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  13  <h1>
  14      <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/">Petter Reinholdtsen</a>
  15
  16  </h1>
  17
  18 </div>
  19
  20
  21     <h3>Entries tagged "debian".</h3>
  22
  23     <div class="entry">
  24       <div class="title">
  25         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_most_supported_MIME_type_in_Debian_in_2018_.html">What is the most supported MIME type in Debian in 2018?</a>
  26       </div>
  27       <div class="date">
  28          9th July 2018
  29       </div>
  30       <div class="body">
  31         <p>Five years ago,
  32 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_most_supported_MIME_type_in_Debian_.html">I
  33 measured what the most supported MIME type in Debian was</a>, by
  34 analysing the desktop files in all packages in the archive.  Since
  35 then, the DEP-11 AppStream system has been put into production, making
  36 the task a lot easier.  This made me want to repeat the measurement,
  37 to see how much things changed.  Here are the new numbers, for
  38 unstable only this time:
  39
  40 <p><strong>Debian Unstable:</strong></p>
  41
  42 <pre>
  43   count MIME type
  44   ----- -----------------------
  45      56 image/jpeg
  46      55 image/png
  47      49 image/tiff
  48      48 image/gif
  49      39 image/bmp
  50      38 text/plain
  51      37 audio/mpeg
  52      34 application/ogg
  53      33 audio/x-flac
  54      32 audio/x-mp3
  55      30 audio/x-wav
  56      30 audio/x-vorbis+ogg
  57      29 image/x-portable-pixmap
  58      27 inode/directory
  59      27 image/x-portable-bitmap
  60      27 audio/x-mpeg
  61      26 application/x-ogg
  62      25 audio/x-mpegurl
  63      25 audio/ogg
  64      24 text/html
  65 </pre>
  66
  67 <p>The list was created like this using a sid chroot: "cat
  68 /var/lib/apt/lists/*sid*_dep11_Components-amd64.yml.gz| zcat | awk '/^
  69 - \S+\/\S+$/ {print $2 }' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -20"</p>
  70
  71 <p>It is interesting to see how image formats have passed text/plain
  72 as the most announced supported MIME type.  These days, thanks to the
  73 AppStream system, if you run into a file format you do not know, and
  74 want to figure out which packages support the format, you can find the
  75 MIME type of the file using "file --mime &lt;filename&gt;", and then
  76 look up all packages announcing support for this format in their
  77 AppStream metadata (XML or .desktop file) using "appstreamcli
  78 what-provides mimetype &lt;mime-type&gt;.  For example if you, like
  79 me, want to know which packages support inode/directory, you can get a
  80 list like this:</p>
  81
  82 <p><blockquote><pre>
  83 % appstreamcli what-provides mimetype inode/directory | grep Package: | sort
  84 Package: anjuta
  85 Package: audacious
  86 Package: baobab
  87 Package: cervisia
  88 Package: chirp
  89 Package: dolphin
  90 Package: doublecmd-common
  91 Package: easytag
  92 Package: enlightenment
  93 Package: ephoto
  94 Package: filelight
  95 Package: gwenview
  96 Package: k4dirstat
  97 Package: kaffeine
  98 Package: kdesvn
  99 Package: kid3
 100 Package: kid3-qt
 101 Package: nautilus
 102 Package: nemo
 103 Package: pcmanfm
 104 Package: pcmanfm-qt
 105 Package: qweborf
 106 Package: ranger
 107 Package: sirikali
 108 Package: spacefm
 109 Package: spacefm
 110 Package: vifm
 111 %
 112 </pre></blockquote></p>
 113
 114 <p>Using the same method, I can quickly discover that the Sketchup file
 115 format is not yet supported by any package in Debian:</p>
 116
 117 <p><blockquote><pre>
 118 % appstreamcli what-provides mimetype  application/vnd.sketchup.skp
 119 Could not find component providing 'mimetype::application/vnd.sketchup.skp'.
 120 %
 121 </pre></blockquote></p>
 122
 123 <p>Yesterday I used it to figure out which packages support the STL 3D
 124 format:</p>
 125
 126 <p><blockquote><pre>
 127 % appstreamcli what-provides mimetype  application/sla|grep Package
 128 Package: cura
 129 Package: meshlab
 130 Package: printrun
 131 %
 132 </pre></blockquote></p>
 133
 134 <p>PS: A new version of Cura was uploaded to Debian yesterday.</p>
 135
 136 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 137 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 138 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 139
 140       </div>
 141       <div class="tags">
 142
 143
 144         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
 145
 146
 147       </div>
 148     </div>
 149     <div class="padding"></div>
 150
 151     <div class="entry">
 152       <div class="title">
 153         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_APT_upgrade_without_enough_free_space_on_the_disk___.html">Debian APT upgrade without enough free space on the disk...</a>
 154       </div>
 155       <div class="date">
 156          8th July 2018
 157       </div>
 158       <div class="body">
 159         <p>Quite regularly, I let my Debian Sid/Unstable chroot stay untouch
 160 for a while, and when I need to update it there is not enough free
 161 space on the disk for apt to do a normal 'apt upgrade'.  I normally
 162 would resolve the issue by doing 'apt install &lt;somepackages&gt;' to
 163 upgrade only some of the packages in one batch, until the amount of
 164 packages to download fall below the amount of free space available.
 165 Today, I had about 500 packages to upgrade, and after a while I got
 166 tired of trying to install chunks of packages manually.  I concluded
 167 that I did not have the spare hours required to complete the task, and
 168 decided to see if I could automate it.  I came up with this small
 169 script which I call 'apt-in-chunks':</p>
 170
 171 <p><blockquote><pre>
 172 #!/bin/sh
 173 #
 174 # Upgrade packages when the disk is too full to upgrade every
 175 # upgradable package in one lump.  Fetching packages to upgrade using
 176 # apt, and then installing using dpkg, to avoid changing the package
 177 # flag for manual/automatic.
 178
 179 set -e
 180
 181 ignore() {
 182     if [ "$1" ]; then
 183         grep -v "$1"
 184     else
 185         cat
 186     fi
 187 }
 188
 189 for p in $(apt list --upgradable | ignore "$@" |cut -d/ -f1 | grep -v '^Listing...'); do
 190     echo "Upgrading $p"
 191     apt clean
 192     apt install --download-only -y $p
 193     for f in /var/cache/apt/archives/*.deb; do
 194         if [ -e "$f" ]; then
 195             dpkg -i /var/cache/apt/archives/*.deb
 196             break
 197         fi
 198     done
 199 done
 200 </pre></blockquote></p>
 201
 202 <p>The script will extract the list of packages to upgrade, try to
 203 download the packages needed to upgrade one package, install the
 204 downloaded packages using dpkg.  The idea is to upgrade packages
 205 without changing the APT mark for the package (ie the one recording of
 206 the package was manually requested or pulled in as a dependency).  To
 207 use it, simply run it as root from the command line.  If it fail, try
 208 'apt install -f' to clean up the mess and run the script again.  This
 209 might happen if the new packages conflict with one of the old
 210 packages.  dpkg is unable to remove, while apt can do this.</p>
 211
 212 <p>It take one option, a package to ignore in the list of packages to
 213 upgrade.  The option to ignore a package is there to be able to skip
 214 the packages that are simply too large to unpack.  Today this was
 215 'ghc', but I have run into other large packages causing similar
 216 problems earlier (like TeX).</p>
 217
 218 <p>Update 2018-07-08: Thanks to Paul Wise, I am aware of two
 219 alternative ways to handle this.  The "unattended-upgrades
 220 --minimal-upgrade-steps" option will try to calculate upgrade sets for
 221 each package to upgrade, and then upgrade them in order, smallest set
 222 first.  It might be a better option than my above mentioned script.
 223 Also, "aptutude upgrade" can upgrade single packages, thus avoiding
 224 the need for using "dpkg -i" in the script above.</p>
 225
 226 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 227 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 228 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 229
 230       </div>
 231       <div class="tags">
 232
 233
 234         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 235
 236
 237       </div>
 238     </div>
 239     <div class="padding"></div>
 240
 241     <div class="entry">
 242       <div class="title">
 243         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Version_3_1_of_Cura__the_3D_print_slicer__is_now_in_Debian.html">Version 3.1 of Cura, the 3D print slicer, is now in Debian</a>
 244       </div>
 245       <div class="date">
 246         13th February 2018
 247       </div>
 248       <div class="body">
 249         <p>A new version of the
 250 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cura">3D printer slicer
 251 software Cura</a>, version 3.1.0, is now available in Debian Testing
 252 (aka Buster) and Debian Unstable (aka Sid).  I hope you find it
 253 useful.  It was uploaded the last few days, and the last update will
 254 enter testing tomorrow.  See the
 255 <a href="https://ultimaker.com/en/products/cura-software/release-notes">release
 256 notes</a> for the list of bug fixes and new features.  Version 3.2
 257 was announced 6 days ago.  We will try to get it into Debian as
 258 well.</p>
 259
 260 <p>More information related to 3D printing is available on the
 261 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/3DPrinting">3D printing</a> and
 262 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/3D-printer">3D printer</a> wiki pages
 263 in Debian.</p>
 264
 265 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 266 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 267 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 268
 269       </div>
 270       <div class="tags">
 271
 272
 273         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 274
 275
 276       </div>
 277     </div>
 278     <div class="padding"></div>
 279
 280     <div class="entry">
 281       <div class="title">
 282         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Cura__the_nice_3D_print_slicer__is_now_in_Debian_Unstable.html">Cura, the nice 3D print slicer, is now in Debian Unstable</a>
 283       </div>
 284       <div class="date">
 285         17th December 2017
 286       </div>
 287       <div class="body">
 288         <p>After several months of working and waiting, I am happy to report
 289 that the nice and user friendly 3D printer slicer software Cura just
 290 entered Debian Unstable.  It consist of five packages,
 291 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cura">cura</a>,
 292 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cura-engine">cura-engine</a>,
 293 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/libarcus">libarcus</a>,
 294 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/fdm-materials">fdm-materials</a>,
 295 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/libsavitar">libsavitar</a> and
 296 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/uranium">uranium</a>.  The last
 297 two, uranium and cura, entered Unstable yesterday.  This should make
 298 it easier for Debian users to print on at least the Ultimaker class of
 299 3D printers.  My nearest 3D printer is an Ultimaker 2+, so it will
 300 make life easier for at least me. :)</p>
 301
 302 <p>The work to make this happen was done by Gregor Riepl, and I was
 303 happy to assist him in sponsoring the packages.  With the introduction
 304 of Cura, Debian is up to three 3D printer slicers at your service,
 305 Cura, Slic3r and Slic3r Prusa.  If you own or have access to a 3D
 306 printer, give it a go. :)</p>
 307
 308 <p>The 3D printer software is maintained by the 3D printer Debian
 309 team, flocking together on the
 310 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/3dprinter-general">3dprinter-general</a>
 311 mailing list and the
 312 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/#debian-3dprinting">#debian-3dprinting</a>
 313 IRC channel.</p>
 314
 315 <p>The next step for Cura in Debian is to update the cura package to
 316 version 3.0.3 and then update the entire set of packages to version
 317 3.1.0 which showed up the last few days.</p>
 318
 319       </div>
 320       <div class="tags">
 321
 322
 323         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 324
 325
 326       </div>
 327     </div>
 328     <div class="padding"></div>
 329
 330     <div class="entry">
 331       <div class="title">
 332         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Generating_3D_prints_in_Debian_using_Cura_and_Slic3r__prusa_.html">Generating 3D prints in Debian using Cura and Slic3r(-prusa)</a>
 333       </div>
 334       <div class="date">
 335          9th October 2017
 336       </div>
 337       <div class="body">
 338         <p>At my nearby maker space,
 339 <a href="http://sonen.ifi.uio.no/">Sonen</a>, I heard the story that it
 340 was easier to generate gcode files for theyr 3D printers (Ultimake 2+)
 341 on Windows and MacOS X than Linux, because the software involved had
 342 to be manually compiled and set up on Linux while premade packages
 343 worked out of the box on Windows and MacOS X.  I found this annoying,
 344 as the software involved,
 345 <a href="https://github.com/Ultimaker/Cura">Cura</a>, is free software
 346 and should be trivial to get up and running on Linux if someone took
 347 the time to package it for the relevant distributions.  I even found
 348 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/706656">a request for adding into
 349 Debian</a> from 2013, which had seem some activity over the years but
 350 never resulted in the software showing up in Debian.  So a few days
 351 ago I offered my help to try to improve the situation.</p>
 352
 353 <p>Now I am very happy to see that all the packages required by a
 354 working Cura in Debian are uploaded into Debian and waiting in the NEW
 355 queue for the ftpmasters to have a look.  You can track the progress
 356 on
 357 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?email=3dprinter-general%40lists.alioth.debian.org">the
 358 status page for the 3D printer team</a>.</p>
 359
 360 <p>The uploaded packages are a bit behind upstream, and was uploaded
 361 now to get slots in <a href="https://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html">the NEW
 362 queue</a> while we work up updating the packages to the latest
 363 upstream version.</p>
 364
 365 <p>On a related note, two competitors for Cura, which I found harder
 366 to use and was unable to configure correctly for Ultimaker 2+ in the
 367 short time I spent on it, are already in Debian.  If you are looking
 368 for 3D printer "slicers" and want something already available in
 369 Debian, check out
 370 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/slic3r">slic3r</a> and
 371 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/slic3r-prusa">slic3r-prusa</a>.
 372 The latter is a fork of the former.</p>
 373
 374 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 375 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 376 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 377
 378       </div>
 379       <div class="tags">
 380
 381
 382         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 383
 384
 385       </div>
 386     </div>
 387     <div class="padding"></div>
 388
 389     <div class="entry">
 390       <div class="title">
 391         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Visualizing_GSM_radio_chatter_using_gr_gsm_and_Hopglass.html">Visualizing GSM radio chatter using gr-gsm and Hopglass</a>
 392       </div>
 393       <div class="date">
 394         29th September 2017
 395       </div>
 396       <div class="body">
 397         <p>Every mobile phone announce its existence over radio to the nearby
 398 mobile cell towers.  And this radio chatter is available for anyone
 399 with a radio receiver capable of receiving them.  Details about the
 400 mobile phones with very good accuracy is of course collected by the
 401 phone companies, but this is not the topic of this blog post.  The
 402 mobile phone radio chatter make it possible to figure out when a cell
 403 phone is nearby, as it include the SIM card ID (IMSI).  By paying
 404 attention over time, one can see when a phone arrive and when it leave
 405 an area.  I believe it would be nice to make this information more
 406 available to the general public, to make more people aware of how
 407 their phones are announcing their whereabouts to anyone that care to
 408 listen.</p>
 409
 410 <p>I am very happy to report that we managed to get something
 411 visualizing this information up and running for
 412 <a href="http://norwaymakers.org/osf17">Oslo Skaperfestival 2017</a>
 413 (Oslo Makers Festival) taking place today and tomorrow at Deichmanske
 414 library.  The solution is based on the
 415 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Easier_recipe_to_observe_the_cell_phones_around_you.html">simple
 416 recipe for listening to GSM chatter</a> I posted a few days ago, and
 417 will show up at the stand of <a href="http://sonen.ifi.uio.no/">Åpen
 418 Sone from the Computer Science department of the University of
 419 Oslo</a>.  The presentation will show the nearby mobile phones (aka
 420 IMSIs) as dots in a web browser graph, with lines to the dot
 421 representing mobile base station it is talking to. It was working in
 422 the lab yesterday, and was moved into place this morning.</p>
 423
 424 <p>We set up a fairly powerful desktop machine using Debian
 425 Buster/Testing with several (five, I believe) RTL2838 DVB-T receivers
 426 connected and visualize the visible cell phone towers using an
 427 <a href="https://github.com/marlow925/hopglass">English version of
 428 Hopglass</a>.  A fairly powerfull machine is needed as the
 429 grgsm_livemon_headless processes from
 430 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/gr-gsm">gr-gsm</a> converting
 431 the radio signal to data packages is quite CPU intensive.</p>
 432
 433 <p>The frequencies to listen to, are identified using a slightly
 434 patched scan-and-livemon (to set the --args values for each receiver),
 435 and the Hopglass data is generated using the
 436 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/IMSI-catcher/tree/meshviewer-output">patches
 437 in my meshviewer-output branch</a>.  For some reason we could not get
 438 more than four SDRs working.  There is also a geographical map trying
 439 to show the location of the base stations, but I believe their
 440 coordinates are hardcoded to some random location in Germany, I
 441 believe.  The code should be replaced with code to look up location in
 442 a text file, a sqlite database or one of the online databases
 443 mentioned in
 444 <a href="https://github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher/issues/14">the github
 445 issue for the topic</a>.
 446
 447 <p>If this sound interesting, visit the stand at the festival!</p>
 448
 449       </div>
 450       <div class="tags">
 451
 452
 453         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
 454
 455
 456       </div>
 457     </div>
 458     <div class="padding"></div>
 459
 460     <div class="entry">
 461       <div class="title">
 462         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Easier_recipe_to_observe_the_cell_phones_around_you.html">Easier recipe to observe the cell phones around you</a>
 463       </div>
 464       <div class="date">
 465         24th September 2017
 466       </div>
 467       <div class="body">
 468         <p>A little more than a month ago I wrote
 469 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Simpler_recipe_on_how_to_make_a_simple__7_IMSI_Catcher_using_Debian.html">how
 470 to observe the SIM card ID (aka IMSI number) of mobile phones talking
 471 to nearby mobile phone base stations using Debian GNU/Linux and a
 472 cheap USB software defined radio</a>, and thus being able to pinpoint
 473 the location of people and equipment (like cars and trains) with an
 474 accuracy of a few kilometer.  Since then we have worked to make the
 475 procedure even simpler, and it is now possible to do this without any
 476 manual frequency tuning and without building your own packages.</p>
 477
 478 <p>The <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/gr-gsm">gr-gsm</a>
 479 package is now included in Debian testing and unstable, and the
 480 IMSI-catcher code no longer require root access to fetch and decode
 481 the GSM data collected using gr-gsm.</p>
 482
 483 <p>Here is an updated recipe, using packages built by Debian and a git
 484 clone of two python scripts:</p>
 485
 486 <ol>
 487
 488 <li>Start with a Debian machine running the Buster version (aka
 489   testing).</li>
 490
 491 <li>Run '<tt>apt install gr-gsm python-numpy python-scipy
 492   python-scapy</tt>' as root to install required packages.</li>
 493
 494 <li>Fetch the code decoding GSM packages using '<tt>git clone
 495   github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher.git</tt>'.</li>
 496
 497 <li>Insert USB software defined radio supported by GNU Radio.</li>
 498
 499 <li>Enter the IMSI-catcher directory and run '<tt>python
 500   scan-and-livemon</tt>' to locate the frequency of nearby base
 501   stations and start listening for GSM packages on one of them.</li>
 502
 503 <li>Enter the IMSI-catcher directory and run '<tt>python
 504   simple_IMSI-catcher.py</tt>' to display the collected information.</li>
 505
 506 </ol>
 507
 508 <p>Note, due to a bug somewhere the scan-and-livemon program (actually
 509 <a href="https://github.com/ptrkrysik/gr-gsm/issues/336">its underlying
 510 program grgsm_scanner</a>) do not work with the HackRF radio.  It does
 511 work with RTL 8232 and other similar USB radio receivers you can get
 512 very cheaply
 513 (<a href="https://www.ebay.com/sch/items/?_nkw=rtl+2832">for example
 514 from ebay</a>), so for now the solution is to scan using the RTL radio
 515 and only use HackRF for fetching GSM data.</p>
 516
 517 <p>As far as I can tell, a cell phone only show up on one of the
 518 frequencies at the time, so if you are going to track and count every
 519 cell phone around you, you need to listen to all the frequencies used.
 520 To listen to several frequencies, use the --numrecv argument to
 521 scan-and-livemon to use several receivers.  Further, I am not sure if
 522 phones using 3G or 4G will show as talking GSM to base stations, so
 523 this approach might not see all phones around you.  I typically see
 524 0-400 IMSI numbers an hour when looking around where I live.</p>
 525
 526 <p>I've tried to run the scanner on a
 527 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi">Raspberry Pi 2 and 3
 528 running Debian Buster</a>, but the grgsm_livemon_headless process seem
 529 to be too CPU intensive to keep up.  When GNU Radio print 'O' to
 530 stdout, I am told there it is caused by a buffer overflow between the
 531 radio and GNU Radio, caused by the program being unable to read the
 532 GSM data fast enough.  If you see a stream of 'O's from the terminal
 533 where you started scan-and-livemon, you need a give the process more
 534 CPU power.  Perhaps someone are able to optimize the code to a point
 535 where it become possible to set up RPi3 based GSM sniffers?  I tried
 536 using Raspbian instead of Debian, but there seem to be something wrong
 537 with GNU Radio on raspbian, causing glibc to abort().</p>
 538
 539       </div>
 540       <div class="tags">
 541
 542
 543         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
 544
 545
 546       </div>
 547     </div>
 548     <div class="padding"></div>
 549
 550     <div class="entry">
 551       <div class="title">
 552         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Simpler_recipe_on_how_to_make_a_simple__7_IMSI_Catcher_using_Debian.html">Simpler recipe on how to make a simple $7 IMSI Catcher using Debian</a>
 553       </div>
 554       <div class="date">
 555          9th August 2017
 556       </div>
 557       <div class="body">
 558         <p>On friday, I came across an interesting article in the Norwegian
 559 web based ICT news magazine digi.no on
 560 <a href="https://www.digi.no/artikler/sikkerhetsforsker-lagde-enkel-imsi-catcher-for-60-kroner-na-kan-mobiler-kartlegges-av-alle/398588">how
 561 to collect the IMSI numbers of nearby cell phones</a> using the cheap
 562 DVB-T software defined radios.  The article refered to instructions
 563 and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjwgNd_as30">a recipe by
 564 Keld Norman on Youtube on how to make a simple $7 IMSI Catcher</a>, and I decided to test them out.</p>
 565
 566 <p>The instructions said to use Ubuntu, install pip using apt (to
 567 bypass apt), use pip to install pybombs (to bypass both apt and pip),
 568 and the ask pybombs to fetch and build everything you need from
 569 scratch.  I wanted to see if I could do the same on the most recent
 570 Debian packages, but this did not work because pybombs tried to build
 571 stuff that no longer build with the most recent openssl library or
 572 some other version skew problem.  While trying to get this recipe
 573 working, I learned that the apt->pip->pybombs route was a long detour,
 574 and the only piece of software dependency missing in Debian was the
 575 gr-gsm package.  I also found out that the lead upstream developer of
 576 gr-gsm (the name stand for GNU Radio GSM) project already had a set of
 577 Debian packages provided in an Ubuntu PPA repository.  All I needed to
 578 do was to dget the Debian source package and built it.</p>
 579
 580 <p>The IMSI collector is a python script listening for packages on the
 581 loopback network device and printing to the terminal some specific GSM
 582 packages with IMSI numbers in them.  The code is fairly short and easy
 583 to understand.  The reason this work is because gr-gsm include a tool
 584 to read GSM data from a software defined radio like a DVB-T USB stick
 585 and other software defined radios, decode them and inject them into a
 586 network device on your Linux machine (using the loopback device by
 587 default).  This proved to work just fine, and I've been testing the
 588 collector for a few days now.</p>
 589
 590 <p>The updated and simpler recipe is thus to</p>
 591
 592 <ol>
 593
 594 <li>start with a Debian machine running Stretch or newer,</li>
 595
 596 <li>build and install the gr-gsm package available from
 597 <a href="http://ppa.launchpad.net/ptrkrysik/gr-gsm/ubuntu/pool/main/g/gr-gsm/">http://ppa.launchpad.net/ptrkrysik/gr-gsm/ubuntu/pool/main/g/gr-gsm/</a>,</li>
 598
 599 <li>clone the git repostory from <a href="https://github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher">https://github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher</a>,</li>
 600
 601 <li>run grgsm_livemon and adjust the frequency until the terminal
 602 where it was started is filled with a stream of text (meaning you
 603 found a GSM station).</li>
 604
 605 <li>go into the IMSI-catcher directory and run 'sudo python simple_IMSI-catcher.py' to extract the IMSI numbers.</li>
 606
 607 </ol>
 608
 609 <p>To make it even easier in the future to get this sniffer up and
 610 running, I decided to package
 611 <a href="https://github.com/ptrkrysik/gr-gsm/">the gr-gsm project</a>
 612 for Debian (<a href="https://bugs.debian.org/871055">WNPP
 613 #871055</a>), and the package was uploaded into the NEW queue today.
 614 Luckily the gnuradio maintainer has promised to help me, as I do not
 615 know much about gnuradio stuff yet.</p>
 616
 617 <p>I doubt this "IMSI cacher" is anywhere near as powerfull as
 618 commercial tools like
 619 <a href="https://www.thespyphone.com/portable-imsi-imei-catcher/">The
 620 Spy Phone Portable IMSI / IMEI Catcher</a> or the
 621 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingray_phone_tracker">Harris
 622 Stingray</a>, but I hope the existance of cheap alternatives can make
 623 more people realise how their whereabouts when carrying a cell phone
 624 is easily tracked.  Seeing the data flow on the screen, realizing that
 625 I live close to a police station and knowing that the police is also
 626 wearing cell phones, I wonder how hard it would be for criminals to
 627 track the position of the police officers to discover when there are
 628 police near by, or for foreign military forces to track the location
 629 of the Norwegian military forces, or for anyone to track the location
 630 of government officials...</p>
 631
 632 <p>It is worth noting that the data reported by the IMSI-catcher
 633 script mentioned above is only a fraction of the data broadcasted on
 634 the GSM network.  It will only collect one frequency at the time,
 635 while a typical phone will be using several frequencies, and not all
 636 phones will be using the frequencies tracked by the grgsm_livemod
 637 program.  Also, there is a lot of radio chatter being ignored by the
 638 simple_IMSI-catcher script, which would be collected by extending the
 639 parser code.  I wonder if gr-gsm can be set up to listen to more than
 640 one frequency?</p>
 641
 642       </div>
 643       <div class="tags">
 644
 645
 646         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
 647
 648
 649       </div>
 650     </div>
 651     <div class="padding"></div>
 652
 653     <div class="entry">
 654       <div class="title">
 655         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook_is_now_available.html">Norwegian Bokmål edition of Debian Administrator's Handbook is now available</a>
 656       </div>
 657       <div class="date">
 658         25th July 2017
 659       </div>
 660       <div class="body">
 661         <p align="center"><img align="center" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-07-25-debian-handbook-nb-testprint.png"/></p>
 662
 663 <p>I finally received a copy of the Norwegian Bokmål edition of
 664 "<a href="https://debian-handbook.info/">The Debian Administrator's
 665 Handbook</a>".  This test copy arrived in the mail a few days ago, and
 666 I am very happy to hold the result in my hand.   We spent around one and a half year translating it. This paperbook edition
 667 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/get/#norwegian">is available
 668 from lulu.com</a>.  If you buy it quickly, you save 25% on the list
 669 price.  The book is also available for download in electronic form as
 670 PDF, EPUB and Mobipocket, as can be
 671 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/browse/nb-NO/stable/">read online
 672 as a web page</a>.</p>
 673
 674 <p>This is the second book I publish (the first was the book
 675 "<a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a>" by Lawrence Lessig
 676 in
 677 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22440520.html">English</a>,
 678 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/culture-libre/paperback/product-22645082.html">French</a>
 679 and
 680 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/fri-kultur/paperback/product-22441576.html">Norwegian
 681 Bokmål</a>), and I am very excited to finally wrap up this
 682 project.  I hope
 683 "<a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/rapha%C3%ABl-hertzog-and-roland-mas/h%C3%A5ndbok-for-debian-administratoren/paperback/product-23262290.html">Håndbok
 684 for Debian-administratoren</a>" will be well received.</p>
 685
 686       </div>
 687       <div class="tags">
 688
 689
 690         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 691
 692
 693       </div>
 694     </div>
 695     <div class="padding"></div>
 696
 697     <div class="entry">
 698       <div class="title">
 699         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/N_r_nynorskoversettelsen_svikter_til_eksamen___.html">Når nynorskoversettelsen svikter til eksamen...</a>
 700       </div>
 701       <div class="date">
 702          3rd June 2017
 703       </div>
 704       <div class="body">
 705         <p><a href="http://www.aftenposten.no/norge/Krever-at-elever-ma-fa-annullert-eksamen-etter-rot-med-oppgavetekster-622459b.html">Aftenposten
 706 melder i dag</a> om feil i eksamensoppgavene for eksamen i politikk og
 707 menneskerettigheter, der teksten i bokmåls og nynorskutgaven ikke var
 708 like.  Oppgaveteksten er gjengitt i artikkelen, og jeg ble nysgjerring
 709 på om den fri oversetterløsningen
 710 <a href="https://www.apertium.org/">Apertium</a> ville gjort en bedre
 711 jobb enn Utdanningsdirektoratet.  Det kan se slik ut.</p>
 712
 713 <p>Her er bokmålsoppgaven fra eksamenen:</p>
 714
 715 <blockquote>
 716 <p>Drøft utfordringene knyttet til nasjonalstatenes og andre aktørers
 717 rolle og muligheter til å håndtere internasjonale utfordringer, som
 718 for eksempel flykningekrisen.</p>
 719
 720 <p>Vedlegge er eksempler på tekster som kan gi relevante perspektiver
 721 på temaet:</p>
 722 <ol>
 723 <li>Flykningeregnskapet 2016, UNHCR og IDMC
 724 <li>«Grenseløst Europa for fall» A-Magasinet, 26. november 2015
 725 </ol>
 726
 727 </blockquote>
 728
 729 <p>Dette oversetter Apertium slik:</p>
 730
 731 <blockquote>
 732 <p>Drøft utfordringane knytte til nasjonalstatane sine og rolla til
 733 andre aktørar og høve til å handtera internasjonale utfordringar, som
 734 til dømes *flykningekrisen.</p>
 735
 736 <p>Vedleggja er døme på tekster som kan gje relevante perspektiv på
 737 temaet:</p>
 738
 739 <ol>
 740 <li>*Flykningeregnskapet 2016, *UNHCR og *IDMC</li>
 741 <li>«*Grenseløst Europa for fall» A-Magasinet, 26. november 2015</li>
 742 </ol>
 743
 744 </blockquote>
 745
 746 <p>Ord som ikke ble forstått er markert med stjerne (*), og trenger
 747 ekstra språksjekk.  Men ingen ord er forsvunnet, slik det var i
 748 oppgaven elevene fikk presentert på eksamen.  Jeg mistenker dog at
 749 "andre aktørers rolle og muligheter til ..." burde vært oversatt til
 750 "rolla til andre aktørar og deira høve til ..." eller noe slikt, men
 751 det er kanskje flisespikking.  Det understreker vel bare at det alltid
 752 trengs korrekturlesning etter automatisk oversettelse.</p>
 753
 754       </div>
 755       <div class="tags">
 756
 757
 758         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stavekontroll">stavekontroll</a>.
 759
 760
 761       </div>
 762     </div>
 763     <div class="padding"></div>
 764
 765     <div class="entry">
 766       <div class="title">
 767         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Detecting_NFS_hangs_on_Linux_without_hanging_yourself___.html">Detecting NFS hangs on Linux without hanging yourself...</a>
 768       </div>
 769       <div class="date">
 770          9th March 2017
 771       </div>
 772       <div class="body">
 773         <p>Over the years, administrating thousand of NFS mounting linux
 774 computers at the time, I often needed a way to detect if the machine
 775 was experiencing NFS hang.  If you try to use <tt>df</tt> or look at a
 776 file or directory affected by the hang, the process (and possibly the
 777 shell) will hang too.  So you want to be able to detect this without
 778 risking the detection process getting stuck too.  It has not been
 779 obvious how to do this.  When the hang has lasted a while, it is
 780 possible to find messages like these in dmesg:</p>
 781
 782 <p><blockquote>
 783 nfs: server nfsserver not responding, still trying
 784 <br>nfs: server nfsserver OK
 785 </blockquote></p>
 786
 787 <p>It is hard to know if the hang is still going on, and it is hard to
 788 be sure looking in dmesg is going to work.  If there are lots of other
 789 messages in dmesg the lines might have rotated out of site before they
 790 are noticed.</p>
 791
 792 <p>While reading through the nfs client implementation in linux kernel
 793 code, I came across some statistics that seem to give a way to detect
 794 it.  The om_timeouts sunrpc value in the kernel will increase every
 795 time the above log entry is inserted into dmesg.  And after digging a
 796 bit further, I discovered that this value show up in
 797 /proc/self/mountstats on Linux.</p>
 798
 799 <p>The mountstats content seem to be shared between files using the
 800 same file system context, so it is enough to check one of the
 801 mountstats files to get the state of the mount point for the machine.
 802 I assume this will not show lazy umounted NFS points, nor NFS mount
 803 points in a different process context (ie with a different filesystem
 804 view), but that does not worry me.</p>
 805
 806 <p>The content for a NFS mount point look similar to this:</p>
 807
 808 <p><blockquote><pre>
 809 [...]
 810 device /dev/mapper/Debian-var mounted on /var with fstype ext3
 811 device nfsserver:/mnt/nfsserver/home0 mounted on /mnt/nfsserver/home0 with fstype nfs statvers=1.1
 812         opts:   rw,vers=3,rsize=65536,wsize=65536,namlen=255,acregmin=3,acregmax=60,acdirmin=30,acdirmax=60,soft,nolock,proto=tcp,timeo=600,retrans=2,sec=sys,mountaddr=129.240.3.145,mountvers=3,mountport=4048,mountproto=udp,local_lock=all
 813         age:    7863311
 814         caps:   caps=0x3fe7,wtmult=4096,dtsize=8192,bsize=0,namlen=255
 815         sec:    flavor=1,pseudoflavor=1
 816         events: 61063112 732346265 1028140 35486205 16220064 8162542 761447191 71714012 37189 3891185 45561809 110486139 4850138 420353 15449177 296502 52736725 13523379 0 52182 9016896 1231 0 0 0 0 0
 817         bytes:  166253035039 219519120027 0 0 40783504807 185466229638 11677877 45561809
 818         RPC iostats version: 1.0  p/v: 100003/3 (nfs)
 819         xprt:   tcp 925 1 6810 0 0 111505412 111480497 109 2672418560317 0 248 53869103 22481820
 820         per-op statistics
 821                 NULL: 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
 822              GETATTR: 61063106 61063108 0 9621383060 6839064400 453650 77291321 78926132
 823              SETATTR: 463469 463470 0 92005440 66739536 63787 603235 687943
 824               LOOKUP: 17021657 17021657 0 3354097764 4013442928 57216 35125459 35566511
 825               ACCESS: 14281703 14290009 5 2318400592 1713803640 1709282 4865144 7130140
 826             READLINK: 125 125 0 20472 18620 0 1112 1118
 827                 READ: 4214236 4214237 0 715608524 41328653212 89884 22622768 22806693
 828                WRITE: 8479010 8494376 22 187695798568 1356087148 178264904 51506907 231671771
 829               CREATE: 171708 171708 0 38084748 46702272 873 1041833 1050398
 830                MKDIR: 3680 3680 0 773980 993920 26 23990 24245
 831              SYMLINK: 903 903 0 233428 245488 6 5865 5917
 832                MKNOD: 80 80 0 20148 21760 0 299 304
 833               REMOVE: 429921 429921 0 79796004 61908192 3313 2710416 2741636
 834                RMDIR: 3367 3367 0 645112 484848 22 5782 6002
 835               RENAME: 466201 466201 0 130026184 121212260 7075 5935207 5961288
 836                 LINK: 289155 289155 0 72775556 67083960 2199 2565060 2585579
 837              READDIR: 2933237 2933237 0 516506204 13973833412 10385 3190199 3297917
 838          READDIRPLUS: 1652839 1652839 0 298640972 6895997744 84735 14307895 14448937
 839               FSSTAT: 6144 6144 0 1010516 1032192 51 9654 10022
 840               FSINFO: 2 2 0 232 328 0 1 1
 841             PATHCONF: 1 1 0 116 140 0 0 0
 842               COMMIT: 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
 843
 844 device binfmt_misc mounted on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc with fstype binfmt_misc
 845 [...]
 846 </pre></blockquote></p>
 847
 848 <p>The key number to look at is the third number in the per-op list.
 849 It is the number of NFS timeouts experiences per file system
 850 operation.  Here 22 write timeouts and 5 access timeouts.  If these
 851 numbers are increasing, I believe the machine is experiencing NFS
 852 hang.  Unfortunately the timeout value do not start to increase right
 853 away.  The NFS operations need to time out first, and this can take a
 854 while.  The exact timeout value depend on the setup.  For example the
 855 defaults for TCP and UDP mount points are quite different, and the
 856 timeout value is affected by the soft, hard, timeo and retrans NFS
 857 mount options.</p>
 858
 859 <p>The only way I have been able to get working on Debian and RedHat
 860 Enterprise Linux for getting the timeout count is to peek in /proc/.
 861 But according to
 862 <ahref="http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19253-01/816-4555/netmonitor-12/index.html">Solaris
 863 10 System Administration Guide: Network Services</a>, the 'nfsstat -c'
 864 command can be used to get these timeout values.  But this do not work
 865 on Linux, as far as I can tell.  I
 866 <ahref="http://bugs.debian.org/857043">asked Debian about this</a>,
 867 but have not seen any replies yet.</p>
 868
 869 <p>Is there a better way to figure out if a Linux NFS client is
 870 experiencing NFS hangs?  Is there a way to detect which processes are
 871 affected?  Is there a way to get the NFS mount going quickly once the
 872 network problem causing the NFS hang has been cleared?  I would very
 873 much welcome some clues, as we regularly run into NFS hangs.</p>
 874
 875       </div>
 876       <div class="tags">
 877
 878
 879         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sysadmin">sysadmin</a>.
 880
 881
 882       </div>
 883     </div>
 884     <div class="padding"></div>
 885
 886     <div class="entry">
 887       <div class="title">
 888         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Norwegian_Bokm_l_translation_of_The_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook_complete__proofreading_in_progress.html">Norwegian Bokmål translation of The Debian Administrator's Handbook complete, proofreading in progress</a>
 889       </div>
 890       <div class="date">
 891          3rd March 2017
 892       </div>
 893       <div class="body">
 894         <p>For almost a year now, we have been working on making a Norwegian
 895 Bokmål edition of <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/">The Debian
 896 Administrator's Handbook</a>.  Now, thanks to the tireless effort of
 897 Ole-Erik, Ingrid and Andreas, the initial translation is complete, and
 898 we are working on the proof reading to ensure consistent language and
 899 use of correct computer science terms.  The plan is to make the book
 900 available on paper, as well as in electronic form.  For that to
 901 happen, the proof reading must be completed and all the figures need
 902 to be translated.  If you want to help out, get in touch.</p>
 903
 904 <p><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-handbook/debian-handbook-nb-NO.pdf">A
 905
 906 fresh PDF edition</a> in A4 format (the final book will have smaller
 907 pages) of the book created every morning is available for
 908 proofreading.  If you find any errors, please
 909 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-handbook/">visit
 910 Weblate and correct the error</a>.  The
 911 <a href="http://l.github.io/debian-handbook/stat/nb-NO/index.html">state
 912 of the translation including figures</a> is a useful source for those
 913 provide Norwegian bokmål screen shots and figures.</p>
 914
 915       </div>
 916       <div class="tags">
 917
 918
 919         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 920
 921
 922       </div>
 923     </div>
 924     <div class="padding"></div>
 925
 926     <div class="entry">
 927       <div class="title">
 928         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Unlimited_randomness_with_the_ChaosKey_.html">Unlimited randomness with the ChaosKey?</a>
 929       </div>
 930       <div class="date">
 931          1st March 2017
 932       </div>
 933       <div class="body">
 934         <p>A few days ago I ordered a small batch of
 935 <a href="http://altusmetrum.org/ChaosKey/">the ChaosKey</a>, a small
 936 USB dongle for generating entropy created by Bdale Garbee and Keith
 937 Packard.  Yesterday it arrived, and I am very happy to report that it
 938 work great!  According to its designers, to get it to work out of the
 939 box, you need the Linux kernel version 4.1 or later.  I tested on a
 940 Debian Stretch machine (kernel version 4.9), and there it worked just
 941 fine, increasing the available entropy very quickly.  I wrote a small
 942 test oneliner to test.  It first print the current entropy level,
 943 drain /dev/random, and then print the entropy level for five seconds.
 944 Here is the situation without the ChaosKey inserted:</p>
 945
 946 <blockquote><pre>
 947 % cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
 948   dd bs=1M if=/dev/random of=/dev/null count=1; \
 949   for n in $(seq 1 5); do \
 950      cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
 951      sleep 1; \
 952   done
 953 300
 954 0+1 oppføringer inn
 955 0+1 oppføringer ut
 956 28 byte kopiert, 0,000264565 s, 106 kB/s
 957 4
 958 8
 959 12
 960 17
 961 21
 962 %
 963 </pre></blockquote>
 964
 965 <p>The entropy level increases by 3-4 every second.  In such case any
 966 application requiring random bits (like a HTTPS enabled web server)
 967 will halt and wait for more entrpy.  And here is the situation with
 968 the ChaosKey inserted:</p>
 969
 970 <blockquote><pre>
 971 % cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
 972   dd bs=1M if=/dev/random of=/dev/null count=1; \
 973   for n in $(seq 1 5); do \
 974      cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
 975      sleep 1; \
 976   done
 977 1079
 978 0+1 oppføringer inn
 979 0+1 oppføringer ut
 980 104 byte kopiert, 0,000487647 s, 213 kB/s
 981 433
 982 1028
 983 1031
 984 1035
 985 1038
 986 %
 987 </pre></blockquote>
 988
 989 <p>Quite the difference. :) I bought a few more than I need, in case
 990 someone want to buy one here in Norway. :)</p>
 991
 992 <p>Update: The dongle was presented at Debconf last year.  You might
 993 find <a href="https://debconf16.debconf.org/talks/94/">the talk
 994 recording illuminating</a>.  It explains exactly what the source of
 995 randomness is, if you are unable to spot it from the schema drawing
 996 available from the ChaosKey web site linked at the start of this blog
 997 post.</p>
 998
 999       </div>
1000       <div class="tags">
1001
1002
1003         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1004
1005
1006       </div>
1007     </div>
1008     <div class="padding"></div>
1009
1010     <div class="entry">
1011       <div class="title">
1012         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Where_did_that_package_go___mdash__geolocated_IP_traceroute.html">Where did that package go? &mdash; geolocated IP traceroute</a>
1013       </div>
1014       <div class="date">
1015          9th January 2017
1016       </div>
1017       <div class="body">
1018         <p>Did you ever wonder where the web trafic really flow to reach the
1019 web servers, and who own the network equipment it is flowing through?
1020 It is possible to get a glimpse of this from using traceroute, but it
1021 is hard to find all the details.  Many years ago, I wrote a system to
1022 map the Norwegian Internet (trying to figure out if our plans for a
1023 network game service would get low enough latency, and who we needed
1024 to talk to about setting up game servers close to the users.  Back
1025 then I used traceroute output from many locations (I asked my friends
1026 to run a script and send me their traceroute output) to create the
1027 graph and the map.  The output from traceroute typically look like
1028 this:
1029
1030 <p><pre>
1031 traceroute to www.stortinget.no (85.88.67.10), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
1032  1  uio-gw10.uio.no (129.240.202.1)  0.447 ms  0.486 ms  0.621 ms
1033  2  uio-gw8.uio.no (129.240.24.229)  0.467 ms  0.578 ms  0.675 ms
1034  3  oslo-gw1.uninett.no (128.39.65.17)  0.385 ms  0.373 ms  0.358 ms
1035  4  te3-1-2.br1.fn3.as2116.net (193.156.90.3)  1.174 ms  1.172 ms  1.153 ms
1036  5  he16-1-1.cr1.san110.as2116.net (195.0.244.234)  2.627 ms he16-1-1.cr2.oslosda310.as2116.net (195.0.244.48)  3.172 ms he16-1-1.cr1.san110.as2116.net (195.0.244.234)  2.857 ms
1037  6  ae1.ar8.oslosda310.as2116.net (195.0.242.39)  0.662 ms  0.637 ms ae0.ar8.oslosda310.as2116.net (195.0.242.23)  0.622 ms
1038  7  89.191.10.146 (89.191.10.146)  0.931 ms  0.917 ms  0.955 ms
1039  8  * * *
1040  9  * * *
1041 [...]
1042 </pre></p>
1043
1044 <p>This show the DNS names and IP addresses of (at least some of the)
1045 network equipment involved in getting the data traffic from me to the
1046 www.stortinget.no server, and how long it took in milliseconds for a
1047 package to reach the equipment and return to me.  Three packages are
1048 sent, and some times the packages do not follow the same path.  This
1049 is shown for hop 5, where three different IP addresses replied to the
1050 traceroute request.</p>
1051
1052 <p>There are many ways to measure trace routes.  Other good traceroute
1053 implementations I use are traceroute (using ICMP packages) mtr (can do
1054 both ICMP, UDP and TCP) and scapy (python library with ICMP, UDP, TCP
1055 traceroute and a lot of other capabilities).  All of them are easily
1056 available in <a href="https://www.debian.org/">Debian</a>.</p>
1057
1058 <p>This time around, I wanted to know the geographic location of
1059 different route points, to visualize how visiting a web page spread
1060 information about the visit to a lot of servers around the globe.  The
1061 background is that a web site today often will ask the browser to get
1062 from many servers the parts (for example HTML, JSON, fonts,
1063 JavaScript, CSS, video) required to display the content.  This will
1064 leak information about the visit to those controlling these servers
1065 and anyone able to peek at the data traffic passing by (like your ISP,
1066 the ISPs backbone provider, FRA, GCHQ, NSA and others).</p>
1067
1068 <p>Lets pick an example, the Norwegian parliament web site
1069 www.stortinget.no.  It is read daily by all members of parliament and
1070 their staff, as well as political journalists, activits and many other
1071 citizens of Norway.  A visit to the www.stortinget.no web site will
1072 ask your browser to contact 8 other servers: ajax.googleapis.com,
1073 insights.hotjar.com, script.hotjar.com, static.hotjar.com,
1074 stats.g.doubleclick.net, www.google-analytics.com,
1075 www.googletagmanager.com and www.netigate.se.  I extracted this by
1076 asking <a href="http://phantomjs.org/">PhantomJS</a> to visit the
1077 Stortinget web page and tell me all the URLs PhantomJS downloaded to
1078 render the page (in HAR format using
1079 <a href="https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/blob/master/examples/netsniff.js">their
1080 netsniff example</a>.  I am very grateful to Gorm for showing me how
1081 to do this).  My goal is to visualize network traces to all IP
1082 addresses behind these DNS names, do show where visitors personal
1083 information is spread when visiting the page.</p>
1084
1085 <p align="center"><a href="www.stortinget.no-geoip.kml"><img
1086 src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-geoip-small.png" alt="map of combined traces for URLs used by www.stortinget.no using GeoIP"/></a></p>
1087
1088 <p>When I had a look around for options, I could not find any good
1089 free software tools to do this, and decided I needed my own traceroute
1090 wrapper outputting KML based on locations looked up using GeoIP.  KML
1091 is easy to work with and easy to generate, and understood by several
1092 of the GIS tools I have available.  I got good help from by NUUG
1093 colleague Anders Einar with this, and the result can be seen in
1094 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/kmltraceroute">my
1095 kmltraceroute git repository</a>.  Unfortunately, the quality of the
1096 free GeoIP databases I could find (and the for-pay databases my
1097 friends had access to) is not up to the task.  The IP addresses of
1098 central Internet infrastructure would typically be placed near the
1099 controlling companies main office, and not where the router is really
1100 located, as you can see from <a href="www.stortinget.no-geoip.kml">the
1101 KML file I created</a> using the GeoLite City dataset from MaxMind.
1102
1103 <p align="center"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-scapy.svg"><img
1104 src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-scapy-small.png" alt="scapy traceroute graph for URLs used by www.stortinget.no"/></a></p>
1105
1106 <p>I also had a look at the visual traceroute graph created by
1107 <a href="http://www.secdev.org/projects/scapy/">the scrapy project</a>,
1108 showing IP network ownership (aka AS owner) for the IP address in
1109 question.
1110 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-scapy.svg">The
1111 graph display a lot of useful information about the traceroute in SVG
1112 format</a>, and give a good indication on who control the network
1113 equipment involved, but it do not include geolocation.  This graph
1114 make it possible to see the information is made available at least for
1115 UNINETT, Catchcom, Stortinget, Nordunet, Google, Amazon, Telia, Level
1116 3 Communications and NetDNA.</p>
1117
1118 <p align="center"><a href="https://geotraceroute.com/index.php?node=4&host=www.stortinget.no"><img
1119 src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-geotraceroute-small.png" alt="example geotraceroute view for www.stortinget.no"/></a></p>
1120
1121 <p>In the process, I came across the
1122 <a href="https://geotraceroute.com/">web service GeoTraceroute</a> by
1123 Salim Gasmi.  Its methology of combining guesses based on DNS names,
1124 various location databases and finally use latecy times to rule out
1125 candidate locations seemed to do a very good job of guessing correct
1126 geolocation.  But it could only do one trace at the time, did not have
1127 a sensor in Norway and did not make the geolocations easily available
1128 for postprocessing.  So I contacted the developer and asked if he
1129 would be willing to share the code (he refused until he had time to
1130 clean it up), but he was interested in providing the geolocations in a
1131 machine readable format, and willing to set up a sensor in Norway.  So
1132 since yesterday, it is possible to run traces from Norway in this
1133 service thanks to a sensor node set up by
1134 <a href="https://www.nuug.no/">the NUUG assosiation</a>, and get the
1135 trace in KML format for further processing.</p>
1136
1137 <p align="center"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-geotraceroute-kml-join.kml"><img
1138 src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-geotraceroute-kml-join.png" alt="map of combined traces for URLs used by www.stortinget.no using geotraceroute"/></a></p>
1139
1140 <p>Here we can see a lot of trafic passes Sweden on its way to
1141 Denmark, Germany, Holland and Ireland.  Plenty of places where the
1142 Snowden confirmations verified the traffic is read by various actors
1143 without your best interest as their top priority.</p>
1144
1145 <p>Combining KML files is trivial using a text editor, so I could loop
1146 over all the hosts behind the urls imported by www.stortinget.no and
1147 ask for the KML file from GeoTraceroute, and create a combined KML
1148 file with all the traces (unfortunately only one of the IP addresses
1149 behind the DNS name is traced this time.  To get them all, one would
1150 have to request traces using IP number instead of DNS names from
1151 GeoTraceroute).  That might be the next step in this project.</p>
1152
1153 <p>Armed with these tools, I find it a lot easier to figure out where
1154 the IP traffic moves and who control the boxes involved in moving it.
1155 And every time the link crosses for example the Swedish border, we can
1156 be sure Swedish Signal Intelligence (FRA) is listening, as GCHQ do in
1157 Britain and NSA in USA and cables around the globe.  (Hm, what should
1158 we tell them? :) Keep that in mind if you ever send anything
1159 unencrypted over the Internet.</p>
1160
1161 <p>PS: KML files are drawn using
1162 <a href="http://ivanrublev.me/kml/">the KML viewer from Ivan
1163 Rublev<a/>, as it was less cluttered than the local Linux application
1164 Marble.  There are heaps of other options too.</p>
1165
1166 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1167 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1168 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1169
1170       </div>
1171       <div class="tags">
1172
1173
1174         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kart">kart</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stortinget">stortinget</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
1175
1176
1177       </div>
1178     </div>
1179     <div class="padding"></div>
1180
1181     <div class="entry">
1182       <div class="title">
1183         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Appstream_just_learned_how_to_map_hardware_to_packages_too_.html">Appstream just learned how to map hardware to packages too!</a>
1184       </div>
1185       <div class="date">
1186         23rd December 2016
1187       </div>
1188       <div class="body">
1189         <p>I received a very nice Christmas present today.  As my regular
1190 readers probably know, I have been working on the
1191 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">the Isenkram
1192 system</a> for many years.  The goal of the Isenkram system is to make
1193 it easier for users to figure out what to install to get a given piece
1194 of hardware to work in Debian, and a key part of this system is a way
1195 to map hardware to packages.  Isenkram have its own mapping database,
1196 and also uses data provided by each package using the AppStream
1197 metadata format.  And today,
1198 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/appstream">AppStream</a> in
1199 Debian learned to look up hardware the same way Isenkram is doing it,
1200 ie using fnmatch():</p>
1201
1202 <p><pre>
1203 % appstreamcli what-provides modalias \
1204   usb:v1130p0202d0100dc00dsc00dp00ic03isc00ip00in00
1205 Identifier: pymissile [generic]
1206 Name: pymissile
1207 Summary: Control original Striker USB Missile Launcher
1208 Package: pymissile
1209 % appstreamcli what-provides modalias usb:v0694p0002d0000
1210 Identifier: libnxt [generic]
1211 Name: libnxt
1212 Summary: utility library for talking to the LEGO Mindstorms NXT brick
1213 Package: libnxt
1214 ---
1215 Identifier: t2n [generic]
1216 Name: t2n
1217 Summary: Simple command-line tool for Lego NXT
1218 Package: t2n
1219 ---
1220 Identifier: python-nxt [generic]
1221 Name: python-nxt
1222 Summary: Python driver/interface/wrapper for the Lego Mindstorms NXT robot
1223 Package: python-nxt
1224 ---
1225 Identifier: nbc [generic]
1226 Name: nbc
1227 Summary: C compiler for LEGO Mindstorms NXT bricks
1228 Package: nbc
1229 %
1230 </pre></p>
1231
1232 <p>A similar query can be done using the combined AppStream and
1233 Isenkram databases using the isenkram-lookup tool:</p>
1234
1235 <p><pre>
1236 % isenkram-lookup usb:v1130p0202d0100dc00dsc00dp00ic03isc00ip00in00
1237 pymissile
1238 % isenkram-lookup usb:v0694p0002d0000
1239 libnxt
1240 nbc
1241 python-nxt
1242 t2n
1243 %
1244 </pre></p>
1245
1246 <p>You can find modalias values relevant for your machine using
1247 <tt>cat $(find /sys/devices/ -name modalias)</tt>.
1248
1249 <p>If you want to make this system a success and help Debian users
1250 make the most of the hardware they have, please
1251 help<a href="https://wiki.debian.org/AppStream/Guidelines">add
1252 AppStream metadata for your package following the guidelines</a>
1253 documented in the wiki.  So far only 11 packages provide such
1254 information, among the several hundred hardware specific packages in
1255 Debian. The Isenkram database on the other hand contain 101 packages,
1256 mostly related to USB dongles.  Most of the packages with hardware
1257 mapping in AppStream are LEGO Mindstorms related, because I have, as
1258 part of my involvement in
1259 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">the Debian LEGO
1260 team</a> given priority to making sure LEGO users get proposed the
1261 complete set of packages in Debian for that particular hardware.  The
1262 team also got a nice Christmas present today.  The
1263 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/nxt-firmware">nxt-firmware
1264 package</a> made it into Debian.  With this package in place, it is
1265 now possible to use the LEGO Mindstorms NXT unit with only free
1266 software, as the nxt-firmware package contain the source and firmware
1267 binaries for the NXT brick.</p>
1268
1269 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1270 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1271 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1272
1273       </div>
1274       <div class="tags">
1275
1276
1277         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
1278
1279
1280       </div>
1281     </div>
1282     <div class="padding"></div>
1283
1284     <div class="entry">
1285       <div class="title">
1286         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Isenkram_updated_with_a_lot_more_hardware_package_mappings.html">Isenkram updated with a lot more hardware-package mappings</a>
1287       </div>
1288       <div class="date">
1289         20th December 2016
1290       </div>
1291       <div class="body">
1292         <p><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">The Isenkram
1293 system</a> I wrote two years ago to make it easier in Debian to find
1294 and install packages to get your hardware dongles to work, is still
1295 going strong.  It is a system to look up the hardware present on or
1296 connected to the current system, and map the hardware to Debian
1297 packages.  It can either be done using the tools in isenkram-cli or
1298 using the user space daemon in the isenkram package.  The latter will
1299 notify you, when inserting new hardware, about what packages to
1300 install to get the dongle working.  It will even provide a button to
1301 click on to ask packagekit to install the packages.</p>
1302
1303 <p>Here is an command line example from my Thinkpad laptop:</p>
1304
1305 <p><pre>
1306 % isenkram-lookup
1307 bluez
1308 cheese
1309 ethtool
1310 fprintd
1311 fprintd-demo
1312 gkrellm-thinkbat
1313 hdapsd
1314 libpam-fprintd
1315 pidgin-blinklight
1316 thinkfan
1317 tlp
1318 tp-smapi-dkms
1319 tp-smapi-source
1320 tpb
1321 %
1322 </pre></p>
1323
1324 <p>It can also list the firware package providing firmware requested
1325 by the load kernel modules, which in my case is an empty list because
1326 I have all the firmware my machine need:
1327
1328 <p><pre>
1329 % /usr/sbin/isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
1330 info: did not find any firmware files requested by loaded kernel modules.  exiting
1331 %
1332 </pre></p>
1333
1334 <p>The last few days I had a look at several of the around 250
1335 packages in Debian with udev rules.  These seem like good candidates
1336 to install when a given hardware dongle is inserted, and I found
1337 several that should be proposed by isenkram.  I have not had time to
1338 check all of them, but am happy to report that now there are 97
1339 packages packages mapped to hardware by Isenkram.  11 of these
1340 packages provide hardware mapping using AppStream, while the rest are
1341 listed in the modaliases file provided in isenkram.</p>
1342
1343 <p>These are the packages with hardware mappings at the moment.  The
1344 <strong>marked packages</strong> are also announcing their hardware
1345 support using AppStream, for everyone to use:</p>
1346
1347 <p>air-quality-sensor, alsa-firmware-loaders, argyll,
1348 <strong>array-info</strong>, avarice, avrdude, b43-fwcutter,
1349 bit-babbler, bluez, bluez-firmware, <strong>brltty</strong>,
1350 <strong>broadcom-sta-dkms</strong>, calibre, cgminer, cheese, colord,
1351 <strong>colorhug-client</strong>, dahdi-firmware-nonfree, dahdi-linux,
1352 dfu-util, dolphin-emu, ekeyd, ethtool, firmware-ipw2x00, fprintd,
1353 fprintd-demo, <strong>galileo</strong>, gkrellm-thinkbat, gphoto2,
1354 gpsbabel, gpsbabel-gui, gpsman, gpstrans, gqrx-sdr, gr-fcdproplus,
1355 gr-osmosdr, gtkpod, hackrf, hdapsd, hdmi2usb-udev, hpijs-ppds, hplip,
1356 ipw3945-source, ipw3945d, kde-config-tablet, kinect-audio-setup,
1357 <strong>libnxt</strong>, libpam-fprintd, <strong>lomoco</strong>,
1358 madwimax, minidisc-utils, mkgmap, msi-keyboard, mtkbabel,
1359 <strong>nbc</strong>, <strong>nqc</strong>, nut-hal-drivers, ola,
1360 open-vm-toolbox, open-vm-tools, openambit, pcgminer, pcmciautils,
1361 pcscd, pidgin-blinklight, printer-driver-splix,
1362 <strong>pymissile</strong>, python-nxt, qlandkartegt,
1363 qlandkartegt-garmin, rosegarden, rt2x00-source, sispmctl,
1364 soapysdr-module-hackrf, solaar, squeak-plugins-scratch, sunxi-tools,
1365 <strong>t2n</strong>, thinkfan, thinkfinger-tools, tlp, tp-smapi-dkms,
1366 tp-smapi-source, tpb, tucnak, uhd-host, usbmuxd, viking,
1367 virtualbox-ose-guest-x11, w1retap, xawtv, xserver-xorg-input-vmmouse,
1368 xserver-xorg-input-wacom, xserver-xorg-video-qxl,
1369 xserver-xorg-video-vmware, yubikey-personalization and
1370 zd1211-firmware</p>
1371
1372 <p>If you know of other packages, please let me know with a wishlist
1373 bug report against the isenkram-cli package, and ask the package
1374 maintainer to
1375 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/AppStream/Guidelines">add AppStream
1376 metadata according to the guidelines</a> to provide the information
1377 for everyone.  In time, I hope to get rid of the isenkram specific
1378 hardware mapping and depend exclusively on AppStream.</p>
1379
1380 <p>Note, the AppStream metadata for broadcom-sta-dkms is matching too
1381 much hardware, and suggest that the package with with any ethernet
1382 card.  See <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/838735">bug #838735</a> for
1383 the details.  I hope the maintainer find time to address it soon.  In
1384 the mean time I provide an override in isenkram.</p>
1385
1386       </div>
1387       <div class="tags">
1388
1389
1390         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
1391
1392
1393       </div>
1394     </div>
1395     <div class="padding"></div>
1396
1397     <div class="entry">
1398       <div class="title">
1399         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Oolite__a_life_in_space_as_vagabond_and_mercenary___nice_free_software.html">Oolite, a life in space as vagabond and mercenary - nice free software</a>
1400       </div>
1401       <div class="date">
1402         11th December 2016
1403       </div>
1404       <div class="body">
1405         <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-12-11-nice-oolite.png"/></p>
1406
1407 <p>In my early years, I played
1408 <a href="http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Classic_Elite">the epic game
1409 Elite</a> on my PC.  I spent many months trading and fighting in
1410 space, and reached the 'elite' fighting status before I moved on.  The
1411 original Elite game was available on Commodore 64 and the IBM PC
1412 edition I played had a 64 KB executable.  I am still impressed today
1413 that the authors managed to squeeze both a 3D engine and details about
1414 more than 2000 planet systems across 7 galaxies into a binary so
1415 small.</p>
1416
1417 <p>I have known about <a href="http://www.oolite.org/">the free
1418 software game Oolite inspired by Elite</a> for a while, but did not
1419 really have time to test it properly until a few days ago.  It was
1420 great to discover that my old knowledge about trading routes were
1421 still valid.  But my fighting and flying abilities were gone, so I had
1422 to retrain to be able to dock on a space station.  And I am still not
1423 able to make much resistance when I am attacked by pirates, so I
1424 bougth and mounted the most powerful laser in the rear to be able to
1425 put up at least some resistance while fleeing for my life. :)</p>
1426
1427 <p>When playing Elite in the late eighties, I had to discover
1428 everything on my own, and I had long lists of prices seen on different
1429 planets to be able to decide where to trade what.  This time I had the
1430 advantages of the
1431 <a href="http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Main_Page">Elite wiki</a>,
1432 where information about each planet is easily available with common
1433 price ranges and suggested trading routes.  This improved my ability
1434 to earn money and I have been able to earn enough to buy a lot of
1435 useful equipent in a few days.  I believe I originally played for
1436 months before I could get a docking computer, while now I could get it
1437 after less then a week.</p>
1438
1439 <p>If you like science fiction and dreamed of a life as a vagabond in
1440 space, you should try out Oolite.  It is available for Linux, MacOSX
1441 and Windows, and is included in Debian and derivatives since 2011.</p>
1442
1443 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1444 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1445 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1446
1447       </div>
1448       <div class="tags">
1449
1450
1451         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
1452
1453
1454       </div>
1455     </div>
1456     <div class="padding"></div>
1457
1458     <div class="entry">
1459       <div class="title">
1460         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Quicker_Debian_installations_using_eatmydata.html">Quicker Debian installations using eatmydata</a>
1461       </div>
1462       <div class="date">
1463         25th November 2016
1464       </div>
1465       <div class="body">
1466         <p>Two years ago, I did some experiments with eatmydata and the Debian
1467 installation system, observing how using
1468 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Speeding_up_the_Debian_installer_using_eatmydata_and_dpkg_divert.html">eatmydata
1469 could speed up the installation</a> quite a bit.  My testing measured
1470 speedup around 20-40 percent for Debian Edu, where we install around
1471 1000 packages from within the installer.  The eatmydata package
1472 provide a way to disable/delay file system flushing.  This is a bit
1473 risky in the general case, as files that should be stored on disk will
1474 stay only in memory a bit longer than expected, causing problems if a
1475 machine crashes at an inconvenient time.  But for an installation, if
1476 the machine crashes during installation the process is normally
1477 restarted, and avoiding disk operations as much as possible to speed
1478 up the process make perfect sense.
1479
1480 <p>I added code in the Debian Edu specific installation code to enable
1481 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/libeatmydata">eatmydata</a>,
1482 but did not have time to push it any further.  But a few months ago I
1483 picked it up again and worked with the libeatmydata package maintainer
1484 Mattia Rizzolo to make it easier for everyone to get this installation
1485 speedup in Debian.  Thanks to our cooperation There is now an
1486 eatmydata-udeb package in Debian testing and unstable, and simply
1487 enabling/installing it in debian-installer (d-i) is enough to get the
1488 quicker installations.  It can be enabled using preseeding.  The
1489 following untested kernel argument should do the trick:</p>
1490
1491 <blockquote><pre>
1492 preseed/early_command="anna-install eatmydata-udeb"
1493 </pre></blockquote>
1494
1495 <p>This should ask d-i to install the package inside the d-i
1496 environment early in the installation sequence.  Having it installed
1497 in d-i in turn will make sure the relevant scripts are called just
1498 after debootstrap filled /target/ with the freshly installed Debian
1499 system to configure apt to run dpkg with eatmydata.  This is enough to
1500 speed up the installation process.  There is a proposal to
1501 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/841153">extend the idea a bit further
1502 by using /etc/ld.so.preload instead of apt.conf</a>, but I have not
1503 tested its impact.</p>
1504
1505
1506       </div>
1507       <div class="tags">
1508
1509
1510         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1511
1512
1513       </div>
1514     </div>
1515     <div class="padding"></div>
1516
1517     <div class="entry">
1518       <div class="title">
1519         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Oversette_bokm_l_til_nynorsk__enklere_enn_du_tror_takket_v_re_Apertium.html">Oversette bokmål til nynorsk, enklere enn du tror takket være Apertium</a>
1520       </div>
1521       <div class="date">
1522         24th November 2016
1523       </div>
1524       <div class="body">
1525         <p>I Norge er det mange som trenger å skrive både bokmål og nynorsk.
1526 Eksamensoppgaver, offentlige brev og nyheter er eksempler på tekster
1527 der det er krav om skriftspråk.  I tillegg til alle skoleoppgavene som
1528 elever over det ganske land skal levere inn hvert år.  Det mange ikke
1529 vet er at selv om de kommersielle alternativene
1530 <a href="https://translate.google.com/">Google Translate</a> og
1531 <a href="https://www.bing.com/translator/">Bing Translator</a> ikke kan
1532 bidra med å oversette mellom bokmål og nynorsk, så finnes det et
1533 utmerket fri programvarealternativ som kan.  Oversetterverktøyet
1534 Apertium har støtte for en rekke språkkombinasjoner, og takket være
1535 den utrettelige innsatsen til blant annet Kevin Brubeck Unhammer, kan
1536 en bruke webtjenesten til å fylle inn en tekst på bokmål eller
1537 nynorsk, og få den automatoversatt til det andre skriftspråket.
1538 Resultatet er ikke perfekt, men et svært godt utgangspunkt.  Av og til
1539 er resultatet så bra at det kan benyttes uten endringer.  Jeg vet
1540 f.eks. at store deler av Joomla ble oversatt til nynorsk ved hjelp
1541 Apertium.  Høres det ut som noe du kan ha bruk for?  Besøk i så fall
1542 <a href="https://www.apertium.org/">Apertium.org</a> og fyll inn
1543 teksten din i webskjemaet der.
1544
1545 <p>Hvis du trenger maskinell tilgang til den bakenforliggende
1546 teknologien kan du enten installere pakken
1547 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/apertium-nno-nob">apertium-nno-nob</a>
1548 på en Debian-maskin eller bruke web-API-et tilgjengelig fra
1549 api.apertium.org.  Se
1550 <a href="http://wiki.apertium.org/wiki/Apertium-apy">API-dokumentasjonen</a>
1551 for detaljer om web-API-et.  Her kan du se hvordan resultatet blir for
1552 denne teksten som ble skrevet på bokmål over maskinoversatt til
1553 nynorsk.</p>
1554
1555 <hr/>
1556
1557 <p>I Noreg er det mange som treng å skriva både bokmål og nynorsk.
1558 Eksamensoppgåver, offentlege brev og nyhende er døme på tekster der
1559 det er krav om skriftspråk.  I tillegg til alle skuleoppgåvene som
1560 elevar over det ganske land skal levera inn kvart år.  Det mange ikkje
1561 veit er at sjølv om dei kommersielle alternativa
1562 <a href="https://translate.google.com/">Google *Translate</a> og
1563 <a href="https://www.bing.com/translator/">Bing *Translator</a> ikkje
1564 kan bidra med å omsetja mellom bokmål og nynorsk, så finst det eit
1565 utmerka fri programvarealternativ som kan.  Omsetjarverktøyet
1566 *Apertium har støtte for ei rekkje språkkombinasjonar, og takka vera
1567 den utrøyttelege innsatsen til blant anna Kevin Brubeck Unhammer, kan
1568 ein bruka *webtjenesten til å fylla inn ei tekst på bokmål eller
1569 nynorsk, og få den *automatoversatt til det andre skriftspråket.
1570 Resultatet er ikkje perfekt, men eit svært godt utgangspunkt.  Av og
1571 til er resultatet så bra at det kan nyttast utan endringar.  Eg veit
1572 t.d. at store delar av *Joomla vart omsett til nynorsk ved hjelp
1573 *Apertium.  Høyrast det ut som noko du kan ha bruk for?  Besøk i så
1574 fall <a href="https://www.apertium.org/">*Apertium.org</a> og fyll inn
1575 teksta di i *webskjemaet der.
1576
1577 <p>Viss du treng *maskinell tilgjenge til den *bakenforliggende
1578 teknologien kan du anten installera pakken
1579 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/apertium-nno-nob">*apertium-*nno-*nob</a>
1580 på ein *Debian-maskin eller bruka *web-*API-eit tilgjengeleg frå
1581 *api.*apertium.org.  Sjå
1582 <a href="http://wiki.apertium.org/wiki/Apertium-apy">*API-dokumentasjonen</a>
1583 for detaljar om *web-*API-eit.  Her kan du sjå korleis resultatet vert
1584 for denne teksta som vart skreva på bokmål over *maskinoversatt til
1585 nynorsk.</p>
1586
1587       </div>
1588       <div class="tags">
1589
1590
1591         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stavekontroll">stavekontroll</a>.
1592
1593
1594       </div>
1595     </div>
1596     <div class="padding"></div>
1597
1598     <div class="entry">
1599       <div class="title">
1600         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Coz_profiler_for_multi_threaded_software_is_now_in_Debian.html">Coz profiler for multi-threaded software is now in Debian</a>
1601       </div>
1602       <div class="date">
1603         13th November 2016
1604       </div>
1605       <div class="body">
1606         <p><a href="http://coz-profiler.org/">The Coz profiler</a>, a nice
1607 profiler able to run benchmarking experiments on the instrumented
1608 multi-threaded program, finally
1609 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/coz-profiler">made it into
1610 Debian unstable yesterday</A>.  Lluís Vilanova and I have spent many
1611 months since
1612 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Coz_can_help_you_find_bottlenecks_in_multi_threaded_software___nice_free_software.html">I
1613 blogged about the coz tool</a> in August working with upstream to make
1614 it suitable for Debian.  There are still issues with clang
1615 compatibility, inline assembly only working x86 and minimized
1616 JavaScript libraries.</p>
1617
1618 <p>To test it, install 'coz-profiler' using apt and run it like this:</p>
1619
1620 <p><blockquote>
1621 <tt>coz run --- /path/to/binary-with-debug-info</tt>
1622 </blockquote></p>
1623
1624 <p>This will produce a profile.coz file in the current working
1625 directory with the profiling information.  This is then given to a
1626 JavaScript application provided in the package and available from
1627 <a href="http://plasma-umass.github.io/coz/">a project web page</a>.
1628 To start the local copy, invoke it in a browser like this:</p>
1629
1630 <p><blockquote>
1631 <tt>sensible-browser /usr/share/coz-profiler/viewer/index.htm</tt>
1632 </blockquote></p>
1633
1634 <p>See the project home page and the
1635 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/summer2016/curtsinger">USENIX
1636 ;login: article on Coz</a> for more information on how it is
1637 working.</p>
1638
1639       </div>
1640       <div class="tags">
1641
1642
1643         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1644
1645
1646       </div>
1647     </div>
1648     <div class="padding"></div>
1649
1650     <div class="entry">
1651       <div class="title">
1652         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/My_own_self_balancing_Lego_Segway.html">My own self balancing Lego Segway</a>
1653       </div>
1654       <div class="date">
1655          4th November 2016
1656       </div>
1657       <div class="body">
1658         <p>A while back I received a Gyro sensor for the NXT
1659 <a href="mindstorms.lego.com">Mindstorms</a> controller as a birthday
1660 present.  It had been on my wishlist for a while, because I wanted to
1661 build a Segway like balancing lego robot.  I had already built
1662 <a href="http://www.nxtprograms.com/NXT2/segway/">a simple balancing
1663 robot</a> with the kids, using the light/color sensor included in the
1664 NXT kit as the balance sensor, but it was not working very well.  It
1665 could balance for a while, but was very sensitive to the light
1666 condition in the room and the reflective properties of the surface and
1667 would fall over after a short while.  I wanted something more robust,
1668 and had
1669 <a href="https://www.hitechnic.com/cgi-bin/commerce.cgi?preadd=action&key=NGY1044">the
1670 gyro sensor from HiTechnic</a> I believed would solve it on my
1671 wishlist for some years before it suddenly showed up as a gift from my
1672 loved ones. :)</p>
1673
1674 <p>Unfortunately I have not had time to sit down and play with it
1675 since then.  But that changed some days ago, when I was searching for
1676 lego segway information and came across a recipe from HiTechnic for
1677 building
1678 <a href="http://www.hitechnic.com/blog/gyro-sensor/htway/">the
1679 HTWay</a>, a segway like balancing robot.  Build instructions and
1680 <a href="https://www.hitechnic.com/upload/786-HTWayC.nxc">source
1681 code</a> was included, so it was just a question of putting it all
1682 together.  And thanks to the great work of many Debian developers, the
1683 compiler needed to build the source for the NXT is already included in
1684 Debian, so I was read to go in less than an hour.  The resulting robot
1685 do not look very impressive in its simplicity:</p>
1686
1687 <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-11-04-lego-htway-robot.jpeg"></p>
1688
1689 <p>Because I lack the infrared sensor used to control the robot in the
1690 design from HiTechnic, I had to comment out the last task
1691 (taskControl).  I simply placed /* and */ around it get the program
1692 working without that sensor present.  Now it balances just fine until
1693 the battery status run low:</p>
1694
1695 <p align="center"><video width="70%" controls="true">
1696    <source src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-11-04-lego-htway-balancing.ogv" type="video/ogg">
1697 </video></p>
1698
1699 <p>Now we would like to teach it how to follow a line and take remote
1700 control instructions using the included Bluetooth receiver in the NXT.</p>
1701
1702 <p>If you, like me, love LEGO and want to make sure we find the tools
1703 they need to work with LEGO in Debian and all our derivative
1704 distributions like Ubuntu, check out
1705 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">the LEGO designers
1706 project page</a> and join the Debian LEGO team.  Personally I own a
1707 RCX and NXT controller (no EV3), and would like to make sure the
1708 Debian tools needed to program the systems I own work as they
1709 should.</p>
1710
1711       </div>
1712       <div class="tags">
1713
1714
1715         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lego">lego</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
1716
1717
1718       </div>
1719     </div>
1720     <div class="padding"></div>
1721
1722     <div class="entry">
1723       <div class="title">
1724         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Experience_and_updated_recipe_for_using_the_Signal_app_without_a_mobile_phone.html">Experience and updated recipe for using the Signal app without a mobile phone</a>
1725       </div>
1726       <div class="date">
1727         10th October 2016
1728       </div>
1729       <div class="body">
1730         <p>In July
1731 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_use_the_Signal_app_if_you_only_have_a_land_line__ie_no_mobile_phone_.html">I
1732 wrote how to get the Signal Chrome/Chromium app working</a> without
1733 the ability to receive SMS messages (aka without a cell phone).  It is
1734 time to share some experiences and provide an updated setup.</p>
1735
1736 <p>The Signal app have worked fine for several months now, and I use
1737 it regularly to chat with my loved ones.  I had a major snag at the
1738 end of my summer vacation, when the the app completely forgot my
1739 setup, identity and keys.  The reason behind this major mess was
1740 running out of disk space.  To avoid that ever happening again I have
1741 started storing everything in <tt>userdata/</tt> in git, to be able to
1742 roll back to an earlier version if the files are wiped by mistake.  I
1743 had to use it once after introducing the git backup.  When rolling
1744 back to an earlier version, one need to use the 'reset session' option
1745 in Signal to get going, and notify the people you talk with about the
1746 problem.  I assume there is some sequence number tracking in the
1747 protocol to detect rollback attacks.  The git repository is rather big
1748 (674 MiB so far), but I have not tried to figure out if some of the
1749 content can be added to a .gitignore file due to lack of spare
1750 time.</p>
1751
1752 <p>I've also hit the 90 days timeout blocking, and noticed that this
1753 make it impossible to send messages using Signal.  I could still
1754 receive them, but had to patch the code with a new timestamp to send.
1755 I believe the timeout is added by the developers to force people to
1756 upgrade to the latest version of the app, even when there is no
1757 protocol changes, to reduce the version skew among the user base and
1758 thus try to keep the number of support requests down.</p>
1759
1760 <p>Since my original recipe, the Signal source code changed slightly,
1761 making the old patch fail to apply cleanly.  Below is an updated
1762 patch, including the shell wrapper I use to start Signal.  The
1763 original version required a new user to locate the JavaScript console
1764 and call a function from there.  I got help from a friend with more
1765 JavaScript knowledge than me to modify the code to provide a GUI
1766 button instead.  This mean that to get started you just need to run
1767 the wrapper and click the 'Register without mobile phone' to get going
1768 now.  I've also modified the timeout code to always set it to 90 days
1769 in the future, to avoid having to patch the code regularly.</p>
1770
1771 <p>So, the updated recipe for Debian Jessie:</p>
1772
1773 <ol>
1774
1775 <li>First, install required packages to get the source code and the
1776 browser you need.  Signal only work with Chrome/Chromium, as far as I
1777 know, so you need to install it.
1778
1779 <pre>
1780 apt install git tor chromium
1781 git clone https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Desktop.git
1782 </pre></li>
1783
1784 <li>Modify the source code using command listed in the the patch
1785 block below.</li>
1786
1787 <li>Start Signal using the run-signal-app wrapper (for example using
1788 <tt>`pwd`/run-signal-app</tt>).
1789
1790 <li>Click on the 'Register without mobile phone', will in a phone
1791 number you can receive calls to the next minute, receive the
1792 verification code and enter it into the form field and press
1793 'Register'.  Note, the phone number you use will be user Signal
1794 username, ie the way others can find you on Signal.</li>
1795
1796 <li>You can now use Signal to contact others.  Note, new contacts do
1797 not show up in the contact list until you restart Signal, and there is
1798 no way to assign names to Contacts.  There is also no way to create or
1799 update chat groups.  I suspect this is because the web app do not have
1800 a associated contact database.</li>
1801
1802 </ol>
1803
1804 <p>I am still a bit uneasy about using Signal, because of the way its
1805 main author moxie0 reject federation and accept dependencies to major
1806 corporations like Google (part of the code is fetched from Google) and
1807 Amazon (the central coordination point is owned by Amazon).  See for
1808 example
1809 <a href="https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37">the
1810 LibreSignal issue tracker</a> for a thread documenting the authors
1811 view on these issues.  But the network effect is strong in this case,
1812 and several of the people I want to communicate with already use
1813 Signal.  Perhaps we can all move to <a href="https://ring.cx/">Ring</a>
1814 once it <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/830265">work on my
1815 laptop</a>?  It already work on Windows and Android, and is included
1816 in <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/ring">Debian</a> and
1817 <a href="https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ring">Ubuntu</a>, but not
1818 working on Debian Stable.</p>
1819
1820 <p>Anyway, this is the patch I apply to the Signal code to get it
1821 working.  It switch to the production servers, disable to timeout,
1822 make registration easier and add the shell wrapper:</p>
1823
1824 <pre>
1825 cd Signal-Desktop; cat &lt;&lt;EOF | patch -p1
1826 diff --git a/js/background.js b/js/background.js
1827 index 24b4c1d..579345f 100644
1828 --- a/js/background.js
1829 +++ b/js/background.js
1830 @@ -33,9 +33,9 @@
1831          });
1832      });
1833
1834 -    var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-staging.whispersystems.org';
1835 +    var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-ca.whispersystems.org';
1836      var SERVER_PORTS = [80, 4433, 8443];
1837 -    var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments-staging.s3.amazonaws.com';
1838 +    var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments.s3.amazonaws.com';
1839      var messageReceiver;
1840      window.getSocketStatus = function() {
1841          if (messageReceiver) {
1842 diff --git a/js/expire.js b/js/expire.js
1843 index 639aeae..beb91c3 100644
1844 --- a/js/expire.js
1845 +++ b/js/expire.js
1846 @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
1847  ;(function() {
1848      'use strict';
1849 -    var BUILD_EXPIRATION = 0;
1850 +    var BUILD_EXPIRATION = Date.now() + (90 * 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000);
1851
1852      window.extension = window.extension || {};
1853
1854 diff --git a/js/views/install_view.js b/js/views/install_view.js
1855 index 7816f4f..1d6233b 100644
1856 --- a/js/views/install_view.js
1857 +++ b/js/views/install_view.js
1858 @@ -38,7 +38,8 @@
1859              return {
1860                  'click .step1': this.selectStep.bind(this, 1),
1861                  'click .step2': this.selectStep.bind(this, 2),
1862 -                'click .step3': this.selectStep.bind(this, 3)
1863 +                'click .step3': this.selectStep.bind(this, 3),
1864 +                'click .callreg': function() { extension.install('standalone') },
1865              };
1866          },
1867          clearQR: function() {
1868 diff --git a/options.html b/options.html
1869 index dc0f28e..8d709f6 100644
1870 --- a/options.html
1871 +++ b/options.html
1872 @@ -14,7 +14,10 @@
1873          &lt;div class='nav'>
1874            &lt;h1>{{ installWelcome }}&lt;/h1>
1875            &lt;p>{{ installTagline }}&lt;/p>
1876 -          &lt;div> &lt;a class='button step2'>{{ installGetStartedButton }}&lt;/a> &lt;/div>
1877 +          &lt;div> &lt;a class='button step2'>{{ installGetStartedButton }}&lt;/a>
1878 +           &lt;br> &lt;a class="button callreg">Register without mobile phone&lt;/a>
1879 +
1880 +         &lt;/div>
1881            &lt;span class='dot step1 selected'>&lt;/span>
1882            &lt;span class='dot step2'>&lt;/span>
1883            &lt;span class='dot step3'>&lt;/span>
1884 --- /dev/null   2016-10-07 09:55:13.730181472 +0200
1885 +++ b/run-signal-app   2016-10-10 08:54:09.434172391 +0200
1886 @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@
1887 +#!/bin/sh
1888 +set -e
1889 +cd $(dirname $0)
1890 +mkdir -p userdata
1891 +userdata="`pwd`/userdata"
1892 +if [ -d "$userdata" ] && [ ! -d "$userdata/.git" ] ; then
1893 +    (cd $userdata && git init)
1894 +fi
1895 +(cd $userdata && git add . && git commit -m "Current status." || true)
1896 +exec chromium \
1897 +  --proxy-server="socks://localhost:9050" \
1898 +  --user-data-dir=$userdata --load-and-launch-app=`pwd`
1899 EOF
1900 chmod a+rx run-signal-app
1901 </pre>
1902
1903 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1904 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1905 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1906
1907       </div>
1908       <div class="tags">
1909
1910
1911         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
1912
1913
1914       </div>
1915     </div>
1916     <div class="padding"></div>
1917
1918     <div class="entry">
1919       <div class="title">
1920         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Isenkram__Appstream_and_udev_make_life_as_a_LEGO_builder_easier.html">Isenkram, Appstream and udev make life as a LEGO builder easier</a>
1921       </div>
1922       <div class="date">
1923          7th October 2016
1924       </div>
1925       <div class="body">
1926         <p><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">The Isenkram
1927 system</a> provide a practical and easy way to figure out which
1928 packages support the hardware in a given machine.  The command line
1929 tool <tt>isenkram-lookup</tt> and the tasksel options provide a
1930 convenient way to list and install packages relevant for the current
1931 hardware during system installation, both user space packages and
1932 firmware packages. The GUI background daemon on the other hand provide
1933 a pop-up proposing to install packages when a new dongle is inserted
1934 while using the computer.  For example, if you plug in a smart card
1935 reader, the system will ask if you want to install <tt>pcscd</tt> if
1936 that package isn't already installed, and if you plug in a USB video
1937 camera the system will ask if you want to install <tt>cheese</tt> if
1938 cheese is currently missing.  This already work just fine.</p>
1939
1940 <p>But Isenkram depend on a database mapping from hardware IDs to
1941 package names.  When I started no such database existed in Debian, so
1942 I made my own data set and included it with the isenkram package and
1943 made isenkram fetch the latest version of this database from git using
1944 http.  This way the isenkram users would get updated package proposals
1945 as soon as I learned more about hardware related packages.</p>
1946
1947 <p>The hardware is identified using modalias strings.  The modalias
1948 design is from the Linux kernel where most hardware descriptors are
1949 made available as a strings that can be matched using filename style
1950 globbing.  It handle USB, PCI, DMI and a lot of other hardware related
1951 identifiers.</p>
1952
1953 <p>The downside to the Isenkram specific database is that there is no
1954 information about relevant distribution / Debian version, making
1955 isenkram propose obsolete packages too.  But along came AppStream, a
1956 cross distribution mechanism to store and collect metadata about
1957 software packages.  When I heard about the proposal, I contacted the
1958 people involved and suggested to add a hardware matching rule using
1959 modalias strings in the specification, to be able to use AppStream for
1960 mapping hardware to packages.  This idea was accepted and AppStream is
1961 now a great way for a package to announce the hardware it support in a
1962 distribution neutral way.  I wrote
1963 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_appstream_with_isenkram_to_install_hardware_related_packages_in_Debian.html">a
1964 recipe on how to add such meta-information</a> in a blog post last
1965 December.  If you have a hardware related package in Debian, please
1966 announce the relevant hardware IDs using AppStream.</p>
1967
1968 <p>In Debian, almost all packages that can talk to a LEGO Mindestorms
1969 RCX or NXT unit, announce this support using AppStream.  The effect is
1970 that when you insert such LEGO robot controller into your Debian
1971 machine, Isenkram will propose to install the packages needed to get
1972 it working.  The intention is that this should allow the local user to
1973 start programming his robot controller right away without having to
1974 guess what packages to use or which permissions to fix.</p>
1975
1976 <p>But when I sat down with my son the other day to program our NXT
1977 unit using his Debian Stretch computer, I discovered something
1978 annoying.  The local console user (ie my son) did not get access to
1979 the USB device for programming the unit.  This used to work, but no
1980 longer in Jessie and Stretch.  After some investigation and asking
1981 around on #debian-devel, I discovered that this was because udev had
1982 changed the mechanism used to grant access to local devices.  The
1983 ConsoleKit mechanism from <tt>/lib/udev/rules.d/70-udev-acl.rules</tt>
1984 no longer applied, because LDAP users no longer was added to the
1985 plugdev group during login.  Michael Biebl told me that this method
1986 was obsolete and the new method used ACLs instead.  This was good
1987 news, as the plugdev mechanism is a mess when using a remote user
1988 directory like LDAP.  Using ACLs would make sure a user lost device
1989 access when she logged out, even if the user left behind a background
1990 process which would retain the plugdev membership with the ConsoleKit
1991 setup.  Armed with this knowledge I moved on to fix the access problem
1992 for the LEGO Mindstorms related packages.</p>
1993
1994 <p>The new system uses a udev tag, 'uaccess'.  It can either be
1995 applied directly for a device, or is applied in
1996 /lib/udev/rules.d/70-uaccess.rules for classes of devices.  As the
1997 LEGO Mindstorms udev rules did not have a class, I decided to add the
1998 tag directly in the udev rules files included in the packages.  Here
1999 is one example.  For the nqc C compiler for the RCX, the
2000 <tt>/lib/udev/rules.d/60-nqc.rules</tt> file now look like this:
2001
2002 <p><pre>
2003 SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ACTION=="add", ATTR{idVendor}=="0694", ATTR{idProduct}=="0001", \
2004     SYMLINK+="rcx-%k", TAG+="uaccess"
2005 </pre></p>
2006
2007 <p>The key part is the 'TAG+="uaccess"' at the end.  I suspect all
2008 packages using plugdev in their /lib/udev/rules.d/ files should be
2009 changed to use this tag (either directly or indirectly via
2010 <tt>70-uaccess.rules</tt>).  Perhaps a lintian check should be created
2011 to detect this?</p>
2012
2013 <p>I've been unable to find good documentation on the uaccess feature.
2014 It is unclear to me if the uaccess tag is an internal implementation
2015 detail like the udev-acl tag used by
2016 <tt>/lib/udev/rules.d/70-udev-acl.rules</tt>.  If it is, I guess the
2017 indirect method is the preferred way.  Michael
2018 <a href="https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/4288">asked for more
2019 documentation from the systemd project</a> and I hope it will make
2020 this clearer.  For now I use the generic classes when they exist and
2021 is already handled by <tt>70-uaccess.rules</tt>, and add the tag
2022 directly if no such class exist.</p>
2023
2024 <p>To learn more about the isenkram system, please check out
2025 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">my
2026 blog posts tagged isenkram</a>.</p>
2027
2028 <p>To help out making life for LEGO constructors in Debian easier,
2029 please join us on our IRC channel
2030 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">#debian-lego</a> and join
2031 the <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/debian-lego/">Debian
2032 LEGO team</a> in the Alioth project we created yesterday.  A mailing
2033 list is not yet created, but we are working on it. :)</p>
2034
2035 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2036 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2037 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2038
2039       </div>
2040       <div class="tags">
2041
2042
2043         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lego">lego</a>.
2044
2045
2046       </div>
2047     </div>
2048     <div class="padding"></div>
2049
2050     <div class="entry">
2051       <div class="title">
2052         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_draft_Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_The_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook_now_public.html">First draft Norwegian Bokmål edition of The Debian Administrator's Handbook now public</a>
2053       </div>
2054       <div class="date">
2055         30th August 2016
2056       </div>
2057       <div class="body">
2058         <p>In April we
2059 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_a_Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_The_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook.html">started
2060 to work</a> on a Norwegian Bokmål edition of the "open access" book on
2061 how to set up and administrate a Debian system.  Today I am happy to
2062 report that the first draft is now publicly available.  You can find
2063 it on <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/get/">get the Debian
2064 Administrator's Handbook page</a> (under Other languages).  The first
2065 eight chapters have a first draft translation, and we are working on
2066 proofreading the content.  If you want to help out, please start
2067 contributing using
2068 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-handbook/">the
2069 hosted weblate project page</a>, and get in touch using
2070 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/debian-handbook-translators">the
2071 translators mailing list</a>.  Please also check out
2072 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/contribute/">the instructions for
2073 contributors</a>.  A good way to contribute is to proofread the text
2074 and update weblate if you find errors.</p>
2075
2076 <p>Our goal is still to make the Norwegian book available on paper as well as
2077 electronic form.</p>
2078
2079       </div>
2080       <div class="tags">
2081
2082
2083         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2084
2085
2086       </div>
2087     </div>
2088     <div class="padding"></div>
2089
2090     <div class="entry">
2091       <div class="title">
2092         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Coz_can_help_you_find_bottlenecks_in_multi_threaded_software___nice_free_software.html">Coz can help you find bottlenecks in multi-threaded software - nice free software</a>
2093       </div>
2094       <div class="date">
2095         11th August 2016
2096       </div>
2097       <div class="body">
2098         <p>This summer, I read a great article
2099 "<a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/summer2016/curtsinger">coz:
2100 This Is the Profiler You're Looking For</a>" in USENIX ;login: about
2101 how to profile multi-threaded programs.  It presented a system for
2102 profiling software by running experiences in the running program,
2103 testing how run time performance is affected by "speeding up" parts of
2104 the code to various degrees compared to a normal run.  It does this by
2105 slowing down parallel threads while the "faster up" code is running
2106 and measure how this affect processing time.  The processing time is
2107 measured using probes inserted into the code, either using progress
2108 counters (COZ_PROGRESS) or as latency meters (COZ_BEGIN/COZ_END).  It
2109 can also measure unmodified code by measuring complete the program
2110 runtime and running the program several times instead.</p>
2111
2112 <p>The project and presentation was so inspiring that I would like to
2113 get the system into Debian.  I
2114 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=830708">created
2115 a WNPP request for it</a> and contacted upstream to try to make the
2116 system ready for Debian by sending patches.  The build process need to
2117 be changed a bit to avoid running 'git clone' to get dependencies, and
2118 to include the JavaScript web page used to visualize the collected
2119 profiling information included in the source package.
2120 But I expect that should work out fairly soon.</p>
2121
2122 <p>The way the system work is fairly simple.  To run an coz experiment
2123 on a binary with debug symbols available, start the program like this:
2124
2125 <p><blockquote><pre>
2126 coz run --- program-to-run
2127 </pre></blockquote></p>
2128
2129 <p>This will create a text file profile.coz with the instrumentation
2130 information.  To show what part of the code affect the performance
2131 most, use a web browser and either point it to
2132 <a href="http://plasma-umass.github.io/coz/">http://plasma-umass.github.io/coz/</a>
2133 or use the copy from git (in the gh-pages branch).  Check out this web
2134 site to have a look at several example profiling runs and get an idea what the end result from the profile runs look like.  To make the
2135 profiling more useful you include &lt;coz.h&gt; and insert the
2136 COZ_PROGRESS or COZ_BEGIN and COZ_END at appropriate places in the
2137 code, rebuild and run the profiler.  This allow coz to do more
2138 targeted experiments.</p>
2139
2140 <p>A video published by ACM
2141 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jE0V-p1odPg">presenting the
2142 Coz profiler</a> is available from Youtube.  There is also a paper
2143 from the 25th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles available
2144 titled
2145 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc16/technical-sessions/presentation/curtsinger">Coz:
2146 finding code that counts with causal profiling</a>.</p>
2147
2148 <p><a href="https://github.com/plasma-umass/coz">The source code</a>
2149 for Coz is available from github.  It will only build with clang
2150 because it uses a
2151 <a href="https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=55606">C++
2152 feature missing in GCC</a>, but I've submitted
2153 <a href="https://github.com/plasma-umass/coz/pull/67">a patch to solve
2154 it</a> and hope it will be included in the upstream source soon.</p>
2155
2156 <p>Please get in touch if you, like me, would like to see this piece
2157 of software in Debian.  I would very much like some help with the
2158 packaging effort, as I lack the in depth knowledge on how to package
2159 C++ libraries.</p>
2160
2161       </div>
2162       <div class="tags">
2163
2164
2165         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
2166
2167
2168       </div>
2169     </div>
2170     <div class="padding"></div>
2171
2172     <div class="entry">
2173       <div class="title">
2174         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Unlocking_HTC_Desire_HD_on_Linux_using_unruu_and_fastboot.html">Unlocking HTC Desire HD on Linux using unruu and fastboot</a>
2175       </div>
2176       <div class="date">
2177          7th July 2016
2178       </div>
2179       <div class="body">
2180         <p>Yesterday, I tried to unlock a HTC Desire HD phone, and it proved
2181 to be a slight challenge.  Here is the recipe if I ever need to do it
2182 again.  It all started by me wanting to try the recipe to set up
2183 <a href="https://blog.torproject.org/blog/mission-impossible-hardening-android-security-and-privacy">an
2184 hardened Android installation</a> from the Tor project blog on a
2185 device I had access to.  It is a old mobile phone with a broken
2186 microphone The initial idea had been to just
2187 <a href="http://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w/Install_CM_for_ace">install
2188 CyanogenMod on it</a>, but did not quite find time to start on it
2189 until a few days ago.</p>
2190
2191 <p>The unlock process is supposed to be simple: (1) Boot into the boot
2192 loader (press volume down and power at the same time), (2) select
2193 'fastboot' before (3) connecting the device via USB to a Linux
2194 machine, (4) request the device identifier token by running 'fastboot
2195 oem get_identifier_token', (5) request the device unlocking key using
2196 the <a href="http://www.htcdev.com/bootloader/">HTC developer web
2197 site</a> and unlock the phone using the key file emailed to you.</p>
2198
2199 <p>Unfortunately, this only work fi you have hboot version 2.00.0029
2200 or newer, and the device I was working on had 2.00.0027.  This
2201 apparently can be easily fixed by downloading a Windows program and
2202 running it on your Windows machine, if you accept the terms Microsoft
2203 require you to accept to use Windows - which I do not.  So I had to
2204 come up with a different approach.  I got a lot of help from AndyCap
2205 on #nuug, and would not have been able to get this working without
2206 him.</p>
2207
2208 <p>First I needed to extract the hboot firmware from
2209 <a href="http://www.htcdev.com/ruu/PD9810000_Ace_Sense30_S_hboot_2.00.0029.exe">the
2210 windows binary for HTC Desire HD</a> downloaded as 'the RUU' from HTC.
2211 For this there is is <a href="https://github.com/kmdm/unruu/">a github
2212 project named unruu</a> using libunshield.  The unshield tool did not
2213 recognise the file format, but unruu worked and extracted rom.zip,
2214 containing the new hboot firmware and a text file describing which
2215 devices it would work for.</p>
2216
2217 <p>Next, I needed to get the new firmware into the device.  For this I
2218 followed some instructions
2219 <a href="http://www.htc1guru.com/2013/09/new-ruu-zips-posted/">available
2220 from HTC1Guru.com</a>, and ran these commands as root on a Linux
2221 machine with Debian testing:</p>
2222
2223 <p><pre>
2224 adb reboot-bootloader
2225 fastboot oem rebootRUU
2226 fastboot flash zip rom.zip
2227 fastboot flash zip rom.zip
2228 fastboot reboot
2229 </pre></p>
2230
2231 <p>The flash command apparently need to be done twice to take effect,
2232 as the first is just preparations and the second one do the flashing.
2233 The adb command is just to get to the boot loader menu, so turning the
2234 device on while holding volume down and the power button should work
2235 too.</p>
2236
2237 <p>With the new hboot version in place I could start following the
2238 instructions on the HTC developer web site.  I got the device token
2239 like this:</p>
2240
2241 <p><pre>
2242 fastboot oem get_identifier_token 2>&1 | sed 's/(bootloader) //'
2243 </pre>
2244
2245 <p>And once I got the unlock code via email, I could use it like
2246 this:</p>
2247
2248 <p><pre>
2249 fastboot flash unlocktoken Unlock_code.bin
2250 </pre></p>
2251
2252 <p>And with that final step in place, the phone was unlocked and I
2253 could start stuffing the software of my own choosing into the device.
2254 So far I only inserted a replacement recovery image to wipe the phone
2255 before I start.  We will see what happen next.  Perhaps I should
2256 install <a href="https://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> on it. :)</p>
2257
2258       </div>
2259       <div class="tags">
2260
2261
2262         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
2263
2264
2265       </div>
2266     </div>
2267     <div class="padding"></div>
2268
2269     <div class="entry">
2270       <div class="title">
2271         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_use_the_Signal_app_if_you_only_have_a_land_line__ie_no_mobile_phone_.html">How to use the Signal app if you only have a land line (ie no mobile phone)</a>
2272       </div>
2273       <div class="date">
2274          3rd July 2016
2275       </div>
2276       <div class="body">
2277         <p>For a while now, I have wanted to test
2278 <a href="https://whispersystems.org/">the Signal app</a>, as it is
2279 said to provide end to end encrypted communication and several of my
2280 friends and family are already using it.  As I by choice do not own a
2281 mobile phone, this proved to be harder than expected.  And I wanted to
2282 have the source of the client and know that it was the code used on my
2283 machine.  But yesterday I managed to get it working.  I used the
2284 Github source, compared it to the source in
2285 <a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/signal-private-messenger/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk?hl=en-US">the
2286 Signal Chrome app</a> available from the Chrome web store, applied
2287 patches to use the production Signal servers, started the app and
2288 asked for the hidden "register without a smart phone" form.  Here is
2289 the recipe how I did it.</p>
2290
2291 <p>First, I fetched the Signal desktop source from Github, using
2292
2293 <pre>
2294 git clone https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Desktop.git
2295 </pre>
2296
2297 <p>Next, I patched the source to use the production servers, to be
2298 able to talk to other Signal users:</p>
2299
2300 <pre>
2301 cat &lt;&lt;EOF | patch -p0
2302 diff -ur ./js/background.js userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/background.js
2303 --- ./js/background.js  2016-06-29 13:43:15.630344628 +0200
2304 +++ userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/background.js    2016-06-29 14:06:29.530300934 +0200
2305 @@ -47,8 +47,8 @@
2306          });
2307      });
2308
2309 -    var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-staging.whispersystems.org';
2310 -    var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments-staging.s3.amazonaws.com';
2311 +    var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-ca.whispersystems.org:4433';
2312 +    var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments.s3.amazonaws.com';
2313      var messageReceiver;
2314      window.getSocketStatus = function() {
2315          if (messageReceiver) {
2316 diff -ur ./js/expire.js userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/expire.js
2317 --- ./js/expire.js      2016-06-29 13:43:15.630344628 +0200
2318 +++ userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/expire.js2016-06-29 14:06:29.530300934 +0200
2319 @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
2320  ;(function() {
2321      'use strict';
2322 -    var BUILD_EXPIRATION = 0;
2323 +    var BUILD_EXPIRATION = 1474492690000;
2324
2325      window.extension = window.extension || {};
2326
2327 EOF
2328 </pre>
2329
2330 <p>The first part is changing the servers, and the second is updating
2331 an expiration timestamp.  This timestamp need to be updated regularly.
2332 It is set 90 days in the future by the build process (Gruntfile.js).
2333 The value is seconds since 1970 times 1000, as far as I can tell.</p>
2334
2335 <p>Based on a tip and good help from the #nuug IRC channel, I wrote a
2336 script to launch Signal in Chromium.</p>
2337
2338 <pre>
2339 #!/bin/sh
2340 cd $(dirname $0)
2341 mkdir -p userdata
2342 exec chromium \
2343   --proxy-server="socks://localhost:9050" \
2344   --user-data-dir=`pwd`/userdata --load-and-launch-app=`pwd`
2345 </pre>
2346
2347 <p> The script start the app and configure Chromium to use the Tor
2348 SOCKS5 proxy to make sure those controlling the Signal servers (today
2349 Amazon and Whisper Systems) as well as those listening on the lines
2350 will have a harder time location my laptop based on the Signal
2351 connections if they use source IP address.</p>
2352
2353 <p>When the script starts, one need to follow the instructions under
2354 "Standalone Registration" in the CONTRIBUTING.md file in the git
2355 repository.  I right clicked on the Signal window to get up the
2356 Chromium debugging tool, visited the 'Console' tab and wrote
2357 'extension.install("standalone")' on the console prompt to get the
2358 registration form.  Then I entered by land line phone number and
2359 pressed 'Call'.  5 seconds later the phone rang and a robot voice
2360 repeated the verification code three times.  After entering the number
2361 into the verification code field in the form, I could start using
2362 Signal from my laptop.
2363
2364 <p>As far as I can tell, The Signal app will leak who is talking to
2365 whom and thus who know who to those controlling the central server,
2366 but such leakage is hard to avoid with a centrally controlled server
2367 setup.  It is something to keep in mind when using Signal - the
2368 content of your chats are harder to intercept, but the meta data
2369 exposing your contact network is available to people you do not know.
2370 So better than many options, but not great.  And sadly the usage is
2371 connected to my land line, thus allowing those controlling the server
2372 to associate it to my home and person.  I would prefer it if only
2373 those I knew could tell who I was on Signal.  There are options
2374 avoiding such information leakage, but most of my friends are not
2375 using them, so I am stuck with Signal for now.</p>
2376
2377 <p><strong>Update 2017-01-10</strong>: There is an updated blog post
2378 on this topic in
2379 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Experience_and_updated_recipe_for_using_the_Signal_app_without_a_mobile_phone.html">Experience
2380 and updated recipe for using the Signal app without a mobile
2381 phone</a>.</p>
2382
2383       </div>
2384       <div class="tags">
2385
2386
2387         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
2388
2389
2390       </div>
2391     </div>
2392     <div class="padding"></div>
2393
2394     <div class="entry">
2395       <div class="title">
2396         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_new__best__multimedia_player_in_Debian_.html">The new "best" multimedia player in Debian?</a>
2397       </div>
2398       <div class="date">
2399          6th June 2016
2400       </div>
2401       <div class="body">
2402         <p>When I set out a few weeks ago to figure out
2403 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_best_multimedia_player_in_Debian_.html">which
2404 multimedia player in Debian claimed to support most file formats /
2405 MIME types</a>, I was a bit surprised how varied the sets of MIME types
2406 the various players claimed support for.  The range was from 55 to 130
2407 MIME types.  I suspect most media formats are supported by all
2408 players, but this is not really reflected in the MimeTypes values in
2409 their desktop files.  There are probably also some bogus MIME types
2410 listed, but it is hard to identify which one this is.</p>
2411
2412 <p>Anyway, in the mean time I got in touch with upstream for some of
2413 the players suggesting to add more MIME types to their desktop files,
2414 and decided to spend some time myself improving the situation for my
2415 favorite media player VLC.  The fixes for VLC entered Debian unstable
2416 yesterday. The complete list of MIME types can be seen on the
2417 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMultimedia/PlayerSupport">Multimedia
2418 player MIME type support status</a> Debian wiki page.</p>
2419
2420 <p>The new "best" multimedia player in Debian?  It is VLC, followed by
2421 totem, parole, kplayer, gnome-mpv, mpv, smplayer, mplayer-gui and
2422 kmplayer.  I am sure some of the other players desktop files support
2423 several of the formats currently listed as working only with vlc,
2424 toten and parole.</p>
2425
2426 <p>A sad observation is that only 14 MIME types are listed as
2427 supported by all the tested multimedia players in Debian in their
2428 desktop files: audio/mpeg, audio/vnd.rn-realaudio, audio/x-mpegurl,
2429 audio/x-ms-wma, audio/x-scpls, audio/x-wav, video/mp4, video/mpeg,
2430 video/quicktime, video/vnd.rn-realvideo, video/x-matroska,
2431 video/x-ms-asf, video/x-ms-wmv and video/x-msvideo.  Personally I find
2432 it sad that video/ogg and video/webm is not supported by all the media
2433 players in Debian.  As far as I can tell, all of them can handle both
2434 formats.</p>
2435
2436       </div>
2437       <div class="tags">
2438
2439
2440         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
2441
2442
2443       </div>
2444     </div>
2445     <div class="padding"></div>
2446
2447     <div class="entry">
2448       <div class="title">
2449         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_program_should_be_able_to_open_its_own_files_on_Linux.html">A program should be able to open its own files on Linux</a>
2450       </div>
2451       <div class="date">
2452          5th June 2016
2453       </div>
2454       <div class="body">
2455         <p>Many years ago, when koffice was fresh and with few users, I
2456 decided to test its presentation tool when making the slides for a
2457 talk I was giving for NUUG on Japhar, a free Java virtual machine.  I
2458 wrote the first draft of the slides, saved the result and went to bed
2459 the day before I would give the talk.  The next day I took a plane to
2460 the location where the meeting should take place, and on the plane I
2461 started up koffice again to polish the talk a bit, only to discover
2462 that kpresenter refused to load its own data file.  I cursed a bit and
2463 started making the slides again from memory, to have something to
2464 present when I arrived.  I tested that the saved files could be
2465 loaded, and the day seemed to be rescued.  I continued to polish the
2466 slides until I suddenly discovered that the saved file could no longer
2467 be loaded into kpresenter.  In the end I had to rewrite the slides
2468 three times, condensing the content until the talk became shorter and
2469 shorter.  After the talk I was able to pinpoint the problem &ndash;
2470 kpresenter wrote inline images in a way itself could not understand.
2471 Eventually that bug was fixed and kpresenter ended up being a great
2472 program to make slides.  The point I'm trying to make is that we
2473 expect a program to be able to load its own data files, and it is
2474 embarrassing to its developers if it can't.</p>
2475
2476 <p>Did you ever experience a program failing to load its own data
2477 files from the desktop file browser?  It is not a uncommon problem.  A
2478 while back I discovered that the screencast recorder
2479 gtk-recordmydesktop would save an Ogg Theora video file the KDE file
2480 browser would refuse to open.  No video player claimed to understand
2481 such file.  I tracked down the cause being <tt>file --mime-type</tt>
2482 returning the application/ogg MIME type, which no video player I had
2483 installed listed as a MIME type they would understand.  I asked for
2484 <a href="http://bugs.gw.com/view.php?id=382">file to change its
2485 behavour</a> and use the MIME type video/ogg instead.  I also asked
2486 several video players to add video/ogg to their desktop files, to give
2487 the file browser an idea what to do about Ogg Theora files.  After a
2488 while, the desktop file browsers in Debian started to handle the
2489 output from gtk-recordmydesktop properly.</p>
2490
2491 <p>But history repeats itself.  A few days ago I tested the music
2492 system Rosegarden again, and I discovered that the KDE and xfce file
2493 browsers did not know what to do with the Rosegarden project files
2494 (*.rg).  I've reported <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/825993">the
2495 rosegarden problem to BTS</a> and a fix is commited to git and will be
2496 included in the next upload.  To increase the chance of me remembering
2497 how to fix the problem next time some program fail to load its files
2498 from the file browser, here are some notes on how to fix it.</p>
2499
2500 <p>The file browsers in Debian in general operates on MIME types.
2501 There are two sources for the MIME type of a given file.  The output from
2502 <tt>file --mime-type</tt> mentioned above, and the content of the
2503 shared MIME type registry (under /usr/share/mime/).  The file MIME
2504 type is mapped to programs supporting the MIME type, and this
2505 information is collected from
2506 <a href="https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/desktop-entry-spec/">the
2507 desktop files</a> available in /usr/share/applications/.  If there is
2508 one desktop file claiming support for the MIME type of the file, it is
2509 activated when asking to open a given file.  If there are more, one
2510 can normally select which one to use by right-clicking on the file and
2511 selecting the wanted one using 'Open with' or similar.  In general
2512 this work well.  But it depend on each program picking a good MIME
2513 type (preferably
2514 <a href="http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/media-types.xhtml">a
2515 MIME type registered with IANA</a>), file and/or the shared MIME
2516 registry recognizing the file and the desktop file to list the MIME
2517 type in its list of supported MIME types.</p>
2518
2519 <p>The <tt>/usr/share/mime/packages/rosegarden.xml</tt> entry for
2520 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/shared-mime-info-spec">the
2521 Shared MIME database</a> look like this:</p>
2522
2523 <p><blockquote><pre>
2524 &lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?&gt;
2525 &lt;mime-info xmlns="http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/shared-mime-info"&gt;
2526   &lt;mime-type type="audio/x-rosegarden"&gt;
2527     &lt;sub-class-of type="application/x-gzip"/&gt;
2528     &lt;comment&gt;Rosegarden project file&lt;/comment&gt;
2529     &lt;glob pattern="*.rg"/&gt;
2530   &lt;/mime-type&gt;
2531 &lt;/mime-info&gt;
2532 </pre></blockquote></p>
2533
2534 <p>This states that audio/x-rosegarden is a kind of application/x-gzip
2535 (it is a gzipped XML file).  Note, it is much better to use an
2536 official MIME type registered with IANA than it is to make up ones own
2537 unofficial ones like the x-rosegarden type used by rosegarden.</p>
2538
2539 <p>The desktop file of the rosegarden program failed to list
2540 audio/x-rosegarden in its list of supported MIME types, causing the
2541 file browsers to have no idea what to do with *.rg files:</p>
2542
2543 <p><blockquote><pre>
2544 % grep Mime /usr/share/applications/rosegarden.desktop
2545 MimeType=audio/x-rosegarden-composition;audio/x-rosegarden-device;audio/x-rosegarden-project;audio/x-rosegarden-template;audio/midi;
2546 X-KDE-NativeMimeType=audio/x-rosegarden-composition
2547 %
2548 </pre></blockquote></p>
2549
2550 <p>The fix was to add "audio/x-rosegarden;" at the end of the
2551 MimeType= line.</p>
2552
2553 <p>If you run into a file which fail to open the correct program when
2554 selected from the file browser, please check out the output from
2555 <tt>file --mime-type</tt> for the file, ensure the file ending and
2556 MIME type is registered somewhere under /usr/share/mime/ and check
2557 that some desktop file under /usr/share/applications/ is claiming
2558 support for this MIME type.  If not, please report a bug to have it
2559 fixed. :)</p>
2560
2561       </div>
2562       <div class="tags">
2563
2564
2565         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2566
2567
2568       </div>
2569     </div>
2570     <div class="padding"></div>
2571
2572     <div class="entry">
2573       <div class="title">
2574         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Isenkram_with_PackageKit_support___new_version_0_23_available_in_Debian_unstable.html">Isenkram with PackageKit support - new version 0.23 available in Debian unstable</a>
2575       </div>
2576       <div class="date">
2577         25th May 2016
2578       </div>
2579       <div class="body">
2580         <p><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/isenkram">The isenkram
2581 system</a> is a user-focused solution in Debian for handling hardware
2582 related packages.  The idea is to have a database of mappings between
2583 hardware and packages, and pop up a dialog suggesting for the user to
2584 install the packages to use a given hardware dongle.  Some use cases
2585 are when you insert a Yubikey, it proposes to install the software
2586 needed to control it; when you insert a braille reader list it
2587 proposes to install the packages needed to send text to the reader;
2588 and when you insert a ColorHug screen calibrator it suggests to
2589 install the driver for it.  The system work well, and even have a few
2590 command line tools to install firmware packages and packages for the
2591 hardware already in the machine (as opposed to hotpluggable hardware).</p>
2592
2593 <p>The system was initially written using aptdaemon, because I found
2594 good documentation and example code on how to use it.  But aptdaemon
2595 is going away and is generally being replaced by
2596 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/software/PackageKit/">PackageKit</a>,
2597 so Isenkram needed a rewrite.  And today, thanks to the great patch
2598 from my college Sunil Mohan Adapa in the FreedomBox project, the
2599 rewrite finally took place.  I've just uploaded a new version of
2600 Isenkram into Debian Unstable with the patch included, and the default
2601 for the background daemon is now to use PackageKit.  To check it out,
2602 install the <tt>isenkram</tt> package and insert some hardware dongle
2603 and see if it is recognised.</p>
2604
2605 <p>If you want to know what kind of packages isenkram would propose for
2606 the machine it is running on, you can check out the isenkram-lookup
2607 program.  This is what it look like on a Thinkpad X230:</p>
2608
2609 <p><blockquote><pre>
2610 % isenkram-lookup
2611 bluez
2612 cheese
2613 fprintd
2614 fprintd-demo
2615 gkrellm-thinkbat
2616 hdapsd
2617 libpam-fprintd
2618 pidgin-blinklight
2619 thinkfan
2620 tleds
2621 tp-smapi-dkms
2622 tp-smapi-source
2623 tpb
2624 %p
2625 </pre></blockquote></p>
2626
2627 <p>The hardware mappings come from several places.  The preferred way
2628 is for packages to announce their hardware support using
2629 <a href="https://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/">the
2630 cross distribution appstream system</a>.
2631 See
2632 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">previous
2633 blog posts about isenkram</a> to learn how to do that.</p>
2634
2635       </div>
2636       <div class="tags">
2637
2638
2639         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
2640
2641
2642       </div>
2643     </div>
2644     <div class="padding"></div>
2645
2646     <div class="entry">
2647       <div class="title">
2648         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Discharge_rate_estimate_in_new_battery_statistics_collector_for_Debian.html">Discharge rate estimate in new battery statistics collector for Debian</a>
2649       </div>
2650       <div class="date">
2651         23rd May 2016
2652       </div>
2653       <div class="body">
2654         <p>Yesterday I updated the
2655 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats
2656 package in Debian</a> with a few patches sent to me by skilled and
2657 enterprising users.  There were some nice user and visible changes.
2658 First of all, both desktop menu entries now work.  A design flaw in
2659 one of the script made the history graph fail to show up (its PNG was
2660 dumped in ~/.xsession-errors) if no controlling TTY was available.
2661 The script worked when called from the command line, but not when
2662 called from the desktop menu.  I changed this to look for a DISPLAY
2663 variable or a TTY before deciding where to draw the graph, and now the
2664 graph window pop up as expected.</p>
2665
2666 <p>The next new feature is a discharge rate estimator in one of the
2667 graphs (the one showing the last few hours).  New is also the user of
2668 colours showing charging in blue and discharge in red.  The percentages
2669 of this graph is relative to last full charge, not battery design
2670 capacity.</p>
2671
2672 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-05-23-battery-stats-rate.png"/></p>
2673
2674 <p>The other graph show the entire history of the collected battery
2675 statistics, comparing it to the design capacity of the battery to
2676 visualise how the battery life time get shorter over time.  The red
2677 line in this graph is what the previous graph considers 100 percent:
2678
2679 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-05-23-battery-stats-history.png"/></p>
2680
2681 <p>In this graph you can see that I only charge the battery to 80
2682 percent of last full capacity, and how the capacity of the battery is
2683 shrinking. :(</p>
2684
2685 <p>The last new feature is in the collector, which now will handle
2686 more hardware models.  On some hardware, Linux power supply
2687 information is stored in /sys/class/power_supply/ACAD/, while the
2688 collector previously only looked in /sys/class/power_supply/AC/.  Now
2689 both are checked to figure if there is power connected to the
2690 machine.</p>
2691
2692 <p>If you are interested in how your laptop battery is doing, please
2693 check out the
2694 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats</a>
2695 in Debian unstable, or rebuild it on Jessie to get it working on
2696 Debian stable. :) The upstream source is available from <a
2697 href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">github</a>.
2698 Patches are very welcome.</p>
2699
2700 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2701 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2702 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2703
2704       </div>
2705       <div class="tags">
2706
2707
2708         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2709
2710
2711       </div>
2712     </div>
2713     <div class="padding"></div>
2714
2715     <div class="entry">
2716       <div class="title">
2717         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_now_with_ZFS_on_Linux_included.html">Debian now with ZFS on Linux included</a>
2718       </div>
2719       <div class="date">
2720         12th May 2016
2721       </div>
2722       <div class="body">
2723         <p>Today, after many years of hard work from many people,
2724 <a href="http://zfsonlinux.org/">ZFS for Linux</a> finally entered
2725 Debian.  The package status can be seen on
2726 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/zfs-linux">the package tracker
2727 for zfs-linux</a>.  and
2728 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=pkg-zfsonlinux-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
2729 team status page</a>. If you want to help out, please join us.
2730 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-zfsonlinux/zfs.git">The
2731 source code</a> is available via git on Alioth.  It would also be
2732 great if you could help out with
2733 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/dkms">the dkms package</a>, as
2734 it is an important piece of the puzzle to get ZFS working.</p>
2735
2736       </div>
2737       <div class="tags">
2738
2739
2740         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2741
2742
2743       </div>
2744     </div>
2745     <div class="padding"></div>
2746
2747     <div class="entry">
2748       <div class="title">
2749         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_best_multimedia_player_in_Debian_.html">What is the best multimedia player in Debian?</a>
2750       </div>
2751       <div class="date">
2752          8th May 2016
2753       </div>
2754       <div class="body">
2755         <p><strong>Where I set out to figure out which multimedia player in
2756 Debian claim support for most file formats.</strong></p>
2757
2758 <p>A few years ago, I had a look at the media support for Browser
2759 plugins in Debian, to get an idea which plugins to include in Debian
2760 Edu.  I created a script to extract the set of supported MIME types
2761 for each plugin, and used this to find out which multimedia browser
2762 plugin supported most file formats / media types.
2763 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">The
2764 result</a> can still be seen on the Debian wiki, even though it have
2765 not been updated for a while.  But browser plugins are less relevant
2766 these days, so I thought it was time to look at standalone
2767 players.</p>
2768
2769 <p>A few days ago I was tired of VLC not being listed as a viable
2770 player when I wanted to play videos from the Norwegian National
2771 Broadcasting Company, and decided to investigate why.  The cause is a
2772 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/822245">missing MIME type in the VLC
2773 desktop file</a>.  In the process I wrote a script to compare the set
2774 of MIME types announced in the desktop file and the browser plugin,
2775 only to discover that there is quite a large difference between the
2776 two for VLC.  This discovery made me dig up the script I used to
2777 compare browser plugins, and adjust it to compare desktop files
2778 instead, to try to figure out which multimedia player in Debian
2779 support most file formats.</p>
2780
2781 <p>The result can be seen on the Debian Wiki, as
2782 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMultimedia/PlayerSupport">a
2783 table listing all MIME types supported by one of the packages included
2784 in the table</a>, with the package supporting most MIME types being
2785 listed first in the table.</p>
2786
2787 </p>The best multimedia player in Debian?  It is totem, followed by
2788 parole, kplayer, mpv, vlc, smplayer mplayer-gui gnome-mpv and
2789 kmplayer.  Time for the other players to update their announced MIME
2790 support?</p>
2791
2792       </div>
2793       <div class="tags">
2794
2795
2796         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
2797
2798
2799       </div>
2800     </div>
2801     <div class="padding"></div>
2802
2803     <div class="entry">
2804       <div class="title">
2805         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Pyra___handheld_computer_with_Debian_preinstalled.html">The Pyra - handheld computer with Debian preinstalled</a>
2806       </div>
2807       <div class="date">
2808          4th May 2016
2809       </div>
2810       <div class="body">
2811         A friend of mine made me aware of
2812 <a href="https://pyra-handheld.com/boards/pages/pyra/">The Pyra</a>, a
2813 handheld computer which will be delivered with Debian preinstalled.  I
2814 would love to get one of those for my birthday. :)</p>
2815
2816 <p>The machine is a complete ARM-based PC with micro HDMI, SATA, USB
2817 plugs and many others connectors, and include a full keyboard and a 5"
2818 LCD touch screen.  The 6000mAh battery is claimed to provide a whole
2819 day of battery life time, but I have not seen any independent tests
2820 confirming this.  The vendor is still collecting preorders, and the
2821 last I heard last night was that 22 more orders were needed before
2822 production started.</p>
2823
2824 <p>As far as I know, this is the first handheld preinstalled with
2825 Debian.  Please let me know if you know of any others.  Is it the
2826 first computer being sold with Debian preinstalled?</p>
2827
2828       </div>
2829       <div class="tags">
2830
2831
2832         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2833
2834
2835       </div>
2836     </div>
2837     <div class="padding"></div>
2838
2839     <div class="entry">
2840       <div class="title">
2841         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_a_Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_The_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook.html">Lets make a Norwegian Bokmål edition of The Debian Administrator's Handbook</a>
2842       </div>
2843       <div class="date">
2844         10th April 2016
2845       </div>
2846       <div class="body">
2847         <p>During this weekends
2848 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Oslo__Takk_for_feilfiksingsfesten.shtml">bug
2849 squashing party and developer gathering</a>, we decided to do our part
2850 to make sure there are good books about Debian available in Norwegian
2851 Bokmål, and got in touch with the people behind the
2852 <a href="http://debian-handbook.info/">Debian Administrator's Handbook
2853 project</a> to get started.  If you want to help out, please start
2854 contributing using
2855 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-handbook/">the
2856 hosted weblate project page</a>, and get in touch using
2857 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/debian-handbook-translators">the
2858 translators mailing list</a>.  Please also check out
2859 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/contribute/">the instructions for
2860 contributors</a>.</p>
2861
2862 <p>The book is already available on paper in English, French and
2863 Japanese, and our goal is to get it available on paper in Norwegian
2864 Bokmål too.  In addition to the paper edition, there are also EPUB and
2865 Mobi versions available.  And there are incomplete translations
2866 available for many more languages.</p>
2867
2868       </div>
2869       <div class="tags">
2870
2871
2872         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2873
2874
2875       </div>
2876     </div>
2877     <div class="padding"></div>
2878
2879     <div class="entry">
2880       <div class="title">
2881         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/One_in_two_hundred_Debian_users_using_ZFS_on_Linux_.html">One in two hundred Debian users using ZFS on Linux?</a>
2882       </div>
2883       <div class="date">
2884          7th April 2016
2885       </div>
2886       <div class="body">
2887         <p>Just for fun I had a look at the popcon number of ZFS related
2888 packages in Debian, and was quite surprised with what I found.  I use
2889 ZFS myself at home, but did not really expect many others to do so.
2890 But I might be wrong.</p>
2891
2892 <p>According to
2893 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=spl-linux">the popcon
2894 results for spl-linux</a>, there are 1019 Debian installations, or
2895 0.53% of the population, with the package installed.  As far as I know
2896 the only use of the spl-linux package is as a support library for ZFS
2897 on Linux, so I use it here as proxy for measuring the number of ZFS
2898 installation on Linux in Debian.  In the kFreeBSD variant of Debian
2899 the ZFS feature is already available, and there
2900 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=zfsutils">the popcon
2901 results for zfsutils</a> show 1625 Debian installations or 0.84% of
2902 the population.  So I guess I am not alone in using ZFS on Debian.</p>
2903
2904 <p>But even though the Debian project leader Lucas Nussbaum
2905 <a href="https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2015/04/msg00006.html">announced
2906 in April 2015</a> that the legal obstacles blocking ZFS on Debian were
2907 cleared, the package is still not in Debian.  The package is again in
2908 the NEW queue.  Several uploads have been rejected so far because the
2909 debian/copyright file was incomplete or wrong, but there is no reason
2910 to give up.  The current status can be seen on
2911 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=pkg-zfsonlinux-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
2912 team status page</a>, and
2913 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-zfsonlinux/zfs.git">the
2914 source code</a> is available on Alioth.</p>
2915
2916 <p>As I want ZFS to be included in next version of Debian to make sure
2917 my home server can function in the future using only official Debian
2918 packages, and the current blocker is to get the debian/copyright file
2919 accepted by the FTP masters in Debian, I decided a while back to try
2920 to help out the team.  This was the background for my blog post about
2921 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Creating__updating_and_checking_debian_copyright_semi_automatically.html">creating,
2922 updating and checking debian/copyright semi-automatically</a>, and I
2923 used the techniques I explored there to try to find any errors in the
2924 copyright file.  It is not very easy to check every one of the around
2925 2000 files in the source package, but I hope we this time got it
2926 right.  If you want to help out, check out the git source and try to
2927 find missing entries in the debian/copyright file.</p>
2928
2929       </div>
2930       <div class="tags">
2931
2932
2933         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2934
2935
2936       </div>
2937     </div>
2938     <div class="padding"></div>
2939
2940     <div class="entry">
2941       <div class="title">
2942         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Full_battery_stats_collector_is_now_available_in_Debian.html">Full battery stats collector is now available in Debian</a>
2943       </div>
2944       <div class="date">
2945         23rd March 2016
2946       </div>
2947       <div class="body">
2948         <p>Since this morning, the battery-stats package in Debian include an
2949 extended collector that will collect the complete battery history for
2950 later processing and graphing.  The original collector store the
2951 battery level as percentage of last full level, while the new
2952 collector also record battery vendor, model, serial number, design
2953 full level, last full level and current battery level.  This make it
2954 possible to predict the lifetime of the battery as well as visualise
2955 the energy flow when the battery is charging or discharging.</p>
2956
2957 <p>The new tools are available in <tt>/usr/share/battery-stats/</tt>
2958 in the version 0.5.1 package in unstable.  Get the new battery level graph
2959 and lifetime prediction by running:
2960
2961 <p><pre>
2962 /usr/share/battery-stats/battery-stats-graph /var/log/battery-stats.csv
2963 </pre></p>
2964
2965 <p>Or select the 'Battery Level Graph' from your application menu.</p>
2966
2967 <p>The flow in/out of the battery can be seen by running (no menu
2968 entry yet):</p>
2969
2970 <p><pre>
2971 /usr/share/battery-stats/battery-stats-graph-flow
2972 </pre></p>
2973
2974 <p>I'm not quite happy with the way the data is visualised, at least
2975 when there are few data points.  The graphs look a bit better with a
2976 few years of data.</p>
2977
2978 <p>A while back one important feature I use in the battery stats
2979 collector broke in Debian.  The scripts in
2980 <tt>/usr/lib/pm-utils/power.d/</tt> were no longer executed.  I
2981 suspect it happened when Jessie started using systemd, but I do not
2982 know.  The issue is reported as
2983 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/818649">bug #818649</a> against
2984 pm-utils.  I managed to work around it by adding an udev rule to call
2985 the collector script every time the power connector is connected and
2986 disconnected.  With this fix in place it was finally time to make a
2987 new release of the package, and get it into Debian.</p>
2988
2989 <p>If you are interested in how your laptop battery is doing, please
2990 check out the
2991 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats</a>
2992 in Debian unstable, or rebuild it on Jessie to get it working on
2993 Debian stable. :) The upstream source is available from
2994 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">github</a>.
2995 As always, patches are very welcome.</p>
2996
2997       </div>
2998       <div class="tags">
2999
3000
3001         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3002
3003
3004       </div>
3005     </div>
3006     <div class="padding"></div>
3007
3008     <div class="entry">
3009       <div class="title">
3010         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Making_battery_measurements_a_little_easier_in_Debian.html">Making battery measurements a little easier in Debian</a>
3011       </div>
3012       <div class="date">
3013         15th March 2016
3014       </div>
3015       <div class="body">
3016         <p>Back in September, I blogged about
3017 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_life_and_death_of_a_laptop_battery.html">the
3018 system I wrote to collect statistics about my laptop battery</a>, and
3019 how it showed the decay and death of this battery (now replaced).  I
3020 created a simple deb package to handle the collection and graphing,
3021 but did not want to upload it to Debian as there were already
3022 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">a battery-stats
3023 package in Debian</a> that should do the same thing, and I did not see
3024 a point of uploading a competing package when battery-stats could be
3025 fixed instead.  I reported a few bugs about its non-function, and
3026 hoped someone would step in and fix it.  But no-one did.</p>
3027
3028 <p>I got tired of waiting a few days ago, and took matters in my own
3029 hands.  The end result is that I am now the new upstream developer of
3030 battery stats (<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">available from github</a>) and part of the team maintaining
3031 battery-stats in Debian, and the package in Debian unstable is finally
3032 able to collect battery status using the <tt>/sys/class/power_supply/</tt>
3033 information provided by the Linux kernel.  If you install the
3034 battery-stats package from unstable now, you will be able to get a
3035 graph of the current battery fill level, to get some idea about the
3036 status of the battery.  The source package build and work just fine in
3037 Debian testing and stable (and probably oldstable too, but I have not
3038 tested).  The default graph you get for that system look like this:</p>
3039
3040 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-03-15-battery-stats-graph-example.png" width="70%" align="center"></p>
3041
3042 <p>My plans for the future is to merge my old scripts into the
3043 battery-stats package, as my old scripts collected a lot more details
3044 about the battery.  The scripts are merged into the upstream
3045 battery-stats git repository already, but I am not convinced they work
3046 yet, as I changed a lot of paths along the way.  Will have to test a
3047 bit more before I make a new release.</p>
3048
3049 <p>I will also consider changing the file format slightly, as I
3050 suspect the way I combine several values into one field might make it
3051 impossible to know the type of the value when using it for processing
3052 and graphing.</p>
3053
3054 <p>If you would like I would like to keep an close eye on your laptop
3055 battery, check out the battery-stats package in
3056 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">Debian</a> and
3057 on
3058 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">github</a>.
3059 I would love some help to improve the system further.</p>
3060
3061       </div>
3062       <div class="tags">
3063
3064
3065         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3066
3067
3068       </div>
3069     </div>
3070     <div class="padding"></div>
3071
3072     <div class="entry">
3073       <div class="title">
3074         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Creating__updating_and_checking_debian_copyright_semi_automatically.html">Creating, updating and checking debian/copyright semi-automatically</a>
3075       </div>
3076       <div class="date">
3077         19th February 2016
3078       </div>
3079       <div class="body">
3080         <p>Making packages for Debian requires quite a lot of attention to
3081 details.  And one of the details is the content of the
3082 debian/copyright file, which should list all relevant licenses used by
3083 the code in the package in question, preferably in
3084 <a href="https://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/">machine
3085 readable DEP5 format</a>.</p>
3086
3087 <p>For large packages with lots of contributors it is hard to write
3088 and update this file manually, and if you get some detail wrong, the
3089 package is normally rejected by the ftpmasters.  So getting it right
3090 the first time around get the package into Debian faster, and save
3091 both you and the ftpmasters some work..  Today, while trying to figure
3092 out what was wrong with
3093 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=686447">the
3094 zfsonlinux copyright file</a>, I decided to spend some time on
3095 figuring out the options for doing this job automatically, or at least
3096 semi-automatically.</p>
3097
3098 <p>Lucikly, there are at least two tools available for generating the
3099 file based on the code in the source package,
3100 <tt><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/debmake">debmake</a></tt>
3101 and <tt><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cme">cme</a></tt>.  I'm
3102 not sure which one of them came first, but both seem to be able to
3103 create a sensible draft file.  As far as I can tell, none of them can
3104 be trusted to get the result just right, so the content need to be
3105 polished a bit before the file is OK to upload.  I found the debmake
3106 option in
3107 <a href="http://goofying-with-debian.blogspot.com/2014/07/debmake-checking-source-against-dep-5.html">a
3108 blog posts from 2014</a>.
3109
3110 <p>To generate using debmake, use the -cc option:
3111
3112 <p><pre>
3113 debmake -cc > debian/copyright
3114 </pre></p>
3115
3116 <p>Note there are some problems with python and non-ASCII names, so
3117 this might not be the best option.</p>
3118
3119 <p>The cme option is based on a config parsing library, and I found
3120 this approach in
3121 <a href="https://ddumont.wordpress.com/2015/04/05/improving-creation-of-debian-copyright-file/">a
3122 blog post from 2015</a>.  To generate using cme, use the 'update
3123 dpkg-copyright' option:
3124
3125 <p><pre>
3126 cme update dpkg-copyright
3127 </pre></p>
3128
3129 <p>This will create or update debian/copyright.  The cme tool seem to
3130 handle UTF-8 names better than debmake.</p>
3131
3132 <p>When the copyright file is created, I would also like some help to
3133 check if the file is correct.  For this I found two good options,
3134 <tt>debmake -k</tt> and <tt>license-reconcile</tt>.  The former seem
3135 to focus on license types and file matching, and is able to detect
3136 ineffective blocks in the copyright file.  The latter reports missing
3137 copyright holders and years, but was confused by inconsistent license
3138 names (like CDDL vs. CDDL-1.0).  I suspect it is good to use both and
3139 fix all issues reported by them before uploading.  But I do not know
3140 if the tools and the ftpmasters agree on what is important to fix in a
3141 copyright file, so the package might still be rejected.</p>
3142
3143 <p>The devscripts tool <tt>licensecheck</tt> deserve mentioning.  It
3144 will read through the source and try to find all copyright statements.
3145 It is not comparing the result to the content of debian/copyright, but
3146 can be useful when verifying the content of the copyright file.</p>
3147
3148 <p>Are you aware of better tools in Debian to create and update
3149 debian/copyright file.  Please let me know, or blog about it on
3150 planet.debian.org.</p>
3151
3152 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3153 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3154 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3155
3156 <p><strong>Update 2016-02-20</strong>: I got a tip from Mike Gabriel
3157 on how to use licensecheck and cdbs to create a draft copyright file
3158
3159 <p><pre>
3160 licensecheck --copyright -r `find * -type f` | \
3161   /usr/lib/cdbs/licensecheck2dep5 > debian/copyright.auto
3162 </pre></p>
3163
3164 <p>He mentioned that he normally check the generated file into the
3165 version control system to make it easier to discover license and
3166 copyright changes in the upstream source.  I will try to do the same
3167 with my packages in the future.</p>
3168
3169 <p><strong>Update 2016-02-21</strong>: The cme author recommended
3170 against using -quiet for new users, so I removed it from the proposed
3171 command line.</p>
3172
3173       </div>
3174       <div class="tags">
3175
3176
3177         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3178
3179
3180       </div>
3181     </div>
3182     <div class="padding"></div>
3183
3184     <div class="entry">
3185       <div class="title">
3186         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_appstream_in_Debian_to_locate_packages_with_firmware_and_mime_type_support.html">Using appstream in Debian to locate packages with firmware and mime type support</a>
3187       </div>
3188       <div class="date">
3189          4th February 2016
3190       </div>
3191       <div class="body">
3192         <p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-11">appstream system</a>
3193 is taking shape in Debian, and one provided feature is a very
3194 convenient way to tell you which package to install to make a given
3195 firmware file available when the kernel is looking for it.  This can
3196 be done using apt-file too, but that is for someone else to blog
3197 about. :)</p>
3198
3199 <p>Here is a small recipe to find the package with a given firmware
3200 file, in this example I am looking for ctfw-3.2.3.0.bin, randomly
3201 picked from the set of firmware announced using appstream in Debian
3202 unstable.  In general you would be looking for the firmware requested
3203 by the kernel during kernel module loading.  To find the package
3204 providing the example file, do like this:</p>
3205
3206 <blockquote><pre>
3207 % apt install appstream
3208 [...]
3209 % apt update
3210 [...]
3211 % appstreamcli what-provides firmware:runtime ctfw-3.2.3.0.bin | \
3212   awk '/Package:/ {print $2}'
3213 firmware-qlogic
3214 %
3215 </pre></blockquote>
3216
3217 <p>See <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/AppStream/Guidelines">the
3218 appstream wiki</a> page to learn how to embed the package metadata in
3219 a way appstream can use.</p>
3220
3221 <p>This same approach can be used to find any package supporting a
3222 given MIME type.  This is very useful when you get a file you do not
3223 know how to handle.  First find the mime type using <tt>file
3224 --mime-type</tt>, and next look up the package providing support for
3225 it.  Lets say you got an SVG file.  Its MIME type is image/svg+xml,
3226 and you can find all packages handling this type like this:</p>
3227
3228 <blockquote><pre>
3229 % apt install appstream
3230 [...]
3231 % apt update
3232 [...]
3233 % appstreamcli what-provides mimetype image/svg+xml | \
3234   awk '/Package:/ {print $2}'
3235 bkchem
3236 phototonic
3237 inkscape
3238 shutter
3239 tetzle
3240 geeqie
3241 xia
3242 pinta
3243 gthumb
3244 karbon
3245 comix
3246 mirage
3247 viewnior
3248 postr
3249 ristretto
3250 kolourpaint4
3251 eog
3252 eom
3253 gimagereader
3254 midori
3255 %
3256 </pre></blockquote>
3257
3258 <p>I believe the MIME types are fetched from the desktop file for
3259 packages providing appstream metadata.</p>
3260
3261       </div>
3262       <div class="tags">
3263
3264
3265         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3266
3267
3268       </div>
3269     </div>
3270     <div class="padding"></div>
3271
3272     <div class="entry">
3273       <div class="title">
3274         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Creepy__visualise_geotagged_social_media_information___nice_free_software.html">Creepy, visualise geotagged social media information - nice free software</a>
3275       </div>
3276       <div class="date">
3277         24th January 2016
3278       </div>
3279       <div class="body">
3280         <p>Most people seem not to realise that every time they walk around
3281 with the computerised radio beacon known as a mobile phone their
3282 position is tracked by the phone company and often stored for a long
3283 time (like every time a SMS is received or sent).  And if their
3284 computerised radio beacon is capable of running programs (often called
3285 mobile apps) downloaded from the Internet, these programs are often
3286 also capable of tracking their location (if the app requested access
3287 during installation).  And when these programs send out information to
3288 central collection points, the location is often included, unless
3289 extra care is taken to not send the location.  The provided
3290 information is used by several entities, for good and bad (what is
3291 good and bad, depend on your point of view).  What is certain, is that
3292 the private sphere and the right to free movement is challenged and
3293 perhaps even eradicated for those announcing their location this way,
3294 when they share their whereabouts with private and public
3295 entities.</p>
3296
3297 <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-01-24-nice-creepy-desktop-window.png"></p>
3298
3299 <p>The phone company logs provide a register of locations to check out
3300 when one want to figure out what the tracked person was doing.  It is
3301 unavailable for most of us, but provided to selected government
3302 officials, company staff, those illegally buying information from
3303 unfaithful servants and crackers stealing the information.  But the
3304 public information can be collected and analysed, and a free software
3305 tool to do so is called
3306 <a href="http://www.geocreepy.com/">Creepy or Cree.py</a>.  I
3307 discovered it when I read
3308 <a href="http://www.aftenposten.no/kultur/Slik-kan-du-bli-overvaket-pa-Twitter-og-Instagram-uten-a-ane-det-7787884.html">an
3309 article about Creepy</a> in the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten i
3310 November 2014, and decided to check if it was available in Debian.
3311 The python program was in Debian, but
3312 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/creepy">the version in
3313 Debian</a> was completely broken and practically unmaintained.  I
3314 uploaded a new version which did not work quite right, but did not
3315 have time to fix it then.  This Christmas I decided to finally try to
3316 get Creepy operational in Debian.  Now a fixed version is available in
3317 Debian unstable and testing, and almost all Debian specific patches
3318 are now included
3319 <a href="https://github.com/jkakavas/creepy">upstream</a>.</p>
3320
3321 <p>The Creepy program visualises geolocation information fetched from
3322 Twitter, Instagram, Flickr and Google+, and allow one to get a
3323 complete picture of every social media message posted recently in a
3324 given area, or track the movement of a given individual across all
3325 these services.  Earlier it was possible to use the search API of at
3326 least some of these services without identifying oneself, but these
3327 days it is impossible.  This mean that to use Creepy, you need to
3328 configure it to log in as yourself on these services, and provide
3329 information to them about your search interests.  This should be taken
3330 into account when using Creepy, as it will also share information
3331 about yourself with the services.</p>
3332
3333 <p>The picture above show the twitter messages sent from (or at least
3334 geotagged with a position from) the city centre of Oslo, the capital
3335 of Norway.  One useful way to use Creepy is to first look at
3336 information tagged with an area of interest, and next look at all the
3337 information provided by one or more individuals who was in the area.
3338 I tested it by checking out which celebrity provide their location in
3339 twitter messages by checkout out who sent twitter messages near a
3340 Norwegian TV station, and next could track their position over time,
3341 making it possible to locate their home and work place, among other
3342 things.  A similar technique have been
3343 <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/maxseddon/does-this-soldiers-instagram-account-prove-russia-is-covertl">used
3344 to locate Russian soldiers in Ukraine</a>, and it is both a powerful
3345 tool to discover lying governments, and a useful tool to help people
3346 understand the value of the private information they provide to the
3347 public.</p>
3348
3349 <p>The package is not trivial to backport to Debian Stable/Jessie, as
3350 it depend on several python modules currently missing in Jessie (at
3351 least python-instagram, python-flickrapi and
3352 python-requests-toolbelt).</p>
3353
3354 <p>(I have uploaded
3355 <a href="https://screenshots.debian.net/package/creepy">the image to
3356 screenshots.debian.net</a> and licensed it under the same terms as the
3357 Creepy program in Debian.)</p>
3358
3359       </div>
3360       <div class="tags">
3361
3362
3363         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
3364
3365
3366       </div>
3367     </div>
3368     <div class="padding"></div>
3369
3370     <div class="entry">
3371       <div class="title">
3372         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Always_download_Debian_packages_using_Tor___the_simple_recipe.html">Always download Debian packages using Tor - the simple recipe</a>
3373       </div>
3374       <div class="date">
3375         15th January 2016
3376       </div>
3377       <div class="body">
3378         <p>During his DebConf15 keynote, Jacob Appelbaum
3379 <a href="https://summit.debconf.org/debconf15/meeting/331/what-is-to-be-done/">observed
3380 that those listening on the Internet lines would have good reason to
3381 believe a computer have a given security hole</a> if it download a
3382 security fix from a Debian mirror.  This is a good reason to always
3383 use encrypted connections to the Debian mirror, to make sure those
3384 listening do not know which IP address to attack.  In August, Richard
3385 Hartmann observed that encryption was not enough, when it was possible
3386 to interfere download size to security patches or the fact that
3387 download took place shortly after a security fix was released, and
3388 <a href="http://richardhartmann.de/blog/posts/2015/08/24-Tor-enabled_Debian_mirror/">proposed
3389 to always use Tor to download packages from the Debian mirror</a>.  He
3390 was not the first to propose this, as the
3391 <tt><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/apt-transport-tor">apt-transport-tor</a></tt>
3392 package by Tim Retout already existed to make it easy to convince apt
3393 to use <a href="https://www.torproject.org/">Tor</a>, but I was not
3394 aware of that package when I read the blog post from Richard.</p>
3395
3396 <p>Richard discussed the idea with Peter Palfrader, one of the Debian
3397 sysadmins, and he set up a Tor hidden service on one of the central
3398 Debian mirrors using the address vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion, thus making
3399 it possible to download packages directly between two tor nodes,
3400 making sure the network traffic always were encrypted.</p>
3401
3402 <p>Here is a short recipe for enabling this on your machine, by
3403 installing <tt>apt-transport-tor</tt> and replacing http and https
3404 urls with tor+http and tor+https, and using the hidden service instead
3405 of the official Debian mirror site.  I recommend installing
3406 <tt>etckeeper</tt> before you start to have a history of the changes
3407 done in /etc/.</p>
3408
3409 <blockquote><pre>
3410 apt install apt-transport-tor
3411 sed -i 's% http://ftp.debian.org/% tor+http://vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion/%' /etc/apt/sources.list
3412 sed -i 's% http% tor+http%' /etc/apt/sources.list
3413 </pre></blockquote>
3414
3415 <p>If you have more sources listed in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/, run
3416 the sed commands for these too.  The sed command is assuming your are
3417 using the ftp.debian.org Debian mirror.  Adjust the command (or just
3418 edit the file manually) to match your mirror.</p>
3419
3420 <p>This work in Debian Jessie and later.  Note that tools like
3421 <tt>apt-file</tt> only recently started using the apt transport
3422 system, and do not work with these tor+http URLs.  For
3423 <tt>apt-file</tt> you need the version currently in experimental,
3424 which need a recent apt version currently only in unstable.  So if you
3425 need a working <tt>apt-file</tt>, this is not for you.</p>
3426
3427 <p>Another advantage from this change is that your machine will start
3428 using Tor regularly and at fairly random intervals (every time you
3429 update the package lists or upgrade or install a new package), thus
3430 masking other Tor traffic done from the same machine.  Using Tor will
3431 become normal for the machine in question.</p>
3432
3433 <p>On <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox</a>, APT
3434 is set up by default to use <tt>apt-transport-tor</tt> when Tor is
3435 enabled.  It would be great if it was the default on any Debian
3436 system.</p>
3437
3438       </div>
3439       <div class="tags">
3440
3441
3442         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
3443
3444
3445       </div>
3446     </div>
3447     <div class="padding"></div>
3448
3449     <div class="entry">
3450       <div class="title">
3451         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/OpenALPR__find_car_license_plates_in_video_streams___nice_free_software.html">OpenALPR, find car license plates in video streams - nice free software</a>
3452       </div>
3453       <div class="date">
3454         23rd December 2015
3455       </div>
3456       <div class="body">
3457         <p>When I was a kid, we used to collect "car numbers", as we used to
3458 call the car license plate numbers in those days.  I would write the
3459 numbers down in my little book and compare notes with the other kids
3460 to see how many region codes we had seen and if we had seen some
3461 exotic or special region codes and numbers.  It was a fun game to pass
3462 time, as we kids have plenty of it.</p>
3463
3464 <p>A few days I came across
3465 <a href="https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr">the OpenALPR
3466 project</a>, a free software project to automatically discover and
3467 report license plates in images and video streams, and provide the
3468 "car numbers" in a machine readable format.  I've been looking for
3469 such system for a while now, because I believe it is a bad idea that the
3470 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number_plate_recognition">automatic
3471 number plate recognition</a> tool only is available in the hands of
3472 the powerful, and want it to be available also for the powerless to
3473 even the score when it comes to surveillance and sousveillance.  I
3474 discovered the developer
3475 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/747509">wanted to get the tool into
3476 Debian</a>, and as I too wanted it to be in Debian, I volunteered to
3477 help him get it into shape to get the package uploaded into the Debian
3478 archive.</p>
3479
3480 <p>Today we finally managed to get the package into shape and uploaded
3481 it into Debian, where it currently
3482 <a href="https://ftp-master.debian.org//new/openalpr_2.2.1-1.html">waits
3483 in the NEW queue</a> for review by the Debian ftpmasters.</p>
3484
3485 <p>I guess you are wondering why on earth such tool would be useful
3486 for the common folks, ie those not running a large government
3487 surveillance system?  Well, I plan to put it in a computer on my bike
3488 and in my car, tracking the cars nearby and allowing me to be notified
3489 when number plates on my watch list are discovered.  Another use case
3490 was suggested by a friend of mine, who wanted to set it up at his home
3491 to open the car port automatically when it discovered the plate on his
3492 car.  When I mentioned it perhaps was a bit foolhardy to allow anyone
3493 capable of placing his license plate number of a piece of cardboard to
3494 open his car port, men replied that it was always unlocked anyway.  I
3495 guess for such use case it make sense.  I am sure there are other use
3496 cases too, for those with imagination and a vision.</p>
3497
3498 <p>If you want to build your own version of the Debian package, check
3499 out the upstream git source and symlink ./distros/debian to ./debian/
3500 before running "debuild" to build the source.  Or wait a bit until the
3501 package show up in unstable.</p>
3502
3503       </div>
3504       <div class="tags">
3505
3506
3507         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
3508
3509
3510       </div>
3511     </div>
3512     <div class="padding"></div>
3513
3514     <div class="entry">
3515       <div class="title">
3516         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_appstream_with_isenkram_to_install_hardware_related_packages_in_Debian.html">Using appstream with isenkram to install hardware related packages in Debian</a>
3517       </div>
3518       <div class="date">
3519         20th December 2015
3520       </div>
3521       <div class="body">
3522         <p>Around three years ago, I created
3523 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">the isenkram
3524 system</a> to get a more practical solution in Debian for handing
3525 hardware related packages.  A GUI system in the isenkram package will
3526 present a pop-up dialog when some hardware dongle supported by
3527 relevant packages in Debian is inserted into the machine.  The same
3528 lookup mechanism to detect packages is available as command line
3529 tools in the isenkram-cli package.  In addition to mapping hardware,
3530 it will also map kernel firmware files to packages and make it easy to
3531 install needed firmware packages automatically.  The key for this
3532 system to work is a good way to map hardware to packages, in other
3533 words, allow packages to announce what hardware they will work
3534 with.</p>
3535
3536 <p>I started by providing data files in the isenkram source, and
3537 adding code to download the latest version of these data files at run
3538 time, to ensure every user had the most up to date mapping available.
3539 I also added support for storing the mapping in the Packages file in
3540 the apt repositories, but did not push this approach because while I
3541 was trying to figure out how to best store hardware/package mappings,
3542 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/">the
3543 appstream system</a> was announced.  I got in touch and suggested to
3544 add the hardware mapping into that data set to be able to use
3545 appstream as a data source, and this was accepted at least for the
3546 Debian version of appstream.</p>
3547
3548 <p>A few days ago using appstream in Debian for this became possible,
3549 and today I uploaded a new version 0.20 of isenkram adding support for
3550 appstream as a data source for mapping hardware to packages.  The only
3551 package so far using appstream to announce its hardware support is my
3552 pymissile package.  I got help from Matthias Klumpp with figuring out
3553 how do add the required
3554 <a href="https://appstream.debian.org/html/sid/main/metainfo/pymissile.html">metadata
3555 in pymissile</a>.  I added a file debian/pymissile.metainfo.xml with
3556 this content:</p>
3557
3558 <blockquote><pre>
3559 &lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?&gt;
3560 &lt;component&gt;
3561   &lt;id&gt;pymissile&lt;/id&gt;
3562   &lt;metadata_license&gt;MIT&lt;/metadata_license&gt;
3563   &lt;name&gt;pymissile&lt;/name&gt;
3564   &lt;summary&gt;Control original Striker USB Missile Launcher&lt;/summary&gt;
3565   &lt;description&gt;
3566     &lt;p&gt;
3567       Pymissile provides a curses interface to control an original
3568       Marks and Spencer / Striker USB Missile Launcher, as well as a
3569       motion control script to allow a webcamera to control the
3570       launcher.
3571     &lt;/p&gt;
3572   &lt;/description&gt;
3573   &lt;provides&gt;
3574     &lt;modalias&gt;usb:v1130p0202d*&lt;/modalias&gt;
3575   &lt;/provides&gt;
3576 &lt;/component&gt;
3577 </pre></blockquote>
3578
3579 <p>The key for isenkram is the component/provides/modalias value,
3580 which is a glob style match rule for hardware specific strings
3581 (modalias strings) provided by the Linux kernel.  In this case, it
3582 will map to all USB devices with vendor code 1130 and product code
3583 0202.</p>
3584
3585 <p>Note, it is important that the license of all the metadata files
3586 are compatible to have permissions to aggregate them into archive wide
3587 appstream files.  Matthias suggested to use MIT or BSD licenses for
3588 these files.  A challenge is figuring out a good id for the data, as
3589 it is supposed to be globally unique and shared across distributions
3590 (in other words, best to coordinate with upstream what to use).  But
3591 it can be changed later or, so we went with the package name as
3592 upstream for this project is dormant.</p>
3593
3594 <p>To get the metadata file installed in the correct location for the
3595 mirror update scripts to pick it up and include its content the
3596 appstream data source, the file must be installed in the binary
3597 package under /usr/share/appdata/.  I did this by adding the following
3598 line to debian/pymissile.install:</p>
3599
3600 <blockquote><pre>
3601 debian/pymissile.metainfo.xml usr/share/appdata
3602 </pre></blockquote>
3603
3604 <p>With that in place, the command line tool isenkram-lookup will list
3605 all packages useful on the current computer automatically, and the GUI
3606 pop-up handler will propose to install the package not already
3607 installed if a hardware dongle is inserted into the machine in
3608 question.</p>
3609
3610 <p>Details of the modalias field in appstream is available from the
3611 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-11">DEP-11</a> proposal.</p>
3612
3613 <p>To locate the modalias values of all hardware present in a machine,
3614 try running this command on the command line:</p>
3615
3616 <blockquote><pre>
3617 cat $(find /sys/devices/|grep modalias)
3618 </pre></blockquote>
3619
3620 <p>To learn more about the isenkram system, please check out
3621 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">my
3622 blog posts tagged isenkram</a>.</p>
3623
3624       </div>
3625       <div class="tags">
3626
3627
3628         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
3629
3630
3631       </div>
3632     </div>
3633     <div class="padding"></div>
3634
3635     <div class="entry">
3636       <div class="title">
3637         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_GNU_General_Public_License_is_not_magic_pixie_dust.html">The GNU General Public License is not magic pixie dust</a>
3638       </div>
3639       <div class="date">
3640         30th November 2015
3641       </div>
3642       <div class="body">
3643         <p>A blog post from my fellow Debian developer Paul Wise titled
3644 "<a href="http://bonedaddy.net/pabs3/log/2015/11/27/sfc-supporter/">The
3645 GPL is not magic pixie dust</a>" explain the importance of making sure
3646 the <a href="http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html">GPL</a> is enforced.
3647 I quote the blog post from Paul in full here with his permission:<p>
3648
3649 <blockquote>
3650
3651 <p><a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/"><img src="https://sfconservancy.org/img/supporter-badge.png" width="194" height="90" alt="Become a Software Freedom Conservancy Supporter!" align="right" border="0" /></a></p>
3652
3653 <blockquote>
3654 The GPL is not magic pixie dust. It does not work by itself.<br/>
3655
3656 The first step is to choose a
3657 <a href="https://copyleft.org/">copyleft</a> license for your
3658 code.<br/>
3659
3660 The next step is, when someone fails to follow that copyleft license,
3661 <b>it must be enforced</b><br/>
3662
3663 and its a simple fact of our modern society that such type of
3664 work<br/>
3665
3666 is incredibly expensive to do and incredibly difficult to do.
3667 </blockquote>
3668
3669 <p><small>-- <a href="http://ebb.org/bkuhn/">Bradley Kuhn</a>, in
3670 <a href="http://faif.us/" title="Free as in Freedom">FaiF</a>
3671 <a href="http://faif.us/cast/2015/nov/24/0x57/">episode
3672 0x57</a></small></p>
3673
3674 <p>As the Debian Website
3675 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/794116">used</a>
3676 <a href="https://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/webwml/webwml/english/intro/free.wml?r1=1.24&amp;r2=1.25">to</a>
3677 imply, public domain and permissively licensed software can lead to
3678 the production of more proprietary software as people discover useful
3679 software, extend it and or incorporate it into their hardware or
3680 software products.  Copyleft licenses such as the GNU GPL were created
3681 to close off this avenue to the production of proprietary software but
3682 such licenses are not enough.  With the ongoing adoption of Free
3683 Software by individuals and groups, inevitably the community's
3684 expectations of license compliance are violated, usually out of
3685 ignorance of the way Free Software works, but not always.  As Karen
3686 and Bradley explained in <a href="http://faif.us/" title="Free as in
3687 Freedom">FaiF</a>
3688 <a href="http://faif.us/cast/2015/nov/24/0x57/">episode 0x57</a>,
3689 copyleft is nothing if no-one is willing and able to stand up in court
3690 to protect it.  The reality of today's world is that legal
3691 representation is expensive, difficult and time consuming.  With
3692 <a href="http://gpl-violations.org/">gpl-violations.org</a> in hiatus
3693 <a href="http://gpl-violations.org/news/20151027-homepage-recovers/">until</a>
3694 some time in 2016, the <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/">Software
3695 Freedom Conservancy</a> (a tax-exempt charity) is the major defender
3696 of the Linux project, Debian and other groups against GPL violations.
3697 In March the SFC supported a
3698 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/mar/05/vmware-lawsuit/">lawsuit
3699 by Christoph Hellwig</a> against VMware for refusing to
3700 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/linux-compliance/vmware-lawsuit-faq.html">comply
3701 with the GPL</a> in relation to their use of parts of the Linux
3702 kernel.  Since then two of their sponsors pulled corporate funding and
3703 conferences
3704 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/nov/24/faif-carols-fundraiser/">blocked
3705 or cancelled their talks</a>.  As a result they have decided to rely
3706 less on corporate funding and more on the broad community of
3707 individuals who support Free Software and copyleft.  So the SFC has
3708 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/nov/23/2015fundraiser/">launched</a>
3709 a <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/">campaign</a> to create
3710 a community of folks who stand up for copyleft and the GPL by
3711 supporting their work on promoting and supporting copyleft and Free
3712 Software.</p>
3713
3714 <p>If you support Free Software,
3715 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/nov/26/like-what-I-do/">like</a>
3716 what the SFC do, agree with their
3717 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/linux-compliance/principles.html">compliance
3718 principles</a>, are happy about their
3719 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/">successes</a> in 2015,
3720 work on a project that is an SFC
3721 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/members/current/">member</a> and or
3722 just want to stand up for copyleft, please join
3723 <a href="https://identi.ca/cwebber/image/JQGPA4qbTyyp3-MY8QpvuA">Christopher
3724 Allan Webber</a>,
3725 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/nov/24/faif-carols-fundraiser/">Carol
3726 Smith</a>,
3727 <a href="http://www.jonobacon.org/2015/11/25/supporting-software-freedom-conservancy/">Jono
3728 Bacon</a>, myself and
3729 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/sponsors/#supporters">others</a> in
3730 becoming a
3731 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/">supporter</a>.  For the
3732 next week your donation will be
3733 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/nov/27/black-friday/">matched</a>
3734 by an anonymous donor.  Please also consider asking your employer to
3735 match your donation or become a sponsor of SFC.  Don't forget to
3736 spread the word about your support for SFC via email, your blog and or
3737 social media accounts.</p>
3738
3739 </blockquote>
3740
3741 <p>I agree with Paul on this topic and just signed up as a Supporter
3742 of Software Freedom Conservancy myself.  Perhaps you should be a
3743 supporter too?</p>
3744
3745       </div>
3746       <div class="tags">
3747
3748
3749         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>.
3750
3751
3752       </div>
3753     </div>
3754     <div class="padding"></div>
3755
3756     <div class="entry">
3757       <div class="title">
3758         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/PGP_key_transition_statement_for_key_EE4E02F9.html">PGP key transition statement for key EE4E02F9</a>
3759       </div>
3760       <div class="date">
3761         17th November 2015
3762       </div>
3763       <div class="body">
3764         <p>I've needed a new OpenPGP key for a while, but have not had time to
3765 set it up properly.  I wanted to generate it offline and have it
3766 available on <a href="http://shop.kernelconcepts.de/#openpgp">a OpenPGP
3767 smart card</a> for daily use, and learning how to do it and finding
3768 time to sit down with an offline machine almost took forever.  But
3769 finally I've been able to complete the process, and have now moved
3770 from my old GPG key to a new GPG key.  See
3771 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-11-17-new-gpg-key-transition.txt">the
3772 full transition statement, signed with both my old and new key</a> for
3773 the details.  This is my new key:</p>
3774
3775 <pre>
3776 pub   3936R/<a href="http://pgp.cs.uu.nl/stats/111D6B29EE4E02F9.html">111D6B29EE4E02F9</a> 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-14]
3777       Key fingerprint = 3AC7 B2E3 ACA5 DF87 78F1  D827 111D 6B29 EE4E 02F9
3778 uid                  Petter Reinholdtsen &lt;pere@hungry.com&gt;
3779 uid                  Petter Reinholdtsen &lt;pere@debian.org&gt;
3780 sub   4096R/87BAFB0E 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-02]
3781 sub   4096R/F91E6DE9 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-02]
3782 sub   4096R/A0439BAB 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-02]
3783 </pre>
3784
3785 <p>The key can be downloaded from the OpenPGP key servers, signed by
3786 my old key.</p>
3787
3788 <p>If you signed my old key
3789 (<a href="http://pgp.cs.uu.nl/stats/DB4CCC4B2A30D729.html">DB4CCC4B2A30D729</a>),
3790 I'd very much appreciate a signature on my new key, details and
3791 instructions in the transition statement. I m happy to reciprocate if
3792 you have a similarly signed transition statement to present.</p>
3793
3794       </div>
3795       <div class="tags">
3796
3797
3798         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
3799
3800
3801       </div>
3802     </div>
3803     <div class="padding"></div>
3804
3805     <div class="entry">
3806       <div class="title">
3807         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_life_and_death_of_a_laptop_battery.html">The life and death of a laptop battery</a>
3808       </div>
3809       <div class="date">
3810         24th September 2015
3811       </div>
3812       <div class="body">
3813         <p>When I get a new laptop, the battery life time at the start is OK.
3814 But this do not last.  The last few laptops gave me a feeling that
3815 within a year, the life time is just a fraction of what it used to be,
3816 and it slowly become painful to use the laptop without power connected
3817 all the time.  Because of this, when I got a new Thinkpad X230 laptop
3818 about two years ago, I decided to monitor its battery state to have
3819 more hard facts when the battery started to fail.</p>
3820
3821 <img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-09-24-laptop-battery-graph.png"/>
3822
3823 <p>First I tried to find a sensible Debian package to record the
3824 battery status, assuming that this must be a problem already handled
3825 by someone else.  I found
3826 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats</a>,
3827 which collects statistics from the battery, but it was completely
3828 broken.  I sent a few suggestions to the maintainer, but decided to
3829 write my own collector as a shell script while I waited for feedback
3830 from him.  Via
3831 <a href="http://www.ifweassume.com/2013/08/the-de-evolution-of-my-laptop-battery.html">a
3832 blog post about the battery development on a MacBook Air</a> I also
3833 discovered
3834 <a href="https://github.com/jradavenport/batlog.git">batlog</a>, not
3835 available in Debian.</p>
3836
3837 <p>I started my collector 2013-07-15, and it has been collecting
3838 battery stats ever since. Now my
3839 /var/log/hjemmenett-battery-status.log file contain around 115,000
3840 measurements, from the time the battery was working great until now,
3841 when it is unable to charge above 7% of original capacity.  My
3842 collector shell script is quite simple and look like this:</p>
3843
3844 <pre>
3845 #!/bin/sh
3846 # Inspired by
3847 # http://www.ifweassume.com/2013/08/the-de-evolution-of-my-laptop-battery.html
3848 # See also
3849 # http://blog.sleeplessbeastie.eu/2013/01/02/debian-how-to-monitor-battery-capacity/
3850 logfile=/var/log/hjemmenett-battery-status.log
3851
3852 files="manufacturer model_name technology serial_number \
3853     energy_full energy_full_design energy_now cycle_count status"
3854
3855 if [ ! -e "$logfile" ] ; then
3856     (
3857         printf "timestamp,"
3858         for f in $files; do
3859             printf "%s," $f
3860         done
3861         echo
3862     ) > "$logfile"
3863 fi
3864
3865 log_battery() {
3866     # Print complete message in one echo call, to avoid race condition
3867     # when several log processes run in parallel.
3868     msg=$(printf "%s," $(date +%s); \
3869         for f in $files; do \
3870             printf "%s," $(cat $f); \
3871         done)
3872     echo "$msg"
3873 }
3874
3875 cd /sys/class/power_supply
3876
3877 for bat in BAT*; do
3878     (cd $bat && log_battery >> "$logfile")
3879 done
3880 </pre>
3881
3882 <p>The script is called when the power management system detect a
3883 change in the power status (power plug in or out), and when going into
3884 and out of hibernation and suspend.  In addition, it collect a value
3885 every 10 minutes.  This make it possible for me know when the battery
3886 is discharging, charging and how the maximum charge change over time.
3887 The code for the Debian package
3888 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-status">is now
3889 available on github</a>.</p>
3890
3891 <p>The collected log file look like this:</p>
3892
3893 <pre>
3894 timestamp,manufacturer,model_name,technology,serial_number,energy_full,energy_full_design,energy_now,cycle_count,status,
3895 1376591133,LGC,45N1025,Li-ion,974,62800000,62160000,39050000,0,Discharging,
3896 [...]
3897 1443090528,LGC,45N1025,Li-ion,974,4900000,62160000,4900000,0,Full,
3898 1443090601,LGC,45N1025,Li-ion,974,4900000,62160000,4900000,0,Full,
3899 </pre>
3900
3901 <p>I wrote a small script to create a graph of the charge development
3902 over time.  This graph depicted above show the slow death of my laptop
3903 battery.</p>
3904
3905 <p>But why is this happening?  Why are my laptop batteries always
3906 dying in a year or two, while the batteries of space probes and
3907 satellites keep working year after year.  If we are to believe
3908 <a href="http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_prolong_lithium_based_batteries">Battery
3909 University</a>, the cause is me charging the battery whenever I have a
3910 chance, and the fix is to not charge the Lithium-ion batteries to 100%
3911 all the time, but to stay below 90% of full charge most of the time.
3912 I've been told that the Tesla electric cars
3913 <a href="http://my.teslamotors.com/de_CH/forum/forums/battery-charge-limit">limit
3914 the charge of their batteries to 80%</a>, with the option to charge to
3915 100% when preparing for a longer trip (not that I would want a car
3916 like Tesla where rights to privacy is abandoned, but that is another
3917 story), which I guess is the option we should have for laptops on
3918 Linux too.</p>
3919
3920 <p>Is there a good and generic way with Linux to tell the battery to
3921 stop charging at 80%, unless requested to charge to 100% once in
3922 preparation for a longer trip?  I found
3923 <a href="http://askubuntu.com/questions/34452/how-can-i-limit-battery-charging-to-80-capacity">one
3924 recipe on askubuntu for Ubuntu to limit charging on Thinkpad to
3925 80%</a>, but could not get it to work (kernel module refused to
3926 load).</p>
3927
3928 <p>I wonder why the battery capacity was reported to be more than 100%
3929 at the start.  I also wonder why the "full capacity" increases some
3930 times, and if it is possible to repeat the process to get the battery
3931 back to design capacity.  And I wonder if the discharge and charge
3932 speed change over time, or if this stay the same.  I did not yet try
3933 to write a tool to calculate the derivative values of the battery
3934 level, but suspect some interesting insights might be learned from
3935 those.</p>
3936
3937 <p>Update 2015-09-24: I got a tip to install the packages
3938 acpi-call-dkms and tlp (unfortunately missing in Debian stable)
3939 packages instead of the tp-smapi-dkms package I had tried to use
3940 initially, and use 'tlp setcharge 40 80' to change when charging start
3941 and stop.  I've done so now, but expect my existing battery is toast
3942 and need to be replaced.  The proposal is unfortunately Thinkpad
3943 specific.</p>
3944
3945       </div>
3946       <div class="tags">
3947
3948
3949         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3950
3951
3952       </div>
3953     </div>
3954     <div class="padding"></div>
3955
3956     <div class="entry">
3957       <div class="title">
3958         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_laptop___some_more_clues_and_ideas_based_on_feedback.html">New laptop - some more clues and ideas based on feedback</a>
3959       </div>
3960       <div class="date">
3961          5th July 2015
3962       </div>
3963       <div class="body">
3964         <p>Several people contacted me after my previous blog post about my
3965 need for a new laptop, and provided very useful feedback.  I wish to
3966 thank every one of these.  Several pointed me to the possibility of
3967 fixing my X230, and I am already in the process of getting Lenovo to
3968 do so thanks to the on site, next day support contract covering the
3969 machine.  But the battery is almost useless (I expect to replace it
3970 with a non-official battery) and I do not expect the machine to live
3971 for many more years, so it is time to plan its replacement.  If I did
3972 not have a support contract, it was suggested to find replacement parts
3973 using <a href="http://www.francecrans.com/">FrancEcrans</a>, but it
3974 might present a language barrier as I do not understand French.</p>
3975
3976 <p>One tip I got was to use the
3977 <a href="https://skinflint.co.uk/?cat=nb">Skinflint</a> web service to
3978 compare laptop models.  It seem to have more models available than
3979 prisjakt.no.  Another tip I got from someone I know have similar
3980 keyboard preferences was that the HP EliteBook 840 keyboard is not
3981 very good, and this matches my experience with earlier EliteBook
3982 keyboards I tested.  Because of this, I will not consider it any further.
3983
3984 <p>When I wrote my blog post, I was not aware of Thinkpad X250, the
3985 newest Thinkpad X model.  The keyboard reintroduces mouse buttons
3986 (which is missing from the X240), and is working fairly well with
3987 Debian Sid/Unstable according to
3988 <a href="http://www.corsac.net/X250/">Corsac.net</a>.  The reports I
3989 got on the keyboard quality are not consistent.  Some say the keyboard
3990 is good, others say it is ok, while others say it is not very good.
3991 Those with experience from X41 and and X60 agree that the X250
3992 keyboard is not as good as those trusty old laptops, and suggest I
3993 keep and fix my X230 instead of upgrading, or get a used X230 to
3994 replace it.  I'm also told that the X250 lack leds for caps lock, disk
3995 activity and battery status, which is very convenient on my X230.  I'm
3996 also told that the CPU fan is running very often, making it a bit
3997 noisy.  In any case, the X250 do not work out of the box with Debian
3998 Stable/Jessie, one of my requirements.</p>
3999
4000 <p>I have also gotten a few vendor proposals, one was
4001 <a href="http://pro-star.com">Pro-Star</a>, another was
4002 <a href="http://shop.gluglug.org.uk/product/libreboot-x200/">Libreboot</a>.
4003 The latter look very attractive to me.</p>
4004
4005 <p>Again, thank you all for the very useful feedback.  It help a lot
4006 as I keep looking for a replacement.</p>
4007
4008 <p>Update 2015-07-06: I was recommended to check out the
4009 <a href="">lapstore.de</a> web shop for used laptops.  They got several
4010 different
4011 <a href="http://www.lapstore.de/f.php/shop/lapstore/f/411/lang/x/kw/Lenovo_ThinkPad_X_Serie/">old
4012 thinkpad X models</a>, and provide one year warranty.</p>
4013
4014       </div>
4015       <div class="tags">
4016
4017
4018         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4019
4020
4021       </div>
4022     </div>
4023     <div class="padding"></div>
4024
4025     <div class="entry">
4026       <div class="title">
4027         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_to_find_a_new_laptop__as_the_old_one_is_broken_after_only_two_years.html">Time to find a new laptop, as the old one is broken after only two years</a>
4028       </div>
4029       <div class="date">
4030          3rd July 2015
4031       </div>
4032       <div class="body">
4033         <p>My primary work horse laptop is failing, and will need a
4034 replacement soon.  The left 5 cm of the screen on my Thinkpad X230
4035 started flickering yesterday, and I suspect the cause is a broken
4036 cable, as changing the angle of the screen some times get rid of the
4037 flickering.</p>
4038
4039 <p>My requirements have not really changed since I bought it, and is
4040 still as
4041 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html">I
4042 described them in 2013</a>.  The last time I bought a laptop, I had
4043 good help from
4044 <a href="http://www.prisjakt.no/category.php?k=353">prisjakt.no</a>
4045 where I could select at least a few of the requirements (mouse pin,
4046 wifi, weight) and go through the rest manually.  Three button mouse
4047 and a good keyboard is not available as an option, and all the three
4048 laptop models proposed today (Thinkpad X240, HP EliteBook 820 G1 and
4049 G2) lack three mouse buttons).  It is also unclear to me how good the
4050 keyboard on the HP EliteBooks are.  I hope Lenovo have not messed up
4051 the keyboard, even if the quality and robustness in the X series have
4052 deteriorated since X41.</p>
4053
4054 <p>I wonder how I can find a sensible laptop when none of the options
4055 seem sensible to me?  Are there better services around to search the
4056 set of available laptops for features?  Please send me an email if you
4057 have suggestions.</p>
4058
4059 <p>Update 2015-07-23: I got a suggestion to check out the FSF
4060 <a href="http://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/endorsement/respects-your-freedom">list
4061 of endorsed hardware</a>, which is useful background information.</p>
4062
4063       </div>
4064       <div class="tags">
4065
4066
4067         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4068
4069
4070       </div>
4071     </div>
4072     <div class="padding"></div>
4073
4074     <div class="entry">
4075       <div class="title">
4076         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_stay_with_sysvinit_in_Debian_Jessie.html">How to stay with sysvinit in Debian Jessie</a>
4077       </div>
4078       <div class="date">
4079         22nd November 2014
4080       </div>
4081       <div class="body">
4082         <p>By now, it is well known that Debian Jessie will not be using
4083 sysvinit as its boot system by default.  But how can one keep using
4084 sysvinit in Jessie?  It is fairly easy, and here are a few recipes,
4085 courtesy of
4086 <a href="http://www.vitavonni.de/blog/201410/2014102101-avoiding-systemd.html">Erich
4087 Schubert</a> and
4088 <a href="http://smcv.pseudorandom.co.uk/2014/still_universal/">Simon
4089 McVittie</a>.
4090
4091 <p>If you already are using Wheezy and want to upgrade to Jessie and
4092 keep sysvinit as your boot system, create a file
4093 <tt>/etc/apt/preferences.d/use-sysvinit</tt> with this content before
4094 you upgrade:</p>
4095
4096 <p><blockquote><pre>
4097 Package: systemd-sysv
4098 Pin: release o=Debian
4099 Pin-Priority: -1
4100 </pre></blockquote><p>
4101
4102 <p>This file content will tell apt and aptitude to not consider
4103 installing systemd-sysv as part of any installation and upgrade
4104 solution when resolving dependencies, and thus tell it to avoid
4105 systemd as a default boot system.  The end result should be that the
4106 upgraded system keep using sysvinit.</p>
4107
4108 <p>If you are installing Jessie for the first time, there is no way to
4109 get sysvinit installed by default (debootstrap used by
4110 debian-installer have no option for this), but one can tell the
4111 installer to switch to sysvinit before the first boot.  Either by
4112 using a kernel argument to the installer, or by adding a line to the
4113 preseed file used.  First, the kernel command line argument:
4114
4115 <p><blockquote><pre>
4116 preseed/late_command="in-target apt-get install --purge -y sysvinit-core"
4117 </pre></blockquote><p>
4118
4119 <p>Next, the line to use in a preseed file:</p>
4120
4121 <p><blockquote><pre>
4122 d-i preseed/late_command string in-target apt-get install -y sysvinit-core
4123 </pre></blockquote><p>
4124
4125 <p>One can of course also do this after the first boot by installing
4126 the sysvinit-core package.</p>
4127
4128 <p>I recommend only using sysvinit if you really need it, as the
4129 sysvinit boot sequence in Debian have several hardware specific bugs
4130 on Linux caused by the fact that it is unpredictable when hardware
4131 devices show up during boot.  But on the other hand, the new default
4132 boot system still have a few rough edges I hope will be fixed before
4133 Jessie is released.</p>
4134
4135 <p>Update 2014-11-26: Inspired by
4136 <ahref="https://www.mirbsd.org/permalinks/wlog-10-tg_e20141125-tg.htm#e20141125-tg_wlog-10-tg">a
4137 blog post by Torsten Glaser</a>, added --purge to the preseed
4138 line.</p>
4139
4140       </div>
4141       <div class="tags">
4142
4143
4144         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4145
4146
4147       </div>
4148     </div>
4149     <div class="padding"></div>
4150
4151     <div class="entry">
4152       <div class="title">
4153         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Debian_package_for_SMTP_via_Tor__aka_SMTorP__using_exim4.html">A Debian package for SMTP via Tor (aka SMTorP) using exim4</a>
4154       </div>
4155       <div class="date">
4156         10th November 2014
4157       </div>
4158       <div class="body">
4159         <p>The right to communicate with your friends and family in private,
4160 without anyone snooping, is a right every citicen have in a liberal
4161 democracy.  But this right is under serious attack these days.</p>
4162
4163 <p>A while back it occurred to me that one way to make the dragnet
4164 surveillance conducted by NSA, GCHQ, FRA and others (and confirmed by
4165 the whisleblower Snowden) more expensive for Internet email,
4166 is to deliver all email using SMTP via Tor.  Such SMTP option would be
4167 a nice addition to the FreedomBox project if we could send email
4168 between FreedomBox machines without leaking metadata about the emails
4169 to the people peeking on the wire.  I
4170 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/2014-October/006493.html">proposed
4171 this on the FreedomBox project mailing list in October</a> and got a
4172 lot of useful feedback and suggestions.  It also became obvious to me
4173 that this was not a novel idea, as the same idea was tested and
4174 documented by Johannes Berg as early as 2006, and both
4175 <a href="https://github.com/pagekite/Mailpile/wiki/SMTorP">the
4176 Mailpile</a> and <a href="http://dee.su/cables">the Cables</a> systems
4177 propose a similar method / protocol to pass emails between users.</p>
4178
4179 <p>To implement such system one need to set up a Tor hidden service
4180 providing the SMTP protocol on port 25, and use email addresses
4181 looking like username@hidden-service-name.onion.  With such addresses
4182 the connections to port 25 on hidden-service-name.onion using Tor will
4183 go to the correct SMTP server.  To do this, one need to configure the
4184 Tor daemon to provide the hidden service and the mail server to accept
4185 emails for this .onion domain.  To learn more about Exim configuration
4186 in Debian and test the design provided by Johannes Berg in his FAQ, I
4187 set out yesterday to create a Debian package for making it trivial to
4188 set up such SMTP over Tor service based on Debian.  Getting it to work
4189 were fairly easy, and
4190 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/exim4-smtorp">the
4191 source code for the Debian package</a> is available from github.  I
4192 plan to move it into Debian if further testing prove this to be a
4193 useful approach.</p>
4194
4195 <p>If you want to test this, set up a blank Debian machine without any
4196 mail system installed (or run <tt>apt-get purge exim4-config</tt> to
4197 get rid of exim4).  Install tor, clone the git repository mentioned
4198 above, build the deb and install it on the machine.  Next, run
4199 <tt>/usr/lib/exim4-smtorp/setup-exim-hidden-service</tt> and follow
4200 the instructions to get the service up and running.  Restart tor and
4201 exim when it is done, and test mail delivery using swaks like
4202 this:</p>
4203
4204 <p><blockquote><pre>
4205 torsocks swaks --server dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion \
4206   --to fbx@dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion
4207 </pre></blockquote></p>
4208
4209 <p>This will test the SMTP delivery using tor.  Replace the email
4210 address with your own address to test your server. :)</p>
4211
4212 <p>The setup procedure is still to complex, and I hope it can be made
4213 easier and more automatic.  Especially the tor setup need more work.
4214 Also, the package include a tor-smtp tool written in C, but its task
4215 should probably be rewritten in some script language to make the deb
4216 architecture independent.  It would probably also make the code easier
4217 to review.  The tor-smtp tool currently need to listen on a socket for
4218 exim to talk to it and is started using xinetd.  It would be better if
4219 no daemon and no socket is needed.  I suspect it is possible to get
4220 exim to run a command line tool for delivery instead of talking to a
4221 socket, and hope to figure out how in a future version of this
4222 system.</p>
4223
4224 <p>Until I wipe my test machine, I can be reached using the
4225 <tt>fbx@dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion</tt> mail address, deliverable over
4226 SMTorP. :)</p>
4227
4228       </div>
4229       <div class="tags">
4230
4231
4232         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
4233
4234
4235       </div>
4236     </div>
4237     <div class="padding"></div>
4238
4239     <div class="entry">
4240       <div class="title">
4241         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/listadmin__the_quick_way_to_moderate_mailman_lists___nice_free_software.html">listadmin, the quick way to moderate mailman lists - nice free software</a>
4242       </div>
4243       <div class="date">
4244         22nd October 2014
4245       </div>
4246       <div class="body">
4247         <p>If you ever had to moderate a mailman list, like the ones on
4248 alioth.debian.org, you know the web interface is fairly slow to
4249 operate.  First you visit one web page, enter the moderation password
4250 and get a new page shown with a list of all the messages to moderate
4251 and various options for each email address.  This take a while for
4252 every list you moderate, and you need to do it regularly to do a good
4253 job as a list moderator.  But there is a quick alternative,
4254 <a href="http://heim.ifi.uio.no/kjetilho/hacks/#listadmin">the
4255 listadmin program</a>.  It allow you to check lists for new messages
4256 to moderate in a fraction of a second.  Here is a test run on two
4257 lists I recently took over:</p>
4258
4259 <p><blockquote><pre>
4260 % time listadmin xiph
4261 fetching data for pkg-xiph-commits@lists.alioth.debian.org ... nothing in queue
4262 fetching data for pkg-xiph-maint@lists.alioth.debian.org ... nothing in queue
4263
4264 real    0m1.709s
4265 user    0m0.232s
4266 sys     0m0.012s
4267 %
4268 </pre></blockquote></p>
4269
4270 <p>In 1.7 seconds I had checked two mailing lists and confirmed that
4271 there are no message in the moderation queue.  Every morning I
4272 currently moderate 68 mailman lists, and it normally take around two
4273 minutes.  When I took over the two pkg-xiph lists above a few days
4274 ago, there were 400 emails waiting in the moderator queue.  It took me
4275 less than 15 minutes to process them all using the listadmin
4276 program.</p>
4277
4278 <p>If you install
4279 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/listadmin">the listadmin
4280 package</a> from Debian and create a file <tt>~/.listadmin.ini</tt>
4281 with content like this, the moderation task is a breeze:</p>
4282
4283 <p><blockquote><pre>
4284 username username@example.org
4285 spamlevel 23
4286 default discard
4287 discard_if_reason "Posting restricted to members only. Remove us from your mail list."
4288
4289 password secret
4290 adminurl https://{domain}/mailman/admindb/{list}
4291 mailman-list@lists.example.com
4292
4293 password hidden
4294 other-list@otherserver.example.org
4295 </pre></blockquote></p>
4296
4297 <p>There are other options to set as well.  Check the manual page to
4298 learn the details.</p>
4299
4300 <p>If you are forced to moderate lists on a mailman installation where
4301 the SSL certificate is self signed or not properly signed by a
4302 generally accepted signing authority, you can set a environment
4303 variable when calling listadmin to disable SSL verification:</p>
4304
4305 <p><blockquote><pre>
4306 PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=0 listadmin
4307 </pre></blockquote></p>
4308
4309 <p>If you want to moderate a subset of the lists you take care of, you
4310 can provide an argument to the listadmin script like I do in the
4311 initial screen dump (the xiph argument).  Using an argument, only
4312 lists matching the argument string will be processed.  This make it
4313 quick to accept messages if you notice the moderation request in your
4314 email.</p>
4315
4316 <p>Without the listadmin program, I would never be the moderator of 68
4317 mailing lists, as I simply do not have time to spend on that if the
4318 process was any slower. The listadmin program have saved me hours of
4319 time I could spend elsewhere over the years.  It truly is nice free
4320 software.</p>
4321
4322 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
4323 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
4324 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
4325
4326 <p>Update 2014-10-27: Added missing 'username' statement in
4327 configuration example.  Also, I've been told that the
4328 PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=0 setting do not work for everyone.  Not
4329 sure why.</p>
4330
4331       </div>
4332       <div class="tags">
4333
4334
4335         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
4336
4337
4338       </div>
4339     </div>
4340     <div class="padding"></div>
4341
4342     <div class="entry">
4343       <div class="title">
4344         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Jessie__PXE_and_automatic_firmware_installation.html">Debian Jessie, PXE and automatic firmware installation</a>
4345       </div>
4346       <div class="date">
4347         17th October 2014
4348       </div>
4349       <div class="body">
4350         <p>When PXE installing laptops with Debian, I often run into the
4351 problem that the WiFi card require some firmware to work properly.
4352 And it has been a pain to fix this using preseeding in Debian.
4353 Normally something more is needed.  But thanks to
4354 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/i/isenkram.html">my isenkram
4355 package</a> and its recent tasksel extension, it has now become easy
4356 to do this using simple preseeding.</p>
4357
4358 <p>The isenkram-cli package provide tasksel tasks which will install
4359 firmware for the hardware found in the machine (actually, requested by
4360 the kernel modules for the hardware).  (It can also install user space
4361 programs supporting the hardware detected, but that is not the focus
4362 of this story.)</p>
4363
4364 <p>To get this working in the default installation, two preeseding
4365 values are needed.  First, the isenkram-cli package must be installed
4366 into the target chroot (aka the hard drive) before tasksel is executed
4367 in the pkgsel step of the debian-installer system.  This is done by
4368 preseeding the base-installer/includes debconf value to include the
4369 isenkram-cli package.  The package name is next passed to debootstrap
4370 for installation.  With the isenkram-cli package in place, tasksel
4371 will automatically use the isenkram tasks to detect hardware specific
4372 packages for the machine being installed and install them, because
4373 isenkram-cli contain tasksel tasks.</p>
4374
4375 <p>Second, one need to enable the non-free APT repository, because
4376 most firmware unfortunately is non-free.  This is done by preseeding
4377 the apt-mirror-setup step.  This is unfortunate, but for a lot of
4378 hardware it is the only option in Debian.</p>
4379
4380 <p>The end result is two lines needed in your preseeding file to get
4381 firmware installed automatically by the installer:</p>
4382
4383 <p><blockquote><pre>
4384 base-installer base-installer/includes string isenkram-cli
4385 apt-mirror-setup apt-setup/non-free boolean true
4386 </pre></blockquote></p>
4387
4388 <p>The current version of isenkram-cli in testing/jessie will install
4389 both firmware and user space packages when using this method.  It also
4390 do not work well, so use version 0.15 or later.  Installing both
4391 firmware and user space packages might give you a bit more than you
4392 want, so I decided to split the tasksel task in two, one for firmware
4393 and one for user space programs.  The firmware task is enabled by
4394 default, while the one for user space programs is not.  This split is
4395 implemented in the package currently in unstable.</p>
4396
4397 <p>If you decide to give this a go, please let me know (via email) how
4398 this recipe work for you. :)</p>
4399
4400 <p>So, I bet you are wondering, how can this work.  First and
4401 foremost, it work because tasksel is modular, and driven by whatever
4402 files it find in /usr/lib/tasksel/ and /usr/share/tasksel/.  So the
4403 isenkram-cli package place two files for tasksel to find.  First there
4404 is the task description file (/usr/share/tasksel/descs/isenkram.desc):</p>
4405
4406 <p><blockquote><pre>
4407 Task: isenkram-packages
4408 Section: hardware
4409 Description: Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)
4410  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific packages are
4411  proposed.
4412 Test-new-install: show show
4413 Relevance: 8
4414 Packages: for-current-hardware
4415
4416 Task: isenkram-firmware
4417 Section: hardware
4418 Description: Hardware specific firmware packages (autodetected by isenkram)
4419  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific firmware
4420  packages are proposed.
4421 Test-new-install: mark show
4422 Relevance: 8
4423 Packages: for-current-hardware-firmware
4424 </pre></blockquote></p>
4425
4426 <p>The key parts are Test-new-install which indicate how the task
4427 should be handled and the Packages line referencing to a script in
4428 /usr/lib/tasksel/packages/.  The scripts use other scripts to get a
4429 list of packages to install.  The for-current-hardware-firmware script
4430 look like this to list relevant firmware for the machine:
4431
4432 <p><blockquote><pre>
4433 #!/bin/sh
4434 #
4435 PATH=/usr/sbin:$PATH
4436 export PATH
4437 isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
4438 </pre></blockquote></p>
4439
4440 <p>With those two pieces in place, the firmware is installed by
4441 tasksel during the normal d-i run. :)</p>
4442
4443 <p>If you want to test what tasksel will install when isenkram-cli is
4444 installed, run <tt>DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical tasksel --test
4445 --new-install</tt> to get the list of packages that tasksel would
4446 install.</p>
4447
4448 <p><a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/">Debian Edu</a> will be
4449 pilots in testing this feature, as isenkram is used there now to
4450 install firmware, replacing the earlier scripts.</p>
4451
4452       </div>
4453       <div class="tags">
4454
4455
4456         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sysadmin">sysadmin</a>.
4457
4458
4459       </div>
4460     </div>
4461     <div class="padding"></div>
4462
4463     <div class="entry">
4464       <div class="title">
4465         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ubuntu_used_to_show_the_bread_prizes_at_ICA_Storo.html">Ubuntu used to show the bread prizes at ICA Storo</a>
4466       </div>
4467       <div class="date">
4468          4th October 2014
4469       </div>
4470       <div class="body">
4471         <p>Today I came across an unexpected Ubuntu boot screen.  Above the
4472 bread shelf on the ICA shop at Storo in Oslo, the grub menu of Ubuntu
4473 with Linux kernel 3.2.0-23 (ie probably version 12.04 LTS) was stuck
4474 on a screen normally showing the bread types and prizes:</p>
4475
4476 <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2014-10-04-ubuntu-ica-storo-crop.jpeg"></p>
4477
4478 <p>If it had booted as it was supposed to, I would never had known
4479 about this hidden Linux installation.  It is interesting what
4480 <a href="http://revealingerrors.com/">errors can reveal</a>.</p>
4481
4482       </div>
4483       <div class="tags">
4484
4485
4486         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4487
4488
4489       </div>
4490     </div>
4491     <div class="padding"></div>
4492
4493     <div class="entry">
4494       <div class="title">
4495         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_lsdvd_release_version_0_17_is_ready.html">New lsdvd release version 0.17 is ready</a>
4496       </div>
4497       <div class="date">
4498          4th October 2014
4499       </div>
4500       <div class="body">
4501         <p>The <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/">lsdvd project</a>
4502 got a new set of developers a few weeks ago, after the original
4503 developer decided to step down and pass the project to fresh blood.
4504 This project is now maintained by Petter Reinholdtsen and Steve
4505 Dibb.</p>
4506
4507 <p>I just wrapped up
4508 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/mailman/message/32896061/">a
4509 new lsdvd release</a>, available in git or from
4510 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/projects/lsdvd/files/lsdvd/">the
4511 download page</a>.  This is the changelog dated 2014-10-03 for version
4512 0.17.</p>
4513
4514 <ul>
4515
4516  <li>Ignore 'phantom' audio, subtitle tracks</li>
4517  <li>Check for garbage in the program chains, which indicate that a track is
4518    non-existant, to work around additional copy protection</li>
4519  <li>Fix displaying content type for audio tracks, subtitles</li>
4520  <li>Fix pallete display of first entry</li>
4521  <li>Fix include orders</li>
4522  <li>Ignore read errors in titles that would not be displayed anyway</li>
4523  <li>Fix the chapter count</li>
4524  <li>Make sure the array size and the array limit used when initialising
4525    the palette size is the same.</li>
4526  <li>Fix array printing.</li>
4527  <li>Correct subsecond calculations.</li>
4528  <li>Add sector information to the output format.</li>
4529  <li>Clean up code to be closer to ANSI C and compile without warnings
4530    with more GCC compiler warnings.</li>
4531
4532 </ul>
4533
4534 <p>This change bring together patches for lsdvd in use in various
4535 Linux and Unix distributions, as well as patches submitted to the
4536 project the last nine years.  Please check it out. :)</p>
4537
4538       </div>
4539       <div class="tags">
4540
4541
4542         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lsdvd">lsdvd</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>.
4543
4544
4545       </div>
4546     </div>
4547     <div class="padding"></div>
4548
4549     <div class="entry">
4550       <div class="title">
4551         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_test_Debian_Edu_Jessie_despite_some_fatal_problems_with_the_installer.html">How to test Debian Edu Jessie despite some fatal problems with the installer</a>
4552       </div>
4553       <div class="date">
4554         26th September 2014
4555       </div>
4556       <div class="body">
4557         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
4558 project</a> provide a Linux solution for schools, including a
4559 powerful desktop with education software, a central server providing
4560 web pages, user database, user home directories, central login and PXE
4561 boot of both  clients without disk and the installation to install Debian
4562 Edu on machines with disk (and a few other services perhaps to small
4563 to mention here).  We in the Debian Edu team are currently working on
4564 the Jessie based version, trying to get everything in shape before the
4565 freeze, to avoid having to maintain our own package repository in the
4566 future.  The
4567 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie">current
4568 status</a> can be seen on the Debian wiki, and there is still heaps of
4569 work left.  Some fatal problems block testing, breaking the installer,
4570 but it is possible to work around these to get anyway.  Here is a
4571 recipe on how to get the installation limping along.</p>
4572
4573 <p>First, download the test ISO via
4574 <a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.no/cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso">ftp</a>,
4575 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.no/cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso">http</a>
4576 or rsync (use
4577 ftp.skolelinux.org::cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso).
4578 The ISO build was broken on Tuesday, so we do not get a new ISO every
4579 12 hours or so, but thankfully the ISO we already got we are able to
4580 install with some tweaking.</p>
4581
4582 <p>When you get to the Debian Edu profile question, go to tty2
4583 (use Alt-Ctrl-F2), run</p>
4584
4585 <p><blockquote><pre>
4586 nano /usr/bin/edu-eatmydata-install
4587 </pre></blockquote></p>
4588
4589 <p>and add 'exit 0' as the second line, disabling the eatmydata
4590 optimization.  Return to the installation, select the profile you want
4591 and continue.  Without this change, exim4-config will fail to install
4592 due to a known bug in eatmydata.</p>
4593
4594 <p>When you get the grub question at the end, answer /dev/sda (or if
4595 this do not work, figure out what your correct value would be.  All my
4596 test machines need /dev/sda, so I have no advice if it do not fit
4597 your need.</p>
4598
4599 <p>If you installed a profile including a graphical desktop, log in as
4600 root after the initial boot from hard drive, and install the
4601 education-desktop-XXX metapackage.  XXX can be kde, gnome, lxde, xfce
4602 or mate.  If you want several desktop options, install more than one
4603 metapackage.  Once this is done, reboot and you should have a working
4604 graphical login screen.  This workaround should no longer be needed
4605 once the education-tasks package version 1.801 enter testing in two
4606 days.</p>
4607
4608 <p>I believe the ISO build will start working on two days when the new
4609 tasksel package enter testing and Steve McIntyre get a chance to
4610 update the debian-cd git repository.  The eatmydata, grub and desktop
4611 issues are already fixed in unstable and testing, and should show up
4612 on the ISO as soon as the ISO build start working again.  Well the
4613 eatmydata optimization is really just disabled.  The proper fix
4614 require an upload by the eatmydata maintainer applying the patch
4615 provided in bug <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/702711">#702711</a>.
4616 The rest have proper fixes in unstable.</p>
4617
4618 <p>I hope this get you going with the installation testing, as we are
4619 quickly running out of time trying to get our Jessie based
4620 installation ready before the distribution freeze in a month.</p>
4621
4622       </div>
4623       <div class="tags">
4624
4625
4626         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4627
4628
4629       </div>
4630     </div>
4631     <div class="padding"></div>
4632
4633     <div class="entry">
4634       <div class="title">
4635         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Suddenly_I_am_the_new_upstream_of_the_lsdvd_command_line_tool.html">Suddenly I am the new upstream of the lsdvd command line tool</a>
4636       </div>
4637       <div class="date">
4638         25th September 2014
4639       </div>
4640       <div class="body">
4641         <p>I use the <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/">lsdvd tool</a>
4642 to handle my fairly large DVD collection.  It is a nice command line
4643 tool to get details about a DVD, like title, tracks, track length,
4644 etc, in XML, Perl or human readable format.  But lsdvd have not seen
4645 any new development since 2006 and had a few irritating bugs affecting
4646 its use with some DVDs.  Upstream seemed to be dead, and in January I
4647 sent a small probe asking for a version control repository for the
4648 project, without any reply.  But I use it regularly and would like to
4649 get <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/lsdvd">an updated version
4650 into Debian</a>.  So two weeks ago I tried harder to get in touch with
4651 the project admin, and after getting a reply from him explaining that
4652 he was no longer interested in the project, I asked if I could take
4653 over.  And yesterday, I became project admin.</p>
4654
4655 <p>I've been in touch with a Gentoo developer and the Debian
4656 maintainer interested in joining forces to maintain the upstream
4657 project, and I hope we can get a new release out fairly quickly,
4658 collecting the patches spread around on the internet into on place.
4659 I've added the relevant Debian patches to the freshly created git
4660 repository, and expect the Gentoo patches to make it too.  If you got
4661 a DVD collection and care about command line tools, check out
4662 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/git/ci/master/tree/">the git source</a> and join
4663 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/mailman/">the project mailing
4664 list</a>. :)</p>
4665
4666       </div>
4667       <div class="tags">
4668
4669
4670         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lsdvd">lsdvd</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>.
4671
4672
4673       </div>
4674     </div>
4675     <div class="padding"></div>
4676
4677     <div class="entry">
4678       <div class="title">
4679         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Speeding_up_the_Debian_installer_using_eatmydata_and_dpkg_divert.html">Speeding up the Debian installer using eatmydata and dpkg-divert</a>
4680       </div>
4681       <div class="date">
4682         16th September 2014
4683       </div>
4684       <div class="body">
4685         <p>The <a href="https://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> installer could be
4686 a lot quicker.  When we install more than 2000 packages in
4687 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a> using
4688 tasksel in the installer, unpacking the binary packages take forever.
4689 A part of the slow I/O issue was discussed in
4690 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/613428">bug #613428</a> about too
4691 much file system sync-ing done by dpkg, which is the package
4692 responsible for unpacking the binary packages.  Other parts (like code
4693 executed by postinst scripts) might also sync to disk during
4694 installation.  All this sync-ing to disk do not really make sense to
4695 me.  If the machine crash half-way through, I start over, I do not try
4696 to salvage the half installed system.  So the failure sync-ing is
4697 supposed to protect against, hardware or system crash, is not really
4698 relevant while the installer is running.</p>
4699
4700 <p>A few days ago, I thought of a way to get rid of all the file
4701 system sync()-ing in a fairly non-intrusive way, without the need to
4702 change the code in several packages.  The idea is not new, but I have
4703 not heard anyone propose the approach using dpkg-divert before.  It
4704 depend on the small and clever package
4705 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/eatmydata">eatmydata</a>, which
4706 uses LD_PRELOAD to replace the system functions for syncing data to
4707 disk with functions doing nothing, thus allowing programs to live
4708 dangerous while speeding up disk I/O significantly.  Instead of
4709 modifying the implementation of dpkg, apt and tasksel (which are the
4710 packages responsible for selecting, fetching and installing packages),
4711 it occurred to me that we could just divert the programs away, replace
4712 them with a simple shell wrapper calling
4713 "eatmydata&nbsp;$program&nbsp;$@", to get the same effect.
4714 Two days ago I decided to test the idea, and wrapped up a simple
4715 implementation for the Debian Edu udeb.</p>
4716
4717 <p>The effect was stunning.  In my first test it reduced the running
4718 time of the pkgsel step (installing tasks) from 64 to less than 44
4719 minutes (20 minutes shaved off the installation) on an old Dell
4720 Latitude D505 machine.  I am not quite sure what the optimised time
4721 would have been, as I messed up the testing a bit, causing the debconf
4722 priority to get low enough for two questions to pop up during
4723 installation.  As soon as I saw the questions I moved the installation
4724 along, but do not know how long the question were holding up the
4725 installation.  I did some more measurements using Debian Edu Jessie,
4726 and got these results.  The time measured is the time stamp in
4727 /var/log/syslog between the "pkgsel: starting tasksel" and the
4728 "pkgsel: finishing up" lines, if you want to do the same measurement
4729 yourself.  In Debian Edu, the tasksel dialog do not show up, and the
4730 timing thus do not depend on how quickly the user handle the tasksel
4731 dialog.</p>
4732
4733 <p><table>
4734
4735 <tr>
4736 <th>Machine/setup</th>
4737 <th>Original tasksel</th>
4738 <th>Optimised tasksel</th>
4739 <th>Reduction</th>
4740 </tr>
4741
4742 <tr>
4743 <td>Latitude D505 Main+LTSP LXDE</td>
4744 <td>64 min (07:46-08:50)</td>
4745 <td><44 min (11:27-12:11)</td>
4746 <td>>20 min 18%</td>
4747 </tr>
4748
4749 <tr>
4750 <td>Latitude D505 Roaming LXDE</td>
4751 <td>57 min (08:48-09:45)</td>
4752 <td>34 min (07:43-08:17)</td>
4753 <td>23 min 40%</td>
4754 </tr>
4755
4756 <tr>
4757 <td>Latitude D505 Minimal</td>
4758 <td>22 min (10:37-10:59)</td>
4759 <td>11 min (11:16-11:27)</td>
4760 <td>11 min 50%</td>
4761 </tr>
4762
4763 <tr>
4764 <td>Thinkpad X200 Minimal</td>
4765 <td>6 min (08:19-08:25)</td>
4766 <td>4 min (08:04-08:08)</td>
4767 <td>2 min 33%</td>
4768 </tr>
4769
4770 <tr>
4771 <td>Thinkpad X200 Roaming KDE</td>
4772 <td>19 min (09:21-09:40)</td>
4773 <td>15 min (10:25-10:40)</td>
4774 <td>4 min 21%</td>
4775 </tr>
4776
4777 </table></p>
4778
4779 <p>The test is done using a netinst ISO on a USB stick, so some of the
4780 time is spent downloading packages.  The connection to the Internet
4781 was 100Mbit/s during testing, so downloading should not be a
4782 significant factor in the measurement.  Download typically took a few
4783 seconds to a few minutes, depending on the amount of packages being
4784 installed.</p>
4785
4786 <p>The speedup is implemented by using two hooks in
4787 <a href="https://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/">Debian
4788 Installer</a>, the pre-pkgsel.d hook to set up the diverts, and the
4789 finish-install.d hook to remove the divert at the end of the
4790 installation.  I picked the pre-pkgsel.d hook instead of the
4791 post-base-installer.d hook because I test using an ISO without the
4792 eatmydata package included, and the post-base-installer.d hook in
4793 Debian Edu can only operate on packages included in the ISO.  The
4794 negative effect of this is that I am unable to activate this
4795 optimization for the kernel installation step in d-i.  If the code is
4796 moved to the post-base-installer.d hook, the speedup would be larger
4797 for the entire installation.</p>
4798
4799 <p>I've implemented this in the
4800 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/debian-edu-install">debian-edu-install</a>
4801 git repository, and plan to provide the optimization as part of the
4802 Debian Edu installation.  If you want to test this yourself, you can
4803 create two files in the installer (or in an udeb).  One shell script
4804 need do go into /usr/lib/pre-pkgsel.d/, with content like this:</p>
4805
4806 <p><blockquote><pre>
4807 #!/bin/sh
4808 set -e
4809 . /usr/share/debconf/confmodule
4810 info() {
4811     logger -t my-pkgsel "info: $*"
4812 }
4813 error() {
4814     logger -t my-pkgsel "error: $*"
4815 }
4816 override_install() {
4817     apt-install eatmydata || true
4818     if [ -x /target/usr/bin/eatmydata ] ; then
4819         for bin in dpkg apt-get aptitude tasksel ; do
4820             file=/usr/bin/$bin
4821             # Test that the file exist and have not been diverted already.
4822             if [ -f /target$file ] ; then
4823                 info "diverting $file using eatmydata"
4824                 printf "#!/bin/sh\neatmydata $bin.distrib \"\$@\"\n" \
4825                     > /target$file.edu
4826                 chmod 755 /target$file.edu
4827                 in-target dpkg-divert --package debian-edu-config \
4828                     --rename --quiet --add $file
4829                 ln -sf ./$bin.edu /target$file
4830             else
4831                 error "unable to divert $file, as it is missing."
4832             fi
4833         done
4834     else
4835         error "unable to find /usr/bin/eatmydata after installing the eatmydata pacage"
4836     fi
4837 }
4838
4839 override_install
4840 </pre></blockquote></p>
4841
4842 <p>To clean up, another shell script should go into
4843 /usr/lib/finish-install.d/ with code like this:
4844
4845 <p><blockquote><pre>
4846 #! /bin/sh -e
4847 . /usr/share/debconf/confmodule
4848 error() {
4849     logger -t my-finish-install "error: $@"
4850 }
4851 remove_install_override() {
4852     for bin in dpkg apt-get aptitude tasksel ; do
4853         file=/usr/bin/$bin
4854         if [ -x /target$file.edu ] ; then
4855             rm /target$file
4856             in-target dpkg-divert --package debian-edu-config \
4857                 --rename --quiet --remove $file
4858             rm /target$file.edu
4859         else
4860             error "Missing divert for $file."
4861         fi
4862     done
4863     sync # Flush file buffers before continuing
4864 }
4865
4866 remove_install_override
4867 </pre></blockquote></p>
4868
4869 <p>In Debian Edu, I placed both code fragments in a separate script
4870 edu-eatmydata-install and call it from the pre-pkgsel.d and
4871 finish-install.d scripts.</p>
4872
4873 <p>By now you might ask if this change should get into the normal
4874 Debian installer too?  I suspect it should, but am not sure the
4875 current debian-installer coordinators find it useful enough.  It also
4876 depend on the side effects of the change.  I'm not aware of any, but I
4877 guess we will see if the change is safe after some more testing.
4878 Perhaps there is some package in Debian depending on sync() and
4879 fsync() having effect?  Perhaps it should go into its own udeb, to
4880 allow those of us wanting to enable it to do so without affecting
4881 everyone.</p>
4882
4883 <p>Update 2014-09-24: Since a few days ago, enabling this optimization
4884 will break installation of all programs using gnutls because of
4885 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/702711">bug #702711</a>.  An updated
4886 eatmydata package in Debian will solve it.</p>
4887
4888 <p>Update 2014-10-17: The bug mentioned above is fixed in testing and
4889 the optimization work again.  And I have discovered that the
4890 dpkg-divert trick is not really needed and implemented a slightly
4891 simpler approach as part of the debian-edu-install package.  See
4892 tools/edu-eatmydata-install in the source package.</p>
4893
4894 <p>Update 2014-11-11: Unfortunately, a new
4895 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/765738">bug #765738</a> in eatmydata only
4896 triggering on i386 made it into testing, and broke this installation
4897 optimization again.  If <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/768893">unblock
4898 request 768893</a> is accepted, it should be working again.</p>
4899
4900       </div>
4901       <div class="tags">
4902
4903
4904         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4905
4906
4907       </div>
4908     </div>
4909     <div class="padding"></div>
4910
4911     <div class="entry">
4912       <div class="title">
4913         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Good_bye_subkeys_pgp_net__welcome_pool_sks_keyservers_net.html">Good bye subkeys.pgp.net, welcome pool.sks-keyservers.net</a>
4914       </div>
4915       <div class="date">
4916         10th September 2014
4917       </div>
4918       <div class="body">
4919         <p>Yesterday, I had the pleasure of attending a talk with the
4920 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a> about
4921 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20140909-sks-keyservers/">the
4922 OpenPGP keyserver pool sks-keyservers.net</a>, and was very happy to
4923 learn that there is a large set of publicly available key servers to
4924 use when looking for peoples public key.  So far I have used
4925 subkeys.pgp.net, and some times wwwkeys.nl.pgp.net when the former
4926 were misbehaving, but those days are ended.  The servers I have used
4927 up until yesterday have been slow and some times unavailable.  I hope
4928 those problems are gone now.</p>
4929
4930 <p>Behind the round robin DNS entry of the
4931 <a href="https://sks-keyservers.net/">sks-keyservers.net</a> service
4932 there is a pool of more than 100 keyservers which are checked every
4933 day to ensure they are well connected and up to date.  It must be
4934 better than what I have used so far. :)</p>
4935
4936 <p>Yesterdays speaker told me that the service is the default
4937 keyserver provided by the default configuration in GnuPG, but this do
4938 not seem to be used in Debian.  Perhaps it should?</p>
4939
4940 <p>Anyway, I've updated my ~/.gnupg/options file to now include this
4941 line:</p>
4942
4943 <p><blockquote><pre>
4944 keyserver pool.sks-keyservers.net
4945 </pre></blockquote></p>
4946
4947 <p>With GnuPG version 2 one can also locate the keyserver using SRV
4948 entries in DNS.  Just for fun, I did just that at work, so now every
4949 user of GnuPG at the University of Oslo should find a OpenGPG
4950 keyserver automatically should their need it:</p>
4951
4952 <p><blockquote><pre>
4953 % host -t srv _pgpkey-http._tcp.uio.no
4954 _pgpkey-http._tcp.uio.no has SRV record 0 100 11371 pool.sks-keyservers.net.
4955 %
4956 </pre></blockquote></p>
4957
4958 <p>Now if only
4959 <a href="http://ietfreport.isoc.org/idref/draft-shaw-openpgp-hkp/">the
4960 HKP lookup protocol</a> supported finding signature paths, I would be
4961 very happy.  It can look up a given key or search for a user ID, but I
4962 normally do not want that, but to find a trust path from my key to
4963 another key.  Given a user ID or key ID, I would like to find (and
4964 download) the keys representing a signature path from my key to the
4965 key in question, to be able to get a trust path between the two keys.
4966 This is as far as I can tell not possible today.  Perhaps something
4967 for a future version of the protocol?</p>
4968
4969       </div>
4970       <div class="tags">
4971
4972
4973         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
4974
4975
4976       </div>
4977     </div>
4978     <div class="padding"></div>
4979
4980     <div class="entry">
4981       <div class="title">
4982         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/From_English_wiki_to_translated_PDF_and_epub_via_Docbook.html">From English wiki to translated PDF and epub via Docbook</a>
4983       </div>
4984       <div class="date">
4985         17th June 2014
4986       </div>
4987       <div class="body">
4988         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
4989 project</a> provide an instruction manual for teachers, system
4990 administrators and other users that contain useful tips for setting up
4991 and maintaining a Debian Edu installation.  This text is about how the
4992 text processing of this manual is handled in the project.</p>
4993
4994 <p>One goal of the project is to provide information in the native
4995 language of its users, and for this we need to handle translations.
4996 But we also want to make sure each language contain the same
4997 information, so for this we need a good way to keep the translations
4998 in sync.  And we want it to be easy for our users to improve the
4999 documentation, avoiding the need to learn special formats or tools to
5000 contribute, and the obvious way to do this is to make it possible to
5001 edit the documentation using a web browser.  We also want it to be
5002 easy for translators to keep the translation up to date, and give them
5003 help in figuring out what need to be translated. Here is the list of
5004 tools and the process we have found trying to reach all these
5005 goals.</p>
5006
5007 <p>We maintain the authoritative source of our manual in the
5008 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/">Debian
5009 wiki</a>, as several wiki pages written in English.  It consist of one
5010 front page with references to the different chapters, several pages
5011 for each chapter, and finally one "collection page" gluing all the
5012 chapters together into one large web page (aka
5013 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/AllInOne">the
5014 AllInOne page</a>).  The AllInOne page is the one used for further
5015 processing and translations.  Thanks to the fact that the
5016 <a href="http://moinmo.in/">MoinMoin</a> installation on
5017 wiki.debian.org support exporting pages in
5018 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">the Docbook format</a>, we can fetch
5019 the list of pages to export using the raw version of the AllInOne
5020 page, loop over each of them to generate a Docbook XML version of the
5021 manual.  This process also download images and transform image
5022 references to use the locally downloaded images.  The generated
5023 Docbook XML files are slightly broken, so some post-processing is done
5024 using the <tt>documentation/scripts/get_manual</tt> program, and the
5025 result is a nice Docbook XML file (debian-edu-wheezy-manual.xml) and
5026 a handfull of images.  The XML file can now be used to generate PDF, HTML
5027 and epub versions of the English manual.  This is the basic step of
5028 our process, making PDF (using dblatex), HTML (using xsltproc) and
5029 epub (using dbtoepub) version from Docbook XML, and the resulting files
5030 are placed in the debian-edu-doc-en binary package.</p>
5031
5032 <p>But English documentation is not enough for us.  We want translated
5033 documentation too, and we want to make it easy for translators to
5034 track the English original.  For this we use the
5035 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/poxml.html">poxml</a> package,
5036 which allow us to transform the English Docbook XML file into a
5037 translation file (a .pot file), usable with the normal gettext based
5038 translation tools used by those translating free software.  The pot
5039 file is used to create and maintain translation files (several .po
5040 files), which the translations update with the native language
5041 translations of all titles, paragraphs and blocks of text in the
5042 original.  The next step is combining the original English Docbook XML
5043 and the translation file (say debian-edu-wheezy-manual.nb.po), to
5044 create a translated Docbook XML file (in this case
5045 debian-edu-wheezy-manual.nb.xml).  This translated (or partly
5046 translated, if the translation is not complete) Docbook XML file can
5047 then be used like the original to create a PDF, HTML and epub version
5048 of the documentation.</p>
5049
5050 <p>The translators use different tools to edit the .po files.  We
5051 recommend using
5052 <a href="http://www.kde.org/applications/development/lokalize/">lokalize</a>,
5053 while some use emacs and vi, others can use web based editors like
5054 <a href="http://pootle.translatehouse.org/">Poodle</a> or
5055 <a href="https://www.transifex.com/">Transifex</a>.  All we care about
5056 is where the .po file end up, in our git repository.  Updated
5057 translations can either be committed directly to git, or submitted as
5058 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/src:debian-edu-doc">bug reports
5059 against the debian-edu-doc package</a>.</p>
5060
5061 <p>One challenge is images, which both might need to be translated (if
5062 they show translated user applications), and are needed in different
5063 formats when creating PDF and HTML versions (epub is a HTML version in
5064 this regard).  For this we transform the original PNG images to the
5065 needed density and format during build, and have a way to provide
5066 translated images by storing translated versions in
5067 images/$LANGUAGECODE/.  I am a bit unsure about the details here.  The
5068 package maintainers know more.</p>
5069
5070 <p>If you wonder what the result look like, we provide
5071 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/">the content
5072 of the documentation packages on the web</a>.  See for example the
5073 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/it/debian-edu-wheezy-manual.pdf">Italian
5074 PDF version</a> or the
5075 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/de/debian-edu-wheezy-manual.html">German
5076 HTML version</a>.  We do not yet build the epub version by default,
5077 but perhaps it will be done in the future.</p>
5078
5079 <p>To learn more, check out
5080 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/debian-edu-doc.html">the
5081 debian-edu-doc package</a>,
5082 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/">the
5083 manual on the wiki</a> and
5084 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/Translations">the
5085 translation instructions</a> in the manual.</p>
5086
5087       </div>
5088       <div class="tags">
5089
5090
5091         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5092
5093
5094       </div>
5095     </div>
5096     <div class="padding"></div>
5097
5098     <div class="entry">
5099       <div class="title">
5100         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Install_hardware_dependent_packages_using_tasksel__Isenkram_0_7_.html">Install hardware dependent packages using tasksel (Isenkram 0.7)</a>
5101       </div>
5102       <div class="date">
5103         23rd April 2014
5104       </div>
5105       <div class="body">
5106         <p>It would be nice if it was easier in Debian to get all the hardware
5107 related packages relevant for the computer installed automatically.
5108 So I implemented one, using
5109 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">my Isenkram
5110 package</a>.  To use it, install the tasksel and isenkram packages and
5111 run tasksel as user root.  You should be presented with a new option,
5112 "Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)".  When you
5113 select it, tasksel will install the packages isenkram claim is fit for
5114 the current hardware, hot pluggable or not.<p>
5115
5116 <p>The implementation is in two files, one is the tasksel menu entry
5117 description, and the other is the script used to extract the list of
5118 packages to install.  The first part is in
5119 <tt>/usr/share/tasksel/descs/isenkram.desc</tt> and look like
5120 this:</p>
5121
5122 <p><blockquote><pre>
5123 Task: isenkram
5124 Section: hardware
5125 Description: Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)
5126  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific packages are
5127  proposed.
5128 Test-new-install: mark show
5129 Relevance: 8
5130 Packages: for-current-hardware
5131 </pre></blockquote></p>
5132
5133 <p>The second part is in
5134 <tt>/usr/lib/tasksel/packages/for-current-hardware</tt> and look like
5135 this:</p>
5136
5137 <p><blockquote><pre>
5138 #!/bin/sh
5139 #
5140 (
5141     isenkram-lookup
5142     isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
5143 ) | sort -u
5144 </pre></blockquote></p>
5145
5146 <p>All in all, a very short and simple implementation making it
5147 trivial to install the hardware dependent package we all may want to
5148 have installed on our machines.  I've not been able to find a way to
5149 get tasksel to tell you exactly which packages it plan to install
5150 before doing the installation.  So if you are curious or careful,
5151 check the output from the isenkram-* command line tools first.</p>
5152
5153 <p>The information about which packages are handling which hardware is
5154 fetched either from the isenkram package itself in
5155 /usr/share/isenkram/, from git.debian.org or from the APT package
5156 database (using the Modaliases header).  The APT package database
5157 parsing have caused a nasty resource leak in the isenkram daemon (bugs
5158 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/719837">#719837</a> and
5159 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/730704">#730704</a>).  The cause is in
5160 the python-apt code (bug
5161 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/745487">#745487</a>), but using a
5162 workaround I was able to get rid of the file descriptor leak and
5163 reduce the memory leak from ~30 MiB per hardware detection down to
5164 around 2 MiB per hardware detection.  It should make the desktop
5165 daemon a lot more useful.  The fix is in version 0.7 uploaded to
5166 unstable today.</p>
5167
5168 <p>I believe the current way of mapping hardware to packages in
5169 Isenkram is is a good draft, but in the future I expect isenkram to
5170 use the AppStream data source for this.  A proposal for getting proper
5171 AppStream support into Debian is floating around as
5172 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-11">DEP-11</a>, and
5173 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2014/Projects#SummerOfCode2014.2FProjects.2FAppStreamDEP11Implementation.AppStream.2FDEP-11_for_the_Debian_Archive">GSoC
5174 project</a> will take place this summer to improve the situation.  I
5175 look forward to seeing the result, and welcome patches for isenkram to
5176 start using the information when it is ready.</p>
5177
5178 <p>If you want your package to map to some specific hardware, either
5179 add a "Xb-Modaliases" header to your control file like I did in
5180 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pymissile">the pymissile
5181 package</a> or submit a bug report with the details to the isenkram
5182 package.  See also
5183 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">all my
5184 blog posts tagged isenkram</a> for details on the notation.  I expect
5185 the information will be migrated to AppStream eventually, but for the
5186 moment I got no better place to store it.</p>
5187
5188       </div>
5189       <div class="tags">
5190
5191
5192         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
5193
5194
5195       </div>
5196     </div>
5197     <div class="padding"></div>
5198
5199     <div class="entry">
5200       <div class="title">
5201         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/FreedomBox_milestone___all_packages_now_in_Debian_Sid.html">FreedomBox milestone - all packages now in Debian Sid</a>
5202       </div>
5203       <div class="date">
5204         15th April 2014
5205       </div>
5206       <div class="body">
5207         <p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox
5208 project</a> is working on providing the software and hardware to make
5209 it easy for non-technical people to host their data and communication
5210 at home, and being able to communicate with their friends and family
5211 encrypted and away from prying eyes.  It is still going strong, and
5212 today a major mile stone was reached.</p>
5213
5214 <p>Today, the last of the packages currently used by the project to
5215 created the system images were accepted into Debian Unstable.  It was
5216 the freedombox-setup package, which is used to configure the images
5217 during build and on the first boot.  Now all one need to get going is
5218 the build code from the freedom-maker git repository and packages from
5219 Debian.  And once the freedombox-setup package enter testing, we can
5220 build everything directly from Debian. :)</p>
5221
5222 <p>Some key packages used by Freedombox are
5223 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/freedombox-setup">freedombox-setup</a>,
5224 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/plinth">plinth</a>,
5225 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pagekite">pagekite</a>,
5226 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/tor">tor</a>,
5227 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/privoxy">privoxy</a>,
5228 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/owncloud">owncloud</a> and
5229 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/dnsmasq">dnsmasq</a>.  There
5230 are plans to integrate more packages into the setup.  User
5231 documentation is maintained on the Debian wiki.  Please
5232 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/Manual/Jessie">check out
5233 the manual</a> and help us improve it.</p>
5234
5235 <p>To test for yourself and create boot images with the FreedomBox
5236 setup, run this on a Debian machine using a user with sudo rights to
5237 become root:</p>
5238
5239 <p><pre>
5240 sudo apt-get install git vmdebootstrap mercurial python-docutils \
5241   mktorrent extlinux virtualbox qemu-user-static binfmt-support \
5242   u-boot-tools
5243 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/freedombox/freedom-maker.git \
5244   freedom-maker
5245 make -C freedom-maker dreamplug-image raspberry-image virtualbox-image
5246 </pre></p>
5247
5248 <p>Root access is needed to run debootstrap and mount loopback
5249 devices.  See the README in the freedom-maker git repo for more
5250 details on the build.  If you do not want all three images, trim the
5251 make line.  Note that the virtualbox-image target is not really
5252 virtualbox specific.  It create a x86 image usable in kvm, qemu,
5253 vmware and any other x86 virtual machine environment.  You might need
5254 the version of vmdebootstrap in Jessie to get the build working, as it
5255 include fixes for a race condition with kpartx.</p>
5256
5257 <p>If you instead want to install using a Debian CD and the preseed
5258 method, boot a Debian Wheezy ISO and use this boot argument to load
5259 the preseed values:</p>
5260
5261 <p><pre>
5262 url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat</a>
5263 </pre></p>
5264
5265 <p>I have not tested it myself the last few weeks, so I do not know if
5266 it still work.</p>
5267
5268 <p>If you wonder how to help, one task you could look at is using
5269 systemd as the boot system.  It will become the default for Linux in
5270 Jessie, so we need to make sure it is usable on the Freedombox.  I did
5271 a simple test a few weeks ago, and noticed dnsmasq failed to start
5272 during boot when using systemd.  I suspect there are other problems
5273 too. :) To detect problems, there is a test suite included, which can
5274 be run from the plinth web interface.</p>
5275
5276 <p>Give it a go and let us know how it goes on the mailing list, and help
5277 us get the new release published. :) Please join us on
5278 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC (#freedombox on
5279 irc.debian.org)</a> and
5280 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
5281 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
5282
5283       </div>
5284       <div class="tags">
5285
5286
5287         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
5288
5289
5290       </div>
5291     </div>
5292     <div class="padding"></div>
5293
5294     <div class="entry">
5295       <div class="title">
5296         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/S3QL__a_locally_mounted_cloud_file_system___nice_free_software.html">S3QL, a locally mounted cloud file system - nice free software</a>
5297       </div>
5298       <div class="date">
5299          9th April 2014
5300       </div>
5301       <div class="body">
5302         <p>For a while now, I have been looking for a sensible offsite backup
5303 solution for use at home.  My requirements are simple, it must be
5304 cheap and locally encrypted (in other words, I keep the encryption
5305 keys, the storage provider do not have access to my private files).
5306 One idea me and my friends had many years ago, before the cloud
5307 storage providers showed up, was to use Google mail as storage,
5308 writing a Linux block device storing blocks as emails in the mail
5309 service provided by Google, and thus get heaps of free space.  On top
5310 of this one can add encryption, RAID and volume management to have
5311 lots of (fairly slow, I admit that) cheap and encrypted storage.  But
5312 I never found time to implement such system.  But the last few weeks I
5313 have looked at a system called
5314 <a href="https://bitbucket.org/nikratio/s3ql/">S3QL</a>, a locally
5315 mounted network backed file system with the features I need.</p>
5316
5317 <p>S3QL is a fuse file system with a local cache and cloud storage,
5318 handling several different storage providers, any with Amazon S3,
5319 Google Drive or OpenStack API.  There are heaps of such storage
5320 providers.  S3QL can also use a local directory as storage, which
5321 combined with sshfs allow for file storage on any ssh server.  S3QL
5322 include support for encryption, compression, de-duplication, snapshots
5323 and immutable file systems, allowing me to mount the remote storage as
5324 a local mount point, look at and use the files as if they were local,
5325 while the content is stored in the cloud as well.  This allow me to
5326 have a backup that should survive fire.  The file system can not be
5327 shared between several machines at the same time, as only one can
5328 mount it at the time, but any machine with the encryption key and
5329 access to the storage service can mount it if it is unmounted.</p>
5330
5331 <p>It is simple to use.  I'm using it on Debian Wheezy, where the
5332 package is included already.  So to get started, run <tt>apt-get
5333 install s3ql</tt>.  Next, pick a storage provider.  I ended up picking
5334 Greenqloud, after reading their nice recipe on
5335 <a href="https://greenqloud.zendesk.com/entries/44611757-How-To-Use-S3QL-to-mount-a-StorageQloud-bucket-on-Debian-Wheezy">how
5336 to use S3QL with their Amazon S3 service</a>, because I trust the laws
5337 in Iceland more than those in USA when it come to keeping my personal
5338 data safe and private, and thus would rather spend money on a company
5339 in Iceland.  Another nice recipe is available from the article
5340 <a href="http://www.admin-magazine.com/HPC/Articles/HPC-Cloud-Storage">S3QL
5341 Filesystem for HPC Storage</a> by Jeff Layton in the HPC section of
5342 Admin magazine.  When the provider is picked, figure out how to get
5343 the API key needed to connect to the storage API.  With Greencloud,
5344 the key did not show up until I had added payment details to my
5345 account.</p>
5346
5347 <p>Armed with the API access details, it is time to create the file
5348 system.  First, create a new bucket in the cloud.  This bucket is the
5349 file system storage area.  I picked a bucket name reflecting the
5350 machine that was going to store data there, but any name will do.
5351 I'll refer to it as <tt>bucket-name</tt> below.  In addition, one need
5352 the API login and password, and a locally created password.  Store it
5353 all in ~root/.s3ql/authinfo2 like this:
5354
5355 <p><blockquote><pre>
5356 [s3c]
5357 storage-url: s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
5358 backend-login: API-login
5359 backend-password: API-password
5360 fs-passphrase: local-password
5361 </pre></blockquote></p>
5362
5363 <p>I create my local passphrase using <tt>pwget 50</tt> or similar,
5364 but any sensible way to create a fairly random password should do it.
5365 Armed with these details, it is now time to run mkfs, entering the API
5366 details and password to create it:</p>
5367
5368 <p><blockquote><pre>
5369 # mkdir -m 700 /var/lib/s3ql-cache
5370 # mkfs.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
5371   --ssl s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
5372 Enter backend login:
5373 Enter backend password:
5374 Before using S3QL, make sure to read the user's guide, especially
5375 the 'Important Rules to Avoid Loosing Data' section.
5376 Enter encryption password:
5377 Confirm encryption password:
5378 Generating random encryption key...
5379 Creating metadata tables...
5380 Dumping metadata...
5381 ..objects..
5382 ..blocks..
5383 ..inodes..
5384 ..inode_blocks..
5385 ..symlink_targets..
5386 ..names..
5387 ..contents..
5388 ..ext_attributes..
5389 Compressing and uploading metadata...
5390 Wrote 0.00 MB of compressed metadata.
5391 # </pre></blockquote></p>
5392
5393 <p>The next step is mounting the file system to make the storage available.
5394
5395 <p><blockquote><pre>
5396 # mount.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
5397   --ssl --allow-root s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name /s3ql
5398 Using 4 upload threads.
5399 Downloading and decompressing metadata...
5400 Reading metadata...
5401 ..objects..
5402 ..blocks..
5403 ..inodes..
5404 ..inode_blocks..
5405 ..symlink_targets..
5406 ..names..
5407 ..contents..
5408 ..ext_attributes..
5409 Mounting filesystem...
5410 # df -h /s3ql
5411 Filesystem                              Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
5412 s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name  1.0T     0  1.0T   0% /s3ql
5413 #
5414 </pre></blockquote></p>
5415
5416 <p>The file system is now ready for use.  I use rsync to store my
5417 backups in it, and as the metadata used by rsync is downloaded at
5418 mount time, no network traffic (and storage cost) is triggered by
5419 running rsync.  To unmount, one should not use the normal umount
5420 command, as this will not flush the cache to the cloud storage, but
5421 instead running the umount.s3ql command like this:
5422
5423 <p><blockquote><pre>
5424 # umount.s3ql /s3ql
5425 #
5426 </pre></blockquote></p>
5427
5428 <p>There is a fsck command available to check the file system and
5429 correct any problems detected.  This can be used if the local server
5430 crashes while the file system is mounted, to reset the "already
5431 mounted" flag.  This is what it look like when processing a working
5432 file system:</p>
5433
5434 <p><blockquote><pre>
5435 # fsck.s3ql --force --ssl s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
5436 Using cached metadata.
5437 File system seems clean, checking anyway.
5438 Checking DB integrity...
5439 Creating temporary extra indices...
5440 Checking lost+found...
5441 Checking cached objects...
5442 Checking names (refcounts)...
5443 Checking contents (names)...
5444 Checking contents (inodes)...
5445 Checking contents (parent inodes)...
5446 Checking objects (reference counts)...
5447 Checking objects (backend)...
5448 ..processed 5000 objects so far..
5449 ..processed 10000 objects so far..
5450 ..processed 15000 objects so far..
5451 Checking objects (sizes)...
5452 Checking blocks (referenced objects)...
5453 Checking blocks (refcounts)...
5454 Checking inode-block mapping (blocks)...
5455 Checking inode-block mapping (inodes)...
5456 Checking inodes (refcounts)...
5457 Checking inodes (sizes)...
5458 Checking extended attributes (names)...
5459 Checking extended attributes (inodes)...
5460 Checking symlinks (inodes)...
5461 Checking directory reachability...
5462 Checking unix conventions...
5463 Checking referential integrity...
5464 Dropping temporary indices...
5465 Backing up old metadata...
5466 Dumping metadata...
5467 ..objects..
5468 ..blocks..
5469 ..inodes..
5470 ..inode_blocks..
5471 ..symlink_targets..
5472 ..names..
5473 ..contents..
5474 ..ext_attributes..
5475 Compressing and uploading metadata...
5476 Wrote 0.89 MB of compressed metadata.
5477 #
5478 </pre></blockquote></p>
5479
5480 <p>Thanks to the cache, working on files that fit in the cache is very
5481 quick, about the same speed as local file access.  Uploading large
5482 amount of data is to me limited by the bandwidth out of and into my
5483 house.  Uploading 685 MiB with a 100 MiB cache gave me 305 kiB/s,
5484 which is very close to my upload speed, and downloading the same
5485 Debian installation ISO gave me 610 kiB/s, close to my download speed.
5486 Both were measured using <tt>dd</tt>.  So for me, the bottleneck is my
5487 network, not the file system code.  I do not know what a good cache
5488 size would be, but suspect that the cache should e larger than your
5489 working set.</p>
5490
5491 <p>I mentioned that only one machine can mount the file system at the
5492 time.  If another machine try, it is told that the file system is
5493 busy:</p>
5494
5495 <p><blockquote><pre>
5496 # mount.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
5497   --ssl --allow-root s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name /s3ql
5498 Using 8 upload threads.
5499 Backend reports that fs is still mounted elsewhere, aborting.
5500 #
5501 </pre></blockquote></p>
5502
5503 <p>The file content is uploaded when the cache is full, while the
5504 metadata is uploaded once every 24 hour by default.  To ensure the
5505 file system content is flushed to the cloud, one can either umount the
5506 file system, or ask S3QL to flush the cache and metadata using
5507 s3qlctrl:
5508
5509 <p><blockquote><pre>
5510 # s3qlctrl upload-meta /s3ql
5511 # s3qlctrl flushcache /s3ql
5512 #
5513 </pre></blockquote></p>
5514
5515 <p>If you are curious about how much space your data uses in the
5516 cloud, and how much compression and deduplication cut down on the
5517 storage usage, you can use s3qlstat on the mounted file system to get
5518 a report:</p>
5519
5520 <p><blockquote><pre>
5521 # s3qlstat /s3ql
5522 Directory entries:    9141
5523 Inodes:               9143
5524 Data blocks:          8851
5525 Total data size:      22049.38 MB
5526 After de-duplication: 21955.46 MB (99.57% of total)
5527 After compression:    21877.28 MB (99.22% of total, 99.64% of de-duplicated)
5528 Database size:        2.39 MB (uncompressed)
5529 (some values do not take into account not-yet-uploaded dirty blocks in cache)
5530 #
5531 </pre></blockquote></p>
5532
5533 <p>I mentioned earlier that there are several possible suppliers of
5534 storage.  I did not try to locate them all, but am aware of at least
5535 <a href="https://www.greenqloud.com/">Greenqloud</a>,
5536 <a href="http://drive.google.com/">Google Drive</a>,
5537 <a href="http://aws.amazon.com/s3/">Amazon S3 web serivces</a>,
5538 <a href="http://www.rackspace.com/">Rackspace</a> and
5539 <a href="http://crowncloud.net/">Crowncloud</A>.  The latter even
5540 accept payment in Bitcoin.  Pick one that suit your need.  Some of
5541 them provide several GiB of free storage, but the prize models are
5542 quite different and you will have to figure out what suits you
5543 best.</p>
5544
5545 <p>While researching this blog post, I had a look at research papers
5546 and posters discussing the S3QL file system.  There are several, which
5547 told me that the file system is getting a critical check by the
5548 science community and increased my confidence in using it.  One nice
5549 poster is titled
5550 "<a href="http://www.lanl.gov/orgs/adtsc/publications/science_highlights_2013/docs/pg68_69.pdf">An
5551 Innovative Parallel Cloud Storage System using OpenStack’s SwiftObject
5552 Store and Transformative Parallel I/O Approach</a>" by Hsing-Bung
5553 Chen, Benjamin McClelland, David Sherrill, Alfred Torrez, Parks Fields
5554 and Pamela Smith.  Please  have a look.</p>
5555
5556 <p>Given my problems with different file systems earlier, I decided to
5557 check out the mounted S3QL file system to see if it would be usable as
5558 a home directory (in other word, that it provided POSIX semantics when
5559 it come to locking and umask handling etc).  Running
5560 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_if_a_file_system_can_be_used_for_home_directories___.html">my
5561 test code to check file system semantics</a>, I was happy to discover that
5562 no error was found.  So the file system can be used for home
5563 directories, if one chooses to do so.</p>
5564
5565 <p>If you do not want a locally file system, and want something that
5566 work without the Linux fuse file system, I would like to mention the
5567 <a href="http://www.tarsnap.com/">Tarsnap service</a>, which also
5568 provide locally encrypted backup using a command line client.  It have
5569 a nicer access control system, where one can split out read and write
5570 access, allowing some systems to write to the backup and others to
5571 only read from it.</p>
5572
5573 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
5574 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
5575 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
5576
5577       </div>
5578       <div class="tags">
5579
5580
5581         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
5582
5583
5584       </div>
5585     </div>
5586     <div class="padding"></div>
5587
5588     <div class="entry">
5589       <div class="title">
5590         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Freedombox_on_Dreamplug__Raspberry_Pi_and_virtual_x86_machine.html">Freedombox on Dreamplug, Raspberry Pi and virtual x86 machine</a>
5591       </div>
5592       <div class="date">
5593         14th March 2014
5594       </div>
5595       <div class="body">
5596         <p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox
5597 project</a> is working on providing the software and hardware for
5598 making it easy for non-technical people to host their data and
5599 communication at home, and being able to communicate with their
5600 friends and family encrypted and away from prying eyes.  It has been
5601 going on for a while, and is slowly progressing towards a new test
5602 release (0.2).</p>
5603
5604 <p>And what day could be better than the Pi day to announce that the
5605 new version will provide "hard drive" / SD card / USB stick images for
5606 Dreamplug, Raspberry Pi and VirtualBox (or any other virtualization
5607 system), and can also be installed using a Debian installer preseed
5608 file.  The Debian based Freedombox is now based on Debian Jessie,
5609 where most of the needed packages used are already present.  Only one,
5610 the freedombox-setup package, is missing.  To try to build your own
5611 boot image to test the current status, fetch the freedom-maker scripts
5612 and build using
5613 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/vmdebootstrap">vmdebootstrap</a>
5614 with a user with sudo access to become root:
5615
5616 <pre>
5617 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/freedombox/freedom-maker.git \
5618   freedom-maker
5619 sudo apt-get install git vmdebootstrap mercurial python-docutils \
5620   mktorrent extlinux virtualbox qemu-user-static binfmt-support \
5621   u-boot-tools
5622 make -C freedom-maker dreamplug-image raspberry-image virtualbox-image
5623 </pre>
5624
5625 <p>Root access is needed to run debootstrap and mount loopback
5626 devices.  See the README for more details on the build. If you do not
5627 want all three images, trim the make line.  But note that thanks to <a
5628 href="https://bugs.debian.org/741407">a race condition in
5629 vmdebootstrap</a>, the build might fail without the patch to the
5630 kpartx call.</p>
5631
5632 <p>If you instead want to install using a Debian CD and the preseed
5633 method, boot a Debian Wheezy ISO and use this boot argument to load
5634 the preseed values:</p>
5635
5636 <pre>
5637 url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat</a>
5638 </pre>
5639
5640 <p>But note that due to <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/740673">a
5641 recently introduced bug in apt in Jessie</a>, the installer will
5642 currently hang while setting up APT sources.  Killing the
5643 '<tt>apt-cdrom ident</tt>' process when it hang a few times during the
5644 installation will get the installation going.  This affect all
5645 installations in Jessie, and I expect it will be fixed soon.</p>
5646
5647 <p>Give it a go and let us know how it goes on the mailing list, and help
5648 us get the new release published. :) Please join us on
5649 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC (#freedombox on
5650 irc.debian.org)</a> and
5651 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
5652 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
5653
5654       </div>
5655       <div class="tags">
5656
5657
5658         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
5659
5660
5661       </div>
5662     </div>
5663     <div class="padding"></div>
5664
5665     <div class="entry">
5666       <div class="title">
5667         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_home_and_release_1_0_for_netgroup_and_innetgr__aka_ng_utils_.html">New home and release 1.0 for netgroup and innetgr (aka ng-utils)</a>
5668       </div>
5669       <div class="date">
5670         22nd February 2014
5671       </div>
5672       <div class="body">
5673         <p>Many years ago, I wrote a GPL licensed version of the netgroup and
5674 innetgr tools, because I needed them in
5675 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a>.  I called the project
5676 ng-utils, and it has served me well.  I placed the project under the
5677 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/">Hungry Programmer</a> umbrella, and it was maintained in our CVS
5678 repository.  But many years ago, the CVS repository was dropped (lost,
5679 not migrated to new hardware, not sure), and the project have lacked a
5680 proper home since then.</p>
5681
5682 <p>Last summer, I had a look at the package and made a new release
5683 fixing a irritating crash bug, but was unable to store the changes in
5684 a proper source control system.  I applied for a project on
5685 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/">Alioth</a>, but did not have time
5686 to follow up on it.  Until today. :)</p>
5687
5688 <p>After many hours of cleaning and migration, the ng-utils project
5689 now have a new home, and a git repository with the highlight of the
5690 history of the project.  I published all release tarballs and imported
5691 them into the git repository.  As the project is really stable and not
5692 expected to gain new features any time soon, I decided to make a new
5693 release and call it 1.0.  Visit the new project home on
5694 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/ng-utils/">https://alioth.debian.org/projects/ng-utils/</a>
5695 if you want to check it out.  The new version is also uploaded into
5696 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/ng-utils.html">Debian Unstable</a>.</p>
5697
5698       </div>
5699       <div class="tags">
5700
5701
5702         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5703
5704
5705       </div>
5706     </div>
5707     <div class="padding"></div>
5708
5709     <div class="entry">
5710       <div class="title">
5711         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_sysvinit_from_experimental_in_Debian_Hurd.html">Testing sysvinit from experimental in Debian Hurd</a>
5712       </div>
5713       <div class="date">
5714          3rd February 2014
5715       </div>
5716       <div class="body">
5717         <p>A few days ago I decided to try to help the Hurd people to get
5718 their changes into sysvinit, to allow them to use the normal sysvinit
5719 boot system instead of their old one.  This follow up on the
5720 <a href="https://teythoon.cryptobitch.de//categories/gsoc.html">great
5721 Google Summer of Code work</a> done last summer by Justus Winter to
5722 get Debian on Hurd working more like Debian on Linux.  To get started,
5723 I downloaded a prebuilt hard disk image from
5724 <a href="http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian-cd/hurd-i386/current/debian-hurd.img.tar.gz">http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian-cd/hurd-i386/current/debian-hurd.img.tar.gz</a>,
5725 and started it using virt-manager.</p>
5726
5727 <p>The first think I had to do after logging in (root without any
5728 password) was to get the network operational.  I followed
5729 <a href="https://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/hurd-install">the
5730 instructions on the Debian GNU/Hurd ports page</a> and ran these
5731 commands as root to get the machine to accept a IP address from the
5732 kvm internal DHCP server:</p>
5733
5734 <p><blockquote><pre>
5735 settrans -fgap /dev/netdde /hurd/netdde
5736 kill $(ps -ef|awk '/[p]finet/ { print $2}')
5737 kill $(ps -ef|awk '/[d]evnode/ { print $2}')
5738 dhclient /dev/eth0
5739 </pre></blockquote></p>
5740
5741 <p>After this, the machine had internet connectivity, and I could
5742 upgrade it and install the sysvinit packages from experimental and
5743 enable it as the default boot system in Hurd.</p>
5744
5745 <p>But before I did that, I set a password on the root user, as ssh is
5746 running on the machine it for ssh login to work a password need to be
5747 set.  Also, note that a bug somewhere in openssh on Hurd block
5748 compression from working.  Remember to turn that off on the client
5749 side.</p>
5750
5751 <p>Run these commands as root to upgrade and test the new sysvinit
5752 stuff:</p>
5753
5754 <p><blockquote><pre>
5755 cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/experimental.list &lt;&lt;EOF
5756 deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ experimental main
5757 EOF
5758 apt-get update
5759 apt-get dist-upgrade
5760 apt-get install -t experimental initscripts sysv-rc sysvinit \
5761     sysvinit-core sysvinit-utils
5762 update-alternatives --config runsystem
5763 </pre></blockquote></p>
5764
5765 <p>To reboot after switching boot system, you have to use
5766 <tt>reboot-hurd</tt> instead of just <tt>reboot</tt>, as there is not
5767 yet a sysvinit process able to receive the signals from the normal
5768 'reboot' command.  After switching to sysvinit as the boot system,
5769 upgrading every package and rebooting, the network come up with DHCP
5770 after boot as it should, and the settrans/pkill hack mentioned at the
5771 start is no longer needed.  But for some strange reason, there are no
5772 longer any login prompt in the virtual console, so I logged in using
5773 ssh instead.
5774
5775 <p>Note that there are some race conditions in Hurd making the boot
5776 fail some times.  No idea what the cause is, but hope the Hurd porters
5777 figure it out.  At least Justus said on IRC (#debian-hurd on
5778 irc.debian.org) that they are aware of the problem.  A way to reduce
5779 the impact is to upgrade to the Hurd packages built by Justus by
5780 adding this repository to the machine:</p>
5781
5782 <p><blockquote><pre>
5783 cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hurd-ci.list &lt;&lt;EOF
5784 deb http://darnassus.sceen.net/~teythoon/hurd-ci/ sid main
5785 EOF
5786 </pre></blockquote></p>
5787
5788 <p>At the moment the prebuilt virtual machine get some packages from
5789 http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian, because some of the packages in
5790 unstable do not yet include the required patches that are lingering in
5791 BTS.  This is the completely list of "unofficial" packages installed:</p>
5792
5793 <p><blockquote><pre>
5794 # aptitude search '?narrow(?version(CURRENT),?origin(Debian Ports))'
5795 i   emacs                   - GNU Emacs editor (metapackage)
5796 i   gdb                     - GNU Debugger
5797 i   hurd-recommended        - Miscellaneous translators
5798 i   isc-dhcp-client         - ISC DHCP client
5799 i   isc-dhcp-common         - common files used by all the isc-dhcp* packages
5800 i   libc-bin                - Embedded GNU C Library: Binaries
5801 i   libc-dev-bin            - Embedded GNU C Library: Development binaries
5802 i   libc0.3                 - Embedded GNU C Library: Shared libraries
5803 i A libc0.3-dbg             - Embedded GNU C Library: detached debugging symbols
5804 i   libc0.3-dev             - Embedded GNU C Library: Development Libraries and Hea
5805 i   multiarch-support       - Transitional package to ensure multiarch compatibilit
5806 i A x11-common              - X Window System (X.Org) infrastructure
5807 i   xorg                    - X.Org X Window System
5808 i A xserver-xorg            - X.Org X server
5809 i A xserver-xorg-input-all  - X.Org X server -- input driver metapackage
5810 #
5811 </pre></blockquote></p>
5812
5813 <p>All in all, testing hurd has been an interesting experience. :)
5814 X.org did not work out of the box and I never took the time to follow
5815 the porters instructions to fix it.  This time I was interested in the
5816 command line stuff.<p>
5817
5818       </div>
5819       <div class="tags">
5820
5821
5822         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5823
5824
5825       </div>
5826     </div>
5827     <div class="padding"></div>
5828
5829     <div class="entry">
5830       <div class="title">
5831         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_chrpath_release_0_16.html">New chrpath release 0.16</a>
5832       </div>
5833       <div class="date">
5834         14th January 2014
5835       </div>
5836       <div class="body">
5837         <p><a href="http://www.coverity.com/">Coverity</a> is a nice tool to
5838 find problems in C, C++ and Java code using static source code
5839 analysis.  It can detect a lot of different problems, and is very
5840 useful to find memory and locking bugs in the error handling part of
5841 the source.  The company behind it provide
5842 <a href="https://scan.coverity.com/">check of free software projects as
5843 a community service</a>, and many hundred free software projects are
5844 already checked.  A few days ago I decided to have a closer look at
5845 the Coverity system, and discovered that the
5846 <a href="http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/">gnash</a> and
5847 <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/ipmitool/">ipmitool</a>
5848 projects I am involved with was already registered.  But these are
5849 fairly big, and I would also like to have a small and easy project to
5850 check, and decided to <a href="http://scan.coverity.com/projects/1179">request
5851 checking of the chrpath project</a>.  It was
5852 added to the checker and discovered seven potential defects.  Six of
5853 these were real, mostly resource "leak" when the program detected an
5854 error.  Nothing serious, as the resources would be released a fraction
5855 of a second later when the program exited because of the error, but it
5856 is nice to do it right in case the source of the program some time in
5857 the future end up in a library.  Having fixed all defects and added
5858 <a href="https://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/chrpath-devel">a
5859 mailing list for the chrpath developers</a>, I decided it was time to
5860 publish a new release.  These are the release notes:</p>
5861
5862 <p>New in 0.16 released 2014-01-14:</p>
5863
5864 <ul>
5865
5866   <li>Fixed all minor bugs discovered by Coverity.</li>
5867   <li>Updated config.sub and config.guess from the GNU project.</li>
5868   <li>Mention new project mailing list in the documentation.</li>
5869
5870 </ul>
5871
5872 <p>You can
5873 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/frs/?group_id=31052">download the
5874 new version 0.16 from alioth</a>.  Please let us know via the Alioth
5875 project if something is wrong with the new release.  The test suite
5876 did not discover any old errors, so if you find a new one, please also
5877 include a test suite check.</p>
5878
5879       </div>
5880       <div class="tags">
5881
5882
5883         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/chrpath">chrpath</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5884
5885
5886       </div>
5887     </div>
5888     <div class="padding"></div>
5889
5890     <div class="entry">
5891       <div class="title">
5892         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_chrpath_release_0_15.html">New chrpath release 0.15</a>
5893       </div>
5894       <div class="date">
5895         24th November 2013
5896       </div>
5897       <div class="body">
5898         <p>After many years break from the package and a vain hope that
5899 development would be continued by someone else, I finally pulled my
5900 acts together this morning and wrapped up a new release of chrpath,
5901 the command line tool to modify the rpath and runpath of already
5902 compiled ELF programs.  The update was triggered by the persistence of
5903 Isha Vishnoi at IBM, which needed a new config.guess file to get
5904 support for the ppc64le architecture (powerpc 64-bit Little Endian) he
5905 is working on.  I checked the
5906 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/chrpath">Debian</a>,
5907 <a href="https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/chrpath">Ubuntu</a> and
5908 <a href="https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/acls/name/chrpath">Fedora</a>
5909 packages for interesting patches (failed to find the source from
5910 OpenSUSE and Mandriva packages), and found quite a few nice fixes.
5911 These are the release notes:</p>
5912
5913 <p>New in 0.15 released 2013-11-24:</p>
5914
5915 <ul>
5916
5917   <li>Updated config.sub and config.guess from the GNU project to work
5918    with newer architectures.  Thanks to isha vishnoi for the heads
5919    up.</li>
5920
5921   <li>Updated README with current URLs.</li>
5922
5923   <li>Added byteswap fix found in Ubuntu, credited Jeremy Kerr and
5924    Matthias Klose.</li>
5925
5926   <li>Added missing help for -k|--keepgoing option, using patch by
5927    Petr Machata found in Fedora.</li>
5928
5929   <li>Rewrite removal of RPATH/RUNPATH to make sure the entry in
5930    .dynamic is a NULL terminated string.  Based on patch found in
5931    Fedora credited Axel Thimm and Christian Krause.</li>
5932
5933 </ul>
5934
5935 <p>You can
5936 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/frs/?group_id=31052">download the
5937 new version 0.15 from alioth</a>.  Please let us know via the Alioth
5938 project if something is wrong with the new release.  The test suite
5939 did not discover any old errors, so if you find a new one, please also
5940 include a testsuite check.</p>
5941
5942       </div>
5943       <div class="tags">
5944
5945
5946         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/chrpath">chrpath</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5947
5948
5949       </div>
5950     </div>
5951     <div class="padding"></div>
5952
5953     <div class="entry">
5954       <div class="title">
5955         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_init_d_boot_script_example_for_rsyslog.html">Debian init.d boot script example for rsyslog</a>
5956       </div>
5957       <div class="date">
5958          2nd November 2013
5959       </div>
5960       <div class="body">
5961         <p>If one of the points of switching to a new init system in Debian is
5962 <a href="http://thomas.goirand.fr/blog/?p=147">to get rid of huge
5963 init.d scripts</a>, I doubt we need to switch away from sysvinit and
5964 init.d scripts at all.  Here is an example init.d script, ie a rewrite
5965 of /etc/init.d/rsyslog:</p>
5966
5967 <p><pre>
5968 #!/lib/init/init-d-script
5969 ### BEGIN INIT INFO
5970 # Provides:          rsyslog
5971 # Required-Start:    $remote_fs $time
5972 # Required-Stop:     umountnfs $time
5973 # X-Stop-After:      sendsigs
5974 # Default-Start:     2 3 4 5
5975 # Default-Stop:      0 1 6
5976 # Short-Description: enhanced syslogd
5977 # Description:       Rsyslog is an enhanced multi-threaded syslogd.
5978 #                    It is quite compatible to stock sysklogd and can be
5979 #                    used as a drop-in replacement.
5980 ### END INIT INFO
5981 DESC="enhanced syslogd"
5982 DAEMON=/usr/sbin/rsyslogd
5983 </pre></p>
5984
5985 <p>Pretty minimalistic to me... For the record, the original sysv-rc
5986 script was 137 lines, and the above is just 15 lines, most of it meta
5987 info/comments.</p>
5988
5989 <p>How to do this, you ask?  Well, one create a new script
5990 /lib/init/init-d-script looking something like this:
5991
5992 <p><pre>
5993 #!/bin/sh
5994
5995 # Define LSB log_* functions.
5996 # Depend on lsb-base (>= 3.2-14) to ensure that this file is present
5997 # and status_of_proc is working.
5998 . /lib/lsb/init-functions
5999
6000 #
6001 # Function that starts the daemon/service
6002
6003 #
6004 do_start()
6005 {
6006         # Return
6007         #   0 if daemon has been started
6008         #   1 if daemon was already running
6009         #   2 if daemon could not be started
6010         start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --exec $DAEMON --test > /dev/null \
6011                 || return 1
6012         start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --exec $DAEMON -- \
6013                 $DAEMON_ARGS \
6014                 || return 2
6015         # Add code here, if necessary, that waits for the process to be ready
6016         # to handle requests from services started subsequently which depend
6017         # on this one.  As a last resort, sleep for some time.
6018 }
6019
6020 #
6021 # Function that stops the daemon/service
6022 #
6023 do_stop()
6024 {
6025         # Return
6026         #   0 if daemon has been stopped
6027         #   1 if daemon was already stopped
6028         #   2 if daemon could not be stopped
6029         #   other if a failure occurred
6030         start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --retry=TERM/30/KILL/5 --pidfile $PIDFILE --name $NAME
6031         RETVAL="$?"
6032         [ "$RETVAL" = 2 ] && return 2
6033         # Wait for children to finish too if this is a daemon that forks
6034         # and if the daemon is only ever run from this initscript.
6035         # If the above conditions are not satisfied then add some other code
6036         # that waits for the process to drop all resources that could be
6037         # needed by services started subsequently.  A last resort is to
6038         # sleep for some time.
6039         start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --oknodo --retry=0/30/KILL/5 --exec $DAEMON
6040         [ "$?" = 2 ] && return 2
6041         # Many daemons don't delete their pidfiles when they exit.
6042         rm -f $PIDFILE
6043         return "$RETVAL"
6044 }
6045
6046 #
6047 # Function that sends a SIGHUP to the daemon/service
6048 #
6049 do_reload() {
6050         #
6051         # If the daemon can reload its configuration without
6052         # restarting (for example, when it is sent a SIGHUP),
6053         # then implement that here.
6054         #
6055         start-stop-daemon --stop --signal 1 --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --name $NAME
6056         return 0
6057 }
6058
6059 SCRIPTNAME=$1
6060 scriptbasename="$(basename $1)"
6061 echo "SN: $scriptbasename"
6062 if [ "$scriptbasename" != "init-d-library" ] ; then
6063     script="$1"
6064     shift
6065     . $script
6066 else
6067     exit 0
6068 fi
6069
6070 NAME=$(basename $DAEMON)
6071 PIDFILE=/var/run/$NAME.pid
6072
6073 # Exit if the package is not installed
6074 #[ -x "$DAEMON" ] || exit 0
6075
6076 # Read configuration variable file if it is present
6077 [ -r /etc/default/$NAME ] && . /etc/default/$NAME
6078
6079 # Load the VERBOSE setting and other rcS variables
6080 . /lib/init/vars.sh
6081
6082 case "$1" in
6083   start)
6084         [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_daemon_msg "Starting $DESC" "$NAME"
6085         do_start
6086         case "$?" in
6087                 0|1) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 0 ;;
6088                 2) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 1 ;;
6089         esac
6090         ;;
6091   stop)
6092         [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_daemon_msg "Stopping $DESC" "$NAME"
6093         do_stop
6094         case "$?" in
6095                 0|1) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 0 ;;
6096                 2) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 1 ;;
6097         esac
6098         ;;
6099   status)
6100         status_of_proc "$DAEMON" "$NAME" && exit 0 || exit $?
6101         ;;
6102   #reload|force-reload)
6103         #
6104         # If do_reload() is not implemented then leave this commented out
6105         # and leave 'force-reload' as an alias for 'restart'.
6106         #
6107         #log_daemon_msg "Reloading $DESC" "$NAME"
6108         #do_reload
6109         #log_end_msg $?
6110         #;;
6111   restart|force-reload)
6112         #
6113         # If the "reload" option is implemented then remove the
6114         # 'force-reload' alias
6115         #
6116         log_daemon_msg "Restarting $DESC" "$NAME"
6117         do_stop
6118         case "$?" in
6119           0|1)
6120                 do_start
6121                 case "$?" in
6122                         0) log_end_msg 0 ;;
6123                         1) log_end_msg 1 ;; # Old process is still running
6124                         *) log_end_msg 1 ;; # Failed to start
6125                 esac
6126                 ;;
6127           *)
6128                 # Failed to stop
6129                 log_end_msg 1
6130                 ;;
6131         esac
6132         ;;
6133   *)
6134         echo "Usage: $SCRIPTNAME {start|stop|status|restart|force-reload}" >&2
6135         exit 3
6136         ;;
6137 esac
6138
6139 :
6140 </pre></p>
6141
6142 <p>It is based on /etc/init.d/skeleton, and could be improved quite a
6143 lot.  I did not really polish the approach, so it might not always
6144 work out of the box, but you get the idea.  I did not try very hard to
6145 optimize it nor make it more robust either.</p>
6146
6147 <p>A better argument for switching init system in Debian than reducing
6148 the size of init scripts (which is a good thing to do anyway), is to
6149 get boot system that is able to handle the kernel events sensibly and
6150 robustly, and do not depend on the boot to run sequentially.  The boot
6151 and the kernel have not behaved sequentially in years.</p>
6152
6153       </div>
6154       <div class="tags">
6155
6156
6157         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6158
6159
6160       </div>
6161     </div>
6162     <div class="padding"></div>
6163
6164     <div class="entry">
6165       <div class="title">
6166         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Browser_plugin_for_SPICE__spice_xpi__uploaded_to_Debian.html">Browser plugin for SPICE (spice-xpi) uploaded to Debian</a>
6167       </div>
6168       <div class="date">
6169          1st November 2013
6170       </div>
6171       <div class="body">
6172         <p><a href="http://www.spice-space.org/">The SPICE protocol</a> for
6173 remote display access is the preferred solution with oVirt and RedHat
6174 Enterprise Virtualization, and I was sad to discover the other day
6175 that the browser plugin needed to use these systems seamlessly was
6176 missing in Debian.  The <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/668284">request
6177 for a package</a> was from 2012-04-10 with no progress since
6178 2013-04-01, so I decided to wrap up a package based on the great work
6179 from Cajus Pollmeier and put it in a collab-maint maintained git
6180 repository to get a package I could use.  I would very much like
6181 others to help me maintain the package (or just take over, I do not
6182 mind), but as no-one had volunteered so far, I just uploaded it to
6183 NEW.  I hope it will be available in Debian in a few days.</p>
6184
6185 <p>The source is now available from
6186 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/spice-xpi.git;a=summary">http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/spice-xpi.git;a=summary</a>.</p>
6187
6188       </div>
6189       <div class="tags">
6190
6191
6192         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6193
6194
6195       </div>
6196     </div>
6197     <div class="padding"></div>
6198
6199     <div class="entry">
6200       <div class="title">
6201         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Teaching_vmdebootstrap_to_create_Raspberry_Pi_SD_card_images.html">Teaching vmdebootstrap to create Raspberry Pi SD card images</a>
6202       </div>
6203       <div class="date">
6204         27th October 2013
6205       </div>
6206       <div class="body">
6207         <p>The
6208 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/v/vmdebootstrap.html">vmdebootstrap</a>
6209 program is a a very nice system to create virtual machine images.  It
6210 create a image file, add a partition table, mount it and run
6211 debootstrap in the mounted directory to create a Debian system on a
6212 stick.  Yesterday, I decided to try to teach it how to make images for
6213 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi">Raspberry Pi</a>, as part
6214 of a plan to simplify the build system for
6215 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the FreedomBox
6216 project</a>.  The FreedomBox project already uses vmdebootstrap for
6217 the virtualbox images, but its current build system made multistrap
6218 based system for Dreamplug images, and it is lacking support for
6219 Raspberry Pi.</p>
6220
6221 <p>Armed with the knowledge on how to build "foreign" (aka non-native
6222 architecture) chroots for Raspberry Pi, I dived into the vmdebootstrap
6223 code and adjusted it to be able to build armel images on my amd64
6224 Debian laptop.  I ended up giving vmdebootstrap five new options,
6225 allowing me to replicate the image creation process I use to make
6226 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Raspberry_Pi_based_batman_adv_Mesh_network_node.html">Debian
6227 Jessie based mesh node images for the Raspberry Pi</a>.  First, the
6228 <tt>--foreign /path/to/binfm_handler</tt> option tell vmdebootstrap to
6229 call debootstrap with --foreign and to copy the handler into the
6230 generated chroot before running the second stage.  This allow
6231 vmdebootstrap to create armel images on an amd64 host.  Next I added
6232 two new options <tt>--bootsize size</tt> and <tt>--boottype
6233 fstype</tt> to teach it to create a separate /boot/ partition with the
6234 given file system type, allowing me to create an image with a vfat
6235 partition for the /boot/ stuff.  I also added a <tt>--variant
6236 variant</tt> option to allow me to create smaller images without the
6237 Debian base system packages installed.  Finally, I added an option
6238 <tt>--no-extlinux</tt> to tell vmdebootstrap to not install extlinux
6239 as a boot loader.  It is not needed on the Raspberry Pi and probably
6240 most other non-x86 architectures.  The changes were accepted by the
6241 upstream author of vmdebootstrap yesterday and today, and is now
6242 available from
6243 <a href="http://git.liw.fi/cgi-bin/cgit/cgit.cgi/vmdebootstrap/">the
6244 upstream project page</a>.</p>
6245
6246 <p>To use it to build a Raspberry Pi image using Debian Jessie, first
6247 create a small script (the customize script) to add the non-free
6248 binary blob needed to boot the Raspberry Pi and the APT source
6249 list:</p>
6250
6251 <p><pre>
6252 #!/bin/sh
6253 set -e # Exit on first error
6254 rootdir="$1"
6255 cd "$rootdir"
6256 cat &lt;&lt;EOF > etc/apt/sources.list
6257 deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ jessie main contrib non-free
6258 EOF
6259 # Install non-free binary blob needed to boot Raspberry Pi.  This
6260 # install a kernel somewhere too.
6261 wget https://raw.github.com/Hexxeh/rpi-update/master/rpi-update \
6262     -O $rootdir/usr/bin/rpi-update
6263 chmod a+x $rootdir/usr/bin/rpi-update
6264 mkdir -p $rootdir/lib/modules
6265 touch $rootdir/boot/start.elf
6266 chroot $rootdir rpi-update
6267 </pre></p>
6268
6269 <p>Next, fetch the latest vmdebootstrap script and call it like this
6270 to build the image:</p>
6271
6272 <pre>
6273 sudo ./vmdebootstrap \
6274     --variant minbase \
6275     --arch armel \
6276     --distribution jessie \
6277     --mirror http://http.debian.net/debian \
6278     --image test.img \
6279     --size 600M \
6280     --bootsize 64M \
6281     --boottype vfat \
6282     --log-level debug \
6283     --verbose \
6284     --no-kernel \
6285     --no-extlinux \
6286     --root-password raspberry \
6287     --hostname raspberrypi \
6288     --foreign /usr/bin/qemu-arm-static \
6289     --customize `pwd`/customize \
6290     --package netbase \
6291     --package git-core \
6292     --package binutils \
6293     --package ca-certificates \
6294     --package wget \
6295     --package kmod
6296 </pre></p>
6297
6298 <p>The list of packages being installed are the ones needed by
6299 rpi-update to make the image bootable on the Raspberry Pi, with the
6300 exception of netbase, which is needed by debootstrap to find
6301 /etc/hosts with the minbase variant.  I really wish there was a way to
6302 set up an Raspberry Pi using only packages in the Debian archive, but
6303 that is not possible as far as I know, because it boots from the GPU
6304 using a non-free binary blob.</p>
6305
6306 <p>The build host need debootstrap, kpartx and qemu-user-static and
6307 probably a few others installed.  I have not checked the complete
6308 build dependency list.</p>
6309
6310 <p>The resulting image will not use the hardware floating point unit
6311 on the Raspberry PI, because the armel architecture in Debian is not
6312 optimized for that use.  So the images created will be a bit slower
6313 than <a href="http://www.raspbian.org/">Raspbian</a> based images.</p>
6314
6315       </div>
6316       <div class="tags">
6317
6318
6319         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/mesh network">mesh network</a>.
6320
6321
6322       </div>
6323     </div>
6324     <div class="padding"></div>
6325
6326     <div class="entry">
6327       <div class="title">
6328         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Good_causes__Debian_Outreach_Program_for_Women__EFF_documenting_the_spying_and_Open_access_in_Norway.html">Good causes: Debian Outreach Program for Women, EFF documenting the spying and Open access in Norway</a>
6329       </div>
6330       <div class="date">
6331         15th October 2013
6332       </div>
6333       <div class="body">
6334         <p>The last few days I came across a few good causes that should get
6335 wider attention.  I recommend signing and donating to each one of
6336 these. :)</p>
6337
6338 <p>Via <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2013/18/">Debian
6339 Project News for 2013-10-14</a> I came across the Outreach Program for
6340 Women program which is a Google Summer of Code like initiative to get
6341 more women involved in free software.  One debian sponsor has offered
6342 to match <a href="http://debian.ch/opw2013">any donation done to Debian
6343 earmarked</a> for this initiative.  I donated a few minutes ago, and
6344 hope you will to. :)</p>
6345
6346 <p>And the Electronic Frontier Foundation just announced plans to
6347 create <a href="https://supporters.eff.org/donate/nsa-videos">video
6348 documentaries about the excessive spying</a> on every Internet user that
6349 take place these days, and their need to fund the work.  I've already
6350 donated.  Are you next?</p>
6351
6352 <p>For my Norwegian audience, the organisation Studentenes og
6353 Akademikernes Internasjonale Hjelpefond is collecting signatures for a
6354 statement under the heading
6355 <a href="http://saih.no/Bloggers_United/">Bloggers United for Open
6356 Access</a> for those of us asking for more focus on open access in the
6357 Norwegian government.  So far 499 signatures.  I hope you will sign it
6358 too.</p>
6359
6360       </div>
6361       <div class="tags">
6362
6363
6364         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
6365
6366
6367       </div>
6368     </div>
6369     <div class="padding"></div>
6370
6371     <div class="entry">
6372       <div class="title">
6373         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Videos_about_the_Freedombox_project___for_inspiration_and_learning.html">Videos about the Freedombox project - for inspiration and learning</a>
6374       </div>
6375       <div class="date">
6376         27th September 2013
6377       </div>
6378       <div class="body">
6379         <p>The <a href="http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/">Freedombox
6380 project</a> have been going on for a while, and have presented the
6381 vision, ideas and solution several places.  Here is a little
6382 collection of videos of talks and presentation of the project.</p>
6383
6384 <ul>
6385
6386 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukvUz5taxvA">FreedomBox -
6387 2,5 minute marketing film</a> (Youtube)</li>
6388
6389 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzW25QTVWsE">Eben Moglen
6390 discusses the Freedombox on CBS news 2011</a> (Youtube)</li>
6391
6392 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ae8SZbxfE0g">Eben Moglen -
6393 Freedom in the Cloud - Software Freedom, Privacy and and Security for
6394 Web 2.0 and Cloud computing at ISOC-NY Public Meeting 2010</a>
6395 (Youtube)</li>
6396
6397 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNaIji_3xBE">Fosdem 2011
6398 Keynote by Eben Moglen presenting the Freedombox</a> (Youtube)</li>
6399
6400 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bDDUyJSQ9s">Presentation of
6401 the Freedombox by James Vasile at Elevate in Gratz 2011</a> (Youtube)</li>
6402
6403 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQTmnk27g9s"> Freedombox -
6404 Discovery, Identity, and Trust by Nick Daly at Freedombox Hackfest New
6405 York City in 2012</a> (Youtube)</li>
6406
6407 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkbSB4Ba7Ck">Introduction
6408 to the Freedombox at Freedombox Hackfest New York City in 2012</a>
6409 (Youtube)</li>
6410
6411 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-P2Jaeg0aQ">Freedom, Out
6412 of the Box! by Bdale Garbee at linux.conf.au Ballarat, 2012</a> (Youtube) </li>
6413
6414 <li><a href="https://archive.fosdem.org/2013/schedule/event/freedombox/">Freedombox
6415 1.0 by Eben Moglen and Bdale Garbee at Fosdem 2013</a> (FOSDEM) </li>
6416
6417 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1LpYX2zVYg">What is the
6418 FreedomBox today by Bdale Garbee at Debconf13 in Vaumarcus
6419 2013</a> (Youtube)</li>
6420
6421 </ul>
6422
6423 <p>A larger list is available from
6424 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/TalksAndPresentations">the
6425 Freedombox Wiki</a>.</p>
6426
6427 <p>On other news, I am happy to report that Freedombox based on Debian
6428 Jessie is coming along quite well, and soon both Owncloud and using
6429 Tor should be available for testers of the Freedombox solution. :) In
6430 a few weeks I hope everything needed to test it is included in Debian.
6431 The withsqlite package is already in Debian, and the plinth package is
6432 pending in NEW.  The third and vital part of that puzzle is the
6433 metapackage/setup framework, which is still pending an upload.  Join
6434 us on <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC
6435 (#freedombox on irc.debian.org)</a> and
6436 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
6437 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
6438
6439       </div>
6440       <div class="tags">
6441
6442
6443         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
6444
6445
6446       </div>
6447     </div>
6448     <div class="padding"></div>
6449
6450     <div class="entry">
6451       <div class="title">
6452         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Recipe_to_test_the_Freedombox_project_on_amd64_or_Raspberry_Pi.html">Recipe to test the Freedombox project on amd64 or Raspberry Pi</a>
6453       </div>
6454       <div class="date">
6455         10th September 2013
6456       </div>
6457       <div class="body">
6458         <p>I was introduced to the
6459 <a href="http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/">Freedombox project</a>
6460 in 2010, when Eben Moglen presented his vision about serving the need
6461 of non-technical people to keep their personal information private and
6462 within the legal protection of their own homes.  The idea is to give
6463 people back the power over their network and machines, and return
6464 Internet back to its intended peer-to-peer architecture.  Instead of
6465 depending on a central service, the Freedombox will give everyone
6466 control over their own basic infrastructure.</p>
6467
6468 <p>I've intended to join the effort since then, but other tasks have
6469 taken priority.  But this summers nasty news about the misuse of trust
6470 and privilege exercised by the "western" intelligence gathering
6471 communities increased my eagerness to contribute to a point where I
6472 actually started working on the project a while back.</p>
6473
6474 <p>The <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/freedombox/">initial
6475 Debian initiative</a> based on the vision from Eben Moglen, is to
6476 create a simple and cheap Debian based appliance that anyone can hook
6477 up in their home and get access to secure and private services and
6478 communication.  The initial deployment platform have been the
6479 <a href="http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/t-dreamplugdetails.aspx">Dreamplug</a>,
6480 which is a piece of hardware I do not own.  So to be able to test what
6481 the current Freedombox setup look like, I had to come up with a way to install
6482 it on some hardware I do have access to.  I have rewritten the
6483 <a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/freedom-maker">freedom-maker</a>
6484 image build framework to use .deb packages instead of only copying
6485 setup into the boot images, and thanks to this rewrite I am able to
6486 set up any machine supported by Debian Wheezy as a Freedombox, using
6487 the previously mentioned deb (and a few support debs for packages
6488 missing in Debian).</p>
6489
6490 <p>The current Freedombox setup consist of a set of bootstrapping
6491 scripts
6492 (<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/freedombox-setup">freedombox-setup</a>),
6493 and a administrative web interface
6494 (<a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/Plinth">plinth</a> + exmachina +
6495 withsqlite), as well as a privacy enhancing proxy based on
6496 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/privoxy">privoxy</a>
6497 (freedombox-privoxy).  There is also a web/javascript based XMPP
6498 client (<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/jwchat">jwchat</a>)
6499 trying (unsuccessfully so far) to talk to the XMPP server
6500 (<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/ejabberd">ejabberd</a>).  The
6501 web interface is pluggable, and the goal is to use it to enable OpenID
6502 services, mesh network connectivity, use of TOR, etc, etc.  Not much of
6503 this is really working yet, see
6504 <a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/freedombox-todos/blob/master/TODO">the
6505 project TODO</a> for links to GIT repositories.  Most of the code is
6506 on github at the moment.  The HTTP proxy is operational out of the
6507 box, and the admin web interface can be used to add/remove plinth
6508 users.  I've not been able to do anything else with it so far, but
6509 know there are several branches spread around github and other places
6510 with lots of half baked features.</p>
6511
6512 <p>Anyway, if you want to have a look at the current state, the
6513 following recipes should work to give you a test machine to poke
6514 at.</p>
6515
6516 <p><strong>Debian Wheezy amd64</strong></p>
6517
6518 <ol>
6519
6520 <li>Fetch normal Debian Wheezy installation ISO.</li>
6521 <li>Boot from it, either as CD or USB stick.</li>
6522 <li><p>Press [tab] on the boot prompt and add this as a boot argument
6523 to the Debian installer:<p>
6524 <pre>url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-wheezy.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-wheezy.dat</a></pre></li>
6525
6526 <li>Answer the few language/region/password questions and pick disk to
6527 install on.</li>
6528
6529 <li>When the installation is finished and the machine have rebooted a
6530 few times, your Freedombox is ready for testing.</li>
6531
6532 </ol>
6533
6534 <p><strong>Raspberry Pi Raspbian</strong></p>
6535
6536 <ol>
6537
6538 <li>Fetch a Raspbian SD card image, create SD card.</li>
6539 <li>Boot from SD card, extend file system to fill the card completely.</li>
6540 <li><p>Log in and add this to /etc/sources.list:</p>
6541 <pre>
6542 deb <a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox</a> wheezy main
6543 </pre></li>
6544 <li><p>Run this as root:</p>
6545 <pre>
6546 wget -O - http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/BE1A583D.asc | \
6547    apt-key add -
6548 apt-get update
6549 apt-get install freedombox-setup
6550 /usr/lib/freedombox/setup
6551 </pre></li>
6552 <li>Reboot into your freshly created Freedombox.</li>
6553
6554 </ol>
6555
6556 <p>You can test it on other architectures too, but because the
6557 freedombox-privoxy package is binary, it will only work as intended on
6558 the architectures where I have had time to build the binary and put it
6559 in my APT repository.  But do not let this stop you.  It is only a
6560 short "<tt>apt-get source -b freedombox-privoxy</tt>" away. :)</p>
6561
6562 <p>Note that by default Freedombox is a DHCP server on the
6563 192.168.1.0/24 subnet, so if this is your subnet be careful and turn
6564 off the DHCP server by running "<tt>update-rc.d isc-dhcp-server
6565 disable</tt>" as root.</p>
6566
6567 <p>Please let me know if this works for you, or if you have any
6568 problems.  We gather on the IRC channel
6569 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">#freedombox</a> on
6570 irc.debian.org and the
6571 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">project
6572 mailing list</a>.</p>
6573
6574 <p>Once you get your freedombox operational, you can visit
6575 <tt>http://your-host-name:8001/</tt> to see the state of the plint
6576 welcome screen (dead end - do not be surprised if you are unable to
6577 get past it), and next visit <tt>http://your-host-name:8001/help/</tt>
6578 to look at the rest of plinth.  The default user is 'admin' and the
6579 default password is 'secret'.</p>
6580
6581       </div>
6582       <div class="tags">
6583
6584
6585         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
6586
6587
6588       </div>
6589     </div>
6590     <div class="padding"></div>
6591
6592     <div class="entry">
6593       <div class="title">
6594         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Intel_180_SSD_disk_with_Lenovo_firmware_can_not_use_Intel_firmware.html">Intel 180 SSD disk with Lenovo firmware can not use Intel firmware</a>
6595       </div>
6596       <div class="date">
6597         18th August 2013
6598       </div>
6599       <div class="body">
6600         <p>Earlier, I reported about
6601 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_fix_a_Thinkpad_X230_with_a_broken_180_GB_SSD_disk.html">my
6602 problems using an Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB disk</a>.  Friday I was
6603 told by IBM that the original disk should be thrown away.  And as
6604 there no longer was a problem if I bricked the firmware, I decided
6605 today to try to install Intel firmware to replace the Lenovo firmware
6606 currently on the disk.</p>
6607
6608 <p>I searched the Intel site for firmware, and found
6609 <a href="https://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&ProdId=3472&DwnldID=18363&ProductFamily=Solid-State+Drives+and+Caching&ProductLine=Intel%c2%ae+High+Performance+Solid-State+Drive&ProductProduct=Intel%c2%ae+SSD+520+Series+(180GB%2c+2.5in+SATA+6Gb%2fs%2c+25nm%2c+MLC)&lang=eng">issdfut_2.0.4.iso</a>
6610 (aka Intel SATA Solid-State Drive Firmware Update Tool) which
6611 according to the site should contain the latest firmware for SSD
6612 disks.  I inserted the broken disk in one of my spare laptops and
6613 booted the ISO from a USB stick.  The disk was recognized, but the
6614 program claimed the newest firmware already were installed and refused
6615 to insert any Intel firmware.  So no change, and the disk is still
6616 unable to handle write load. :( I guess the only way to get them
6617 working would be if Lenovo releases new firmware.  No idea how likely
6618 that is.  Anyway, just blogging about this test for completeness.  I
6619 got a working Samsung disk, and see no point in spending more time on
6620 the broken disks.</p>
6621
6622       </div>
6623       <div class="tags">
6624
6625
6626         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6627
6628
6629       </div>
6630     </div>
6631     <div class="padding"></div>
6632
6633     <div class="entry">
6634       <div class="title">
6635         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_fix_a_Thinkpad_X230_with_a_broken_180_GB_SSD_disk.html">How to fix a Thinkpad X230 with a broken 180 GB SSD disk</a>
6636       </div>
6637       <div class="date">
6638         17th July 2013
6639       </div>
6640       <div class="body">
6641         <p>Today I switched to
6642 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html">my
6643 new laptop</a>.  I've previously written about the problems I had with
6644 my new Thinkpad X230, which was delivered with an
6645 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Intel_SSD_520_Series_180_GB_with_Lenovo_firmware_still_lock_up_from_sustained_writes.html">180
6646 GB Intel SSD disk with Lenovo firmware</a> that did not handle
6647 sustained writes.  My hardware supplier have been very forthcoming in
6648 trying to find a solution, and after first trying with another
6649 identical 180 GB disks they decided to send me a 256 GB Samsung SSD
6650 disk instead to fix it once and for all.  The Samsung disk survived
6651 the installation of Debian with encrypted disks (filling the disk with
6652 random data during installation killed the first two), and I thus
6653 decided to trust it with my data.  I have installed it as a Debian Edu
6654 Wheezy roaming workstation hooked up with my Debian Edu Squeeze main
6655 server at home using Kerberos and LDAP, and will use it as my work
6656 station from now on.</p>
6657
6658 <p>As this is a solid state disk with no moving parts, I believe the
6659 Debian Wheezy default installation need to be tuned a bit to increase
6660 performance and increase life time of the disk.  The Linux kernel and
6661 user space applications do not yet adjust automatically to such
6662 environment.  To make it easier for my self, I created a draft Debian
6663 package <tt>ssd-setup</tt> to handle this tuning.  The
6664 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/ssd-setup.git">source
6665 for the ssd-setup package</a> is available from collab-maint, and it
6666 is set up to adjust the setup of the machine by just installing the
6667 package.  If there is any non-SSD disk in the machine, the package
6668 will refuse to install, as I did not try to write any logic to sort
6669 file systems in SSD and non-SSD file systems.</p>
6670
6671 <p>I consider the package a draft, as I am a bit unsure how to best
6672 set up Debian Wheezy with an SSD.  It is adjusted to my use case,
6673 where I set up the machine with one large encrypted partition (in
6674 addition to /boot), put LVM on top of this and set up partitions on
6675 top of this again.  See the README file in the package source for the
6676 references I used to pick the settings.  At the moment these
6677 parameters are tuned:</p>
6678
6679 <ul>
6680
6681 <li>Set up cryptsetup to pass TRIM commands to the physical disk
6682     (adding discard to /etc/crypttab)</li>
6683
6684 <li>Set up LVM to pass on TRIM commands to the underlying device (in
6685     this case a cryptsetup partition) by changing issue_discards from
6686     0 to 1 in /etc/lvm/lvm.conf.</li>
6687
6688 <li>Set relatime as a file system option for ext3 and ext4 file
6689     systems.</li>
6690
6691 <li>Tell swap to use TRIM commands by adding 'discard' to
6692     /etc/fstab.</li>
6693
6694 <li>Change I/O scheduler from cfq to deadline using a udev rule.</li>
6695
6696 <li>Run fstrim on every ext3 and ext4 file system every night (from
6697     cron.daily).</li>
6698
6699 <li>Adjust sysctl values vm.swappiness to 1 and vm.vfs_cache_pressure
6700     to 50 to reduce the kernel eagerness to swap out processes.</li>
6701
6702 </ul>
6703
6704 <p>During installation, I cancelled the part where the installer fill
6705 the disk with random data, as this would kill the SSD performance for
6706 little gain.  My goal with the encrypted file system is to ensure
6707 those stealing my laptop end up with a brick and not a working
6708 computer.  I have no hope in keeping the really resourceful people
6709 from getting the data on the disk (see
6710 <a href="http://xkcd.com/538/">XKCD #538</a> for an explanation why).
6711 Thus I concluded that adding the discard option to crypttab is the
6712 right thing to do.</p>
6713
6714 <p>I considered using the noop I/O scheduler, as several recommended
6715 it for SSD, but others recommended deadline and a benchmark I found
6716 indicated that deadline might be better for interactive use.</p>
6717
6718 <p>I also considered using the 'discard' file system option for ext3
6719 and ext4, but read that it would give a performance hit ever time a
6720 file is removed, and thought it best to that that slowdown once a day
6721 instead of during my work.</p>
6722
6723 <p>My package do not set up tmpfs on /var/run, /var/lock and /tmp, as
6724 this is already done by Debian Edu.</p>
6725
6726 <p>I have not yet started on the user space tuning.  I expect
6727 iceweasel need some tuning, and perhaps other applications too, but
6728 have not yet had time to investigate those parts.</p>
6729
6730 <p>The package should work on Ubuntu too, but I have not yet tested it
6731 there.</p>
6732
6733 <p>As for the answer to the question in the title of this blog post,
6734 as far as I know, the only solution I know about is to replace the
6735 disk.  It might be possible to flash it with Intel firmware instead of
6736 the Lenovo firmware.  But I have not tried and did not want to do so
6737 without approval from Lenovo as I wanted to keep the warranty on the
6738 disk until a solution was found and they wanted the broken disks
6739 back.</p>
6740
6741       </div>
6742       <div class="tags">
6743
6744
6745         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6746
6747
6748       </div>
6749     </div>
6750     <div class="padding"></div>
6751
6752     <div class="entry">
6753       <div class="title">
6754         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Intel_SSD_520_Series_180_GB_with_Lenovo_firmware_still_lock_up_from_sustained_writes.html">Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB with Lenovo firmware still lock up from sustained writes</a>
6755       </div>
6756       <div class="date">
6757         10th July 2013
6758       </div>
6759       <div class="body">
6760         <p>A few days ago, I wrote about
6761 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html">the
6762 problems I experienced with my new X230 and its SSD disk</a>, which
6763 was dying during installation because it is unable to cope with
6764 sustained write.  My supplier is in contact with
6765 <a href="http://www.lenovo.com/">Lenovo</a>, and they wanted to send a
6766 replacement disk to try to fix the problem.  They decided to send an
6767 identical model, so my hopes for a permanent fix was slim.</p>
6768
6769 <p>Anyway, today I got the replacement disk and tried to install
6770 Debian Edu Wheezy with encrypted disk on it.  The new disk have the
6771 same firmware version as the original.  This time my hope raised
6772 slightly as the installation progressed, as the original disk used to
6773 die after 4-7% of the disk was written to, while this time it kept
6774 going past 10%, 20%, 40% and even past 50%.  But around 60%, the disk
6775 died again and I was back on square one.  I still do not have a new
6776 laptop with a disk I can trust.  I can not live with a disk that might
6777 lock up when I download a new
6778 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> ISO or
6779 other large files.  I look forward to hearing from my supplier with
6780 the next proposal from Lenovo.</p>
6781
6782 <p>The original disk is marked Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB,
6783 11S0C38722Z1ZNME35X1TR, ISN: CVCV321407HB180EGN, SA: G57560302, FW:
6784 LF1i, 29MAY2013, PBA: G39779-300, LBA 351,651,888, LI P/N: 0C38722,
6785 Pb-free 2LI, LC P/N: 16-200366, WWN: 55CD2E40002756C4, Model:
6786 SSDSC2BW180A3L 2.5" 6Gb/s SATA SSD 180G 5V 1A, ASM P/N 0C38732, FRU
6787 P/N 45N8295, P0C38732.</p>
6788
6789 <p>The replacement disk is marked Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB,
6790 11S0C38722Z1ZNDE34N0L0, ISN: CVCV315306RK180EGN, SA: G57560-302, FW:
6791 LF1i, 22APR2013, PBA: G39779-300, LBA 351,651,888, LI P/N: 0C38722,
6792 Pb-free 2LI, LC P/N: 16-200366, WWN: 55CD2E40000AB69E, Model:
6793 SSDSC2BW180A3L 2.5" 6Gb/s SATA SSD 180G 5V 1A, ASM P/N 0C38732, FRU
6794 P/N 45N8295, P0C38732.</p>
6795
6796 <p>The only difference is in the first number (serial number?), ISN,
6797 SA, date and WNPP values.  Mentioning all the details here in case
6798 someone is able to use the information to find a way to identify the
6799 failing disk among working ones (if any such working disk actually
6800 exist).</p>
6801
6802       </div>
6803       <div class="tags">
6804
6805
6806         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6807
6808
6809       </div>
6810     </div>
6811     <div class="padding"></div>
6812
6813     <div class="entry">
6814       <div class="title">
6815         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/July_13th__Debian_Ubuntu_BSP_and_Skolelinux_Debian_Edu_developer_gathering_in_Oslo.html">July 13th: Debian/Ubuntu BSP and Skolelinux/Debian Edu developer gathering in Oslo</a>
6816       </div>
6817       <div class="date">
6818          9th July 2013
6819       </div>
6820       <div class="body">
6821         <p>The upcoming Saturday, 2013-07-13, we are organising a combined
6822 Debian Edu developer gathering and Debian and Ubuntu bug squashing
6823 party in Oslo.  It is organised by <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the
6824 member assosiation NUUG</a> and
6825 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">the Debian Edu / Skolelinux
6826 project</a> together with <a href="http://bitraf.no/">the hack space
6827 Bitraf</a>.</p>
6828
6829 <p>It starts 10:00 and continue until late evening.  Everyone is
6830 welcome, and there is no fee to participate.  There is on the other
6831 hand limited space, and only room for 30 people.  Please put your name
6832 on <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/BSP/2013/07/13/no/Oslo">the event
6833 wiki page</a> if you plan to join us.</p>
6834
6835       </div>
6836       <div class="tags">
6837
6838
6839         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
6840
6841
6842       </div>
6843     </div>
6844     <div class="padding"></div>
6845
6846     <div class="entry">
6847       <div class="title">
6848         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html">The Thinkpad is dead, long live the Thinkpad X230?</a>
6849       </div>
6850       <div class="date">
6851          5th July 2013
6852       </div>
6853       <div class="body">
6854         <p>Half a year ago, I reported that I had to find a
6855 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html">replacement
6856 for my trusty old Thinkpad X41</a>.  Unfortunately I did not have much
6857 time to spend on it, and it took a while to find a model I believe
6858 will do the job, but two days ago the replacement finally arrived.  I
6859 ended up picking a
6860 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/lenovo_thinkpad_x230">Thinkpad X230</a>
6861 with SSD disk (NZDAJMN).  I first test installed Debian Edu Wheezy as
6862 a roaming workstation, and it seemed to work flawlessly.  But my
6863 second installation with encrypted disk was not as successful.  More
6864 on that below.</p>
6865
6866 <p>I had a hard time trying to track down a good laptop, as my most
6867 important requirements (robust and with a good keyboard) are never
6868 listed in the feature list.  But I did get good help from the search
6869 feature at <a href="http://www.prisjakt.no/">Prisjakt</a>, which
6870 allowed me to limit the list of interesting laptops based on my other
6871 requirements.  A bit surprising that SSD disk are not disks according
6872 to that search interface, so I had to drop specifying the number of
6873 disks from my search parameters.  I also asked around among friends to
6874 get their impression on keyboards and robustness.</p>
6875
6876 <p>So the new laptop arrived, and it is quite a lot wider than the
6877 X41.  I am not quite convinced about the keyboard, as it is
6878 significantly wider than my old keyboard, and I have to stretch my
6879 hand a lot more to reach the edges.  But the key response is fairly
6880 good and the individual key shape is fairly easy to handle, so I hope
6881 I will get used to it.  My old X40 was starting to fail, and I really
6882 needed a new laptop now. :)</p>
6883
6884 <p>Turning off the touch pad was simple.  All it took was a quick
6885 visit to the BIOS during boot it disable it.</p>
6886
6887 <p>But there is a fatal problem with the laptop.  The 180 GB SSD disk
6888 lock up during load.  And this happen when installing Debian Wheezy
6889 with encrypted disk, while the disk is being filled with random data.
6890 I also tested to install Ubuntu Raring, and it happen there too if I
6891 reenable the code to fill the disk with random data (it is disabled by
6892 default in Ubuntu).  And the bug with is already known.  It was
6893 reported to Debian as <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/691427">BTS
6894 report #691427 2012-10-25</a> (journal commit I/O error on brand-new
6895 Thinkpad T430s ext4 on lvm on SSD).  It is also reported to the Linux
6896 kernel developers as
6897 <a href="https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=51861">Kernel bugzilla
6898 report #51861 2012-12-20</a> (Intel SSD 520 stops working under load
6899 (SSDSC2BW180A3L in Lenovo ThinkPad T430s)). It is also reported on the
6900 Lenovo forums, both for
6901 <a href="http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T400-T500-and-newer-T-series/T430s-Intel-SSD-520-180GB-issue/m-p/1070549">T430
6902 2012-11-10</a> and for
6903 <a href="http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/X-Series-ThinkPad-Laptops/x230-SATA-errors-with-180GB-Intel-520-SSD-under-heavy-write-load/m-p/1068147">X230
6904 03-20-2013</a>.  The problem do not only affect installation.  The
6905 reports state that the disk lock up during use if many writes are done
6906 on the disk, so it is much no use to work around the installation
6907 problem and end up with a computer that can lock up at any moment.
6908 There is even a
6909 <a href="https://git.efficios.com/?p=test-ssd.git">small C program
6910 available</a> that will lock up the hard drive after running a few
6911 minutes by writing to a file.</p>
6912
6913 <p>I've contacted my supplier and asked how to handle this, and after
6914 contacting PCHELP Norway (request 01D1FDP) which handle support
6915 requests for Lenovo, his first suggestion was to upgrade the disk
6916 firmware.  Unfortunately there is no newer firmware available from
6917 Lenovo, as my disk already have the most recent one (version LF1i).  I
6918 hope to hear more from him today and hope the problem can be
6919 fixed. :)</p>
6920
6921       </div>
6922       <div class="tags">
6923
6924
6925         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6926
6927
6928       </div>
6929     </div>
6930     <div class="padding"></div>
6931
6932     <div class="entry">
6933       <div class="title">
6934         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230.html">The Thinkpad is dead, long live the Thinkpad X230</a>
6935       </div>
6936       <div class="date">
6937          4th July 2013
6938       </div>
6939       <div class="body">
6940         <p>Half a year ago, I reported that I had to find a replacement for my
6941 trusty old Thinkpad X41.  Unfortunately I did not have much time to
6942 spend on it, but today the replacement finally arrived.  I ended up
6943 picking a <a href="http://www.linlap.com/lenovo_thinkpad_x230">Thinkpad
6944 X230</a> with SSD disk (NZDAJMN).  I first test installed Debian Edu
6945 Wheezy as a roaming workstation, and it worked flawlessly.  As I write
6946 this, it is installing what I hope will be a more final installation,
6947 with a encrypted hard drive to ensure any dope head stealing it end up
6948 with an expencive door stop.</p>
6949
6950 <p>I had a hard time trying to track down a good laptop, as my most
6951 important requirements (robust and with a good keyboard) are never
6952 listed in the feature list.  But I did get good help from the search
6953 feature at <ahref="http://www.prisjakt.no/">Prisjakt</a>, which
6954 allowed me to limit the list of interesting laptops based on my other
6955 requirements.  A bit surprising that SSD disk are not disks, so I had
6956 to drop number of disks from my search parameters.</p>
6957
6958 <p>I am not quite convinced about the keyboard, as it is significantly
6959 wider than my old keyboard, and I have to stretch my hand a lot more
6960 to reach the edges.  But the key response is fairly good and the
6961 individual key shape is fairly easy to handle, so I hope I will get
6962 used to it.  My old X40 was starting to fail, and I really needed a
6963 new laptop now. :)</p>
6964
6965 <p>I look forward to figuring out how to turn off the touch pad.</p>
6966
6967       </div>
6968       <div class="tags">
6969
6970
6971         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6972
6973
6974       </div>
6975     </div>
6976     <div class="padding"></div>
6977
6978     <div class="entry">
6979       <div class="title">
6980         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatically_locate_and_install_required_firmware_packages_on_Debian__Isenkram_0_4_.html">Automatically locate and install required firmware packages on Debian (Isenkram 0.4)</a>
6981       </div>
6982       <div class="date">
6983         25th June 2013
6984       </div>
6985       <div class="body">
6986         <p>It annoys me when the computer fail to do automatically what it is
6987 perfectly capable of, and I have to do it manually to get things
6988 working.  One such task is to find out what firmware packages are
6989 needed to get the hardware on my computer working.  Most often this
6990 affect the wifi card, but some times it even affect the RAID
6991 controller or the ethernet card.  Today I pushed version 0.4 of the
6992 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">Isenkram package</a>
6993 including a new script isenkram-autoinstall-firmware handling the
6994 process of asking all the loaded kernel modules what firmware files
6995 they want, find debian packages providing these files and install the
6996 debian packages.  Here is a test run on my laptop:</p>
6997
6998 <p><pre>
6999 # isenkram-autoinstall-firmware
7000 info: kernel drivers requested extra firmware: ipw2200-bss.fw ipw2200-ibss.fw ipw2200-sniffer.fw
7001 info: fetching http://http.debian.net/debian/dists/squeeze/Contents-i386.gz
7002 info: locating packages with the requested firmware files
7003 info: Updating APT sources after adding non-free APT source
7004 info: trying to install firmware-ipw2x00
7005 firmware-ipw2x00
7006 firmware-ipw2x00
7007 Preconfiguring packages ...
7008 Selecting previously deselected package firmware-ipw2x00.
7009 (Reading database ... 259727 files and directories currently installed.)
7010 Unpacking firmware-ipw2x00 (from .../firmware-ipw2x00_0.28+squeeze1_all.deb) ...
7011 Setting up firmware-ipw2x00 (0.28+squeeze1) ...
7012 #
7013 </pre></p>
7014
7015 <p>When all the requested firmware is present, a simple message is
7016 printed instead:</p>
7017
7018 <p><pre>
7019 # isenkram-autoinstall-firmware
7020 info: did not find any firmware files requested by loaded kernel modules.  exiting
7021 #
7022 </pre></p>
7023
7024 <p>It could use some polish, but it is already working well and saving
7025 me some time when setting up new machines. :)</p>
7026
7027 <p>So, how does it work?  It look at the set of currently loaded
7028 kernel modules, and look up each one of them using modinfo, to find
7029 the firmware files listed in the module meta-information.  Next, it
7030 download the Contents file from a nearby APT mirror, and search for
7031 the firmware files in this file to locate the package with the
7032 requested firmware file.  If the package is in the non-free section, a
7033 non-free APT source is added and the package is installed using
7034 <tt>apt-get install</tt>.  The end result is a slightly better working
7035 machine.</p>
7036
7037 <p>I hope someone find time to implement a more polished version of
7038 this script as part of the hw-detect debian-installer module, to
7039 finally fix <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/655507">BTS report
7040 #655507</a>.  There really is no need to insert USB sticks with
7041 firmware during a PXE install when the packages already are available
7042 from the nearby Debian mirror.</p>
7043
7044       </div>
7045       <div class="tags">
7046
7047
7048         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
7049
7050
7051       </div>
7052     </div>
7053     <div class="padding"></div>
7054
7055     <div class="entry">
7056       <div class="title">
7057         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Fixing_the_Linux_black_screen_of_death_on_machines_with_Intel_HD_video.html">Fixing the Linux black screen of death on machines with Intel HD video</a>
7058       </div>
7059       <div class="date">
7060         11th June 2013
7061       </div>
7062       <div class="body">
7063         <p>When installing RedHat, Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu on some machines,
7064 the screen just turn black when Linux boot, either during installation
7065 or on first boot from the hard disk.  I've seen it once in a while the
7066 last few years, but only recently understood the cause.  I've seen it
7067 on HP laptops, and on my latest acquaintance the Packard Bell laptop.
7068 The reason seem to be in the wiring of some laptops.  The system to
7069 control the screen background light is inverted, so when Linux try to
7070 turn the brightness fully on, it end up turning it off instead.  I do
7071 not know which Linux drivers are affected, but this post is about the
7072 i915 driver used by the
7073 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Packard Bell
7074 EasyNote LV</a>, Thinkpad X40 and many other laptops.</p>
7075
7076 <p>The problem can be worked around two ways.  Either by adding
7077 i915.invert_brightness=1 as a kernel option, or by adding a file in
7078 /etc/modprobe.d/ to tell modprobe to add the invert_brightness=1
7079 option when it load the i915 kernel module.  On Debian and Ubuntu, it
7080 can be done by running these commands as root:</p>
7081
7082 <pre>
7083 echo options i915 invert_brightness=1 | tee /etc/modprobe.d/i915.conf
7084 update-initramfs -u -k all
7085 </pre>
7086
7087 <p>Since March 2012 there is
7088 <a href="http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=4dca20efb1a9c2efefc28ad2867e5d6c3f5e1955">a
7089 mechanism in the Linux kernel</a> to tell the i915 driver which
7090 hardware have this problem, and get the driver to invert the
7091 brightness setting automatically.  To use it, one need to add a row in
7092 <a href="http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_display.c">the
7093 intel_quirks array</a> in the driver source
7094 <tt>drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_display.c</tt> (look for "<tt>static
7095 struct intel_quirk intel_quirks</tt>"), specifying the PCI device
7096 number (vendor number 8086 is assumed) and subdevice vendor and device
7097 number.</p>
7098
7099 <p>My Packard Bell EasyNote LV got this output from <tt>lspci
7100 -vvnn</tt> for the video card in question:</p>
7101
7102 <p><pre>
7103 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation \
7104     3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller [8086:0156] \
7105     (rev 09) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
7106  Subsystem: Acer Incorporated [ALI] Device [1025:0688]
7107  Control: I/O+ Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- \
7108     ParErr- Stepping- SE RR- FastB2B- DisINTx+
7109  Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort- \
7110     <TAbort- <MAbort->SERR- <PERR- INTx-
7111  Latency: 0
7112  Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 42
7113  Region 0: Memory at c2000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4M]
7114  Region 2: Memory at b0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
7115  Region 4: I/O ports at 4000 [size=64]
7116  Expansion ROM at <unassigned> [disabled]
7117  Capabilities: <access denied>
7118  Kernel driver in use: i915
7119 </pre></p>
7120
7121 <p>The resulting intel_quirks entry would then look like this:</p>
7122
7123 <p><pre>
7124 struct intel_quirk intel_quirks[] = {
7125        ...
7126         /* Packard Bell EasyNote LV11HC needs invert brightness quirk */
7127         { 0x0156, 0x1025, 0x0688, quirk_invert_brightness },
7128        ...
7129 }
7130 </pre></p>
7131
7132 <p>According to the kernel module instructions (as seen using
7133 <tt>modinfo i915</tt>), information about hardware needing the
7134 invert_brightness flag should be sent to the
7135 <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/dri-devel">dri-devel
7136 (at) lists.freedesktop.org</a> mailing list to reach the kernel
7137 developers.  But my email about the laptop sent 2013-06-03 have not
7138 yet shown up in
7139 <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2013-June/thread.html">the
7140 web archive for the mailing list</a>, so I suspect they do not accept
7141 emails from non-subscribers.  Because of this, I sent my patch also to
7142 the Debian bug tracking system instead as
7143 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/710938">BTS report #710938</a>, to make
7144 sure the patch is not lost.</p>
7145
7146 <p>Unfortunately, it is not enough to fix the kernel to get Laptops
7147 with this problem working properly with Linux.  If you use Gnome, your
7148 worries should be over at this point.  But if you use KDE, there is
7149 something in KDE ignoring the invert_brightness setting and turning on
7150 the screen during login.  I've reported it to Debian as
7151 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/711237">BTS report #711237</a>, and
7152 have no idea yet how to figure out exactly what subsystem is doing
7153 this.  Perhaps you can help?  Perhaps you know what the Gnome
7154 developers did to handle this, and this can give a clue to the KDE
7155 developers?  Or you know where in KDE the screen brightness is changed
7156 during login?  If so, please update the BTS report (or get in touch if
7157 you do not know how to update BTS).</p>
7158
7159 <p>Update 2013-07-19: The correct fix for this machine seem to be
7160 acpi_backlight=vendor, to disable ACPI backlight support completely,
7161 as the ACPI information on the machine is trash and it is better to
7162 leave it to the intel video driver to control the screen
7163 backlight.</p>
7164
7165       </div>
7166       <div class="tags">
7167
7168
7169         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7170
7171
7172       </div>
7173     </div>
7174     <div class="padding"></div>
7175
7176     <div class="entry">
7177       <div class="title">
7178         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_install_Linux_on_a_Packard_Bell_Easynote_LV_preinstalled_with_Windows_8.html">How to install Linux on a Packard Bell Easynote LV preinstalled with Windows 8</a>
7179       </div>
7180       <div class="date">
7181         27th May 2013
7182       </div>
7183       <div class="body">
7184         <p>Two days ago, I asked
7185 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_can_I_install_Linux_on_a_Packard_Bell_Easynote_LV_preinstalled_with_Windows_8_.html">how
7186 I could install Linux on a Packard Bell EasyNote LV computer
7187 preinstalled with Windows 8</a>.  I found a solution, but am horrified
7188 with the obstacles put in the way of Linux users on a laptop with UEFI
7189 and Windows 8.</p>
7190
7191 <p>I never found out if the cause of my problems were the use of UEFI
7192 secure booting or fast boot.  I suspect fast boot was the problem,
7193 causing the firmware to boot directly from HD without considering any
7194 key presses and alternative devices, but do not know UEFI settings
7195 enough to tell.</p>
7196
7197 <p>There is no way to install Linux on the machine in question without
7198 opening the box and disconnecting the hard drive!  This is as far as I
7199 can tell, the only way to get access to the firmware setup menu
7200 without accepting the Windows 8 license agreement.  I am told (and
7201 found description on how to) that it is possible to configure the
7202 firmware setup once booted into Windows 8.  But as I believe the terms
7203 of that agreement are completely unacceptable, accepting the license
7204 was never an alternative.  I do not enter agreements I do not intend
7205 to follow.</p>
7206
7207 <p>I feared I had to return the laptops and ask for a refund, and
7208 waste many hours on this, but luckily there was a way to get it to
7209 work.  But I would not recommend it to anyone planning to run Linux on
7210 it, and I have become sceptical to Windows 8 certified laptops.  Is
7211 this the way Linux will be forced out of the market place, by making
7212 it close to impossible for "normal" users to install Linux without
7213 accepting the Microsoft Windows license terms?  Or at least not
7214 without risking to loose the warranty?</p>
7215
7216 <p>I've updated the
7217 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Linux Laptop
7218 wiki page for Packard Bell EasyNote LV</a>, to ensure the next person
7219 do not have to struggle as much as I did to get Linux into the
7220 machine.</p>
7221
7222 <p>Thanks to Bob Rosbag, Florian Weimer, Philipp Kern, Ben Hutching,
7223 Michael Tokarev and others for feedback and ideas.</p>
7224
7225       </div>
7226       <div class="tags">
7227
7228
7229         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7230
7231
7232       </div>
7233     </div>
7234     <div class="padding"></div>
7235
7236     <div class="entry">
7237       <div class="title">
7238         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_can_I_install_Linux_on_a_Packard_Bell_Easynote_LV_preinstalled_with_Windows_8_.html">How can I install Linux on a Packard Bell Easynote LV preinstalled with Windows 8?</a>
7239       </div>
7240       <div class="date">
7241         25th May 2013
7242       </div>
7243       <div class="body">
7244         <p>I've run into quite a problem the last few days.  I bought three
7245 new laptops for my parents and a few others.  I bought Packard Bell
7246 Easynote LV to run Kubuntu on and use as their home computer.  But I
7247 am completely unable to figure out how to install Linux on it.  The
7248 computer is preinstalled with Windows 8, and I suspect it uses UEFI
7249 instead of a BIOS to boot.</p>
7250
7251 <p>The problem is that I am unable to get it to PXE boot, and unable
7252 to get it to boot the Linux installer from my USB stick.  I have yet
7253 to try the DVD install, and still hope it will work.  when I turn on
7254 the computer, there is no information on what buttons to press to get
7255 the normal boot menu.  I expect to get some boot menu to select PXE or
7256 USB stick booting.  When booting, it first ask for the language to
7257 use, then for some regional settings, and finally if I will accept the
7258 Windows 8 terms of use.  As these terms are completely unacceptable to
7259 me, I have no other choice but to turn off the computer and try again
7260 to get it to boot the Linux installer.</p>
7261
7262 <p>I have gathered my findings so far on a Linlap page about the
7263 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Packard Bell
7264 EasyNote LV</a> model.  If you have any idea how to get Linux
7265 installed on this machine, please get in touch or update that wiki
7266 page.  If I can't find a way to install Linux, I will have to return
7267 the laptop to the seller and find another machine for my parents.</p>
7268
7269 <p>I wonder, is this the way Linux will be forced out of the market
7270 using UEFI and "secure boot" by making it impossible to install Linux
7271 on new Laptops?</p>
7272
7273       </div>
7274       <div class="tags">
7275
7276
7277         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7278
7279
7280       </div>
7281     </div>
7282     <div class="padding"></div>
7283
7284     <div class="entry">
7285       <div class="title">
7286         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_transform_a_Debian_based_system_to_a_Debian_Edu_installation.html">How to transform a Debian based system to a Debian Edu installation</a>
7287       </div>
7288       <div class="date">
7289         17th May 2013
7290       </div>
7291       <div class="body">
7292         <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> is
7293 an operating system based on Debian intended for use in schools.  It
7294 contain a turn-key solution for the computer network provided to
7295 pupils in the primary schools.  It provide both the central server,
7296 network boot servers and desktop environments with heaps of
7297 educational software.  The project was founded almost 12 years ago,
7298 2001-07-02.  If you want to support the project, which is in need for
7299 cash to fund developer gatherings and other project related activity,
7300 <a href="http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">please
7301 donate some money</a>.
7302
7303 <p>A topic that come up again and again on the Debian Edu mailing
7304 lists and elsewhere, is the question on how to transform a Debian or
7305 Ubuntu installation into a Debian Edu installation.  It isn't very
7306 hard, and last week I wrote a script to replicate the steps done by
7307 the Debian Edu installer.</p>
7308
7309 <p>The script,
7310 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/branches/wheezy/debian-edu-config/share/debian-edu-config/tools/debian-edu-bless?view=markup">debian-edu-bless<a/>
7311 in the debian-edu-config package, will go through these six steps and
7312 transform an existing Debian Wheezy or Ubuntu (untested) installation
7313 into a Debian Edu Workstation:</p>
7314
7315 <ol>
7316
7317 <li>Add skolelinux related APT sources.</li>
7318 <li>Create /etc/debian-edu/config with the wanted configuration.</li>
7319 <li>Install debian-edu-install to load preseeding values and pull in
7320     our configuration.</li>
7321 <li>Preseed debconf database with profile setup in
7322     /etc/debian-edu/config, and run tasksel to install packages
7323     according to the profile specified in the config above,
7324     overriding some of the Debian automation machinery.</li>
7325 <li>Run debian-edu-cfengine-D installation to configure everything
7326     that could not be done using preseeding.</li>
7327 <li>Ask for a reboot to enable all the configuration changes.</li>
7328
7329 </ol>
7330
7331 <p>There are some steps in the Debian Edu installation that can not be
7332 replicated like this.  Disk partitioning and LVM setup, for example.
7333 So this script just assume there is enough disk space to install all
7334 the needed packages.</p>
7335
7336 <p>The script was created to help a Debian Edu student working on
7337 setting up <a href="http://www.raspberrypi.org">Raspberry Pi</a> as a
7338 Debian Edu client, and using it he can take the existing
7339 <a href="http://www.raspbian.org/FrontPage‎">Raspbian</a> installation and
7340 transform it into a fully functioning Debian Edu Workstation (or
7341 Roaming Workstation, or whatever :).</p>
7342
7343 <p>The default setting in the script is to create a KDE Workstation.
7344 If a LXDE based Roaming workstation is wanted instead, modify the
7345 PROFILE and DESKTOP values at the top to look like this instead:</p>
7346
7347 <p><pre>
7348 PROFILE="Roaming-Workstation"
7349 DESKTOP="lxde"
7350 </pre></p>
7351
7352 <p>The script could even become useful to set up Debian Edu servers in
7353 the cloud, by starting with a virtual Debian installation at some
7354 virtual hosting service and setting up all the services on first
7355 boot.</p>
7356
7357       </div>
7358       <div class="tags">
7359
7360
7361         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7362
7363
7364       </div>
7365     </div>
7366     <div class="padding"></div>
7367
7368     <div class="entry">
7369       <div class="title">
7370         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian__the_Linux_distribution_of_choice_for_LEGO_designers_.html">Debian, the Linux distribution of choice for LEGO designers?</a>
7371       </div>
7372       <div class="date">
7373         11th May 2013
7374       </div>
7375       <div class="body">
7376         <P>In January,
7377 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_IRC_channel_for_LEGO_designers_using_Debian.html">I
7378 announced a</a> new <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">IRC
7379 channel #debian-lego</a>, for those of us in the Debian and Linux
7380 community interested in <a href="http://www.lego.com/">LEGO</a>, the
7381 marvellous construction system from Denmark.  We also created
7382 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">a wiki page</a> to have
7383 a place to take notes and write down our plans and hopes.  And several
7384 people showed up to help.  I was very happy to see the effect of my
7385 call.  Since the small start, we have a debtags tag
7386 <a href="http://debtags.debian.net/search/bytag?wl=hardware::hobby:lego">hardware::hobby:lego</a>
7387 tag for LEGO related packages, and now count 10 packages related to
7388 LEGO and <a href="http://mindstorms.lego.com/">Mindstorms</a>:</p>
7389
7390 <p><table>
7391 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/brickos">brickos</a></td><td>alternative OS for LEGO Mindstorms RCX. Supports development in C/C++</td></tr>
7392 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/leocad">leocad</a></td><td>virtual brick CAD software</td></tr>
7393 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/libnxt">libnxt</a></td><td>utility library for talking to the LEGO Mindstorms NX</td></tr>
7394 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/lnpd">lnpd</a></td><td>daemon for LNP communication with BrickOS</td></tr>
7395 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/nbc">nbc</a></td><td>compiler for LEGO Mindstorms NXT bricks</td></tr>
7396 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/nqc">nqc</a></td><td>Not Quite C compiler for LEGO Mindstorms RCX</td></tr>
7397 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/python-nxt">python-nxt</a></td><td>python driver/interface/wrapper for the Lego Mindstorms NXT robot</td></tr>
7398 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/python-nxt-filer">python-nxt-filer</a></td><td>simple GUI to manage files on a LEGO Mindstorms NXT</td></tr>
7399 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/scratch">scratch</a></td><td>easy to use programming environment for ages 8 and up</td></tr>
7400 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/t2n">t2n</a></td><td>simple command-line tool for Lego NXT</td></tr>
7401 </table></p>
7402
7403 <p>Some of these are available in Wheezy, and all but one are
7404 currently available in Jessie/testing.  leocad is so far only
7405 available in experimental.</p>
7406
7407 <p>If you care about LEGO in Debian, please join us on IRC and help
7408 adding the rest of the great free software tools available on Linux
7409 for LEGO designers.</p>
7410
7411       </div>
7412       <div class="tags">
7413
7414
7415         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lego">lego</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
7416
7417
7418       </div>
7419     </div>
7420     <div class="padding"></div>
7421
7422     <div class="entry">
7423       <div class="title">
7424         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Wheezy_is_out___and_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_should_soon_follow___newinwheezy.html">Debian Wheezy is out - and Debian Edu / Skolelinux should soon follow! #newinwheezy</a>
7425       </div>
7426       <div class="date">
7427          5th May 2013
7428       </div>
7429       <div class="body">
7430         <p>When I woke up this morning, I was very happy to see that the
7431 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2013/20130504">release announcement
7432 for Debian Wheezy</a> was waiting in my mail box.  This is a great
7433 Debian release, and I expect to move my machines at home over to it fairly
7434 soon.</p>
7435
7436 <p>The new debian release contain heaps of new stuff, and one program
7437 in particular make me very happy to see included.  The
7438 <a href="http://scratch.mit.edu/">Scratch</a> program, made famous by
7439 the <a href="http://www.code.org/">Teach kids code</a> movement, is
7440 included for the first time.  Alongside similar programs like
7441 <a href="http://edu.kde.org/kturtle/">kturtle</a> and
7442 <a href="http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Turtle_Art">turtleart</a>,
7443 it allow for visual programming where syntax errors can not happen,
7444 and a friendly programming environment for learning to control the
7445 computer.  Scratch will also be included in the next release of Debian
7446 Edu.</a>
7447
7448 <p>And now that Wheezy is wrapped up, we can wrap up the next Debian
7449 Edu/Skolelinux release too.  The
7450 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/2013/04/msg00132.html">first
7451 alpha release</a> went out last week, and the next should soon
7452 follow.<p>
7453
7454       </div>
7455       <div class="tags">
7456
7457
7458         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7459
7460
7461       </div>
7462     </div>
7463     <div class="padding"></div>
7464
7465     <div class="entry">
7466       <div class="title">
7467         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Isenkram_0_2_finally_in_the_Debian_archive.html">Isenkram 0.2 finally in the Debian archive</a>
7468       </div>
7469       <div class="date">
7470          3rd April 2013
7471       </div>
7472       <div class="body">
7473         <p>Today the <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">Isenkram
7474 package</a> finally made it into the archive, after lingering in NEW
7475 for many months.  I uploaded it to the Debian experimental suite
7476 2013-01-27, and today it was accepted into the archive.</p>
7477
7478 <p>Isenkram is a system for suggesting to users what packages to
7479 install to work with a pluggable hardware device.  The suggestion pop
7480 up when the device is plugged in.  For example if a Lego Mindstorm NXT
7481 is inserted, it will suggest to install the program needed to program
7482 the NXT controller.  Give it a go, and report bugs and suggestions to
7483 BTS. :)</p>
7484
7485       </div>
7486       <div class="tags">
7487
7488
7489         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
7490
7491
7492       </div>
7493     </div>
7494     <div class="padding"></div>
7495
7496     <div class="entry">
7497       <div class="title">
7498         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Bitcoin_GUI_now_available_from_Debian_unstable__and_Ubuntu_raring_.html">Bitcoin GUI now available from Debian/unstable (and Ubuntu/raring)</a>
7499       </div>
7500       <div class="date">
7501          2nd February 2013
7502       </div>
7503       <div class="body">
7504         <p>My
7505 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_backport_bitcoin_qt_version_0_7_2_2_to_Debian_Squeeze.html">last
7506 bitcoin related blog post</a> mentioned that the new
7507 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">bitcoin package</a> for
7508 Debian was waiting in NEW.  It was accepted by the Debian ftp-masters
7509 2013-01-19, and have been available in unstable since then.  It was
7510 automatically copied to Ubuntu, and is available in their Raring
7511 version too.</p>
7512
7513 <p>But there is a strange problem with the build that block this new
7514 version from being available on the i386 and kfreebsd-i386
7515 architectures.  For some strange reason, the autobuilders in Debian
7516 for these architectures fail to run the test suite on these
7517 architectures (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/672524">BTS #672524</a>).
7518 We are so far unable to reproduce it when building it manually, and
7519 no-one have been able to propose a fix.  If you got an idea what is
7520 failing, please let us know via the BTS.</p>
7521
7522 <p>One feature that is annoying me with of the bitcoin client, because
7523 I often run low on disk space, is the fact that the client will exit
7524 if it run short on space (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/696715">BTS
7525 #696715</a>).  So make sure you have enough disk space when you run
7526 it. :)</p>
7527
7528 <p>As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
7529 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
7530 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
7531
7532       </div>
7533       <div class="tags">
7534
7535
7536         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7537
7538
7539       </div>
7540     </div>
7541     <div class="padding"></div>
7542
7543     <div class="entry">
7544       <div class="title">
7545         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html">Welcome to the world, Isenkram!</a>
7546       </div>
7547       <div class="date">
7548         22nd January 2013
7549       </div>
7550       <div class="body">
7551         <p>Yesterday, I
7552 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_prototype_ready_making_hardware_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">asked
7553 for testers</a> for my prototype for making Debian better at handling
7554 pluggable hardware devices, which I
7555 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">set
7556 out to create</a> earlier this month.  Several valuable testers showed
7557 up, and caused me to really want to to open up the development to more
7558 people.  But before I did this, I want to come up with a sensible name
7559 for this project.  Today I finally decided on a new name, and I have
7560 renamed the project from hw-support-handler to this new name.  In the
7561 process, I moved the source to git and made it available as a
7562 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/isenkram.git">collab-maint</a>
7563 repository in Debian.  The new name?  It is <strong>Isenkram</strong>.
7564 To fetch and build the latest version of the source, use</p>
7565
7566 <pre>
7567 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/collab-maint/isenkram.git
7568 cd isenkram && git-buildpackage -us -uc
7569 </pre>
7570
7571 <p>I have not yet adjusted all files to use the new name yet.  If you
7572 want to hack on the source or improve the package, please go ahead.
7573 But please talk to me first on IRC or via email before you do major
7574 changes, to make sure we do not step on each others toes. :)</p>
7575
7576 <p>If you wonder what 'isenkram' is, it is a Norwegian word for iron
7577 stuff, typically meaning tools, nails, screws, etc.  Typical hardware
7578 stuff, in other words.  I've been told it is the Norwegian variant of
7579 the German word eisenkram, for those that are familiar with that
7580 word.</p>
7581
7582 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-26</strong>: Added -us -us to build
7583 instructions, to avoid confusing people with an error from the signing
7584 process.</p>
7585
7586 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-27</strong>: Switch to HTTP URL for the git
7587 clone argument to avoid the need for authentication.</p>
7588
7589       </div>
7590       <div class="tags">
7591
7592
7593         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
7594
7595
7596       </div>
7597     </div>
7598     <div class="padding"></div>
7599
7600     <div class="entry">
7601       <div class="title">
7602         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_prototype_ready_making_hardware_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">First prototype ready making hardware easier to use in Debian</a>
7603       </div>
7604       <div class="date">
7605         21st January 2013
7606       </div>
7607       <div class="body">
7608         <p>Early this month I set out to try to
7609 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">improve
7610 the Debian support for pluggable hardware devices</a>.  Now my
7611 prototype is working, and it is ready for a larger audience.  To test
7612 it, fetch the
7613 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">source
7614 from the Debian Edu subversion repository</a>, build and install the
7615 package.  You might have to log out and in again activate the
7616 autostart script.</p>
7617
7618 <p>The design is simple:</p>
7619
7620 <ul>
7621
7622 <li>Add desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ causing a program
7623 hw-support-handlerd to start when the user log in.</li>
7624
7625 <li>This program listen for kernel events about new hardware (directly
7626 from the kernel like udev does), not using HAL dbus events as I
7627 initially did.</li>
7628
7629 <li>When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware modalias in
7630 the APT database, a database
7631 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=markup">available
7632 via HTTP</a> and a database available as part of the package.</li>
7633
7634 <li>If a package is mapped to the hardware in question, the package
7635 isn't installed yet and this is the first time the hardware was
7636 plugged in, show a desktop notification suggesting to install the
7637 package or packages.</li>
7638
7639 <li>If the user click on the 'install package now' button, ask
7640 aptdaemon via the PackageKit API to install the requrired package.</li>
7641
7642 <li>aptdaemon ask for root password or sudo password, and install the
7643 package while showing progress information in a window.</li>
7644
7645 </ul>
7646
7647 <p>I still need to come up with a better name for the system.  Here
7648 are some screen shots showing the prototype in action.  First the
7649 notification, then the password request, and finally the request to
7650 approve all the dependencies.  Sorry for the Norwegian Bokmål GUI.</p>
7651
7652 <p><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-1-notification.png">
7653 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-2-password.png">
7654 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-3-dependencies.png">
7655 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-4-installing.png">
7656 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-5-installing-details.png" width="70%"></p>
7657
7658 <p>The prototype still need to be improved with longer timeouts, but
7659 is already useful.  The database of hardware to package mappings also
7660 need more work.  It is currently compatible with the Ubuntu way of
7661 storing such information in the package control file, but could be
7662 changed to use other formats instead or in addition to the current
7663 method.  I've dropped the use of discover for this mapping, as the
7664 modalias approach is more flexible and easier to use on Linux as long
7665 as the Linux kernel expose its modalias strings directly.</p>
7666
7667 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-21 16:50</strong>: Due to popular demand,
7668 here is the command required to check out and build the source: Use
7669 '<tt>svn checkout
7670 svn://svn.debian.org/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/; cd
7671 hw-support-handler; debuild</tt>'.  If you lack debuild, install the
7672 devscripts package.</p>
7673
7674 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-23 12:00</strong>: The project is now
7675 renamed to Isenkram and the source moved from the Debian Edu
7676 subversion repository to a Debian collab-maint git repository.  See
7677 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html">build
7678 instructions</a> for details.</p>
7679
7680       </div>
7681       <div class="tags">
7682
7683
7684         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
7685
7686
7687       </div>
7688     </div>
7689     <div class="padding"></div>
7690
7691     <div class="entry">
7692       <div class="title">
7693         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html">Thank you Thinkpad X41, for your long and trustworthy service</a>
7694       </div>
7695       <div class="date">
7696         19th January 2013
7697       </div>
7698       <div class="body">
7699         <p>This Christmas my trusty old laptop died.  It died quietly and
7700 suddenly in bed.  With a quiet whimper, it went completely quiet and
7701 black.  The power button was no longer able to turn it on.  It was a
7702 IBM Thinkpad X41, and the best laptop I ever had.  Better than both
7703 Thinkpads X30, X31, X40, X60, X61 and X61S.  Far better than the
7704 Compaq I had before that.  Now I need to find a replacement.  To keep
7705 going during Christmas, I moved the one year old SSD disk to my old
7706 X40 where it fitted (only one I had left that could use it), but it is
7707 not a durable solution.
7708
7709 <p>My laptop needs are fairly modest.  This is my wishlist from when I
7710 got a new one more than 10 years ago.  It still holds true.:)</p>
7711
7712 <ul>
7713
7714 <li>Lightweight (around 1 kg) and small volume (preferably smaller
7715   than A4).</li>
7716 <li>Robust, it will be in my backpack every day.</li>
7717 <li>Three button mouse and a mouse pin instead of touch pad.</li>
7718 <li>Long battery life time.  Preferable a week.</li>
7719 <li>Internal WIFI network card.</li>
7720 <li>Internal Twisted Pair network card.</li>
7721 <li>Some USB slots (2-3 is plenty)</li>
7722 <li>Good keyboard - similar to the Thinkpad.</li>
7723 <li>Video resolution at least 1024x768, with size around 12" (A4 paper
7724 size).</li>
7725 <li>Hardware supported by Debian Stable, ie the default kernel and
7726   X.org packages.</li>
7727 <li>Quiet, preferably fan free (or at least not using the fan most of
7728   the time).
7729
7730 </ul>
7731
7732 <p>You will notice that there are no RAM and CPU requirements in the
7733 list.  The reason is simply that the specifications on laptops the
7734 last 10-15 years have been sufficient for my needs, and I have to look
7735 at other features to choose my laptop.  But are there still made as
7736 robust laptops as my X41?  The Thinkpad X60/X61 proved to be less
7737 robust, and Thinkpads seem to be heading in the wrong direction since
7738 Lenovo took over.  But I've been told that X220 and X1 Carbon might
7739 still be useful.</p>
7740
7741 <p>Perhaps I should rethink my needs, and look for a pad with an
7742 external keyboard?  I'll have to check the
7743 <a href="http://www.linux-laptop.net/">Linux Laptops site</a> for
7744 well-supported laptops, or perhaps just buy one preinstalled from one
7745 of the vendors listed on the <a href="http://linuxpreloaded.com/">Linux
7746 Pre-loaded site</a>.</p>
7747
7748       </div>
7749       <div class="tags">
7750
7751
7752         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7753
7754
7755       </div>
7756     </div>
7757     <div class="padding"></div>
7758
7759     <div class="entry">
7760       <div class="title">
7761         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_find_a_browser_plugin_supporting_a_given_MIME_type.html">How to find a browser plugin supporting a given MIME type</a>
7762       </div>
7763       <div class="date">
7764         18th January 2013
7765       </div>
7766       <div class="body">
7767         <p>Some times I try to figure out which Iceweasel browser plugin to
7768 install to get support for a given MIME type.  Thanks to
7769 <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MozillaTeam/Plugins">specifications
7770 done by Ubuntu</a> and Mozilla, it is possible to do this in Debian.
7771 Unfortunately, not very many packages provide the needed meta
7772 information, Anyway, here is a small script to look up all browser
7773 plugin packages announcing ther MIME support using this specification:</p>
7774
7775 <pre>
7776 #!/usr/bin/python
7777 import sys
7778 import apt
7779 def pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
7780     cache = apt.Cache()
7781     cache.open(None)
7782     thepkgs = []
7783     for pkg in cache:
7784         version = pkg.candidate
7785         if version is None:
7786             version = pkg.installed
7787         if version is None:
7788             continue
7789         record = version.record
7790         if not record.has_key('Npp-MimeType'):
7791             continue
7792         mime_types = record['Npp-MimeType'].split(',')
7793         for t in mime_types:
7794             t = t.rstrip().strip()
7795             if t == mimetype:
7796                 thepkgs.append(pkg.name)
7797     return thepkgs
7798 mimetype = "audio/ogg"
7799 if 1 < len(sys.argv):
7800     mimetype = sys.argv[1]
7801 print "Browser plugin packages supporting %s:" % mimetype
7802 for pkg in pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
7803     print "  %s" %pkg
7804 </pre>
7805
7806 <p>It can be used like this to look up a given MIME type:</p>
7807
7808 <pre>
7809 % ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype
7810 Browser plugin packages supporting audio/ogg:
7811   gecko-mediaplayer
7812 % ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype application/x-shockwave-flash
7813 Browser plugin packages supporting application/x-shockwave-flash:
7814   browser-plugin-gnash
7815 %
7816 </pre>
7817
7818 <p>In Ubuntu this mechanism is combined with support in the browser
7819 itself to query for plugins and propose to install the needed
7820 packages.  It would be great if Debian supported such feature too.  Is
7821 anyone working on adding it?</p>
7822
7823 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-18 14:20</strong>: The Debian BTS
7824 request for icweasel support for this feature is
7825 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/484010">#484010</a> from 2008 (and
7826 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/698426">#698426</a> from today).  Lack
7827 of manpower and wish for a different design is the reason thus feature
7828 is not yet in iceweasel from Debian.</p>
7829
7830       </div>
7831       <div class="tags">
7832
7833
7834         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7835
7836
7837       </div>
7838     </div>
7839     <div class="padding"></div>
7840
7841     <div class="entry">
7842       <div class="title">
7843         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_most_supported_MIME_type_in_Debian_.html">What is the most supported MIME type in Debian?</a>
7844       </div>
7845       <div class="date">
7846         16th January 2013
7847       </div>
7848       <div class="body">
7849         <p>The <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/AppStreamDebianProposal">DEP-11
7850 proposal to add AppStream information to the Debian archive</a>, is a
7851 proposal to make it possible for a Desktop application to propose to
7852 the user some package to install to gain support for a given MIME
7853 type, font, library etc. that is currently missing.  With such
7854 mechanism in place, it would be possible for the desktop to
7855 automatically propose and install leocad if some LDraw file is
7856 downloaded by the browser.</p>
7857
7858 <p>To get some idea about the current content of the archive, I decided
7859 to write a simple program to extract all .desktop files from the
7860 Debian archive and look up the claimed MIME support there.  The result
7861 can be found on the
7862 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/pub/AppStreamTest">Skolelinux FTP
7863 site</a>.  Using the collected information, it become possible to
7864 answer the question in the title.  Here are the 20 most supported MIME
7865 types in Debian stable (Squeeze), testing (Wheezy) and unstable (Sid).
7866 The complete list is available from the link above.</p>
7867
7868 <p><strong>Debian Stable:</strong></p>
7869
7870 <pre>
7871   count MIME type
7872   ----- -----------------------
7873      32 text/plain
7874      30 audio/mpeg
7875      29 image/png
7876      28 image/jpeg
7877      27 application/ogg
7878      26 audio/x-mp3
7879      25 image/tiff
7880      25 image/gif
7881      22 image/bmp
7882      22 audio/x-wav
7883      20 audio/x-flac
7884      19 audio/x-mpegurl
7885      18 video/x-ms-asf
7886      18 audio/x-musepack
7887      18 audio/x-mpeg
7888      18 application/x-ogg
7889      17 video/mpeg
7890      17 audio/x-scpls
7891      17 audio/ogg
7892      16 video/x-ms-wmv
7893 </pre>
7894
7895 <p><strong>Debian Testing:</strong></p>
7896
7897 <pre>
7898   count MIME type
7899   ----- -----------------------
7900      33 text/plain
7901      32 image/png
7902      32 image/jpeg
7903      29 audio/mpeg
7904      27 image/gif
7905      26 image/tiff
7906      26 application/ogg
7907      25 audio/x-mp3
7908      22 image/bmp
7909      21 audio/x-wav
7910      19 audio/x-mpegurl
7911      19 audio/x-mpeg
7912      18 video/mpeg
7913      18 audio/x-scpls
7914      18 audio/x-flac
7915      18 application/x-ogg
7916      17 video/x-ms-asf
7917      17 text/html
7918      17 audio/x-musepack
7919      16 image/x-xbitmap
7920 </pre>
7921
7922 <p><strong>Debian Unstable:</strong></p>
7923
7924 <pre>
7925   count MIME type
7926   ----- -----------------------
7927      31 text/plain
7928      31 image/png
7929      31 image/jpeg
7930      29 audio/mpeg
7931      28 application/ogg
7932      27 image/gif
7933      26 image/tiff
7934      26 audio/x-mp3
7935      23 audio/x-wav
7936      22 image/bmp
7937      21 audio/x-flac
7938      20 audio/x-mpegurl
7939      19 audio/x-mpeg
7940      18 video/x-ms-asf
7941      18 video/mpeg
7942      18 audio/x-scpls
7943      18 application/x-ogg
7944      17 audio/x-musepack
7945      16 video/x-ms-wmv
7946      16 video/x-msvideo
7947 </pre>
7948
7949 <p>I am told that PackageKit can provide an API to access the kind of
7950 information mentioned in DEP-11.  I have not yet had time to look at
7951 it, but hope the PackageKit people in Debian are on top of these
7952 issues.</p>
7953
7954 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-16 13:35</strong>: Updated numbers after
7955 discovering a typo in my script.</p>
7956
7957       </div>
7958       <div class="tags">
7959
7960
7961         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7962
7963
7964       </div>
7965     </div>
7966     <div class="padding"></div>
7967
7968     <div class="entry">
7969       <div class="title">
7970         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_modalias_info_to_find_packages_handling_my_hardware.html">Using modalias info to find packages handling my hardware</a>
7971       </div>
7972       <div class="date">
7973         15th January 2013
7974       </div>
7975       <div class="body">
7976         <p>Yesterday, I wrote about the
7977 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Modalias_strings___a_practical_way_to_map__stuff__to_hardware.html">modalias
7978 values provided by the Linux kernel</a> following my hope for
7979 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">better
7980 dongle support in Debian</a>.  Using this knowledge, I have tested how
7981 modalias values attached to package names can be used to map packages
7982 to hardware.  This allow the system to look up and suggest relevant
7983 packages when I plug in some new hardware into my machine, and replace
7984 discover and discover-data as the database used to map hardware to
7985 packages.</p>
7986
7987 <p>I create a modaliases file with entries like the following,
7988 containing package name, kernel module name (if relevant, otherwise
7989 the package name) and globs matching the relevant hardware
7990 modalias.</p>
7991
7992 <p><blockquote>
7993 Package: package-name
7994 <br>Modaliases: module(modaliasglob, modaliasglob, modaliasglob)</p>
7995 </blockquote></p>
7996
7997 <p>It is fairly trivial to write code to find the relevant packages
7998 for a given modalias value using this file.</p>
7999
8000 <p>An entry like this would suggest the video and picture application
8001 cheese for many USB web cameras (interface bus class 0E01):</p>
8002
8003 <p><blockquote>
8004 Package: cheese
8005 <br>Modaliases: cheese(usb:v*p*d*dc*dsc*dp*ic0Eisc01ip*)</p>
8006 </blockquote></p>
8007
8008 <p>An entry like this would suggest the pcmciautils package when a
8009 CardBus bridge (bus class 0607) PCI device is present:</p>
8010
8011 <p><blockquote>
8012 Package: pcmciautils
8013 <br>Modaliases: pcmciautils(pci:v*d*sv*sd*bc06sc07i*)
8014 </blockquote></p>
8015
8016 <p>An entry like this would suggest the package colorhug-client when
8017 plugging in a ColorHug with USB IDs 04D8:F8DA:</p>
8018
8019 <p><blockquote>
8020 Package: colorhug-client
8021 <br>Modaliases: colorhug-client(usb:v04D8pF8DAd*)</p>
8022 </blockquote></p>
8023
8024 <p>I believe the format is compatible with the format of the Packages
8025 file in the Debian archive.  Ubuntu already uses their Packages file
8026 to store their mappings from packages to hardware.</p>
8027
8028 <p>By adding a XB-Modaliases: header in debian/control, any .deb can
8029 announce the hardware it support in a way my prototype understand.
8030 This allow those publishing packages in an APT source outside the
8031 Debian archive as well as those backporting packages to make sure the
8032 hardware mapping are included in the package meta information.  I've
8033 tested such header in the pymissile package, and its modalias mapping
8034 is working as it should with my prototype.  It even made it to Ubuntu
8035 Raring.</p>
8036
8037 <p>To test if it was possible to look up supported hardware using only
8038 the shell tools available in the Debian installer, I wrote a shell
8039 implementation of the lookup code.  The idea is to create files for
8040 each modalias and let the shell do the matching.  Please check out and
8041 try the
8042 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/hw-support-lookup?view=co">hw-support-lookup</a>
8043 shell script.  It run without any extra dependencies and fetch the
8044 hardware mappings from the Debian archive and the subversion
8045 repository where I currently work on my prototype.</p>
8046
8047 <p>When I use it on a machine with a yubikey inserted, it suggest to
8048 install yubikey-personalization:</p>
8049
8050 <p><blockquote>
8051 % ./hw-support-lookup
8052 <br>yubikey-personalization
8053 <br>%
8054 </blockquote></p>
8055
8056 <p>When I run it on my Thinkpad X40 with a PCMCIA/CardBus slot, it
8057 propose to install the pcmciautils package:</p>
8058
8059 <p><blockquote>
8060 % ./hw-support-lookup
8061 <br>pcmciautils
8062 <br>%
8063 </blockquote></p>
8064
8065 <p>If you know of any hardware-package mapping that should be added to
8066 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=co">my
8067 database</a>, please tell me about it.</p>
8068
8069 <p>It could be possible to generate several of the mappings between
8070 packages and hardware.  One source would be to look at packages with
8071 kernel modules, ie packages with *.ko files in /lib/modules/, and
8072 extract their modalias information.  Another would be to look at
8073 packages with udev rules, ie packages with files in
8074 /lib/udev/rules.d/, and extract their vendor/model information to
8075 generate a modalias matching rule.  I have not tested any of these to
8076 see if it work.</p>
8077
8078 <p>If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
8079 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
8080 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
8081 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-devel">#debian-devel</a>.</p>
8082
8083       </div>
8084       <div class="tags">
8085
8086
8087         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
8088
8089
8090       </div>
8091     </div>
8092     <div class="padding"></div>
8093
8094     <div class="entry">
8095       <div class="title">
8096         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Modalias_strings___a_practical_way_to_map__stuff__to_hardware.html">Modalias strings - a practical way to map "stuff" to hardware</a>
8097       </div>
8098       <div class="date">
8099         14th January 2013
8100       </div>
8101       <div class="body">
8102         <p>While looking into how to look up Debian packages based on hardware
8103 information, to find the packages that support a given piece of
8104 hardware, I refreshed my memory regarding modalias values, and decided
8105 to document the details.  Here are my findings so far, also available
8106 in
8107 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">the
8108 Debian Edu subversion repository</a>:
8109
8110 <p><strong>Modalias decoded</strong></p>
8111
8112 <p>This document try to explain what the different types of modalias
8113 values stands for.  It is in part based on information from
8114 &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias">https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias</a> &gt;,
8115 &lt;URL: <a href="http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/26132/how-to-assign-usb-driver-to-device">http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/26132/how-to-assign-usb-driver-to-device</a> &gt;,
8116 &lt;URL: <a href="http://code.metager.de/source/history/linux/stable/scripts/mod/file2alias.c">http://code.metager.de/source/history/linux/stable/scripts/mod/file2alias.c</a> &gt; and
8117 &lt;URL: <a href="http://cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/dmidecode/dmidecode.c?root=dmidecode&view=markup">http://cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/dmidecode/dmidecode.c?root=dmidecode&view=markup</a> &gt;.
8118
8119 <p>The modalias entries for a given Linux machine can be found using
8120 this shell script:</p>
8121
8122 <pre>
8123 find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -0 cat | sort -u
8124 </pre>
8125
8126 <p>The supported modalias globs for a given kernel module can be found
8127 using modinfo:</p>
8128
8129 <pre>
8130 % /sbin/modinfo psmouse | grep alias:
8131 alias:          serio:ty05pr*id*ex*
8132 alias:          serio:ty01pr*id*ex*
8133 %
8134 </pre>
8135
8136 <p><strong>PCI subtype</strong></p>
8137
8138 <p>A typical PCI entry can look like this.  This is an Intel Host
8139 Bridge memory controller:</p>
8140
8141 <p><blockquote>
8142 pci:v00008086d00002770sv00001028sd000001ADbc06sc00i00
8143 </blockquote></p>
8144
8145 <p>This represent these values:</p>
8146
8147 <pre>
8148  v   00008086  (vendor)
8149  d   00002770  (device)
8150  sv  00001028  (subvendor)
8151  sd  000001AD  (subdevice)
8152  bc  06        (bus class)
8153  sc  00        (bus subclass)
8154  i   00        (interface)
8155 </pre>
8156
8157 <p>The vendor/device values are the same values outputted from 'lspci
8158 -n' as 8086:2770.  The bus class/subclass is also shown by lspci as
8159 0600.  The 0600 class is a host bridge.  Other useful bus values are
8160 0300 (VGA compatible card) and 0200 (Ethernet controller).</p>
8161
8162 <p>Not sure how to figure out the interface value, nor what it
8163 means.</p>
8164
8165 <p><strong>USB subtype</strong></p>
8166
8167 <p>Some typical USB entries can look like this.  This is an internal
8168 USB hub in a laptop:</p>
8169
8170 <p><blockquote>
8171 usb:v1D6Bp0001d0206dc09dsc00dp00ic09isc00ip00
8172 </blockquote></p>
8173
8174 <p>Here is the values included in this alias:</p>
8175
8176 <pre>
8177  v    1D6B  (device vendor)
8178  p    0001  (device product)
8179  d    0206  (bcddevice)
8180  dc     09  (device class)
8181  dsc    00  (device subclass)
8182  dp     00  (device protocol)
8183  ic     09  (interface class)
8184  isc    00  (interface subclass)
8185  ip     00  (interface protocol)
8186 </pre>
8187
8188 <p>The 0900 device class/subclass means hub.  Some times the relevant
8189 class is in the interface class section.  For a simple USB web camera,
8190 these alias entries show up:</p>
8191
8192 <p><blockquote>
8193 usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc01ip00
8194 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc02ip00
8195 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc01ip00
8196 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc02ip00
8197 </blockquote></p>
8198
8199 <p>Interface class 0E01 is video control, 0E02 is video streaming (aka
8200 camera), 0101 is audio control device and 0102 is audio streaming (aka
8201 microphone).  Thus this is a camera with microphone included.</p>
8202
8203 <p><strong>ACPI subtype</strong></p>
8204
8205 <p>The ACPI type is used for several non-PCI/USB stuff.  This is an IR
8206 receiver in a Thinkpad X40:</p>
8207
8208 <p><blockquote>
8209 acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
8210 </blockquote></p>
8211
8212 <p>The values between the colons are IDs.</p>
8213
8214 <p><strong>DMI subtype</strong></p>
8215
8216 <p>The DMI table contain lots of information about the computer case
8217 and model.  This is an entry for a IBM Thinkpad X40, fetched from
8218 /sys/devices/virtual/dmi/id/modalias:</p>
8219
8220 <p><blockquote>
8221 dmi:bvnIBM:bvr1UETB6WW(1.66):bd06/15/2005:svnIBM:pn2371H4G:pvrThinkPadX40:rvnIBM:rn2371H4G:rvrNotAvailable:cvnIBM:ct10:cvrNotAvailable:
8222 </blockquote></p>
8223
8224 <p>The values present are</p>
8225
8226 <pre>
8227  bvn  IBM            (BIOS vendor)
8228  bvr  1UETB6WW(1.66) (BIOS version)
8229  bd   06/15/2005     (BIOS date)
8230  svn  IBM            (system vendor)
8231  pn   2371H4G        (product name)
8232  pvr  ThinkPadX40    (product version)
8233  rvn  IBM            (board vendor)
8234  rn   2371H4G        (board name)
8235  rvr  NotAvailable   (board version)
8236  cvn  IBM            (chassis vendor)
8237  ct   10             (chassis type)
8238  cvr  NotAvailable   (chassis version)
8239 </pre>
8240
8241 <p>The chassis type 10 is Notebook.  Other interesting values can be
8242 found in the dmidecode source:</p>
8243
8244 <pre>
8245   3 Desktop
8246   4 Low Profile Desktop
8247   5 Pizza Box
8248   6 Mini Tower
8249   7 Tower
8250   8 Portable
8251   9 Laptop
8252  10 Notebook
8253  11 Hand Held
8254  12 Docking Station
8255  13 All In One
8256  14 Sub Notebook
8257  15 Space-saving
8258  16 Lunch Box
8259  17 Main Server Chassis
8260  18 Expansion Chassis
8261  19 Sub Chassis
8262  20 Bus Expansion Chassis
8263  21 Peripheral Chassis
8264  22 RAID Chassis
8265  23 Rack Mount Chassis
8266  24 Sealed-case PC
8267  25 Multi-system
8268  26 CompactPCI
8269  27 AdvancedTCA
8270  28 Blade
8271  29 Blade Enclosing
8272 </pre>
8273
8274 <p>The chassis type values are not always accurately set in the DMI
8275 table.  For example my home server is a tower, but the DMI modalias
8276 claim it is a desktop.</p>
8277
8278 <p><strong>SerIO subtype</strong></p>
8279
8280 <p>This type is used for PS/2 mouse plugs.  One example is from my
8281 test machine:</p>
8282
8283 <p><blockquote>
8284 serio:ty01pr00id00ex00
8285 </blockquote></p>
8286
8287 <p>The values present are</p>
8288
8289 <pre>
8290   ty  01  (type)
8291   pr  00  (prototype)
8292   id  00  (id)
8293   ex  00  (extra)
8294 </pre>
8295
8296 <p>This type is supported by the psmouse driver.  I am not sure what
8297 the valid values are.</p>
8298
8299 <p><strong>Other subtypes</strong></p>
8300
8301 <p>There are heaps of other modalias subtypes according to
8302 file2alias.c.  There is the rest of the list from that source: amba,
8303 ap, bcma, ccw, css, eisa, hid, i2c, ieee1394, input, ipack, isapnp,
8304 mdio, of, parisc, pcmcia, platform, scsi, sdio, spi, ssb, vio, virtio,
8305 vmbus, x86cpu and zorro.  I did not spend time documenting all of
8306 these, as they do not seem relevant for my intended use with mapping
8307 hardware to packages when new stuff is inserted during run time.</p>
8308
8309 <p><strong>Looking up kernel modules using modalias values</strong></p>
8310
8311 <p>To check which kernel modules provide support for a given modalias,
8312 one can use the following shell script:</p>
8313
8314 <pre>
8315   for id in $(find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -0 cat | sort -u); do \
8316     echo "$id" ; \
8317     /sbin/modprobe --show-depends "$id"|sed 's/^/  /' ; \
8318   done
8319 </pre>
8320
8321 <p>The output can look like this (only the first few entries as the
8322 list is very long on my test machine):</p>
8323
8324 <pre>
8325   acpi:ACPI0003:
8326     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/acpi/ac.ko
8327   acpi:device:
8328   FATAL: Module acpi:device: not found.
8329   acpi:IBM0068:
8330     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/char/nvram.ko
8331     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/leds/led-class.ko
8332     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/net/rfkill/rfkill.ko
8333     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/platform/x86/thinkpad_acpi.ko
8334   acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
8335     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/lib/crc-ccitt.ko
8336     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/net/irda/irda.ko
8337     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/net/irda/nsc-ircc.ko
8338   [...]
8339 </pre>
8340
8341 <p>If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
8342 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
8343 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
8344 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-devel">#debian-devel</a>.</p>
8345
8346 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-15:</strong> Rewrite "cat $(find ...)" to
8347 "find ... -print0 | xargs -0 cat" to make sure it handle directories
8348 in /sys/ with space in them.</p>
8349
8350       </div>
8351       <div class="tags">
8352
8353
8354         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
8355
8356
8357       </div>
8358     </div>
8359     <div class="padding"></div>
8360
8361     <div class="entry">
8362       <div class="title">
8363         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Moved_the_pymissile_Debian_packaging_to_collab_maint.html">Moved the pymissile Debian packaging to collab-maint</a>
8364       </div>
8365       <div class="date">
8366         10th January 2013
8367       </div>
8368       <div class="body">
8369         <p>As part of my investigation on how to improve the support in Debian
8370 for hardware dongles, I dug up my old Mark and Spencer USB Rocket
8371 Launcher and updated the Debian package
8372 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pymissile">pymissile</a> to make
8373 sure udev will fix the device permissions when it is plugged in.  I
8374 also added a "Modaliases" header to test it in the Debian archive and
8375 hopefully make the package be proposed by jockey in Ubuntu when a user
8376 plug in his rocket launcher.  In the process I moved the source to a
8377 git repository under collab-maint, to make it easier for any DD to
8378 contribute.  <a href="http://code.google.com/p/pymissile/">Upstream</a>
8379 is not very active, but the software still work for me even after five
8380 years of relative silence.  The new git repository is not listed in
8381 the uploaded package yet, because I want to test the other changes a
8382 bit more before I upload the new version.  If you want to check out
8383 the new version with a .desktop file included, visit the
8384 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/pymissile.git">gitweb
8385 view</a> or use "<tt>git clone
8386 git://anonscm.debian.org/collab-maint/pymissile.git</tt>".</p>
8387
8388       </div>
8389       <div class="tags">
8390
8391
8392         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
8393
8394
8395       </div>
8396     </div>
8397     <div class="padding"></div>
8398
8399     <div class="entry">
8400       <div class="title">
8401         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">Lets make hardware dongles easier to use in Debian</a>
8402       </div>
8403       <div class="date">
8404          9th January 2013
8405       </div>
8406       <div class="body">
8407         <p>One thing that annoys me with Debian and Linux distributions in
8408 general, is that there is a great package management system with the
8409 ability to automatically install software packages by downloading them
8410 from the distribution mirrors, but no way to get it to automatically
8411 install the packages I need to use the hardware I plug into my
8412 machine.  Even if the package to use it is easily available from the
8413 Linux distribution.  When I plug in a LEGO Mindstorms NXT, it could
8414 suggest to automatically install the python-nxt, nbc and t2n packages
8415 I need to talk to it.  When I plug in a Yubikey, it could propose the
8416 yubikey-personalization package.  The information required to do this
8417 is available, but no-one have pulled all the pieces together.</p>
8418
8419 <p>Some years ago, I proposed to
8420 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg01206.html">use
8421 the discover subsystem to implement this</a>.  The idea is fairly
8422 simple:
8423
8424 <ul>
8425
8426 <li>Add a desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ pointing to a program
8427   starting when a user log in.</li>
8428
8429 <li>Set this program up to listen for kernel events emitted when new
8430   hardware is inserted into the computer.</li>
8431
8432 <li>When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware ID in a
8433   database mapping to packages, and take note of any non-installed
8434   packages.</li>
8435
8436 <li>Show a message to the user proposing to install the discovered
8437   package, and make it easy to install it.</li>
8438
8439 </ul>
8440
8441 <p>I am not sure what the best way to implement this is, but my
8442 initial idea was to use dbus events to discover new hardware, the
8443 discover database to find packages and
8444 <a href="http://www.packagekit.org/">PackageKit</a> to install
8445 packages.</p>
8446
8447 <p>Yesterday, I found time to try to implement this idea, and the
8448 draft package is now checked into
8449 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">the
8450 Debian Edu subversion repository</a>.  In the process, I updated the
8451 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover-data.html">discover-data</a>
8452 package to map the USB ids of LEGO Mindstorms and Yubikey devices to
8453 the relevant packages in Debian, and uploaded a new version
8454 2.2013.01.09 to unstable.  I also discovered that the current
8455 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover.html">discover</a>
8456 package in Debian no longer discovered any USB devices, because
8457 /proc/bus/usb/devices is no longer present.  I ported it to use
8458 libusb as a fall back option to get it working.  The fixed package
8459 version 2.1.2-6 is now in experimental (didn't upload it to unstable
8460 because of the freeze).</p>
8461
8462 <p>With this prototype in place, I can insert my Yubikey, and get this
8463 desktop notification to show up (only once, the first time it is
8464 inserted):</p>
8465
8466 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-09-hw-autoinstall.png"></p>
8467
8468 <p>For this prototype to be really useful, some way to automatically
8469 install the proposed packages by pressing the "Please install
8470 program(s)" button should to be implemented.</p>
8471
8472 <p>If this idea seem useful to you, and you want to help make it
8473 happen, please help me update the discover-data database with mappings
8474 from hardware to Debian packages.  Check if 'discover-pkginstall -l'
8475 list the package you would like to have installed when a given
8476 hardware device is inserted into your computer, and report bugs using
8477 reportbug if it isn't.  Or, if you know of a better way to provide
8478 such mapping, please let me know.</p>
8479
8480 <p>This prototype need more work, and there are several questions that
8481 should be considered before it is ready for production use.  Is dbus
8482 the correct way to detect new hardware?  At the moment I look for HAL
8483 dbus events on the system bus, because that is the events I could see
8484 on my Debian Squeeze KDE desktop.  Are there better events to use?
8485 How should the user be notified?  Is the desktop notification
8486 mechanism the best option, or should the background daemon raise a
8487 popup instead?  How should packages be installed?  When should they
8488 not be installed?</p>
8489
8490 <p>If you want to help getting such feature implemented in Debian,
8491 please send me an email. :)</p>
8492
8493       </div>
8494       <div class="tags">
8495
8496
8497         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
8498
8499
8500       </div>
8501     </div>
8502     <div class="padding"></div>
8503
8504     <div class="entry">
8505       <div class="title">
8506         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_IRC_channel_for_LEGO_designers_using_Debian.html">New IRC channel for LEGO designers using Debian</a>
8507       </div>
8508       <div class="date">
8509          2nd January 2013
8510       </div>
8511       <div class="body">
8512         <p>During Christmas, I have worked a bit on the Debian support for
8513 <a href="http://mindstorms.lego.com/en-us/Default.aspx">LEGO Mindstorm
8514 NXT</a>.  My son and I have played a bit with my NXT set, and I
8515 discovered I had to build all the tools myself because none were
8516 already in Debian Squeeze.  If Debian support for LEGO is something
8517 you care about, please join me on the IRC channel
8518 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">#debian-lego</a> (server
8519 irc.debian.org).  There is a lot that could be done to improve the
8520 Debian support for LEGO designers.  For example both CAD software
8521 and Mindstorm compilers are missing. :)</p>
8522
8523 <p>Update 2012-01-03: A
8524 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">project page</a>
8525 including links to Lego related packages is now available.</p>
8526
8527       </div>
8528       <div class="tags">
8529
8530
8531         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lego">lego</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
8532
8533
8534       </div>
8535     </div>
8536     <div class="padding"></div>
8537
8538     <div class="entry">
8539       <div class="title">
8540         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_backport_bitcoin_qt_version_0_7_2_2_to_Debian_Squeeze.html">How to backport bitcoin-qt version 0.7.2-2 to Debian Squeeze</a>
8541       </div>
8542       <div class="date">
8543         25th December 2012
8544       </div>
8545       <div class="body">
8546         <p>Let me start by wishing you all marry Christmas and a happy new
8547 year!  I hope next year will prove to be a good year.</p>
8548
8549 <p><a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">Bitcoin</a>, the digital
8550 decentralised "currency" that allow people to transfer bitcoins
8551 between each other with minimal overhead, is a very interesting
8552 experiment.  And as I wrote a few days ago, the bitcoin situation in
8553 <a href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> is about to improve a bit.
8554 The <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">new debian source
8555 package</a> (version 0.7.2-2) was uploaded yesterday, and is waiting
8556 in <a href="http://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html">the NEW queue</A>
8557 for one of the ftpmasters to approve the new bitcoin-qt package
8558 name.</p>
8559
8560 <p>And thanks to the great work of Jonas and the rest of the bitcoin
8561 team in Debian, you can easily test the package in Debian Squeeze
8562 using the following steps to get a set of working packages:</p>
8563
8564 <blockquote><pre>
8565 git clone git://git.debian.org/git/collab-maint/bitcoin
8566 cd bitcoin
8567 DEB_MAINTAINER_MODE=1 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp fakeroot debian/rules clean
8568 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp git-buildpackage --git-ignore-new
8569 </pre></blockquote>
8570
8571 <p>You might have to install some build dependencies as well.  The
8572 list of commands should give you two packages, bitcoind and
8573 bitcoin-qt, ready for use in a Squeeze environment.  Note that the
8574 client will download the complete set of bitcoin "blocks", which need
8575 around 5.6 GiB of data on my machine at the moment.  Make sure your
8576 ~/.bitcoin/ directory have lots of spare room if you want to download
8577 all the blocks.  The client will warn if the disk is getting full, so
8578 there is not really a problem if you got too little room, but you will
8579 not be able to get all the features out of the client.</p>
8580
8581 <p>As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
8582 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
8583 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
8584
8585       </div>
8586       <div class="tags">
8587
8588
8589         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8590
8591
8592       </div>
8593     </div>
8594     <div class="padding"></div>
8595
8596     <div class="entry">
8597       <div class="title">
8598         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_word_on_bitcoin_support_in_Debian.html">A word on bitcoin support in Debian</a>
8599       </div>
8600       <div class="date">
8601         21st December 2012
8602       </div>
8603       <div class="body">
8604         <p>It has been a while since I wrote about
8605 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">bitcoin</a>, the decentralised
8606 peer-to-peer based crypto-currency, and the reason is simply that I
8607 have been busy elsewhere.  But two days ago, I started looking at the
8608 state of <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">bitcoin in
8609 Debian</a> again to try to recover my old bitcoin wallet.  The package
8610 is now maintained by a
8611 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-bitcoin/">team of
8612 people</a>, and the grunt work had already been done by this team.  We
8613 owe a huge thank you to all these team members. :)
8614 But I was sad to discover that the bitcoin client is missing in
8615 Wheezy.  It is only available in Sid (and an outdated client from
8616 backports).  The client had several RC bugs registered in BTS blocking
8617 it from entering testing.  To try to help the team and improve the
8618 situation, I spent some time providing patches and triaging the bug
8619 reports.  I also had a look at the bitcoin package available from Matt
8620 Corallo in a
8621 <a href="https://launchpad.net/~bitcoin/+archive/bitcoin">PPA for
8622 Ubuntu</a>, and moved the useful pieces from that version into the
8623 Debian package.</p>
8624
8625 <p>After checking with the main package maintainer Jonas Smedegaard on
8626 IRC, I pushed several patches into the collab-maint git repository to
8627 improve the package.  It now contains fixes for the RC issues (not from
8628 me, but fixed by Scott Howard), build rules for a Qt GUI client
8629 package, konqueror support for the bitcoin: URI and bash completion
8630 setup.  As I work on Debian Squeeze, I also created
8631 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-bitcoin-devel/Week-of-Mon-20121217/000041.html">a
8632 patch to backport</a> the latest version.  Jonas is going to look at
8633 it and try to integrate it into the git repository before uploading a
8634 new version to unstable.
8635
8636 <p>I would very much like bitcoin to succeed, to get rid of the
8637 centralized control currently exercised in the monetary system.  I
8638 find it completely unacceptable that the USA government is collecting
8639 transaction data for almost all international money transfers (most are done in USD and transaction logs shipped to the spooks), and
8640 that the major credit card companies can block legal money
8641 transactions to Wikileaks.  But for bitcoin to succeed, more people
8642 need to use bitcoins, and more people need to accept bitcoins when
8643 they sell products and services.  Improving the bitcoin support in
8644 Debian is a small step in the right direction, but not enough.
8645 Unfortunately the user experience when browsing the web and wanting to
8646 pay with bitcoin is still not very good.  The bitcoin: URI is a step
8647 in the right direction, but need to work in most or every browser in
8648 use.  Also the bitcoin-qt client is too heavy to fire up to do a
8649 quick transaction.  I believe there are other clients available, but
8650 have not tested them.</p>
8651
8652 <p>My
8653 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html">experiment
8654 with bitcoins</a> showed that at least some of my readers use bitcoin.
8655 I received 20.15 BTC so far on the address I provided in my blog two
8656 years ago, as can be
8657 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">seen
8658 on the blockexplorer service</a>.  Thank you everyone for your
8659 donation.  The blockexplorer service demonstrates quite well that
8660 bitcoin is not quite anonymous and untracked. :) I wonder if the
8661 number of users have gone up since then.  If you use bitcoin and want
8662 to show your support of my activity, please send Bitcoin donations to
8663 the same address as last time,
8664 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
8665
8666       </div>
8667       <div class="tags">
8668
8669
8670         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8671
8672
8673       </div>
8674     </div>
8675     <div class="padding"></div>
8676
8677     <div class="entry">
8678       <div class="title">
8679         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Git_repository_for_song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">Git repository for song book for Computer Scientists</a>
8680       </div>
8681       <div class="date">
8682          7th September 2012
8683       </div>
8684       <div class="body">
8685         <p>As I
8686 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">mentioned
8687 this summer</a>, I have created a Computer Science song book a few
8688 years ago, and today I finally found time to create a public
8689 <a href="https://gitorious.org/pere-cs-songbook/pere-cs-songbook">Gitorious
8690 repository for the project</a>.</p>
8691
8692 <p>If you want to help out, please clone the source and submit patches
8693 to the HTML version.  To generate the PDF and PostScript version,
8694 please use prince XML, or let me know about a useful free software
8695 processor capable of creating a good looking PDF from the HTML.</p>
8696
8697 <p>Want to sing?  You can still find the song book in HTML, PDF and
8698 PostScript formats at
8699 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/">Petter's Computer
8700 Science Songbook</a>.</p>
8701
8702       </div>
8703       <div class="tags">
8704
8705
8706         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>.
8707
8708
8709       </div>
8710     </div>
8711     <div class="padding"></div>
8712
8713     <div class="entry">
8714       <div class="title">
8715         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gratulerer_med_19__rsdagen__Debian_.html">Gratulerer med 19-årsdagen, Debian!</a>
8716       </div>
8717       <div class="date">
8718         16th August 2012
8719       </div>
8720       <div class="body">
8721         <p>I dag fyller
8722 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120813">Debian-prosjektet 19
8723 år</a>.  Jeg har fulgt det de siste 12 årene, og er veldig glad for å kunne
8724 si gratulerer med dagen, Debian!</p>
8725
8726       </div>
8727       <div class="tags">
8728
8729
8730         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>.
8731
8732
8733       </div>
8734     </div>
8735     <div class="padding"></div>
8736
8737     <div class="entry">
8738       <div class="title">
8739         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">Song book for Computer Scientists</a>
8740       </div>
8741       <div class="date">
8742         24th June 2012
8743       </div>
8744       <div class="body">
8745         <p>Many years ago, while studying Computer Science at the
8746 <a href="http://www.uit.no/">University of Tromsø</a>, I started
8747 collecting computer related songs for use at parties.  The original
8748 version was written in LaTeX, but a few years ago I got help from
8749 Håkon W. Lie, one of the inventors of W3C CSS, to convert it to HTML
8750 while keeping the ability to create a nice book in PDF format.  I have
8751 not had time to maintain the book for a while now, and guess I should
8752 put it up on some public version control repository where others can
8753 help me extend and update the book.  If anyone is volunteering to help
8754 me with this, send me an email.  Also let me know if there are songs
8755 missing in my book.</p>
8756
8757 <p>I have not mentioned the book on my blog so far, and it occured to
8758 me today that I really should let all my readers share the joys of
8759 singing out load about programming, computers and computer networks.
8760 Especially now that <a href="http://debconf12.debconf.org/">Debconf
8761 12</a> is about to start (and I am not going).  Want to sing?  Check
8762 out <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/">Petter's
8763 Computer Science Songbook</a>.
8764
8765       </div>
8766       <div class="tags">
8767
8768
8769         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>.
8770
8771
8772       </div>
8773     </div>
8774     <div class="padding"></div>
8775
8776     <div class="entry">
8777       <div class="title">
8778         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatically_upgrading_server_firmware_on_Dell_PowerEdge.html">Automatically upgrading server firmware on Dell PowerEdge</a>
8779       </div>
8780       <div class="date">
8781         21st November 2011
8782       </div>
8783       <div class="body">
8784         <p>At work we have heaps of servers.  I believe the total count is
8785 around 1000 at the moment.  To be able to get help from the vendors
8786 when something go wrong, we want to keep the firmware on the servers
8787 up to date.  If the firmware isn't the latest and greatest, the
8788 vendors typically refuse to start debugging any problems until the
8789 firmware is upgraded.  So before every reboot, we want to upgrade the
8790 firmware, and we would really like everyone handling servers at the
8791 university to do this themselves when they plan to reboot a machine.
8792 For that to happen we at the unix server admin group need to provide
8793 the tools to do so.</p>
8794
8795 <p>To make firmware upgrading easier, I am working on a script to
8796 fetch and install the latest firmware for the servers we got.  Most of
8797 our hardware are from Dell and HP, so I have focused on these servers
8798 so far.  This blog post is about the Dell part.</P>
8799
8800 <p>On the Dell FTP site I was lucky enough to find
8801 <a href="ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz">an XML file</a>
8802 with firmware information for all 11th generation servers, listing
8803 which firmware should be used on a given model and where on the FTP
8804 site I can find it.  Using a simple perl XML parser I can then
8805 download the shell scripts Dell provides to do firmware upgrades from
8806 within Linux and reboot when all the firmware is primed and ready to
8807 be activated on the first reboot.</p>
8808
8809 <p>This is the Dell related fragment of the perl code I am working on.
8810 Are there anyone working on similar tools for firmware upgrading all
8811 servers at a site?  Please get in touch and lets share resources.</p>
8812
8813 <p><pre>
8814 #!/usr/bin/perl
8815 use strict;
8816 use warnings;
8817 use File::Temp qw(tempdir);
8818 BEGIN {
8819     # Install needed RHEL packages if missing
8820     my %rhelmodules = (
8821         'XML::Simple' => 'perl-XML-Simple',
8822         );
8823     for my $module (keys %rhelmodules) {
8824         eval "use $module;";
8825         if ($@) {
8826             my $pkg = $rhelmodules{$module};
8827             system("yum install -y $pkg");
8828             eval "use $module;";
8829         }
8830     }
8831 }
8832 my $errorsto = 'pere@hungry.com';
8833
8834 upgrade_dell();
8835
8836 exit 0;
8837
8838 sub run_firmware_script {
8839     my ($opts, $script) = @_;
8840     unless ($script) {
8841         print STDERR "fail: missing script name\n";
8842         exit 1
8843     }
8844     print STDERR "Running $script\n\n";
8845
8846     if (0 == system("sh $script $opts")) { # FIXME correct exit code handling
8847         print STDERR "success: firmware script ran succcessfully\n";
8848     } else {
8849         print STDERR "fail: firmware script returned error\n";
8850     }
8851 }
8852
8853 sub run_firmware_scripts {
8854     my ($opts, @dirs) = @_;
8855     # Run firmware packages
8856     for my $dir (@dirs) {
8857         print STDERR "info: Running scripts in $dir\n";
8858         opendir(my $dh, $dir) or die "Unable to open directory $dir: $!";
8859         while (my $s = readdir $dh) {
8860             next if $s =~ m/^\.\.?/;
8861             run_firmware_script($opts, "$dir/$s");
8862         }
8863         closedir $dh;
8864     }
8865 }
8866
8867 sub download {
8868     my $url = shift;
8869     print STDERR "info: Downloading $url\n";
8870     system("wget --quiet \"$url\"");
8871 }
8872
8873 sub upgrade_dell {
8874     my @dirs;
8875     my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
8876     chomp $product;
8877
8878     if ($product =~ m/PowerEdge/) {
8879
8880         # on RHEL, these pacakges are needed by the firwmare upgrade scripts
8881         system('yum install -y compat-libstdc++-33.i686 libstdc++.i686 libxml2.i686 procmail');
8882
8883         my $tmpdir = tempdir(
8884             CLEANUP => 1
8885             );
8886         chdir($tmpdir);
8887         fetch_dell_fw('catalog/Catalog.xml.gz');
8888         system('gunzip Catalog.xml.gz');
8889         my @paths = fetch_dell_fw_list('Catalog.xml');
8890         # -q is quiet, disabling interactivity and reducing console output
8891         my $fwopts = "-q";
8892         if (@paths) {
8893             for my $url (@paths) {
8894                 fetch_dell_fw($url);
8895             }
8896             run_firmware_scripts($fwopts, $tmpdir);
8897         } else {
8898             print STDERR "error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
8899             print STDERR "error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
8900         }
8901         chdir('/');
8902     } else {
8903         print STDERR "error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
8904         print STDERR "error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
8905     }
8906 }
8907
8908 sub fetch_dell_fw {
8909     my $path = shift;
8910     my $url = "ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/$path";
8911     download($url);
8912 }
8913
8914 # Using ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz, figure out which
8915 # firmware packages to download from Dell.  Only work for Linux
8916 # machines and 11th generation Dell servers.
8917 sub fetch_dell_fw_list {
8918     my $filename = shift;
8919
8920     my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
8921     chomp $product;
8922     my ($mybrand, $mymodel) = split(/\s+/, $product);
8923
8924     print STDERR "Finding firmware bundles for $mybrand $mymodel\n";
8925
8926     my $xml = XMLin($filename);
8927     my @paths;
8928     for my $bundle (@{$xml->{SoftwareBundle}}) {
8929         my $brand = $bundle->{TargetSystems}->{Brand}->{Display}->{content};
8930         my $model = $bundle->{TargetSystems}->{Brand}->{Model}->{Display}->{content};
8931         my $oscode;
8932         if ("ARRAY" eq ref $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}) {
8933             $oscode = $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}[0]->{osCode};
8934         } else {
8935             $oscode = $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}->{osCode};
8936         }
8937         if ($mybrand eq $brand && $mymodel eq $model && "LIN" eq $oscode)
8938         {
8939             @paths = map { $_->{path} } @{$bundle->{Contents}->{Package}};
8940         }
8941     }
8942     for my $component (@{$xml->{SoftwareComponent}}) {
8943         my $componenttype = $component->{ComponentType}->{value};
8944
8945         # Drop application packages, only firmware and BIOS
8946         next if 'APAC' eq $componenttype;
8947
8948         my $cpath = $component->{path};
8949         for my $path (@paths) {
8950             if ($cpath =~ m%/$path$%) {
8951                 push(@paths, $cpath);
8952             }
8953         }
8954     }
8955     return @paths;
8956 }
8957 </pre>
8958
8959 <p>The code is only tested on RedHat Enterprise Linux, but I suspect
8960 it could work on other platforms with some tweaking.  Anyone know a
8961 index like Catalog.xml is available from HP for HP servers?  At the
8962 moment I maintain a similar list manually and it is quickly getting
8963 outdated.</p>
8964
8965       </div>
8966       <div class="tags">
8967
8968
8969         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8970
8971
8972       </div>
8973     </div>
8974     <div class="padding"></div>
8975
8976     <div class="entry">
8977       <div class="title">
8978         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_is_booting_into_runlevel_1_different_from_single_user_boots_.html">How is booting into runlevel 1 different from single user boots?</a>
8979       </div>
8980       <div class="date">
8981          4th August 2011
8982       </div>
8983       <div class="body">
8984         <p>Wouter Verhelst have some
8985 <a href="http://grep.be/blog/en/retorts/pere_kubuntu_boot">interesting
8986 comments and opinions</a> on my blog post on
8987 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_should_start_from__etc_rcS_d__in_Debian____almost_nothing.html">the
8988 need to clean up /etc/rcS.d/ in Debian</a> and my blog post about
8989 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_missing_in_the_Debian_desktop__or_why_my_parents_use_Kubuntu.html">the
8990 default KDE desktop in Debian</a>.  I only have time to address one
8991 small piece of his comment now, and though it best to address the
8992 misunderstanding he bring forward:</p>
8993
8994 <p><blockquote>
8995 Currently, a system admin has four options: [...] boot to a
8996 single-user system (by adding 'single' to the kernel command line;
8997 this runs rcS and rc1 scripts)
8998 </blockquote></p>
8999
9000 <p>This make me believe Wouter believe booting into single user mode
9001 and booting into runlevel 1 is the same.  I am not surprised he
9002 believe this, because it would make sense and is a quite sensible
9003 thing to believe.  But because the boot in Debian is slightly broken,
9004 runlevel 1 do not work properly and it isn't the same as single user
9005 mode.  I'll try to explain what is actually happing, but it is a bit
9006 hard to explain.</p>
9007
9008 <p>Single user mode is defined like this in /etc/inittab:
9009 "<tt>~~:S:wait:/sbin/sulogin</tt>".  This means the only thing that is
9010 executed in single user mode is sulogin.  Single user mode is a boot
9011 state "between" the runlevels, and when booting into single user mode,
9012 only the scripts in /etc/rcS.d/ are executed before the init process
9013 enters the single user state.  When switching to runlevel 1, the state
9014 is in fact not ending in runlevel 1, but it passes through runlevel 1
9015 and end up in the single user mode (see /etc/rc1.d/S03single, which
9016 runs "init -t1 S" to switch to single user mode at the end of runlevel
9017 1.  It is confusing that the 'S' (single user) init mode is not the
9018 mode enabled by /etc/rcS.d/ (which is more like the initial boot
9019 mode).</p>
9020
9021 <p>This summary might make it clearer.  When booting for the first
9022 time into single user mode, the following commands are executed:
9023 "<tt>/etc/init.d/rc S; /sbin/sulogin</tt>".  When booting into
9024 runlevel 1, the following commands are executed: "<tt>/etc/init.d/rc
9025 S; /etc/init.d/rc 1; /sbin/sulogin</tt>".  A problem show up when
9026 trying to continue after visiting single user mode.  Not all services
9027 are started again as they should, causing the machine to end up in an
9028 unpredicatble state.  This is why Debian admins recommend rebooting
9029 after visiting single user mode.</p>
9030
9031 <p>A similar problem with runlevel 1 is caused by the amount of
9032 scripts executed from /etc/rcS.d/.  When switching from say runlevel 2
9033 to runlevel 1, the services started from /etc/rcS.d/ are not properly
9034 stopped when passing through the scripts in /etc/rc1.d/, and not
9035 started again when switching away from runlevel 1 to the runlevels
9036 2-5.  I believe the problem is best fixed by moving all the scripts
9037 out of /etc/rcS.d/ that are not <strong>required</strong> to get a
9038 functioning single user mode during boot.</p>
9039
9040 <p>I have spent several years investigating the Debian boot system,
9041 and discovered this problem a few years ago.  I suspect it originates
9042 from when sysvinit was introduced into Debian, a long time ago.</p>
9043
9044       </div>
9045       <div class="tags">
9046
9047
9048         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9049
9050
9051       </div>
9052     </div>
9053     <div class="padding"></div>
9054
9055     <div class="entry">
9056       <div class="title">
9057         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_should_start_from__etc_rcS_d__in_Debian____almost_nothing.html">What should start from /etc/rcS.d/ in Debian? - almost nothing</a>
9058       </div>
9059       <div class="date">
9060         30th July 2011
9061       </div>
9062       <div class="body">
9063         <p>In the Debian boot system, several packages include scripts that
9064 are started from /etc/rcS.d/.  In fact, there is a bite more of them
9065 than make sense, and this causes a few problems.  What kind of
9066 problems, you might ask.  There are at least two problems.  The first
9067 is that it is not possible to recover a machine after switching to
9068 runlevel 1.  One need to actually reboot to get the machine back to
9069 the expected state.  The other is that single user boot will sometimes
9070 run into problems because some of the subsystems are activated before
9071 the root login is presented, causing problems when trying to recover a
9072 machine from a problem in that subsystem.  A minor additional point is
9073 that moving more scripts out of rcS.d/ and into the other rc#.d/
9074 directories will increase the amount of scripts that can run in
9075 parallel during boot, and thus decrease the boot time.</p>
9076
9077 <p>So, which scripts should start from rcS.d/.  In short, only the
9078 scripts that _have_ to execute before the root login prompt is
9079 presented during a single user boot should go there.  Everything else
9080 should go into the numeric runlevels.  This means things like
9081 lm-sensors, fuse and x11-common should not run from rcS.d, but from
9082 the numeric runlevels.  Today in Debian, there are around 115 init.d
9083 scripts that are started from rcS.d/, and most of them should be moved
9084 out.  Do your package have one of them?  Please help us make single
9085 user and runlevel 1 better by moving it.</p>
9086
9087 <p>Scripts setting up the screen, keyboard, system partitions
9088 etc. should still be started from rcS.d/, but there is for example no
9089 need to have the network enabled before the single user login prompt
9090 is presented.</p>
9091
9092 <p>As always, things are not so easy to fix as they sound.  To keep
9093 Debian systems working while scripts migrate and during upgrades, the
9094 scripts need to be moved from rcS.d/ to rc2.d/ in reverse dependency
9095 order, ie the scripts that nothing in rcS.d/ depend on can be moved,
9096 and the next ones can only be moved when their dependencies have been
9097 moved first.  This migration must be done sequentially while we ensure
9098 that the package system upgrade packages in the right order to keep
9099 the system state correct.  This will require some coordination when it
9100 comes to network related packages, but most of the packages with
9101 scripts that should migrate do not have anything in rcS.d/ depending
9102 on them.  Some packages have already been updated, like the sudo
9103 package, while others are still left to do.  I wish I had time to work
9104 on this myself, but real live constrains make it unlikely that I will
9105 find time to push this forward.</p>
9106
9107       </div>
9108       <div class="tags">
9109
9110
9111         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9112
9113
9114       </div>
9115     </div>
9116     <div class="padding"></div>
9117
9118     <div class="entry">
9119       <div class="title">
9120         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_missing_in_the_Debian_desktop__or_why_my_parents_use_Kubuntu.html">What is missing in the Debian desktop, or why my parents use Kubuntu</a>
9121       </div>
9122       <div class="date">
9123         29th July 2011
9124       </div>
9125       <div class="body">
9126         <p>While at Debconf11, I have several times during discussions
9127 mentioned the issues I believe should be improved in Debian for its
9128 desktop to be useful for more people.  The use case for this is my
9129 parents, which are currently running Kubuntu which solve the
9130 issues.</p>
9131
9132 <p>I suspect these four missing features are not very hard to
9133 implement.  After all, they are present in Ubuntu, so if we wanted to
9134 do this in Debian we would have a source.</p>
9135
9136 <ol>
9137
9138 <li><strong>Simple GUI based upgrade of packages.</strong> When there
9139 are new packages available for upgrades, a icon in the KDE status bar
9140 indicate this, and clicking on it will activate the simple upgrade
9141 tool to handle it.  I have no problem guiding both of my parents
9142 through the process over the phone.  If a kernel reboot is required,
9143 this too is indicated by the status bars and the upgrade tool.  Last
9144 time I checked, nothing with the same features was working in KDE in
9145 Debian.</li>
9146
9147 <li><strong>Simple handling of missing Firefox browser
9148 plugins.</strong> When the browser encounter a MIME type it do not
9149 currently have a handler for, it will ask the user if the system
9150 should search for a package that would add support for this MIME type,
9151 and if the user say yes, the APT sources will be searched for packages
9152 advertising the MIME type in their control file (visible in the
9153 Packages file in the APT archive).  If one or more packages are found,
9154 it is a simple click of the mouse to add support for the missing mime
9155 type.  If the package require the user to accept some non-free
9156 license, this is explained to the user.  The entire process make it
9157 more clear to the user why something do not work in the browser, and
9158 make the chances higher for the user to blame the web page authors and
9159 not the browser for any missing features.</li>
9160
9161 <li><strong>Simple handling of missing multimedia codec/format
9162 handlers.</strong> When the media players encounter a format or codec
9163 it is not supporting, a dialog pop up asking the user if the system
9164 should search for a package that would add support for it.  This
9165 happen with things like MP3, Windows Media or H.264.  The selection
9166 and installation procedure is very similar to the Firefox browser
9167 plugin handling.  This is as far as I know implemented using a
9168 gstreamer hook.  The end result is that the user easily get access to
9169 the codecs that are present from the APT archives available, while
9170 explaining more on why a given format is unsupported by Ubuntu.</li>
9171
9172 <li><strong>Better browser handling of some MIME types.</strong> When
9173 displaying a text/plain file in my Debian browser, it will propose to
9174 start emacs to show it.  If I remember correctly, when doing the same
9175 in Kunbutu it show the file as a text file in the browser.  At least I
9176 know Opera will show text files within the browser.  I much prefer the
9177 latter behaviour.</li>
9178
9179 </ol>
9180
9181 <p>There are other nice features as well, like the simplified suite
9182 upgrader, but given that I am the one mostly doing the dist-upgrade,
9183 it do not matter much.</p>
9184
9185 <p>I really hope we could get these features in place for the next
9186 Debian release.  It would require the coordinated effort of several
9187 maintainers, but would make the end user experience a lot better.</p>
9188
9189       </div>
9190       <div class="tags">
9191
9192
9193         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
9194
9195
9196       </div>
9197     </div>
9198     <div class="padding"></div>
9199
9200     <div class="entry">
9201       <div class="title">
9202         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Perl_modules_used_by_FixMyStreet_which_are_missing_in_Debian_Squeeze.html">Perl modules used by FixMyStreet which are missing in Debian/Squeeze</a>
9203       </div>
9204       <div class="date">
9205         26th July 2011
9206       </div>
9207       <div class="body">
9208         <p>The Norwegian <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</A>
9209 site is build on Debian/Squeeze, and this platform was chosen because
9210 I am most familiar with Debian (being a Debian Developer for around 10
9211 years) because it is the latest stable Debian release which should get
9212 security support for a few years.</p>
9213
9214 <p>The web service is written in Perl, and depend on some perl modules
9215 that are missing in Debian at the moment.  It would be great if these
9216 modules were added to the Debian archive, allowing anyone to set up
9217 their own <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com">FixMyStreet</a> clone
9218 in their own country using only Debian packages.  The list of modules
9219 missing in Debian/Squeeze isn't very long, and I hope the perl group
9220 will find time to package the 12 modules Catalyst::Plugin::SmartURI,
9221 Catalyst::Plugin::Unicode::Encoding, Catalyst::View::TT, Devel::Hide,
9222 Sort::Key, Statistics::Distributions, Template::Plugin::Comma,
9223 Template::Plugin::DateTime::Format, Term::Size::Any, Term::Size::Perl,
9224 URI::SmartURI and Web::Scraper to make the maintenance of FixMyStreet
9225 easier in the future.</p>
9226
9227 <p>Thanks to the great tools in Debian, getting the missing modules
9228 installed on my server was a simple call to 'cpan2deb Module::Name'
9229 and 'dpkg -i' to install the resulting package.  But this leave me
9230 with the responsibility of tracking security problems, which I really
9231 do not have time for.</p>
9232
9233       </div>
9234       <div class="tags">
9235
9236
9237         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami</a>.
9238
9239
9240       </div>
9241     </div>
9242     <div class="padding"></div>
9243
9244     <div class="entry">
9245       <div class="title">
9246         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Norwegian_FixMyStreet_have_kept_me_busy_the_last_few_weeks.html">A Norwegian FixMyStreet have kept me busy the last few weeks</a>
9247       </div>
9248       <div class="date">
9249          3rd April 2011
9250       </div>
9251       <div class="body">
9252         <p>Here is a small update for my English readers.  Most of my blog
9253 posts have been in Norwegian the last few weeks, so here is a short
9254 update in English.</p>
9255
9256 <p>The kids still keep me too busy to get much free software work
9257 done, but I did manage to organise a project to get a Norwegian port
9258 of the British service
9259 <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com/">FixMyStreet</a> up and running,
9260 and it has been running for a month now.  The entire project has been
9261 organised by me and two others.  Around Christmas we gathered sponsors
9262 to fund the development work.  In January I drafted a contract with
9263 <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a> on what to develop,
9264 and in February the development took place.  Most of it involved
9265 converting the source to use GPS coordinates instead of British
9266 easting/northing, and the resulting code should be a lot easier to get
9267 running in any country by now.  The Norwegian
9268 <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a> is using
9269 <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/">OpenStreetmap</a> as the map
9270 source and the source for administrative borders in Norway, and
9271 support for this had to be added/fixed.</p>
9272
9273 <p>The Norwegian version went live March 3th, and we spent the weekend
9274 polishing the system before we announced it March 7th.  The system is
9275 running on a KVM instance of Debian/Squeeze, and has seen almost 3000
9276 problem reports in a few weeks.  Soon we hope to announce the Android
9277 and iPhone versions making it even easier to report problems with the
9278 public infrastructure.</p>
9279
9280 <p>Perhaps something to consider for those of you in countries without
9281 such service?</p>
9282
9283       </div>
9284       <div class="tags">
9285
9286
9287         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kart">kart</a>.
9288
9289
9290       </div>
9291     </div>
9292     <div class="padding"></div>
9293
9294     <div class="entry">
9295       <div class="title">
9296         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_NVD_and_CPE_to_track_CVEs_in_locally_maintained_software.html">Using NVD and CPE to track CVEs in locally maintained software</a>
9297       </div>
9298       <div class="date">
9299         28th January 2011
9300       </div>
9301       <div class="body">
9302         <p>The last few days I have looked at ways to track open security
9303 issues here at my work with the University of Oslo.  My idea is that
9304 it should be possible to use the information about security issues
9305 available on the Internet, and check our locally
9306 maintained/distributed software against this information.  It should
9307 allow us to verify that no known security issues are forgotten.  The
9308 CVE database listing vulnerabilities seem like a great central point,
9309 and by using the package lists from Debian mapped to CVEs provided by
9310 the testing security team, I believed it should be possible to figure
9311 out which security holes were present in our free software
9312 collection.</p>
9313
9314 <p>After reading up on the topic, it became obvious that the first
9315 building block is to be able to name software packages in a unique and
9316 consistent way across data sources.  I considered several ways to do
9317 this, for example coming up with my own naming scheme like using URLs
9318 to project home pages or URLs to the Freshmeat entries, or using some
9319 existing naming scheme.  And it seem like I am not the first one to
9320 come across this problem, as MITRE already proposed and implemented a
9321 solution.  Enter the <a href="http://cpe.mitre.org/index.html">Common
9322 Platform Enumeration</a> dictionary, a vocabulary for referring to
9323 software, hardware and other platform components.  The CPE ids are
9324 mapped to CVEs in the <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/">National
9325 Vulnerability Database</a>, allowing me to look up know security
9326 issues for any CPE name.  With this in place, all I need to do is to
9327 locate the CPE id for the software packages we use at the university.
9328 This is fairly trivial (I google for 'cve cpe $package' and check the
9329 NVD entry if a CVE for the package exist).</p>
9330
9331 <p>To give you an example.  The GNU gzip source package have the CPE
9332 name cpe:/a:gnu:gzip.  If the old version 1.3.3 was the package to
9333 check out, one could look up
9334 <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/search?cpe=cpe%3A%2Fa%3Agnu%3Agzip:1.3.3">cpe:/a:gnu:gzip:1.3.3
9335 in NVD</a> and get a list of 6 security holes with public CVE entries.
9336 The most recent one is
9337 <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2010-0001">CVE-2010-0001</a>,
9338 and at the bottom of the NVD page for this vulnerability the complete
9339 list of affected versions is provided.</p>
9340
9341 <p>The NVD database of CVEs is also available as a XML dump, allowing
9342 for offline processing of issues.  Using this dump, I've written a
9343 small script taking a list of CPEs as input and list all CVEs
9344 affecting the packages represented by these CPEs.  One give it CPEs
9345 with version numbers as specified above and get a list of open
9346 security issues out.</p>
9347
9348 <p>Of course for this approach to be useful, the quality of the NVD
9349 information need to be high.  For that to happen, I believe as many as
9350 possible need to use and contribute to the NVD database.  I notice
9351 RHEL is providing
9352 <a href="https://www.redhat.com/security/data/metrics/rhsamapcpe.txt">a
9353 map from CVE to CPE</a>, indicating that they are using the CPE
9354 information.  I'm not aware of Debian and Ubuntu doing the same.</p>
9355
9356 <p>To get an idea about the quality for free software, I spent some
9357 time making it possible to compare the CVE database from Debian with
9358 the CVE database in NVD.  The result look fairly good, but there are
9359 some inconsistencies in NVD (same software package having several
9360 CPEs), and some inaccuracies (NVD not mentioning buggy packages that
9361 Debian believe are affected by a CVE).  Hope to find time to improve
9362 the quality of NVD, but that require being able to get in touch with
9363 someone maintaining it.  So far my three emails with questions and
9364 corrections have not seen any reply, but I hope contact can be
9365 established soon.</p>
9366
9367 <p>An interesting application for CPEs is cross platform package
9368 mapping.  It would be useful to know which packages in for example
9369 RHEL, OpenSuSe and Mandriva are missing from Debian and Ubuntu, and
9370 this would be trivial if all linux distributions provided CPE entries
9371 for their packages.</p>
9372
9373       </div>
9374       <div class="tags">
9375
9376
9377         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
9378
9379
9380       </div>
9381     </div>
9382     <div class="padding"></div>
9383
9384     <div class="entry">
9385       <div class="title">
9386         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Which_module_is_loaded_for_a_given_PCI_and_USB_device_.html">Which module is loaded for a given PCI and USB device?</a>
9387       </div>
9388       <div class="date">
9389         23rd January 2011
9390       </div>
9391       <div class="body">
9392         <p>In the
9393 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/discover-data">discover-data</a>
9394 package in Debian, there is a script to report useful information
9395 about the running hardware for use when people report missing
9396 information.  One part of this script that I find very useful when
9397 debugging hardware problems, is the part mapping loaded kernel module
9398 to the PCI device it claims.  It allow me to quickly see if the kernel
9399 module I expect is driving the hardware I am struggling with.  To see
9400 the output, make sure discover-data is installed and run
9401 <tt>/usr/share/bug/discover-data 3>&1</tt>.  The relevant output on
9402 one of my machines like this:</p>
9403
9404 <pre>
9405 loaded modules:
9406 10de:03eb i2c_nforce2
9407 10de:03f1 ohci_hcd
9408 10de:03f2 ehci_hcd
9409 10de:03f0 snd_hda_intel
9410 10de:03ec pata_amd
9411 10de:03f6 sata_nv
9412 1022:1103 k8temp
9413 109e:036e bttv
9414 109e:0878 snd_bt87x
9415 11ab:4364 sky2
9416 </pre>
9417
9418 <p>The code in question look like this, slightly modified for
9419 readability and to drop the output to file descriptor 3:</p>
9420
9421 <pre>
9422 if [ -d /sys/bus/pci/devices/ ] ; then
9423     echo loaded pci modules:
9424     (
9425         cd /sys/bus/pci/devices/
9426         for address in * ; do
9427             if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
9428                 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
9429                 if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
9430                     address=$(echo $address |sed s/0000://)
9431                     id=`lspci -n -s $address | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $3}'`
9432                     echo "$id $module"
9433                 fi
9434             fi
9435         done
9436     )
9437     echo
9438 fi
9439 </pre>
9440
9441 <p>Similar code could be used to extract USB device module
9442 mappings:</p>
9443
9444 <pre>
9445 if [ -d /sys/bus/usb/devices/ ] ; then
9446     echo loaded usb modules:
9447     (
9448         cd /sys/bus/usb/devices/
9449         for address in * ; do
9450             if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
9451                 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
9452                 if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
9453                     address=$(echo $address |sed s/0000://)
9454                     id=$(lsusb -s $address | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $6}')
9455                     if [ "$id" ] ; then
9456                         echo "$id $module"
9457                     fi
9458                 fi
9459             fi
9460         done
9461     )
9462     echo
9463 fi
9464 </pre>
9465
9466 <p>This might perhaps be something to include in other tools as
9467 well.</p>
9468
9469       </div>
9470       <div class="tags">
9471
9472
9473         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9474
9475
9476       </div>
9477     </div>
9478     <div class="padding"></div>
9479
9480     <div class="entry">
9481       <div class="title">
9482         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_test_if_a_laptop_is_working_with_Linux.html">How to test if a laptop is working with Linux</a>
9483       </div>
9484       <div class="date">
9485         22nd December 2010
9486       </div>
9487       <div class="body">
9488         <p>The last few days I have spent at work here at the <a
9489 href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a> testing if the new
9490 batch of computers will work with Linux.  Every year for the last few
9491 years the university have organised shared bid of a few thousand
9492 computers, and this year HP won the bid.  Two different desktops and
9493 five different laptops are on the list this year.  We in the UNIX
9494 group want to know which one of these computers work well with RHEL
9495 and Ubuntu, the two Linux distributions we currently handle at the
9496 university.</p>
9497
9498 <p>My test method is simple, and I share it here to get feedback and
9499 perhaps inspire others to test hardware as well.  To test, I PXE
9500 install the OS version of choice, and log in as my normal user and run
9501 a few applications and plug in selected pieces of hardware.  When
9502 something fail, I make a note about this in the test matrix and move
9503 on.  If I have some spare time I try to report the bug to the OS
9504 vendor, but as I only have the machines for a short time, I rarely
9505 have the time to do this for all the problems I find.</p>
9506
9507 <p>Anyway, to get to the point of this post.  Here is the simple tests
9508 I perform on a new model.</p>
9509
9510 <ul>
9511
9512 <li>Is PXE installation working?  I'm testing with RHEL6, Ubuntu Lucid
9513 and Ubuntu Maverik at the moment.  If I feel like it, I also test with
9514 RHEL5 and Debian Edu/Squeeze.</li>
9515
9516 <li>Is X.org working?  If the graphical login screen show up after
9517 installation, X.org is working.</li>
9518
9519 <li>Is hardware accelerated OpenGL working?  Running glxgears (in
9520 package mesa-utils on Ubuntu) and writing down the frames per second
9521 reported by the program.</li>
9522
9523 <li>Is sound working?  With Gnome and KDE, a sound is played when
9524 logging in, and if I can hear this the test is successful.  If there
9525 are several audio exits on the machine, I try them all and check if
9526 the Gnome/KDE audio mixer can control where to send the sound.  I
9527 normally test this by playing
9528 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20101012-chef/ ">a HTML5
9529 video</a> in Firefox/Iceweasel.</li>
9530
9531 <li>Is the USB subsystem working?  I test this by plugging in a USB
9532 memory stick and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.</li>
9533
9534 <li>Is the CD/DVD player working?  I test this by inserting any CD/DVD
9535 I have lying around, and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.</li>
9536
9537 <li>Is any built in camera working?  Test using cheese, and see if a
9538 picture from the v4l device show up.</li>
9539
9540 <li>Is bluetooth working?  Use the Gnome/KDE browsing tool to see if
9541 any bluetooth devices are discovered.  In my office, I normally see a
9542 few.</li>
9543
9544 <li>For laptops, is the SD or Compaq Flash reader working.  I have
9545 memory modules lying around, and stick them in and see if Gnome/KDE
9546 notice this.</li>
9547
9548 <li>For laptops, is suspend/hibernate working?  I'm testing if the
9549 special button work, and if the laptop continue to work after
9550 resume.</li>
9551
9552 <li>For laptops, is the extra buttons working, like audio level,
9553 adjusting background light, switching on/off external video output,
9554 switching on/off wifi, bluetooth, etc?  The set of buttons differ from
9555 laptop to laptop, so I just write down which are working and which are
9556 not.</li>
9557
9558 <li>Some laptops have smart card readers, finger print readers,
9559 acceleration sensors etc.  I rarely test these, as I do not know how
9560 to quickly test if they are working or not, so I only document their
9561 existence.</li>
9562
9563 </ul>
9564
9565 <p>By now I suspect you are really curious what the test results are
9566 for the HP machines I am testing.  I'm not done yet, so I will report
9567 the test results later.  For now I can report that HP 8100 Elite work
9568 fine, and hibernation fail with HP EliteBook 8440p on Ubuntu Lucid,
9569 and audio fail on RHEL6.  Ubuntu Maverik worked with 8440p.  As you
9570 can see, I have most machines left to test.  One interesting
9571 observation is that Ubuntu Lucid has almost twice the frame rate than
9572 RHEL6 with glxgears.  No idea why.</p>
9573
9574       </div>
9575       <div class="tags">
9576
9577
9578         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9579
9580
9581       </div>
9582     </div>
9583     <div class="padding"></div>
9584
9585     <div class="entry">
9586       <div class="title">
9587         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_thoughts_on_BitCoins.html">Some thoughts on BitCoins</a>
9588       </div>
9589       <div class="date">
9590         11th December 2010
9591       </div>
9592       <div class="body">
9593         <p>As I continue to explore
9594 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin</a>, I've starting to wonder
9595 what properties the system have, and how it will be affected by laws
9596 and regulations here in Norway.  Here are some random notes.</p>
9597
9598 <p>One interesting thing to note is that since the transactions are
9599 verified using a peer to peer network, all details about a transaction
9600 is known to everyone.  This means that if a BitCoin address has been
9601 published like I did with mine in my initial post about BitCoin, it is
9602 possible for everyone to see how many BitCoins have been transfered to
9603 that address.  There is even a web service to look at the details for
9604 all transactions.  There I can see that my address
9605 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a>
9606 have received 16.06 Bitcoin, the
9607 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3">1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3</a>
9608 address of Simon Phipps have received 181.97 BitCoin and the address
9609 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt">1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt</A>
9610 of EFF have received 2447.38 BitCoins so far.  Thank you to each and
9611 every one of you that donated bitcoins to support my activity. The
9612 fact that anyone can see how much money was transfered to a given
9613 address make it more obvious why the BitCoin community recommend to
9614 generate and hand out a new address for each transaction.  I'm told
9615 there is no way to track which addresses belong to a given person or
9616 organisation without the person or organisation revealing it
9617 themselves, as Simon, EFF and I have done.</p>
9618
9619 <p>In Norway, and in most other countries, there are laws and
9620 regulations limiting how much money one can transfer across the border
9621 without declaring it.  There are money laundering, tax and accounting
9622 laws and regulations I would expect to apply to the use of BitCoin.
9623 If the Skolelinux foundation
9624 (<a href="http://linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">SLX
9625 Debian Labs</a>) were to accept donations in BitCoin in addition to
9626 normal bank transfers like EFF is doing, how should this be accounted?
9627 Given that it is impossible to know if money can cross the border or
9628 not, should everything or nothing be declared?  What exchange rate
9629 should be used when calculating taxes?  Would receivers have to pay
9630 income tax if the foundation were to pay Skolelinux contributors in
9631 BitCoin?  I have no idea, but it would be interesting to know.</p>
9632
9633 <p>For a currency to be useful and successful, it must be trusted and
9634 accepted by a lot of users.  It must be possible to get easy access to
9635 the currency (as a wage or using currency exchanges), and it must be
9636 easy to spend it.  At the moment BitCoin seem fairly easy to get
9637 access to, but there are very few places to spend it.  I am not really
9638 a regular user of any of the vendor types currently accepting BitCoin,
9639 so I wonder when my kind of shop would start accepting BitCoins.  I
9640 would like to buy electronics, travels and subway tickets, not herbs
9641 and books. :) The currency is young, and this will improve over time
9642 if it become popular, but I suspect regular banks will start to lobby
9643 to get BitCoin declared illegal if it become popular.  I'm sure they
9644 will claim it is helping fund terrorism and money laundering (which
9645 probably would be true, as is any currency in existence), but I
9646 believe the problems should be solved elsewhere and not by blaming
9647 currencies.</p>
9648
9649 <p>The process of creating new BitCoins is called mining, and it is
9650 CPU intensive process that depend on a bit of luck as well (as one is
9651 competing against all the other miners currently spending CPU cycles
9652 to see which one get the next lump of cash).  The "winner" get 50
9653 BitCoin when this happen.  Yesterday I came across the obvious way to
9654 join forces to increase ones changes of getting at least some coins,
9655 by coordinating the work on mining BitCoins across several machines
9656 and people, and sharing the result if one is lucky and get the 50
9657 BitCoins.  Check out
9658 <a href="http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/bitcoin-pool/">BitCoin Pool</a>
9659 if this sounds interesting.  I have not had time to try to set up a
9660 machine to participate there yet, but have seen that running on ones
9661 own for a few days have not yield any BitCoins througth mining
9662 yet.</p>
9663
9664 <p>Update 2010-12-15: Found an <a
9665 href="http://inertia.posterous.com/reply-to-the-underground-economist-why-bitcoi">interesting
9666 criticism</a> of bitcoin.  Not quite sure how valid it is, but thought
9667 it was interesting to read.  The arguments presented seem to be
9668 equally valid for gold, which was used as a currency for many years.</p>
9669
9670       </div>
9671       <div class="tags">
9672
9673
9674         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
9675
9676
9677       </div>
9678     </div>
9679     <div class="padding"></div>
9680
9681     <div class="entry">
9682       <div class="title">
9683         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html">Now accepting bitcoins - anonymous and distributed p2p crypto-money</a>
9684       </div>
9685       <div class="date">
9686         10th December 2010
9687       </div>
9688       <div class="body">
9689         <p>With this weeks lawless
9690 <a href="http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/06/wikileaks/index.html">governmental
9691 attacks</a> on Wikileak and
9692 <a href="http://www.salon.com/technology/dan_gillmor/2010/12/06/war_on_speech">free
9693 speech</a>, it has become obvious that PayPal, visa and mastercard can
9694 not be trusted to handle money transactions.
9695 A blog post from
9696 <a href="http://webmink.com/2010/12/06/now-accepting-bitcoin/">Simon
9697 Phipps on bitcoin</a> reminded me about a project that a friend of
9698 mine mentioned earlier.  I decided to follow Simon's example, and get
9699 involved with <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin</a>.  I got
9700 some help from my friend to get it all running, and he even handed me
9701 some bitcoins to get started.  I even donated a few bitcoins to Simon
9702 for helping me remember BitCoin.</p>
9703
9704 <p>So, what is bitcoins, you probably wonder?  It is a digital
9705 crypto-currency, decentralised and handled using peer-to-peer
9706 networks.  It allows anonymous transactions and prohibits central
9707 control over the transactions, making it impossible for governments
9708 and companies alike to block donations and other transactions.  The
9709 source is free software, and while the key dependency wxWidgets 2.9
9710 for the graphical user interface is missing in Debian, the command
9711 line client builds just fine.  Hopefully Jonas
9712 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/578157">will get the package into
9713 Debian</a> soon.</p>
9714
9715 <p>Bitcoins can be converted to other currencies, like USD and EUR.
9716 There are <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/trade">companies accepting
9717 bitcoins</a> when selling services and goods, and there are even
9718 currency "stock" markets where the exchange rate is decided.  There
9719 are not many users so far, but the concept seems promising.  If you
9720 want to get started and lack a friend with any bitcoins to spare,
9721 you can even get
9722 <a href="https://freebitcoins.appspot.com/">some for free</a> (0.05
9723 bitcoin at the time of writing).  Use
9724 <a href="http://www.bitcoinwatch.com/">BitcoinWatch</a> to keep an eye
9725 on the current exchange rates.</p>
9726
9727 <p>As an experiment, I have decided to set up bitcoind on one of my
9728 machines.  If you want to support my activity, please send Bitcoin
9729 donations to the address
9730 <b>15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</b>.  Thank you!</p>
9731
9732       </div>
9733       <div class="tags">
9734
9735
9736         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
9737
9738
9739       </div>
9740     </div>
9741     <div class="padding"></div>
9742
9743     <div class="entry">
9744       <div class="title">
9745         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_isn_t_Debian_Edu_using_VLC_.html">Why isn't Debian Edu using VLC?</a>
9746       </div>
9747       <div class="date">
9748         27th November 2010
9749       </div>
9750       <div class="body">
9751         <p>In the latest issue of Linux Journal, the readers choices were
9752 presented, and the winner among the multimedia player were VLC.
9753 Personally, I like VLC, and it is my player of choice when I first try
9754 to play a video file or stream.  Only if VLC fail will I drag out
9755 gmplayer to see if it can do better.  The reason is mostly the failure
9756 model and trust.  When VLC fail, it normally pop up a error message
9757 reporting the problem.  When mplayer fail, it normally segfault or
9758 just hangs.  The latter failure mode drain my trust in the program.<p>
9759
9760 <p>But even if VLC is my player of choice, we have choosen to use
9761 mplayer in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
9762 Edu/Skolelinux</a>.  The reason is simple.  We need a good browser
9763 plugin to play web videos seamlessly, and the VLC browser plugin is
9764 not very good.  For example, it lack in-line control buttons, so there
9765 is no way for the user to pause the video.  Also, when I
9766 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">last
9767 tested the browser plugins</a> available in Debian, the VLC plugin
9768 failed on several video pages where mplayer based plugins worked.  If
9769 the browser plugin for VLC was as good as the gecko-mediaplayer
9770 package (which uses mplayer), we would switch.</P>
9771
9772 <p>While VLC is a good player, its user interface is slightly
9773 annoying.  The most annoying feature is its inconsistent use of
9774 keyboard shortcuts.  When the player is in full screen mode, its
9775 shortcuts are different from when it is playing the video in a window.
9776 For example, space only work as pause when in full screen mode.  I
9777 wish it had consisten shortcuts and that space also would work when in
9778 window mode.  Another nice shortcut in gmplayer is [enter] to restart
9779 the current video.  It is very nice when playing short videos from the
9780 web and want to restart it when new people arrive to have a look at
9781 what is going on.</p>
9782
9783       </div>
9784       <div class="tags">
9785
9786
9787         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
9788
9789
9790       </div>
9791     </div>
9792     <div class="padding"></div>
9793
9794     <div class="entry">
9795       <div class="title">
9796         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades_of_the_Gnome_and_KDE_desktop__now_with_apt_get_autoremove.html">Lenny->Squeeze upgrades of the Gnome and KDE desktop, now with apt-get autoremove</a>
9797       </div>
9798       <div class="date">
9799         22nd November 2010
9800       </div>
9801       <div class="body">
9802         <p>Michael Biebl suggested to me on IRC, that I changed my automated
9803 upgrade testing of the
9804 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
9805 Gnome and KDE Desktop</a> to do <tt>apt-get autoremove</tt> when using apt-get.
9806 This seem like a very good idea, so I adjusted by test scripts and
9807 can now present the updated result from today:</p>
9808
9809 <p>This is for Gnome:</p>
9810
9811 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
9812
9813 <blockquote><p>
9814   apache2.2-bin
9815   aptdaemon
9816   baobab
9817   binfmt-support
9818   browser-plugin-gnash
9819   cheese-common
9820   cli-common
9821   cups-pk-helper
9822   dmz-cursor-theme
9823   empathy
9824   empathy-common
9825   freedesktop-sound-theme
9826   freeglut3
9827   gconf-defaults-service
9828   gdm-themes
9829   gedit-plugins
9830   geoclue
9831   geoclue-hostip
9832   geoclue-localnet
9833   geoclue-manual
9834   geoclue-yahoo
9835   gnash
9836   gnash-common
9837   gnome
9838   gnome-backgrounds
9839   gnome-cards-data
9840   gnome-codec-install
9841   gnome-core
9842   gnome-desktop-environment
9843   gnome-disk-utility
9844   gnome-screenshot
9845   gnome-search-tool
9846   gnome-session-canberra
9847   gnome-system-log
9848   gnome-themes-extras
9849   gnome-themes-more
9850   gnome-user-share
9851   gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
9852   gstreamer0.10-tools
9853   gtk2-engines
9854   gtk2-engines-pixbuf
9855   gtk2-engines-smooth
9856   hamster-applet
9857   libapache2-mod-dnssd
9858   libapr1
9859   libaprutil1
9860   libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3
9861   libaprutil1-ldap
9862   libart2.0-cil
9863   libboost-date-time1.42.0
9864   libboost-python1.42.0
9865   libboost-thread1.42.0
9866   libchamplain-0.4-0
9867   libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0
9868   libcheese-gtk18
9869   libclutter-gtk-0.10-0
9870   libcryptui0
9871   libdiscid0
9872   libelf1
9873   libepc-1.0-2
9874   libepc-common
9875   libepc-ui-1.0-2
9876   libfreerdp-plugins-standard
9877   libfreerdp0
9878   libgconf2.0-cil
9879   libgdata-common
9880   libgdata7
9881   libgdu-gtk0
9882   libgee2
9883   libgeoclue0
9884   libgexiv2-0
9885   libgif4
9886   libglade2.0-cil
9887   libglib2.0-cil
9888   libgmime2.4-cil
9889   libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
9890   libgnome2.24-cil
9891   libgnomepanel2.24-cil
9892   libgpod-common
9893   libgpod4
9894   libgtk2.0-cil
9895   libgtkglext1
9896   libgtksourceview2.0-common
9897   libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
9898   libmono-addins0.2-cil
9899   libmono-cairo2.0-cil
9900   libmono-corlib2.0-cil
9901   libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil
9902   libmono-posix2.0-cil
9903   libmono-security2.0-cil
9904   libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
9905   libmono-system2.0-cil
9906   libmtp8
9907   libmusicbrainz3-6
9908   libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil
9909   libndesk-dbus1.0-cil
9910   libopal3.6.8
9911   libpolkit-gtk-1-0
9912   libpt2.6.7
9913   libpython2.6
9914   librpm1
9915   librpmio1
9916   libsdl1.2debian
9917   libsrtp0
9918   libssh-4
9919   libtelepathy-farsight0
9920   libtelepathy-glib0
9921   libtidy-0.99-0
9922   media-player-info
9923   mesa-utils
9924   mono-2.0-gac
9925   mono-gac
9926   mono-runtime
9927   nautilus-sendto
9928   nautilus-sendto-empathy
9929   p7zip-full
9930   pkg-config
9931   python-aptdaemon
9932   python-aptdaemon-gtk
9933   python-axiom
9934   python-beautifulsoup
9935   python-bugbuddy
9936   python-clientform
9937   python-coherence
9938   python-configobj
9939   python-crypto
9940   python-cupshelpers
9941   python-elementtree
9942   python-epsilon
9943   python-evolution
9944   python-feedparser
9945   python-gdata
9946   python-gdbm
9947   python-gst0.10
9948   python-gtkglext1
9949   python-gtksourceview2
9950   python-httplib2
9951   python-louie
9952   python-mako
9953   python-markupsafe
9954   python-mechanize
9955   python-nevow
9956   python-notify
9957   python-opengl
9958   python-openssl
9959   python-pam
9960   python-pkg-resources
9961   python-pyasn1
9962   python-pysqlite2
9963   python-rdflib
9964   python-serial
9965   python-tagpy
9966   python-twisted-bin
9967   python-twisted-conch
9968   python-twisted-core
9969   python-twisted-web
9970   python-utidylib
9971   python-webkit
9972   python-xdg
9973   python-zope.interface
9974   remmina
9975   remmina-plugin-data
9976   remmina-plugin-rdp
9977   remmina-plugin-vnc
9978   rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
9979   rhythmbox-plugins
9980   rpm-common
9981   rpm2cpio
9982   seahorse-plugins
9983   shotwell
9984   software-center
9985   system-config-printer-udev
9986   telepathy-gabble
9987   telepathy-mission-control-5
9988   telepathy-salut
9989   tomboy
9990   totem
9991   totem-coherence
9992   totem-mozilla
9993   totem-plugins
9994   transmission-common
9995   xdg-user-dirs
9996   xdg-user-dirs-gtk
9997   xserver-xephyr
9998 </p></blockquote>
9999
10000 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
10001
10002 <blockquote><p>
10003   cheese
10004   ekiga
10005   eog
10006   epiphany-extensions
10007   evolution-exchange
10008   fast-user-switch-applet
10009   file-roller
10010   gcalctool
10011   gconf-editor
10012   gdm
10013   gedit
10014   gedit-common
10015   gnome-games
10016   gnome-games-data
10017   gnome-nettool
10018   gnome-system-tools
10019   gnome-themes
10020   gnuchess
10021   gucharmap
10022   guile-1.8-libs
10023   libavahi-ui0
10024   libdmx1
10025   libgalago3
10026   libgtk-vnc-1.0-0
10027   libgtksourceview2.0-0
10028   liblircclient0
10029   libsdl1.2debian-alsa
10030   libspeexdsp1
10031   libsvga1
10032   rhythmbox
10033   seahorse
10034   sound-juicer
10035   system-config-printer
10036   totem-common
10037   transmission-gtk
10038   vinagre
10039   vino
10040 </p></blockquote>
10041
10042 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
10043
10044 <blockquote><p>
10045   gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
10046 </p></blockquote>
10047
10048 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
10049
10050 <blockquote><p>
10051 [nothing]
10052 </p></blockquote>
10053
10054 <p>This is for KDE:</p>
10055
10056 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
10057
10058 <blockquote><p>
10059   ksmserver
10060 </p></blockquote>
10061
10062 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
10063
10064 <blockquote><p>
10065   kwin
10066   network-manager-kde
10067 </p></blockquote>
10068
10069 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
10070
10071 <blockquote><p>
10072   arts
10073   dolphin
10074   freespacenotifier
10075   google-gadgets-gst
10076   google-gadgets-xul
10077   kappfinder
10078   kcalc
10079   kcharselect
10080   kde-core
10081   kde-plasma-desktop
10082   kde-standard
10083   kde-window-manager
10084   kdeartwork
10085   kdeartwork-emoticons
10086   kdeartwork-style
10087   kdeartwork-theme-icon
10088   kdebase
10089   kdebase-apps
10090   kdebase-workspace
10091   kdebase-workspace-bin
10092   kdebase-workspace-data
10093   kdeeject
10094   kdelibs
10095   kdeplasma-addons
10096   kdeutils
10097   kdewallpapers
10098   kdf
10099   kfloppy
10100   kgpg
10101   khelpcenter4
10102   kinfocenter
10103   konq-plugins-l10n
10104   konqueror-nsplugins
10105   kscreensaver
10106   kscreensaver-xsavers
10107   ktimer
10108   kwrite
10109   libgle3
10110   libkde4-ruby1.8
10111   libkonq5
10112   libkonq5-templates
10113   libnetpbm10
10114   libplasma-ruby
10115   libplasma-ruby1.8
10116   libqt4-ruby1.8
10117   marble-data
10118   marble-plugins
10119   netpbm
10120   nuvola-icon-theme
10121   plasma-dataengines-workspace
10122   plasma-desktop
10123   plasma-desktopthemes-artwork
10124   plasma-runners-addons
10125   plasma-scriptengine-googlegadgets
10126   plasma-scriptengine-python
10127   plasma-scriptengine-qedje
10128   plasma-scriptengine-ruby
10129   plasma-scriptengine-webkit
10130   plasma-scriptengines
10131   plasma-wallpapers-addons
10132   plasma-widget-folderview
10133   plasma-widget-networkmanagement
10134   ruby
10135   sweeper
10136   update-notifier-kde
10137   xscreensaver-data-extra
10138   xscreensaver-gl
10139   xscreensaver-gl-extra
10140   xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
10141 </p></blockquote>
10142
10143 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
10144
10145 <blockquote><p>
10146   ark
10147   google-gadgets-common
10148   google-gadgets-qt
10149   htdig
10150   kate
10151   kdebase-bin
10152   kdebase-data
10153   kdepasswd
10154   kfind
10155   klipper
10156   konq-plugins
10157   konqueror
10158   ksysguard
10159   ksysguardd
10160   libarchive1
10161   libcln6
10162   libeet1
10163   libeina-svn-06
10164   libggadget-1.0-0b
10165   libggadget-qt-1.0-0b
10166   libgps19
10167   libkdecorations4
10168   libkephal4
10169   libkonq4
10170   libkonqsidebarplugin4a
10171   libkscreensaver5
10172   libksgrd4
10173   libksignalplotter4
10174   libkunitconversion4
10175   libkwineffects1a
10176   libmarblewidget4
10177   libntrack-qt4-1
10178   libntrack0
10179   libplasma-geolocation-interface4
10180   libplasmaclock4a
10181   libplasmagenericshell4
10182   libprocesscore4a
10183   libprocessui4a
10184   libqalculate5
10185   libqedje0a
10186   libqtruby4shared2
10187   libqzion0a
10188   libruby1.8
10189   libscim8c2a
10190   libsmokekdecore4-3
10191   libsmokekdeui4-3
10192   libsmokekfile3
10193   libsmokekhtml3
10194   libsmokekio3
10195   libsmokeknewstuff2-3
10196   libsmokeknewstuff3-3
10197   libsmokekparts3
10198   libsmokektexteditor3
10199   libsmokekutils3
10200   libsmokenepomuk3
10201   libsmokephonon3
10202   libsmokeplasma3
10203   libsmokeqtcore4-3
10204   libsmokeqtdbus4-3
10205   libsmokeqtgui4-3
10206   libsmokeqtnetwork4-3
10207   libsmokeqtopengl4-3
10208   libsmokeqtscript4-3
10209   libsmokeqtsql4-3
10210   libsmokeqtsvg4-3
10211   libsmokeqttest4-3
10212   libsmokeqtuitools4-3
10213   libsmokeqtwebkit4-3
10214   libsmokeqtxml4-3
10215   libsmokesolid3
10216   libsmokesoprano3
10217   libtaskmanager4a
10218   libtidy-0.99-0
10219   libweather-ion4a
10220   libxklavier16
10221   libxxf86misc1
10222   okteta
10223   oxygencursors
10224   plasma-dataengines-addons
10225   plasma-scriptengine-superkaramba
10226   plasma-widget-lancelot
10227   plasma-widgets-addons
10228   plasma-widgets-workspace
10229   polkit-kde-1
10230   ruby1.8
10231   systemsettings
10232   update-notifier-common
10233 </p></blockquote>
10234
10235 <p>Running apt-get autoremove made the results using apt-get and
10236 aptitude a bit more similar, but there are still quite a lott of
10237 differences.  I have no idea what packages should be installed after
10238 the upgrade, but hope those that do can have a look.</p>
10239
10240       </div>
10241       <div class="tags">
10242
10243
10244         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10245
10246
10247       </div>
10248     </div>
10249     <div class="padding"></div>
10250
10251     <div class="entry">
10252       <div class="title">
10253         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Migrating_Xen_virtual_machines_using_LVM_to_KVM_using_disk_images.html">Migrating Xen virtual machines using LVM to KVM using disk images</a>
10254       </div>
10255       <div class="date">
10256         22nd November 2010
10257       </div>
10258       <div class="body">
10259         <p>Most of the computers in use by the
10260 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux project</a>
10261 are virtual machines.  And they have been Xen machines running on a
10262 fairly old IBM eserver xseries 345 machine, and we wanted to migrate
10263 them to KVM on a newer Dell PowerEdge 2950 host machine.  This was a
10264 bit harder that it could have been, because we set up the Xen virtual
10265 machines to get the virtual partitions from LVM, which as far as I
10266 know is not supported by KVM.  So to migrate, we had to convert
10267 several LVM logical volumes to partitions on a virtual disk file.</p>
10268
10269 <p>I found
10270 <a href="http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM">a
10271 nice recipe</a> to do this, and wrote the following script to do the
10272 migration.  It uses qemu-img from the qemu package to make the disk
10273 image, parted to partition it, losetup and kpartx to present the disk
10274 image partions as devices, and dd to copy the data.  I NFS mounted the
10275 new servers storage area on the old server to do the migration.</p>
10276
10277 <pre>
10278 #!/bin/sh
10279
10280 # Based on
10281 # http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM
10282
10283 set -e
10284 set -x
10285
10286 if [ -z "$1" ] ; then
10287     echo "Usage: $0 &lt;hostname&gt;"
10288     exit 1
10289 else
10290     host="$1"
10291 fi
10292
10293 if [ ! -e /dev/vg_data/$host-disk ] ; then
10294     echo "error: unable to find LVM volume for $host"
10295     exit 1
10296 fi
10297
10298 # Partitions need to be a bit bigger than the LVM LVs.  not sure why.
10299 disksize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-disk | awk '{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }')
10300 swapsize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-swap | awk '{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }')
10301 totalsize=$(( ( $disksize + $swapsize ) ))
10302
10303 img=$host.img
10304 #dd if=/dev/zero of=$img bs=1M count=$(( $disksize + $swapsize ))
10305 qemu-img create $img ${totalsize}MMaking room on the Debian Edu/Sqeeze DVD
10306
10307 parted $img mklabel msdos
10308 parted $img mkpart primary linux-swap 0 $disksize
10309 parted $img mkpart primary ext2 $disksize $totalsize
10310 parted $img set 1 boot on
10311
10312 modprobe dm-mod
10313 losetup /dev/loop0 $img
10314 kpartx -a /dev/loop0
10315
10316 dd if=/dev/vg_data/$host-disk of=/dev/mapper/loop0p1 bs=1M
10317 fsck.ext3 -f /dev/mapper/loop0p1 || true
10318 mkswap /dev/mapper/loop0p2
10319
10320 kpartx -d /dev/loop0
10321 losetup -d /dev/loop0
10322 </pre>
10323
10324 <p>The script is perhaps so simple that it is not copyrightable, but
10325 if it is, it is licenced using GPL v2 or later at your discretion.</p>
10326
10327 <p>After doing this, I booted a Debian CD in rescue mode in KVM with
10328 the new disk image attached, installed grub-pc and linux-image-686 and
10329 set up grub to boot from the disk image.  After this, the KVM machines
10330 seem to work just fine.</p>
10331
10332       </div>
10333       <div class="tags">
10334
10335
10336         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10337
10338
10339       </div>
10340     </div>
10341     <div class="padding"></div>
10342
10343     <div class="entry">
10344       <div class="title">
10345         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__apt_vs_aptitude_with_the_Gnome_and_KDE_desktop.html">Lenny->Squeeze upgrades, apt vs aptitude with the Gnome and KDE desktop</a>
10346       </div>
10347       <div class="date">
10348         20th November 2010
10349       </div>
10350       <div class="body">
10351         <p>I'm still running upgrade testing of the
10352 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
10353 Gnome and KDE Desktop</a>, but have not had time to spend on reporting the
10354 status.  Here is a short update based on a test I ran 20101118.</p>
10355
10356 <p>I still do not know what a correct migration should look like, so I
10357 report any differences between apt and aptitude and hope someone else
10358 can see if anything should be changed.</p>
10359
10360 <p>This is for Gnome:</p>
10361
10362 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
10363
10364 <blockquote><p>
10365   apache2.2-bin aptdaemon at-spi baobab binfmt-support
10366   browser-plugin-gnash cheese-common cli-common cpp-4.3 cups-pk-helper
10367   dmz-cursor-theme empathy empathy-common finger
10368   freedesktop-sound-theme freeglut3 gconf-defaults-service gdm-themes
10369   gedit-plugins geoclue geoclue-hostip geoclue-localnet geoclue-manual
10370   geoclue-yahoo gnash gnash-common gnome gnome-backgrounds
10371   gnome-cards-data gnome-codec-install gnome-core
10372   gnome-desktop-environment gnome-disk-utility gnome-screenshot
10373   gnome-search-tool gnome-session-canberra gnome-spell
10374   gnome-system-log gnome-themes-extras gnome-themes-more
10375   gnome-user-share gs-common gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
10376   gstreamer0.10-tools gtk2-engines gtk2-engines-pixbuf
10377   gtk2-engines-smooth hal-info hamster-applet libapache2-mod-dnssd
10378   libapr1 libaprutil1 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3 libaprutil1-ldap
10379   libart2.0-cil libatspi1.0-0 libboost-date-time1.42.0
10380   libboost-python1.42.0 libboost-thread1.42.0 libchamplain-0.4-0
10381   libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0 libcheese-gtk18 libclutter-gtk-0.10-0
10382   libcryptui0 libcupsys2 libdiscid0 libeel2-data libelf1 libepc-1.0-2
10383   libepc-common libepc-ui-1.0-2 libfreerdp-plugins-standard
10384   libfreerdp0 libgail-common libgconf2.0-cil libgdata-common libgdata7
10385   libgdl-1-common libgdu-gtk0 libgee2 libgeoclue0 libgexiv2-0 libgif4
10386   libglade2.0-cil libglib2.0-cil libgmime2.4-cil libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
10387   libgnome2.24-cil libgnomepanel2.24-cil libgnomeprint2.2-data
10388   libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod-common libgpod4
10389   libgtk2.0-cil libgtkglext1 libgtksourceview-common
10390   libgtksourceview2.0-common libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
10391   libmono-addins0.2-cil libmono-cairo2.0-cil libmono-corlib2.0-cil
10392   libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil libmono-posix2.0-cil
10393   libmono-security2.0-cil libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
10394   libmono-system2.0-cil libmtp8 libmusicbrainz3-6
10395   libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil libndesk-dbus1.0-cil libopal3.6.8
10396   libpolkit-gtk-1-0 libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
10397   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libpt2.6.7 libpython2.6 librpm1 librpmio1
10398   libsdl1.2debian libservlet2.4-java libsrtp0 libssh-4
10399   libtelepathy-farsight0 libtelepathy-glib0 libtidy-0.99-0
10400   libxalan2-java libxerces2-java media-player-info mesa-utils
10401   mono-2.0-gac mono-gac mono-runtime nautilus-sendto
10402   nautilus-sendto-empathy openoffice.org-writer2latex
10403   openssl-blacklist p7zip p7zip-full pkg-config python-4suite-xml
10404   python-aptdaemon python-aptdaemon-gtk python-axiom
10405   python-beautifulsoup python-bugbuddy python-clientform
10406   python-coherence python-configobj python-crypto python-cupshelpers
10407   python-cupsutils python-eggtrayicon python-elementtree
10408   python-epsilon python-evolution python-feedparser python-gdata
10409   python-gdbm python-gst0.10 python-gtkglext1 python-gtkmozembed
10410   python-gtksourceview2 python-httplib2 python-louie python-mako
10411   python-markupsafe python-mechanize python-nevow python-notify
10412   python-opengl python-openssl python-pam python-pkg-resources
10413   python-pyasn1 python-pysqlite2 python-rdflib python-serial
10414   python-tagpy python-twisted-bin python-twisted-conch
10415   python-twisted-core python-twisted-web python-utidylib python-webkit
10416   python-xdg python-zope.interface remmina remmina-plugin-data
10417   remmina-plugin-rdp remmina-plugin-vnc rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
10418   rhythmbox-plugins rpm-common rpm2cpio seahorse-plugins shotwell
10419   software-center svgalibg1 system-config-printer-udev
10420   telepathy-gabble telepathy-mission-control-5 telepathy-salut tomboy
10421   totem totem-coherence totem-mozilla totem-plugins
10422   transmission-common xdg-user-dirs xdg-user-dirs-gtk xserver-xephyr
10423   zip
10424 </p></blockquote>
10425
10426 Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude
10427
10428 <blockquote><p>
10429   arj bluez-utils cheese dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop ekiga eog
10430   epiphany-extensions epiphany-gecko evolution-exchange
10431   fast-user-switch-applet file-roller gcalctool gconf-editor gdm gedit
10432   gedit-common gnome-app-install gnome-games gnome-games-data
10433   gnome-nettool gnome-system-tools gnome-themes gnome-utils
10434   gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager gnuchess gucharmap
10435   guile-1.8-libs hal libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5
10436   libavahi-ui0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7
10437   libcucul0 libcurl3 libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdmx1 libdvdread3
10438   libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1
10439   libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3 libfaad0 libgadu3
10440   libgalago3 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
10441   libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
10442   libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
10443   libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtk-vnc-1.0-0
10444   libgtkhtml2-0 libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgtksourceview2.0-0
10445   libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
10446   libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libkpathsea4 liblircclient0 libltdl3 liblwres50
10447   libmagick++10 libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmozjs1d libmpfr1ldbl libmtp7
10448   libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0
10449   libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpisock9
10450   libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8
10451   libsdl1.2debian-alsa libsensors3 libsexy2 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
10452   libspeexdsp1 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libsvga1
10453   libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0
10454   libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12
10455   libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common rhythmbox seahorse
10456   sound-juicer swfdec-gnome system-config-printer totem-common
10457   totem-gstreamer transmission-gtk vinagre vino w3c-dtd-xhtml wodim
10458 </p></blockquote>
10459
10460 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
10461
10462 <blockquote><p>
10463   gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
10464 </p></blockquote>
10465
10466 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
10467
10468 <blockquote><p>
10469 [nothing]
10470 </p></blockquote>
10471
10472 <p>This is for KDE:</p>
10473
10474 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
10475
10476 <blockquote><p>
10477   autopoint bomber bovo cantor cantor-backend-kalgebra cpp-4.3 dcoprss
10478   edict espeak espeak-data eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
10479   ghostscript-x git gnome-audio gnugo granatier gs-common
10480   gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio indi kaddressbook-plugins kalgebra
10481   kalzium-data kanjidic kapman kate-plugins kblocks kbreakout kbstate
10482   kde-icons-mono kdeaccessibility kdeaddons-kfile-plugins
10483   kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
10484   kdeedu kdeedu-data kdeedu-kvtml-data kdegames kdegames-card-data
10485   kdegames-mahjongg-data kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc
10486   kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
10487   kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdessh kdetoys kdewebdev
10488   kdiamond kdnssd kfilereplace kfourinline kgeography-data kigo
10489   killbots kiriki klettres-data kmoon kmrml knewsticker-scripts
10490   kollision kpf krosspython ksirk ksmserver ksquares kstars-data
10491   ksudoku kubrick kweather libasound2-plugins libboost-python1.42.0
10492   libcfitsio3 libconvert-binhex-perl libcrypt-ssleay-perl libdb4.6++
10493   libdjvulibre-text libdotconf1.0 liberror-perl libespeak1
10494   libfinance-quote-perl libgail-common libgsl0ldbl libhtml-parser-perl
10495   libhtml-tableextract-perl libhtml-tagset-perl libhtml-tree-perl
10496   libio-stringy-perl libkdeedu4 libkdegames5 libkiten4 libkpathsea5
10497   libkrossui4 libmailtools-perl libmime-tools-perl
10498   libnews-nntpclient-perl libopenbabel3 libportaudio2 libpulse-browse0
10499   libservlet2.4-java libspeechd2 libtiff-tools libtimedate-perl
10500   libunistring0 liburi-perl libwww-perl libxalan2-java libxerces2-java
10501   lirc luatex marble networkstatus noatun-plugins
10502   openoffice.org-writer2latex palapeli palapeli-data parley
10503   parley-data poster psutils pulseaudio pulseaudio-esound-compat
10504   pulseaudio-module-x11 pulseaudio-utils quanta-data rocs rsync
10505   speech-dispatcher step svgalibg1 texlive-binaries texlive-luatex
10506   ttf-sazanami-gothic
10507 </p></blockquote>
10508
10509 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
10510
10511 <blockquote><p>
10512   amor artsbuilder atlantik atlantikdesigner blinken bluez-utils cvs
10513   dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop imlib-base imlib11 kalzium kanagram kandy
10514   kasteroids katomic kbackgammon kbattleship kblackbox kbounce kbruch
10515   kcron kdat kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data kdeprint kdict kdvi kedit
10516   keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs kgeography kghostview
10517   kgoldrunner khangman khexedit kiconedit kig kimagemapeditor
10518   kitchensync kiten kjumpingcube klatin klettres klickety klines
10519   klinkstatus kmag kmahjongg kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmines
10520   kmousetool kmouth kmplot knetwalk kodo kolf kommander konquest kooka
10521   kpager kpat kpdf kpercentage kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler krec
10522   kregexpeditor kreversi ksame ksayit kshisen ksig ksim ksirc ksirtet
10523   ksmiletris ksnake ksokoban kspaceduel kstars ksvg ksysv kteatime
10524   ktip ktnef ktouch ktron kttsd ktuberling kturtle ktux kuickshow
10525   kverbos kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kwordquiz
10526   kworldclock kxsldbg libakode2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
10527   libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
10528   libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2
10529   libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0
10530   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
10531   libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0 libicu38
10532   libiec61883-0 libindex0 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
10533   libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1 libkdeedu3
10534   libkdegames1 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
10535   libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
10536   libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick10
10537   libmimelib1c2a libmodplug0c2 libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libmpfr1ldbl
10538   libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9 libpoppler-glib3
10539   libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 librss1 libsensors3
10540   libsmbios2 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90
10541   libtalloc1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 lskat
10542   mpeglib network-manager-kde noatun pmount tex-common texlive-base
10543   texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended tidy
10544   ttf-dustin ttf-kochi-gothic ttf-sjfonts
10545 </p></blockquote>
10546
10547 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
10548
10549 <blockquote><p>
10550   dolphin kde-core kde-plasma-desktop kde-standard kde-window-manager
10551   kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-apps kdebase-workspace
10552   kdebase-workspace-bin kdebase-workspace-data kdeutils kscreensaver
10553   kscreensaver-xsavers libgle3 libkonq5 libkonq5-templates libnetpbm10
10554   netpbm plasma-widget-folderview plasma-widget-networkmanagement
10555   xscreensaver-data-extra xscreensaver-gl xscreensaver-gl-extra
10556   xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
10557 </p></blockquote>
10558
10559 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
10560
10561 <blockquote><p>
10562   kdebase-bin konq-plugins konqueror
10563 </p></blockquote>
10564
10565       </div>
10566       <div class="tags">
10567
10568
10569         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10570
10571
10572       </div>
10573     </div>
10574     <div class="padding"></div>
10575
10576     <div class="entry">
10577       <div class="title">
10578         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_buildbot_slave_and_Debian_kfreebsd.html">Gnash buildbot slave and Debian kfreebsd</a>
10579       </div>
10580       <div class="date">
10581         20th November 2010
10582       </div>
10583       <div class="body">
10584         <p>Answering
10585 <a href="http://www.listware.net/201011/gnash-dev/67431-gnash-dev-buildbot-looking-for-slaves.html">the
10586 call from the Gnash project</a> for
10587 <a href="http://www.gnashdev.org:8010">buildbot</a> slaves to test the
10588 current source, I have set up a virtual KVM machine on the Debian
10589 Edu/Skolelinux virtualization host to test the git source on
10590 Debian/Squeeze.  I hope this can help the developers in getting new
10591 releases out more often.</p>
10592
10593 <p>As the developers want less main-stream build platforms tested to,
10594 I have considered setting up a <a
10595 href="http://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/">Debian/kfreebsd</a>
10596 machine as well.  I have also considered using the kfreebsd
10597 architecture in Debian as a file server in NUUG to get access to the 5
10598 TB zfs volume we currently use to store DV video.  Because of this, I
10599 finally got around to do a test installation of Debian/Squeeze with
10600 kfreebsd.  Installation went fairly smooth, thought I noticed some
10601 visual glitches in the cdebconf dialogs (black cursor left on the
10602 screen at random locations).  Have not gotten very far with the
10603 testing.  Noticed cfdisk did not work, but fdisk did so it was not a
10604 fatal problem.  Have to spend some more time on it to see if it is
10605 useful as a file server for NUUG.  Will try to find time to set up a
10606 gnash buildbot slave on the Debian Edu/Skolelinux this weekend.</p>
10607
10608       </div>
10609       <div class="tags">
10610
10611
10612         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
10613
10614
10615       </div>
10616     </div>
10617     <div class="padding"></div>
10618
10619     <div class="entry">
10620       <div class="title">
10621         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_in_3D.html">Debian in 3D</a>
10622       </div>
10623       <div class="date">
10624          9th November 2010
10625       </div>
10626       <div class="body">
10627         <p><img src="http://thingiverse-production.s3.amazonaws.com/renders/23/e0/c4/f9/2b/debswagtdose_preview_medium.jpg"></p>
10628
10629 <p>3D printing is just great.  I just came across this Debian logo in
10630 3D linked in from
10631 <a href="http://blog.thingiverse.com/2010/11/09/participatory-branding/">the
10632 thingiverse blog</a>.</p>
10633
10634       </div>
10635       <div class="tags">
10636
10637
10638         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10639
10640
10641       </div>
10642     </div>
10643     <div class="padding"></div>
10644
10645     <div class="entry">
10646       <div class="title">
10647         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_updates_2010_10_24.html">Software updates 2010-10-24</a>
10648       </div>
10649       <div class="date">
10650         24th October 2010
10651       </div>
10652       <div class="body">
10653         <p>Some updates.</p>
10654
10655 <p>My <a href="http://pledgebank.com/gnash-avm2">gnash pledge</a> to
10656 raise money for the project is going well.  The lower limit of 10
10657 signers was reached in 24 hours, and so far 13 people have signed it.
10658 More signers and more funding is most welcome, and I am really curious
10659 how far we can get before the time limit of December 24 is reached.
10660 :)</p>
10661
10662 <p>On the #gnash IRC channel on irc.freenode.net, I was just tipped
10663 about what appear to be a great code coverage tool capable of
10664 generating code coverage stats without any changes to the source code.
10665 It is called
10666 <a href="http://simonkagstrom.github.com/kcov/index.html">kcov</a>,
10667 and can be used using <tt>kcov &lt;directory&gt; &lt;binary&gt;</tt>.
10668 It is missing in Debian, but the git source built just fine in Squeeze
10669 after I installed libelf-dev, libdwarf-dev, pkg-config and
10670 libglib2.0-dev.  Failed to build in Lenny, but suspect that is
10671 solvable.  I hope kcov make it into Debian soon.</p>
10672
10673 <p>Finally found time to wrap up the release notes for <a
10674 href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2010/10/msg00002.html">a
10675 new alpha release of Debian Edu</a>, and just published the second
10676 alpha test release of the Squeeze based Debian Edu /
10677 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a>
10678 release.  Give it a try if you need a complete linux solution for your
10679 school, including central infrastructure server, workstations, thin
10680 client servers and diskless workstations.  A nice touch added
10681 yesterday is RDP support on the thin client servers, for windows
10682 clients to get a Linux desktop on request.</p>
10683
10684       </div>
10685       <div class="tags">
10686
10687
10688         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>.
10689
10690
10691       </div>
10692     </div>
10693     <div class="padding"></div>
10694
10695     <div class="entry">
10696       <div class="title">
10697         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_notes_on_Flash_in_Debian_and_Debian_Edu.html">Some notes on Flash in Debian and Debian Edu</a>
10698       </div>
10699       <div class="date">
10700          4th September 2010
10701       </div>
10702       <div class="body">
10703         <p>In the <a href="http://popcon.debian.org/unknown/by_vote">Debian
10704 popularity-contest numbers</a>, the adobe-flashplugin package the
10705 second most popular used package that is missing in Debian.  The sixth
10706 most popular is flashplayer-mozilla.  This is a clear indication that
10707 working flash is important for Debian users.  Around 10 percent of the
10708 users submitting data to popcon.debian.org have this package
10709 installed.</p>
10710
10711 <p>In the report written by Lars Risan in August 2008
10712 («<a href="http://wiki.skolelinux.no/Dokumentasjon/Rapporter?action=AttachFile&do=view&target=Skolelinux_i_bruk_rapport_1.0.pdf">Skolelinux
10713 i bruk – Rapport for Hurum kommune, Universitetet i Agder og
10714 stiftelsen SLX Debian Labs</a>»), one of the most important problems
10715 schools experienced with <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
10716 Edu/Skolelinux</a> was the lack of working Flash.  A lot of educational
10717 web sites require Flash to work, and lacking working Flash support in
10718 the web browser and the problems with installing it was perceived as a
10719 good reason to stay with Windows.</p>
10720
10721 <p>I once saw a funny and sad comment in a web forum, where Linux was
10722 said to be the retarded cousin that did not really understand
10723 everything you told him but could work fairly well.  This was a
10724 comment regarding the problems Linux have with proprietary formats and
10725 non-standard web pages, and is sad because it exposes a fairly common
10726 understanding of whose fault it is if web pages that only work in for
10727 example Internet Explorer 6 fail to work on Firefox, and funny because
10728 it explain very well how annoying it is for users when Linux
10729 distributions do not work with the documents they receive or the web
10730 pages they want to visit.</p>
10731
10732 <p>This is part of the reason why I believe it is important for Debian
10733 and Debian Edu to have a well working Flash implementation in the
10734 distribution, to get at least popular sites as Youtube and Google
10735 Video to working out of the box.  For Squeeze, Debian have the chance
10736 to include the latest version of Gnash that will make this happen, as
10737 the new release 0.8.8 was published a few weeks ago and is resting in
10738 unstable.  The new version work with more sites that version 0.8.7.
10739 The Gnash maintainers have asked for a freeze exception, but the
10740 release team have not had time to reply to it yet.  I hope they agree
10741 with me that Flash is important for the Debian desktop users, and thus
10742 accept the new package into Squeeze.</p>
10743
10744       </div>
10745       <div class="tags">
10746
10747
10748         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
10749
10750
10751       </div>
10752     </div>
10753     <div class="padding"></div>
10754
10755     <div class="entry">
10756       <div class="title">
10757         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Circular_package_dependencies_harms_apt_recovery.html">Circular package dependencies harms apt recovery</a>
10758       </div>
10759       <div class="date">
10760         27th July 2010
10761       </div>
10762       <div class="body">
10763         <p>I discovered this while doing
10764 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">automated
10765 testing of upgrades from Debian Lenny to Squeeze</a>.  A few packages
10766 in Debian still got circular dependencies, and it is often claimed
10767 that apt and aptitude should be able to handle this just fine, but
10768 some times these dependency loops causes apt to fail.</p>
10769
10770 <p>An example is from todays
10771 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing//test-20100727-lenny-squeeze-kde-aptitude.txt">upgrade
10772 of KDE using aptitude</a>.  In it, a bug in kdebase-workspace-data
10773 causes perl-modules to fail to upgrade.  The cause is simple.  If a
10774 package fail to unpack, then only part of packages with the circular
10775 dependency might end up being unpacked when unpacking aborts, and the
10776 ones already unpacked will fail to configure in the recovery phase
10777 because its dependencies are unavailable.</p>
10778
10779 <p>In this log, the problem manifest itself with this error:</p>
10780
10781 <blockquote><pre>
10782 dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of perl-modules:
10783  perl-modules depends on perl (>= 5.10.1-1); however:
10784   Version of perl on system is 5.10.0-19lenny2.
10785 dpkg: error processing perl-modules (--configure):
10786  dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
10787 </pre></blockquote>
10788
10789 <p>The perl/perl-modules circular dependency is already
10790 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/527917">reported as a bug</a>, and will
10791 hopefully be solved as soon as possible, but it is not the only one,
10792 and each one of these loops in the dependency tree can cause similar
10793 failures.  Of course, they only occur when there are bugs in other
10794 packages causing the unpacking to fail, but it is rather nasty when
10795 the failure of one package causes the problem to become worse because
10796 of dependency loops.</p>
10797
10798 <p>Thanks to
10799 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/06/msg00116.html">the
10800 tireless effort by Bill Allombert</a>, the number of circular
10801 dependencies
10802 <a href="http://debian.semistable.com/debgraph.out.html">left in Debian
10803 is dropping</a>, and perhaps it will reach zero one day. :)</p>
10804
10805 <p>Todays testing also exposed a bug in
10806 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/590605">update-notifier</a> and
10807 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/590604">different behaviour</a> between
10808 apt-get and aptitude, the latter possibly caused by some circular
10809 dependency.  Reported both to BTS to try to get someone to look at
10810 it.</p>
10811
10812       </div>
10813       <div class="tags">
10814
10815
10816         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
10817
10818
10819       </div>
10820     </div>
10821     <div class="padding"></div>
10822
10823     <div class="entry">
10824       <div class="title">
10825         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_are_they_searching_for___PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_in_LDAP.html">What are they searching for - PowerDNS and ISC DHCP in LDAP</a>
10826       </div>
10827       <div class="date">
10828         17th July 2010
10829       </div>
10830       <div class="body">
10831         <p>This is a
10832 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">followup</a>
10833 on my
10834 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_a_change_to_LDAP_schemas_allowing_DNS_and_DHCP_info_to_be_combined_into_one_object.html">previous
10835 work</a> on
10836 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">merging
10837 all</a> the computer related LDAP objects in Debian Edu.</p>
10838
10839 <p>As a step to try to see if it possible to merge the DNS and DHCP
10840 LDAP objects, I have had a look at how the packages pdns-backend-ldap
10841 and dhcp3-server-ldap in Debian use the LDAP server.  The two
10842 implementations are quite different in how they use LDAP.</p>
10843
10844 To get this information, I started slapd with debugging enabled and
10845 dumped the debug output to a file to get the LDAP searches performed
10846 on a Debian Edu main-server.  Here is a summary.
10847
10848 <p><strong>powerdns</strong></p>
10849
10850 <a href="http://www.linuxnetworks.de/doc/index.php/PowerDNS_LDAP_Backend">Clues
10851 on how to</a> set up PowerDNS to use a LDAP backend is available on
10852 the web.
10853
10854 <p>PowerDNS have two modes of operation using LDAP as its backend.
10855 One "strict" mode where the forward and reverse DNS lookups are done
10856 using the same LDAP objects, and a "tree" mode where the forward and
10857 reverse entries are in two different subtrees in LDAP with a structure
10858 based on the DNS names, as in tjener.intern and
10859 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa.</p>
10860
10861 <p>In tree mode, the server is set up to use a LDAP subtree as its
10862 base, and uses a "base" scoped search for the DNS name by adding
10863 "dc=tjener,dc=intern," to the base with a filter for
10864 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" for the forward entry and
10865 "dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa," with a filter for
10866 "(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)" for the reverse entry.  For
10867 forward entries, it is looking for attributes named dnsttl, arecord,
10868 nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord,
10869 txtrecord, rprecord, afsdbrecord, keyrecord, aaaarecord, locrecord,
10870 srvrecord, naptrrecord, kxrecord, certrecord, dsrecord, sshfprecord,
10871 ipseckeyrecord, rrsigrecord, nsecrecord, dnskeyrecord, dhcidrecord,
10872 spfrecord and modifytimestamp.  For reverse entries it is looking for
10873 the attributes dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord,
10874 ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord,
10875 locrecord, srvrecord, naptrrecord and modifytimestamp.  The equivalent
10876 ldapsearch commands could look like this:</p>
10877
10878 <blockquote><pre>
10879 ldapsearch -h ldap \
10880   -b dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
10881   -s base -x '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
10882   cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
10883   rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
10884   nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
10885   rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
10886
10887 ldapsearch -h ldap \
10888   -b dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
10889   -s base -x '(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)'
10890   dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord soarecord ptrrecord \
10891   hinforecord mxrecord txtrecord rprecord aaaarecord locrecord \
10892   srvrecord naptrrecord modifytimestamp
10893 </pre></blockquote>
10894
10895 <p>In Debian Edu/Lenny, the PowerDNS tree mode is used with
10896 ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no as the base, and these are two
10897 example LDAP objects used there.  In addition to these objects, the
10898 parent objects all th way up to ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
10899 also exist.</p>
10900
10901 <blockquote><pre>
10902 dn: dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
10903 objectclass: top
10904 objectclass: dnsdomain
10905 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
10906 dc: tjener
10907 arecord: 10.0.2.2
10908 associateddomain: tjener.intern
10909
10910 dn: dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
10911 objectclass: top
10912 objectclass: dnsdomain2
10913 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
10914 dc: 2
10915 ptrrecord: tjener.intern
10916 associateddomain: 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa
10917 </pre></blockquote>
10918
10919 <p>In strict mode, the server behaves differently.  When looking for
10920 forward DNS entries, it is doing a "subtree" scoped search with the
10921 same base as in the tree mode for a object with filter
10922 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" and requests the attributes dnsttl,
10923 arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord,
10924 mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord, locrecord, srvrecord,
10925 naptrrecord and modifytimestamp.  For reverse entires it also do a
10926 subtree scoped search but this time the filter is "(arecord=10.0.2.2)"
10927 and the requested attributes are associateddomain, dnsttl and
10928 modifytimestamp.  In short, in strict mode the objects with ptrrecord
10929 go away, and the arecord attribute in the forward object is used
10930 instead.</p>
10931
10932 <p>The forward and reverse searches can be simulated using ldapsearch
10933 like this:</p>
10934
10935 <blockquote><pre>
10936 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
10937   '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
10938   cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
10939   rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
10940   nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
10941   rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
10942
10943 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
10944   '(arecord=10.0.2.2)' associateddomain dnsttl modifytimestamp
10945 </pre></blockquote>
10946
10947 <p>In addition to the forward and reverse searches , there is also a
10948 search for SOA records, which behave similar to the forward and
10949 reverse lookups.</p>
10950
10951 <p>A thing to note with the PowerDNS behaviour is that it do not
10952 specify any objectclass names, and instead look for the attributes it
10953 need to generate a DNS reply.  This make it able to work with any
10954 objectclass that provide the needed attributes.</p>
10955
10956 <p>The attributes are normally provided in the cosine (RFC 1274) and
10957 dnsdomain2 schemas.  The latter is used for reverse entries like
10958 ptrrecord and recent DNS additions like aaaarecord and srvrecord.</p>
10959
10960 <p>In Debian Edu, we have created DNS objects using the object classes
10961 dcobject (for dc), dnsdomain or dnsdomain2 (structural, for the DNS
10962 attributes) and domainrelatedobject (for associatedDomain).  The use
10963 of structural object classes make it impossible to combine these
10964 classes with the object classes used by DHCP.</p>
10965
10966 <p>There are other schemas that could be used too, for example the
10967 dnszone structural object class used by Gosa and bind-sdb for the DNS
10968 attributes combined with the domainrelatedobject object class, but in
10969 this case some unused attributes would have to be included as well
10970 (zonename and relativedomainname).</p>
10971
10972 <p>My proposal for Debian Edu would be to switch PowerDNS to strict
10973 mode and not use any of the existing objectclasses (dnsdomain,
10974 dnsdomain2 and dnszone) when one want to combine the DNS information
10975 with DHCP information, and instead create a auxiliary object class
10976 defined something like this (using the attributes defined for
10977 dnsdomain and dnsdomain2 or dnszone):</p>
10978
10979 <blockquote><pre>
10980 objectclass ( some-oid NAME 'dnsDomainAux'
10981     SUP top
10982     AUXILIARY
10983     MAY ( ARecord $ MDRecord $ MXRecord $ NSRecord $ SOARecord $ CNAMERecord $
10984           DNSTTL $ DNSClass $ PTRRecord $ HINFORecord $ MINFORecord $
10985           TXTRecord $ SIGRecord $ KEYRecord $ AAAARecord $ LOCRecord $
10986           NXTRecord $ SRVRecord $ NAPTRRecord $ KXRecord $ CERTRecord $
10987           A6Record $ DNAMERecord
10988     ))
10989 </pre></blockquote>
10990
10991 <p>This will allow any object to become a DNS entry when combined with
10992 the domainrelatedobject object class, and allow any entity to include
10993 all the attributes PowerDNS wants.  I've sent an email to the PowerDNS
10994 developers asking for their view on this schema and if they are
10995 interested in providing such schema with PowerDNS, and I hope my
10996 message will be accepted into their mailing list soon.</p>
10997
10998 <p><strong>ISC dhcp</strong></p>
10999
11000 <p>The DHCP server searches for specific objectclass and requests all
11001 the object attributes, and then uses the attributes it want.  This
11002 make it harder to figure out exactly what attributes are used, but
11003 thanks to the working example in Debian Edu I can at least get an idea
11004 what is needed without having to read the source code.</p>
11005
11006 <p>In the DHCP server configuration, the LDAP base to use and the
11007 search filter to use to locate the correct dhcpServer entity is
11008 stored.  These are the relevant entries from
11009 /etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf:</p>
11010
11011 <blockquote><pre>
11012 ldap-base-dn "dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no";
11013 ldap-dhcp-server-cn "dhcp";
11014 </pre></blockquote>
11015
11016 <p>The DHCP server uses this information to nest all the DHCP
11017 configuration it need.  The cn "dhcp" is located using the given LDAP
11018 base and the filter "(&(objectClass=dhcpServer)(cn=dhcp))".  The
11019 search result is this entry:</p>
11020
11021 <blockquote><pre>
11022 dn: cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
11023 cn: dhcp
11024 objectClass: top
11025 objectClass: dhcpServer
11026 dhcpServiceDN: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
11027 </pre></blockquote>
11028
11029 <p>The content of the dhcpServiceDN attribute is next used to locate the
11030 subtree with DHCP configuration.  The DHCP configuration subtree base
11031 is located using a base scope search with base "cn=DHCP
11032 Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" and filter
11033 "(&(objectClass=dhcpService)(|(dhcpPrimaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)(dhcpSecondaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)))".
11034 The search result is this entry:</p>
11035
11036 <blockquote><pre>
11037 dn: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
11038 cn: DHCP Config
11039 objectClass: top
11040 objectClass: dhcpService
11041 objectClass: dhcpOptions
11042 dhcpPrimaryDN: cn=dhcp, dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
11043 dhcpStatements: ddns-update-style none
11044 dhcpStatements: authoritative
11045 dhcpOption: smtp-server code 69 = array of ip-address
11046 dhcpOption: www-server code 72 = array of ip-address
11047 dhcpOption: wpad-url code 252 = text
11048 </pre></blockquote>
11049
11050 <p>Next, the entire subtree is processed, one level at the time.  When
11051 all the DHCP configuration is loaded, it is ready to receive requests.
11052 The subtree in Debian Edu contain objects with object classes
11053 top/dhcpService/dhcpOptions, top/dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions,
11054 top/dhcpSubnet, top/dhcpGroup and top/dhcpHost.  These provide options
11055 and information about netmasks, dynamic range etc.  Leaving out the
11056 details here because it is not relevant for the focus of my
11057 investigation, which is to see if it is possible to merge dns and dhcp
11058 related computer objects.</p>
11059
11060 <p>When a DHCP request come in, LDAP is searched for the MAC address
11061 of the client (00:00:00:00:00:00 in this example), using a subtree
11062 scoped search with "cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" as
11063 the base and "(&(objectClass=dhcpHost)(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet
11064 00:00:00:00:00:00))" as the filter.  This is what a host object look
11065 like:</p>
11066
11067 <blockquote><pre>
11068 dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
11069 cn: hostname
11070 objectClass: top
11071 objectClass: dhcpHost
11072 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
11073 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname
11074 </pre></blockquote>
11075
11076 <p>There is less flexiblity in the way LDAP searches are done here.
11077 The object classes need to have fixed names, and the configuration
11078 need to be stored in a fairly specific LDAP structure.  On the
11079 positive side, the invidiual dhcpHost entires can be anywhere without
11080 the DN pointed to by the dhcpServer entries.  The latter should make
11081 it possible to group all host entries in a subtree next to the
11082 configuration entries, and this subtree can also be shared with the
11083 DNS server if the schema proposed above is combined with the dhcpHost
11084 structural object class.
11085
11086 <p><strong>Conclusion</strong></p>
11087
11088 <p>The PowerDNS implementation seem to be very flexible when it come
11089 to which LDAP schemas to use.  While its "tree" mode is rigid when it
11090 come to the the LDAP structure, the "strict" mode is very flexible,
11091 allowing DNS objects to be stored anywhere under the base cn specified
11092 in the configuration.</p>
11093
11094 <p>The DHCP implementation on the other hand is very inflexible, both
11095 regarding which LDAP schemas to use and which LDAP structure to use.
11096 I guess one could implement ones own schema, as long as the
11097 objectclasses and attributes have the names used, but this do not
11098 really help when the DHCP subtree need to have a fairly fixed
11099 structure.</p>
11100
11101 <p>Based on the observed behaviour, I suspect a LDAP structure like
11102 this might work for Debian Edu:</p>
11103
11104 <blockquote><pre>
11105 ou=services
11106   cn=machine-info (dhcpService) - dhcpServiceDN points here
11107     cn=dhcp (dhcpServer)
11108     cn=dhcp-internal (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
11109       cn=10.0.2.0 (dhcpSubnet)
11110         cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
11111     cn=dhcp-thinclients (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
11112       cn=192.168.0.0 (dhcpSubnet)
11113         cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
11114     ou=machines - PowerDNS base points here
11115       cn=hostname (dhcpHost/domainrelatedobject/dnsDomainAux)
11116 </pre></blockquote>
11117
11118 <P>This is not tested yet.  If the DHCP server require the dhcpHost
11119 entries to be in the dhcpGroup subtrees, the entries can be stored
11120 there instead of a common machines subtree, and the PowerDNS base
11121 would have to be moved one level up to the machine-info subtree.</p>
11122
11123 <p>The combined object under the machines subtree would look something
11124 like this:</p>
11125
11126 <blockquote><pre>
11127 dn: dc=hostname,ou=machines,cn=machine-info,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
11128 dc: hostname
11129 objectClass: top
11130 objectClass: dhcpHost
11131 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
11132 objectclass: dnsDomainAux
11133 associateddomain: hostname.intern
11134 arecord: 10.11.12.13
11135 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
11136 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname.intern
11137 </pre></blockquote>
11138
11139 </p>One could even add the LTSP configuration associated with a given
11140 machine, as long as the required attributes are available in a
11141 auxiliary object class.</p>
11142
11143       </div>
11144       <div class="tags">
11145
11146
11147         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
11148
11149
11150       </div>
11151     </div>
11152     <div class="padding"></div>
11153
11154     <div class="entry">
11155       <div class="title">
11156         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">Combining PowerDNS and ISC DHCP LDAP objects</a>
11157       </div>
11158       <div class="date">
11159         14th July 2010
11160       </div>
11161       <div class="body">
11162         <p>For a while now, I have wanted to find a way to change the DNS and
11163 DHCP services in Debian Edu to use the same LDAP objects for a given
11164 computer, to avoid the possibility of having a inconsistent state for
11165 a computer in LDAP (as in DHCP but no DNS entry or the other way
11166 around) and make it easier to add computers to LDAP.</p>
11167
11168 <p>I've looked at how powerdns and dhcpd is using LDAP, and using this
11169 information finally found a solution that seem to work.</p>
11170
11171 <p>The old setup required three LDAP objects for a given computer.
11172 One forward DNS entry, one reverse DNS entry and one DHCP entry.  If
11173 we switch powerdns to use its strict LDAP method (ldap-method=strict
11174 in pdns-debian-edu.conf), the forward and reverse DNS entries are
11175 merged into one while making it impossible to transfer the reverse map
11176 to a slave DNS server.</p>
11177
11178 <p>If we also replace the object class used to get the DNS related
11179 attributes to one allowing these attributes to be combined with the
11180 dhcphost object class, we can merge the DNS and DHCP entries into one.
11181 I've written such object class in the dnsdomainaux.schema file (need
11182 proper OIDs, but that is a minor issue), and tested the setup.  It
11183 seem to work.</p>
11184
11185 <p>With this test setup in place, we can get away with one LDAP object
11186 for both DNS and DHCP, and even the LTSP configuration I suggested in
11187 an earlier email.  The combined LDAP object will look something like
11188 this:</p>
11189
11190 <blockquote><pre>
11191   dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
11192   cn: hostname
11193   objectClass: dhcphost
11194   objectclass: domainrelatedobject
11195   objectclass: dnsdomainaux
11196   associateddomain: hostname.intern
11197   arecord: 10.11.12.13
11198   dhcphwaddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
11199   dhcpstatements: fixed-address hostname
11200   ldapconfigsound: Y
11201 </pre></blockquote>
11202
11203 <p>The DNS server uses the associateddomain and arecord entries, while
11204 the DHCP server uses the dhcphwaddress and dhcpstatements entries
11205 before asking DNS to resolve the fixed-adddress.  LTSP will use
11206 dhcphwaddress or associateddomain and the ldapconfig* attributes.</p>
11207
11208 <p>I am not yet sure if I can get the DHCP server to look for its
11209 dhcphost in a different location, to allow us to put the objects
11210 outside the "DHCP Config" subtree, but hope to figure out a way to do
11211 that.  If I can't figure out a way to do that, we can still get rid of
11212 the hosts subtree and move all its content into the DHCP Config tree
11213 (which probably should be renamed to be more related to the new
11214 content.  I suspect cn=dnsdhcp,ou=services or something like that
11215 might be a good place to put it.</p>
11216
11217 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
11218 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
11219
11220       </div>
11221       <div class="tags">
11222
11223
11224         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
11225
11226
11227       </div>
11228     </div>
11229     <div class="padding"></div>
11230
11231     <div class="entry">
11232       <div class="title">
11233         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_storing_LTSP_configuration_in_LDAP.html">Idea for storing LTSP configuration in LDAP</a>
11234       </div>
11235       <div class="date">
11236         11th July 2010
11237       </div>
11238       <div class="body">
11239         <p>Vagrant mentioned on IRC today that ltsp_config now support
11240 sourcing files from /usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ on the thin
11241 clients, and that this can be used to fetch configuration from LDAP if
11242 Debian Edu choose to store configuration there.</p>
11243
11244 <p>Armed with this information, I got inspired and wrote a test module
11245 to get configuration from LDAP.  The idea is to look up the MAC
11246 address of the client in LDAP, and look for attributes on the form
11247 ltspconfigsetting=value, and use this to export SETTING=value to the
11248 LTSP clients.</p>
11249
11250 <p>The goal is to be able to store the LTSP configuration attributes
11251 in a "computer" LDAP object used by both DNS and DHCP, and thus
11252 allowing us to store all information about a computer in one place.</p>
11253
11254 <p>This is a untested draft implementation, and I welcome feedback on
11255 this approach.  A real LDAP schema for the ltspClientAux objectclass
11256 need to be written.  Comments, suggestions, etc?</p>
11257
11258 <blockquote><pre>
11259 # Store in /opt/ltsp/$arch/usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ldap-config
11260 #
11261 # Fetch LTSP client settings from LDAP based on MAC address
11262 #
11263 # Uses ethernet address as stored in the dhcpHost objectclass using
11264 # the dhcpHWAddress attribute or ethernet address stored in the
11265 # ieee802Device objectclass with the macAddress attribute.
11266 #
11267 # This module is written to be schema agnostic, and only depend on the
11268 # existence of attribute names.
11269 #
11270 # The LTSP configuration variables are saved directly using a
11271 # ltspConfig prefix and uppercasing the rest of the attribute name.
11272 # To set the SERVER variable, set the ltspConfigServer attribute.
11273 #
11274 # Some LDAP schema should be created with all the relevant
11275 # configuration settings.  Something like this should work:
11276 #
11277 # objectclass ( 1.1.2.2 NAME 'ltspClientAux'
11278 #     SUP top
11279 #     AUXILIARY
11280 #     MAY ( ltspConfigServer $ ltsConfigSound $ ... )
11281
11282 LDAPSERVER=$(debian-edu-ldapserver)
11283 if [ "$LDAPSERVER" ] ; then
11284     LDAPBASE=$(debian-edu-ldapserver -b)
11285     for MAC in $(LANG=C ifconfig |grep -i hwaddr| awk '{print $5}'|sort -u) ; do
11286         filter="(|(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet $MAC)(macAddress=$MAC))"
11287         ldapsearch -h "$LDAPSERVER" -b "$LDAPBASE" -v -x "$filter" | \
11288             grep '^ltspConfig' | while read attr value ; do
11289             # Remove prefix and convert to upper case
11290             attr=$(echo $attr | sed 's/^ltspConfig//i' | tr a-z A-Z)
11291             # bass value on to clients
11292             eval "$attr=$value; export $attr"
11293         done
11294     done
11295 fi
11296 </pre></blockquote>
11297
11298 <p>I'm not sure this shell construction will work, because I suspect
11299 the while block might end up in a subshell causing the variables set
11300 there to not show up in ltsp-config, but if that is the case I am sure
11301 the code can be restructured to make sure the variables are passed on.
11302 I expect that can be solved with some testing. :)</p>
11303
11304 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
11305 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
11306
11307 <p>Update 2010-07-17: I am aware of another effort to store LTSP
11308 configuration in LDAP that was created around year 2000 by
11309 <a href="http://www.pcxperience.com/thinclient/documentation/ldap.html">PC
11310 Xperience, Inc., 2000</a>.  I found its
11311 <a href="http://people.redhat.com/alikins/ltsp/ldap/">files</a> on a
11312 personal home page over at redhat.com.</p>
11313
11314       </div>
11315       <div class="tags">
11316
11317
11318         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
11319
11320
11321       </div>
11322     </div>
11323     <div class="padding"></div>
11324
11325     <div class="entry">
11326       <div class="title">
11327         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/jXplorer__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">jXplorer, a very nice LDAP GUI</a>
11328       </div>
11329       <div class="date">
11330          9th July 2010
11331       </div>
11332       <div class="body">
11333         <p>Since
11334 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">my
11335 last post</a> about available LDAP tools in Debian, I was told about a
11336 LDAP GUI that is even better than luma.  The java application
11337 <a href="http://jxplorer.org/">jXplorer</a> is claimed to be capable of
11338 moving LDAP objects and subtrees using drag-and-drop, and can
11339 authenticate using Kerberos.  I have only tested the Kerberos
11340 authentication, but do not have a LDAP setup allowing me to rewrite
11341 LDAP with my test user yet.  It is
11342 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/j/jxplorer.html">available in
11343 Debian</a> testing and unstable at the moment.  The only problem I
11344 have with it is how it handle errors.  If something go wrong, its
11345 non-intuitive behaviour require me to go through some query work list
11346 and remove the failing query.  Nothing big, but very annoying.</p>
11347
11348       </div>
11349       <div class="tags">
11350
11351
11352         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
11353
11354
11355       </div>
11356     </div>
11357     <div class="padding"></div>
11358
11359     <div class="entry">
11360       <div class="title">
11361         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__apt_vs_aptitude_with_the_Gnome_desktop.html">Lenny->Squeeze upgrades, apt vs aptitude with the Gnome desktop</a>
11362       </div>
11363       <div class="date">
11364          3rd July 2010
11365       </div>
11366       <div class="body">
11367         <p>Here is a short update on my <a
11368 href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">my
11369 Debian Lenny->Squeeze upgrade testing</a>.  Here is a summary of the
11370 difference for Gnome when it is upgraded by apt-get and aptitude.  I'm
11371 not reporting the status for KDE, because the upgrade crashes when
11372 aptitude try because of missing conflicts
11373 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#584861</a> and
11374 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/585716">#585716</a>).</p>
11375
11376 <p>At the end of the upgrade test script, dpkg -l is executed to get a
11377 complete list of the installed packages.  Based on this I see these
11378 differences when I did a test run today.  As usual, I do not really
11379 know what the correct set of packages would be, but thought it best to
11380 publish the difference.</p>
11381
11382 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
11383
11384 <blockquote><p>
11385   at-spi cpp-4.3 finger gnome-spell gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
11386   libatspi1.0-0 libcupsys2 libeel2-data libgail-common libgdl-1-common
11387   libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin
11388   libgtksourceview-common libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
11389   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libservlet2.4-java libxalan2-java
11390   libxerces2-java openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
11391   python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gtkhtml2
11392   python-gtkmozembed svgalibg1 xserver-xephyr zip
11393 </p></blockquote>
11394
11395 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
11396
11397 <blockquote><p>
11398   bluez-utils dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop epiphany-gecko
11399   gnome-app-install gnome-mount gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager
11400   libao2 libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libbind9-50
11401   libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcurl3
11402   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9
11403   libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3
11404   libfaad0 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
11405   libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
11406   libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
11407   libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
11408   libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50
11409   libisccfg50 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick++10
11410   libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4
11411   libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5
11412   libparted1.8-10 libpisock9 libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3
11413   libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8 libsensors3 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
11414   libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1
11415   libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0 libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj
11416   libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3
11417   mysql-common swfdec-gnome totem-gstreamer wodim
11418 </p></blockquote>
11419
11420 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
11421
11422 <blockquote><p>
11423   gnome gnome-desktop-environment hamster-applet python-gnomeapplet
11424   python-gnomekeyring python-wnck rhythmbox-plugins xorg
11425   xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
11426   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
11427   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-video-all
11428   xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark xserver-xorg-video-ati
11429   xserver-xorg-video-chips xserver-xorg-video-cirrus
11430   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
11431   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
11432   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-mach64
11433   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
11434   xserver-xorg-video-nouveau xserver-xorg-video-nv
11435   xserver-xorg-video-r128 xserver-xorg-video-radeon
11436   xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd xserver-xorg-video-rendition
11437   xserver-xorg-video-s3 xserver-xorg-video-s3virge
11438   xserver-xorg-video-savage xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion
11439   xserver-xorg-video-sis xserver-xorg-video-sisusb
11440   xserver-xorg-video-tdfx xserver-xorg-video-tga
11441   xserver-xorg-video-trident xserver-xorg-video-tseng
11442   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vmware
11443   xserver-xorg-video-voodoo
11444 </p></blockquote>
11445
11446 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
11447
11448 <blockquote><p>
11449   deskbar-applet xserver-xorg xserver-xorg-core
11450   xserver-xorg-input-wacom xserver-xorg-video-intel
11451   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome
11452 </p></blockquote>
11453
11454 <p>I was told on IRC that the xorg-xserver package was
11455 <a href="http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-xorg/xserver/xorg-server.git;a=commit;h=9c8080d06c457932d3bfec021c69ac000aa60120">changed
11456 in git</a> today to try to get apt-get to not remove xorg completely.
11457 No idea when it hits Squeeze, but when it does I hope it will reduce
11458 the difference somewhat.
11459
11460       </div>
11461       <div class="tags">
11462
11463
11464         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
11465
11466
11467       </div>
11468     </div>
11469     <div class="padding"></div>
11470
11471     <div class="entry">
11472       <div class="title">
11473         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">LUMA, a very nice LDAP GUI</a>
11474       </div>
11475       <div class="date">
11476         28th June 2010
11477       </div>
11478       <div class="body">
11479         <p>The last few days I have been looking into the status of the LDAP
11480 directory in Debian Edu, and in the process I started to miss a GUI
11481 tool to browse the LDAP tree.  The only one I was able to find in
11482 Debian/Squeeze and Lenny is
11483 <a href="http://luma.sourceforge.net/">LUMA</a>, which has proved to
11484 be a great tool to get a overview of the current LDAP directory
11485 populated by default in Skolelinux.  Thanks to it, I have been able to
11486 find empty and obsolete subtrees, misplaced objects and duplicate
11487 objects.  It will be installed by default in Debian/Squeeze.  If you
11488 are working with LDAP, give it a go. :)</p>
11489
11490 <p>I did notice one problem with it I have not had time to report to
11491 the BTS yet.  There is no .desktop file in the package, so the tool do
11492 not show up in the Gnome and KDE menus, but only deep down in in the
11493 Debian submenu in KDE.  I hope that can be fixed before Squeeze is
11494 released.</p>
11495
11496 <p>I have not yet been able to get it to modify the tree yet.  I would
11497 like to move objects and remove subtrees directly in the GUI, but have
11498 not found a way to do that with LUMA yet.  So in the mean time, I use
11499 <a href="http://www.lichteblau.com/ldapvi/">ldapvi</a> for that.</p>
11500
11501 <p>If you have tips on other GUI tools for LDAP that might be useful
11502 in Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
11503
11504 <p>Update 2010-06-29: Ross Reedstrom tipped us about the
11505 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/g/gq.html">gq</a> package as a
11506 useful GUI alternative.  It seem like a good tool, but is unmaintained
11507 in Debian and got a RC bug keeping it out of Squeeze.  Unless that
11508 changes, it will not be an option for Debian Edu based on Squeeze.</p>
11509
11510       </div>
11511       <div class="tags">
11512
11513
11514         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
11515
11516
11517       </div>
11518     </div>
11519     <div class="padding"></div>
11520
11521     <div class="entry">
11522       <div class="title">
11523         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_a_change_to_LDAP_schemas_allowing_DNS_and_DHCP_info_to_be_combined_into_one_object.html">Idea for a change to LDAP schemas allowing DNS and DHCP info to be combined into one object</a>
11524       </div>
11525       <div class="date">
11526         24th June 2010
11527       </div>
11528       <div class="body">
11529         <p>A while back, I
11530 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">complained
11531 about the fact</a> that it is not possible with the provided schemas
11532 for storing DNS and DHCP information in LDAP to combine the two sets
11533 of information into one LDAP object representing a computer.</p>
11534
11535 <p>In the mean time, I discovered that a simple fix would be to make
11536 the dhcpHost object class auxiliary, to allow it to be combined with
11537 the dNSDomain object class, and thus forming one object for one
11538 computer when storing both DHCP and DNS information in LDAP.</p>
11539
11540 <p>If I understand this correctly, it is not safe to do this change
11541 without also changing the assigned number for the object class, and I
11542 do not know enough about LDAP schema design to do that properly for
11543 Debian Edu.</p>
11544
11545 <p>Anyway, for future reference, this is how I believe we could change
11546 the
11547 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dhc-ldap-schema-00">DHCP
11548 schema</a> to solve at least part of the problem with the LDAP schemas
11549 available today from IETF.</p>
11550
11551 <pre>
11552 --- dhcp.schema    (revision 65192)
11553 +++ dhcp.schema    (working copy)
11554 @@ -376,7 +376,7 @@
11555  objectclass ( 2.16.840.1.113719.1.203.6.6
11556         NAME 'dhcpHost'
11557         DESC 'This represents information about a particular client'
11558 -       SUP top
11559 +       SUP top AUXILIARY
11560         MUST cn
11561         MAY  (dhcpLeaseDN $ dhcpHWAddress $ dhcpOptionsDN $ dhcpStatements $ dhcpComments $ dhcpOption)
11562         X-NDS_CONTAINMENT ('dhcpService' 'dhcpSubnet' 'dhcpGroup') )
11563 </pre>
11564
11565 <p>I very much welcome clues on how to do this properly for Debian
11566 Edu/Squeeze.  We provide the DHCP schema in our debian-edu-config
11567 package, and should thus be free to rewrite it as we see fit.</p>
11568
11569 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
11570 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
11571
11572       </div>
11573       <div class="tags">
11574
11575
11576         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
11577
11578
11579       </div>
11580     </div>
11581     <div class="padding"></div>
11582
11583     <div class="entry">
11584       <div class="title">
11585         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Calling_tasksel_like_the_installer__while_still_getting_useful_output.html">Calling tasksel like the installer, while still getting useful output</a>
11586       </div>
11587       <div class="date">
11588         16th June 2010
11589       </div>
11590       <div class="body">
11591         <p>A few times I have had the need to simulate the way tasksel
11592 installs packages during the normal debian-installer run.  Until now,
11593 I have ended up letting tasksel do the work, with the annoying problem
11594 of not getting any feedback at all when something fails (like a
11595 conffile question from dpkg or a download that fails), using code like
11596 this:
11597
11598 <blockquote><pre>
11599 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
11600 tasksel --new-install
11601 </pre></blockquote>
11602
11603 This would invoke tasksel, let its automatic task selection pick the
11604 tasks to install, and continue to install the requested tasks without
11605 any output what so ever.
11606
11607 Recently I revisited this problem while working on the automatic
11608 package upgrade testing, because tasksel would some times hang without
11609 any useful feedback, and I want to see what is going on when it
11610 happen.  Then it occured to me, I can parse the output from tasksel
11611 when asked to run in test mode, and use that aptitude command line
11612 printed by tasksel then to simulate the tasksel run.  I ended up using
11613 code like this:
11614
11615 <blockquote><pre>
11616 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
11617 cmd="$(in_target tasksel -t --new-install | sed 's/debconf-apt-progress -- //')"
11618 $cmd
11619 </pre></blockquote>
11620
11621 <p>The content of $cmd is typically something like "<tt>aptitude -q
11622 --without-recommends -o APT::Install-Recommends=no -y install
11623 ~t^desktop$ ~t^gnome-desktop$ ~t^laptop$ ~pstandard ~prequired
11624 ~pimportant</tt>", which will install the gnome desktop task, the
11625 laptop task and all packages with priority standard , required and
11626 important, just like tasksel would have done it during
11627 installation.</p>
11628
11629 <p>A better approach is probably to extend tasksel to be able to
11630 install packages without using debconf-apt-progress, for use cases
11631 like this.</p>
11632
11633       </div>
11634       <div class="tags">
11635
11636
11637         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
11638
11639
11640       </div>
11641     </div>
11642     <div class="padding"></div>
11643
11644     <div class="entry">
11645       <div class="title">
11646         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__removals_by_apt_and_aptitude.html">Lenny->Squeeze upgrades, removals by apt and aptitude</a>
11647       </div>
11648       <div class="date">
11649         13th June 2010
11650       </div>
11651       <div class="body">
11652         <p>My
11653 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">testing
11654 of Debian upgrades</a> from Lenny to Squeeze continues, and I've
11655 finally made the upgrade logs available from
11656 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/</a>.
11657 I am now testing dist-upgrade of Gnome and KDE in a chroot using both
11658 apt and aptitude, and found their differences interesting.  This time
11659 I will only focus on their removal plans.</p>
11660
11661 <p>After installing a Gnome desktop and the laptop task, apt-get wants
11662 to remove 72 packages when dist-upgrading from Lenny to Squeeze.  The
11663 surprising part is that it want to remove xorg and all
11664 xserver-xorg-video* drivers.  Clearly not a good choice, but I am not
11665 sure why.  When asking aptitude to do the same, it want to remove 129
11666 packages, but most of them are library packages I suspect are no
11667 longer needed.  Both of them want to remove bluetooth packages, which
11668 I do not know.  Perhaps these bluetooth packages are obsolete?</p>
11669
11670 <p>For KDE, apt-get want to remove 82 packages, among them kdebase
11671 which seem like a bad idea and xorg the same way as with Gnome. Asking
11672 aptitude for the same, it wants to remove 192 packages, none which are
11673 too surprising.</p>
11674
11675 <p>I guess the removal of xorg during upgrades should be investigated
11676 and avoided, and perhaps others as well.  Here are the complete list
11677 of planned removals.  The complete logs is available from the URL
11678 above.  Note if you want to repeat these tests, that the upgrade test
11679 for kde+apt-get hung in the tasksel setup because of dpkg asking
11680 conffile questions.  No idea why.  I worked around it by using
11681 '<tt>echo >> /proc/<em>pidofdpkg</em>/fd/0</tt>' to tell dpkg to
11682 continue.</p>
11683
11684 <p><b>apt-get gnome 72</b>
11685 <br>bluez-gnome cupsddk-drivers deskbar-applet gnome
11686   gnome-desktop-environment gnome-network-admin gtkhtml3.14
11687   iceweasel-gnome-support libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libgdl-1-0
11688   libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libmetacity0 libslab0 libxcb-xlib0
11689   nautilus-cd-burner python-gnome2-desktop python-gnome2-extras
11690   serpentine swfdec-mozilla update-manager xorg xserver-xorg
11691   xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
11692   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
11693   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
11694   xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
11695   xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
11696   xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
11697   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
11698   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
11699   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
11700   xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
11701   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
11702   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
11703   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
11704   xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
11705   xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
11706   xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
11707   xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
11708   xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
11709   xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
11710   xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
11711   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
11712   xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9
11713   xulrunner-1.9-gnome-support</p>
11714
11715 <p><b>aptitude gnome 129</b>
11716
11717 <br>bluez-gnome bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers dhcdbd
11718   djvulibre-desktop finger gnome-app-install gnome-mount
11719   gnome-network-admin gnome-spell gnome-vfs-obexftp
11720   gnome-volume-manager gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs gtkhtml3.14 libao2
11721   libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
11722   libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcupsys2 libcurl3 libdatrie0
11723   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20
11724   libeel2-data libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libfaad0 libgail-common
11725   libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libgdl-1-0 libgdl-1-common
11726   libggz2 libggzcore9 libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0
11727   libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libgnomeprint2.2-0
11728   libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgnomeprintui2.2-common
11729   libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
11730   libgtksourceview-common libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6
11731   libhesiod0 libicu38 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 libmagick++10
11732   libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmetacity0 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off
11733   libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2
11734   libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10
11735   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libraw1394-8
11736   libsensors3 libslab0 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8 libssh2-1
11737   libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10
11738   libtrackerclient0 libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0
11739   libxerces2-java libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6
11740   libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common nautilus-cd-burner
11741   openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
11742   python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gnome2-desktop
11743   python-gnome2-extras python-gtkhtml2 python-gtkmozembed
11744   python-numeric python-sexy serpentine svgalibg1 swfdec-gnome
11745   swfdec-mozilla totem-gstreamer update-manager wodim
11746   xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
11747   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
11748   zip</p>
11749
11750 <p><b>apt-get kde 82</b>
11751
11752 <br>cupsddk-drivers karm kaudiocreator kcoloredit kcontrol kde kde-core
11753   kdeaddons kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-bin kdebase-bin-kde3
11754   kdebase-kio-plugins kdesktop kdeutils khelpcenter kicker
11755   kicker-applets knewsticker kolourpaint konq-plugins konqueror korn
11756   kpersonalizer kscreensaver ksplash libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libkiten1
11757   libxcb-xlib0 quanta superkaramba texlive-base-bin xorg xserver-xorg
11758   xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
11759   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
11760   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
11761   xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
11762   xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
11763   xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
11764   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
11765   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
11766   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
11767   xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
11768   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
11769   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
11770   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
11771   xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
11772   xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
11773   xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
11774   xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
11775   xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
11776   xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
11777   xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
11778   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
11779   xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9</p>
11780
11781 <p><b>aptitude kde 192</b>
11782 <br>bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers cvs dcoprss dhcdbd
11783   djvulibre-desktop dosfstools eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
11784   ghostscript-x imlib-base imlib11 indi kandy karm kasteroids
11785   kaudiocreator kbackgammon kbstate kcoloredit kcontrol kcron kdat
11786   kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
11787   kdebase-bin-kde3 kdebase-kio-plugins kdeedu-data
11788   kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data
11789   kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
11790   kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdeprint kdesktop kdessh
11791   kdict kdnssd kdvi kedit keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs
11792   kghostview khelpcenter khexedit kiconedit kitchensync klatin
11793   klickety kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmoon kmrml kodo kolourpaint
11794   kooka korn kpager kpdf kpercentage kpf kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler
11795   krec kregexpeditor ksayit ksim ksirc ksirtet ksmiletris ksmserver
11796   ksnake ksokoban ksplash ksvg ksysv ktip ktnef kuickshow kverbos
11797   kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kworldclock
11798   kxsldbg libakode2 libao2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
11799   libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
11800   libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
11801   libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0 libdatrie0
11802   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
11803   libgail-common libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0
11804   libicu38 libiec61883-0 libindex0 libiw29 libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1
11805   libkdeedu3 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkiten1 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
11806   libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
11807   libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 libmagick10 libmimelib1c2a
11808   libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9
11809   libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 libsmbios2
11810   libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libtalloc1 libtiff-tools
11811   libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0 libxerces2-java
11812   libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 mpeglib networkstatus
11813   openoffice.org-writer2latex pmount poster psutils quanta quanta-data
11814   superkaramba svgalibg1 tex-common texlive-base texlive-base-bin
11815   texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended
11816   xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
11817   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
11818   xulrunner-1.9</p>
11819
11820
11821       </div>
11822       <div class="tags">
11823
11824
11825         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
11826
11827
11828       </div>
11829     </div>
11830     <div class="padding"></div>
11831
11832     <div class="entry">
11833       <div class="title">
11834         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">Automatic upgrade testing from Lenny to Squeeze</a>
11835       </div>
11836       <div class="date">
11837         11th June 2010
11838       </div>
11839       <div class="body">
11840         <p>The last few days I have done some upgrade testing in Debian, to
11841 see if the upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze will go smoothly.  A few bugs
11842 have been discovered and reported in the process
11843 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/585410">#585410</a> in nagios3-cgi,
11844 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584879">#584879</a> already fixed in
11845 enscript and <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#584861</a> in
11846 kdebase-workspace-data), and to get a more regular testing going on, I
11847 am working on a script to automate the test.</p>
11848
11849 <p>The idea is to create a Lenny chroot and use tasksel to install a
11850 Gnome or KDE desktop installation inside the chroot before upgrading
11851 it.  To ensure no services are started in the chroot, a policy-rc.d
11852 script is inserted.  To make sure tasksel believe it is to install a
11853 desktop on a laptop, the tasksel tests are replaced in the chroot
11854 (only acceptable because this is a throw-away chroot).</p>
11855
11856 <p>A naive upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze using aptitude dist-upgrade
11857 currently always fail because udev refuses to upgrade with the kernel
11858 in Lenny, so to avoid that problem the file /etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
11859 is created.  The bug report
11860 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/566000">#566000</a> make me suspect
11861 this problem do not trigger in a chroot, but I touch the file anyway
11862 to make sure the upgrade go well.  Testing on virtual and real
11863 hardware have failed me because of udev so far, and creating this file
11864 do the trick in such settings anyway.  This is a
11865 <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/debian-26/failed-dist-upgrade-due-to-udev-config_sysfs_deprecated-nonsense-804130/">known
11866 issue</a> and the current udev behaviour is intended by the udev
11867 maintainer because he lack the resources to rewrite udev to keep
11868 working with old kernels or something like that.  I really wish the
11869 udev upstream would keep udev backwards compatible, to avoid such
11870 upgrade problem, but given that they fail to do so, I guess
11871 documenting the way out of this mess is the best option we got for
11872 Debian Squeeze.</p>
11873
11874 <p>Anyway, back to the task at hand, testing upgrades.  This test
11875 script, which I call <tt>upgrade-test</tt> for now, is doing the
11876 trick:</p>
11877
11878 <blockquote><pre>
11879 #!/bin/sh
11880 set -ex
11881
11882 if [ "$1" ] ; then
11883     desktop=$1
11884 else
11885     desktop=gnome
11886 fi
11887
11888 from=lenny
11889 to=squeeze
11890
11891 exec &lt; /dev/null
11892 unset LANG
11893 mirror=http://ftp.skolelinux.org/debian
11894 tmpdir=chroot-$from-upgrade-$to-$desktop
11895 fuser -mv .
11896 debootstrap $from $tmpdir $mirror
11897 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
11898 cat > $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d &lt;&lt;EOF
11899 #!/bin/sh
11900 exit 101
11901 EOF
11902 chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d
11903 exit_cleanup() {
11904     umount $tmpdir/proc
11905 }
11906 mount -t proc proc $tmpdir/proc
11907 # Make sure proc is unmounted also on failure
11908 trap exit_cleanup EXIT INT
11909
11910 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y install debconf-utils
11911
11912 # Make sure tasksel autoselection trigger.  It need the test scripts
11913 # to return the correct answers.
11914 echo tasksel tasksel/desktop multiselect $desktop | \
11915     chroot $tmpdir debconf-set-selections
11916
11917 # Include the desktop and laptop task
11918 for test in desktop laptop ; do
11919     echo > $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test &lt;&lt;EOF
11920 #!/bin/sh
11921 exit 2
11922 EOF
11923     chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test
11924 done
11925
11926 DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
11927 DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical
11928 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND DEBIAN_PRIORITY
11929 chroot $tmpdir tasksel --new-install
11930
11931 echo deb $mirror $to main > $tmpdir/etc/apt/sources.list
11932 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
11933 touch $tmpdir/etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
11934 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y dist-upgrade
11935 fuser -mv
11936 </pre></blockquote>
11937
11938 <p>I suspect it would be useful to test upgrades with both apt-get and
11939 with aptitude, but I have not had time to look at how they behave
11940 differently so far.  I hope to get a cron job running to do the test
11941 regularly and post the result on the web.  The Gnome upgrade currently
11942 work, while the KDE upgrade fail because of the bug in
11943 kdebase-workspace-data</p>
11944
11945 <p>I am not quite sure what kind of extract from the huge upgrade logs
11946 (KDE 167 KiB, Gnome 516 KiB) it make sense to include in this blog
11947 post, so I will refrain from trying.  I can report that for Gnome,
11948 aptitude report 760 packages upgraded, 448 newly installed, 129 to
11949 remove and 1 not upgraded and 1024MB need to be downloaded while for
11950 KDE the same numbers are 702 packages upgraded, 507 newly installed,
11951 193 to remove and 0 not upgraded and 1117MB need to be downloaded</p>
11952
11953 <p>I am very happy to notice that the Gnome desktop + laptop upgrade
11954 is able to migrate to dependency based boot sequencing and parallel
11955 booting without a hitch.  Was unsure if there were still bugs with
11956 packages failing to clean up their obsolete init.d script during
11957 upgrades, and no such problem seem to affect the Gnome desktop+laptop
11958 packages.</p>
11959
11960       </div>
11961       <div class="tags">
11962
11963
11964         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
11965
11966
11967       </div>
11968     </div>
11969     <div class="padding"></div>
11970
11971     <div class="entry">
11972       <div class="title">
11973         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Upstart_or_sysvinit___as_init_d_scripts_see_it.html">Upstart or sysvinit - as init.d scripts see it</a>
11974       </div>
11975       <div class="date">
11976          6th June 2010
11977       </div>
11978       <div class="body">
11979         <p>If Debian is to migrate to upstart on Linux, I expect some init.d
11980 scripts to migrate (some of) their operations to upstart job while
11981 keeping the init.d for hurd and kfreebsd.  The packages with such
11982 needs will need a way to get their init.d scripts to behave
11983 differently when used with sysvinit and with upstart.  Because of
11984 this, I had a look at the environment variables set when a init.d
11985 script is running under upstart, and when it is not.</p>
11986
11987 <p>With upstart, I notice these environment variables are set when a
11988 script is started from rcS.d/ (ignoring some irrelevant ones like
11989 COLUMNS):</p>
11990
11991 <blockquote><pre>
11992 DEFAULT_RUNLEVEL=2
11993 previous=N
11994 PREVLEVEL=
11995 RUNLEVEL=
11996 runlevel=S
11997 UPSTART_EVENTS=startup
11998 UPSTART_INSTANCE=
11999 UPSTART_JOB=rc-sysinit
12000 </pre></blockquote>
12001
12002 <p>With sysvinit, these environment variables are set for the same
12003 script.</p>
12004
12005 <blockquote><pre>
12006 INIT_VERSION=sysvinit-2.88
12007 previous=N
12008 PREVLEVEL=N
12009 RUNLEVEL=S
12010 runlevel=S
12011 </pre></blockquote>
12012
12013 <p>The RUNLEVEL and PREVLEVEL environment variables passed on from
12014 sysvinit are not set by upstart.  Not sure if it is intentional or not
12015 to not be compatible with sysvinit in this regard.</p>
12016
12017 <p>For scripts needing to behave differently when upstart is used,
12018 looking for the UPSTART_JOB environment variable seem to be a good
12019 choice.</p>
12020
12021       </div>
12022       <div class="tags">
12023
12024
12025         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
12026
12027
12028       </div>
12029     </div>
12030     <div class="padding"></div>
12031
12032     <div class="entry">
12033       <div class="title">
12034         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_manual_for_standards_wars___.html">A manual for standards wars...</a>
12035       </div>
12036       <div class="date">
12037          6th June 2010
12038       </div>
12039       <div class="body">
12040         <p>Via the
12041 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/robweir/antic-atom/~3/QzU4RgoAGMg/weekly-links-10.html">blog
12042 of Rob Weir</a> I came across the very interesting essay named
12043 <a href="http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/shapiro/wars.pdf">The Art of
12044 Standards Wars</a> (PDF 25 pages).  I recommend it for everyone
12045 following the standards wars of today.</p>
12046
12047       </div>
12048       <div class="tags">
12049
12050
12051         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
12052
12053
12054       </div>
12055     </div>
12056     <div class="padding"></div>
12057
12058     <div class="entry">
12059       <div class="title">
12060         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sitesummary_tip__Listing_computer_hardware_models_used_at_site.html">Sitesummary tip: Listing computer hardware models used at site</a>
12061       </div>
12062       <div class="date">
12063          3rd June 2010
12064       </div>
12065       <div class="body">
12066         <p>When using sitesummary at a site to track machines, it is possible
12067 to get a list of the machine types in use thanks to the DMI
12068 information extracted from each machine.  The script to do so is
12069 included in the sitesummary package, and here is example output from
12070 the Skolelinux build servers:</p>
12071
12072 <blockquote><pre>
12073 maintainer:~# /usr/lib/sitesummary/hardware-model-summary
12074   vendor                    count
12075   Dell Computer Corporation     1
12076     PowerEdge 1750              1
12077   IBM                           1
12078     eserver xSeries 345 -[8670M1X]-     1
12079   Intel                         2
12080   [no-dmi-info]                 3
12081 maintainer:~#
12082 </pre></blockquote>
12083
12084 <p>The quality of the report depend on the quality of the DMI tables
12085 provided in each machine.  Here there are Intel machines without model
12086 information listed with Intel as vendor and no model, and virtual Xen
12087 machines listed as [no-dmi-info].  One can add -l as a command line
12088 option to list the individual machines.</p>
12089
12090 <p>A larger list is
12091 <a href="http://narvikskolen.no/sitesummary/">available from the the
12092 city of Narvik</a>, which uses Skolelinux on all their shools and also
12093 provide the basic sitesummary report publicly.  In their report there
12094 are ~1400 machines. I know they use both Ubuntu and Skolelinux on
12095 their machines, and as sitesummary is available in both distributions,
12096 it is trivial to get all of them to report to the same central
12097 collector.</p>
12098
12099       </div>
12100       <div class="tags">
12101
12102
12103         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary</a>.
12104
12105
12106       </div>
12107     </div>
12108     <div class="padding"></div>
12109
12110     <div class="entry">
12111       <div class="title">
12112         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/KDM_fail_at_boot_with_NVidia_cards___and_no_one_try_to_fix_it_.html">KDM fail at boot with NVidia cards - and no one try to fix it?</a>
12113       </div>
12114       <div class="date">
12115          1st June 2010
12116       </div>
12117       <div class="body">
12118         <p>It is strange to watch how a bug in Debian causing KDM to fail to
12119 start at boot when an NVidia video card is used is handled.  The
12120 problem seem to be that the nvidia X.org driver uses a long time to
12121 initialize, and this duration is longer than kdm is configured to
12122 wait.</p>
12123
12124 <p>I came across two bugs related to this issue,
12125 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">#583312</a> initially filed
12126 against initscripts and passed on to nvidia-glx when it became obvious
12127 that the nvidia drivers were involved, and
12128 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/524751">#524751</a> initially filed against
12129 kdm and passed on to src:nvidia-graphics-drivers for unknown reasons.</p>
12130
12131 <p>To me, it seem that no-one is interested in actually solving the
12132 problem nvidia video card owners experience and make sure the Debian
12133 distribution work out of the box for these users.  The nvidia driver
12134 maintainers expect kdm to be set up to wait longer, while kdm expect
12135 the nvidia driver maintainers to fix the driver to start faster, and
12136 while they wait for each other I guess the users end up switching to a
12137 distribution that work for them.  I have no idea what the solution is,
12138 but I am pretty sure that waiting for each other is not it.</p>
12139
12140 <p>I wonder why we end up handling bugs this way.</p>
12141
12142       </div>
12143       <div class="tags">
12144
12145
12146         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
12147
12148
12149       </div>
12150     </div>
12151     <div class="padding"></div>
12152
12153     <div class="entry">
12154       <div class="title">
12155         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellized_boot_seem_to_hold_up_well_in_Debian_testing.html">Parallellized boot seem to hold up well in Debian/testing</a>
12156       </div>
12157       <div class="date">
12158         27th May 2010
12159       </div>
12160       <div class="body">
12161         <p>A few days ago, parallel booting was enabled in Debian/testing.
12162 The feature seem to hold up pretty well, but three fairly serious
12163 issues are known and should be solved:
12164
12165 <p><ul>
12166
12167 <li>The wicd package seen to
12168 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/508289">break NFS mounting</a> and
12169 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/581586">network setup</a> when
12170 parallel booting is enabled.  No idea why, but the wicd maintainer
12171 seem to be on the case.</li>
12172
12173 <li>The nvidia X driver seem to
12174 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">have a race condition</a>
12175 triggered more easily when parallel booting is in effect.  The
12176 maintainer is on the case.</li>
12177
12178 <li>The sysv-rc package fail to properly enable dependency based boot
12179 sequencing (the shutdown is broken) when old file-rc users
12180 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/575080">try to switch back</a> to
12181 sysv-rc.  One way to solve it would be for file-rc to create
12182 /etc/init.d/.legacy-bootordering, and another is to try to make
12183 sysv-rc more robust.  Will investigate some more and probably upload a
12184 workaround in sysv-rc to help those trying to move from file-rc to
12185 sysv-rc get a working shutdown.</li>
12186
12187 </ul></p>
12188
12189 <p>All in all not many surprising issues, and all of them seem
12190 solvable before Squeeze is released.  In addition to these there are
12191 some packages with bugs in their dependencies and run level settings,
12192 which I expect will be fixed in a reasonable time span.</p>
12193
12194 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
12195 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
12196 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
12197 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
12198
12199 <p>Update: Correct bug number to file-rc issue.</p>
12200
12201       </div>
12202       <div class="tags">
12203
12204
12205         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
12206
12207
12208       </div>
12209     </div>
12210     <div class="padding"></div>
12211
12212     <div class="entry">
12213       <div class="title">
12214         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/More_flexible_firmware_handling_in_debian_installer.html">More flexible firmware handling in debian-installer</a>
12215       </div>
12216       <div class="date">
12217         22nd May 2010
12218       </div>
12219       <div class="body">
12220         <p>After a long break from debian-installer development, I finally
12221 found time today to return to the project.  Having to spend less time
12222 working dependency based boot in debian, as it is almost complete now,
12223 definitely helped freeing some time.</p>
12224
12225 <p>A while back, I ran into a problem while working on Debian Edu.  We
12226 include some firmware packages on the Debian Edu CDs, those needed to
12227 get disk and network controllers working.  Without having these
12228 firmware packages available during installation, it is impossible to
12229 install Debian Edu on the given machine, and because our target group
12230 are non-technical people, asking them to provide firmware packages on
12231 an external medium is a support pain.  Initially, I expected it to be
12232 enough to include the firmware packages on the CD to get
12233 debian-installer to find and use them.  This proved to be wrong.
12234 Next, I hoped it was enough to symlink the relevant firmware packages
12235 to some useful location on the CD (tried /cdrom/ and
12236 /cdrom/firmware/).  This also proved to not work, and at this point I
12237 found time to look at the debian-installer code to figure out what was
12238 going to work.</p>
12239
12240 <p>The firmware loading code is in the hw-detect package, and a closer
12241 look revealed that it would only look for firmware packages outside
12242 the installation media, so the CD was never checked for firmware
12243 packages.  It would only check USB sticks, floppies and other
12244 "external" media devices.  Today I changed it to also look in the
12245 /cdrom/firmware/ directory on the mounted CD or DVD, which should
12246 solve the problem I ran into with Debian edu.  I also changed it to
12247 look in /firmware/, to make sure the installer also find firmware
12248 provided in the initrd when booting the installer via PXE, to allow us
12249 to provide the same feature in the PXE setup included in Debian
12250 Edu.</p>
12251
12252 <p>To make sure firmware deb packages with a license questions are not
12253 activated without asking if the license is accepted, I extended
12254 hw-detect to look for preinst scripts in the firmware packages, and
12255 run these before activating the firmware during installation.  The
12256 license question is asked using debconf in the preinst, so this should
12257 solve the issue for the firmware packages I have looked at so far.</p>
12258
12259 <p>If you want to discuss the details of these features, please
12260 contact us on debian-boot@lists.debian.org.</p>
12261
12262       </div>
12263       <div class="tags">
12264
12265
12266         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
12267
12268
12269       </div>
12270     </div>
12271     <div class="padding"></div>
12272
12273     <div class="entry">
12274       <div class="title">
12275         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellized_boot_is_now_the_default_in_Debian_unstable.html">Parallellized boot is now the default in Debian/unstable</a>
12276       </div>
12277       <div class="date">
12278         14th May 2010
12279       </div>
12280       <div class="body">
12281         <p>Since this evening, parallel booting is the default in
12282 Debian/unstable for machines using dependency based boot sequencing.
12283 Apparently the testing of concurrent booting has been wider than
12284 expected, if I am to believe the
12285 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
12286 on debian-devel@</a>, and I concluded a few days ago to move forward
12287 with the feature this weekend, to give us some time to detect any
12288 remaining problems before Squeeze is frozen.  If serious problems are
12289 detected, it is simple to change the default back to sequential boot.
12290 The upload of the new sysvinit package also activate a new upstream
12291 version.</p>
12292
12293 More information about
12294 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
12295 based boot sequencing</a> is available from the Debian wiki.  It is
12296 currently possible to disable parallel booting when one run into
12297 problems caused by it, by adding this line to /etc/default/rcS:</p>
12298
12299 <blockquote><pre>
12300 CONCURRENCY=none
12301 </pre></blockquote>
12302
12303 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
12304 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
12305 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
12306 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
12307
12308       </div>
12309       <div class="tags">
12310
12311
12312         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
12313
12314
12315       </div>
12316     </div>
12317     <div class="padding"></div>
12318
12319     <div class="entry">
12320       <div class="title">
12321         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sitesummary_tip__Listing_MAC_address_of_all_clients.html">Sitesummary tip: Listing MAC address of all clients</a>
12322       </div>
12323       <div class="date">
12324         14th May 2010
12325       </div>
12326       <div class="body">
12327         <p>In the recent Debian Edu versions, the
12328 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary">sitesummary
12329 system</a> is used to keep track of the machines in the school
12330 network.  Each machine will automatically report its status to the
12331 central server after boot and once per night.  The network setup is
12332 also reported, and using this information it is possible to get the
12333 MAC address of all network interfaces in the machines.  This is useful
12334 to update the DHCP configuration.</p>
12335
12336 <p>To give some idea how to use sitesummary, here is a one-liner to
12337 ist all MAC addresses of all machines reporting to sitesummary.  Run
12338 this on the collector host:</p>
12339
12340 <blockquote><pre>
12341 perl -MSiteSummary -e 'for_all_hosts(sub { print join(" ", get_macaddresses(shift)), "\n"; });'
12342 </pre></blockquote>
12343
12344 <p>This will list all MAC addresses assosiated with all machine, one
12345 line per machine and with space between the MAC addresses.</p>
12346
12347 <p>To allow system administrators easier job at adding static DHCP
12348 addresses for hosts, it would be possible to extend this to fetch
12349 machine information from sitesummary and update the DHCP and DNS
12350 tables in LDAP using this information.  Such tool is unfortunately not
12351 written yet.</p>
12352
12353       </div>
12354       <div class="tags">
12355
12356
12357         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary</a>.
12358
12359
12360       </div>
12361     </div>
12362     <div class="padding"></div>
12363
12364     <div class="entry">
12365       <div class="title">
12366         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/systemd__an_interesting_alternative_to_upstart.html">systemd, an interesting alternative to upstart</a>
12367       </div>
12368       <div class="date">
12369         13th May 2010
12370       </div>
12371       <div class="body">
12372         <p>The last few days a new boot system called
12373 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd">systemd</a>
12374 has been
12375 <a href="http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html">introduced</a>
12376
12377 to the free software world.  I have not yet had time to play around
12378 with it, but it seem to be a very interesting alternative to
12379 <a href="http://upstart.ubuntu.com/">upstart</a>, and might prove to be
12380 a good alternative for Debian when we are able to switch to an event
12381 based boot system.  Tollef is
12382 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/580814">in the process</a> of getting
12383 systemd into Debian, and I look forward to seeing how well it work.  I
12384 like the fact that systemd handles init.d scripts with dependency
12385 information natively, allowing them to run in parallel where upstart
12386 at the moment do not.</p>
12387
12388 <p>Unfortunately do systemd have the same problem as upstart regarding
12389 platform support.  It only work on recent Linux kernels, and also need
12390 some new kernel features enabled to function properly.  This means
12391 kFreeBSD and Hurd ports of Debian will need a port or a different boot
12392 system.  Not sure how that will be handled if systemd proves to be the
12393 way forward.</p>
12394
12395 <p>In the mean time, based on the
12396 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
12397 on debian-devel@</a> regarding parallel booting in Debian, I have
12398 decided to enable full parallel booting as the default in Debian as
12399 soon as possible (probably this weekend or early next week), to see if
12400 there are any remaining serious bugs in the init.d dependencies.  A
12401 new version of the sysvinit package implementing this change is
12402 already in experimental.  If all go well, Squeeze will be released
12403 with parallel booting enabled by default.</p>
12404
12405       </div>
12406       <div class="tags">
12407
12408
12409         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
12410
12411
12412       </div>
12413     </div>
12414     <div class="padding"></div>
12415
12416     <div class="entry">
12417       <div class="title">
12418         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellizing_the_boot_in_Debian_Squeeze___ready_for_wider_testing.html">Parallellizing the boot in Debian Squeeze - ready for wider testing</a>
12419       </div>
12420       <div class="date">
12421          6th May 2010
12422       </div>
12423       <div class="body">
12424         <p>These days, the init.d script dependencies in Squeeze are quite
12425 complete, so complete that it is actually possible to run all the
12426 init.d scripts in parallell based on these dependencies.  If you want
12427 to test your Squeeze system, make sure
12428 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
12429 based boot sequencing</a> is enabled, and add this line to
12430 /etc/default/rcS:</p>
12431
12432 <blockquote><pre>
12433 CONCURRENCY=makefile
12434 </pre></blockquote>
12435
12436 <p>That is it.  It will cause sysv-rc to use the startpar tool to run
12437 scripts in parallel using the dependency information stored in
12438 /etc/init.d/.depend.boot, /etc/init.d/.depend.start and
12439 /etc/init.d/.depend.stop to order the scripts.  Startpar is configured
12440 to try to start the kdm and gdm scripts as early as possible, and will
12441 start the facilities required by kdm or gdm as early as possible to
12442 make this happen.</p>
12443
12444 <p>Give it a try, and see if you like the result.  If some services
12445 fail to start properly, it is most likely because they have incomplete
12446 init.d script dependencies in their startup script (or some of their
12447 dependent scripts have incomplete dependencies).  Report bugs and get
12448 the package maintainers to fix it. :)</p>
12449
12450 <p>Running scripts in parallel could be the default in Debian when we
12451 manage to get the init.d script dependencies complete and correct.  I
12452 expect we will get there in Squeeze+1, if we get manage to test and
12453 fix the remaining issues.</p>
12454
12455 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
12456 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
12457 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
12458 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
12459
12460       </div>
12461       <div class="tags">
12462
12463
12464         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
12465
12466
12467       </div>
12468     </div>
12469     <div class="padding"></div>
12470
12471     <div class="entry">
12472       <div class="title">
12473         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_has_switched_to_dependency_based_boot_sequencing.html">Debian has switched to dependency based boot sequencing</a>
12474       </div>
12475       <div class="date">
12476         27th July 2009
12477       </div>
12478       <div class="body">
12479         <p>Since this evening, with the upload of sysvinit version 2.87dsf-2,
12480 and the upload of insserv version 1.12.0-10 yesterday, Debian unstable
12481 have been migrated to using dependency based boot sequencing.  This
12482 conclude work me and others have been doing for the last three days.
12483 It feels great to see this finally part of the default Debian
12484 installation.  Now we just need to weed out the last few problems that
12485 are bound to show up, to get everything ready for Squeeze.</p>
12486
12487 <p>The next step is migrating /sbin/init from sysvinit to upstart, and
12488 fixing the more fundamental problem of handing the event based
12489 non-predictable kernel in the early boot.</p>
12490
12491       </div>
12492       <div class="tags">
12493
12494
12495         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
12496
12497
12498       </div>
12499     </div>
12500     <div class="padding"></div>
12501
12502     <div class="entry">
12503       <div class="title">
12504         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Taking_over_sysvinit_development.html">Taking over sysvinit development</a>
12505       </div>
12506       <div class="date">
12507         22nd July 2009
12508       </div>
12509       <div class="body">
12510         <p>After several years of frustration with the lack of activity from
12511 the existing sysvinit upstream developer, I decided a few weeks ago to
12512 take over the package and become the new upstream.  The number of
12513 patches to track for the Debian package was becoming a burden, and the
12514 lack of synchronization between the distribution made it hard to keep
12515 the package up to date.</p>
12516
12517 <p>On the new sysvinit team is the SuSe maintainer Dr. Werner Fink,
12518 and my Debian co-maintainer Kel Modderman.  About 10 days ago, I made
12519 a new upstream tarball with version number 2.87dsf (for Debian, SuSe
12520 and Fedora), based on the patches currently in use in these
12521 distributions.  We Debian maintainers plan to move to this tarball as
12522 the new upstream as soon as we find time to do the merge.  Since the
12523 new tarball was created, we agreed with Werner at SuSe to make a new
12524 upstream project at <a href="http://savannah.nongnu.org/">Savannah</a>, and continue
12525 development there.  The project is registered and currently waiting
12526 for approval by the Savannah administrators, and as soon as it is
12527 approved, we will import the old versions from svn and continue
12528 working on the future release.</p>
12529
12530 <p>It is a bit ironic that this is done now, when some of the involved
12531 distributions are moving to upstart as a syvinit replacement.</p>
12532
12533       </div>
12534       <div class="tags">
12535
12536
12537         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
12538
12539
12540       </div>
12541     </div>
12542     <div class="padding"></div>
12543
12544     <div class="entry">
12545       <div class="title">
12546         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_boots_quicker_and_quicker.html">Debian boots quicker and quicker</a>
12547       </div>
12548       <div class="date">
12549         24th June 2009
12550       </div>
12551       <div class="body">
12552         <p>I spent Monday and tuesday this week in London with a lot of the
12553 people involved in the boot system on Debian and Ubuntu, to see if we
12554 could find more ways to speed up the boot system.  This was an Ubuntu
12555 funded
12556 <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FoundationsTeam/BootPerformance/DebianUbuntuSprint">developer
12557 gathering</a>. It was quite productive.  We also discussed the future
12558 of boot systems, and ways to handle the increasing number of boot
12559 issues introduced by the Linux kernel becoming more and more
12560 asynchronous and event base.  The Ubuntu approach using udev and
12561 upstart might be a good way forward.  Time will show.</p>
12562
12563 <p>Anyway, there are a few ways at the moment to speed up the boot
12564 process in Debian.  All of these should be applied to get a quick
12565 boot:</p>
12566
12567 <ul>
12568
12569 <li>Use dash as /bin/sh.</li>
12570
12571 <li>Disable the init.d/hwclock*.sh scripts and make sure the hardware
12572    clock is in UTC.</li>
12573
12574 <li>Install and activate the insserv package to enable
12575    <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
12576    based boot sequencing</a>, and enable concurrent booting.</li>
12577
12578 </ul>
12579
12580 These points are based on the Google summer of code work done by
12581 <a href="http://initscripts-ng.alioth.debian.org/soc2006-bootsystem/">Carlos
12582 Villegas</a>.
12583
12584 <p>Support for makefile-style concurrency during boot was uploaded to
12585 unstable yesterday.  When we tested it, we were able to cut 6 seconds
12586 from the boot sequence.  It depend on very correct dependency
12587 declaration in all init.d scripts, so I expect us to find edge cases
12588 where the dependences in some scripts are slightly wrong when we start
12589 using this.</p>
12590
12591 <p>On our IRC channel for this effort, #pkg-sysvinit, a new idea was
12592 introduced by Raphael Geissert today, one that could affect the
12593 startup speed as well.  Instead of starting some scripts concurrently
12594 from rcS.d/ and another set of scripts from rc2.d/, it would be
12595 possible to run a of them in the same process.  A quick way to test
12596 this would be to enable insserv and run 'mv /etc/rc2.d/S* /etc/rcS.d/;
12597 insserv'.  Will need to test if that work. :)</p>
12598
12599       </div>
12600       <div class="tags">
12601
12602
12603         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
12604
12605
12606       </div>
12607     </div>
12608     <div class="padding"></div>
12609
12610     <div class="entry">
12611       <div class="title">
12612         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/BSAs_p_stander_om_piratkopiering_m_ter_motstand.html">BSAs påstander om piratkopiering møter motstand</a>
12613       </div>
12614       <div class="date">
12615         17th May 2009
12616       </div>
12617       <div class="body">
12618         <p>Hvert år de siste årene har BSA, lobbyfronten til de store
12619 programvareselskapene som Microsoft og Apple, publisert en rapport der
12620 de gjetter på hvor mye piratkopiering påfører i tapte inntekter i
12621 ulike land rundt om i verden.  Resultatene er tendensiøse.  For noen
12622 dager siden kom
12623 <a href="http://global.bsa.org/globalpiracy2008/studies/globalpiracy2008.pdf">siste
12624 rapport</a>, og det er flere kritiske kommentarer publisert de siste
12625 dagene.  Et spesielt interessant kommentar fra Sverige,
12626 <a href="http://www.idg.se/2.1085/1.229795/bsa-hoftade-sverigesiffror">BSA
12627 höftade Sverigesiffror</a>, oppsummeres slik:</p>
12628
12629 <blockquote>
12630 I sin senaste rapport slår BSA fast att 25 procent av all mjukvara i
12631 Sverige är piratkopierad. Det utan att ha pratat med ett enda svenskt
12632 företag. "Man bör nog kanske inte se de här siffrorna som helt
12633 exakta", säger BSAs Sverigechef John Hugosson.
12634 </blockquote>
12635
12636 <p>Mon tro om de er like metodiske når de gjetter på andelen piratkopiering i Norge?  To andre kommentarer er <a
12637 href="http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/comment/2242134/bsa-piracy-figures-shot-reality">BSA
12638 piracy figures need a shot of reality</a> og <a
12639 href="http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/3958/125/">Does The WIPO
12640 Copyright Treaty Work?</a></p>
12641
12642 <p>Fant lenkene via <a
12643 href="http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/17/1632242">oppslag
12644 på Slashdot</a>.</p>
12645
12646       </div>
12647       <div class="tags">
12648
12649
12650         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bsa">bsa</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fildeling">fildeling</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>.
12651
12652
12653       </div>
12654     </div>
12655     <div class="padding"></div>
12656
12657     <div class="entry">
12658       <div class="title">
12659         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IDG_mener_linux_i_servermarkedet_vil_vokse_med_21__i_2009.html">IDG mener linux i servermarkedet vil vokse med 21% i 2009</a>
12660       </div>
12661       <div class="date">
12662          7th May 2009
12663       </div>
12664       <div class="body">
12665         <p>Kom over
12666 <a href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10216873-16.html">interessante
12667 tall</a> fra IDG om utviklingen av linuxservermarkedet.  Fikk meg til
12668 å tenke på antall tjenermaskiner ved Universitetet i Oslo der jeg
12669 jobber til daglig.  En rask opptelling forteller meg at vi har 490
12670 (61%) fysiske unix-tjener (mest linux men også noen solaris) og 196
12671 (25%) windowstjenere, samt 112 (14%) virtuelle unix-tjenere.  Med den
12672 bakgrunnskunnskapen kan jeg godt tro at IDG er inne på noe.</p>
12673
12674       </div>
12675       <div class="tags">
12676
12677
12678         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
12679
12680
12681       </div>
12682     </div>
12683     <div class="padding"></div>
12684
12685     <div class="entry">
12686       <div class="title">
12687         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Kryptert_harddisk___naturligvis.html">Kryptert harddisk - naturligvis</a>
12688       </div>
12689       <div class="date">
12690          2nd May 2009
12691       </div>
12692       <div class="body">
12693         <p><a href="http://www.dagensit.no/trender/article1658676.ece">Dagens
12694 IT melder</a> at Intel hevder at det er dyrt å miste en datamaskin,
12695 når en tar tap av arbeidstid, fortrolige dokumenter,
12696 personopplysninger og alt annet det innebærer.  Det er ingen tvil om
12697 at det er en kostbar affære å miste sin datamaskin, og det er årsaken
12698 til at jeg har kryptert harddisken på både kontormaskinen og min
12699 bærbare.  Begge inneholder personopplysninger jeg ikke ønsker skal
12700 komme på avveie, den første informasjon relatert til jobben min ved
12701 Universitetet i Oslo, og den andre relatert til blant annet
12702 foreningsarbeide.  Kryptering av diskene gjør at det er lite
12703 sannsynlig at dophoder som kan finne på å rappe maskinene får noe ut
12704 av dem.  Maskinene låses automatisk etter noen minutter uten bruk,
12705 og en reboot vil gjøre at de ber om passord før de vil starte opp.
12706 Jeg bruker Debian på begge maskinene, og installasjonssystemet der
12707 gjør det trivielt å sette opp krypterte disker.  Jeg har LVM på toppen
12708 av krypterte partisjoner, slik at alt av datapartisjoner er kryptert.
12709 Jeg anbefaler alle å kryptere diskene på sine bærbare.  Kostnaden når
12710 det er gjort slik jeg gjør det er minimale, og gevinstene er
12711 betydelige.  En bør dog passe på passordet.  Hvis det går tapt, må
12712 maskinen reinstalleres og alt er tapt.</p>
12713
12714 <p>Krypteringen vil ikke stoppe kompetente angripere som f.eks. kjøler
12715 ned minnebrikkene før maskinen rebootes med programvare for å hente ut
12716 krypteringsnøklene.  Kostnaden med å forsvare seg mot slike angripere
12717 er for min del høyere enn gevinsten.  Jeg tror oddsene for at
12718 f.eks. etteretningsorganisasjoner har glede av å titte på mine
12719 maskiner er minimale, og ulempene jeg ville oppnå ved å forsøke å
12720 gjøre det vanskeligere for angripere med kompetanse og ressurser er
12721 betydelige.</p>
12722
12723       </div>
12724       <div class="tags">
12725
12726
12727         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
12728
12729
12730       </div>
12731     </div>
12732     <div class="padding"></div>
12733
12734     <div class="entry">
12735       <div class="title">
12736         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Two_projects_that_have_improved_the_quality_of_free_software_a_lot.html">Two projects that have improved the quality of free software a lot</a>
12737       </div>
12738       <div class="date">
12739          2nd May 2009
12740       </div>
12741       <div class="body">
12742         <p>There are two software projects that have had huge influence on the
12743 quality of free software, and I wanted to mention both in case someone
12744 do not yet know them.</p>
12745
12746 <p>The first one is <a href="http://valgrind.org/">valgrind</a>, a
12747 tool to detect and expose errors in the memory handling of programs.
12748 It is easy to use, all one need to do is to run 'valgrind program',
12749 and it will report any problems on stdout.  It is even better if the
12750 program include debug information.  With debug information, it is able
12751 to report the source file name and line number where the problem
12752 occurs.  It can report things like 'reading past memory block in file
12753 X line N, the memory block was allocated in file Y, line M', and
12754 'using uninitialised value in control logic'.  This tool has made it
12755 trivial to investigate reproducible crash bugs in programs, and have
12756 reduced the number of this kind of bugs in free software a lot.
12757
12758 <p>The second one is
12759 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coverity">Coverity</a> which is
12760 a source code checker.  It is able to process the source of a program
12761 and find problems in the logic without running the program.  It
12762 started out as the Stanford Checker and became well known when it was
12763 used to find bugs in the Linux kernel.  It is now a commercial tool
12764 and the company behind it is running
12765 <a href="http://www.scan.coverity.com/">a community service</a> for the
12766 free software community, where a lot of free software projects get
12767 their source checked for free.  Several thousand defects have been
12768 found and fixed so far.  It can find errors like 'lock L taken in file
12769 X line N is never released if exiting in line M', or 'the code in file
12770 Y lines O to P can never be executed'.  The projects included in the
12771 community service project have managed to get rid of a lot of
12772 reliability problems thanks to Coverity.</p>
12773
12774 <p>I believe tools like this, that are able to automatically find
12775 errors in the source, are vital to improve the quality of software and
12776 make sure we can get rid of the crashing and failing software we are
12777 surrounded by today.</p>
12778
12779       </div>
12780       <div class="tags">
12781
12782
12783         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
12784
12785
12786       </div>
12787     </div>
12788     <div class="padding"></div>
12789
12790     <div class="entry">
12791       <div class="title">
12792         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/No_patch_is_not_better_than_a_useless_patch.html">No patch is not better than a useless patch</a>
12793       </div>
12794       <div class="date">
12795         28th April 2009
12796       </div>
12797       <div class="body">
12798         <p>Julien Blache
12799 <a href="http://blog.technologeek.org/2009/04/12/214">claim that no
12800 patch is better than a useless patch</a>.  I completely disagree, as a
12801 patch allow one to discuss a concrete and proposed solution, and also
12802 prove that the issue at hand is important enough for someone to spent
12803 time on fixing it.  No patch do not provide any of these positive
12804 properties.</p>
12805
12806       </div>
12807       <div class="tags">
12808
12809
12810         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
12811
12812
12813       </div>
12814     </div>
12815     <div class="padding"></div>
12816
12817     <div class="entry">
12818       <div class="title">
12819         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Standardize_on_protocols_and_formats__not_vendors_and_applications.html">Standardize on protocols and formats, not vendors and applications</a>
12820       </div>
12821       <div class="date">
12822         30th March 2009
12823       </div>
12824       <div class="body">
12825         <p>Where I work at the University of Oslo, one decision stand out as a
12826 very good one to form a long lived computer infrastructure.  It is the
12827 simple one, lost by many in todays computer industry: Standardize on
12828 open network protocols and open exchange/storage formats, not applications.
12829 Applications come and go, while protocols and files tend to stay, and
12830 thus one want to make it easy to change application and vendor, while
12831 avoiding conversion costs and locking users to a specific platform or
12832 application.</p>
12833
12834 <p>This approach make it possible to replace the client applications
12835 independently of the server applications.  One can even allow users to
12836 use several different applications as long as they handle the selected
12837 protocol and format.  In the normal case, only one client application
12838 is recommended and users only get help if they choose to use this
12839 application, but those that want to deviate from the easy path are not
12840 blocked from doing so.</p>
12841
12842 <p>It also allow us to replace the server side without forcing the
12843 users to replace their applications, and thus allow us to select the
12844 best server implementation at any moment, when scale and resouce
12845 requirements change.</p>
12846
12847 <p>I strongly recommend standardizing - on open network protocols and
12848 open formats, but I would never recommend standardizing on a single
12849 application that do not use open network protocol or open formats.</p>
12850
12851       </div>
12852       <div class="tags">
12853
12854
12855         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
12856
12857
12858       </div>
12859     </div>
12860     <div class="padding"></div>
12861
12862     <div class="entry">
12863       <div class="title">
12864         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Returning_from_Skolelinux_developer_gathering.html">Returning from Skolelinux developer gathering</a>
12865       </div>
12866       <div class="date">
12867         29th March 2009
12868       </div>
12869       <div class="body">
12870         <p>I'm sitting on the train going home from this weekends Debian
12871 Edu/Skolelinux development gathering.  I got a bit done tuning the
12872 desktop, and looked into the dynamic service location protocol
12873 implementation avahi.  It look like it could be useful for us.  Almost
12874 30 people participated, and I believe it was a great environment to
12875 get to know the Skolelinux system.  Walter Bender, involved in the
12876 development of the Sugar educational platform, presented his stuff and
12877 also helped me improve my OLPC installation.  He also showed me that
12878 his Turtle Art application can be used in standalone mode, and we
12879 agreed that I would help getting it packaged for Debian.  As a
12880 standalone application it would be great for Debian Edu.  We also
12881 tried to get the video conferencing working with two OLPCs, but that
12882 proved to be too hard for us.  The application seem to need more work
12883 before it is ready for me.  I look forward to getting home and relax
12884 now. :)</p>
12885
12886       </div>
12887       <div class="tags">
12888
12889
12890         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
12891
12892
12893       </div>
12894     </div>
12895     <div class="padding"></div>
12896
12897     <div class="entry">
12898       <div class="title">
12899         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">Time for new  LDAP schemas replacing RFC 2307?</a>
12900       </div>
12901       <div class="date">
12902         29th March 2009
12903       </div>
12904       <div class="body">
12905         <p>The state of standardized LDAP schemas on Linux is far from
12906 optimal.  There is RFC 2307 documenting one way to store NIS maps in
12907 LDAP, and a modified version of this normally called RFC 2307bis, with
12908 some modifications to be compatible with Active Directory.  The RFC
12909 specification handle the content of a lot of system databases, but do
12910 not handle DNS zones and DHCP configuration.</p>
12911
12912 <p>In <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux</a>,
12913 we would like to store information about users, SMB clients/hosts,
12914 filegroups, netgroups (users and hosts), DHCP and DNS configuration,
12915 and LTSP configuration in LDAP.  These objects have a lot in common,
12916 but with the current LDAP schemas it is not possible to have one
12917 object per entity.  For example, one need to have at least three LDAP
12918 objects for a given computer, one with the SMB related stuff, one with
12919 DNS information and another with DHCP information.  The schemas
12920 provided for DNS and DHCP are impossible to combine into one LDAP
12921 object.  In addition, it is impossible to implement quick queries for
12922 netgroup membership, because of the way NIS triples are implemented.
12923 It just do not scale.  I believe it is time for a few RFC
12924 specifications to cleam up this mess.</p>
12925
12926 <p>I would like to have one LDAP object representing each computer in
12927 the network, and this object can then keep the SMB (ie host key), DHCP
12928 (mac address/name) and DNS (name/IP address) settings in one place.
12929 It need to be efficently stored to make sure it scale well.</p>
12930
12931 <p>I would also like to have a quick way to map from a user or
12932 computer and to the net group this user or computer is a member.</p>
12933
12934 <p>Active Directory have done a better job than unix heads like myself
12935 in this regard, and the unix side need to catch up.  Time to start a
12936 new IETF work group?</p>
12937
12938       </div>
12939       <div class="tags">
12940
12941
12942         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
12943
12944
12945       </div>
12946     </div>
12947     <div class="padding"></div>
12948
12949     <div class="entry">
12950       <div class="title">
12951         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Endelig_er_Debian_Lenny_gitt_ut.html">Endelig er Debian Lenny gitt ut</a>
12952       </div>
12953       <div class="date">
12954         15th February 2009
12955       </div>
12956       <div class="body">
12957         <p>Endelig er <a href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian</a>
12958 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2009/20090214">Lenny</a> gitt ut.
12959 Et langt steg videre for Debian-prosjektet, og en rekke nye
12960 programpakker blir nå tilgjengelig for de av oss som bruker den
12961 stabile utgaven av Debian.  Neste steg er nå å få
12962 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a> /
12963 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/">Debian Edu</a> ferdig
12964 oppdatert for den nye utgaven, slik at en oppdatert versjon kan
12965 slippes løs på skolene.  Takk til alle debian-utviklerne som har
12966 gjort dette mulig.  Endelig er f.eks. fungerende avhengighetsstyrt
12967 bootsekvens tilgjengelig i stabil utgave, vha pakken
12968 <tt>insserv</tt>.</p>
12969
12970       </div>
12971       <div class="tags">
12972
12973
12974         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>.
12975
12976
12977       </div>
12978     </div>
12979     <div class="padding"></div>
12980
12981     <div class="entry">
12982       <div class="title">
12983         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Devcamp_brought_us_closer_to_the_Lenny_based_Debian_Edu_release.html">Devcamp brought us closer to the Lenny based Debian Edu release</a>
12984       </div>
12985       <div class="date">
12986          7th December 2008
12987       </div>
12988       <div class="body">
12989         <p>This weekend we had a small developer gathering for Debian Edu in
12990 Oslo.  Most of Saturday was used for the general assemly for the
12991 member organization, but the rest of the weekend I used to tune the
12992 LTSP installation.  LTSP now work out of the box on the 10-network.
12993 Acer Aspire One proved to be a very nice thin client, with both
12994 screen, mouse and keybard in a small box.  Was working on getting the
12995 diskless workstation setup configured out of the box, but did not
12996 finish it before the weekend was up.</p>
12997
12998 <p>Did not find time to look at the 4 VGA cards in one box we got from
12999 the Brazilian group, so that will have to wait for the next
13000 development gathering.  Would love to have the Debian Edu installer
13001 automatically detect and configure a multiseat setup when it find one
13002 of these cards.</p>
13003
13004       </div>
13005       <div class="tags">
13006
13007
13008         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ltsp">ltsp</a>.
13009
13010
13011       </div>
13012     </div>
13013     <div class="padding"></div>
13014
13015     <div class="entry">
13016       <div class="title">
13017         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_sorry_state_of_multimedia_browser_plugins_in_Debian.html">The sorry state of multimedia browser plugins in Debian</a>
13018       </div>
13019       <div class="date">
13020         25th November 2008
13021       </div>
13022       <div class="body">
13023         <p>Recently I have spent some time evaluating the multimedia browser
13024 plugins available in Debian Lenny, to see which one we should use by
13025 default in Debian Edu.  We need an embedded video playing plugin with
13026 control buttons to pause or stop the video, and capable of streaming
13027 all the multimedia content available on the web.  The test results and
13028 notes are available on
13029 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">the
13030 Debian wiki</a>.  I was surprised how few of the plugins are able to
13031 fill this need.  My personal video player favorite, VLC, has a really
13032 bad plugin which fail on a lot of the test pages.  A lot of the MIME
13033 types I would expect to work with any free software player (like
13034 video/ogg), just do not work.  And simple formats like the
13035 audio/x-mplegurl format (m3u playlists), just isn't supported by the
13036 totem and vlc plugins.  I hope the situation will improve soon.  No
13037 wonder sites use the proprietary Adobe flash to play video.</p>
13038
13039 <p>For Lenny, we seem to end up with the mplayer plugin.  It seem to
13040 be the only one fitting our needs. :/</p>
13041
13042       </div>
13043       <div class="tags">
13044
13045
13046         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
13047
13048
13049       </div>
13050     </div>
13051     <div class="padding"></div>
13052
13053     <p style="text-align: right;"><a href="debian.rss"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/xml.gif" alt="RSS Feed" width="36" height="14" /></a></p>
13054     <div id="sidebar">
13055
13056
13057
13058 <h2>Archive</h2>
13059 <ul>
13060
13061 <li>2018
13062 <ul>
13063
13064 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/01/">January (1)</a></li>
13065
13066 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/02/">February (5)</a></li>
13067
13068 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/03/">March (5)</a></li>
13069
13070 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/04/">April (3)</a></li>
13071
13072 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/06/">June (2)</a></li>
13073
13074 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/07/">July (2)</a></li>
13075
13076 </ul></li>
13077
13078 <li>2017
13079 <ul>
13080
13081 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/01/">January (4)</a></li>
13082
13083 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/02/">February (3)</a></li>
13084
13085 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/03/">March (5)</a></li>
13086
13087 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/04/">April (2)</a></li>
13088
13089 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/06/">June (5)</a></li>
13090
13091 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/07/">July (1)</a></li>
13092
13093 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/08/">August (1)</a></li>
13094
13095 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/09/">September (3)</a></li>
13096
13097 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/10/">October (5)</a></li>
13098
13099 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/11/">November (3)</a></li>
13100
13101 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/12/">December (4)</a></li>
13102
13103 </ul></li>
13104
13105 <li>2016
13106 <ul>
13107
13108 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/01/">January (3)</a></li>
13109
13110 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/02/">February (2)</a></li>
13111
13112 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/03/">March (3)</a></li>
13113
13114 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/04/">April (8)</a></li>
13115
13116 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/05/">May (8)</a></li>
13117
13118 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/06/">June (2)</a></li>
13119
13120 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/07/">July (2)</a></li>
13121
13122 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/08/">August (5)</a></li>
13123
13124 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/09/">September (2)</a></li>
13125
13126 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/10/">October (3)</a></li>
13127
13128 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/11/">November (8)</a></li>
13129
13130 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/12/">December (5)</a></li>
13131
13132 </ul></li>
13133
13134 <li>2015
13135 <ul>
13136
13137 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/01/">January (7)</a></li>
13138
13139 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/02/">February (6)</a></li>
13140
13141 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/03/">March (1)</a></li>
13142
13143 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/04/">April (4)</a></li>
13144
13145 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/05/">May (3)</a></li>
13146
13147 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/06/">June (4)</a></li>
13148
13149 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/07/">July (6)</a></li>
13150
13151 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/08/">August (2)</a></li>
13152
13153 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/09/">September (2)</a></li>
13154
13155 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/10/">October (9)</a></li>
13156
13157 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/11/">November (6)</a></li>
13158
13159 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/12/">December (3)</a></li>
13160
13161 </ul></li>
13162
13163 <li>2014
13164 <ul>
13165
13166 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/01/">January (2)</a></li>
13167
13168 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/02/">February (3)</a></li>
13169
13170 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/03/">March (8)</a></li>
13171
13172 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/04/">April (7)</a></li>
13173
13174 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/05/">May (1)</a></li>
13175
13176 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/06/">June (2)</a></li>
13177
13178 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/07/">July (2)</a></li>
13179
13180 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/08/">August (2)</a></li>
13181
13182 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/09/">September (5)</a></li>
13183
13184 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/10/">October (6)</a></li>
13185
13186 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/11/">November (3)</a></li>
13187
13188 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/12/">December (5)</a></li>
13189
13190 </ul></li>
13191
13192 <li>2013
13193 <ul>
13194
13195 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/01/">January (11)</a></li>
13196
13197 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/02/">February (9)</a></li>
13198
13199 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/03/">March (9)</a></li>
13200
13201 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/04/">April (6)</a></li>
13202
13203 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/05/">May (9)</a></li>
13204
13205 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/06/">June (10)</a></li>
13206
13207 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/07/">July (7)</a></li>
13208
13209 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/08/">August (3)</a></li>
13210
13211 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/09/">September (5)</a></li>
13212
13213 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/10/">October (7)</a></li>
13214
13215 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/11/">November (9)</a></li>
13216
13217 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/12/">December (3)</a></li>
13218
13219 </ul></li>
13220
13221 <li>2012
13222 <ul>
13223
13224 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/01/">January (7)</a></li>
13225
13226 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/02/">February (10)</a></li>
13227
13228 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/03/">March (17)</a></li>
13229
13230 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/04/">April (12)</a></li>
13231
13232 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/05/">May (12)</a></li>
13233
13234 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/06/">June (20)</a></li>
13235
13236 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/07/">July (17)</a></li>
13237
13238 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/08/">August (6)</a></li>
13239
13240 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/09/">September (9)</a></li>
13241
13242 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/10/">October (17)</a></li>
13243
13244 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/11/">November (10)</a></li>
13245
13246 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/12/">December (7)</a></li>
13247
13248 </ul></li>
13249
13250 <li>2011
13251 <ul>
13252
13253 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/01/">January (16)</a></li>
13254
13255 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/02/">February (6)</a></li>
13256
13257 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/03/">March (6)</a></li>
13258
13259 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/04/">April (7)</a></li>
13260
13261 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/05/">May (3)</a></li>
13262
13263 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/06/">June (2)</a></li>
13264
13265 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/07/">July (7)</a></li>
13266
13267 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/08/">August (6)</a></li>
13268
13269 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/09/">September (4)</a></li>
13270
13271 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/10/">October (2)</a></li>
13272
13273 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/11/">November (3)</a></li>
13274
13275 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/12/">December (1)</a></li>
13276
13277 </ul></li>
13278
13279 <li>2010
13280 <ul>
13281
13282 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/01/">January (2)</a></li>
13283
13284 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/02/">February (1)</a></li>
13285
13286 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/03/">March (3)</a></li>
13287
13288 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/04/">April (3)</a></li>
13289
13290 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/05/">May (9)</a></li>
13291
13292 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/06/">June (14)</a></li>
13293
13294 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/07/">July (12)</a></li>
13295
13296 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/08/">August (13)</a></li>
13297
13298 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/09/">September (7)</a></li>
13299
13300 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/10/">October (9)</a></li>
13301
13302 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/11/">November (13)</a></li>
13303
13304 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/12/">December (12)</a></li>
13305
13306 </ul></li>
13307
13308 <li>2009
13309 <ul>
13310
13311 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/01/">January (8)</a></li>
13312
13313 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/02/">February (8)</a></li>
13314
13315 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/03/">March (12)</a></li>
13316
13317 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/04/">April (10)</a></li>
13318
13319 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/05/">May (9)</a></li>
13320
13321 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/06/">June (3)</a></li>
13322
13323 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/07/">July (4)</a></li>
13324
13325 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/08/">August (3)</a></li>
13326
13327 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/09/">September (1)</a></li>
13328
13329 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/10/">October (2)</a></li>
13330
13331 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/11/">November (3)</a></li>
13332
13333 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/12/">December (3)</a></li>
13334
13335 </ul></li>
13336
13337 <li>2008
13338 <ul>
13339
13340 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/11/">November (5)</a></li>
13341
13342 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/12/">December (7)</a></li>
13343
13344 </ul></li>
13345
13346 </ul>
13347
13348
13349
13350 <h2>Tags</h2>
13351 <ul>
13352
13353  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer (16)</a></li>
13354
13355  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/amiga">amiga (1)</a></li>
13356
13357  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/aros">aros (1)</a></li>
13358
13359  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bankid">bankid (4)</a></li>
13360
13361  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin (9)</a></li>
13362
13363  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem (17)</a></li>
13364
13365  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bsa">bsa (2)</a></li>
13366
13367  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/chrpath">chrpath (2)</a></li>
13368
13369  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian (158)</a></li>
13370
13371  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu (158)</a></li>
13372
13373  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook (4)</a></li>
13374
13375  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan (10)</a></li>
13376
13377  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/dld">dld (17)</a></li>
13378
13379  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook (25)</a></li>
13380
13381  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/drivstoffpriser">drivstoffpriser (4)</a></li>
13382
13383  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english (376)</a></li>
13384
13385  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami (23)</a></li>
13386
13387  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fildeling">fildeling (13)</a></li>
13388
13389  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture (32)</a></li>
13390
13391  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox (9)</a></li>
13392
13393  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen (18)</a></li>
13394
13395  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264 (20)</a></li>
13396
13397  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju (42)</a></li>
13398
13399  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram (16)</a></li>
13400
13401  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kart">kart (20)</a></li>
13402
13403  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap (9)</a></li>
13404
13405  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lego">lego (4)</a></li>
13406
13407  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lenker">lenker (8)</a></li>
13408
13409  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lsdvd">lsdvd (2)</a></li>
13410
13411  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ltsp">ltsp (1)</a></li>
13412
13413  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/mesh network">mesh network (8)</a></li>
13414
13415  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia (41)</a></li>
13416
13417  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software (10)</a></li>
13418
13419  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk (299)</a></li>
13420
13421  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug (190)</a></li>
13422
13423  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn (33)</a></li>
13424
13425  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/open311">open311 (2)</a></li>
13426
13427  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett (71)</a></li>
13428
13429  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern (107)</a></li>
13430
13431  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/raid">raid (2)</a></li>
13432
13433  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reactos">reactos (1)</a></li>
13434
13435  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reprap">reprap (11)</a></li>
13436
13437  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rfid">rfid (3)</a></li>
13438
13439  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot (10)</a></li>
13440
13441  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rss">rss (1)</a></li>
13442
13443  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ruter">ruter (6)</a></li>
13444
13445  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/scraperwiki">scraperwiki (2)</a></li>
13446
13447  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet (54)</a></li>
13448
13449  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary (4)</a></li>
13450
13451  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/skepsis">skepsis (5)</a></li>
13452
13453  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard (55)</a></li>
13454
13455  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stavekontroll">stavekontroll (6)</a></li>
13456
13457  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stortinget">stortinget (12)</a></li>
13458
13459  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance (55)</a></li>
13460
13461  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sysadmin">sysadmin (4)</a></li>
13462
13463  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/usenix">usenix (2)</a></li>
13464
13465  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/valg">valg (9)</a></li>
13466
13467  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/verkidetfri">verkidetfri (11)</a></li>
13468
13469  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video (64)</a></li>
13470
13471  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/vitenskap">vitenskap (4)</a></li>
13472
13473  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web (41)</a></li>
13474
13475 </ul>
13476
13477
13478     </div>
13479     <p style="text-align: right">
13480  Created by <a href="http://steve.org.uk/Software/chronicle">Chronicle v4.6</a>
13481 </p>
13482
13483   </body>
13484 </html>