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