]> pere.pagekite.me Git - homepage.git/blob - blog/tags/debian/debian.rss
abc34fd52bbf15724f39dcf30e36e952ee620dc2
[homepage.git] / blog / tags / debian / debian.rss
1 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
2 <rss version='2.0' xmlns:lj='http://www.livejournal.org/rss/lj/1.0/'>
3 <channel>
4 <title>Petter Reinholdtsen - Entries tagged debian</title>
5 <description>Entries tagged debian</description>
6 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/</link>
7
8
9 <item>
10 <title>How can I install Linux on a Packard Bell Easynote LV preinstalled with Windows 8?</title>
11 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_can_I_install_Linux_on_a_Packard_Bell_Easynote_LV_preinstalled_with_Windows_8_.html</link>
12 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_can_I_install_Linux_on_a_Packard_Bell_Easynote_LV_preinstalled_with_Windows_8_.html</guid>
13 <pubDate>Sat, 25 May 2013 18:20:00 +0200</pubDate>
14 <description>&lt;p&gt;I&#39;ve run into quite a problem the last few days. I bought three
15 new laptops for my parents and a few others. I bought Packard Bell
16 Easynote LV to run Kubuntu on and use as their home computer. But I
17 am completely unable to figure out how to install Linux on it. The
18 computer is preinstalled with Windows 8, and I suspect it uses UEFI
19 instead of a BIOS to boot.&lt;/p&gt;
20
21 &lt;p&gt;The problem is that I am unable to get it to PXE boot, and unable
22 to get it to boot the Linux installer from my USB stick. I have yet
23 to try the DVD install, and still hope it will work. when I turn on
24 the computer, there is no information on what buttons to press to get
25 the normal boot menu. I expect to get some boot menu to select PXE or
26 USB stick booting. When booting, it first ask for the language to
27 use, then for some regional settings, and finally if I will accept the
28 Windows 8 terms of use. As these terms are completely unacceptable to
29 me, I have no other choice but to turn off the computer and try again
30 to get it to boot the Linux installer.&lt;/p&gt;
31
32 &lt;p&gt;I have gathered my findings so far on a Linlap page about the
33 &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv&quot;&gt;Packard Bell
34 EasyNote LV&lt;/a&gt; model. If you have any idea how to get Linux
35 installed on this machine, please get in touch or update that wiki
36 page. If I can&#39;t find a way to install Linux, I will have to return
37 the laptop to the seller and find another machine for my parents.&lt;/p&gt;
38
39 &lt;p&gt;I wonder, is this the way Linux will be forced out of the marked
40 using UEFI and &quot;secure boot&quot; by making it impossible to install Linux
41 on new Laptops?&lt;/p&gt;
42 </description>
43 </item>
44
45 <item>
46 <title>How to transform a Debian based system to a Debian Edu installation</title>
47 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_transform_a_Debian_based_system_to_a_Debian_Edu_installation.html</link>
48 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_transform_a_Debian_based_system_to_a_Debian_Edu_installation.html</guid>
49 <pubDate>Fri, 17 May 2013 11:50:00 +0200</pubDate>
50 <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.skolelinux.org/&quot;&gt;Debian Edu / Skolelinux&lt;/a&gt; is
51 an operating system based on Debian intended for use in schools. It
52 contain a turn-key solution for the computer network provided to
53 pupils in the primary schools. It provide both the central server,
54 network boot servers and desktop environments with heaps of
55 educational software. The project was founded almost 12 years ago,
56 2001-07-02. If you want to support the project, which is in need for
57 cash to fund developer gatherings and other project related activity,
58 &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html&quot;&gt;please
59 donate some money&lt;/a&gt;.
60
61 &lt;p&gt;A topic that come up again and again on the Debian Edu mailing
62 lists and elsewhere, is the question on how to transform a Debian or
63 Ubuntu installation into a Debian Edu installation. It isn&#39;t very
64 hard, and last week I wrote a script to replicate the steps done by
65 the Debian Edu installer.&lt;/p&gt;
66
67 &lt;p&gt;The script,
68 &lt;a href=&quot;http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/branches/wheezy/debian-edu-config/share/debian-edu-config/tools/debian-edu-bless?view=markup&quot;&gt;debian-edu-bless&lt;a/&gt;
69 in the debian-edu-config package, will go through these six steps and
70 transform an existing Debian Wheezy or Ubuntu (untested) installation
71 into a Debian Edu Workstation:&lt;/p&gt;
72
73 &lt;ol&gt;
74
75 &lt;li&gt;Add skolelinux related APT sources.&lt;/li&gt;
76 &lt;li&gt;Create /etc/debian-edu/config with the wanted configuration.&lt;/li&gt;
77 &lt;li&gt;Install debian-edu-install to load preseeding values and pull in
78 our configuration.&lt;/li&gt;
79 &lt;li&gt;Preseed debconf database with profile setup in
80 /etc/debian-edu/config, and run tasksel to install packages
81 according to the profile specified in the config above,
82 overriding some of the Debian automation machinery.&lt;/li&gt;
83 &lt;li&gt;Run debian-edu-cfengine-D installation to configure everything
84 that could not be done using preseeding.&lt;/li&gt;
85 &lt;li&gt;Ask for a reboot to enable all the configuration changes.&lt;/li&gt;
86
87 &lt;/ol&gt;
88
89 &lt;p&gt;There are some steps in the Debian Edu installation that can not be
90 replicated like this. Disk partitioning and LVM setup, for example.
91 So this script just assume there is enough disk space to install all
92 the needed packages.&lt;/p&gt;
93
94 &lt;p&gt;The script was created to help a Debian Edu student working on
95 setting up &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.raspberrypi.org&quot;&gt;Raspberry Pi&lt;/a&gt; as a
96 Debian Edu client, and using it he can take the existing
97 &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.raspbian.org/FrontPage‎&quot;&gt;Raspbian&lt;/a&gt; installation and
98 transform it into a fully functioning Debian Edu Workstation (or
99 Roaming Workstation, or whatever :).&lt;/p&gt;
100
101 &lt;p&gt;The default setting in the script is to create a KDE Workstation.
102 If a LXDE based Roaming workstation is wanted instead, modify the
103 PROFILE and DESKTOP values at the top to look like this instead:&lt;/p&gt;
104
105 &lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
106 PROFILE=&quot;Roaming-Workstation&quot;
107 DESKTOP=&quot;lxde&quot;
108 &lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
109
110 &lt;p&gt;The script could even become useful to set up Debian Edu servers in
111 the cloud, by starting with a virtual Debian installation at some
112 virtual hosting service and setting up all the services on first
113 boot.&lt;/p&gt;
114 </description>
115 </item>
116
117 <item>
118 <title>Debian, the Linux distribution of choice for LEGO designers?</title>
119 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian__the_Linux_distribution_of_choice_for_LEGO_designers_.html</link>
120 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian__the_Linux_distribution_of_choice_for_LEGO_designers_.html</guid>
121 <pubDate>Sat, 11 May 2013 20:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
122 <description>&lt;P&gt;In January,
123 &lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_IRC_channel_for_LEGO_designers_using_Debian.html&quot;&gt;I
124 announced a&lt;/a&gt; new &lt;a href=&quot;irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego&quot;&gt;IRC
125 channel #debian-lego&lt;/a&gt;, for those of us in the Debian and Linux
126 community interested in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lego.com/&quot;&gt;LEGO&lt;/a&gt;, the
127 marvellous construction system from Denmark. We also created
128 &lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners&quot;&gt;a wiki page&lt;/a&gt; to have
129 a place to take notes and write down our plans and hopes. And several
130 people showed up to help. I was very happy to see the effect of my
131 call. Since the small start, we have a debtags tag
132 &lt;a href=&quot;http://debtags.debian.net/search/bytag?wl=hardware::hobby:lego&quot;&gt;hardware::hobby:lego&lt;/a&gt;
133 tag for LEGO related packages, and now count 10 packages related to
134 LEGO and &lt;a href=&quot;http://mindstorms.lego.com/&quot;&gt;Mindstorms&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;
135
136 &lt;p&gt;&lt;table&gt;
137 &lt;tr&gt;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/brickos&quot;&gt;brickos&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&lt;td&gt;alternative OS for LEGO Mindstorms RCX. Supports development in C/C++&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;
138 &lt;tr&gt;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/leocad&quot;&gt;leocad&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&lt;td&gt;virtual brick CAD software&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;
139 &lt;tr&gt;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/libnxt&quot;&gt;libnxt&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&lt;td&gt;utility library for talking to the LEGO Mindstorms NX&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;
140 &lt;tr&gt;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/lnpd&quot;&gt;lnpd&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&lt;td&gt;daemon for LNP communication with BrickOS&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;
141 &lt;tr&gt;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/nbc&quot;&gt;nbc&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&lt;td&gt;compiler for LEGO Mindstorms NXT bricks&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;
142 &lt;tr&gt;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/nqc&quot;&gt;nqc&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&lt;td&gt;Not Quite C compiler for LEGO Mindstorms RCX&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;
143 &lt;tr&gt;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/python-nxt&quot;&gt;python-nxt&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&lt;td&gt;python driver/interface/wrapper for the Lego Mindstorms NXT robot&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;
144 &lt;tr&gt;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/python-nxt-filer&quot;&gt;python-nxt-filer&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&lt;td&gt;simple GUI to manage files on a LEGO Mindstorms NXT&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;
145 &lt;tr&gt;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/scratch&quot;&gt;scratch&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&lt;td&gt;easy to use programming environment for ages 8 and up&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;
146 &lt;tr&gt;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/t2n&quot;&gt;t2n&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&lt;td&gt;simple command-line tool for Lego NXT&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;
147 &lt;/table&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
148
149 &lt;p&gt;Some of these are available in Wheezy, and all but one are
150 currently available in Jessie/testing. leocad is so far only
151 available in experimental.&lt;/p&gt;
152
153 &lt;p&gt;If you care about LEGO in Debian, please join us on IRC and help
154 adding the rest of the great free software tools available on Linux
155 for LEGO designers.&lt;/p&gt;
156 </description>
157 </item>
158
159 <item>
160 <title>Debian Wheezy is out - and Debian Edu / Skolelinux should soon follow! #newinwheezy</title>
161 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Wheezy_is_out___and_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_should_soon_follow___newinwheezy.html</link>
162 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Wheezy_is_out___and_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_should_soon_follow___newinwheezy.html</guid>
163 <pubDate>Sun, 5 May 2013 07:40:00 +0200</pubDate>
164 <description>&lt;p&gt;When I woke up this morning, I was very happy to see that the
165 &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.debian.org/News/2013/20130504&quot;&gt;release announcement
166 for Debian Wheezy&lt;/a&gt; was waiting in my mail box. This is a great
167 Debian release, and I expect to move my machines at home over to it fairly
168 soon.&lt;/p&gt;
169
170 &lt;p&gt;The new debian release contain heaps of new stuff, and one program
171 in particular make me very happy to see included. The
172 &lt;a href=&quot;http://scratch.mit.edu/&quot;&gt;Scratch&lt;/a&gt; program, made famous by
173 the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.code.org/&quot;&gt;Teach kids code&lt;/a&gt; movement, is
174 included for the first time. Alongside similar programs like
175 &lt;a href=&quot;http://edu.kde.org/kturtle/&quot;&gt;kturtle&lt;/a&gt; and
176 &lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Turtle_Art&quot;&gt;turtleart&lt;/a&gt;,
177 it allow for visual programming where syntax errors can not happen,
178 and a friendly programming environment for learning to control the
179 computer. Scratch will also be included in the next release of Debian
180 Edu.&lt;/a&gt;
181
182 &lt;p&gt;And now that Wheezy is wrapped up, we can wrap up the next Debian
183 Edu/Skolelinux release too. The
184 &lt;a href=&quot;http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/2013/04/msg00132.html&quot;&gt;first
185 alpha release&lt;/a&gt; went out last week, and the next should soon
186 follow.&lt;p&gt;
187 </description>
188 </item>
189
190 <item>
191 <title>Isenkram 0.2 finally in the Debian archive</title>
192 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Isenkram_0_2_finally_in_the_Debian_archive.html</link>
193 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Isenkram_0_2_finally_in_the_Debian_archive.html</guid>
194 <pubDate>Wed, 3 Apr 2013 23:40:00 +0200</pubDate>
195 <description>&lt;p&gt;Today the &lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram&quot;&gt;Isenkram
196 package&lt;/a&gt; finally made it into the archive, after lingering in NEW
197 for many months. I uploaded it to the Debian experimental suite
198 2013-01-27, and today it was accepted into the archive.&lt;/p&gt;
199
200 &lt;p&gt;Isenkram is a system for suggesting to users what packages to
201 install to work with a pluggable hardware device. The suggestion pop
202 up when the device is plugged in. For example if a Lego Mindstorm NXT
203 is inserted, it will suggest to install the program needed to program
204 the NXT controller. Give it a go, and report bugs and suggestions to
205 BTS. :)&lt;/p&gt;
206 </description>
207 </item>
208
209 <item>
210 <title>Bitcoin GUI now available from Debian/unstable (and Ubuntu/raring)</title>
211 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Bitcoin_GUI_now_available_from_Debian_unstable__and_Ubuntu_raring_.html</link>
212 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Bitcoin_GUI_now_available_from_Debian_unstable__and_Ubuntu_raring_.html</guid>
213 <pubDate>Sat, 2 Feb 2013 09:00:00 +0100</pubDate>
214 <description>&lt;p&gt;My
215 &lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_backport_bitcoin_qt_version_0_7_2_2_to_Debian_Squeeze.html&quot;&gt;last
216 bitcoin related blog post&lt;/a&gt; mentioned that the new
217 &lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin&quot;&gt;bitcoin package&lt;/a&gt; for
218 Debian was waiting in NEW. It was accepted by the Debian ftp-masters
219 2013-01-19, and have been available in unstable since then. It was
220 automatically copied to Ubuntu, and is available in their Raring
221 version too.&lt;/p&gt;
222
223 &lt;p&gt;But there is a strange problem with the build that block this new
224 version from being available on the i386 and kfreebsd-i386
225 architectures. For some strange reason, the autobuilders in Debian
226 for these architectures fail to run the test suite on these
227 architectures (&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/672524&quot;&gt;BTS #672524&lt;/a&gt;).
228 We are so far unable to reproduce it when building it manually, and
229 no-one have been able to propose a fix. If you got an idea what is
230 failing, please let us know via the BTS.&lt;/p&gt;
231
232 &lt;p&gt;One feature that is annoying me with of the bitcoin client, because
233 I often run low on disk space, is the fact that the client will exit
234 if it run short on space (&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/696715&quot;&gt;BTS
235 #696715&lt;/a&gt;). So make sure you have enough disk space when you run
236 it. :)&lt;/p&gt;
237
238 &lt;p&gt;As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
239 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
240 &lt;b&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&amp;label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog&quot;&gt;15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/b&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
241 </description>
242 </item>
243
244 <item>
245 <title>Welcome to the world, Isenkram!</title>
246 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html</link>
247 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html</guid>
248 <pubDate>Tue, 22 Jan 2013 22:00:00 +0100</pubDate>
249 <description>&lt;p&gt;Yesterday, I
250 &lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_prototype_ready_making_hardware_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html&quot;&gt;asked
251 for testers&lt;/a&gt; for my prototype for making Debian better at handling
252 pluggable hardware devices, which I
253 &lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html&quot;&gt;set
254 out to create&lt;/a&gt; earlier this month. Several valuable testers showed
255 up, and caused me to really want to to open up the development to more
256 people. But before I did this, I want to come up with a sensible name
257 for this project. Today I finally decided on a new name, and I have
258 renamed the project from hw-support-handler to this new name. In the
259 process, I moved the source to git and made it available as a
260 &lt;a href=&quot;http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/isenkram.git&quot;&gt;collab-maint&lt;/a&gt;
261 repository in Debian. The new name? It is &lt;strong&gt;Isenkram&lt;/strong&gt;.
262 To fetch and build the latest version of the source, use&lt;/p&gt;
263
264 &lt;pre&gt;
265 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/collab-maint/isenkram.git
266 cd isenkram &amp;&amp; git-buildpackage -us -uc
267 &lt;/pre&gt;
268
269 &lt;p&gt;I have not yet adjusted all files to use the new name yet. If you
270 want to hack on the source or improve the package, please go ahead.
271 But please talk to me first on IRC or via email before you do major
272 changes, to make sure we do not step on each others toes. :)&lt;/p&gt;
273
274 &lt;p&gt;If you wonder what &#39;isenkram&#39; is, it is a Norwegian word for iron
275 stuff, typically meaning tools, nails, screws, etc. Typical hardware
276 stuff, in other words. I&#39;ve been told it is the Norwegian variant of
277 the German word eisenkram, for those that are familiar with that
278 word.&lt;/p&gt;
279
280 &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update 2013-01-26&lt;/strong&gt;: Added -us -us to build
281 instructions, to avoid confusing people with an error from the signing
282 process.&lt;/p&gt;
283
284 &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update 2013-01-27&lt;/strong&gt;: Switch to HTTP URL for the git
285 clone argument to avoid the need for authentication.&lt;/p&gt;
286 </description>
287 </item>
288
289 <item>
290 <title>First prototype ready making hardware easier to use in Debian</title>
291 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_prototype_ready_making_hardware_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html</link>
292 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_prototype_ready_making_hardware_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html</guid>
293 <pubDate>Mon, 21 Jan 2013 12:00:00 +0100</pubDate>
294 <description>&lt;p&gt;Early this month I set out to try to
295 &lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html&quot;&gt;improve
296 the Debian support for pluggable hardware devices&lt;/a&gt;. Now my
297 prototype is working, and it is ready for a larger audience. To test
298 it, fetch the
299 &lt;a href=&quot;http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/&quot;&gt;source
300 from the Debian Edu subversion repository&lt;/a&gt;, build and install the
301 package. You might have to log out and in again activate the
302 autostart script.&lt;/p&gt;
303
304 &lt;p&gt;The design is simple:&lt;/p&gt;
305
306 &lt;ul&gt;
307
308 &lt;li&gt;Add desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ causing a program
309 hw-support-handlerd to start when the user log in.&lt;/li&gt;
310
311 &lt;li&gt;This program listen for kernel events about new hardware (directly
312 from the kernel like udev does), not using HAL dbus events as I
313 initially did.&lt;/li&gt;
314
315 &lt;li&gt;When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware modalias in
316 the APT database, a database
317 &lt;a href=&quot;http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=markup&quot;&gt;available
318 via HTTP&lt;/a&gt; and a database available as part of the package.&lt;/li&gt;
319
320 &lt;li&gt;If a package is mapped to the hardware in question, the package
321 isn&#39;t installed yet and this is the first time the hardware was
322 plugged in, show a desktop notification suggesting to install the
323 package or packages.&lt;/li&gt;
324
325 &lt;li&gt;If the user click on the &#39;install package now&#39; button, ask
326 aptdaemon via the PackageKit API to install the requrired package.&lt;/li&gt;
327
328 &lt;li&gt;aptdaemon ask for root password or sudo password, and install the
329 package while showing progress information in a window.&lt;/li&gt;
330
331 &lt;/ul&gt;
332
333 &lt;p&gt;I still need to come up with a better name for the system. Here
334 are some screen shots showing the prototype in action. First the
335 notification, then the password request, and finally the request to
336 approve all the dependencies. Sorry for the Norwegian Bokmål GUI.&lt;/p&gt;
337
338 &lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-1-notification.png&quot;&gt;
339 &lt;br&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-2-password.png&quot;&gt;
340 &lt;br&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-3-dependencies.png&quot;&gt;
341 &lt;br&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-4-installing.png&quot;&gt;
342 &lt;br&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-5-installing-details.png&quot; width=&quot;70%&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
343
344 &lt;p&gt;The prototype still need to be improved with longer timeouts, but
345 is already useful. The database of hardware to package mappings also
346 need more work. It is currently compatible with the Ubuntu way of
347 storing such information in the package control file, but could be
348 changed to use other formats instead or in addition to the current
349 method. I&#39;ve dropped the use of discover for this mapping, as the
350 modalias approach is more flexible and easier to use on Linux as long
351 as the Linux kernel expose its modalias strings directly.&lt;/p&gt;
352
353 &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update 2013-01-21 16:50&lt;/strong&gt;: Due to popular demand,
354 here is the command required to check out and build the source: Use
355 &#39;&lt;tt&gt;svn checkout
356 svn://svn.debian.org/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/; cd
357 hw-support-handler; debuild&lt;/tt&gt;&#39;. If you lack debuild, install the
358 devscripts package.&lt;/p&gt;
359
360 &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update 2013-01-23 12:00&lt;/strong&gt;: The project is now
361 renamed to Isenkram and the source moved from the Debian Edu
362 subversion repository to a Debian collab-maint git repository. See
363 &lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html&quot;&gt;build
364 instructions&lt;/a&gt; for details.&lt;/p&gt;
365 </description>
366 </item>
367
368 <item>
369 <title>Thank you Thinkpad X41, for your long and trustworthy service</title>
370 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html</link>
371 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html</guid>
372 <pubDate>Sat, 19 Jan 2013 09:20:00 +0100</pubDate>
373 <description>&lt;p&gt;This Christmas my trusty old laptop died. It died quietly and
374 suddenly in bed. With a quiet whimper, it went completely quiet and
375 black. The power button was no longer able to turn it on. It was a
376 IBM Thinkpad X41, and the best laptop I ever had. Better than both
377 Thinkpads X30, X31, X40, X60, X61 and X61S. Far better than the
378 Compaq I had before that. Now I need to find a replacement. To keep
379 going during Christmas, I moved the one year old SSD disk to my old
380 X40 where it fitted (only one I had left that could use it), but it is
381 not a durable solution.
382
383 &lt;p&gt;My laptop needs are fairly modest. This is my wishlist from when I
384 got a new one more than 10 years ago. It still holds true.:)&lt;/p&gt;
385
386 &lt;ul&gt;
387
388 &lt;li&gt;Lightweight (around 1 kg) and small volume (preferably smaller
389 than A4).&lt;/li&gt;
390 &lt;li&gt;Robust, it will be in my backpack every day.&lt;/li&gt;
391 &lt;li&gt;Three button mouse and a mouse pin instead of touch pad.&lt;/li&gt;
392 &lt;li&gt;Long battery life time. Preferable a week.&lt;/li&gt;
393 &lt;li&gt;Internal WIFI network card.&lt;/li&gt;
394 &lt;li&gt;Internal Twisted Pair network card.&lt;/li&gt;
395 &lt;li&gt;Some USB slots (2-3 is plenty)&lt;/li&gt;
396 &lt;li&gt;Good keyboard - similar to the Thinkpad.&lt;/li&gt;
397 &lt;li&gt;Video resolution at least 1024x768, with size around 12&quot; (A4 paper
398 size).&lt;/li&gt;
399 &lt;li&gt;Hardware supported by Debian Stable, ie the default kernel and
400 X.org packages.&lt;/li&gt;
401 &lt;li&gt;Quiet, preferably fan free (or at least not using the fan most of
402 the time).
403
404 &lt;/ul&gt;
405
406 &lt;p&gt;You will notice that there are no RAM and CPU requirements in the
407 list. The reason is simply that the specifications on laptops the
408 last 10-15 years have been sufficient for my needs, and I have to look
409 at other features to choose my laptop. But are there still made as
410 robust laptops as my X41? The Thinkpad X60/X61 proved to be less
411 robust, and Thinkpads seem to be heading in the wrong direction since
412 Lenovo took over. But I&#39;ve been told that X220 and X1 Carbon might
413 still be useful.&lt;/p&gt;
414
415 &lt;p&gt;Perhaps I should rethink my needs, and look for a pad with an
416 external keyboard? I&#39;ll have to check the
417 &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.linux-laptop.net/&quot;&gt;Linux Laptops site&lt;/a&gt; for
418 well-supported laptops, or perhaps just buy one preinstalled from one
419 of the vendors listed on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://linuxpreloaded.com/&quot;&gt;Linux
420 Pre-loaded site&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
421 </description>
422 </item>
423
424 <item>
425 <title>How to find a browser plugin supporting a given MIME type</title>
426 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_find_a_browser_plugin_supporting_a_given_MIME_type.html</link>
427 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_find_a_browser_plugin_supporting_a_given_MIME_type.html</guid>
428 <pubDate>Fri, 18 Jan 2013 10:40:00 +0100</pubDate>
429 <description>&lt;p&gt;Some times I try to figure out which Iceweasel browser plugin to
430 install to get support for a given MIME type. Thanks to
431 &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MozillaTeam/Plugins&quot;&gt;specifications
432 done by Ubuntu&lt;/a&gt; and Mozilla, it is possible to do this in Debian.
433 Unfortunately, not very many packages provide the needed meta
434 information, Anyway, here is a small script to look up all browser
435 plugin packages announcing ther MIME support using this specification:&lt;/p&gt;
436
437 &lt;pre&gt;
438 #!/usr/bin/python
439 import sys
440 import apt
441 def pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
442 cache = apt.Cache()
443 cache.open(None)
444 thepkgs = []
445 for pkg in cache:
446 version = pkg.candidate
447 if version is None:
448 version = pkg.installed
449 if version is None:
450 continue
451 record = version.record
452 if not record.has_key(&#39;Npp-MimeType&#39;):
453 continue
454 mime_types = record[&#39;Npp-MimeType&#39;].split(&#39;,&#39;)
455 for t in mime_types:
456 t = t.rstrip().strip()
457 if t == mimetype:
458 thepkgs.append(pkg.name)
459 return thepkgs
460 mimetype = &quot;audio/ogg&quot;
461 if 1 &lt; len(sys.argv):
462 mimetype = sys.argv[1]
463 print &quot;Browser plugin packages supporting %s:&quot; % mimetype
464 for pkg in pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
465 print &quot; %s&quot; %pkg
466 &lt;/pre&gt;
467
468 &lt;p&gt;It can be used like this to look up a given MIME type:&lt;/p&gt;
469
470 &lt;pre&gt;
471 % ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype
472 Browser plugin packages supporting audio/ogg:
473 gecko-mediaplayer
474 % ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype application/x-shockwave-flash
475 Browser plugin packages supporting application/x-shockwave-flash:
476 browser-plugin-gnash
477 %
478 &lt;/pre&gt;
479
480 &lt;p&gt;In Ubuntu this mechanism is combined with support in the browser
481 itself to query for plugins and propose to install the needed
482 packages. It would be great if Debian supported such feature too. Is
483 anyone working on adding it?&lt;/p&gt;
484
485 &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update 2013-01-18 14:20&lt;/strong&gt;: The Debian BTS
486 request for icweasel support for this feature is
487 &lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/484010&quot;&gt;#484010&lt;/a&gt; from 2008 (and
488 &lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/698426&quot;&gt;#698426&lt;/a&gt; from today). Lack
489 of manpower and wish for a different design is the reason thus feature
490 is not yet in iceweasel from Debian.&lt;/p&gt;
491 </description>
492 </item>
493
494 <item>
495 <title>What is the most supported MIME type in Debian?</title>
496 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_most_supported_MIME_type_in_Debian_.html</link>
497 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_most_supported_MIME_type_in_Debian_.html</guid>
498 <pubDate>Wed, 16 Jan 2013 10:10:00 +0100</pubDate>
499 <description>&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.debian.org/AppStreamDebianProposal&quot;&gt;DEP-11
500 proposal to add AppStream information to the Debian archive&lt;/a&gt;, is a
501 proposal to make it possible for a Desktop application to propose to
502 the user some package to install to gain support for a given MIME
503 type, font, library etc. that is currently missing. With such
504 mechanism in place, it would be possible for the desktop to
505 automatically propose and install leocad if some LDraw file is
506 downloaded by the browser.&lt;/p&gt;
507
508 &lt;p&gt;To get some idea about the current content of the archive, I decided
509 to write a simple program to extract all .desktop files from the
510 Debian archive and look up the claimed MIME support there. The result
511 can be found on the
512 &lt;a href=&quot;http://ftp.skolelinux.org/pub/AppStreamTest&quot;&gt;Skolelinux FTP
513 site&lt;/a&gt;. Using the collected information, it become possible to
514 answer the question in the title. Here are the 20 most supported MIME
515 types in Debian stable (Squeeze), testing (Wheezy) and unstable (Sid).
516 The complete list is available from the link above.&lt;/p&gt;
517
518 &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Debian Stable:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
519
520 &lt;pre&gt;
521 count MIME type
522 ----- -----------------------
523 32 text/plain
524 30 audio/mpeg
525 29 image/png
526 28 image/jpeg
527 27 application/ogg
528 26 audio/x-mp3
529 25 image/tiff
530 25 image/gif
531 22 image/bmp
532 22 audio/x-wav
533 20 audio/x-flac
534 19 audio/x-mpegurl
535 18 video/x-ms-asf
536 18 audio/x-musepack
537 18 audio/x-mpeg
538 18 application/x-ogg
539 17 video/mpeg
540 17 audio/x-scpls
541 17 audio/ogg
542 16 video/x-ms-wmv
543 &lt;/pre&gt;
544
545 &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Debian Testing:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
546
547 &lt;pre&gt;
548 count MIME type
549 ----- -----------------------
550 33 text/plain
551 32 image/png
552 32 image/jpeg
553 29 audio/mpeg
554 27 image/gif
555 26 image/tiff
556 26 application/ogg
557 25 audio/x-mp3
558 22 image/bmp
559 21 audio/x-wav
560 19 audio/x-mpegurl
561 19 audio/x-mpeg
562 18 video/mpeg
563 18 audio/x-scpls
564 18 audio/x-flac
565 18 application/x-ogg
566 17 video/x-ms-asf
567 17 text/html
568 17 audio/x-musepack
569 16 image/x-xbitmap
570 &lt;/pre&gt;
571
572 &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Debian Unstable:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
573
574 &lt;pre&gt;
575 count MIME type
576 ----- -----------------------
577 31 text/plain
578 31 image/png
579 31 image/jpeg
580 29 audio/mpeg
581 28 application/ogg
582 27 image/gif
583 26 image/tiff
584 26 audio/x-mp3
585 23 audio/x-wav
586 22 image/bmp
587 21 audio/x-flac
588 20 audio/x-mpegurl
589 19 audio/x-mpeg
590 18 video/x-ms-asf
591 18 video/mpeg
592 18 audio/x-scpls
593 18 application/x-ogg
594 17 audio/x-musepack
595 16 video/x-ms-wmv
596 16 video/x-msvideo
597 &lt;/pre&gt;
598
599 &lt;p&gt;I am told that PackageKit can provide an API to access the kind of
600 information mentioned in DEP-11. I have not yet had time to look at
601 it, but hope the PackageKit people in Debian are on top of these
602 issues.&lt;/p&gt;
603
604 &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update 2013-01-16 13:35&lt;/strong&gt;: Updated numbers after
605 discovering a typo in my script.&lt;/p&gt;
606 </description>
607 </item>
608
609 <item>
610 <title>Using modalias info to find packages handling my hardware</title>
611 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_modalias_info_to_find_packages_handling_my_hardware.html</link>
612 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_modalias_info_to_find_packages_handling_my_hardware.html</guid>
613 <pubDate>Tue, 15 Jan 2013 08:00:00 +0100</pubDate>
614 <description>&lt;p&gt;Yesterday, I wrote about the
615 &lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Modalias_strings___a_practical_way_to_map__stuff__to_hardware.html&quot;&gt;modalias
616 values provided by the Linux kernel&lt;/a&gt; following my hope for
617 &lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html&quot;&gt;better
618 dongle support in Debian&lt;/a&gt;. Using this knowledge, I have tested how
619 modalias values attached to package names can be used to map packages
620 to hardware. This allow the system to look up and suggest relevant
621 packages when I plug in some new hardware into my machine, and replace
622 discover and discover-data as the database used to map hardware to
623 packages.&lt;/p&gt;
624
625 &lt;p&gt;I create a modaliases file with entries like the following,
626 containing package name, kernel module name (if relevant, otherwise
627 the package name) and globs matching the relevant hardware
628 modalias.&lt;/p&gt;
629
630 &lt;p&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;
631 Package: package-name
632 &lt;br&gt;Modaliases: module(modaliasglob, modaliasglob, modaliasglob)&lt;/p&gt;
633 &lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
634
635 &lt;p&gt;It is fairly trivial to write code to find the relevant packages
636 for a given modalias value using this file.&lt;/p&gt;
637
638 &lt;p&gt;An entry like this would suggest the video and picture application
639 cheese for many USB web cameras (interface bus class 0E01):&lt;/p&gt;
640
641 &lt;p&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;
642 Package: cheese
643 &lt;br&gt;Modaliases: cheese(usb:v*p*d*dc*dsc*dp*ic0Eisc01ip*)&lt;/p&gt;
644 &lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
645
646 &lt;p&gt;An entry like this would suggest the pcmciautils package when a
647 CardBus bridge (bus class 0607) PCI device is present:&lt;/p&gt;
648
649 &lt;p&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;
650 Package: pcmciautils
651 &lt;br&gt;Modaliases: pcmciautils(pci:v*d*sv*sd*bc06sc07i*)
652 &lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
653
654 &lt;p&gt;An entry like this would suggest the package colorhug-client when
655 plugging in a ColorHug with USB IDs 04D8:F8DA:&lt;/p&gt;
656
657 &lt;p&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;
658 Package: colorhug-client
659 &lt;br&gt;Modaliases: colorhug-client(usb:v04D8pF8DAd*)&lt;/p&gt;
660 &lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
661
662 &lt;p&gt;I believe the format is compatible with the format of the Packages
663 file in the Debian archive. Ubuntu already uses their Packages file
664 to store their mappings from packages to hardware.&lt;/p&gt;
665
666 &lt;p&gt;By adding a XB-Modaliases: header in debian/control, any .deb can
667 announce the hardware it support in a way my prototype understand.
668 This allow those publishing packages in an APT source outside the
669 Debian archive as well as those backporting packages to make sure the
670 hardware mapping are included in the package meta information. I&#39;ve
671 tested such header in the pymissile package, and its modalias mapping
672 is working as it should with my prototype. It even made it to Ubuntu
673 Raring.&lt;/p&gt;
674
675 &lt;p&gt;To test if it was possible to look up supported hardware using only
676 the shell tools available in the Debian installer, I wrote a shell
677 implementation of the lookup code. The idea is to create files for
678 each modalias and let the shell do the matching. Please check out and
679 try the
680 &lt;a href=&quot;http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/hw-support-lookup?view=co&quot;&gt;hw-support-lookup&lt;/a&gt;
681 shell script. It run without any extra dependencies and fetch the
682 hardware mappings from the Debian archive and the subversion
683 repository where I currently work on my prototype.&lt;/p&gt;
684
685 &lt;p&gt;When I use it on a machine with a yubikey inserted, it suggest to
686 install yubikey-personalization:&lt;/p&gt;
687
688 &lt;p&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;
689 % ./hw-support-lookup
690 &lt;br&gt;yubikey-personalization
691 &lt;br&gt;%
692 &lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
693
694 &lt;p&gt;When I run it on my Thinkpad X40 with a PCMCIA/CardBus slot, it
695 propose to install the pcmciautils package:&lt;/p&gt;
696
697 &lt;p&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;
698 % ./hw-support-lookup
699 &lt;br&gt;pcmciautils
700 &lt;br&gt;%
701 &lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
702
703 &lt;p&gt;If you know of any hardware-package mapping that should be added to
704 &lt;a href=&quot;http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=co&quot;&gt;my
705 database&lt;/a&gt;, please tell me about it.&lt;/p&gt;
706
707 &lt;p&gt;It could be possible to generate several of the mappings between
708 packages and hardware. One source would be to look at packages with
709 kernel modules, ie packages with *.ko files in /lib/modules/, and
710 extract their modalias information. Another would be to look at
711 packages with udev rules, ie packages with files in
712 /lib/udev/rules.d/, and extract their vendor/model information to
713 generate a modalias matching rule. I have not tested any of these to
714 see if it work.&lt;/p&gt;
715
716 &lt;p&gt;If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
717 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
718 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
719 &lt;a href=&quot;irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-devel&quot;&gt;#debian-devel&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
720 </description>
721 </item>
722
723 <item>
724 <title>Modalias strings - a practical way to map &quot;stuff&quot; to hardware</title>
725 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Modalias_strings___a_practical_way_to_map__stuff__to_hardware.html</link>
726 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Modalias_strings___a_practical_way_to_map__stuff__to_hardware.html</guid>
727 <pubDate>Mon, 14 Jan 2013 11:20:00 +0100</pubDate>
728 <description>&lt;p&gt;While looking into how to look up Debian packages based on hardware
729 information, to find the packages that support a given piece of
730 hardware, I refreshed my memory regarding modalias values, and decided
731 to document the details. Here are my findings so far, also available
732 in
733 &lt;a href=&quot;http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/&quot;&gt;the
734 Debian Edu subversion repository&lt;/a&gt;:
735
736 &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Modalias decoded&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
737
738 &lt;p&gt;This document try to explain what the different types of modalias
739 values stands for. It is in part based on information from
740 &amp;lt;URL: &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias&quot;&gt;https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias&lt;/a&gt; &amp;gt;,
741 &amp;lt;URL: &lt;a href=&quot;http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/26132/how-to-assign-usb-driver-to-device&quot;&gt;http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/26132/how-to-assign-usb-driver-to-device&lt;/a&gt; &amp;gt;,
742 &amp;lt;URL: &lt;a href=&quot;http://code.metager.de/source/history/linux/stable/scripts/mod/file2alias.c&quot;&gt;http://code.metager.de/source/history/linux/stable/scripts/mod/file2alias.c&lt;/a&gt; &amp;gt; and
743 &amp;lt;URL: &lt;a href=&quot;http://cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/dmidecode/dmidecode.c?root=dmidecode&amp;view=markup&quot;&gt;http://cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/dmidecode/dmidecode.c?root=dmidecode&amp;view=markup&lt;/a&gt; &amp;gt;.
744
745 &lt;p&gt;The modalias entries for a given Linux machine can be found using
746 this shell script:&lt;/p&gt;
747
748 &lt;pre&gt;
749 find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -0 cat | sort -u
750 &lt;/pre&gt;
751
752 &lt;p&gt;The supported modalias globs for a given kernel module can be found
753 using modinfo:&lt;/p&gt;
754
755 &lt;pre&gt;
756 % /sbin/modinfo psmouse | grep alias:
757 alias: serio:ty05pr*id*ex*
758 alias: serio:ty01pr*id*ex*
759 %
760 &lt;/pre&gt;
761
762 &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;PCI subtype&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
763
764 &lt;p&gt;A typical PCI entry can look like this. This is an Intel Host
765 Bridge memory controller:&lt;/p&gt;
766
767 &lt;p&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;
768 pci:v00008086d00002770sv00001028sd000001ADbc06sc00i00
769 &lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
770
771 &lt;p&gt;This represent these values:&lt;/p&gt;
772
773 &lt;pre&gt;
774 v 00008086 (vendor)
775 d 00002770 (device)
776 sv 00001028 (subvendor)
777 sd 000001AD (subdevice)
778 bc 06 (bus class)
779 sc 00 (bus subclass)
780 i 00 (interface)
781 &lt;/pre&gt;
782
783 &lt;p&gt;The vendor/device values are the same values outputted from &#39;lspci
784 -n&#39; as 8086:2770. The bus class/subclass is also shown by lspci as
785 0600. The 0600 class is a host bridge. Other useful bus values are
786 0300 (VGA compatible card) and 0200 (Ethernet controller).&lt;/p&gt;
787
788 &lt;p&gt;Not sure how to figure out the interface value, nor what it
789 means.&lt;/p&gt;
790
791 &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;USB subtype&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
792
793 &lt;p&gt;Some typical USB entries can look like this. This is an internal
794 USB hub in a laptop:&lt;/p&gt;
795
796 &lt;p&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;
797 usb:v1D6Bp0001d0206dc09dsc00dp00ic09isc00ip00
798 &lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
799
800 &lt;p&gt;Here is the values included in this alias:&lt;/p&gt;
801
802 &lt;pre&gt;
803 v 1D6B (device vendor)
804 p 0001 (device product)
805 d 0206 (bcddevice)
806 dc 09 (device class)
807 dsc 00 (device subclass)
808 dp 00 (device protocol)
809 ic 09 (interface class)
810 isc 00 (interface subclass)
811 ip 00 (interface protocol)
812 &lt;/pre&gt;
813
814 &lt;p&gt;The 0900 device class/subclass means hub. Some times the relevant
815 class is in the interface class section. For a simple USB web camera,
816 these alias entries show up:&lt;/p&gt;
817
818 &lt;p&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;
819 usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc01ip00
820 &lt;br&gt;usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc02ip00
821 &lt;br&gt;usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc01ip00
822 &lt;br&gt;usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc02ip00
823 &lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
824
825 &lt;p&gt;Interface class 0E01 is video control, 0E02 is video streaming (aka
826 camera), 0101 is audio control device and 0102 is audio streaming (aka
827 microphone). Thus this is a camera with microphone included.&lt;/p&gt;
828
829 &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ACPI subtype&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
830
831 &lt;p&gt;The ACPI type is used for several non-PCI/USB stuff. This is an IR
832 receiver in a Thinkpad X40:&lt;/p&gt;
833
834 &lt;p&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;
835 acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
836 &lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
837
838 &lt;p&gt;The values between the colons are IDs.&lt;/p&gt;
839
840 &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;DMI subtype&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
841
842 &lt;p&gt;The DMI table contain lots of information about the computer case
843 and model. This is an entry for a IBM Thinkpad X40, fetched from
844 /sys/devices/virtual/dmi/id/modalias:&lt;/p&gt;
845
846 &lt;p&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;
847 dmi:bvnIBM:bvr1UETB6WW(1.66):bd06/15/2005:svnIBM:pn2371H4G:pvrThinkPadX40:rvnIBM:rn2371H4G:rvrNotAvailable:cvnIBM:ct10:cvrNotAvailable:
848 &lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
849
850 &lt;p&gt;The values present are&lt;/p&gt;
851
852 &lt;pre&gt;
853 bvn IBM (BIOS vendor)
854 bvr 1UETB6WW(1.66) (BIOS version)
855 bd 06/15/2005 (BIOS date)
856 svn IBM (system vendor)
857 pn 2371H4G (product name)
858 pvr ThinkPadX40 (product version)
859 rvn IBM (board vendor)
860 rn 2371H4G (board name)
861 rvr NotAvailable (board version)
862 cvn IBM (chassis vendor)
863 ct 10 (chassis type)
864 cvr NotAvailable (chassis version)
865 &lt;/pre&gt;
866
867 &lt;p&gt;The chassis type 10 is Notebook. Other interesting values can be
868 found in the dmidecode source:&lt;/p&gt;
869
870 &lt;pre&gt;
871 3 Desktop
872 4 Low Profile Desktop
873 5 Pizza Box
874 6 Mini Tower
875 7 Tower
876 8 Portable
877 9 Laptop
878 10 Notebook
879 11 Hand Held
880 12 Docking Station
881 13 All In One
882 14 Sub Notebook
883 15 Space-saving
884 16 Lunch Box
885 17 Main Server Chassis
886 18 Expansion Chassis
887 19 Sub Chassis
888 20 Bus Expansion Chassis
889 21 Peripheral Chassis
890 22 RAID Chassis
891 23 Rack Mount Chassis
892 24 Sealed-case PC
893 25 Multi-system
894 26 CompactPCI
895 27 AdvancedTCA
896 28 Blade
897 29 Blade Enclosing
898 &lt;/pre&gt;
899
900 &lt;p&gt;The chassis type values are not always accurately set in the DMI
901 table. For example my home server is a tower, but the DMI modalias
902 claim it is a desktop.&lt;/p&gt;
903
904 &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;SerIO subtype&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
905
906 &lt;p&gt;This type is used for PS/2 mouse plugs. One example is from my
907 test machine:&lt;/p&gt;
908
909 &lt;p&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;
910 serio:ty01pr00id00ex00
911 &lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
912
913 &lt;p&gt;The values present are&lt;/p&gt;
914
915 &lt;pre&gt;
916 ty 01 (type)
917 pr 00 (prototype)
918 id 00 (id)
919 ex 00 (extra)
920 &lt;/pre&gt;
921
922 &lt;p&gt;This type is supported by the psmouse driver. I am not sure what
923 the valid values are.&lt;/p&gt;
924
925 &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Other subtypes&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
926
927 &lt;p&gt;There are heaps of other modalias subtypes according to
928 file2alias.c. There is the rest of the list from that source: amba,
929 ap, bcma, ccw, css, eisa, hid, i2c, ieee1394, input, ipack, isapnp,
930 mdio, of, parisc, pcmcia, platform, scsi, sdio, spi, ssb, vio, virtio,
931 vmbus, x86cpu and zorro. I did not spend time documenting all of
932 these, as they do not seem relevant for my intended use with mapping
933 hardware to packages when new stuff is inserted during run time.&lt;/p&gt;
934
935 &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Looking up kernel modules using modalias values&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
936
937 &lt;p&gt;To check which kernel modules provide support for a given modalias,
938 one can use the following shell script:&lt;/p&gt;
939
940 &lt;pre&gt;
941 for id in $(find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -0 cat | sort -u); do \
942 echo &quot;$id&quot; ; \
943 /sbin/modprobe --show-depends &quot;$id&quot;|sed &#39;s/^/ /&#39; ; \
944 done
945 &lt;/pre&gt;
946
947 &lt;p&gt;The output can look like this (only the first few entries as the
948 list is very long on my test machine):&lt;/p&gt;
949
950 &lt;pre&gt;
951 acpi:ACPI0003:
952 insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/acpi/ac.ko
953 acpi:device:
954 FATAL: Module acpi:device: not found.
955 acpi:IBM0068:
956 insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/char/nvram.ko
957 insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/leds/led-class.ko
958 insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/net/rfkill/rfkill.ko
959 insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/platform/x86/thinkpad_acpi.ko
960 acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
961 insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/lib/crc-ccitt.ko
962 insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/net/irda/irda.ko
963 insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/net/irda/nsc-ircc.ko
964 [...]
965 &lt;/pre&gt;
966
967 &lt;p&gt;If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
968 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
969 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
970 &lt;a href=&quot;irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-devel&quot;&gt;#debian-devel&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
971
972 &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update 2013-01-15:&lt;/strong&gt; Rewrite &quot;cat $(find ...)&quot; to
973 &quot;find ... -print0 | xargs -0 cat&quot; to make sure it handle directories
974 in /sys/ with space in them.&lt;/p&gt;
975 </description>
976 </item>
977
978 <item>
979 <title>Moved the pymissile Debian packaging to collab-maint</title>
980 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Moved_the_pymissile_Debian_packaging_to_collab_maint.html</link>
981 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Moved_the_pymissile_Debian_packaging_to_collab_maint.html</guid>
982 <pubDate>Thu, 10 Jan 2013 20:40:00 +0100</pubDate>
983 <description>&lt;p&gt;As part of my investigation on how to improve the support in Debian
984 for hardware dongles, I dug up my old Mark and Spencer USB Rocket
985 Launcher and updated the Debian package
986 &lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/pymissile&quot;&gt;pymissile&lt;/a&gt; to make
987 sure udev will fix the device permissions when it is plugged in. I
988 also added a &quot;Modaliases&quot; header to test it in the Debian archive and
989 hopefully make the package be proposed by jockey in Ubuntu when a user
990 plug in his rocket launcher. In the process I moved the source to a
991 git repository under collab-maint, to make it easier for any DD to
992 contribute. &lt;a href=&quot;http://code.google.com/p/pymissile/&quot;&gt;Upstream&lt;/a&gt;
993 is not very active, but the software still work for me even after five
994 years of relative silence. The new git repository is not listed in
995 the uploaded package yet, because I want to test the other changes a
996 bit more before I upload the new version. If you want to check out
997 the new version with a .desktop file included, visit the
998 &lt;a href=&quot;http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/pymissile.git&quot;&gt;gitweb
999 view&lt;/a&gt; or use &quot;&lt;tt&gt;git clone
1000 git://anonscm.debian.org/collab-maint/pymissile.git&lt;/tt&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;
1001 </description>
1002 </item>
1003
1004 <item>
1005 <title>Lets make hardware dongles easier to use in Debian</title>
1006 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html</link>
1007 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html</guid>
1008 <pubDate>Wed, 9 Jan 2013 15:40:00 +0100</pubDate>
1009 <description>&lt;p&gt;One thing that annoys me with Debian and Linux distributions in
1010 general, is that there is a great package management system with the
1011 ability to automatically install software packages by downloading them
1012 from the distribution mirrors, but no way to get it to automatically
1013 install the packages I need to use the hardware I plug into my
1014 machine. Even if the package to use it is easily available from the
1015 Linux distribution. When I plug in a LEGO Mindstorms NXT, it could
1016 suggest to automatically install the python-nxt, nbc and t2n packages
1017 I need to talk to it. When I plug in a Yubikey, it could propose the
1018 yubikey-personalization package. The information required to do this
1019 is available, but no-one have pulled all the pieces together.&lt;/p&gt;
1020
1021 &lt;p&gt;Some years ago, I proposed to
1022 &lt;a href=&quot;http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg01206.html&quot;&gt;use
1023 the discover subsystem to implement this&lt;/a&gt;. The idea is fairly
1024 simple:
1025
1026 &lt;ul&gt;
1027
1028 &lt;li&gt;Add a desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ pointing to a program
1029 starting when a user log in.&lt;/li&gt;
1030
1031 &lt;li&gt;Set this program up to listen for kernel events emitted when new
1032 hardware is inserted into the computer.&lt;/li&gt;
1033
1034 &lt;li&gt;When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware ID in a
1035 database mapping to packages, and take note of any non-installed
1036 packages.&lt;/li&gt;
1037
1038 &lt;li&gt;Show a message to the user proposing to install the discovered
1039 package, and make it easy to install it.&lt;/li&gt;
1040
1041 &lt;/ul&gt;
1042
1043 &lt;p&gt;I am not sure what the best way to implement this is, but my
1044 initial idea was to use dbus events to discover new hardware, the
1045 discover database to find packages and
1046 &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.packagekit.org/&quot;&gt;PackageKit&lt;/a&gt; to install
1047 packages.&lt;/p&gt;
1048
1049 &lt;p&gt;Yesterday, I found time to try to implement this idea, and the
1050 draft package is now checked into
1051 &lt;a href=&quot;http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/&quot;&gt;the
1052 Debian Edu subversion repository&lt;/a&gt;. In the process, I updated the
1053 &lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover-data.html&quot;&gt;discover-data&lt;/a&gt;
1054 package to map the USB ids of LEGO Mindstorms and Yubikey devices to
1055 the relevant packages in Debian, and uploaded a new version
1056 2.2013.01.09 to unstable. I also discovered that the current
1057 &lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover.html&quot;&gt;discover&lt;/a&gt;
1058 package in Debian no longer discovered any USB devices, because
1059 /proc/bus/usb/devices is no longer present. I ported it to use
1060 libusb as a fall back option to get it working. The fixed package
1061 version 2.1.2-6 is now in experimental (didn&#39;t upload it to unstable
1062 because of the freeze).&lt;/p&gt;
1063
1064 &lt;p&gt;With this prototype in place, I can insert my Yubikey, and get this
1065 desktop notification to show up (only once, the first time it is
1066 inserted):&lt;/p&gt;
1067
1068 &lt;p align=&quot;center&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-09-hw-autoinstall.png&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
1069
1070 &lt;p&gt;For this prototype to be really useful, some way to automatically
1071 install the proposed packages by pressing the &quot;Please install
1072 program(s)&quot; button should to be implemented.&lt;/p&gt;
1073
1074 &lt;p&gt;If this idea seem useful to you, and you want to help make it
1075 happen, please help me update the discover-data database with mappings
1076 from hardware to Debian packages. Check if &#39;discover-pkginstall -l&#39;
1077 list the package you would like to have installed when a given
1078 hardware device is inserted into your computer, and report bugs using
1079 reportbug if it isn&#39;t. Or, if you know of a better way to provide
1080 such mapping, please let me know.&lt;/p&gt;
1081
1082 &lt;p&gt;This prototype need more work, and there are several questions that
1083 should be considered before it is ready for production use. Is dbus
1084 the correct way to detect new hardware? At the moment I look for HAL
1085 dbus events on the system bus, because that is the events I could see
1086 on my Debian Squeeze KDE desktop. Are there better events to use?
1087 How should the user be notified? Is the desktop notification
1088 mechanism the best option, or should the background daemon raise a
1089 popup instead? How should packages be installed? When should they
1090 not be installed?&lt;/p&gt;
1091
1092 &lt;p&gt;If you want to help getting such feature implemented in Debian,
1093 please send me an email. :)&lt;/p&gt;
1094 </description>
1095 </item>
1096
1097 <item>
1098 <title>New IRC channel for LEGO designers using Debian</title>
1099 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_IRC_channel_for_LEGO_designers_using_Debian.html</link>
1100 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_IRC_channel_for_LEGO_designers_using_Debian.html</guid>
1101 <pubDate>Wed, 2 Jan 2013 15:40:00 +0100</pubDate>
1102 <description>&lt;p&gt;During Christmas, I have worked a bit on the Debian support for
1103 &lt;a href=&quot;http://mindstorms.lego.com/en-us/Default.aspx&quot;&gt;LEGO Mindstorm
1104 NXT&lt;/a&gt;. My son and I have played a bit with my NXT set, and I
1105 discovered I had to build all the tools myself because none were
1106 already in Debian Squeeze. If Debian support for LEGO is something
1107 you care about, please join me on the IRC channel
1108 &lt;a href=&quot;irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego&quot;&gt;#debian-lego&lt;/a&gt; (server
1109 irc.debian.org). There is a lot that could be done to improve the
1110 Debian support for LEGO designers. For example both CAD software
1111 and Mindstorm compilers are missing. :)&lt;/p&gt;
1112
1113 &lt;p&gt;Update 2012-01-03: A
1114 &lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners&quot;&gt;project page&lt;/a&gt;
1115 including links to Lego related packages is now available.&lt;/p&gt;
1116 </description>
1117 </item>
1118
1119 <item>
1120 <title>How to backport bitcoin-qt version 0.7.2-2 to Debian Squeeze</title>
1121 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_backport_bitcoin_qt_version_0_7_2_2_to_Debian_Squeeze.html</link>
1122 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_backport_bitcoin_qt_version_0_7_2_2_to_Debian_Squeeze.html</guid>
1123 <pubDate>Tue, 25 Dec 2012 20:50:00 +0100</pubDate>
1124 <description>&lt;p&gt;Let me start by wishing you all marry Christmas and a happy new
1125 year! I hope next year will prove to be a good year.&lt;/p&gt;
1126
1127 &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bitcoin.org/&quot;&gt;Bitcoin&lt;/a&gt;, the digital
1128 decentralised &quot;currency&quot; that allow people to transfer bitcoins
1129 between each other with minimal overhead, is a very interesting
1130 experiment. And as I wrote a few days ago, the bitcoin situation in
1131 &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.debian.org/&quot;&gt;Debian&lt;/a&gt; is about to improve a bit.
1132 The &lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin&quot;&gt;new debian source
1133 package&lt;/a&gt; (version 0.7.2-2) was uploaded yesterday, and is waiting
1134 in &lt;a href=&quot;http://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html&quot;&gt;the NEW queue&lt;/A&gt;
1135 for one of the ftpmasters to approve the new bitcoin-qt package
1136 name.&lt;/p&gt;
1137
1138 &lt;p&gt;And thanks to the great work of Jonas and the rest of the bitcoin
1139 team in Debian, you can easily test the package in Debian Squeeze
1140 using the following steps to get a set of working packages:&lt;/p&gt;
1141
1142 &lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
1143 git clone git://git.debian.org/git/collab-maint/bitcoin
1144 cd bitcoin
1145 DEB_MAINTAINER_MODE=1 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp fakeroot debian/rules clean
1146 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp git-buildpackage --git-ignore-new
1147 &lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;
1148
1149 &lt;p&gt;You might have to install some build dependencies as well. The
1150 list of commands should give you two packages, bitcoind and
1151 bitcoin-qt, ready for use in a Squeeze environment. Note that the
1152 client will download the complete set of bitcoin &quot;blocks&quot;, which need
1153 around 5.6 GiB of data on my machine at the moment. Make sure your
1154 ~/.bitcoin/ directory have lots of spare room if you want to download
1155 all the blocks. The client will warn if the disk is getting full, so
1156 there is not really a problem if you got too little room, but you will
1157 not be able to get all the features out of the client.&lt;/p&gt;
1158
1159 &lt;p&gt;As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1160 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1161 &lt;b&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&amp;label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog&quot;&gt;15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/b&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
1162 </description>
1163 </item>
1164
1165 <item>
1166 <title>A word on bitcoin support in Debian</title>
1167 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_word_on_bitcoin_support_in_Debian.html</link>
1168 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_word_on_bitcoin_support_in_Debian.html</guid>
1169 <pubDate>Fri, 21 Dec 2012 23:59:00 +0100</pubDate>
1170 <description>&lt;p&gt;It has been a while since I wrote about
1171 &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bitcoin.org/&quot;&gt;bitcoin&lt;/a&gt;, the decentralised
1172 peer-to-peer based crypto-currency, and the reason is simply that I
1173 have been busy elsewhere. But two days ago, I started looking at the
1174 state of &lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin&quot;&gt;bitcoin in
1175 Debian&lt;/a&gt; again to try to recover my old bitcoin wallet. The package
1176 is now maintained by a
1177 &lt;a href=&quot;https://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-bitcoin/&quot;&gt;team of
1178 people&lt;/a&gt;, and the grunt work had already been done by this team. We
1179 owe a huge thank you to all these team members. :)
1180 But I was sad to discover that the bitcoin client is missing in
1181 Wheezy. It is only available in Sid (and an outdated client from
1182 backports). The client had several RC bugs registered in BTS blocking
1183 it from entering testing. To try to help the team and improve the
1184 situation, I spent some time providing patches and triaging the bug
1185 reports. I also had a look at the bitcoin package available from Matt
1186 Corallo in a
1187 &lt;a href=&quot;https://launchpad.net/~bitcoin/+archive/bitcoin&quot;&gt;PPA for
1188 Ubuntu&lt;/a&gt;, and moved the useful pieces from that version into the
1189 Debian package.&lt;/p&gt;
1190
1191 &lt;p&gt;After checking with the main package maintainer Jonas Smedegaard on
1192 IRC, I pushed several patches into the collab-maint git repository to
1193 improve the package. It now contains fixes for the RC issues (not from
1194 me, but fixed by Scott Howard), build rules for a Qt GUI client
1195 package, konqueror support for the bitcoin: URI and bash completion
1196 setup. As I work on Debian Squeeze, I also created
1197 &lt;a href=&quot;http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-bitcoin-devel/Week-of-Mon-20121217/000041.html&quot;&gt;a
1198 patch to backport&lt;/a&gt; the latest version. Jonas is going to look at
1199 it and try to integrate it into the git repository before uploading a
1200 new version to unstable.
1201
1202 &lt;p&gt;I would very much like bitcoin to succeed, to get rid of the
1203 centralized control currently exercised in the monetary system. I
1204 find it completely unacceptable that the USA government is collecting
1205 transaction data for almost all international money transfers (most are done in USD and transaction logs shipped to the spooks), and
1206 that the major credit card companies can block legal money
1207 transactions to Wikileaks. But for bitcoin to succeed, more people
1208 need to use bitcoins, and more people need to accept bitcoins when
1209 they sell products and services. Improving the bitcoin support in
1210 Debian is a small step in the right direction, but not enough.
1211 Unfortunately the user experience when browsing the web and wanting to
1212 pay with bitcoin is still not very good. The bitcoin: URI is a step
1213 in the right direction, but need to work in most or every browser in
1214 use. Also the bitcoin-qt client is too heavy to fire up to do a
1215 quick transaction. I believe there are other clients available, but
1216 have not tested them.&lt;/p&gt;
1217
1218 &lt;p&gt;My
1219 &lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html&quot;&gt;experiment
1220 with bitcoins&lt;/a&gt; showed that at least some of my readers use bitcoin.
1221 I received 20.15 BTC so far on the address I provided in my blog two
1222 years ago, as can be
1223 &lt;a href=&quot;http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&quot;&gt;seen
1224 on the blockexplorer service&lt;/a&gt;. Thank you everyone for your
1225 donation. The blockexplorer service demonstrates quite well that
1226 bitcoin is not quite anonymous and untracked. :) I wonder if the
1227 number of users have gone up since then. If you use bitcoin and want
1228 to show your support of my activity, please send Bitcoin donations to
1229 the same address as last time,
1230 &lt;b&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&amp;label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog&quot;&gt;15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/b&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
1231 </description>
1232 </item>
1233
1234 <item>
1235 <title>Git repository for song book for Computer Scientists</title>
1236 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Git_repository_for_song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html</link>
1237 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Git_repository_for_song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html</guid>
1238 <pubDate>Fri, 7 Sep 2012 13:50:00 +0200</pubDate>
1239 <description>&lt;p&gt;As I
1240 &lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html&quot;&gt;mentioned
1241 this summer&lt;/a&gt;, I have created a Computer Science song book a few
1242 years ago, and today I finally found time to create a public
1243 &lt;a href=&quot;https://gitorious.org/pere-cs-songbook/pere-cs-songbook&quot;&gt;Gitorious
1244 repository for the project&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
1245
1246 &lt;p&gt;If you want to help out, please clone the source and submit patches
1247 to the HTML version. To generate the PDF and PostScript version,
1248 please use prince XML, or let me know about a useful free software
1249 processor capable of creating a good looking PDF from the HTML.&lt;/p&gt;
1250
1251 &lt;p&gt;Want to sing? You can still find the song book in HTML, PDF and
1252 PostScript formats at
1253 &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/&quot;&gt;Petter&#39;s Computer
1254 Science Songbook&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
1255 </description>
1256 </item>
1257
1258 <item>
1259 <title>Gratulerer med 19-årsdagen, Debian!</title>
1260 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gratulerer_med_19__rsdagen__Debian_.html</link>
1261 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gratulerer_med_19__rsdagen__Debian_.html</guid>
1262 <pubDate>Thu, 16 Aug 2012 11:20:00 +0200</pubDate>
1263 <description>&lt;p&gt;I dag fyller
1264 &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120813&quot;&gt;Debian-prosjektet 19
1265 år&lt;/a&gt;. Jeg har fulgt det de siste 12 årene, og er veldig glad for å kunne
1266 si gratulerer med dagen, Debian!&lt;/p&gt;
1267 </description>
1268 </item>
1269
1270 <item>
1271 <title>Song book for Computer Scientists</title>
1272 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html</link>
1273 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html</guid>
1274 <pubDate>Sun, 24 Jun 2012 13:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
1275 <description>&lt;p&gt;Many years ago, while studying Computer Science at the
1276 &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.uit.no/&quot;&gt;University of Tromsø&lt;/a&gt;, I started
1277 collecting computer related songs for use at parties. The original
1278 version was written in LaTeX, but a few years ago I got help from
1279 Håkon W. Lie, one of the inventors of W3C CSS, to convert it to HTML
1280 while keeping the ability to create a nice book in PDF format. I have
1281 not had time to maintain the book for a while now, and guess I should
1282 put it up on some public version control repository where others can
1283 help me extend and update the book. If anyone is volunteering to help
1284 me with this, send me an email. Also let me know if there are songs
1285 missing in my book.&lt;/p&gt;
1286
1287 &lt;p&gt;I have not mentioned the book on my blog so far, and it occured to
1288 me today that I really should let all my readers share the joys of
1289 singing out load about programming, computers and computer networks.
1290 Especially now that &lt;a href=&quot;http://debconf12.debconf.org/&quot;&gt;Debconf
1291 12&lt;/a&gt; is about to start (and I am not going). Want to sing? Check
1292 out &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/&quot;&gt;Petter&#39;s
1293 Computer Science Songbook&lt;/a&gt;.
1294 </description>
1295 </item>
1296
1297 <item>
1298 <title>Automatically upgrading server firmware on Dell PowerEdge</title>
1299 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatically_upgrading_server_firmware_on_Dell_PowerEdge.html</link>
1300 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatically_upgrading_server_firmware_on_Dell_PowerEdge.html</guid>
1301 <pubDate>Mon, 21 Nov 2011 12:00:00 +0100</pubDate>
1302 <description>&lt;p&gt;At work we have heaps of servers. I believe the total count is
1303 around 1000 at the moment. To be able to get help from the vendors
1304 when something go wrong, we want to keep the firmware on the servers
1305 up to date. If the firmware isn&#39;t the latest and greatest, the
1306 vendors typically refuse to start debugging any problems until the
1307 firmware is upgraded. So before every reboot, we want to upgrade the
1308 firmware, and we would really like everyone handling servers at the
1309 university to do this themselves when they plan to reboot a machine.
1310 For that to happen we at the unix server admin group need to provide
1311 the tools to do so.&lt;/p&gt;
1312
1313 &lt;p&gt;To make firmware upgrading easier, I am working on a script to
1314 fetch and install the latest firmware for the servers we got. Most of
1315 our hardware are from Dell and HP, so I have focused on these servers
1316 so far. This blog post is about the Dell part.&lt;/P&gt;
1317
1318 &lt;p&gt;On the Dell FTP site I was lucky enough to find
1319 &lt;a href=&quot;ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz&quot;&gt;an XML file&lt;/a&gt;
1320 with firmware information for all 11th generation servers, listing
1321 which firmware should be used on a given model and where on the FTP
1322 site I can find it. Using a simple perl XML parser I can then
1323 download the shell scripts Dell provides to do firmware upgrades from
1324 within Linux and reboot when all the firmware is primed and ready to
1325 be activated on the first reboot.&lt;/p&gt;
1326
1327 &lt;p&gt;This is the Dell related fragment of the perl code I am working on.
1328 Are there anyone working on similar tools for firmware upgrading all
1329 servers at a site? Please get in touch and lets share resources.&lt;/p&gt;
1330
1331 &lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
1332 #!/usr/bin/perl
1333 use strict;
1334 use warnings;
1335 use File::Temp qw(tempdir);
1336 BEGIN {
1337 # Install needed RHEL packages if missing
1338 my %rhelmodules = (
1339 &#39;XML::Simple&#39; =&gt; &#39;perl-XML-Simple&#39;,
1340 );
1341 for my $module (keys %rhelmodules) {
1342 eval &quot;use $module;&quot;;
1343 if ($@) {
1344 my $pkg = $rhelmodules{$module};
1345 system(&quot;yum install -y $pkg&quot;);
1346 eval &quot;use $module;&quot;;
1347 }
1348 }
1349 }
1350 my $errorsto = &#39;pere@hungry.com&#39;;
1351
1352 upgrade_dell();
1353
1354 exit 0;
1355
1356 sub run_firmware_script {
1357 my ($opts, $script) = @_;
1358 unless ($script) {
1359 print STDERR &quot;fail: missing script name\n&quot;;
1360 exit 1
1361 }
1362 print STDERR &quot;Running $script\n\n&quot;;
1363
1364 if (0 == system(&quot;sh $script $opts&quot;)) { # FIXME correct exit code handling
1365 print STDERR &quot;success: firmware script ran succcessfully\n&quot;;
1366 } else {
1367 print STDERR &quot;fail: firmware script returned error\n&quot;;
1368 }
1369 }
1370
1371 sub run_firmware_scripts {
1372 my ($opts, @dirs) = @_;
1373 # Run firmware packages
1374 for my $dir (@dirs) {
1375 print STDERR &quot;info: Running scripts in $dir\n&quot;;
1376 opendir(my $dh, $dir) or die &quot;Unable to open directory $dir: $!&quot;;
1377 while (my $s = readdir $dh) {
1378 next if $s =~ m/^\.\.?/;
1379 run_firmware_script($opts, &quot;$dir/$s&quot;);
1380 }
1381 closedir $dh;
1382 }
1383 }
1384
1385 sub download {
1386 my $url = shift;
1387 print STDERR &quot;info: Downloading $url\n&quot;;
1388 system(&quot;wget --quiet \&quot;$url\&quot;&quot;);
1389 }
1390
1391 sub upgrade_dell {
1392 my @dirs;
1393 my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
1394 chomp $product;
1395
1396 if ($product =~ m/PowerEdge/) {
1397
1398 # on RHEL, these pacakges are needed by the firwmare upgrade scripts
1399 system(&#39;yum install -y compat-libstdc++-33.i686 libstdc++.i686 libxml2.i686 procmail&#39;);
1400
1401 my $tmpdir = tempdir(
1402 CLEANUP =&gt; 1
1403 );
1404 chdir($tmpdir);
1405 fetch_dell_fw(&#39;catalog/Catalog.xml.gz&#39;);
1406 system(&#39;gunzip Catalog.xml.gz&#39;);
1407 my @paths = fetch_dell_fw_list(&#39;Catalog.xml&#39;);
1408 # -q is quiet, disabling interactivity and reducing console output
1409 my $fwopts = &quot;-q&quot;;
1410 if (@paths) {
1411 for my $url (@paths) {
1412 fetch_dell_fw($url);
1413 }
1414 run_firmware_scripts($fwopts, $tmpdir);
1415 } else {
1416 print STDERR &quot;error: Unsupported Dell model &#39;$product&#39;.\n&quot;;
1417 print STDERR &quot;error: Please report to $errorsto.\n&quot;;
1418 }
1419 chdir(&#39;/&#39;);
1420 } else {
1421 print STDERR &quot;error: Unsupported Dell model &#39;$product&#39;.\n&quot;;
1422 print STDERR &quot;error: Please report to $errorsto.\n&quot;;
1423 }
1424 }
1425
1426 sub fetch_dell_fw {
1427 my $path = shift;
1428 my $url = &quot;ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/$path&quot;;
1429 download($url);
1430 }
1431
1432 # Using ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz, figure out which
1433 # firmware packages to download from Dell. Only work for Linux
1434 # machines and 11th generation Dell servers.
1435 sub fetch_dell_fw_list {
1436 my $filename = shift;
1437
1438 my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
1439 chomp $product;
1440 my ($mybrand, $mymodel) = split(/\s+/, $product);
1441
1442 print STDERR &quot;Finding firmware bundles for $mybrand $mymodel\n&quot;;
1443
1444 my $xml = XMLin($filename);
1445 my @paths;
1446 for my $bundle (@{$xml-&gt;{SoftwareBundle}}) {
1447 my $brand = $bundle-&gt;{TargetSystems}-&gt;{Brand}-&gt;{Display}-&gt;{content};
1448 my $model = $bundle-&gt;{TargetSystems}-&gt;{Brand}-&gt;{Model}-&gt;{Display}-&gt;{content};
1449 my $oscode;
1450 if (&quot;ARRAY&quot; eq ref $bundle-&gt;{TargetOSes}-&gt;{OperatingSystem}) {
1451 $oscode = $bundle-&gt;{TargetOSes}-&gt;{OperatingSystem}[0]-&gt;{osCode};
1452 } else {
1453 $oscode = $bundle-&gt;{TargetOSes}-&gt;{OperatingSystem}-&gt;{osCode};
1454 }
1455 if ($mybrand eq $brand &amp;&amp; $mymodel eq $model &amp;&amp; &quot;LIN&quot; eq $oscode)
1456 {
1457 @paths = map { $_-&gt;{path} } @{$bundle-&gt;{Contents}-&gt;{Package}};
1458 }
1459 }
1460 for my $component (@{$xml-&gt;{SoftwareComponent}}) {
1461 my $componenttype = $component-&gt;{ComponentType}-&gt;{value};
1462
1463 # Drop application packages, only firmware and BIOS
1464 next if &#39;APAC&#39; eq $componenttype;
1465
1466 my $cpath = $component-&gt;{path};
1467 for my $path (@paths) {
1468 if ($cpath =~ m%/$path$%) {
1469 push(@paths, $cpath);
1470 }
1471 }
1472 }
1473 return @paths;
1474 }
1475 &lt;/pre&gt;
1476
1477 &lt;p&gt;The code is only tested on RedHat Enterprise Linux, but I suspect
1478 it could work on other platforms with some tweaking. Anyone know a
1479 index like Catalog.xml is available from HP for HP servers? At the
1480 moment I maintain a similar list manually and it is quickly getting
1481 outdated.&lt;/p&gt;
1482 </description>
1483 </item>
1484
1485 <item>
1486 <title>How is booting into runlevel 1 different from single user boots?</title>
1487 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_is_booting_into_runlevel_1_different_from_single_user_boots_.html</link>
1488 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_is_booting_into_runlevel_1_different_from_single_user_boots_.html</guid>
1489 <pubDate>Thu, 4 Aug 2011 12:40:00 +0200</pubDate>
1490 <description>&lt;p&gt;Wouter Verhelst have some
1491 &lt;a href=&quot;http://grep.be/blog/en/retorts/pere_kubuntu_boot&quot;&gt;interesting
1492 comments and opinions&lt;/a&gt; on my blog post on
1493 &lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_should_start_from__etc_rcS_d__in_Debian____almost_nothing.html&quot;&gt;the
1494 need to clean up /etc/rcS.d/ in Debian&lt;/a&gt; and my blog post about
1495 &lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_missing_in_the_Debian_desktop__or_why_my_parents_use_Kubuntu.html&quot;&gt;the
1496 default KDE desktop in Debian&lt;/a&gt;. I only have time to address one
1497 small piece of his comment now, and though it best to address the
1498 misunderstanding he bring forward:&lt;/p&gt;
1499
1500 &lt;p&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;
1501 Currently, a system admin has four options: [...] boot to a
1502 single-user system (by adding &#39;single&#39; to the kernel command line;
1503 this runs rcS and rc1 scripts)
1504 &lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
1505
1506 &lt;p&gt;This make me believe Wouter believe booting into single user mode
1507 and booting into runlevel 1 is the same. I am not surprised he
1508 believe this, because it would make sense and is a quite sensible
1509 thing to believe. But because the boot in Debian is slightly broken,
1510 runlevel 1 do not work properly and it isn&#39;t the same as single user
1511 mode. I&#39;ll try to explain what is actually happing, but it is a bit
1512 hard to explain.&lt;/p&gt;
1513
1514 &lt;p&gt;Single user mode is defined like this in /etc/inittab:
1515 &quot;&lt;tt&gt;~~:S:wait:/sbin/sulogin&lt;/tt&gt;&quot;. This means the only thing that is
1516 executed in single user mode is sulogin. Single user mode is a boot
1517 state &quot;between&quot; the runlevels, and when booting into single user mode,
1518 only the scripts in /etc/rcS.d/ are executed before the init process
1519 enters the single user state. When switching to runlevel 1, the state
1520 is in fact not ending in runlevel 1, but it passes through runlevel 1
1521 and end up in the single user mode (see /etc/rc1.d/S03single, which
1522 runs &quot;init -t1 S&quot; to switch to single user mode at the end of runlevel
1523 1. It is confusing that the &#39;S&#39; (single user) init mode is not the
1524 mode enabled by /etc/rcS.d/ (which is more like the initial boot
1525 mode).&lt;/p&gt;
1526
1527 &lt;p&gt;This summary might make it clearer. When booting for the first
1528 time into single user mode, the following commands are executed:
1529 &quot;&lt;tt&gt;/etc/init.d/rc S; /sbin/sulogin&lt;/tt&gt;&quot;. When booting into
1530 runlevel 1, the following commands are executed: &quot;&lt;tt&gt;/etc/init.d/rc
1531 S; /etc/init.d/rc 1; /sbin/sulogin&lt;/tt&gt;&quot;. A problem show up when
1532 trying to continue after visiting single user mode. Not all services
1533 are started again as they should, causing the machine to end up in an
1534 unpredicatble state. This is why Debian admins recommend rebooting
1535 after visiting single user mode.&lt;/p&gt;
1536
1537 &lt;p&gt;A similar problem with runlevel 1 is caused by the amount of
1538 scripts executed from /etc/rcS.d/. When switching from say runlevel 2
1539 to runlevel 1, the services started from /etc/rcS.d/ are not properly
1540 stopped when passing through the scripts in /etc/rc1.d/, and not
1541 started again when switching away from runlevel 1 to the runlevels
1542 2-5. I believe the problem is best fixed by moving all the scripts
1543 out of /etc/rcS.d/ that are not &lt;strong&gt;required&lt;/strong&gt; to get a
1544 functioning single user mode during boot.&lt;/p&gt;
1545
1546 &lt;p&gt;I have spent several years investigating the Debian boot system,
1547 and discovered this problem a few years ago. I suspect it originates
1548 from when sysvinit was introduced into Debian, a long time ago.&lt;/p&gt;
1549 </description>
1550 </item>
1551
1552 <item>
1553 <title>What should start from /etc/rcS.d/ in Debian? - almost nothing</title>
1554 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_should_start_from__etc_rcS_d__in_Debian____almost_nothing.html</link>
1555 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_should_start_from__etc_rcS_d__in_Debian____almost_nothing.html</guid>
1556 <pubDate>Sat, 30 Jul 2011 14:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
1557 <description>&lt;p&gt;In the Debian boot system, several packages include scripts that
1558 are started from /etc/rcS.d/. In fact, there is a bite more of them
1559 than make sense, and this causes a few problems. What kind of
1560 problems, you might ask. There are at least two problems. The first
1561 is that it is not possible to recover a machine after switching to
1562 runlevel 1. One need to actually reboot to get the machine back to
1563 the expected state. The other is that single user boot will sometimes
1564 run into problems because some of the subsystems are activated before
1565 the root login is presented, causing problems when trying to recover a
1566 machine from a problem in that subsystem. A minor additional point is
1567 that moving more scripts out of rcS.d/ and into the other rc#.d/
1568 directories will increase the amount of scripts that can run in
1569 parallel during boot, and thus decrease the boot time.&lt;/p&gt;
1570
1571 &lt;p&gt;So, which scripts should start from rcS.d/. In short, only the
1572 scripts that _have_ to execute before the root login prompt is
1573 presented during a single user boot should go there. Everything else
1574 should go into the numeric runlevels. This means things like
1575 lm-sensors, fuse and x11-common should not run from rcS.d, but from
1576 the numeric runlevels. Today in Debian, there are around 115 init.d
1577 scripts that are started from rcS.d/, and most of them should be moved
1578 out. Do your package have one of them? Please help us make single
1579 user and runlevel 1 better by moving it.&lt;/p&gt;
1580
1581 &lt;p&gt;Scripts setting up the screen, keyboard, system partitions
1582 etc. should still be started from rcS.d/, but there is for example no
1583 need to have the network enabled before the single user login prompt
1584 is presented.&lt;/p&gt;
1585
1586 &lt;p&gt;As always, things are not so easy to fix as they sound. To keep
1587 Debian systems working while scripts migrate and during upgrades, the
1588 scripts need to be moved from rcS.d/ to rc2.d/ in reverse dependency
1589 order, ie the scripts that nothing in rcS.d/ depend on can be moved,
1590 and the next ones can only be moved when their dependencies have been
1591 moved first. This migration must be done sequentially while we ensure
1592 that the package system upgrade packages in the right order to keep
1593 the system state correct. This will require some coordination when it
1594 comes to network related packages, but most of the packages with
1595 scripts that should migrate do not have anything in rcS.d/ depending
1596 on them. Some packages have already been updated, like the sudo
1597 package, while others are still left to do. I wish I had time to work
1598 on this myself, but real live constrains make it unlikely that I will
1599 find time to push this forward.&lt;/p&gt;
1600 </description>
1601 </item>
1602
1603 <item>
1604 <title>What is missing in the Debian desktop, or why my parents use Kubuntu</title>
1605 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_missing_in_the_Debian_desktop__or_why_my_parents_use_Kubuntu.html</link>
1606 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_missing_in_the_Debian_desktop__or_why_my_parents_use_Kubuntu.html</guid>
1607 <pubDate>Fri, 29 Jul 2011 08:10:00 +0200</pubDate>
1608 <description>&lt;p&gt;While at Debconf11, I have several times during discussions
1609 mentioned the issues I believe should be improved in Debian for its
1610 desktop to be useful for more people. The use case for this is my
1611 parents, which are currently running Kubuntu which solve the
1612 issues.&lt;/p&gt;
1613
1614 &lt;p&gt;I suspect these four missing features are not very hard to
1615 implement. After all, they are present in Ubuntu, so if we wanted to
1616 do this in Debian we would have a source.&lt;/p&gt;
1617
1618 &lt;ol&gt;
1619
1620 &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Simple GUI based upgrade of packages.&lt;/strong&gt; When there
1621 are new packages available for upgrades, a icon in the KDE status bar
1622 indicate this, and clicking on it will activate the simple upgrade
1623 tool to handle it. I have no problem guiding both of my parents
1624 through the process over the phone. If a kernel reboot is required,
1625 this too is indicated by the status bars and the upgrade tool. Last
1626 time I checked, nothing with the same features was working in KDE in
1627 Debian.&lt;/li&gt;
1628
1629 &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Simple handling of missing Firefox browser
1630 plugins.&lt;/strong&gt; When the browser encounter a MIME type it do not
1631 currently have a handler for, it will ask the user if the system
1632 should search for a package that would add support for this MIME type,
1633 and if the user say yes, the APT sources will be searched for packages
1634 advertising the MIME type in their control file (visible in the
1635 Packages file in the APT archive). If one or more packages are found,
1636 it is a simple click of the mouse to add support for the missing mime
1637 type. If the package require the user to accept some non-free
1638 license, this is explained to the user. The entire process make it
1639 more clear to the user why something do not work in the browser, and
1640 make the chances higher for the user to blame the web page authors and
1641 not the browser for any missing features.&lt;/li&gt;
1642
1643 &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Simple handling of missing multimedia codec/format
1644 handlers.&lt;/strong&gt; When the media players encounter a format or codec
1645 it is not supporting, a dialog pop up asking the user if the system
1646 should search for a package that would add support for it. This
1647 happen with things like MP3, Windows Media or H.264. The selection
1648 and installation procedure is very similar to the Firefox browser
1649 plugin handling. This is as far as I know implemented using a
1650 gstreamer hook. The end result is that the user easily get access to
1651 the codecs that are present from the APT archives available, while
1652 explaining more on why a given format is unsupported by Ubuntu.&lt;/li&gt;
1653
1654 &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Better browser handling of some MIME types.&lt;/strong&gt; When
1655 displaying a text/plain file in my Debian browser, it will propose to
1656 start emacs to show it. If I remember correctly, when doing the same
1657 in Kunbutu it show the file as a text file in the browser. At least I
1658 know Opera will show text files within the browser. I much prefer the
1659 latter behaviour.&lt;/li&gt;
1660
1661 &lt;/ol&gt;
1662
1663 &lt;p&gt;There are other nice features as well, like the simplified suite
1664 upgrader, but given that I am the one mostly doing the dist-upgrade,
1665 it do not matter much.&lt;/p&gt;
1666
1667 &lt;p&gt;I really hope we could get these features in place for the next
1668 Debian release. It would require the coordinated effort of several
1669 maintainers, but would make the end user experience a lot better.&lt;/p&gt;
1670 </description>
1671 </item>
1672
1673 <item>
1674 <title>Perl modules used by FixMyStreet which are missing in Debian/Squeeze</title>
1675 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Perl_modules_used_by_FixMyStreet_which_are_missing_in_Debian_Squeeze.html</link>
1676 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Perl_modules_used_by_FixMyStreet_which_are_missing_in_Debian_Squeeze.html</guid>
1677 <pubDate>Tue, 26 Jul 2011 12:25:00 +0200</pubDate>
1678 <description>&lt;p&gt;The Norwegian &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fiksgatami.no/&quot;&gt;FiksGataMi&lt;/A&gt;
1679 site is build on Debian/Squeeze, and this platform was chosen because
1680 I am most familiar with Debian (being a Debian Developer for around 10
1681 years) because it is the latest stable Debian release which should get
1682 security support for a few years.&lt;/p&gt;
1683
1684 &lt;p&gt;The web service is written in Perl, and depend on some perl modules
1685 that are missing in Debian at the moment. It would be great if these
1686 modules were added to the Debian archive, allowing anyone to set up
1687 their own &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fixmystreet.com&quot;&gt;FixMyStreet&lt;/a&gt; clone
1688 in their own country using only Debian packages. The list of modules
1689 missing in Debian/Squeeze isn&#39;t very long, and I hope the perl group
1690 will find time to package the 12 modules Catalyst::Plugin::SmartURI,
1691 Catalyst::Plugin::Unicode::Encoding, Catalyst::View::TT, Devel::Hide,
1692 Sort::Key, Statistics::Distributions, Template::Plugin::Comma,
1693 Template::Plugin::DateTime::Format, Term::Size::Any, Term::Size::Perl,
1694 URI::SmartURI and Web::Scraper to make the maintenance of FixMyStreet
1695 easier in the future.&lt;/p&gt;
1696
1697 &lt;p&gt;Thanks to the great tools in Debian, getting the missing modules
1698 installed on my server was a simple call to &#39;cpan2deb Module::Name&#39;
1699 and &#39;dpkg -i&#39; to install the resulting package. But this leave me
1700 with the responsibility of tracking security problems, which I really
1701 do not have time for.&lt;/p&gt;
1702 </description>
1703 </item>
1704
1705 <item>
1706 <title>A Norwegian FixMyStreet have kept me busy the last few weeks</title>
1707 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Norwegian_FixMyStreet_have_kept_me_busy_the_last_few_weeks.html</link>
1708 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Norwegian_FixMyStreet_have_kept_me_busy_the_last_few_weeks.html</guid>
1709 <pubDate>Sun, 3 Apr 2011 22:50:00 +0200</pubDate>
1710 <description>&lt;p&gt;Here is a small update for my English readers. Most of my blog
1711 posts have been in Norwegian the last few weeks, so here is a short
1712 update in English.&lt;/p&gt;
1713
1714 &lt;p&gt;The kids still keep me too busy to get much free software work
1715 done, but I did manage to organise a project to get a Norwegian port
1716 of the British service
1717 &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fixmystreet.com/&quot;&gt;FixMyStreet&lt;/a&gt; up and running,
1718 and it has been running for a month now. The entire project has been
1719 organised by me and two others. Around Christmas we gathered sponsors
1720 to fund the development work. In January I drafted a contract with
1721 &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mysociety.org/&quot;&gt;mySociety&lt;/a&gt; on what to develop,
1722 and in February the development took place. Most of it involved
1723 converting the source to use GPS coordinates instead of British
1724 easting/northing, and the resulting code should be a lot easier to get
1725 running in any country by now. The Norwegian
1726 &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fiksgatami.no/&quot;&gt;FiksGataMi&lt;/a&gt; is using
1727 &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.openstreetmap.org/&quot;&gt;OpenStreetmap&lt;/a&gt; as the map
1728 source and the source for administrative borders in Norway, and
1729 support for this had to be added/fixed.&lt;/p&gt;
1730
1731 &lt;p&gt;The Norwegian version went live March 3th, and we spent the weekend
1732 polishing the system before we announced it March 7th. The system is
1733 running on a KVM instance of Debian/Squeeze, and has seen almost 3000
1734 problem reports in a few weeks. Soon we hope to announce the Android
1735 and iPhone versions making it even easier to report problems with the
1736 public infrastructure.&lt;/p&gt;
1737
1738 &lt;p&gt;Perhaps something to consider for those of you in countries without
1739 such service?&lt;/p&gt;
1740 </description>
1741 </item>
1742
1743 <item>
1744 <title>Using NVD and CPE to track CVEs in locally maintained software</title>
1745 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_NVD_and_CPE_to_track_CVEs_in_locally_maintained_software.html</link>
1746 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_NVD_and_CPE_to_track_CVEs_in_locally_maintained_software.html</guid>
1747 <pubDate>Fri, 28 Jan 2011 15:40:00 +0100</pubDate>
1748 <description>&lt;p&gt;The last few days I have looked at ways to track open security
1749 issues here at my work with the University of Oslo. My idea is that
1750 it should be possible to use the information about security issues
1751 available on the Internet, and check our locally
1752 maintained/distributed software against this information. It should
1753 allow us to verify that no known security issues are forgotten. The
1754 CVE database listing vulnerabilities seem like a great central point,
1755 and by using the package lists from Debian mapped to CVEs provided by
1756 the testing security team, I believed it should be possible to figure
1757 out which security holes were present in our free software
1758 collection.&lt;/p&gt;
1759
1760 &lt;p&gt;After reading up on the topic, it became obvious that the first
1761 building block is to be able to name software packages in a unique and
1762 consistent way across data sources. I considered several ways to do
1763 this, for example coming up with my own naming scheme like using URLs
1764 to project home pages or URLs to the Freshmeat entries, or using some
1765 existing naming scheme. And it seem like I am not the first one to
1766 come across this problem, as MITRE already proposed and implemented a
1767 solution. Enter the &lt;a href=&quot;http://cpe.mitre.org/index.html&quot;&gt;Common
1768 Platform Enumeration&lt;/a&gt; dictionary, a vocabulary for referring to
1769 software, hardware and other platform components. The CPE ids are
1770 mapped to CVEs in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.nvd.nist.gov/&quot;&gt;National
1771 Vulnerability Database&lt;/a&gt;, allowing me to look up know security
1772 issues for any CPE name. With this in place, all I need to do is to
1773 locate the CPE id for the software packages we use at the university.
1774 This is fairly trivial (I google for &#39;cve cpe $package&#39; and check the
1775 NVD entry if a CVE for the package exist).&lt;/p&gt;
1776
1777 &lt;p&gt;To give you an example. The GNU gzip source package have the CPE
1778 name cpe:/a:gnu:gzip. If the old version 1.3.3 was the package to
1779 check out, one could look up
1780 &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/search?cpe=cpe%3A%2Fa%3Agnu%3Agzip:1.3.3&quot;&gt;cpe:/a:gnu:gzip:1.3.3
1781 in NVD&lt;/a&gt; and get a list of 6 security holes with public CVE entries.
1782 The most recent one is
1783 &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2010-0001&quot;&gt;CVE-2010-0001&lt;/a&gt;,
1784 and at the bottom of the NVD page for this vulnerability the complete
1785 list of affected versions is provided.&lt;/p&gt;
1786
1787 &lt;p&gt;The NVD database of CVEs is also available as a XML dump, allowing
1788 for offline processing of issues. Using this dump, I&#39;ve written a
1789 small script taking a list of CPEs as input and list all CVEs
1790 affecting the packages represented by these CPEs. One give it CPEs
1791 with version numbers as specified above and get a list of open
1792 security issues out.&lt;/p&gt;
1793
1794 &lt;p&gt;Of course for this approach to be useful, the quality of the NVD
1795 information need to be high. For that to happen, I believe as many as
1796 possible need to use and contribute to the NVD database. I notice
1797 RHEL is providing
1798 &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.redhat.com/security/data/metrics/rhsamapcpe.txt&quot;&gt;a
1799 map from CVE to CPE&lt;/a&gt;, indicating that they are using the CPE
1800 information. I&#39;m not aware of Debian and Ubuntu doing the same.&lt;/p&gt;
1801
1802 &lt;p&gt;To get an idea about the quality for free software, I spent some
1803 time making it possible to compare the CVE database from Debian with
1804 the CVE database in NVD. The result look fairly good, but there are
1805 some inconsistencies in NVD (same software package having several
1806 CPEs), and some inaccuracies (NVD not mentioning buggy packages that
1807 Debian believe are affected by a CVE). Hope to find time to improve
1808 the quality of NVD, but that require being able to get in touch with
1809 someone maintaining it. So far my three emails with questions and
1810 corrections have not seen any reply, but I hope contact can be
1811 established soon.&lt;/p&gt;
1812
1813 &lt;p&gt;An interesting application for CPEs is cross platform package
1814 mapping. It would be useful to know which packages in for example
1815 RHEL, OpenSuSe and Mandriva are missing from Debian and Ubuntu, and
1816 this would be trivial if all linux distributions provided CPE entries
1817 for their packages.&lt;/p&gt;
1818 </description>
1819 </item>
1820
1821 <item>
1822 <title>Which module is loaded for a given PCI and USB device?</title>
1823 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Which_module_is_loaded_for_a_given_PCI_and_USB_device_.html</link>
1824 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Which_module_is_loaded_for_a_given_PCI_and_USB_device_.html</guid>
1825 <pubDate>Sun, 23 Jan 2011 00:20:00 +0100</pubDate>
1826 <description>&lt;p&gt;In the
1827 &lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/discover-data&quot;&gt;discover-data&lt;/a&gt;
1828 package in Debian, there is a script to report useful information
1829 about the running hardware for use when people report missing
1830 information. One part of this script that I find very useful when
1831 debugging hardware problems, is the part mapping loaded kernel module
1832 to the PCI device it claims. It allow me to quickly see if the kernel
1833 module I expect is driving the hardware I am struggling with. To see
1834 the output, make sure discover-data is installed and run
1835 &lt;tt&gt;/usr/share/bug/discover-data 3&gt;&amp;1&lt;/tt&gt;. The relevant output on
1836 one of my machines like this:&lt;/p&gt;
1837
1838 &lt;pre&gt;
1839 loaded modules:
1840 10de:03eb i2c_nforce2
1841 10de:03f1 ohci_hcd
1842 10de:03f2 ehci_hcd
1843 10de:03f0 snd_hda_intel
1844 10de:03ec pata_amd
1845 10de:03f6 sata_nv
1846 1022:1103 k8temp
1847 109e:036e bttv
1848 109e:0878 snd_bt87x
1849 11ab:4364 sky2
1850 &lt;/pre&gt;
1851
1852 &lt;p&gt;The code in question look like this, slightly modified for
1853 readability and to drop the output to file descriptor 3:&lt;/p&gt;
1854
1855 &lt;pre&gt;
1856 if [ -d /sys/bus/pci/devices/ ] ; then
1857 echo loaded pci modules:
1858 (
1859 cd /sys/bus/pci/devices/
1860 for address in * ; do
1861 if [ -d &quot;$address/driver/module&quot; ] ; then
1862 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
1863 if grep -q &quot;^$module &quot; /proc/modules ; then
1864 address=$(echo $address |sed s/0000://)
1865 id=`lspci -n -s $address | tail -n 1 | awk &#39;{print $3}&#39;`
1866 echo &quot;$id $module&quot;
1867 fi
1868 fi
1869 done
1870 )
1871 echo
1872 fi
1873 &lt;/pre&gt;
1874
1875 &lt;p&gt;Similar code could be used to extract USB device module
1876 mappings:&lt;/p&gt;
1877
1878 &lt;pre&gt;
1879 if [ -d /sys/bus/usb/devices/ ] ; then
1880 echo loaded usb modules:
1881 (
1882 cd /sys/bus/usb/devices/
1883 for address in * ; do
1884 if [ -d &quot;$address/driver/module&quot; ] ; then
1885 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
1886 if grep -q &quot;^$module &quot; /proc/modules ; then
1887 address=$(echo $address |sed s/0000://)
1888 id=$(lsusb -s $address | tail -n 1 | awk &#39;{print $6}&#39;)
1889 if [ &quot;$id&quot; ] ; then
1890 echo &quot;$id $module&quot;
1891 fi
1892 fi
1893 fi
1894 done
1895 )
1896 echo
1897 fi
1898 &lt;/pre&gt;
1899
1900 &lt;p&gt;This might perhaps be something to include in other tools as
1901 well.&lt;/p&gt;
1902 </description>
1903 </item>
1904
1905 <item>
1906 <title>How to test if a laptop is working with Linux</title>
1907 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_test_if_a_laptop_is_working_with_Linux.html</link>
1908 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_test_if_a_laptop_is_working_with_Linux.html</guid>
1909 <pubDate>Wed, 22 Dec 2010 14:55:00 +0100</pubDate>
1910 <description>&lt;p&gt;The last few days I have spent at work here at the &lt;a
1911 href=&quot;http://www.uio.no/&quot;&gt;University of Oslo&lt;/a&gt; testing if the new
1912 batch of computers will work with Linux. Every year for the last few
1913 years the university have organised shared bid of a few thousand
1914 computers, and this year HP won the bid. Two different desktops and
1915 five different laptops are on the list this year. We in the UNIX
1916 group want to know which one of these computers work well with RHEL
1917 and Ubuntu, the two Linux distributions we currently handle at the
1918 university.&lt;/p&gt;
1919
1920 &lt;p&gt;My test method is simple, and I share it here to get feedback and
1921 perhaps inspire others to test hardware as well. To test, I PXE
1922 install the OS version of choice, and log in as my normal user and run
1923 a few applications and plug in selected pieces of hardware. When
1924 something fail, I make a note about this in the test matrix and move
1925 on. If I have some spare time I try to report the bug to the OS
1926 vendor, but as I only have the machines for a short time, I rarely
1927 have the time to do this for all the problems I find.&lt;/p&gt;
1928
1929 &lt;p&gt;Anyway, to get to the point of this post. Here is the simple tests
1930 I perform on a new model.&lt;/p&gt;
1931
1932 &lt;ul&gt;
1933
1934 &lt;li&gt;Is PXE installation working? I&#39;m testing with RHEL6, Ubuntu Lucid
1935 and Ubuntu Maverik at the moment. If I feel like it, I also test with
1936 RHEL5 and Debian Edu/Squeeze.&lt;/li&gt;
1937
1938 &lt;li&gt;Is X.org working? If the graphical login screen show up after
1939 installation, X.org is working.&lt;/li&gt;
1940
1941 &lt;li&gt;Is hardware accelerated OpenGL working? Running glxgears (in
1942 package mesa-utils on Ubuntu) and writing down the frames per second
1943 reported by the program.&lt;/li&gt;
1944
1945 &lt;li&gt;Is sound working? With Gnome and KDE, a sound is played when
1946 logging in, and if I can hear this the test is successful. If there
1947 are several audio exits on the machine, I try them all and check if
1948 the Gnome/KDE audio mixer can control where to send the sound. I
1949 normally test this by playing
1950 &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20101012-chef/ &quot;&gt;a HTML5
1951 video&lt;/a&gt; in Firefox/Iceweasel.&lt;/li&gt;
1952
1953 &lt;li&gt;Is the USB subsystem working? I test this by plugging in a USB
1954 memory stick and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.&lt;/li&gt;
1955
1956 &lt;li&gt;Is the CD/DVD player working? I test this by inserting any CD/DVD
1957 I have lying around, and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.&lt;/li&gt;
1958
1959 &lt;li&gt;Is any built in camera working? Test using cheese, and see if a
1960 picture from the v4l device show up.&lt;/li&gt;
1961
1962 &lt;li&gt;Is bluetooth working? Use the Gnome/KDE browsing tool to see if
1963 any bluetooth devices are discovered. In my office, I normally see a
1964 few.&lt;/li&gt;
1965
1966 &lt;li&gt;For laptops, is the SD or Compaq Flash reader working. I have
1967 memory modules lying around, and stick them in and see if Gnome/KDE
1968 notice this.&lt;/li&gt;
1969
1970 &lt;li&gt;For laptops, is suspend/hibernate working? I&#39;m testing if the
1971 special button work, and if the laptop continue to work after
1972 resume.&lt;/li&gt;
1973
1974 &lt;li&gt;For laptops, is the extra buttons working, like audio level,
1975 adjusting background light, switching on/off external video output,
1976 switching on/off wifi, bluetooth, etc? The set of buttons differ from
1977 laptop to laptop, so I just write down which are working and which are
1978 not.&lt;/li&gt;
1979
1980 &lt;li&gt;Some laptops have smart card readers, finger print readers,
1981 acceleration sensors etc. I rarely test these, as I do not know how
1982 to quickly test if they are working or not, so I only document their
1983 existence.&lt;/li&gt;
1984
1985 &lt;/ul&gt;
1986
1987 &lt;p&gt;By now I suspect you are really curious what the test results are
1988 for the HP machines I am testing. I&#39;m not done yet, so I will report
1989 the test results later. For now I can report that HP 8100 Elite work
1990 fine, and hibernation fail with HP EliteBook 8440p on Ubuntu Lucid,
1991 and audio fail on RHEL6. Ubuntu Maverik worked with 8440p. As you
1992 can see, I have most machines left to test. One interesting
1993 observation is that Ubuntu Lucid has almost twice the frame rate than
1994 RHEL6 with glxgears. No idea why.&lt;/p&gt;
1995 </description>
1996 </item>
1997
1998 <item>
1999 <title>Some thoughts on BitCoins</title>
2000 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_thoughts_on_BitCoins.html</link>
2001 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_thoughts_on_BitCoins.html</guid>
2002 <pubDate>Sat, 11 Dec 2010 15:10:00 +0100</pubDate>
2003 <description>&lt;p&gt;As I continue to explore
2004 &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bitcoin.org/&quot;&gt;BitCoin&lt;/a&gt;, I&#39;ve starting to wonder
2005 what properties the system have, and how it will be affected by laws
2006 and regulations here in Norway. Here are some random notes.&lt;/p&gt;
2007
2008 &lt;p&gt;One interesting thing to note is that since the transactions are
2009 verified using a peer to peer network, all details about a transaction
2010 is known to everyone. This means that if a BitCoin address has been
2011 published like I did with mine in my initial post about BitCoin, it is
2012 possible for everyone to see how many BitCoins have been transfered to
2013 that address. There is even a web service to look at the details for
2014 all transactions. There I can see that my address
2015 &lt;a href=&quot;http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&quot;&gt;15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&lt;/a&gt;
2016 have received 16.06 Bitcoin, the
2017 &lt;a href=&quot;http://blockexplorer.com/address/1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3&quot;&gt;1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3&lt;/a&gt;
2018 address of Simon Phipps have received 181.97 BitCoin and the address
2019 &lt;a href=&quot;http://blockexplorer.com/address/1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt&quot;&gt;1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt&lt;/A&gt;
2020 of EFF have received 2447.38 BitCoins so far. Thank you to each and
2021 every one of you that donated bitcoins to support my activity. The
2022 fact that anyone can see how much money was transfered to a given
2023 address make it more obvious why the BitCoin community recommend to
2024 generate and hand out a new address for each transaction. I&#39;m told
2025 there is no way to track which addresses belong to a given person or
2026 organisation without the person or organisation revealing it
2027 themselves, as Simon, EFF and I have done.&lt;/p&gt;
2028
2029 &lt;p&gt;In Norway, and in most other countries, there are laws and
2030 regulations limiting how much money one can transfer across the border
2031 without declaring it. There are money laundering, tax and accounting
2032 laws and regulations I would expect to apply to the use of BitCoin.
2033 If the Skolelinux foundation
2034 (&lt;a href=&quot;http://linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html&quot;&gt;SLX
2035 Debian Labs&lt;/a&gt;) were to accept donations in BitCoin in addition to
2036 normal bank transfers like EFF is doing, how should this be accounted?
2037 Given that it is impossible to know if money can cross the border or
2038 not, should everything or nothing be declared? What exchange rate
2039 should be used when calculating taxes? Would receivers have to pay
2040 income tax if the foundation were to pay Skolelinux contributors in
2041 BitCoin? I have no idea, but it would be interesting to know.&lt;/p&gt;
2042
2043 &lt;p&gt;For a currency to be useful and successful, it must be trusted and
2044 accepted by a lot of users. It must be possible to get easy access to
2045 the currency (as a wage or using currency exchanges), and it must be
2046 easy to spend it. At the moment BitCoin seem fairly easy to get
2047 access to, but there are very few places to spend it. I am not really
2048 a regular user of any of the vendor types currently accepting BitCoin,
2049 so I wonder when my kind of shop would start accepting BitCoins. I
2050 would like to buy electronics, travels and subway tickets, not herbs
2051 and books. :) The currency is young, and this will improve over time
2052 if it become popular, but I suspect regular banks will start to lobby
2053 to get BitCoin declared illegal if it become popular. I&#39;m sure they
2054 will claim it is helping fund terrorism and money laundering (which
2055 probably would be true, as is any currency in existence), but I
2056 believe the problems should be solved elsewhere and not by blaming
2057 currencies.&lt;/p&gt;
2058
2059 &lt;p&gt;The process of creating new BitCoins is called mining, and it is
2060 CPU intensive process that depend on a bit of luck as well (as one is
2061 competing against all the other miners currently spending CPU cycles
2062 to see which one get the next lump of cash). The &quot;winner&quot; get 50
2063 BitCoin when this happen. Yesterday I came across the obvious way to
2064 join forces to increase ones changes of getting at least some coins,
2065 by coordinating the work on mining BitCoins across several machines
2066 and people, and sharing the result if one is lucky and get the 50
2067 BitCoins. Check out
2068 &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/bitcoin-pool/&quot;&gt;BitCoin Pool&lt;/a&gt;
2069 if this sounds interesting. I have not had time to try to set up a
2070 machine to participate there yet, but have seen that running on ones
2071 own for a few days have not yield any BitCoins througth mining
2072 yet.&lt;/p&gt;
2073
2074 &lt;p&gt;Update 2010-12-15: Found an &lt;a
2075 href=&quot;http://inertia.posterous.com/reply-to-the-underground-economist-why-bitcoi&quot;&gt;interesting
2076 criticism&lt;/a&gt; of bitcoin. Not quite sure how valid it is, but thought
2077 it was interesting to read. The arguments presented seem to be
2078 equally valid for gold, which was used as a currency for many years.&lt;/p&gt;
2079 </description>
2080 </item>
2081
2082 <item>
2083 <title>Now accepting bitcoins - anonymous and distributed p2p crypto-money</title>
2084 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html</link>
2085 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html</guid>
2086 <pubDate>Fri, 10 Dec 2010 08:20:00 +0100</pubDate>
2087 <description>&lt;p&gt;With this weeks lawless
2088 &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/06/wikileaks/index.html&quot;&gt;governmental
2089 attacks&lt;/a&gt; on Wikileak and
2090 &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.salon.com/technology/dan_gillmor/2010/12/06/war_on_speech&quot;&gt;free
2091 speech&lt;/a&gt;, it has become obvious that PayPal, visa and mastercard can
2092 not be trusted to handle money transactions.
2093 A blog post from
2094 &lt;a href=&quot;http://webmink.com/2010/12/06/now-accepting-bitcoin/&quot;&gt;Simon
2095 Phipps on bitcoin&lt;/a&gt; reminded me about a project that a friend of
2096 mine mentioned earlier. I decided to follow Simon&#39;s example, and get
2097 involved with &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bitcoin.org/&quot;&gt;BitCoin&lt;/a&gt;. I got
2098 some help from my friend to get it all running, and he even handed me
2099 some bitcoins to get started. I even donated a few bitcoins to Simon
2100 for helping me remember BitCoin.&lt;/p&gt;
2101
2102 &lt;p&gt;So, what is bitcoins, you probably wonder? It is a digital
2103 crypto-currency, decentralised and handled using peer-to-peer
2104 networks. It allows anonymous transactions and prohibits central
2105 control over the transactions, making it impossible for governments
2106 and companies alike to block donations and other transactions. The
2107 source is free software, and while the key dependency wxWidgets 2.9
2108 for the graphical user interface is missing in Debian, the command
2109 line client builds just fine. Hopefully Jonas
2110 &lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/578157&quot;&gt;will get the package into
2111 Debian&lt;/a&gt; soon.&lt;/p&gt;
2112
2113 &lt;p&gt;Bitcoins can be converted to other currencies, like USD and EUR.
2114 There are &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bitcoin.org/trade&quot;&gt;companies accepting
2115 bitcoins&lt;/a&gt; when selling services and goods, and there are even
2116 currency &quot;stock&quot; markets where the exchange rate is decided. There
2117 are not many users so far, but the concept seems promising. If you
2118 want to get started and lack a friend with any bitcoins to spare,
2119 you can even get
2120 &lt;a href=&quot;https://freebitcoins.appspot.com/&quot;&gt;some for free&lt;/a&gt; (0.05
2121 bitcoin at the time of writing). Use
2122 &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bitcoinwatch.com/&quot;&gt;BitcoinWatch&lt;/a&gt; to keep an eye
2123 on the current exchange rates.&lt;/p&gt;
2124
2125 &lt;p&gt;As an experiment, I have decided to set up bitcoind on one of my
2126 machines. If you want to support my activity, please send Bitcoin
2127 donations to the address
2128 &lt;b&gt;15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&lt;/b&gt;. Thank you!&lt;/p&gt;
2129 </description>
2130 </item>
2131
2132 <item>
2133 <title>Why isn&#39;t Debian Edu using VLC?</title>
2134 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_isn_t_Debian_Edu_using_VLC_.html</link>
2135 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_isn_t_Debian_Edu_using_VLC_.html</guid>
2136 <pubDate>Sat, 27 Nov 2010 11:30:00 +0100</pubDate>
2137 <description>&lt;p&gt;In the latest issue of Linux Journal, the readers choices were
2138 presented, and the winner among the multimedia player were VLC.
2139 Personally, I like VLC, and it is my player of choice when I first try
2140 to play a video file or stream. Only if VLC fail will I drag out
2141 gmplayer to see if it can do better. The reason is mostly the failure
2142 model and trust. When VLC fail, it normally pop up a error message
2143 reporting the problem. When mplayer fail, it normally segfault or
2144 just hangs. The latter failure mode drain my trust in the program.&lt;p&gt;
2145
2146 &lt;p&gt;But even if VLC is my player of choice, we have choosen to use
2147 mplayer in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.skolelinux.org/&quot;&gt;Debian
2148 Edu/Skolelinux&lt;/a&gt;. The reason is simple. We need a good browser
2149 plugin to play web videos seamlessly, and the VLC browser plugin is
2150 not very good. For example, it lack in-line control buttons, so there
2151 is no way for the user to pause the video. Also, when I
2152 &lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia&quot;&gt;last
2153 tested the browser plugins&lt;/a&gt; available in Debian, the VLC plugin
2154 failed on several video pages where mplayer based plugins worked. If
2155 the browser plugin for VLC was as good as the gecko-mediaplayer
2156 package (which uses mplayer), we would switch.&lt;/P&gt;
2157
2158 &lt;p&gt;While VLC is a good player, its user interface is slightly
2159 annoying. The most annoying feature is its inconsistent use of
2160 keyboard shortcuts. When the player is in full screen mode, its
2161 shortcuts are different from when it is playing the video in a window.
2162 For example, space only work as pause when in full screen mode. I
2163 wish it had consisten shortcuts and that space also would work when in
2164 window mode. Another nice shortcut in gmplayer is [enter] to restart
2165 the current video. It is very nice when playing short videos from the
2166 web and want to restart it when new people arrive to have a look at
2167 what is going on.&lt;/p&gt;
2168 </description>
2169 </item>
2170
2171 <item>
2172 <title>Lenny-&gt;Squeeze upgrades of the Gnome and KDE desktop, now with apt-get autoremove</title>
2173 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades_of_the_Gnome_and_KDE_desktop__now_with_apt_get_autoremove.html</link>
2174 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades_of_the_Gnome_and_KDE_desktop__now_with_apt_get_autoremove.html</guid>
2175 <pubDate>Mon, 22 Nov 2010 14:15:00 +0100</pubDate>
2176 <description>&lt;p&gt;Michael Biebl suggested to me on IRC, that I changed my automated
2177 upgrade testing of the
2178 &lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/&quot;&gt;Lenny
2179 Gnome and KDE Desktop&lt;/a&gt; to do &lt;tt&gt;apt-get autoremove&lt;/tt&gt; when using apt-get.
2180 This seem like a very good idea, so I adjusted by test scripts and
2181 can now present the updated result from today:&lt;/p&gt;
2182
2183 &lt;p&gt;This is for Gnome:&lt;/p&gt;
2184
2185 &lt;p&gt;Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude&lt;/p&gt;
2186
2187 &lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;
2188 apache2.2-bin
2189 aptdaemon
2190 baobab
2191 binfmt-support
2192 browser-plugin-gnash
2193 cheese-common
2194 cli-common
2195 cups-pk-helper
2196 dmz-cursor-theme
2197 empathy
2198 empathy-common
2199 freedesktop-sound-theme
2200 freeglut3
2201 gconf-defaults-service
2202 gdm-themes
2203 gedit-plugins
2204 geoclue
2205 geoclue-hostip
2206 geoclue-localnet
2207 geoclue-manual
2208 geoclue-yahoo
2209 gnash
2210 gnash-common
2211 gnome
2212 gnome-backgrounds
2213 gnome-cards-data
2214 gnome-codec-install
2215 gnome-core
2216 gnome-desktop-environment
2217 gnome-disk-utility
2218 gnome-screenshot
2219 gnome-search-tool
2220 gnome-session-canberra
2221 gnome-system-log
2222 gnome-themes-extras
2223 gnome-themes-more
2224 gnome-user-share
2225 gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
2226 gstreamer0.10-tools
2227 gtk2-engines
2228 gtk2-engines-pixbuf
2229 gtk2-engines-smooth
2230 hamster-applet
2231 libapache2-mod-dnssd
2232 libapr1
2233 libaprutil1
2234 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3
2235 libaprutil1-ldap
2236 libart2.0-cil
2237 libboost-date-time1.42.0
2238 libboost-python1.42.0
2239 libboost-thread1.42.0
2240 libchamplain-0.4-0
2241 libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0
2242 libcheese-gtk18
2243 libclutter-gtk-0.10-0
2244 libcryptui0
2245 libdiscid0
2246 libelf1
2247 libepc-1.0-2
2248 libepc-common
2249 libepc-ui-1.0-2
2250 libfreerdp-plugins-standard
2251 libfreerdp0
2252 libgconf2.0-cil
2253 libgdata-common
2254 libgdata7
2255 libgdu-gtk0
2256 libgee2
2257 libgeoclue0
2258 libgexiv2-0
2259 libgif4
2260 libglade2.0-cil
2261 libglib2.0-cil
2262 libgmime2.4-cil
2263 libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
2264 libgnome2.24-cil
2265 libgnomepanel2.24-cil
2266 libgpod-common
2267 libgpod4
2268 libgtk2.0-cil
2269 libgtkglext1
2270 libgtksourceview2.0-common
2271 libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
2272 libmono-addins0.2-cil
2273 libmono-cairo2.0-cil
2274 libmono-corlib2.0-cil
2275 libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil
2276 libmono-posix2.0-cil
2277 libmono-security2.0-cil
2278 libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
2279 libmono-system2.0-cil
2280 libmtp8
2281 libmusicbrainz3-6
2282 libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil
2283 libndesk-dbus1.0-cil
2284 libopal3.6.8
2285 libpolkit-gtk-1-0
2286 libpt2.6.7
2287 libpython2.6
2288 librpm1
2289 librpmio1
2290 libsdl1.2debian
2291 libsrtp0
2292 libssh-4
2293 libtelepathy-farsight0
2294 libtelepathy-glib0
2295 libtidy-0.99-0
2296 media-player-info
2297 mesa-utils
2298 mono-2.0-gac
2299 mono-gac
2300 mono-runtime
2301 nautilus-sendto
2302 nautilus-sendto-empathy
2303 p7zip-full
2304 pkg-config
2305 python-aptdaemon
2306 python-aptdaemon-gtk
2307 python-axiom
2308 python-beautifulsoup
2309 python-bugbuddy
2310 python-clientform
2311 python-coherence
2312 python-configobj
2313 python-crypto
2314 python-cupshelpers
2315 python-elementtree
2316 python-epsilon
2317 python-evolution
2318 python-feedparser
2319 python-gdata
2320 python-gdbm
2321 python-gst0.10
2322 python-gtkglext1
2323 python-gtksourceview2
2324 python-httplib2
2325 python-louie
2326 python-mako
2327 python-markupsafe
2328 python-mechanize
2329 python-nevow
2330 python-notify
2331 python-opengl
2332 python-openssl
2333 python-pam
2334 python-pkg-resources
2335 python-pyasn1
2336 python-pysqlite2
2337 python-rdflib
2338 python-serial
2339 python-tagpy
2340 python-twisted-bin
2341 python-twisted-conch
2342 python-twisted-core
2343 python-twisted-web
2344 python-utidylib
2345 python-webkit
2346 python-xdg
2347 python-zope.interface
2348 remmina
2349 remmina-plugin-data
2350 remmina-plugin-rdp
2351 remmina-plugin-vnc
2352 rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
2353 rhythmbox-plugins
2354 rpm-common
2355 rpm2cpio
2356 seahorse-plugins
2357 shotwell
2358 software-center
2359 system-config-printer-udev
2360 telepathy-gabble
2361 telepathy-mission-control-5
2362 telepathy-salut
2363 tomboy
2364 totem
2365 totem-coherence
2366 totem-mozilla
2367 totem-plugins
2368 transmission-common
2369 xdg-user-dirs
2370 xdg-user-dirs-gtk
2371 xserver-xephyr
2372 &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;
2373
2374 &lt;p&gt;Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude&lt;/p&gt;
2375
2376 &lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;
2377 cheese
2378 ekiga
2379 eog
2380 epiphany-extensions
2381 evolution-exchange
2382 fast-user-switch-applet
2383 file-roller
2384 gcalctool
2385 gconf-editor
2386 gdm
2387 gedit
2388 gedit-common
2389 gnome-games
2390 gnome-games-data
2391 gnome-nettool
2392 gnome-system-tools
2393 gnome-themes
2394 gnuchess
2395 gucharmap
2396 guile-1.8-libs
2397 libavahi-ui0
2398 libdmx1
2399 libgalago3
2400 libgtk-vnc-1.0-0
2401 libgtksourceview2.0-0
2402 liblircclient0
2403 libsdl1.2debian-alsa
2404 libspeexdsp1
2405 libsvga1
2406 rhythmbox
2407 seahorse
2408 sound-juicer
2409 system-config-printer
2410 totem-common
2411 transmission-gtk
2412 vinagre
2413 vino
2414 &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;
2415
2416 &lt;p&gt;Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get&lt;/p&gt;
2417
2418 &lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;
2419 gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
2420 &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;
2421
2422 &lt;p&gt;Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get&lt;/p&gt;
2423
2424 &lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;
2425 [nothing]
2426 &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;
2427
2428 &lt;p&gt;This is for KDE:&lt;/p&gt;
2429
2430 &lt;p&gt;Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude&lt;/p&gt;
2431
2432 &lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;
2433 ksmserver
2434 &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;
2435
2436 &lt;p&gt;Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude&lt;/p&gt;
2437
2438 &lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;
2439 kwin
2440 network-manager-kde
2441 &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;
2442
2443 &lt;p&gt;Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get&lt;/p&gt;
2444
2445 &lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;
2446 arts
2447 dolphin
2448 freespacenotifier
2449 google-gadgets-gst
2450 google-gadgets-xul
2451 kappfinder
2452 kcalc
2453 kcharselect
2454 kde-core
2455 kde-plasma-desktop
2456 kde-standard
2457 kde-window-manager
2458 kdeartwork
2459 kdeartwork-emoticons
2460 kdeartwork-style
2461 kdeartwork-theme-icon
2462 kdebase
2463 kdebase-apps
2464 kdebase-workspace
2465 kdebase-workspace-bin
2466 kdebase-workspace-data
2467 kdeeject
2468 kdelibs
2469 kdeplasma-addons
2470 kdeutils
2471 kdewallpapers
2472 kdf
2473 kfloppy
2474 kgpg
2475 khelpcenter4
2476 kinfocenter
2477 konq-plugins-l10n
2478 konqueror-nsplugins
2479 kscreensaver
2480 kscreensaver-xsavers
2481 ktimer
2482 kwrite
2483 libgle3
2484 libkde4-ruby1.8
2485 libkonq5
2486 libkonq5-templates
2487 libnetpbm10
2488 libplasma-ruby
2489 libplasma-ruby1.8
2490 libqt4-ruby1.8
2491 marble-data
2492 marble-plugins
2493 netpbm
2494 nuvola-icon-theme
2495 plasma-dataengines-workspace
2496 plasma-desktop
2497 plasma-desktopthemes-artwork
2498 plasma-runners-addons
2499 plasma-scriptengine-googlegadgets
2500 plasma-scriptengine-python
2501 plasma-scriptengine-qedje
2502 plasma-scriptengine-ruby
2503 plasma-scriptengine-webkit
2504 plasma-scriptengines
2505 plasma-wallpapers-addons
2506 plasma-widget-folderview
2507 plasma-widget-networkmanagement
2508 ruby
2509 sweeper
2510 update-notifier-kde
2511 xscreensaver-data-extra
2512 xscreensaver-gl
2513 xscreensaver-gl-extra
2514 xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
2515 &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;
2516
2517 &lt;p&gt;Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get&lt;/p&gt;
2518
2519 &lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;
2520 ark
2521 google-gadgets-common
2522 google-gadgets-qt
2523 htdig
2524 kate
2525 kdebase-bin
2526 kdebase-data
2527 kdepasswd
2528 kfind
2529 klipper
2530 konq-plugins
2531 konqueror
2532 ksysguard
2533 ksysguardd
2534 libarchive1
2535 libcln6
2536 libeet1
2537 libeina-svn-06
2538 libggadget-1.0-0b
2539 libggadget-qt-1.0-0b
2540 libgps19
2541 libkdecorations4
2542 libkephal4
2543 libkonq4
2544 libkonqsidebarplugin4a
2545 libkscreensaver5
2546 libksgrd4
2547 libksignalplotter4
2548 libkunitconversion4
2549 libkwineffects1a
2550 libmarblewidget4
2551 libntrack-qt4-1
2552 libntrack0
2553 libplasma-geolocation-interface4
2554 libplasmaclock4a
2555 libplasmagenericshell4
2556 libprocesscore4a
2557 libprocessui4a
2558 libqalculate5
2559 libqedje0a
2560 libqtruby4shared2
2561 libqzion0a
2562 libruby1.8
2563 libscim8c2a
2564 libsmokekdecore4-3
2565 libsmokekdeui4-3
2566 libsmokekfile3
2567 libsmokekhtml3
2568 libsmokekio3
2569 libsmokeknewstuff2-3
2570 libsmokeknewstuff3-3
2571 libsmokekparts3
2572 libsmokektexteditor3
2573 libsmokekutils3
2574 libsmokenepomuk3
2575 libsmokephonon3
2576 libsmokeplasma3
2577 libsmokeqtcore4-3
2578 libsmokeqtdbus4-3
2579 libsmokeqtgui4-3
2580 libsmokeqtnetwork4-3
2581 libsmokeqtopengl4-3
2582 libsmokeqtscript4-3
2583 libsmokeqtsql4-3
2584 libsmokeqtsvg4-3
2585 libsmokeqttest4-3
2586 libsmokeqtuitools4-3
2587 libsmokeqtwebkit4-3
2588 libsmokeqtxml4-3
2589 libsmokesolid3
2590 libsmokesoprano3
2591 libtaskmanager4a
2592 libtidy-0.99-0
2593 libweather-ion4a
2594 libxklavier16
2595 libxxf86misc1
2596 okteta
2597 oxygencursors
2598 plasma-dataengines-addons
2599 plasma-scriptengine-superkaramba
2600 plasma-widget-lancelot
2601 plasma-widgets-addons
2602 plasma-widgets-workspace
2603 polkit-kde-1
2604 ruby1.8
2605 systemsettings
2606 update-notifier-common
2607 &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;
2608
2609 &lt;p&gt;Running apt-get autoremove made the results using apt-get and
2610 aptitude a bit more similar, but there are still quite a lott of
2611 differences. I have no idea what packages should be installed after
2612 the upgrade, but hope those that do can have a look.&lt;/p&gt;
2613 </description>
2614 </item>
2615
2616 <item>
2617 <title>Migrating Xen virtual machines using LVM to KVM using disk images</title>
2618 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Migrating_Xen_virtual_machines_using_LVM_to_KVM_using_disk_images.html</link>
2619 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Migrating_Xen_virtual_machines_using_LVM_to_KVM_using_disk_images.html</guid>
2620 <pubDate>Mon, 22 Nov 2010 11:20:00 +0100</pubDate>
2621 <description>&lt;p&gt;Most of the computers in use by the
2622 &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.skolelinux.org/&quot;&gt;Debian Edu/Skolelinux project&lt;/a&gt;
2623 are virtual machines. And they have been Xen machines running on a
2624 fairly old IBM eserver xseries 345 machine, and we wanted to migrate
2625 them to KVM on a newer Dell PowerEdge 2950 host machine. This was a
2626 bit harder that it could have been, because we set up the Xen virtual
2627 machines to get the virtual partitions from LVM, which as far as I
2628 know is not supported by KVM. So to migrate, we had to convert
2629 several LVM logical volumes to partitions on a virtual disk file.&lt;/p&gt;
2630
2631 &lt;p&gt;I found
2632 &lt;a href=&quot;http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM&quot;&gt;a
2633 nice recipe&lt;/a&gt; to do this, and wrote the following script to do the
2634 migration. It uses qemu-img from the qemu package to make the disk
2635 image, parted to partition it, losetup and kpartx to present the disk
2636 image partions as devices, and dd to copy the data. I NFS mounted the
2637 new servers storage area on the old server to do the migration.&lt;/p&gt;
2638
2639 &lt;pre&gt;
2640 #!/bin/sh
2641
2642 # Based on
2643 # http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM
2644
2645 set -e
2646 set -x
2647
2648 if [ -z &quot;$1&quot; ] ; then
2649 echo &quot;Usage: $0 &amp;lt;hostname&amp;gt;&quot;
2650 exit 1
2651 else
2652 host=&quot;$1&quot;
2653 fi
2654
2655 if [ ! -e /dev/vg_data/$host-disk ] ; then
2656 echo &quot;error: unable to find LVM volume for $host&quot;
2657 exit 1
2658 fi
2659
2660 # Partitions need to be a bit bigger than the LVM LVs. not sure why.
2661 disksize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-disk | awk &#39;{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }&#39;)
2662 swapsize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-swap | awk &#39;{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }&#39;)
2663 totalsize=$(( ( $disksize + $swapsize ) ))
2664
2665 img=$host.img
2666 #dd if=/dev/zero of=$img bs=1M count=$(( $disksize + $swapsize ))
2667 qemu-img create $img ${totalsize}MMaking room on the Debian Edu/Sqeeze DVD
2668
2669 parted $img mklabel msdos
2670 parted $img mkpart primary linux-swap 0 $disksize
2671 parted $img mkpart primary ext2 $disksize $totalsize
2672 parted $img set 1 boot on
2673
2674 modprobe dm-mod
2675 losetup /dev/loop0 $img
2676 kpartx -a /dev/loop0
2677
2678 dd if=/dev/vg_data/$host-disk of=/dev/mapper/loop0p1 bs=1M
2679 fsck.ext3 -f /dev/mapper/loop0p1 || true
2680 mkswap /dev/mapper/loop0p2
2681
2682 kpartx -d /dev/loop0
2683 losetup -d /dev/loop0
2684 &lt;/pre&gt;
2685
2686 &lt;p&gt;The script is perhaps so simple that it is not copyrightable, but
2687 if it is, it is licenced using GPL v2 or later at your discretion.&lt;/p&gt;
2688
2689 &lt;p&gt;After doing this, I booted a Debian CD in rescue mode in KVM with
2690 the new disk image attached, installed grub-pc and linux-image-686 and
2691 set up grub to boot from the disk image. After this, the KVM machines
2692 seem to work just fine.&lt;/p&gt;
2693 </description>
2694 </item>
2695
2696 <item>
2697 <title>Lenny-&gt;Squeeze upgrades, apt vs aptitude with the Gnome and KDE desktop</title>
2698 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__apt_vs_aptitude_with_the_Gnome_and_KDE_desktop.html</link>
2699 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__apt_vs_aptitude_with_the_Gnome_and_KDE_desktop.html</guid>
2700 <pubDate>Sat, 20 Nov 2010 22:50:00 +0100</pubDate>
2701 <description>&lt;p&gt;I&#39;m still running upgrade testing of the
2702 &lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/&quot;&gt;Lenny
2703 Gnome and KDE Desktop&lt;/a&gt;, but have not had time to spend on reporting the
2704 status. Here is a short update based on a test I ran 20101118.&lt;/p&gt;
2705
2706 &lt;p&gt;I still do not know what a correct migration should look like, so I
2707 report any differences between apt and aptitude and hope someone else
2708 can see if anything should be changed.&lt;/p&gt;
2709
2710 &lt;p&gt;This is for Gnome:&lt;/p&gt;
2711
2712 &lt;p&gt;Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude&lt;/p&gt;
2713
2714 &lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;
2715 apache2.2-bin aptdaemon at-spi baobab binfmt-support
2716 browser-plugin-gnash cheese-common cli-common cpp-4.3 cups-pk-helper
2717 dmz-cursor-theme empathy empathy-common finger
2718 freedesktop-sound-theme freeglut3 gconf-defaults-service gdm-themes
2719 gedit-plugins geoclue geoclue-hostip geoclue-localnet geoclue-manual
2720 geoclue-yahoo gnash gnash-common gnome gnome-backgrounds
2721 gnome-cards-data gnome-codec-install gnome-core
2722 gnome-desktop-environment gnome-disk-utility gnome-screenshot
2723 gnome-search-tool gnome-session-canberra gnome-spell
2724 gnome-system-log gnome-themes-extras gnome-themes-more
2725 gnome-user-share gs-common gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
2726 gstreamer0.10-tools gtk2-engines gtk2-engines-pixbuf
2727 gtk2-engines-smooth hal-info hamster-applet libapache2-mod-dnssd
2728 libapr1 libaprutil1 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3 libaprutil1-ldap
2729 libart2.0-cil libatspi1.0-0 libboost-date-time1.42.0
2730 libboost-python1.42.0 libboost-thread1.42.0 libchamplain-0.4-0
2731 libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0 libcheese-gtk18 libclutter-gtk-0.10-0
2732 libcryptui0 libcupsys2 libdiscid0 libeel2-data libelf1 libepc-1.0-2
2733 libepc-common libepc-ui-1.0-2 libfreerdp-plugins-standard
2734 libfreerdp0 libgail-common libgconf2.0-cil libgdata-common libgdata7
2735 libgdl-1-common libgdu-gtk0 libgee2 libgeoclue0 libgexiv2-0 libgif4
2736 libglade2.0-cil libglib2.0-cil libgmime2.4-cil libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
2737 libgnome2.24-cil libgnomepanel2.24-cil libgnomeprint2.2-data
2738 libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod-common libgpod4
2739 libgtk2.0-cil libgtkglext1 libgtksourceview-common
2740 libgtksourceview2.0-common libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
2741 libmono-addins0.2-cil libmono-cairo2.0-cil libmono-corlib2.0-cil
2742 libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil libmono-posix2.0-cil
2743 libmono-security2.0-cil libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
2744 libmono-system2.0-cil libmtp8 libmusicbrainz3-6
2745 libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil libndesk-dbus1.0-cil libopal3.6.8
2746 libpolkit-gtk-1-0 libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
2747 libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libpt2.6.7 libpython2.6 librpm1 librpmio1
2748 libsdl1.2debian libservlet2.4-java libsrtp0 libssh-4
2749 libtelepathy-farsight0 libtelepathy-glib0 libtidy-0.99-0
2750 libxalan2-java libxerces2-java media-player-info mesa-utils
2751 mono-2.0-gac mono-gac mono-runtime nautilus-sendto
2752 nautilus-sendto-empathy openoffice.org-writer2latex
2753 openssl-blacklist p7zip p7zip-full pkg-config python-4suite-xml
2754 python-aptdaemon python-aptdaemon-gtk python-axiom
2755 python-beautifulsoup python-bugbuddy python-clientform
2756 python-coherence python-configobj python-crypto python-cupshelpers
2757 python-cupsutils python-eggtrayicon python-elementtree
2758 python-epsilon python-evolution python-feedparser python-gdata
2759 python-gdbm python-gst0.10 python-gtkglext1 python-gtkmozembed
2760 python-gtksourceview2 python-httplib2 python-louie python-mako
2761 python-markupsafe python-mechanize python-nevow python-notify
2762 python-opengl python-openssl python-pam python-pkg-resources
2763 python-pyasn1 python-pysqlite2 python-rdflib python-serial
2764 python-tagpy python-twisted-bin python-twisted-conch
2765 python-twisted-core python-twisted-web python-utidylib python-webkit
2766 python-xdg python-zope.interface remmina remmina-plugin-data
2767 remmina-plugin-rdp remmina-plugin-vnc rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
2768 rhythmbox-plugins rpm-common rpm2cpio seahorse-plugins shotwell
2769 software-center svgalibg1 system-config-printer-udev
2770 telepathy-gabble telepathy-mission-control-5 telepathy-salut tomboy
2771 totem totem-coherence totem-mozilla totem-plugins
2772 transmission-common xdg-user-dirs xdg-user-dirs-gtk xserver-xephyr
2773 zip
2774 &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;
2775
2776 Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude
2777
2778 &lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;
2779 arj bluez-utils cheese dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop ekiga eog
2780 epiphany-extensions epiphany-gecko evolution-exchange
2781 fast-user-switch-applet file-roller gcalctool gconf-editor gdm gedit
2782 gedit-common gnome-app-install gnome-games gnome-games-data
2783 gnome-nettool gnome-system-tools gnome-themes gnome-utils
2784 gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager gnuchess gucharmap
2785 guile-1.8-libs hal libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5
2786 libavahi-ui0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7
2787 libcucul0 libcurl3 libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdmx1 libdvdread3
2788 libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1
2789 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3 libfaad0 libgadu3
2790 libgalago3 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
2791 libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
2792 libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
2793 libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtk-vnc-1.0-0
2794 libgtkhtml2-0 libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgtksourceview2.0-0
2795 libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
2796 libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libkpathsea4 liblircclient0 libltdl3 liblwres50
2797 libmagick++10 libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmozjs1d libmpfr1ldbl libmtp7
2798 libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0
2799 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpisock9
2800 libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8
2801 libsdl1.2debian-alsa libsensors3 libsexy2 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
2802 libspeexdsp1 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libsvga1
2803 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0
2804 libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12
2805 libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common rhythmbox seahorse
2806 sound-juicer swfdec-gnome system-config-printer totem-common
2807 totem-gstreamer transmission-gtk vinagre vino w3c-dtd-xhtml wodim
2808 &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;
2809
2810 &lt;p&gt;Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get&lt;/p&gt;
2811
2812 &lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;
2813 gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
2814 &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;
2815
2816 &lt;p&gt;Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get&lt;/p&gt;
2817
2818 &lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;
2819 [nothing]
2820 &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;
2821
2822 &lt;p&gt;This is for KDE:&lt;/p&gt;
2823
2824 &lt;p&gt;Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude&lt;/p&gt;
2825
2826 &lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;
2827 autopoint bomber bovo cantor cantor-backend-kalgebra cpp-4.3 dcoprss
2828 edict espeak espeak-data eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
2829 ghostscript-x git gnome-audio gnugo granatier gs-common
2830 gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio indi kaddressbook-plugins kalgebra
2831 kalzium-data kanjidic kapman kate-plugins kblocks kbreakout kbstate
2832 kde-icons-mono kdeaccessibility kdeaddons-kfile-plugins
2833 kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
2834 kdeedu kdeedu-data kdeedu-kvtml-data kdegames kdegames-card-data
2835 kdegames-mahjongg-data kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc
2836 kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
2837 kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdessh kdetoys kdewebdev
2838 kdiamond kdnssd kfilereplace kfourinline kgeography-data kigo
2839 killbots kiriki klettres-data kmoon kmrml knewsticker-scripts
2840 kollision kpf krosspython ksirk ksmserver ksquares kstars-data
2841 ksudoku kubrick kweather libasound2-plugins libboost-python1.42.0
2842 libcfitsio3 libconvert-binhex-perl libcrypt-ssleay-perl libdb4.6++
2843 libdjvulibre-text libdotconf1.0 liberror-perl libespeak1
2844 libfinance-quote-perl libgail-common libgsl0ldbl libhtml-parser-perl
2845 libhtml-tableextract-perl libhtml-tagset-perl libhtml-tree-perl
2846 libio-stringy-perl libkdeedu4 libkdegames5 libkiten4 libkpathsea5
2847 libkrossui4 libmailtools-perl libmime-tools-perl
2848 libnews-nntpclient-perl libopenbabel3 libportaudio2 libpulse-browse0
2849 libservlet2.4-java libspeechd2 libtiff-tools libtimedate-perl
2850 libunistring0 liburi-perl libwww-perl libxalan2-java libxerces2-java
2851 lirc luatex marble networkstatus noatun-plugins
2852 openoffice.org-writer2latex palapeli palapeli-data parley
2853 parley-data poster psutils pulseaudio pulseaudio-esound-compat
2854 pulseaudio-module-x11 pulseaudio-utils quanta-data rocs rsync
2855 speech-dispatcher step svgalibg1 texlive-binaries texlive-luatex
2856 ttf-sazanami-gothic
2857 &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;
2858
2859 &lt;p&gt;Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude&lt;/p&gt;
2860
2861 &lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;
2862 amor artsbuilder atlantik atlantikdesigner blinken bluez-utils cvs
2863 dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop imlib-base imlib11 kalzium kanagram kandy
2864 kasteroids katomic kbackgammon kbattleship kblackbox kbounce kbruch
2865 kcron kdat kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data kdeprint kdict kdvi kedit
2866 keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs kgeography kghostview
2867 kgoldrunner khangman khexedit kiconedit kig kimagemapeditor
2868 kitchensync kiten kjumpingcube klatin klettres klickety klines
2869 klinkstatus kmag kmahjongg kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmines
2870 kmousetool kmouth kmplot knetwalk kodo kolf kommander konquest kooka
2871 kpager kpat kpdf kpercentage kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler krec
2872 kregexpeditor kreversi ksame ksayit kshisen ksig ksim ksirc ksirtet
2873 ksmiletris ksnake ksokoban kspaceduel kstars ksvg ksysv kteatime
2874 ktip ktnef ktouch ktron kttsd ktuberling kturtle ktux kuickshow
2875 kverbos kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kwordquiz
2876 kworldclock kxsldbg libakode2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
2877 libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
2878 libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2
2879 libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0
2880 libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
2881 libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0 libicu38
2882 libiec61883-0 libindex0 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
2883 libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1 libkdeedu3
2884 libkdegames1 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
2885 libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
2886 libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick10
2887 libmimelib1c2a libmodplug0c2 libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libmpfr1ldbl
2888 libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9 libpoppler-glib3
2889 libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 librss1 libsensors3
2890 libsmbios2 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90
2891 libtalloc1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 lskat
2892 mpeglib network-manager-kde noatun pmount tex-common texlive-base
2893 texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended tidy
2894 ttf-dustin ttf-kochi-gothic ttf-sjfonts
2895 &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;
2896
2897 &lt;p&gt;Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get&lt;/p&gt;
2898
2899 &lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;
2900 dolphin kde-core kde-plasma-desktop kde-standard kde-window-manager
2901 kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-apps kdebase-workspace
2902 kdebase-workspace-bin kdebase-workspace-data kdeutils kscreensaver
2903 kscreensaver-xsavers libgle3 libkonq5 libkonq5-templates libnetpbm10
2904 netpbm plasma-widget-folderview plasma-widget-networkmanagement
2905 xscreensaver-data-extra xscreensaver-gl xscreensaver-gl-extra
2906 xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
2907 &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;
2908
2909 &lt;p&gt;Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get&lt;/p&gt;
2910
2911 &lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;
2912 kdebase-bin konq-plugins konqueror
2913 &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;
2914 </description>
2915 </item>
2916
2917 <item>
2918 <title>Gnash buildbot slave and Debian kfreebsd</title>
2919 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_buildbot_slave_and_Debian_kfreebsd.html</link>
2920 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_buildbot_slave_and_Debian_kfreebsd.html</guid>
2921 <pubDate>Sat, 20 Nov 2010 07:20:00 +0100</pubDate>
2922 <description>&lt;p&gt;Answering
2923 &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.listware.net/201011/gnash-dev/67431-gnash-dev-buildbot-looking-for-slaves.html&quot;&gt;the
2924 call from the Gnash project&lt;/a&gt; for
2925 &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnashdev.org:8010&quot;&gt;buildbot&lt;/a&gt; slaves to test the
2926 current source, I have set up a virtual KVM machine on the Debian
2927 Edu/Skolelinux virtualization host to test the git source on
2928 Debian/Squeeze. I hope this can help the developers in getting new
2929 releases out more often.&lt;/p&gt;
2930
2931 &lt;p&gt;As the developers want less main-stream build platforms tested to,
2932 I have considered setting up a &lt;a
2933 href=&quot;http://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/&quot;&gt;Debian/kfreebsd&lt;/a&gt;
2934 machine as well. I have also considered using the kfreebsd
2935 architecture in Debian as a file server in NUUG to get access to the 5
2936 TB zfs volume we currently use to store DV video. Because of this, I
2937 finally got around to do a test installation of Debian/Squeeze with
2938 kfreebsd. Installation went fairly smooth, thought I noticed some
2939 visual glitches in the cdebconf dialogs (black cursor left on the
2940 screen at random locations). Have not gotten very far with the
2941 testing. Noticed cfdisk did not work, but fdisk did so it was not a
2942 fatal problem. Have to spend some more time on it to see if it is
2943 useful as a file server for NUUG. Will try to find time to set up a
2944 gnash buildbot slave on the Debian Edu/Skolelinux this weekend.&lt;/p&gt;
2945 </description>
2946 </item>
2947
2948 <item>
2949 <title>Debian in 3D</title>
2950 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_in_3D.html</link>
2951 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_in_3D.html</guid>
2952 <pubDate>Tue, 9 Nov 2010 16:10:00 +0100</pubDate>
2953 <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://thingiverse-production.s3.amazonaws.com/renders/23/e0/c4/f9/2b/debswagtdose_preview_medium.jpg&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
2954
2955 &lt;p&gt;3D printing is just great. I just came across this Debian logo in
2956 3D linked in from
2957 &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.thingiverse.com/2010/11/09/participatory-branding/&quot;&gt;the
2958 thingiverse blog&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
2959 </description>
2960 </item>
2961
2962 <item>
2963 <title>Software updates 2010-10-24</title>
2964 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_updates_2010_10_24.html</link>
2965 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_updates_2010_10_24.html</guid>
2966 <pubDate>Sun, 24 Oct 2010 22:45:00 +0200</pubDate>
2967 <description>&lt;p&gt;Some updates.&lt;/p&gt;
2968
2969 &lt;p&gt;My &lt;a href=&quot;http://pledgebank.com/gnash-avm2&quot;&gt;gnash pledge&lt;/a&gt; to
2970 raise money for the project is going well. The lower limit of 10
2971 signers was reached in 24 hours, and so far 13 people have signed it.
2972 More signers and more funding is most welcome, and I am really curious
2973 how far we can get before the time limit of December 24 is reached.
2974 :)&lt;/p&gt;
2975
2976 &lt;p&gt;On the #gnash IRC channel on irc.freenode.net, I was just tipped
2977 about what appear to be a great code coverage tool capable of
2978 generating code coverage stats without any changes to the source code.
2979 It is called
2980 &lt;a href=&quot;http://simonkagstrom.github.com/kcov/index.html&quot;&gt;kcov&lt;/a&gt;,
2981 and can be used using &lt;tt&gt;kcov &amp;lt;directory&amp;gt; &amp;lt;binary&amp;gt;&lt;/tt&gt;.
2982 It is missing in Debian, but the git source built just fine in Squeeze
2983 after I installed libelf-dev, libdwarf-dev, pkg-config and
2984 libglib2.0-dev. Failed to build in Lenny, but suspect that is
2985 solvable. I hope kcov make it into Debian soon.&lt;/p&gt;
2986
2987 &lt;p&gt;Finally found time to wrap up the release notes for &lt;a
2988 href=&quot;http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2010/10/msg00002.html&quot;&gt;a
2989 new alpha release of Debian Edu&lt;/a&gt;, and just published the second
2990 alpha test release of the Squeeze based Debian Edu /
2991 &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.skolelinux.org/&quot;&gt;Skolelinux&lt;/a&gt;
2992 release. Give it a try if you need a complete linux solution for your
2993 school, including central infrastructure server, workstations, thin
2994 client servers and diskless workstations. A nice touch added
2995 yesterday is RDP support on the thin client servers, for windows
2996 clients to get a Linux desktop on request.&lt;/p&gt;
2997 </description>
2998 </item>
2999
3000 <item>
3001 <title>Some notes on Flash in Debian and Debian Edu</title>
3002 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_notes_on_Flash_in_Debian_and_Debian_Edu.html</link>
3003 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_notes_on_Flash_in_Debian_and_Debian_Edu.html</guid>
3004 <pubDate>Sat, 4 Sep 2010 10:10:00 +0200</pubDate>
3005 <description>&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;a href=&quot;http://popcon.debian.org/unknown/by_vote&quot;&gt;Debian
3006 popularity-contest numbers&lt;/a&gt;, the adobe-flashplugin package the
3007 second most popular used package that is missing in Debian. The sixth
3008 most popular is flashplayer-mozilla. This is a clear indication that
3009 working flash is important for Debian users. Around 10 percent of the
3010 users submitting data to popcon.debian.org have this package
3011 installed.&lt;/p&gt;
3012
3013 &lt;p&gt;In the report written by Lars Risan in August 2008
3014&lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.skolelinux.no/Dokumentasjon/Rapporter?action=AttachFile&amp;do=view&amp;target=Skolelinux_i_bruk_rapport_1.0.pdf&quot;&gt;Skolelinux
3015 i bruk – Rapport for Hurum kommune, Universitetet i Agder og
3016 stiftelsen SLX Debian Labs&lt;/a&gt;»), one of the most important problems
3017 schools experienced with &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.skolelinux.org/&quot;&gt;Debian
3018 Edu/Skolelinux&lt;/a&gt; was the lack of working Flash. A lot of educational
3019 web sites require Flash to work, and lacking working Flash support in
3020 the web browser and the problems with installing it was perceived as a
3021 good reason to stay with Windows.&lt;/p&gt;
3022
3023 &lt;p&gt;I once saw a funny and sad comment in a web forum, where Linux was
3024 said to be the retarded cousin that did not really understand
3025 everything you told him but could work fairly well. This was a
3026 comment regarding the problems Linux have with proprietary formats and
3027 non-standard web pages, and is sad because it exposes a fairly common
3028 understanding of whose fault it is if web pages that only work in for
3029 example Internet Explorer 6 fail to work on Firefox, and funny because
3030 it explain very well how annoying it is for users when Linux
3031 distributions do not work with the documents they receive or the web
3032 pages they want to visit.&lt;/p&gt;
3033
3034 &lt;p&gt;This is part of the reason why I believe it is important for Debian
3035 and Debian Edu to have a well working Flash implementation in the
3036 distribution, to get at least popular sites as Youtube and Google
3037 Video to working out of the box. For Squeeze, Debian have the chance
3038 to include the latest version of Gnash that will make this happen, as
3039 the new release 0.8.8 was published a few weeks ago and is resting in
3040 unstable. The new version work with more sites that version 0.8.7.
3041 The Gnash maintainers have asked for a freeze exception, but the
3042 release team have not had time to reply to it yet. I hope they agree
3043 with me that Flash is important for the Debian desktop users, and thus
3044 accept the new package into Squeeze.&lt;/p&gt;
3045 </description>
3046 </item>
3047
3048 <item>
3049 <title>Circular package dependencies harms apt recovery</title>
3050 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Circular_package_dependencies_harms_apt_recovery.html</link>
3051 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Circular_package_dependencies_harms_apt_recovery.html</guid>
3052 <pubDate>Tue, 27 Jul 2010 23:50:00 +0200</pubDate>
3053 <description>&lt;p&gt;I discovered this while doing
3054 &lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html&quot;&gt;automated
3055 testing of upgrades from Debian Lenny to Squeeze&lt;/a&gt;. A few packages
3056 in Debian still got circular dependencies, and it is often claimed
3057 that apt and aptitude should be able to handle this just fine, but
3058 some times these dependency loops causes apt to fail.&lt;/p&gt;
3059
3060 &lt;p&gt;An example is from todays
3061 &lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing//test-20100727-lenny-squeeze-kde-aptitude.txt&quot;&gt;upgrade
3062 of KDE using aptitude&lt;/a&gt;. In it, a bug in kdebase-workspace-data
3063 causes perl-modules to fail to upgrade. The cause is simple. If a
3064 package fail to unpack, then only part of packages with the circular
3065 dependency might end up being unpacked when unpacking aborts, and the
3066 ones already unpacked will fail to configure in the recovery phase
3067 because its dependencies are unavailable.&lt;/p&gt;
3068
3069 &lt;p&gt;In this log, the problem manifest itself with this error:&lt;/p&gt;
3070
3071 &lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
3072 dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of perl-modules:
3073 perl-modules depends on perl (&gt;= 5.10.1-1); however:
3074 Version of perl on system is 5.10.0-19lenny2.
3075 dpkg: error processing perl-modules (--configure):
3076 dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
3077 &lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;
3078
3079 &lt;p&gt;The perl/perl-modules circular dependency is already
3080 &lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/527917&quot;&gt;reported as a bug&lt;/a&gt;, and will
3081 hopefully be solved as soon as possible, but it is not the only one,
3082 and each one of these loops in the dependency tree can cause similar
3083 failures. Of course, they only occur when there are bugs in other
3084 packages causing the unpacking to fail, but it is rather nasty when
3085 the failure of one package causes the problem to become worse because
3086 of dependency loops.&lt;/p&gt;
3087
3088 &lt;p&gt;Thanks to
3089 &lt;a href=&quot;http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/06/msg00116.html&quot;&gt;the
3090 tireless effort by Bill Allombert&lt;/a&gt;, the number of circular
3091 dependencies
3092 &lt;a href=&quot;http://debian.semistable.com/debgraph.out.html&quot;&gt;left in Debian
3093 is dropping&lt;/a&gt;, and perhaps it will reach zero one day. :)&lt;/p&gt;
3094
3095 &lt;p&gt;Todays testing also exposed a bug in
3096 &lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/590605&quot;&gt;update-notifier&lt;/a&gt; and
3097 &lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/590604&quot;&gt;different behaviour&lt;/a&gt; between
3098 apt-get and aptitude, the latter possibly caused by some circular
3099 dependency. Reported both to BTS to try to get someone to look at
3100 it.&lt;/p&gt;
3101 </description>
3102 </item>
3103
3104 <item>
3105 <title>What are they searching for - PowerDNS and ISC DHCP in LDAP</title>
3106 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_are_they_searching_for___PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_in_LDAP.html</link>
3107 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_are_they_searching_for___PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_in_LDAP.html</guid>
3108 <pubDate>Sat, 17 Jul 2010 21:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
3109 <description>&lt;p&gt;This is a
3110 &lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html&quot;&gt;followup&lt;/a&gt;
3111 on my
3112 &lt;a href=&quot;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&quot;&gt;previous
3113 work&lt;/a&gt; on
3114 &lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html&quot;&gt;merging
3115 all&lt;/a&gt; the computer related LDAP objects in Debian Edu.&lt;/p&gt;
3116
3117 &lt;p&gt;As a step to try to see if it possible to merge the DNS and DHCP
3118 LDAP objects, I have had a look at how the packages pdns-backend-ldap
3119 and dhcp3-server-ldap in Debian use the LDAP server. The two
3120 implementations are quite different in how they use LDAP.&lt;/p&gt;
3121
3122 To get this information, I started slapd with debugging enabled and
3123 dumped the debug output to a file to get the LDAP searches performed
3124 on a Debian Edu main-server. Here is a summary.
3125
3126 &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;powerdns&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
3127
3128 &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.linuxnetworks.de/doc/index.php/PowerDNS_LDAP_Backend&quot;&gt;Clues
3129 on how to&lt;/a&gt; set up PowerDNS to use a LDAP backend is available on
3130 the web.
3131
3132 &lt;p&gt;PowerDNS have two modes of operation using LDAP as its backend.
3133 One &quot;strict&quot; mode where the forward and reverse DNS lookups are done
3134 using the same LDAP objects, and a &quot;tree&quot; mode where the forward and
3135 reverse entries are in two different subtrees in LDAP with a structure
3136 based on the DNS names, as in tjener.intern and
3137 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa.&lt;/p&gt;
3138
3139 &lt;p&gt;In tree mode, the server is set up to use a LDAP subtree as its
3140 base, and uses a &quot;base&quot; scoped search for the DNS name by adding
3141 &quot;dc=tjener,dc=intern,&quot; to the base with a filter for
3142 &quot;(associateddomain=tjener.intern)&quot; for the forward entry and
3143 &quot;dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,&quot; with a filter for
3144 &quot;(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)&quot; for the reverse entry. For
3145 forward entries, it is looking for attributes named dnsttl, arecord,
3146 nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord,
3147 txtrecord, rprecord, afsdbrecord, keyrecord, aaaarecord, locrecord,
3148 srvrecord, naptrrecord, kxrecord, certrecord, dsrecord, sshfprecord,
3149 ipseckeyrecord, rrsigrecord, nsecrecord, dnskeyrecord, dhcidrecord,
3150 spfrecord and modifytimestamp. For reverse entries it is looking for
3151 the attributes dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord,
3152 ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord,
3153 locrecord, srvrecord, naptrrecord and modifytimestamp. The equivalent
3154 ldapsearch commands could look like this:&lt;/p&gt;
3155
3156 &lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
3157 ldapsearch -h ldap \
3158 -b dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
3159 -s base -x &#39;(associateddomain=tjener.intern)&#39; dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
3160 cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
3161 rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
3162 nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
3163 rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
3164
3165 ldapsearch -h ldap \
3166 -b dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
3167 -s base -x &#39;(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)&#39;
3168 dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord soarecord ptrrecord \
3169 hinforecord mxrecord txtrecord rprecord aaaarecord locrecord \
3170 srvrecord naptrrecord modifytimestamp
3171 &lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;
3172
3173 &lt;p&gt;In Debian Edu/Lenny, the PowerDNS tree mode is used with
3174 ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no as the base, and these are two
3175 example LDAP objects used there. In addition to these objects, the
3176 parent objects all th way up to ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
3177 also exist.&lt;/p&gt;
3178
3179 &lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
3180 dn: dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
3181 objectclass: top
3182 objectclass: dnsdomain
3183 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
3184 dc: tjener
3185 arecord: 10.0.2.2
3186 associateddomain: tjener.intern
3187
3188 dn: dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
3189 objectclass: top
3190 objectclass: dnsdomain2
3191 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
3192 dc: 2
3193 ptrrecord: tjener.intern
3194 associateddomain: 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa
3195 &lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;
3196
3197 &lt;p&gt;In strict mode, the server behaves differently. When looking for
3198 forward DNS entries, it is doing a &quot;subtree&quot; scoped search with the
3199 same base as in the tree mode for a object with filter
3200 &quot;(associateddomain=tjener.intern)&quot; and requests the attributes dnsttl,
3201 arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord,
3202 mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord, locrecord, srvrecord,
3203 naptrrecord and modifytimestamp. For reverse entires it also do a
3204 subtree scoped search but this time the filter is &quot;(arecord=10.0.2.2)&quot;
3205 and the requested attributes are associateddomain, dnsttl and
3206 modifytimestamp. In short, in strict mode the objects with ptrrecord
3207 go away, and the arecord attribute in the forward object is used
3208 instead.&lt;/p&gt;
3209
3210 &lt;p&gt;The forward and reverse searches can be simulated using ldapsearch
3211 like this:&lt;/p&gt;
3212
3213 &lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
3214 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
3215 &#39;(associateddomain=tjener.intern)&#39; dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
3216 cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
3217 rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
3218 nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
3219 rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
3220
3221 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
3222 &#39;(arecord=10.0.2.2)&#39; associateddomain dnsttl modifytimestamp
3223 &lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;
3224
3225 &lt;p&gt;In addition to the forward and reverse searches , there is also a
3226 search for SOA records, which behave similar to the forward and
3227 reverse lookups.&lt;/p&gt;
3228
3229 &lt;p&gt;A thing to note with the PowerDNS behaviour is that it do not
3230 specify any objectclass names, and instead look for the attributes it
3231 need to generate a DNS reply. This make it able to work with any
3232 objectclass that provide the needed attributes.&lt;/p&gt;
3233
3234 &lt;p&gt;The attributes are normally provided in the cosine (RFC 1274) and
3235 dnsdomain2 schemas. The latter is used for reverse entries like
3236 ptrrecord and recent DNS additions like aaaarecord and srvrecord.&lt;/p&gt;
3237
3238 &lt;p&gt;In Debian Edu, we have created DNS objects using the object classes
3239 dcobject (for dc), dnsdomain or dnsdomain2 (structural, for the DNS
3240 attributes) and domainrelatedobject (for associatedDomain). The use
3241 of structural object classes make it impossible to combine these
3242 classes with the object classes used by DHCP.&lt;/p&gt;
3243
3244 &lt;p&gt;There are other schemas that could be used too, for example the
3245 dnszone structural object class used by Gosa and bind-sdb for the DNS
3246 attributes combined with the domainrelatedobject object class, but in
3247 this case some unused attributes would have to be included as well
3248 (zonename and relativedomainname).&lt;/p&gt;
3249
3250 &lt;p&gt;My proposal for Debian Edu would be to switch PowerDNS to strict
3251 mode and not use any of the existing objectclasses (dnsdomain,
3252 dnsdomain2 and dnszone) when one want to combine the DNS information
3253 with DHCP information, and instead create a auxiliary object class
3254 defined something like this (using the attributes defined for
3255 dnsdomain and dnsdomain2 or dnszone):&lt;/p&gt;
3256
3257 &lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
3258 objectclass ( some-oid NAME &#39;dnsDomainAux&#39;
3259 SUP top
3260 AUXILIARY
3261 MAY ( ARecord $ MDRecord $ MXRecord $ NSRecord $ SOARecord $ CNAMERecord $
3262 DNSTTL $ DNSClass $ PTRRecord $ HINFORecord $ MINFORecord $
3263 TXTRecord $ SIGRecord $ KEYRecord $ AAAARecord $ LOCRecord $
3264 NXTRecord $ SRVRecord $ NAPTRRecord $ KXRecord $ CERTRecord $
3265 A6Record $ DNAMERecord
3266 ))
3267 &lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;
3268
3269 &lt;p&gt;This will allow any object to become a DNS entry when combined with
3270 the domainrelatedobject object class, and allow any entity to include
3271 all the attributes PowerDNS wants. I&#39;ve sent an email to the PowerDNS
3272 developers asking for their view on this schema and if they are
3273 interested in providing such schema with PowerDNS, and I hope my
3274 message will be accepted into their mailing list soon.&lt;/p&gt;
3275
3276 &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ISC dhcp&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
3277
3278 &lt;p&gt;The DHCP server searches for specific objectclass and requests all
3279 the object attributes, and then uses the attributes it want. This
3280 make it harder to figure out exactly what attributes are used, but
3281 thanks to the working example in Debian Edu I can at least get an idea
3282 what is needed without having to read the source code.&lt;/p&gt;
3283
3284 &lt;p&gt;In the DHCP server configuration, the LDAP base to use and the
3285 search filter to use to locate the correct dhcpServer entity is
3286 stored. These are the relevant entries from
3287 /etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf:&lt;/p&gt;
3288
3289 &lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
3290 ldap-base-dn &quot;dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no&quot;;
3291 ldap-dhcp-server-cn &quot;dhcp&quot;;
3292 &lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;
3293
3294 &lt;p&gt;The DHCP server uses this information to nest all the DHCP
3295 configuration it need. The cn &quot;dhcp&quot; is located using the given LDAP
3296 base and the filter &quot;(&amp;(objectClass=dhcpServer)(cn=dhcp))&quot;. The
3297 search result is this entry:&lt;/p&gt;
3298
3299 &lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
3300 dn: cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
3301 cn: dhcp
3302 objectClass: top
3303 objectClass: dhcpServer
3304 dhcpServiceDN: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
3305 &lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;
3306
3307 &lt;p&gt;The content of the dhcpServiceDN attribute is next used to locate the
3308 subtree with DHCP configuration. The DHCP configuration subtree base
3309 is located using a base scope search with base &quot;cn=DHCP
3310 Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no&quot; and filter
3311 &quot;(&amp;(objectClass=dhcpService)(|(dhcpPrimaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)(dhcpSecondaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)))&quot;.
3312 The search result is this entry:&lt;/p&gt;
3313
3314 &lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
3315 dn: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
3316 cn: DHCP Config
3317 objectClass: top
3318 objectClass: dhcpService
3319 objectClass: dhcpOptions
3320 dhcpPrimaryDN: cn=dhcp, dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
3321 dhcpStatements: ddns-update-style none
3322 dhcpStatements: authoritative
3323 dhcpOption: smtp-server code 69 = array of ip-address
3324 dhcpOption: www-server code 72 = array of ip-address
3325 dhcpOption: wpad-url code 252 = text
3326 &lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;
3327
3328 &lt;p&gt;Next, the entire subtree is processed, one level at the time. When
3329 all the DHCP configuration is loaded, it is ready to receive requests.
3330 The subtree in Debian Edu contain objects with object classes
3331 top/dhcpService/dhcpOptions, top/dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions,
3332 top/dhcpSubnet, top/dhcpGroup and top/dhcpHost. These provide options
3333 and information about netmasks, dynamic range etc. Leaving out the
3334 details here because it is not relevant for the focus of my
3335 investigation, which is to see if it is possible to merge dns and dhcp
3336 related computer objects.&lt;/p&gt;
3337
3338 &lt;p&gt;When a DHCP request come in, LDAP is searched for the MAC address
3339 of the client (00:00:00:00:00:00 in this example), using a subtree
3340 scoped search with &quot;cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no&quot; as
3341 the base and &quot;(&amp;(objectClass=dhcpHost)(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet
3342 00:00:00:00:00:00))&quot; as the filter. This is what a host object look
3343 like:&lt;/p&gt;
3344
3345 &lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
3346 dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
3347 cn: hostname
3348 objectClass: top
3349 objectClass: dhcpHost
3350 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
3351 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname
3352 &lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;
3353
3354 &lt;p&gt;There is less flexiblity in the way LDAP searches are done here.
3355 The object classes need to have fixed names, and the configuration
3356 need to be stored in a fairly specific LDAP structure. On the
3357 positive side, the invidiual dhcpHost entires can be anywhere without
3358 the DN pointed to by the dhcpServer entries. The latter should make
3359 it possible to group all host entries in a subtree next to the
3360 configuration entries, and this subtree can also be shared with the
3361 DNS server if the schema proposed above is combined with the dhcpHost
3362 structural object class.
3363
3364 &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
3365
3366 &lt;p&gt;The PowerDNS implementation seem to be very flexible when it come
3367 to which LDAP schemas to use. While its &quot;tree&quot; mode is rigid when it
3368 come to the the LDAP structure, the &quot;strict&quot; mode is very flexible,
3369 allowing DNS objects to be stored anywhere under the base cn specified
3370 in the configuration.&lt;/p&gt;
3371
3372 &lt;p&gt;The DHCP implementation on the other hand is very inflexible, both
3373 regarding which LDAP schemas to use and which LDAP structure to use.
3374 I guess one could implement ones own schema, as long as the
3375 objectclasses and attributes have the names used, but this do not
3376 really help when the DHCP subtree need to have a fairly fixed
3377 structure.&lt;/p&gt;
3378
3379 &lt;p&gt;Based on the observed behaviour, I suspect a LDAP structure like
3380 this might work for Debian Edu:&lt;/p&gt;
3381
3382 &lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
3383 ou=services
3384 cn=machine-info (dhcpService) - dhcpServiceDN points here
3385 cn=dhcp (dhcpServer)
3386 cn=dhcp-internal (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
3387 cn=10.0.2.0 (dhcpSubnet)
3388 cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
3389 cn=dhcp-thinclients (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
3390 cn=192.168.0.0 (dhcpSubnet)
3391 cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
3392 ou=machines - PowerDNS base points here
3393 cn=hostname (dhcpHost/domainrelatedobject/dnsDomainAux)
3394 &lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;
3395
3396 &lt;P&gt;This is not tested yet. If the DHCP server require the dhcpHost
3397 entries to be in the dhcpGroup subtrees, the entries can be stored
3398 there instead of a common machines subtree, and the PowerDNS base
3399 would have to be moved one level up to the machine-info subtree.&lt;/p&gt;
3400
3401 &lt;p&gt;The combined object under the machines subtree would look something
3402 like this:&lt;/p&gt;
3403
3404 &lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
3405 dn: dc=hostname,ou=machines,cn=machine-info,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
3406 dc: hostname
3407 objectClass: top
3408 objectClass: dhcpHost
3409 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
3410 objectclass: dnsDomainAux
3411 associateddomain: hostname.intern
3412 arecord: 10.11.12.13
3413 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
3414 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname.intern
3415 &lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;
3416
3417 &lt;/p&gt;One could even add the LTSP configuration associated with a given
3418 machine, as long as the required attributes are available in a
3419 auxiliary object class.&lt;/p&gt;
3420 </description>
3421 </item>
3422
3423 <item>
3424 <title>Combining PowerDNS and ISC DHCP LDAP objects</title>
3425 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html</link>
3426 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html</guid>
3427 <pubDate>Wed, 14 Jul 2010 23:45:00 +0200</pubDate>
3428 <description>&lt;p&gt;For a while now, I have wanted to find a way to change the DNS and
3429 DHCP services in Debian Edu to use the same LDAP objects for a given
3430 computer, to avoid the possibility of having a inconsistent state for
3431 a computer in LDAP (as in DHCP but no DNS entry or the other way
3432 around) and make it easier to add computers to LDAP.&lt;/p&gt;
3433
3434 &lt;p&gt;I&#39;ve looked at how powerdns and dhcpd is using LDAP, and using this
3435 information finally found a solution that seem to work.&lt;/p&gt;
3436
3437 &lt;p&gt;The old setup required three LDAP objects for a given computer.
3438 One forward DNS entry, one reverse DNS entry and one DHCP entry. If
3439 we switch powerdns to use its strict LDAP method (ldap-method=strict
3440 in pdns-debian-edu.conf), the forward and reverse DNS entries are
3441 merged into one while making it impossible to transfer the reverse map
3442 to a slave DNS server.&lt;/p&gt;
3443
3444 &lt;p&gt;If we also replace the object class used to get the DNS related
3445 attributes to one allowing these attributes to be combined with the
3446 dhcphost object class, we can merge the DNS and DHCP entries into one.
3447 I&#39;ve written such object class in the dnsdomainaux.schema file (need
3448 proper OIDs, but that is a minor issue), and tested the setup. It
3449 seem to work.&lt;/p&gt;
3450
3451 &lt;p&gt;With this test setup in place, we can get away with one LDAP object
3452 for both DNS and DHCP, and even the LTSP configuration I suggested in
3453 an earlier email. The combined LDAP object will look something like
3454 this:&lt;/p&gt;
3455
3456 &lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
3457 dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
3458 cn: hostname
3459 objectClass: dhcphost
3460 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
3461 objectclass: dnsdomainaux
3462 associateddomain: hostname.intern
3463 arecord: 10.11.12.13
3464 dhcphwaddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
3465 dhcpstatements: fixed-address hostname
3466 ldapconfigsound: Y
3467 &lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;
3468
3469 &lt;p&gt;The DNS server uses the associateddomain and arecord entries, while
3470 the DHCP server uses the dhcphwaddress and dhcpstatements entries
3471 before asking DNS to resolve the fixed-adddress. LTSP will use
3472 dhcphwaddress or associateddomain and the ldapconfig* attributes.&lt;/p&gt;
3473
3474 &lt;p&gt;I am not yet sure if I can get the DHCP server to look for its
3475 dhcphost in a different location, to allow us to put the objects
3476 outside the &quot;DHCP Config&quot; subtree, but hope to figure out a way to do
3477 that. If I can&#39;t figure out a way to do that, we can still get rid of
3478 the hosts subtree and move all its content into the DHCP Config tree
3479 (which probably should be renamed to be more related to the new
3480 content. I suspect cn=dnsdhcp,ou=services or something like that
3481 might be a good place to put it.&lt;/p&gt;
3482
3483 &lt;p&gt;If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
3484 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.&lt;/p&gt;
3485 </description>
3486 </item>
3487
3488 <item>
3489 <title>Idea for storing LTSP configuration in LDAP</title>
3490 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_storing_LTSP_configuration_in_LDAP.html</link>
3491 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_storing_LTSP_configuration_in_LDAP.html</guid>
3492 <pubDate>Sun, 11 Jul 2010 22:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
3493 <description>&lt;p&gt;Vagrant mentioned on IRC today that ltsp_config now support
3494 sourcing files from /usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ on the thin
3495 clients, and that this can be used to fetch configuration from LDAP if
3496 Debian Edu choose to store configuration there.&lt;/p&gt;
3497
3498 &lt;p&gt;Armed with this information, I got inspired and wrote a test module
3499 to get configuration from LDAP. The idea is to look up the MAC
3500 address of the client in LDAP, and look for attributes on the form
3501 ltspconfigsetting=value, and use this to export SETTING=value to the
3502 LTSP clients.&lt;/p&gt;
3503
3504 &lt;p&gt;The goal is to be able to store the LTSP configuration attributes
3505 in a &quot;computer&quot; LDAP object used by both DNS and DHCP, and thus
3506 allowing us to store all information about a computer in one place.&lt;/p&gt;
3507
3508 &lt;p&gt;This is a untested draft implementation, and I welcome feedback on
3509 this approach. A real LDAP schema for the ltspClientAux objectclass
3510 need to be written. Comments, suggestions, etc?&lt;/p&gt;
3511
3512 &lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
3513 # Store in /opt/ltsp/$arch/usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ldap-config
3514 #
3515 # Fetch LTSP client settings from LDAP based on MAC address
3516 #
3517 # Uses ethernet address as stored in the dhcpHost objectclass using
3518 # the dhcpHWAddress attribute or ethernet address stored in the
3519 # ieee802Device objectclass with the macAddress attribute.
3520 #
3521 # This module is written to be schema agnostic, and only depend on the
3522 # existence of attribute names.
3523 #
3524 # The LTSP configuration variables are saved directly using a
3525 # ltspConfig prefix and uppercasing the rest of the attribute name.
3526 # To set the SERVER variable, set the ltspConfigServer attribute.
3527 #
3528 # Some LDAP schema should be created with all the relevant
3529 # configuration settings. Something like this should work:
3530 #
3531 # objectclass ( 1.1.2.2 NAME &#39;ltspClientAux&#39;
3532 # SUP top
3533 # AUXILIARY
3534 # MAY ( ltspConfigServer $ ltsConfigSound $ ... )
3535
3536 LDAPSERVER=$(debian-edu-ldapserver)
3537 if [ &quot;$LDAPSERVER&quot; ] ; then
3538 LDAPBASE=$(debian-edu-ldapserver -b)
3539 for MAC in $(LANG=C ifconfig |grep -i hwaddr| awk &#39;{print $5}&#39;|sort -u) ; do
3540 filter=&quot;(|(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet $MAC)(macAddress=$MAC))&quot;
3541 ldapsearch -h &quot;$LDAPSERVER&quot; -b &quot;$LDAPBASE&quot; -v -x &quot;$filter&quot; | \
3542 grep &#39;^ltspConfig&#39; | while read attr value ; do
3543 # Remove prefix and convert to upper case
3544 attr=$(echo $attr | sed &#39;s/^ltspConfig//i&#39; | tr a-z A-Z)
3545 # bass value on to clients
3546 eval &quot;$attr=$value; export $attr&quot;
3547 done
3548 done
3549 fi
3550 &lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;
3551
3552 &lt;p&gt;I&#39;m not sure this shell construction will work, because I suspect
3553 the while block might end up in a subshell causing the variables set
3554 there to not show up in ltsp-config, but if that is the case I am sure
3555 the code can be restructured to make sure the variables are passed on.
3556 I expect that can be solved with some testing. :)&lt;/p&gt;
3557
3558 &lt;p&gt;If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
3559 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.&lt;/p&gt;
3560
3561 &lt;p&gt;Update 2010-07-17: I am aware of another effort to store LTSP
3562 configuration in LDAP that was created around year 2000 by
3563 &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.pcxperience.com/thinclient/documentation/ldap.html&quot;&gt;PC
3564 Xperience, Inc., 2000&lt;/a&gt;. I found its
3565 &lt;a href=&quot;http://people.redhat.com/alikins/ltsp/ldap/&quot;&gt;files&lt;/a&gt; on a
3566 personal home page over at redhat.com.&lt;/p&gt;
3567 </description>
3568 </item>
3569
3570 <item>
3571 <title>jXplorer, a very nice LDAP GUI</title>
3572 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/jXplorer__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html</link>
3573 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/jXplorer__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html</guid>
3574 <pubDate>Fri, 9 Jul 2010 12:55:00 +0200</pubDate>
3575 <description>&lt;p&gt;Since
3576 &lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html&quot;&gt;my
3577 last post&lt;/a&gt; about available LDAP tools in Debian, I was told about a
3578 LDAP GUI that is even better than luma. The java application
3579 &lt;a href=&quot;http://jxplorer.org/&quot;&gt;jXplorer&lt;/a&gt; is claimed to be capable of
3580 moving LDAP objects and subtrees using drag-and-drop, and can
3581 authenticate using Kerberos. I have only tested the Kerberos
3582 authentication, but do not have a LDAP setup allowing me to rewrite
3583 LDAP with my test user yet. It is
3584 &lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/j/jxplorer.html&quot;&gt;available in
3585 Debian&lt;/a&gt; testing and unstable at the moment. The only problem I
3586 have with it is how it handle errors. If something go wrong, its
3587 non-intuitive behaviour require me to go through some query work list
3588 and remove the failing query. Nothing big, but very annoying.&lt;/p&gt;
3589 </description>
3590 </item>
3591
3592 <item>
3593 <title>Lenny-&gt;Squeeze upgrades, apt vs aptitude with the Gnome desktop</title>
3594 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__apt_vs_aptitude_with_the_Gnome_desktop.html</link>
3595 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__apt_vs_aptitude_with_the_Gnome_desktop.html</guid>
3596 <pubDate>Sat, 3 Jul 2010 23:55:00 +0200</pubDate>
3597 <description>&lt;p&gt;Here is a short update on my &lt;a
3598 href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/&quot;&gt;my
3599 Debian Lenny-&gt;Squeeze upgrade testing&lt;/a&gt;. Here is a summary of the
3600 difference for Gnome when it is upgraded by apt-get and aptitude. I&#39;m
3601 not reporting the status for KDE, because the upgrade crashes when
3602 aptitude try because of missing conflicts
3603 (&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/584861&quot;&gt;#584861&lt;/a&gt; and
3604 &lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/585716&quot;&gt;#585716&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;
3605
3606 &lt;p&gt;At the end of the upgrade test script, dpkg -l is executed to get a
3607 complete list of the installed packages. Based on this I see these
3608 differences when I did a test run today. As usual, I do not really
3609 know what the correct set of packages would be, but thought it best to
3610 publish the difference.&lt;/p&gt;
3611
3612 &lt;p&gt;Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude&lt;/p&gt;
3613
3614 &lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;
3615 at-spi cpp-4.3 finger gnome-spell gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
3616 libatspi1.0-0 libcupsys2 libeel2-data libgail-common libgdl-1-common
3617 libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin
3618 libgtksourceview-common libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
3619 libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libservlet2.4-java libxalan2-java
3620 libxerces2-java openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
3621 python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gtkhtml2
3622 python-gtkmozembed svgalibg1 xserver-xephyr zip
3623 &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;
3624
3625 &lt;p&gt;Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude&lt;/p&gt;
3626
3627 &lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;
3628 bluez-utils dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop epiphany-gecko
3629 gnome-app-install gnome-mount gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager
3630 libao2 libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libbind9-50
3631 libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcurl3
3632 libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9
3633 libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3
3634 libfaad0 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
3635 libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
3636 libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
3637 libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
3638 libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50
3639 libisccfg50 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick++10
3640 libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4
3641 libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5
3642 libparted1.8-10 libpisock9 libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3
3643 libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8 libsensors3 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
3644 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1
3645 libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0 libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj
3646 libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3
3647 mysql-common swfdec-gnome totem-gstreamer wodim
3648 &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;
3649
3650 &lt;p&gt;Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get&lt;/p&gt;
3651
3652 &lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;
3653 gnome gnome-desktop-environment hamster-applet python-gnomeapplet
3654 python-gnomekeyring python-wnck rhythmbox-plugins xorg
3655 xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
3656 xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
3657 xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-video-all
3658 xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark xserver-xorg-video-ati
3659 xserver-xorg-video-chips xserver-xorg-video-cirrus
3660 xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
3661 xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
3662 xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-mach64
3663 xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
3664 xserver-xorg-video-nouveau xserver-xorg-video-nv
3665 xserver-xorg-video-r128 xserver-xorg-video-radeon
3666 xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd xserver-xorg-video-rendition
3667 xserver-xorg-video-s3 xserver-xorg-video-s3virge
3668 xserver-xorg-video-savage xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion
3669 xserver-xorg-video-sis xserver-xorg-video-sisusb
3670 xserver-xorg-video-tdfx xserver-xorg-video-tga
3671 xserver-xorg-video-trident xserver-xorg-video-tseng
3672 xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vmware
3673 xserver-xorg-video-voodoo
3674 &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;
3675
3676 &lt;p&gt;Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get&lt;/p&gt;
3677
3678 &lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;
3679 deskbar-applet xserver-xorg xserver-xorg-core
3680 xserver-xorg-input-wacom xserver-xorg-video-intel
3681 xserver-xorg-video-openchrome
3682 &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;
3683
3684 &lt;p&gt;I was told on IRC that the xorg-xserver package was
3685 &lt;a href=&quot;http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-xorg/xserver/xorg-server.git;a=commit;h=9c8080d06c457932d3bfec021c69ac000aa60120&quot;&gt;changed
3686 in git&lt;/a&gt; today to try to get apt-get to not remove xorg completely.
3687 No idea when it hits Squeeze, but when it does I hope it will reduce
3688 the difference somewhat.
3689 </description>
3690 </item>
3691
3692 <item>
3693 <title>LUMA, a very nice LDAP GUI</title>
3694 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html</link>
3695 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html</guid>
3696 <pubDate>Mon, 28 Jun 2010 00:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
3697 <description>&lt;p&gt;The last few days I have been looking into the status of the LDAP
3698 directory in Debian Edu, and in the process I started to miss a GUI
3699 tool to browse the LDAP tree. The only one I was able to find in
3700 Debian/Squeeze and Lenny is
3701 &lt;a href=&quot;http://luma.sourceforge.net/&quot;&gt;LUMA&lt;/a&gt;, which has proved to
3702 be a great tool to get a overview of the current LDAP directory
3703 populated by default in Skolelinux. Thanks to it, I have been able to
3704 find empty and obsolete subtrees, misplaced objects and duplicate
3705 objects. It will be installed by default in Debian/Squeeze. If you
3706 are working with LDAP, give it a go. :)&lt;/p&gt;
3707
3708 &lt;p&gt;I did notice one problem with it I have not had time to report to
3709 the BTS yet. There is no .desktop file in the package, so the tool do
3710 not show up in the Gnome and KDE menus, but only deep down in in the
3711 Debian submenu in KDE. I hope that can be fixed before Squeeze is
3712 released.&lt;/p&gt;
3713
3714 &lt;p&gt;I have not yet been able to get it to modify the tree yet. I would
3715 like to move objects and remove subtrees directly in the GUI, but have
3716 not found a way to do that with LUMA yet. So in the mean time, I use
3717 &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lichteblau.com/ldapvi/&quot;&gt;ldapvi&lt;/a&gt; for that.&lt;/p&gt;
3718
3719 &lt;p&gt;If you have tips on other GUI tools for LDAP that might be useful
3720 in Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.&lt;/p&gt;
3721
3722 &lt;p&gt;Update 2010-06-29: Ross Reedstrom tipped us about the
3723 &lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/g/gq.html&quot;&gt;gq&lt;/a&gt; package as a
3724 useful GUI alternative. It seem like a good tool, but is unmaintained
3725 in Debian and got a RC bug keeping it out of Squeeze. Unless that
3726 changes, it will not be an option for Debian Edu based on Squeeze.&lt;/p&gt;
3727 </description>
3728 </item>
3729
3730 <item>
3731 <title>Idea for a change to LDAP schemas allowing DNS and DHCP info to be combined into one object</title>
3732 <link>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</link>
3733 <guid isPermaLink="true">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</guid>
3734 <pubDate>Thu, 24 Jun 2010 00:35:00 +0200</pubDate>
3735 <description>&lt;p&gt;A while back, I
3736 &lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html&quot;&gt;complained
3737 about the fact&lt;/a&gt; that it is not possible with the provided schemas
3738 for storing DNS and DHCP information in LDAP to combine the two sets
3739 of information into one LDAP object representing a computer.&lt;/p&gt;
3740
3741 &lt;p&gt;In the mean time, I discovered that a simple fix would be to make
3742 the dhcpHost object class auxiliary, to allow it to be combined with
3743 the dNSDomain object class, and thus forming one object for one
3744 computer when storing both DHCP and DNS information in LDAP.&lt;/p&gt;
3745
3746 &lt;p&gt;If I understand this correctly, it is not safe to do this change
3747 without also changing the assigned number for the object class, and I
3748 do not know enough about LDAP schema design to do that properly for
3749 Debian Edu.&lt;/p&gt;
3750
3751 &lt;p&gt;Anyway, for future reference, this is how I believe we could change
3752 the
3753 &lt;a href=&quot;http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dhc-ldap-schema-00&quot;&gt;DHCP
3754 schema&lt;/a&gt; to solve at least part of the problem with the LDAP schemas
3755 available today from IETF.&lt;/p&gt;
3756
3757 &lt;pre&gt;
3758 --- dhcp.schema (revision 65192)
3759 +++ dhcp.schema (working copy)
3760 @@ -376,7 +376,7 @@
3761 objectclass ( 2.16.840.1.113719.1.203.6.6
3762 NAME &#39;dhcpHost&#39;
3763 DESC &#39;This represents information about a particular client&#39;
3764 - SUP top
3765 + SUP top AUXILIARY
3766 MUST cn
3767 MAY (dhcpLeaseDN $ dhcpHWAddress $ dhcpOptionsDN $ dhcpStatements $ dhcpComments $ dhcpOption)
3768 X-NDS_CONTAINMENT (&#39;dhcpService&#39; &#39;dhcpSubnet&#39; &#39;dhcpGroup&#39;) )
3769 &lt;/pre&gt;
3770
3771 &lt;p&gt;I very much welcome clues on how to do this properly for Debian
3772 Edu/Squeeze. We provide the DHCP schema in our debian-edu-config
3773 package, and should thus be free to rewrite it as we see fit.&lt;/p&gt;
3774
3775 &lt;p&gt;If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
3776 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.&lt;/p&gt;
3777 </description>
3778 </item>
3779
3780 <item>
3781 <title>Calling tasksel like the installer, while still getting useful output</title>
3782 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Calling_tasksel_like_the_installer__while_still_getting_useful_output.html</link>
3783 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Calling_tasksel_like_the_installer__while_still_getting_useful_output.html</guid>
3784 <pubDate>Wed, 16 Jun 2010 14:55:00 +0200</pubDate>
3785 <description>&lt;p&gt;A few times I have had the need to simulate the way tasksel
3786 installs packages during the normal debian-installer run. Until now,
3787 I have ended up letting tasksel do the work, with the annoying problem
3788 of not getting any feedback at all when something fails (like a
3789 conffile question from dpkg or a download that fails), using code like
3790 this:
3791
3792 &lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
3793 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
3794 tasksel --new-install
3795 &lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;
3796
3797 This would invoke tasksel, let its automatic task selection pick the
3798 tasks to install, and continue to install the requested tasks without
3799 any output what so ever.
3800
3801 Recently I revisited this problem while working on the automatic
3802 package upgrade testing, because tasksel would some times hang without
3803 any useful feedback, and I want to see what is going on when it
3804 happen. Then it occured to me, I can parse the output from tasksel
3805 when asked to run in test mode, and use that aptitude command line
3806 printed by tasksel then to simulate the tasksel run. I ended up using
3807 code like this:
3808
3809 &lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
3810 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
3811 cmd=&quot;$(in_target tasksel -t --new-install | sed &#39;s/debconf-apt-progress -- //&#39;)&quot;
3812 $cmd
3813 &lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;
3814
3815 &lt;p&gt;The content of $cmd is typically something like &quot;&lt;tt&gt;aptitude -q
3816 --without-recommends -o APT::Install-Recommends=no -y install
3817 ~t^desktop$ ~t^gnome-desktop$ ~t^laptop$ ~pstandard ~prequired
3818 ~pimportant&lt;/tt&gt;&quot;, which will install the gnome desktop task, the
3819 laptop task and all packages with priority standard , required and
3820 important, just like tasksel would have done it during
3821 installation.&lt;/p&gt;
3822
3823 &lt;p&gt;A better approach is probably to extend tasksel to be able to
3824 install packages without using debconf-apt-progress, for use cases
3825 like this.&lt;/p&gt;
3826 </description>
3827 </item>
3828
3829 <item>
3830 <title>Lenny-&gt;Squeeze upgrades, removals by apt and aptitude</title>
3831 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__removals_by_apt_and_aptitude.html</link>
3832 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__removals_by_apt_and_aptitude.html</guid>
3833 <pubDate>Sun, 13 Jun 2010 09:05:00 +0200</pubDate>
3834 <description>&lt;p&gt;My
3835 &lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html&quot;&gt;testing
3836 of Debian upgrades&lt;/a&gt; from Lenny to Squeeze continues, and I&#39;ve
3837 finally made the upgrade logs available from
3838 &lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/&quot;&gt;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/&lt;/a&gt;.
3839 I am now testing dist-upgrade of Gnome and KDE in a chroot using both
3840 apt and aptitude, and found their differences interesting. This time
3841 I will only focus on their removal plans.&lt;/p&gt;
3842
3843 &lt;p&gt;After installing a Gnome desktop and the laptop task, apt-get wants
3844 to remove 72 packages when dist-upgrading from Lenny to Squeeze. The
3845 surprising part is that it want to remove xorg and all
3846 xserver-xorg-video* drivers. Clearly not a good choice, but I am not
3847 sure why. When asking aptitude to do the same, it want to remove 129
3848 packages, but most of them are library packages I suspect are no
3849 longer needed. Both of them want to remove bluetooth packages, which
3850 I do not know. Perhaps these bluetooth packages are obsolete?&lt;/p&gt;
3851
3852 &lt;p&gt;For KDE, apt-get want to remove 82 packages, among them kdebase
3853 which seem like a bad idea and xorg the same way as with Gnome. Asking
3854 aptitude for the same, it wants to remove 192 packages, none which are
3855 too surprising.&lt;/p&gt;
3856
3857 &lt;p&gt;I guess the removal of xorg during upgrades should be investigated
3858 and avoided, and perhaps others as well. Here are the complete list
3859 of planned removals. The complete logs is available from the URL
3860 above. Note if you want to repeat these tests, that the upgrade test
3861 for kde+apt-get hung in the tasksel setup because of dpkg asking
3862 conffile questions. No idea why. I worked around it by using
3863 &#39;&lt;tt&gt;echo &gt;&gt; /proc/&lt;em&gt;pidofdpkg&lt;/em&gt;/fd/0&lt;/tt&gt;&#39; to tell dpkg to
3864 continue.&lt;/p&gt;
3865
3866 &lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;apt-get gnome 72&lt;/b&gt;
3867 &lt;br&gt;bluez-gnome cupsddk-drivers deskbar-applet gnome
3868 gnome-desktop-environment gnome-network-admin gtkhtml3.14
3869 iceweasel-gnome-support libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libgdl-1-0
3870 libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libmetacity0 libslab0 libxcb-xlib0
3871 nautilus-cd-burner python-gnome2-desktop python-gnome2-extras
3872 serpentine swfdec-mozilla update-manager xorg xserver-xorg
3873 xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
3874 xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
3875 xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
3876 xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
3877 xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
3878 xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
3879 xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
3880 xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
3881 xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
3882 xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
3883 xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
3884 xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
3885 xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
3886 xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
3887 xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
3888 xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
3889 xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
3890 xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
3891 xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
3892 xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
3893 xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
3894 xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9
3895 xulrunner-1.9-gnome-support&lt;/p&gt;
3896
3897 &lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;aptitude gnome 129&lt;/b&gt;
3898
3899 &lt;br&gt;bluez-gnome bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers dhcdbd
3900 djvulibre-desktop finger gnome-app-install gnome-mount
3901 gnome-network-admin gnome-spell gnome-vfs-obexftp
3902 gnome-volume-manager gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs gtkhtml3.14 libao2
3903 libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
3904 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcupsys2 libcurl3 libdatrie0
3905 libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20
3906 libeel2-data libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libfaad0 libgail-common
3907 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libgdl-1-0 libgdl-1-common
3908 libggz2 libggzcore9 libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0
3909 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libgnomeprint2.2-0
3910 libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgnomeprintui2.2-common
3911 libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
3912 libgtksourceview-common libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6
3913 libhesiod0 libicu38 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 libmagick++10
3914 libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmetacity0 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off
3915 libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2
3916 libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10
3917 libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libraw1394-8
3918 libsensors3 libslab0 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8 libssh2-1
3919 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10
3920 libtrackerclient0 libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0
3921 libxerces2-java libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6
3922 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common nautilus-cd-burner
3923 openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
3924 python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gnome2-desktop
3925 python-gnome2-extras python-gtkhtml2 python-gtkmozembed
3926 python-numeric python-sexy serpentine svgalibg1 swfdec-gnome
3927 swfdec-mozilla totem-gstreamer update-manager wodim
3928 xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
3929 xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
3930 zip&lt;/p&gt;
3931
3932 &lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;apt-get kde 82&lt;/b&gt;
3933
3934 &lt;br&gt;cupsddk-drivers karm kaudiocreator kcoloredit kcontrol kde kde-core
3935 kdeaddons kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-bin kdebase-bin-kde3
3936 kdebase-kio-plugins kdesktop kdeutils khelpcenter kicker
3937 kicker-applets knewsticker kolourpaint konq-plugins konqueror korn
3938 kpersonalizer kscreensaver ksplash libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libkiten1
3939 libxcb-xlib0 quanta superkaramba texlive-base-bin xorg xserver-xorg
3940 xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
3941 xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
3942 xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
3943 xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
3944 xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
3945 xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
3946 xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
3947 xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
3948 xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
3949 xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
3950 xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
3951 xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
3952 xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
3953 xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
3954 xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
3955 xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
3956 xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
3957 xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
3958 xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
3959 xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
3960 xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
3961 xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9&lt;/p&gt;
3962
3963 &lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;aptitude kde 192&lt;/b&gt;
3964 &lt;br&gt;bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers cvs dcoprss dhcdbd
3965 djvulibre-desktop dosfstools eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
3966 ghostscript-x imlib-base imlib11 indi kandy karm kasteroids
3967 kaudiocreator kbackgammon kbstate kcoloredit kcontrol kcron kdat
3968 kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
3969 kdebase-bin-kde3 kdebase-kio-plugins kdeedu-data
3970 kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data
3971 kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
3972 kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdeprint kdesktop kdessh
3973 kdict kdnssd kdvi kedit keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs
3974 kghostview khelpcenter khexedit kiconedit kitchensync klatin
3975 klickety kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmoon kmrml kodo kolourpaint
3976 kooka korn kpager kpdf kpercentage kpf kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler
3977 krec kregexpeditor ksayit ksim ksirc ksirtet ksmiletris ksmserver
3978 ksnake ksokoban ksplash ksvg ksysv ktip ktnef kuickshow kverbos
3979 kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kworldclock
3980 kxsldbg libakode2 libao2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
3981 libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
3982 libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
3983 libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0 libdatrie0
3984 libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
3985 libgail-common libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0
3986 libicu38 libiec61883-0 libindex0 libiw29 libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1
3987 libkdeedu3 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkiten1 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
3988 libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
3989 libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 libmagick10 libmimelib1c2a
3990 libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9
3991 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 libsmbios2
3992 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libtalloc1 libtiff-tools
3993 libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0 libxerces2-java
3994 libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 mpeglib networkstatus
3995 openoffice.org-writer2latex pmount poster psutils quanta quanta-data
3996 superkaramba svgalibg1 tex-common texlive-base texlive-base-bin
3997 texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended
3998 xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
3999 xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
4000 xulrunner-1.9&lt;/p&gt;
4001
4002 </description>
4003 </item>
4004
4005 <item>
4006 <title>Automatic upgrade testing from Lenny to Squeeze</title>
4007 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html</link>
4008 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html</guid>
4009 <pubDate>Fri, 11 Jun 2010 22:50:00 +0200</pubDate>
4010 <description>&lt;p&gt;The last few days I have done some upgrade testing in Debian, to
4011 see if the upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze will go smoothly. A few bugs
4012 have been discovered and reported in the process
4013 (&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/585410&quot;&gt;#585410&lt;/a&gt; in nagios3-cgi,
4014 &lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/584879&quot;&gt;#584879&lt;/a&gt; already fixed in
4015 enscript and &lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/584861&quot;&gt;#584861&lt;/a&gt; in
4016 kdebase-workspace-data), and to get a more regular testing going on, I
4017 am working on a script to automate the test.&lt;/p&gt;
4018
4019 &lt;p&gt;The idea is to create a Lenny chroot and use tasksel to install a
4020 Gnome or KDE desktop installation inside the chroot before upgrading
4021 it. To ensure no services are started in the chroot, a policy-rc.d
4022 script is inserted. To make sure tasksel believe it is to install a
4023 desktop on a laptop, the tasksel tests are replaced in the chroot
4024 (only acceptable because this is a throw-away chroot).&lt;/p&gt;
4025
4026 &lt;p&gt;A naive upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze using aptitude dist-upgrade
4027 currently always fail because udev refuses to upgrade with the kernel
4028 in Lenny, so to avoid that problem the file /etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
4029 is created. The bug report
4030 &lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/566000&quot;&gt;#566000&lt;/a&gt; make me suspect
4031 this problem do not trigger in a chroot, but I touch the file anyway
4032 to make sure the upgrade go well. Testing on virtual and real
4033 hardware have failed me because of udev so far, and creating this file
4034 do the trick in such settings anyway. This is a
4035 &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/debian-26/failed-dist-upgrade-due-to-udev-config_sysfs_deprecated-nonsense-804130/&quot;&gt;known
4036 issue&lt;/a&gt; and the current udev behaviour is intended by the udev
4037 maintainer because he lack the resources to rewrite udev to keep
4038 working with old kernels or something like that. I really wish the
4039 udev upstream would keep udev backwards compatible, to avoid such
4040 upgrade problem, but given that they fail to do so, I guess
4041 documenting the way out of this mess is the best option we got for
4042 Debian Squeeze.&lt;/p&gt;
4043
4044 &lt;p&gt;Anyway, back to the task at hand, testing upgrades. This test
4045 script, which I call &lt;tt&gt;upgrade-test&lt;/tt&gt; for now, is doing the
4046 trick:&lt;/p&gt;
4047
4048 &lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
4049 #!/bin/sh
4050 set -ex
4051
4052 if [ &quot;$1&quot; ] ; then
4053 desktop=$1
4054 else
4055 desktop=gnome
4056 fi
4057
4058 from=lenny
4059 to=squeeze
4060
4061 exec &amp;lt; /dev/null
4062 unset LANG
4063 mirror=http://ftp.skolelinux.org/debian
4064 tmpdir=chroot-$from-upgrade-$to-$desktop
4065 fuser -mv .
4066 debootstrap $from $tmpdir $mirror
4067 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
4068 cat &gt; $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d &amp;lt;&amp;lt;EOF
4069 #!/bin/sh
4070 exit 101
4071 EOF
4072 chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d
4073 exit_cleanup() {
4074 umount $tmpdir/proc
4075 }
4076 mount -t proc proc $tmpdir/proc
4077 # Make sure proc is unmounted also on failure
4078 trap exit_cleanup EXIT INT
4079
4080 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y install debconf-utils
4081
4082 # Make sure tasksel autoselection trigger. It need the test scripts
4083 # to return the correct answers.
4084 echo tasksel tasksel/desktop multiselect $desktop | \
4085 chroot $tmpdir debconf-set-selections
4086
4087 # Include the desktop and laptop task
4088 for test in desktop laptop ; do
4089 echo &gt; $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test &amp;lt;&amp;lt;EOF
4090 #!/bin/sh
4091 exit 2
4092 EOF
4093 chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test
4094 done
4095
4096 DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
4097 DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical
4098 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND DEBIAN_PRIORITY
4099 chroot $tmpdir tasksel --new-install
4100
4101 echo deb $mirror $to main &gt; $tmpdir/etc/apt/sources.list
4102 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
4103 touch $tmpdir/etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
4104 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y dist-upgrade
4105 fuser -mv
4106 &lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;
4107
4108 &lt;p&gt;I suspect it would be useful to test upgrades with both apt-get and
4109 with aptitude, but I have not had time to look at how they behave
4110 differently so far. I hope to get a cron job running to do the test
4111 regularly and post the result on the web. The Gnome upgrade currently
4112 work, while the KDE upgrade fail because of the bug in
4113 kdebase-workspace-data&lt;/p&gt;
4114
4115 &lt;p&gt;I am not quite sure what kind of extract from the huge upgrade logs
4116 (KDE 167 KiB, Gnome 516 KiB) it make sense to include in this blog
4117 post, so I will refrain from trying. I can report that for Gnome,
4118 aptitude report 760 packages upgraded, 448 newly installed, 129 to
4119 remove and 1 not upgraded and 1024MB need to be downloaded while for
4120 KDE the same numbers are 702 packages upgraded, 507 newly installed,
4121 193 to remove and 0 not upgraded and 1117MB need to be downloaded&lt;/p&gt;
4122
4123 &lt;p&gt;I am very happy to notice that the Gnome desktop + laptop upgrade
4124 is able to migrate to dependency based boot sequencing and parallel
4125 booting without a hitch. Was unsure if there were still bugs with
4126 packages failing to clean up their obsolete init.d script during
4127 upgrades, and no such problem seem to affect the Gnome desktop+laptop
4128 packages.&lt;/p&gt;
4129 </description>
4130 </item>
4131
4132 <item>
4133 <title>Upstart or sysvinit - as init.d scripts see it</title>
4134 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Upstart_or_sysvinit___as_init_d_scripts_see_it.html</link>
4135 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Upstart_or_sysvinit___as_init_d_scripts_see_it.html</guid>
4136 <pubDate>Sun, 6 Jun 2010 23:55:00 +0200</pubDate>
4137 <description>&lt;p&gt;If Debian is to migrate to upstart on Linux, I expect some init.d
4138 scripts to migrate (some of) their operations to upstart job while
4139 keeping the init.d for hurd and kfreebsd. The packages with such
4140 needs will need a way to get their init.d scripts to behave
4141 differently when used with sysvinit and with upstart. Because of
4142 this, I had a look at the environment variables set when a init.d
4143 script is running under upstart, and when it is not.&lt;/p&gt;
4144
4145 &lt;p&gt;With upstart, I notice these environment variables are set when a
4146 script is started from rcS.d/ (ignoring some irrelevant ones like
4147 COLUMNS):&lt;/p&gt;
4148
4149 &lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
4150 DEFAULT_RUNLEVEL=2
4151 previous=N
4152 PREVLEVEL=
4153 RUNLEVEL=
4154 runlevel=S
4155 UPSTART_EVENTS=startup
4156 UPSTART_INSTANCE=
4157 UPSTART_JOB=rc-sysinit
4158 &lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;
4159
4160 &lt;p&gt;With sysvinit, these environment variables are set for the same
4161 script.&lt;/p&gt;
4162
4163 &lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
4164 INIT_VERSION=sysvinit-2.88
4165 previous=N
4166 PREVLEVEL=N
4167 RUNLEVEL=S
4168 runlevel=S
4169 &lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;
4170
4171 &lt;p&gt;The RUNLEVEL and PREVLEVEL environment variables passed on from
4172 sysvinit are not set by upstart. Not sure if it is intentional or not
4173 to not be compatible with sysvinit in this regard.&lt;/p&gt;
4174
4175 &lt;p&gt;For scripts needing to behave differently when upstart is used,
4176 looking for the UPSTART_JOB environment variable seem to be a good
4177 choice.&lt;/p&gt;
4178 </description>
4179 </item>
4180
4181 <item>
4182 <title>A manual for standards wars...</title>
4183 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_manual_for_standards_wars___.html</link>
4184 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_manual_for_standards_wars___.html</guid>
4185 <pubDate>Sun, 6 Jun 2010 14:15:00 +0200</pubDate>
4186 <description>&lt;p&gt;Via the
4187 &lt;a href=&quot;http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/robweir/antic-atom/~3/QzU4RgoAGMg/weekly-links-10.html&quot;&gt;blog
4188 of Rob Weir&lt;/a&gt; I came across the very interesting essay named
4189 &lt;a href=&quot;http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/shapiro/wars.pdf&quot;&gt;The Art of
4190 Standards Wars&lt;/a&gt; (PDF 25 pages). I recommend it for everyone
4191 following the standards wars of today.&lt;/p&gt;
4192 </description>
4193 </item>
4194
4195 <item>
4196 <title>Sitesummary tip: Listing computer hardware models used at site</title>
4197 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sitesummary_tip__Listing_computer_hardware_models_used_at_site.html</link>
4198 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sitesummary_tip__Listing_computer_hardware_models_used_at_site.html</guid>
4199 <pubDate>Thu, 3 Jun 2010 12:05:00 +0200</pubDate>
4200 <description>&lt;p&gt;When using sitesummary at a site to track machines, it is possible
4201 to get a list of the machine types in use thanks to the DMI
4202 information extracted from each machine. The script to do so is
4203 included in the sitesummary package, and here is example output from
4204 the Skolelinux build servers:&lt;/p&gt;
4205
4206 &lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
4207 maintainer:~# /usr/lib/sitesummary/hardware-model-summary
4208 vendor count
4209 Dell Computer Corporation 1
4210 PowerEdge 1750 1
4211 IBM 1
4212 eserver xSeries 345 -[8670M1X]- 1
4213 Intel 2
4214 [no-dmi-info] 3
4215 maintainer:~#
4216 &lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;
4217
4218 &lt;p&gt;The quality of the report depend on the quality of the DMI tables
4219 provided in each machine. Here there are Intel machines without model
4220 information listed with Intel as vendor and no model, and virtual Xen
4221 machines listed as [no-dmi-info]. One can add -l as a command line
4222 option to list the individual machines.&lt;/p&gt;
4223
4224 &lt;p&gt;A larger list is
4225 &lt;a href=&quot;http://narvikskolen.no/sitesummary/&quot;&gt;available from the the
4226 city of Narvik&lt;/a&gt;, which uses Skolelinux on all their shools and also
4227 provide the basic sitesummary report publicly. In their report there
4228 are ~1400 machines. I know they use both Ubuntu and Skolelinux on
4229 their machines, and as sitesummary is available in both distributions,
4230 it is trivial to get all of them to report to the same central
4231 collector.&lt;/p&gt;
4232 </description>
4233 </item>
4234
4235 <item>
4236 <title>KDM fail at boot with NVidia cards - and no one try to fix it?</title>
4237 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/KDM_fail_at_boot_with_NVidia_cards___and_no_one_try_to_fix_it_.html</link>
4238 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/KDM_fail_at_boot_with_NVidia_cards___and_no_one_try_to_fix_it_.html</guid>
4239 <pubDate>Tue, 1 Jun 2010 17:05:00 +0200</pubDate>
4240 <description>&lt;p&gt;It is strange to watch how a bug in Debian causing KDM to fail to
4241 start at boot when an NVidia video card is used is handled. The
4242 problem seem to be that the nvidia X.org driver uses a long time to
4243 initialize, and this duration is longer than kdm is configured to
4244 wait.&lt;/p&gt;
4245
4246 &lt;p&gt;I came across two bugs related to this issue,
4247 &lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/583312&quot;&gt;#583312&lt;/a&gt; initially filed
4248 against initscripts and passed on to nvidia-glx when it became obvious
4249 that the nvidia drivers were involved, and
4250 &lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/524751&quot;&gt;#524751&lt;/a&gt; initially filed against
4251 kdm and passed on to src:nvidia-graphics-drivers for unknown reasons.&lt;/p&gt;
4252
4253 &lt;p&gt;To me, it seem that no-one is interested in actually solving the
4254 problem nvidia video card owners experience and make sure the Debian
4255 distribution work out of the box for these users. The nvidia driver
4256 maintainers expect kdm to be set up to wait longer, while kdm expect
4257 the nvidia driver maintainers to fix the driver to start faster, and
4258 while they wait for each other I guess the users end up switching to a
4259 distribution that work for them. I have no idea what the solution is,
4260 but I am pretty sure that waiting for each other is not it.&lt;/p&gt;
4261
4262 &lt;p&gt;I wonder why we end up handling bugs this way.&lt;/p&gt;
4263 </description>
4264 </item>
4265
4266 <item>
4267 <title>Parallellized boot seem to hold up well in Debian/testing</title>
4268 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellized_boot_seem_to_hold_up_well_in_Debian_testing.html</link>
4269 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellized_boot_seem_to_hold_up_well_in_Debian_testing.html</guid>
4270 <pubDate>Thu, 27 May 2010 23:55:00 +0200</pubDate>
4271 <description>&lt;p&gt;A few days ago, parallel booting was enabled in Debian/testing.
4272 The feature seem to hold up pretty well, but three fairly serious
4273 issues are known and should be solved:
4274
4275 &lt;p&gt;&lt;ul&gt;
4276
4277 &lt;li&gt;The wicd package seen to
4278 &lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/508289&quot;&gt;break NFS mounting&lt;/a&gt; and
4279 &lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/581586&quot;&gt;network setup&lt;/a&gt; when
4280 parallel booting is enabled. No idea why, but the wicd maintainer
4281 seem to be on the case.&lt;/li&gt;
4282
4283 &lt;li&gt;The nvidia X driver seem to
4284 &lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/583312&quot;&gt;have a race condition&lt;/a&gt;
4285 triggered more easily when parallel booting is in effect. The
4286 maintainer is on the case.&lt;/li&gt;
4287
4288 &lt;li&gt;The sysv-rc package fail to properly enable dependency based boot
4289 sequencing (the shutdown is broken) when old file-rc users
4290 &lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/575080&quot;&gt;try to switch back&lt;/a&gt; to
4291 sysv-rc. One way to solve it would be for file-rc to create
4292 /etc/init.d/.legacy-bootordering, and another is to try to make
4293 sysv-rc more robust. Will investigate some more and probably upload a
4294 workaround in sysv-rc to help those trying to move from file-rc to
4295 sysv-rc get a working shutdown.&lt;/li&gt;
4296
4297 &lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
4298
4299 &lt;p&gt;All in all not many surprising issues, and all of them seem
4300 solvable before Squeeze is released. In addition to these there are
4301 some packages with bugs in their dependencies and run level settings,
4302 which I expect will be fixed in a reasonable time span.&lt;/p&gt;
4303
4304 &lt;p&gt;If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
4305 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
4306 &lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org&quot;&gt;the
4307 list of usertagged bugs related to this&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
4308
4309 &lt;p&gt;Update: Correct bug number to file-rc issue.&lt;/p&gt;
4310 </description>
4311 </item>
4312
4313 <item>
4314 <title>More flexible firmware handling in debian-installer</title>
4315 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/More_flexible_firmware_handling_in_debian_installer.html</link>
4316 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/More_flexible_firmware_handling_in_debian_installer.html</guid>
4317 <pubDate>Sat, 22 May 2010 21:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
4318 <description>&lt;p&gt;After a long break from debian-installer development, I finally
4319 found time today to return to the project. Having to spend less time
4320 working dependency based boot in debian, as it is almost complete now,
4321 definitely helped freeing some time.&lt;/p&gt;
4322
4323 &lt;p&gt;A while back, I ran into a problem while working on Debian Edu. We
4324 include some firmware packages on the Debian Edu CDs, those needed to
4325 get disk and network controllers working. Without having these
4326 firmware packages available during installation, it is impossible to
4327 install Debian Edu on the given machine, and because our target group
4328 are non-technical people, asking them to provide firmware packages on
4329 an external medium is a support pain. Initially, I expected it to be
4330 enough to include the firmware packages on the CD to get
4331 debian-installer to find and use them. This proved to be wrong.
4332 Next, I hoped it was enough to symlink the relevant firmware packages
4333 to some useful location on the CD (tried /cdrom/ and
4334 /cdrom/firmware/). This also proved to not work, and at this point I
4335 found time to look at the debian-installer code to figure out what was
4336 going to work.&lt;/p&gt;
4337
4338 &lt;p&gt;The firmware loading code is in the hw-detect package, and a closer
4339 look revealed that it would only look for firmware packages outside
4340 the installation media, so the CD was never checked for firmware
4341 packages. It would only check USB sticks, floppies and other
4342 &quot;external&quot; media devices. Today I changed it to also look in the
4343 /cdrom/firmware/ directory on the mounted CD or DVD, which should
4344 solve the problem I ran into with Debian edu. I also changed it to
4345 look in /firmware/, to make sure the installer also find firmware
4346 provided in the initrd when booting the installer via PXE, to allow us
4347 to provide the same feature in the PXE setup included in Debian
4348 Edu.&lt;/p&gt;
4349
4350 &lt;p&gt;To make sure firmware deb packages with a license questions are not
4351 activated without asking if the license is accepted, I extended
4352 hw-detect to look for preinst scripts in the firmware packages, and
4353 run these before activating the firmware during installation. The
4354 license question is asked using debconf in the preinst, so this should
4355 solve the issue for the firmware packages I have looked at so far.&lt;/p&gt;
4356
4357 &lt;p&gt;If you want to discuss the details of these features, please
4358 contact us on debian-boot@lists.debian.org.&lt;/p&gt;
4359 </description>
4360 </item>
4361
4362 <item>
4363 <title>Parallellized boot is now the default in Debian/unstable</title>
4364 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellized_boot_is_now_the_default_in_Debian_unstable.html</link>
4365 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellized_boot_is_now_the_default_in_Debian_unstable.html</guid>
4366 <pubDate>Fri, 14 May 2010 22:40:00 +0200</pubDate>
4367 <description>&lt;p&gt;Since this evening, parallel booting is the default in
4368 Debian/unstable for machines using dependency based boot sequencing.
4369 Apparently the testing of concurrent booting has been wider than
4370 expected, if I am to believe the
4371 &lt;a href=&quot;http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html&quot;&gt;input
4372 on debian-devel@&lt;/a&gt;, and I concluded a few days ago to move forward
4373 with the feature this weekend, to give us some time to detect any
4374 remaining problems before Squeeze is frozen. If serious problems are
4375 detected, it is simple to change the default back to sequential boot.
4376 The upload of the new sysvinit package also activate a new upstream
4377 version.&lt;/p&gt;
4378
4379 More information about
4380 &lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot&quot;&gt;dependency
4381 based boot sequencing&lt;/a&gt; is available from the Debian wiki. It is
4382 currently possible to disable parallel booting when one run into
4383 problems caused by it, by adding this line to /etc/default/rcS:&lt;/p&gt;
4384
4385 &lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
4386 CONCURRENCY=none
4387 &lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;
4388
4389 &lt;p&gt;If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
4390 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
4391 &lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org&quot;&gt;the
4392 list of usertagged bugs related to this&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
4393 </description>
4394 </item>
4395
4396 <item>
4397 <title>Sitesummary tip: Listing MAC address of all clients</title>
4398 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sitesummary_tip__Listing_MAC_address_of_all_clients.html</link>
4399 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sitesummary_tip__Listing_MAC_address_of_all_clients.html</guid>
4400 <pubDate>Fri, 14 May 2010 21:10:00 +0200</pubDate>
4401 <description>&lt;p&gt;In the recent Debian Edu versions, the
4402 &lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary&quot;&gt;sitesummary
4403 system&lt;/a&gt; is used to keep track of the machines in the school
4404 network. Each machine will automatically report its status to the
4405 central server after boot and once per night. The network setup is
4406 also reported, and using this information it is possible to get the
4407 MAC address of all network interfaces in the machines. This is useful
4408 to update the DHCP configuration.&lt;/p&gt;
4409
4410 &lt;p&gt;To give some idea how to use sitesummary, here is a one-liner to
4411 ist all MAC addresses of all machines reporting to sitesummary. Run
4412 this on the collector host:&lt;/p&gt;
4413
4414 &lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
4415 perl -MSiteSummary -e &#39;for_all_hosts(sub { print join(&quot; &quot;, get_macaddresses(shift)), &quot;\n&quot;; });&#39;
4416 &lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;
4417
4418 &lt;p&gt;This will list all MAC addresses assosiated with all machine, one
4419 line per machine and with space between the MAC addresses.&lt;/p&gt;
4420
4421 &lt;p&gt;To allow system administrators easier job at adding static DHCP
4422 addresses for hosts, it would be possible to extend this to fetch
4423 machine information from sitesummary and update the DHCP and DNS
4424 tables in LDAP using this information. Such tool is unfortunately not
4425 written yet.&lt;/p&gt;
4426 </description>
4427 </item>
4428
4429 <item>
4430 <title>systemd, an interesting alternative to upstart</title>
4431 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/systemd__an_interesting_alternative_to_upstart.html</link>
4432 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/systemd__an_interesting_alternative_to_upstart.html</guid>
4433 <pubDate>Thu, 13 May 2010 22:20:00 +0200</pubDate>
4434 <description>&lt;p&gt;The last few days a new boot system called
4435 &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd&quot;&gt;systemd&lt;/a&gt;
4436 has been
4437 &lt;a href=&quot;http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html&quot;&gt;introduced&lt;/a&gt;
4438
4439 to the free software world. I have not yet had time to play around
4440 with it, but it seem to be a very interesting alternative to
4441 &lt;a href=&quot;http://upstart.ubuntu.com/&quot;&gt;upstart&lt;/a&gt;, and might prove to be
4442 a good alternative for Debian when we are able to switch to an event
4443 based boot system. Tollef is
4444 &lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/580814&quot;&gt;in the process&lt;/a&gt; of getting
4445 systemd into Debian, and I look forward to seeing how well it work. I
4446 like the fact that systemd handles init.d scripts with dependency
4447 information natively, allowing them to run in parallel where upstart
4448 at the moment do not.&lt;/p&gt;
4449
4450 &lt;p&gt;Unfortunately do systemd have the same problem as upstart regarding
4451 platform support. It only work on recent Linux kernels, and also need
4452 some new kernel features enabled to function properly. This means
4453 kFreeBSD and Hurd ports of Debian will need a port or a different boot
4454 system. Not sure how that will be handled if systemd proves to be the
4455 way forward.&lt;/p&gt;
4456
4457 &lt;p&gt;In the mean time, based on the
4458 &lt;a href=&quot;http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html&quot;&gt;input
4459 on debian-devel@&lt;/a&gt; regarding parallel booting in Debian, I have
4460 decided to enable full parallel booting as the default in Debian as
4461 soon as possible (probably this weekend or early next week), to see if
4462 there are any remaining serious bugs in the init.d dependencies. A
4463 new version of the sysvinit package implementing this change is
4464 already in experimental. If all go well, Squeeze will be released
4465 with parallel booting enabled by default.&lt;/p&gt;
4466 </description>
4467 </item>
4468
4469 <item>
4470 <title>Parallellizing the boot in Debian Squeeze - ready for wider testing</title>
4471 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellizing_the_boot_in_Debian_Squeeze___ready_for_wider_testing.html</link>
4472 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellizing_the_boot_in_Debian_Squeeze___ready_for_wider_testing.html</guid>
4473 <pubDate>Thu, 6 May 2010 23:25:00 +0200</pubDate>
4474 <description>&lt;p&gt;These days, the init.d script dependencies in Squeeze are quite
4475 complete, so complete that it is actually possible to run all the
4476 init.d scripts in parallell based on these dependencies. If you want
4477 to test your Squeeze system, make sure
4478 &lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot&quot;&gt;dependency
4479 based boot sequencing&lt;/a&gt; is enabled, and add this line to
4480 /etc/default/rcS:&lt;/p&gt;
4481
4482 &lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
4483 CONCURRENCY=makefile
4484 &lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;
4485
4486 &lt;p&gt;That is it. It will cause sysv-rc to use the startpar tool to run
4487 scripts in parallel using the dependency information stored in
4488 /etc/init.d/.depend.boot, /etc/init.d/.depend.start and
4489 /etc/init.d/.depend.stop to order the scripts. Startpar is configured
4490 to try to start the kdm and gdm scripts as early as possible, and will
4491 start the facilities required by kdm or gdm as early as possible to
4492 make this happen.&lt;/p&gt;
4493
4494 &lt;p&gt;Give it a try, and see if you like the result. If some services
4495 fail to start properly, it is most likely because they have incomplete
4496 init.d script dependencies in their startup script (or some of their
4497 dependent scripts have incomplete dependencies). Report bugs and get
4498 the package maintainers to fix it. :)&lt;/p&gt;
4499
4500 &lt;p&gt;Running scripts in parallel could be the default in Debian when we
4501 manage to get the init.d script dependencies complete and correct. I
4502 expect we will get there in Squeeze+1, if we get manage to test and
4503 fix the remaining issues.&lt;/p&gt;
4504
4505 &lt;p&gt;If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
4506 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
4507 &lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org&quot;&gt;the
4508 list of usertagged bugs related to this&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
4509 </description>
4510 </item>
4511
4512 <item>
4513 <title>Debian has switched to dependency based boot sequencing</title>
4514 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_has_switched_to_dependency_based_boot_sequencing.html</link>
4515 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_has_switched_to_dependency_based_boot_sequencing.html</guid>
4516 <pubDate>Mon, 27 Jul 2009 23:50:00 +0200</pubDate>
4517 <description>&lt;p&gt;Since this evening, with the upload of sysvinit version 2.87dsf-2,
4518 and the upload of insserv version 1.12.0-10 yesterday, Debian unstable
4519 have been migrated to using dependency based boot sequencing. This
4520 conclude work me and others have been doing for the last three days.
4521 It feels great to see this finally part of the default Debian
4522 installation. Now we just need to weed out the last few problems that
4523 are bound to show up, to get everything ready for Squeeze.&lt;/p&gt;
4524
4525 &lt;p&gt;The next step is migrating /sbin/init from sysvinit to upstart, and
4526 fixing the more fundamental problem of handing the event based
4527 non-predictable kernel in the early boot.&lt;/p&gt;
4528 </description>
4529 </item>
4530
4531 <item>
4532 <title>Taking over sysvinit development</title>
4533 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Taking_over_sysvinit_development.html</link>
4534 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Taking_over_sysvinit_development.html</guid>
4535 <pubDate>Wed, 22 Jul 2009 23:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
4536 <description>&lt;p&gt;After several years of frustration with the lack of activity from
4537 the existing sysvinit upstream developer, I decided a few weeks ago to
4538 take over the package and become the new upstream. The number of
4539 patches to track for the Debian package was becoming a burden, and the
4540 lack of synchronization between the distribution made it hard to keep
4541 the package up to date.&lt;/p&gt;
4542
4543 &lt;p&gt;On the new sysvinit team is the SuSe maintainer Dr. Werner Fink,
4544 and my Debian co-maintainer Kel Modderman. About 10 days ago, I made
4545 a new upstream tarball with version number 2.87dsf (for Debian, SuSe
4546 and Fedora), based on the patches currently in use in these
4547 distributions. We Debian maintainers plan to move to this tarball as
4548 the new upstream as soon as we find time to do the merge. Since the
4549 new tarball was created, we agreed with Werner at SuSe to make a new
4550 upstream project at &lt;a href=&quot;http://savannah.nongnu.org/&quot;&gt;Savannah&lt;/a&gt;, and continue
4551 development there. The project is registered and currently waiting
4552 for approval by the Savannah administrators, and as soon as it is
4553 approved, we will import the old versions from svn and continue
4554 working on the future release.&lt;/p&gt;
4555
4556 &lt;p&gt;It is a bit ironic that this is done now, when some of the involved
4557 distributions are moving to upstart as a syvinit replacement.&lt;/p&gt;
4558 </description>
4559 </item>
4560
4561 <item>
4562 <title>Debian boots quicker and quicker</title>
4563 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_boots_quicker_and_quicker.html</link>
4564 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_boots_quicker_and_quicker.html</guid>
4565 <pubDate>Wed, 24 Jun 2009 21:40:00 +0200</pubDate>
4566 <description>&lt;p&gt;I spent Monday and tuesday this week in London with a lot of the
4567 people involved in the boot system on Debian and Ubuntu, to see if we
4568 could find more ways to speed up the boot system. This was an Ubuntu
4569 funded
4570 &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FoundationsTeam/BootPerformance/DebianUbuntuSprint&quot;&gt;developer
4571 gathering&lt;/a&gt;. It was quite productive. We also discussed the future
4572 of boot systems, and ways to handle the increasing number of boot
4573 issues introduced by the Linux kernel becoming more and more
4574 asynchronous and event base. The Ubuntu approach using udev and
4575 upstart might be a good way forward. Time will show.&lt;/p&gt;
4576
4577 &lt;p&gt;Anyway, there are a few ways at the moment to speed up the boot
4578 process in Debian. All of these should be applied to get a quick
4579 boot:&lt;/p&gt;
4580
4581 &lt;ul&gt;
4582
4583 &lt;li&gt;Use dash as /bin/sh.&lt;/li&gt;
4584
4585 &lt;li&gt;Disable the init.d/hwclock*.sh scripts and make sure the hardware
4586 clock is in UTC.&lt;/li&gt;
4587
4588 &lt;li&gt;Install and activate the insserv package to enable
4589 &lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot&quot;&gt;dependency
4590 based boot sequencing&lt;/a&gt;, and enable concurrent booting.&lt;/li&gt;
4591
4592 &lt;/ul&gt;
4593
4594 These points are based on the Google summer of code work done by
4595 &lt;a href=&quot;http://initscripts-ng.alioth.debian.org/soc2006-bootsystem/&quot;&gt;Carlos
4596 Villegas&lt;/a&gt;.
4597
4598 &lt;p&gt;Support for makefile-style concurrency during boot was uploaded to
4599 unstable yesterday. When we tested it, we were able to cut 6 seconds
4600 from the boot sequence. It depend on very correct dependency
4601 declaration in all init.d scripts, so I expect us to find edge cases
4602 where the dependences in some scripts are slightly wrong when we start
4603 using this.&lt;/p&gt;
4604
4605 &lt;p&gt;On our IRC channel for this effort, #pkg-sysvinit, a new idea was
4606 introduced by Raphael Geissert today, one that could affect the
4607 startup speed as well. Instead of starting some scripts concurrently
4608 from rcS.d/ and another set of scripts from rc2.d/, it would be
4609 possible to run a of them in the same process. A quick way to test
4610 this would be to enable insserv and run &#39;mv /etc/rc2.d/S* /etc/rcS.d/;
4611 insserv&#39;. Will need to test if that work. :)&lt;/p&gt;
4612 </description>
4613 </item>
4614
4615 <item>
4616 <title>BSAs påstander om piratkopiering møter motstand</title>
4617 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/BSAs_p_stander_om_piratkopiering_m_ter_motstand.html</link>
4618 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/BSAs_p_stander_om_piratkopiering_m_ter_motstand.html</guid>
4619 <pubDate>Sun, 17 May 2009 23:05:00 +0200</pubDate>
4620 <description>&lt;p&gt;Hvert år de siste årene har BSA, lobbyfronten til de store
4621 programvareselskapene som Microsoft og Apple, publisert en rapport der
4622 de gjetter på hvor mye piratkopiering påfører i tapte inntekter i
4623 ulike land rundt om i verden. Resultatene er tendensiøse. For noen
4624 dager siden kom
4625 &lt;a href=&quot;http://global.bsa.org/globalpiracy2008/studies/globalpiracy2008.pdf&quot;&gt;siste
4626 rapport&lt;/a&gt;, og det er flere kritiske kommentarer publisert de siste
4627 dagene. Et spesielt interessant kommentar fra Sverige,
4628 &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.idg.se/2.1085/1.229795/bsa-hoftade-sverigesiffror&quot;&gt;BSA
4629 höftade Sverigesiffror&lt;/a&gt;, oppsummeres slik:&lt;/p&gt;
4630
4631 &lt;blockquote&gt;
4632 I sin senaste rapport slår BSA fast att 25 procent av all mjukvara i
4633 Sverige är piratkopierad. Det utan att ha pratat med ett enda svenskt
4634 företag. &quot;Man bör nog kanske inte se de här siffrorna som helt
4635 exakta&quot;, säger BSAs Sverigechef John Hugosson.
4636 &lt;/blockquote&gt;
4637
4638 &lt;p&gt;Mon tro om de er like metodiske når de gjetter på andelen piratkopiering i Norge? To andre kommentarer er &lt;a
4639 href=&quot;http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/comment/2242134/bsa-piracy-figures-shot-reality&quot;&gt;BSA
4640 piracy figures need a shot of reality&lt;/a&gt; og &lt;a
4641 href=&quot;http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/3958/125/&quot;&gt;Does The WIPO
4642 Copyright Treaty Work?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
4643
4644 &lt;p&gt;Fant lenkene via &lt;a
4645 href=&quot;http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/17/1632242&quot;&gt;oppslag
4646 på Slashdot&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
4647 </description>
4648 </item>
4649
4650 <item>
4651 <title>IDG mener linux i servermarkedet vil vokse med 21% i 2009</title>
4652 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IDG_mener_linux_i_servermarkedet_vil_vokse_med_21__i_2009.html</link>
4653 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IDG_mener_linux_i_servermarkedet_vil_vokse_med_21__i_2009.html</guid>
4654 <pubDate>Thu, 7 May 2009 22:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
4655 <description>&lt;p&gt;Kom over
4656 &lt;a href=&quot;http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10216873-16.html&quot;&gt;interessante
4657 tall&lt;/a&gt; fra IDG om utviklingen av linuxservermarkedet. Fikk meg til
4658 å tenke på antall tjenermaskiner ved Universitetet i Oslo der jeg
4659 jobber til daglig. En rask opptelling forteller meg at vi har 490
4660 (61%) fysiske unix-tjener (mest linux men også noen solaris) og 196
4661 (25%) windowstjenere, samt 112 (14%) virtuelle unix-tjenere. Med den
4662 bakgrunnskunnskapen kan jeg godt tro at IDG er inne på noe.&lt;/p&gt;
4663 </description>
4664 </item>
4665
4666 <item>
4667 <title>Kryptert harddisk - naturligvis</title>
4668 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Kryptert_harddisk___naturligvis.html</link>
4669 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Kryptert_harddisk___naturligvis.html</guid>
4670 <pubDate>Sat, 2 May 2009 15:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
4671 <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dagensit.no/trender/article1658676.ece&quot;&gt;Dagens
4672 IT melder&lt;/a&gt; at Intel hevder at det er dyrt å miste en datamaskin,
4673 når en tar tap av arbeidstid, fortrolige dokumenter,
4674 personopplysninger og alt annet det innebærer. Det er ingen tvil om
4675 at det er en kostbar affære å miste sin datamaskin, og det er årsaken
4676 til at jeg har kryptert harddisken på både kontormaskinen og min
4677 bærbare. Begge inneholder personopplysninger jeg ikke ønsker skal
4678 komme på avveie, den første informasjon relatert til jobben min ved
4679 Universitetet i Oslo, og den andre relatert til blant annet
4680 foreningsarbeide. Kryptering av diskene gjør at det er lite
4681 sannsynlig at dophoder som kan finne på å rappe maskinene får noe ut
4682 av dem. Maskinene låses automatisk etter noen minutter uten bruk,
4683 og en reboot vil gjøre at de ber om passord før de vil starte opp.
4684 Jeg bruker Debian på begge maskinene, og installasjonssystemet der
4685 gjør det trivielt å sette opp krypterte disker. Jeg har LVM på toppen
4686 av krypterte partisjoner, slik at alt av datapartisjoner er kryptert.
4687 Jeg anbefaler alle å kryptere diskene på sine bærbare. Kostnaden når
4688 det er gjort slik jeg gjør det er minimale, og gevinstene er
4689 betydelige. En bør dog passe på passordet. Hvis det går tapt, må
4690 maskinen reinstalleres og alt er tapt.&lt;/p&gt;
4691
4692 &lt;p&gt;Krypteringen vil ikke stoppe kompetente angripere som f.eks. kjøler
4693 ned minnebrikkene før maskinen rebootes med programvare for å hente ut
4694 krypteringsnøklene. Kostnaden med å forsvare seg mot slike angripere
4695 er for min del høyere enn gevinsten. Jeg tror oddsene for at
4696 f.eks. etteretningsorganisasjoner har glede av å titte på mine
4697 maskiner er minimale, og ulempene jeg ville oppnå ved å forsøke å
4698 gjøre det vanskeligere for angripere med kompetanse og ressurser er
4699 betydelige.&lt;/p&gt;
4700 </description>
4701 </item>
4702
4703 <item>
4704 <title>Two projects that have improved the quality of free software a lot</title>
4705 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Two_projects_that_have_improved_the_quality_of_free_software_a_lot.html</link>
4706 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Two_projects_that_have_improved_the_quality_of_free_software_a_lot.html</guid>
4707 <pubDate>Sat, 2 May 2009 15:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
4708 <description>&lt;p&gt;There are two software projects that have had huge influence on the
4709 quality of free software, and I wanted to mention both in case someone
4710 do not yet know them.&lt;/p&gt;
4711
4712 &lt;p&gt;The first one is &lt;a href=&quot;http://valgrind.org/&quot;&gt;valgrind&lt;/a&gt;, a
4713 tool to detect and expose errors in the memory handling of programs.
4714 It is easy to use, all one need to do is to run &#39;valgrind program&#39;,
4715 and it will report any problems on stdout. It is even better if the
4716 program include debug information. With debug information, it is able
4717 to report the source file name and line number where the problem
4718 occurs. It can report things like &#39;reading past memory block in file
4719 X line N, the memory block was allocated in file Y, line M&#39;, and
4720 &#39;using uninitialised value in control logic&#39;. This tool has made it
4721 trivial to investigate reproducible crash bugs in programs, and have
4722 reduced the number of this kind of bugs in free software a lot.
4723
4724 &lt;p&gt;The second one is
4725 &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coverity&quot;&gt;Coverity&lt;/a&gt; which is
4726 a source code checker. It is able to process the source of a program
4727 and find problems in the logic without running the program. It
4728 started out as the Stanford Checker and became well known when it was
4729 used to find bugs in the Linux kernel. It is now a commercial tool
4730 and the company behind it is running
4731 &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.scan.coverity.com/&quot;&gt;a community service&lt;/a&gt; for the
4732 free software community, where a lot of free software projects get
4733 their source checked for free. Several thousand defects have been
4734 found and fixed so far. It can find errors like &#39;lock L taken in file
4735 X line N is never released if exiting in line M&#39;, or &#39;the code in file
4736 Y lines O to P can never be executed&#39;. The projects included in the
4737 community service project have managed to get rid of a lot of
4738 reliability problems thanks to Coverity.&lt;/p&gt;
4739
4740 &lt;p&gt;I believe tools like this, that are able to automatically find
4741 errors in the source, are vital to improve the quality of software and
4742 make sure we can get rid of the crashing and failing software we are
4743 surrounded by today.&lt;/p&gt;
4744 </description>
4745 </item>
4746
4747 <item>
4748 <title>No patch is not better than a useless patch</title>
4749 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/No_patch_is_not_better_than_a_useless_patch.html</link>
4750 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/No_patch_is_not_better_than_a_useless_patch.html</guid>
4751 <pubDate>Tue, 28 Apr 2009 09:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
4752 <description>&lt;p&gt;Julien Blache
4753 &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.technologeek.org/2009/04/12/214&quot;&gt;claim that no
4754 patch is better than a useless patch&lt;/a&gt;. I completely disagree, as a
4755 patch allow one to discuss a concrete and proposed solution, and also
4756 prove that the issue at hand is important enough for someone to spent
4757 time on fixing it. No patch do not provide any of these positive
4758 properties.&lt;/p&gt;
4759 </description>
4760 </item>
4761
4762 <item>
4763 <title>Standardize on protocols and formats, not vendors and applications</title>
4764 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Standardize_on_protocols_and_formats__not_vendors_and_applications.html</link>
4765 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Standardize_on_protocols_and_formats__not_vendors_and_applications.html</guid>
4766 <pubDate>Mon, 30 Mar 2009 11:50:00 +0200</pubDate>
4767 <description>&lt;p&gt;Where I work at the University of Oslo, one decision stand out as a
4768 very good one to form a long lived computer infrastructure. It is the
4769 simple one, lost by many in todays computer industry: Standardize on
4770 open network protocols and open exchange/storage formats, not applications.
4771 Applications come and go, while protocols and files tend to stay, and
4772 thus one want to make it easy to change application and vendor, while
4773 avoiding conversion costs and locking users to a specific platform or
4774 application.&lt;/p&gt;
4775
4776 &lt;p&gt;This approach make it possible to replace the client applications
4777 independently of the server applications. One can even allow users to
4778 use several different applications as long as they handle the selected
4779 protocol and format. In the normal case, only one client application
4780 is recommended and users only get help if they choose to use this
4781 application, but those that want to deviate from the easy path are not
4782 blocked from doing so.&lt;/p&gt;
4783
4784 &lt;p&gt;It also allow us to replace the server side without forcing the
4785 users to replace their applications, and thus allow us to select the
4786 best server implementation at any moment, when scale and resouce
4787 requirements change.&lt;/p&gt;
4788
4789 &lt;p&gt;I strongly recommend standardizing - on open network protocols and
4790 open formats, but I would never recommend standardizing on a single
4791 application that do not use open network protocol or open formats.&lt;/p&gt;
4792 </description>
4793 </item>
4794
4795 <item>
4796 <title>Returning from Skolelinux developer gathering</title>
4797 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Returning_from_Skolelinux_developer_gathering.html</link>
4798 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Returning_from_Skolelinux_developer_gathering.html</guid>
4799 <pubDate>Sun, 29 Mar 2009 21:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
4800 <description>&lt;p&gt;I&#39;m sitting on the train going home from this weekends Debian
4801 Edu/Skolelinux development gathering. I got a bit done tuning the
4802 desktop, and looked into the dynamic service location protocol
4803 implementation avahi. It look like it could be useful for us. Almost
4804 30 people participated, and I believe it was a great environment to
4805 get to know the Skolelinux system. Walter Bender, involved in the
4806 development of the Sugar educational platform, presented his stuff and
4807 also helped me improve my OLPC installation. He also showed me that
4808 his Turtle Art application can be used in standalone mode, and we
4809 agreed that I would help getting it packaged for Debian. As a
4810 standalone application it would be great for Debian Edu. We also
4811 tried to get the video conferencing working with two OLPCs, but that
4812 proved to be too hard for us. The application seem to need more work
4813 before it is ready for me. I look forward to getting home and relax
4814 now. :)&lt;/p&gt;
4815 </description>
4816 </item>
4817
4818 <item>
4819 <title>Time for new LDAP schemas replacing RFC 2307?</title>
4820 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html</link>
4821 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html</guid>
4822 <pubDate>Sun, 29 Mar 2009 20:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
4823 <description>&lt;p&gt;The state of standardized LDAP schemas on Linux is far from
4824 optimal. There is RFC 2307 documenting one way to store NIS maps in
4825 LDAP, and a modified version of this normally called RFC 2307bis, with
4826 some modifications to be compatible with Active Directory. The RFC
4827 specification handle the content of a lot of system databases, but do
4828 not handle DNS zones and DHCP configuration.&lt;/p&gt;
4829
4830 &lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.skolelinux.org/&quot;&gt;Debian Edu/Skolelinux&lt;/a&gt;,
4831 we would like to store information about users, SMB clients/hosts,
4832 filegroups, netgroups (users and hosts), DHCP and DNS configuration,
4833 and LTSP configuration in LDAP. These objects have a lot in common,
4834 but with the current LDAP schemas it is not possible to have one
4835 object per entity. For example, one need to have at least three LDAP
4836 objects for a given computer, one with the SMB related stuff, one with
4837 DNS information and another with DHCP information. The schemas
4838 provided for DNS and DHCP are impossible to combine into one LDAP
4839 object. In addition, it is impossible to implement quick queries for
4840 netgroup membership, because of the way NIS triples are implemented.
4841 It just do not scale. I believe it is time for a few RFC
4842 specifications to cleam up this mess.&lt;/p&gt;
4843
4844 &lt;p&gt;I would like to have one LDAP object representing each computer in
4845 the network, and this object can then keep the SMB (ie host key), DHCP
4846 (mac address/name) and DNS (name/IP address) settings in one place.
4847 It need to be efficently stored to make sure it scale well.&lt;/p&gt;
4848
4849 &lt;p&gt;I would also like to have a quick way to map from a user or
4850 computer and to the net group this user or computer is a member.&lt;/p&gt;
4851
4852 &lt;p&gt;Active Directory have done a better job than unix heads like myself
4853 in this regard, and the unix side need to catch up. Time to start a
4854 new IETF work group?&lt;/p&gt;
4855 </description>
4856 </item>
4857
4858 <item>
4859 <title>Endelig er Debian Lenny gitt ut</title>
4860 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Endelig_er_Debian_Lenny_gitt_ut.html</link>
4861 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Endelig_er_Debian_Lenny_gitt_ut.html</guid>
4862 <pubDate>Sun, 15 Feb 2009 11:50:00 +0100</pubDate>
4863 <description>&lt;p&gt;Endelig er &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.debian.org/&quot;&gt;Debian&lt;/a&gt;
4864 &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.debian.org/News/2009/20090214&quot;&gt;Lenny&lt;/a&gt; gitt ut.
4865 Et langt steg videre for Debian-prosjektet, og en rekke nye
4866 programpakker blir nå tilgjengelig for de av oss som bruker den
4867 stabile utgaven av Debian. Neste steg er nå å få
4868 &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.skolelinux.org/&quot;&gt;Skolelinux&lt;/a&gt; /
4869 &lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/&quot;&gt;Debian Edu&lt;/a&gt; ferdig
4870 oppdatert for den nye utgaven, slik at en oppdatert versjon kan
4871 slippes løs på skolene. Takk til alle debian-utviklerne som har
4872 gjort dette mulig. Endelig er f.eks. fungerende avhengighetsstyrt
4873 bootsekvens tilgjengelig i stabil utgave, vha pakken
4874 &lt;tt&gt;insserv&lt;/tt&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
4875 </description>
4876 </item>
4877
4878 <item>
4879 <title>Devcamp brought us closer to the Lenny based Debian Edu release</title>
4880 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Devcamp_brought_us_closer_to_the_Lenny_based_Debian_Edu_release.html</link>
4881 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Devcamp_brought_us_closer_to_the_Lenny_based_Debian_Edu_release.html</guid>
4882 <pubDate>Sun, 7 Dec 2008 12:00:00 +0100</pubDate>
4883 <description>&lt;p&gt;This weekend we had a small developer gathering for Debian Edu in
4884 Oslo. Most of Saturday was used for the general assemly for the
4885 member organization, but the rest of the weekend I used to tune the
4886 LTSP installation. LTSP now work out of the box on the 10-network.
4887 Acer Aspire One proved to be a very nice thin client, with both
4888 screen, mouse and keybard in a small box. Was working on getting the
4889 diskless workstation setup configured out of the box, but did not
4890 finish it before the weekend was up.&lt;/p&gt;
4891
4892 &lt;p&gt;Did not find time to look at the 4 VGA cards in one box we got from
4893 the Brazilian group, so that will have to wait for the next
4894 development gathering. Would love to have the Debian Edu installer
4895 automatically detect and configure a multiseat setup when it find one
4896 of these cards.&lt;/p&gt;
4897 </description>
4898 </item>
4899
4900 <item>
4901 <title>The sorry state of multimedia browser plugins in Debian</title>
4902 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_sorry_state_of_multimedia_browser_plugins_in_Debian.html</link>
4903 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_sorry_state_of_multimedia_browser_plugins_in_Debian.html</guid>
4904 <pubDate>Tue, 25 Nov 2008 00:10:00 +0100</pubDate>
4905 <description>&lt;p&gt;Recently I have spent some time evaluating the multimedia browser
4906 plugins available in Debian Lenny, to see which one we should use by
4907 default in Debian Edu. We need an embedded video playing plugin with
4908 control buttons to pause or stop the video, and capable of streaming
4909 all the multimedia content available on the web. The test results and
4910 notes are available on
4911 &lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia&quot;&gt;the
4912 Debian wiki&lt;/a&gt;. I was surprised how few of the plugins are able to
4913 fill this need. My personal video player favorite, VLC, has a really
4914 bad plugin which fail on a lot of the test pages. A lot of the MIME
4915 types I would expect to work with any free software player (like
4916 video/ogg), just do not work. And simple formats like the
4917 audio/x-mplegurl format (m3u playlists), just isn&#39;t supported by the
4918 totem and vlc plugins. I hope the situation will improve soon. No
4919 wonder sites use the proprietary Adobe flash to play video.&lt;/p&gt;
4920
4921 &lt;p&gt;For Lenny, we seem to end up with the mplayer plugin. It seem to
4922 be the only one fitting our needs. :/&lt;/p&gt;
4923 </description>
4924 </item>
4925
4926 </channel>
4927 </rss>