
25792 to a slave DNS server.</p>
25793
25794 <p>If we also replace the object class used to get the DNS related
25795 attributes to one allowing these attributes to be combined with the
25796 dhcphost object class, we can merge the DNS and DHCP entries into one.
25797 I've written such object class in the dnsdomainaux.schema file (need
25798 proper OIDs, but that is a minor issue), and tested the setup.  It
25799 seem to work.</p>
25800
25801 <p>With this test setup in place, we can get away with one LDAP object
25802 for both DNS and DHCP, and even the LTSP configuration I suggested in
25803 an earlier email.  The combined LDAP object will look something like
25804 this:</p>
25805
25806 <blockquote><pre>
25807   dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
25808   cn: hostname
25809   objectClass: dhcphost
25810   objectclass: domainrelatedobject
25811   objectclass: dnsdomainaux
25812   associateddomain: hostname.intern
25813   arecord: 10.11.12.13
25814   dhcphwaddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
25815   dhcpstatements: fixed-address hostname
25816   ldapconfigsound: Y
25817 </pre></blockquote>
25818
25819 <p>The DNS server uses the associateddomain and arecord entries, while
25820 the DHCP server uses the dhcphwaddress and dhcpstatements entries
25821 before asking DNS to resolve the fixed-adddress.  LTSP will use
25822 dhcphwaddress or associateddomain and the ldapconfig* attributes.</p>
25823
25824 <p>I am not yet sure if I can get the DHCP server to look for its
25825 dhcphost in a different location, to allow us to put the objects
25826 outside the "DHCP Config" subtree, but hope to figure out a way to do
25827 that.  If I can't figure out a way to do that, we can still get rid of
25828 the hosts subtree and move all its content into the DHCP Config tree
25829 (which probably should be renamed to be more related to the new
25830 content.  I suspect cn=dnsdhcp,ou=services or something like that
25831 might be a good place to put it.</p>
25832
25833 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
25834 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
25835
25836       </div>
25837       <div class="tags">
25838
25839
25840         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>.
25841
25842
25843       </div>
25844     </div>
25845     <div class="padding"></div>
25846
25847     <div class="entry">
25848       <div class="title">
25849         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_storing_LTSP_configuration_in_LDAP.html">Idea for storing LTSP configuration in LDAP</a>
25850       </div>
25851       <div class="date">
25852         11th July 2010
25853       </div>
25854       <div class="body">
25855         <p>Vagrant mentioned on IRC today that ltsp_config now support
25856 sourcing files from /usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ on the thin
25857 clients, and that this can be used to fetch configuration from LDAP if
25858 Debian Edu choose to store configuration there.</p>
25859
25860 <p>Armed with this information, I got inspired and wrote a test module
25861 to get configuration from LDAP.  The idea is to look up the MAC
25862 address of the client in LDAP, and look for attributes on the form
25863 ltspconfigsetting=value, and use this to export SETTING=value to the
25864 LTSP clients.</p>
25865
25866 <p>The goal is to be able to store the LTSP configuration attributes
25867 in a "computer" LDAP object used by both DNS and DHCP, and thus
25868 allowing us to store all information about a computer in one place.</p>
25869
25870 <p>This is a untested draft implementation, and I welcome feedback on
25871 this approach.  A real LDAP schema for the ltspClientAux objectclass
25872 need to be written.  Comments, suggestions, etc?</p>
25873
25874 <blockquote><pre>
25875 # Store in /opt/ltsp/$arch/usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ldap-config
25876 #
25877 # Fetch LTSP client settings from LDAP based on MAC address
25878 #
25879 # Uses ethernet address as stored in the dhcpHost objectclass using
25880 # the dhcpHWAddress attribute or ethernet address stored in the
25881 # ieee802Device objectclass with the macAddress attribute.
25882 #
25883 # This module is written to be schema agnostic, and only depend on the
25884 # existence of attribute names.
25885 #
25886 # The LTSP configuration variables are saved directly using a
25887 # ltspConfig prefix and uppercasing the rest of the attribute name.
25888 # To set the SERVER variable, set the ltspConfigServer attribute.
25889 #
25890 # Some LDAP schema should be created with all the relevant
25891 # configuration settings.  Something like this should work:
25892 #
25893 # objectclass ( 1.1.2.2 NAME 'ltspClientAux'
25894 #     SUP top
25895 #     AUXILIARY
25896 #     MAY ( ltspConfigServer $ ltsConfigSound $ ... )
25897
25898 LDAPSERVER=$(debian-edu-ldapserver)
25899 if [ "$LDAPSERVER" ] ; then
25900     LDAPBASE=$(debian-edu-ldapserver -b)
25901     for MAC in $(LANG=C ifconfig |grep -i hwaddr| awk '{print $5}'|sort -u) ; do
25902         filter="(|(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet $MAC)(macAddress=$MAC))"
25903         ldapsearch -h "$LDAPSERVER" -b "$LDAPBASE" -v -x "$filter" | \
25904             grep '^ltspConfig' | while read attr value ; do
25905             # Remove prefix and convert to upper case
25906             attr=$(echo $attr | sed 's/^ltspConfig//i' | tr a-z A-Z)
25907             # bass value on to clients
25908             eval "$attr=$value; export $attr"
25909         done
25910     done
25911 fi
25912 </pre></blockquote>
25913
25914 <p>I'm not sure this shell construction will work, because I suspect
25915 the while block might end up in a subshell causing the variables set
25916 there to not show up in ltsp-config, but if that is the case I am sure
25917 the code can be restructured to make sure the variables are passed on.
25918 I expect that can be solved with some testing. :)</p>
25919
25920 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
25921 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
25922
25923 <p>Update 2010-07-17: I am aware of another effort to store LTSP
25924 configuration in LDAP that was created around year 2000 by
25925 <a href="http://www.pcxperience.com/thinclient/documentation/ldap.html">PC
25926 Xperience, Inc., 2000</a>.  I found its
25927 <a href="http://people.redhat.com/alikins/ltsp/ldap/">files</a> on a
25928 personal home page over at redhat.com.</p>
25929
25930       </div>
25931       <div class="tags">
25932
25933
25934         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>.
25935
25936
25937       </div>
25938     </div>
25939     <div class="padding"></div>
25940
25941     <div class="entry">
25942       <div class="title">
25943         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/jXplorer__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">jXplorer, a very nice LDAP GUI</a>
25944       </div>
25945       <div class="date">
25946          9th July 2010
25947       </div>
25948       <div class="body">
25949         <p>Since
25950 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">my
25951 last post</a> about available LDAP tools in Debian, I was told about a
25952 LDAP GUI that is even better than luma.  The java application
25953 <a href="http://jxplorer.org/">jXplorer</a> is claimed to be capable of
25954 moving LDAP objects and subtrees using drag-and-drop, and can
25955 authenticate using Kerberos.  I have only tested the Kerberos
25956 authentication, but do not have a LDAP setup allowing me to rewrite
25957 LDAP with my test user yet.  It is
25958 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/j/jxplorer.html">available in
25959 Debian</a> testing and unstable at the moment.  The only problem I
25960 have with it is how it handle errors.  If something go wrong, its
25961 non-intuitive behaviour require me to go through some query work list
25962 and remove the failing query.  Nothing big, but very annoying.</p>
25963
25964       </div>
25965       <div class="tags">
25966
25967
25968         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>.
25969
25970
25971       </div>
25972     </div>
25973     <div class="padding"></div>
25974
25975     <div class="entry">
25976       <div class="title">
25977         <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>
25978       </div>
25979       <div class="date">
25980          3rd July 2010
25981       </div>
25982       <div class="body">
25983         <p>Here is a short update on my <a
25984 href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">my
25985 Debian Lenny->Squeeze upgrade testing</a>.  Here is a summary of the
25986 difference for Gnome when it is upgraded by apt-get and aptitude.  I'm
25987 not reporting the status for KDE, because the upgrade crashes when
25988 aptitude try because of missing conflicts
25989 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#584861</a> and
25990 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/585716">#585716</a>).</p>
25991
25992 <p>At the end of the upgrade test script, dpkg -l is executed to get a
25993 complete list of the installed packages.  Based on this I see these
25994 differences when I did a test run today.  As usual, I do not really
25995 know what the correct set of packages would be, but thought it best to
25996 publish the difference.</p>
25997
25998 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
25999
26000 <blockquote><p>
26001   at-spi cpp-4.3 finger gnome-spell gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
26002   libatspi1.0-0 libcupsys2 libeel2-data libgail-common libgdl-1-common
26003   libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin
26004   libgtksourceview-common libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
26005   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libservlet2.4-java libxalan2-java
26006   libxerces2-java openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
26007   python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gtkhtml2
26008   python-gtkmozembed svgalibg1 xserver-xephyr zip
26009 </p></blockquote>
26010
26011 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
26012
26013 <blockquote><p>
26014   bluez-utils dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop epiphany-gecko
26015   gnome-app-install gnome-mount gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager
26016   libao2 libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libbind9-50
26017   libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcurl3
26018   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9
26019   libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3
26020   libfaad0 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
26021   libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
26022   libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
26023   libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
26024   libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50
26025   libisccfg50 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick++10
26026   libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4
26027   libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5
26028   libparted1.8-10 libpisock9 libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3
26029   libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8 libsensors3 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
26030   libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1
26031   libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0 libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj
26032   libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3
26033   mysql-common swfdec-gnome totem-gstreamer wodim
26034 </p></blockquote>
26035
26036 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
26037
26038 <blockquote><p>
26039   gnome gnome-desktop-environment hamster-applet python-gnomeapplet
26040   python-gnomekeyring python-wnck rhythmbox-plugins xorg
26041   xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
26042   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
26043   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-video-all
26044   xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark xserver-xorg-video-ati
26045   xserver-xorg-video-chips xserver-xorg-video-cirrus
26046   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
26047   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
26048   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-mach64
26049   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
26050   xserver-xorg-video-nouveau xserver-xorg-video-nv
26051   xserver-xorg-video-r128 xserver-xorg-video-radeon
26052   xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd xserver-xorg-video-rendition
26053   xserver-xorg-video-s3 xserver-xorg-video-s3virge
26054   xserver-xorg-video-savage xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion
26055   xserver-xorg-video-sis xserver-xorg-video-sisusb
26056   xserver-xorg-video-tdfx xserver-xorg-video-tga
26057   xserver-xorg-video-trident xserver-xorg-video-tseng
26058   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vmware
26059   xserver-xorg-video-voodoo
26060 </p></blockquote>
26061
26062 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
26063
26064 <blockquote><p>
26065   deskbar-applet xserver-xorg xserver-xorg-core
26066   xserver-xorg-input-wacom xserver-xorg-video-intel
26067   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome
26068 </p></blockquote>
26069
26070 <p>I was told on IRC that the xorg-xserver package was
26071 <a href="http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-xorg/xserver/xorg-server.git;a=commit;h=9c8080d06c457932d3bfec021c69ac000aa60120">changed
26072 in git</a> today to try to get apt-get to not remove xorg completely.
26073 No idea when it hits Squeeze, but when it does I hope it will reduce
26074 the difference somewhat.
26075
26076       </div>
26077       <div class="tags">
26078
26079
26080         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>.
26081
26082
26083       </div>
26084     </div>
26085     <div class="padding"></div>
26086
26087     <div class="entry">
26088       <div class="title">
26089         <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>
26090       </div>
26091       <div class="date">
26092          1st July 2010
26093       </div>
26094       <div class="body">
26095         <p>For a laptop, centralized user directories and password checking is
26096 a bit troubling.  Laptops are typically used also when not connected
26097 to the network, and it is vital for a user to be able to log in or
26098 unlock the screen saver also when a central server is unavailable.
26099 This is possible by caching passwords and directory information (user
26100 and group attributes) locally, and the packages to do so are available
26101 in Debian.  Here follow two recipes to set this up in Debian/Squeeze.
26102 It is also possible to set up in Debian/Lenny, but require more manual
26103 setup there because pam-auth-update is missing in Lenny.</p>
26104
26105 <h2>LDAP/Kerberos + nscd + libpam-ccreds + libpam-mklocaluser/pam_mkhomedir</h2>
26106
26107 This is the traditional method with a twist.  The password caching is
26108 provided by libpam-ccreds (version 10-4 or later is needed on
26109 Squeeze), and the directory caching is done by nscd.  The directory
26110 lookup and password checking is done using LDAP.  If one want to use
26111 Kerberos for password checking the libpam-ldapd package can be
26112 replaced with libpam-krb5 or libpam-heimdal.  If one is happy having a
26113 local home directory with the path listed in LDAP, one can use the
26114 pam_mkhomedir module from pam-modules to make this happen instead of
26115 using libpam-mklocaluser.  A setup for pam-auth-update to enable
26116 pam_mkhomedir will have to be written until a fix for
26117 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/568577">bug #568577</a> is in the
26118 archive.  Because I believe it is a bad idea to have local home
26119 directories using misleading paths like /site/server/partition/, I
26120 prefer to create a local user with the home directory in /home/.  This
26121 is done using the libpam-mklocaluser package.</p>
26122
26123 <p>These packages need to be installed and configured</p>
26124
26125 <blockquote><pre>
26126 libnss-ldapd libpam-ldapd nscd libpam-ccreds libpam-mklocaluser
26127 </pre></blockquote>
26128
26129 <p>The ldapd packages will ask for LDAP connection information, and
26130 one have to fill in the values that fits ones own site.  Make sure the
26131 PAM part uses encrypted connections, to make sure the password is not
26132 sent in clear text to the LDAP server.  I've been unable to get TLS
26133 certificate checking for a self signed certificate working, which make
26134 LDAP authentication unsafe for Debian Edu (nslcd is not checking if it
26135 is talking to the correct LDAP server), and very much welcome feedback
26136 on how to get this working.</p>
26137
26138 <p>Because nscd do not have a default configuration fit for offline
26139 caching until <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/485282">bug #485282</a>
26140 is fixed, this configuration should be used instead of the one
26141 currently in /etc/nscd.conf.  The changes are in the fields
26142 reload-count and positive-time-to-live, and is based on the
26143 instructions I found in the
26144 <a href="http://www.flyn.org/laptopldap/">LDAP for Mobile Laptops</a>
26145 instructions by Flyn Computing.</p>
26146
26147 <blockquote><pre>
26148         debug-level             0
26149         reload-count            unlimited
26150         paranoia                no
26151
26152         enable-cache            passwd          yes
26153         positive-time-to-live   passwd          2592000
26154         negative-time-to-live   passwd          20
26155         suggested-size          passwd          211
26156         check-files             passwd          yes
26157         persistent              passwd          yes
26158         shared                  passwd          yes
26159         max-db-size             passwd          33554432
26160         auto-propagate          passwd          yes
26161
26162         enable-cache            group           yes
26163         positive-time-to-live   group           2592000
26164         negative-time-to-live   group           20
26165         suggested-size          group           211
26166         check-files             group           yes
26167         persistent              group           yes
26168         shared                  group           yes
26169         max-db-size             group           33554432
26170         auto-propagate          group           yes
26171
26172         enable-cache            hosts           no
26173         positive-time-to-live   hosts           2592000
26174         negative-time-to-live   hosts           20
26175         suggested-size          hosts           211
26176         check-files             hosts           yes
26177         persistent              hosts           yes
26178         shared                  hosts           yes
26179         max-db-size             hosts           33554432
26180
26181         enable-cache            services        yes
26182         positive-time-to-live   services        2592000
26183         negative-time-to-live   services        20
26184         suggested-size          services        211
26185         check-files             services        yes
26186         persistent              services        yes
26187         shared                  services        yes
26188         max-db-size             services        33554432
26189 </pre></blockquote>
26190
26191 <p>While we wait for a mechanism to update /etc/nsswitch.conf
26192 automatically like the one provided in
26193 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/496915">bug #496915</a>, the file
26194 content need to be manually replaced to ensure LDAP is used as the
26195 directory service on the machine.  /etc/nsswitch.conf should normally
26196 look like this:</p>
26197
26198 <blockquote><pre>
26199 passwd:         files ldap
26200 group:          files ldap
26201 shadow:         files ldap
26202 hosts:          files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns mdns4
26203 networks:       files
26204 protocols:      files
26205 services:       files
26206 ethers:         files
26207 rpc:            files
26208 netgroup:       files ldap
26209 </pre></blockquote>
26210
26211 <p>The important parts are that ldap is listed last for passwd, group,
26212 shadow and netgroup.</p>
26213
26214 <p>With these changes in place, any user in LDAP will be able to log
26215 in locally on the machine using for example kdm, get a local home
26216 directory created and have the password as well as user and group
26217 attributes cached.
26218
26219 <h2>LDAP/Kerberos + nss-updatedb + libpam-ccreds +
26220   libpam-mklocaluser/pam_mkhomedir</h2>
26221
26222 <p>Because nscd have had its share of problems, and seem to have
26223 problems doing proper caching, I've seen suggestions and recipes to
26224 use nss-updatedb to copy parts of the LDAP database locally when the
26225 LDAP database is available.  I have not tested such setup, because I
26226 discovered sssd.</p>
26227
26228 <h2>LDAP/Kerberos + sssd + libpam-mklocaluser</h2>
26229
26230 <p>A more flexible and robust setup than the nscd combination
26231 mentioned earlier that has shown up recently, is the
26232 <a href="https://fedorahosted.org/sssd/">sssd</a> package from Redhat.
26233 It is part of the <a href="http://www.freeipa.org/">FreeIPA</A> project
26234 to provide a Active Directory like directory service for Linux
26235 machines.  The sssd system combines the caching of passwords and user
26236 information into one package, and remove the need for nscd and
26237 libpam-ccreds.  It support LDAP and Kerberos, but not NIS.  Version
26238 1.2 do not support netgroups, but it is said that it will support this
26239 in version 1.5 expected to show up later in 2010.  Because the
26240 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/sssd.html">sssd package</a>
26241 was missing in Debian, I ended up co-maintaining it with Werner, and
26242 version 1.2 is now in testing.
26243
26244 <p>These packages need to be installed and configured to get the
26245 roaming setup I want</p>
26246
26247 <blockquote><pre>
26248 libpam-sss libnss-sss libpam-mklocaluser
26249 </pre></blockquote>
26250
26251 The complete setup of sssd is done by editing/creating
26252 <tt>/etc/sssd/sssd.conf</tt>.
26253
26254 <blockquote><pre>
26255 [sssd]
26256 config_file_version = 2
26257 reconnection_retries = 3
26258 sbus_timeout = 30
26259 services = nss, pam
26260 domains = INTERN
26261
26262 [nss]
26263 filter_groups = root
26264 filter_users = root
26265 reconnection_retries = 3
26266
26267 [pam]
26268 reconnection_retries = 3
26269
26270 [domain/INTERN]
26271 enumerate = false
26272 cache_credentials = true
26273
26274 id_provider = ldap
26275 auth_provider = ldap
26276 chpass_provider = ldap
26277
26278 ldap_uri = ldap://ldap
26279 ldap_search_base = dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
26280 ldap_tls_reqcert = never
26281 ldap_tls_cacert = /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt
26282 </pre></blockquote>
26283
26284 <p>I got the same problem here with certificate checking.  Had to set
26285 "ldap_tls_reqcert = never" to get it working.</p>
26286
26287 <p>With the libnss-sss package in testing at the moment, the
26288 nsswitch.conf file is update automatically, so there is no need to
26289 modify it manually.</p>
26290
26291 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
26292 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
26293
26294       </div>
26295       <div class="tags">
26296
26297
26298         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>.
26299
26300
26301       </div>
26302     </div>
26303     <div class="padding"></div>
26304
26305     <div class="entry">
26306       <div class="title">
26307         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">LUMA, a very nice LDAP GUI</a>
26308       </div>
26309       <div class="date">
26310         28th June 2010
26311       </div>
26312       <div class="body">
26313         <p>The last few days I have been looking into the status of the LDAP
26314 directory in Debian Edu, and in the process I started to miss a GUI
26315 tool to browse the LDAP tree.  The only one I was able to find in
26316 Debian/Squeeze and Lenny is
26317 <a href="http://luma.sourceforge.net/">LUMA</a>, which has proved to
26318 be a great tool to get a overview of the current LDAP directory
26319 populated by default in Skolelinux.  Thanks to it, I have been able to
26320 find empty and obsolete subtrees, misplaced objects and duplicate
26321 objects.  It will be installed by default in Debian/Squeeze.  If you
26322 are working with LDAP, give it a go. :)</p>
26323
26324 <p>I did notice one problem with it I have not had time to report to
26325 the BTS yet.  There is no .desktop file in the package, so the tool do
26326 not show up in the Gnome and KDE menus, but only deep down in in the
26327 Debian submenu in KDE.  I hope that can be fixed before Squeeze is
26328 released.</p>
26329
26330 <p>I have not yet been able to get it to modify the tree yet.  I would
26331 like to move objects and remove subtrees directly in the GUI, but have
26332 not found a way to do that with LUMA yet.  So in the mean time, I use
26333 <a href="http://www.lichteblau.com/ldapvi/">ldapvi</a> for that.</p>
26334
26335 <p>If you have tips on other GUI tools for LDAP that might be useful
26336 in Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
26337
26338 <p>Update 2010-06-29: Ross Reedstrom tipped us about the
26339 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/g/gq.html">gq</a> package as a
26340 useful GUI alternative.  It seem like a good tool, but is unmaintained
26341 in Debian and got a RC bug keeping it out of Squeeze.  Unless that
26342 changes, it will not be an option for Debian Edu based on Squeeze.</p>
26343
26344       </div>
26345       <div class="tags">
26346
26347
26348         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>.
26349
26350
26351       </div>
26352     </div>
26353     <div class="padding"></div>
26354
26355     <div class="entry">
26356       <div class="title">
26357         <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>
26358       </div>
26359       <div class="date">
26360         24th June 2010
26361       </div>
26362       <div class="body">
26363         <p>A while back, I
26364 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">complained
26365 about the fact</a> that it is not possible with the provided schemas
26366 for storing DNS and DHCP information in LDAP to combine the two sets
26367 of information into one LDAP object representing a computer.</p>
26368
26369 <p>In the mean time, I discovered that a simple fix would be to make
26370 the dhcpHost object class auxiliary, to allow it to be combined with
26371 the dNSDomain object class, and thus forming one object for one
26372 computer when storing both DHCP and DNS information in LDAP.</p>
26373
26374 <p>If I understand this correctly, it is not safe to do this change
26375 without also changing the assigned number for the object class, and I
26376 do not know enough about LDAP schema design to do that properly for
26377 Debian Edu.</p>
26378
26379 <p>Anyway, for future reference, this is how I believe we could change
26380 the
26381 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dhc-ldap-schema-00">DHCP
26382 schema</a> to solve at least part of the problem with the LDAP schemas
26383 available today from IETF.</p>
26384
26385 <pre>
26386 --- dhcp.schema    (revision 65192)
26387 +++ dhcp.schema    (working copy)
26388 @@ -376,7 +376,7 @@
26389  objectclass ( 2.16.840.1.113719.1.203.6.6
26390         NAME 'dhcpHost'
26391         DESC 'This represents information about a particular client'
26392 -       SUP top
26393 +       SUP top AUXILIARY
26394         MUST cn
26395         MAY  (dhcpLeaseDN $ dhcpHWAddress $ dhcpOptionsDN $ dhcpStatements $ dhcpComments $ dhcpOption)
26396         X-NDS_CONTAINMENT ('dhcpService' 'dhcpSubnet' 'dhcpGroup') )
26397 </pre>
26398
26399 <p>I very much welcome clues on how to do this properly for Debian
26400 Edu/Squeeze.  We provide the DHCP schema in our debian-edu-config
26401 package, and should thus be free to rewrite it as we see fit.</p>
26402
26403 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
26404 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
26405
26406       </div>
26407       <div class="tags">
26408
26409
26410         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>.
26411
26412
26413       </div>
26414     </div>
26415     <div class="padding"></div>
26416
26417     <div class="entry">
26418       <div class="title">
26419         <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>
26420       </div>
26421       <div class="date">
26422         16th June 2010
26423       </div>
26424       <div class="body">
26425         <p>A few times I have had the need to simulate the way tasksel
26426 installs packages during the normal debian-installer run.  Until now,
26427 I have ended up letting tasksel do the work, with the annoying problem
26428 of not getting any feedback at all when something fails (like a
26429 conffile question from dpkg or a download that fails), using code like
26430 this:
26431
26432 <blockquote><pre>
26433 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
26434 tasksel --new-install
26435 </pre></blockquote>
26436
26437 This would invoke tasksel, let its automatic task selection pick the
26438 tasks to install, and continue to install the requested tasks without
26439 any output what so ever.
26440
26441 Recently I revisited this problem while working on the automatic
26442 package upgrade testing, because tasksel would some times hang without
26443 any useful feedback, and I want to see what is going on when it
26444 happen.  Then it occured to me, I can parse the output from tasksel
26445 when asked to run in test mode, and use that aptitude command line
26446 printed by tasksel then to simulate the tasksel run.  I ended up using
26447 code like this:
26448
26449 <blockquote><pre>
26450 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
26451 cmd="$(in_target tasksel -t --new-install | sed 's/debconf-apt-progress -- //')"
26452 $cmd
26453 </pre></blockquote>
26454
26455 <p>The content of $cmd is typically something like "<tt>aptitude -q
26456 --without-recommends -o APT::Install-Recommends=no -y install
26457 ~t^desktop$ ~t^gnome-desktop$ ~t^laptop$ ~pstandard ~prequired
26458 ~pimportant</tt>", which will install the gnome desktop task, the
26459 laptop task and all packages with priority standard , required and
26460 important, just like tasksel would have done it during
26461 installation.</p>
26462
26463 <p>A better approach is probably to extend tasksel to be able to
26464 install packages without using debconf-apt-progress, for use cases
26465 like this.</p>
26466
26467       </div>
26468       <div class="tags">
26469
26470
26471         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>.
26472
26473
26474       </div>
26475     </div>
26476     <div class="padding"></div>
26477
26478     <div class="entry">
26479       <div class="title">
26480         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_taking_shape.html">Officeshots taking shape</a>
26481       </div>
26482       <div class="date">
26483         13th June 2010
26484       </div>
26485       <div class="body">
26486         <p>For those of us caring about document exchange and
26487 interoperability, <a href="http://www.officeshots.org/">OfficeShots</a>
26488 is a great service.  It is to ODF documents what
26489 <a href="http://browsershots.org/">BrowserShots</a> is for web
26490 pages.</p>
26491
26492 <p>A while back, I was contacted by Knut Yrvin at the part of Nokia
26493 that used to be Trolltech, who wanted to help the OfficeShots project
26494 and wondered if the University of Oslo where I work would be
26495 interested in supporting the project.  I helped him to navigate his
26496 request to the right people at work, and his request was answered with
26497 a spot in the machine room with power and network connected, and Knut
26498 arranged funding for a machine to fill the spot.  The machine is
26499 administrated by the OfficeShots people, so I do not have daily
26500 contact with its progress, and thus from time to time check back to
26501 see how the project is doing.</p>
26502
26503 <p>Today I had a look, and was happy to see that the Dell box in our
26504 machine room now is the host for several virtual machines running as
26505 OfficeShots factories, and the project is able to render ODF documents
26506 in 17 different document processing implementation on Linux and
26507 Windows.  This is great.</p>
26508
26509       </div>
26510       <div class="tags">
26511
26512
26513         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>.
26514
26515
26516       </div>
26517     </div>
26518     <div class="padding"></div>
26519
26520     <div class="entry">
26521       <div class="title">
26522         <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>
26523       </div>
26524       <div class="date">
26525         13th June 2010
26526       </div>
26527       <div class="body">
26528         <p>My
26529 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">testing
26530 of Debian upgrades</a> from Lenny to Squeeze continues, and I've
26531 finally made the upgrade logs available from
26532 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/</a>.
26533 I am now testing dist-upgrade of Gnome and KDE in a chroot using both
26534 apt and aptitude, and found their differences interesting.  This time
26535 I will only focus on their removal plans.</p>
26536
26537 <p>After installing a Gnome desktop and the laptop task, apt-get wants
26538 to remove 72 packages when dist-upgrading from Lenny to Squeeze.  The
26539 surprising part is that it want to remove xorg and all
26540 xserver-xorg-video* drivers.  Clearly not a good choice, but I am not
26541 sure why.  When asking aptitude to do the same, it want to remove 129
26542 packages, but most of them are library packages I suspect are no
26543 longer needed.  Both of them want to remove bluetooth packages, which
26544 I do not know.  Perhaps these bluetooth packages are obsolete?</p>
26545
26546 <p>For KDE, apt-get want to remove 82 packages, among them kdebase
26547 which seem like a bad idea and xorg the same way as with Gnome. Asking
26548 aptitude for the same, it wants to remove 192 packages, none which are
26549 too surprising.</p>
26550
26551 <p>I guess the removal of xorg during upgrades should be investigated
26552 and avoided, and perhaps others as well.  Here are the complete list
26553 of planned removals.  The complete logs is available from the URL
26554 above.  Note if you want to repeat these tests, that the upgrade test
26555 for kde+apt-get hung in the tasksel setup because of dpkg asking
26556 conffile questions.  No idea why.  I worked around it by using
26557 '<tt>echo >> /proc/<em>pidofdpkg</em>/fd/0</tt>' to tell dpkg to
26558 continue.</p>
26559
26560 <p><b>apt-get gnome 72</b>
26561 <br>bluez-gnome cupsddk-drivers deskbar-applet gnome
26562   gnome-desktop-environment gnome-network-admin gtkhtml3.14
26563   iceweasel-gnome-support libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libgdl-1-0
26564   libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libmetacity0 libslab0 libxcb-xlib0
26565   nautilus-cd-burner python-gnome2-desktop python-gnome2-extras
26566   serpentine swfdec-mozilla update-manager xorg xserver-xorg
26567   xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
26568   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
26569   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
26570   xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
26571   xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
26572   xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
26573   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
26574   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
26575   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
26576   xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
26577   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
26578   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
26579   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
26580   xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
26581   xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
26582   xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
26583   xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
26584   xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
26585   xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
26586   xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
26587   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
26588   xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9
26589   xulrunner-1.9-gnome-support</p>
26590
26591 <p><b>aptitude gnome 129</b>
26592
26593 <br>bluez-gnome bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers dhcdbd
26594   djvulibre-desktop finger gnome-app-install gnome-mount
26595   gnome-network-admin gnome-spell gnome-vfs-obexftp
26596   gnome-volume-manager gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs gtkhtml3.14 libao2
26597   libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
26598   libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcupsys2 libcurl3 libdatrie0
26599   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20
26600   libeel2-data libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libfaad0 libgail-common
26601   libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libgdl-1-0 libgdl-1-common
26602   libggz2 libggzcore9 libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0
26603   libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libgnomeprint2.2-0
26604   libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgnomeprintui2.2-common
26605   libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
26606   libgtksourceview-common libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6
26607   libhesiod0 libicu38 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 libmagick++10
26608   libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmetacity0 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off
26609   libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2
26610   libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10
26611   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libraw1394-8
26612   libsensors3 libslab0 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8 libssh2-1
26613   libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10
26614   libtrackerclient0 libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0
26615   libxerces2-java libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6
26616   libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common nautilus-cd-burner
26617   openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
26618   python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gnome2-desktop
26619   python-gnome2-extras python-gtkhtml2 python-gtkmozembed
26620   python-numeric python-sexy serpentine svgalibg1 swfdec-gnome
26621   swfdec-mozilla totem-gstreamer update-manager wodim
26622   xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
26623   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
26624   zip</p>
26625
26626 <p><b>apt-get kde 82</b>
26627
26628 <br>cupsddk-drivers karm kaudiocreator kcoloredit kcontrol kde kde-core
26629   kdeaddons kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-bin kdebase-bin-kde3
26630   kdebase-kio-plugins kdesktop kdeutils khelpcenter kicker
26631   kicker-applets knewsticker kolourpaint konq-plugins konqueror korn
26632   kpersonalizer kscreensaver ksplash libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libkiten1
26633   libxcb-xlib0 quanta superkaramba texlive-base-bin xorg xserver-xorg
26634   xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
26635   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
26636   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
26637   xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
26638   xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
26639   xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
26640   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
26641   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
26642   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
26643   xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
26644   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
26645   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
26646   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
26647   xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
26648   xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
26649   xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
26650   xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
26651   xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
26652   xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
26653   xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
26654   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
26655   xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9</p>
26656
26657 <p><b>aptitude kde 192</b>
26658 <br>bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers cvs dcoprss dhcdbd
26659   djvulibre-desktop dosfstools eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
26660   ghostscript-x imlib-base imlib11 indi kandy karm kasteroids
26661   kaudiocreator kbackgammon kbstate kcoloredit kcontrol kcron kdat
26662   kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
26663   kdebase-bin-kde3 kdebase-kio-plugins kdeedu-data
26664   kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data
26665   kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
26666   kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdeprint kdesktop kdessh
26667   kdict kdnssd kdvi kedit keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs
26668   kghostview khelpcenter khexedit kiconedit kitchensync klatin
26669   klickety kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmoon kmrml kodo kolourpaint
26670   kooka korn kpager kpdf kpercentage kpf kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler
26671   krec kregexpeditor ksayit ksim ksirc ksirtet ksmiletris ksmserver
26672   ksnake ksokoban ksplash ksvg ksysv ktip ktnef kuickshow kverbos
26673   kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kworldclock
26674   kxsldbg libakode2 libao2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
26675   libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
26676   libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
26677   libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0 libdatrie0
26678   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
26679   libgail-common libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0
26680   libicu38 libiec61883-0 libindex0 libiw29 libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1
26681   libkdeedu3 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkiten1 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
26682   libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
26683   libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 libmagick10 libmimelib1c2a
26684   libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9
26685   libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 libsmbios2
26686   libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libtalloc1 libtiff-tools
26687   libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0 libxerces2-java
26688   libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 mpeglib networkstatus
26689   openoffice.org-writer2latex pmount poster psutils quanta quanta-data
26690   superkaramba svgalibg1 tex-common texlive-base texlive-base-bin
26691   texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended
26692   xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
26693   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
26694   xulrunner-1.9</p>
26695
26696
26697       </div>
26698       <div class="tags">
26699
26700
26701         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>.
26702
26703
26704       </div>
26705     </div>
26706     <div class="padding"></div>
26707
26708     <div class="entry">
26709       <div class="title">
26710         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">Automatic upgrade testing from Lenny to Squeeze</a>
26711       </div>
26712       <div class="date">
26713         11th June 2010
26714       </div>
26715       <div class="body">
26716         <p>The last few days I have done some upgrade testing in Debian, to
26717 see if the upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze will go smoothly.  A few bugs
26718 have been discovered and reported in the process
26719 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/585410">#585410</a> in nagios3-cgi,
26720 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584879">#584879</a> already fixed in
26721 enscript and <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#584861</a> in
26722 kdebase-workspace-data), and to get a more regular testing going on, I
26723 am working on a script to automate the test.</p>
26724
26725 <p>The idea is to create a Lenny chroot and use tasksel to install a
26726 Gnome or KDE desktop installation inside the chroot before upgrading
26727 it.  To ensure no services are started in the chroot, a policy-rc.d
26728 script is inserted.  To make sure tasksel believe it is to install a
26729 desktop on a laptop, the tasksel tests are replaced in the chroot
26730 (only acceptable because this is a throw-away chroot).</p>
26731
26732 <p>A naive upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze using aptitude dist-upgrade
26733 currently always fail because udev refuses to upgrade with the kernel
26734 in Lenny, so to avoid that problem the file /etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
26735 is created.  The bug report
26736 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/566000">#566000</a> make me suspect
26737 this problem do not trigger in a chroot, but I touch the file anyway
26738 to make sure the upgrade go well.  Testing on virtual and real
26739 hardware have failed me because of udev so far, and creating this file
26740 do the trick in such settings anyway.  This is a
26741 <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/debian-26/failed-dist-upgrade-due-to-udev-config_sysfs_deprecated-nonsense-804130/">known
26742 issue</a> and the current udev behaviour is intended by the udev
26743 maintainer because he lack the resources to rewrite udev to keep
26744 working with old kernels or something like that.  I really wish the
26745 udev upstream would keep udev backwards compatible, to avoid such
26746 upgrade problem, but given that they fail to do so, I guess
26747 documenting the way out of this mess is the best option we got for
26748 Debian Squeeze.</p>
26749
26750 <p>Anyway, back to the task at hand, testing upgrades.  This test
26751 script, which I call <tt>upgrade-test</tt> for now, is doing the
26752 trick:</p>
26753
26754 <blockquote><pre>
26755 #!/bin/sh
26756 set -ex
26757
26758 if [ "$1" ] ; then
26759     desktop=$1
26760 else
26761     desktop=gnome
26762 fi
26763
26764 from=lenny
26765 to=squeeze
26766
26767 exec &lt; /dev/null
26768 unset LANG
26769 mirror=http://ftp.skolelinux.org/debian
26770 tmpdir=chroot-$from-upgrade-$to-$desktop
26771 fuser -mv .
26772 debootstrap $from $tmpdir $mirror
26773 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
26774 cat > $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d &lt;&lt;EOF
26775 #!/bin/sh
26776 exit 101
26777 EOF
26778 chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d
26779 exit_cleanup() {
26780     umount $tmpdir/proc
26781 }
26782 mount -t proc proc $tmpdir/proc
26783 # Make sure proc is unmounted also on failure
26784 trap exit_cleanup EXIT INT
26785
26786 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y install debconf-utils
26787
26788 # Make sure tasksel autoselection trigger.  It need the test scripts
26789 # to return the correct answers.
26790 echo tasksel tasksel/desktop multiselect $desktop | \
26791     chroot $tmpdir debconf-set-selections
26792
26793 # Include the desktop and laptop task
26794 for test in desktop laptop ; do
26795     echo > $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test &lt;&lt;EOF
26796 #!/bin/sh
26797 exit 2
26798 EOF
26799     chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test
26800 done
26801
26802 DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
26803 DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical
26804 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND DEBIAN_PRIORITY
26805 chroot $tmpdir tasksel --new-install
26806
26807 echo deb $mirror $to main > $tmpdir/etc/apt/sources.list
26808 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
26809 touch $tmpdir/etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
26810 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y dist-upgrade
26811 fuser -mv
26812 </pre></blockquote>
26813
26814 <p>I suspect it would be useful to test upgrades with both apt-get and
26815 with aptitude, but I have not had time to look at how they behave
26816 differently so far.  I hope to get a cron job running to do the test
26817 regularly and post the result on the web.  The Gnome upgrade currently
26818 work, while the KDE upgrade fail because of the bug in
26819 kdebase-workspace-data</p>
26820
26821 <p>I am not quite sure what kind of extract from the huge upgrade logs
26822 (KDE 167 KiB, Gnome 516 KiB) it make sense to include in this blog
26823 post, so I will refrain from trying.  I can report that for Gnome,
26824 aptitude report 760 packages upgraded, 448 newly installed, 129 to
26825 remove and 1 not upgraded and 1024MB need to be downloaded while for
26826 KDE the same numbers are 702 packages upgraded, 507 newly installed,
26827 193 to remove and 0 not upgraded and 1117MB need to be downloaded</p>
26828
26829 <p>I am very happy to notice that the Gnome desktop + laptop upgrade
26830 is able to migrate to dependency based boot sequencing and parallel
26831 booting without a hitch.  Was unsure if there were still bugs with
26832 packages failing to clean up their obsolete init.d script during
26833 upgrades, and no such problem seem to affect the Gnome desktop+laptop
26834 packages.</p>
26835
26836       </div>
26837       <div class="tags">
26838
26839
26840         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>.
26841
26842
26843       </div>
26844     </div>
26845     <div class="padding"></div>
26846
26847     <div class="entry">
26848       <div class="title">
26849         <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>
26850       </div>
26851       <div class="date">
26852          6th June 2010
26853       </div>
26854       <div class="body">
26855         <p>If Debian is to migrate to upstart on Linux, I expect some init.d
26856 scripts to migrate (some of) their operations to upstart job while
26857 keeping the init.d for hurd and kfreebsd.  The packages with such
26858 needs will need a way to get their init.d scripts to behave
26859 differently when used with sysvinit and with upstart.  Because of
26860 this, I had a look at the environment variables set when a init.d
26861 script is running under upstart, and when it is not.</p>
26862
26863 <p>With upstart, I notice these environment variables are set when a
26864 script is started from rcS.d/ (ignoring some irrelevant ones like
26865 COLUMNS):</p>
26866
26867 <blockquote><pre>
26868 DEFAULT_RUNLEVEL=2
26869 previous=N
26870 PREVLEVEL=
26871 RUNLEVEL=
26872 runlevel=S
26873 UPSTART_EVENTS=startup
26874 UPSTART_INSTANCE=
26875 UPSTART_JOB=rc-sysinit
26876 </pre></blockquote>
26877
26878 <p>With sysvinit, these environment variables are set for the same
26879 script.</p>
26880
26881 <blockquote><pre>
26882 INIT_VERSION=sysvinit-2.88
26883 previous=N
26884 PREVLEVEL=N
26885 RUNLEVEL=S
26886 runlevel=S
26887 </pre></blockquote>
26888
26889 <p>The RUNLEVEL and PREVLEVEL environment variables passed on from
26890 sysvinit are not set by upstart.  Not sure if it is intentional or not
26891 to not be compatible with sysvinit in this regard.</p>
26892
26893 <p>For scripts needing to behave differently when upstart is used,
26894 looking for the UPSTART_JOB environment variable seem to be a good
26895 choice.</p>
26896
26897       </div>
26898       <div class="tags">
26899
26900
26901         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>.
26902
26903
26904       </div>
26905     </div>
26906     <div class="padding"></div>
26907
26908     <div class="entry">
26909       <div class="title">
26910         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_manual_for_standards_wars___.html">A manual for standards wars...</a>
26911       </div>
26912       <div class="date">
26913          6th June 2010
26914       </div>
26915       <div class="body">
26916         <p>Via the
26917 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/robweir/antic-atom/~3/QzU4RgoAGMg/weekly-links-10.html">blog
26918 of Rob Weir</a> I came across the very interesting essay named
26919 <a href="http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/shapiro/wars.pdf">The Art of
26920 Standards Wars</a> (PDF 25 pages).  I recommend it for everyone
26921 following the standards wars of today.</p>
26922
26923       </div>
26924       <div class="tags">
26925
26926
26927         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>.
26928
26929
26930       </div>
26931     </div>
26932     <div class="padding"></div>
26933
26934     <div class="entry">
26935       <div class="title">
26936         <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>
26937       </div>
26938       <div class="date">
26939          3rd June 2010
26940       </div>
26941       <div class="body">
26942         <p>When using sitesummary at a site to track machines, it is possible
26943 to get a list of the machine types in use thanks to the DMI
26944 information extracted from each machine.  The script to do so is
26945 included in the sitesummary package, and here is example output from
26946 the Skolelinux build servers:</p>
26947
26948 <blockquote><pre>
26949 maintainer:~# /usr/lib/sitesummary/hardware-model-summary
26950   vendor                    count
26951   Dell Computer Corporation     1
26952     PowerEdge 1750              1
26953   IBM                           1
26954     eserver xSeries 345 -[8670M1X]-     1
26955   Intel                         2
26956   [no-dmi-info]                 3
26957 maintainer:~#
26958 </pre></blockquote>
26959
26960 <p>The quality of the report depend on the quality of the DMI tables
26961 provided in each machine.  Here there are Intel machines without model
26962 information listed with Intel as vendor and no model, and virtual Xen
26963 machines listed as [no-dmi-info].  One can add -l as a command line
26964 option to list the individual machines.</p>
26965
26966 <p>A larger list is
26967 <a href="http://narvikskolen.no/sitesummary/">available from the the
26968 city of Narvik</a>, which uses Skolelinux on all their shools and also
26969 provide the basic sitesummary report publicly.  In their report there
26970 are ~1400 machines. I know they use both Ubuntu and Skolelinux on
26971 their machines, and as sitesummary is available in both distributions,
26972 it is trivial to get all of them to report to the same central
26973 collector.</p>
26974
26975       </div>
26976       <div class="tags">
26977
26978
26979         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>.
26980
26981
26982       </div>
26983     </div>
26984     <div class="padding"></div>
26985
26986     <div class="entry">
26987       <div class="title">
26988         <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>
26989       </div>
26990       <div class="date">
26991          1st June 2010
26992       </div>
26993       <div class="body">
26994         <p>It is strange to watch how a bug in Debian causing KDM to fail to
26995 start at boot when an NVidia video card is used is handled.  The
26996 problem seem to be that the nvidia X.org driver uses a long time to
26997 initialize, and this duration is longer than kdm is configured to
26998 wait.</p>
26999
27000 <p>I came across two bugs related to this issue,
27001 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">#583312</a> initially filed
27002 against initscripts and passed on to nvidia-glx when it became obvious
27003 that the nvidia drivers were involved, and
27004 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/524751">#524751</a> initially filed against
27005 kdm and passed on to src:nvidia-graphics-drivers for unknown reasons.</p>
27006
27007 <p>To me, it seem that no-one is interested in actually solving the
27008 problem nvidia video card owners experience and make sure the Debian
27009 distribution work out of the box for these users.  The nvidia driver
27010 maintainers expect kdm to be set up to wait longer, while kdm expect
27011 the nvidia driver maintainers to fix the driver to start faster, and
27012 while they wait for each other I guess the users end up switching to a
27013 distribution that work for them.  I have no idea what the solution is,
27014 but I am pretty sure that waiting for each other is not it.</p>
27015
27016 <p>I wonder why we end up handling bugs this way.</p>
27017
27018       </div>
27019       <div class="tags">
27020
27021
27022         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>.
27023
27024
27025       </div>
27026     </div>
27027     <div class="padding"></div>
27028
27029     <div class="entry">
27030       <div class="title">
27031         <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>
27032       </div>
27033       <div class="date">
27034         27th May 2010
27035       </div>
27036       <div class="body">
27037         <p>A few days ago, parallel booting was enabled in Debian/testing.
27038 The feature seem to hold up pretty well, but three fairly serious
27039 issues are known and should be solved:
27040
27041 <p><ul>
27042
27043 <li>The wicd package seen to
27044 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/508289">break NFS mounting</a> and
27045 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/581586">network setup</a> when
27046 parallel booting is enabled.  No idea why, but the wicd maintainer
27047 seem to be on the case.</li>
27048
27049 <li>The nvidia X driver seem to
27050 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">have a race condition</a>
27051 triggered more easily when parallel booting is in effect.  The
27052 maintainer is on the case.</li>
27053
27054 <li>The sysv-rc package fail to properly enable dependency based boot
27055 sequencing (the shutdown is broken) when old file-rc users
27056 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/575080">try to switch back</a> to
27057 sysv-rc.  One way to solve it would be for file-rc to create
27058 /etc/init.d/.legacy-bootordering, and another is to try to make
27059 sysv-rc more robust.  Will investigate some more and probably upload a
27060 workaround in sysv-rc to help those trying to move from file-rc to
27061 sysv-rc get a working shutdown.</li>
27062
27063 </ul></p>
27064
27065 <p>All in all not many surprising issues, and all of them seem
27066 solvable before Squeeze is released.  In addition to these there are
27067 some packages with bugs in their dependencies and run level settings,
27068 which I expect will be fixed in a reasonable time span.</p>
27069
27070 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
27071 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
27072 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
27073 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
27074
27075 <p>Update: Correct bug number to file-rc issue.</p>
27076
27077       </div>
27078       <div class="tags">
27079
27080
27081         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>.
27082
27083
27084       </div>
27085     </div>
27086     <div class="padding"></div>
27087
27088     <div class="entry">
27089       <div class="title">
27090         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/More_flexible_firmware_handling_in_debian_installer.html">More flexible firmware handling in debian-installer</a>
27091       </div>
27092       <div class="date">
27093         22nd May 2010
27094       </div>
27095       <div class="body">
27096         <p>After a long break from debian-installer development, I finally
27097 found time today to return to the project.  Having to spend less time
27098 working dependency based boot in debian, as it is almost complete now,
27099 definitely helped freeing some time.</p>
27100
27101 <p>A while back, I ran into a problem while working on Debian Edu.  We
27102 include some firmware packages on the Debian Edu CDs, those needed to
27103 get disk and network controllers working.  Without having these
27104 firmware packages available during installation, it is impossible to
27105 install Debian Edu on the given machine, and because our target group
27106 are non-technical people, asking them to provide firmware packages on
27107 an external medium is a support pain.  Initially, I expected it to be
27108 enough to include the firmware packages on the CD to get
27109 debian-installer to find and use them.  This proved to be wrong.
27110 Next, I hoped it was enough to symlink the relevant firmware packages
27111 to some useful location on the CD (tried /cdrom/ and
27112 /cdrom/firmware/).  This also proved to not work, and at this point I
27113 found time to look at the debian-installer code to figure out what was
27114 going to work.</p>
27115
27116 <p>The firmware loading code is in the hw-detect package, and a closer
27117 look revealed that it would only look for firmware packages outside
27118 the installation media, so the CD was never checked for firmware
27119 packages.  It would only check USB sticks, floppies and other
27120 "external" media devices.  Today I changed it to also look in the
27121 /cdrom/firmware/ directory on the mounted CD or DVD, which should
27122 solve the problem I ran into with Debian edu.  I also changed it to
27123 look in /firmware/, to make sure the installer also find firmware
27124 provided in the initrd when booting the installer via PXE, to allow us
27125 to provide the same feature in the PXE setup included in Debian
27126 Edu.</p>
27127
27128 <p>To make sure firmware deb packages with a license questions are not
27129 activated without asking if the license is accepted, I extended
27130 hw-detect to look for preinst scripts in the firmware packages, and
27131 run these before activating the firmware during installation.  The
27132 license question is asked using debconf in the preinst, so this should
27133 solve the issue for the firmware packages I have looked at so far.</p>
27134
27135 <p>If you want to discuss the details of these features, please
27136 contact us on debian-boot@lists.debian.org.</p>
27137
27138       </div>
27139       <div class="tags">
27140
27141
27142         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>.
27143
27144
27145       </div>
27146     </div>
27147     <div class="padding"></div>
27148
27149     <div class="entry">
27150       <div class="title">
27151         <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>
27152       </div>
27153       <div class="date">
27154         19th May 2010
27155       </div>
27156       <div class="body">
27157         <p>Today, the last piece of the puzzle for roaming laptops in Debian
27158 Edu finally entered the Debian archive.  Today, the new
27159 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/libp/libpam-mklocaluser.html">libpam-mklocaluser</a>
27160 package was accepted.  Two days ago, two other pieces was accepted
27161 into unstable.  The
27162 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/pam-python.html">pam-python</a>
27163 package needed by libpam-mklocaluser, and the
27164 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/sssd.html">sssd</a> package
27165 passed NEW on Monday.  In addition, the
27166 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/libp/libpam-ccreds.html">libpam-ccreds</a>
27167 package we need is in experimental (version 10-4) since Saturday, and
27168 hopefully will be moved to unstable soon.</p>
27169
27170 <p>This collection of packages allow for two different setups for
27171 roaming laptops.  The traditional setup would be using libpam-ccreds,
27172 nscd and libpam-mklocaluser with LDAP or Kerberos authentication,
27173 which should work out of the box if the configuration changes proposed
27174 for nscd in <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/485282">BTS report
27175 #485282</a> is implemented.  The alternative setup is to use sssd with
27176 libpam-mklocaluser to connect to LDAP or Kerberos and let sssd take
27177 care of the caching of passwords and group information.</p>
27178
27179 <p>I have so far been unable to get sssd to work with the LDAP server
27180 at the University, but suspect the issue is some SSL/GnuTLS related
27181 problem with the server certificate.  I plan to update the Debian
27182 package to version 1.2, which is scheduled for next week, and hope to
27183 find time to make sure the next release will include both the
27184 Debian/Ubuntu specific patches.  Upstream is friendly and responsive,
27185 and I am sure we will find a good solution.</p>
27186
27187 <p>The idea is to set up the roaming laptops to authenticate using
27188 LDAP or Kerberos and create a local user with home directory in /home/
27189 when a usre in LDAP logs in via KDM or GDM for the first time, and
27190 cache the password for offline checking, as well as caching group
27191 memberhips and other relevant LDAP information.  The
27192 libpam-mklocaluser package was created to make sure the local home
27193 directory is in /home/, instead of /site/server/directory/ which would
27194 be the home directory if pam_mkhomedir was used.  To avoid confusion
27195 with support requests and configuration, we do not want local laptops
27196 to have users in a path that is used for the same users home directory
27197 on the home directory servers.</p>
27198
27199 <p>One annoying problem with gdm is that it do not show the PAM
27200 message passed to the user from libpam-mklocaluser when the local user
27201 is created.  Instead gdm simply reject the login with some generic
27202 message.  The message is shown in kdm, ssh and login, so I guess it is
27203 a bug in gdm.  Have not investigated if there is some other message
27204 type that can be used instead to get gdm to also show the message.</p>
27205
27206 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
27207 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
27208
27209       </div>
27210       <div class="tags">
27211
27212
27213         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>.
27214
27215
27216       </div>
27217     </div>
27218     <div class="padding"></div>
27219
27220     <div class="entry">
27221       <div class="title">
27222         <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>
27223       </div>
27224       <div class="date">
27225         14th May 2010
27226       </div>
27227       <div class="body">
27228         <p>Since this evening, parallel booting is the default in
27229 Debian/unstable for machines using dependency based boot sequencing.
27230 Apparently the testing of concurrent booting has been wider than
27231 expected, if I am to believe the
27232 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
27233 on debian-devel@</a>, and I concluded a few days ago to move forward
27234 with the feature this weekend, to give us some time to detect any
27235 remaining problems before Squeeze is frozen.  If serious problems are
27236 detected, it is simple to change the default back to sequential boot.
27237 The upload of the new sysvinit package also activate a new upstream
27238 version.</p>
27239
27240 More information about
27241 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
27242 based boot sequencing</a> is available from the Debian wiki.  It is
27243 currently possible to disable parallel booting when one run into
27244 problems caused by it, by adding this line to /etc/default/rcS:</p>
27245
27246 <blockquote><pre>
27247 CONCURRENCY=none
27248 </pre></blockquote>
27249
27250 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
27251 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
27252 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
27253 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
27254
27255       </div>
27256       <div class="tags">
27257
27258
27259         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>.
27260
27261
27262       </div>
27263     </div>
27264     <div class="padding"></div>
27265
27266     <div class="entry">
27267       <div class="title">
27268         <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>
27269       </div>
27270       <div class="date">
27271         14th May 2010
27272       </div>
27273       <div class="body">
27274         <p>In the recent Debian Edu versions, the
27275 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary">sitesummary
27276 system</a> is used to keep track of the machines in the school
27277 network.  Each machine will automatically report its status to the
27278 central server after boot and once per night.  The network setup is
27279 also reported, and using this information it is possible to get the
27280 MAC address of all network interfaces in the machines.  This is useful
27281 to update the DHCP configuration.</p>
27282
27283 <p>To give some idea how to use sitesummary, here is a one-liner to
27284 ist all MAC addresses of all machines reporting to sitesummary.  Run
27285 this on the collector host:</p>
27286
27287 <blockquote><pre>
27288 perl -MSiteSummary -e 'for_all_hosts(sub { print join(" ", get_macaddresses(shift)), "\n"; });'
27289 </pre></blockquote>
27290
27291 <p>This will list all MAC addresses assosiated with all machine, one
27292 line per machine and with space between the MAC addresses.</p>
27293
27294 <p>To allow system administrators easier job at adding static DHCP
27295 addresses for hosts, it would be possible to extend this to fetch
27296 machine information from sitesummary and update the DHCP and DNS
27297 tables in LDAP using this information.  Such tool is unfortunately not
27298 written yet.</p>
27299
27300       </div>
27301       <div class="tags">
27302
27303
27304         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>.
27305
27306
27307       </div>
27308     </div>
27309     <div class="padding"></div>
27310
27311     <div class="entry">
27312       <div class="title">
27313         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/systemd__an_interesting_alternative_to_upstart.html">systemd, an interesting alternative to upstart</a>
27314       </div>
27315       <div class="date">
27316         13th May 2010
27317       </div>
27318       <div class="body">
27319         <p>The last few days a new boot system called
27320 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd">systemd</a>
27321 has been
27322 <a href="http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html">introduced</a>
27323
27324 to the free software world.  I have not yet had time to play around
27325 with it, but it seem to be a very interesting alternative to
27326 <a href="http://upstart.ubuntu.com/">upstart</a>, and might prove to be
27327 a good alternative for Debian when we are able to switch to an event
27328 based boot system.  Tollef is
27329 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/580814">in the process</a> of getting
27330 systemd into Debian, and I look forward to seeing how well it work.  I
27331 like the fact that systemd handles init.d scripts with dependency
27332 information natively, allowing them to run in parallel where upstart
27333 at the moment do not.</p>
27334
27335 <p>Unfortunately do systemd have the same problem as upstart regarding
27336 platform support.  It only work on recent Linux kernels, and also need
27337 some new kernel features enabled to function properly.  This means
27338 kFreeBSD and Hurd ports of Debian will need a port or a different boot
27339 system.  Not sure how that will be handled if systemd proves to be the
27340 way forward.</p>
27341
27342 <p>In the mean time, based on the
27343 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
27344 on debian-devel@</a> regarding parallel booting in Debian, I have
27345 decided to enable full parallel booting as the default in Debian as
27346 soon as possible (probably this weekend or early next week), to see if
27347 there are any remaining serious bugs in the init.d dependencies.  A
27348 new version of the sysvinit package implementing this change is
27349 already in experimental.  If all go well, Squeeze will be released
27350 with parallel booting enabled by default.</p>
27351
27352       </div>
27353       <div class="tags">
27354
27355
27356         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>.
27357
27358
27359       </div>
27360     </div>
27361     <div class="padding"></div>
27362
27363     <div class="entry">
27364       <div class="title">
27365         <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>
27366       </div>
27367       <div class="date">
27368          6th May 2010
27369       </div>
27370       <div class="body">
27371         <p>These days, the init.d script dependencies in Squeeze are quite
27372 complete, so complete that it is actually possible to run all the
27373 init.d scripts in parallell based on these dependencies.  If you want
27374 to test your Squeeze system, make sure
27375 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
27376 based boot sequencing</a> is enabled, and add this line to
27377 /etc/default/rcS:</p>
27378
27379 <blockquote><pre>
27380 CONCURRENCY=makefile
27381 </pre></blockquote>
27382
27383 <p>That is it.  It will cause sysv-rc to use the startpar tool to run
27384 scripts in parallel using the dependency information stored in
27385 /etc/init.d/.depend.boot, /etc/init.d/.depend.start and
27386 /etc/init.d/.depend.stop to order the scripts.  Startpar is configured
27387 to try to start the kdm and gdm scripts as early as possible, and will
27388 start the facilities required by kdm or gdm as early as possible to
27389 make this happen.</p>
27390
27391 <p>Give it a try, and see if you like the result.  If some services
27392 fail to start properly, it is most likely because they have incomplete
27393 init.d script dependencies in their startup script (or some of their
27394 dependent scripts have incomplete dependencies).  Report bugs and get
27395 the package maintainers to fix it. :)</p>
27396
27397 <p>Running scripts in parallel could be the default in Debian when we
27398 manage to get the init.d script dependencies complete and correct.  I
27399 expect we will get there in Squeeze+1, if we get manage to test and
27400 fix the remaining issues.</p>
27401
27402 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
27403 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
27404 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
27405 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
27406
27407       </div>
27408       <div class="tags">
27409
27410
27411         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>.
27412
27413
27414       </div>
27415     </div>
27416     <div class="padding"></div>
27417
27418     <div class="entry">
27419       <div class="title">
27420         <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>
27421       </div>
27422       <div class="date">
27423          2nd May 2010
27424       </div>
27425       <div class="body">
27426         <p>One interesting feature in Active Directory, is the ability to
27427 create a new user with an expired password, and thus force the user to
27428 change the password on the first login attempt.</p>
27429
27430 <p>I'm not quite sure how to do that with the LDAP setup in Debian
27431 Edu, but did some initial testing with a local account.  The account
27432 and password aging information is available in /etc/shadow, but
27433 unfortunately, it is not possible to specify an expiration time for
27434 passwords, only a maximum age for passwords.</p>
27435
27436 <p>A freshly created account (using adduser test) will have these
27437 settings in /etc/shadow:</p>
27438
27439 <blockquote><pre>
27440 root@tjener:~# chage -l test
27441 Last password change                                    : May 02, 2010
27442 Password expires                                        : never
27443 Password inactive                                       : never
27444 Account expires                                         : never
27445 Minimum number of days between password change          : 0
27446 Maximum number of days between password change          : 99999
27447 Number of days of warning before password expires       : 7
27448 root@tjener:~#
27449 </pre></blockquote>
27450
27451 <p>The only way I could come up with to create a user with an expired
27452 account, is to change the date of the last password change to the
27453 lowest value possible (January 1th 1970), and the maximum password age
27454 to the difference in days between that date and today.  To make it
27455 simple, I went for 30 years (30 * 365 = 10950) and January 2th (to
27456 avoid testing if 0 is a valid value).</p>
27457
27458 <p>After using these commands to set it up, it seem to work as
27459 intended:</p>
27460
27461 <blockquote><pre>
27462 root@tjener:~# chage -d 1 test; chage -M 10950 test
27463 root@tjener:~# chage -l test
27464 Last password change                                    : Jan 02, 1970
27465 Password expires                                        : never
27466 Password inactive                                       : never
27467 Account expires                                         : never
27468 Minimum number of days between password change          : 0
27469 Maximum number of days between password change          : 10950
27470 Number of days of warning before password expires       : 7
27471 root@tjener:~#
27472 </pre></blockquote>
27473
27474 <p>So far I have tested this with ssh and console, and kdm (in
27475 Squeeze) login, and all ask for a new password before login in the
27476 user (with ssh, I was thrown out and had to log in again).</p>
27477
27478 <p>Perhaps we should set up something similar for Debian Edu, to make
27479 sure only the user itself have the account password?</p>
27480
27481 <p>If you want to comment on or help out with implementing this for
27482 Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
27483
27484 <p>Update 2010-05-02 17:20: Paul Tötterman tells me on IRC that the
27485 shadow(8) page in Debian/testing now state that setting the date of
27486 last password change to zero (0) will force the password to be changed
27487 on the first login.  This was not mentioned in the manual in Lenny, so
27488 I did not notice this in my initial testing.  I have tested it on
27489 Squeeze, and '<tt>chage -d 0 username</tt>' do work there.  I have not
27490 tested it on Lenny yet.</p>
27491
27492 <p>Update 2010-05-02-19:05: Jim Paris tells me via email that an
27493 equivalent command to expire a password is '<tt>passwd -e
27494 username</tt>', which insert zero into the date of the last password
27495 change.</p>
27496
27497       </div>
27498       <div class="tags">
27499
27500
27501         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>.
27502
27503
27504       </div>
27505     </div>
27506     <div class="padding"></div>
27507
27508     <div class="entry">
27509       <div class="title">
27510         <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>
27511       </div>
27512       <div class="date">
27513         28th April 2010
27514       </div>
27515       <div class="body">
27516         <p>For some years now, I have wondered how we should handle laptops in
27517 Debian Edu.  The Debian Edu infrastructure is mostly designed to
27518 handle stationary computers, and less suited for computers that come
27519 and go.</p>
27520
27521 <p>Now I finally believe I have an sensible idea on how to adjust
27522 Debian Edu for laptops, by introducing a new profile for them, for
27523 example called Roaming Workstations.  Here are my thought on this.
27524 The setup would consist of the following:</p>
27525
27526 <ul>
27527
27528  <li>During installation, the user name of the owner / primary user of
27529    the laptop is requested and a local home directory is set up for
27530    the user, with uid and gid information fetched from the LDAP
27531    server.  This allow the user to work also when offline.  The
27532    central home directory can be available in a subdirectory on
27533    request, for example mounted via CIFS.  It could be mounted
27534    automatically when a user log in while on the Debian Edu network,
27535    and unmounted when the machine is taken away (network down,
27536    hibernate, etc), it can be set up to do automatic mounting on
27537    request (using autofs), or perhaps some GUI button on the desktop
27538    can be used to access it when needed.  Perhaps it is enough to use
27539    the fish protocol in KDE?</li>
27540
27541  <li>Password checking is set up to use LDAP or Kerberos
27542    authentication when the machine is on the Debian Edu network, and
27543    to cache the password for offline checking when the machine unable
27544    to reach the LDAP or Kerberos server.  This can be done using
27545    <a href="http://www.padl.com/OSS/pam_ccreds.html">libpam-ccreds</a>
27546    or the Fedora developed
27547    <a href="https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/SSSD">System
27548    Security Services Daemon</a> packages.</li>
27549
27550  <li>File synchronisation with the central home directory is set up
27551    using a shared directory in both the local and the central home
27552    directory, using unison.</li>
27553
27554  <li>Printing should be set up to print to all printers broadcasting
27555    their existence on the local network, and should then work out of
27556    the box with CUPS.  For sites needing accurate printer quotas, some
27557    system with Kerberos authentication or printing via ssh could be
27558    implemented.</li>
27559
27560  <li>For users that should have local root access to their laptop,
27561    sudo should be used to allow this to the local user.</li>
27562
27563  <li>It would be nice if user and group information from LDAP is
27564    cached on the client, but given that there are entries for the
27565    local user and primary group in /etc/, it should not be needed.</li>
27566
27567 </ul>
27568
27569 <p>I believe all the pieces to implement this are in Debian/testing at
27570 the moment.  If we work quickly, we should be able to get this ready
27571 in time for the Squeeze release to freeze.  Some of the pieces need
27572 tweaking, like libpam-ccreds should get support for pam-auth-update
27573 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/566718">#566718</a>) and nslcd (or
27574 perhaps debian-edu-config) should get some integration code to stop
27575 its daemon when the LDAP server is unavailable to avoid long timeouts
27576 when disconnected from the net.  If we get Kerberos enabled, we need
27577 to make sure we avoid long timeouts there too.</p>
27578
27579 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
27580 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
27581
27582       </div>
27583       <div class="tags">
27584
27585
27586         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>.
27587
27588
27589       </div>
27590     </div>
27591     <div class="padding"></div>
27592
27593     <div class="entry">
27594       <div class="title">
27595         <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>
27596       </div>
27597       <div class="date">
27598         19th April 2010
27599       </div>
27600       <div class="body">
27601         <p>The last few weeks i have had the pleasure of reading a
27602 thought-provoking collection of essays by Cory Doctorow, on topics
27603 touching copyright, virtual worlds, the future of man when the
27604 conscience mind can be duplicated into a computer and many more. The
27605 book titled "Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity,
27606 Copyright, and the Future of the Future" is available with few
27607 restrictions on the web, for example from
27608 <a href="http://craphound.com/content/">his own site</a>. I read the
27609 epub-version from
27610 <a href="http://www.feedbooks.com/book/2883">feedbooks</a> using
27611 <a href="http://www.fbreader.org/">fbreader</a> and my N810. I
27612 strongly recommend this book.</p>
27613
27614       </div>
27615       <div class="tags">
27616
27617
27618         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>.
27619
27620
27621       </div>
27622     </div>
27623     <div class="padding"></div>
27624
27625     <div class="entry">
27626       <div class="title">
27627         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Kerberos_for_Debian_Edu_Squeeze_.html">Kerberos for Debian Edu/Squeeze?</a>
27628       </div>
27629       <div class="date">
27630         14th April 2010
27631       </div>
27632       <div class="body">
27633         <p><a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20100413-kerberos/">Yesterdays
27634 NUUG presentation</a> about Kerberos was inspiring, and reminded me
27635 about the need to start using Kerberos in Skolelinux.  Setting up a
27636 Kerberos server seem to be straight forward, and if we get this in
27637 place a long time before the Squeeze version of Debian freezes, we
27638 have a chance to migrate Skolelinux away from NFSv3 for the home
27639 directories, and over to an architecture where the infrastructure do
27640 not have to trust IP addresses and machines, and instead can trust
27641 users and cryptographic keys instead.</p>
27642
27643 <p>A challenge will be integration and administration.  Is there a
27644 Kerberos implementation for Debian where one can control the
27645 administration access in Kerberos using LDAP groups?  With it, the
27646 school administration will have to maintain access control using flat
27647 files on the main server, which give a huge potential for errors.</p>
27648
27649 <p>A related question I would like to know is how well Kerberos and
27650 pam-ccreds (offline password check) work together.  Anyone know?</p>
27651
27652 <p>Next step will be to use Kerberos for access control in Lwat and
27653 Nagios.  I have no idea how much work that will be to implement.  We
27654 would also need to document how to integrate with Windows AD, as such
27655 shared network will require two Kerberos realms that need to cooperate
27656 to work properly.</p>
27657
27658 <p>I believe a good start would be to start using Kerberos on the
27659 skolelinux.no machines, and this way get ourselves experience with
27660 configuration and integration.  A natural starting point would be
27661 setting up ldap.skolelinux.no as the Kerberos server, and migrate the
27662 rest of the machines from PAM via LDAP to PAM via Kerberos one at the
27663 time.</p>
27664
27665 <p>If you would like to contribute to get this working in Skolelinux,
27666 I recommend you to see the video recording from yesterdays NUUG
27667 presentation, and start using Kerberos at home.  The video show show
27668 up in a few days.</p>
27669
27670       </div>
27671       <div class="tags">
27672
27673
27674         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>.
27675
27676
27677       </div>
27678     </div>
27679     <div class="padding"></div>
27680
27681     <div class="entry">
27682       <div class="title">
27683         <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>
27684       </div>
27685       <div class="date">
27686          6th March 2010
27687       </div>
27688       <div class="body">
27689         <p>6 years ago, as part of the Debian Edu development I am involved
27690 in, I asked for a hook in the kdm and gdm setup to run scripts as root
27691 when the user log out.  A bug was submitted against the xfree86-common
27692 package in 2004 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/230422">#230422</a>),
27693 and revisited every time Debian Edu was working on a new release.
27694 Today, this finally paid off.</p>
27695
27696 <p>The framework for this feature was today commited to the git
27697 repositry for the xorg package, and the git repository for xdm has
27698 been updated to use this framework.  Next on my agenda is to make sure
27699 kdm and gdm also add code to use this framework.</p>
27700
27701 <p>In Debian Edu, we want to ability to run commands as root when the
27702 user log out, to get rid of runaway processes and do general cleanup
27703 after a user.  With this framework in place, we finally can do that in
27704 a generic way that work with all display managers using this
27705 framework.  My goal is to get all display managers in Debian use it,
27706 similar to how they use the Xsession.d framework today.<p>
27707
27708       </div>
27709       <div class="tags">
27710
27711
27712         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>.
27713
27714
27715       </div>
27716     </div>
27717     <div class="padding"></div>
27718
27719     <div class="entry">
27720       <div class="title">
27721         <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>
27722       </div>
27723       <div class="date">
27724         11th February 2010
27725       </div>
27726       <div class="body">
27727         <p>On Tuesday, the Debian/Lenny based version of
27728 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a> was finally
27729 shipped.  This was a major leap forward for the project, and I am very
27730 pleased that we finally got the release wrapped up.  Work on the first
27731 point release starts imediately, as we plan to get that one out a
27732 month after the major release, to include all fixes for bugs we found
27733 and fixed too late in the release process to include last Tuesday.</p>
27734
27735 <p>Perhaps it even is time for some partying?</p>
27736
27737 <p>After this first point release, my plan is to focus again on the
27738 next major release, based on Squeeze.  We will try to get as many of
27739 the fixes we need into the official Debian packages before the freeze,
27740 and have just a few weeks or months to make it happen.</p>
27741
27742       </div>
27743       <div class="tags">
27744
27745
27746         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>.
27747
27748
27749       </div>
27750     </div>
27751     <div class="padding"></div>
27752
27753     <div class="entry">
27754       <div class="title">
27755         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_Munin_and_Nagios_configuration.html">Automatic Munin and Nagios configuration</a>
27756       </div>
27757       <div class="date">
27758         27th January 2010
27759       </div>
27760       <div class="body">
27761         <p>One of the new features in the next Debian/Lenny based release of
27762 Debian Edu/Skolelinux, which is scheduled for release in the next few
27763 days, is automatic configuration of the service monitoring system
27764 Nagios.  The previous release had automatic configuration of trend
27765 analysis using Munin, and this Lenny based release take that a step
27766 further.</p>
27767
27768 <p>When installing a Debian Edu Main-server, it is automatically
27769 configured as a Munin and Nagios server.  In addition, it is
27770 configured to be a server for the
27771 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary">SiteSummary
27772 system</a> I have written for use in Debian Edu.  The SiteSummary
27773 system is inspired by a system used by the University of Oslo where I
27774 work.  In short, the system provide a centralised collector of
27775 information about the computers on the network, and a client on each
27776 computer submitting information to this collector.  This allow for
27777 automatic information on which packages are installed on each machine,
27778 which kernel the machines are using, what kind of configuration the
27779 packages got etc.  This also allow us to automatically generate Munin
27780 and Nagios configuration.</p>
27781
27782 <p>All computers reporting to the sitesummary collector with the
27783 munin-node package installed is automatically enabled as a Munin
27784 client and graphs from the statistics collected from that machine show
27785 up automatically on http://www/munin/ on the Main-server.</p>
27786
27787 <p>All non-laptop computers reporting to the sitesummary collector are
27788 automatically monitored for network presence (ping and any network
27789 services detected).  In addition, all computers (also laptops) with
27790 the nagios-nrpe-server package installed and configured the way
27791 sitesummary would configure it, are monitored for full disks, software
27792 raid status, swap free and other checks that need to run locally on
27793 the machine.</p>
27794
27795 <p>The result is that the administrator on a school using Debian Edu
27796 based on Lenny will be able to check the health of his installation
27797 with one look at the Nagios settings, without having to spend any time
27798 keeping the Nagios configuration up-to-date.</p>
27799
27800 <p>The only configuration one need to do to get Nagios up and running
27801 is to set the password used to get access via HTTP.  The system
27802 administrator need to run "<tt>htpasswd /etc/nagios3/htpasswd.users
27803 nagiosadmin</tt>" to create a nagiosadmin user and set a password for
27804 it to be able to log into the Nagios web pages.  After that,
27805 everything is taken care of.</p>
27806
27807       </div>
27808       <div class="tags">
27809
27810
27811         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>.
27812
27813
27814       </div>
27815     </div>
27816     <div class="padding"></div>
27817
27818     <div class="entry">
27819       <div class="title">
27820         <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>
27821       </div>
27822       <div class="date">
27823         12th August 2009
27824       </div>
27825       <div class="body">
27826         <p>Just for fun, I did a search right now on Google for a few file ODF
27827 and MS Office based formats (not to be mistaken for ISO or ECMA
27828 OOXML), to get an idea of their relative usage.  I searched using
27829 'filetype:odt' and equvalent terms, and got these results:</P>
27830
27831 <table>
27832 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
27833 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:282000</td> <td>docx:308000</td></tr>
27834 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:75600</td> <td>pptx:183000</td></tr>
27835 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:26500     </td> <td>xlsx:145000</td></tr>
27836 </table>
27837
27838 <p>Next, I added a 'site:no' limit to get the numbers for Norway, and
27839 got these numbers:</p>
27840
27841 <table>
27842 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
27843 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:2480 </td> <td>docx:4460</td></tr>
27844 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:299   </td> <td>pptx:741</td></tr>
27845 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:187       </td> <td>xlsx:372</td></tr>
27846 </table>
27847
27848 <p>I wonder how these numbers change over time.</p>
27849
27850 <p>I am aware of Google returning different results and numbers based
27851 on where the search is done, so I guess these numbers will differ if
27852 they are conduced in another country.  Because of this, I did the same
27853 search from a machine in California, USA, a few minutes after the
27854 search done from a machine here in Norway.</p>
27855
27856
27857 <table>
27858 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
27859 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:129000</td> <td>docx:308000</td></tr>
27860 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:44200</td> <td>pptx:93900</td></tr>
27861 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:26500     </td> <td>xlsx:82400</td></tr>
27862 </table>
27863
27864 <p>And with 'site:no':
27865
27866 <table>
27867 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
27868 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:2480</td> <td>docx:3410</td></tr>
27869 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:175</td> <td>pptx:604</td></tr>
27870 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:186       </td> <td>xlsx:296</td></tr>
27871 </table>
27872
27873 <p>Interesting difference, not sure what to conclude from these
27874 numbers.</p>
27875
27876       </div>
27877       <div class="tags">
27878
27879
27880         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>.
27881
27882
27883       </div>
27884     </div>
27885     <div class="padding"></div>
27886
27887     <div class="entry">
27888       <div class="title">
27889         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ISO_still_hope_to_fix_OOXML.html">ISO still hope to fix OOXML</a>
27890       </div>
27891       <div class="date">
27892          8th August 2009
27893       </div>
27894       <div class="body">
27895         <p>According to <a
27896 href="http://twerner.blogspot.com/2009/08/defects-of-office-open-xml.html">a
27897 blog post from Torsten Werner</a>, the current defect report for ISO
27898 29500 (ISO OOXML) is 809 pages.  His interesting point is that the
27899 defect report is 71 pages more than the full ODF 1.1 specification.
27900 Personally I find it more interesting that ISO still believe ISO OOXML
27901 can be fixed in ISO.  Personally, I believe it is broken beyon repair,
27902 and I completely lack any trust in ISO for being able to get anywhere
27903 close to solving the problems.  I was part of the Norwegian committee
27904 involved in the OOXML fast track process, and was not impressed with
27905 Standard Norway and ISO in how they handled it.</p>
27906
27907 <p>These days I focus on ODF instead, which seem like a specification
27908 with the future ahead of it.  We are working in NUUG to organise a ODF
27909 seminar this autumn.</p>
27910
27911       </div>
27912       <div class="tags">
27913
27914
27915         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>.
27916
27917
27918       </div>
27919     </div>
27920     <div class="padding"></div>
27921
27922     <div class="entry">
27923       <div class="title">
27924         <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>
27925       </div>
27926       <div class="date">
27927         27th July 2009
27928       </div>
27929       <div class="body">
27930         <p>Since this evening, with the upload of sysvinit version 2.87dsf-2,
27931 and the upload of insserv version 1.12.0-10 yesterday, Debian unstable
27932 have been migrated to using dependency based boot sequencing.  This
27933 conclude work me and others have been doing for the last three days.
27934 It feels great to see this finally part of the default Debian
27935 installation.  Now we just need to weed out the last few problems that
27936 are bound to show up, to get everything ready for Squeeze.</p>
27937
27938 <p>The next step is migrating /sbin/init from sysvinit to upstart, and
27939 fixing the more fundamental problem of handing the event based
27940 non-predictable kernel in the early boot.</p>
27941
27942       </div>
27943       <div class="tags">
27944
27945
27946         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>.
27947
27948
27949       </div>
27950     </div>
27951     <div class="padding"></div>
27952
27953     <div class="entry">
27954       <div class="title">
27955         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Taking_over_sysvinit_development.html">Taking over sysvinit development</a>
27956       </div>
27957       <div class="date">
27958         22nd July 2009
27959       </div>
27960       <div class="body">
27961         <p>After several years of frustration with the lack of activity from
27962 the existing sysvinit upstream developer, I decided a few weeks ago to
27963 take over the package and become the new upstream.  The number of
27964 patches to track for the Debian package was becoming a burden, and the
27965 lack of synchronization between the distribution made it hard to keep
27966 the package up to date.</p>
27967
27968 <p>On the new sysvinit team is the SuSe maintainer Dr. Werner Fink,
27969 and my Debian co-maintainer Kel Modderman.  About 10 days ago, I made
27970 a new upstream tarball with version number 2.87dsf (for Debian, SuSe
27971 and Fedora), based on the patches currently in use in these
27972 distributions.  We Debian maintainers plan to move to this tarball as
27973 the new upstream as soon as we find time to do the merge.  Since the
27974 new tarball was created, we agreed with Werner at SuSe to make a new
27975 upstream project at <a href="http://savannah.nongnu.org/">Savannah</a>, and continue
27976 development there.  The project is registered and currently waiting
27977 for approval by the Savannah administrators, and as soon as it is
27978 approved, we will import the old versions from svn and continue
27979 working on the future release.</p>
27980
27981 <p>It is a bit ironic that this is done now, when some of the involved
27982 distributions are moving to upstart as a syvinit replacement.</p>
27983
27984       </div>
27985       <div class="tags">
27986
27987
27988         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>.
27989
27990
27991       </div>
27992     </div>
27993     <div class="padding"></div>
27994
27995     <div class="entry">
27996       <div class="title">
27997         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_boots_quicker_and_quicker.html">Debian boots quicker and quicker</a>
27998       </div>
27999       <div class="date">
28000         24th June 2009
28001       </div>
28002       <div class="body">
28003         <p>I spent Monday and tuesday this week in London with a lot of the
28004 people involved in the boot system on Debian and Ubuntu, to see if we
28005 could find more ways to speed up the boot system.  This was an Ubuntu
28006 funded
28007 <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FoundationsTeam/BootPerformance/DebianUbuntuSprint">developer
28008 gathering</a>. It was quite productive.  We also discussed the future
28009 of boot systems, and ways to handle the increasing number of boot
28010 issues introduced by the Linux kernel becoming more and more
28011 asynchronous and event base.  The Ubuntu approach using udev and
28012 upstart might be a good way forward.  Time will show.</p>
28013
28014 <p>Anyway, there are a few ways at the moment to speed up the boot
28015 process in Debian.  All of these should be applied to get a quick
28016 boot:</p>
28017
28018 <ul>
28019
28020 <li>Use dash as /bin/sh.</li>
28021
28022 <li>Disable the init.d/hwclock*.sh scripts and make sure the hardware
28023    clock is in UTC.</li>
28024
28025 <li>Install and activate the insserv package to enable
28026    <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
28027    based boot sequencing</a>, and enable concurrent booting.</li>
28028
28029 </ul>
28030
28031 These points are based on the Google summer of code work done by
28032 <a href="http://initscripts-ng.alioth.debian.org/soc2006-bootsystem/">Carlos
28033 Villegas</a>.
28034
28035 <p>Support for makefile-style concurrency during boot was uploaded to
28036 unstable yesterday.  When we tested it, we were able to cut 6 seconds
28037 from the boot sequence.  It depend on very correct dependency
28038 declaration in all init.d scripts, so I expect us to find edge cases
28039 where the dependences in some scripts are slightly wrong when we start
28040 using this.</p>
28041
28042 <p>On our IRC channel for this effort, #pkg-sysvinit, a new idea was
28043 introduced by Raphael Geissert today, one that could affect the
28044 startup speed as well.  Instead of starting some scripts concurrently
28045 from rcS.d/ and another set of scripts from rc2.d/, it would be
28046 possible to run a of them in the same process.  A quick way to test
28047 this would be to enable insserv and run 'mv /etc/rc2.d/S* /etc/rcS.d/;
28048 insserv'.  Will need to test if that work. :)</p>
28049
28050       </div>
28051       <div class="tags">
28052
28053
28054         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>.
28055
28056
28057       </div>
28058     </div>
28059     <div class="padding"></div>
28060
28061     <div class="entry">
28062       <div class="title">
28063         <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>
28064       </div>
28065       <div class="date">
28066          2nd May 2009
28067       </div>
28068       <div class="body">
28069         <p>There are two software projects that have had huge influence on the
28070 quality of free software, and I wanted to mention both in case someone
28071 do not yet know them.</p>
28072
28073 <p>The first one is <a href="http://valgrind.org/">valgrind</a>, a
28074 tool to detect and expose errors in the memory handling of programs.
28075 It is easy to use, all one need to do is to run 'valgrind program',
28076 and it will report any problems on stdout.  It is even better if the
28077 program include debug information.  With debug information, it is able
28078 to report the source file name and line number where the problem
28079 occurs.  It can report things like 'reading past memory block in file
28080 X line N, the memory block was allocated in file Y, line M', and
28081 'using uninitialised value in control logic'.  This tool has made it
28082 trivial to investigate reproducible crash bugs in programs, and have
28083 reduced the number of this kind of bugs in free software a lot.
28084
28085 <p>The second one is
28086 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coverity">Coverity</a> which is
28087 a source code checker.  It is able to process the source of a program
28088 and find problems in the logic without running the program.  It
28089 started out as the Stanford Checker and became well known when it was
28090 used to find bugs in the Linux kernel.  It is now a commercial tool
28091 and the company behind it is running
28092 <a href="http://www.scan.coverity.com/">a community service</a> for the
28093 free software community, where a lot of free software projects get
28094 their source checked for free.  Several thousand defects have been
28095 found and fixed so far.  It can find errors like 'lock L taken in file
28096 X line N is never released if exiting in line M', or 'the code in file
28097 Y lines O to P can never be executed'.  The projects included in the
28098 community service project have managed to get rid of a lot of
28099 reliability problems thanks to Coverity.</p>
28100
28101 <p>I believe tools like this, that are able to automatically find
28102 errors in the source, are vital to improve the quality of software and
28103 make sure we can get rid of the crashing and failing software we are
28104 surrounded by today.</p>
28105
28106       </div>
28107       <div class="tags">
28108
28109
28110         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>.
28111
28112
28113       </div>
28114     </div>
28115     <div class="padding"></div>
28116
28117     <div class="entry">
28118       <div class="title">
28119         <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>
28120       </div>
28121       <div class="date">
28122         28th April 2009
28123       </div>
28124       <div class="body">
28125         <p>Julien Blache
28126 <a href="http://blog.technologeek.org/2009/04/12/214">claim that no
28127 patch is better than a useless patch</a>.  I completely disagree, as a
28128 patch allow one to discuss a concrete and proposed solution, and also
28129 prove that the issue at hand is important enough for someone to spent
28130 time on fixing it.  No patch do not provide any of these positive
28131 properties.</p>
28132
28133       </div>
28134       <div class="tags">
28135
28136
28137         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>.
28138
28139
28140       </div>
28141     </div>
28142     <div class="padding"></div>
28143
28144     <div class="entry">
28145       <div class="title">
28146         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Recording_video_from_cron_using_VLC.html">Recording video from cron using VLC</a>
28147       </div>
28148       <div class="date">
28149          5th April 2009
28150       </div>
28151       <div class="body">
28152         <p>One think I have wanted to figure out for a along time is how to
28153 run vlc from cron to do recording of video streams on the net.  The
28154 task is trivial with mplayer, but I do not really trust the security
28155 of mplayer (it crashes too often on strange input), and thus prefer
28156 vlc.  I finally found a way to do it today.  I spent an hour or so
28157 searching the web for recipes and reading the documentation.  The
28158 hardest part was to get rid of the GUI window, but after finding the
28159 dummy interface, the command line finally presented itself:</p>
28160
28161 <blockquote><pre>URL=http://www.ping.uio.no/video/rms-oslo_2009.ogg
28162 SAVEFILE=rms.ogg
28163 DISPLAY= vlc -q $URL \
28164   --sout="#duplicate{dst=std{access=file,url='$SAVEFILE'},dst=nodisplay}" \
28165   --intf=dummy</pre></blockquote>
28166
28167 <p>The command stream the URL and store it in the SAVEFILE by
28168 duplicating the output stream to "nodisplay" and the file, using the
28169 dummy interface.  The dummy interface and the nodisplay output make
28170 sure no X interface is needed.</p>
28171
28172 <p>The cron job then need to start this job with the appropriate URL
28173 and file name to save, sleep for the duration wanted, and then kill
28174 the vlc process with SIGTERM.  Here is a complete script
28175 <tt>vlc-record</tt> to use from <tt>at</tt> or <tt>cron</tt>:</p>
28176
28177 <blockquote><pre>#!/bin/sh
28178 set -e
28179 URL="$1"
28180 SAVEFILE="$2"
28181 DURATION="$3"
28182 DISPLAY= vlc -q "$URL" \
28183   --sout="#duplicate{dst=std{access=file,url='$SAVEFILE'},dst=nodisplay}" \
28184   --intf=dummy < /dev/null > /dev/null 2>&1 &
28185 pid=$!
28186 sleep $DURATION
28187 kill $pid
28188 wait $pid</pre></blockquote>
28189
28190       </div>
28191       <div class="tags">
28192
28193
28194         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>.
28195
28196
28197       </div>
28198     </div>
28199     <div class="padding"></div>
28200
28201     <div class="entry">
28202       <div class="title">
28203         <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>
28204       </div>
28205       <div class="date">
28206         30th March 2009
28207       </div>
28208       <div class="body">
28209         <p>Where I work at the University of Oslo, one decision stand out as a
28210 very good one to form a long lived computer infrastructure.  It is the
28211 simple one, lost by many in todays computer industry: Standardize on
28212 open network protocols and open exchange/storage formats, not applications.
28213 Applications come and go, while protocols and files tend to stay, and
28214 thus one want to make it easy to change application and vendor, while
28215 avoiding conversion costs and locking users to a specific platform or
28216 application.</p>
28217
28218 <p>This approach make it possible to replace the client applications
28219 independently of the server applications.  One can even allow users to
28220 use several different applications as long as they handle the selected
28221 protocol and format.  In the normal case, only one client application
28222 is recommended and users only get help if they choose to use this
28223 application, but those that want to deviate from the easy path are not
28224 blocked from doing so.</p>
28225
28226 <p>It also allow us to replace the server side without forcing the
28227 users to replace their applications, and thus allow us to select the
28228 best server implementation at any moment, when scale and resouce
28229 requirements change.</p>
28230
28231 <p>I strongly recommend standardizing - on open network protocols and
28232 open formats, but I would never recommend standardizing on a single
28233 application that do not use open network protocol or open formats.</p>
28234
28235       </div>
28236       <div class="tags">
28237
28238
28239         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>.
28240
28241
28242       </div>
28243     </div>
28244     <div class="padding"></div>
28245
28246     <div class="entry">
28247       <div class="title">
28248         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Returning_from_Skolelinux_developer_gathering.html">Returning from Skolelinux developer gathering</a>
28249       </div>
28250       <div class="date">
28251         29th March 2009
28252       </div>
28253       <div class="body">
28254         <p>I'm sitting on the train going home from this weekends Debian
28255 Edu/Skolelinux development gathering.  I got a bit done tuning the
28256 desktop, and looked into the dynamic service location protocol
28257 implementation avahi.  It look like it could be useful for us.  Almost
28258 30 people participated, and I believe it was a great environment to
28259 get to know the Skolelinux system.  Walter Bender, involved in the
28260 development of the Sugar educational platform, presented his stuff and
28261 also helped me improve my OLPC installation.  He also showed me that
28262 his Turtle Art application can be used in standalone mode, and we
28263 agreed that I would help getting it packaged for Debian.  As a
28264 standalone application it would be great for Debian Edu.  We also
28265 tried to get the video conferencing working with two OLPCs, but that
28266 proved to be too hard for us.  The application seem to need more work
28267 before it is ready for me.  I look forward to getting home and relax
28268 now. :)</p>
28269
28270       </div>
28271       <div class="tags">
28272
28273
28274         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>.
28275
28276
28277       </div>
28278     </div>
28279     <div class="padding"></div>
28280
28281     <div class="entry">
28282       <div class="title">
28283         <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>
28284       </div>
28285       <div class="date">
28286         29th March 2009
28287       </div>
28288       <div class="body">
28289         <p>The state of standardized LDAP schemas on Linux is far from
28290 optimal.  There is RFC 2307 documenting one way to store NIS maps in
28291 LDAP, and a modified version of this normally called RFC 2307bis, with
28292 some modifications to be compatible with Active Directory.  The RFC
28293 specification handle the content of a lot of system databases, but do
28294 not handle DNS zones and DHCP configuration.</p>
28295
28296 <p>In <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux</a>,
28297 we would like to store information about users, SMB clients/hosts,
28298 filegroups, netgroups (users and hosts), DHCP and DNS configuration,
28299 and LTSP configuration in LDAP.  These objects have a lot in common,
28300 but with the current LDAP schemas it is not possible to have one
28301 object per entity.  For example, one need to have at least three LDAP
28302 objects for a given computer, one with the SMB related stuff, one with
28303 DNS information and another with DHCP information.  The schemas
28304 provided for DNS and DHCP are impossible to combine into one LDAP
28305 object.  In addition, it is impossible to implement quick queries for
28306 netgroup membership, because of the way NIS triples are implemented.
28307 It just do not scale.  I believe it is time for a few RFC
28308 specifications to cleam up this mess.</p>
28309
28310 <p>I would like to have one LDAP object representing each computer in
28311 the network, and this object can then keep the SMB (ie host key), DHCP
28312 (mac address/name) and DNS (name/IP address) settings in one place.
28313 It need to be efficently stored to make sure it scale well.</p>
28314
28315 <p>I would also like to have a quick way to map from a user or
28316 computer and to the net group this user or computer is a member.</p>
28317
28318 <p>Active Directory have done a better job than unix heads like myself
28319 in this regard, and the unix side need to catch up.  Time to start a
28320 new IETF work group?</p>
28321
28322       </div>
28323       <div class="tags">
28324
28325
28326         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>.
28327
28328
28329       </div>
28330     </div>
28331     <div class="padding"></div>
28332
28333     <div class="entry">
28334       <div class="title">
28335         <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>
28336       </div>
28337       <div class="date">
28338         28th February 2009
28339       </div>
28340       <div class="body">
28341         <p>At work, we have a few hundred Linux servers, and with that amount
28342 of hardware it is important to keep track of when the hardware support
28343 contract expire for each server.  We have a machine (and service)
28344 register, which until recently did not contain much useful besides the
28345 machine room location and contact information for the system owner for
28346 each machine.  To make it easier for us to track support contract
28347 status, I've recently spent time on extending the machine register to
28348 include information about when the support contract expire, and to tag
28349 machines with expired contracts to make it easy to get a list of such
28350 machines.  I extended a perl script already being used to import
28351 information about machines into the register, to also do some screen
28352 scraping off the sites of Dell, HP and IBM (our majority of machines
28353 are from these vendors), and automatically check the support status
28354 for the relevant machines.  This make the support status information
28355 easily available and I hope it will make it easier for the computer
28356 owner to know when to get new hardware or renew the support contract.
28357 The result of this work documented that 27% of the machines in the
28358 registry is without a support contract, and made it very easy to find
28359 them.  27% might seem like a lot, but I see it more as the case of us
28360 using machines a bit longer than the 3 years a normal support contract
28361 last, to have test machines and a platform for less important
28362 services.  After all, the machines without a contract are working fine
28363 at the moment and the lack of contract is only a problem if any of
28364 them break down.  When that happen, we can either fix it using spare
28365 parts from other machines or move the service to another old
28366 machine.</p>
28367
28368 <p>I believe the code for screen scraping the Dell site was originally
28369 written by Trond Hasle Amundsen, and later adjusted by me and Morten
28370 Werner Forsbring.  The HP scraping was written by me after reading a
28371 nice article in ;login: about how to use WWW::Mechanize, and the IBM
28372 scraping was written by me based on the Dell code.  I know the HTML
28373 parsing could be done using nice libraries, but did not want to
28374 introduce more dependencies.  This is the current incarnation:</p>
28375
28376 <pre>
28377 use LWP::Simple;
28378 use POSIX;
28379 use WWW::Mechanize;
28380 use Date::Parse;
28381 [...]
28382 sub get_support_info {
28383     my ($machine, $model, $serial, $productnumber) = @_;
28384     my $str;
28385
28386     if ( $model =~ m/^Dell / ) {
28387         # fetch website from Dell support
28388         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";
28389         my $webpage = get($url);
28390         return undef unless ($webpage);
28391
28392         my $daysleft = -1;
28393         my @lines = split(/\n/, $webpage);
28394         foreach my $line (@lines) {
28395             next unless ($line =~ m/Beskrivelse/);
28396             $line =~ s/&lt;[^>]+?>/;/gm;
28397             $line =~ s/^.+?;(Beskrivelse;)/$1/;
28398
28399             my @f = split(/\;/, $line);
28400             @f = @f[13 .. $#f];
28401             my $lastend = "";
28402             while ($f[3] eq "DELL") {
28403                 my ($type, $startstr, $endstr, $days) = @f[0, 5, 7, 10];
28404
28405                 my $start = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
28406                                             localtime(str2time($startstr)));
28407                 my $end = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
28408                                           localtime(str2time($endstr)));
28409                 $str .= "$type $start -> $end ";
28410                 @f = @f[14 .. $#f];
28411                 $lastend = $end if ($end gt $lastend);
28412             }
28413             my $today = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time));
28414             tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
28415                 if ($lastend lt $today);
28416         }
28417     } elsif ( $model =~ m/^HP / ) {
28418         my $mech = WWW::Mechanize->new();
28419         my $url =
28420             'http://www1.itrc.hp.com/service/ewarranty/warrantyInput.do';
28421         $mech->get($url);
28422         my $fields = {
28423             'BODServiceID' => 'NA',
28424             'RegisteredPurchaseDate' => '',
28425             'country' => 'NO',
28426             'productNumber' => $productnumber,
28427             'serialNumber1' => $serial,
28428         };
28429         $mech->submit_form( form_number => 2,
28430                             fields      => $fields );
28431         # Next step is screen scraping
28432         my $content = $mech->content();
28433
28434         $content =~ s/&lt;[^>]+?>/;/gm;
28435         $content =~ s/\s+/ /gm;
28436         $content =~ s/;\s*;/;;/gm;
28437         $content =~ s/;[\s;]+/;/gm;
28438
28439         my $today = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time));
28440
28441         while ($content =~ m/;Warranty Type;/) {
28442             my ($type, $status, $startstr, $stopstr) = $content =~
28443                 m/;Warranty Type;([^;]+);.+?;Status;(\w+);Start Date;([^;]+);End Date;([^;]+);/;
28444             $content =~ s/^.+?;Warranty Type;//;
28445             my $start = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
28446                                         localtime(str2time($startstr)));
28447             my $end = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
28448                                       localtime(str2time($stopstr)));
28449
28450             $str .= "$type ($status) $start -> $end ";
28451
28452             tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
28453                 if ($end lt $today);
28454         }
28455     } elsif ( $model =~ m/^IBM / ) {
28456         # This code ignore extended support contracts.
28457         my ($producttype) = $model =~ m/.*-\[(.{4}).+\]-/;
28458         if ($producttype &amp;&amp; $serial) {
28459             my $content =
28460                 get("http://www-947.ibm.com/systems/support/supportsite.wss/warranty?action=warranty&amp;brandind=5000008&amp;Submit=Submit&amp;type=$producttype&amp;serial=$serial");
28461             if ($content) {
28462                 $content =~ s/&lt;[^>]+?>/;/gm;
28463                 $content =~ s/\s+/ /gm;
28464                 $content =~ s/;\s*;/;;/gm;
28465                 $content =~ s/;[\s;]+/;/gm;
28466
28467                 $content =~ s/^.+?;Warranty status;//;
28468                 my ($status, $end) = $content =~ m/;Warranty status;([^;]+)\s*;Expiration date;(\S+) ;/;
28469
28470                 $str .= "($status) -> $end ";
28471
28472                 my $today = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time));
28473                 tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
28474                     if ($end lt $today);
28475             }
28476         }
28477     }
28478     return $str;
28479 }
28480 </pre>
28481
28482 <p>Here are some examples on how to use the function, using fake
28483 serial numbers.  The information passed in as arguments are fetched
28484 from dmidecode.</p>
28485
28486 <pre>
28487 print get_support_info("hp.host", "HP ProLiant BL460c G1", "1234567890"
28488                        "447707-B21");
28489 print get_support_info("dell.host", "Dell Inc. PowerEdge 2950", "1234567");
28490 print get_support_info("ibm.host", "IBM eserver xSeries 345 -[867061X]-",
28491                        "1234567");
28492 </pre>
28493
28494 <p>I would recommend this approach for tracking support contracts for
28495 everyone with more than a few computers to administer. :)</p>
28496
28497 <p>Update 2009-03-06: The IBM page do not include extended support
28498 contracts, so it is useless in that case.  The original Dell code do
28499 not handle extended support contracts either, but has been updated to
28500 do so.</p>
28501
28502       </div>
28503       <div class="tags">
28504
28505
28506         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>.
28507
28508
28509       </div>
28510     </div>
28511     <div class="padding"></div>
28512
28513     <div class="entry">
28514       <div class="title">
28515         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_bar_codes_at_a_computing_center.html">Using bar codes at a computing center</a>
28516       </div>
28517       <div class="date">
28518         20th February 2009
28519       </div>
28520       <div class="body">
28521         <p>At work with the University of Oslo, we have several hundred computers
28522 in our computing center.  This give us a challenge in tracking the
28523 location and cabling of the computers, when they are added, moved and
28524 removed.  Some times the location register is not updated when a
28525 computer is inserted or moved and we then have to search the room for
28526 the "missing" computer.</p>
28527
28528 <p>In the last issue of Linux Journal, I came across a project
28529 <a href="http://www.libdmtx.org/">libdmtx</a> to write and read bar
28530 code blocks as defined in the
28531 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Matrix">The Data Matrix
28532 Standard</a>.  This is bar codes that can be read with a normal
28533 digital camera, for example that on a cell phone, and several such bar
28534 codes can be read by libdmtx from one picture.  The bar code standard
28535 allow up to 2 KiB to be written in the tag.  There is another project
28536 with <a href="http://www.terryburton.co.uk/barcodewriter/">a bar code
28537 writer written in postscript</a> capable of creating such bar codes,
28538 but this was the first time I found a tool to read these bar
28539 codes.</p>
28540
28541 <p>It occurred to me that this could be used to tag and track the
28542 machines in our computing center.  If both racks and computers are
28543 tagged this way, we can use a picture of the rack and all its
28544 computers to detect the rack location of any computer in that rack.
28545 If we do this regularly for the entire room, we will find all
28546 locations, and can detect movements and removals.</p>
28547
28548 <p>I decided to test if this would work in practice, and picked a
28549 random rack and tagged all the machines with their names.  Next, I
28550 took pictures with my digital camera, and gave the dmtxread program
28551 these JPEG pictures to see how many tags it could read.  This worked
28552 fairly well.  If the pictures was well focused and not taken from the
28553 side, all tags in the image could be read.  Because of limited space
28554 between the racks, I was unable to get a good picture of the entire
28555 rack, but could without problem read all tags from a picture covering
28556 about half the rack.  I had to limit the search time used by dmtxread
28557 to 60000 ms to make sure it terminated in a reasonable time frame.</p>
28558
28559 <p>My conclusion is that this could work, and we should probably look
28560 at adjusting our computer tagging procedures to use bar codes for
28561 easier automatic tracking of computers.</p>
28562
28563       </div>
28564       <div class="tags">
28565
28566
28567         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>.
28568
28569
28570       </div>
28571     </div>
28572     <div class="padding"></div>
28573
28574     <div class="entry">
28575       <div class="title">
28576         <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>
28577       </div>
28578       <div class="date">
28579         17th January 2009
28580       </div>
28581       <div class="body">
28582         <p>As part of the work we do in <a href="http://www.nuug.no">NUUG</a>
28583 to publish video recordings of our monthly presentations, we provide a
28584 page with embedded video for easy access to the recording.  Putting a
28585 good set of HTML tags together to get working embedded video in all
28586 browsers and across all operating systems is not easy.  I hope this
28587 will become easier when the &lt;video&gt; tag is implemented in all
28588 browsers, but I am not sure.  We provide the recordings in several
28589 formats, MPEG1, Ogg Theora, H.264 and Quicktime, and want the
28590 browser/media plugin to pick one it support and use it to play the
28591 recording, using whatever embed mechanism the browser understand.
28592 There is at least four different tags to use for this, the new HTML5
28593 &lt;video&gt; tag, the &lt;object&gt; tag, the &lt;embed&gt; tag and
28594 the &lt;applet&gt; tag.  All of these take a lot of options, and
28595 finding the best options is a major challenge.</p>
28596
28597 <p>I just tested the experimental Opera browser available from <a
28598 href="http://labs.opera.com">labs.opera.com</a>, to see how it handled
28599 a &lt;video&gt; tag with a few video sources and no extra attributes.
28600 I was not very impressed.  The browser start by fetching a picture
28601 from the video stream.  Not sure if it is the first frame, but it is
28602 definitely very early in the recording.  So far, so good. Next,
28603 instead of streaming the 76 MiB video file, it start to download all
28604 of it, but do not start to play the video.  This mean I have to wait
28605 for several minutes for the downloading to finish.  When the download
28606 is done, the playing of the video do not start!  Waiting for the
28607 download, but I do not get to see the video?  Some testing later, I
28608 discover that I have to add the controls="true" attribute to be able
28609 to get a play button to pres to start the video.  Adding
28610 autoplay="true" did not help.  I sure hope this is a misfeature of the
28611 test version of Opera, and that future implementations of the
28612 &lt;video&gt; tag will stream recordings by default, or at least start
28613 playing when the download is done.</p>
28614
28615 <p>The test page I used (since changed to add more attributes) is
28616 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20090113-foredrag-om-foredrag/">available
28617 from the nuug site</a>.  Will have to test it with the new Firefox
28618 too.</p>
28619
28620 <p>In the test process, I discovered a missing feature.  I was unable
28621 to find a way to get the URL of the playing video out of Opera, so I
28622 am not quite sure it picked the Ogg Theora version of the video.  I
28623 sure hope it was using the announced Ogg Theora support. :)</p>
28624
28625       </div>
28626       <div class="tags">
28627
28628
28629         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>.
28630
28631
28632       </div>
28633     </div>
28634     <div class="padding"></div>
28635
28636     <div class="entry">
28637       <div class="title">
28638         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_video_mixer_on_a_USB_stick.html">Software video mixer on a USB stick</a>
28639       </div>
28640       <div class="date">
28641         28th December 2008
28642       </div>
28643       <div class="body">
28644         <p>The <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a> is
28645 recording our montly presentation on video, and recently we have
28646 worked on improving the quality of the recordings by mixing the slides
28647 directly with the video stream.  For this, we use the
28648 <a href="http://dvswitch.alioth.debian.org/">dvswitch</a> package from
28649 the Debian video team.  As this require quite one computer per video
28650 source, and NUUG do not have enough laptops available, we need to
28651 borrow laptops.  And to avoid having to install extra software on
28652 these borrwed laptops, I have wrapped up all the programs needed on a
28653 bootable USB stick.  The software required is dvswitch with assosiated
28654 source, sink and mixer applications and
28655 <a href="http://www.kinodv.org/">dvgrab</a>.  To allow this setup to
28656 work without any configuration, I've patched dvswitch to use
28657 <a href="http://www.avahi.org/">avahi</a> to connect the various parts
28658 together.  And to allow us to use laptops without firewire plugs, I
28659 upgraded dvgrab to the one from Debian/unstable to get one that work
28660 with USB sources.  We have not yet tested this setup in a production
28661 setup, but I hope it will work properly, and allow us to set up a
28662 video mixer in a very short time frame.  We will need it for
28663 <a href="http://www.goopen.no/">Go Open 2009</a>.</p>
28664
28665 <p><a href="http://www.nuug.no/pub/video/bin/usbstick-dvswitch.img.gz">The
28666 USB image</a> is for a 1 GB memory stick, but can be used on any
28667 larger stick as well.</p>
28668
28669       </div>
28670       <div class="tags">
28671
28672
28673         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>.
28674
28675
28676       </div>
28677     </div>
28678     <div class="padding"></div>
28679
28680     <div class="entry">
28681       <div class="title">
28682         <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>
28683       </div>
28684       <div class="date">
28685          7th December 2008
28686       </div>
28687       <div class="body">
28688         <p>This weekend we had a small developer gathering for Debian Edu in
28689 Oslo.  Most of Saturday was used for the general assemly for the
28690 member organization, but the rest of the weekend I used to tune the
28691 LTSP installation.  LTSP now work out of the box on the 10-network.
28692 Acer Aspire One proved to be a very nice thin client, with both
28693 screen, mouse and keybard in a small box.  Was working on getting the
28694 diskless workstation setup configured out of the box, but did not
28695 finish it before the weekend was up.</p>
28696
28697 <p>Did not find time to look at the 4 VGA cards in one box we got from
28698 the Brazilian group, so that will have to wait for the next
28699 development gathering.  Would love to have the Debian Edu installer
28700 automatically detect and configure a multiseat setup when it find one
28701 of these cards.</p>
28702
28703       </div>
28704       <div class="tags">
28705
28706
28707         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>.
28708
28709
28710       </div>
28711     </div>
28712     <div class="padding"></div>
28713
28714     <div class="entry">
28715       <div class="title">
28716         <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>
28717       </div>
28718       <div class="date">
28719         25th November 2008
28720       </div>
28721       <div class="body">
28722         <p>Recently I have spent some time evaluating the multimedia browser
28723 plugins available in Debian Lenny, to see which one we should use by
28724 default in Debian Edu.  We need an embedded video playing plugin with
28725 control buttons to pause or stop the video, and capable of streaming
28726 all the multimedia content available on the web.  The test results and
28727 notes are available on
28728 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">the
28729 Debian wiki</a>.  I was surprised how few of the plugins are able to
28730 fill this need.  My personal video player favorite, VLC, has a really
28731 bad plugin which fail on a lot of the test pages.  A lot of the MIME
28732 types I would expect to work with any free software player (like
28733 video/ogg), just do not work.  And simple formats like the
28734 audio/x-mplegurl format (m3u playlists), just isn't supported by the
28735 totem and vlc plugins.  I hope the situation will improve soon.  No
28736 wonder sites use the proprietary Adobe flash to play video.</p>
28737
28738 <p>For Lenny, we seem to end up with the mplayer plugin.  It seem to
28739 be the only one fitting our needs. :/</p>
28740
28741       </div>
28742       <div class="tags">
28743
28744
28745         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>.
28746
28747
28748       </div>
28749     </div>
28750     <div class="padding"></div>
28751
28752     <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>
28753     <div id="sidebar">
28754
28755
28756
28757 <h2>Archive</h2>
28758 <ul>
28759
28760 <li>2017
28761 <ul>
28762
28763 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/01/">January (4)</a></li>
28764
28765 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/02/">February (3)</a></li>
28766
28767 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/03/">March (5)</a></li>
28768
28769 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/04/">April (2)</a></li>
28770
28771 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/06/">June (5)</a></li>
28772
28773 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/07/">July (1)</a></li>
28774
28775 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/08/">August (1)</a></li>
28776
28777 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/09/">September (3)</a></li>
28778
28779 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/10/">October (2)</a></li>
28780
28781 </ul></li>
28782
28783 <li>2016
28784 <ul>
28785
28786 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/01/">January (3)</a></li>
28787
28788 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/02/">February (2)</a></li>
28789
28790 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/03/">March (3)</a></li>
28791
28792 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/04/">April (8)</a></li>
28793
28794 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/05/">May (8)</a></li>
28795
28796 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/06/">June (2)</a></li>
28797
28798 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/07/">July (2)</a></li>
28799
28800 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/08/">August (5)</a></li>
28801
28802 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/09/">September (2)</a></li>
28803
28804 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/10/">October (3)</a></li>
28805
28806 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/11/">November (8)</a></li>
28807
28808 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/12/">December (5)</a></li>
28809
28810 </ul></li>
28811
28812 <li>2015
28813 <ul>
28814
28815 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/01/">January (7)</a></li>
28816
28817 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/02/">February (6)</a></li>
28818
28819 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/03/">March (1)</a></li>
28820
28821 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/04/">April (4)</a></li>
28822
28823 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/05/">May (3)</a></li>
28824
28825 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/06/">June (4)</a></li>
28826
28827 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/07/">July (6)</a></li>
28828
28829 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/08/">August (2)</a></li>
28830
28831 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/09/">September (2)</a></li>
28832
28833 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/10/">October (9)</a></li>
28834
28835 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/11/">November (6)</a></li>
28836
28837 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/12/">December (3)</a></li>
28838
28839 </ul></li>
28840
28841 <li>2014
28842 <ul>
28843
28844 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/01/">January (2)</a></li>
28845
28846 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/02/">February (3)</a></li>
28847
28848 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/03/">March (8)</a></li>
28849
28850 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/04/">April (7)</a></li>
28851
28852 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/05/">May (1)</a></li>
28853
28854 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/06/">June (2)</a></li>
28855
28856 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/07/">July (2)</a></li>
28857
28858 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/08/">August (2)</a></li>
28859
28860 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/09/">September (5)</a></li>
28861
28862 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/10/">October (6)</a></li>
28863
28864 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/11/">November (3)</a></li>
28865
28866 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/12/">December (5)</a></li>
28867
28868 </ul></li>
28869
28870 <li>2013
28871 <ul>
28872
28873 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/01/">January (11)</a></li>
28874
28875 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/02/">February (9)</a></li>
28876
28877 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/03/">March (9)</a></li>
28878
28879 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/04/">April (6)</a></li>
28880
28881 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/05/">May (9)</a></li>
28882
28883 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/06/">June (10)</a></li>
28884
28885 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/07/">July (7)</a></li>
28886
28887 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/08/">August (3)</a></li>
28888
28889 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/09/">September (5)</a></li>
28890
28891 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/10/">October (7)</a></li>
28892
28893 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/11/">November (9)</a></li>
28894
28895 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/12/">December (3)</a></li>
28896
28897 </ul></li>
28898
28899 <li>2012
28900 <ul>
28901
28902 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/01/">January (7)</a></li>
28903
28904 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/02/">February (10)</a></li>
28905
28906 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/03/">March (17)</a></li>
28907
28908 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/04/">April (12)</a></li>
28909
28910 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/05/">May (12)</a></li>
28911
28912 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/06/">June (20)</a></li>
28913
28914 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/07/">July (17)</a></li>
28915
28916 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/08/">August (6)</a></li>
28917
28918 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/09/">September (9)</a></li>
28919
28920 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/10/">October (17)</a></li>
28921
28922 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/11/">November (10)</a></li>
28923
28924 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/12/">December (7)</a></li>
28925
28926 </ul></li>
28927
28928 <li>2011
28929 <ul>
28930
28931 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/01/">January (16)</a></li>
28932
28933 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/02/">February (6)</a></li>
28934
28935 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/03/">March (6)</a></li>
28936
28937 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/04/">April (7)</a></li>
28938
28939 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/05/">May (3)</a></li>
28940
28941 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/06/">June (2)</a></li>
28942
28943 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/07/">July (7)</a></li>
28944
28945 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/08/">August (6)</a></li>
28946
28947 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/09/">September (4)</a></li>
28948
28949 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/10/">October (2)</a></li>
28950
28951 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/11/">November (3)</a></li>
28952
28953 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/12/">December (1)</a></li>
28954
28955 </ul></li>
28956
28957 <li>2010
28958 <ul>
28959
28960 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/01/">January (2)</a></li>
28961
28962 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/02/">February (1)</a></li>
28963
28964 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/03/">March (3)</a></li>
28965
28966 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/04/">April (3)</a></li>
28967
28968 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/05/">May (9)</a></li>
28969
28970 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/06/">June (14)</a></li>
28971
28972 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/07/">July (12)</a></li>
28973
28974 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/08/">August (13)</a></li>
28975
28976 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/09/">September (7)</a></li>
28977
28978 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/10/">October (9)</a></li>
28979
28980 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/11/">November (13)</a></li>
28981
28982 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/12/">December (12)</a></li>
28983
28984 </ul></li>
28985
28986 <li>2009
28987 <ul>
28988
28989 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/01/">January (8)</a></li>
28990
28991 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/02/">February (8)</a></li>
28992
28993 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/03/">March (12)</a></li>
28994
28995 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/04/">April (10)</a></li>
28996
28997 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/05/">May (9)</a></li>
28998
28999 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/06/">June (3)</a></li>
29000
29001 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/07/">July (4)</a></li>
29002
29003 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/08/">August (3)</a></li>
29004
29005 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/09/">September (1)</a></li>
29006
29007 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/10/">October (2)</a></li>
29008
29009 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/11/">November (3)</a></li>
29010
29011 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/12/">December (3)</a></li>
29012
29013 </ul></li>
29014
29015 <li>2008
29016 <ul>
29017
29018 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/11/">November (5)</a></li>
29019
29020 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/12/">December (7)</a></li>
29021
29022 </ul></li>
29023
29024 </ul>
29025
29026
29027
29028 <h2>Tags</h2>
29029 <ul>
29030
29031  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer (14)</a></li>
29032
29033  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/amiga">amiga (1)</a></li>
29034
29035  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/aros">aros (1)</a></li>
29036
29037  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bankid">bankid (4)</a></li>
29038
29039  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin (9)</a></li>
29040
29041  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem (16)</a></li>
29042
29043  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bsa">bsa (2)</a></li>
29044
29045  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/chrpath">chrpath (2)</a></li>
29046
29047  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian (154)</a></li>
29048
29049  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu (158)</a></li>
29050
29051  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook (4)</a></li>
29052
29053  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan (10)</a></li>
29054
29055  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/dld">dld (17)</a></li>
29056
29057  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook (24)</a></li>
29058
29059  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/drivstoffpriser">drivstoffpriser (4)</a></li>
29060
29061  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english (354)</a></li>
29062
29063  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami (23)</a></li>
29064
29065  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fildeling">fildeling (12)</a></li>
29066
29067  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture (30)</a></li>
29068
29069  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox (9)</a></li>
29070
29071  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen (18)</a></li>
29072
29073  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264 (20)</a></li>
29074
29075  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju (42)</a></li>
29076
29077  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram (15)</a></li>
29078
29079  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kart">kart (20)</a></li>
29080
29081  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap (9)</a></li>
29082
29083  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lenker">lenker (8)</a></li>
29084
29085  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lsdvd">lsdvd (2)</a></li>
29086
29087  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ltsp">ltsp (1)</a></li>
29088
29089  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/mesh network">mesh network (8)</a></li>
29090
29091  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia (39)</a></li>
29092
29093  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software (9)</a></li>
29094
29095  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk (293)</a></li>
29096
29097  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug (189)</a></li>
29098
29099  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn (33)</a></li>
29100
29101  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/open311">open311 (2)</a></li>
29102
29103  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett (64)</a></li>
29104
29105  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern (104)</a></li>
29106
29107  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/raid">raid (1)</a></li>
29108
29109  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reactos">reactos (1)</a></li>
29110
29111  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reprap">reprap (11)</a></li>
29112
29113  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rfid">rfid (3)</a></li>
29114
29115  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot (10)</a></li>
29116
29117  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rss">rss (1)</a></li>
29118
29119  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ruter">ruter (5)</a></li>
29120
29121  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/scraperwiki">scraperwiki (2)</a></li>
29122
29123  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet (53)</a></li>
29124
29125  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary (4)</a></li>
29126
29127  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/skepsis">skepsis (5)</a></li>
29128
29129  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard (55)</a></li>
29130
29131  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stavekontroll">stavekontroll (6)</a></li>
29132
29133  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stortinget">stortinget (12)</a></li>
29134
29135  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance (52)</a></li>
29136
29137  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sysadmin">sysadmin (3)</a></li>
29138
29139  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/usenix">usenix (2)</a></li>
29140
29141  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/valg">valg (9)</a></li>
29142
29143  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video (59)</a></li>
29144
29145  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/vitenskap">vitenskap (4)</a></li>
29146
29147  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web (40)</a></li>
29148
29149 </ul>
29150
29151
29152     </div>
29153     <p style="text-align: right">
29154  Created by <a href="http://steve.org.uk/Software/chronicle">Chronicle v4.6</a>
29155 </p>
29156
29157   </body>
29158 </html>